"We call these people riot police. They’re actually rioting police. I mean, they’re the ones who were inflicting the violence. And they’re doing, under the direction of the central government, exactly what the U.S. always criticizes other countries for. That is beating, rousting, [and] jailing anti-government demonstrators."

- Lew Rockwell

h/t RTAmerica
Photo: Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

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Federal Prosecutions

Financial Industry

Everyone Else

[ed. Questions?]

via: Catherine Rampell, Economix, NY Times

Charts: Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), Syracuse University

The Science Behind Airport Body Scanners

[ed.  Just noticed today, TSA is backing away from an independent study to evaluate the health effects of scanners, relying instead on draft conclusions from the Inspector General of Homeland Security.] 

by Erica Swallow, Mashable

The first full body scanner was developed by Dr. Steven W. Smith, inventor of the Secure 1000 whole body scanner in 1992. Smith sold the scanner and associated patents to Rapiscan Systems, who now manufactures and distributes the device. Rapiscan is just one of three companies that manufacture commercial X-ray devices used as security scanning applications — the other two companies are Tek84 and American Science and Engineering.

If you’ve flown with a commercial airline in the past two years, you’ve probably encountered or heard news of full body scanners, which use either X-rays or millimeter radio waves to create a virtually nude image of a person’s body to identify any hidden objects, such as weapons or explosives, that the person may have concealed.

David J. Brenner, the Higgins Professor of Radiation Biophysics at Columbia University, explained quite simply in an interview with NPR late last year that “both [scanning technologies] work on the same basic principle of firing a beam of radiation at the individual and looking at what it’s reflected back, quite similar to radar or sonar, but in one case using millimeter waves, which are not so different from microwaves, in fact, and the other uses X-rays.”

Inventor Steven W. Smith explains backscatter X-ray scanning quite thoroughly in his 1993 patent for the technology behind the Secure 1000:

“A pencil beam of X-rays is scanned over the surface of the body of a person being examined. X-rays that are scattered or reflected from the subject’s body are detected by a detector. The signal produced by this scattered X-ray detector in then used to modulate an image display device to produce an image of the subject and any concealed objects carried by the subject.”

Each pixel in the processed image is determined by the intensity of the backscattered signal collected by the X-ray detector. Because heavy elements (like most metals) backscatter electrons more strongly than light elements (such as tissue, organic materials and plastics), they show up differently in the processed images. With current technologies, heavy elements show up darker, while light elements appear brighter — as a result, concealed weapons, which are often made of heavy elements, can be detected.

Millimeter wave scanning works in the same way, except it uses millimeter waves instead of X-rays. The basic difference between the two technologies is that millimeter wave radiation — unlike high frequency X-rays — is not genotoxic and cannot cause cancer.

Safety Concerns

So, what does the proliferation of these scanners mean for the safety of travelers undergoing full-body scanning?

Backscatter X-ray scanning has received the majority of attention when it comes to safety issues, because “as far as we know, there is no health hazard associated with the millimeter wave scanners,” Dr. Brenner told NPR. On the other hand, he notes, “We know that X-rays can damage DNA in cells, and we know that X-rays can ultimately produce cancer. So the concern is about the possibility of inducing X-ray-induced cancer in one of the individuals who’s scanned.”

No conclusive studies have been conducted that confirm that backscatter X-ray security scanners are safe for commercial use. Advocates for the use of the scanners believe that low-energy X-rays are of negligible risk to scanned travelers, but researchers protest that even very small doses of ionizing radiation is carcinogenic. The health effects of backscatter X-ray scanning remain under scrutiny, especially in scientific communities focused on cancer and imaging.

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Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Marchcattle

Teaching Good Sex

by Laurie Abraham, NY Times

“First base, second base, third base, home run,” Al Vernacchio ticked off the classic baseball terms for sex acts. His goal was to prompt the students in Sexuality and Society — an elective for seniors at the private Friends’ Central School on Philadelphia’s affluent Main Line — to examine the assumptions buried in the venerable metaphor. “Give me some more,” urged the fast-talking 47-year-old, who teaches 9th- and 12th-grade English as well as human sexuality. Arrayed before Vernacchio was a circle of small desks occupied by 22 teenagers, six male and the rest female — a blur of sweatshirts and Ugg boots and form-fitting leggings.

“Grand slam,” called out a boy (who’d later tell me with disarming matter-of-factness that “the one thing Mr. V. talked about that made me feel really good was that penis size doesn’t matter”).

“Now, ‘grand slam’ has a bunch of different meanings,” replied Vernacchio, who has a master’s degree in human sexuality. “Some people say it’s an orgy, some people say grand slam is a one-night stand. Other stuff?”

“Grass,” a girl, a cheerleader, offered.

“If there’s grass on the field, play ball, right, right,” Vernacchio agreed, “which is interesting in this rather hair-phobic society where a lot of people are shaving their pubic hair — ”

“You know there’s grass, and then it got mowed, a landing strip,” one boy deadpanned, instigating a round of laughter. While these kids will sit poker-faced as Vernacchio expounds on quite graphic matters, class discussions are a spirited call and response, punctuated with guffaws, jokey patter and whispered asides, which Vernacchio tolerates, to a point.

Vernacchio explained that sex as baseball implies that it’s a game; that one party is the aggressor (almost always the boy), while the other is defending herself; that there is a strict order of play, and you can’t stop until you finish. “If you’re playing baseball,” he elaborated, “you can’t just say, ‘I’m really happy at second base.’ ”

A boy who was the leader of the Young Conservatives Club asked, “But what if it’s just more pleasure getting to home base?” Although this student is a fan of Vernacchio’s, he likes to challenge him about his tendency to empathize with the female perspective.

“Well, we’ve talked about how a huge percentage of women aren’t orgasming through vaginal intercourse,” Vernacchio responded, “so if that’s what you call a home run, there’s a lot of women saying” — his voice dropped to a dull monotone — ‘O.K., but this is not doing it for me.’ ”

In its breadth, depth and frank embrace of sexuality as, what Vernacchio calls, a “force for good” — even for teenagers — this sex-ed class may well be the only one of its kind in the United States. “There is abstinence-only sex education, and there’s abstinence-based sex ed,” said Leslie Kantor, vice president of education for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “There’s almost nothing else left in public schools.”

Across the country, the approach ranges from abstinence until marriage is the only acceptable choice, contraceptives don’t work and premarital sex is physically and emotionally harmful, to abstinence is usually best, but if you must have sex, here are some ways to protect yourself from pregnancy and disease. The latter has been called “disaster prevention” education by sex educators who wish they could teach more; a dramatic example of the former comes in a video called “No Second Chances,” which has been used in abstinence-only courses. In it, a student asks a school nurse, “What if I want to have sex before I get married?” To which the nurse replies, “Well, I guess you’ll just have to be prepared to die.”

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Photo: Olivia Bee for The New York Times

Matinicus 1916, George Wesley Bellows

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Salman Khan: The New Andrew Carnegie?

by Annie Murphy Paul, Time

Meet Salman Khan, your child’s new teacher. If you haven’t heard of Khan, rest assured that your son or daughter is in good hands. He has four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard. He got a perfect score on the math portion of his SAT. And he’s very experienced, having taught more than 85 million lessons to students all over the world.

Khan is the former hedge fund manager who set out to tutor his young cousin in math with a homemade video he posted online. From that modest beginning has grown the Khan Academy, a free online library of more than 2,700 videos offering instruction in everything from algebra to computer science to art history. Running the nonprofit academy is now Khan’s full-time job, and he plans to expand the enterprise further, adding more subject areas, more faculty members (until now, all the videos have been narrated by Khan himself) and translating the tutorials into the world’s most widely used languages.

Much attention has been paid to the use of Khan Academy videos in classrooms. Hundreds of schools across the U.S. have integrated his lessons into their curricula, often using them to “flip” the classroom: students watch the videos at home in the evening, then work on problem sets — what would once have been homework — in class, where there are teachers to help and peers to interact with. The approach is promising, and it may well change the way American students are taught.

The real revolution represented by Khan Academy, however, has gone mostly unremarked upon. The new availability of sophisticated knowledge, produced by a trusted source and presented in an accessible fashion, promises to usher in a new golden age of the autodidact: the self-taught man or woman. Not just the Khan Academy, but also the nation’s top colleges and universities are giving away learning online. Khan’s alma mater, MIT, has made more than 2,000 of its courses available gratis on the Internet. Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Carnegie Mellon are among the other elite institutions offering such free education. When Stanford announced last August that it would be opening to the online public a course on artificial intelligence, more than 70,000 people signed up within a matter of days. The course’s two professors say they were inspired to disseminate their lessons by the example of Salman Khan. Khan Academy’s own videos now go well beyond basic algebra to teach college-level calculus, biology and chemistry.

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Photos: Left; Steve Jurvetson: Right; Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Huang Yong Ping
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Helicopters and Boomerangs

[ed.  Manifestations of these phenomena are found in other parts of the world, too..In Japan, they use the charming euphemism parasite single.]

by Lawrence J. Cohen and Anthony T. Debenedet M.D., Time

As advocates of parent-child rough-and-tumble play, we have often bumped up against the bubble-wrapping tendencies of the helicopter parent. So when Merriam-Webster announced recently that helicopter parent is now a bona fide entry in their dictionary, we took notice. The concept — a parent who is overly involved in the life and safety of his or her child — surely predates the first known use of the phrase, in 1989. But official inclusion in the dictionary suggests that helicoptering is not just a fad that will go out of style. In fact, more and more parents seem to be in hover mode these days, but the trend is worth standing up to. Because the truth is that children benefit from precisely the opposite of helicoptering: rowdy, physical, interactive play — or roughhousing. Roughhousing between parent and child, not helicoptering, makes kids smart, emotionally intelligent, likable, ethical and physically fit.   (...)

For others, focusing too much on the future leads to a collapse, a giving up and dropping out of what seems like an impossible and exhausting ordeal. In the words of a “recovered” helicopter parent we know, “I finally got it when I realized all I wanted for my child was a manageable failure, a blip on the screen, a trip to the principal’s office — something to help him learn the art and beauty of imperfection and the fact that life goes on even when it isn’t exactly how we planned it to go.” These ideas bring to mind another term, boomerang child, which was also entered into the dictionary this year. A boomerang child is a young adult who returns home to live with his or her parents after college, usually due to financial reasons. Aside from the obvious economic factors, it’s possible that some of these boomerangers are the result of too much helicoptering, too much attention on the avoidance of falling or failing — and not enough attention on the excitement of risk or the wonders and dangers of the unknown.

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Photo: David Pollack / Corbis

Alécio Andrade París (Grand Palais), 1975
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Current Events: So What Exactly is a Technocrat Anyway?

by Joshua A. Tucker, Aljazeera

The sky is falling! The Euro is collapsing! What can we do? Look, up in the sky: it's a bird! it's a plane, it's... technocratic government!

Destined to save small and large European countries alike, we have now been graced with the sudden appearance of technocratic government as a deus ex machina in Italy, where economist Mario Monti has been named prime minister and Greece, where economist Lucas Papademos has been named prime minister. As the hero of our day - the technocratic government - is largely unknown to many of our readers, we summon the spirit of Greek drama for a brief dialogue on technocratic government:

Q: What's a technocratic government?

A: To answer this question we first need to be clear about how governments are formed in parliamentary systems, which are what we find in both Greece and Italy (and most advanced industrialised democracies outside of the United States). Unlike in presidential systems - where the president is largely free to choose the ministers he or she wants in the cabinet - in a parliamentary system the government must be approved by the parliament.

Often this will require the agreement of more than one political party, resulting in a coalition of parties to support the government. As part of this "coalition agreement", the heads of ministries (or what are called Secretaries in the United States) are allocated to the different parties, who place representatives from their parties as the heads of their respective ministries. Moreover, the parties agree on a "Prime Minister" to head the government, usually but not always from the largest party in the coalition. Most of the time, the identity of this "Prime Minister" - conditional on election results - is known during the election campaign.

Q: Ok, so what's a technocratic government?

A: Technically (no pun intended), a technocratic government is one in which the ministers are not career politicians; in fact, in some cases they may not even be members of political parties at all. They are instead supposed to be "experts" in the fields of their respective ministries. So the classic example is that the Finance Minister would be someone with an academic background in economics who had worked for years at the IMF, but has not previously run for elective office or been heavily involved in election campaigns.

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Photo: Reuters

More Mammoth (and Mysterious) Structures Found in China’s Desert

by Noah Shachtman, Wired

The internet lost its collective mind earlier this week, when a Reddit user stumbled across “what appears to be a monumental military/science experiment going on in a Chinese desert, visible on Google Earth.” But the strange and massive box of jagged lines wasn’t the only odd structure carved into the ground — and this week’s swarm of Google-spotters weren’t the first ones to take an interest in the region.

As former CIA analyst Allen Thomson notes, turning on the DigitalGlobe coverage layer in Google Earth shows all the various times the imaging satellite has been asked to inspect that part of the desert. (Here’s a screenshot, above.) “Starting in 2004, somebody has ordered many, many satellite pictures of it,” Thomson tells Danger Room. “Can’t have been cheap.”

Below are some of the strange things those satellite swoops photographed, which were then uncovered by Danger Room’s community of commenters.

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The Educational Lottery

by Steven Brint, LA Review of Books

Education is as close to a secular religion as we have in the United States. In a time when Americans have lost faith in their government and economic institutions, millions of us still believe in its saving grace. National leaders, from Benjamin Rush on, oversaw plans for extending its benefits more broadly. In the 19th century, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie famously conceived of schools as ladders on which the industrious poor would ascend to a better life, and he spent a good bit of his fortune laying the foundations for such an education society. After World War II, policy makers who believed in the education gospel grew numerous enough to fill stadiums. One by one, the G.I. Bill, the Truman Commission report, and the War on Poverty singled out education as the way of national and personal advance. “The answer to all of our national problems,” as Lyndon Johnson put it in 1965, “comes down to one single word: education.”

The American education gospel is built around four core beliefs. First, it teaches that access to higher levels of education should be available to everyone, regardless of their background or previous academic performance. Every educational sinner should have a path to redemption (most of these paths now run through the community colleges). Second, the gospel teaches that opportunity for a better life is the goal of everyone and that education is the primary — and perhaps the only — road to opportunity. Third, it teaches that the country can solve its social problems — drugs, crime, poverty, and the rest — by providing more education to the poor. Education instills the knowledge, discipline, and the habits of life that lead to personal renewal and social mobility. And, finally, it teaches that higher levels of education for all will reduce social inequalities, as they will put everyone on a more equal footing. No wonder President Obama and Bill Gates want the country to double its college graduation rate over the next 10 years.

The advance of the education gospel has been shadowed from the beginning by critics who claim that education, despite our best efforts, remains a bastion of privilege. For these critics, it is not that the educational gospel is wrong (a truly democratic, meritocratic school system would, in principle, be a good thing); it is that the benefits of education have not yet spread evenly to every corner of American society, and that the trend toward educational equality may be heading in the wrong direction. They decry the fact that schools in poor communities have become dropout factories and that only the wealthy can afford the private preparatory schools that are the primary feeders to prestigious private colleges. The Higher Education Establishment recognizes critics like these as family. They accept the core beliefs of the education gospel and are impatient only with its slow and incomplete adoption.

Other heresies are more radical, and thus more disturbing to settled beliefs about the power of education. One currently growing in popularity we might call “the new restrictionism.” According to the new restrictionists, such as the economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, co-authors of the 2008 paper “Leisure College USA: The Decline in Student Study Time,” access to higher education may have gone too far. Our colleges and universities are full to the brim with students who do not really belong there, who are unprepared for college and uninterested in breaking a mental sweat. Instead of studying, they spend time talking on the phone, planning social events, chitchatting about personal trivia and popular culture, and facebooking. Faculty members demand less of these students, according to Babcock and Marks, both because they are incapable of doing more and because they will punish faculty members with bad evaluations if they are pushed to try harder. The students often consider courses that require concentration “boring” and “irrelevant.” They argue and wheedle their way into grades they do not deserve. The colleges, out of craven financial motives, do not squarely face the fact that not all of their students are “college material.” Worse, they cater to ill-prepared and under-motivated students, dumbing down the curriculum to the point where a college degree is worth less, in terms of educational quality, than a degree from one of the better high schools. Institutions at the tail end of academic procession are, as David Riesman once put it, “colleges only by the grace of semantic generosity.”   (...)

Another heresy, and a very old one, is the idea that schooling provides education for servitude rather than freedom. It crushes the spirit, rather than expanding it. It is easy to see the elements of truth in this critique: Schools do line students up in rows, make them raise their hands, set them on task after evaluated task, insist on discipline in the classroom, and reward the motivated conformists. The “free the students” heresy goes back at least to Rousseau; though popular among Romantics of all eras, it had a major resurgence in the 1960s, when Paul Goodman, John Holt, and Ivan Illich carried the “free the students” flag. For them, children are born creative and curious, only to have the schools drum out these natural dispositions in order to create good soldiers for “the system.”   (...)

John Marsh is a proponent of another old heretical sect: the “fool’s gold” group. These heretics specialize in debunking the social progress beliefs of the educational gospel. Although education does indeed lead to social mobility for some, Marsh argues, it cannot do so for most. For the working classes, a much better approach, he believes, would be to attack the proximate sources of inequality: tax laws that privilege the rich and labor laws that restrict the rights of unions and set the minimum wage below a decent living standard. “Given the political will,” he writes, “whether through redistributive tax rates, massive public works projects, a living wage law, or a renaissance of labor unions, we could decrease poverty and inequality tomorrow regardless of … the number of educated and uneducated workers.” Left to its own devices, he argues, expansion of the educational system will produce not social equality but credential inflation: the condition in which higher levels of education (or distinctive brands of education) are necessary to “buy” standards of living previously associated with lower levels (or generic brands) of education. As workers attain the bachelor’s degree, middle-class incomes become associated with the attainment of master’s or first professional degrees, and access to truly powerful opportunities requires attendance at an elite institution.   (...)

Finally, there is the “true educators” sect, to which University of Chicago professor of education Philip W. Jackson belongs. This group takes the standpoint of the Platonic form of education to inspire deeper appreciation of craft and, at least indirectly, to hold up a mirror to the deficiencies of our current system of schooling. For these heretics, upward mobility is beside the point; to dwell on such sociological factors is to neglect the true nature of education. What does “true education” look like? Drawing on Hegel, Kant, and Dewey, Jackson has an answer.

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Paul Newman, Decency Manifest

[ed.  Love letter to Paul Newman in text and pictures from the gals at the Hairpin.  And, really, who doesn't love Paul Newman?  One of the interesting things, beyond his movie career, was how successful he was as a race-car driver.]

by Anne Helen Petersen, Hairpin

So let’s set things straight: Paul Newman isn’t from Classic Hollywood. In fact, he’s not even scandalous — if anything, he managed to avoid scandal altogether, in a way that few stars have before or since. His star image was that of a genuinely talented actor, a kind man, a passionate philanthropist, and an absolutely devoted husband....

….who just happened to the most gorgeous thing on the planet. Sometimes I’ll say that a movie star is good looking, or sexy, or handsome, but I also realize that my opinion is subjective, and others might not find him to be so. But when it comes to Paul Newman, it is impossible not to find him attractive. He is objectively handsome. His blue eyes are un-unlikable.

What’s that you say? You don’t find Paul Newman attractive? You’re going to tell me so in the comments? You are a robot.

Usually the prettiest boys are the biggest assholes. If you went to high school or ever set foot in a fraternity, you know this to be true. But sometimes the prettiest boys don’t realize they’re pretty, and they somehow end up becoming decent human beings, getting really into car racing, making lots of pantry items, and using the profits from said pantry items to let kids go play en plein air. Paul Newman is one of those few and far between. Or, more precisely, his image is that of one of the few and far between — the guarantor that hotness and decency are not mutually exclusive.

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Joe Jackson

 

Sergio Albiac. Unconnected.
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Investing In Packers, Wallet And Soul

by Ken Belson, NY Times

In any other place, they would be called souvenirs, documents suitable for framing, or even a sham. But here in the heart of Packers country, they are stock certificates that confer to the owner a microscopically thin and perhaps meaningless slice of the hometown team.

The Green Bay Packers are the only publicly owned team in the N.F.L., but the value of the shares they will soon offer to fans is almost strictly of the sentimental variety. They offer none of the privileges, or risks, of normal shares: they do not appreciate, are not traded on an exchange and produce no dividends. Owners get no discounts on tickets, although some merchandise is available only to shareholders.

Perhaps the biggest benefit is that they get to attend the annual shareholders’ meeting, where they can vote on new board members and pepper management with questions.

Yet with the economy flirting with recession and more than 4.75 million shares outstanding, the Packers, who already have 112,264 shareholders, are confident that their fans will line up by the thousands to buy shares again. And chances are they’re right.

In the coming weeks, the team expects to complete its offering of new shares. According to a filing with securities regulators in Utah, the Packers plan to issue shares for about $250 each. And fans who have closets full of Brett Favre jerseys and foam cheeseheads, as well as old stock certificates hanging on the wall, may well shell out hundreds of dollars for more shares, if only because they cannot resist the chance to support their team and indoctrinate the next generation.

“We live and breathe the Packers,” said Chuck Olsen, the owner of Olsen’s Piggly Wiggly, which does a big business selling bratwursts to tailgaters on game days. “Everyone wants to be part of this, so I’ll buy a share for my grandson, who is now 1 year old.”

The team hopes to raise at least $22 million after fees, about what was generated in 1997, the last time it sold shares. The money raised will help offset some of the $143 million needed to add as many as 7,000 seats and replace the scoreboard and sound system at Lambeau Field.

In an era when teams routinely beg, threaten and cajole their host cities into helping them build new stadiums, the Packers’ approach of asking their fans to contribute is refreshingly quaint. And something of a tradition.

The team’s fans are fiercely proud of the Packers’ publicly owned status, which dates to 1923 when Curly Lambeau and four local businessmen incorporated and sold 1,000 shares of the team at $5 each to keep it afloat. The Packers also issued stock not just in 1997, but also in 1950 and 1935 to bolster their sagging finances. Each time, fans snapped up the shares even though they were little more than a gift to the team.

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Photo: Morry Gash/Associated Press

Two Degrees of Disaster

by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker

Two years ago, at a meeting in Copenhagen, world leaders agreed on the goal of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius, or roughly three and a half degrees Fahrenheit. The so-called Copenhagen Accord, which Barack Obama personally helped negotiate, contained no mechanism for meeting this goal, so even though the President called it a “meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough,” many others questioned whether it was worth the proverbial paper it was printed on. Unfortunately, it now seems, the many others had a point.

On Wednesday, the Paris-based International Energy Agency released its annual “World Energy Outlook.” Among the report’s key findings is that, in spite of a shaky economy, global carbon-dioxide emissions rose by five per cent last year, to more than thirty billion metric tons. Meanwhile, energy efficiency—defined as the amount of energy used per unit of economic output—declined for the second year in a row. According to the I.E.A., “The door to 2°C is closing.” The group warned that unless dramatic action is taken by 2017, so many additional billions of tons of emissions will effectively be “locked in” that a temperature increase exceeding two degrees will become inevitable.

“If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re heading,” the report said.

One of the (many) obstacles to engaging the public on the issue of climate change is that, in the context of daily life, a temperature increase of two degrees Celsius (or even the larger number in Fahrenheit) sounds like no big deal. The problem, of course, is that daily life is a poor guide when the issue you’re dealing with is the global average. In that context, an increase of two degrees spells—at the very least—massive disruption. In fact, many scientists have warned that holding the average global temperature increase to “only” two degrees Celsius is a bit like limiting yourself to “only” a few rounds of Russian roulette: unless you’re uncommonly lucky, the result is not likely to be happy. As a group of climatologists put it on the blog RealClimate,

Even a “moderate” warming of 2°C stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society, leading potentially to the conflict and suffering that go with failed states and mass migrations. Global warming of 2°C would leave the Earth warmer than it has been in millions of years.

Meanwhile, other scientists have already turned their attention to a future beyond two degrees. Earlier this year, Britain’s Royal Society devoted an entire issue of its journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A to this topic. One of the articles in the issue posed the question “When could global warming reach 4°C?” (Which is to say, an increase of more than seven degrees Fahrenheit.) The answer, it concluded, was fairly soon. If the world continues on its current emissions path, then by the 2070s, the authors calculated, average global temperatures should be about four degrees higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution. If certain carbon “feedbacks” turn out to be stronger than currently predicted, then that four-degree rise could occur by the 2060s. A second article looked at what this might mean for society. The author, Rachel Warren, a researcher at the University of East Anglia, observed that in

a 4°C world, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world, while the limits for adaptation for natural systems would largely be exceeded throughout the world.

Since we can’t know the future, it is possible to imagine that, either through better technology or more creativity or sheer necessity, our children will be able to find a solution that currently eludes us. Somehow or other, they will figure out a way to avoid “a 4°C world.” But to suppose that an answer to global warming can be found by waiting is to misunderstand the nature of the problem. Once you’ve dumped CO₂ into the atmosphere, there’s no getting it back, at least not on a human timescale. When it comes to global warming, the future really is now.

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Photograph by Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images

Cooks Travel Poster, by R M Lander, 1955
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