Shifting wind patterns are making extreme weather events more likely. This is because the wind, which distributes areas of high and low pressure along the latitude lines of the Earth, is also being influenced by climate change.
The wind is the motor for our weather. It brings us both sunshine and rain. And during the winter months, it regularly blows itself up into heavy storms. But throughout the globe, climate change is causing shifts in existing wind systems – with devastating consequences. Atlantic hurricanes, which build up over the tropics and often lay waste to swathes of land on the eastern coast of the US, are becoming more intense and bringing heavier rainfall.
Scientists are looking for clues as to the precise causes for the warming in the Arctic, where temperatures are climbing more rapidly than anywhere else in the world. In the northern hemisphere, rising temperatures result in wind systems ‘twisting’ at 10-kilometer altitudes. The Arctic jet stream drives high- and low-pressure areas around the globe. It travels around the planet from west to east at speeds of up to 500 kilometers an hour. But in recent years, meteorologists have noticed more frequent weaker phases in the jet stream – with fatal consequences for Europe. Droughts like the one experienced in 2018 and flood catastrophes like that of 2021 are both likely to recur.
Researchers on the island of Spitsbergen have already made an alarming discovery. Climate change is altering the wind, and the altered wind is accelerating climate change – a dangerous vicious cycle.
Climate models have been getting more and more sophisticated as the power of super computers has increased exponentially over the last few years. But have all the variables been factored in? A machine is only as good as the person that builds it, after all. Now a new research paper has found some very strange temperature differences in the Eastern Pacific Ocean between climate models and observed ‘real world’ measurements. So, what’s going on?
Official Website: https://to.pbs.org/3Uqz0db Celebrate the annual ceremony of Prince William’s prestigious environmental award: The Earthshot Prize. The star-studded event honors this year’s five winners and their innovative solutions to help repair our planet. Stream The Earthshot Prize on the PBS YouTube channel Monday, December 5 at 8 p.m. ET. Stream on pbs.org and the PBS app on Monday, December 5 at 2 p.m. ET. Catch the broadcast premiere on Wednesday, December 14 at 8 p.m. ET (check your local listings).
The activist and historian Staughton Lynd in 2019. “At age 16 and 17, I wanted to find a way to change the world,” he said in 2010. “Just as I do at age 79.”Credit…Dustin Franz for The New York Times
After being blacklisted from academia for his antiwar activity, he became an organizer among steel workers in the industrial Midwest.
By Clay Risen Published Nov. 18, 2022Updated Nov. 20, 2022
Staughton Lynd, a historian and lawyer who over a long and varied career organized schools for Black children in Mississippi, led antiwar protests in Washington and fought for labor rights in the industrial Midwest, died on Thursday in the town of Warren, in northeast Ohio. He was 92.
His wife and frequent collaborator, Alice Lynd, said his death, at a hospital, was caused by multiple organ failure.
Mr. Lynd was one of the last of a generation of radical academics — including his friend and colleague Howard Zinn — who in the 1960s overthrew their predecessors’ obsession with detached, objective scholarship in favor of political engagement.
Many of his colleagues stayed within the bounds of academia, but Mr. Lynd burst beyond them. As a young professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, he led students in marches against nuclear weapons. In 1964 he was one of the main organizers behind Freedom Summer, which brought Northern college students to Mississippi to teach and organize in Black communities.
When the Vietnam War was still relatively new and most Americans still supported it, he organized antiwar protests in Washington. He was among the first of about 350 people arrested during one demonstration — though not before neo-Nazis, staging a counter protest, dumped paint on him and two other marchers, David Dellinger and Bob Moses. A photo of the three bespattered men appeared in Life magazine.
In age he fell between the Old Left, which cut its teeth in the 1930s and ’40s, and the New, which was coming up in the ’60s. There was no question where his loyalty lay: He reveled in the impassioned spontaneity he encountered as a professor on college campuses, and students flocked to him in turn.
At Yale they would cram into his office or gather on his living room floor to hear him take on all comers, staking positions to the left even of outspoken liberals like the Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, a frequent verbal sparring partner.
Even as he developed a following as an agitator, he built a reputation as a pathbreaking historian. His best-known book, “The Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism” (1968), opened new ground by identifying members of the Revolutionary War generation who embraced abolition and equality, and it won praise even from establishment historians.
“Of all the New Left historians, only Staughton Lynd appears able to combine the techniques of historical scholarship with the commitment to social reform,” David Herbert Donald wrote in a 1968 review in Commentary.
But his academic star soon fizzled out. By the end of the 1960s, his outspoken activism had drawn the attention of the F.B.I. and gotten him blacklisted from higher education, even from small urban colleges in Chicago, where he and his family had moved in 1968.
He pivoted, involving himself in labor organizing among the factories that lined the southern shores of Lake Michigan. He received a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1976, after which he and his wife moved to Youngstown, Ohio, where workers, union leaders and owners were fighting over the impending closure of the city’s steel mills.
To the frustration of both the union bosses and the mill owners, he sided with the rank and file, writing a handbook for workers trying to navigate the legal system. In the early 1980s he helped lead a high-profile effort to turn the mills over to a worker-owned cooperative. Though the effort failed, it brought him renewed acclaim on the left.
He did much of his later work alongside his wife. She wrote several books with him and, after getting her own law degree, joined him as a partner. They officially retired in 1996 but continued taking pro bono cases, this time with a focus on the death penalty and prison reform.
“Whether in his pathbreaking historical work on the roots of American radicalism, his active participation in campaigns for civil rights, his crucial role in steps toward democratization of the economy, Staughton Lynd was always in the forefront of struggle, a model of integrity, courage, and farsighted understanding of what must be done if there is to be a livable world,” the linguist and left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky wrote in an email.
Staughton Craig Lynd was born on Nov. 22, 1929, the same year that his parents, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd, published their book “Middletown,” based on their research in Muncie, Ind. It was one of the first books to offer a comprehensive study of an American community, and it established them as two of the country’s best-known academics.
The Lynds lived in New York City — Robert Lynd taught at Columbia, while Helen Lynd taught at Sarah Lawrence College — but Staughton was born in a hospital in Philadelphia because his mother preferred the doctors there.
He grew up among the New York intellectual set, attending the Ethical Culture School and the Fieldston School, and entered Harvard in 1946.
He studied social relations, a popular but now defunct major. In his free time he dabbled in radical politics, joining the Communist Party-aligned John Reed Club and briefly participating in two Trotskyist organizations on campus.
During the 1950 summer school session he met Alice Niles, a student at Radcliffe. They married the next year.
Along with his wife, he is survived by his son, Lee Lynd; his daughters Barbara Bond and Marta Lynd-Altan; seven grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.
After graduating in 1951, he spent time studying urban planning before being drafted into the Army in 1953. As a conscientious objector, he was given a noncombat role, despite the continuing Korean War.
A year later, though, he received a dishonorable discharge after Army investigators dug up his Communist affiliations in college; they also highlighted his mother’s career as a “modern” professional woman.
He and others with similar disqualifications appealed, and the Supreme Court eventually ordered the Army to give them honorable discharges instead. The change in status allowed Mr. Lynd to take advantage of the G.I. Bill, which he used to pay for graduate school.
But first, he and Alice spent three years living on a Quaker commune in northern Georgia. They then spent six months in a similar community in New Jersey, where he first met Mr. Dellinger, a like-minded pacifist who brought him on as an editor at his magazine, Liberation.
The Lynds finally returned to New York City, where Mr. Lynd worked for a tenants’ rights organization on the Lower East Side and pursued a history doctorate at Columbia.
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Clay Risen is an obituaries reporter for The Times. Previously, he was a senior editor on the Politics desk and a deputy op-ed editor on the Opinion desk. He is the author, most recently, of “Bourbon: The Story of Kentucky Whiskey.” @risenc
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 20, 2022, Section A, Page 26 of the New York edition with the headline: Staughton Lynd, 92, Civil Rights Activist Who Led Vietnam Protests, Dies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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[It would be hard to overstate the crucial importance of ProfessorStaughton Lynd on the Yale campus in the late 1960s and particularly for the members of the Class of 1968.
Professor Lynd stood out as a principled opponent to a war in which America had assumed the post-colonial legacy of Empire from the French in Indo-China. The Vietnam war was massively unpopular among the Yale student body — and all around the country. Along with the Yale Chaplin, The Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., and a handful of other courageous professors including Robert Jay Lifton and Kai Ericksonat Yale as well as Professor Noam Chomsky at MIT and Howard Zinn at Boston University — Professor Lynd came to represent the best highest example of what a principled scholar could achieve through devoted scholarship combined with a commitment to international social and political justice.
His death will be widely remembered and he presence deeply missed among all those who were fortunate meet and come to know him.]
The Nation – Jan 24, 2011
In this sixth video in the series “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate” from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, linguist, philosopher and political activist Noam Chomsky talks about the Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute and other business lobbies enthusiastically carrying out campaigns “to try and convince the population that global warming is a liberal hoax.” According to Chomsky, this massive public relations campaign has succeeded in leading a good portion of the population into doubting the human causes of global warming. Known for his criticism of the media, Chomsky doesn’t hold back in this clip, laying blame on mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times, which will run frontpage articles on what meteorologists think about global warming. “Meteorologists are pretty faces reading scripts telling you whether it’s going to rain tomorrow,” Chomsky says. “What do they have to say any more than your barber?” All this is part of the media’s pursuit of “fabled objectivity.” Of particular concern for Chomsky is the atmosphere of anger, fear and hostility that currently reigns in America. The public’s hatred of Democrats, Republicans, big business and banks and the public’s distrust of scientists all lead to general disregard for the findings of “pointy-headed elitists.” The 2010 elections could be interpreted as a “death knell for the species” because most of the new Republicans in Congress are global warming deniers. “If this was happening in some small country,” Chomsky concludes, “it wouldn’t matter much. But when it’s happening in the richest, most powerful country in the world, it’s a danger to the survival of the species.”
Russia has launched its largest strikes on Ukraine in months, attacking civilian areas in Kyiv and nine other cities just two days after President Vladimir Putin had accused Ukraine of blowing up a key bridge connecting Russia to Crimea. As the war continues to escalate in Ukraine, we feature an interview recorded earlier this month with world-renowned political dissident Noam Chomsky in Brazil and political writer Vijay Prashad. Chomsky discusses why he thinks there is no major U.S. peace movement in response to the Ukraine war, and talks about the dangerous U.S. Senate policy on China and Taiwan, which he says, along with Ukraine, could end in a “terminal war.” Prashad also examines the destruction wrought in the Global South by Western so-called humanitarian invasion in the name of democracy, from Haiti to Libya. “You can’t bring democracy by warfare,” says Prashad. “You have to let people develop their own dignified histories.”
Thanks to people power at COP27 & beyond Loss and Damage is in the final text! However, the outcome paves the way for continued expansion of fossil fuels & increased climate impacts. We know real climate leadership comes from the grassroots and we will never stop fighting for climate justice.
Welcome to Transition Studies. To prosper for very much longer on the changing Earth humankind will need to move beyond its current fossil-fueled civilization toward one that is sustained on recycled materials and renewable energy. This is not a trivial shift. It will require a major transition in all aspects of our lives.
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