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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>May 24, 2020</b></font></i></p>
[Opinion and action]<br>
<b>Facebook Is Taking Down Posts That Cause Imminent Harm -- But Not
Posts That Cause Inevitable Harm</b><br>
The social media platform is siding with scientists to stop the
spread of harmful misinformation about the pandemic. If it can do it
now, why wasn't it doing it all along?<br>
In January 2020, Facebook executives began paying attention to a new
coronavirus spreading across the globe. The virus was deadly and
highly contagious, and when the World Health Organization shared
guidance about it, the company's leadership dropped their typically
hands-off approach to misinformation.<br>
<br>
"We decided we would remove content that directly contradicted [the
WHO] and could contribute to risk of imminent physical harm," Monika
Bickert, Facebook's head of global policy management, told BuzzFeed
News...<br>
- - <br>
When making policy decisions on things like the coronavirus,
Facebook looks mostly to immunologists, doctors, and the medical
establishment, another ex-Facebook employee told BuzzFeed News.
"Facebook would be looking for -- what is the medical consensus, not
what is the political consensus," he said.<br>
<br>
In this case, that meant conflict.<br>
<br>
And it could get worse for Facebook as President Donald Trump takes
actions that oppose the health establishment's guidance. Earlier
this week, Trump said he was taking hydroxychloroquine, an
antimalarial drug that the Food and Drug Administration had
previously warned against taking outside of a hospital setting. (A
study released Friday found the drug was tied to an increased risk
of death among patients taking it.)<br>
<br>
Asked about the possibility of removing something Trump said,
Bickert didn't rule it out. "We have removed content from
high-profile individuals, including the president of Brazil and the
president of Madagascar, where statements that they've made have
contradicted health guidance," she said. "Nobody is exempted from
this policy."<br>
<br>
"Public health is squishy by definition," Kenneth Bernard, an
epidemiologist who's served in the WHO and set up the NSC's health
security office, told BuzzFeed News. "We don't have enough
information and we're dealing with biological organisms that have a
variety of responses. Different opinions can exist."<br>
<br>
Still, Bernard said Facebook is doing what's necessary, even if it's
messy. "I think that it's irresponsible to allow information under
'free speech' to go out if it's actually going to directly cause
harm," he said. "This is not an easy problem. I think Facebook is
trying. They don't have a lot to go on."<br>
more at -
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/facebook-coronavirus-misinformation-takedowns">https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/facebook-coronavirus-misinformation-takedowns</a><br>
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</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[waste not worry]<br>
<b>Good news: Americans can freak out about coronavirus and climate
change at the same time</b><br>
By Shannon Osaka on May 20, 2020<br>
"Cognitive psychologists talk about a 'finite pool of worry,'" said
Ed Maibach, a professor at George Mason University who studies
climate communication, and one of the authors of the report. "The
hypothesis is that people can only worry about so many things at any
one time." Researchers expected that their respondents -- whose
brains were filled with concerns about COVID-19 -- would have other
things on their minds.<br>
<br>
There was a sharp drop in concern about climate change following the
2008 financial crisis, which led some experts to speculate that
Americans simply didn't have enough bandwidth to stress over a
crashing economy and an overheated planet. That also coincided with
"the climate denial industry going into hyperdrive," Maibach said.
Fossil fuel companies and conservative groups at the time were
spending millions of dollars attempting to discredit and hamstring
mainstream climate science.<br>
<br>
But according to the study, the global pandemic and lockdown are not
turning Americans away from the looming problem of climate change.
The latest figures add to a trend of increasing belief in global
warming since 2015, which some have attributed to changing
demographics and impossible-to-ignore consequences of climate change
in everyday life -- like record temperatures and record-shattering
heat waves around the world. Maibach said that more than half of
Americans see climate change as a threat to the health of their
communities, an increase of 15 percentage points over the past five
or six years.<br>
<br>
"It's one thing to understand that climate change is real, and it's
threatening polar bears," said Maibach. "It's an entirely different
thing to understand that climate change is real, and it's
threatening me and my children."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://grist.org/climate/good-news-americans-can-freak-out-about-coronavirus-and-climate-change-at-the-same-time/">https://grist.org/climate/good-news-americans-can-freak-out-about-coronavirus-and-climate-change-at-the-same-time/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[physics opinion]<br>
<b>World can likely capture and store enough carbon dioxide to meet
climate targets</b><br>
by Imperial College London<br>
- - <br>
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) would be used alongside other
interventions such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, and
electrification of the transportation sector.<br>
<br>
The IPCC used models to create around 1,200 technology scenarios
whereby climate change targets are met using a mix of these
interventions, most of which require the use of CCS.<br>
<br>
Now a new analysis from Imperial College London, published today in
Energy & Environmental Science, suggests that no more than 2,700
Gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon dioxide (CO2) would be sufficient to meet
the IPCC's global warming targets. This is far less than leading
estimates by academic and industry groups of what is available,
which suggest there is more than 10,000 Gt of CO2 storage space
globally.<br>
<br>
It also found that that the current rate of growth in the installed
capacity of CCS is on track to meet some of the targets identified
in IPCC reports, but that research and commercial efforts should
focus on maintaining this growth while identifying enough
underground space to store this much CO2.<br>
<br>
CCS involves trapping CO2 at its emission source, such as
fossil-fuel power stations, and storing it underground to keep it
from entering the atmosphere. Together with other climate change
mitigation strategies, CCS could help the world reach the climate
change mitigation goals set out by the IPCC.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://phys.org/news/2020-05-world-capture-carbon-dioxide-climate.html">https://phys.org/news/2020-05-world-capture-carbon-dioxide-climate.html</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[opinion]<br>
<b>The continuous whipsawing of climate change policy</b><br>
The continuous conflict over climate policy is whipsawing U.S.
environmental policy. Neither side prevails. Policy radically
changes based on the administration in power. This is a stalemate on
an issue that 67 percent of adults believe the U.S. government is
not doing enough to address.<br>
- - <br>
When different administrations ignore the absence of legislative
authority and rely exclusively on executive power or judicial
overreach to issue major policy decisions, those decisions can be
easily overturned by the next administration. Such actions are not
governing; they are whipsawing policy. <br>
<br>
Our nation needs to return to a constitutional process in which each
branch of government recognizes the limits of its constitutional
authority. Our Constitution clearly places all legislative power in
Congress. Only Congress can develop the balance between the
environment and our economy that the American people seek. Until
Congress acts, the actions of courts and agencies merely allow us to
imagine that we have a national climate policy. Unfortunately, this
illusion only lasts until the next administration.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/498698-the-continuous-whipsawing-of-climate-change-policy">https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/498698-the-continuous-whipsawing-of-climate-change-policy</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[dance, I say, dance]<br>
<b>HOT 10 Climate Songs</b><br>
MAY 21, 2020<br>
As global temperatures have climbed, so have mentions of climate
change in popular songs. Here are 10 that led the way.<br>
By Kendra Pierre-Louis<br>
- - <br>
SMASH MOUTH<br>
'ALL STAR' (1999)<br>
- - <br>
MOS DEF<br>
'NEW WORLD WATER' (1999)<br>
- - <br>
MELISSA ETHERIDGE<br>
'I NEED TO WAKE UP' (2006)<br>
- - <br>
THOM YORKE<br>
'AND IT RAINED ALL NIGHT' (2006)<br>
- - <br>
PITBULL featuring SENSATO<br>
'GLOBAL WARMING' (2012)<br>
- - <br>
MACY GRAY<br>
'ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS' (2015)<br>
- - <br>
ANOHNI<br>
'4 DEGREES' (2016)<br>
- - <br>
ONEREPUBLIC<br>
'TRUTH TO POWER' (2017)<br>
- - <br>
CHILDISH GAMBINO<br>
'FEELS LIKE SUMMER' (2018)<br>
- - <br>
BILLIE EILISH<br>
'ALL THE GOOD GIRLS GO TO HELL' (2019)<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/21/climate/songs-about-climate-change.html">https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/21/climate/songs-about-climate-change.html</a><br>
<p>- - -</p>
[Yours Truly playlist offering 134 music videos]<br>
<b>Collected Music for Global Warming Anthropocene and changing
climate - playlist</b><br>
135 videos 538 views Last updated on Jan 13, 2020<br>
Public<br>
Search for an Anthem for Global Warming - offering this collection
of musical anthems and political and cultural song about our
changing future. This is the Anthropocene - the era where humans
have left their mark on the world. We have a huge mess now, and
worse problems for our future. We have dire science, and now we
are on a path of tremendous self-discovery, why are we so willing to
tolerate such self harm? We now bring relentless attention to
adapting to our mess and figuring out how to mitigate harm. <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU5dY2n3AbGHCgJ9OiDxG5hjY9QYAkQ55">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU5dY2n3AbGHCgJ9OiDxG5hjY9QYAkQ55</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[after 43 min lots of discussion of global warming ramifications]<br>
<b>Mark Blyth - A Brief History of How We Got Here and Why</b><br>
Jul 16, 2019<br>
McMaster Humanities<br>
This lecture is part of the McMaster Department of Philosophy's
Summer School in Capitalism, democratic solidarity, and
Institutional design<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.solidaritydesign2019.com">https://www.solidaritydesign2019.com</a><br>
<br>
This lecture sets out a brief history of two versions of capitalist
software. The first drove the capitalist hardware during the period
known as the Great Compression--1945 to 1980. The second did the
same for the period many refer to as the era of neoliberalism--1980
to 2008. This lecture describes the bug in the system that crashed
the first version of the capitalist software and the subsequent
design of the neoliberal software. It also describes the bug that
led to the 2008 Great Recession, landing us in the current
transitional period that we might describe as the era of
neonationalism or Global Trumpism. A key idea is that the emergence
of contemporary populist politics, both left-wing and right-wing
Trumpist variants, are attempts to rewrite the software of
capitalism once again.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://youtu.be/tJoe_daP0DE">https://youtu.be/tJoe_daP0DE</a><br>
<p><br>
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<p><br>
</p>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
May 24, 2006 </b></font><br>
<p>"An Inconvenient Truth" is released in the United States.
BoxOfficeGuru.com's Gitesh Pandya notes:<br>
<br>
"Setting the limited release box office on fire was the global
warming documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth' which opened in only
four theaters but grossed a hefty $367,311. That gave the Al Gore
pic a stunning average of $91,827 per location over four days.
Distributed by Paramount Vantage, the new incarnation of Paramount
Classics, Truth collected $281,330 over the Friday-to-Sunday
portion averaging a scorching $70,332. Total since Wednesday
stands at $490,860. Opening this weekend on multiple screens at a
pair of theaters in both New York and Los Angeles, Truth will add
about 60 more playdates on Friday and expand throughout June
hoping to become the dominant doc of the summer."<br>
<br>
(Al Gore and director Davis Guggenheim would appear on the June 2,
2006 edition of "EcoTalk" on Air America to discuss the film.)<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://youtu.be/8ZUoYGAI5i0">http://youtu.be/8ZUoYGAI5i0</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.boxofficeguru.com/052906.htm">http://www.boxofficeguru.com/052906.htm</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://blogsofbainbridge.typepad.com/ecotalkblog/2006/06/al_gore_about_a.html">http://blogsofbainbridge.typepad.com/ecotalkblog/2006/06/al_gore_about_a.html</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://blogsofbainbridge.typepad.com/ecotalkblog/2006/06/davis_guggenhei.html">http://blogsofbainbridge.typepad.com/ecotalkblog/2006/06/davis_guggenhei.html</a><br>
</p>
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