While eating lunch, I read this cheerful article from Rolling Stone:
Thanks to the pressure we're putting on the planet's ecosystem — warming, acidification and good old-fashioned pollution — the oceans are set up for several decades of rapid change. Here's what could happen next.
The combination of excessive nutrients from agricultural runoff, abnormal wind patterns and the warming oceans is already creating seasonal dead zones in coastal regions when algae blooms suck up most of the available oxygen. ...
These low-oxygen regions could gradually expand in size — potentially thousands of miles across — which would force fish, whales, pretty much everything upward. If this were to occur, large sections of the temperate deep oceans would suffer should the oxygen-free layer grow so pronounced that it stratifies, pushing surface ocean warming into overdrive and hindering upwelling of cooler, nutrient-rich deeper water.
Enhanced evaporation from the warmer oceans will create heavier downpours, perhaps destabilizing the root systems of forests, and accelerated runoff will pour more excess nutrients into coastal areas, further enhancing dead zones. ...
Evidence for the above scenario comes in large part from our best understanding of what happened 250 million years ago, during the "Great Dying," when more than 90 percent of all oceanic species perished after a pulse of carbon dioxide and methane from land-based sources began a period of profound climate change. The conditions that triggered "Great Dying" took hundreds of thousands of years to develop. But humans have been emitting carbon dioxide at a much quicker rate, so the current mass extinction only took 100 years or so to kick-start.
Good thing we don't eat plankton, because there won't be much left in a few decades.
Oh, wait...
The ink on the Iranian nuclear deal isn't dry yet, but already American and European companies are starting to benefit:
Iran plans to buy as many as 90 planes per year from Boeing and Airbus to revamp its antiquated fleet once Western sanctions are lifted, its state news agency IRNA quoted a senior aviation official as saying on Sunday.
"Iran will buy a total of 80-90 planes per year from the two aviation giants in the first phase of renovating its air fleet," said Mohammad Khodakarami, the caretaker director of Iran's Civil Aviation Organization, according to IRNA.
"We will purchase planes from Boeing and Airbus in equal numbers," Khodakarami was quoted as saying, adding that Iran would initially need to add at least 80 planes to its fleet each year. That would mean a total of 300 planes within five years, he added.
So over the next five years, the U.S. and Europe will get a small ($2 billion) bump in GDP. And Iran will have flyable civilian airplanes again, but no atomic bombs. Everyone wins!
Just some of the news stories I haven't got time to read this morning:
I will now continue doing tasks from two jobs ago while I think about things I'd like to do for my current job.
So far Chicago has had a milder-than-normal summer, with only a couple of over-32°C days and a lot of rain. Given our greenhouse gas emissions, that will change:
The NASA climate projections offer a detailed view of future temperature and precipitation patterns around the world at a 15.5 mile (25 kilometer) resolution, covering the time period from 1950 to 2100. The 11-terabyte dataset provided daily records and estimates of maximum and minimum temperatures and precipitation over the entire globe. It integrates actual measurements from around the world with data from climate simulations created by the international Fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, or CMIP, which is a standard experimental protocol for studying the output of coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models.
The result? Pretty warm:
I won't be around to experience an average annual temperature around 30°C. Unfortunately, given the effects of climate change on our food and water supplies, not many others might be either.
Stuff I found on the Interwebs this week:
That's all for now.
The Atlantic's CityLab blog looks at the historic buildings and shares a 1965 video about its construction:
The city has granted Marina City preliminary landmark status. Final approval could take a few weeks.
Seventy years ago today, the United States detonated the world's first nuclear weapon:
On Thursday, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, part of the Department of Energy, will commemorate the 70th anniversary of its greatest scientific accomplishment: the first successful test of an atomic bomb.
The anniversary of that explosion, which happened about 210 miles south of here at a site named Trinity, will be marked in a low-key fashion at the lab. There will be a roundtable discussion in an auditorium.
Well, that sounds exciting. We're still the only country to have waged nuclear war, and we still have more nuclear weapons than anyone else except Russia. At least we're not still in the days of my childhood when we had over 10,000 bombs.
It's still debated whether the Manhattan Project saved more lives than it cost in 1945. (I think it did—and I'm very, very glad the Nazi nuclear effort went in completely the wrong direction, preventing them from getting the bomb first.)
Governments do much better at providing many services than private companies do, for the simple reason that private companies have incentives incompatible with the services. Bruce Schneier points out a shining example, nuclear security:
We can learn a lot about the potential for safety failures at US nuclear plants from the July 29, 2012, incident in which three religious activists broke into the supposedly impregnable Y-12 facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the Fort Knox of uranium. Once there, they spilled blood and spray painted “work for peace not war” on the walls of a building housing enough uranium to build thousands of nuclear weapons. They began hammering on the building with a sledgehammer, and waited half an hour to be arrested. If an 82-year-old nun with a heart condition and two confederates old enough to be AARP members could do this, imagine what a team of determined terrorists could do.
Instead of having government forces guard the site, the Department of Energy had hired two contractors: Wackenhut and Babcock and Wilcox. Wackenhut is now owned by the British company G4S, which also botched security for the 2012 London Olympics, forcing the British government to send 3,500 troops to provide security that the company had promised but proved unable to deliver. Private companies are, of course, driven primarily by the need to make a profit, but there are surely some operations for which profit should not be the primary consideration.
Corporate structures also contribute to making this kind of operation unprofitable. If someone steals fissile material from Oak Ridge and blows up Toledo with it, the biggest liability Wackenhut or B&W would face is bankruptcy and dissolution. The shareholders won't go to jail; probably not even the managers responsible for putting profit above nuclear security would, either.
But the Army and the Department of Energy have no such profit incentive, and therefore have no incentives to cut corners or rely on broken technology. Instead they have incentives to do their jobs well, and protect Americans.
Government isn't a business. I hope someday more people understand this, and I hope more that it doesn't take a nuclear disaster to prove it.
For a wildly successful heath care regime:
What’s amazing about this is that the good news about Obamacare isn’t really debatable. It’s a simple fact that there has been a stunningly rapid drop in the number of uninsured, coming from multiple independent sources. It’s also a simple fact that outlays on Medicaid and exchange subsidies are coming in well below projections.
You can argue that this is all temporary — that premiums will eventually skyrocket even though they haven’t yet, that the predicted death spiral will come back from the er, dead. But Obamacare is, by any measure, doing better so far than even its supporters expected.
Of course, in the data-free zone of the Republican Party, this simple truth isn't even understood, let alone understood to be true. It would be great to have a real opposition party in this country; someday, maybe, we can.
The Atlantic's CityLab blog has a host:
Train stations in America span all the styles of architecture this nation has to offer. There’s the the gorgeous Italianate train station in Jackson, Michigan. The Amtrak station in Raton, New Mexico, is a beautiful example of Mission Revival. Even the humble lil’ train station in Mineola, Texas, has got some flair. Whatever you might think about Orlando’s train station, it no doubt looks historic.
The stations I want to talk about are not those train stations. These are not the Art Deco transit hubs that look like vintage monuments to the future, or the Spanish Colonial stations that summon visions of desperados waiting for a train. These are the other train stations—the ones that make you wish you’d left the house a little later so you’d have to spend that much less time waiting at the station.
Warning: truly depressing train station photos follow. And depression, according to a new meta-analysis, damages your brain. So after looking at these photos, go for a walk, and then write your member of Congress to restore funding to Amtrak.