Month: November 2019

Temperature anomalies arranged by country 1900 – 2018Created…



Temperature anomalies arranged by country 1900 - 2018

Created by Antti Lipponen and released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License 

Temperature anomalies arranged by country 1900 - 2018. Visualization based on Berkeley Earth / Robert Rohde data 

GLOBAL WARMING

There’s a great deal of misinformation about climate change.  Some people say the climate isn’t changing; they say that we’ve always had weather.  And when we have colder snap, they insisted it proved global warming isn’t happening.

But weather is not synonymous with climate.  

Weather is the day-to-day state of the atmosphere, and its short-term variation in minutes to weeks. People generally think of weather as the combination of temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloudiness, visibility, and wind. … Climate is the weather of a place averaged over a period of time, often 30 years.

— “What is the difference between weather and climate?”
National Snow and Ice Data Center

Antti Lipponen’s animated visualization does a lovely job of demonstrating the pattern of climate change over time.

So rather than trying to fight the naysayers, those trying to sound the alarm about global warming stopped trying to fight this battle, and instead started calling the problem Climate Change.

This video is slightly longer than 30 seconds, but I needed it to be much shorter so I could use it to demonstrate the changing climate for a 1 minute campaign video I was producing for my husband’s 2019 election campaign as the Green Party of Canada candidate for Brantford—Brant.  Since Antti Lipponen released the visualization with a free culture license, I was not only able to use it, under the terms of the CC-By licence I was able to reduce it to fit.  The short version works brilliantly in my Green Wave video, but in order to shoehorn it into the necessary space, I’d needed to reduce each year to a single frame.  But the original video is very well worth seeing as well, because of the increasing frequency of multiple temperature anomolies over the years as climate change picks up speed.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL

Despite everything, the “climate change skeptics” continue to deny the existence of human caused Climate Change. Not because the science is faulty— Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) has been accepted by at least 99.9% of publishing climate scientists— but because the fossil fuel industry (and those profiting from it) want to wring as much money out of their holdings as possible, much like the cigarette industry wanted to  suppress the science indicating smoking was hazardous to human health as long as possible so they could continue profiting.   

disbander-of-armies: This week I had my first lecture on Mesopotamian history. At one point, the…

disbander-of-armies:

This week I had my first lecture on Mesopotamian history. At one point, the professor was talking about ancient texts. As an example, he told us that if we read an ancient inscription of a king who conquered other peoples, we could just take it as that, as a king telling us about something he did. Then he said this: “But most importantly, ask yourselves: “Why is he telling me this?””.

This, I think, is why Ancient History and all the other fields of the Classics department are more important than ever. I’ve studied other things before but never was there such an emphasis on the critical evaluation of sources. In my first semester, we critically analyzed Pericles’ funeral speech in Thukydides’ Peloponnesian War. In my second semester, we talked about historians’ interpretation of the past and how they were influenced by the events of their own times. I’m in my third semester now. 

In the times of “fake news” and “alternative facts”, this skill is the most valuable tool we have. I’ve started studying Ancient History because of my love for the ancient Greeks but this is living proof that Classics is much more than just the study of long dead civilizations. 

So always ask yourselves: “Why is that person telling me this?”

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

- R.S. Thomas.

#1yrago EU antitrust enforcers investigate Amazon’s predatory private-label products

mostlysignssomeportents:

Amazon’s best selling wholesales have long accused the company of mining their sales data to discover which products are most profitable; then Amazon clones the product and offers it for sale at a lower price than the wholesales can afford (because Amazon doesn’t have to worry about a wholesale-retail markup when it’s both wholesaler and retailer at once) and tweaks its search and recommendation system to drive sales to its private-label versions of its partners’ products.

This is the kind of thing that US antitrust regulators have turned a blind eye to for 40+ years, since University of Chicago economists dripped poison in Ronald Reagan’s ear, shifting antitrust enforcement to the “public harm” standard, in which companies are only punished for monopolistic activities that raise prices, not those that limit competition.

But the EU is emerging from this “public harm” standard to a more robust antitrust framework, driven by the crusading trustbuster Margrethe Vestager, who has capitalized on the EU’s delight at a covert trade war with the US to visit stonking great fines upon US Big Tech.

Now the European Commission has announced that it will subject Amazon’s predatory private-label practices (say that six times fast!) to antitrust investigations, relying in part on insider/whistleblower confirmation that the Amazon’s suppliers’ theories are correct.

Given the multibillion-dollar fines the Commission has smacked other US companies with, this is a pretty significant announcement.

This antitrust announcement pairs very well with Stacy Mitchell’s analysis of how Amazon’s #HQ2 search process resulted in the company amassing mountains of useful market intelligence on the plans cities have made for their futures, which the company can use to outmaneuver its competitors, even in cities where it isn’t going to build a new headquarters.

https://boingboing.net/2018/11/16/trade-war-antitrust.html

#1yrago UN poverty envoy calls UK poverty a “political choice” that inflicted “great misery”

mostlysignssomeportents:

Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has followed up his scorching condemnation of US poverty with an even more damning report on poverty in the UK, which he calls a “political choice” brought on by a decade of austerity at the hands of the Conservative Party.

Alston characterised the findings from his two-week fact-finding tour as “a disgrace…a social calamity and an economic disaster.” He described the country’s policies as so bad for women that “if you got a group of misogynists in a room and said how can we make this system work for men and not for women they would not have come up with too many ideas that are not already in place.”

He predicted further declines in the lives of middle class people, who will “find themselves living in an increasingly hostile and unwelcoming society because community roots are being broken.”

He condemned homelessness, child poverty, the rise of food banks, the sell-off of public assets, the closure of youth centres, the rise of sex-work and gang affiliation among the most vulnerable people, and said that the sole bright spot – communities pitching in to help their neighbours – “resembled the sort of activity you might expect for a natural disaster or health epidemic.”

Conservative politicians insisted that Alston didn’t understand how austerity worked and that everyone was much better off due to a decade of cuts.

https://boingboing.net/2018/11/16/un-poverty-envoy-calls-uk-pove.html

Austerity is a choice for rich countries.

If UK voters want something different, its time to start voting different.