Rising income inequality exacerbates downward economic mobility

April 30, 2019
AUTHORS: Liz Hipple, Elisabeth Jacobs

•••••

The top panel shows that between 1950 and 1980, when economic growth was shared equitably across income quintiles (see the green bars), children born to middle-income households were likely to experience upward mobility even if they slipped down the income ladder a bit. In other words, those children born in 1950 were likely to have a higher income than their parents even if their relative position on the income distribution was a little lower than their parents’ place on the ladder.

The story is different between 1980 and 2010, as shown in the bottom panel. Children born to middle-income households in 1980 would be unlikely to have a higher income than their parents even if those children managed to hold on to middle-income status as adults. The reason: The income gains from growth between 1980 and 2010 were highly concentrated at the top of the income distribution while those in the middle saw less, and those in the bottom two income groups actually lost ground (see the red bars). Children born in 1980 needed to move up the income distribution substantially just to have the same inflation-adjusted income as their parents had.

What happened in 1980's? Ronald Reagan

•••••

Salt-Water Fish Extinction Seen By 2048

Keeps getting worse.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/salt-water-fish-extinction-seen-by-2048/

Nov. 2, 2006

The apocalypse has a new date: 2048.

That's when the world's oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.

The study by Boris Worm, PhD, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, -- with colleagues in the U.K., U.S., Sweden, and Panama -- was an effort to understand what this loss of ocean species might mean to the world.

The researchers analyzed several different kinds of data. Even to these ecology-minded scientists, the results were an unpleasant surprise.

"I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are -- beyond anything we suspected," Worm says in a news release.

"This isn't predicted to happen. This is happening now," study researcher Nicola Beaumont, PhD, of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, U.K., says in a news release.

"If biodiversity continues to decline, the marine environment will not be able to sustain our way of life. Indeed, it may not be able to sustain our lives at all," Beaumont adds.

Already, 29% of edible fish and seafood species have declined by 90% -- a drop that means the collapse of these fisheries.

But the issue isn't just having seafood on our plates. Ocean species filter toxins from the water. They protect shorelines. And they reduce the risks of algae blooms such as the red tide.

"A large and increasing proportion of our population lives close to the coast; thus the loss of services such as flood control and waste detoxification can have disastrous consequences," Worm and colleagues say.

•••••

the loss of species isn't gradual. It's happening fast -- and getting faster, the researchers say.

•••••

Deadly Flooding From Michigan to the South Damages Homes, Sends Mississippi River to 157-Year-High in Davenport, Iowa

Global warming has caused an increase in the amount of moisture in the air, which is resulting in an increase in the number and strength of extreme precipitation events.

Deadly Flooding From Michigan to the South Damages Homes, Sends Mississippi River to 157-Year-High in Davenport, Iowa
By Pam Wright
May 4, 2019

At a Glance

At least seven people are dead as a result of storms and flooding since Monday. The Mississippi River ticked above levels reached in 1993 in Davenport, Iowa, the highest level there in 157 years.The city's downtown area remained under water Friday, days after a temporary levee gave way.Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declared a state of emergency Thursday for Wayne CountyAt least 3,000 homes have been damaged in Wayne County from flooding.

•••••

tags: extreme weather, severe weather

Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01313-4?fbclid=IwAR2sV8WC2CLFqPMKj2LcDZoX1Us73pIVFnO-WDrYwQ4T5Q7incagJGhoUgg

April 30, 2019

As the temperature of the ground rises above freezing, microorganisms break down organic matter in the soil. Greenhouse gases — including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — are released into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming. Soils in the permafrost region hold twice as much carbon as the atmosphere does — almost 1,600 billion tonnes1.

What fraction of that will decompose? Will it be released suddenly, or seep out slowly? We need to find out.

Current models of greenhouse-gas release and climate assume that permafrost thaws gradually from the surface downwards. Deeper layers of organic matter are exposed over decades or even centuries, and some models are beginning to track these slow changes.

But models are ignoring an even more troubling problem. Frozen soil doesn’t just lock up carbon — it physically holds the landscape together. Across the Arctic and Boreal regions, permafrost is collapsing suddenly as pockets of ice within it melt. Instead of a few centimetres of soil thawing each year, several metres of soil can become destabilized within days or weeks. The land can sink and be inundated by swelling lakes and wetlands.

Abrupt thawing of permafrost is dramatic to watch. Returning to field sites in Alaska, for example, we often find that lands that were forested a year ago are now covered with lakes2. Rivers that once ran clear are thick with sediment. Hillsides can liquefy, sometimes taking sensitive scientific equipment with them.

This type of thawing is a serious problem for communities living around the Arctic (see ‘Arctic permafrost’). Roads buckle, houses become unstable. Access to traditional foods is changing, because it is becoming dangerous to travel across the land to hunt. Families cannot reach lines of game traps that have supported them for generations.

•••••

There's so much CO2 in the atmosphere that planting trees can no longer save us

https://www.businessinsider.com/so-much-co2-planting-trees-cant-save-us-2017-5?utm_content=buffer5cb53&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer-bi&fbclid=IwAR04QGlFhxc8AFQYpO_UKS4nQiOGdL4sf9wmL6B68C9QO1cxbM_voxJtjf4

Rob Ludacer and Jessica Orwig
Oct. 26, 2018

Humans emit roughly 30 to 40 billion tons of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere each year. If we keep it up, Earth will continue to heat up and ultimately devastate our way of life.

So what can we do about it?

Most scientists agree that we need a way to capture some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. One idea is to plant lots of trees. Trees use CO2 in order to grow. They also release oxygen, so it's a win-win.

But studies indicate that we simply can't grow enough trees to capture the necessary amount of CO2 that would help us meet the goals set by the Paris Agreement.

In truth, we would have to cover the entire contiguous US with trees just to capture 10% of the CO2 we emit annually.

There's just not enough room on this planet to have the farmland it takes to feed the world plus the space to plant the necessary number of trees.

In other words, many of us would starve if we tried using trees to solve our emissions problem.

Billionaire founder of opioid firm guilty of bribing doctors to prescribe drug

Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years for cheating a bunch of rich people out of money. These people face at most 20 years for deliberate actions leading to many, many deaths, for the sake of enriching themselves.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/02/john-kapoor-opioids-billionaire-founder-guilty-of-bribing-doctors-to-prescribe

Chris McGreal in Kansas City
Thu 2 May 2019 15.17 EDT

The head of a leading drug manufacturer has been found guilty of bribing doctors to prescribe a dangerous painkiller to patients who did not need it, in the first criminal conviction of a pharma chief over the opioid epidemic.

A Boston jury also found John Kapoor, the 75-year-old billionaire founder of Insys Theraputics, guilty of defrauding insurance companies in the push to sell Subsys, a spray made from fentanyl, a synthetic opioid many times stronger than morphine.

Subsys was approved for terminal cancer patients but the company targeted sales at a much bigger and more profitable market of people with non-life threatening chronic pain. Prosecutors said that fuelled the opioid epidemic and cost lives.

Four other Insys executives were also convicted on similar racketeering charges after the jury took two weeks to deliberate. They each face up to 20 years in prison.

The convictions will spur demands for executives of other opioid makers to be held to account for an epidemic that has claimed about 400,000 lives over the past two decades.

•••••

Kapoor oversaw a marketing strategy at Insys that hired doctors as speakers at educational seminars as cover to pay them more than $1m to prescribe high doses of Subsys to patients who did not need it. Prosecutors said the seminars were no more than social gatherings at expensive New York restaurants followed by company sales reps taking the physicians to strip clubs and bars.

•••••

Insys employees also posed as doctors to give insurance companies invented diagnoses to get approval for payments for the drug.

•••••

The company’s former vice-president of managed markets, Michael Gurry; its former national sales director, Richard Simon; and two sales directors, Sunrise Lee and Joseph Rowan, were also convicted.

Several other former Insys executives previously pleaded guilty over the scheme and gave evidence against Kapoor.

Michael Babich, the former Insys CEO, pleaded guilty earlier this year. Babich faces up to 20 years in prison when he is sentenced later this year. Babich’s wife, Natalie Levine, an Insys sales rep, is also awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty over the kickback scheme.

Others convicted include the company’s vice-president of sales, Alec Burlakoff, who told the trial Kapoor devised a sales strategy to target doctors known to dispense opioids without too many questions in so-called “pill mills”.

“Pill mills, for us, meant dollars,” he said.

Mueller’s letter to AG Barr criticizing his framing of the Russia report’s findings

https://www.vox.com/2019/5/1/18525296/mueller-report-letter-william-barr-testimony

By Jen Kirby
May 1, 2019

Three days after Attorney General William Barr sent Congress his four-page letter on the “principal conclusions” of the Russia investigation, special counsel Robert Mueller sent a letter to the attorney general objecting to how he’d framed the probe’s findings.

The House Judiciary Committee has now released that March 27 letter Mueller wrote to Barr, the contents of which were first reported by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

In the letter, Mueller says that Barr’s summary “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions,” and that as a result, “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation.”

“This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the [Justice] Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations,” Mueller continues.

•••••

Spike in US teen suicides after Netflix '13 Reasons Why' release: study

https://news.yahoo.com/spike-us-teen-suicides-netflix-13-reasons-why-065939492.html

AFP•May 1, 2019

The suicide rate among US teenagers spiked in the months after the release of the controversial Netflix drama "13 Reasons Why", which follows the story of a high school girl who kills herself, a new study has found.

The series was met with concern when it aired in March 2017, with health and education professionals fearing the content was potentially harmful for vulnerable populations, such as adolescents.

According to the new study, researchers estimated there were an additional 195 suicide deaths -- an increase of nearly 29 percent -- among 10 to 17 year-olds in the nine months after its release.

The number of suicide deaths among the same age category "increased significantly" in the month immediately after it hit screens, said the paper, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

The additional deaths mainly affected boys.

•••••

The alleged synagogue shooter was a churchgoer who talked Christian theology, raising tough questions for evangelical pastors

Any religion that claims that God only accepts people in that religion will lead to horrible stuff like this.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2019/05/01/alleged-synagogue-shooter-was-churchgoer-who-articulated-christian-theology-prompting-tough-questions-evangelical-pastors/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2c0f3697179f


By Julie Zauzmer
May 1, 2019

Before he allegedly walked into a synagogue in Poway, Calif., and opened fire, John Earnest appears to have written a seven-page letter spelling out his core beliefs: that Jewish people, guilty in his view of faults ranging from killing Jesus to controlling the media, deserved to die. That his intention to kill Jews would glorify God.

Days later, the Rev. Mika Edmondson read those words and was stunned. “It certainly calls for a good amount of soul-searching,” said Edmondson, a pastor in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, a small evangelical denomination founded to counter liberalism in mainline Presbyterianism. Earnest, 19, was a member of an OPC congregation. His father was an elder. He attended regularly. And in the manifesto, the writer spewed not only invective against Jews and racial minorities but also cogent Christian theology he heard in the pews.

So the pastor read those seven pages, trying to understand. “We can’t pretend as though we didn’t have some responsibility for him — he was radicalized into white nationalism from within the very midst of our church,” Edmondson said.

•••••

Some drew comparisons to Muslim communities asked to account for terrorist actions and worried that they could be in the same position when the shooter claims to be a faithful Christian.

“When there’s an act of ‘radical Islamic terror’ — somebody claiming they’re motivated by their Islamic faith — if we’re going to call upon moderates in Muslim communities to condemn those things, we should do the same.

•••••

the writer also spoke of biblical justification and of Christian belief throughout the document. The two main themes were: Jews’ guilt in the biblical narrative, and his own salvation.

Several pastors said they found the manifesto’s parts about salvation significantly more troubling. Because when it came to what it said about salvation, they agreed with it. “I did not choose to be a Christian. The Father chose me. The Son saved me. And the Spirit keeps me,” the writer said, espousing a Reformed, or Calvinist, theology. He also wrote that his salvation was based not on his actions or lack of sin but on God’s will.

In the manifesto, “you actually hear a frighteningly clear articulation of Christian theology in certain sentences and paragraphs. He has, in some ways, been well taught in the church,” said the Rev. Duke Kwon, a Washington pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America, another evangelical denomination which shares many of its beliefs with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

•••••

That’s why Kwon said some parts of the manifesto made him so uncomfortable. It wasn’t the white supremacist drivel taken from online chat rooms, totally foreign to the church, that chilled him most. It was the familiar theology, the parts where the writer showed he did believe what he’d been hearing in the pews as well as what he’d been hearing online.

“It’s possible to teach people in the church about personal individual salvation in Jesus Christ and still fail to instruct them regarding the ethical implications of that faith,” he said. Going forward, Kwon called for “a vision of the gospel that includes implications for the love of neighbor and those that are different from ourselves, to teach it as an essential feature of the gospel of grace and not just an add-on or an appendage to more important matters.”

•••••

Statute requires IRS to furnish Congressional committe with Trump's tax returns

https://www.rollcall.com/news/congress/trump-tax-returns-put-mnuchin-legal-jeopardy

Doug Sword
April 23, 2019

•••••

Neal’s authority to seek the president’s tax returns stems from Section 6103 of the tax code, which states that upon “written request” from the chairman of either of the two tax-writing committees “the Secretary shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified” in the request.

“The statute is very clear and seems like very strong support for what Mr. Neal is trying to do,” said Yin, who said he’d advise Mnuchin to proceed cautiously. “I think he obviously needs to think very seriously about that; now he might not care if he gets fired, but I think he would care if he gets sent to jail.”

The best route, to McDaniel’s thinking, is for the House to find Mnuchin in contempt of Congress.

The House “could then apply to a court to enforce that contempt order, by requiring him to turn it over or suffer some coercive penalty,” McDaniel said. “They fine somebody, or put them in jail until they comply.”

Issuing a subpoena for the returns, McDaniel said, would be a waste of time, since the statute clearly states Mnuchin “shall furnish” any tax return requested by the Ways and Means chairman. “This statute is good and it’s better than a subpoena,” said McDaniel, who said he’d advise Neal to pursue a standalone court case if the contempt of Congress route isn’t taken.

•••••

Microsoft workers decry grueling '996' working standard at Chinese tech firms

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/22/microsoft-workers-decry-grueling-996-working-standard-at-chinese-tech-firms

Kari Paul
Mon 22 Apr 2019 21.54 EDT

Microsoft employees have published a letter on the software development platform Github in solidarity with tech workers in China.

Workers at tech companies in the country have used the Microsoft-owned platform to complain about grueling working conditions and the “996” standard in the industry, a philosophy endorsed by the tech billionaire Jack Ma. The name is based on the idea of working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.

Microsoft workers called on Chinese tech companies to comply with local labor laws, which limit their workers to 40 hours a week, with a maximum of 36 hours per month of overtime.

“These same issues permeate across full time and contingent jobs at Microsoft and the industry as a whole,” the workers said.

•••••

In November 2018, Google employees walked off the job over reports that a former executive who had been ousted for sexual harassment had received a $90m severance package. Workers involved in organizing that protest have reported internal backlash and demotions for their actions.

Sri Lanka

My heart goes out to the people of Sri Lanka

link to Mueller report

https://www.npr.org/2019/04/18/708850903/read-the-full-mueller-report-with-redactions

links to

https://apps.npr.org/documents/document.html?id=5955997-Muellerreport

Which links to

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5955997/Muellerreport.pdf

which contains both volumes 1 and 2

50-year low in jobless claims but not just from few layoffs

https://www.mcall.com/business/sns-bc-us--unemployment-benefits-20190411-story.html

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER | Associated Press |
Apr 15, 2019

The fewest people in nearly 50 years sought unemployment benefits last week, a sign of a strong job market and an unusually low level of layoffs.

Yet the decline in applications for jobless aid isn't due solely to a tight employment picture. Many states have imposed stricter rules on their unemployment insurance programs — from making it harder to qualify to reducing the duration of benefits to cutting payouts.

The combined effect has been to reduce the number of unemployed people who apply for and receive aid, economists say. Nationwide, just 30% of people out of work now receive unemployment insurance, down from about 40% before the Great Recession.

•••••

Another reason for the decline is that long-term unemployment remains much higher than in previous periods when the unemployment rate fell as low as last month's figure of 3.8%. People who have been out of work for 27 weeks or more aren't eligible for unemployment insurance.

In March, 21% of the unemployed were out of work for 27 weeks or more. The last time the unemployment rate fell below 4%, in 2000, the proportion was about half that. And in 1969, less than 5% of those out of work were long-term unemployed.

•••••

Female space pioneer and member of the Mercury 13, Jerrie Cobb has died at 88 years old

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/space/article/Female-space-pioneer-Jerrie-Cobb-has-died-at-88-13778049.php

Alex Stuckey April 18, 2019

Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb, the first woman to pass NASA's astronaut training, has died. She was 88.

Cobb, a pioneering female pilot, was a member of the Mercury 13, a group of women who were able to complete in the early 1960s the same, physically demanding astronaut training as male candidates.

NASA squashed the program before any of these women could fly in space, but Cobb remained a steadfast advocate for women pilots throughout her lifetime — even taking on revered Mercury 7 astronaut John Glenn in Congress to fight for a woman's right to be an astronaut.

When that didn't work, she changed course, spending much of her life as a missionary pilot in the Amazon jungle, delivering medicine, food and clothing to extremely isolated regions. This work earned her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 1981.

•••••

She died on March 18 in Florida, according to a statement from her family. The Associated Press reported that she died after a brief illness.

•••••

News of her death comes just one day after NASA announced Wednesday that astronaut Christina Koch will make the longest female spaceflight in history, at 328 days.

•••••

But Glenn stood in their way, telling Congress that "the fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order."

Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova rocketed into space the following year. It would be another two decades before American women finally got their chance, when Sally Ride strapped into the Space Shuttle Challenger in June 1983. Ride died in 2012.

•••••

Facebook Says Instagram Password Breach Larger Than Initially Thought

By Denise Petski
April 18, 2019 1:52pm

Facebook now says millions of Instagram users’ passwords were accidentally stored in a readable format on its servers, not tens of thousands as it initially thought.

Facebook revealed the new information in an updated blog post Thursday morning.

“Since this post was published, we discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format,” Facebook said in its post. “We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users. We will be notifying these users as we did the others. Our investigation has determined that these stored passwords were not internally abused or improperly accessed.”

In its March 21 blog post, Facebook said it found the user password issue as part of a routine security review in January, but stressed that the passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and that they had found no evidence that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed the passwords. “We have fixed these issues and as a precaution we will be notifying everyone whose passwords we have found were stored in this way,” Facebook said.

•••••

Alaska had April weather in March

https://news.uaf.edu/alaska-had-april-weather-in-march/

University of Alaska Fairbanks
Sue Mitchell
April 2, 2019

In March, most of Alaska had weather normally expected in April.

“March was too warm,” said Martin Stuefer, Alaska’s state climatologist. “It was as if we didn’t have March this year. We had April instead.”

Stuefer is an associate research professor with the Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.

•••••

New monthly high temperature records were set in 10 of the selected 19 stations, especially in the Interior and in western and northern Alaska. Kotzebue’s average monthly temperature was 21.9 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Utqiaġvik’s mean monthly temperature was 5.9, which is 5.5 degrees warmer than the previous record March, recorded in 1904. Other sites that recorded record high monthly temperatures were Bethel, Nome, Delta Junction, Bettles, Fairbanks, Homer, McGrath and Talkeetna.

Ten stations around the state departed from the monthly averages by double digits. Many daily temperature records were broken as well.

Fairbanks saw consecutive days with low temperatures above freezing during the last week of March, the first time this has ever been recorded in March.

The Bering Sea set a new record for lowest March sea ice extent, as did the Chukchi Sea. Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean was the seventh lowest since satellite records have been kept.

•••••

2018's Hemispheric Heat Wave Wasn't Possible Without Climate Change, Scientists Say

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11042019/2018-heat-wave-climate-change-attribution-northern-hemisphere-extreme-weather-record

By Bob Berwyn, InsideClimate News
Apr 12, 2019

•••••

A study presented this week at a scientific conference in Vienna now shows that last summer's extreme heat was an "unprecedented" hemispheric event that would not have happened without heat-trapping greenhouse gas pollution, the researchers said, and that it lasted longer and was more widespread across the Northern Hemisphere than previously realized.

All summers will be like last year if the world warms 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, said the study's lead author Martha Vogel, an extreme-temperature researcher with ETH Zürich Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science. Even with 1.5 degrees Celsius warming, 25 percent of the Northern Hemisphere will experience a summer as hot as the summer of 2018 two out of every three years, she said.

•••••

From May to July, the heat waves affected 22 percent of the agricultural land and populated areas in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, from Canada and the United States to Russia, Japan and South Korea, killing hundreds of people, devastating crops and curtailing power production. On an average day during those heat waves, 5.2 million square kilometers (about 2 million square miles) were affected by extreme heat, Vogel said. At its peak extent in July, the affected area was twice as big.

•••••

The growing likelihood of widespread heat waves raises concerns about food security, as well as human health, and the impacts can ripple well beyond the affected countries, said co-author Sonia Seneviratne, a climate researcher with ETH Zürich.

The 2018 heat wave caused total losses of some crops in Germany and Austria, and spurred large-scale outbreaks of tree-killing bugs.

In the Scandinavian Arctic, temperatures soared to above 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) for the first time on record, leading to unusual fires in the boreal forests of Sweden. Across Europe, river flows reached record lows in late summer and autumn, hampering commercial shipping and power generators that rely on rivers for cooling.

•••••

Glaciers are melting faster

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/glaciers-in-the-americas-are-melting-faster/

Glaciers in the Americas Are Melting Faster

By Chelsea Harvey, E&E News on January 18, 2019

•••••

Glaciers in the snowy mountains of western Canada are melting faster than they were a decade ago, according to scientists.

New research suggests that ice loss in the southern Coast Mountains of British Columbia is happening at nearly five times the rate it was in the early 2000s.

Overall, glaciers in western North America—not including Alaska—have lost about 117 billion tons of ice since 2000; they are currently losing about 12 billion tons a year.

•••••

The vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica get the most global attention when it comes to melting glaciers, largely because of their immense potential to contribute to sea-level rise. Greenland is currently the biggest loser, pouring nearly 300 billion tons of ice into the ocean each year, by recent estimates. But Antarctica is a rising concern—research published this week finds that the Antarctic ice sheet is losing about 250 billion tons of ice annually, and the melt rate seems to be accelerating (Climatewire, Jan. 15).

Still, Greenland and Antarctica aren’t the only important frozen places on Earth. Glaciers exist in many regions, from the Americas to the Swiss Alps to the Himalayas. Scientists are finding that many of these glaciers are also melting and retreating, likely in response to rising temperatures.

And while most of them aren’t likely to make much of a dent in global sea-level rise—in part because many mountain glaciers don’t empty into the oceans—these losses are still important. Many are a critical source of fresh water, helping to feed the streams and rivers that wildlife and human communities depend on.

As the glaciers shrink, experts worry that these water supplies could begin to dry up. So keeping close tabs on melt rates, and the factors that influence them, can help communities plan for the future.

•••••

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/01/greeland-ice-melting-four-times-faster-than-thought-raising-sea-level/

Greenland’s ice is melting four times faster than thought—what it means

By Stephen Leahy
PUBLISHED January 21, 2019

•••••

Greenland, the world’s biggest island, appears to have hit a tipping point around 2002-2003 when the ice loss rapidly accelerated, said lead author Michael Bevis, a geoscientist at Ohio State University. By 2012 the annual ice loss was “unprecedented” at nearly four times the rate in 2003, Bevis said in an interview.

•••••

https://www.foxnews.com/science/antarctic-ice-is-melting-six-times-faster-than-it-did-in-the-1980s-and-could-destabilize-glaciers

By Chris Ciaccia | Fox News
Jan. 15, 2019

An alarming new study shows that ice in Antarctica is melting more than six times faster than it did in the 1980s, including areas that were thought to be relatively stable and resistant to change.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that Antarctic ice melting between 1979 to 2017 raised global sea levels more than 1.4 centimeters and the ice loss is accelerating dramatically — a key indicator of human-caused climate change.

•••••

Pfizer CEO gets 61% pay raise—to $27.9 million—as drug prices continue to climb

Beth Mole - 3/16/2018, 11:45 AM

As drug giant Pfizer Inc. hiked the price of dozens of drugs in 2017, it also jacked up the compensation of CEO Ian Read by 61 percent, putting his total compensation at $27.9 million, according to financial filings reported by Bloomberg.

•••••

The 61 percent raise comes after a string of separate reports noting drug price increases by Pfizer. In January, FiercePharma reported an analysis finding that Pfizer implemented 116 price hikes just between this past December 15 and January 3 of this year. The list price increases ranged from 3 percent to 9.46 percent. The analysts noted that Pfizer increased the price of 20 drugs by 9.44 percent. Those included Viagra, Pristiq, Lipitor, and Zoloft, which are available as generics, as well as Chantix.

Additionally, Pfizer had increased the prices of 91 drugs by an average of 20 percent in just the first half of 2017, according to data first reported by Financial Times. That included two waves of price hikes, one in January and the other on June 1.

That echoes the pattern seen in 2016, 2015, and 2014, according to a report by STAT. In June of 2016, Pfizer raised the list prices of its medicines by an average of 8.8 percent. That followed an average 10.4 percent raise in list prices in January of that year.

•••••

The 61 percent raise comes after a string of separate reports noting drug price increases by Pfizer. In January, FiercePharma reported an analysis finding that Pfizer implemented 116 price hikes just between this past December 15 and January 3 of this year. The list price increases ranged from 3 percent to 9.46 percent. The analysts noted that Pfizer increased the price of 20 drugs by 9.44 percent. Those included Viagra, Pristiq, Lipitor, and Zoloft, which are available as generics, as well as Chantix.

Additionally, Pfizer had increased the prices of 91 drugs by an average of 20 percent in just the first half of 2017, according to data first reported by Financial Times. That included two waves of price hikes, one in January and the other on June 1.

That echoes the pattern seen in 2016, 2015, and 2014, according to a report by STAT. In June of 2016, Pfizer raised the list prices of its medicines by an average of 8.8 percent. That followed an average 10.4 percent raise in list prices in January of that year.