Music: Bugge Wesseltoft & Dhafer Youssef — ‘Hope’
David Suzuki: ‘It’s very, very late and urgent’ to take climate action if we want to prevent human extinction
The key to winning victories against big oil? Perseverance
Bill McKibben writes: Vermont’s Middlebury College announced on Wednesday that it was divesting its holdings in fossil fuel companies. Given that more than a thousand institutions with endowments totaling more than $8tn have made similar pledges, it might not seem so newsworthy – but Middlebury was one of the first to reverse course. Six years ago the college flatly rejected divestment, and the shift makes it clear why big oil’s purchase on our economy and our society is eroding. Much…
America never gave Afghan women a chance
Sophia Jones and Christina Asquith write: Parwin is dying from cancer, her time running out. There is no radiation available, and chemotherapy might not save her. But it isn’t just her life she’s worried about—it’s the future of her daughter Fatema, who had planned to go to college to become a midwife. If Parwin dies of breast cancer, her husband will likely pull Fatema out of school and marry her off. One less mouth to feed for their struggling family….
A leading anthropologist suggests that protohumans became domesticated by killing off violent males
Melvin Konner writes: When I was studying for my doctorate, in the late 1960s, we budding anthropologists read a book called Ideas on Human Evolution, a collection of then-recent papers in the field. With typical graduate-student arrogance, I pronounced it “too many ideas chasing too little data.” Half a century and thousands of fossil finds later, we have a far more complete—and also more puzzling—view of the human past. The ever-growing fossil record fills in one missing link in the…
European colonization of Americas killed so many indigenous people it cooled Earth’s climate
The Guardian reports: European colonization of the Americas resulted in the killing of so many native people that it transformed the environment and caused the Earth’s climate to cool down, new research has found. Settlers killed off huge numbers of people in conflicts and also by spreading disease, which reduced the indigenous population by 90% in the century following Christopher Columbus’s initial journey to the Americas and Caribbean in 1492. This “large-scale depopulation” resulted in vast tracts of agricultural land…
Music: Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd — ‘L’Aventure’
From a no-deal Brexit to a no-Brexit deal
Hans-Werner Sinn writes: With the recent signing of the Treaty of Aachen, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have renewed the Franco-German friendship pact and taken an important and necessary step forward for Europe. But the United Kingdom should not have been left out. The UK is an integral part of Europe; as the European Union’s second-largest economy, its GDP equals that of the 19 smallest EU member states combined. Its exodus thus would shake Europe to…
The messier Brexit gets, the better Europe looks
The New York Times reports: After Britain voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, its leaders were in a panic. The bloc was mired in a migration crisis, and anti-Europe, populist forces were gaining. Britain’s decision seemed to herald the start of a great unraveling. Two years later, as Britain’s exit from the bloc, or Brexit, looks increasingly messy and self-destructive, there is a growing sense, even in the populist corners of the continent, that if this is…
Michael Bloomberg’s plans to take down Trump
Edward-Isaac Dovere writes: Michael Bloomberg has bigger plans for 2020 than running for president. The billionaire and former New York City mayor has been openly dreaming of the White House for 25 years, and spent huge amounts of time and money four times over the past 10 years trying to figure out a way to get himself there. But he has hesitations about this race, too. He’s not sure there is a realistic space in the Democratic primaries for his…
Howard Schultz doesn’t understand American history
Jamelle Bouie writes: Howard Schultz, the former chief executive of Starbucks, cannot win the presidency as an independent candidate. But is there someone who could? Is there any chance a third-party candidate could contest the presidency and win? The short answer is no. As long as the United States has an Electoral College and winner-take-all process for presidential elections, third-party and independent candidates will have a hard time finding any traction. There have been times in American history, though, when…
Cave that housed multiple human species challenges view of cultural evolution
Scientific American reports: Deep in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia sits a very choice piece of real estate. It’s nothing so newfangled as a ski lodge or one of the traditional wood houses that dot the local countryside. Rather it’s a primeval limestone cave, called Denisova, that overlooks a rushing river and the surrounding forest. Multiple human species, or hominins, have sought shelter in this cave over the past 300,000 years, such is its allure. Artifacts, bits of bone…
Dogs may have helped ancient Middle Easterners hunt small game
Science News reports: Dogs that lived alongside Middle Eastern villagers roughly 11,500 years ago may have helped to transform how those humans hunted, researchers say. Fragmentary canine bones unearthed at Shubayqa 6, an ancient site in northeastern Jordan, date to a time when remains of hares and other small prey at the outpost sharply increased, say zooarchaeologist Lisa Yeomans of the University of Copenhagen and her colleagues. Many animal bones from Shubayqa 6 also display damage caused by having been…
January was Australia’s hottest month since records began
Australian Associated Press reports: January was Australia’s hottest month on record, the Bureau of Meteorology has said. The mean temperature last month, averaged across the country, exceeded 30C for the first time for any month. A senior climatologist at the bureau, Andrew Watkins, said January’s heat was unprecedented. “We saw heatwave conditions affect large parts of the country through most of the month, with records broken for both duration and also individual daily extremes,” he said on Thursday. [Continue reading…]
Music: Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd — ‘How Close Your Soul’
How the geography of climate damage could make the politics less polarizing
Mark Muro, David G. Victor, and Jacob Whiton write: As a new Congress and the 2020 presidential election cycle gear up, much of Washington is likely to focus on topics where political polarization is high. Yet there may be surprises. Take climate change, a top priority for many Democrats. The standard story is that the high-tech “blue” states are pushing a green wave of massive investment to cut emissions of gases that cause climate change. Meanwhile, the GOP-leaning “red” states…