Author: Andrew Sullivan

Noah Millman argues that although “a rise in sea levels and an increased incidence of extreme weather are the easiest parts of climate change to understand, they aren’t actually the most important.” He makes some reasonable points:

Human beings adapt pretty readily to flooding. We know how to build sea walls, and ecologically-sophisticated systems of flood control. In the extreme, we know how to move – we are a highly mobile species.

It’s less clear how well we’d adapt to wholesale changes in the ecology attendant on changes in CO2 levels. An increase in the acidity of the oceans, for example, could significantly disrupt the marine food chain (what’s left of it after over-fishing). A wide variety of land-based species are also sensitive to changes in the climate; global changes could have an unpredictable global impact on overall biodiversity. The earth, of course, will adapt just fine; the terrestrial climate has seen some pretty huge swings over geological timescales, and the diversity of life has recovered from multiple mass-extinctions. Human beings, though, have only been around for a million or so years (much less depending on how picky you are about what counts as “human”), and large-scale civilization is only a few thousand years old. We have no idea how well that civilization would adapt to widespread ecological disruption.

Moreover, there is a synergy between efforts to reduce the impact of human activity on the environment and efforts to repair or adapt to the consequences of that activity. The slower the rate of CO2 and methane emissions, the slower these changes will progress; in effect, we’d be buying time to adapt.

With regard to height:

For centuries, Americans were the NBA players of the world. We were two inches taller than the Red Coats we squared off against in the American Revolution. In 1850, Americans had about two and a half inches on people from every European country. But our stature plateaued after World War II, and since then, other countries shot past us. White Americans have grown a bit taller since the early 1980s, but African Americans haven’t.

And the tallest in the world?

[T]he Dutch are the tallest, at an average of six feet for men and five-foot-seven for women. They’ve come a long way: In 1848, a quarter of Dutch men were rejected from military service because they didn’t meet the five-foot-two height limit. “Today, fewer than one in 1,000 is that short,” the Associated Press noted in 2006.  (The tallest people on record, though, are apparently the people of the Dinaric Alps, in the former Yugoslavia, where adolescent males are, on average, six-foot-one monoliths.)

The Danes, Norwegians, and Germans stack up right under the Dutch. American men and women, meanwhile, measure just 5’9″ and 5’4″, respectively, barely edging out the Southern Europeans.

Noting that only 30 percent of American workers say they are engaged with their jobs, Krystal D’Costa wants us to start taking the problem of burnout seriously:

Burnout is a work-related disorder that results from prolonged experiences of stress, which can stem from work overload, role ambiguity, a lack of autonomy, and low social support. It’s characterized by a lengthy list of symptoms including exhaustion, disinterest, boredom, heightened irritability, feeling unappreciated, loss of concentration and feelings of detachment. And if allowed to fester, burnout can result in depression, substance abuse, and make you more susceptible to illnesses overall. …

Search for “burnout” and the majority of the news results you’ll found are Canadian or based in the EU. The scarce recognition of burnout in the United States is noticeable and what exists reads like the same general piece over and over again.

We’re dancing around the topic despite the potentially serious impact of burnout because there is also be a degree of stigma in the assignment, particularly in a market where jobs are still somewhat difficult to come by and employees may feel pressure to perform (or appear as if they are). Burnout suggests you don’t fit with the company—that you can’t cut it. It implies that you’re not a prime candidate.

Denial, which is a huge factor in the progression of burnout, is also at work on a larger social level: we acknowledge the problem with general self-help articles, but place the burden of diagnosis and treatment largely on the individual with suggested tips for identifying and managing symptoms. This overlooks the ways in which organizational and social structures can create a setting for burnout.

Hugh Byrd and Steve Matthewman warn that electrical blackouts are “becoming increasingly common” across the globe and “will only get more frequent and severe”:

Electricity systems are complex, high-tech assemblages in which small failures can interact in unanticipated and often incomprehensible ways. The North American grid, for example, is arguably the world’s largest machine, but is highly fragmented. It crosses borders and regulatory zones and has no single owner or manager. Over 3,100 utility companies are on it.

Other continent-scale grids have similar weaknesses. The vulnerability of such systems is demonstrated by the Italian blackout of 2003. The event began when a falling tree broke a power line in Switzerland; when a second tree took out another Swiss power line, connectors towards Italy tripped and several Italian power plants failed as a result. Virtually the whole country was left without power. It says something when a nation can be brought to a halt by two trees falling outside its borders. …

Resource depletion is already having an effect on countries that rely on fossil fuels such as coal for electricity generation. Countries with significant renewable resources are not immune, either. Weather is not predictable and is likely to become less so, courtesy of climate change: in the past decade shortages of rain for hydro dams has led to blackouts in Kenya, India, Tanzania and Venezuela. Deregulation and privatization have created further weaknesses in supply as there is no incentive to maintain or improve the grid. Almost three-quarters of US transmission lines and power transformers are more than 25 years old and the average age of power plants there is 30 years.

(Photo: Indian women and children wait inside a darkened train carriage at a railway station in New Delhi on July 31, 2012. A massive power failure hit India for the second day running as three regional power grids collapsed. By Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images. Dish coverage of the blackouts here.)

Earlier this month, Jane Perlez reported (NYT) on the mounting crisis facing Burma’s Rohingya Muslim minority, who are being denied access to lifesaving aid as they languish in displaced persons camps and face sporadic pogroms carried out by radical Buddhists:

The crisis began with the government’s expulsion of Doctors Without Borders, one of the world’s premier humanitarian aid groups and the lifeline to health care for more than a million Rohingya increasingly denied those services by their own government. But the situation has grown more dire in recent weeks, as local Buddhist officials began severely restricting other humanitarian aid to the camps and the rest of Rakhine State, where tuberculosis, waterborne illnesses and malnutrition are endemic. Some aid workers fear they are being kept away so there are fewer witnesses to rampant mistreatment and occasional bloodletting; the doctor’s group was expelled from Rakhine State after caring for victims of a violent assault on a Rohingya village that the government denies ever happened.

Sir Geoffrey Nice and Francis Wade warn that all signs point to genocide:

The situation has been allowed to fester — and actively encouraged — for too long. What were once horrible but sporadic bursts of violence have become sustained and deeply sinister.

The government has done little to help and much to harm the conditions in Rakhine state. It has rendered the Rohingya stateless, impeded aid, failed to punish perpetrators of violence and hate-speech, and thereby created an environment that allows violence to flourish. But all the while, it maintains the pretense that the mobs are operating on their own whim, and that the violence is purely communal. The tactic is familiar to state crime scholars: Policies are devised by leaders at the top, and delivered by those on the ground, with the puppeteer’s strings rarely visible. Now tensions are at a point where even small disputes are erupting into mass violence, with attacks on Rohingya occurring because of who they are, and not what they have done. All leaders in Burma must know that this is the mental state that enables genocide. And they also must know that once the genocidal mindset is free to act, it is rarely possible to stop, save by another greater force.

Previous Dish on the plight of the Rohingya here and here.

(Photo: Rosheda Bagoung holds her malnourished child outside a tent at Dar Paing refugees camp on May 10, 2014 in Sittwe, Burma. 150,000 Rohingya IDP (internally displaced people) are currently imprisoned in refugee camps outside of Sittwe in Rakhine State in Western Myanmar. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the primary supplier of medical care within the camps, was banned in March by the Myanmar government. Follow up attacks by Buddhist mobs on the homes of aid workers in Sittwe put an end to NGO operations in the camps. Though some NGOs are beginning to resume work, MSF remains banned and little to no healthcare is being provided to most Rohingya IDPs. One Rohingya doctor is servicing 150,000 refugees with limited medication. Several Rakhine volunteer doctors sporadically enter the camps for two hours a day. Births are the most complicated procedures successfully carried out in the camps. Requests to visit Yangon or Sittwe hospitals for life threatening situations require lengthy applications and are routinely denied. Malnutrition and diarrhea are the most widespread issues, but more serious diseases like tuberculosis are going untreated and could lead to the rise of drug resistant tuberculosis. By Lam Yik Fei/Getty Images)