It's Official: 2014 Was the Hottest Year on Record

It's Official: 2014 Was the Hottest Year on Record: "Deny this. The animation below shows the Earth’s warming climate, recorded in monthly measurements from land and sea over 135 years. Temperatures are displayed in degrees above or below the 20th-century average. Thirteen of the 14 hottest years are in the 21st century."



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Shanghai first major Chinese region to ditch GDP growth target - FT.com

Shanghai first major Chinese region to ditch GDP growth target - FT.com: "hanghai has ditched its official economic growth target for 2015, becoming the first major city or province in China to abandon such metrics as government policy shifts towards a focus on growth quality over quantity.
The move signifies both a nationwide move to switch focus from hitting annual targets with some of the fastest growth rates in the world — now that those rates are waning — as well as an effort to de-link growth from promotions at the local level.
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Growth in gross domestic product has long been a key metric to evaluate the performance of local officials, helping to determine whether they were promoted. But President Xi Jinping last year said that “we can no longer simply use GDP growth rates to decide who the [party] heroes are”."



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US Senate: full of hot air humans, who do not accept scientic evidence

US Senate refuses to accept humanity's role in global climate change, again | Environment | The Guardian: "It is nearly 27 years now since a Nasa scientist testified before the US Senate that the agency was 99% certain that rising global temperatures were caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

And the Senate still has not got it – based on the results of three symbolic climate change votes on Wednesday night.

The Senate voted virtually unanimously that climate change is occurring and not, as some Republicans have said, a hoax – but it defeated two measures attributing its causes to human activity.

Only one Senator, Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi, voted against a resolution declaring climate change was real and not – as his fellow Republican, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma once famous declared – a hoax. That measure passed 98 to one.


White House unveils plan to open Atlantic waters to offshore oil drilling
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But the Senate voted down two measures that attributed climate change to human activity – and that is far more important.

Unless Senators are prepared to acknowledge the causes of climate change, it is likely they will remain unable and unwilling to do anything about it.

Democrats had planned the symbolic, “sense of the Senate” votes as a way of exposing the Republicans’ increasingly embarrassing climate change denial. Further climate votes will come up on Thursday.

Two were tacked on as Democratic amendments to a bill seeking to force approval of the contentious Keystone XL pipeline – despite a veto threat from Barack Obama.

The third, introduced by a Republican, affirmed climate change was real but expressed support for the Keystone XL pipeline."



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Mass Death of Seabirds in Western U.S. Is 'Unprecedented'

Mass Death of Seabirds in Western U.S. Is 'Unprecedented': "Cassin's auklets are tiny diving seabirds that look like puffballs. They feed on animal plankton and build their nests by burrowing in the dirt on offshore islands. Their total population, from the Baja Peninsula to Alaska's Aleutian Islands, is estimated at somewhere between 1 million and 3.5 million.

Last year, beginning about Halloween, thousands of juvenile auklets started washing ashore dead from California's Farallon Islands to Haida Gwaii (also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands) off central British Columbia. Since then the deaths haven't stopped. Researchers are wondering if the die-off might spread to other birds or even fish.

"This is just massive, massive, unprecedented," said Julia Parrish, a University of Washington seabird ecologist who oversees the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a program that has tracked West Coast seabird deaths for almost 20 years. "We may be talking about 50,000 to 100,000 deaths. So far.""



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United States of Kochs

Kochs to Play Big in 2016—$1 Billion Big - Bloomberg Politics: "The political network led by the Koch brothers aims to pump nearly $1 billion into the 2016 presidential race, an unambiguous signal that the powerful Republican donors aren't backing down.

The fundraising goal of $889 million was announced Monday at a summit of 450 wealthy donors and small-government activists in Palm Springs, Calif., an attendee said.  It comes a day after the group hosted what was tantamount to the first debate in the Republican primary campaign, with Senators Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz regaling the private audience for 80 minutes Sunday night.

Taken together, the panel of presidential hopefuls and eye-popping fundraising goal show that billionaire energy executives Charles and David Koch have no interest in shying away from politics, even after being denounced on the Senate floor by then-Leader Harry Reid as "un-American" for secretly steering money into politics.

The attendee said the fundraising goal is meant in part as a statement that the Koch-funded groups and their donors aren't intimidated by Reid.

If achieved, the sum would approach the amount 2012 Republican candidate Mitt Romney spent trying to get elected."



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Tell General Mills: Stop hiding high fructose corn syrup | CREDO Action

Tell General Mills: Stop hiding high fructose corn syrup | CREDO Action: "General Mills’ Vanilla, Chocolate and Cinnamon Chex boxes all proudly display a label that should make many health-conscious consumers happy: “no high fructose corn syrup.”

The only problem: it’s not true.

These General Mills products all contain a super-concentrated sweetener that is made from high fructose corn syrup, and within the Big Ag industry is literally called “HFCS-90” or high fructose corn syrup-90.

But then the Corn Refiners Association changed the name to “fructose.”1 And now General Mills is not only disingenuously hiding their corn syrup behind this innocuous alias – the company is bragging that its products don’t contain any!

We deserve to know what we’re eating. Tell General Mills to stop hiding high fructose corn syrup.

The “fructose” label is especially nefarious, since fructose is a naturally occurring fruit sugar, and HFCS-90 is a highly concentrated, highly processed product that is molecularly different from the fructose you would eat in your apple."



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Gardening: Ditch the chemicals and go natural

Gardening: Ditch the chemicals and go natural: "It’s funny how things change. Or, rather, how our attitudes to things change. Take, for example, antibiotics, which only a few short decades ago were considered magic pills for the mildest of ailments, before scientists discovered that their over-use was leading to increased resistance, as well as to the destruction of important “good” bacteria in the human gut, with significant consequences for long-term human health. Cue the growing popularity of probiotics and homemade products such as kefir (a fermented milk drink) that help re-seed or re-inoculate the human gut with a mixture of beneficial live microorganisms."



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Chinese demand for tiger wine and skins puts wild cats in peril | World news | The Guardian

Chinese demand for tiger wine and skins puts wild cats in peril | World news | The Guardian: "ver since establishing the farms, Chinese wildlife officials have been campaigning for international approval to lift the ban on tiger bone use, arguing that the country has a right to use its “domestic natural resources” as it sees fit, and that tiger bone wine – rice wine in which bones from the big cats have been soaking – is medically effective and part of Chinese culture. They contend that the trade could be regulated effectively to reduce the demand for wild tiger parts.

But even as the rest of the world disagrees, it appears that China has gone ahead anyway. Multiple probes by the EIA and International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) over the past decade, together with The Washington Post’s own investigation, show the tiger bone wine industry has boomed, with support from the SFA.

“After these farms started selling wine, and taxidermists started selling tiger pelts, it really stimulated waning demand from consumers,” said Grace Ge Gabriel of the IFAW.

Xiongshen alone says it houses more than 1,000 tigers – although fewer than 200 are available for tourists to view – and 500 bears, legally farmed to extract their bile for a different wine."



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How I stopped worrying and learned to love the exclamation mark

How I stopped worrying and learned to love the exclamation mark: "My initial resistance to the exclamation mark was down to an intense dislike of their use in journalism. An exclamation mark should only be employed within quotes, and only then when the journalist is sure it was uttered.
Otherwise, seeing an article end in an exclamation mark suggests that the writer has been unable to get the message across adequately in the many words that preceded it. It is, as F Scott Fitzgerald once said, “like laughing at your own joke”.
So, when the moment came to use that exclamation mark in a text, thumb hovering over the key, it felt like a slipping of standards, a crumbling of resistance. It was the breaking of the dam.
Since which, I have learned to love the exclamation mark, to accept it as another shift in the evolution of written communication, allowable in texts, mails, Twitter – but still not journalism. Never in journalism.
But the mass deployment of the exclamation mark in personal communication has fuelled a shift in punctuation, an upward inflection of sorts, one of the new work-arounds that attempts to convey in written communication what would be clear if it were spoken."



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