The State Of The Ocean: ‘On the verge of a major extinction event’

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

orangefish

I had some idea this was happening (my niece is a marine biologist and she’s been telling me for years we’re overfishing the oceans) and friends who went scuba diving in Belize talked about how their world-famous coral is dying off. But when you see it all collected in one piece, it’s so obvious that our greed is killing the ocean that even a Republican can see it.

And of course they’ll immediately attack the study instead of doing anything:

A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.

“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

But there is still time to avert catastrophe, Dr. McCauley and his colleagues also found. Compared with the continents, the oceans are mostly intact, still wild enough to bounce back to ecological health.

“We’re lucky in many ways,” said Malin L. Pinsky, a marine biologist at Rutgers University and another author of the new report. “The impacts are accelerating, but they’re not so bad we can’t reverse them.”

Scientific assessments of the oceans’ health are dogged by uncertainty: It’s much harder for researchers to judge the well-being of a species living underwater, over thousands of miles, than to track the health of a species on land. And changes that scientists observe in particular ocean ecosystems may not reflect trends across the planet.

Dr. Pinsky, Dr. McCauley and their colleagues sought a clearer picture of the oceans’ health by pulling together data from an enormous range of sources, from discoveries in the fossil record to statistics on modern container shipping, fish catches and seabed mining. While many of the findings already existed, they had never been juxtaposed in such a way.

A number of experts said the result was a remarkable synthesis, along with a nuanced and encouraging prognosis.

“I see this as a call for action to close the gap between conservation on land and in the sea,” said Loren McClenachan of Colby College, who was not involved in the study.

There are clear signs already that humans are harming the oceans to a remarkable degree, the scientists found. Some ocean species are certainly overharvested, but even greater damage results from large-scale habitat loss, which is likely to accelerate as technology advances the human footprint, the scientists reported.

Coral reefs, for example, have declined by 40 percent worldwide, partly as a result of climate-change-driven warming.

Some fish are migrating to cooler waters already. Black sea bass, once most common off the coast of Virginia, have moved up to New Jersey. Less fortunate species may not be able to find new ranges. At the same time, carbon emissions are altering the chemistry of seawater, making it more acidic.

“If you cranked up the aquarium heater and dumped some acid in the water, your fish would not be very happy,” Dr. Pinsky said. “In effect, that’s what we’re doing to the oceans.”

How about that

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

The World Economic Forum 'Summer Davos' China Meeting

Bertolini’s been a little schizy. I’ve read about him doing some really annoying shit, but he also does things like this. Great! More CEOs should change their pay structure:

One CEO has taken a step that could help fend off Thomas Piketty’s nightmare vision of rising wealth inequality: He’s giving thousands of his workers a raise.

Aetna Chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini announced on Monday that the health-insurance company will be raising wages for its lowest-paid employees. Starting in April, the minimum hourly base pay for Aetna’s American workers will be $16 an hour, according to a company press release.

The 5,700 workers affected by the change will see an average pay raise of about 11 percent. The lowest-paid workers, who currently make $12 an hour, will get a 33-percent raise.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Bertolini recently requested that Aetna executives read Capital In The Twenty-First Century, by the French economist Piketty. The book, which has been hailed as the “most important book of the twenty-first century,” warns that the gap between the haves and the have-nots is heading toward Gilded Age levels of inequality and calls on the world’s largest economies to fix the problem.

Free speech and Pope Frank’s mom

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

Day 1 - I feel so blessed, once in a lifetime.

I’ve been going back and forth about this. Yes, I believe in free speech, absolutely. I also believe some speech is pointless and violent, and it’s going to provoke that kind of response. What to do about it? I haven’t a clue. I like people to get along:

A week after the massacre at the headquarters of a French publication known for insulting adherents of several faiths, Pope Francis told reporters that freedom of expression has its limits when it comes to insulting religion.

Or, he joked, his mom.

Calling freedom of expression a “fundamental” human right, the pope outlined why he believes there are limits to that right. If someone “says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch,” he joked, according to an Associated Press translation. “It’s normal. It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”

Despite joking about his mother, Francis also condemned violent retaliation. “One cannot offend, make war, kill in the name of one’s own religion — that is, in the name of God,” the pope said. “To kill in the name of God is an aberration.”

It’s just a fantasy

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

And doing it harder, faster, longer isn’t going to change the results:

Over the weekend, a Texas gun rights group repeatedly reenacted the Charlie Hebdo massacre in order to determine whether it could have been prevented if one of the editors or cartoonists had been armed, CBS DFW reports.

Members of the group, “The Truth About Guns,” recreated the Hebdo offices, then took turns playing the role of the “armed civilian” in the scenario.

No matter how the situation played out, though, one thing remained consistent — if the “armed civilian” confronted the attackers, he or she died. The only time the “armed civilian” survived was when the volunteer playing him ran away at the first sound of gunfire.

For nonprofit hospitals who sue patients, new rules

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

by Paul Kiel ProPublica, Jan. 15, 2015, 10:33 a.m.

Last month, ProPublica and NPR detailed how one nonprofit hospital in Missouri sued thousands of lower income workers who couldn’t pay their bills, then seized their wages, all while enjoying a big break on its taxes.

Since then, the IRS has released long-awaited rules designed to address such aggressive debt collection against the poor. Largely because these new rules fill a void 2014 there were hardly any rules at all 2014 patient advocates agree they are a major step forward.

Even so, they have easily exploitable gaps. It remains up to each hospital, for example, to decide which patients the new rules should apply to. And because the rules only apply to hospitals that have been granted tax-exempt status by the IRS, they don’t apply to for-profit hospitals or most public hospitals. ProPublica reported last month that public hospitals can be even more aggressive in collecting debt than nonprofits.

Most hospitals in the U.S. are charitable organizations. They don’t pay taxes because they are supposed to be a key part of the safety net for the nation’s poor patients. In theory, patients who aren’t covered by Medicaid and can’t afford insurance 2014 or who are underinsured and can’t afford their out-of-pocket costs 2014 can receive necessary care from a nonprofit hospital without facing financial ruin. Each hospital is required to offer services to lower-income patients at a reduced cost and to have a financial assistance policy that states who qualifies for aid, known as “charity care.”

But while hospitals are required to have this policy, there have been very few rules on how they publicize it or how they treat patients who qualify. That’s where the new rules, which go into effect in 2016, will make the biggest difference. The rules were required as part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

At Heartland Regional Medical Center in St. Joseph, the hospital featured in our story, many patients had been sued despite apparently qualifying for financial assistance. In interviews, patients either didn’t know the hospital had charity care or wrongly believed they didn’t qualify.

Under the new rules, all nonprofit hospitals will be required to post their financial assistance policies on their websites and offer a written, “plain language summary” of them to patients when they’re in the hospital. If patients don’t apply for assistance or pay their bills, then the hospitals are required to send at least one more summary of the policy, along with mentioning it on billing statements.

And if hospitals plan to sue patients over unpaid bills, they must attempt to verbally tell the patients about their policies, as well as send notices that they are planning to sue and that the patients may qualify for financial assistance.

Hospitals that don’t take these steps before suing patients could face the ultimate penalty of losing their tax-exempt status.

That sounds clear enough. But the first catch is that the IRS does not have a history of aggressive enforcement.

“That’s always been the problem with the charitable hospital rules,” said Corey Davis, an attorney with the National Health Law Program, a nonprofit patient advocacy organization. “The IRS doesn’t enforce them and nobody else can enforce them.”

The second catch is that hospitals are still responsible for setting their own financial assistance policies, and these protections are only helpful to patients who qualify for help.

“There’s all sorts of discretion because [hospitals] just have to have a policy,” said Chi Chi Wu of the National Consumer Law Center. The rules don’t set a baseline for the type of assistance hospitals must provide, she said.

A hospital could limit aid to uninsured patients with income below the federal poverty line 2014 $11,670 for a single person with no dependents.  A hospital could also restrict aid to uninsured patients, excluding patients with bare-bones insurance policies who might face huge out-of-pocket payments.

For patients excluded by the policy, all these protections would be effectively moot. Even those covered by the policy might receive some reduction on cost, but still find themselves pursued over the outstanding balance.

The hospital industry’s reaction to the new rules has been muted. A spokeswoman for the American Hospital Association said it had no comment. But best practices for the industry, set by the Healthcare Financial Management Association, urge hospitals to take steps beyond the new rules to ensure patients eligible for financial assistance aren’t the target of lawsuits. For example, as we noted in our story, some hospitals automatically identify some patients as eligible without them having to apply.

Jessica Curtis, an attorney with Community Catalyst, a national nonprofit consumer organization, joined other advocates in stressing that the new rules were welcome. But, as before, she said, there will be large variation among hospitals in how generously they treat lower-income patients. “It will come down to: How seriously does the hospital take this issue?” she said.

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GOP Senate to vote on whether climate change is real

~ susie ~ 1 Comment
Hey! We’ve just come up with the best drinking game EVER! We’ll get to that in a moment, but first the news: Mitch McConnell announced yesterday that the Senate will openly debate and take a vote on whether climate change is a real thing. Yes, Bernie Sanders’ amendment is coming up on the Senate floor. Not… Continue reading “GOP Senate to vote on whether climate change is real” →