The Climate Crisis is causing water shortages, wars and creating refugees.

December 16, 2021

By Ben Adler

A herder guarding his cattle. (click here)

Violent confrontations (click here) over increasingly scarce water in Africa have broken out in northern Cameroon, causing more than 30,000 people to flee into neighboring Chad, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency. Since Sunday, 22 people have been killed and 30 others seriously injured in fighting between fishermen and farmers, which follows an eruption of violence in August, which led to 45 deaths and forced 23,000 Cameroonians to leave their homes.

The root cause, according to the United Nations, is the dramatic decrease of water levels in Lake Chad, which has lost 90 percent of its surface area since 1963 due to overuse and climate change. “The water body is no longer sufficient to meet the demands of the population who need water to carry out their daily activities,” Benjamin Tonga, a campaigns officer at CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society organizations based in South Africa, told Yahoo News. The dwindling of water resources has led to fighting over what is left.

“The conflict started in August between herders and fishermen, and it’s all about the sharing of resources and especially of water,” Xavier Bourgois, a spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Cameroon, told Yahoo News. “What they do in that specific region of Cameroon is fishermen dig holes to do fish farming. As there is a lack of water in this region, the cows are naturally attracted by the water, by these huge holes made by the fishermen. That was the beginning of the conflict.”

The herders raise cattle, and when their livestock are drawn to the muddy, water-filled ditches, they can fall in and drown. So angry herders have attacked farmers to punish them for digging the trenches and to prevent them from making new ones, which in turn leads to reprisals. The fighting that broke out as a result led to the displacement of tens of thousands Cameroonians....

The Arctic regions of Earth are a house of cards. One part fails and it opens entire areas to move into the oceans.

Virtual vs. In-person conferences in regard to sustainability practices.

...a Carbon footprint associated (click here) with transportation for individual participants, indicating that the per pkm carbon footprint for trips primarily by plane (slope of cyan dashed line) tends to be smaller than that for driving (slope of orange dashed line).

b Cumulative carbon footprint for participants with increasing travel distances, showing that 50% of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for all participants’ trips result from long-distance travels with a round-trip distance of over 10,000 km.

c Environmental profiles of the virtual conference and in-person conference with only one hub, suggesting the environmental and energy sustainability of virtual conference in all impact categories. Colors represent different processes within the life cycle stages. Specifically, transitioning from in-person to virtual conferencing reduces the carbon footprint by 94% and cumulative energy demand (CED) by 90%. Among the impact categories at the midpoint level, air transportation dominates fossil depletion, marine eutrophication, natural land transformation, ozone depletion, and photochemical oxidant formation for the 1-hub in-person scenario....

Out with the old, in with the new.

December 19, 2021

By Tristan Baurick

To the left is the New Gas Standard, zero emissions.

Louisiana’s two most populous cities (click here) lost ground this year in an annual ranking of the country's most energy-efficient cities.

New Orleans plummeted 16 spots to 67th place and Baton Rouge slipped three spots to the 100th position, last out of the 100 cities evaluated by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy in its 2021 City Clean Energy Scorecard.

First place went to San Francisco, which made the top spot for the first time since the nonprofit research council began ranking cities in 2013. Rounding out the top 5 cities were Seattle, Washington D.C. and Minneapolis, with Boston and New York tying for fifth place. The top cities in the South were Austin, Texas, at 14th and Atlanta at 15th....

There will be unrest in countries hit hard by the climate crisis.

December 19, 2021
By Golnar Motevalli

Experts (click here) fear a long drought could jeopardise the recovery of Lake Urmia

It was a gushing river (click here) that turned the ancient town of Esfahan into a cultural paragon that twice served as capital of the Persian Empire. But today, as it trickles through Iran, the Zayandeh Rud is a dried up battleground.

Thousands of Iranians flooded the barren riverbed last month to protest against the state’s management of water resources during the worst drought in decades. Social media videos showed baton-wielding security forces step in to quell the crowd, leaving some with bloodied faces, including a middle-aged woman cloaked in a black chador.

This is exactly what the danger is for civilization. People will protest the lack of water and in reaction to the protests there will be government oppression that will result in prison and quite possibly excutions to uphold policy.

Deadly clashes also took place this summer in the province of Khuzestan, 180 miles away, where decades of oil exploitation has drained wetlands and destroyed once-fertile soil.

Iran’s Water Crisis

Shortages have destroyed farms and limited drinking water in affected cities and provinces...

This is the way it works. There will be deluges of rain at one end of a region and drought at the other. It is just as immoral in Iran as anywhere else on Earth to abuse the planet and cause problems that are not easily reversed.

February 25, 2021

By Peter Schwartzstein

It was the slow lengthening (click here) of the boat pier that Solmaz Daryani remembers as the most obvious sign that something was amiss.

Until the late 1990s, her family's hotel stood steps away from Lake Urmia's northern shoreline. Bit by bit, though, the waters began to retreat. At first, her uncle extended the pier 100 metres (330ft) out to facilitate guests' access to his boats. The next year, he built it out twice as far. Eventually, with the lake retreating at record speed, he had to admit defeat.

"At some point he just had to stop extending it. The lake was moving 500 metres [1,640ft] a year," says Daryani, a photographer who has spent much of the past few years documenting what has become of the lake. "Ultimately, people would have had to walk right to the middle."...

This is not a passive observation, it is a WARNING!

12 May 2021
By Damian Carrington

Humanity’s enormous emissions of greenhouse gases (click here) are shrinking the stratosphere, a new study has revealed.

The thickness of the atmospheric layer has contracted by 400 metres since the 1980s, the researchers found, and will thin by about another kilometre by 2080 without major cuts in emissions. The changes have the potential to affect satellite operations, the GPS navigation system and radio communications.

The discovery is the latest to show the profound impact of humans on the planet. In April, scientists showed that the climate crisis had shifted the Earth’s axis as the massive melting of glaciers redistributes weight around the globe.

The stratosphere extends from about 20km to 60km above the Earth’s surface. Below is the troposphere, in which humans live, and here carbon dioxide heats and expands the air. This pushes up the lower boundary of the stratosphere. But, in addition, when CO2 enters the stratosphere it actually cools the air, causing it to contract....

Is the USA legislature going to allow one Senator bought and paid for by Big Oil destroy our home?

Machin is imperiling lives and he does not care. It is incredible to realize that one man so corrupt can actually get away with death of citizens. The dead in Kentucky is still coming in. Currently there is still one person missing.

$577,060 from Big Oil in a quid pro quo relationship opposing all the good measures that President Biden was elected to carry out is at least an ethics issue and the most criminal.

December 19, 2021

By Jennifer Ludden

For months, (click here) West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has been watering down the climate provisions in the Build Back Better legislation. Now, his final rejection of a stripped down version effectively kills President Biden's ambitious plans to reduce carbon emissions deeply enough to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. But the objections Manchin described to the bill's climate measures are misleading.

Here's what's really going on:
The free market is not moving fast enough to avert climate catastrophe

In a statement explaining his decision Sunday, Manchin said, "The energy transition my colleagues seek is already well underway." He means the transition from fossil fuels to wind, solar and other forms of renewable power. While it's true the U.S. is shifting away from fossil fuels, it's happening far more slowly than climate scientists say is needed to curtail the carbon pollution that is disrupting the climate.

Earlier this year, Manchin's argument that the U.S. should not "pay companies to do what they're already doing" killed off a keystone Build Back Better provision that would have used carrots and sticks — payments and penalties — to push utilities to speed up the shift to renewables, roughly doubling the amount of wind, solar, and other forms of clean energy put on the grid each year....

It is absolutely fascinating to realize people once oppressed and threatened with death can become productive out of that.

Those were just a few famous examples. But, in realizing the tremendous contribution they had to humankind is to realize the very important policies that have been developed and applied in the name of freedom. These people are unmatched in their contributions to The West and it is all because of democracy, compassion, clear decision making and freedom. 

Where would we be without any of them. Their oppressors would never have fostered their genius in the same way it manifested under the protections of freedom and the USA.

As a country in need of a moral compass it is important to reflect on the past and the very solid achievements freedom offers and why we defend the USA, both in war to oppose aggression and in policy that protects us all.

The USA Constitution is a beautiful document. To look at it is most orginary and written on parchment, but, in the Rule of Law and it's consistency in treatment of the human experience in the USA, there is nothing that matches it. The document is a work of genius itself and it has spawned nothing but opportunity and genius in others.

Sigmund Freud was another refugee from Nazi Germany.

March 27, 2020
By Kendra Cherry

Students of psychology (click here) spend a fair amount of time learning about Sigmund Freud's theories. Even people who are relatively unfamiliar with psychology have some awareness of psychoanalysis, the school of thought created by Sigmund Freud.

While you may have some passing knowledge of key concepts in psychoanalysis like the unconscious, fixations, defense mechanisms, and dream symbolism, you might wonder exactly how these ideas fit in together and what influence they really have on contemporary psychologists....

Freud is the father of modern thought. Without his research and practices we would not have modern psychiatry. Much has been added and changed, but, the truth is there that on the shoulders of genius we build our insight.

Born in Vienna, Austria in 1858, (click here) and of Jewish decent, Freud was one of the most influential psychologists of his time, introducing the ideas of unconscious desires, psychosexual-development and dream-analysis. After the rise of the Nazi party and their increasingly hostile attitude towards Jews, Freud was forced to flee to England in 1938 to escape persecution. It was here that he spent the remainder of his life in Hampstead, London.

Whilst the validity of some of his research and methods are today questioned by modern psychological standards, many methods are still widely used across the world. His research has led to many modern therapeutic techniques, and he is often regarded as one of the most famous and influential psychologists in history....

Iman was a refugee from Somalia at a young age as well.

October 8, 2020

Iman (click here) with her famous husband the late David Bowie.

She’s a supermodel, (click here) an activist and an entrepreneur (one of the first to have a makeup line for African-American, Asian, Latina and multi-cultural women), but Iman says at heart, she will always be a refugee: "It never leaves you."

In this week's PEOPLE, the 65 year old style icon tells the story of her family's escape from Somalia in 1972. "My family left in the middle of the night, with just the clothes on our backs, and crossed the border from Somalia to Kenya. My father was a diplomat, and people who worked for the government were being executed or put in jail. I was a 16-year-old who'd never been on her own and never worked. All of a sudden, I was without my family and on my own in a foreign country."...

Albert Einstein was also a refugee from Nazi Germany.

July 24, 2021

Albert Einstein is known as a genius, (click here) physicist and Nobel Laureate. While his theory of relativity changed the world, it wasn’t his only legacy. He was also a refugee and humanitarian, having inspired the founding of the organization that became the International Rescue Committee....

This is some of his biography from the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Albert Einstein (click here) was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich, where he later on began his schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and mathematics. In 1901, the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss citizenship and, as he was unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1905 he obtained his doctor’s degree....

Ilhan Omar is a fascinating reality. Escaped death as a child and is a US Representative today.

12 November 2018
By Jason Burke

Ilhan Omar on the campaign trail in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Ilhan Omar, (click here) who lived in a Somali refugee camp when she was a girl and was elected to the US Congress last week, has said she hopes her victory would give hope to those whose childhoods resembled hers.

Omar fled the civil war in Somalia with her family in 1991 and spent four years in the Utango camp, near the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa, before arriving in the US with her six brothers and sisters under a resettlement programme.

“I would have loved to have heard a story like mine. I could have used it as an inspiration to get by. The lesson is to be hopeful, to dream and to aspire for more,” said the 36-year-old member-elect of the US House of Representatives for Minnesota’s fifth district.

Omar, a Democrat, will assume office in January, sharing with Rashida Tlaib the historic distinction of being the first Muslim women elected to the US Congress.

Multiple media outlets, including the Guardian, have reported that Omar lived in the vast Dadaab camp, which opened to receive civil war refugees around the same time as the Utango facility....

Chris Hayes also spent time with her and her story about Somalia is very compeling. She remembers quite vividly how her family was only one step ahead of certain execution. Eight year olds would be fearful enough to remember all that. She is a living example of American policy and it is a policy to be proud of and the hope for many.

November 19, 2021

Representative Ilhan Omar (click here) was just eight years old when her life turned upside down. After an armed compound attack, her family fled Mogadishu, and ultimately ended up in a refugee camp in Kenya. It was there that she experienced the reality that hundreds of millions of refugees worldwide endure. After an intense vetting and interview process, her family was eventually granted asylum in the U.S. and emigrated to Arlington, Virginia. In 2016, she was elected as a Minnesota House Representative, making her the highest-elected Somali-American public official in the U.S. and the first Somali-American State legislator. Omar joins to discuss her new book, “This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman,” how she got into politics, her response to accusations of anti-Semitism and what’s needed to ensure more productivity and less combativeness among members of Congress....

Refecting on refugees and their sad Christmases. That is a good thing to do for this holiday season.

December 19, 2021

The call came with a sudden urgency. Armina Husic (click here) was told that if she wanted to escape, she had to leave immediately.

Husic, a mother of two children, had just sat down to enjoy a coffee in the living room of her Sarajevo home that morning in 1995. She wasn’t thinking about leaving her life in Bosnia and Herzegovina behind when the call came.

But the Siege of Sarajevo had reached almost four years by then. It would continue into the next year before the capital city was spared from the atrocities of a civil war that targeted the majority Muslim population.

Husic gathered her children, then 9 and 4 years old, a nephew, 8, and brother, 15, and began a life-altering journey that ultimately ended in the South Bay where she still feels painful stabs of emotion over fleeing her homeland.

“We didn’t plan to leave,” Husic said. “You have to make that decision about what is best for your kids and to save lives.”...

Good Evening.

The Christmas Spirit is certainly in the air by now, regardless of the illness and multiple COVID variants ravaging people.

Maybe the horoscope can tell us something influential.

Sagittarius ? This is Capricorn's month. 

It’s the third week (click here) of an eternal December and the beginning of Venus’ retrograde station in Capricorn. While the astrological climate might seem foreboding, it’s worth noting that much of the past month has prepared us for what looms ahead–even if that preparation felt difficult to bear. 

What the real bummer is today is that the date this time next week will be December 26, 2021. That is a day after Christmas. That means Christmas is on a Saturday. That is really lousy. Children will only have five days off from school.

Well. There is this happening, too.

Matrix Resurrection (click here) is going on in San Francisco. There is like, no War Horse, or anything for kids this year except on Disney Channel and who doesn't want to go to the movies?

Where is all the good juice this Christmas. I mean I like Keanu Reeves, but, Matrix isn't really a kid movie for Christmas. Reeves is a really intereting person. He does a lot of interesting charity work. He takes time out of a day sometime to commune with the homeless. 

A virus is dominating world order. Really?

How convenient for Wall Street. And wait until the P variant shows up. Having a virus dictate quality of life is a complete defeat for human beings.

December 11, 2021

Pfizer Inc on Friday forecast that the COVID-19 pandemic (click here) would not be behind us until 2024 and said a lower-dose version of its vaccine for 2- to 4-year-olds generated a weaker immune response than expected, potentially delaying authorization.

Pfizer Chief Scientific Officer Mikael Dolsten said in a presentation to investors that the company expects some regions to continue to see pandemic levels of COVID-19 cases over the next year or two. Other countries will transition to "endemic" with low, manageable caseloads during that same time period.

By 2024, the disease should be endemic around the globe, the company projected.

"When and how exactly this happens will depend on evolution of the disease, how effectively society deploys vaccines and treatments, and equitable distribution to places where vaccination rates are low," Dolsten said. "The emergence of new variants could also impact how the pandemic continues to play out."

Pfizer developed its COVID-19 vaccine with Germany's BioNTech SE, and currently expects it to generate revenue of $31 billion next year. It plans to make 4 billion shots next year....

The Brits are geniuses at relating to the people.

I saw an interesting piece where an anthropologist aligned anti-vaccine with some sort of positive aspect of personality, such as celebrity.

People are dearly hanging on to their mobile phones for word about the pandemic and/or a word from their "identity group." People tend to move in groups emotionally these days and identify with an icon of sorts. The worst of this can be a political icon such as Donald John Trump and his arrogance or it can be a celebrity with talent that seems to carry good social habits, such as Paris Hilton and the pay for a peak wedding episode. The anthropologist finds that antivaccers are more or less following a social pattern within the ideology of an icon of sorts. Now, let me say Paris Hilton is not commenting on vaccines.

But, this social iconography is a symbiotic relationship. The celebrity states they are an antivaccer or simply won't take the vaccine and the fans follow in the same ideology. The fan is achieving a status not otherwise realized and the celebrity is having a fan base to promote their career.

The problem before societies globally is the nearly criminal content that exists in these groups and this is my commentary and not that of an anthropologist. If the government is stating the global pandemic is being addressed by restrictive movements and some economic hardship, then it is best to carry on with a quality of life that is harmonious to the end of the pandemic. That is not happening because of "friend groups" and these idiotic choices in the social media that demands alliance with a celebrity no matter the cost.

It seems to me there is also a political cost that must be observed to enforce these IMPORTANT mandates to end the pandemic. Now, in the USA judges are becoming the enemy due to some idea that this is a precedent to enable political leaders to require vaccinations and/or changes in the social fabric. That is not the case. THE ONLY PRECEDENT THIS SETS IF FOR THE RARE GLOBAL PANDEMIC. But, even if judges are siding with liberty rather than death, then it is paramount that social icons are on the same page and not empowering anti-vaccers or icons profiting from notions that vaccines are not necessary.

It is criminal. We know the unvaccinated are getting sick and dying. That is criminal. I believe any iconic anybody no matter who they are, if promoting anti-vaccine in a GLOBAL PANDEMIC then they need to be charged and carted off to jail. No fines. Jail. Mandatory jail time to ensure they don't do it again.

According to the statistics, the leading agent of death to police officers in the USA is COVID-19. That is criminial. People will move away from becoming a police officer if they are going to be exposed to a virus that will kill them in their line of work. Where is OSHA AND POSHA in all this?

This global pandemic will end, but, it is a matter of how it ends. Either the virus wins and kills off more and more people because a Level Three virus now can infect anyone with immunity, be it natural or acquired. Or. Human beings will stop being stupid and finally realize the New Zealand Model is the only accurate way to handle this virus and there will be an end to social interaction and sequestering at home until this is over. Which in most cases is four weeks or so. Four weeks of economic oppression ending the global pandemic is far less expensive then what is occurring now. Hospitals are overwhelmed when waves of the virus hit. This is an enormous cost to countries.

It seems to me if iconic persons can be linked to anti-vaccine messages then there should be a criminal penalty for it and soon.

When one really listens to the authorities and experts, they are far more interesting icons and are working all the time to sort out data to protect human life. They are in labs working with the lousy bug and we can't listen to what they have to say? Outrageous.