Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that as a new president, Bush was like Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee whom critics said lacked knowledge about foreign affairs.
Based on an assessment of the published scientific literature, the primary conclusions presented in this report are:
• Recent rapid changes at the edges of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets show acceleration of flow and thinning, with the velocity of some glaciers increasing more than twofold.... Inclusion of these processes in models will likely lead to sea-level projections for the end of the 21st century that substantially exceed the projections presented in the IPCC AR4 report (0.28 ± 0.10 m to 0.42 ± 0.16 m rise)....
• [S]ubtropical aridity is likely to intensify and persist due to future greenhouse warming. This projected drying extends poleward into the United States Southwest, potentially increasing the likelihood of severe and persistent drought there in the future...
• The strength of the [northward flow of warm, salty water in the upper layers of the Atlantic, and the southward flow of colder water in the deep Atlantic, {which} plays an important role in the oceanic transport of heat from low to high latitudes.] will decrease over the course of the 21st century in response to increasing greenhouse gases, with a best estimate decrease of 25-30%.... [RFM: this means the lower latitudes will heat up much faster than the upper latitudes, and New York City, to choose a place at random, may even get colder for some time.]
• A... doubling of northern high latitudes CH4 emissions[RFM:, a much more intense greenhouse gas that Carbon Dioxide,] could be realized fairly easily. However, since these models do not realistically represent all the processes thought to be relevant to future northern high-latitude CH4 emissions, much larger (or smaller) increases cannot be discounted.
John P. Holdren, a physicist and environmental policy professor at Harvard, will serve as the president’s science adviser as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology. Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist from Oregon State University, will lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which overseas ocean and atmospheric studies and performs much of the government’s research on global warming.It struck me that maybe our perceived cynicism about politics was because bad things kept happening to us, and our apathy was because we didn't seem to be able to do much about it. I'm ready for good things to happen.
Dr. Holdren will also be a co-chairman the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology along with the Nobel Prize-winning cancer research Dr. Harold Varmus, a former director of the National Institutes of Health, and Eric S. Lander, a genomic researcher.
An interesting example is looking at US inflation around WW1: Inflation skyrocketed at the end of the war as the US invested in sending its work force toward futile engagement in the trenches. And then deflation skyrocketed once they came home. The average over this period was probably somewhere in the vicinity of something small.Using the linked table -- and there's a line between quoting and stealing I'm never sure when I cross, but I make you click in to the table -- inflation in the year 1924 was zero, so we'll treat that as a turning point (even though the year before was positive, at 1.8%) and end in 1923. Inflation jumps from 1% in 1914 and 1915 to 7.9% in 1916, so we'll start in 1916. This gives us inflation rates of 7.9, 17.4, 18, 14.6, 15.6, -10.5, -6.1 and 1.8 per cent per year, which add up to a 1915 dollar being worth 93 cents at the end of 1916 and 59 cents at the end of 1923. Deflation starts in again about half-way through 1926 -- remember that's supposed to be the middle of a great economic boom -- so the 1915 dollar bottoms out at 58 cents in 1926 before zooming back up to 78 cents (nearly its 1917 value) after 1933. In 1943, it's back to 58 cents.
“Barton Biggs is no doubt a great moneyman,” writes a reader in response to a Biggs essay we published last Tuesday . “His assertion... ‘We must be pretty close to maximum bearishness’ sound[s] like... cheerleading, to me.”
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“We’ve hit the point of maximum pessimism? The point of maximum pessimism can only be known in hindsight. People will get more and more pessimistic as their personal conditions/news get worse. If you are saying it’s not possible for people to be more pessimistic than they are now, I disagree. Whether or not they do become more pessimistic is another argument and will depend on what happens to them. (I have a couple of friends who left Liberia at the start of the civil war. They were really pessimistic then. In fact, I was so concerned, I recommended counseling, but they still felt they would be back in Monrovia before Christmas. Ha. Somewhere over the next five years, they hit their point of maximum pessimism.)
Pulitzer Administrator Sig Gissler told E&P that "we are expanding the Pulitzers to include many text-based newspapers and news organizations that publish only on the Internet." At the same time, they are "stressing" that all entered material should come from news outlets that publish material at least weekly, "are primarily dedicated to original news reporting, are dedicated to coverage of ongoing stories and that adhere to the highest journalistic principles."Which leaves the door open for yours truly.
“The Changing Prospects for Building Home Equity,”[PDF] tries to predict where today’s first-time buyers in the 100 biggest metropolitan areas may actually have less home equity by 2012 as a result of continued price declines. The verdict was that buyers in 33 of the markets could see a decline by 2012, including potential six-figure drops on an average home in the New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle metropolitan areas.
Stiglitz denounced Rubin's support for repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking for precisely the reasons we are now witnessing on Wall Street.... Stiglitz became the most prominent voice in Washington to say plainly that free-market absolutism, which began with the Reagan revolution and continued under Clinton (who upon being elected declared the era of "big government" was over), was ill-founded theoretically and disastrous practically....All I could come up with when asked who should be on Obama's economic team was Elizabeth Warren. But, Joseph Stiglitz should definitely be up there.
As far back as 1990, Stiglitz argued in a paper (it can be found on The Economist's Voice Web site at www.bppress.com) against securitizing mortgages and selling them
Stepan Arkadyevitch took in and read a liberal paper, not an extreme one, but one advocating the views held by the majority. And in spite of the fact that science, art, and plitics [sic.] had no special interest for him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held by the majority and by his paper, and he only changed them when the majority changed them--or, more strictly speaking, he did not change them, but they imperceptibly changed of themselves within him.I've always felt like this was my eventual fate, to be a superfluous man. And Glenn Greenwald's getting me closer.
New rifts have developed on the Wilkins Ice Shelf that could lead to the opening of the ice bridge that has been preventing the ice shelf from disintegrating and breaking away from the Antarctic Peninsula.
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If the ice shelf breaks away from the peninsula, it will not cause a rise in sea level since it is already floating.
