Global warming: New research emphasizes the role of economic growth

It's a message no one wants to hear: To slow down global warming, we'll either have to put the brakes on economic growth or transform the way the world's economies work.

That's the implication of an innovative University of Michigan study examining the evolution of atmospheric CO₂, the most likely cause of global climate change.

The study, conducted by José Tapia Granados and Edward Ionides of U-M and Óscar Carpintero of the University of Valladolid in Spain, was published online in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Policy. It is the first analysis to use measurable levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide to assess fluctuations in the gas, rather than estimates of CO₂ emissions, which are less accurate.

"If 'business as usual' conditions continue, economic contractions the size of the Great Recession or even bigger will be needed to reduce atmospheric levels of CO₂," said Tapia Granados, who is a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).

For the study, the researchers assessed the impact of four factors on short-run, year-to-year changes in atmospheric concentrations of CO₂, widely considered the most important greenhouse gas. Those factors included two natural phenomena believed to affect CO₂ levels—volcanic eruptions and the El Niño Southern oscillation—and also world population and the world economy, as measured by worldwide gross domestic product.

Tapia Granados and colleagues found no observable relation between short-term growth of world population and CO₂ concentrations, and they show that incidents of volcanic activity coincided with global recessions, which brings into question the reductions in atmospheric CO₂ previously ascribed to these volcanic eruptions.

Read More:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-05/uom-gwn050112.php

Resveratrol: Study Resolves Controversy On Life-Extending Red Wine Ingredient, Restores Hope for Anti-Aging Pill

A study in the May issue of the Cell Press journal Cell Metabolism appears to offer vindication for an approach to anti-aging drugs that has been at the center of heated scientific debate in recent years. The new findings show for the first time that the metabolic benefits of the red wine ingredient known as resveratrol evaporate in mice that lack the famed longevity gene SIRT1.

"Resveratrol improves the health of mice on a high-fat diet and increases life span," said David Sinclair of Harvard Medical School. The question was how.

Resveratrol is a dirty molecule, he explained. Its benefits had been attributed largely to its actions on SIRT1, based on studies in yeast, worms, and flies, but the naturally occurring ingredient has other effects; it influences dozens of proteins, and some evidence had pointed to the importance of another well-known gene (called AMPK) for resveratrol's metabolic benefits. That called into question not only the biology, but also whether SIRT1-targeted drugs in development were aimed in the wrong direction. (Those doubts and other factors led the pharmaceutical company Sirtris to halt its last clinical trial of resveratrol last year.)

Read More:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120501134209.htm

Bill McKibben - Too Hot Not to Notice?

The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by a giant’s fist, and most obvious of all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.

The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the raging river was Vermont’s iconic image from its worst disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed Hurricane Irene’s rampage through the state in August 2011.  It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut more than a billion-dollar swath of destruction across the eastern United States.

I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline.  Since Vermont’s my home, it took the theoretical -- the ever more turbulent, erratic, and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure -- and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.

And I’m not the only one.

New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” No less striking, 35% of the respondents reported that extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011.  As Yale’s Anthony Laiserowitz told the New York Times, “People are starting to connect the dots.”

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175537/

Renee Parsons - NATO to Visit the U.S.

For the first time in more than a decade, representatives from NATO's 28 member nations will meet in Chicago on May 21 for a two day conference.

With the European continent devastated at the end of WWII and an ominous Russian presence in eastern Europe, the emergence of two superpowers with radically different political and economic agendas gave birth to an era of tensions and confrontations dubbed the Cold War -- a non-shooting conflict that dominated global politics for the next forty years. By early 1949, the Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb and in an effort to halt the spread of communism, nip nationalistic militarism in the bud and encourage political integration amongst European nations, the United States and eleven western European counties formed NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Its charter, known as the Washington Treaty, included the admirable goals of settling "any international dispute... by peaceful means... that international peace and security and justice are not endangered and to refrain... from the threat or use of force... inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations."

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/renee-parsons/nato-to-visit-the-us_b_1470710.html

Gary Younge - Osama bin Laden's death has had zero impact on America's security

Last week, Afghanistan; two coalition troops were injured and one killed by Afghan soldiers; the US reached an agreement with the Afghan governmentto maintain a presence in the country until 2024; and the US failed to break a diplomatic deadlock with Pakistan after the US refused to apologise for killing 25 Pakistani soldiers in November.

This week, the White House will celebrate the anniversary of the assassination of Osama bin Laden as though it were the crowning achievement of its foreign policy. On Wednesday, Obama will hold a rare televised interview in the situation room to discuss the raid in Abbottabad. His campaign has released of a web video in which Bill Clinton says President Obama "took the harder and the more honorable path, and the one that produced, in my opinion, the best result". The video then asks, "Which path would Mitt Romney have taken?"

The man who entered the White House with the message of "hope" and "change" wants to hold on to it with a record of "shoot to kill".

Republicans are right to criticise the president for the crass manner in which he is "dancing around the end zone". Unfortunately, those criticisms ring hollow from a party whose leader played dress up on the USS Abraham Lincoln to announce the end of a war that is still not over, and whosepresidential candidate claims Obama should stop travelling the globe "apologising for" America. Moreover, the problem is not that Obama is exploiting a moment of national unity for partisan gain – though he most certainly is – but that this extra-judicial execution of an unmourned man has proved the only event capable of uniting the country since 9/11.

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/01/osama-bin-laden-death-zero-impact

Breaking Up with ALEC is Hard to Do For Johnson & Johnson

These Johnson & Johnson products were previously recalled as Procter and Gamble became the 13th major American firm to announce that it was dropping its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a few corporations have publicly confirmed their loyalty to the controversial organization. Johnson & Johnson is one of the companies that has so far stood by ALEC, despite ALEC's role in pushing "model" laws that make it harder for Americans to vote and that advance the NRA's gun agenda.

Firm Tries to Distance itself from Extreme ALEC Agenda

Instead of quitting, Johnson & Johnson prefers to try to distance itself from certain elements of the ALEC agenda, which may explain ALEC's PR move to dump its "Public Safety and Elections Task Force," where corporate lobbyists and elected officials voted behind closed doors on templates for changing gun and voting laws.

Bill Price, a spokesman for the New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson said the company financially supports ALEC and other organizations because of "a broad range of issues and, while we express our views to organizations with which we work, we may not align with or support every public position each of these broad-based groups takes." Johnson & Johnson's Vice President for State Government Affairs Don Bohn represents the company on ALEC's corporate "Private Enterprise" board, as of 2011.

Read More:

http://www.prwatch.org/node/11460

Rebecca Solnit - Welcome to the 2012 Hunger Games

When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s -- which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.

Some of them -- Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land -- were comically of their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert’s Dune had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now.  Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert.

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones.  Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175536/

Arun Gupta - How to Rebrand Occupy

By all measures the Occupy movement is a powerful brand. It has thousands of spin-offs such as occupy our homes, occupy money, occupy the hood, occupy gender equality and occupy the food system. It has powerful name recognition, snagging “word of the year” honors in 2011. And now ardent supporters are manning the ramparts to defend its integrity.

Adbusters, the culture-jamming magazine that helped spark Occupy Wall Street, is accusing unions and liberal groups clustered under the banner of the 99% Spring of tarnishing Occupy’s sterling name. Launched in February by groups like Greenpeace, the Service Employees International Union, MoveOn and Rebuild the Dream, the 99% Spring announced it would train 100,000 people in April for “sustained nonviolent direct action” against targets like Verizon, Bank of America and Walmart.

These groups, bellowed Adbusters in an online missive “Battle for the Soul of Occupy,” are “the same cabal of old world thinkers who have blunted the possibility of revolution for decades.” Adbusters fingered MoveOn as one of the primary saboteurs of Occupy, and linked to an article in Counterpunch that claims the 99% Spring “is primarily about co-option and division, about sucking a large cross-section of Occupy into Obama’s reelection campaign, watering down its radical politics, and using these mass trainings as a groundwork to put forward 100,000 ‘good protesters’ to overshadow the ‘bad protesters.’”

Read More:

http://www.progressive.org/rebrand_occupy.html

Ron Unz - China’s Rise, America’s Fall. Which Superpower is more Threatened by its “Extractive Elites”?

The rise of China surely ranks among the most important world developments of the last 100 years. With America still trapped in its fifth year of economic hardship, and the Chinese economy poised to surpass our own before the end of this decade, China looms very large on the horizon. We are living in the early years of what journalists once dubbed “The Pacific Century,” yet there are worrisome signs it may instead become known as “The Chinese Century.”

But does the Chinese giant have feet of clay? In a recently published book, Why Nations Fail, economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson characterize China’s ruling elites as “extractive”—parasitic and corrupt—and predict that Chinese economic growth will soon falter and decline, while America’s “inclusive” governing institutions have taken us from strength to strength. They argue that a country governed as a one-party state, without the free media or checks and balances of our own democratic system, cannot long prosper in the modern world. The glowing tributes this book has received from a vast array of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, including six Nobel laureates in economics, testifies to the widespread popularity of this optimistic message.

Yet do the facts about China and America really warrant this conclusion? 

China Shakes the World

By the late 1970s, three decades of Communist central planning had managed to increase China’s production at a respectable rate, but with tremendous fits and starts, and often at a terrible cost: 35 million or more Chinese had starved to death during the disastrous 1959–1961 famine caused by Mao’s forced industrialization policy of the Great Leap Forward.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30621

Pesticide exposure linked to brain changes: study

When pregnant women are exposed to moderate levels of a common pesticide, their children may experience lasting changes in brain structure linked to lower intelligence, a US study said Monday.

The study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined New York City pregnant mothers who were tested for exposure to chlorpyrifos, or CPF, which is widely used for pest control in farms and public spaces.

The women in the study, which included 369 subjects total, took part prior to 2001 when CPF was banned from household use in the United States, though the chemical continues to be used worldwide in agriculture.

Researchers compared 20 children -- age five to 11 -- whose mothers tested highest for levels of CPF and found "significant abnormalities" in brain structure compared to 20 children whose mothers showed lower exposures.

Read More:

http://www.seeddaily.com/reports/Pesticide_exposure_linked_to_brain_changes_study_999.html