Quotation of the Day – Jan. 28, 2019

“The climate operates on a time delay.  When carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere, it takes decades – in a technical sense, millennia – for the earth to equilibrate.  This summer’s fish kill [that coated the banks of the Yellowstone River in 2016] was a product of warming that had become inevitable twenty or thirty years ago, and the warming that’s being locked in today won’t be fully felt until today’s toddlers reach middle age.  In effect, we are living in the climate of the past, but already we’ve determined the climate’s future.” – Elizabeth Kolbert, “A Song of Ice,” in: The New Yorker, Oct. 24, 2016, pg. 61

Quotation of the Day – Jan. 23, 2019

“I was penalised for working more, for working harder. Why, as an example, do some states require you to have less than $1,000 [£775] in savings? They are actively discouraging people from saving. Some people work really hard and still have no food in the fridge, while the wealthy are just getting wealthier while promoting this rhetoric that poor people are the ones taking all the money. And we still think they’re the ones making the best decisions. Hell, I thought that when I went into their houses.” – Stephanie Land, from her book: Maid, in today’s Guardian

Quotation of the Day – Jan. 20, 2019

“It is not enough simply to gather information about what people do. Eventually, you have to influence behavior, beyond the simple suasion practiced by targeted ads. It’s not about showing someone the right ad; you have to show it at the right place and time, with the language and imagery calibrated for precise effect. You have to lead people through the physical world, making them show up at the sponsored pop-up store or vote for the preferred candidate….   Companies are beginning to practice just this kind of coercion, which is why you might see makeup ads before a Friday evening out or why inducements from a personal injury lawyer might pop up on your phone as you sit in a hospital waiting room.” – From Jacob Silverman’s review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff, in: The New York Times, Jan. 18, 2019

Statistic of the Day – Jan. 18, 2019

The Trump administration’s Fourth National Climate Assessment in November 2018 said that “without significant reductions in emissions,” average global temperatures could rise 9 F by the turn of the century.
Higher waters are already hitting home in the United States. Cities like Norfolk, Va.; Baltimore; Charleston, S.C.; and Miami experience flooding on sunny days due to rising sea levels. Rising water threatens roads, railways, ports, sanitation systems, tourism, agriculture, power plants and underground cables that connect the internet.