• Young People’s Priorities: climate change at the bottom
  • Don’t Just Sit There: I also stand on one foot when I brush my teeth at night, which has little to do with reducing inactivity but may be one of the more transformative actions I’ve picked up from researching fitness. My balance and physical confidence have improved, and my husband is consistently amused, which is not a bad foundation for marital health.
  • Police Chiefs Focus on Disparities in Gun Violence, With an Eye Toward Solutions: If there was a central message to be drawn from the survey, it was that gun violence is tightly concentrated in the poorest urban neighborhoods, its victims mostly minorities, who receive little attention from politicians and the news media. “Nobody in this room, unless you’re from Sanford, Fla., would even know the name of Trayvon Martin if it was a black kid that had shot Trayvon Martin,”
  • Too hot to handle: can we afford a 4-degree rise?: Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain, was quoted in The Scotsman ahead of the 2009 Copenhagen conference saying the consequences were ‘‘terrifying’’. ‘‘For humanity it’s a matter of life or death … we will not make all human beings extinct, as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4 degrees. ‘‘If you have got a population of 9 billion by 2050 and you hit 4 degrees, 5 degrees or 6 degrees, you might have half a billion people surviving.’’
  • Clouds’ Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters
  • Life in the Sea Found Its Fate in a Paroxysm of Extinction: It may never be as well known as the Cretaceous extinction, the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Yet the much earlier Permian extinction — 252 million years ago — was by far the most catastrophic of the planet’s five known paroxysms of species loss.
  • The Campus Tsunami By DAVID BROOKS: Online education could potentially push colleges up the value chain — away from information transmission and up to higher things.
  • Book club: The Cartoon Introduction to Economics: Volume two: Macroeconomics: Will Hodges enjoys a light-hearted look at the “dismal science” [YB: But what is the reference to regarding “There is also a mildly risqué cancer joke that is certain to raise a few eyebrows”? So far his are the only eyebrows I’ve seen raised.]
  • British Columbia Rethinks Its Pioneering Carbon Tax: Michael Sweeney, president of the Cement Association of Canada testified last September to the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government that the carbon tax will cost his industry more than $20 million (U.S. $20.7 million) by July 1, 2012. Since the carbon tax was instituted in 2008, he told the committee, imports of cement have risen from 4 percent to 23 percent of market share, slicing into the share produced within the province.
  • E2 Feature: Impacts of a Carbon Tax (Nice chart on electricity price impacts)