More than 11,000 scientists from around the world issued a dire warning Tuesday that the world must take immediate action to fundamentally alter a range of human activities to avert "untold suffering due to the climate crisis."
In a statement published in the journal BioScience, the scientists declared that the Earth is facing a "climate emergency" and that, despite continued warnings about "insufficient progress" over the last several decades, greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to increase and posing "increasingly damaging effects on the Earth's climate."
They wrote: "An immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis."
The group, which includes experts from 153 countries, cited increases in human and livestock populations, meat production, world gross domestic product, tree cover loss, air travel, fossil fuel consumption, and carbon dioxide emissions as factors that have contributed to the crisis.
"Geneva, 9 July 2020 – The annual mean global temperature is likely to be at least 1° Celsius above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900) in each of the coming five years (2020-2024) and there is a 20% chance that it will exceed 1.5°C in at least one year, according to new climate predictions issued by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
The Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update, led by the United Kingdom’s Met Office, provides a climate outlook for the next five years, updated annually. It harnesses the expertise of internationally acclaimed climate scientists and the best computer models from leading climate centres around the world to produce actionable information for decision-makers.
The earth’s average temperature is already over 1.0 C above the pre-industrial period. The last five-year period has been the warmest five years on record.
'This study shows – with a high level of scientific skill – the enormous challenge ahead in meeting the Paris Agreement on Climate Change target of keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius,' said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
The predictions take into account natural variations as well as human influences on climate to provide the best possible forecasts of temperature, rainfall, wind patterns and other variables for the coming five years. The forecast models do not take into consideration changes in emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols as a result of the coronavirus lockdown.
'WMO has repeatedly stressed that the industrial and economic slowdown from COVID-19 is not a substitute for sustained and coordinated climate action. Due to the very long lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere, the impact of the drop in emissions this year is not expected to lead to a reduction of CO2 atmospheric concentrations which are driving global temperature increases,' said Professor Taalas.
'Whilst COVID-19 has caused a severe international health and economic crisis, failure to tackle climate change may threaten human well-being, ecosystems and economies for centuries, Governments should use the opportunity to embrace climate action as part of recovery programmes and ensure that we grow back better,' he said."
Shock, anger, confusion grip Alabama after court ruling on embryos
"Alabama doctors are puzzled over whether they will have to make changes to in vitro fertilization procedures. Couples have crammed into online support groups wondering if they should transfer frozen embryos out of state. And attorneys are warning that divorce settlements that call for frozen embryos to be destroyed may now be void.
Throughout Alabama, there is widespread shock, anger and confusion over how to proceed after the state Supreme Court ruled Friday that frozen embryos are people, a potentially far-reaching decision that could upend women’s reproductive health care in a state that already has one of the nation’s strictest abortion laws."
More than 11,000 scientists from around the world issued a dire warning Tuesday that the world must take immediate action to fundamentally alter a range of human activities to avert "untold suffering due to the climate crisis."
In a statement published in the journal BioScience, the scientists declared that the Earth is facing a "climate emergency" and that, despite continued warnings about "insufficient progress" over the last several decades, greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to increase and posing "increasingly damaging effects on the Earth's climate."
They wrote: "An immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis."
The group, which includes experts from 153 countries, cited increases in human and livestock populations, meat production, world gross domestic product, tree cover loss, air travel, fossil fuel consumption, and carbon dioxide emissions as factors that have contributed to the crisis.
The mug-shot posters, pasted on walls and lampposts around Paris by an activist group during the United Nations climate talks last year, were hardly flattering. They depicted Myron Ebell, a climate contrarian, as one of seven “climate criminals” wanted for “destroying our future.”
But in his customary mild-mannered way, Mr. Ebell, who directs environmental and energy policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian advocacy group in Washington, brushed it off.
“I’ve gotten used to this over the years,” he told an interviewer at the talks. “But I did go out and get my photo taken with my poster, just so I have it as a memento.”
In looking for someone to follow through on his campaign vow to dismantle one of the Obama administration’s signature climate change policies, President-elect Donald J. Trump probably could not have found a better candidate for the job than Mr. Ebell.
Mr. Ebell, who revels in taking on the scientific consensus on global warming, will be Mr. Trump’s lead agent in choosing personnel and setting the direction of the federal agencies that address climate change and environmental policy more broadly.
Mr. Ebell, whose organization is financed in part by the coal industry, has been one of the most vocal opponents of the linchpin of that policy, the Clean Power Plan. Developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the plan is a far-reaching set of regulations that, by seeking to reduce carbon emissions from electricity generation, could result in the closing of many coal-burning power plants, among other effects.
Before I lay out all my fears, is there any silver lining to be found in this vote? I’ve been searching for hours, and the only one I can find is this: I don’t think Trump was truly committed to a single word or policy he offered during the campaign, except one phrase: “I want to win.”
But Donald Trump cannot be a winner unless he undergoes a radical change in personality and politics and becomes everything he was not in this campaign. He has to become a healer instead of a divider; a compulsive truth-teller rather than a compulsive liar; someone ready to study problems and make decisions based on evidence, not someone who just shoots from the hip; someone who tells people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear; and someone who appreciates that an interdependent world can thrive only on win-win relationships, not zero-sum ones.
We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law.
It turns out that we were wrong. There turn out to be a huge number of people — white people, living mainly in rural areas — who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about. For them, it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy. And there were many other people who might not share those anti-democratic values, but who nonetheless were willing to vote for anyone bearing the Republican label.
I don’t know how we go forward from here. Is America a failed state and society? It looks truly possible. I guess we have to pick ourselves up and try to find a way forward, but this has been a night of terrible revelations, and I don’t think it’s self-indulgent to feel quite a lot of despair.
I retract none of the warnings that I issued about the likelihood of catastrophe and crisis on his watch. I fear the risks of a Trump presidency as I have feared nothing in our politics before. But he will be the president, thanks to a crude genius that identified all the weak spots in our parties and our political system and that spoke to a host of voters for whom that system promised at best a sustainable stagnation under the tutelage of a distant and self-satisfied elite. So we must hope that he has the wit to be more than a wrecker, more than a demagogue, and that his crude genius can actually be turned, somehow, to the common good.
And if that hope is dashed, we must find ways to resist him — all of us, right and left, in the new chapter of American history that has opened very unexpectedly tonight.
"The United States has seen worse than Donald Trump. It has endured political crises and corruption, war abroad and bloodshed at home. But that doesn’t make it any easier to contemplate the catastrophe that looms if we wake up Wednesday morning to President-elect Trump.
There’s no sense complaining anymore. The hurricane is three days from landfall. The urgent thing now is to avert the worst, minimize the damage, save the foundations, clear the mess.
Averting the worst starts with electing Hillary Clinton. For many voters that will mean defying Republican efforts to jam the electoral machinery through lies, legal obstructions and the threat of violence. We hope the voters hold out, however intimidating the process and long the lines. For Americans who may feel unmoved or unwilling to vote for Mrs. Clinton, here is a question from the future: In 2016 we were closer than ever to electing an ignorant and reckless tyrant — what did you do to stop him?"
"To hear Donald Trump describe it, President Barack Obama was 'really screaming' at a pro-Trump protester whose appearance at a Hillary Clinton rally momentarily interrupted the President's remarks.
'You have to go back and look and study and see what happened,' Trump told supporters Friday.
So we did. And Trump's description of Obama's response is flatly misleading.
Here's what happened: Obama was speaking in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Friday afternoon when a protester stood up holding a Trump sign. That led the crowd of Clinton supporters to boo, a common response to protesters during rallies for both candidates this election.
But the President wasn't having it.
'Hold up! Hold up!' Obama repeatedly called to the crowd, never once addressing the protester and certainly not, as Trump put it, 'really screaming' at him.
More to the point, Obama's rebuke was directed at the Clinton supporters, not the protester. He first told the audience they shouldn't worry about the man, who was peacefully conducting himself.
'We live in a country that respects free speech. Second of all, it looks like maybe he might have served in our military and we've got to respect that,' Obama said. 'Third of all, he was elderly and we've got to respect our elders.'"
"How he responded to business setbacks could predict what he'll do if he isn't the next president." • "When Donald Trump loses, he lashes out, assigns blame and does whatever it takes to make a defeat look like a win. When that isn’t plausible, he pronounces the system rigged — victory wasn’t possible because someone put in the fix. • In a roller-coaster career in which glittering buildings and a flamboyant lifestyle have been tempered by bankruptcies and failed ventures, Trump has consistently fought — often successfully — to recast each defeat as proof of his strategic savvy. He has reacted to failure by exploding in anger and recrimination, then moving on to very different ventures, though always in arenas where he can vie for public admiration. • Trump calls defeats “blips.” Losing the race for the most powerful job on the planet is no one’s idea of a blip, and if that happens, Trump is highly unlikely to slip away and accept life as a historical footnote, as Michael Dukakis did; to live out his golden years as a respected elder statesman, as Bob Dole has done; or to consider some other form of government service, as John Kerry did."
Photographers have shot tens of thousands of images for The New York Times and logged hundreds of thousands of miles on the presidential campaign trail since early 2015. Here are 12 of their most memorable photographs.
The order crackled over a loudspeaker from two sheriff’s deputies crouched behind the doors of police cruisers, semiautomatic rifles at their sides.
Several middle-aged militiamen were toting loaded AR-15 rifles and 9-millimeter pistols at a makeshift checkpoint — two lawn chairs and a narrow board — on a dirt driveway in central Georgia. The men, members of the Georgia Security Force III% militia, grumbled but laid their weapons down on the red clay earth.
The brief standoff ended with an amicable chat, and the men retrieved their weapons the moment the lawmen drove away. But the episode further stoked the militiamen’s abiding fears that their cherished Second Amendment rights were under assault.
As president, Trump sought to use military planes and bases for deportation. Now, he and his allies are talking about a new effort that current and former officials warn could be impractical and dangerous.
The inaugural group of 35 Green Communities was designated in 2010. Since then, the program has grown to include 286 municipalities. On June 30th 2022, the Secretary of the EEA released the Clean Energy and Climate Plan for 2025 and 2030.
The 2025/2030 CECP is rooted in the understanding that climate change poses a unique and potentially irreversible threat to the well-being of society. It expresses the Commonwealth’s plans for 2025 and 2030 that maximize the ability to realize a 2050 future in which the heat in homes, power in vehicles, and electric grid can all operate with a minimum reliance on fossil fuels, and natural and working lands can be protected from conversion and better managed and restored to enhance carbon sequestration.
As a result, DOER intends to offer additional opportunities and resources to municipalities that have been actively participating in the Green Communities Designation and Grant Program through a new program that aligns with the Commonwealth’s goals.
Tentatively called “Climate Leaders”, this voluntary program seeks to incentivize municipalities to implement clean energy and climate-friendly policies, community engagement, and sustainable transportation programs..
DOER is interested in hearing from municipalities and those who collaborate with them.
Three men, eyes closed and heads bowed, pray before a rough-hewn wooden cross. Another man wraps his arms around a massive Bible pressed against his chest like a shield. All throughout the crowd, people wave "Jesus Saves" banners and pump their fists toward the sky.
At first glance, these snapshots look like scenes from an outdoor church rally. But this event wasn't a revival; it was what some call a Christian revolt. These were photos of people who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, during an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The insurrection marked the first time many Americans realized the US is facing a burgeoning White Christian nationalist movement. This movement uses Christian language to cloak sexism and hostility to Black people and non-White immigrants in its quest to create a White Christian America. A report from a team of clergy, scholars and advocates — sponsored by two groups that advocate for the separation of church and state — concluded that this ideology was used to "bolster, justify and intensify" the attack on the US Capitol.
"President Donald Trump. Three words that were unthinkable to tens of millions of Americans — and much of the rest of the world — have now become the future of the United States."
………………….
"So who is the man who will be the 45th president? After a year and a half of erratic tweets and rambling speeches, we can’t be certain."
………………….
"Here is what we do know: We know Mr. Trump is the most unprepared president-elect in modern history. We know that by words and actions, he has shown himself to be temperamentally unfit to lead a diverse nation of 320 million people. We know he has threatened to prosecute and jail his political opponents, and he has said he would curtail the freedom of the press. We know he lies without compunction."
………………….
"He has insulted women and threatened Muslims and immigrants, and he has recruited as his allies a dark combination of racists, white supremacists and anti-Semites. Given the importance of the alt-right to Mr. Trump’s rise, it is perhaps time to drop the “alt.” David Duke celebrated Mr. Trump’s victory on Tuesday night, tweeting, 'It’s time to TAKE AMERICA BACK!!!'"
………………….
"We know that, with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, Mr. Trump would be able to restore a right-wing majority by filling the Supreme Court seat that Republican senators have held hostage for nine months.
Republicans will soon control every branch of the federal government, in addition to a majority of governorships and statehouses. There is no obvious check on Mr. Trump’s vengeful impulses. Other Republican leaders, including his running mate, Mike Pence, have largely made excuses for his most extreme behavior.
By challenging every norm of American politics, Mr. Trump upended first the Republican Party and now the Democratic Party, which attempted a Clinton restoration at a moment when the nation was impatient to escape the status quo. Misogyny and racism played their part in his rise, but so did a fierce and even heedless desire for change.
That change has now placed the United States on a precipice."
"What I do know for certain is this: The Republican Party and Donald Trump will have control of all the levers of government, from the courts to the Congress to the White House. That is an awesome responsibility, and it is all going to be on them. Do they understand that?
Personally, I will not wish them ill. Too much is at stake for my country and my children. Unlike the Republican Party for the last eight years, I am not going to try to make my president fail. If he fails, we all fail. So yes, I will hope that a better man emerges than we saw in this campaign.
But at the moment I am in anguish, frightened for my country and for our unity. And for the first time, I feel homeless in America."
What old men know is that everything can change. Langston Hughes wrote these lines when I was 8 years old, in the very different America of 1935.
It was an America where the life of a black person didn’t count for much. Where women were still second-class citizens, where Jews and other ethnic whites were looked on with suspicion, and immigrants were kept out almost completely unless they came from certain approved countries in Northern Europe. Where gay people dared not speak the name of their love, and where “passing” — as white, as a WASP, as heterosexual, as something, anything else that fit in with what America was supposed to be was a commonplace, with all of the self-abasement and the shame that entailed.
It was an America still ruled, at its base, by violence. Where lynchings, and especially the threat of lynchings, were used to keep minorities away from the ballot box and in their place. Where companies amassed arsenals of weapons for goons to use against their own employees and recruited the police and National Guardsmen to help them if these private corporate armies proved insufficient. Where destitute veterans of World War I were driven from the streets of Washington with tear gas and bayonets, after they went to our nation’s capital to ask for the money they were owed.
"• Hitler was an effective orator and actor, Mr. Ullrich reminds readers, adept at assuming various masks and feeding off the energy of his audiences. Although he concealed his anti-Semitism beneath a “mask of moderation” when trying to win the support of the socially liberal middle classes, he specialized in big, theatrical rallies staged with spectacular elements borrowed from the circus. Here, “Hitler adapted the content of his speeches to suit the tastes of his lower-middle-class, nationalist-conservative, ethnic-chauvinist and anti-Semitic listeners,” Mr. Ullrich writes. He peppered his speeches with coarse phrases and put-downs of hecklers. Even as he fomented chaos by playing to crowds’ fears and resentments, he offered himself as the visionary leader who could restore law and order. • Hitler increasingly presented himself in messianic terms, promising “to lead Germany to a new era of national greatness,” though he was typically vague about his actual plans. He often harked back to a golden age for the country, Mr. Ullrich says, the better “to paint the present day in hues that were all the darker. Everywhere you looked now, there was only decline and decay.” • Hitler’s repertoire of topics, Mr. Ullrich notes, was limited, and reading his speeches in retrospect, “it seems amazing that he attracted larger and larger audiences” with “repeated mantralike phrases” consisting largely of “accusations, vows of revenge and promises for the future.” But Hitler virtually wrote the modern playbook on demagoguery, arguing in “Mein Kampf” that propaganda must appeal to the emotions — not the reasoning powers — of the crowd. Its “purely intellectual level,” Hitler said, “will have to be that of the lowest mental common denominator among the public it is desired to reach.” Because the understanding of the masses “is feeble,” he went on, effective propaganda needed to be boiled down to a few slogans that should be “persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.”"
"Can any Trump partisans imagine their candidate working tirelessly to convince others of the good or bad of a policy sans obnoxious rhetoric, and better yet, anyone listening to this most empty-headed of candidates? Regardless of Tuesday’s outcome, can anyone honestly say Trump will leave behind any kind of legacy that actually advances the policy debate?
Donald Trump is quite simply the most policy ignorant presidential candidate to ever emerge from the Republican primaries. But it’s not Trump’s stunning ignorance about seemingly everything policy-related that makes him such a lousy candidate, and such an embarrassment to the GOP. Figure that we’re advantaged economically and also in terms of freedom when presidents do nothing. Trump’s problem is that he combines policy ignorance with an impressive lack of common sense, and then tops it off with a desire to actually turn his know-nothingness into law. This is worth mentioning simply because yours truly would be cheering for Trump rather boisterously if he advertised his total cluelessness alongside an expressed desire to sit on his hands for four years. The problem with Trump once again is that he’s got lots of policy ideas. They’re nearly all bad. And the manufactured facts supporting them are nearly all wrong."
"FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers Sunday the agency hasn't changed its opinion that Hillary Clinton should not face criminal charges after a review of new emails." "(CNN) FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers Sunday the agency hasn't changed its opinion that Hillary Clinton should not face criminal charges after a review of new emails. • Comey had dropped a bombshell 11 days from the election when he informed Congress that the FBI had discovered emails in its separate investigation of Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, that could be connected to its investigation of whether Clinton mishandled classified information by using a private email server. • It's impossible to know before results are tallied what impact Comey's actions -- first raising a vaguely worded red flag 11 days out, and then lowering it two days from the election -- will have on the contest. But the news could help Clinton put to rest a controversy that has dogged her in the 2016 race's closing days, helping Donald Trump narrow a polling gap nationally and in key battleground sstates." " in the letter to top RepubOveCommittee.
Donald J. Trump encourages his supporters to heckle journalists, whom he requires to sit in a separate section, during campaign appearances. Experience the boos.
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