"The radioactive core in a reactor at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant appears to have melted through the bottom of its containment vessel and on to a concrete floor, experts say, raising fears of a major release of radiation at the site."The UK’s Guardian reports the grim news in its breaking story whose blunt headline I used above.
"Recently William Cronon, a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, decided to weigh in on his state’s political turmoil. He started a blog, “Scholar as Citizen,” devoting his first post to the role of the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council in pushing hard-line conservative legislation at the state level. Then he published an opinion piece in The Times, suggesting that Wisconsin’s Republican governor has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”So what was the G.O.P.’s response? A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians.If this action strikes you as no big deal, you’re missing the point. The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. And that demand for copies of e-mails is obviously motivated by no more than a hope that it will provide something, anything, that can be used to subject Mr. Cronon to the usual treatment.
"O sistema político atingiu o ‘ponto de rebuçado’: todos vêem vantagens em precipitar eleições. Com um governo minoritário e perante ajustamentos que não encontram paralelo na democracia, era inevitável que o dia em que PS e PSD convergissem na vontade de ir a votos chegasse.Até aqui, quando o PS queria eleições, o PSD não queria e quando o PSD queria, o PS não queria. Mas eis que numa semana tudo muda.– Enviado através da Barra de ferramentas do Google"
[....] An analysis by The Economist shows that regional income disparities have widened in several rich countries during the recession (see article), and are particularly big in Britain and America. The gap between Britain’s poorest regions (mainly in the north and Wales) and its richest (in the south-east) has widened for the past 20 years. It grew worse during the recent recession, and is likely to widen again as government budget cuts fall disproportionately on poorer regions. [....]Does this matter and, if so, what should be done about it? To most politicians the answer to the first question is self-evidently yes. [....] And all too often the answer to the second question has involved subsidies. The European Union’s “structural funds”, more than a third of the EU’s budget, are designed to shift cash from richer to poorer parts of the single market. [....]Unfortunately, the record of such regional-development efforts is poor. [....] Even policies that, in principle, should be helpful, such as improving infrastructure, are no panacea. [....] And good intentions can backfire: “enterprise zones” and other regional tax incentives often shift jobs away from places that don’t get the subsidy, rather than create new ones.Instead of obsessing about revitalising lagging regions, politicians would do better to focus on the people within them. A region’s prosperity is determined by its inhabitants’ productivity and thus by people’s skills, the scale of capital investment and the pace of innovation. These are bound to vary across regions."– Enviado através da Barra de ferramentas do Google"
[....]
The reasons we must be far more ambitious in politics and policy and clean technology deployment are the increasing evidence of accelerated carbon-cycle feedbacks and the dire warnings from the scientific community about the dangers of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions (see Lonnie Thompson on why climatologists are speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization”).Yet, most new climate science remains either under-reported or mis-reported by most of the traditional media and blogosphere. And, like CO2 concentrations, the rate of growth (of important science articles) is growing faster as the reality of human-caused climate changes grows[....]{Also, increases in per capita energy and electricity use do not correlate with increases in well-being in developed countries}
The study’s conclusion includes electricity: “The present analysis with longitudinal data shows that among industrial nations, increases in per capita energy and electricity consumption over the past three decades are not associated with corresponding improvements in quality of life.”Again, not a big surprise. After all, California kept per capita electricity consumption flat for the past three decades while it has gone up 60% in the rest of America, and they are in the same country. Sort of.
"As you can see, there's a tight relationship between school enrolment in 1900 and income a century later. Ed Glaeser wrote on this back in 2009:One reason that historical education levels have such predictive power is that educational investment is extremely persistent. School enrollments in 1900 can explain more than 72 percent of the variation in years of schooling across countries today, as measured by data collected by Robert J. Barro and Jong-Wha Lee; a similar degree of persistence occurs across United States cities.Educated parents and teachers produce educated children; societies that invested in schooling a century ago still generally do so today. Moreover, education has an extraordinarily high contemporaneous relationship with national income levels.
Da credibilidade | Vítor Bento | Económico: ‘The absence of trust is clearly inimical to a well-run society’. Tony Judt, Ill Fares the LandQuando o Orçamento de Estado para 2009 foi aprovado - contemplando um eleitoralista aumento salarial de 2.9% -, tinha previsto um défice global de 2.2% do PIB, assente numa previsão de crescimento do PIB de 0.6% (apesar da queda de 1.3% prevista para a zona euro e de a economia já estar em recessão). A maioria dos economistas não alinhados advertiu logo para o irrealismo, quer da previsão económica, quer do défice orçamental.
Mal o Orçamento foi aprovado, foi logo corrigido através de uma Iniciativa para o Investimento e o Emprego que implicava, segundo o anúncio feito e para além da utilização de fundos comunitários, um acréscimo de despesa orçamental correspondente a 0.8% do PIB, colocando, por conseguinte e implicitamente, o défice global do Orçamento acabar de aprovar nos "míticos" 3% do PIB. Mas recusando-se a reconhecer que o valor real seria inevitavelmente muito superior a esse limite, para não contrariar a narrativa eleitoral "optimista" que negava qualquer crise financeira.
Com o decorrer do ano, o inevitável agravamento da recessão e o irrealismo de que partira, a situação orçamental foi-se afundando. Porém, contra todas as evidências e as análises de muitos economistas, a recusa governamental em pôr em causa a fantasiosa narrativa eleitoral manteve-se. De tal forma que, no exercício de reporte obrigatório à Comissão Europeia, feito nas vésperas do ato eleitoral, se reportou um défice de 5.8%, quando economistas - com muito menos informação do que a oficial - já diziam há meses que o valor não poderia ser inferior a 7%. É claro que as previsões económicas daquela Comissão, divulgadas pouco depois, já apresentavam um défice de 8%, mostrando a credibilidade atribuída ao que lhe fora reportado pelo Governo português. [....]
Cabeça fria | João Cardoso Rosas | Económico: "A política portuguesa parece ter mergulhado num vórtice auto-destrutivo no qual a razão não é mais do que uma serva das paixões.Os principais agentes políticos são guiados pelo ódio, pela desconfiança e pelo ressentimento, tendo esquecido a virtude da prudência, que aconselharia calma, discernimento e moderação.O Governo e o primeiro-ministro escolheram uma fuga para a frente, tratando com desprezo e sobranceria a oposição e o Presidente da República. O principal partido da oposição e o seu líder cederam à sua própria sede de poder e a uma incontida aversão face ao primeiro-ministro e ao Governo. A antiga líder do PSD procura agora a vingança pessoal, esquecendo que foi a sua política de destruição de carácter que criou as condições de crispação e irracionalidade que hoje vivemos. Até o Presidente da República deixou extravasar, desde a noite eleitoral, a sua própria cólera e indignação (isso desiludiu-me - um Presidente tem de ter 'a pele dura').
FT.com / Comment / Opinion - How Germany can avoid a two-speed Europe: "Germany blames the crisis on the countries that have lost competitiveness and run up their debts, and so puts all the burden of adjustment on debtor countries. This is a biased view, which ignores the fact that this is not only a sovereign debt crisis but also a currency and banking crisis – and Germany bears a major share of responsibility for those crises.
'Não quis entrar em politiquices, por isso não falei de medidas concretas.'
The Mauritius Miracle by Joseph E. Stiglitz - Project Syndicate:Suppose someone were to describe a small country that provided free education through university for all of its citizens, transportation for school children, and free health care – including heart surgery – for all. You might suspect that such a country is either phenomenally rich or on the fast track to fiscal crisis.But Mauritius, a small island nation off the east coast of Africa, is neither particularly rich nor on its way to budgetary ruin. Nonetheless, it has spent the last decades successfully building a diverse economy, a democratic political system, and a strong social safety net. Many countries, not least the US, could learn from its experience.In a recent visit to this tropical archipelago of 1.3 million people, I had a chance to see some of the leaps Mauritius has taken – accomplishments that can seem bewildering in light of the debate in the US and elsewhere. Consider home ownership: while American conservatives say that the government’s attempt to extend home ownership to 70% of the US population was responsible for the financial meltdown, 87% of Mauritians own their own homes – without fueling a housing bubble.Now comes the painful number: Mauritius’s GDP has grown faster than 5% annually for almost 30 years. Surely, this must be some “trick.” Mauritius must be rich in diamonds, oil, or some other valuable commodity. But Mauritius has no exploitable natural resources. Indeed, so dismal were its prospects as it approached independence from Britain, which came in 1968, that the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Meade wrote in 1961: “It is going to be a great achievement if [the country] can find productive employment for its population without a serious reduction in the existing standard of living….[T]he outlook for peaceful development is weak.”As if to prove Meade wrong, the Mauritians have increased per capita income from less than $400 around the time of independence to more than $6,700 today. The country has progressed from the sugar-based monoculture of 50 years ago to a diversified economy that includes tourism, finance, textiles, and, if current plans bear fruit, advanced technology.During my visit, my interest was to understand better what had led to what some have called the Mauritius Miracle, and what others might learn from it. There are, in fact, many lessons, some of which should be borne in mind by politicians in the US and elsewhere as they fight their budget battles.
- arquivo| Pedro Adão e Silva! : Se isto é um Presidente: "Na nuvem de palavras que reproduzia os termos mais utilizados por Cavaco Silva no discurso de posse, Europa aparecia pouco e era impossível vislumbrar a palavra ‘Euro’. Numa intervenção de quarenta minutos, devastadora para o Governo e com um diagnóstico muito critico do país é incompreensível que assim seja. Por muitos males nacionais que existam, não enquadrar a nossa situação na crise da dívida soberana da zona Euro não ajudará a resolver nenhum dos problemas que enfrentamos. Trata-se, apenas, de mais um contributo para a nacionalização da crise que está em curso e que se encarregará de nos afundar mais no buraco profundo onde já nos encontramos. Cavaco Silva foi mais um na longa lista daqueles que alimentam uma ilusão de soberania, trocando discursos críticos, esquecendo que vivemos já num contexto em que os Governos nacionais, de facto, pouco podem fazer.
- arquivo: há resgates e resgates: [....] Os vários actores políticos não souberam estar à altura da responsabilidade do momento dramático que vivemos em Portugal e no conjunto da Zona Euro. Quem são os responsáveis? O primeiro-ministro que, enquanto conseguiu um resgate menos desfavorável que o da Grécia e da Irlanda, continua a demonizar a ajuda externa que de facto já existe e teve sempre reservas em relação a uma coligação; o Presidente da República que, após o inenarrável episódio das escutas ficou tolhido, permitiu a formação de um governo minoritário e depois, na tomada de posse, não lhe ocorreu melhor do que recusar ‘mais sacrifícios’, quando sabia que eles eram inevitáveis e faziam parte de uma negociação em curso com a Comissão e o BCE; e o líder da oposição que, enquanto vai alimentando umas vacuidades sobre os consumos intermédios e sabendo que terá de aplicar a mesma dieta que agora recusa, é movido pela pressão do aparelho que o elegeu, que quer o mais rapidamente possível ir “ao pote”. [....] A margem de manobra que nos resta é quase inexistente e, nesta fase, sem que haja uma revisão profunda da arquitetura da Zona Euro, afirmações como, “distribuir os sacrifícios” ou “não penalizar os do costume” não passam de slogans sem qualquer exequibilidade.
"Nuclear power is hardly the pristine, economical, unambiguous answer to the nation’s energy needs and global warming concerns. It offers benefits and big-time shortcomings. Ultimately, the price may be much too high.
"Ninguém duvide, também, do estado de lucidez do líder socialista. Sócrates está fino e consciente do efeito da sua estratégia. Não sabe o que (lhe) vai acontecer, mas sabe o que não quer que lhe aconteça: ser frito em lume brando. Sabe que vai perder, só quer perder com honra. E quando assim é, paira a dúvida do que nunca morre: será que ainda dá para dar a volta?
Recent climate science suggests human civilization is on the precipice. It turns out that a purely mathematical analysis, “Evidence for super-exponentially accelerating atmospheric carbon dioxide growth,” comes to the same conclusion. he paper itself is mostly for math and statistics junkies. It is essentially agnostic on climate science. But the conclusions are as stark as any in the climate literature:
The human population is still growing at an exponential rate and there is no sign in the data that the growth rate is decreasing. Many argue that economic developments and education of women will lead to a decreased growth rate and an eventual stabilization of human population. This is not yet observed in the population dynamics, when integrated worldwide. Let us hope that the stabilization of the human population will occur endogenously by self-regulation, rather than by more stringent finite carrying capacity constraints that can be expected to lead to severe strains on a significant fraction of the population.
Notwithstanding a lot of discussions, international meetings, prevalence in the media, atmospheric CO2 content growth continues unabated with a clear faster-than-exponential behavior. On the face of this evidence using data until 2009, stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions at levels reached in 1990 for instance seems very ambitious, if not utterly unrealistic. We are not pessimistic. We think that only evidence-based decision making can lead to progress. The present evidence gives some measure of the enormous challenges to control our CO2 emissions to acceptable levels.
LIMBAUGH: The Japanese have done so much to save the planet … and yet Gaia levels them [laughs], just wipes them out. Wipes out their nuclear plants, all kinds of radiation. What kind of payback is this? That is an excellent question. They invented the Prius. In fact, where Gaia blew up is right where they make all these electric cars. That’s where the tsunami hit. All those brand new electric cars sitting there on the lot. I like the way this guy was thinking. It’s like — it’s like Gaia hit the Prius and [Nissan] Leaf place. It’s like they were in the crosshairs, if we can use that word, it does. What is Gaia trying to tell us here? What is the mother of environmentalism trying to say with this hit? Great observation out there, Chris.
You just can’t make this stuff up. Indeed, this would be hard to believe — even for Limbaugh — if it weren’t all on video.
AmericaBlog adds a useful explanation for those reading this from outside of America:
And for any Japanese media out there, you need to understand that this man is the number one radio personality for Republicans in our country. Every Republican presidential candidate and every Republican White House goes on Limbaugh’s radio show to try to curry his favor. Even the head of the Republican party does what Limbaugh wants. This isn’t just some crazy right-wing American guy. He’s a leader in the Republican party, and supported by all the leaders of the Republican party. You’re being attacked by a lead member of the Republican establishment in America. Let’s see if any Republican leaders have the courage to criticize Limbaugh for his comments. More likely, you’ll see them interviewing on his show again soon.
We now live in a world where overfishing is far too prevalent. To stem this tide, regulators impose tighter and tighter restrictions on fishermen,* in the face of fundamental disagreements among harvesters, regulators, and conservationists about how many is too many.
"One of the most frustrating things about policy debate is the way in which arguments about efficiency are often interpreted and responded to as arguments about values.
Samuel Huntington [in] “The Clash of Civilizations?”[wrote that]human beings [...] are divided along cultural lines — Western, Islamic, Hindu and so on. There is no universal civilization. Instead, there are these cultural blocks, each within its own distinct set of values. The Islamic civilization, he wrote, is the most troublesome. People in the Arab world do not share the general suppositions of the Western world. Their primary attachment is to their religion, not to their nation-state. Their culture is inhospitable to certain liberal ideals, like pluralism, individualism and democracy.Huntington correctly foresaw that the Arab strongman regimes were fragile and were threatened by the masses of unemployed young men. He thought these regimes could fall, but he did not believe that the nations would modernize in a Western direction. Amid the tumult of regime change, the rebels would selectively borrow tools from the West, but their borrowing would be refracted through their own beliefs. They would follow their own trajectory and not become more Western.The Muslim world has bloody borders, he continued. There are wars and tensions where the Muslim world comes into conflict with other civilizations. Even if decrepit regimes fell, he suggested, there would still be a fundamental clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. The Western nations would do well to keep their distance from Muslim affairs. The more the two civilizations intermingle, the worse the tensions will be.Huntington’s thesis set off a furious debate. But with the historic changes sweeping through the Arab world, it’s illuminating to go back and read his argument today. In retrospect, I’d say that Huntington committed the Fundamental Attribution Error. That is, he ascribed to traits qualities that are actually determined by context.
"One of the three ancient arts of discourse, rhetoric is all about how you make the case for something. It’s a way of framing a debate, using language persuasively, and when used right it’s the counterpoise to sophistry. A skilled rhetorician can convince you of the merits of a case, but he or she will do so using logic as a way of getting at underlying truth.
This Delors report [1989] was even more specific than the Werner report was, in envisaging the dangers that inconsistent economic policies within the single currency area could give rise to. It warned “Monetary union without a sufficient degree of convergence of economic policies is unlikely to be durable and could be damaging to the Community. Parallel advancement in economic and monetary integration would be indispensable in order to avoid imbalances.”
Figure 2. Smoke from fires in Russia on August 4, 2010 covered an area over 3,000 km (1860 miles) across. If the smoke were in the United States, it would have extended from San Francisco to Chicago. Visibility in Moscow dropped to 20 meters (0.01 miles) on August 4, and health officials warned that everyone, including healthy people, needed to take preventative measures such as staying indoors or wearing a mask outdoors. Image credit: NASA.
"The deadliest heat wave in human history--the 2010 Russian heat wave, which killed approximately 56,000 people last summer--was due to a natural atmospheric phenomenon often associated with weather extremes, according to a new NOAA study. The study, titled 'Was There a Basis for Anticipating the 2010 Russian Heat Wave?' was accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, and used observations and computer climate models to evaluate the possible roles of natural and human-caused climate influences on the severity of the heat wave.
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace, according to a new NASA-funded satellite study. The findings of the study — the longest to date of changes in polar ice sheet mass — suggest these ice sheets are overtaking ice loss from Earth’s mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted.
The study, led by the U.S. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was just published in Geophysical Research Letters here (subs. req’d). It’s been clear for a while that not that polar ice sheet mass loss is accelerating (see Large Antarctic glacier thinning 4 times faster than it was 10 years ago: “Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier”).But the new study is a bombshell because of its credibility and thoroughness — and because it provides perhaps the most credible estimate to date of the sea level rise we face in 2050 on our current emissions path, 1 foot. People, including commenters here, are always asking me what kind of sea level rise we face by midcentury. Now we have a reasonable figure.
