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Rising Sea Levels a Growing Risk to Coastal U.S., Study Says – NYTimes.com

14 Mar

Nonprofit Climate Central is releasing research on vulnerabililty to coastal flooding.

About 3.7 million Americans live within a few feet of high tide and risk being hit by more frequent coastal flooding in coming decades because of the sea level rise caused by global warming, according to new research.

If the pace of the rise accelerates as much as expected, researchers found, coastal flooding at levels that were once exceedingly rare could become an every-few-years occurrence by the middle of this century.

To check out your vulnerability, you can search this map by ZIP code.

via Rising Sea Levels a Growing Risk to Coastal U.S., Study Says – NYTimes.com.

The report is available online here. From the executive summary:

Global warming has raised sea level about 8 inches since 1880, and the rate of rise is accelerating. Scientists expect 20 to 80 more inches this century, a lot depending upon how much more heat-trapping pollution humanity puts into the sky. This study makes mid-range projections of 1-8 inches by 2030, and 4-19 inches by 2050, depending upon location across the contiguous 48 states.

Rising seas dramatically increase the odds of damaging floods from storm surges. For over two-thirds of the locations analyzed (and for 85% of sites outside the Gulf of Mexico), past and future global warming more than doubles the estimated odds of “century” or worse floods occurring within the next 18 years — meaning floods so high they would historically be expected just once per century. For over half the locations analyzed, warming at least triples the odds of century-plus floods over the same period. And for two-thirds the locations, sea level rise from warming has already more than doubled the odds of such a flood even this year.

These increases are likely to cause an enormous amount of damage. At three quarters of the 55 sites analyzed in this report, century levels are higher than 4 feet above the high tide line. Yet across the country, nearly 5 million people live in 2.6 million homes at less than 4 feet above high tide. In 285 cities and towns, more than half the population lives on land below this line, potential victims of increasingly likely climate-induced coastal flooding. 3.7 million live less than 1 meter above the tide.

About half of this exposed population, and eight of the top ten cities, are in the state of Florida. A preliminary independent analysis suggests about $30 billion in taxable property is vulnerable below the three-foot line in just three counties in southeast Florida, not including the county with the most homes at risk in the state and the nation, Miami-Dade. Small pockets or wide areas of vulnerability, however, exist in almost every other coastal state.

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Symposium on Graeber’s Debt

23 Feb

Symposium on Graeber’s Debt

As I’ve all ready noted, Crooked Timber is running a symposium on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years. Contributions so far:

All are worth reading, as are many of the comments. I’ll end with the last paragraph from Bertram’s introduction:

Does Graeber find in utopian and democratic resistance to the Axial empires an historic precedent for the Occupy movement to emulate? Perhaps our best possibilities lie not in grand schemes of societal transformation but in developing the “baseline communism” and the democratic instincts that persist even in the heart of modern capitalism. The anarchist writer Colin Ward used a phrase from Ignazio Silone – “the seed beneath the snow” – to make a similar idea vivid. We cannot take the beast on in a direct assault, and nor should we, but we can work together to develop a more human society within the nooks and crannies of the commercial one.

Sounds a bit like a plug for the Transition Movement, which originated in England and has since spread around the world.

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Facebook Is Using You – NYTimes.com

5 Feb

In Europe, laws give people the right to know what data companies have about them, but that is not the case in the United States….

Ads that pop up on your screen might seem useful, or at worst, a nuisance. But they are much more than that. The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.

Material mined online has been used against people battling for child custody or defending themselves in criminal cases. LexisNexis has a product called Accurint for Law Enforcement, which gives government agents information about what people do on social networks. The Internal Revenue Service searches Facebook and MySpace for evidence of tax evaders’ income and whereabouts, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services has been known to scrutinize photos and posts to confirm family relationships or weed out sham marriages.

via Facebook Is Using You – NYTimes.com.

The Evolved Self-management System | Conversation | Edge

7 Dec

And then what about the messages we pick up from the natural world? I’ve become particularly interested in how nature itself may provide placebo information, by seeming to suggest that we’re in the presence of a great designer, a creator, God. Wherever we look, there’s no question the natural world shouts “intelligent design”, shouts of a great artist in the sky. And, admit it or not, I’m sure this can provide a powerful subconscious prime. It can make us believe that we’re in the presence of a loving father, or perhaps a loving partner, someone whom we should look up to and want to get closer to—but who gives us permission to be such selves as we wouldn’t be otherwise. If overt religious messages can act as placebos, then so too can the beauties of nature, so too can the sun and the moon and the stars.

via The Evolved Self-management System | Conversation | Edge.

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How should we design the cities of our dreams? – Dream City – Salon.com

28 Nov

The dirty secret of our urban rebound is that today’s cities are more economically segregated than they were in the ’70s. By 2005, only 4.6 percent of the homes for sale in New York were affordable to people making the city’s median income. In L.A., rental prices doubled in a decade while wages grew by less than one-fifth. And Washington, D.C., has become the wealthiest city in America by income — even though the jobless rate in its poorest neighborhood is the highest in the country.

via How should we design the cities of our dreams? – Dream City – Salon.com.

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What’s in a Name? “Pepper Spray”

24 Nov

The police use of so-called pepper spray is much in the news and on the web these days, especially as a result of its use at University of California at Davis. According to The New York Times“Megyn Kelly on Fox News dismissed pepper spray as ‘a food product, essentially.” That same story also reports:

To the American Civil Liberties Union, its use as a crowd-control device, particularly when those crowds are nonthreatening, is an excessive and unconstitutional use of force and violates the right to peaceably assemble.

A food product? Excessive and unconstitutional? One and the same product. I understand the name’s derivation, that the active ingredient—technically, oleoresin capsicum—is the chemical that causes the ‘bite’ in peppers. The use of THAT name, of course, automatically associates the spray with food. Not only is food innocuous, it’s necessary for life. So the name tells us that this agent is, at most, an exaggeration or amplification of something that’s good for us: “Eat your spinach, it’s good for you.” We don’t think that such an agent could put someone in the hospital or induce possibly permanent nerve damage. How would these stories play out if the spray was known as ‘liquid pain’ or ‘torture spray’? How would the officers using the agent think of themselves and their actions if they thought of the agent as torture spray rather than as a food derivative?

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Occupy Wall Street: America HAS a Ruling Class

5 Nov

The OWS movement recognizes that America is divided into a ruling class and a class of servants.

Yes, America DOES have a ruling class. It’s not a hereditary ruling class, like the old European aristocracies. It’s permeable. One can enter it from below, and one can be thrust out of it too.

Of course the existence of this ruling class contradicts official doctrine, which says that American is ruled by the people and for the people. Members of this ruling class, therefore, will deny its existence. Certainly, the politician members MUST deny it.

Just what these rulers say among themselves, at the Bohemian Grove, in board meetings of for-profit corporations (e.g. General Motors, Goldman Sachs) and not-for-profit (e.g. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Ford Foundation), in private clubs of various kinds, that’s a different matter. On that, I suspect, some are frank about being among The Rulers while others persist they are still of the people.

Nor do non-member Americans recognize the existence of this ruling class. Well, some of us do, some of us don’t. It’d be interesting to see whether recognition of the ruling class is stringing among non-voters than among voters. After all, if you do see that there’s a ruling class, what’s the point of voting? You vote doesn’t matter. At the same time, one might vote out of identification with and affirmation of that very same ruling class. After all, maybe you too will be tapped to enter into the sacred halls of the ruling class.

All of which is to say that, while a ruling class exists, though not a classical ruling class, class consciousness is weak, on both sides of the divide.

Outing the Class Divide

And THAT’s the biggest service that is being performed by Occupy Wall Street: identifying the class divide in America. The 1%, that’s the ruling class. The rest, no matter how many things otherwise divide us, we are the 99%. Continue reading →

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Amazing Charts Show How 90% Of The Country Has Gotten Shafted Over The Past 30 Years…

16 Oct

Basically, the charts show that, starting in the early 1980s, a 60-year trend changed, and most of the country’s wealth gains started going to the top 10% of the population. In other words, the charts show how 90% of the country has gotten shafted over the past 30 years, and especially over the past 10.

via Amazing Charts Show How 90% Of The Country Has Gotten Shafted Over The Past 30 Years….

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Vital Bus Lines are Closing, Leaving People Stranded

13 Oct

From Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, to Town Square, USA, thousands upon thousands of people rely on public transportation to take them to jobs, shopping, to the doctor, and so forth. But bus lines are closing in cities across the nation and leaving people stranded in their homes, especially poor people and old people. It’s happening in Detroit, Longmont (Colorado), Washington D.C., and in my neighborhood in Jersey City, NJ.

Three neighborhood associations met at the Monumental Baptist Church last night to make plans on how to meet the crisis. While there is some reasonable hope that the abandoned routes will be taken-up by other providers, it is clear that this is a recurring problem that must be met by sustained action.

What’s happening in your neighborhood? Have any bus lines been closed in the last two or three years? Are bus lines being closed in the near future? What will happen to people stranded by these closures?

How is it that the so-called richest nation on the planet cannot figure out how to provide transportation for ALL of its citizens?

If you’ve got a story, put it in the comments.

Other stories below the fold. Continue reading →

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Occupy Together Meetups Everywhere – Meetup

12 Oct

Find a group new year. There are almost 1500 of them.

About Occupy Together Meetups Everywhere

* 9,846 Occupiers

* 1,491 cities

This is OCCUPY TOGETHER’s hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St. See what’s going on in your community or get something started!

via Occupy Together Meetups Everywhere – Meetup.

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