Six on Geography and Science: How to Survive Climate Change; Midwest Flooding, the Corn and Soy Crops, and Knock-On Effects;
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"Gilead, which enjoys a U.S. monopoly on Truvada, charges between $1,600 and $2,000 for a month’s supply of a pill that can be manufactured for a fraction of that amount. The number of new HIV infections in the United States has barely budged, meanwhile, and is stuck around 40,000 a year, according to CDC estimates.
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Activists want the government to take a more aggressive stance against Gilead. Their complaints are part of a broader wave of anger over drug companies reaping hefty financial rewards by capitalizing on taxpayer-funded research."
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"Trump cited severe conditions from long ago as evidence for his views, even though scientists say extreme events are becoming more common, driven by climate change.
“Forty years ago, we had the worst tornado binge we’ve ever had,” Trump said. “In the 1890s, we had our worst hurricanes.”
He said he was impressed by the passion displayed by the Prince of Wales, who has been an outspoken advocate on climate issues. The two were supposed to meet for 15 minutes, Trump said, but ended up speaking for an hour and a half. He said he shared the prince’s desire for a “good climate as opposed to a disaster.”
But the president blamed China, India and Russia for polluting the environment and said the United States was responsible for “among the cleanest climates.”
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(cc photo: kleverenrique/Wikimedia)
Also on the show: Corporate media would have us believe they’re interested in climate action, but they’re failing a key test of that, which would be taking seriously the lives and deaths of people on the frontline. The recent court victory of Ecuador’s indigenous Waorani, against the government’s push to auction off their land to oil companies, brings together critical things: Biodiversity, the global impact of the Amazon, the integrity of agreements between indigenous communities and the state, and legal protections for nature. But coverage suggests it’s just not that interesting to corporate media. We’ll get the story from Reynard Loki, Editor at the Earth | Food | Life project of the Independent Media Institute.
"Professor Melott said these materials must have arrived on Earth from a supernova, which would have exploded 163 light years away during the transition from the Pliocene Epoch to the Ice Age.
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“We calculated the ionisation of the atmosphere from cosmic rays which would come from a supernova about as far away as the iron-60 deposits indicate,” he said.
“We contend it would increase the ionisation of the lower atmosphere by 50-fold. Usually, you don’t get lower-atmosphere ionisation because cosmic rays don’t penetrate that far, but the more energetic ones from supernovae come right down to the surface – so there would be a lot of electrons being knocked out of the atmosphere.”
They suggest ionisation in the lower atmosphere meant there were more pathways for lightning strikes which led to widespread fires.
Professor Melott also said he believed his theory was supported by the discovery of carbon deposits in soils at around the same time as this cosmic-ray bombardment was happening.
“The observation is that there’s a lot more charcoal and soot in the world starting a few million years ago. It’s all over the place, and nobody has any explanation for why it would have happened all over the world in different climate zones. This could be an explanation,” he said.
“That increase in fires is thought to have stimulated the transition from woodland to savannah in a lot of places – where you had forests, now you had mostly open grassland with shrubby things here and there.”
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