[✔️] April 28, 2024 Global Warming News | Neuro harms, Father's apology, Nixon dropped it, 2010 Epistemic closure

Sun Apr 28 09:55:31 EDT 2024

/*April *//*28, 2024*/

/[ Audio podcast.   Climate destabilization to our brains ]/
*Rewiring Our Brains: The Alarming Neurological Consequences of Climate 
Change*
JEFF SCHECHTMAN
April 26, 2024
A neuroscientist exposes the shocking mental health toll of a warming world.

Climate change is not just threatening our planet, but also our minds. 
In this WhoWhatWhy podcast, we uncover the hidden mental health crisis 
triggered by climate change with 
neuroscientist-turned-environmental-journalist Clayton Page Aldern.

Aldern takes us on an eye-opening journey through cutting-edge research, 
exposing the ways our changing environment is physically altering our 
brains and behavior. From cognitive impairment sparked by rising 
temperatures to the psychological aftermath of natural disasters, he 
paints a haunting portrait of a crisis that has been largely ignored.

A Rhodes scholar who holds advanced degrees in neuroscience and public 
policy from the University of Oxford, Aldern is a research affiliate at 
the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology and the author of the 
new book The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains.
As awareness of this critical issue grows, Aldern foresees a surge in 
research and funding aimed at unraveling the complex relationship 
between the environment and the brain. He offers a frightening look at 
how the climate emergency is reshaping our minds and what we can do to 
build resilience in the face of this existential threat.
          ( check back for transcript )
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/rewiring-our-brains-the-alarming-neurological-consequences-of-climate-change/

/[ a dramatic voice and message  ]/
*Benedict Cumberbatch reads a Letter of Apology from a Father to his 
Children* | 2024
Just Stop Oil
Apr 27, 2024  ROYAL ALBERT HALL
"I want to tell you that I am sorry, and that I tried"

In 2021, Stuart Capstick, deputy director at the Centre for Climate 
Change & Social Transformations in Cardiff, wrote a letter to his 
children. Benedict Cumberbatch reads it at Letters Live in March 2024 at 
London's Royal Albert Hall.

This letter is a part of the Letters to the Earth campaign, which began 
in 2019, when the British public were invited to put pen to paper and 
write letters in response to the climate and ecological emergency. It is 
published in their book 'Letters to the Earth: Writing to a Planet in 
Crisis'.
https://www.letterstotheearth.com
Copyright: Stuart Capstick, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w945eNXt0c

/[ Nixon dropped the ball ]/
*Nixon Advisers’ Climate Research Plan: Another Lost Chance on the Road 
to Crisis*
A 1971 plan for a global carbon dioxide monitoring network never came to 
fruition. The proposal is detailed in a document newly unearthed by the 
National Security Archive.
By Marianne Lavelle
April 26, 2024
A newly revealed research proposal from 1971 shows that Richard Nixon’s 
science advisors embarked on an extensive analysis of the potential 
risks of climate change.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon’s science advisers proposed a 
multimillion dollar climate change research project with benefits they 
said were too “immense” to be quantified, since they involved “ensuring 
man’s survival,” according to a White House document newly obtained by 
the nonprofit National Security Archive and shared exclusively with 
Inside Climate News.

The plan would have established six global and 10 regional monitoring 
stations in remote locations to collect data on carbon dioxide, solar 
radiation, aerosols and other factors that exert influence on the 
atmosphere. It would have engaged five government agencies in a six-year 
initiative, with spending of $23 million in the project’s peak year of 
1974—the equivalent of $172 million in today’s dollars. It would have 
used then-cutting-edge technology, some of which is only now being 
widely implemented in carbon monitoring more than 50 years later.

But it stands as yet another lost opportunity early on the road to the 
climate crisis. Researchers at the National Security Archive, based at 
the George Washington University, could find no documentation of what 
happened to the proposal, and it was never implemented.
- -
“Who knows what would have happened if we had some kind of concerted 
effort, just even on the monitoring side of things?” asked Rachel 
Santarsiero, an analyst who directs the National Security Archive’s 
Climate Change Transparency Project.

It turns out that the monitoring proposal, which was authorized by the 
head of Nixon’s White House Office of Science and Technology, Edward E. 
David Jr., did get a second life in another form. After leaving the 
Nixon administration, David joined the oil giant Exxon, and as president 
of the Exxon Research and Engineering Company from 1977 to 1986, he 
signed off on a groundbreaking Exxon project that used one of its oil 
tankers to gather atmospheric and oceanic carbon dioxide samples, 
beginning in 1979. That research, which was first reported by Inside 
Climate News in 2015, confirmed fossil fuels’ role in global warming. It 
also showed the oil industry knew the harm of its products and is now a 
key piece of evidence in lawsuits by states and cities across the 
country seeking compensation from the oil industry for climate damages.

The National Security Archive relies on the Freedom of Information Act 
to obtain such historical documents, and it currently maintains one of 
the largest non-governmental archives of declassified government 
documents—many relating to military and security issues. In the past 
year, the Archive has launched a project specifically to compile the 
historical record of the U.S. government’s reckoning with climate 
change. On Friday, to mark Earth Week, the group released a briefing 
book detailing climate change discussions in the Nixon White House, 
including the new document.

It has long been known that Nixon’s advisers warned him of the risks of 
global warming. A tranche of documents released by the Nixon 
Presidential Library in 2010 showed that his then-adviser Daniel Patrick 
Moynihan urged his administration to engage with the issue as early as 
1969. Moynihan, who later served 24 years as U.S. Senator from New York, 
noted that sea level rise of 10 feet was possible with a 7-degree 
Fahrenheit (3.9-degree Celsius) temperature increase. “Goodbye, New 
York,” he wrote. “Goodbye Washington, for that matter.”

But the newly revealed Dec. 20, 1971, research proposal by the White 
House Office of Science and Technology shows for the first time that 
Nixon’s science advisors embarked on an extensive analysis of the 
potential risks of climate change and an assessment of the data needs.

The purpose of the project would be to “assess current and future impact 
of natural climatic changes, provide alerts to potential catastrophic 
trends and gain new environmental insight and understanding as a basis 
for wise strategies,” reads the research plan, which is unsigned but was 
conducted under the authority of David.

Under a section marked “cost-benefit analysis,” the authors wrote, “No 
analysis is feasible. Benefits are immense, but not quantifiable, since 
this element contributes to ensuring man’s survival.”

Nixon’s aides proposed that the government embark on development of new 
instruments using lidar, or light-detecting and remote sensing—a 
technology then less than a decade old—to better measure carbon in the 
atmosphere. They were correct on the advantages of lidar, but it would 
be more than four decades until scientists at NASA and around the world 
began to implement its use to study not just the concentration of carbon 
dioxide, but its global distribution and daily variations.

“I felt like this document was really ahead of its time,” Santarsiero said.

Decades before a scientific consensus emerged on climate change, Nixon’s 
science advisers conveyed an understanding of the risks. Research, they 
wrote, would assist in “taking of protective measures against potential 
natural disasters such as large-scale inundation of low-lying coastal 
regions, broad extensions of ice sheets and severe health hazards.”

The advisers showed awareness of the role of fossil fuel pollution in 
climate change, even if their understanding was incomplete. 
“Transportation on land or in the air exerts a deleterious effect upon 
the atmosphere and is in turn affected by it,” they wrote.

“They readily admitted that the science wasn’t there yet to solve these 
problems,” Santarsiero said. “But they said we still need to take 
action, and the science will grow alongside, to help us tackle these 
issues. That attitude just feels markedly different from the discourse 
that’s happening today, where we can’t even get general consensus, and 
that basically halts preventative or mitigation efforts in its tracks.”

Nixon, indeed, left behind a far more progressive record on the 
environment than his Republican successors. He proposed and established 
the Environmental Protection Agency and later embraced a national Earth 
Day, expanding on the idea launched earlier by U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, 
a Wisconsin Democrat. Although the U.S. government never embarked on a 
carbon dioxide monitoring plan as ambitious as the one Nixon’s science 
advisers proposed, it would expand its research stations, as they 
advised, beyond the one site at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, which had been 
operating since 1958. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric 
Administration opened additional carbon dioxide measurement stations at 
Barrow, Alaska; American Samoa; and South Pole, Antarctica, in 1973.

But by then, with the Watergate scandal engulfing Washington, the Nixon 
administration was unraveling. Nixon, who had privately railed against 
environmentalists for wanting humans to “go back and live like a bunch 
of damned animals,” as Santarsiero recollects in her briefing book, 
abolished his science and technology office. Its leader, David, quit in 
frustration early in 1973, according to his New York Times obituary in 2017.

While at Exxon, David continued to press for more science related to 
global warming, and in addition to the sampling research, he oversaw a 
transition to more climate modeling work—some of which was remarkably on 
target in its projection of temperature increase related to carbon 
dioxide concentrations. But in a coda to his career, he signed on to a 
2012 Wall Street Journal opinion piece in which climate science skeptics 
argued there was no compelling reason to decarbonize the world’s economy.

Ultimately, U.S. government researchers at NASA, NOAA and other agencies 
would lead much of the science that led to a consensus on global 
warming. But government policy has lagged far behind the warnings of 
scientists, as the latest document from the Nixon archives underscores.
https://youtu.be/hlX_m8jYZkw

/[The news archive -  ]/
/*April 28, 2010 */
April 28, 2010: The New York Times reports on the "epistemic closure" 
phenomenon on the right (also known as "the dumbing down of the American 
conservative movement"); the piece makes note of recent right-wing 
attacks on National Review writer Jim Manzi after he pointed out flaws 
in the climate-change section of talk-radio host Mark Levin's 2009 book 
"Liberty and Tyranny."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/books/28conserv.html?_r=0

    ChatGPT in 2024
    *Epistemic closure *refers to the cognitive phenomenon where an
    individual's beliefs are closed off from any external influences or
    challenges. In essence, it's the tendency to only accept information
    or evidence that confirms one's existing beliefs, while dismissing
    or ignoring contradictory evidence. This concept is often discussed
    in the context of ideological or political beliefs, where
    individuals may become entrenched in their viewpoints and resistant
    to considering alternative perspectives. Epistemic closure can
    hinder critical thinking, intellectual growth, and open dialogue,
    leading to polarization and a lack of meaningful discourse.

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