Eoin Higgins at Common Dreams writes—'We Are in a Climate Emergency' Warn Experts and AOC as Greenland Ice Sheet Faces Possible Record-Breaking Melting:
Last week's European heatwave is moving north toward the Arctic, where temperatures could trigger record melting in Greenland and affect sea levels worldwide for millennia.
That's according to meteorologist Eric Holthaus, who said on Twitter Monday that the melting event from the heat could result in the loss of 40 billion tons of ice.
"This single heat wave will create a permanent change in our oceans that will linger for millennia," said Holthaus. "We are in a climate emergency."
The heat is an indicator of the climate crisis that can't be ignored, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted Monday. The congresswoman said the crisis makes the case that her Green New Deal legislation needs to be passed as soon as possible, no matter the concerns about it being "too much, too soon."
"Setting climate goals for 2030 isn't due to some arbitrary political rationale—it's there due to scientific consensus," said Ocasio-Cortez. "Simply put, we must draw down carbon by 2030 to stave off climate disaster on levels yet unseen."
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On this date at Daily Kos in 2005—The "No Race" Superiority
Ever since Charles Murray's racist nonsense The Bell Curve first posited that different races have different intelligence aptitudes (to the everlasting shame of The New Republic and its then Editor Andrew Sullivan, the book was treated as a serious work at the time), we have had to suffer too many "serious discussions" on this issue, and other related issues (Summers). Making racism respectable was Charles Murray's goal, and for a while it succeeded. But, as the NYTimes Ed Board points out, race is not an easily described concept genetically:
[A]t Pennsylvania State University, where about 90 students took complex genetic screening tests that compared their samples with those of four regional groups . . . [m]any of these students thought of themselves as "100 percent" white or black or something else, but only a tiny fraction of them, as it turned out, actually fell into that category. Most learned instead that they shared genetic markers with people of different skin colors.
What amazes me about this, as I was amazed by the remarks of Lawrence Summers, is that even if the racist nirvana could be achieved: that intelligence could even be reduced to a measurable concept, that it could be proven that there are genetic differences between the races and genders that lead to different intelligence aptitudes, etc. - does anyone seriously believe that that hypothetical factor is even worthy of mention as compared to the very real, very well documented societal prejudices that have plagued mankind since the beginning of history?
What value these genetic studies may have for understanding diseases et al I can't say, but I am always skeptical when the science appears to be undertaken to discover whether there are innate differences in intelligence between races and genders.