Terms: dice
Matches: 3    Displayed: 2

Categories

• Social Studies > Current Events Archives > Politics > USA 2011
• Science > Catastrophic Climate Change > Catastrophic Climate Change
• Social Studies > Current Events > Environment

Specific Results

1. -09-18-12 Editorial: Time for an Intervention (Wall Street Journal)
   Conservative Peggy Noonan comments on the current status of the Romney campaign.
   
   "The central problem revealed by the tape is Romney’s theory of the 2012 election. It is that a high percentage of the electorate receives government checks and therefore won’t vote for him, another high percentage is supplying the tax revenues and will vote for him, and almost half the people don’t pay taxes and presumably won’t vote for him."
   
   "My goodness, that’s a lot of people who won’t vote for you. You wonder how he gets up in the morning."
   
   "This is not how big leaders talk, it’s how shallow campaign operatives talk: They slice and dice the electorate like that, they see everything as determined by this interest or that. They’re usually young enough and dumb enough that nobody holds it against them, but they don’t know anything. They don’t know much about America."
   
   "We are a big, complicated nation. And we are human beings. We are people. We have souls. We are complex. We are not data points. Many things go into our decisions and our political affiliations."
   
   "You have to be sophisticated to know that. And if you’re operating at the top of national politics, you’re supposed to be sophisticated." 09-12

2. -Terrifying New Math on Global Warming (RollingStone.com)
   The global leaders have determined that 2 degrees Centigrade (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is the most global temperature change we can have without triggering a catastrophe: "All told, 167 countries responsible for more than 87 percent of the world's carbon emissions have signed on to the Copenhagen Accord, endorsing the two-degree target.”
   
   "Some context: So far, we've raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.) Given those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target."
   
   "But, in fact, computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere. That means we're already three-quarters of the way to the two-degree target." 12-13