Mark Kleiman watched Hillary Clinton’s efforts to round up the support of Al Sharpton and Rupert Murdoch which certainly would, on some level, be an impressively odious tag-team of endorsements. On the other hand, on some level you’d expect everyone who moves and shakes in New York politics to get behind the nominal home state candidate.
Chapter Four Excerpt: The Hell and High Water Scenario
We could get a meter [of sea-level rise] easy in 50 years.
– Bob Corell, chair, Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, 2006
The peak rate of deglaciation following the last Ice Age was . . . about one meter [39 inches] of sea- level rise every 20 years, which was maintained for several centuries.
– James Hansen, director, Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA), 2004
Sea-level rise of 20 to 80 feet will be all but unstoppable by midcentury if current emissions trends continue. The first few feet of sea-level rise alone will displace more than 100 million people worldwide and turn all of our major Gulf and Atlantic coast cities into pre-Katrina New Orleans–below sea level and facing superhurricanes.
How fast can seas rise? For the past decade, sea levels have been rising about 1 inch a decade, double the rate of a few decades ago. The Third Assessment Report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released back in 2001, projected that sea levels would rise 12 to 36 inches by 2100, with little of that rise coming from either Greenland or Antarctica. Seas rise mainly because ocean water expands as it gets warmer, and inland glaciers melt, releasing their water to the oceans.
Sea-level rise is a lagging indicator of climate change, in part because global warming also increases atmospheric moisture. More atmospheric moisture probably means more snowfall over both the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets, which would cause them to gain mass in their centers even as they lose mass at the edges. Until recently, most scientists thought that the primary mechanism by which these enormous ice sheets would lose mass was through simple melting. The planet warms and ice melts–a straightforward physics calculation and a very slow process, with Greenland taking perhaps a thousand years or more to melt this way, according to some models.
Since 2001, however, a great many studies using direct observation and satellite monitoring have revealed that both of the two great ice sheets are losing mass at the edges much faster than the models had predicted. We now know a number of physical processes can cause the major ice sheets to disintegrate faster than by simple melting alone. The whole idea of “glacial change” as a metaphor for change too slow to see will vanish in a world where glaciers are shrinking so fast that you can actually watch them retreat.
The disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is a multistage process that starts with the accelerated warming of the Arctic….
‘Tens of thousands’ turn out to protest Iraq escalation.
“The event drew demonstrators from across the country, and many said that in addition to taking their discontent to the streets they planned to press members of Congress to oppose the war.” Nearly 70 percent of the American public opposes President Bush’s plan to send more U.S. troops to Iraq.
No Respect!
I’ve been concerned that winning the All-Star starter’s slot might de-chip Agent Zero’s shoulder. So in a desperate effort to gin up feelings of disrespect, let me note that ESPN.com rounded up midseason opinion from six writers and zero writers out of six picked the Wizards — only the team with the best record in the Eastern Conference — to represent the Eastern Conference in the NBA Finals. The case against DC is pretty clear and by no means dumb, but you’d think someone would pick the conference leader to win the conference.
Everyone knows except Mitch McConnell.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “said benchmarks are the best way to determine if the Iraqis are holding up their end of the bargain but he stopped short of saying what the U.S. should do it the Iraqis fall short. ‘I think everyone knows what the consequences are,’ McConnell said without specifying what he thinks they are, even when pressed. ‘I’m not going to start playing out the scenarios,’ he added.”
Last Best Gifts
Even libertarian economics writer Virginia Postrel likes lefty sociologist Kieran Healy’s book about organ donations, Last Best Gifts. See the website here. The basic point of the book is to try to move beyond a simple debate about markets versus altruism in the realm of organ donation and try to get you to see that there’s essentially no way to move outside the real of embedded systems of social value.
There’s a case to be made for incorporating more in the way of financial incentives into the organ procurement system, but assuming you’re actually more interested in getting people to donate organs than in writing clever blog posts you need to do this in a careful way that’s sensitive to different ways of framing the issue of money. Grieving spouses and parents typically don’t, for example, want to be put in the situation of selling their wife, husband, or child’s corpse and thereby profiting personally off their death.
The New Charles Lindberg
Oh, excellent, now Jonah Goldberg says I’m Charles Lindberg. Fantastic. See Ezra. I’ll cop to not actually knowing anything about the real historical record of Lindberg, but I take the point of the reference to be a not-so-thinly veiled effort to once again call Wesley Clark and myself anti-semites. One noteworthy thing about the way these debates unfold is that people taking the Jonah G. side of these arguments invariably twist people’s words around. Look back through this current controversy and you’ll see that I don’t accuse “the Jews” of having a pernicious influence on anything. If you do want to talk about “the Jews” as a class, we’ve had a beneficial impact on US foreign policy lately, voting in overwhelming numbers for congressional Democrats, putting Nancy Pelosi in the Speaker’s Chair and thereby somewhat restraining Bush’s poor national security policies.
The claim is that specific American Jews and the organizations they run and finance have had a pernicious impact on American foreign policy (these guys, say). Lots of Jewish Americans — Russ Feingold, M.J. Rosenberg, Eric Alterman — are trying to have a positive impact on American foreign policy.
Tester goes transparent.
With encouragement from the Sunlight Foundation, Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) now posts his schedule online at the end of each day. “Whether it’s a visit to the gym, a meeting with the founder of the Montana Meth Project, or an interview with Wolf Blitzer, staff for Tester post his entire schedule online each workday — a Senate first.” Check it out HERE.
Molly Ivins hospitalized in cancer battle.
Three weeks ago, legendary Texan and progressive columnist Molly Ivins “wrote that she would dedicate every single one of her syndicated columns from now on to the issue of stopping the war in Iraq — until it ended. But she has managed to finish only one more column since. The gravely ill Texas columnist has been hospitalized again this week in her ongoing battle with breast cancer.”
Strange Ethics
As you can see here there have been some persistent attempts by someone at the Council on Foreign Relations to scrub the Max Boot Wikipedia page of some unflattering information. Boot, of course, is a fellow at CFR and a columnist for The Los Angeles Times. What information? Well, as you can read here on Altercation, what this is about is the fact that Boot is involved in some scandalously corrupt backstory. Before he was a prestigious military policy writer, Boot was simply a generic rightwing hack at The Wall Street Journal‘s hack-laden editorial page. While there he, among other things, wrote an editorial attacking public health officials that was edited by tobacco lobbyist Steven MIlloy.
The only reason we know anything about this is that it happens to have come up in tobacco-related litigation. It’s possible, in principle, that when Boot was writing rightwing regulatory policy journalism for the Journal he just so happened to let one of his pieces be edited by a lobbyist and that that piece just so happened to have come up in a lawsuit. Much more likely, however, is that he did this on various occasions and there just so happens to have been a lawsuit that uncovered this.
And now Boot, or someone working on his behalf, is trying to keep this incident hushed up. I wonder why he’s bothering. In case Boot hasn’t noticed, he’s a conservative. The rules of the media game are clear — no jobs for the left, no accountability for the right. Corrupt or not, Boot seems like a smart, perceptive guy . . . surely he’s picked up on this.
