Lloyd Alter of Treehugger says that the following post by Kaid Benfield of NRDC Switchboard is his favourite of the year:
2010 Closes With Yet More Killer Climate Disasters
As greenhouse pollution continues to build in the atmosphere, 2010 is entering the history books as the hottest year on record. A year of unprecedented extreme weather disasters, 2010 saw tens of thousands of people killed and millions affected by our increasingly dangerous climate. The year is ending with yet more climate disasters, from floods in Australia to winter tornadoes across America:
Parts of Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee were on the lookout for more twisters after several touched down Friday — including one that killed three people in an Arkansas town. Two more people died in southern Missouri. Three people died in Cincinnati, a hamlet of about 100 residents about three miles from the Oklahoma border. An elderly couple died in their home, while a dairy farmer was killed while milking his cows.
The tornadoes are part of an “unusual” storm front fed by “warm, moist air in place over the region.” On the colder edge of the front, “the storm responsible for the deadly tornado is also bringing a dangerous winter storm to the West and Midwest,” with up to three feet of new snow from California to Idaho.
Meanwhile, Australia is being ravaged by unprecedented flooding, following tremendous rainfall for months, compounded by the Christmas Day landfall of Cyclone Tasha. Floods now cover an area “the size of France and Germany combined.” Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced millions of dollars of relief funding as she described the record-breaking floods:
Some communities are seeing floodwaters higher than they’ve seen in decades, and for some communities floodwaters have never reached these levels before [in] the time that we have been recording floods. For many communities we haven’t even seen the peak of the floodwaters yet, that’s a number of days away.
“Some sections of coastal Queensland received over four feet of rain from September through November,” meteorologist Jeff Masters reports. The floods, which have wiped out crops, drowned livestock, and disrupted the largest coal ports in the world, are expected to cause at least $1 billion in damage.
“The science is cooked,” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) told Politico today. Unfortunately, the cold facts of science are that the planet itself is cooking.
Featured
Pete writes:
I’ve lived most of my life in rural Southern Minnesota. I’ve lived intimately with nature for much of that time. I’m also a keen observer.
To be fair, I have witnessed such extremes before. What concerns me is the ongoing trends. I’ve kept a log of weather events for decades: First frost. “Leaf season”. First snow. First “safe” ice for ice-fishing. First green buds of spring. Ice out. etc.
I can say, based on my own observations, that winter is two to three weeks later and spring is two to three weeks earlier just during my lifetime. I knew that something was screwy long before Al Gore made that damned movie.
And? The observations that I’ve made personally pale in comparison to the less tangible signs of change. I didn’t see a possum until I was thirty. Now? They are thick as fleas. Coyotes have also been expanding their range northward. Countless plants have moved North. I’ve seen ducks largely abandon the Northern Mississippi flyway due to drought and invasive species. The coot are almost gone.
Living here, at the border of two biozones, the changes are not hard to see.
Future Shock
The Economist did an interesting 2010 in charts feature to close the year out. Combining their chart 2:
With their chart 3:
I think what we see is that for unclear reasons leaders in developed countries have basically given up on trying to have economic growth. The US, the Eurozone, and Japan are so terrified that real growth might lead to growth-imperiling inflation that we’ve just decided to live without the growth in the first place. To me this is also Tyler Cowen’s real message here.
But if the developed world has decided it’s not interested in growth anymore, I think we can look forward to many more stories like this:
With a market share of 31.5 percent, Nokia is still the largest vendor of handsets in the Indian market, followed by Chinese brand G’Five with about 10 percent share, IDC said on Wednesday.
That’s via full-time professional mobile device market analyst Horace Dedieu who remarks: “No, I haven’t heard of G’Five either.”
Welcome to the teens.
Provocation of the Day
There are sort of two different kinds of issues in K-12 education in America. One set of questions is about the structure of the system and what kinds of structural changes might drive better outcomes. Another set of questions is specifically about pedagogy and what kinds of classroom content would be valuable and effective. The former gets discussed a lot in the policy community and the latter much less so. This is, I think, mostly for good reason since someone like me would just be guessing randomly about pedagogical issues.
So I think each and every one of Michael O’Hare’s ideas on this subject should be taken with some grains of salt, but I found the whole post though-provoking and especially this: “let’s look hard at the differences between what we do to students in school and the environment they go into in a workplace, like the contrast between treating collaboration as cheating and as an essential for success.”
I will, however, stand up for a certain amount of instructional practices that O’Hare regards as obsolete. I think the evidence suggests that one of the most important skills people learn (or don’t) in school is self-discipline rather than specific knowledge. I don’t think learning the chronology of ancient near eastern empires (Sumeria then Assyria then Babylonia then Persia then Greece then Rome) in elementary school has ever been useful to me, or even that the chronology I learned is especially accurate, but a lot of life involves semi-arbitrary tasks and it’s worth one’s while to get used to performing them.
Hottest Year In History Ends With Freak Climate Disasters
As greenhouse pollution continues to build in the atmosphere, 2010 is entering the history books as the hottest year on record. A year of unprecedented extreme weather disasters, 2010 is ending with yet more climate disasters, from floods in Australia to winter tornadoes across America:
Parts of Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee were on the lookout for more twisters after several touched down Friday — including one that killed three people in an Arkansas town. Two more people died in southern Missouri. Three people died in Cincinnati, a hamlet of about 100 residents about three miles from the Oklahoma border. An elderly couple died in their home, while a dairy farmer was killed while milking his cows.
The tornadoes are part of an “unusual” storm front fed by “warm, moist air in place over the region.” On the colder edge of the front, “the storm responsible for the deadly tornado is also bringing a dangerous winter storm to the West and Midwest,” with up to three feet of new snow from California to Idaho.
Meanwhile, Australia is being ravaged by unprecedented flooding, following tremendous rainfall for months, compounded by the Christmas Day landfall of Cyclone Tasha. Floods now cover an area “the size of France and Germany combined.” Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced millions of dollars of relief funding as she described the record-breaking floods:
Some communities are seeing floodwaters higher than they’ve seen in decades, and for some communities floodwaters have never reached these levels before [in] the time that we have been recording floods. For many communities we haven’t even seen the peak of the floodwaters yet, that’s a number of days away.
“Some sections of coastal Queensland received over four feet of rain from September through November,” meteorologist Jeff Masters reports. The floods, which have wiped out crops, drowned livestock, and disrupted the largest coal ports in the world, are expected to cause at least $1 billion in damage.
It’s looking like 2011 will thus continue the disturbing trend of rising disaster from our fossil-fueled climate.
State Budget Cuts Pushing More Students To Costly For-Profit Colleges
With Republicans taking control of the House of Representatives next month, it seems increasingly unlikely that Senate Democrats will be successful in their push to enact stricter regulations on for-profit colleges. These institutions — like Strayer University and the University of Phoenix — are taking in a growing number of students and an ever increasing amount of federal student aid, while also accounting for a disproportionate amount of student loan defaults.
At the moment, eleven percent of higher-education students are enrolled in for-profits, “but they receive 26 percent of federal student loans and account for 43 percent of defaulters.” For-profit schools have also been accused of “recruiting students with inflated promises, fudging financial-aid applications and leaving graduates with crushing debt and bleak job prospects.”
And at a time when for-profit colleges may very well escape from enchanced regulation, they’re going to be gaining even more students, as state-level budget cuts are pushing students from their local community colleges into the waiting arms of for-profit schools:
As state budget cuts lock students out of community-college classrooms or force them to stand in class, for-profit colleges are attracting hundreds of thousands of poor and minority students, charging up to 10 times as much for the same degree…Today, one in seven minority students attends a for-profit college, as does one in four poor students who receive federal Pell grants for low-income families, according to the U.S. Department of Education and an industry group. Students in for- profit college programs graduate or stay in school less than those at community colleges, according to a study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and released this month.
Washington state, New York state, and California have all cut their community college budgets in response to the recession, while many states, including Virgina and Georgia, have hiked community college tuition.
According to the Pew Research Center, “one-quarter (24%) of 2008 bachelor’s degree graduates at for-profit schools borrowed more than $40,000, compared with 5% of graduates at public institutions and 14% at not-for-profit schools.” But the problem here isn’t only that these schools are leaving students buried in debt. It’s that they’re doing it while sucking up taxpayer money.
As Bloomberg News noted, “as much as 90 percent of revenue at each for-profit college comes from federal student aid.” And executives at these schools are using this taxpayer largesse to line their own pockets. Strayer University’s CEO, for instance, made $41.9 million last year, “26 times the compensation of the highest-paid president of a traditional university.” But House Republicans are going to bat for these higher education profiteers, to the detriment of students and the federal government’s bottom line.
Request for Requests
As we head into the New Year, I’d like to revisit the idea of soliciting requests. What are people interested in? Are there questions you’d like to see my answer too? Issues that need more exploration?
Starting Over
Probably my favorite cultural event of the year is the Christmas Revels, which I go see with one of my best friends from college every December. The performance of traditional music and pagent ends with this poem by Susan Cooper, which I adore. It’s called “The Shortest Day”:
And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us – listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Thanks for another year, folks. I’ll see you in 2011, and best wishes for a joyous start to it this weekend.
Mortgage Bankers Association Stands Against Successful Foreclosure Prevention Efforts
In April 2009, the Mortgage Bankers Association — with the help of Congressional Republicans and the rest of the banking industry — successfully lobbied against the adoption of mortgage cram-down legislation, which would have allowed judges to modify mortgages for troubled borrowers in bankruptcy court. That legislation’s defeat, and the MBA’s subsequent celebrations, led Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) to say that when it comes to the Senate, the banks, “frankly, own the place.” And with 2010 coming to a close, the MBA is once again standing in opposition to programs aimed at keeping families in their homes — this time by taking aim at what are known as mortgage mediation programs, which push banks to negotiate with borrowers before finalizing a foreclosure:
John Mechem, a spokesman for the Mortgage Bankers Association, which represents the largest mortgage lenders, said the group is opposed to both mandatory and voluntary mediation programs. He argued that the programs are expensive and are often used by borrowers as a tactic to stall foreclosure.
As The Wonk Room explained, with foreclosures on pace to top one million this year and federal foreclosure prevention programs falling woefully short of their goals, mediation has been incredibly successful, as the sessions require lenders to actively negotiate, instead of giving borrowers the run-around. As Christopher Brecciano, a Connecticut attorney who represents borrowers, explained, mediation “requires the borrower to sit eye to eye with the bank’s attorney and means there is someone to hold accountable rather than just some service person on the telephone.” Sixty-two percent of those entering Connecticut’s mediation program received a permanent loan modification, while in Nevada seventy-four percent received one.
The King’s Speech
See this film. It’s excellent. It’s about George VI’s struggles with stammering and his relationship with his speech therapist. But that sounds like a terrible idea for a movie, whereas in fact the film is excellent. I note that 2006′s The Queen was excellent as well, further bolstering the case for constitutional monarchy.
But should films really be limited to British monarchs? Of currently reigning sovereigns, Juan Carlos of Spain has had a much more interesting life than Queen Elizabeth, and of World War II-era monarchs, Wilhelmina of the Netherlands seems more noteworthy than George VI.
