Managing director of Ebono Institute and major sponsor of The Generator, Geoff Ebbs, is running against Kevin Rudd in the seat of Griffith at the next Federal election. By the expression on their faces in this candid shot it looks like a pretty dull campaign. Read on
Scientists have discovered an important method of how carbon is drawn down from the surface of the Southern Ocean to the deep waters beneath. The Southern Ocean is an important carbon sink in the world – around 40 percent of the annual global CO2 emissions absorbed by the world’s oceans enter through this region.
–The Government is trying to push through sweeping changes to Australia’s surveillance and intelligence laws which put our privacy at risk.Watch the video to find out more and sign the petition:http://www.getup.org.au/protect-us-but-respect-us—
Dear NEVILLE,
Would you copy ASIO in on every personal email you send, include them in every conversation you have with a friend online, send them your personal photos and videos? Soon, you may not have a choice.
Right now the Government is considering the most sweeping and radical changes to Australia’s surveillance and intelligence laws since the establishment of the original laws in 1979.
The changes would give Australia’s spy agency, ASIO, broad powers to gather unprecedented levels of data on Australian citizens, including monitoring your emails and posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts. Internet providers and websites would be forced to keep detailed records of everything you do online for at least 2 years, and be forced to turn this over to the government if requested– and all of this could potentially be done without a warrant.
We’ve put together an informative video to explain the changes. Watch the video to find out more about how your privacy could be invaded, and add your name to the petition asking the Government to protect us, but respect us:
These changes are so controversial that Attorney-General Nicola Roxon is trying to rush them through the committee1 – hoping they’ll get through before we catch on to what’s going on, without proper scrutiny.
Intelligence agencies play a vital role in protecting our national security, but that can’t come at the expense of privacy and proper safeguards. These changes would treat everyone like criminals, seek to reduce the checks and balances governing the use of and access to intercepted communications, skirt the power of the courts, and give significant powers to the intelligence services and the Attorney-General.
GetUp members have successfully stood up for our privacy online in the past. When the Rudd Government tried to introduce a mandatory internet filter, GetUp members mobilised to ensure our internet is free from unsolicited government interference. Now we must again come together to protect our civil liberties.
These next few weeks are crucial as the Government’s discussion paper is debated in committee and reported on to Parliament. With such a short time allowed for consultation, the Attorney-General and the Government are trying to rush this through Parliament and avoid public scrutiny. Add your name to the petition and tell the Government to protect our civil liberties:
GetUp Action for Australia is an independent, not-for-profit community campaigning group. We use new technology to empower Australians to have their say on important national issues. We receive no political party or government funding, and every campaign we run is entirely supported by voluntary donations. If you’d like to contribute to help fund GetUp Action for Australia’s work, pleasedonate now! If you have trouble with any links in this email, please go directly towww.getup.org.au. To unsubscribe from GetUp Action for Australia, please clickhere. Authorised by Simon Sheikh on behalf of GetUp Action for Australia, Level 2, 104 Commonwealth Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010.
Roy Johnson: ‘Hell, I’m through with it. I’m walking away from the house.’ Photo: New York Times
MABLETON, Georgia: Roy Johnson fell so far behind on his $US1000-per-month mortgage payments that last year he allowed the red brick, three-bedroom ranch he had owned since 1963 to lapse into foreclosure.
”I couldn’t pay it any longer,” he said. ”One day, I woke up and said, ‘Hell, I’m through with it. I’m walking away from the house’.”
That decision swept Mr Johnson, 79, into a rapidly expanding demographic: older Americans who have lost their homes in the great recession. As he hauled his belongings by pick-up truck from this Atlanta suburb and moved into his daughter’s basement, Mr Johnson became one of the 1½ million Americans over the age of 50 who lost their houses to foreclosure between 2007 and 2011. Of those, the highest foreclosure rate was for homeowners over 75.
Once viewed as the most fiscally stable age group, older people are struggling. Last week, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), released what it described as the most comprehensive analysis of why the foreclosure crisis struck so many Americans in their retirement years.
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The report found that while people under 50 are the group most likely to face foreclosure, the risk of ”serious delinquency” on mortgages has grown fastest for people over 50.
While the study classified even baby boomers as ”older Americans,” its most dire findings were for the oldest group. Among people over 75, the foreclosure rate grew more than eightfold from 2007 to 2011, to 3 per cent of that group of homeowners, the report found.
”Despite the perception that older Americans are more housing secure than younger people, millions of older Americans are carrying more mortgage debt than ever before, and more than 3 million are at risk of losing their homes,” the report found. ”As the mortgage crisis continues, millions of older Americans are struggling to maintain their financial security.”
The report was based on nationwide loan data that covered a five-year span. The profile of those facing foreclosure has changed since 2007. As the average age and wealth of those people rise, their foreclosures are less likely to involve high-interest loans. In fact, most foreclosures are now the result of prime loans rather than subprime ones, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Instead, older Americans are losing their homes because of pension cuts, rising medical costs, shrinking stock portfolios and falling property values, according to Debra Whitman, AARP’s executive vice-president for policy.
They are also not saving enough money. Half of households whose head is between 65 and 74 have no money in retirement accounts, according to the Federal Reserve.
Other older foreclosure victims have managed to negotiate with banks to stay in their houses.
Selling houses is also a challenge for many older people. The value of real estate has collapsed, especially in wealthy suburbs of some cities.
For Roy Johnson, it was painful to watch the house he built 48 years earlier sell for only $33,000 at auction last year.
Now he lives in what his 55-year-old daughter calls his ”man cave” in her basement. It is an hour away from his old house. Although Mr Johnson is grateful to have been helped by a relative, he misses having space for all of his belongings and the tree from which he made pear preserves.
”I planned to die in that house,” he said. ”But I guess it won’t work out that way.”
“The decadal land-surface average temperature using a 10-year moving average of surface temperatures over land. Anomalies are relative to the Jan 1950 – December 1979 mean. The grey band indicates 95% statistical and spatial uncertainty interval.” A Koch-funded reanalysis of 1.6 billion temperature reports finds that “essentially all of this increase is due to the human emission of greenhouse gases.”
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) is poised to release its findings next week on the cause of recent global warming.
UPDATE (9 pm): A NY Times op-ed by Richard Muller, BEST’s Founder and Scientific Director, has been published, “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic.” Here is the money graf:
CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
Yes, yes, I know, the finding itself is “dog bites man.” What makes this “man bites dog” is that Muller has been a skeptic of climate science, and the single biggest funder of this study is the “Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation ($150,000).” The Kochs are the leading funder of climate disinformation in the world! It gets better:
Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases. These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming.
In short, a Koch-funded study has found that the IPCC “consensus” underestimated both the rate of surface warming and how much could be attributed to human emissions! Here is some background on BEST followed by a longer excerpt of the op-ed.
A group of scientists led by one well-known skeptic, Muller — and whose only climatologist listed is Judith Curry, a well-known confusionist [see Schmidtand Annan and Steig andVerheggen, and CP] — decided to reexamine all of the temperature data they could get their hands on. I broke the story of their initial findings in March 2011 (with the help of climatologist Ken Caldeira) – see Exclusive: Berkeley temperature study results “confirm the reality of global warming and support in all essential respects the historical temperature analyses of the NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU.” The top figure is an updated chart of their findings from March of this year. They found a lot of warming. Indeed, their key paper from 2011 found:
… our analysis suggests a degree of global land-surface warming during the anthropogenic era that is consistent with prior work (e.g. NOAA) but on the high end of the existing range of reconstructions.
So the only remaining question for BEST was: What is the cause of that warming? Of course, those who read ClimateProgress or the scientific literature already knew the answer to that question (see the 12/11 post, It’s “Extremely Likely That at Least 74% of Observed Warming Since 1950″ Was Manmade; It’s Highly Likely All of It Was). BEST is set to release those findings this week. The excellent UK Guardianreporter, Leo Hickman, tweeted earlier today that “Significant climate-related news will be breaking on Guardian website in next 24-36 hours” and then he tweeted an hour ago the link to the excerpt of Muller’s op-ed. Here is more of the op-ed:
How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does.
Well, in fact, to be seriously considered, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as does CO2 — and it must offer some mechanism that counteracts the well-known warming effect of CO2. Not bloody likely.
The careful analysis by our team is laid out in five scientific papers now online at BerkeleyEarth.org. That site also shows our chart of temperature from 1753 to the present, with its clear fingerprint of volcanoes and carbon dioxide, but containing no component that matches solar activity. Four of our papers have undergone extensive scrutiny by the scientific community, and the newest, a paper with the analysis of the human component, is now posted, along with the data and computer programs used. Such transparency is the heart of the scientific method; if you find our conclusions implausible, tell us of any errors of data or analysis. What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years. Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes.
Ouch. I asked Caldeira for a comment on Muller’s op-ed. He writes:
I am glad that Muller et al have taken a look at the data and have come to essentially the same conclusion that nearly everyone else had come to more than a decade ago. The basic scientific results have been established for a long time now, so I do not see the results of Muller et al as being scientifically important. However, their result may be politically important. It shows that even people who suspect climate scientists of being charlatans, when they take a hard look at the data, see that the climate scientists have been right all along.
From: Bill McKibben – 350.org <organizers@350.org> Sent: Thursday, 26 July 2012 8:17 AM Subject: My reckoning
Dear friends,
Last week, Rolling Stone magazine published a piece of mine that I think may be the most important writing I’ve done since The End of Nature, way back in 1989. (And no, it’s not the profile of Justin Bieber.)
Warning: it’s pretty long, and it’s not entirely cheerful. Indeed, it shows that the business plans of the fossil fuel industry will wreck the planet — that they’ve already got enough carbon in their reserves to drive the heat past anyone’s definition of okay.
Okay I read Bill McKibben’s “Global Warnings Terrifying New Math” report in RollingStone. Interesting and possible fruitful line of attack, but not all that convincing. Especially as Bill does not cite his sources, nor even broach the contradiction between his statement that 2C limit is till possible to be UNDER versus other scientific reports that current CO2 levels NOW in the atmosphere mean we are already well past such pleasant mirages.
The other problem as Lenz Blog shows (by way of his sci-fi fiction) is how Bill McKibben has a poor understanding of business dynamics. ;- “… it was very easy for the fossil fuel industry to make oil (and other fossil fuels) much more expensive. All they needed to do was reduce their drilling activities by a large factor, leaving more of the precious stuff in the ground for future generations. The increase in prices sent the value of their mining rights up in the stratosphere….” http://k.lenz.name/LB/http://k.lenz.name/LB/?p=7256
Melbourne scientists say they have made a major breakthrough in the search for an alternative to antibiotics.
Researchers from Monash University in Melbourne, along with The Rockfeller University and the University of Maryland in the United States, have spent the past six years studying the structure of a viral protein called PlyC.
They say they have discovered the way it kills the bacteria that causes a range of infections including sore throats, pneumonia and streptococcal toxic shock syndrome.
They have described the protein as a powerful anti-bacterial killing machine and say that discovering what it looks like and how it attacks bacteria is a major step forward in developing alternatives to antibiotics.
They say scientists have been trying to decipher the structure of PlyC for more than 40 years.
Monash University’s Dr Sheena McGowan says identifying the atomic structure of PlyC is crucial to understanding how it can be used to fight bacteria.
“Over the last few years or few decades, there has been a lot of instances of resistance to antibiotics of bacteria,” she said.
“I’m sure you’ve all heard… of multi-resistant bacteria and drug resistant bacteria. What we’re looking at over the next coming decades is a time when antibiotics may not be as effective as they are now. So by doing research early, we can start to look for alternatives.”
