#media2014

[earthpledge]

"This year is on track to be a record 1.8 degrees hotter than the 19th-century average, hitting a symbolic milestone in the temperature rise that scientists blame mostly on human activities, Britain’s weather service said Monday." "The increase is important because it’s halfway to the 3.6 degrees that governments have set as a limit to avoid dangerous levels of warming."

[earthpledge]

"The 41st president suggests that the 43rd president’s 2002 speech describing Iraq, Iran and North Korea as part of an “Axis of Evil” included comments “that might be historically proved to be not benefiting anything.” He says Cheney had “his iron-ass view of everything” and that Rumsfeld displayed a “lack of humility” and “was an arrogant fellow.”"

[earthpledge]

"According to the World Resources Institute (WRI), land use represents 61 percent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions. That means deforestation causes far more climate pollution than all of the country's cars and power plants combined. In fact, Indonesia has the world's highest rate of deforestation, even higher than Brazil, which contains most of the Amazon rainforest. From 2000 to 2012, according to research published in Nature, Indonesia lost more than 23,000 square miles of forest to logging, agriculture, and other uses. That's roughly the size of West Virginia. In 2010, the government attempted to put the brakes on deforestation by exchanging a two-year moratorium on new logging permits for $1 billion in aid from Norway and the United States. But according to Susan Minnemeyer, a forest analyst at the WRI, that policy appears to have had the "perverse impact of accelerating [deforestation], because those with permits felt that they had to take action quickly or they would no longer be able to." This all adds up to global-scale pollution: Indonesia is the world's fifth-ranking greenhouse gas emitter, coming in just behind Russia and India. In other words, we can't stop climate change without saving Indonesia's rainforests. Indonesia is in the middle of a public health crisis from forest fire haze. The problem isn't just deforestation, but how that deforestation is happening. In Indonesia, forests are often cleared out with fire. This can be done legally with a permit, but it's often carried out illegally as well. This year, forest fires are also being fueled by El Niño-related weather patterns. The combination of El Niño and intentional deforestation has proven incredibly dangerous: The country has experienced nearly 100,000 fires so far this year, the worst since the last major El Niño in 1997. Fire activity typically ramps up in September and October, the end of the dry season, and over the last couple of weeks the conflagrations have grown to crisis proportions—hence Joko's hasty return. The fires are so big they can be seen from space. The greenhouse impact from those fires is staggering: On several days over the last month, emissions from Indonesian forest fires have exceeded all emissions from the US economy: World Resources Institute To make matters worse, more than half of those fires occur on land made of peat, the thick, soil-like material made from decomposed plant matter. Peat is packed with carbon, and fires that occur on peatland can have a global warming impact 200 times greater than fires on normal soil, according to the WRI. Last week, Joko said the government would stop issuing new permits for commercial development on peatland, but that won't stop the fires that are already burning. Climate pollution is just part of the problem. Firefighting costs are pushing $50 million per week. The impact of this fire season on Indonesia's economy could reach $14 billion. And the thick blanket of haze that is stretching from the country across Southeast Asia has caused at least 10 deaths from haze-related illness and 500,000 cases of acute respiratory illness. Your snacks and makeup are part of the problem. Of course, Indonesians aren't just chopping and burning down trees for fun. Besides logging, one of the main uses for cleared land is to plant African oil palm, the fruits of which are used to produce palm oil. Palm oil is the world's most popular form of vegetable oil, and half of it comes from Indonesia. It's also found in about half the processed food you encounter in a grocery store (as well as many cosmetics). "

[earthpledge]

"The meme that married people are happier and healthier than single people is unfounded. DePaulo dug into the research supposedly proving the benefits of getting married and found substantial experimental flaws across the board. (Often, these studies either excluded divorced people entirely or lumped them in with single people, thereby obscuring the fact that they had gotten married — and hadn’t liked it. Another problem: Unlike with drug studies, a study of marriage can never truly isolate that variable; you can’t randomly assign people to get married or not.) The least problematic research, in DePaulo’s estimation, which follows the same people over the long term, has found that around the time of their weddings, people show a brief increase in happiness, then go right back to where they were when they were single. (If they get divorced later, they don’t even show this brief honeymoon effect.) Stigma against single parents is easily debunked, too: what’s really bad for kids is not having a single parent, but “conflict, acrimony or cold, neglectful environments.” The bottom line is that there’s no better or worse — and no shortcut to happiness. Those who are happiest follow their desires, whether that means getting married or staying single. For DePaulo, as for many others, staying single just feels right. “If I got married, I would not become happier and healthier!” she says. “I love living single — except for all the singlism and matrimania.”"

[earthpledge]

"(CNN)Hurricane Patricia -- the strongest hurricane ever recorded -- made landfall on Mexico's Pacific coast Friday evening, its 165 mph winds barreling into southwestern Mexico near Cuixmala, officials said. The monster storm touched down about 6:15 p.m., hours after weakening slightly with sustained winds decreasing to 190 mph and gusts to 235 mph, according to the U.S National Weather Service."

[earthpledge]

“Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.” http://m.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/astronomy/its-either-aliens-or-a-swarm-of-comets-scientists-baffled-by-wtf-001-our-galaxys-strangest-star-20151014-gk9iwj.html

[earthpledge]

"For just the third time on record, scientists say they are now watching the unfolding of a massive worldwide coral bleaching event, spanning the globe from Hawaii to the Indian Ocean. And they fear that thanks to warm sea temperatures, the ultimate result could be the loss of more than 12,000 square kilometers, or over 4,500 square miles, of coral this year — with particularly strong impacts in Hawaii and other U.S. tropical regions, and potentially continuing into 2016. The event is being brought on by a combination of global warming, a very strong El Nino event, and the so-called warm “blob” in the Pacific Ocean, say the researchers, part of a consortium including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as well as XL Catlin Seaview Survey, The University of Queensland in Australia, and Reef Check. “This is only the third time we’ve seen what we would refer to as a global bleaching event, an event that causes mass bleaching in the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and the Atlantic-Caribbean basin,” said Mark Eakin, who heads NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch. The prior events, Eakin continues, “were in 1998 and 2010, and those were pretty much one year events. We’re looking at a similar spatial scale of bleaching across the globe, but spanning across at least 2 years. So that means a lot of these corals are being put under really prolonged stress, or are being hit 2 years in a row.” The total loss could amount to 5 percent of the world’s corals in 2015, according to Eakin. That’s not as bad as the loss in 1998, but there’s a fear that if the event continues into 2016, the losses would grow. “We’ve been hearing worrying reports of bleaching from various places, and now the bad news is officially here, with worse news likely yet to come with the strengthening El Nino,” says Nancy Knowlton, an expert on coral reefs with the Smithsonian Institution, of the news. “No reefs that experience unusually warm waters are likely to escape unscathed, but reefs already suffering from overfishing and pollution may have a particularly rough time recovering, based on what we have learned from past bleaching events.”"

[earthpledge]

"The U.S. bombing attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, was grotesque, lasting more than half an hour and burning people alive — medical staff and patients alike — in the kind of facility that international rules of war recognize as a safe haven. There should have been no question about the nature of the work done in the building. Doctors Without Borders has operated the hospital for four years. It had reminded the U.S. and Afghan forces just days earlier of the hospital's location, and it reportedly told U.S. military officials mid-attack that it was under fire from a helicopter gunship. Yet the attack continued, destroying the facility, killing 12 staff members and 10 patients, including three children, and wounding 37 more. The Pentagon, after some initial confusion about what had occurred, acknowledged that the hospital was mistakenly struck and promised to investigate, which is the appropriate response. Gen. John F. Campbell, who leads the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, reportedly suspects that U.S. troops failed to follow established protocol in approving and conducting the attack. That's troubling, if true, and the Pentagon should ensure that its investigation proceeds quickly and transparently, with an eye not only toward understanding what happened but also toward drafting procedures to reduce the chances of a repeat episode. War, it is said, is conducted in a fog, and while civilian deaths are to be avoided and lamented, they are also inevitable. But the incident at the Kunduz hospital was more than a misdirected bomb. It was a sustained attack and, according to Campbell, seems not to have been justified under rules that limit U.S. military engagement to defending American and allied troops, supporting missions targeting Al Qaeda and assisting Afghan forces if they are under attack and at risk of mass casualties. Although Campbell said the Afghan forces requested the air support, the decision to provide it and the approval of the target came from within the U.S. command. He told a Senate committee this week that he has ordered the "entire force to undergo in-depth training in order to review all of our operational authorities and rules of engagement." Doctors Without Borders is understandably outraged by the attack, which led it to close its operations in Kunduz, a regrettable loss of medical support in that war-torn city. President Obama on Wednesday offered his apology to Joanne Liu, the head of Doctors Without Borders, but the organization is pressing its allegation that the attack constitutes a war crime and has called for a non-prosecutorial investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-finding Commission under the Geneva Convention. The medical relief organization is within its rights to seek that independent assessment, and the U.S. government should cooperate."