BLOGS

Source: Reddit

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism

Oligarchy (noun): government by the few; a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes, Merriam-Webster

In Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address, he warned of the military-industrial complex.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." National Archives

In Joseph R. Biden's Farewell Address, he warned of oligarchy, run by the tech-industrial complex, which ironically spells the acronym: "T.I.C."

"Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead." Reuters

Tick (noun): any of a superfamily (Ixodoidea) of bloodsucking acarid arachnids that are larger than the related mites, attach themselves to warm-blooded vertebrates to feed and include important vectors of infectious diseases. Seems appropriate.

From Quora:

Why do Republicans believe so much stuff that is simply not true? What is their problem with reality?

Stay with me on this for a second….

In 1976 Republicans lost a Presidential election with an incumbent candidate to an unknown peanut farmer. This rocked them to the core.

After the election, they used a new methodology (focus group studies) to try to figure out how to win elections in the future. Their efforts identified one narrow path to victory for Republicans in national elections. They had to divide the country along the lines of religion and race to win. Ronald Reagan used this to great effect in 1980. In making this change Republicans switched their base from fiscal conservatives to religious conservatives. This fundamentally changed the nature of the Republican Party.

Previously Republicans were a pragmatic group of people looking for workable solutions to the problems of the country. Here is what Barry Goldwater had to say about this change.

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”

This switch turned the Republican Party from a group of political pragmatists to a faith community. In short, the most important issues to Republicans were group loyalty and shared belief.

The problem you have when a group is centered on its beliefs as opposed to its goals is that if any of the beliefs do not line up with the facts, it is going to be very hard to change them. This goes double if these beliefs are wrapped up in their religion such that they believe that they came from God.

The solution for Republicans was “alternative facts.” Their beliefs were the most important thing to them, but the facts were less so. They were much more willing to create facts that aligned with their beliefs and then believe those facts than change their beliefs.

This is cowardice and if it continues will create even worse disasters for the U.S. Policy has to align with the facts. Beliefs are not terribly important in politics. The facts and policies that align with those facts need to be the focus.

I haven't watched the confirmation hearings, though I've been asked if I did. I have seen excerpts posted on YouTube that have been decidedly nauseous. Despite that most of the candidates' slim "qualifications" should bar them from selection, they have the votes in the Senate on party lines alone, especially if they throw out the filibuster for the minority party and 60-vote threshold as I expect them to do.

This kabuki theater isn't supposed to put forward the best and brightest minds, or anyone qualified for the positions. Sycophancy is the "secret sauce" of political expediency. "Deconstructing the administrative state" (Bannon, the Leninist) means defying the norms that have held the republic together since its inception, but like any physical momentum, it eventually meets the Entropy of friction over time and distance. Their despise of the "deep state" means what they want is a shallow alternative, where expertise can be ignored for the almighty, all-powerful "gut," "hunch," or claims of communication with spirits through dreams. Preparation can be substituted for crowdsourcing "concepts of plans," otherwise known as conspiracy theories. Quantum mechanics can be mastered in a few clicks: Who needs a degree in Physics? Who needs those stinking, liberal-biased facts?

Where does this lead us?

Kakistocracy (noun): government by the worst people.

Kleptocracy (noun): government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed.

Idiocracy (noun): 1. a society governed or populated by idiots 2. government by idiots.

Our nation is turning into an idiocracy.—Neil deGrasse Tyson

As we lurch toward idiocracy—the real thing, not the movie—we must change course.—John Kass - definitions and quotes from Merriam-Webster.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Preamble to the Declaration of Independence - National Archives

The Washington Post's tagline used to be "Democracy Dies in Darkness." The United States: July 4, 1776 - January 20, 2025. Consider this a eulogy.

Emissions of Carbon Dioxide in the Transportation Sector, Motor Vehicle Miles Traveled, and Emissions per Mile Traveled by Light-Duty Vehicles Measured as a Percentage of Their Value in 1975 - Transportation sector emissions have not risen nearly as much as vehicle miles traveled because gains in fuel economy have reduced emissions per mile of travel.

Image source: Emissions of Carbon Dioxide in the Transportation Sector, Congressional Budget Office (CBO), December 2022

Topics: Chemistry, Climate Change, Environment, Existentialism, Global Warming

Comment: Americans go above and beyond anything suggested, even if the goal is to improve things. Americans in particular, and humans in general like "quick fixes" that don't disrupt their lives and approximate what they're used to doing already. Lithium is an energetic element, number 3 on the Periodic Table, following Hydrogen and Helium. Its properties as an anode are why we use the element in battery technology. It's now "trendy" to own an Electric Vehicle, when during the pandemic (see the dip above in Fig. 10 from the CBO report), the simplest solution - at least short term - would be to drive less. This might entail telework agreements to come into the office on set days in a pay period. It could also mean an infrastructure centered around public transportation, Maglev trains such as in China, Japan, and Korea. A longer-term solution would be a total revision of what we regard as capital, earnings, and quarterly profits, which seem shortsighted and not strategically positioned for the global environment or species survival.

Lithium is an essential component of clean energy technologies, from electric vehicles (EVs) to the big batteries used to store electricity at power plants. It is an abundant mineral, but to be used it must be extracted from the earth and processed. 

Today, there are two main ways to pull lithium from the ground. Until recently, most lithium mining occurred in Chile, where lithium is extracted from brines: salty liquid found at the Earth’s surface or underground. To extract lithium, that liquid is pumped from the earth and then placed in pools where the water can evaporate, leaving behind lithium and other elements.

Elsewhere, lithium mining looks more traditional. In 2017, Australia overtook Chile as the dominant lithium producer. Companies there blast a lithium-rich mineral called spodumene out of open pits. Today, Australia produces roughly half of the globe’s supplies.¹ More than 80 percent of that rock then travels to China, where it’s further processed to yield lithium.²

Though Australia and Chile dominate production, the rise of clean energy has spurred a growing hunger for lithium, so other mining operations have cropped up in numerous other places. Global lithium production has grown from about 37,000 tons a decade ago to 130,000 tons in 2022.^1,3

“We've just seen an explosion of proposed projects in the planning, piloting, demonstration stage across a much wider array of countries,” says Caroline White-Nockleby, a PhD candidate who studies renewable energy transitions in MIT’s doctoral program in History and anthropology; and Science, Technology, and Society.

How is Lithium mined? MIT Climate Portal

Related articles:

Elon Musk, ready to dry up Texas: He wants what has been underground for millions of years, Sanusha S., Eco News, January 13, 2025, in Energy

How demand for lithium batteries could drain America’s water resources, PBS News Hour, January 25, 2024

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Democracy, Existentialism

Ref: https://litkicks.com/ingatsbystracks/, In Gatsby’s Tracks: Locating the Valley of Ashes in a 1924 Photo. The ash heap was a metaphor for the rot and decay of modern life as the author depicted it in the novel:

The spot where Fitzgerald had a vision would soon become world famous because the trash-burning operation at Flushing Meadows was closed shortly after The Great Gatsby was written. The creeks were drained and turned into artificial lakes, and the Long Island Expressway, Van Wyck Expressway, and Grand Central Parkway were all built to carry the massive automobile traffic between New York City and Long Island that they still carry today. Beautiful Flushing Meadows Park was developed on the large square of land circumscribed by these three highways, encompassing the creek and its valley. This park hosted the 1939 Worlds Fair and then the 1964-65 Worlds Fair. Shea Stadium was built to host the New York Mets on the northern side and was then replaced by CitiField on the same spot. Every year the US Open Tennis Tournament is held at the Billie Jean King Tennis Center south of the baseball fields. Here’s what the same spot looks like in an aerial photograph from 2009. Shea Stadium is on the top left, and the US Open tennis courts are on the bottom left.

The hashtag #FAFO is apropos here. Noam Chomsky's book is a pamphlet. It is short and meant to be absorbed in one sitting. In 1991, Chomsky was 65. He's knocking on the door of his 99th birthday, and we buried President Carter yesterday who was 100. My fear: will anyone ever read anything brief, in paperback, and offline before Chomsky expires?

Chomsky begins by asserting two models of democracy—one in which the public actively participates, and one in which the public is manipulated and controlled. According to Chomsky "propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state," and the mass media is the primary vehicle for delivering propaganda in the United States. From an examination of how Woodrow Wilson's Creel Commission "succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population," to Bush Sr.'s war on Iraq, Chomsky examines how the mass media and public relations industries have been used as propaganda to generate public support for going to war.
Chomsky touches on how the modern public relations industry has been influenced by Walter Lippmann's theory of "spectator democracy," in which the public is seen as a "bewildered herd" that needs to be directed, not empowered; and how the public relations industry in the United States focuses on "controlling the public mind," and not on informing it.

Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, Noam Chomsky, Seven Stories Press

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. 

Post "Retreat and Aftermath," and "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business," by Neil Postman

Morpheus: This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, and you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. The Matrix

I worked alongside H-1B visa recipients with no stigma whatsoever. They worked alongside me, a graduate of the largest HBCU in the nation, and the largest supplier of graduate engineers and scientists in the STEM pipeline. I spoke at conferences. I published proceedings. I never once felt inferior, nor did I feel that Motorola, Advanced Micro Devices, or Applied Materials did me a "favor." It's ludicrous. It's self-defeating and stupid. Instead of a faux halcyon "great again," it's the blueprint for the reinstitution of serfdom.

The giveaway was Elon and Vivek disparaging “American” workers, which means all of us, and all ages. This is what I expect in their ketamine-fueled thought process that will lead us to perdition:

1. “Break” the economy (Elon's words) - sending the U.S. into a recession.

2. Layoffs, particularly of African American, Hispanic/Latino, and Asian-Pacific Islander talent.

3. Wait a few months and lower salary price points.

4. Hire H-1Bs at LOWER than even that lowered rate. Companies don't have to and usually don't, but they have that option and have always had it. What about all of that African American, Hispanic/Latino, Asian-Pacific Islander, and white American talent? They can apply for "black jobs," plentiful after the forcible expulsion of undocumented immigrant labor from home and commercial builder sites, fields, and meat processing plants. Someone's got to do it. Don't worry. They won't go anywhere. They'll be working alongside you as leased labor from for-profit prisons. It will keep salaries down. The "minimum wage" will become an urban myth. "Social security" was always a communist plot.

5. All leverage is with the employer. Don’t like your job? Quitting will get your H-1B revoked and you’ll be sent back to your country. Fired at will? Break the law? See the first and third sentences of item 5.

6. (Added) Look for stiff competition on "Who will be the world's first trillionaire?"

A reporter once asked John D. Rockefeller, the founder of the Standard Oil Company, the first billionaire of the United States of America, and once the richest man on Earth, “How much money is enough?” He calmly replied, "Just a little bit more." CNBCTV

Where does it leave American workers? Well, the pesky, “woke” DEI thing is history. Industries have abandoned it for the simple reason that it's no longer profitable. It's ridiculous to think that corporations will "do the right thing." They only think in quarters and the bank accounts of shareholders, life on Earth be damned. Unions will be in the vein of Tyrannosaurus and the Dodo. Income inequality will be SOLVED because rural and urban workers will be in a goulash of poverty. Training to be in the "specialized class" will become irrelevant. Social mobility will be eliminated by the financial canyon erected between the have-nots by the Hoarding Disorder kleptocratic haves! We're at the same income inequality that preceded the French Revolution. Brian Thomson and Luigi Mangione might be the harbinger of things to come.

I call it “tech bro servitude,” or “lords, and serfs.” If you’re not a billionaire, you’re probably a serf. Again, I fear the result of the blowback. Unfortunately, imposed totalitarian regimes don't crumble without a lot of bloodshed and violence.

“The most dangerous creation of any society is a man who feels he has nothing to lose.”

-James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time”

The Palisades Fire on January 7, 2025. ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo

Topics: Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism

 “People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.”—Lauren Olamina, “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler

I called my cousin, our family historian last night, to check on her. She calmly told me she lived about 15 miles from the Palisades, where the fires are fueled by a dry winter and climate change. I was checking to see if she received my payments for our family reunion planned for Los Angeles this summer and my concern for her safety. I signed us up for the tour of Hollywood, thinking that fate and the summer would be "normal" in this environment of climate crisis and science denial. She assured me that she had packed her "Mo-bag" and if the authorities told her to go, she'd go. This post hits home more than any other I've produced. We said "I love you" before we hung up. I'll keep checking on her.

The nature of the Santa Ana winds makes them perfectly suited to fueling blazes like the Palisades Fire, and climate change is increasing the risk.

Editor’s Note (1/8/25): This story is being updated as the situation unfolds.

Another explosive wildfire in California, driven by the region’s notorious Santa Ana winds, has burned hundreds of buildings and has forced thousands to evacuate from their homes. The Palisades Fire began at 10:30 A.M. local time on Tuesday near Los Angeles’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood. Much of the neighborhood is under evacuation orders, which extended to northern Santa Monica. As of Wednesday afternoon, the fire had scorched more than 15,000 acres and destroyed more than 1,000 structures.

Another blaze, the Eaton Fire, erupted on Tuesday evening in Altadena, Calif., just north of Los Angeles. As of late Wednesday, it had burned more than 10,000 acres and resulted in at least five deaths. Both fires had caused numerous injuries, according to officials.

On Wednesday evening, another fire began in the heart of Los Angeles just north of Hollywood. The fire grew rapidly to cover at least 20 acres as it spread downhill in Runyon Canyon. Though winds were not as high as Tuesday night, they were still pushing the fire and carrying embers that started spot fires.

Forecasters had warned that the risk of fire was extremely high this week, reaching “particularly dangerous situation” status as the ferocious winds combined with tinder-dry vegetation after a lack of rain during the beginning of what would usually be the wet season.

How the Ferocious Santa Ana Winds Are Fueling the Palisades Fire, Andrea Thompson, edited by Dean Visser, Scientific American

CROCUS researchers crossed Chicago’s Michigan Avenue as they collected data on how buildings, streets, and greenspaces impact temperature and air quality. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory.)

Topics: Civilization, Climate Change, Environment, Global Warming, Thermodynamics

CROCUS’s Urban Canyon campaign captured data on heat islands and air quality while also helping scientists understand how to conduct a major research initiative in the heart of one of America’s largest cities.

When you picture atmospheric scientists, you might think of them monitoring cloud cover on the open plains or even chasing a twister through a cornfield. You probably don’t imagine teams of people launching weather balloons in the center of one of the largest cities in the U.S.

But that’s what happened this past July during the CROCUS Urban Canyon Campaign in Chicago. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research program, the Community Research on Climate and Urban Science (CROCUS) effort studies urban climate change and the impact it has on local homeowners and businesses.

An urban canyon is a dense city street with buildings on both sides. These confined spaces trap heat, leading to an urban heat island effect. This effect is one factor contributing to cities being warmer than surrounding areas. It can impact energy use, air quality, and overall climate patterns. The goal of the Urban Canyon campaign was to collect data at the street level, where people live and work, and in the boundary layer, where air from the city mixes with the atmosphere.

Over two weeks, CROCUS researchers from Chicago and around the region converged on the city to conduct two intensive measurement sessions. They measured temperature, air quality, and airflow in and around Chicago’s mix of skyscrapers, highways, and neighborhoods. Their data will help inform strategies to mitigate extreme heat and weather while protecting property and infrastructure.

Backed by the support of community partners Blacks in Green (BIG) and the Puerto Rican Agenda, more than 40 scientists and staff collaborated to make the campaign successful. Throughout their work, they snapped pictures of research in action.

Snapshots of urban climate science
Researchers study heat islands and air quality in the heart of Chicago, Gillian-King Carlyle, Argonne National Laboratory

Image source: https://www.istockphoto.com/photos/methane-molecule

Topics: Chemistry, Civilization, Climate Change, Entropy, Environment, Global Warming

The "good news": you can download the PDF for free by registering an email, or read the report from the National Academies of Science and Medicine here. Citizenship takes work and effort to be informed. It would be nice to carry on a little longer than the dinosaurs.

2023 shattered global climate records as the warmest year in the modern record, bringing with it devastating impacts on human and natural systems. About 60% of methane emissions come from human activities and are a major contributor to global warming, second only to carbon dioxide (CO2). Methane is relatively short-lived in the atmosphere but is 80 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat over a 20-year period. Together with reducing CO2 emissions, rapid and sustained reductions in methane emissions are critical to limit both near- and long-term warming in future decades. However, given the many barriers to achieving needed emissions reductions at scale, researchers are exploring the potential of technologies to remove methane from the atmosphere.

A Research Agenda Toward Atmospheric Methane Removal is the first report of a two-phase study to assess the need and potential for atmospheric methane removal. This report identifies priority research that should be addressed within 3-5 years so that a second-phase assessment could more robustly assess the technical, economic, and social viability of technologies to remove atmospheric methane at climate-relevant scales. The research agenda presented in this report includes foundational research that would help us better understand atmospheric methane removal while also filling knowledge gaps in related fields, and systems research that seek to address what developing and/or deploying atmospheric methane removal at scale would entail. A Research Agenda Toward Atmospheric Methane Removal also assesses five atmospheric methane removal technologies that would accelerate the conversion of methane to a less radiatively potent form or physically remove methane from the atmosphere and store it elsewhere.

Contributor(s): National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Division on Earth and Life Studies; Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences; Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate; Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology; Board on Energy and Environmental Systems; Committee on Atmospheric Methane Removal: Development of a Research Agenda

James Carter, the 39th President of the United States, https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/james-carter/

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Democracy, Education, Existentialism, Nobel Peace Prize, Nuclear Power

James Earl Carter Jr. was the 39^th President of the United States. In 1980, I voted for the first time as an eighteen-year-old for his re-election. He lost to Reagan, the “Gipper,” who launched his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, blocks from the assassination of voting rights activists Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner by domestic terrorists in white robes,[1] and the first uttered promise by a political candidate to “make America great again,” without defining “when” greatness was, or how he would bring it about. It has recently been revealed (long suspected) that his operatives had a secret deal with Iran to hold the hostages until after the election was “won,” then miraculously release them after Reagan’s inauguration.[2] He was the first president to comment on the climate crisis and put solar panels on the White House roof. His successor, safely in the pockets of the fossil fuels industry, promptly took them off and forgot about the crisis.[3]

Carter was an Annapolis Naval Graduate, and a Nuclear Engineer (I did wince at his southern pronunciation: “new que lure”). He rappelled into a nuclear reactor after a meltdown and lived to a hundred to tell about it.[4] Jimmy Carter negotiated peace between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in 1978, two years before I voted for him, and the year I received my driver’s license (that I am scheduled to renew this summer). He is the reason that we ratified the Panama Canal treaties. He established full-diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China and negotiated the SALT II Treaty with Russia (important in the Cold War/M.A.D. era). He is the reason we HAVE a Department of Education. You can see why I was proud to vote for him.

His post-presidency was astonishingly productive. He witnessed over 100 elections promoting democracy around the world. He and his wife Rosalyn built up to 1,000 homes through Habitat For Humanity. He won the Nobel Peace Prize “for work to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” In addition to all of that, he still managed to teach Sunday School at Maranatha Baptist Church in Georgia. Jimmy Carter, a one-term president, and the longest-lived ex-president, was the backlash to Watergate.[5]

The Nixon administration years brought us Watergate and the lack of trust in our institutions, which we currently still endure today. It started with his first Vice President, Spiro Agnew, accepting bags of money in the White House (as he had as Maryland’s governor),[6] Richard Nixon’s departure before impeachment and removal, and his pardon by his unelected Vice President, Gerald Ford, which gave a green light for future presidents to skirt the law.[7] He colluded with a foreign power to win an election before collusion was “cool.”[8]

If history is not propagandized, obfuscated, or “banned” beyond this moment, Jimmy Carter will go down as our only authentically Christian president. I say authentic versus “cultural,” now used to describe people who like the ritual, music, and customs around holidays (Christmas just concluded, unless you include Epiphany), but may be non-practicing, non-theist, apathetic, trans-theist, deist, pantheist, or atheist, like Richard Dawkins,[9] of “The God Delusion.” For Jimmy Carter, God was no delusion. He walked out his faith, while other politicians memorized scriptures to spout from podiums.

He was our first openly Evangelical Christian President, and it’s why politicos like Michelle Bachmann supported him initially. He ran afoul of the religious right when he applied federal law and the Bible against Bob Jones University for their anti-miscegenation (“interracial dating” and generally not wanting African Americans as students – old school terminology).[10] The right pivoted to a B-Movie actor who could “act” presidential but showed zero interest in being of intellectual heft to BE presidential. Hence, a former reality show host isn’t much of a departure from the Reagan model.

They’ve never been about that “Jesus’ life.” Jimmy Carter always was.

Godspeed Jimmy, to Rosalyn’s arms.

[1] Aug. 3, 1980: Reagan Gives “State’s Rights” Speech at Neshoba County Fair, Zinn Education Project, https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/reagan-speech-at-neshoba/

[2] Expert analyzes new account of GOP deal that used Iran hostage crisis for gain, PBS News Weekend, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/expert-analyzes-new-account-of-gop-deal-that-used-iran-hostage-crisis-for-gain

[3] Where Did the Carter White House's Solar Panels Go? David Biello, Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-house-solar-panel-array/

[4] How Jimmy Carter Saved a Canadian Nuclear Reactor After a Meltdown, Blake Stilwell, Military.com, https://www.military.com/history/how-jimmy-carter-saved-canadian-nuclear-reactor-after-meltdown.html

[5] James Carter, 39^th President of the United States, https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/james-carter/

[6] Spiro Agnew and “Bagman,” https://www.southplattesentinel.com/2019/02/26/spiro-agnew-and-bagman/

[7] Watergate Scandal, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Watergate-Scandal

[8] When a Candidate Conspired With a Foreign Power to Win An Election, John A. Farrell, Politico, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/06/nixon-vietnam-candidate-conspired-with-foreign-power-win-election-215461/

[9] Richard Dawkins, a “Cultural Christian,” John Stonestreet, Breaking Point, https://www.breakpoint.org/richard-dawkins-a-cultural-christian/

[10] The Real Origins of the Religious Right, Randall Balmer, Politico, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Democracy, Existentialism

Like many people after the election, I retreated from corporate media, which is anything on television and in print now. GE/Comcast, News Corps/Fox, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS: six corporations control 90% of what we passively consume after long hard days of work on what was affectionately dubbed "the boob tube" (and it was not a compliment). The distinction between mainstream media and corporate couldn't be more stark. "Mainstream" (noun) is "a prevailing current or direction of activity or influence," and (adjective) is "having, reflecting, or being compatible with the prevailing attitudes and values of a society or group" - Merriam-Webster. We gravitate towards outlets that reflect and reinforce our viewpoints, and we feel it's "mainstream," but none of these outlets is doing anything for the "public good": they are answering to boards of directors, CEOs, and Wall Street. I began my retreat by rereading an old book that seemed strange when published in 1985. Neil Postman's central argument was the danger of CNN:

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well-known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

We say something is "Orwellian" when it reminds us of "1984," where the Cambridge dictionary defines it as "a political system in which the government tries to control every part of people's lives." The loss of bodily autonomy by over 50% of the population qualifies as Orwellian. But also, the naming of a device a "smartphone" which is a supercomputer on our hips capable of using global positioning satellites to guide us better than a Rand McNally map (old school), and give us meaningless drivel from TikTok. That qualifies as the "equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy." Yet even though these supercomputers would compete well with Star Trek Tricorders: "21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024. 54% of adults have literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below a 5th-grade level). Low levels of literacy cost the US up to 2.2 trillion per year." Source: The National Literacy Institute - Literacy Statistics 2024- 2025 (Where we are now)

Our Cellular Ones, I-Phones, Galaxies, and Motorola "centrifugal bumble-puppies" do not appear to be making us, their owners "smarter."

I keep hearing "Don't check out." I haven't checked out. I've checked in to reading actual books offline about history, and science, climate change, and critical thinking.

Even before this dichotomy between Huxley and Orwell, the three original television stations' only incentive structure was based on Nielsen Ratings, which used to go for sitcoms after Harry Reasoner and Walter Cronkite scared the crap out of you. We needed something then to tamp us down. We currently have nothing of the sort. As "trickledown" was Orwellian doublespeak for "siphon up," every form of media - social, print, and television must engage our emotions before our intelligence, it must strategically induce Intermittent Explosive Disorder (with the ironic initials, "I.E.D."). It's not enough to sell "if it bleeds, it leads," corporate media must induce the bleeding. They must convince us that our neighbor is "the other": alien, dangerous, trying to destroy with liberal or fascistic policies. "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" The movie "Network's" mantra has to be shouted from windows, Capitols have to be stormed and defecated on, billionaire celebrities have to join "joy campaigns" to fight a dreaded, pending tyranny, and when the election is over, we're supposed to go back to "normal" like nothing was ever uttered.

Well, I'm "mad as hell." And I'm reading every book I can get my hands on. Ten so far this year. Read the Financial Times and other overseas journals - there is this new thing called "The Internet." I'm walking two miles a day, meditating, and taking pleasure in my immediate life without thinking that I'm on some great quest for the "Dawn of the Age of Aquarius" by any means necessary! That's where the lit powder keg explodes.

Try it. Breath. Relax. Talk to your neighbors, especially the ones whose political signs you disagreed with. Control the things you can. Play chess. Your blood pressure will lower, I promise. And vote: It pisses off the small cadre of nincompoops who like Brain the Mouse want to "take over the world!" But he, and Pinky, are just that, mice, not men.

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Entropy, Existentialism

The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival, Sir John Glubb, Abe Books

In these inspiring essays, Sir John Glubb examines the human race over 4,000 years and finds the same patterns of rise and fall of national greatness on the same timescale.

I. Pioneers - In the video, these are the explorers. They used the technology of their time, usually sailing ships to traverse vast distances to new lands.

II. Conquests—Colonization in Western culture typically involves subjugation of the land and its people, sometimes to the point of depopulation or extinction.

III. Commerce - Global trade in the Americas started with the first genocidal assaults, and kidnapping of Africans to subjugate the land because past the conquering stage, the colonizers remote control their commerce with the crack of whips and brutality.

IV. Affluence - With great wealth from commerce/slave trading and breeding, one can build castles, plantations with wraparound porches and mint julip tea.

V. Intellect—The video alludes to the building of Ivy League institutions: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. Public colleges emulate this model. Everyone becomes credentialed.

VI. Decadence - "Internal division, an influx of foreigners, materialism, and frivolity. A welfare state, weakening religion, and a defensive mindset." Sounds eerily familiar.

Entropy (noun): a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.

"the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases with time"

Empires last about 250 years. Ours is now 248.

This land’s semi-quincentennial is 2026.

Topics: Applied Physics, Astrobiology, Astrophysics, Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism, Exoplanets, SETI, Thermodynamics

Well, this firmly puts a kink in the "Fermi Paradox."

The Industrial Revolution started in Britain around 1760 - 1840, and there was a colloquial saying that "the sun did not set on the British Empire." The former colony, America, cranked up its industrial revolution around 1790. Mary Shelley birthed the science fiction genre in the dystopian Frankenstein in 1818, around the time of climate-induced change of European weather, and a noticeable drop in temperature. It was also a warning of the overconfidence of science, the morality that should be considered when designing new technologies, its impact on the environment, and humans that sadly, don't think themselves a part of the environment. The divide between sci-fi is dystopian and Pollyannish: Star Trek mythology made that delicate balance between their fictional Eugenics Wars, World War III, the "Atomic Horror," and a 21st Century dark age, the discovery of superluminal space travel, and First Contact with benevolent, pointy-eared aliens, leading to Utopia post xenophobia. We somehow abandoned countries and currency, and thus, previous hierarchal power and inequality modalities. Roddenberry's dream was a secular version of Asgard, Heaven, Olympus, and Svarga: a notion of continuance for a species aware of its finite existence, buttressed by science and space lasers.

If aliens had a similar industrial revolution, they perhaps created currencies that allowed for trade and commerce, hierarchies to decide who would hoard resources, and which part of their societies were functionally peasantry. They would separate by tribes, complexions, and perhaps stripes if they're aquatic, and fight territorial wars over resources. Those wars would throw a lot of carbon dioxide in their oxygenated atmospheres. Selfishness, hoarding disorder, and avarice would convince the aliens that the weather patterns were "a hoax," they would pay the equivalent of lawyers to obfuscate the reality of their situations before it was too late on any of their planets to reverse the effects on their worlds. If they were colonizing the stars, it wouldn't be for the altruistic notion of expanding their knowledge by "seeking out life, and new civilizations": they would have exceeded the thermal budgets of their previous planets. Changing their galactic zip codes would only change the locations of their eventual outcomes.

Thermodynamics wins, and Lord Kelvin may have answered Enrico Fermi's question. Far be it for me to adjudicate whether or not anyone has had a "close encounter of the third kind," but I don't see starships coming out of this scenario. Cogito ergo sum homo stultus.

It may take less than 1,000 years for an advanced alien civilization to destroy its own planet with climate change, even if it relies solely on renewable energy, a new model suggests.

When astrophysicists simulated the rise and fall of alien civilizations, they found that, if a civilization were to experience exponential technological growth and energy consumption, it would have less than 1,000 years before the alien planet got too hot to be habitable. This would be true even if the civilization used renewable energy sources, due to inevitable leakage in the form of heat, as predicted by the laws of thermodynamics. The new research was posted to the preprint database arXiv and is in the process of being peer-reviewed.

While the astrophysicists wanted to understand the implications for life beyond our planet, their study was initially inspired by human energy use, which has grown exponentially since the 1800s. In 2023, humans used about 180,000 terawatt hours (TWh), which is roughly the same amount of energy that hits Earth from the sun at any given moment. Much of this energy is produced by gas and coal, which is heating up the planet at an unsustainable rate. But even if all that energy were created by renewable sources like wind and solar power, humanity would keep growing, and thus keep needing more energy."

This brought up the question, 'Is this something that is sustainable over a long period of time?'" Manasvi Lingam, an astrophysicist at Florida Tech and a co-author of the study, told Live Science in an interview.

Lingam and his co-author Amedeo Balbi, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Tor Vergata University of Rome, were interested in applying the second law of thermodynamics to this problem. This law says that there is no perfect energy system, where all energy created is efficiently used; some energy must always escape the system. This escaped energy will cause a planet to heat up over time.

"You can think of it like a leaky bathtub," Lingam said. If a bathtub that is holding only a little water has a leak, only a small amount can get out, he explained. But as the bathtub is filled more and more — as energy levels increase exponentially to meet demand — a small leak can suddenly turn into a flooded house.

Alien civilizations are probably killing themselves from climate change, bleak study suggests, Sierra Bouchér, Live Science

Hummocks of moss cover Ardley Island off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Credit: Dan Charman

Topics: Antarctica, Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism, Global Warming

A fast-warming region of Antarctica is getting greener with shocking speed. Satellite imagery of the region reveals that the area covered by plants increased by almost 14 times over 35 years — a trend that will spur rapid change of Antarctic ecosystems.

“It's the beginning of dramatic transformation,” says Olly Bartlett, a remote-sensing specialist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, and an author of the study¹, published today in Nature Geoscience, that reports these results.

From white to green

Bartlett and his colleagues analyzed images taken between 1986 and 2021 of the Antarctic Peninsula — a part of the continent that juts north towards the tip of South America. The pictures were taken by the Landsat satellites operated by NASA and the US Geological Survey in March, which is the end of the growing season for vegetation in the Antarctic.

To assess how much of the land was covered with vegetation, the researchers took advantage of the properties of growing plants: healthy plants absorb a lot of red light and reflect a lot of near-infrared light. Scientists can use satellite measurements of light at these wavelengths to determine whether a piece of land is covered by thriving plants.

The team found that the peninsula's area swathed in plants grew from less than one square kilometer in 1986 to nearly 12 square kilometers in 2021 (see ‘An icy land goes green’). The rate of expansion was roughly 33% higher between 2016 and 2021 compared with the four-decade study period as a whole.

Believe it or not, this lush landscape is Antarctica, Alix Soliman, Nature

Meinzahn/Getty Images

Topics: Applied Physics, Atmospheric Science, Chemistry, Climate Change, Global Warming

Note: It's disheartening that geoengineering, made popular by science fiction novels and plots in Star Trek, is being considered because we're too selfish to change our behavior.

More and more climate scientists are supporting experiments to cool Earth by altering the stratosphere or the ocean.

As recently as 10 years ago most scientists I interviewed and heard speak at conferences did not support geoengineering to counteract climate change. Whether the idea was to release large amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to “block” the sun’s heating or to spread iron across the ocean to supercharge algae that breathe in carbon dioxide, researchers resisted on principle: don’t mess with natural systems because unintended consequences could ruin Earth. They also worried that trying the techniques even at a small scale could be a slippery slope to wider deployment and that countries would use the promise of geoengineering as an excuse to keep burning carbon-emitting fossil fuels.

But today, climate scientists more openly support experimenting with these and other proposed strategies, partly because entrepreneurs and organizations are going ahead with the methods anyway—often based on little data or field trials. Scientists want to run controlled experiments to see if the methods are productive, to test consequences, and perhaps to show objectively that the approaches can cause serious problems.

“We do need to try the techniques to figure them out,” says Rob Jackson, a professor at Stanford University, chair of the international research partnership Global Carbon Project, and author of a book on climate solutions called Into the Clear Blue Sky (Scribner, 2024). “But doing research does make them more likely to happen. That is the knotty part of all this.”

As Earth’s Climate Unravels, More Scientists Are Ready to Test Geoengineering, Mark Fischetti, Scientific American

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Democracy, Existentialism

I read the poem "Seeds" at my wife's family reunion. For African Americans, reunions are a chance to connect with family members without associating it with a casket. Black life in general has always been dangerous and treacherous since 1619. Ripped from the African continent, the survivors of cargo vessels like "The Good Ship Jesus" lost their culture, languages, indigenous religious practices. As a culture, we had to reestablish this through being thrown together from different tribes with different customs, infusing what we found with distant memories reconstructed into the language of our oppressors, the religions that gaslit us into an Anglo "Imago Dei" to ensure that the enslaved "obeyed their [white] masters." Mother Dear and Paw-Paw were the culmination of this remarkable adjustment, despite a psychopathological caste system that would rather ban books than learn from its history. The secret weapon of all people in oppressive systems is joy.

The history of this reunion started with a story,

Repeated with many African American families,

The patriarch almost lost his life for the audacity of voting.

Assaulted by Klansmen,

Three years before the lynching of Emmitt Till in Mississippi.

The inspiration for the March on Washington, eight years later.

The cowardly Klansmen’s ancestors dressed in sheets,

Pretending to be malevolent spirits,

Attempting to frighten newly freed citizens from voting,

Helped by Poll Taxes, Constitutional Quizzes, and guessing the number of soap bubbles.

(They now use repealing parts of the Voting Rights Act, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and voter purging.)

Paw-Paw was assaulted,

Eleven years before the assassination of a fellow Traveling Man, Medgar Evers.

Excerpted from "Seeds."

To survive, people of color had to find joy. Many times it was and is through what outsiders, particularly the dominant culture, think of as primitive, unsophisticated religious rituals. These rituals are our therapy before the invention of what we now know as psychology, our tribal gathering, our ministers the tribal leaders. Many gotten drunk on their power have abused the relationship with vulnerable congregants, but on the positive tip, they can provide centers for meetings that galvanize actions the Civil Rights movement, which in itself is a response to reparations given to former plantation oligarchs, and the formerly enslaved and their descendants never seeing "forty acres and a mule."

Can "Joy and Hope," the slogan of the Harris-Walz campaign, help Democrats to win the 2024 election? Patrick Healy, deputy opinion editor of the New York Times, is doubtful. "I cringed a little in the convention hall Tuesday night when Bill Clinton said Kamala Harris would be the 'president of joy'," Healy wrote in a recent op-ed, comparing the Democratic focus on joy to Donald Trump's embrace of his anointment as a divinity by his most fervent followers. "Joy is not a political strategy. And God is not a political strategy."  

I disagree. As I have written in Strongmen, positive emotions such as love, solidarity, and yes, joy, have been part of successful anti-authoritarian political strategies. Positive emotions motivate people to engage in politics when they might have grown apathetic or cynical about the possibility of change.

Why Joy is an Effective Anti-Authoritarian Strategy. Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Lucid Substack

 Dear Mr. Healy: "Hope and change" wasn't a strategy either, but it worked.

‘A lot has changed in the past three hundred years,’ the ship’s captain Jean-Luc Picard tells him. ‘People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.’

Instead of working just to live, humans are free to spend their time exploring the cosmos, or inventing, or making art—and sometimes doing all three. This optimistic view of human nature is in stark contrast to films such as Pixar’s Wall-E, which follows the right-wing line of thinking that achieving a post-scarcity society (what Keynes calls the ‘economic problem') would lead to sloth and hedonism, and ultimately the demise of humanity.

The Radical Politics of Star Trek, Simon Tyrie

lthough it is Lucas’s much maligned 1999 prequel, Episode I: The Phantom Menace, which is usually thought of as the series’ most politics-heavy entry, I think there is something of value in looking at each film and trying to decode the way in which it reflects the world from which it emerged.  As much credit, and criticism, as George Lucas and his collaborators deserve, they were all products of a changing geo-political environment which helped to shape them even as they were creating and shaping these films.  George Lucas may have directed Star Wars, but it was real life that directed George Lucas.  Just as surely as the collapsing skyscrapers seen in the likes of The Avengers, Man of Steel, Transformers 4, and Star Trek into Darkness reflect the realities of our post-9/11 world, so too did the real world seep into Lucas’s magnum opus.

The Politics of Star Wars: Race and Resistance in American Popular Culture and Cinema, Dr. Darren Reid

September 10, 2001, in the world that existed before the Tuesday that changed the planet, you could walk your loved ones up to the door of an airplane to say goodbye. Your body wasn't imaged by a scanner, and your shoes and laptop did not go onto a conveyor belt for x-ray analysis. There had been a terror attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, and the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995. We were not a "nonviolent" world, but we were less apocalyptic and "prepping for doomsday." September 11, 2001 brought with it depression, hopelessness, a dark existentialism that we (in my opinion), became addicted to and victim of its PTSD. Covid, the deaths of one million American citizens, isolation, social media and "Zoom fatigue" exacerbated it, and birth QAnon.

Kiefer Sutherland became the larger-than-life antihero of "24," and Hollywood dramatized torture before Abu Ghraib. Star Trek: The Original Series, saw a world that had somehow eliminated its attachment to racial hierarchies and "the affirmative action of generational wealth," and Luke Skywalker was introduced in Star Wars as a "New Hope."

An Army friend (I'm an Air Force vet) called me on November 5, 2008, and asked:

“Reg, did you ever think that we would live to see this?”

Of course not. As black men, we lived in the tyranny of low expectations. We were the textbook cases for which "Mis-Education of the Negro" was written by Dr. Carter G. Woodson. The United States managed to have 43 white males as the chief executive from George Washington to George W. Bush. Other democratic nations like Denmark, England, Finland, India, Israel have managed to have women as chief executives, and a diversity of cultures at the helm of state power. We also tend to be the only democratic government with an "electoral college," that sounds academic until you realize it gives undue power to southern states that held human beings enslaved, and wrote laws to continue the "peculiar institution" of the antebellum South in perpetuity. The former enslaver's descendants would like some of those laws to make a comeback.

"Hope and change" and "joy" are not strategies, but it does give us something to live for.

“Your future is whatever you make it. So make it a good one.”  Dr. Emmett Brown, "Back to the Future, Part III."

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Economics, Environment, Existentialism, Fascism

Tech bros (n): someone, usually a man, who works in the digital technology industry, especially in the United States, and is sometimes thought to not have good social skills and to be too confident about their own ability. Source: Cambridge Dictionary

“The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity,” Carlo M. Cipollo, UC Berkley, Economist, Historian

5 basic laws:

1. Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. (E.g., Nazi Germany)
2. The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristics of that person. (E.g., economics, education level, skillset)
3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. (E.g., authoritarian governments who destroy their countries, financial meltdowns, etc.)
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances, to deal with and (or) to associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake. (E.g., downplaying their impact, giving them the benefit of the doubt)
5. A stupid person is more dangerous than a pillager. (E.g., Bandits act typically in self-interest. Stupid people don’t consider collateral damage, even to themselves.)

Call it "Dunning-Kruger" on steroids. The lead description on Amazon is ominous:

An economist explains five laws that confirm our worst fears: stupid people can and do rule the world

Throughout history, a powerful force has hindered the growth of human welfare and happiness. It is more powerful than the Mafia or the military. It has global catastrophic effects and can be found anywhere from the world's most powerful boardrooms to your local bar.

It is human stupidity.

I apply stupidity not to intelligence but to behavior that, once achieving arguable success in an area of life, empowers said person to feel they have a right, and in their mind, a duty, to pontificate on other areas of life that they have no experience in, or clue.

 In 1862, a famous Irish physicist and mathematician, Lord Kelvin, estimated that Earth was between 20-million and 400-million years old. While that is an enormous span of time, even an age of 400 million years would make the planet quite young in relation to the rest of the universe. Lord Kelvin based his conclusion on a calculation of how long it would have taken Earth to cool if it had begun as a molten mass. While his estimate was wrong by a significant margin, his technique of drawing conclusions based on observations and calculations was an accurate scientific method. How Did Scientists Calculate the Age of Earth? NatGeo Education

Suffice it to say, Lord Kelvin, for whom the Kelvin scale in Thermodynamics is named for reflecting a "complete absence of thermal energy," was WAY out over his skis!

Lord Kelvin, God bless him, exhibited the logical fallacy called "appeal to authority." He appealed to the fact that he was a superstar in thermodynamics (KNIGHTED, for crying out loud), so he had to be right! The geologists, ahem, the people who study the structure and composition of the Earth, in his mindIn his mind, the geologists, ahem, the people who study the structure and composition of the Earth, were wrong.

So, the "bros" (and most of them are male), have the unfortunate habit of assuming after they conquered the hill in Silicon Valley and became "new money" millionaires and billionaires, they have a right and an obligation to pontificate on matters in society they have no experience in, or clue. The bros might spread misinformation online on a platform they bought that arguably fails to attract other customers and might sue those who have left. They might use their leverage to turn over precedents in our nation's highest court. They are Einstein in their areas of expertise, but Fredo in all others. They are over their skis. They read the Cliff Notes to Atlas Shrugged, and forgot that Ayn Rand ended up on the collectivist scheme she railed against in her latter years: Social Security. For the bros, the government is daddy bailing them out of a jam of their creation usually, and everyone else isn't "special" or daddy's favorite: they are. And they want what they want, damn the economy, the environment, and the planet—he who dies last with the gold wins.

The "bros" should study earnestly the real and fictional outcomes of Boesky and Gekko.

Figure 1. The Vadret da Tschierva glacier in 1935 (top) and in 2022 (bottom).Photos courtesy of swisstopo, L. Hösli, G. Carcanade, M. Huss, VAW-ETHZ.

Topics: Civilization, Climate Change, Fluid Mechanics, Global Warming, Meteorology, Research

Glaciers—dynamic masses of ice descending from the mountain tops—have always been fascinating to humankind. They intrinsically belong to the high-alpine environment. Countless photographs immortalize their bright white beauty and the power they radiate. Glaciers have been depicted on oil and parchment for centuries, as if trying to capture their transience. They are constantly moving; under the influence of gravity, the ice generated at high elevation flows downwards and shapes tremendous glacier tongues that are speckled with deep fissures known as crevasses. Sometimes, the openings to these crevasses are hidden by a light dusting of snow; subsequently, mountaineers need a lot of experience to accurately judge their exposure to the ice.

Even though glaciers are not living things, they are not lifeless. For many mountain regions worldwide, glaciers function similarly to lungs: They absorb snow in wintertime and “breathe” out water during hot summer days. This glacier water is urgently needed, especially in dry periods.

Glaciers consequently have a relevance that goes far beyond the mountain peaks where they reside. A reduction in meltwater from glaciers would be painful for nature and the global economy: irrigation of fields would be restricted, the temperature and mineralization of rivers would change, and during periods of drought, serious bottlenecks could come into existence for the drinking water supply and for shipping on rivers. In addition, melting glacial ice contributes to sea-level rise and therefore directly or indirectly affects billions of people living near the coast.

Despite, or perhaps because of, their majestic appearance, glaciers can also pose an immediate threat. Glaciers can produce floods and ice avalanches that endanger villages in the valleys. Together with permafrost, glaciers also stabilize mountain flanks and therefore reduce the potential for rock falls and landslides—a role that is becoming increasingly lost.

The so-called “eternal” ice of glaciers tells a long and dynamic story. During the Ice Age, ice sheets covered a large part of the North American continent, as well as Europe. The last time this happened was around 20,000 years ago—a blink of the eye from a geological perspective. Since then, the climate has changed, due both to natural factors and to anthropogenic influences—human-caused factors—which have massively accelerated over the past 100 years (Marzeion et al., 2014). As a result, the glaciers are still present, but they are getting smaller every year.

The Alps’ iconic glaciers are melting, but there’s still time to save (most of) the biggest, Matthias Huss, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Democracy, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

Excerpt from Facts, Fascism, and Fascists, Friday, January 24, 2020

Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, have begun to dismantle the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment. They are creating a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and shutting out all those they define as the enemy. This movement, veering closer and closer to traditional fascism, seeks to force a recalcitrant world to submit before an imperial America. It champions the eradication of social deviants, beginning with homosexuals, and moving on to immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims and those they dismiss as “nominal Christians” — meaning Christians who do not embrace their perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible. Those who defy the mass movement are condemned as posing a threat to the health and hygiene of the country and the family. All will be purged.

The followers of deviant faiths, from Judaism to Islam, must be converted or repressed. The deviant media, the deviant public schools, the deviant entertainment industry, the deviant secular humanist government and judiciary and the deviant churches will be reformed or closed. There will be a relentless promotion of Christian “values,” already under way on Christian radio and television and in Christian schools, as information and facts are replaced with overt forms of indoctrination. The march toward this terrifying dystopia has begun. It is taking place on the streets of Arizona, on cable news channels, at tea party rallies, in the Texas public schools, among militia members and within a Republican Party that is being hijacked by this lunatic fringe.

The Christian Fascists Are Growing Stronger, Chris Hedges, Truth Dig

There has been high praise for the House Impeachment Managers: Representatives Jerrold Nadler, Val Demings, Zoe Lofgren, Sylvia Garcia, Jason Crow, Hakeem Jeffries; especially its leader, Adam Schiff. My fraternity brother, House Manager Hakeem Jeffries probably accomplished the first hip hop Biggie Smalls' mic drop rebuttal in impeachment history. I'm sure it completely went over Jay Sekulow's head.

Sadly, facts don't matter to fascists.

Belief in pseudoscience extended across the Nazi high command, from the Führer's search for 'death rays' to Goebbels reading Nostradamus in bed.

This is a dense and scholarly book about one of the pulpiest subjects of the past 70 years - the relationship between the Nazi party and the occult, which has been much debated across popular culture both in fiction (Captain America: Civil War, Hellboy, Wolfenstein, the Indiana Jones series, Iron Sky, The Keep and countless others) and in innumerable schlocky works of pseudoscience with runes and swastikas on the covers.

As it turns out, though, even this sober, academic treatment of the topic reveals stranger-than-fiction truths on every page.

Here are a few of them. In the 1930s, Hitler made extensive notes on a book called Magic: Theory, History, Practice and underlined passages such as "He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world". In 1934, the year after he was appointed chancellor of Germany, he hired a dowser to go over the Reich Chancellery in search of "death rays" that might damage staff in the building. He and Himmler held frequent conversations about "the World Empire of Atlantis, which fell victim to the catastrophe of the moons falling to Earth" and about a discredited pseudoscience called Welteislehre, or World Ice Theory, which taught that the cosmos was made of ice and which they saw as a "Germanic" counterbalance to the "Jewish" theory of relativity.

Hitler's obsession with the occult, Tim Martin, July 30, 2017, Independent.ie

Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, Eric Kurlander, Amazon.com

*****

The spectacle of televised debates ignores one key fact: the television was invented September 27, 1927 by Philo Taylor Farnsworth. Fast forward 33 years to the first televised debate between Kennedy and Nixon. I’ve heard that people listening to the debate by radio thought Nixon was victorious, because he had knowledge that Kennedy did not have. However, Kennedy “looked good,” he was young, tan, and Nixon was nursing an infection. It was the first instance of style over substance. Had Nixon won, there might not have been a Civil Rights Act, a Voting Rights Act, a Fair Housing Act, a Vietnam conflict, or Watergate.

In recent memory, John Kerry bested George W. Bush in every debate, as well as did Al Gore prior to him, and Hillary mopped the floor with orange bone spurs. The election at this time, is “baked in.” It will depend on which side gets its base out. Corporate debates are superfluous to democracy, and useless theater. If we copy anything from Great Britain, we should have a shorter campaign period.

If Biden wins (and historian Allan Lichtman thinks he will - he’s predicted 9 of 10 of the last presidential elections accurately), we have to think about who will represent the party and win in 2028. His "thirteen keys model" goes in the garbage if Biden is forced off the ticket. The twice-impeached, instigator of the insurrection, 88-count indicted, 34-count convicted (sentencing September 18th), adjudicated fraudster and rapist has not been asked to leave the ticket in all seriousness, nor is his personality cult likely to do so. This ageism-on-steroids was started by publications like the New York Times, and unlike the propaganda we've been sold about news outlets, they are more concerned with the bottom-line than holding power accountable, and they are loathe to print retractions admitting mistakes.

We will have a few seconds to breathe after this election cycle, if we're successful, to start thinking about 2028: whichever party controls the White House will be in charge of the 2030 Census, meaning the drawing of congressional districts. The party in power gets to draw congressional districts, i.e., the incumbents get to PICK their voters, which doesn't sound like how democracy is supposed to work! Fairness would be an AI algorithm that draws congressional maps with no respect to party, making the lawmakers actually speak to their constituents and have to WORK for every vote. I am fighting for democracy because, we haven't achieved it yet. The Founding Fathers are lionized, mythologized, and apotheosized as wise men, and they were. William Hogeland, historian, writes "The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding," that though Lin Manuel Miranda had us jamming to the hip hop play with its diverse cast, Hamilton was antidemocracy, except for the ruling class in America that he was engineering, who, like their descendants, had an aversion to paying taxes.

Thrilling to the romance of becoming the one-man inventor of a modern nation, our first Treasury secretary fostered growth by engineering an ingenious dynamo—banking, public debt, manufacturing—for concentrating national wealth in the hands of a government-connected elite. Seeking American prosperity, he built American oligarchy. Hence his animus and mutual sense of betrayal with Jefferson and Madison—and his career-long fight to suppress a rowdy egalitarian movement little remembered today: the eighteenth-century white working class.

If you're wondering why lawmakers seem older than you would like, or why after an election that showed a plurality of voters voting for another outcome, gerrymandering is the answer. Case-in-point: North Carolina GOP lost the popular vote in 2018, but gained seats in the house, to now a veto-proof majority. That is gerrymandering, that is the Census. My biggest criticism of the Democratic Party is they are great tacticians, and poor strategists. I hope they're gaming this out, because both National Committees (D&R) did the citizenry a disservice by running primary dog-and-pony shows in 2016, 2020, and 2024, each with diverse voices, diverse opinions, and DIVERSITY, only to end up with two old white guys in the mold of George Washington, so that Barack Obama can be seen as a one-off fluke. Heaven help us if a woman or another person of color can run the country as effectively as the 43 other white males that preceded the first black president, and it seems the oligarchy is determined that that will be the last deviation from their preferred "norm."

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 1, Dec 19, 1776 (published pamphlet), Dec 24, 1776 (Read to Washington's troops before crossing the Delaware for the Battle of Trenton).

The (not) Supreme Court by a 6-3 vote impowered a king, destroyed the "rule of law" and enacted a tenet of Project 2025 that Taraji P. Henson on the BET awards got to be the most searched term on the Internet. I placed it here for you to read it.

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless—if the left allows it to be,” Roberts said, in front of a backdrop advertising the Heritage Foundation. You only have to read the forward - the abstract, or preamble if you will - to the 920-page document. Kevin D. Roberts list his terminal academic credentials as PhD in History from UT Austin. His threat wasn't even trying to be subtle, or coy. Like William Luther Pierce, a PhD in Physics and author of the Neo-Nazi Turner Diaries that inspired Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, having a PhD doesn't make you moral, ethical, or intelligent.

Conservative Behind Trump Agenda Issues Cryptic Threat to Liberals, Talia Jane, Yahoo News/The New Republic

I'm tired too. But psychopaths don't take holidays, and not only democracy, but the planet will be impacted by the next election, and who wields now, god-like powers. My prediction is that the Insurrection Act will be invoked by the next president, either to quell another cosplay/Civil War/January 6 redux, or to imprison citizens, "disappear them" by deportation, or into American Gulags like Gitmo and black sites we thankfully have never heard of.

We are in a modern American Crisis, and the future will be shaped by what we do, win, or lose, in the next few months. We are not voting for a candidate, we are voting for Democracy, "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Those words should matter.

Image Source: History.com/Civil Rights Act of 1964

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism, Human Rights

Sixty years ago today, I was a month and twelve days from my second birthday. Sixty years ago today, my world was changed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act, ninety-nine years after the surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, and the cessation of the insurrection known by the Orwellian name: "Civil War."

A year prior, my parents would see four little black girls murdered by Klansmen on her 38th birthday (September 15, 1963), only exacerbated by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (November 22, 1963), which propelled his then Vice President into the presidency. The year prior to that, barely on the planet, the "Missiles of October" threatened my brief existence as nuclear weapons had been staged off the coast of Florida by Russia in Cuba (October 14, 1962). The sixties may have given us the utopian vision of Star Trek, but it was not the "Dawning of the Age of Aquarius" as the Fifth Dimension sang joyfully.

The project to dismantle American democracy started today as well.

The 9-0 vote on Brown vs. Board of Education was untenable at the time for Southern Dixiecrats, who wanted it as a ballot initiative because they knew they had the votes to defeat it, and "put things back in proper order," the hierarchy of the chattel enslavement of kidnapped humans, and Jim Crow. The parties "flipflopped" as Dixiecrats left the Democratic Party, after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 the next year, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, migrating to the Republican Party, all willing to absorb southern racists with the slick, Hollywood line a B-Movie Actor gave them as mantra: "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me." After the Powell Memo that set the framework for the first decades-long lurch to fascism, "The Gipper" was born, the first of three avatar presidents that made you feel nostalgic for halcyon days that have never existed, all of them always preceded by memos, the Project for a New American Century, and the frightening, dystopian document Project 2025.

It was always going to come to this.

My letter to the President after the "Supreme Court" decision establishing a monarch:

The Revolutionary War was fought to get out of the authoritarian rule of a tyrant, King George of England. This "Supreme Court" is neither. It is broken, and I will be voting for you, working to elect Josh Stein in North Carolina, and donating to both campaigns. I feel passionate about the successes of this administration, and we're so close to addressing climate change. Mr. President, please consider something that goes against the grain and your respect for institutions: stack the court. Propose that if re-elected, you will rebalance the high court, which is clearly activist, out-of-touch, and out of control. This convicted felon, this adjudicated rapist CANNOT regain political power, or else we will be a byword, a proverb, an oxymoron. If the U.S. falls, so will every democracy across the globe, which is the goal of Vladimir Putin and the Russian government, a kleptocracy masquerading as a state. The extinction-level event for the dinosaurs was a meteor off the Gulf of Mexico. I don't see the human species continuing if this cretin gets back into the Oval Office. The United States is an essential nation. Thank you.

My biggest critique of the Democratic Party is they lack strategic vision. The evisceration of Roe vs. Wade was a decades-long strategy that the DNC treated as a political football. The party had since 1973 7 Republican - 2 Democratic justices' decision to codify women's bodily autonomy into law, but it was too useful a political football, so no one tried. Meanwhile, the Republicans are following no rules other than the grasp and maintenance of power; call it class warfare or white supremacy; it doesn't matter.

The Dred Scott Decision by Chief Justice Robert B. Taney is credited for the impetus of the "Civil War," resulting in about 622,000 countrymen dead from both sides, only surpassed by the ineptitude of the tyrant who botched the Coronavirus response, who Chief Justice John Roberts just gave dictatorial powers to if he were to return to office January 20, 2025.

For the maintenance of a toxic social hierarchy, may history list John Roberts as our last Chief Justice, the one who destroyed our republic and democracy worldwide.

The sixth mass extinction event clearly will not need meteors, just incompetent, pious jurists who think themselves gods.

Worrying trend Reliable climate models are needed so that societies can adapt to the impact of climate change. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/Migel)

Topics: Applied Physics, Atmospheric Science, CERN, Civilization, Climate Change

It was a scorcher last year. Land and sea temperatures were up to 0.2 °C (32.36 °F) higher every single month in the second half of 2023, with these warm anomalies continuing into 2024. We know the world is warming, but the sudden heat spike had not been predicted. As NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt wrote in Nature recently: “It’s humbling and a bit worrying to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.”

As Schmidt went on to explain, a spell of record-breaking warmth had been deemed “unlikely” despite 2023 being an El Niño year, where the relatively cool waters in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean are replaced with warmer waters. Trouble is, the complex interactions between atmospheric deep convection and equatorial modes of ocean variability, which lie behind El Niño, are poorly resolved in conventional climate models.

Our inability to simulate El Niño properly with current climate models (J. Climate 10.1175/JCLI-D-21-0648.1) is symptomatic of a much bigger problem. In 2011 I argued that contemporary climate models were not good enough to simulate the changing nature of weather extremes such as droughts, heat waves and floods (see “A CERN for climate change” March 2011 p13). With grid-point spacings typically around 100 km, these models provide a blurred, distorted vision of the future climate. For variables like rainfall, the systematic errors associated with such low spatial resolution are larger than the climate-change signals that the models attempt to predict.

Reliable climate models are vitally required so that societies can adapt to climate change, assess the urgency of reaching net-zero or implement geoengineering solutions if things get really bad. Yet how is it possible to adapt if we don’t know whether droughts, heat waves, storms or floods cause the greater threat? How do we assess the urgency of net-zero if models cannot simulate “tipping” points? How is it possible to agree on potential geoengineering solutions if it is not possible to reliably assess whether spraying aerosols in the stratosphere will weaken the monsoons or reduce the moisture supply to the tropical rainforests? Climate modelers have to take the issue of model inadequacy much more seriously if they wish to provide society with reliable actionable information about climate change.

I concluded in 2011 that we needed to develop global climate models with spatial resolution of around 1 km (with compatible temporal resolution) and the only way to achieve this is to pool human and computer resources to create one or more internationally federated institutes. In other words, we need a “CERN for climate change” – an effort inspired by the particle-physics facility near Geneva, which has become an emblem for international collaboration and progress.

Why we still need a CERN for climate change, Tim Palmer, Physics World

― Gaylord Nelson, former Republican Governor and Senator of Wisconsin, Founder of Earth Day, April 20, 1970, which led to the formation of the U.S. EPA, December 2, 1970. Image: Nelson Institute of Environmental Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Democracy, Existentialism, Fascism

Robert Mueller was the subject of Internet memes as a 21st-century version of Joe Friday in "Dragnet." There was going to be an arrest. The 45th Oval Office occupant was going to be put in handcuffs and "perp-walked" in full view and total embarrassment of the Troll-in-Chief who tormented them with his itchy, psychotic Twitter fingers.

Robert Mueller did not save us.

Jack Smith was appointed late in the game of criminality. He joined Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, Letitia James, Shawn Crawley, and Roberta Kaplan after two impeachments and 91 federal indictments, trying to do justice, stymied by wealth and privilege that most of us will never have. He has been convicted twice in the E. Jean Carroll: the second time because he couldn't keep his mouth shut. He owes over half a billion dollars between the two. But these are civil lawsuits. He owes money that he actually doesn't have, so he has to go hat in hand to the faux Tony Stark to get a bailout, I guess because a check in Rubles would be to hard to gaslight, even for him.

Jack Smith will not save us.

Meme posting on Facebook, tweeting (or "X"), Threading, Snapchatting, Reddit posts with pithy commentary, and real clever zingers will not change anything. Hiding behind your laptop as a "keyboard warrior" is no different and no less cowardly than the trolls you get your blood pressure up over in their mom's basements. Our democratic republic is "hanging by a thread." We need your bodies; we need your commitment.

Focus your anger into action.

Due to a lot going on at work, I ended up voting on Super Tuesday. I did not encounter any resistance. The tape in the machine had to be replaced, so my ballot was counted sometime later. I came back when my wife voted to get my sticker.

The candidates I voted for won in the primaries. I plan to volunteer for the campaigns that I want to be successful.

If you're angry about the state of the world and your country, I quote the Honorable John Lewis, who joined the ancestors: "Get in good trouble, necessary trouble."

It's not just civil rights anymore. It's Women's Rights, LGBTQ Rights, Immigrant Rights, and the rights to just BE yourselves.

The Danger of Echo Chambers

The State of the Union started with the pomp and circumstance of the Joint Chambers of Congress, which is still a crime scene. The current Speaker filed the Amicus Brief to overturn the results of the 2020 election. However, I am reminded of the 2012 election.

I see Senator Romney glad-handing everyone on the floor. I recall him so confident that he had won the 2012 election, he launched his transition website. It was because he consumed a lot of Fox (not) News, and they projected he would win, until he didn't.

I recall Karl Rove making Meghan Kelly walk to the statisticians' office at Fox (not) News, totally apoplectic that Obama/Biden had won re-election. The other persons utterly stunned were Mitt and Ann Romney. As Karl and Fox (not) News viewers, they absorbed a medium that made them feel better, but it did not, in fact, inform them, and still doesn't.

The danger of echo chambers is like Narcissus; it only gives you the last thing that you might hear:

One day, while hunting, Narcissus comes across an untouched, glassy spring. He is drawn to its beauty and lies down to take a drink, but what he sees in the still water enchants him. He is in love with what he sees and is inflamed by the features of the vision: the hair, his eyes, porcelain skin, and rosy cheeks. Attempts to kiss and hold the reflection are in vain, and Narcissus is only frustrated by the teasing reactions of the image. When Narcissus winks, the image winks back; when Narcissus waves, the image waves; and when he cries tears, he sees that the image also cries. Narcissus cannot understand why he cannot reach what he so desperately desires.

The tormented boy agonizes over his unrequited love. He cannot leave the spring and is trapped in his frozen gaze at his reflection, pining away for the boy in the water who rejects all advances. Then Narcissus realizes that the image is his, but it’s too late, as he has already fallen tragically in love with himself. Knowing that he can never have what he desires, his body withers away in despair. When Narcissus says “Goodbye” to the reflection, Echo’s voice says “Goodbye.” At that moment, Narcissus dies while peering into the spring. Historic Mysteries

The danger of echo chambers is adherence to narratives that do not exist in the real world. It is allegiance to "alternative facts," crackpot conspiracy theories, Big Lies, horse manure, hoopla, and hogwash. It says climate change doesn't exist in a deluge of evidence on a warming globe annually breaking its previous records. It is saying the Affordable Care Act was destined to "kill grandma," when four years ago, we had refrigerator trucks as mobile morgues by ignoring a pandemic and promoting quackery like drinking bleach, shining lights up our rectums, ivermectin, and hydroxychloroquine. It is putting on a Batman suit and thinking yourself an undefeatable martial artist, or a Superman suit and thinking you can fly. "Try that in Gotham," or leap from the roof of a short house: the acceleration due to gravity is still 9.81 m/s². Physics is reality, and it cannot be gaslighted.

Things like the Orwellian Citizen's United have guaranteed that every election until capitalism is reformed is the "election of our lifetimes." The American oligarchs today are the spiritual descendants of the fascists who tried to prop up Smedley Butler as their dictator. He balked, realizing that he was a "gangster for capitalism" and that "war is a racket."

Time travel is a popular sci-fi trope, but backward travel is impossible due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But it is possible to shape the future we want to see for our children. To do that, we can't listen to nymphs reflecting echoes.

“Our goal is not just an environment of clean air, water, and scenic beauty. The objective is an environment of decency, quality, and mutual respect for all other human beings and living creatures.”

“The ultimate test of man's conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.”
― Gaylord Nelson, former Republican Governor and Senator of Wisconsin, Founder of Earth Day, April 20, 1970, which led to the formation of the U.S. EPA, December 2, 1970.

Scientists used samples from sclerosponges off the coast of Puerto Rico to calculate ocean surface temperatures going back 300 years. Douglas Rissing/iStockphoto/Getty Images

Topics: Climate Change, Existentialism, Global Warming, Research, Thermodynamics

CNN — Using sponges collected off the coast of Puerto Rico in the eastern Caribbean, scientists have calculated 300 years of ocean temperatures and concluded the world has already overshot one crucial global warming limit and is speeding toward another.

These findings, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, are alarming but also controversial. Other scientists say the study contains too many uncertainties and limitations to draw such firm conclusions and could end up confusing public understanding of climate change.

Sponges — which grow slowly, layer by layer — can act like data time capsules, allowing a glimpse into what the ocean was like hundreds of years ago, long before the existence of modern data.

Using samples from sclerosponges, which live for centuries, the team of international scientists was able to calculate ocean surface temperatures going back 300 years.

They found human-caused warming may have started earlier than currently assumed and, as a result, global average temperature may have already warmed more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Researchers say the results also suggest global temperature could overshoot 2 degrees of warming by the end of the decade.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries pledged to restrict global warming to less than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, with an ambition to limit it to 1.5 degrees. The pre-industrial era — or the state of the climate before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels and warming the planet — is commonly defined as 1850-1900.

Data from centuries-old sea creatures suggest the world is warming faster than scientists thought, Rachel Ramirez, CNN