100 million will die by 2030 if world fails to act on climate – report

Nina Chestney at Reuters:

DownloadMore than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday.

As global average temperatures rise due to greenhouse gas emissions, the effects on the planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by humanitarian organisation DARA.

It calculated that five million deaths occur each year from air pollution, hunger and disease as a result of climate change and carbon-intensive economies, and that toll would likely rise to six million a year by 2030 if current patterns of fossil fuel use continue.

More than 90 percent of those deaths will occur in developing countries, said the report that calculated the human and economic impact of climate change on 184 countries in 2010 and 2030. It was commissioned by the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a partnership of 20 developing countries threatened by climate change.

“A combined climate-carbon crisis is estimated to claim 100 million lives between now and the end of the next decade,” the report said.

It said the effects of climate change had lowered global output by 1.6 percent of world GDP, or by about $1.2 trillion a year, and losses could double to 3.2 percent of global GDP by 2030 if global temperatures are allowed to rise, surpassing 10 percent before 2100.

More here.

Bad science gets busted

High-profile cases show the importance of questioning academic research — especially when it has a corporate tie.

David Sirota in Salon:

ScreenHunter_05 Sep. 27 08.32As any P.R. hack worth his weight in press releases knows, the most persuasive content is that which doesn’t look like propaganda at all.

If you want to influence a mass audience, for instance, you can try to do what the Pentagon does and subtly bake slanted information into entertainment products such as movies and television shows. If, on the other hand, you are looking to influence a slightly higher-brow audience, you can embed disinformation in newspapers’ news andopinion pages. And if you are looking to brainwash politicians, think tanks, columnists and the rest of the political elite in order to rig an esoteric debate over public policy, you can attempt to shroud your agitprop in the veneer of science.

While these are all diabolically effective methods of manipulating political discourse, the latter, which involves corporate funding of academic research, is the most insidious of all. But the good news is that the last few weeks provided important reminders about the problem — and why scrutiny of sources is so important.

At the national level, media organizations frothed with news about Stanford University researchers supposedly determining that organic food food is no more healthy than conventionally produced food. In the rush to generate audience-grabbing headlines, most of these news outlets simply regurgitated the Stanford press release, which deliberately stressed that researchers ”did not find strong evidence that organic foods are more nutritious or carry fewer health risks than conventional alternatives.”

More here.

New Stanford/NYU study documents the civilian terror from Obama’s drones

Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian:

A vitally important and thoroughly documented new report on the impact of Obama's drone campaign has just been released by researchers at NYU School of Law and Stanford University Law School. Entitled “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan”, the report details the terrorizing effects of Obama's drone assaults as well as the numerous, highly misleading public statements from administration officials about that campaign. The study's purpose was to conduct an “independent investigations into whether, and to what extent, drone strikes in Pakistan conformed to international law and caused harm and/or injury to civilians”.

The report is “based on over 130 detailed interviews with victims and witnesses of drone activity, their family members, current and former Pakistani government officials, representatives from five major Pakistani political parties, subject matter experts, lawyers, medical professionals, development and humanitarian workers, members of civil society, academics, and journalists.” Witnesses “provided first-hand
accounts of drone strikes, and provided testimony about a range of issues, including the missile strikes themselves, the strike sites, the victims' bodies, or a family member or members killed or injured in the strike”.

Here is the powerful first three paragraphs of the report, summarizing its main findings:

Whilte noting that it is difficult to obtain precise information on the number of civilian deaths “because of US efforts to shield the drone program from democratic accountability”, the report nonetheless concludes: “while civilian casualties are rarely acknowledged by the US government, there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians.”

But beyond body counts, there's the fact that “US drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accounted for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury”:

In other words, the people in the areas targeted by Obama's drone campaign are being systematically terrorized. There's just no other word for it. It is a campaign of terror – highly effective terror – regardless of what noble progressive sentiments one wishes to believe reside in the heart of the leader ordering it. And that's precisely why the report, to its great credit, uses that term to describe the Obama policy: the drone campaign “terrorizes men, women, and children”.

More here.

Sri Lanka to New York…

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We have coffee with almond milk and agave syrup rather than buffalo curd and strong tea and decide to take a long morning walk to integrate back into New York society. The Harlem apartment is right on Central Park. Living in Brooklyn, we don’t often get a chance to stroll through this famous place. It is raining just a little, which makes the city feel that much more surreal. Right away I notice how many ducks there are — big fat American ducks, they are so wonderful, trailing along in a row along the algae-topped lake. I notice all the bird sounds and look at the trees in a new way. Even the pigeons look beautiful. Two people behind us speak Spanish and I think it’s nice to hear people speaking Spanish. I like this language. There are people wearing expensive shoes picking up their dog’s poop with little blue baggies on their hands. I try to picture Sri Lankans doing this and cannot, no matter what kind of shoes they wear. A young woman in a button down shirt and tall rubber boots paces past us. She listens to music on her iPod and has her nose down, reading a daily paper. She does all this without falling, without slowing. It is like a circus act.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

Lightness is a strategy

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As elsewhere, one of my guides here is W. G. Sebald, who performed this task with a kind of relentlessness that is as stunning as it is deeply sad. The unnamed subject of each of Sebald’s books is, by his own admission, the concentration camps, and yet, with a few exceptions, he touches on them so lightly that you could be lulled, by his long, languorous sentences, into thinking the books were about something else: herring, say, or the rise of the Dowager Empress. That they are not is a function of a very Sebaldian principle: atrocity needs no exaggeration. If you look closely enough you see how it saturates all that surrounds it, drawing the energy of the world into its deep and abhorrent abyss. But lightness, in Sebald and elsewhere, provides more than a cover. Lightness is a strategy, much as I distrust that word. It is a method for dealing with and channeling other energies.

more from Erik Anderson at the LA Review of Books here.

the return of the story

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It has been more than 70 years since Walter Benjamin, in his classic essay “The Storyteller,” declared that telling stories was obsolete. “Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly,” Benjamin complained. “It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.” For most of us in the western world, our first experience of our culture’s classic stories—Snow White, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood—does not come through a wise man or woman sitting before an audience, spellbinding us with words. It is in print or through images that we learn our culture’s foundational stories. This development has led to a certain nostalgia about the mere act of telling a story. In his novel The Storyteller, Mario Vargas Llosa writes lovingly about the raconteurs of the Machiguenga people, a remote Amazonian tribe that has had almost no contact with modern Peruvian civilisation. By reciting their people’s cosmogonies and myths, by bringing news from one far-flung group to another, the storyteller “remind[ed] each member of the tribe that the others were alive, that despite the great distances that separated them, they still formed a community, shared a tradition and beliefs.”

more from Adam Kirsch at Prospect Magazine here.

The best books on the Beatles

From The Gaurdian:

The-Beatles-in-London-196-0085 October is the 50th birthday of the Beatles' first single, released back when Harold Macmillan was the PM, and the Cuban missile crisis was only weeks away.

“Love Me Do” sounds like the world in which it was made: tentative, still feeling the pinch of post-war austerity. Ian MacDonald's wonderful song-by-song history of the group, Revolution in the Head, reckoned that the song's “modal gauntness” is subtly cunning, serving notice of the Beatles' “unvarnished honesty”, and – via John Lennon's wailing harmonica part – the “blunt vitality” of their native Liverpool. In the surviving Beatles' own account, the huge Anthology, Paul McCartney recalls that the song was meant to sound hard and authentic: “blues” rather than “la de da de la”. Many Beatles books barely mention “Love Me Do” at all. But there it is: a number 17 hit, long rumoured to have been propelled into the charts thanks to bulk-buying by manager Brian Epstein. If, like me, one of your first experiences of Beatles music was the collection 1962-66 (known as “The Red Album”, as against 1967-70 “The Blue Album”), you will probably have experienced it as a strangely muted opening to a listening experience that quickly flared into spectacular life: a prologue, rather than a first chapter proper.

The Beatles' second single, “Please Please Me”, was released in January 1963, in the midst of a legendarily biting British winter, to which its giddy sound was an antidote. “Congratulations, Gentlemen, you've just made your first number one,” said their producer, George Martin. And he was right. By early the following year, their songs were crowding the US charts, and they were about to play to 73 million Americans on The Ed Sullivan Show. Once again, they were adopted as a panacea for cold and grim times – this time less a matter of the weather than the pall cast by the murder of President Kennedy. Only two years later, they would reach the apex of their fame, chased around the Deep South by fundamentalist Christians outraged by John Lennon's claim that they were “bigger than Jesus”, while their music took on the textures and expanded horizons traceable – at least in part – to Lennon and George Harrison's use of LSD. Such is the remarkable pace of a story that has been told by scores of writers, a story about four young musicians but no end of other things: the cities of Liverpool, Hamburg and London; class, and the shaking of English hierarchies; pop's transmutation into a global culture; and the western world's passage from a world still defined by the second world war and its aftermath, to the accelerated modernity we know today. Everything in the tale pulses with significance and drama. It seems barely believable, and in the best Beatles books, it still burns.

More here.

Researchers prevent heart failure in mice

From PhysOrg:

HeartCardiac stress, for example a heart attack or high blood pressure, frequently leads to pathological heart growth and subsequently to heart failure. Two tiny RNA molecules play a key role in this detrimental development in mice, as researchers at the Hannover Medical School and the Göttingen Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry have now discovered. When they inhibited one of those two specific molecules, they were able to protect the rodent against pathological heart growth and failure. With these findings, the scientists hope to be able to develop therapeutic approaches that can protect humans against heart failure.

A research team at the Göttingen Max Planck Institute for and the Hannover Medical School discovered that two small play a key role in the growth of heart muscle cells: the microRNAs miR-212 and miR-132. The scientists had observed that these microRNAs are more prevalent in the of mice suffering from cardiac hypertrophy. To determine the role that the two microRNAs play, the scientists bred genetically modified mice that had an abnormally large number of these molecules in their heart muscle cells. “These rodents developed cardiac hypertrophy and lived for only three to six months, whereas their healthy conspecifics had a normal healthy life-span of several years,” explained Dr. Kamal Chowdhury, researcher in the Department of Molecular Cell Biology at the Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. “For comparison, we also selectively switched off these microRNAs in other mice. These animals had a slightly smaller heart than their healthy conspecifics, but did not differ from them in behavior or life-span,” continued the biologist. The crucial point is when the scientists subjected the hearts of these mice to stress by narrowing the aorta, the mice did not develop cardiac hypertrophy – in contrast to normal mice.

More here.

Wednesday Poem

Gratitude to Old Teachers

When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake,
We place our feet where they have never been.
We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy.
Who is down there but our old teachers?

Water that once could take no human weight
We were students then-holds up our feet,
And goes on ahead of us for a mile.
Beneath us the teachers, and around us the stillness.

by Robert Bly
from Eating the Honey of Words, 1999
Harper Collins Publishers, New York, NY

Reinventing Ethics

Howard Gardner in the New York Times:

Ten_commandmentsWhat’s good and what’s bad? There are plenty of reasons to believe that human nature changes slowly, if at all — all’s still fair in love and war. For millennia, religious believers have attributed our nature to God’s image, as well as to God’s plan. In recent years, evolutionary psychologists peered directly at our forerunners on the savannahs of East Africa; if human beings change, we do so gradually over thousands of years. Given little or nothing new in the human firmament, traditional morality — the “goods” and “bads” as outlined in the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule — should suffice.

My view of the matter is quite different. As I see it, human beings and citizens in complex, modern democratic societies regularly confront situations in which traditional morality provides little if any guidance. Moreover, tenable views of “good” and “bad” that arose in the last few centuries are being radically challenged, most notably by the societal shifts spurred by digital media. If we are to have actions and solutions adequate to our era, we will need to create and experiment with fresh approaches to identifying the right course of action.

More here.

Do Targeted Killings Work?

Micah Zenko at the Council on Foreign Relations website:

ScreenHunter_03 Sep. 26 11.40Pir Zubair Shah: My answer is that in Pakistan, targeted killings have worked to a large extent—CIA operated drone strikes have eliminated top al-Qaeda and local Taliban leadership. The tribal region of Pakistan along the Afghanistan border turned into a safe haven for the Taliban and other foreign fighters affiliated with groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) that fled Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S. invasion. Because Pakistan was unable and sometimes unwilling to take on such groups, drone strikes became the only politically viable option for U.S. counterterrorism goals, such as destroying al-Qaeda safe heavens.

The first known case of targeted killing by a drone strike is when a Pakistani Taliban commander, Nek Mohammad, was killed in 2004. Since then, more than three hundred strikes have killed dozens of al-Qaeda leaders and local insurgent commanders. The main focus of the drone attacks have been the tribal districts of South and North Waziristan, where al-Qaeda militants and other foreign fighters took refuge after the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Drone strikes have also killed fighters who posed a greater threat to Pakistan than to the United States, including commanders like Baitullah Mehsud, Qari Hussain, and Badar Mansoor. Similarly, some of the top al-Qaeda commanders were Abu Yahya al Libi, Khalid Habib, Osama Alkini, and many others. Drones have also killed the head of IMU, Qari Tahir Yeldeshev, and the commander of the Eastern Turkistan Movement in North Waziristan. In recent months, drones have also targeted members of the Haqqani network, including the sons of Jalaluddin Haqqani, the symbolic head of the network that is now run by his son from safe havens in North Waziristan and other places in Pakistan.

Drone strikes have also resulted in civilian deaths, although far less than what is reported (mostly) in Pakistani media. The number of civilians killed by drones is also fewer than those killed by Pakistani jet bombers and artillery shelling. Similarly, the tribal areas targeted by drones have a favorable view of the attacks, compared to mainstream Pakistani society, who view the strikes as violations of their national sovereignty.

More here.

Defending Just-So Stories

Jonathan Gottschall in Psychology Today:

ScreenHunter_02 Sep. 26 11.32Which brings me to Adam Gottlieb, a New Yorker writer who recently stirred controversy with his critique of evolutionary psychology. Gottlieb’s argument is quite dusty. It goes back more than 30 years to the fervent ur-critic of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology Stephen Jay Gould. Following Gould, Gottlieb argues that evolutionary psychology lacks scientific merit because it amounts to nothing more than an anthology of just-so stories.

But this critique holds little water. Evolution is an intrinsically story-based discipline. All evolutionists shape hypotheses in the form of historical narratives. That is, they develop a plausible account of how some biological feature—from pair-bonding, to upright posture, to aggression–may have emerged through the evolutionary process, and then seek to test the account against information derived from a wide variety of sources. So Gould, as an evolutionist, was actually a thoroughgoing just-so storyteller himself. His story of how the woman got her orgasm is as speculative and storylike as anything you’ll find in evolutionary psychology. The difference: EP has tended to favor stories where features of human anatomy and behavior serve a specific evolutionary function, and Gould favored stories where they didn’t. In Gould’s account, a man’s orgasm serves an obvious evolutionary function, while a woman’s orgasm—and the clitoris that enables it—is a functionless (if fortunate) evolutionary side effect. (Perhaps one day I’ll write a post on why I find this particular story to be so far-fetched.)

Critics of evolutionary psychology, including Gould, have pointed out many weaknesses in the discipline, and have helped it reach a more humble and mature form. And they are right to point out that it is hard to test certain EP ideas as thoroughly as we might like. But EP stories make predictions that can be tested against data from genetics, primatology, sociology, developmental psychology, and many other fields.

More here.

Writers’ Favorite Punctuation Marks

Jen Doll in The Atlantic:

D87414a85a5bc898047c851015d57662_300x300Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, and language columnist for the Boston Globe: “When I revealed in a New York Times article last year that I'm overly attached to em-dashes, I was taken to task by the redoubtable John McIntyre, copy editor for the Baltimore Sun. 'When you are tempted to use dashes,' he wrote, 'stop for a moment to consider whether you really want dashes there rather than commas or parentheses.' Properly chastened, I've tried to tone down my dashiness. But I still admire the artfully wielded em-dash, especially used near the end of a sentence—when it works, it really works. (Some might have preferred a semicolon in the previous sentence; I can appreciate the affection for the humble semicolon, less flashy than the em-dash.)”

More here.

the departed

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THE MEN WHO GATHERED in Srinagar on a bright Sunday morning in early July had all left their lives behind; not once, but twice. They sat, about 25 of them, on the lawn outside the historic Mujahid Manzil—once the epicentre of a movement for Kashmiri independence—trading stories, chain-smoking cheap filterless cigarettes, inspecting old wounds. More than 20 years ago, all these men left their homes in Kashmir to cross to the other side—to Azad Kashmir, a sliver of the former princely state under Pakistani control. They crossed the mountains to become militants; to be trained with guns and explosives and grenades in camps run by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Some returned as fighters; some never fired a shot. Within six or seven years, they had all ceased to fight; they left the camps, became refugees in Pakistan, and started new lives on the other side of the line. They married, had children, scraped together work. And then, two decades after they first crossed over, they began to return, in ones and twos—smuggling themselves back into the state they once dreamt of liberating from Indian rule.

more from Mehboob Jeelani at Caravan here.

Lincoln’s Indispensable Man

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Although Seward retired at the age of sixty-eight, in 1869, when Grant assumed the Presidency, he continued to be, as Frances had described him a quarter century earlier, “the most indefatigable of men.” He said, “At my age, and in my condition of health, ‘rest was rust,’ and nothing remained, to prevent rust, but to keep in motion.” Still suffering from pain in his face and neck, his hands crippled, and paralysis creeping up his arms, he went on a journey with his family on the newly opened transcontinental railroad—a cause that he had championed in the Senate—and then on to British Columbia, Alaska, Cuba, and Mexico. He returned home for five months before setting off for Japan, China, and Europe with the two daughters of an old political friend. There had been speculation that he would marry one of them, twenty-four-year-old Olive Risley, whom he had been seeing regularly in Washington. (One paper, alluding to the age difference, described Seward as “amiable, sportive, frisky, foxy.”) Instead, Seward adopted her, thus preëmpting any stories about the impropriety of travelling with two very young women. After the trip, he finally settled down in Auburn, where he worked with Olive on a book about their journeys, and received frequent visitors at home.

more from Dorothy Wickenden at The New Yorker here.

Kael

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Kael’s taste tended toward quick pacing and a down-to-earth story that could grab an audience and make it feel something. A movie didn’t have to be hysterically funny to win her over; she found it especially thrilling when a loose, jocular tone somehow eloped with otherwise straight-faced genres—hence her lifelong allegiance to Jean Renoir and Robert Altman and Jonathan Demme. Praising a movie by another one of her favorites, Jean-Luc Godard, Kael wrote that its “fusion of attitudes—seeing characters as charming and poetic and, at the same time, preposterous and absurd—is one of Godard’s contributions to modern film.” Her most withering scorn was reserved for movies that she took to deny the possibility of laughter or pretended they were above it—her blacklist included much of Bergman, most of Kubrick, and pretty much all of Hitchcock.

more from Jana Prikryl at the NYRB here.

Common Parasite Linked to Personality Changes

From Scientific American:

Common-parasite-linked-to-personali_1Feeling sociable or reckless? You might have toxoplasmosis, an infection caused by the microscopic parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which the CDC estimates has infected about 22.5 percent of Americans older than 12 years old. Researchers tested participants for T. gondii infection and had them complete a personality questionnaire. They found that both men and women infected with T. gondii were more extroverted and less conscientious than the infection-free participants. These changes are thought to result from the parasite's influence on brain chemicals, the scientists write in the May/June issue of the European Journal of Personality. “Toxoplasma manipulates the behavior of its animal host by increasing the concentration of dopamine and by changing levels of certain hormones,” says study author Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.

Although humans can carry the parasite, its life cycle must play out in cats and rodents. Infected mice and rats lose their fear of cats, increasing the chance they will be eaten, so that the parasite can then reproduce in a cat's body and spread through its feces. In humans, T. gondii's effects are more subtle; the infected population has a slightly higher rate of traffic accidents, studies have shown, and people with schizophrenia have higher rates of infection—but until recent years, the parasite was not thought to affect most people's daily lives.

More here.

Feathered Freeloaders at the Ant Parade

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

AntsBARRO COLORADO ISLAND, Panama — Here in the exuberantly dour understory of the Panamanian rain forest, the best way to find the elusive and evolutionarily revealing spotted antbird is to stare at your boots. For one thing, if you don’t tuck in your pant legs to protect against chiggers and ticks, you will end up a color plate in “Rook’s Textbook of Dermatology.” For another, sooner or later — O.K., much later, many, many hiking hours later — you will finally step into a swarm of army ants boiling out across the forest floor. At that point you should step right back out of the swarm and start looking for the characteristic flitting and hopping of the thrush-size antbird, listening for its vibrato “peee-ti peee-it” call. Because wherever there are army ants out on a hunting raid, peckish antbirds are almost sure to follow. The birds are not foolish enough to try to eat them: Army ants are fiercely mandibled and militantly cohesive. Instead, they hope to skim off a percentage of the ants’ labor, by snatching up any grasshoppers, beetles, spiders or small lizards that may jump to the side in a frantic attempt to elude the oncoming avalanche of predatory ants. It’s a gleeful reversal of the conventional notion of parasites as little, ticky things that plague large, poorly dressed hosts. Here the big vertebrates are the parasites, freeloading off insects a fraction of their size. And the parasitic strategy is so irresistible that according to recent research in the journal Ecology, the spotted antbirds on Barro Colorado Island just may be taking it professional. Whereas the species has traditionally opted for a mixed approach — filching from ant swarms but also finding food on its own — the island-bound antbirds appear to increasingly depend on army ants to scare up their every meal. Janeene M. Touchton a researcher associated with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Princeton, and the principal author of the report, is now trying to identify the personality traits that may facilitate a spotted antbird’s leap from amateur to polished parasite. Is it boldness, aggressiveness, a love of novelty? Or maybe a lack of aggressiveness, a nonchalance about territory and a refusal to pick a fight? She is collaborating on the project with Martin Wikelski of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology.

Dr. Touchton, who is 37, looks as if she could be Keira Knightley’s sister and has the field-hardiness of a Dr. Livingstone. In her view, studying spotted antbirds offers an extraordinary opportunity to catch evolution on the wing, to identify the precise steps behind the great mystery of how new species arise from old ones.

More here.