Monday, August 03, 2020


How some Black Americans are finding solace in African spirituality

Between the pandemic and protests, practitioners of African religions are welcoming the community and liberation their traditions can bring.

By Nylah Burton Jul 31, 2020

Porsche Little, a Brooklyn-based artist, diviner, and aborisha — or someone who serves the Orisha, a group of spirits central to the Yoruba and other African Diaspora religions — says that she has received a huge increase in requests for divinations and readings throughout the pandemic  .https://www.instagram.com/p/CBlk-9tjEMP/?utm_source=ig_embed



“There’s so much happening right now in the world to everyone, and I know for certain that all of this is happening for a reason,” she says. “A lot of people are stuck in the house and can’t really make sense of their lives, but that’s what I’m here for.”


Little says when she counsels people in her community these days, they specifically want to talk about challenges arising from this tumultuous time we’re living in. Between a terrifying pandemic, a major racial reckoning, an existential crisis that climate change presents, and a government that fails to address any of these things, some Black people are turning to African and Black Diaspora traditions as a means of comfort, community, healing, and liberation.

“With the pandemic and the anxiety and the fear and all of those emotions that all of us are dealing with right now … in the beginning my spiritual practice helped keep me connected and grounded. It helped me understand this moment in the larger context,” says Akissi Britton, an assistant professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University and Lucumí priestess for 36 years.

The Black Diaspora has been through centuries of struggle, resistance, and joy since being scattered from our original homelands. And through it all, many of us have connected with those original practices — food, family structures, languages — as a way of healing and building community with each other. The same goes for African and Black Diasporic spirituality, like the Yoruba, Lucumí, and Santería traditions; many practitioners of these religions offer a different type of healing, one that is removed from traditionally Westernized versions, which generally stress individualism and independence. African traditions, instead, are reliant upon collectivism, strong communities, and healthy interdependence.

Most of these traditions revolve around Orisha (sometimes referred to as Orisa, or Òrìṣà in the Yoruba language, or Orixá in Latin America), a group of spirits from the Yoruba religion that provide guidance. Yoruba and other practitioners are often connected to one Orisha, usually called their guardian — like Oshun, the goddess of love, fertility, and success, and Babalú-Aye, Orisha of healing, including against airborne diseases that can cause epidemics. People who seek practitioners like Little are looking for guidance, which comes from rituals that invoke the Orisha, like baths or offerings and sometimes the reading of tarot cards. Sessions and ceremonies are often private and individualized.

Britton says that growing up in the Afro-Cuban Lucumí religion, which is derived from the Yoruba tradition, gave her a fulfilling sense of self. “I am not separated from my Orisa, from my ancestors, from the spirits, as well as from my community,” she says. “When my sense of self is much broader and attached to other things, I don’t feel so isolated. I don’t feel so alone, like I’m trying to figure it out on my own.”

Britton spiritually counsels others, but she encourages them to seek therapy if they can, too; Lucumí priestesses are not necessarily trained therapists, psychiatrists, and psychologists. Britton has sought out therapy for herself, and says that it works well with her spiritual practice. Often in therapy, she says, “I have gotten information that my ancestors and Orisa have given to me, which is just confirmation.”

Jo, a former student of Britton’s and an Afro-Boricua artist and community organizer, says that the Lucumí religion offered her healing after a tumultuous relationship with both race and religion as a child. Growing up with a white mother and in the Christian church, Jo had little connection to her father’s Puerto Rican family. Still, she was always drawn to the beauty of the complex cultural practices in the Boricua community.

Early in her life, Jo says, she didn’t receive much affection from the people who were “supposed to love” her, and instead she experienced a lot of pain. She completely rejected Christianity and religion altogether, until she found strength and healing in Lucumí. Although she didn’t come to Lucumí until adulthood, she feels much of it has always been with her.

“In some weird way, I always felt protected,” she says. “My angels and ancestors have always been the ones to bring me that feeling. As an adult, I was led right back to the same innate practices I believed in when I was young. I reconnected with the voices and knowings I had turned away from for so long. And it changed my life.”
The liberation in connecting with African spirituality

For practitioners of African spirituality, healing often comes in the form of liberation and resistance. These traditions are made even more pressing considering the centuries-long attempts by European slave owners, colonists, and neo-colonists to suppress and demonize these religions. And now, in a time when America’s racist foundation has been pushed to the foreground, seeking solace in this connection feels especially poignant.

During slavery, Christianity was used to justify the horrific practice. As such, the enslaved were often forbidden from practicing their indigenous religions, and other religions like Islam. Even in places like Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, and Trinidad, European colonists and slave masters attempted to obliterate the humanity and autonomy of enslaved Africans, Britton says. Many in the Black Diaspora embraced Christianity, finding a different sort of liberation in a religion meant to oppress them — a radical tradition that continues today, especially in the African American Episcopal Church (AME).

However, as a form of resistance, other enslaved Africans syncretized their indigenous religions with Christianity, creating traditions like Santería, Vodun, and Hoodoo. For instance, the word Santería means “honor to saints,” and the religion is infused with the Spanish Catholicism that was indoctrinated into enslaved Africans early on. In fact, some practitioners correspond Orishas with Catholic saints — Eleguá, associated with roads and paths, corresponds with Saint Anthony, the patron saint of travelers and lost things — while others believed in removing the Catholic component altogether, as they saw the European influences as antithetical to goals of decolonization and autonomy.

But syncretizing practices wasn’t a matter of happenstance. “[Africans’] ingenuity, their creativity, their brilliance allowed them to maintain certain practices from home while masking them in the practices that Europeans insisted upon,” Britton says. Santería was “the masking behind the saints … that in itself is a liberation practice,” she says.

Britton points out that the Haitian Revolution — the only successful slave revolt and an event that led to the creation of the first free Black republic — while not specifically Lucumí, was “the coming together of Africans, different ethnic groups too, that had a ceremony that inspired and gave strength for the revolution that made it.”

“Africans and their descendants [have] refused to allow Europeans slave masters and colonialists to dictate their full humanity,” Britton says. “This gave them a very strong sense of identity, inspiration, spiritual grounding that was liberatory in the sense that it allowed them to think differently and understand themselves differently than the dominant models do.”

Little, who is studying Ifá and Lucumí traditions, says honoring Orisha and her ancestors helps her connect with her past before enslavement and colonization. She has been following the path to become an initiated priestess, which is mostly focused on immersing oneself in community as they guide you, something that can feel like coming home for so many Black people. “I spent a lot of my life wondering who I was, and where I came from, but now I don’t question that. It has truly reconnected me with not only my roots but with people that I’ve known from past lives,” she says. “There’s a certain power that comes with remembering where you came from.”

Because of the oppression people in the Black Diaspora faced, however, stigma against African spirituality exists today. The Roman Catholic Church has often viewed these practices as akin to demon worship. I know in my own family, some people see these practices as evil or dangerous. Others embrace it.

Little says that we should interrogate those ingrained beliefs and where they come from, particularly relating to Christianity and other religions closely related to “conquest, murder, homophobia, sexism, and slavery amongst so many other forms of violence.” For Little, it’s worth questioning why some in the diaspora have been taught that African religion, which she says “connects you with your personal power, identity and lineage,” is evil. She suggests that “people need to decolonize their own minds and then see what serves them best.”

Ruqaiyyah Beatty, who grew up practicing Christianity, Islam, and other other African religions, is a now practitioner of Ifá, a Yoruba religion and system of divination. She says that through her practice, she was able to find healing through connection. “I was able to connect to Nigeria, it gave me a global network of spirituality, divine guidance, family, and love, and I was able to create and sustain a great relationship to god,” she says.

For those looking to get involved with African spiritual traditions, Britton stresses that research is key. She suggests reading books by independent scholar John Mason, who wrote Black Gods — Orisa Studies in the New World, which discusses 13 Orisha, including their symbols, personal characteristics, philosophical values, animal familiars, and feast days.

She also says it’s important to enter these spaces from a place of respect, seeking mentorship and accountability, and above all, community. “You cannot do this by yourself,” she stresses. The best way to guard against misinformation, Britton says, is to go slow, research, and talk to people.

While African spirituality can keep us connected during a time that can feel especially isolating, Little says, it can also keep us empowered. “I just want people to know that although there is a higher power, remember that you have power as well. I want us all collectively to start using our intuitions ... and to question everything.”

Nylah Burton is a Denver-based writer. She covers mental health, social justice, and identity. You can follow her on Twitter.
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The NYPD unit that snatched a protester off the street has been accosting people for years

The plainclothes NYPD Warrant Squad that “kidnapped” a Black Lives Matter protester, explained.
By Katelyn Burns  

Black Lives Matter protesters in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, on July 12, 2020.
 Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images

A silver minivan had been driving just ahead of a group of Black Lives Matter protesters in Manhattan Tuesday night when it came to a sudden stop. Five men in plain T-shirts and cargo shorts came pouring out of the vehicle and grabbed a young woman in the crowd off of her skateboard. They then violently placed her into the van, driving off, leaving surrounding protesters confused and upset about what just happened.
To some observers, it looked like a kidnapping; in video clips, protesters are seen surging forward, trying to intervene. Then, immediately, a group of about a dozen uniformed police on bikes circle the van to push people away.
The men in the van, it turns out, were plainclothes officers from the New York Police Department’s Warrant Squad, and they were detaining a young woman who was later identified as Nikki Stone, an 18-year-old homeless trans girl. An NYPD spokesperson, Sergeant Jessica McRorie, told Vox, “The NYPD had probable cause to arrest her for five previous crimes,” which included allegations of vandalizing police cameras with stickers and paint around City Hall Park in Manhattan.
The NYPD said that while officers were detaining Stone, protesters assaulted them by throwing rocks and bottles. But video of the incident shows only one bottle rolling around on the ground in the aftermath. Protesters who witnessed the incident disputed the police narrative.
“None of that happened whatsoever,” Clara Kraebber, a 20-year-old Oxford student told Gothamist. “We literally turned the corner and were met with a line of police who attacked us without warning.”
The incident left many asking why a violent police abduction was necessary over alleged vandalism. It has also prompted new questions about police abuse in the wake of federal officers in Portland, Oregon, similarly snatching protesters off the street.
Several prominent New York City elected officials decried Stone’s arrest on Twitter. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) tweeted, “There is no excuse for snatching women off the street and throwing them in unmarked vans.” House Judiciary Chair Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) also shared video of the Tuesday arrest on Twitter, calling it “terrifying” and “unacceptable” while demanding an explanation.
New York City Council member Carlina Rivera, who tweeted the following morning that Stone had been released from police custody, said that she would be exploring legislation to change the NYPD’s use of plainclothes officers in unmarked cars making arrests. A GoFundMe to assist Stone, whose nickname is “Stickers,” has raised over $42,000 as of Friday morning to help her find housing.
However, the unit that made the arrest — the NYPD Warrant Squad — was not created as some new policing tactic in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that have swept the nation in recent months. It’s a shadowy group of plainclothes officers who have been detaining persons of interest in the city for decades. Until Tuesday night’s arrest, many New Yorkers were unaware of the squad’s existence, and yet taking suspects into unmarked vehicles — especially in Black and brown communities — has been a longtime tactic of the squad, legal experts and advocates say.

The alarming tactics of the NYPD Warrant Squad

The NYPD Warrant Squad is a remnant of the department’s expansion into counterterrorism in the wake of 9/11 under then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani. These days, however, according to several people with knowledge of the squad’s tactics, it focuses less on counterterrorism and more on rounding up persons of interest for the department.
Like in the incident seen in the video of Stone, officers from the squad (or, perhaps more accurately, squads) typically operate in plainclothes, with nothing identifying them as police, and utilize unmarked vehicles. At its inception, the squad was meant to be a tactical unit to apprehend the city’s most dangerous wanted criminals. Appearing in plainclothes added to the element of surprise when taking on a potentially armed and wanted suspect. (An NYPD spokesperson did not respond to Vox’s request for comment regarding the purpose and actions of the squad.)
Nearly every precinct in the city has its own warrant squad, which is typically part of a precinct’s detective squad, Jennvine Wong, a staff attorney for the Cop Accountability Project at the Legal Aid Society, told Vox. Over the past 15 years, the Warrant Squad, along with the NYPD’s anti-crime unit, has developed a reputation in the city’s Black and brown neighborhoods for using plainclothes and unmarked vehicles to disappear or accost people off the street. The anti-crime unit’s reputation was so bad that in June NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea disbanded it, reassigning officers to other units. And both units’ secretive tactics are so common that some lower-income neighborhoods have developed a nickname for these officers: “jump-out boys.”
“Jump-out boys is a term that describes undercover non-identifiable cops,” said writer and criminal justice organizer Josmar Trujillo, who lives in Spanish Harlem in Manhattan. “But you know that they’re cops [by] the cars that they drive and what they look like, usually with the cargo shorts and the Under Armour and the steroid arms. They just jump out on people.”
According to Trujillo, the squad has strayed far from its original purpose. “The problem with the Warrant Squad is that oftentimes they’re framed as catching really dangerous people,” he told Vox. “But most of the warrants in New York City historically have been for low-level misdemeanor [crimes] and under.”
Several years ago, the city revealed that the NYPD had over a million open warrants. With so many open warrants, the police couldn’t possibly arrest everyone; Trujillo said officers would therefore sometimes round people up just to meet an arrest quota.
After years of speculation from critics of the police, in 2015 the New York Daily News reported that Staten Island officers were in fact given arrest quotas to meet. A 2015 Vice report detailed how the Warrant Squad frequently raids homeless shelters, seemingly to meet those quotas, waiting until the middle of the night when potential detainees must be inside the facility for the night or they lose their spot.
“You’re disoriented and angry,” Jonathan Allen, who sometimes stayed in the city’s Wards Island shelter, told Vice at the time about his experience with the squad. “You’re asking, ‘What’s going on?’ Then they crush you into the vans like sardines.”
Maryanne Kaishian, senior policy counsel and staff attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services, told Vox that defense attorneys would often meet with clients and ask about how they were detained, and the response is that the “jump-out boys” appeared suddenly and physically pulled them into an unmarked car. And they don’t even necessarily need a judge-signed warrant to do so.
“Often what happens is people are arrested on mechanisms called [Investigation Cards or I-Cards]. This is not an arrest warrant. It is not signed by a judge,” Kaishian said. I-Cards are issued for persons of interest to investigators, she said, but they also present an opportunity for police to detain people and get around the hassle of getting a judge to sign off on a legitimate warrant.
“It’s an internal piece of information that’s shared amongst the members of the NYPD describing the person to be arrested and saying that another cop has probable cause to make the arrest, which then they argue confers probable cause to any officer that might encounter that person,” Kaishian said.
But Wong wasn’t sure how often the squad picks up people based on I-Cards. “The Warrant Squad should only be effectuating arrest if there’s actually a warrant,” she said. “So it could be a bench warrant from criminal court or an arrest warrant. They almost never have an arrest warrant. It’s usually just for bench warrants.”
Bench warrants are issued if a person misses a court date without an excuse, while an arrest warrant is signed by a judge and allows police to arrest and detain a suspect accused of a specific crime. (An NYPD spokesperson also did not respond to a question from Vox over whether they had a warrant for Stone’s arrest or whether the officers detained her based on an I-Card.)
There are the protocols for the Warrant Squad’s arrests that are shaky, criminal justice reform advocates say, and then there are the tactics. The prospect of plainclothes officers roaming the city and disappearing people off the street without potential judicial oversight raises serious constitutional issues.
The squad’s lack of clear, observable identifiers may help them capture unsuspecting persons of interest, but a sudden, potentially violently arrest is often disproportionate to the crime they are wanted for. And any physical reaction to what amounts to a kidnapping can draw charges of resisting arrest or assaulting an officer.
“When a person is accosted by surprise, they have a natural reaction. Someone will run, they’ll fight, they’ll yank their arms away from someone who’s trying to pull them into a car,” said Kaishian. “These acts were often charged as resisting arrest or obstructions of governmental administration. So in addition to the charge for the warrant or the I-Card that was issued, even if they caught the wrong person, the person that they grabbed would be subjected to additional charges simply for responding to that terrifying situation.”

These “kidnapping” tactics have been used for years, but often out of sight of white people

The practice of law enforcement officers snatching protesters off the street most recently gained widespread attention earlier this month in Portland, Oregon. Over the course of several days of intense protests, federal agents were caught on camera “disappearing” protesters into unmarked vans before whisking them away to detention.
To be released by federal agents, ProPublica reported Tuesday, protesters were forced to sign an order which stated they were not allowed to engage in further protests.
The practice was widely denounced by Democratic elected officials across the country — including by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who first won office in 2014 promising criminal justice reform.
But when faced with his own police department using the very same “secret police” tactics in his own city, de Blasio waffled. “I think it was the wrong time and the wrong place to effectuate that arrest,” he said of Stone’s arrest at a press conference Wednesday. “Anything that even slightly suggests that is, to me, troubling and it’s the kind of thing we don’t want to see in this city. ... This is not Portland.”
The mayor promised to discuss the arrest with Dermot Shea, the NYPD commissioner, but also said he would not push to discipline the officers involved. However, the Stone incident was not a one-off and the Warrant Squad’s tactics have been used for decades in the city’s Black and brown neighborhoods. It’s only now, after a white woman was grabbed on camera in midtown Manhattan, that more people have taken notice of the squad.
“People have created the space for you now to question the validity of policing at a more fundamental level,” Trujillo said. “If the NYPD is willing to do this to someone who’s participating in an organized demonstration, what do you think that they’ve been doing for years when no one’s been looking in housing projects in the Bronx? If you’re outraged over the things you’re seeing on video right now, that’s just like a fraction of it.”
But creating systemic change within the NYPD has proven difficult through the years. Often, “reform” has simply meant changing the name of a historically abusive unit which can then just continue on until the public discovers it again and calls for more reform. A report by the Intercept in June detailed the NYPD’s “shell game” of disbanding units only to replicate them later with a new name.
“You can say ‘abolish the Warrant Squad’ or disband it, kind of like the anti-crime unit was disbanded,” Trujillo said. But he also points out that before the anti-crime unit became notorious for brutal tactics, the city’s street crime unit was operating in a similar way. The street crime unit was disbanded in 2002 while it was tied up in litigation over the Amadou Diallo shooting, a 23-year-old immigrant who was shot 41 times by NYPD officers in 1999, only to be recreated again within the anti-crime unit.
The issue is these units — and their tactics — are baked into the city’s legal system. When de Blasio or Shea decline to discipline officers, it’s tacit approval for abuses of power, reform advocates say. When district attorneys decline to prosecute abusive officers, it only reinforces the NYPD’s impunity.
In other words, there’s plenty of political blame to go around. “This isn’t just Portland inspired,” Eliza Orlins, a candidate for Manhattan district attorney and a career public defender, told Vox. “This is something that has been going on for years and that’s because the Manhattan DA Cy Vance has let the cops run wild without any accountability.” (Vance’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Vox.)
Wong agrees that prosecutors in the city are complicit with condoning abusive police tactics. “While there may be individual prosecutors who take their ethical obligations very seriously about disclosing everything you need to know about officers and these kind of tactics, my overwhelming experience with this office is that their prosecutors are going to hide that information for as long as possible,” she said. “They are going to, in a way, be willfully ignorant about it so they have plausible deniability.”
This is why many reform advocates are calling for defunding the police, or at least reimagining what the police does. And it’s clear to Trujillo that abolishing police units cannot be a one-time deal; it has to be a long-term process to make sure that police and prosecutors don’t just reinvent the wheel when everyone stops paying attention.
“It’s important to have baseline demands [like abolishing the Warrant Squad], but it’s also important to keep challenging ourselves,” he said. We need to “make sure that, if the police are trying to be two steps ahead of us, we have to be three steps ahead of them.”
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The most notorious act of protest for women’s suffrage

In 1913, suffragette Emily Davison disrupted a major horse race in the name of winning British women the vote.

By Coleman Lowndes Jul 27, 2020,

British suffragettes in the early 20th century used spectacle and drama to draw attention to their fight to win women the vote. They delivered public speeches, marched, displayed colorful banners, and got thrown in jail, all in an effort to pressure legislators to extend suffrage to women.

But after a violent clash with police in November 1910 — a day known as “Black Friday” — their tactics changed. They began committing random acts of property damage, smashing windows, setting fire to buildings, and even destroying fine art on public display.

The most radical act of destruction came in 1913, when militant suffragette Emily Wilding Davison threw herself under King George V’s racehorse at the Epsom Derby. She died of her injuries and became a suffragette martyr.

Davison’s funeral procession ultimately ended up being one of the largest (and last) major demonstrations by the British suffragettes. World War I interrupted their protests, and women over 30 won the vote in 1918, when the war ended.

Watch the video above to learn more about the suffragette movement. You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.


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Scientists have backed away from the worst-case climate scenario — and the best one too

There’s a range of possibilities for how much the earth will warm. A new study narrows the likely window by the largest margin in decades.

By Umair Irfan Jul 31, 2020, 
Oil refineries like this one in Corpus Christi, Texas, are heating up the planet. Roschetzky Photography/Shutterstock


The basic mechanics of climate change are simple: Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat. More carbon dioxide means more heat is trapped across the Earth, causing it to warm up.

But scaled up over the entire planet, these physical processes interact in a myriad of complex and sometimes unexpected ways. The Arctic reflects sunlight back into space. Clouds in some circumstances trap heat, and in others, they cool the region beneath them. Forests store a big chunk of carbon, but they’re being burned, cut down, and dying off from warming. The ocean soaks up a huge amount of heat and carbon dioxide, but it can’t absorb it forever. And these effects are not all linear; some may taper off as the planet heats up while others may suddenly accelerate.

That’s why scientists for decades have struggled to answer the basic question of how much the earth will eventually warm up for a given amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The term for this parameter is equilibrium climate sensitivity. The classic way of framing it is asking what happens if we double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere compared to levels prior to the industrial revolution. Back in the 1800s, it was about 280 parts per million. Today, it’s about 413 ppm. Some estimate it could reach 560 ppm as soon as 2050 without major mitigation steps.

A team of 25 scientists from around the world recently took a stab at answering the question of how sensitive the Earth’s climate is to carbon dioxide and came up with range of possibilities. Their results, published July 22 in Reviews of Geophysics, showed that the planet would most likely warm on average between 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit and 7 degrees Fahrenheit (2.6 degrees Celsius and 3.9 degrees Celsius) if atmospheric carbon dioxide were to double.

This is still a wide span, but it’s much smaller than prior estimated range of 2.7 and 9.1 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius) that had been the reigning benchmark for decades.

The new, narrower estimate for climate sensitivity has huge implications, not just for climate science, but for how humanity prepares for a warming world. It shows that the worst-case-scenario is not as dire as previously thought, but also that the best possibilities are still quite grim. In particular, it means that it will be almost impossible to hit the main target of the Paris climate agreement, limiting warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) this century, by chance; it will require aggressive action to reduce emissions with even less margin for delay.
Why climate sensitivity is so important to our understanding of climate change

In 1979, the National Research Council put together a report looking at the ways increasing carbon dioxide emissions would impact the world. The researchers behind the report understood even then that it would be a complicated task.

“In order to address this question in its entirety, one would have to peer into the world of our grandchildren, the world of the 21st century,” they wrote. “A complete assessment of all the issues will be a long and difficult task.”

It was this report that came up with the climate sensitivity range between 2.7 and 9.1 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius). Now that we’re in the 21st century, how much has our understanding of climate science improved?

On many fronts, the gains in climate science have been vast and substantial. New measurements from ice cores, satellite monitoring, and sophisticated computer models have yielded new insights in the the climate of the past, present, and future. Scientists are even getting close to being able to see carbon dioxide emissions in real time.Scientists have found that the record flooding in Houston, Texas, after Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was worsened by climate change. Yin Bogu/Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images

However, until recently, the estimates of climate sensitivity barely budged. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a team of scientists assembled by the United Nations, came up with the same estimate climate sensitivity in 2014 as the National Research Council came up with in 1979. But not for lack of trying.

“There have been a number of research studies over the years that have looked at the climate sensitivity range,” said Donald Wuebbles, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois and an author of the 2014 IPCC report who was not involved in the new paper, in an email. “The best of those studies had not been able to reduce this sensitivity from the range much differently than the traditional range of 1.5-4.5 C.”

Such a wide range for climate sensitivity makes it much harder to plan for the future, from how much oceans will rise, to where we can grow crops best, to what places will become too hot to inhabit.

So a new smaller climate sensitivity range is significant. Since it’s a foundational parameter of climate models, it can yield a more precise range for what to expect as the world continues warming.
It took decades of advances in science to narrow the boundaries of climate sensitivity

Then how did this team of researchers chip away at a problem that has vexed climate scientists for more than 40 years?

It wasn’t any one finding in particular. Rather, the team took the colossal body of research that has built up in the intervening decades to create their sensitivity estimate. They drew on paleoclimate records dating back 3 million years, observational temperature records over the last 150 years, and a new generation of climate models.

“The single biggest factor was the ability to combine estimates from these three independent lines of evidence,” explained Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute and a coauthor of the new paper.

Baked into these lines of evidence is a better understanding of underlying phenomena like how albedo — the reflectiveness of the earth’s surface — changes as the air warms, how aerosols form and reflect sunlight, and how natural variability in the climate factors in.

Hausfather added that in recent years, scientists have gained to insight into feedback loops in the climate that can enhance warming. That means that over time, greenhouse gas emissions will pack a bigger punch for the climate.

“We’d expect a bit more warming, all things being equal, in the future from emissions than we have today,” he said.

The resulting estimate of climate sensitivity — 4.7 degrees to 7 degrees Fahrenheit (2.6 degrees Celsius and 3.9 degrees Celsius) — may seem small, but it represents a drastic shift from the world as we know it today. In an editorial in the Hill, Hausfather pointed out that during the last ice age 20,000 years ago, the planet was on average 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) cooler than today. That led to so much ice across the planet that global sea levels were 300 feet lower than they are today.Scientists examine an ice core drilled from a glacier. These sample provide a window in the past climate of the planet. Philippe Desmazes/AFP via Getty Images

It’s also important to remember that the climate is already changing, providing some real-world results for how the climate system responds to carbon dioxide. The world has warmed more than 1 degree Celsius since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Sea levels have risen more than 8 inches since 1880, and the rate is accelerating.

Even if humanity were to halt emissions now, there is still inertia in the climate system and the planet would likely continue warming by a certain amount.

And while much of climate discussions center on changes in average temperatures, those shifted averages obscure the fact that there can be drastic increases in the extremes. Scientists have found signals of human caused emissions in the growing intensity of hurricanes, the frequency of heat waves, and the drying of some forests, a key ingredient in wildfires.

Could scientists narrow the boundaries of climate sensitivity even more?

“It’s difficult,” Wuebbels said. “I would expect though that after another decade (or so) of climate changes and the observations of climate relevant processes that the range should be able to be reduced further.”

However, the world can’t wait another decade for better information to act, and Ploy Pattanun Achakulwisut, a climate scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, said the new findings are a call to action.

“This study is an important milestone for the climate science community, and only serves to strengthen what the public and policymakers have known for decades: that we need to transition away from fossil fuels,” she wrote in an email. Achakulwisut added that the results emphasize the need for leaders to create policies to speed up the move toward low-carbon energy.
Human action remains the greatest uncertainty for the global climate

While the new climate sensitivity estimate gives the world a clearer vision of the future, it is a future that can still be altered by our actions.

Indeed, the biggest factor shaping the future of the climate, and the greatest source of uncertainty, is what humans will do about it in the coming years. Power plants, farms, aircraft, trucks, buildings, deforestation, and other human-sources collectively spew carbon dioxide into the air at a rate of 2.6 million pounds per second, making humans the dominant source of changes in the climate over the past 50 years. And that rate is accelerating: More than half of all human greenhouse gas emissions occurred in just the last 30 years.

The question is how long this will continue and when the curve of carbon dioxide emissions will bend. However, like climate sensitivity, there has been some narrowing of what to expect in recent years. Current human greenhouse gas emissions are now much less likely to follow the most pessimistic trajectory, which assumes unchecked growth of fossil fuel combustion and little to no efforts to limit climate change.
Student call for action on climate change at protest in Brussels, Belgium. Alexandros Michailidis/Shutterstock

The dirtiest sources of energy are now declining, and some parts of the world are making progress to cut emissions while others have signed onto aggressive targets. But emissions are still rising, and limiting climate change demands cutting them drastically, and soon.

A 2018 report from the IPCC examined what people would have to do to meet the more aggressive target under the Paris climate agreement, limiting warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius. The report concluded that the world’s greenhouse gas emissions need to be half of where they are now by 2030, zero by 2050, and thereafter emissions would actually have to be removed from the atmosphere to stabilize the climate.

That goal is almost certainly out of reach. The emissions gap between where the world is and where it needs to be is only getting wider.

And now with the latest estimate of climate sensitivity, the low-end estimate of climate sensitivity has gone up, meaning there’s virtually no chance of staying below 2 degrees Celsius of warming if carbon dioxide concentrations reach 560 ppm. Even with the inherent uncertainties of these forecasts, these factors point toward a need for more concerted action to curb greenhouse gases.

“When it comes to climate, uncertainty is not our friend because the damages of climate change increase non-linearly,” Hausfather said. “Because there are some uncertainties we are never really going to be able to get rid of, it really suggests we need to be cautious about our emissions.”

The problem of dangerous levels of global warming can still be solved, but the easiest options are off the table, and the longer we wait, the harder it gets.
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Covid-19 is exposing inequalities in college sports. Now athletes are demanding change.

Hundreds of athletes are threatening to skip the upcoming season, unless economic and racial issues are addressed.

By Anya van Wagtendonk Aug 2, 2020, 
UCLA’s Elisha Guidry and USC’s Tyler Vaughns at a November 2019 Pac-12 game in Los Angeles. Jayne Kamin-Oncea/Getty Images


Several hundred college athletes have announced their intention to sit out the coming season as the coronavirus pandemic continues across the United States, and as confirmed case rates rise in almost every state.

Sunday, hundreds of football players from the Pac-12 Conference, which is made up of 12 Western schools, announced they would not participate in training camps or games this fall unless their conference negotiates with them on certain demands, including the implementation of health and safety procedures, creating protections for other conference sports, and addressing racial injustice.

That communal action — organized under the hashtag #WeAreUnited — describes the new push by college players as one of racial and economic justice. With respect to the coronavirus, it notes that Black college athletes, like Black Americans in general, will be disproportionately placed at risk of infection if conference leaders do not implement measures that will protect players against Covid-19.

But the athletes argue disparities in coronavirus outcomes also highlight existing inequalities that disproportionately hurt Black players, particularly those from low income homes. The players point out that they bring significant economic value to their conferences and colleges, while receiving almost no compensation themselves beyond scholarships that are contingent upon strict requirements of behavior and performance.

“Because NCAA sports exploit college athletes physically, economically and academically, and also disproportionately harm Black college athletes, #WeAreUnited,” the athletes’ statement reads in part. “Because we are being asked to play college sports in a pandemic in a system without enforced health and safety standards, and without transparency about COVID cases on our teams, the risks to ourselves, our families, and our communities, #WeAreUnited.”

According to Sports Illustrated, the players spent more than a month organizing before presenting their demands; they hope the threat of a boycott will lead to a “formal negotiation process” with their conference.

“The coronavirus has put a spotlight on a lot of the injustices in college athletics,” Valentino Daltoso, an offensive lineman at the University of California Berkeley, told Sports Illustrated. “The way to affect change and the way to get your voice heard is to affect the bottom line. Our power as players comes from being together. The only way to do this is to do something collectively.”
Briefly, what the Pac-12 athletes want

The Pac-12 athletes have four areas in which they want to see their conference make critical changes to its policies: health, non-revenue generating sports, racial justice, and financial matters. The changes would apply to both scholarship and walk-on athletes.

The health demands would primarily require the conference to make changes to limit the effects of the coronavirus, like allowing players to opt out of the season for the duration of the pandemic without losing their eligibility, and enacting minimal safety standards that cover “Covid-19 as well as serious injury, abuse and death.”

Second, the athletes want all sports governed by the conference to be given equal weight. They demand an end to “excessive pay” for NCAA administrators and coaches, including Larry Scott, the Pac-12 commissioner, arguing the reductions would allow for the funding of sports that do not generate as much revenue as football or basketball. They also suggest institutions with means use a portion of their endowments to cover some sports costs.

The group also wants to see the conference put some of its money — 2 percent of its revenue — toward supporting financial aid packages for Black students, as well as toward community initiatives. They propose starting a yearly summit for Black Pac-12 athletes, and demand the conference fund a a council populated by student-selected experts that would work toward eradicating racial inequality.

Finally, the group wants major changes to how revenue is distributed. They demand that half of the conference’s revenue be evenly distributed among its athletes and that players be allowed agents and the right to use their own names, images, and likenesses to earn money. And they have asked for guaranteed medical coverage for athletes for six years after their eligibility ends, for issues related to their sport, as well as the freedom to volunteer and pursue activities outside of sports as they choose while on their teams.
Race and economic issues have long been a part of college football

The unified front presented by the Pac-12 athletes represents a near-unprecedented level of solidarity among college athletes, who bring billions of dollars into their conferences and campuses, but face stringent requirements and receive no compensation beyond educational scholarships.

As Vox’s Jane Coaston has explained, there is a significant overlap between college sports and issues of racial justice, especially in football programs. Football powers entire athletic departments, Coaston writes, which translates to money and prestige for universities.

And college football is disproportionately fueled by Black athletes: Half of all Division 1 football players are Black, with higher numbers in the SEC and some other conferences. For this reason, as the Pac-12 statement says, issues that affect athletic programs disproportionately affect Black student athletes.

In part because of these demographics, college football players are uniquely poised to demand change on their campuses. While they do take on risk when they speak out against their programs, particularly with respect to losing their scholarships, they also are powerful when united, a fact schools are increasingly acknowledging.

“[C]ollege football programs are beginning to respond to demands from players — players on whom those programs rely,” Coaston writes. “That’s because in real-world terms, black college football players are part of an infrastructure that brings in billions of dollars to universities, cable networks, and sponsors — an entire industry, in fact.”

But college players have had limited access to the wealth that they accrue for their programs. They cannot benefit from being turned into a video game character, for example, or from sales of jerseys with their own names across the back.

The NCAA has repeatedly argued that players receive compensation in the form of their athletic scholarships, but those are also contingent on stringent standards of behavior and on performance, as well as on not getting injured.

As Coaston points out, college athletes attempting to leverage their power to address social issues is not new. In the 1960s and ’70s, players at institutions like Michigan State spoke out against racism, risking both college scholarships and, sometimes, professional career opportunities.

But the current moment is a singular one, with its confluence of a major civil rights movement and a global pandemic. As the coronavirus has shined a bright light on differential access to health care, education, and safe jobs — among many other issues — student athletes have found themselves with a unique opportunity to leverage their earning power to enact lasting change.

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism
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The US ambassador to Brazil reportedly asked Brazilian officials to help Trump’s reelection

Brazilian news reports say the ambassador asked for a “favor.” Democrats are demanding answers.

By Anya van Wagtendonk Aug 1, 2020, 
US ambassador Todd Chapman exits a 2018 meeting in Ecuador. Dolores Ochoa/AP


The Trump administration has been accused of attempting to pressure another foreign country into helping Trump’s reelection prospects, according to a letter from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

That letter cites Brazilian news articles that report US Ambassador to Brazil Todd Chapman pressured members of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration to lower ethanol tariffs in order to support President Donald Trump’s reelection efforts.

In the letter, Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Rep. Eliot Engel demands Chapman explain an article in which the ambassador is said to have asked for the tariffs to be lowered as a “favor” from the Brazilian government to the Trump reelection campaign.

“Iowa is the largest ethanol producer in the United States…and could be a key player in Trump’s election,” an article in the Brazilian newspaper O Globo reads, according to the letter. “Hence the importance – according to Chapman – for the Bolsonaro government to do the U.S. a favor.”

Beyond the report in O Globo, the New York Times notes, another Brazilian outlet, Estadão, published a similar story based on its own reporting, with its journalists finding that Chapman had made the request, and was rebuffed by government officials.

Alceu Moreira, a Brazilian congressman, also told the Times that Chapman “had made repeated references to the electoral calendar during a recent meeting the two had about ethanol.”

Engel has called for Chapman to respond to the reports by August 4, and for him to provide “any and all documents referring or related to any discussions” with Brazilian officials.

If the reports are accurate, the letter states, Chapman’s actions could be in violation of the Hatch Act, which prevents federal employees from engaging in certain political activities, such as partisan campaigning for candidates.

A State Department spokesperson said in a statement that Chapman’s efforts were part of a policy of pushing for lower tariffs in general, not narrowly focused on supporting an incumbent presidential campaign.

“Allegations suggesting that Ambassador Chapman has asked Brazilians to support a specific U.S. candidate are false,” the statement reads. “The United States has long been focused on reducing tariff barriers and will continue do so.”
Foreign interference marred the 2016 election. Requests for interference led to impeachment.

The reports are also of concern because of how closely they echo the request that led to Trump’s impeachment.

Last July, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to “do us a favor” during a phone call in which he asked the leader to look into the business dealings of Hunter Biden, the son of then-candidate, now presumed Democratic nominee Joe Biden. In that call, Trump appeared to condition military aid badly needed by Ukraine on Zelensky’s willingness to search for information that might be used to discredit Biden.

A congressional investigation into that call revealed the ways the Trump administration used traditional diplomatic channels — most notably the office of the US ambassador to the European Union — to forward that goal.

It isn’t clear whether Trump was involved in Chapman’s reported pressure campaign about ethanol, but as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp wrote during 2019’s impeachment hearings, the testimony of another of Trump’s ambassadors — former US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland — showed a willingness on Trump’s part “to use US foreign policy as a tool to cement his own hold on power.”

And that has Trump critics concerned about the Brazilian reports, with Engel warning Chapman in his letter, “Elections in the United States are for the American people and the American people only to decide.”

In delivering that warning, the letter explicitly links Chapman’s reported campaign to the 2016 election, the outcome of which foreign governments repeatedly attempted to sway, according to the results of a Senate investigation.

“Given the events of 2016, it is all the more important for U.S. ambassadors serving our country abroad to not insert themselves into U.S. elections or encourage foreign government officials from any branch of government to do so,” the letter reads.

This warning follows intelligence reports that find Russia has actively worked to disrupt November’s elections — as well as the Democratic presidential primary. But politicians and experts have warned that the US is not as prepared as it ought to be to combat such interference, leaving it vulnerable to meddling attempts not just by adversaries, but by also by Americans who, as Engel writes, “should know better.”
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Sunday, August 02, 2020

COVIDIOT
Gohmert Says He Will Take Hydroxychloroquine For COVID-19, Flouting FDA Warning
WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 06: U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) waits for U.S. President Donald Trump to speak to the media, one day after the U.S. Senate acquitted on two articles of impeachment, in the East Room of th... MORE
By Zoë Richards
|
July 30, 2020 8:43 a.m.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) said after testing positive for coronavirus Wednesday that he will take an anti-malaria drug as treatment, flouting the wisdom of experts who have cautioned against its use for COVID-19.

“My doctor and I are all in,” Gohmert said when asked if he had considered taking the hydroxychloroquine during an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Wednesday night.


Texas GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert told Sean Hannity Wednesday that "my doctor and I are all in," when asked if he had considered a hydroxychloroquine regimen following an announcement earlier in the day that the congressman had tested positive test for coronavirus. pic.twitter.com/xwPONXJc0D
TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) July 30, 2020


Gohmert said that he had received a text from a friend who was a doctor who just found out that he also had the virus “and he started the regimen too.” Gohmert said that he will begin taking the anti-malaria drug “in just a day or two.”

The remarks follow news that Gohmert, who has often refused to wear a mask around the Capitol, announced that he had tested positive for coronavirus.

In spite of warnings from the Federal Drug Administration and his own task force of health experts, President Donal Trump has continued to promote hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the virus, even retweeting Monday a video that falsely declared the drug was a cure for COVID-19. The video featured Stella Immanuel, a woman who call herself a doctor who has history of making false statements — including a claim that endometriosis is caused by sex with demons in dreams.

In a briefing Tuesday, when asked about doctor whose video was removed by several social media companies for spreading misinformation, Trump said Immanuel’s was a “very important voice” and called her “very impressive.”

In an ABC interview Tuesday, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said hat he is in agreement with the FDA, who recently revoked the emergency use authorization for the drug as treatment.

“The overwhelming, prevailing clinical trials that have looked at the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine have indicated that it is not effective in coronavirus disease,” Fauci said.
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