When Will White-Male Violence Be Addressed In America?

Or perhaps I should ask if it ever will be addressed.  When I hear of violence being perpetrated against Americans in the corporate media, it usually revolves around scary brown people who have a different religion than our corporate overlords.

I have a basic question: how many Americans were involved in large-scale violent acts by brown-skinned or non-Christian people in the last year?

Here’s another question: how many Americans were involved in large-scale violent acts by white-skinned or Christian people in the last year?

I’m not talking about events in which one person was harmed or killed.  I’m talking about the kind of events where multiple casualties and/or murders occurred.

The latest example of the 2nd type occurred yesterday in Virginia, where Christopher Speight shot and killed eight people, possibly including his wife and son.  Christopher had a large amount of explosives in and around his rural residence and a high-powered rifle with which he shot at a police helicopter.

What is it with white, middle-aged suburban/rural men in this country?

If his name included Muhammed or Hussein, this story would have dominated right-wing corporate propaganda outlets for days.  But his name was Christopher and he was white.  Has Limbaugh gone ballistic on this guy or the trend he’s a part of?  How about Beck or Hannity or Malkin or Coulter?  Anyone at Faux?  I’m betting they’ve spent zero time attacking this bozo or the psychos who have attacked Americans and will continue to do so as long as the hate-merchants focus white America’s attention on possibilities that likely won’t happen.

Are Tea-Baggers Serious About Seating Scott Brown Immediately?

If so, why aren’t they screaming that the debt limit vote set for today be postponed until Scott Brown has been seated?

Why would the Insurance Giveaway Bill proceedings be delayed until Brown has been sat, but not the debt ceiling?

After all, isn’t the “grassroots” tea-bagging movement supposed to be all about our nation’s financial standing?  Isn’t that what all those tea-baggers are supposedly angry about?  Yet nothing from any of them about Brown missing a critical vote on raising our debt ceiling, something he should be dead-set against, regardless of the consequences.  Because it’s all about principle. Isn’t it?

David Waldman nails it.

Thoughts On 2010 MA Senate Special Election

I think the defeat in Massachusetts last night can be summed up thusly: Democrats largely did it to themselves.

NASA: 2009 Had 2nd Warmest Surface Temps On Record; 2000s Warmest Decade On Record

NASA released some data a few days ago confirming what many objective observers were saying about 2009: it would be one of the hottest years for planet Earth in modern recorded history.  The NASA data mesh well with what NOAA and UKMet had already announced.  Importantly, the NASA data include temperatures over very northern latitudes, while UKMet chooses instead to interpolate surface station temperatures on coastlines over the Arctic Ocean, where direct measurements are scarce.  Unsurprisingly, the NASA data have been shown to be more representative of conditions where observations are made away from land.  As a result of slightly different methodologies of constructing the temperature data, the three datasets have, at times, slightly different messages to deliver.  2009 was such a case in which all three largely agree with one another: global temperatures continue to increase in the long-term (day-to-day weather conditions aren’t representative of climate).

According to NASA, 2009′s globally average surface temperatures ranked 2nd behind 2005′s (and tied with 2007′s): 0.57°C above average, compared to 0.63°C above average:

Pine Island Glacier Past A Tipping Point?

A major glacier located in West Antarctica could, according to recent research, be near or past a tipping point, beyond which the glacier will inevitably slide into the ocean.  Pine Island Glacier has had its grounding line, the area where the glacier rests either on the ocean or land, pushed back toward land due to increasingly warm ocean temperatures melting it from below.  If it retreats behind a lip on the continental shelf, rapid and irreversible loss of ice will occur.

Investigation into the glacier indicates that the grounding line may have retreated behind the lip back in 1996.

Research indicates that before the next stable grounding line can be reached on the inner slope, half of the land-based glacier will have melted into the ocean.  Melting land-based glaciers result in rising sea levels.  Half of Pine Island Glacier would raise sea levels by 9″ before 2100.  If a nearby glacier also retreats, sea levels would rise by 20″.  Either case would result in the displacement of millions of people worldwide, likely leading to the collapse of stable governments.

Tipping points can no longer be viewed as future abstractions.  We are already passing them, cementing disastrous events in our future.  How many we pass, and by what degree, is up to us.

Another Con Representative Is Retiring – 2010 To Be A Disaster For Republicans?

Arizona Rep. John Shadegg (R) is voluntarily retiring this year.  That brings the total number of retiring Republicans to 14!  How will the Republican Party win back a majority in the 2010 elections if 14 of them have to be replaced already?

That’s what the corporate media stenographers would say if ‘Republican’ were replaced with ‘Democrat’ in the story.  More Cons are retiring than Democrats so far in 2010.  Yet the corporate stenographers keep talking about how tough it will be for Democrats to hold on to their 39-seat majority.

To heck with that!  The Cons have more seats to defend and more seats to take away to even attain a majority, and they aren’t even fundraising at the pace the Democrats are.  Put the ever-angry tea-baggers in the mix (who will demand nothing less than the craziest of the crazy Cons) and 2010 will be a disaster for Republicans.

Ancient Greenhouse Climates Had Similar CO2 Concentrations As Predicted for 2100

New research into past climates with elevated CO₂ concentrations demonstrates the absolute folly of refusing to reduce our greenhouse gas pollution.

A favorite talking point of climate change deniers has been that past CO₂ concentrations swung wildly up and down by thousands of ppmV (parts per million by volume).  When the concentrations were very high, greenhouse climates were found on Earth.  When they were low, ice sheets were able to cover large swaths of the planet.

Like other talking points by the deniers, this one has now been proven to be false.  CO₂ concentrations did not, in fact, fluctuate by large amounts.  It turns out that previously assumed soil CO₂ concentrations during carbonate formation (which removes atmospheric CO₂, albeit very slowly) were too high.  Using more accurate constraints, past greenhouse climates were accompanied by concentrations similar to those projected for the end of this century.

This news is stunning in its implications.

Flow Through Bering Strait Affects Ice Sheets & Global Climate

A paper was published in the journal Nature Geoscience this week describing an investigation into the influence of the Bering Strait on oceanic circulation between the Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic Oceans.  The investigation found that sea-level fluctuations in the last glacial period were due primarily to changes in Northern Hemispheric ice sheet volumes and not solely to variable solar radiation.  This study (and others in progress) was made possible by more supercomputing resources at NCAR in Boulder, CO.

The relationships between historical ice sheet volume, sea-level height, solar radiation and climatic effects are important to scientists’ efforts to accurately model and interpret model results from ongoing climate research.

The group ran two pairs of experiments: one pair with the North American ice sheets and one pair without.  Within the pairs, all conditions were identical except on had an open Bering Strait and the other a closed Bering Strait.  With an open Bering Strait, relatively fresh water is allowed to circulate from the Pacific Ocean into the Arctic Ocean and then into the Atlantic Ocean – the real world’s conditions for the past 70,000 years or so.

With a closed Bering Strait, that fresh water supply to the Atlantic is largely cut off.  As a result, the overturning current in the Atlantic strengthens, redistributing heat and fresh water on the global scale in different ways.  For instance, northeast North America warms up to 1.5 ^°C annually, while the North Pacific cools up to 1.5 ^°C and a smaller warming occurs over parts of Antarctica.  Precipitation is reduced over most of North America.  As a result, Northern Hemispheric ice sheets melt faster – at a rate of 0.112m per year.  Over millenia, the North American and Greenland ice sheets thin by 560m, increasing global sea-levels by 33m.  It is important to note that these experimental results match up well with observations.

Eventually, the rising sea-levels re-open the Bering Strait circulation.  Pacific waters are then allowed to be transported to the Atlantic, weakening the overturning circulation and shifting heat and fresh water patterns.  This process cools the North Atlantic while precipitation increases over North America.  Cooler temperatures and more precipitation mean more snow lasts throughout the year to rebuild the ice sheet volumes.  Sea levels eventually drop, closing off the Bering Strait and starting the cycle over again.  The model results mesh well with observed ice sheet and sea-level trends observed in nature.

The way in which radiation has been observed (and now modeled) to influence sea-levels and ice sheet volumes does not match well with a simpler case of no Bering Strait influence.  Thus, a prime result of this study indicates that changes in the radiation budget cannot account for climate shifts by itself.  Processes like the Bering Strait’s modulation of climate are indeed very important for climatologists to consider and take into account.  Put another way, the simple way in which climate change deniers view the world have been shown to once again not be sufficient to explain the real world.

I will also note that no mention was made in the paper of future climate scenarios with greatly reduced ice sheet volumes as a result of greenhouse gas pollution.  Logically, one can speculate that deeper seas means more flow through the Bering Strait, leading to weaker circulations, cooler regions of the North Atlantic and more precipitation over North America.  It could eventually act as a modulator on anthropogenic climate change (i.e. cooling a much warmer world), but the time-scales involved (many thousands of years) should be no comfort to policy makers in 2010.  Once again, it is clear that the best way to deal with climate change is to reduce our system forcing.

Cross-posted at SquareState.

CO Democratic Party Power Struggles

News this week that CO Gov. Bill Ritter would not run for re-election in 2010 has, of course, sent the two major parties scrambling.  The announcement was given with no notice to other officials or the party members themselves.  After the announcement, the way in which potential Democratic replacements have been offered up and discussed by the “Serious People” nagged at me.  I want to explore these developments with the removal of a state Representative from a committee vice-chairmanship and trends emanating from the Obama White House.

NY Fed’s Emails: Told AIG To Conceal Payment Info

I’m going to make a wager with myself: I bet the emails I’m going to discuss in this post don’t make nearly the waves that the climate change denialists made sure were made regarding emails between climate scientists.  One set of emails clearly demonstrates a willful attempt to conceal things from people that shouldn’t have been concealed, especially at the time that they happened.  The other set of emails were normal correspondence between professional colleagues and had no effect on people’s lives.

Our current Treasury Secretary is Timothy Geithner.  He formerly was the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  In Dec. 2008, the NY Fed instructed AIG to cross out a reference to how much the insurer paid banks for credit-default swaps they had bought.  The story continues:

The New York Fed took over negotiations between AIG and the banks in November 2008 as losses on the swaps, which were contracts tied to subprime home loans, threatened to swamp the insurer weeks after its taxpayer-funded rescue. The regulator decided that Goldman Sachs and more than a dozen banks would be fully repaid for $62.1 billion of the swaps, prompting lawmakers to call the AIG rescue a “backdoor bailout” of financial firms.

One question is how involved was Mr. Geithner.  These activities have a very real sense of denying the disclosure of information that taxpayers deserve to have, since they were put on the hook to pay the banks in full for swaps AIG should have negotiated down in price.

Not for love of country, only for their party, some Cons in the House and Senate have been trying to build a case to attack Sec. Geithner and have him removed from his post in the Obama administration.  It’s becoming a troubling trend that no one in the corporate media is covering (Van Jones was the first target removed).  In this case, however, it would be in the Democrats’ best interest to pursue this matter regardless of where it leads them.  If Geithner was even tangentially involved in this mess, he doesn’t deserve an administration post.  Upward failure was a hallmark of the Bush years.  It should not be in the Obama administration also.

So, what should this be called?  Fedgate?  AIGgate?  Geithnergate?  Financegate?

The anti-science crowd and their corporate media stenographer allies were only too happy to jump on the conspiratorial bandwagon leading up to the Copenhagen Climate Conference last month.  No one has been charged with the illegal act of hacking into servers to get those emails, either.  Again, it won’t be out of principle, but I bet the corporate stenographers don’t jump on this particular bandwagon.  It wouldn’t look good to go after the financial elite, after all.