Editor’s Note – China

Stephan:  Friday morning, as you read this, I will be in the air headed for China. I have been invited to speak at several conferences and am pleased to be going because I have not been to China since 1989, and it is a different country in 2017 than it was nearly three decades ago. I am going to try to do SR, but I have been told that I can't access Google or the other search engines I routinely use, and may not be able to publish in any case. So, I am going to try, but it may not work. In that case there will be no SR until I return on 1 November. My apologies for the interruption; one possible upside is that I will write something about the trip and try to give my readers a sense of what I experienced and learned. -- Stephan
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Four in 10 Americans Fear Being a Victim of a Mass Shooting

Stephan:  Forty percent of Americans fear being a victim of a mass shooting the headline of this Gallup report reads, little changed from a similar survey in December 2015. Think about that for a minute. What is the psychological effect on a country when nearly half the citizens think about being killed in a mass shooting event? What does that do to a nation's psyché do you think? It certainly can't be good.

 

Worry About Mass Shootings Little Changed From December 2015
How worried are you that you or someone in your family will become a victim of a mass shooting?

 

Very worried
Somewhat worried
Not too worried
Not worried at all

%
%
%
%

Oct. 5-11, 2017
10
29
34
26

Dec. 11-12, 2015
11
27
35
27

GALLUP

WASHINGTON, D.C. — About four in 10 Americans are “very” or “somewhat” worried that they or someone in their family will become a victim of a mass shooting. These data are from a Gallup poll taken Oct. 5-11, after a mass shooting in Las Vegas on Oct. 1 left 58 dead. Americans’ anxiety is similar to the level found after the San Bernardino shooting in December 2015 that left 14 dead.

Overall, 10% of Americans are very worried, 29% are somewhat worried and a total of 60% report being “not too worried” or “not worried at all.”

Gallup has asked this “worry” question only twice — both times after high-profile attacks — so it is possible that concern about mass shootings would be lower if the question were asked at other times. Still, the similarity of responses between December 2015 and now shows little evidence that worry is “ratcheting up” as these tragic events accumulate.

Worry about being the victim of a […]

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NASA satellite spots cause of unprecedented spike in atmospheric CO2

Stephan:  Rightwing Climate change deniers will tell you that CO2 is a plant food so having more of it in our atmosphere is actually good.  It is a jaw droppingly stupid fake-fact, but strongly believed by the Right. You may remember that on Monday I ran a piece on Trump's appointment of Kathleen Hartness White, who passionately advocates this nonsense, to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The truth is the human mediated disruption of earth's atmosphere portends dire consequences, and the problem is getting worse. Here is the latest from NASA. The research was published in the journal Science.

Atmospheric data gathered by the NASA satellite OCO-2 has revealed that certain tropical regions are responsible for an unprecedented spike in CO2 levels in 2015 and 2016
Credit: NASA

Since the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have been steadily increasing, but 2015 and 2016 saw an unprecedented spike. A NASA study has now analyzed data gathered by the atmosphere-monitoring satellite, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), over more than two years and pinpointed the cause: the El Nino weather effect caused certain tropical regions to release far more CO2 than they normally would.

Although there’s been some huge efforts to reduce the amount of CO2 produced through human activity, the amount of the gas pumped into the atmosphere has still increased by an average of 2 parts per million (about 4 gigatons of carbon) annually, in recent years. But 2015 and 2016 broke the trend with the largest spikes on record: up to 3 parts per million, amounting to 6.3 gigatons of carbon. Emissions from human activity stayed […]

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Children are Dying at Alarming Rates in Foster Care, and Nobody is Bothering to Investigate

Stephan:  Republicans are wild to privatize what were formerly public institutions, schools, prisons, hospitals, child care. Why? The political blather they put forward is how improved everything will be. But that is not the real reason. We now have the evidence, and it is clear and universal. Privatization makes a small group of owners richer but social outcome data always shows that privatization degrades the wellbeing of everyone served by those privatized, formerly public, institutions. This story confirms yet again a nasty truth no one likes to talk about: The United States of America does not care much about the wellbeing of its children. I find the behavior of religious "pro-lifers" particularly despicable. They are obsessed with fetuses but once you are born, they have no time for you, and you are on your own.

Children in the for-profit foster care system are dying at alarming rates, but the deaths are not being investigated, and autopsies are not even being attached to the now-closed case files, a two-year investigation has found.

The investigation, conducted and released in rare bipartisan fashion by the Senate Finance Committee, looked closely at one of the largest private providers of foster care services, the MENTOR Network.

The companies and agencies charged with keeping foster children safe often failed to provide the most basic protections or take steps to prevent tragedies, the investigation found.

In the wake of the report, shares of the MENTOR Network’s parent company, Civitas Solutions, traded sharply downward, but quickly rebounded amid a lack of press coverage.

By pushing the report to colleagues, Sen. Ron Wyden, the committee’s top-ranking Democratic member, said he and panel chair Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, are trying to “light a big fire around” how important it is to fix the child welfare system’s flaws.

The report was prompted in part by a BuzzFeed investigation into the company two years ago. The committee found that 86 children had died in the company’s care over […]

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Need more evidence of global weirding? The trees are heading west.

Stephan:  Yesterday I did a piece on the radical and precipitous decline in insect populations.  And we all know about the bees. Today we have a report on what is happening in American forests. We are in trouble folks. Whether we are paying attention or not, whether we believe or don't believe in climate change doesn't matter. Massive change and a civilization threatening crisis is coming.

Credit: Pexel

Need more evidence that the world is getting really weird? Trees on the East Coast of the U.S. might be migrating west.

Songlin Fei, an ecologist at Purdue University, compared U.S. Forest Service data on tree ranges from 1980-1995 against more recent data from 2013-2015. According to the study published in the journal Science Advances, trees on the East Coast might be shifting their ranges westward right underneath our noses.

Nearly half of the tree species they examined were making a break for it.

Of the 86 different tree species, 47% had a significant westward shift, including quaking aspens, several types of oak, and plum and cherry trees.

The trees weren’t physically moving, of course. Nor were they necessarily disappearing in the east. Instead, the trees, especially saplings, were spreading more along the species’ western edges.

So why are the trees moving? Fei’s team thinks they’re following the water. Over the past century, the southeast has gotten drier while the Midwest and Great Lakes have gotten wetter. The trees […]

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