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<font size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b>April </b></i></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b>28, 2024</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
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<i>[ Audio podcast. Climate destabilization to our brains ]</i><br>
<b>Rewiring Our Brains: The Alarming Neurological Consequences of
Climate Change</b><br>
JEFF SCHECHTMAN <br>
April 26, 2024<br>
A neuroscientist exposes the shocking mental health toll of a
warming world.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
( check back for transcript )<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/rewiring-our-brains-the-alarming-neurological-consequences-of-climate-change/">https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/rewiring-our-brains-the-alarming-neurological-consequences-of-climate-change/</a><br>
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<i>[ a dramatic voice and message ]</i><br>
<b>Benedict Cumberbatch reads a Letter of Apology from a Father to
his Children</b> | 2024 <br>
Just Stop Oil<br>
Apr 27, 2024 ROYAL ALBERT HALL<br>
"I want to tell you that I am sorry, and that I tried" <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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'.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.letterstotheearth.com">https://www.letterstotheearth.com</a> <br>
Copyright: Stuart Capstick, 2019 <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w945eNXt0c">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w945eNXt0c</a><br>
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<i>[ Nixon dropped the ball ]</i><br>
<b>Nixon Advisers’ Climate Research Plan: Another Lost Chance on the
Road to Crisis</b><br>
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.<br>
By Marianne Lavelle<br>
April 26, 2024<br>
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. <br>
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.<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
- -<br>
“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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“I felt like this document was really ahead of its time,”
Santarsiero said.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://youtu.be/hlX_m8jYZkw">https://youtu.be/hlX_m8jYZkw</a><br>
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<font face="Calibri"><br>
</font><font face="Calibri"> <i>[The news archive - ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> <font size="+2"><i><b>April 28, 2010 </b></i></font>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> </font> 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."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/books/28conserv.html?_r=0">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/books/28conserv.html?_r=0</a><br>
<blockquote>
<p>ChatGPT in 2024<br>
<b>Epistemic closure </b>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.<br>
</p>
</blockquote>
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