It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
Chickpeas identified as key crop for future food security
The Viennese authors of the study. Left to right: Anke Bellaire and Arindam Ghatak collected chickpea leaves from the field and measured the physiological parameters. Credit: Wolfram Weckwerth
Climate change has a negative impact on food security. An international research team led by Wolfram Weckwerth from the University of Vienna has now conducted a study to investigate the natural variation of different chickpea genotypes and their resistance to drought stress. The scientists were able to show that chickpeas are a drought-resistant legume plant with a high protein content that can complement grain cultivation systems even in urban areas.
The study is published in the Plant Biotechnology Journal.
Long periods of drought stress have become a reality in Central Europe due to climate change, and pose a major threat to plant productivity, harvests and therefore food security. At the same time, there is a decline in the use of plant genetic diversity, and the global food system has become more and more uniform. While there are approximately 7,000 edible crops, two-thirds of global food production is based on just nine crop species.
"This narrow genetic base can have several negative consequences, such as increased susceptibility of plants to diseases and pests, reduced resistance to factors such as drought and climate change, and increased economic fragility," explains molecular biologist Weckwerth.
"Maintaining adequate plant and genetic diversity is crucial for agriculture, which must adapt to future changing conditions. With our new study, we have taken an important step in this direction and looked at the chickpea as an important food of the future."
The chickpea is currently not one of the plants mentioned above on which the global diet is currently mainly based. Weckwerth's international research team has researched the natural variations of different chickpea genotypes and their resistance to drought stress and achieved promising results.
The team managed to grow many different chickpea varieties under drought stress in a field experiment in a Vienna city region, demonstrating that chickpeas are a great alternative legume plant with a high protein content that can complement grain farming systems in urban areas.
"The different varieties and wild types show very different mechanisms to deal with persistent drought stress. This natural genetic variability is particularly important in order to withstand climate change and ensure the survival of the plant," says Weckwerth.
"In our study, we used a stress susceptibility index (SSI) to assess the effects of drought stress on yield. This allowed us to identify genotypes that perform best and worst under stressful conditions. Our findings are crucial for the selection of genotypes for breeding drought-tolerant chickpeas," explains Palak Chaturvedi from the University of Vienna, lead author of the study. The team used artificial intelligence, multivariate statistics and modeling to identify markers and mechanisms for better resilience to drought stress.
"With their high protein content and their drought resistance, legumes such as chickpeas are a food of the future. Another advantage is that a higher proportion of legumes in a country's agricultural systems improves the overall efficiency of nitrogen use—this also makes agriculture more sustainable," says Weckwerth.
More information: Palak Chaturvedi et al, Natural variation in the chickpea metabolome under drought stress, Plant Biotechnology Journal (2024). DOI: 10.1111/pbi.14447
America, it seems, can't quit tariffs. Like corduroy and round glasses, these short-term taxes sometimes fall out of fashion. But before you know it, they're back in style—a quick fix deployed whenever foreign competitors seize a competitive advantage.
Tariffs have experienced a major renaissance over the last five years, at home and abroad. In the U.S., where the political divide seems to widen by the hour, something of a consensus has formed on this traditionally divisive issue. President Joe Biden has extended many of the levies, though not all, imposed during President Donald Trump's administration while also authorizing new tariffs.
If re-elected, Trump plans to implement a 10% tariff on all imported goods, 60% on goods from China. On the campaign trail, Vice-President Kamala Harris has said the proposed Trump tariffs would act as a "sales tax" on American families. However, she has not specified whether she would extend the Biden tariffs if elected president. On her campaign website, she vows to continue supporting "American leadership in semiconductors, clean energy, AI, and other cutting-edge industries of the future," while addressing "unfair trade practices from China or any competitor that undermines American workers."
In the study titled "Protect Me Not: the effects of tariffs on U.S. supply networks," Sina Golara, assistant professor of supply chain and operations management at Georgia State University's Robinson College of Business, and co-authors from Colorado State University, Arizona State University, and Kuwait University, urge politicians to exercise caution when it comes to tariffs.
The paper is published in the Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management.
Golara and co-authors acknowledge the levies can produce temporary benefits but assert that the long-term impact on the global flow of products is often overlooked and regularly misunderstood.
Rationales vary for the recent spate of tariffs, the study found, from protecting intellectual property proactively to responding in retaliatory ways against rogue actors like Russia, subject to bans on oil imports and exports ever since its invasion of Ukraine.
"While tariffs can provide some protection to certain industries, they can also create inefficiencies for the industries they were designed to protect, as well as for their supply chain partners," the study concluded.
Focusing on the implementation of tariffs by the U.S. in 2018, Golara and his colleagues traced "an overall negative impact" on firm value that led to a decrease in the value of domestic producers within the protected industries. The financial impact on firms in their supplier and customer industries was mixed.
"These findings demonstrate the ripple effect of unintended consequences that tariffs can lead to throughout supply chains, motivating further theoretical development and informing trade policy," the study asserts.
While tariffs may provide short-term relief, and perhaps a psychological lift to the public, they prevent companies from addressing the problems that led to market inequities in the first place, Golara said. Innovation suffers.
"A painkiller doesn't address the problem," he said. "It's just a temporary solution."
Economists have grown increasingly cool to tariffs. If carefully implemented, they occasionally yield positive results for vulnerable domestic industries, Golara acknowledged.
But most view tariffs as ineffective and outdated tools to correct a country's growing trade imbalance. This has led some to warn that tariffs typically end up harming the exporting country but also consumers and businesses from the importing nation.
Two recent tariffs, imposed in the pre-Trump era, support those findings.
In 2002, President George W. Bush raised tariffs on selected steel products in hopes of saving the U.S. steel industry. The move backfired. Longtime trading partners were outraged and threatened to retaliate against American-made goods. More jobs were lost than saved.
"We found there were 10 times as many people in steel-using industries as there were in steel-producing industries," former U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) told Politico in a 2018 interview. "They lost more jobs than exist in the steel industry."
Seven years after the steel tariff was imposed, President Barack Obama slapped a 35% levy on Chinese tires. The president would later boast the tariff saved 1,200 U.S. tire jobs and spurred a rise in U.S. tire production after a protracted decline.
But a 2012 review by the Peterson Institute of International Economics found that as a result of the tariffs, Americans ended up paying more for tires. The cost of Chinese-made tires rose 26%, and with less competition from China, domestic tire makers raised prices 3.2%.
Altogether, the increase in prices from the tire tariff cost Americans an extra $1.1 billion, which translated to an estimated 3,731 retail jobs lost, the Peterson study determined.
Golara said such unintended consequences typically accompany tariffs. Protecting one industry can cause ripple effects on other industries that supply or purchase their goods.
Golara and his associates focused on China, which has endured restrictions, funded by the politically popular CHIPS Act, on the integration of Chinese suppliers in semiconductor development. The 2018 tariffs were intended to protect America's manufacturing base. But did they?
Golara said the effects of the levies are much more complicated than those in power may have you believe.
"Their effectiveness is still up for debate," Golara said.
Tariffs are cyclical, Golara said, and there have been successful implementations that have yielded lasting benefits. "Protect Me Not" notes the 1964 "chicken tax" that insulated U.S. heavy truck manufacturers from significant foreign competition for over 50 years also helped the Ford F-150 truck to become the best-selling automobile in the U.S.
But the risks have become more pervasive, the study found. They can lead to an "increased political risk, supply uncertainty, a threat of retaliatory tariffs and the inability of politicians to optimally select a tariff rate and maintain it."
The 2018 tariffs, Golara and his colleagues found, increased costs by $51 billion per year, a burden carried primarily by U.S. companies and consumers.
"With such a high price tag, it is crucial for policymakers to understand the total impact of tariffs and whether they achieve their intended goals, and what their overall impact on supply chains can be," the researchers wrote.
The issue is further complicated by the interconnectivity between the U.S. and Chinese economies. Engaging in a trade war with your top trade partner, as China has been for much of the 21st century, is as counterproductive as it sounds, Golara said.
"In addition to hurting firms in the protected industries, retaliatory Chinese counter-tariffs also hurt non-protected U.S. firms, particularly those in the agricultural industry," the study found.
Hard questions must be asked going forward, said Golara.
If tariffs are adopted at all, an optimal tariff rate needs to be accurately calculated and "skillfully administered," temporarily until the industry can address its underlying shortcomings, Golara and colleagues concluded. The uncertainty that accompanied the 2018 tariff rollout, which saw rates abruptly increase from 10 to 25 percent, can't be repeated.
Will that happen?
"To be honest, all I see are partisan approaches," Golara said. "We have to move beyond that if we're going to continue deploying tariffs."
More information: Zachary S. Rogers et al, Protect me not: The effect of tariffs on U.S. supply networks, Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.pursup.2024.100897
‘Off the charts’: How Trump tariffs would shock US, world economies
Washington Post 16 Oct, 2024
“To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff. And it’s my favourite,” Trump said in Chicago on Tuesday. Photo / Getty Images
Former president Donald Trump is campaigning on the most significant increase in tariffs in close to a century, preparing an attack on the international trade order that would likely raise prices, hurt the stock market and spark economic feuds with much of the world.
Trump’s trade plans, a staple of his stump speeches, have fluctuated, but he consistently calls for steep duties to discourage imports and promote domestic production. The former president has floated “automatic” tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on every US trading partner, 60 percent levies on goods from China, and rates as high as 100, 200 or even 1,000 percent in other circumstances.
These proposals would go far beyond the disruptive trade wars of his first term even if they are only partially implemented. They would wrench the nation out of the system of global interdependence that arose in recent decades, making the US economy much more isolated and autonomous, like it was in the late 19th century. (Trump last week falsely claimed that the United States was never richer than in the 1890s, when it had high trade barriers.)
“To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff. And it’s my favourite,” Trump said in Chicago on Tuesday. “I’m a believer in tariffs.”
The consequences would be far-reaching: Americans would be hit by higher prices for grocery staples from abroad, such as fruit, vegetables and coffee. Domestic firms dependent on imports would need to either figure out new supply chains or raise costs for consumers. US manufacturers would almost certainly see sharp declines in orders from abroad as foreign nations impose retaliatory tariffs.
“We are talking about a plan of historic significance: It would be enormous, and the blowback would be even more enormous,” said Douglas A. Irwin, an economist at Dartmouth College who authored a 2017 book on the history of US trade policy. “This would stand way off the charts.”
Companies and governments around the world have begun preparing contingency plans for the potential Trump tariffs. Diplomats and business leaders from Latin America, Europe, Asia and even Canada have in recent weeks asked their US counterparts about Trump’s intentions and authorities, according to interviews with several domestic and international economic advisers, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private planning.
While some business leaders and congressional Republicans remain optimistic that the former president is engaged in election-year posturing, Trump has repeatedly insisted that tariffs represent an unmitigated positive for the US economy, recently calling them “the greatest thing ever invented.” Tariffs have been a constant bedrock of his economic agenda since he first ran in 2016, along with lower taxes, increased energy production and deregulation.
Trump says his plan would force other countries to back off what he has claimed are abusive trade practices. And while high tariffs could force many firms to move jobs and production to the United States to access the world’s largest market, doing so would come at a high, disruptive cost.
“The world economies are now so interwoven with each other - to rip and pull that apart would be incredibly disruptive to the US,” Irwin said. “It would really ripple through the economy in ways that are very hard to predict.”
Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign senior adviser, dismissed the nonpartisan and Wall Street assessments of the tariffs’ likely effects.
“Just like 2016, Wall Street and so-called expert forecasts said that Trump policies would result in lower growth and higher inflation, the media took these forecasts at face value, and the record was never corrected when actual growth and job gains widely outperformed these opinions,” Hughes said in a statement. “These Wall Street elites would be wise to review the record and acknowledge the shortcomings of their past work if they’d like their new forecasts to be seen as credible.” ‘We’re not talking about caviar’
Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), have defended higher tariffs as good for the working class, arguing they will bring back jobs to the United States that had moved abroad.
Trump’s plan would automatically apply a minimum tariff rate on imports from every country that trades with the United States, known as a universal tariff. The Coalition for a Prosperous America, which supports higher tariffs, has projected that a 10 percent universal tariff would generate 3 million additional jobs and lead to a surge in US manufacturing output. It would also bring in trillions in revenue to the federal coffers. Even as the economy overall has grown, US manufacturing has dramatically declined since the 1950s as a share of the workforce. Trump has said tariffs will bring those kinds of jobs back to the United States.
On Tuesday, however, Trump said that 10 percent tariffs would be insufficient for bringing jobs back and that the rate would have to be closer to 50 percent.
“When they have to pay tariffs to come in, but they have incentive to build here, they’re going to come roaring back,” Trump said in Georgia last month.
More than half of registered voters said they would be more likely to back a candidate who supported imposing both a 10 percent tariff on all imports and a 60 percent tariff on imports from China, according to a mid-September Reuters-Ipsos poll. Republicans were more than twice as likely as Democrats to support higher tariffs, but 56 percent of independents also endorsed Trump’s plan.
However, the most immediate impact of Trump’s plans might be to raise costs for US consumers, in a way likely to prove particularly painful for low-income Americans.
During his first term, Trump imposed tariffs on roughly US$360 billion in Chinese imports, as well as on steel and aluminum imports, washing machines and solar panels. The Biden administration has largely maintained those policies, but Trump is now eyeing a more than ninefold increase in the volume of affected imports, which economists say would lead to widespread price hikes.
The US imports more than US$1 trillion worth of goods annually used directly by consumers: inexpensive electronics from China; food from Latin America and Canada; pharmaceuticals produced in India and Mexico. Tariffs of 20 percent on all imports could amount to a more than US$4 trillion tax hike over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan think tank. (Trump has insisted that tariffs raise costs only for foreign nations, though economists say the duties, usually paid by importers to the government, are typically passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.)
Gas prices would increase by as much as 75 cents per gallon in the Midwest, where most refined products come from Canada, according to Patrick De Haan, an analyst at GasBuddy. Overall, the Peterson Institute for International Economics said Trump’s tariffs would cost the typical household US$2,600 per year; the Yale Budget Lab said in an estimate released Wednesday that the annual cost could be as high as US$7,600 for a typical household. As a share of their income, the poorest Americans would pay 6 percent more with 20 percent tariffs, compared with 1.4 percent more for the richest 1 percent, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning think tank.
“We’re not talking about caviar - these are things that people have to buy. They’re essentials,” said Neil Saunders, a managing director at the analytics company GlobalData.
Economists say it would take several painful years for alternative domestic producers to emerge for many goods. For instance, almost all shoes and 90 percent of tomatoes sold in the country are imported, according to the Peterson Institute. And the United States does not even have the climate necessary to produce many food items - such as coffee, bananas, avocados, to say nothing of Chilean sea bass - at the necessary scale to meet domestic demand, said Joseph Politano, an economic analyst who has written on the subject on his Substack. ‘Higher interest rates, slower growth, higher inflation’
Trump’s tariffs would also reverberate through Wall Street and global markets, inviting turmoil that would affect investors and companies worldwide. Those effects would probably be felt quickly.
During Trump’s first term, stocks fell on nine of 11 days in 2018 and 2019 that the United States or China announced new tariffs, according to a study this year by economists with the Federal Reserve and Columbia University. Comprehensive tariffs would cause a swift one-time jump in prices before reducing economic growth about six months later, according to economist David Page, head of macro research for AXA Investment Managers in London.
Many analysts are hopeful that a stock market panic would dissuade or prevent Trump from carrying out his plans. The investment bank UBS projected that a 10 percent universal tariff could lead to a 10 percent contraction in the stock market. US multinationals are heavily dependent on foreign subsidiaries, and retailers, auto manufacturers and other industrial sectors would be hit the hardest, according to UBS. Chris McNally, an analyst at Evercore, said Trump’s 10 percent tariff plan could cause a more than 20 percent decline in General Motors’ earnings, with slightly smaller declines for Ford and Stellantis.
Stephen Miran, who served in the Treasury Department during Trump’s administration, said he expects Trump to gradually phase in the tariffs, mitigating any stock market volatility. Miran echoed Trump’s comments that dozens of countries have higher import tariffs on the United States than it has on those countries - and sees the former president’s proposals as a first step toward fairer trade agreements.
But other nations may not agree to more US-friendly trade deals. And if that happens, the new tariffs would depress global merchandise trade and disrupt the corresponding financial flows among the United States, China and Europe, experts say.
As the United States bought fewer goods from China and Europe, they, in turn, could buy fewer Treasury bonds. That would cause yields to increase on long-term US government debt; American consumers would feel the impact with higher mortgage rates.
Trump has spoken of finding ways to lower the value of the dollar to make US exports more attractive to foreign customers. But global tariffs would undermine that goal, pushing the dollar higher. In 2018, as Trump implemented the first several rounds of tariff hikes, the dollar rose more than 10 percent against the Chinese yuan.
“We’d be facing higher interest rates, slower growth, higher inflation - that stagflation scenario that people talk about,” said Marc Chandler, managing director of Bannockburn Global Forex, referring to a combination of high inflation and anemic growth. ‘Every capital around the world’ may respond
Trump and his advisers express confidence that tariffs can be an effective tool to cajole other countries into complying with his demands. But many may respond by imposing trade restrictions of their own on US exports.
During Trump’s first term, the European Union imposed retaliatory tariffs on everything from US corn to Harley-Davidson motorcycles. China reduced purchases of food products made in the Midwest, leading the Trump administration to approve a US$30 billion bailout for farmers. That preceded a China-US trade deal, but there is no guarantee a similar resolution could be reached again.
While the discussions are preliminary, officials in Canada, the European Union, China, India and elsewhere are already working through options to respond to another potential Trump trade war. The retaliation could be harsher this time: Canada, for instance, could cut off access to lumber, aluminum and steel. Boeing aircraft and US vehicle exports could be threatened. Some analysts believe China could devastate US farming exports.
“They’re thinking through their leverage points, and I’m sure every capital around the world is doing the same,” said one person in touch with senior Canadian officials preparing potential responses, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
A new universal tariff would violate US commitments to the World Trading Organization. Other nations would almost certainly file WTO complaints. But experts said trade partners would not wait for that cumbersome judicial process, which can take years to yield a conclusion.
“Day one, if there’s a 10 percent tariff put in place, day two, there’s going to be retaliatory tariffs from all of our trading partners,” said John Veroneau, a trade attorney with Covington & Burling, who served as deputy US trade representative under President George W. Bush.
Written by: Jeff Stein, David J. Lynch
QUEBEC
Student debt: An individual and collective burden at English-language universities
Why do people feel it is legitimate to voluntarily take on debt in order to pursue higher education, and then challenge the debt burden later on, when it prevents them from enjoying the lifestyle that an education seemed to promise?
Professor Jean François Bissonnette explores this question in a recent study in Social Science Information. He focuses on England and the United States, where debt has lost its perceived legitimacy and protest movements against student debt have emerged since Occupy Wall Street in 2011.
Bissonnette, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Université de Montréal and an expert on the sociology of economics and political theory, has been interested in this issue since the 2012 student strike in Quebec.
"I was completing my Ph.D. at the time and the slogan 'We want to study, not go into debt' resonated with me," he recalled. "It articulated a critique of debt at a time when reliance on credit was normalized—as it still is today."
Although Canadian households are among the most indebted in the world, with a debt to disposable income ratio in the 175% to 180% range, "this rather alarming situation is rarely questioned, with the exception of student debt, which has become politicized and contested ground," Bissonnette noted.
The moral economy of student debt
To analyze the logic of taking on debt to get an education, Bissonnette draws on the concept of moral economy, which considers economic relations from the angle of their perceived fairness or unfairness.
"In the case of student debt, this approach reveals a profound ambivalence," Bissonnette explained.
"On the one hand, the debt is perceived as legitimate because the degree is considered an investment that will pay off in the long run, but on the other hand, this logic leads to accepting a lifestyle based on long-term debt. The ambivalence is embedded in the very nature of debt: debt has a moral dimension related to the obligation to repay and the feeling of owing something. The moral economy approach lets us examine the motivations that drive people to accept indebtedness and also to understand how this acceptance can tip over into contestation."
Critique of the commodification of education
While Bissonnette makes no normative judgments about student debt, his analysis does have a critical dimension. He points to the transformation of the academy into a "supplier of market services, whereby higher education is reduced to its market value."
"This shift has been informed by a utilitarian vision of education which regards learning primarily as an individual investment," he explained. "This view, promoted by economists such as Milton Friedman starting in the 1960s and 1970s, was used to justify the state's withdrawal from funding higher education and increased reliance on private debt."
According to Bissonnette, individual financing of education through debt is based on "expectations that are increasingly being disappointed: many students take on heavy debt in the hope of achieving a middle class lifestyle—a stable, well-paid job, home ownership, etc.—but these prospects are becoming increasingly elusive for many graduates, who face a more precarious job market and skyrocketing real estate prices."
Bissonnette points specifically to England, where the funding model for higher education has changed rapidly: just 25 years ago, university was free, whereas today, tuition fees are £9,250 per year and the average undergraduate leaves school with £45,000 in debt.
"It is estimated that around a third of university graduates in England will never reach the income threshold at which they must start repaying their student loans," Bissonnette said. "In the U.S., student debt has become an impediment to home ownership for the first time."
A protest movement emerges
Against this backdrop, a student debt protest movement sprang up in the United States in the wake of Occupy Wall Street in 2011-2012. Groups such as Strike Debt and then Debt Collective worked to politically organize student debtors to fight the power of the financial industry.
"These activists are challenging the moral and political legitimacy of student debt," said Bissonnette. "They condemn the transformation of education, which should be a right, into a financial product on which creditors speculate. They also point to the double standard between the bailout of the banks during the 2008 crisis and the lack of assistance for debt-burdened households."
The goal of these movements is to transform debt from an individual burden into a tool of collective action. They advocate strategies such as a debt strike and campaign for free higher education and massive cancellation of existing student debt.
These demands have gradually gained political traction. During the 2020 US presidential campaign, partial cancellation of student debt was championed by several Democratic candidates. Then, in August 2022, the Biden administration announced a plan to cancel some student debt, which would have forgiven up to $20,000 in debt for more than 40 million borrowers.
However, the plan met with fierce opposition, particularly from Republicans, who criticized it as unfair to those who had already repaid their loans or who had not pursued higher education. These arguments eventually led to the program being struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2023.
Toward a rethink of the model?
This debate reveals deep-seated tensions in contemporary society and raises complex questions about social justice, individual and collective responsibility, the role of education and the reproduction of inequality.
Faced with these dilemmas, some are calling for a fundamental rethinking of the higher education funding model. There are calls for a return to largely publicly-funded higher education. Others propose intermediate solutions, such as income-based repayment systems or the idea of a "universal student income."
In Bissonnette's view, "These are crucial debates, for they bear on the future of our education systems, and more broadly, our societal models. Student debt is a symptom of much broader issues, one that crystallizes tensions between individual aspirations and the common good, between the logic of the market and social rights, between the promise of social mobility and the reproduction of social inequality."
More information: Jean François Bissonnette, The moral economy of student debt: A pharmacological approach, Social Science Information (2024). DOI: 10.1177/05390184241268512
Arctic sea ice retreated to near-historic lows in the Northern Hemisphere this summer, likely melting to its minimum extent for the year on September 11, 2024, according to researchers at NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The decline continues the decades-long trend of shrinking and thinning ice cover in the Arctic Ocean.
The amount of frozen seawater in the Arctic fluctuates during the year as the ice thaws and regrows between seasons. Scientists chart these swings to construct a picture of how the Arctic responds over time to rising air and sea temperatures and longer melting seasons. Over the past 46 years, satellites have observed persistent trends of more melting in the summer and less ice formation in the winter.
Tracking sea ice changes in real time has revealed wide-ranging impacts, from losses and changes in polar wildlife habitat to impacts on local communities in the Arctic and international trade routes.
This year, Arctic sea ice shrank to a minimum extent of 4.28 million square kilometers (1.65 million square miles), as shown on the map above. That’s about 1.94 million square kilometers (750,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 end-of-summer average of 6.22 million square kilometers (2.4 million square miles). The difference in ice cover spans an area larger than the state of Alaska. Sea ice extent is defined as the total area of the ocean with at least 15 percent ice concentration.
2024
This year’s minimum—the seventh lowest in the satellite record—remained above the all-time low of 3.39 million square kilometers (1.31 million square miles) set in September 2012. While sea ice coverage can fluctuate from year to year, it has trended downward since the start of the satellite record for ice in the late 1970s. Since then, the loss of sea ice has been about 77,800 square kilometers (30,000 square miles) per year, according to NSIDC.
Scientists currently measure sea ice extent using data from passive microwave sensors aboard satellites in the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, with additional historical data from the Nimbus-7 satellite, jointly operated by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Sea ice is not only shrinking, it’s also getting younger, noted Nathan Kurtz, chief of the Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Today, the overwhelming majority of ice in the Arctic Ocean is thinner, first-year ice, which is less able to survive the warmer months. There is far, far less ice that is three years or older now,” Kurtz said.
Ice thickness measurements collected with spaceborne altimeters, including NASA’s ICESat and ICESat-2 satellites, have found that much of the oldest, thickest ice has already been lost. New research out of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows that in the central Arctic, away from the coasts, fall sea ice now hovers around 1.3 meters (4.2 feet) thick, down from a peak of 2.7 meters (8.8 feet) in 1980.
Another Meager Winter Around Antarctica
Sea ice in the southern polar regions of the planet was also low in 2024. Around Antarctica, scientists tracked near-record-low sea ice at a time when it should have been growing extensively during the Southern Hemisphere’s darkest and coldest months.
Ice around the continent likely reached its maximum extent for the year on September 19, 2024, when growth stalled out at 17.16 million square kilometers (6.63 million square miles). This year’s maximum, shown on the map above, was the second lowest in the satellite record and remained above the record winter low of 16.96 million square kilometers (6.55 million square miles) set in September 2023. The average maximum extent between 1981 and 2010 was 18.71 million square kilometers (7.22 million square miles).
The meager growth in 2024 prolongs a recent downward trend. Prior to 2014, sea ice in the Antarctic was increasing slightly by about 1 percent per decade. Following a spike in 2014, ice growth has fallen dramatically. Scientists are working to understand the cause of this reversal. The recurring loss hints at a long-term shift in conditions in the Southern Ocean, likely resulting from global climate change.
“While changes in sea ice have been dramatic in the Arctic over several decades, Antarctic sea ice was relatively stable. But that has changed,” said Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at NSIDC. “It appears that global warming has come to the Southern Ocean.”
2024
In both the Arctic and Antarctic, ice loss compounds ice loss. This is because while bright sea ice reflects most of the Sun’s energy back to space, open ocean water absorbs 90 percent of it. With more of the ocean exposed to sunlight, water temperatures rise, further delaying sea ice growth. This cycle of reinforced warming is called ice-albedo feedback.
Overall, the loss of sea ice increases heat in the Arctic, where temperatures have risen about four times the global average, Kurtz said.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Story by Sally Younger, NASA’s Earth Science News Team, updated and adapted for Earth Observatory by Kathryn Hansen.
Sea ice in the Arctic continued a decades-long downward trend in its minimum summer extent, while sea ice around Antarctica saw meager winter growth in 2024.
Image of the Day for October 17, 2024Instruments:DMSP — SSM/IDMSP — SSMISNimbus 7 — SMMR
Do Social Media Platforms Suspend Conservatives More?
We talked to Yale SOM’s Tauhid Zaman about his new research, which examined Twitter data from 2020 to see if conservative users were suspended for misinformation at a higher rate. His findings have implications for the current election season and beyond.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene holding a press conference on free speech and Twitter outside the Capitol in April 2022.Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Tauhid Zaman Associate Professor of Operations Management October 15, 2024
Conservatives often say that social media platforms are biased against their point of view. What did your research into the 2020 election find about whether that was true?
Our research found that accounts sharing pro-Trump or conservative hashtags were suspended at a significantly higher rate than those sharing pro-Biden or liberal hashtags—they were about 4.4 times more likely to be suspended. At face value, this pattern could be interpreted as evidence of bias against conservatives. However, we also found that users associated with conservative-leaning content were more likely to share links from low-quality or misinformation-heavy sources, which the platform’s policies aimed to restrict.
Importantly, these results show that the increased suspension rate can be explained by Twitter’s politically neutral efforts to curb the spread of misinformation. The bias we observed wasn’t necessarily intentional or ideological on the part of the platform—it was a result of the differing media consumption patterns between political groups.
How do you determine what counts as misinformation in a politically polarized environment?
To address this challenge, we used a media quality score based on crowd-sourced ratings from politically balanced groups of people. These raters included equal representation from both sides of the political spectrum, which minimized the risk of partisan bias influencing the evaluations. The media quality score reflects how trustworthy different news domains are, as determined by this diverse crowd. Looking for more insights?Sign up to get our top stories by email.
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This approach ensured that even though there’s polarization in the U.S., the quality scores weren’t skewed toward one political perspective. It allowed us to assess low-quality content in a way that is fair and reflects consensus judgments rather than the views of any single political group.
What are the lessons in your research for social media platforms today?
There are two major lessons:Polarization and separate media universes. The research highlights how severe polarization has become in the U.S. People from different political backgrounds are consuming entirely different types of media—one side mainly engages with mainstream sources, while the other engages with more fringe or hyper-partisan sources. This fragmentation is not just a media problem; it reflects broader issues in our political discourse, where people operate in isolated information bubbles.Careful enforcement is critical during elections. Since the suspensions we observed primarily affected one side of the political spectrum during an election year, it is important for platforms to be extremely cautious with how they implement these policies. Even when enforcement is neutral in intent, it can appear biased and may erode public trust or impact election outcomes. Transparency and consistency in enforcement will be essential to ensure that anti-misinformation policies don’t unintentionally amplify perceptions of political bias, especially during politically sensitive periods.
Children light candles during a vigil in memory of Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and in support of Palestinians in Gaza, at a beach in Beirut, Lebanon, 22 October 2023. JOSEPH EID/AFP via Getty Images
"I don't feel at all that we are getting half of the justice that Issam deserves," says the slain journalist’s sister in an interview with RSF.
This statement was originally published on rsf.org on 11 October 2024.
One year after Issam Abdallah was killed by the Israeli army while covering the conflict in southern Lebanon, justice still has not been served. Six independent investigations, including one by RSF, confirm that the journalist was killed by targeted fire from the Israeli army. Abeer Abdallah, the journalist’s sister, speaks out for the first time.
“It’s been a year since Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah was targeted and killed by Israeli forces while he was working, on 13 October 2023. The six investigations into this crime, including one by RSF, leave no room for doubt, and there is no reason why justice should not take its course. Justice must be done for Issam. On behalf of his family and his fellow journalists. For all the journalists killed since 7 October in Gaza and Lebanon. Combating impunity for crimes against journalists is an essential condition for the protection of journalism and the right to information”.
Jonathan Dagher, Head of RSF’s Middle East Desk
Saudi Arabia: Escalating use of the death penalty with 200 executions this year
Human Rights Watch 16 October 2024 New York, USA, 1 June 2019. People gather in front of the Saudi Consulate to protest against Saudi Arabia’s decision to execute three Islamic scholars, including Salman al-Odah.
Atlgan Özdil/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Rights groups warn that authorities have weaponized the use of the death penalty as a tool to repress freedom of expression in the country.
This statement was originally published on hrw.org on 14 October 2024.
The high number of executions in Saudi Arabia, including for offenses that do not meet international standards for the most serious crimes, is especially alarming, 7 organizations including Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. The following is their statement:
We, the undersigned organizations, are horrified by the soaring number of executions in Saudi Arabia. According to data from the Saudi Press Agency, the authorities executed at least 200 individuals in the first nine months of 2024 alone, more than the number of executions for any whole year in the past three decades. This shows the Saudi authorities’ flagrant disregard for the right to life and contradicts their own pledges to limit use of the death penalty. During their Universal Periodic Review (UPR) this year, the authorities accepted only one of the 22 recommendations relating to the use of the death penalty, showcasing their lack of commitment to meaningful reform.
Of the 214 individuals publicly reported as having been executed so far in 2024 (as of 9 October), 59 were executed for drug-related crimes, 46 of whom were foreign nationals, according to ALQST, Amnesty International, the European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights (ESOHR), and Reprieve. This marks a sharp rise from 2023, which saw just two drug-related executions, and signals the total reversal of a previously announced moratorium on executions for such offenses. This regressive trend raises serious concerns for the lives of hundreds of prisoners sentenced to death for drug-related charges, including 33 Egyptians. Two Egyptian nationals, Hani Mohammed and Suleiman Humeid, were executed on 28 September for drug-related offenses. Such executions are in clear violation of international human rights law, which prohibits use of the death penalty for crimes that do not meet the threshold of the “most serious”.
Throughout 2024, Saudi Arabia has continued to use the death penalty for non-lethal offenses, which account for 41 percent of executions so far, including 13 percent (29 individuals) who were executed for non-lethal terrorism-related offenses, which can include a wide range of acts such as taking part in protests, according to Reprieve. The implausible claim that Abdulmajeed Al Nimr, a Shi’a man executed on 17 August, had joined a terrorist cell affiliated to Al-Qaeda – a charge that did not appear anywhere in the court documents relating to his trial and sentencing – represents a flagrant example of the Saudi authorities’ determination to brand legitimate dissent and protest as a form of terrorism.
Saudi Arabia has for years been among the countries carrying out the highest number of executions in the world. Yet, despite a pledge in 2018 from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to reduce use of the death penalty, the rate of executions has continued to soar, apart from a relative lull during the coronavirus pandemic. As recently as March 2022, Mohammed bin Salman repeated this commitment to limiting the use of the death penalty, and yet that year saw the highest number of executions on record until that point. In 2023, the authorities carried out at least 172 executions, and the figure for the first nine months of 2024 already marks the highest rate in recent Saudi history. In the absence of transparency, and with executions sometimes carried out in secret, the real figures may be even higher.
The Saudi authorities are also failing to deliver on what have proved to be false promises in relation to use of the death penalty for juveniles. Currently, at least 9 young men are at risk of execution, with several at imminent risk, for offenses committed while they were below the age of 18. This is in violation of international human rights law, and directly contradicts official claims to have ended the practice. The young men’s sentences all followed grossly unfair trials that failed to meet basic standards of due process, including by denying them legal counsel and access to criminal files, and admitting coerced confessions as evidence in court.
The authorities have also used the death penalty to stifle dissent in the online sphere. In July 2023, retired 55-year-old teacher Mohammed al-Ghamdi was sentenced to death for peaceful social media activity. Although this sentence was recently commuted to 30 years’ imprisonment, his case highlights how the Saudi authorities have weaponized the use of the death penalty as a tool to repress freedom of expression in the country. Meanwhile, Islamic scholars Salman al-Odah and Hassan Farhan al-Maliki, for whom the Public Prosecutor is seeking the death penalty on a range of vaguely formulated charges, continue to have their trials drag on for unknown reasons.
While continuing to carry out these egregious human rights abuses, the Saudi authorities are at the same time striving to rebrand their image on the international stage. Megacity projects such as NEOM, massive investments in global sports such as the purchase of top football clubs and bidding to host the FIFA World Cup, as well as their bid for a seat at the United Nations Human Rights Council, all constitute efforts to sweep Saudi Arabia’s horrendous human rights record under the rug. As such, it is vital that the international community is not dazzled by such distractions, but focuses on the reality on the ground, namely the spike in executions and systematic crackdown on free speech.
In light of the alarming scale on which executions are being carried out in Saudi Arabia, we urge the authorities there to immediately establish an official moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty for all crimes. Pending full abolition of the death penalty, Saudi Arabia must immediately remove from its laws any death penalty provisions which are in breach of international human rights law, such as its mandatory imposition, its use against people below the age of 18 at the time of the commission of the crime, or for crimes which do not meet threshold of “most serious crimes” as stipulated in Article 6(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Signatories ALQST for Human Rights Amnesty International ECPM - Together against the death penalty Human Rights Watch MENA Rights Group Reprieve The European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights (ESOHR)
I covered Gov. Walz’s pheasant hunt and got an unexpected lesson in misinformation
Hunting for the truth in a southern Minnesota field? Stay off social media.
The Minnesota Star Tribune October 16, 2024 Flanked by his Secret Service detail, Minnesota Governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz looks for birds during the annual Governor's Pheasant Hunting Opener on Saturday near Sleepy Eye. (Anthony Souffle/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
The dogs were tired. The small army of press stalking him needed to put down cameras. And Gov. Tim Walz was fiddling with removing shells from his gun.
Nothing could’ve prepared us for the political bombshell that came next.
As the governor fussed with the firearm on this idyllic October morning southwest of Sleepy Eye, two dozen blaze orange-vested reporters watching, our own Minnesota Star Tribune photojournalist Anthony Soufflé asked Walz if he owned the gun.
“This is mine,” the 60-year-old responded.
And then Walz, who in his first year in Congress de-throned former Rep. Collin Peterson as Democrats’ top shot in the Congressional Shootout of clay pigeons, dispensed a dad joke that would’ve landed well on the gingham tablecloths of the farmhouses he represented for a dozen years in Washington, D.C.
“Borrowing a gun is like borrowing underwear,” Walz said, to chuckles from the press.
And, then ... well, actually that was it. Minnesota Star Tribune reporter Chris Vondracek, left, joined the press corps shadowing Gov. Tim Walz, center, at the Governor's Pheasant Hunting Opener near Sleepy Eye on Saturday. (Christopher Vondracek/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
Walz talked about his semiautomatic shotgun, a Beretta A-400, mentioned he liked the more forgiving recoil on his shoulders, and then — flipping up the shotgun, shells removed — walked along the tall grass back to the farmsite where he sat on a pick-up, ate venison sticks and talked hunting dogs.
Little did any of us know, however, at that moment, buzzing over the internet around the world, the biggest news event of the day, perhaps an October Surprise, for this vice presidential candidate was, at least in the eyes of the internet, already hatched.
Walz didn’t know how to use his gun.
A CBS reporter next to me had managed to dispatch to X a roughly 30-second clip of Walz un-jamming a gun, and within seconds, the rapacious reviews came pouring in, accusing “Tampon Timmy” of rural play-acting, like being caught redhanded lip-synching at the Super Bowl halftime show.
I, standing in the field, didn’t know any of this at the time. But when I returned to Minneapolis that night, while my wife and sister-in-law made dinner and peppered me with questions, I opened up my phone to check on reactions to my story and, instead, saw a piece from the Daily Mail in London.
“Tim Walz roasted over pheasant hunting stunt,” read the headline.
Huh? I scanned the story.
Was it the underwear joke? Nope.
The fact that he’d hadn’t shot a bird? No, according to trolls on the internet, Walz inelegantly un-loaded his shotgun shells.
Flanked by his Secret Service detail, Minnesota Governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz watches a dog work at the annual Governor's Pheasant Hunting Opener on Saturday near Sleepy Eye. (Anthony Souffle/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
But there were other “hot takes” on the day’s big event.
A Trump campaign page had shared what it called “another angle of Tim Walz fumbling around for his gun” and noted, “Tampon has absolutely no idea what he’s doing.”
Even Rep. Brad Finstad, the southern Minnesota congressman who represents not only Walz’s old district but also hunted in the same county as the governor Saturday morning, put out on X a photo of himself with two pheasants he shot, saying, “Great day for pheasant hunting in Brown County where we typically hunt with our shotguns.”
Was the insinuation that the governor hadn’t even brought his gun?
Sure enough, yes. All across the internet, people had interpreted a still photograph of the governor arriving in the motorcade and walking up to the DNR officer to get his license checked as evidence that Walz had never even picked up a shotgun, just done a blaze orange cosplay.
Look, I’m the paper’s agriculture reporter. Corn, soybeans, occasionally cultivated wild rice. It’s a good gig. Sometimes, due to scheduling conflicts on our politics team, I get to fill in on the other commodity: power. I’ve seen turkeys (not) pardoned in a gilded room at the Capitol. I’ve interviewed senators about flooding in southern Minnesota. Last August, I sat on a rainy stage for 30 minutes chatting with Royce White, the GOP Senate candidate, outside the Star Tribune booth at the State Fair. (I lost a beloved vintage blazer!)
And in some ways, lamenting the social juggernaut of misinformation is a little passé. To borrow an agricultural film metaphor, we are not in Kansas anymore.
But the internet is complicating our democracy. Two weekends ago, I sat on a patio overlooking the Root River in lovely Lanesboro when I overheard a patron insist to a table next to us that the government had orchestrated the tragic hurricane in the U.S. to take out conservative voters.
Even back in August, I had two dear friends insist to me that, actually, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance did alight onto a monologue about romantic relationships with couches in his memoir (he didn’t).
These are smart people. Well-intentioned people. We’ve just been overwhelmed by the medium. I’m not a hunter. I went to graduate school for literature. We are in need of rhetorical flotation devices to keep us afloat in the floods.
Gov. Tim Walz compares Pheasants Forever hats with Matt Kucharski before they set out for the annual Governor's Pheasant Hunting Opener on Saturday near Sleepy Eye. (Anthony Souffle/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
So here’s what actually happened last Saturday morning.
First-off, there might not be a Casey’s or Kwik Trip between the Twin Cities and New Ulm that carries a blaze orange stocking cap. That’s a missed opportunity. Because I searched nearly every single one on my pre-dawn ride down from Minneapolis on Saturday morning to the appointed meeting-place on a gravel road to get wanded by Secret Service.
Second, hunting is the most “Downton Abbey” thing we do in American politics. It’s not all foxes and hounds and horses and bugle calls. But it is a little silly. How can you shoot a bird with 20 reporters, 15 staffers, and five social media influencers in tow?
Still, I get it. There is a romantic showmanship to the day. The prairie presents well. And you got to dress warmly, which my East Coast colleagues — in hoodies and sneakers — didn’t. We sat there for what seemed like an eternity until, right before 9 a.m., Walz’s motorcade arrived, and the governor got his pheasant-hunting credentials checked by the DNR officer.
Then, yes, we did do a bit of “fake news.” One of the photographers requested views of faces of the hunting party — consisting of Walz, the president and CEO of Pheasants Forever, a local landowner, and a Nobles County hunter. So, for a performative few minutes, without taking any shots, the group walked toward the mobile media row, holding guns.
Then, finally, around 9:09 a.m. or so, according to the time-stamp on my phone, the actual hunting started.
Quickly enough, as we walked toward some increasingly tall grass, a fluttering ball of might — a male pheasant — flew out of the grass.
“Rooster! Rooster!”
Bam. The bird fell.
Walz called out, “Nice shot.”
The Nobles County hunter, Scott Rall, had downed the bird. But Rall’s intrepid dogs couldn’t actually find the pheasant in the cover. We searched for a while and kept moving.
Over the next 60 minutes or so, with my phone increasingly teetering toward battery doom, we climbed through thickets, tripped over buried logs. The hunters communicated with each other wonderfully in a ridiculous situation. When a hen flew out, they’d call out “Hen! Hen!”, a hunter’s version of “stand down.” When the dogs excitedly dove up and down in the grass, Walz prepped everyone to get ready for a bird.
Yes, he didn’t take a shot. Would that have played better or worse with undecideds in Pennsylvania? I don’t know. There may’ve been chances. Mostly hens flew out. In one moment, a rooster emerged, but the bird was quite young. Maybe other hunters would’ve pulled the trigger. A journalist from an outdoors magazine next to me told another reporter: “I would’ve blasted it.”
Regardless, about an hour into the hunt, I was quite relieved the governor didn’t fire his shotgun. A rooster sprung up in the opposite direction, clear over the heads of the pursuing press corps. Everyone, with cameras, ducked. Everyone, that is, except me. I tried following the bird with my cellphone camera. When I turned, Walz — who’d called out “don’t shoot” — was clutching his gun upright. Then he broke the nervous laughter.
“Every vice president joke there ever was was about to be made right there,” Walz said.
The joke was probably his best shot of the day.
Then we kept hunting. And hunting. Which for the reporters meant walking. And walking. I was reminded of the apocryphal Mark Twain quote: “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” Then, my phone died. Fortunately, I had a laptop in my backpack; I recharged my phone so that, about an hour later, I was able to record the governor just as he was removing his shotgun shells ... and apparently ending his political career.
Then, we walked back to the farmsite. The social media influencers awaited. The Diet Mountain Dew needed to be swigged. One influencer asked the governor his favorite food. Another talked about restoring the country to “sanity.” I mostly just wanted to get on the road to internet and some beef jerky. But we had to wait for a security phalanx rolling a half-dozen cars deep.
Bringing gun-toting hunters around a vice presidential candidate in this political environment certainly could be scary. But the most dangerous place, apparently, was the misinformation superhighway the internet has become.
Former president Jimmy Carter, 100, votes in US election
Former president Jimmy Carter recently celebrated his 100th birthday. Picture: AP
Wed, 16 Oct, 2024 - 21:19
AP Reporter
Former president Jimmy Carter has cast his ballot in the 2024 US election.
The ex-president voted by post, the Carter Centre confirmed in a statement.
It happened barely two weeks after Mr Carter celebrated his 100th birthday on October 1 at his home in Plains, Georgia, where he has been living in hospice care.
Jimmy Carter is living in hospice care (AP)
His son Chip Carter said before the family gathering that his father had this election very much in mind.
“He’s plugged in,” Chip Carter told the Associated Press. “I asked him two months ago if he was trying to live to be 100, and he said, ‘No, I’m trying to live to vote for Kamala Harris’.”
The Carter Centre’s brief statement said it had no more details to share.
Georgia’s registered voters have been turning out in record numbers since early voting began on Tuesday.
Video of Jimmy Carter does not show him casting ballot
Jimmy Carter voted in the 2024 US presidential election one day after polls opened in his home state of Georgia, but a video spreading across platforms does not show the 100-year-old former president casting his ballot in person from a reclining wheelchair. The Democrat voted by mail, and the clip shared online was taken on his birthday weeks earlier.
"WATCH: A viral video shows 100-year-old former President Jimmy Carter casting his vote for Kamala Harris while lying in bed. #jimmycarter#kamalaharris," says a post shared October 15, 2024 on X and Instagram.
Some posts shared the clip to push unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud or Democrats using elderly voters to rig elections.
"That's elder abuse taking Jimmy Carter to the polls to vote," says one post on X. "He don't know he's alive is this how Dems go to nursing homes and get elders to vote when they can’t tell you their name or speak. It's like digging up the dead to vote. #DesperateDems."
But the video of Carter in a wheelchair is unrelated to his participation in the 2024 election, a knife-edge race between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump where the vote in Georgia, a swing state, could tilt the result.
"President Carter voted by mail today. This footage is not from today," Matthew De Galan, press liaison for the Carter family and vice president of communications for the Carter Center, the nonprofit the former president founded after he left office, told AFP in an October 16 email.
"Former President Jimmy Carter celebrated his 100th birthday surrounded by family and friends in his backyard in Plains, Georgia. CBS News was there as he was wheeled outside, beneath the shade of his trees, to witness a military flyover with four fighter jets," the network wrote on X.
Carter, a one-term president who occupied the White House from 1977 to 1981, submitted his mail-in ballot October 16, the Carter Center said in a statement.
The wife of his son, Chip Carter, dropped his ballot off at a drop box at a nearby courthouse, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. The younger Carter told the newspaper his father "absolutely" voted for Harris.
The centenarian had told his family earlier in the year that he aspired to live long enough to vote for Harris and help defeat Trump, the outlet reported.
AFP has debunked other misinformation about the US election here.
