Yeah. This speaks for itself.
When you think, “Recovery”, think, “Yeah, right!”
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Click here ➡ to see the recovery…
– Research thanks to Rowdy BrownGirl
The New Normal Recovery !
November 22nd, 2010Bernanke’s QE Explained – “Screw You America!”
November 21st, 2010– I found this really funny and insightful. Things are truly going to hell.
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– Research thanks to Mike D.
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POSTSCRIPT – Apparently, there’s more of this out there. Here’s another one which is a natural follow-on to the first:
– Research thanks this time to Ann G.
Water map shows billions at risk of ‘water insecurity’
November 17th, 2010About 80% of the world’s population lives in areas where the fresh water supply is not secure, according to a new global analysis.
Researchers compiled a composite index of “water threats” that includes issues such as scarcity and pollution.
The most severe threat category encompasses 3.4 billion people.
Writing in the journal Nature, they say that in western countries, conserving water for people through reservoirs and dams works for people, but not nature.
They urge developing countries not to follow the same path.
Instead, they say governments should invest in water management strategies that combine infrastructure with “natural” options such as safeguarding watersheds, wetlands and flood plains.
The analysis is a global snapshot, and the research team suggests more people are likely to encounter more severe stress on their water supply in the coming decades, as the climate changes and the human population continues to grow.
They have taken data on a variety of different threats, used models of threats where data is scarce, and used expert assessment to combine the various individual threats into a composite index.
The result is a map that plots the composite threat to human water security and to biodiversity in squares 50km by 50km (30 miles by 30 miles) across the world.
– More (including the map)… ➡
Alcohol ‘more harmful than heroin’ says Prof David Nutt
November 17th, 2010Alcohol is more harmful than heroin or crack when the overall dangers to the individual and society are considered, according to a study in the Lancet.
The report is co-authored by Professor David Nutt, the former government chief drugs adviser who was sacked in 2009.
It ranked 20 drugs on 16 measures of harm to users and to wider society.
Heroin, crack and crystal meth were deemed worst for individuals, with alcohol, heroin and crack cocaine worst for society, and alcohol worst overall.
The study by the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs also said tobacco and cocaine were judged to be equally harmful, while ecstasy and LSD were among the least damaging.
Harm score
Professor Nutt refused to leave the drugs debate when he was sacked from his official post by the former Labour Home Secretary, Alan Johnson.
He went on to form the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, which says it aims to investigate the drug issue without any political interference.
One of its other members is Dr Les King, another former government adviser who quit over Prof Nutt’s treatment.
Members of the group, joined by two other experts, scored each drug for harms including mental and physical damage, addiction, crime and costs to the economy and communities.
– More… ➡
Foreclosure activity up across most US metro areas
November 3rd, 2010LOS ANGELES (AP) — The foreclosure crisis intensified across a majority of large U.S. metropolitan areas this summer, with Chicago and Seattle — cities outside of the states that have shouldered the worst of the housing downturn — seeing a sharp increase in foreclosure warnings.
California, Nevada, Florida and Arizona remain the nation’s foreclosure hotbeds, accounting for 19 of the top 20 metropolitan areas with the highest foreclosure rates between July and September, foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac Inc. said Thursday.
Those states saw housing values surge during the housing boom years. When the boom ended, values collapsed and foreclosures soared.
But the latest data show that many of the metro areas in those states saw a decline in the number of households receiving foreclosure-related filings, while many cities in other states saw a spike in foreclosure activity.
“The epidemic is spreading from the states at the ground zero of the foreclosure problems out into areas that hadn’t been previously affected,” said Rick Sharga, a senior vice president at RealtyTrac.
The trend is the latest sign that the nation’s foreclosure crisis is worsening as homeowners facing high unemployment, slow job growth and uncertainty about home prices continue to fall behind on their mortgage payments.
In all, 133 out of 206 metropolitan areas with at least 200,000 residents posted an annual increase in foreclosure activity in the three months ended Sept. 30, RealtyTrac said.
The firm tracks notices for defaults, scheduled home auctions and home repossessions — warnings that can lead up to a home eventually being lost to foreclosure.
Eleven out of the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan areas saw foreclosure activity increase in the third quarter compared to the same period last year.
The Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area registered the sharpest annual increase — 71 percent. One in every 129 households received a foreclosure filing.
– More… ➡
Scientists Quantify Global Warming’s Threat to Public Health
November 3rd, 2010From heat stress to sewage overflows, climate change promises to bring extreme weather that will challenge the ill-prepared U.S. public health infrastructure.
Extreme weather induced by climate change has dire public health consequences, as heat waves threaten the vulnerable, storm runoffoverwhelms city sewage systems and hotter summer days bake more pollution into asthma-inducing smog, scientists say.
The United States – to say nothing of the developed world – is unprepared for such conditions predicted by myriad climate models and already being seen today, warn climate researchers and public health officials.
“Climate change as it’s projected will impact almost every aspect of public health, both in the developed world and – more importantly – in the developing world,” said Michael McGeehin, director of the Environmental Hazards and Health Effects division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“A flood is a major public health disaster,” he added. “A flood takes us back to the 1890s as far as the public health system is concerned.”
Last week, as the East Coast stewed its way through the first heat wave of the summer, researchers at Stanford University published a study suggesting exceptionally long heat waves and extreme temperatures could be commonplace in the United States within 30 years – sooner than expected.
“I did not expect to see anything this large within the next three decades,” Noah Diffenbaugh, assistant professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “It was definitely a surprise.”
The report was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Using some of the highest-resolution computer models to date, Diffenbaugh and Moetasim Ashfaq, a former Stanford postdoctoral researcher now at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, were able to simulate daily temperatures across small sections of the country.
They found an intense heat wave – equal to the longest on record from 1951 to 1999 – could hit western and central United States as many as five times between 2020 and 2029.
– More… ➡
Nature’s sting: The real cost of damaging Planet Earth
October 27th, 2010You don’t have to be an environmentalist to care about protecting the Earth’s wildlife.
Just ask a Chinese fruit farmer who now has to pay people to pollinate apple trees because there are no longer enough bees to do the job for free.
And it’s not just the number of bees that is dwindling rapidly – as a direct result of human activity, species are becoming extinct at a rate 1,000 times greater than the natural average.
The Earth’s natural environment is also suffering.
In the past few decades alone, 20% of the oceans’ coral reefs have been destroyed, with a further 20% badly degraded or under serious threat of collapse, while tropical forests equivalent in size to the UK are cut down every two years.
These statistics, and the many more just like them, impact on everyone, for the very simple reason that we will all end up footing the bill.
Costing nature
For the first time in history, we can now begin to quantify just how expensive degradation of nature really is.
A recent, two-year study for the United Nations Environment Programme, entitled The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb), put the damage done to the natural world by human activity in 2008 at between $2tn (£1.3tn) and $4.5tn.
At the lower estimate, that is roughly equivalent to the entire annual economic output of the UK or Italy.
A second study, for the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), puts the cost considerably higher. Taking what research lead Dr Richard Mattison calls a more “hard-nosed, economic approach”, corporate environmental research group Trucost estimates the figure at $6.6tn, or 11% of global economic output.
This, says Trucost, compares with a $5.4tn fall in the value of pension funds in developed countries caused by the global financial crisis in 2007 and 2008.
Of course these figures are just estimates – there is no exact science to measuring humans’ impact on the natural world – but they show that the risks to the global economy of large-scale environmental destruction are huge.
– More… ➡