Dramatic Climate Swings Likely as World Warms

ScienceDaily (July 15, 2011) — Dramatic climate swings behind both last year's Pakistan flooding and this year's Queensland floods in Australia are likely to continue as the world gets warmer, scientists predict.

Horn of Africa Drought ‘Set to Worsen’ The plight of millions of drought-stricken people across the Horn of Africa is set to worsen, with rains expected only later in the year and harvests months away, a top UN official warned Saturday. Scanty or failed rainfall in the region over the past two years has already forced thousands of Somalis to flee the country and ruined the livelihoods of millions in parts of Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti. more...---------------------------------Fiery reds and oranges nearly covered the United States on meteorologist maps as a massive heat wave hit hard in much of the country on Saturday. Temperatures averaged up to 15 degrees above normal, with most peaks in the 90s but triple digit heat expected to strike from Montana to New Mexico, according to lead meteorologists for The Weather Channel and The National Weather Service. Paired with oppressive humidity, temperatures will feel even hotter, as measured by the heat indexes. The NWS issued excessive heat warnings and watches for the Midwest from Texas to Canada, and heat index values over 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 C) are possible for portions of the central and eastern United States by the middle of next week. Locations affected are expected to see temperatures and heat indexes of up to 117 degrees (47 C), including cities like Minneapolis where that is extremely rare. "The stage is being set for a massive heat wave to develop," the National Weather service warned on Thursday.

Researchers at the Universities of Oxford and Leeds have discovered that the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the sloshing of the warmest waters on the planet from the West Pacific towards the East Pacific every 2-7 years, continued during Earth's last great warm period, the Pliocene.

Their results suggest that swings between the two climatic extremes, known as El Niño and La Niña, may even have occurred more frequently in the warmer past and may increase in frequency in the future. Extreme ENSO events cause droughts, forest fires and floods across much of the world as well as affecting fishery production.

Reporting in the journal Paleoceanography, the team of geochemists and climate modellers use the Pliocene as a past analogue and predictor of the workings of Earth's future climate.

The Pliocene (which lasted from 5 to 3 million years ago) had carbon dioxide levels similar to the present day, with global mean temperatures about 2-3ºC higher, so it is a useful test-ground for climate research.

Lead Scientist Nick Scroxton from Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences said: 'We know from previous studies that the mean state of the Pacific during the warm Pliocene was similar to the climate patterns observed during a typical El Niño event that we see today.

'However, until recently it was believed that a warmer Pacific would reduce the climate swings that cause the dramatic weather extremes throughout the region leading to a permanent state of El Niño. What we didn't expect was that climatic variability would remain strong under these warmer conditions.'

The team combined experiments performed on the Met Office Hadley Centre climate model, HadCM3, with the analysis of the chemical composition of lots of individual shells of small organisms, known as foraminifera.

These were collected from a deep sea sediment core in the East Equatorial Pacific, and provided a record of temperature in the upper layer of the ocean through time. They discovered that the range of temperatures experienced by these organisms during the Pliocene, was higher than what would be expected from just the seasonal cycle.

The extra variation in temperature can be explained by the additional extreme temperature swings provided by the El Niño/La Niña system.

ALEC Exposed - And It's Connection To Texas Laws

This week the Center for Media and Democracy rolled out a new web site, ALEC Exposed, to make public information about the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC is a powerful coalition of corporations, right wing foundations, and state legislators who have been literally writing the laws at the state level to push their pro-business agenda.

The ALEC has operated in relative secrecy since 1973, avoiding scrutiny from the media and watchdog groups as it has sought to impose a coordinated corporate agenda on all fifty states. ALEC’s scheme is to game the lawmaking process with “model legislation” penned by corporation insiders and billionaire conservatives, which is then passed to Republican state legislators to submit as their own bills in state legislatures in all 50 states. ALEC's "model legislation seeks to protect polluters, privatize public education, break unions and give advantage to Republican candidates through restrictive voter photo ID requirements and other legislation crafted to restrict access to the voting booth.

ALEC counts among its alumni House Speaker John Boehner, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Ohio Governor John Kasich, Texas Governor Rick Perry and other key players in the current push to restructure federal and state government with tax breaks for the rich, regulatory breaks for corporations, privatization strategies and draconian “Voter ID” laws that threaten to make it harder for millions of Americans to cast ballots.

According to this ALEC watch report, the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) is associated with the American Legislative Exchange Council.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation is an Austin-based conservative think tank that lobbied Republicans in the Texas legislature to make deep cuts to K-12 public education funding, college funding and Medicare funding in the 2011-13 state budget Gov. Perry signed into law last month.

TPPF also strongly advocated for the Texas voter photo ID legislation Gov. Perry signed in law in May as well as the Texas' Sanctuary Cities anti-Immigrant legislation and the privatization of public schools in Texas introduced during the 2011 Texas legislative session.

• see TPM: The Crackdown on Voting and BradBlog: Ohio's Republican SoS: GOP Photo ID Bill Does Not Protect Against Fraud, Excludes Legal Voters.

Trickle Down Tax Cuts To End Elected Government And Put The Rich In Control

David Stockman, Pres. Reagan's budget director, "In 1985, the top five percent wealthiest households had a net worth of $8 trillion, but since then the top 5% have gained more wealth than the whole human race had created prior to 1980."

If you remember anything at all about David Stockman, it’s probably his being “taken to the woodshed” by Pres. Ronald Reagan when he was Reagan's budget director. That was back in late 1981 when he gave a long interview to William Greider for the Atlantic magazine. In a piece titled “The Education of David Stockman,” the young former congressman from Michigan acknowledged that Reagan’s tax cut was “a Trojan horse” to cut the top tax rates for the rich.

“The supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down’,” Stockman admitted to Greider. "None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers.”

The result of Reagan's tax cuts, without accompanying cuts in government spending, were rapidly rising deficits. The deficit created by those tax cuts got so large so fast in the early 1980's that Reagan himself reversed course and supported budget legislation restoring some of the tax rates.

"Trickle-down economics" is a pejorative terms that refer to the theory that providing tax cuts to the wealthy and tax benefits to conglomerate corporations will provide incentive to corporations and the wealth to great jobs for the rest of the society and thus indirectly benefit the broad population.

Lesley Stahl comments on her interview with David Stockman.

The "trickle-down" term is attributed to humorist Will Rogers, who said during the Great Depression of the 1930's that "money was all appropriated to the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy."

Stockman is back with essentially the same message as he delivered in that 1981 Atlantic magazine interview.

On a CBS 60 Minutes interview of David Stockman by Leslie Stahl in October 2010 Stockman said that Americans need to pay more taxes:

Medicare In As Much Trouble As GOP Says?

Posted at Jobsanger by Ted McLaughlin: I think all of us can agree that Medicare is in need of some help.

The program works as well as any government program in that it gives all of America's elderly citizens health care coverage. This is what the program was designed to do, and it does it very well.

... The Republicans want us to think the program is in such bad trouble that it cannot be fixed, and if we don't make substantial changes it will soon be bankrupt and won't be able to cover any elderly citizens. And by substantial changes they mean the program must be abolished for everyone now under 55 years of age.

... Let me put this as gently as I can -- what an outrageous load of horse manure! Does Medicare need more funding? Yes. Is it about to implode? No, not at all -- at least not unless the Congress fails to do its duty and adequately fund it. The truth is that the Republicans have never liked Medicare. They believe health care is not a right, but a commodity which should only go to the people who have the money to pay for it. And they, with the cooperation of too many Democrats, have been underfunding the program for many years now.

... According to the Center for Economic Policy and Research, the Medicare system could be fixed for at least the next 75 years with a cash infusion amounting to less than 0.4% of GDP. And how much is that? About one quarter of the money we have spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan!

... Isn't it amazing that the Republicans can't find the money to fix Medicare to protect ALL of America's elderly citizens, but they have no trouble coming up with the money [to not only continue Pres Bush's massive tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, but give them even more tax cuts?

Read the full post at Jobsanger Blog...