Sylvia Brown, DPhil from the University of London, “Youths in Non-Military Roles in an Armed Opposition Group on the Burmese-Thai Border”,
Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London, http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/15634/1/Brown_3434.pdf
a)
Definition of key terms
The term ‘youth’ is understood in this study to be a socially constructed emic term which, like all social constructions, is not static, but continually re-defined by society based on the social context of the time.
The term ‘non-military’ is used here to refer to roles which are not located within army or militia structures. Since roles within military structures involve both combat and non-combat roles
(army cooks, porters, signallers and engineers, for example), the term ‘noncombat’ can be used to refer to ancillary roles within a military, which are not the focus of this study
. This study is concerned with participants outside the armed wing of an armed opposition group entirely, for instance, within its administrative apparatus or mass organizations.
Charlie Reed, Reporter for Stars and Stripes, “NOAA, the service that’s a little “less formal” January 22, 2010.
(http://www.stripes.com/news/noaa-the-service-that-s-a-little-less-formal-1.98207
Call it the "military for geeks."
At least that’s how Lt. j.g. Jackie Alemeida describes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Corps
, a group of 300 officers commissioned by the Department of Commerce, under which NOAA operates.
The corps consists of aviators, meteorologists and other scientific professionals who work alongside NOAA civilians to generate weather forecasts, aerial mapping of disaster zones and marine mammal surveys. "It’s not as strict as the regular service," said Alemeida, a meteorologist working temporarily from Yokota Air Base in
Japan as part of the Winter Storm Reconnaissance Program. "We joke that it’s military lite."
Considered the seventh uniformed service
— the sixth is the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps — the NOAA Corps uses the same ranking structure as the Navy and Coast Guard
but has no enlisted personnel.
Officers receive all the same benefits provided to troops in the traditional service s, including military exchange and commissary privileges, Tricare insurance, VA benefits, tuition assistance and a retirement pension after 20 years.
NOAA’s Aircraft Operations Center is located at MacDill Air Force Base
in Tampa, Fla., and NOAA operates from other military bases
, too. But researchers, both officer and civilian, do not work hand-in-hand with the military, nor do they deploy to war zones or carry weapons.
Though much of their work is unclassified, they must be eligible for a "secret" security clearance
, according to the NOAA Web site. Half its officers
— who can receive a commission up to the age of 42 — have former military service
, according to NOAA
. Like the military, officers in the NOAA Corps must make rank to stay in the service. "We’re just like the other services
— you’re either up or you’re out," said Cmdr. Jeff Hagan, an aviator who joined the NOAA Corps
16 years ago after flying C-130s in the Coast Guard. "Are we a little less formal than the other services? Absolutely."

Jim
-14, http://www.voanews.com/content/political-forecast-moregridlock/1950498.html
Given that the chances for agreement on substantial legislation
in Congress are
now fleeting
, both sides are ramping up their arguments for midterm voters.
Democrats start with a huge disadvantage
. A lot of their folks are much less inclined to turn out
in midterm congressional elections than they are for a presidential contest. Obama and other
Democrats are
now heavily focused on encouraging core
Democratic supporters
, especially what they like to call the “rising electorate”, to get off their rumps and out to the polls in
November. That rising electorate includes younger voters, especially unmarried women, as well as Hispanic and Asian-American voters. In fact, many
Democrats see motivating younger unmarried women as the key to
boosting turnout enough that it could save their majority
in the U.S. Senate.
There is general consensus
among political analysts and pundit-types that Republicans
appear to have a big advantage
in holding on to their majority in the House of Representatives. In fact, by some estimates, they could add seats. The real battle is for control of the Senate, where 36 of the 100 seats are at stake. Republicans need to gain six Democratic seats to reclaim a majority. That would normally be a tall order in any election year but this year there are far more Democratic seats at stake than Republican, and many of the Democratic seats are in states where
Republicans have an advantage.
[Greg Sargent, Washington Post writer, “Morning Plum: Obama to set off bomb in middle of midterms”, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/07/09/morning-plum-obama-to-set-off-bomb-in-middle-ofmidterm-elections/, 7/9/14]
Now that Republicans have made it clear that they will not participate on any level in basic problem
solving when it comes to our immigration crisis, it is now on Obama to determine just how far he can go unilaterally, particularly when it comes to easing the pace of deportations. This is going to be one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency in substantive, moral, and legal terms, and politically, it could set off a bomb this fall, in the middle of the midterm elections.
I’m told there are currently internal discussions underway among Democrats over whether ambitious action by Obama could be politically harmful in tough races. According to two sources familiar with internal discussions, some top Dems have wondered aloud whether Obama going big would further inflame the GOP base, with little payoff for Dems in red states where Latinos might not be a key factor. I don’t want to overstate this: These are merely discussions, not necessarily worries. Indeed, some Dems are making the opposite case, and that argument is described well in a new Politico piece out this morning. The story notes that Obama has privately told immigration advocates demanding ambitious action that they might not get what they want, telling them: “We need to right-size expectations.” And yet, according to Politico, some
advocates still hope for aggressive
action and believe Dems see it as in their own political interests: Adding to the elevated hopes about what Obama will do is the feeling among Democratic strategists that immigration reform is a clear political winner: The people who will be opposed to reform or to the president taking action on his own are already likely prime Republican base voters. But voters whom Obama might be able to activate, both among immigrant communities and progressives overall who see this issue as a touchstone, are exactly the ones that Democrats are hoping will be there to counter a midterm year in which the map and
historical trends favor GOP turnout.
[EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE, senior White House reporter, “Barack Obama becomes mocker-in-chief on climate change skeptics”, http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/barack-obama-climate-change-108338.html, 6/26/14]
For the White House it’s about getting the liberal base excited for the midterms
.
It’s a confidence that climate change has shifted in voters’ minds.
It’s a broader play against congressional Republicans as obstructionists. And for Obama, it’s a

good time. Wednesday night, Obama ripped into his opponents in front of a League of Conservation Voters crowd so friendly that some were pumping their arms in the air as he spoke. “It’s pretty rare that you encounter people who say that the problem of carbon pollution is not a problem,” Obama said. “In most communities and workplaces, they may not know how big a problem it is, they may not know exactly how it works, they may doubt they can do something about it. Generally they don’t just say, ‘No I don’t believe anything scientists say.’ Except, where?” he said, waiting for the more than accommodating crowd to call back, “Congress!”
Obama smiled — not his big toothy self-satisfied grin, but his stick-it-in-the-ribs smirk. “In Congress,” he said. “Folks will tell you climate change is hoax or a fad or a plot. A liberal plot.” Then, Obama said, there are the people who duck the question. “They say, hey, I’m not a scientist, which really translates into, I accept that man-made climate change is real, but if I say so out loud, I will be run out of town by a bunch of fringe elements that thinks climate science is a liberal plot so I’m going to just pretend like, I don’t know, I can’t read,” Obama said. “I mean, I’m not a scientist either, but I’ve got this guy, John Holdren, he’s a scientist,” Obama added to laughter. “I’ve got a bunch of scientists at NASA and I’ve got a bunch of scientists at EPA.” “I’m not a doctor either, but if a bunch of doctors tell me that tobacco can cause lung cancer, then I’ll say, okay. Right? I mean, it’s not that hard,” Obama said, managing not to mention that he kept smoking himself at least through his first term.
If Obama’s talking about regulations, he’s losing. If he’s talking about carbon caps for power plants or energy emissions for air conditioners, no one cares. But if he’s talking about crazy
Republicans who don’t make any sense — and by the way, are putting children at risk, he charges — well, that’s an argument he can wrap his arms around.
(Zachary Keck is Managing Editor of The Diplomat where he authors The Pacific Realist blog. He also writes a monthly column for The National Interest.—“ The Midterm Elections and the Asia Pivot”—
thediplomat—22 April 2014-- http://thediplomat.com/2014/04/the-midterm-elections-and-the-asia-pivot/--
WH)
There is a growing sense in the United States that when voters go to the polls this November, the Republican Party will win enough Senate seats to control both houses of Congress. This would potentially introduce more gridlock into an already dysfunctional American political system.
¶ But it needn’t be all doom and gloom for U.S. foreign policy, including in the Asia-Pacific. In fact, the Republicans wrestling control of the Senate from the Democrats this November could be a boon for the U.S. Asia pivot
. This is true for at least three reasons.
¶
First, with little prospect of getting any of his domestic agenda through Congress,
President Barack
Obama will
naturally focus his attention on foreign affairs. Presidents in general have a tendency to focus more attention on foreign policy during their second term, and this
effect is magnified if the other party controls the legislature
. And for good reason: U.S. presidents have far more latitude to take unilateral action in the realm of foreign affairs than in domestic policy. Additionally, the 2016 presidential election will consume much of the country’s media’s attention on domestic matters. It’s only when acting on the world stage that the president will still be able to stand taller in the media’s eyes than the candidates running to for legislative office.
¶
Second, should the Democrats get pummeled in the midterm elections this year, President
Obama is likely to make some personnel changes in the White House and cabinet
.
For instance, after the Republican Party incurred losses in the 2006 midterms, then-President George W. Bush quickly moved to replace
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with the less partisan (at least in that era) Robert Gates. Obama followed suit by making key personnel changes after the Democrats “shellacking” in the 2010 midterm elections.
¶ Should the Democrats face a similar fate in the 2014 midterm elections, Obama is also likely to make notable personnel changes. Other aides, particular former Clinton aides, are likely to leave the administration early in order to start vying for spots on Hillary Clinton’s presumed presidential campaign.
Many of these changes are likely to be with domestic advisors given that domestic issues are certain to decide this year’s elections. Even so, many nominally domestic positions—such as Treasury and Commerce Secretary—have important implications for U.S. policy in Asia
. Moreover, some of the post-election changes are likely be foreign policy and defense positions, which bodes well for Asia given the appalling lack of Asia expertise among Obama’s current senior advisors.
¶
But the most important way a Republican victory
in November will help the Asia Pivot is that the GOP in Congress are actually more favorable to the pivot than are members of Obama’s own party.
For example, Congressional opposition to granting President Trade Promotional Authority — which is key to getting the Trans-Pacific Partnership ratified — is largely from Democratic legislators. Similarly, it is the Democrats who are largely in favor of the defense budget cuts that threaten to undermine America’s military posture in
Asia
.
¶ I f Republicans do prevail in November
, President
Obama will naturally want to find ways to bridge the very wide partisan
gap
between them.
Asia offers the perfect issue area to begin reaching across the aisle.
¶
The
Republicans would have every incentive to reciprocate the President’s outreach.
After all, by giving them control of the entire Legislative Branch, American voters will be expecting some results from the GOP before they would be ostensibly be ready to elect them to the White House in 2016.
A Republican failure to achieve anything between 2014 and 2016 would risk putting the GOP in the same dilemma
they faced in the 1996 and 2012 presidential elections.
Working with the president to pass the TPP and strengthen America’s military’s posture in Asia would be ideal ways for the GOP to

deliver results without violating their principles
.
¶
Thus, while the president will work tirelessly between now and November to help the Democrats retain the Senate, he should also prepare for failure by having a major outreach initiative to Congressional Republicans ready on day one. This initiative should be Asia-centric.
(Col Vivek Chadha (Retd) is a Research Fellow at Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses -- ASIAN STRATEGIC REVIEW: US
Pivot and Asian Security – a book edited by S.D. Muni, Vivek Chadha – From Chapter Three: “Military Implications of the
US Rebalancing Strategy” – by Vivek Chadha – http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCUQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fidsa.in%2Fsyst em%2Ffiles%2Fbook_ASR2013.pdf&ei=AY-XU8rjNuaO8gG3g4CQBg&usg=AFQjCNG_ooiEIMhuGCnMzg7oy_t67sZTgQ)
The US rebalance or
the pivot to
the
Asia
-Pacific is not merely a military move aimed at readjusting the deployment of platforms in light of the withdrawal from Iraq and drawdown from Afghanistan. It is the fulcrum of the US efforts to retain its economic growth, strategic influence and competitive edge in all spheres. It is also about the often unsaid China factor—a factor that has the potential to impact every domain of undeniable US leadership. It would be an overstatement to classify the rebalance as a paradigm shift in the US strategy for the region. The US has been and is likely to remain a Pacific power in the foreseeable future. In the past, the pillars of its association with the region have been similar to the ones proposed. Since the beginning of the Cold War, the US has remained a pre-eminent power in the Asia-Pacific, through its economic and military strength and network of alliances with countries like Japan, South Korea and
Australia. It has also maintained a substantial forward presence in Japan and South Korea. This coupled with a generational lead in military technology has kept the
US ahead of its rivals. It is through these salient pillars of its strategy that the US has maintained a favourable environment in the Asia- Pacific region. It therefore emerges that the pivot or rebalance is not entirely a fresh perspective, nor is it aimed at achieving anything substantially different. It does, however, reinforce the importance of the region, in light of the emergence of China as the greatest threat to US supremacy and a desire to move away from nation building, which was a by-product of the war on terror. Rebalancing rather than being a new strategy can be described as a readjustment of priorities and focus, backed by military capability. This capability will mirror the policy through asset reallocation both between theatres and within the Asia-Pacific. In addition to the China factor, the readjustment is likely to be impacted for the first time in the last five decades by the cloud of severe budgetary constraints. When these two factors are viewed in concert, the challenges posed become evident. China is emerging as the largest trading partner in the area of focus of the pivot.1 Its strategic influence is on the rise and it is competing with the US in all spheres for leadership, including military modernisation. Simultaneously, the US Armed Forces are threatened by a $ 500 billion budget cut over the next decade. Therefore, the rebalance should be seen as a larger strategy of the US
to maintain i ts slipping position as the strategic prime mover in the
Asia
-Pacific and by co-relation the world.
In doing so, it will deter the ability of China to disturb the regional status quo
within the financial constraints of depleting financial outlays.
This will demand of
the US
both ingenuity and resilient partnerships for it to remain a pre-eminent power in the region. The US is likely to pursue this goal through the following objectives: • Establish a military posture, which has both deterrence and punitive capability in the region within its reducing means. • Maintain a generational lead in military technology over China, to achieve its strategic objectives. • Create and
strengthen a network of allies
and partners, who have vested interests in building their economies in an environment of peace and
security. • Strike a
balance between credibility of
alliances with partner countries in the region
and simultaneously discourage any temptation on their part to use this as a leverage for escalating military tensions in bilateral disputes
. The paper briefly traces the trajectory of events leading to the announcement of rebalance by the US. It further analyses the factors that have forced a more proactive and vocal enunciation of the policy. This is followed up by a focus on the military shift as a result of the rebalance strategy, its implications and finally the impact of sequestration. The US “Pivot” to the Asia-
Pacific or the “rebalancing”, as it was subsequently christened, was a shift waiting to happen after the end of the Cold War. With the disintegration of the Soviet
Union and the emergence of the US as the preeminent power, the strategic significance of both Europe and the Atlantic diminished. This intervening period witnessed the US in a state of strategic stall, with the absence of a potential adversary, which could challenge the brief phase of unipolarity in world politics.
Referring to this period, Condoleezza Rice, wrote: “That we did not know how to think about what follows the US-Soviet confrontation is clear from the continued references to the ‘post Cold-War period’.”2 It was not until the rise of China was finally acknowledged as a threat to US influence in the world in general and the
Asia-Pacific region in particular that the need for a shift was realised. Rice identifying the threat from China wrote in the year 2000: “What we do know is that China is a great power with unresolved vital interests, particularly concerning Taiwan and the South China Sea. China resents the role of the United States in the Asia-
Pacific region. This means that China is not a status-quo power but one that would like to alter Asia’s balance of power in its favor [sic].”3 However, the open admission of a definitive threat from China during the initial years of the Bush administration’s first tenure in the White House faded after the launch of the “war on terror”. The shift in focus towards terrorism led to a softening of US focus on China, given the need for wide ranging cooperation against a common threat and the inability to focus militarily on two major fronts. Thus, despite the threat perceptions enunciated by senior officials in the Bush
administration, the pivot did happen
, but
it tuned towards Iraq and Afghanistan
.
This preoccupation with the
“ war on terror ism” and a simultaneous economic slowdown, opened a window of opportunity for China to enlarge its area of influence. Its core interests increased in rapid succession from Taiwan to Tibet and then the South and East China Seas4, bringing into focus the disputes with Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia.5 Chinese activism raised concerns amongst the US allies and partners about the ability and lack of will of the sole superpower to assert its influence in the region. This was reinforced after the slowdown of the US and European economy in 2008. Joseph S. Nye felt that this very assessment led to an increase in
Chinese activism and a desire
to take a more proactive stance in the South China Sea dispute.
6 Reflecting on this strategic

direction, the US clearly signalled its intent to enlarge its role in the region in concert with its allies and partners.9 The amplification of this intent aimed at ensuring
“security” in the region, “international order”, which would guarantee the rights of countries and adherence to “international law”, thereby safeguarding freedom of navigation. The specific contours of the US rebalance from the overall strategic perspective were outlined by the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she said: “Our work will proceed along six key lines of action: strengthening bilateral security alliances; deepening our working relationships with emerging powers, including with China; engaging with regional multilateral institutions; expanding trade and investment; forging a broad-based military presence; and advancing democracy and human rights.”10 Factors Influencing US Rebalancing The strategic guidance laid down by the Department of Defense outlines the shifting contours of priorities for the US. It aims at a smaller footprint while countering terrorism through surgical strikes, maintaining presence and influence to shape events in the
Middle East, reducing presence in Europe, Africa and Latin America and providing an impetus to its presence and focus on the Asia- Pacific.11 Amongst the areas of interest outlined, the Asia-Pacific has emerged as a priority for the US in the foreseeable future. Given this reassessment of interests, a rebalance of strategic focus became inevitable. The US rebalancing has been influenced by a number of factors. This paper will consider three, as a prelude to an assessment of its military implications. The visual aspect of the US rebalancing, has been the redeployment of its military hardware, which became the focus of world attention. However, the shift is not merely military in nature and more importantly it represents a strategic rebalance. This includes enhancing economic ties in the region, strengthening and building partnerships with allies and friendly countries and finally ensuring that a stable environment can be ensured by deterring the disturbance of status quo.12 The US decision to join the East Asia Summit indicated its willingness to increase its influence at the multilateral level.13 Similarly, an impetus to bilateral ties, with specific focus on military engagement, is also evident. This is evident through stronger military ties with Australia, India, Japan, Singapore and other countries of the region, as will be dealt with later in the paper. On the economic front, the US initiative to establish a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with countries like Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam on November 12, 2011 was seen as an attempt to enhance trade, investment and influence.14 There is broad consensus on “ensuring that the United States plays a key role in shaping Asian economic architecture will also affect its influence in the region.”15 This is seen in the US as the economic lever of the pivot to the Asia-Pacific.16
The feeling that the
Asia
-Pacific region had not received adequate attention
in the recent past was accentuated most by the rise of China. This was especially in light of
China’s growing assertiveness as well as its enhanced capability. It is evident from the article written by Condoleezza Rice in 2000 that China was firmly on the
US radar. However, the rapid ity of its rise and growing assertiveness
was a catalyst in the ensuring shift. This assertiveness has been most pronounced amongst the US partners and allies in Southeast
and East
Asia
, who have territorial disputes with China. The decision to include some of these disputes
as core issues by China, by implication, could lead to the use of force in case of a showdown.
China’s state-owned Global Times
in a blunt warning wrote, “If these countries don’t want to change their ways with China, they will need to prepare for the sound of cannons.
We need to be ready for that, as it may be the only way for the disputes in the sea to be resolved.”
17 China’s military capability gives it the ability to take pre-emptive action to assert its territorial claims and simultaneously deter US intervention. This could become an important factor in the capacity of the US to retain its influence in the region.
China’s ability to use force and its qualitative enhancement has been a subject of debate in the past. However, recent advances have greatly augmented its capability
. This is increasingly becoming a cause for concern in the US. In its assessment, the US
Department of Defense (DoD) China Report for 2012, says: “China’s approach to dealing with this challenge is manifested in a sustained effort to develop the capability to attack, at long ranges, military forces that might deploy and or operate within the western Pacific, which the DoD characterizes [sic] as ‘anti-access’ and
‘area denial’ (A2/AD) capabilities.”

(
Sahadi, Jeanne. "Deficit Continues to Drop Sharply." CNNMoney. Cable News Network, 04 Feb. 2014. Web. 18 July 2014.
<http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/04/news/economy/budget-outlook-deficits-cbo/>. Jeanne Sahadi is a writer and reporter for CNN that writes about the economy and money. Fred).
The age of trillion-dollar deficits is well over. For now.
¶
Thanks to a recovering economy, spending restraint and higher tax receipts, the
Congressional Budget Office now projects the deficit for 2014 will be $514 billion, or
3% of the size of the U.S. economy.¶
As a share of gross domestic product, that represents a nearly 27% drop from last year, and marks the smallest deficit since 2007.
¶
In its latest budget and economic outlook, released
Tuesday, the
CBO also projected that the 2015 deficit would reach a low for the coming decade, at $478 billion, or 2.6% of GDP, and then stay below 3% for a couple of years after that.
Ken Spahn is the Senior Manager in the Port Authority’s Port Commerce Department.- “ Port Authority of New York and New Jersey” http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/topics/coasts/monitoring/ioos/jul30mtg/jul30_public_statements.pdf
The data provided by the hydrographic surveying and observation programs – which NOAA calls the backbone of IOOS – are vital to the prevention of accidents and groundings, which can result in injuries, loss of life, and spills that harm the estuary, not to mention significant negative economic impact to the region and the nation.
As presented today, the Federal government’s plan to expand and integrate ocean-observing systems will provide extremely valuable information with a wide range of benefits. However, that worthy objective should be coordinated – regionally and nationally – with the daily need for accurate information for the maritime sector, the principal user of the Federal services
. Members of the maritime sector, including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, have been active in promoting navigation and safety programs with this and prior Administrations and
Congress. The expertise and hands-on experience of the stakeholders can provide invaluable assistance to Ocean.US and the regional associations in preparing the integrated system envisioned by NOAA. By partnering with the maritime industry, the academic and research institutions that have taken the lead in developing the
IOOS regional associations will be better able to understand what systems are necessary for a pilot to navigate a 6,000 TEU vessel to safe berth here and in most any port in this country. I am pleased to note that the Port Authority has existing relationships with academic and research institutions that are involved in the development of IOOS in our region. We look forward to working with them on this project. As we understand it,
NOAA and Ocean.US envision a large, integrated system that by definition will require a major investment of Federal funds
. I will conclude by saying that even as that investment is being made, it will be important that NOAA’s budget, as presented to
Congress, include strong continued funding
for PORTS and the other navigation programs on which the maritime sector relies. That should include funding for the operation and maintenance of PORTS installations, funding that to date this Port Authority, working with the States of New York and New
Jersey, has provided. The PORTS equipment is part of the Federal system on which IOOS will be built. Lacking that funding, the PORTS system would cease to operate. The non-Federal agencies should not be expected to keep the Federal system in operation, as we have been asked to do each year. When you go to
Congress for funding
, NOAA and Ocean.US should be sure to incorporate those costs into the costs of the integrated system.
We will work hard to ensure that the NOAA navigation programs are fully funded. We expect the Federal agencies to do the same
.

-Vice President and Economic Adviser [Daniel L. Thornton, “Does the Economy Need More Spending Now?”,
St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, Economic Synopses, 2013, No. 24, http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/es/article/9892, accessed 7/19/14]RMT
In addition to concerns about the extent to which deficit spending crowds out private spending is the fact that any increase in output is temporary: Increased deficit spending can have no permanent effect on output. In short, government debt cannot be considered net wealth by all U.S. households. If it could be, then we could all become infinitely wealthy simply by incurring an infinite amount of debt. Just as with fiat money, you cannot simply print your way to long-run prosperity. Assessing the benefits of additional deficit spending is further complicated by the likelihood that deficit spending reduces economic growth. Additional deficit spending reduces economic growth by crowding out capital investment. A smaller stock of capital means less future output. This is an intergenerational transfer:
People today get more output, while those in the future get less. It seems likely that such a loss of future output could easily swamp any (temporary) increase in current output. Future output gains associated with a larger capital stock accrue over a long period of time, while the increased output associated with additional deficit spending is short-lived.
, [Director of Regional Strategic Programs at The Nixon Center, served in the White House under Ronald Reagan, special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the
National Security Council Staff, Former Director, Middle East Arms Control Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, Geoffrey The East Moves West: India, China, and Asia’s Growing Presence in the Middle East”, p. 233-4)
The second scenario, called Mayhem and Chaos, is the opposite of the first scenario; everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
The world economic situation weakens
rather than strengthens, and
India, China, and Japan suffer a major reduction in
their growth rates
, further weakening the global economy. As a result, energy demand falls
and the price of fossil fuels plummets, leading to
a financial crisis
for the energy-producing states, which are forced to cut back dramatically on expansion programs and social welfare. That in turn leads to political unrest
: and nurtures
different radical groups
, including, but not limited to, Islamic extremists. The internal stability
of some countries is challenged
, and there are more “failed states.” Most serious is the collapse of
the democratic government in
Pakistan
and its takeover by Muslim extremists
, who then take possession of
a large number of nuclear weapons
. The danger of war between India and Pakistan increases
significantly.
Iran
, always worried about an extremist Pakistan, expands and weaponizes
its nuclear program.
That
further enhances
nuclear proliferation in the Middle
East, with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt joining Israel and Iran as nuclear states. Under these circumstances, the potential for nuclear terrorism increases, and the possibility of a nuclear terrorist attack
in either the Western world or in the oil-producing states may lead to a further devastating collapse of the world economic market, with a tsunami-like impact on stability. In this scenario, major disruptions can be expected, with dire consequences for
two-thirds of the planet’s population.

(P. & R., “Conserving Australia’s Marine Environment: Key Directions Statement, Australian Committee for IUCN”,
SydneyConserving Australia’s Marine Environment, 2012, http://aciucn.org.au/wpcontent/uploads/2013/08/Marine_Statement_Web.pdf)//krishnik
Beyond our territorial waters and EEZ
Australia has made international commitments and contributions to marine
¶ conservation through signing on to international conventions, engaging in international marine policy through ¶ conferences such as Rio+20 and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as well as collaborating in regional ¶ agreements, programs and summits such as the Coral Triangle Initiative.
The Australian Government also uses such
¶
international policies to guide its national marine agenda, notably with the recent establishment of the NRSMPA.
¶
Australia’s leadership in marine conservation must continue to guide best-practice marine policy. This is vitally
¶
important to the global efforts to restore the earth’s largest ecosystem
but also very important to our regional ¶ policies. Most of Australia’s near neighbours are nations reliant on their marine-based livelihoods. ¶ The following are specific international priority actions that should be taken by the
Australian Government: ¶ • support the Global Ocean Commission in formulating effective global marine conservation measures. ¶ • enhance the sustainability of commercial fisheries by:
¶
o contributing to a greater global commitment to reduce fishery capacities within the oceans to
¶
avoid overfishing.
¶
o taking a stronger and broader approach to address issues of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU)
¶
fishing including international collaboration through relevant conventions and agreements. ¶ • protect the High Seas by reaffirming the commitment to establish an implementing agreement for the United
¶
Nations
Convention on the Law of the Sea as a mechanism for high seas governance in areas beyond national ¶ jurisdiction (such as establishing high seas MPAs and increasing compliance of Regional Fisheries Management ¶ Organisations (UNCSD, 2012). ¶ • meet the challenge of deep-sea mining by: ¶ o supporting the establishment of a global moratorium that bans deep-sea mining consistent with the ¶ precautionary approach in the absence of a current understanding of the environmental implications of ¶ such mining. ¶ o supporting increased priority being given to mapping biodiversity values prior to exploration of the seabed. ¶ o increasing communication with the International Seabed Authority. ¶ • embrace and encourage a broader adoption of the ecosystem-based marine management approach of the ¶ Antarctic Treaty System as a mechanism to shift away from sector-based management.
This approach requires
¶
science-based performance standards for protection of ecological systems and for monitoring.
¶
• formally integrate blue carbon and coastal ecosystems into guidelines of the Coastal
Resilience Program for
¶
AusAID in relation to climate change adaptation and mitigation
. ¶ • enhance integrated bioregional marine planning by: ¶ o working to improve integrated bioregional marine planning with our international neighbors including ¶ Indonesia, Timor Leste and Papua New Guinea to address trans-boundary issues in shared shallow waters ¶ that contain near pristine, tropical ecosystems. ¶ o accessing and using
Australia’s leading marine science expertise and the expertise and interests of key
¶
marine stakeholders, to inform effective and holistic international marine policy development and planning

(David Robert, PhD in Politics and Environment, Neoliberalism and climate change adaptation, http://grist.org/politics/2011-08-
24-how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-neoliberalism/)
Fieldman argues, in a nutshell, that “ the neoliberal system produces vulnerability to climate-induced
(and other) changes and
effectively incapacitates effective responses
.”
Adaptation
policy is not something that can
simply be tacked onto
, or absorbed into, neoliberal development policy
more broadly, because “ development
as presently conceived and practised is itself maladaptive
.” For one thing, Feildman argues, it has put workers in a perpetual state of insecurity
: Economic insecurity does not refer just to the failure of the neoliberal system to dent global poverty substantially, but also to the increasingly contingent nature of employment.
Globally, surplus workers from all sectors are forced into competition for a limited number of jobs
. As capital moves to exploit these surpluses, one day’s ‘winners’ may become the next day’s ‘losers’: maquiladora workers in Mexico lose jobs to China or Vietnam, while
American information technology workers lose theirs to India or Malaysia.
Periods of unemployment mean
that most people have few opportunities to accumulate assets that would enable them to take anticipatory adaptation measures
such as strengthening a house, or to rebuild lives disrupted by a climate-induced disaster. Moreover, as Hoogvelt (2001) argues, hundreds of millions face a future of permanent social and economic exclusion as ‘afundamental cleavage has opened up between, on the one hand, networks of capital, labour, information and markets … and on the other, populations and territories deprived of interest and value to the dynamics of global capitalism’. Those at the bottom of the global income scale are likely to remain there; they are ‘economically irrelevant’; many will never find formal employment.
Despite the freedom of capital to move, the neoliberal order restricts the mobility of people
.
Even the option to migrate to escape climate-induced change is not available to those at the bottom
of the global income scale, since most lack the special skills that would permit them to relocate
legally. For the state, the story is similar. It’s clear that “ international climate funding
” is and probably always will be grossly inadequate to the needs states face
, both for basic background services (e.g., infrastructure) and climate-specific measures (e.g., building sea walls, restoring coastal wetlands). States need to be able to marshal their own resources to spend on resilience that benefits local populations. But neoliberalism
, because it encourages capital mobility, leaves states in the position of competing for investment by lowering tax rates and removing tariffs
, thus depriving themselves of revenue. “Neoliberalism,” Fieldman says, “has consequently put the social and much of the public-goods portions of state budgets on a strict, if not starvation, diet.” That includes climate-specific measures. To boot, states competing for corporate investment are loathe to constrain private-sector activities that increase vulnerability, like logging in erosion-prone areas or overshrimping for export. Despite the fond dreams of some neoliberals, civil society is not going to be able to fill this gap
.
Resilience requires a robust, well-funded state
and a citizenry that enjoys some employment stability and asset ownership. Neoliberalism, Fieldman argues, works against that. In the end, big changes are necessary
, but Fieldman’s handwaving on that front isn’t much more helpful than everyone else’s — something about Gramscian moments and counter-hegemonic projects. She does make a good case, though, that the currently dominant model of
global development is pursuing macroeconomic efficiency at the expense of resilience
. That doesn’t seem like a wise strategy heading into an age of uncertainty and upheaval.
(David, FBA is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography @ the Graduate Center of the City Univ. of New
York, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, pgs 165-171)//ddi
To presume
that markets
and market signals can best determine all allocative decisions is to presume
that everything can
in principle be treated as a commodity
.
Commodification presumes the existence of property

rights over
processes, things, and
social relations, that a price can be put on them
, and that they can be traded subject to legal contract.
The market is presumed to work as an appropriate guide
–– an ethic––for all human action
. In practice, of course, every society sets some bounds on where commodification begins and ends. Where the boundaries lie is a matter of contention.
Certain drugs are deemed illegal. The buying and selling of sexual favours is outlawed in most US states, though elsewhere it may be legalized, decriminalized, and even state-regulated as an industry. Pornography is broadly protected as a form of free speech under US law although here, too, there are certain forms (mainly concerning children) that are considered beyond the pale. In the US, conscience and honour are supposedly not for sale, and there exists a curious penchant to pursue ‘corruption’ as if it is easily distinguishable from the normal practices of influence-peddling and making money in the marketplace.
The commodification of
sexuality, culture, history, heritage; of nature as spectacle or as rest cure
; the extraction of monopoly rents from originality, authenticity, and uniqueness
(of works or art, for example)–– these all amount to putting a price on things that were never
actually produced as commodities
.17 There is often disagreement as to the appropriate- ness of commodification (of religious events and symbols, for example) or of who should exercise the property rights and derive the rents (over access to Aztec ruins or marketing of Aboriginal art, for example).
¶
Neoliberalization has
unquestionably rolled back the bounds of commodification and
greatly extended the reach of legal contracts
.
It
typically celebrates
(as does much of postmodern theory) ephemerality and the short-term contract
––marriage, for example, is understood as a short-term contractual arrangement rather than as a sacred and unbreakable bond. The divide between neoliberals and neoconservatives partially reflects a difference as to where the lines are drawn. The neoconservatives typically blame ‘liberals’, ‘Hollywood’, or even ‘postmodernists’ for what they see as the dissolution and immorality of the social order, rather than the corporate capitalists (like Rupert Murdoch) who actually do most of the damage by foisting all manner of sexually charged if not salacious material upon the world and who continually flaunt their pervasive preference for short-term over long-term commitments in their endless pursuit of profit.
¶ But there are far more serious issues here than merely trying to protect some treasured object, some particular ritual or
a preferred corner of social life from
the monetary calculus
and the short-term contract. For at the heart of
liberal and neoliberal theory lies the necessity of constructing coherent markets for land, labour, and money, and these
, as Karl Polanyi pointed out,
‘are obviously not commodities
. . . the commodity description of labour, land, and money is entirely fictitious’.
While capitalism cannot function without such fictions
, it does untold damage if it fails to acknowledge the complex realities behind them
. Polanyi, in one of his more famous passages, puts it this way: ¶
To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment
, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society
. For the alleged commodity
‘labour power’ cannot be shoved about
, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this
peculiar commodity
.
In disposing of man’s labour power the system would
, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man
’ attached to that tag
.
Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure
; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation
through vice, perversion, crime and starvation.
Nature would be reduced to its elements
, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted
, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed
. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages
and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts
in primitive society.18
¶
The damage wrought through the ‘floods and droughts’ of fictitious capitals within
the global credit system, be it in
Indonesia, Argentina,
Mexico, or
even within the US, testifies all too well
to Polanyi’s final point. But his theses on labour and land deserve further elaboration.
¶
Individuals enter the labour market as persons of character
, as individuals embedded in networks of social relations and socialized in various ways, as physical beings identifiable by certain characteristics (such as phenotype and gender), as individuals who have accumulated various skills
(sometimes referred to as ‘human cap- ital’) and tastes (sometime referred to as ‘cultural capital’), and as living beings endowed with dreams, desires, ambitions, hopes, doubts, and fears
.
For capitalists
, however, such individuals are a mere factor of production
, though not an undifferentiated factor since employers require labour of certain qualities, such as physical strength, skills, flexibility, docility, and the like, appropriate to cer- tain tasks. Workers are hired on contract, and in the neoliberal scheme of things short-term contracts are preferred in order to maximize flexibility. Employers have historically used differentiations within the labour pool to divide and rule. Segmented labour markets then arise and distinctions of race, ethnicity, gen- der, and religion are frequently used, blatantly or covertly, in ways that redound to the employers’ advantage. Conversely, workers may use the social networks in which they are embedded to gain privileged access to certain lines of employment. They typically seek to monopolize skills and, through collective action and the creation of appropriate institutions, seek to regulate the labour market to protect their interests. In this they are merely construct- ing that ‘protective covering of cultural institutions’ of which Polanyi speaks.
¶
Neoliberalization seeks to strip away
the
protective coverings that embedded liberalism allowed and occasionally nurtured
. The general attack against labour has been two-pronged. The powers of trade unions and other working-class institutions are curbed or dismantled within a particular state (by violence if necessary).
Flexible labour markets are established. State withdrawal from social welfare provision and technologically induced shifts in job structures that render large segments of the labour force redun- dant complete the domination of capital over labour in the market- place.
The individualized and relatively powerless worker then confronts a labour market in which only short-term contracts are offered on a

customized basis
. Security of tenure becomes a thing of the past (Thatcher abolished it in universities, for example). A ‘personal responsibility system’
(how apt Deng’s language was!) is substituted for social protections (pensions, health care, protec- tions against injury) that were formerly an obligation of employers and the state.
Individuals buy
products in the markets that sell social protections
instead.
Individual security is
therefore a matter of individual choice tied to the affordability of financial products embedded in risky financial markets
.
¶ The second prong of attack entails transformations in the spa- tial and temporal co-ordinates of the labour market. While too much can be made of the ‘race to the bottom’ to find the cheapest and most docile labour supplies, the geographical mobility of capital permits it to dominate a global labour force whose own geographical mobility is constrained
.
Captive labour forces abound because immigration is restricted
. These barriers can be evaded only by illegal immigration (which creates an easily exploitable labour force) or through short-term contracts that permit, for example, Mexican labourers to work in Californian agribusiness only to be shamelessly shipped back to Mexico when they get sick and even die from the pesticides to which they are exposed.
¶ Under neoliberalization, the figure of ‘the disposable worker’ emerges as prototypical upon the world stage.19 Accounts of the appalling conditions of labour and the despotic conditions under which labourers work in the sweatshops of the world abound. In China, the conditions under which migrant young women from rural areas work are nothing short of appalling: ‘unbearably long hours, substandard food, cramped dorms, sadistic managers who beat and sexually abuse them, and pay that arrives months late, or sometimes not at all’.20 In Indonesia, two young women recounted their experiences
working for a Singapore-based Levi-Strauss subcontractor as follows: ¶
We are regularly insulted
, as a matter of course. When the boss gets angry he calls the women dogs, pigs, sluts, all of which we have to endure patiently without reacting.
We work officially from seven
in the morning until three
(salary less than $2 a day), but there is often compulsory overtime, sometimes––especially if there is an urgent order to be delivered––until nine. However tired we are, we are not allowed to go home. We may get an extra 200 rupiah (10 US cents) . . . We go on foot to the factory from where we live. Inside it is very hot. The building has a metal roof, and there is not much space for all the workers.
It is very cramped
. There are over 200 people working there, mostly women, but there is only one toilet for the whole factory . . . when we come home from work, we have no energy left to do anything but eat and sleep
. . .21
¶ Similar tales come from the
Mexican maquila factories, the Taiwanese- and Korean-operated manufacturing plants in Honduras, South Africa, Malaysia, and Thailand. The health haz- ards, the exposure to a wide range of toxic substances, and death on the job pass by unregulated and unremarked. In Shanghai, the Taiwanese businessman who ran a textile warehouse ‘in which 61 workers, locked in the building, died in a fire’ received a ‘lenient’ two-year suspended sentence because he had ‘showed repentance’ and
‘cooperated in the aftermath of the fire’.22
¶ Women, for the most part, and sometimes children, bear the brunt of this sort of degrading, debilitating, and dangerous toil.23
The social consequences of neoliberalization are in fact extreme
.
Accumulation by dispossession typically undermines whatever powers women may have had within household production
/ marketing systems and within traditional social structures and relocates everything in male-dominated commodity and credit markets. The paths of women’s liberation from traditional patri- archal controls in developing countries lie either through degrad- ing factory labour or through trading on sexuality, which varies from respectable work as hostesses and waitresses to the sex trade (one of the most lucrative of all contemporary industries in which a good deal of slavery is involved). The loss of social protec- tions in advanced capitalist countries has had particularly negative effects on lower-class women, and in many of the ex-communist countries
of the Soviet bloc the loss of women’s rights through neoliberalization has been nothing short of catastrophic
.
¶ So how, then, do disposable workers––women in particular–– survive both socially and affectively in a world of flexible labour markets and short-term contracts, chronic job insecurities, lost social protections, and often debilitating labour, amongst the wreckage of collective institutions that once gave them a modicum of dignity and support?
For some the increased flexibility in labour markets is a boon
, and even when it does not lead to material gains the simple right to change jobs relatively easily and free of the traditional social constraints of patriarchy and family has intangible benefits.
For those who successfully negotiate the labour market there are seemingly abundant rewards in the world of a capitalist consumer culture
.
Unfortunately, that culture, however spectacular
, glamorous, and beguiling, perpetually plays with desires without ever conferring satisfactions beyond the limited identity of the shopping mall and the anxieties of status
by way of good looks (in the case of women) or of material possessions. ‘I shop therefore I am’ and possessive individualism together con- struct a world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.
But for those who have lost their jobs or who have never managed to move out
of the extensive informal economies
that now provide a parlous refuge for most of the world’s disposable work- ers, the story is entirely different
.
With
some
2 billion people condemned to live on less than $2 a day, the taunting world of capitalist consumer culture
, the huge bonuses earned in financial services, and the self-congratulatory polemics as to the emancipa- tory potential of neoliberalization, privatization, and personal responsibility must seem like a cruel joke
. From impoverished rural China to the affluent US, the loss of health-care protections and the increasing imposition of all manner of user fees adds considerably to the financial burdens of the poor.24

(Chris, Prof. of Politics @ University of Adelaide, Carol, Prof. Emeritus @ University of Adelaide, “Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity -- towards an ethic of `social flesh'”, Feminist Theory, 2007 8: 279)
The political vocabulary of social flesh
has significant implications for democratic visions. Because it conceptualizes citizens as socially embodied
– as interconnected mutually reliant flesh – in a more thoroughgoing sense than the languages of trust, care, responsibility and generosity, it resists accounts of political change as making transactions between the ‘less fortunate’ and
‘more privileged’
, more trusting, more caring, more responsible or more generous.
Social flesh is political metaphor in which fleshly sociality is profoundly levelling
.
As a result, it challenges meliorist reforms that aim to protect the
‘vulnerable’ from the worst effects of social inequality
, including the current distribution of wealth.
A political ethic of embodied intersubjectivity requires us to consider fleshly interconnection as the basis of a democratic sociality, demanding a
rather more far-reaching reassessment of
national and international
institutional
arrangements than political vocabularies that rest upon extending altruism
. Relatedly, it provides a new basis for thinking about the sorts of institutional arrangements necessary to acknowledge social fleshly existence, opening up ‘the scope of what counts as relevant’ (Shildrick, 2001:
238). For example, it allows a challenge to current conceptualizations that construct attention to the ‘private sphere’ as compensatory rather than as necessary
(Beasley and Bacchi, 2000: 350). We intend to pursue the relationship between social flesh and democratic governance in future papers. Conclusion In this paper we focus on various vocabularies of social interconnection intended to offer a challenge to the ethos of atomistic individualism associated with neo-liberalism and develop a new ethical ideal called ‘social flesh’. Despite significant differences in the several vocabularies canvassed in this paper, we note that most of the trust and care writers conceive
the social reform of atomistic individualism
they claim to address in terms of a presumed moral
or ethical deficiency within the disposition of individuals
. Hence, they reinstate the conception of the independent active self
in certain ways. Moreover, there is a disturbing commonality within
all these accounts
: an ongoing conception of asymmetrical power relations between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’
,
‘carers’ and ‘cared for’
, ‘altruistic’ and ‘needy’. While widely used terms like trust and care clearly remain vocabularies around which social debate may be mobilized, and hence are not to be dismissed (see Pocock, 2006), we suggest that there are important reasons for questioning their limits and their claims to offer progressive alternative understandings of social life. In this setting, we offer the concept of social flesh as a way forward in rethinking the complex nature of the interaction between subjectivity, embodiment, intimacy, social institutions and social interconnection. Social flesh generalizes the insight that trusting/caring/ altruistic practices already take place on an ongoing basis to insist that the broad, complex sustenance of life that characterizes embodied subjectivity and intersubjective existence be acknowledged.
As an ethico-political starting point, ‘social flesh’ highlights human embodied interdependence
.
By drawing attention to shared embodied reliance
, mutual reliance, of people across the globe on social space, infrastructure and resources, it offers a decided challenge to neo-
liberal conceptions of the autonomous self and removes the social distance and always already given distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’
.
There is no sense here of ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’
; rather we are all recognized as receivers of socially generated goods and services
.
Social flesh also marks our diversity, challenging the privileging of normative
over ‘other’ bodies
. Finally, because social flesh necessarily inhabits a specific geographical space, environmentalist efforts to preserve that space take on increased salience
(Macken, 2004: 25). By these means, the grounds are created for defending a politics beyond assisting the ‘less fortunate’.
Social flesh
, therefore, refuses
the residues of ‘noblesse oblige’ that
still appear to linger in emphasis upon vulnerability and altruism within the apparently reformist ethical ideals of trust/respect, care, responsibility and even generosity
. In so doing it puts into question the social privilege that produces inequitable vulnerability and the associated need for ‘altruism’
.
Vital debates about appropriate distribution of social goods, environmental politics, professional and institutional power and democratic processes are reopened

(by JAMES DELINGPOLE 4 Apr 2014, WORLD DOING JUST FINE; GLOBAL WARMING IS GOOD; CO2 IS OUR
FRIEND' SAY SCIENTISTS, http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/04/04/World-doing-just-fine-Global-Warming-is-
Good-CO2-is-our-friend-say-Scientists)
The latest verdict is in on 'climate change' - and the news is good. The planet is greening, the oceans are blooming, food production is up, animals are thriving and humans are doing better than ever: and all thanks to CO2 and global warming. So say the authors of the latest Climate Change Reconsidered report by the NIPCC - that's the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change, an independent research body funded by the Heartland Institute. The scientific team, led by atmospheric physicist Fred Singer, geographer and agronomist Craig Idso, research physicist Sherwood B. Idso and marine geologist Bob Carter, has assessed the peer-reviewed evidence and reached a conclusion somewhat different from the scaremongering narrative which has been promoted in the last week by the IPCC and its amen corner in the mainstream media: reports of the planet's imminent demise have been somewhat exaggerated
; in fact we're doing just fine. Here are their latest report's key findings. Biological Impacts
Atmospheric CO2 is not a pollutant
and is greening the planet.
Far from damaging food production it is helping to increase it, as are rising temperatures
.
Ecosystems are thriving and rising CO2 levels and temperatures pose no significant threat to aquatic life
. Global warming will have a negligible effect on human morbidity and the spread of infectious diseases but will, on balance, be beneficial because cold is a deadlier threat to the human species than warmth
. CO2, Plants And Soil
Numerous studies show that CO2 is good for plants, increasing their growth-rate, reducing their reliance on water and making them less vulnerable to stress
. Increased CO2 has resulted in reduced topsoil erosion, has encouraged beneficial bacteria, and improved aerial fertilization - creating more plantlife which will help sequester the carbon apparently of so much concern to environmentalists. Plant Characteristics Rising CO2 will improve plant growth, development and yield.
It enables plants to produce more - and larger - flowers, thus increasing productivity
. It also helps plants grow more disease-resistant. Earth's Vegetative Future Rising CO2 has led to a greening of the planet. Agricultural production has increased dramatically across the globe in the last three decades, partly because of new technologies but partly also because of the beneficial warmth and increased CO2. Terrestrial Animals
There is little if any evidence to support the IPCC's predictions of species extinction which are based mainly on computer models rather than hard data
. Amphibian populations will suffer little, if any, harm. Bird populations may have been affected by habitat loss - but not by "climate change" to which they are more than capable of adapting. Polar bears have survived periods climatic change considerably more extreme than the ones currently being experienced. Butterflies, insects, reptiles and mammals tend on balance to proliferate rather than be harmed by "climate change." Aquatic Life Multiple studies from multiple oceanic regions confirm that productivity - from phytoplankton and microalgae to corals, crustaceans and fish - tends to increase with temperature. Some experts predict coral calcification will increase by about 35 per cent beyond pre-industrial levels by 2100, with no extinction of coral reefs.
Laboratory studies predicting lower PH levels - "ocean acidification" - fail to capture the complexities of the real world and often contradict observations in nature
. Human Health Warmer temperatures result in fewer deaths associated with cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness and strokes. In the US a person who dies of cold loses on average in excess of ten years of life, whereas someone who dies from heat loses likely no more than a few days or weeks of life. Between
3 and 7 per cent of the gains in longevity in the US in the last three decades are the result of people moving to warmer states. There is a large body of evidence to suggest that the spread of malaria will NOT increase as a result of global warming. Rising CO2 is increasing the nutritional value of food with consequent health benefits for humans. The report concludes:
The impact of rising temperatures and higher atmospheric CO2 levels in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has not been anything like what IPCC would have us believe and its forecasts differ wildly from those sound science would suggest
. Either IPCC's authors purposely ignore this research because it runs counter to their thesis that any human impact on climate must be bad and therefore stopped at any cost or they are inept and have failed to conduct a proper and full scientific investigation of the pertinent literature. Either way, IPCC is misleading the scientific community, policymakers and the general public. Because the stakes are high this is a grave disservice.
( Victor, PhD Environmental Science and Director of the Cooperative Oxford Lab, 2002, “Coastal and Marine
Ecosystems and Global Climate Change,” Pew, http://www.c2es.org/docUploads/marine_ecosystems.pdf, CH )
There is evidence that marine
organisms and ecosystems are resilient
to environmental change. Steele (1991) hypothesized that the biological components of marine systems are tightly coupled to physical factors, allowing them to respond quickly to rapid environmental change and thus rendering them ecologically adaptable. Some species also have wide genetic variability throughout their range, which may allow for adaptation
to climate change.

James Delingpole and Kit Eastwood. 23 June 2014. "Global Warming Fabricated by NASA and NOAA". Breitbart Online. http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/06/23/Global-warming-Fabricated-by-NASA-and-NOAA
The evidence of their tinkering can clearly be seen at Real Science,
where blogger Steven Goddard has posted a series of graphs which show "climate change" before and after the adjustments. When the raw data is used, there is little if any evidence of global warming and some evidence of global cooling. However, once the data has been adjusted
- ie fabricated by computer models -
20th century 'global warming' suddenly looks much more dramatic. This is especially noticeable on the US temperature records. Before 2000, it was generally accepted - even by climate activists like NASA's James Hansen - that the hottest decade in the
US was the 1930s. As Hansen himself said in a 1989 report: In the U.S. there has been little temperature change in the past 50 years,
the time of rapidly increasing greenhouse gases — in fact, there was a slight cooling throughout much of the country.
However, Hansen subsequently changed his tune when,
sometime after 2000, the temperatures were adjusted to accord with the climate alarmists' fashionable "global warming" narrative.
By cooling the record-breaking year of
1934, and promoting 1998 as the hottest year in US history, the scientists who made the adjustments were able suddenly to show 20th century temperatures shooting up - where before they looked either flat or declining. These adjustments, however, are not limited to the US temperature data sets. Similar fabrications have taken place everywhere from Iceland to Australia.
(Craig D., PhD Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, 6/15/11, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and
Global Climate Change, “Estimates of Global Food Production in the Year 2050: Will We Produce Enough to Adequately Feed the World?” AS)
Many people have long believed that the ongoing rise in the air’s
carbon dioxide or
CO2 content has been causing the world to warm, due to the “greenhouse effect”
of this radiatively-active trace gas of the atmosphere; and they believe that the planet will continue to warm for decades -- if not centuries -- to come, based upon economic projections of the amounts of future fossil fuel (coal, gas and oil) usage and climate-model projections of the degree of global warming they expect to be produced by the CO2 that is emitted to the atmosphere as a result of the burning of these fuels.
The same people have also long believed that CO2-induced global warming will lead to a whole host of climate
- and weather-related catastrophes, including more frequent and severe floods, droughts, hurricanes and other storms, rising sea levels that will inundate the planet’s coastal lowlands, increased human illness and mortality, the widespread extinction of many plant and animal species, declining agricultural productivity, frequent coral bleaching, and marine life dissolving away in acidified oceans
. And because of these theoretical model-based projections, they have lobbied local, regional and national governments for decades in an attempt to get the nations of the world to severely reduce the magnitudes of their anthropogenic CO2 emissions. But are the scenarios painted by these climate alarmists true portrayals of what the future holds for humanity and the rest of the biosphere if their demands are not met?
¶ This is the question recently addressed in our
Center’s most recent major report: Carbon Dioxide and Earth’s Future: Pursuing the Prudent Path. In it, we describe the findings of many hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies that analyzed real-world data pertaining to
the host of climate
- and weatherrelated catastrophes predicted by the world’s climate alarmists
to result from rising global temperatures. The approach of most of these studies was to determine if there had been any increasing trends in the predicted catastrophic phenomena
over the past millennia or two, the course of the 20th century, or the past few decades, when the world’s climate alarmists claim that the planet warmed at a rate and to a degree that they contend was unprecedented over the past thousand or two years.
And the common finding of all of this research was a resounding No!
¶ But even this near-universal repudiation of climate-alarmist contentions has not been enough to cause them to alter their overriding goal of reducing anthropogenic

CO2 emissions. Invoking the precautionary principle
, they essentially say that the potential climatic outcomes they foresee are so catastrophic that we cannot afford to gamble upon them being wrong, evoking the old adage that it is better to be safe than sorry, even if the cost is staggering
.
¶
If this were all there were to the story, we all would agree with them. But it is not
, for they ignore an even more ominous catastrophe that is rushing towards us like an out-of-control freight train that is only years away from occurring. And preventing this ominous future involves letting the air’s CO2 content continue its historical upward course, until the age of fossil fuels gradually peaks and then
naturally, in the course of unforced innovation, declines, as other sources of energy
gradually become more efficient and less expensive
, and without the forced intervention of government.

David Dickson was the founding director of SciDev.Net and spent many years at Nature, as its Washington correspondent and later as news editor. He also worked on the staffs of Science and New Scientist, specializing in reporting on science policy. He started a career in journalism as a sub-editor, following a degree in mathematics, The limits of science diplomacy, 6-27-14, http://www.scidev.net/global/capacity-building/editorials/the-limits-of-science-diplomacy.html
Using science for diplomatic purposes has obvious attractions
and several benefits.
But there are limits
to what it can achieve.
¶
The scientific community has a deserved reputation for its international perspective — scientists often ignore national boundaries and interests when it comes to exchanging ideas or collaborating on global problems.
So it is not surprising that science attracts the interest of politicians keen to open channels of communication with other states. Signing agreements on scientific and technological cooperation is often the first step for countries wanting to forge closer working relationships.
More significantly, scientists have formed key links behind-the-scenes when more overt dialogue has been impossible.
At the height of the Cold
War, for example, scientific organisations provided a conduit for discussing nuclear weapons control.
Only so much science can do
Recently, the
Obama administration has given this field a new push, in its desire to pursue "soft diplomacy" in regions such as the Middle East. Scientific agreements have been at the forefront of the administration's activities in countries such as Iraq and Pakistan. But — as emerged from a meeting entitled New Frontiers in Science Diplomacy, held in London this week (1–2 June) — using science for diplomatic purposes is not as straightforward as it seems.
Some scientific collaboration clearly demonstrates what countries can achieve by working together.
For example, a new synchrotron under construction in
Jordan is rapidly becoming a symbol of the potential for teamwork in the Middle East.
But whether scientific cooperation can become a precursor for political collaboration is less evident.
For example, despite hopes that the Middle East synchrotron would help bring peace to the region, several countries have been reluctant to support it until the Palestine problem is resolved. Indeed, one speaker at the London meeting
(organised by the UK's Royal Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science) even suggested that the changes scientific innovations bring inevitably lead to turbulence and upheaval. In such a context, viewing science as a driver for peace may be wishful thinking.
Conflicting ethos Perhaps the most contentious area discussed at the meeting was how science diplomacy can frame developed countries' efforts to help build scientific capacity in the developing world.
There is little to quarrel with in collaborative efforts that are put forward with a genuine desire for partnership.
Indeed, partnership — whether between individuals, institutions or countries — is the new buzzword in the "science for development" community. But true partnership requires transparent relations between partners who are prepared to meet as equals
. And that goes against diplomats' implicit role: to promote and defend their own countries' interests. John
Beddington, the British government's chief scientific adviser, may have been a bit harsh when he told the meeting that a diplomat is someone who is "sent abroad to lie for his country". But he touched a raw nerve. Worlds apart yet co-dependent The truth is that science and politics make an uneasy alliance. Both need the other. Politicians need science to achieve their goals, whether social, economic or — unfortunately — military; scientists need political support to fund their research.But they also occupy different universes.
Politics is, at root, about exercising power by one means or another.
Science is — or should be — about pursuing robust knowledge that can be put to useful purposes
. A strategy for promoting science diplomacy that respects these differences deserves support. Particularly so if it focuses on ways to leverage political and financial backing for science's more humanitarian goals, such as tackling climate change or reducing world poverty.
But a commitment to science diplomacy that ignores the differences — acting for example as if science can substitute politics (or perhaps more worryingly, vice versa), is dangerous
. The Obama administration's commitment to "soft power" is already faltering. It faces challenges ranging from North Korea's nuclear weapons test to domestic opposition to limits on oil consumption.
A taste of reality may be no bad thing
.David Dickson Director, SciDev.Net

Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, STEM: Why It Makes No Sense, Education Week,
June 19, 2012, http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2012/06/stem_why_it_makes_no_sense.html
Of course you know what
STEM stands for:
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
It's an acronym, signifying a program and a national priority. The argument for its centrality is simple. Our economy is technology-driven. The strength of that economy depends on our ability to turn out an endless bag full of technological triumphs. Our capacity to fulfill that promise in turn depends on the skills of our people in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
But we are swiftly falling behind a growing number of other countries with respect to both the quality and quantity of people with the needed STEM skills. So, inevitably, we place a high priority on the production of more people with higher quality STEM skills. The logic is ironclad, isn't it?
Or is it?
Here is an interesting fact.
The countries that are producing more people with higher skills in mathematics, science, engineering, technology, and science don't have STEM programs. When we do benchmarking research in those countries, we don't hear their educators talking about STEM priorities.
We don't hear their industrial leaders doing that either. The term is not used. The programs don't exist
.
What is going on here?
How come they are doing better at this when we have STEM programs and they don't?
The answer is that they have education systems that work and we don't. When we start falling behind in an area, we invent a program. When they start falling behind, they ask, What's wrong with our system?
And they fix it. The truth is that "programs" won't work in an arena like this. The causes of our poor performance in these disciplines run deep. Those causes implicate the inner workings of our education system. It is not possible to ring fence the STEM subjects from the system itself, nor is it possible to build a strong secondary school STEM program on a weak elementary school curriculum. If you try to do that, you will fail. If you think that you can fix the problems in the STEM subjects without fixing the larger system, you will find that any progress you make will be limited and even that progress will disappear very quickly as the system reverts to form as soon as your back is turned. This is not because educators are opposed to your objectives or fail to share your hopes for their students. It is because they are as much trapped by the system as you are. We are all in this together
.
Dr. Robert N. Charette is an internationally acknowledged authority and pioneer in risk management, information systems and technology. He serves as a senior advisor to a wide variety of international Fortune 100 companies, high tech consortiums, as well as government departments on the effectiveness, the impacts, and the rewards/risks of their high-technology programs.
Robert Charette is a frequent international lecturer and author. He is the author of the McGraw-Hill books, STEM Education
Funding in the U.S. - Is More or Less Needed?- 6-8-12
Do we really know whether we have too few or too many STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) students to meet the future innovation and competitive needs of the US? That was one of the questions being addressed at a STEM conference on measures for innovation and competitiveness that I attended this week in Washington, D.C. It was sponsored by several industry associations, including the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and IEEE USA. ¶ Since the 2007 publication of the influential National Science
Foundation report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future," which examined the
“erosion” of the “U.S. advantages in the marketplace and in science and technology” and which stated that a “coordinated federal effort is urgently needed to bolster U.S. competitiveness and pre-eminence in these areas,” there has been a bi-partisan consensus that the way to reverse said erosion is to increase both the number of STEM graduates as well as STEM knowledge in the general student population, which has been on a relative decline over the past decade.
¶ In response to the increasing concern over the dwindling supply of STEM students, back in
2009 the Obama Administration announced a $260 million government/private industry initiative called, “Educate to Innovate,” the aim of which was “to move American students to the top of the pack in science and math achievement over the next decade.”
¶
More recently, the

Administration proposed a new $100 million government/private industry initiative to train 100,000 STEM teachers and graduate 1 million additional STEM students over the next decade, an very ambitious goal given that about 167,000 students total graduated with STEM degrees last year.
¶ Even as these and dozens more STEM initiatives have sprung up, there has been a lingering question about how much STEM professionals contribute to national innovation and competitiveness as well as whether there truly is a STEM education shortfall
, and if so, by how much? Without good answers to these questions based on concrete data, national policy is formed and scarce national resources allocated based on anecdotal information which one can only hope provides the correct insights.
¶ The speakers at the STEM workshop dug into these issues and more. For instance,
Professor Richard Freeman from Harvard stated that while everyone generally agrees that “innovation” is critical to U.S. economic and social progress, there aren’t good definitions of what the term means let alone how to measure innovation at a national level.
As a result, when R&D funding is reduced (as it has been for quite some time at the federal level in relation to GDP), no one is really sure what the effects are on future innovation and therefore economic or social progress.
Freeman proposed an approach to define and measure innovation (i.e., an "innovation index") so that when national policy decisions involving
R&D funding are made there is some understanding as to what the end result will likely end up being.
¶ In a similar vein,
Professor
Nicholas Vonortas from George Washington University spoke about the disconnect that seems to exist in US manufacturing and the role of STEM education. He noted that the US manufacturing sector continues to shrink from the size it once was
(although it is still the largest in the world) and what remains increasingly depends on knowledge-intensive work. Furthermore, there exist high-skilled manufacturing jobs that are going unfilled and likely will continue to be for some time, as this Washington Post story also noted a few months back. This is important because in previous U.S. recessions, manufacturing has led the way out of them.
The assumption is that if these jobs go unfulfilled, what’s left of U. S. manufacturing will not only eventually disappear but the effects of the last recession and the current job stagnation will linger for a long time; therefore, the argument goes, if only there were more STEM graduates, the U.S. could at least preserve the manufacturing jobs that exist.
¶ However, Vonortas noted that, when one digs into the data, most of the jobs going begging are apparently for production workers; not ones that would necessarily require STEM degrees.
In addition, manufacturing jobs may go begging because manufacturing is seen by students and their parents as a poorly paying industry that doesn’t have a healthy long-term future. Therefore, Vonortas says, there isn’t really any hard evidence to claim that the lack of STEM students is the problem or that more are the solution to maintaining U.S. manufacturing.
U.S. policy makers may need to look at other avenues than STEM education to solve U.S. manufacturing issues
.
¶
One area where STEM students are needed is in aerospace
and especially the defense industry. Edward Swallow from Northrup Grumman discussed how aerospace and defense (A&D) is the leading employer of STEM professionals, but it is having a hard time attracting new STEM grads. One reason, similar to manufacturing, is that
STEM graduates look at A&D as a declining industry, which given projected defense budget cuts, is not an unreasonable perspective.
Another is that usually U.S. citizenship and often a security clearance is required, which reduces those eligible to be employed.
A third is that there are not a lot of exciting new aerospace or defense initiatives that spur the imagination of young engineers like there once were.
¶ Swallow’s company and others in the A&D industry are pushing hard to increase the total number of STEM students (especially from minority groups and women) in order to meet their needs. But as another speaker, Professor Ron Hira from Rochester Institute of Technology pointed out in his talk on the globalization of engineering and its impact, the US economy has created less than 50,000 new engineering jobs in the past decade. That lackluster performance can be attributed to both increased global competition and the outsourcing of engineering and other STEM-related jobs even as 900,000 engineering students were graduating from colleges and universities.
The use of H-1B visas has also negatively impacted the availability of STEM jobs in the US, Hira argued.
¶ All these factors may help explain why only about half of those graduating with undergraduate STEM degrees actually work in the STEM-related fields after college, and after 10 years, only some eight percent still do. I should note that those with STEM degrees do seem to enjoy higher salaries than non-STEM degree co-workers in any field they so choose, which may be the best reason to get one.
¶
By the end of the conference it was pretty clear that the assumption that a major increase in STEM educational funding is absolutely required for the US to avert future economic decline is not well tested.
Funding may well be needed, but the current data provide mixed support.
I’ll provide a link to the speaker presentation videos when it appears, but in the meantime, you may want to read the Spectrum article on jobless innovation that made many of the same points the speakers at the conference did.

Robert D. Atkinson, President of IT and Innovation Foundation in Washington DC, “Why the Current Education Reform Strategy
Won’t Work“, Issues.org, 10-27-13
The first myth is that in a globalized, technology-driven world, all students needs to learn STEM
. In this view
—so widely held that it is virtually never questioned— the economy will be so innovation-based that everyone, even those who will never become Ph.D. scientists, will need to learn as much STEM as possible. The reality is quite different
.
Only about 5% of jobs are STEM jobs
, and that share is not expected to grow significantly.
This is one of the findings that my colleague Merrilea Mayo and I reported in Refueling the U
.S.
Innovation
Economy
: Fresh Approaches to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education, issued in December 2010 by the Information
Technology and Innovation Foundation.
Very few workers actually need advanced STEM education
, and surveys of employers reinforce that. One survey noted in our report found that although 70% of employers rated oral communication skills as very important for high-school graduates, only 9% rated science skills as very important
.
The rate was higher for fouryear college graduates
, but still only 33% of employers rated science skills as very important, compared with 90% who rated writing skills as very important.
Saying that the nation should pour resources into K-12 because everyone needs to know STEM is akin to saying that because music is important to society, every K-12 student should have access to a Steinway piano and a Juilliard-trained music teacher
. In fact, because very few students become professional musicians, doing this would be a waste of societal resources
. It would be far better to find students interested in music and give them the focused educational opportunities they need. STEM is no different.
The second myth is that focusing on K-12 will ensure that enough students graduate from college with STEM degrees
. The Some STEM for All view holds that the best way to increase college STEM graduates is to boost STEM skills in the early years, as argued by many observers and reports, including the
National Academies’ 2007 report Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. In this view, it is too late to focus on college, or even high school, for promoting STEM.
This can be described as the “leaky pipeline” model, in which kids enter the educational flow but drop out through leaks along the way
. Norman R.
Augustine, who chaired the committee that produced Rising Above the Gathering Storm, described this leakage in another 2007 Academies’ report, Is America Falling Off the Flat Earth? “As one might suspect,” he wrote, “there is a great deal of leakage along that extended educational highway. To begin with, about one-third of U.S. eighth-graders do not receive a high school diploma. And of those who do, about
40 percent do not go on to college. About half who do begin college do not receive a bachelor’s degree. Of those who do receive such a degree, two-thirds will not be in science or engineering. And of those who are U.S. citizens and do receive degrees in either science or engineering, only about 1 in 10 will become candidates for a doctoral degree in those fields. And over half the doctoral candidates drop out before being awarded a Ph.D.” If the goal is to have every high-school graduate be able and ready to major in a STEM field in college, then ensuring that the pipeline is completely full by the end of the eighth grade is critical. That is why the Gathering Storm report so strongly declared that “the U.S. system of public education must lay the foundation for developing a workforce that is literate in mathematics and science.” As the report continued, “The point is that it takes a lot of third-graders to produce one contributing research scientist or engineer and a very long time to do it.” In other words, if everyone has an equal probability of taking the next step to become STEM-educated, then the best way to get more at the end of the pipeline is to put a lot of students in at the beginning. There are two problems with this logic, however. First, not everyone has an equal probability of getting a graduate STEM degree. At the risk of violating political correctness, the fact is that being a scientist or engineer requires above-average intelligence. But the nation is not a huge Lake Wobegon, the fictional community where all the children are above average. Moreover, it is not just intelligence that determines a student’s likelihood to go into STEM; it is also personality. There is a long tradition of research exploring the link between personality characteristics and choice of occupation, including STEM occupations. A new study, reported by Scott Andrew Shane in his 2010 book Born Entrepreneurs, Born Leaders: How Your Genes Affect Your Work Life, has found that the choice of careers in physical science and engineering was about 70% more influenced by a person’s genetic makeup than were choices in such areas as finance and sales. Assuming that exposing every student to a lot of high-quality STEM education will make them want and be able to become a scientist or engineer is simply wishful thinking, just as it would be to assume that every student exposed to high-quality music education and a requirement to take four years of music in high school will want and be able to become a professional musician. The second problem, as noted above, is that the nation does not need everyone to gain a STEM degree
. In fact
, the current pipeline produces enough high-school students able to get the needed number of STEM college degrees
.
But society currently does a poor job in high school and college of helping those students get all the way to a STEM degree. To use the pipeline analogy, replacing a malfunctioning valve is likely to be a more effective, and much cheaper, strategy than increasing the size of a five-mile-long pipe.

“NOAA: $5.5 billion FY 2015 budget request promotes environmental intelligence Investments ensure NOAA continues to protect the public with innovative science” National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration- March 13, 2014- http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2014/20140313_budget_statement.html
President Obama's fiscal year 2015 discretionary budget request for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, totals $5.5 billion. This is $174 million over the 2014 enacted budget, an increase of 3.2 percent
. The proposed budget will enhance public safety and community resiliency to weather and climate disasters. It also makes smart investments in critical infrastructure and innovative science to better position NOAA for the future and continues efforts to strengthen the agency’s oceanic and coastal programs, its internal and extramural programs, all while maintaining strong fiscal discipline. The budget proposal supports vital NOAA missions and environmental priorities under the
Commerce Department’s Open for Business Agenda. “NOAA is one of the most valuable service agencies in the U.S. government,” said Dr. Kathryn Sullivan, under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. “We make science matter for millions of Americans thanks to the environmental intelligence from our network of earth observations, weather and climate forecasts, and assessments of marine life. We live on an ever changing planet, and our products and services help people live well and safely.”
The 2015 budget focuses on three areas: Investing in mission critical infrastructure: NOAA is the only federal agency with the responsibility to provide timely and accurate weather, water, ocean, climate, and ecosystem forecasts
. Accordingly, t his budget includes an additional
$222.7 million to launch new polar and geostationary satellites and ensure essential information technology and physical infrastructure is in place to support NOAA’ s Weather Ready Nation initiative and atmospheric and coastal monitoring programs. Strengthening scientific innovation:
Developing the latest technological advancements and promoting an understanding of our planet is essential to keep NOAA products and services viable and invaluable to the American public. An increase of $40.6 million is proposed to advance electronic monitoring and next generation fisheries stock assessments, continue improvements to our weather products, and fund research and development related to drought, sea level rise, extreme heat, and climate impacts on living marine resources. Providing services to enhance community resilience:
Last year, seven weather and climate related events caused more than $1 billion in damages. NOAA’s environmental intelligence is vital in preparing communities for the next disaster.
This budget includes an additional $47.2 million to promote public safety and marine ecosystem health, enable sustainable economic activity, and strengthen coastal communities. Improvements include the expansion of coastal inundation tools that will enable better flood warnings and improved ecological forecasting for better detection of harmful algal blooms and hypoxia. Budget requests for NOAA’s five offices include: National Ocean Service (NOS): NOS is making critical investments in products, services and capabilities that will improve the resilience of the nation’s coasts.
In FY 2015, NOAA requests $496.2 million, an increase of $20.6 million over the 2014 enacte d. National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS): NMFS provides science-based conservation and management services of the nation’s living marine resources and their habitat. It also promotes sustainable commercial fisheries. In FY 2015,
NOAA’s budget request includes
$887.2 million, which is $65.7 million below the 2014 enacted due to a $75.0 million decrease for onetime fisheries disaster funding.
Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR): OAR provides
NOAA’s research foundation for understanding our planet’s complex systems
and integrates those efforts through its network of laboratories and external research and science partners. In FY 2015,
NOAA requests $462.2 million, an increase of $35.4 million over the 2014 enacted level
. National Weather Service (NWS): NWS is the nation’s official voice during life threatening weather events and provides warnings to communities nationwide, including specialized forecasts every day for public aviation, marine transportation, space weather, and river flooding. NOAA’s FY 2015 request is part of a broader effort to help the NWS deliver more efficient, responsive, and advanced operations to communities around the country. The proposal will align the NWS budget to both function and performance. It includes $1.06 billion, a decrease of $3.9 million from the 2014 enacted level. National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS): NESDIS is responsible for the procurement, launch and operation of the Nation's civil operational environmental satellites, and manages three National Data Centers that house and provide easy access to the world's largest archive of global environmental data from both satellite and in situ sources. Funding in FY 2015 totals $2.2 billion, an increase of $164.8 million over the 2014 enacted level. In addition to its discretionary budget submission, NOAA includes investments in the Administration’s Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative ($180 million) as well as in its Climate Resiliency Fund ($75 million). More specifically, NOAA seeks funds to sustain observations and data gathering capabilities by constructing a NOAA ocean survey vessel; improve climate models and predictions so that scientists can better anticipate the impacts of future climate variability and change; and provide competitive grants to communities to improve coastal resilience to severe weather events, climate hazards, and changing ocean conditions.

(Jack, former editor at the Guardian, writing for the Center of Research on Globalization, “Global Capitalism and Climate
Change”, 5/25/14, http://www.globalresearch.ca/global-capitalism-and-climate-change/5383709, HG)
Despite the reality of climate change, the major capitalist industrialized countries
— most certainly the United States
—are moving at a snail’s pace,
if moving at all
, to mitigate
its decimating effects on life on Earth.
At issue is whether the capitalist system is willing
and able to bring about the immense changes required to prevent climate change from developing into a global catastrophe from mid-to-end century.
The evidence so far is that it will not move fast enough
. Virtually all scientists and most concerned people now understand why climate change is happening, and that it will become much worse. Some of them are part a growing mass movement to stop climate change, which we strongly support. But there’s a catch. At this point
, the problem is deeply embedded in a capitalist
economic system based upon the relentless exploitation of the Earth
and all its resources to obtain super profits that largely accrue to a small minority of people.
Capital must be sharply challenged as a system if climate change is to be halted
. Some progress is being made in the conversion from oil, natural gas and coal to solar, hydropower, wind,
biomass (biofuel
) and geothermal energy
, mainly in several smaller social democratic or liberal countries of Europe and elsewhere.
But such progress is the exception and is dwarfed by the greenhouse gas emissions of the major industrialized capitalist economie s, led by the U.S. and
China. Of these societies, China — now the world’s largest annual contributor of CO2 to the atmosphere — is devoting the greatest amount of resources and money to develop sources of green energy, but the gap between its fossil and renewable fuels is immense. The U.S., which was the principal emitter of CO2 for well over a hundred years and remains the number one cumulative contributor of poisons in the atmosphere, became number two a few years ago. Washington lags far behind most major industrial countries in efforts to limit greenhouse emissions. American presidents have known about an impending climate catastrophe at least since the
Clinton Administration in the 1990s but have done virtually nothing about it.Given its wealth and powerful status as global hegemon, the United States government under the regimes of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, has been the principal obstacle to concerted global climate action
. President
Obama
has finally decided after five years to use the powers he already possesses without the need of Congressional approval to implement certain limited beneficial environmental measures, but this is hardly good enough. Now he is even giving hopeful speeches about climate change. But his few insignificant accomplishments are buried by a mountain of missed opportunities and his dedication to drilling for as much oil and fracking for as much gas as possible
, turning our country into Saudi America. As said in mid-May by Paul Jay, the senior editor of The Real News Network: Obama “has a big bully pulpit. He could be rallying the country for a new, green America… but [he’s done] next to nothing since he was elected.” It is convenient to blame the far right and Tea Party know-nothings for America’s shameful lethargy in this regard, but that’s simply not the main problem
. Climate deniers in Congress
, exasperating as they are, constitute the farcical sideshow of a much bigger economic and political three-ring circus
known as U.S.A. Inc. — the world’s largest business/government monopoly.
Its run by the wealthiest sector of the population, including the corporate, banking and finance chieftains, and their well-paid minions in business and government, the mass media and other key institutions.
Theoretically, American democracy is a means of organizing a society based first and foremost on an honest electoral system to choose its leaders and hold them responsible.
The electoral system is still based on one person, one vote, but it is corrupted absolutely by the power of big money contributions from the multi-millionaires and billionaires in the ruling class
.
And by seeing to it
there are only two viable parties to choose from — both capitalist, one representing the right and far right and the other the center right
— the Plutocracy cannot lose, no matter who wins. Being capitalist, it’s also supposed to mean a society where citizens may not be economically equal, but assuredly not as unequal as conditions in the U.S. today. Of all the OECD’s major industrial economies America is last in equality. In its quest for ever-greater profits, this ruling class is shredding what remains of that democracy. In the process it has also fought to lower the income and politically disempower the middle and working classes. According to economic columnist Eduardo Porter in the May 14, New York Times: “The growing concentration of income can, in fact, make inequality more difficult to correct, as the wealthy bring their wealth to bear on the political process to maintain their privilege.
What’s more, disparities in income seem to produce political polarization and gridlock, which tend to favor those who receive a better deal from the prevailing rules.” What’s this got to do with climate change? Everything. Fossil fuel interests
(oil, gas, coal) are major elements of the U.S. economy
— so much so that
Washington subsidizes this industry with from $10 billion up to $52 billion a
year (which includes costs of defending pipelines and shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf). Fossil fuel makes its owners, executives and stockholders incredibly rich
. All America’s industries and corporations are dependent in one way or another on prevailing energy resources.
Most big corporations and financial interests are wedded to the short-term profit picture, such as a company’s quarterly economic performance charts. Heads roll when profits drop. The fossil fuel industry in particular, and big business in general, fear profits will fall if the U.S. sharply lowers greenhouse gas emissions.
Another factor is that a commitment to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and to stop the devastation of the ecological system means that the consumption in the richer countries inevitably must be reduced — an utter anathema for capitalism
, which is based on continual expansion of demand. Neither the existing ruling class nor the political system will support the required massive and prompt transition torenewable fuels and the establishment of a sustainable ecological policy to slow down and eventually halt the

continual increase in global warming and the decimation of the natural and human environment. It will take decades of transformation away from fossil fuels and from conspicuous consumption for tangible progress to be made.But only in this way can global warming and ecological disaster be avoided. In effect, however, the owners of big capital say to this: “No go
! Our profits may fall. And we’re certainly not going to tell consumers to cut back on demand! We can make lots of money by adjusting to climate change
— building sea walls, retrofitting businesses, schools and other structures to withstand powerful hurricanes or tornadoes, building houses in cooler parts of the country, selling air-conditioners, extracting oil from the Arctic and Antarctic and so on and on. It’s endless. We can finally sell refrigerators to Eskimos! Don’t you realize that adapting to climate change can be an economic boom for big business? There are two options confronting the American people: (1) Long-term survival and a revived world for future generations by swiftly replacing fossil fuels to mitigate a potential climate change calamity for the 9.5 billion human beings who will inhabit the increasingly inhospitable world of 2050. (2) The other option, evidently intended to protect the economic status quo and strengthen immediate profits, is to prolong the transition to renewable energy as long as possible, meanwhile focusing on profiting from adaptation to rising temperatures and sea levels and so on. Working toward a better world required requires a radical solution.
There’s a fitting slogan in parts of the worldwide environmental movement that expresses the real situation: “System Change, Not Climate Change
.”
The existing capitalist system demonstrably works against the needs of the masses of people, and not only in climate change. The U.S. economy is in long-term stagnation, kept going by financial bubbles that profit the wealthy and penalize the middle class
, working class and poor; joblessness is expected to remain high in future years; 50% of the American people are low income or poor; many young people, saddled with excessive college debts, are often rewarded with substandard jobs and pay; personal privacy of almost any kind is on the way out, now that the NSA knows all and sees all. There’s more — war, racism, sexism, dead-end minimum wage jobs, and so on and on. It is imperative that a far more powerful environmental movement develops in the next few years to put some effective breaks on greenhouse gas emissions and the despoliation of the land, water and quality of life. It’s time for the various components of the environmental and left political movements, while retaining their identities and missions, to unite in action on the issue of climate change and build the struggle for climate sanity into a powerful political force. In this connection, it is timely to recall this statement by Hungarian philosopher István Mészáros: “The uncomfortable truth of the matter is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time… there can be no future for humanity itself.”
The best opportunity we have to end increasing climate change
— before high temperatures, air pollution, flooded coastlines, droughts, fierce storms, scarcity of potable water and famine reach disastrous heights — is system change. This is already obvious to much of the left and will become clear to those in the struggle as the crisis increases but the government and business are content to take minimal steps, concentrating more on adaptation than mitigation
. The capitalist industrial world has done much to improve life in the last 200 years
(not counting wars, imperialism, colonialism, exploitation and inequality) but now that same economic system’s industrialization is threatening life on Earth. The only alternative system to global capitalism, is 21st century socialism, which has learned a lot from its 150 years of efforts, experiences, trials, errors, and successes.
It took capitalism over 600 years to get to where it is now, including the colonial theft of three-quarters of the world and the degradation of its peoples, hundreds of years of slavery, Jim Crow segregation laws, gross inequality, wage-theft, the subjugation of women, child labor, the holocaust imposed upon Native Americans, two
World Wars (including another holocaust), thousands of nuclear weapons ready for the next war, grotesque poverty for over half the 7.2 billion people on Earth today, and predictions of much worse environment changes with each passing decade. That, they say, is the price of progress. Another price, if we allow it to happen,will be severe climate change for future generations.Actually, capital is proving itself incapable of doing the right thing about three existential matters confronting the world and its people today and in the future: climate change, poverty/inequality, and wars. Socialism isn’t finished because of the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the development of market economies in some remaining societies. The first chapter of a longer book is over. It’s time for socialism’s second chapter. Socialism comes in different varieties but none of them would allow profits to stand in the way of creating a society based on renewable fuels, sustainable developmentand new ecological, industrial, economic and social policies. It wouldn’t tolerate great inequality and poverty. It would do its best to avoid war. In our view the world needs this desperately requires system change, not climate change

(Mark Sagoff, Senior Research Scholar – Institute for Philosophy and Public policy in School of Public Affairs – U. Maryland,
William and Mary Law Review, “INSTITUTE OF BILL OF RIGHTS LAW SYMPOSIUM DEFINING TAKINGS: PRIVATE PROPERTY AND
THE FUTURE OF GOVERNMENT REGULATION: MUDDLE OR MUDDLE THROUGH? TAKINGS JURISPRUDENCE MEETS THE
ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT”, 38 Wm and Mary L. Rev. 825, March) (Note – Colin Tudge - Research Fellow at the Centre for
Philosophy at the London School of Economics. Frmr Zoological Society of London: Scientific Fellow and tons of other positions.
PhD. Read zoology at Cambridge, Simon Levin = Moffet Professor of Biology, Princeton. 2007 American Institute of Biological
Sciences Distinguished Scientist Award 2008 Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti 2009 Honorary Doctorate of Science,
Michigan State University 2010 Eminent Ecologist Award, Ecological Society of America 2010 Margalef Prize in Ecology, etc…
PhD)
Although one may agree with ecologists such as Ehrlich and Raven that the earth stands on the brink of an episode of massive extinction, it may not follow from this grim fact that human beings will suffer as a result. On the contrary, skeptics such as science writer Colin Tudge have challenged biologists to explain why we need more than a tenth of the 10 to 100 million species that grace the earth. Noting that "cultivated systems often out-produce wild systems by 100-fold or more," Tudge declared that "the argument that humans need the variety of other species is, when you think about it, a theological one." n343 Tudge observed that " the elimination of all but a tiny minority of our fellow creatures does not affect the material well-being of humans one iota.
" n344 This skeptic challenged ecologists to list more than 10,000 species (other than unthreatened microbes) that are essential to ecosystem productivity or functioning. n345 "
The human species could survive just as well if 99.9% of our fellow creatures went extinct, provided only that we retained the appropriate 0.1% that we need.
" n346 [*906] The monumental Global Biodiversity Assessment ("the
Assessment") identified two positions with respect to redundancy of species. "At one extreme is the idea that each species is unique and important, such that its removal or loss will have demonstrable consequences to the functioning of the community or ecosystem." n347 The authors of the Assessment, a panel of eminent ecologists, endorsed this position, saying it is "unlikely that there is much, if any, ecological redundancy in communities over time scales of decades to centuries, the time period over which environmental policy should operate." n348
These eminent ecologists rejected the opposing view, "the notion that species overlap in function to a sufficient degree that removal or loss of a species will be compensated by others, with negligible overall consequences to the community or ecosystem." n349 Other biologists believe, however, that species are so fabulously redundant in the
ecological functions they perform that
the life-support systems and processes of the planet and ecological processes
in general will function perfectly well with fewer of them, certainly fewer than the millions and millions we can expect to remain even if every threatened organism becomes extinct.
n350 Even the kind of sparse and miserable world depicted in the movie Blade Runner could provide a
"sustainable" context for the human economy as long as people forgot their aesthetic and moral commitment to the glory and beauty of the natural world. n351 The Assessment makes this point. "Although any ecosystem contains hundreds to thousands of species interacting among themselves and their physical environment, the emerging consensus is that the system is driven by a small number of . . . biotic variables on whose interactions the balance of species are, in a sense, carried along." n352 [*907] To make up your mind on the question of the functional redundancy of species, consider an endangered species of bird, plant, or insect and ask how the ecosystem would fare in its absence. The fact that the creature is endangered suggests an answer: it is already in limbo as far as ecosystem processes are concerned. What crucial ecological services does the black-capped vireo, for example, serve? Are any of the species threatened with extinction necessary to the provision of any ecosystem service on which humans depend? If so, which ones are they? Ecosystems and the species that compose them have changed, dramatically, continually, and totally in virtually every part of the United States. There is little ecological similarity, for example, between New
England today and the land where the Pilgrims died. n353 In view of the constant reconfiguration of the biota, one may wonder why Americans have not suffered more as a result of ecological catastrophes. The cast of species in nearly every environment changes constantly-local extinction is commonplace in nature-but the crops still grow. Somehow, it seems, property values keep going up on Martha's Vineyard in spite of the tragic disappearance of the heath hen. One might argue that the sheer number and variety of creatures available to any ecosystem buffers that system against stress.
Accordingly, we should be concerned if the "library" of creatures ready, willing, and able to colonize ecosystems gets too small. (Advances in genetic engineering may well permit us to write a large number of additions to that
"library.")
In the United States as in many other parts of the world, however, the number of species has been increasing dramatically, not decreasing, as a result of human activity.
This is because the hordes of exotic species coming into ecosystems in the United States far exceed the number of species that are becoming extinct. Indeed, introductions may outnumber extinctions by more than ten to one, so that the United States is becoming more and more species-rich all the time largely as a result of human action. n354 [*908] Peter Vitousek and colleagues estimate that over 1000 non-native plants grow in California alone; in Hawaii there are 861; in Florida, 1210. n355 In Florida more than 1000 non-native insects, 23 species of mammals, and about 11 exotic birds have established themselves. n356 Anyone who waters a lawn or hoes a garden knows how many weeds desire to grow there, how many birds and bugs visit the yard, and how many fungi, creepy-crawlies, and other odd life forms show forth when it rains. All belong to nature, from wherever they might hail, but not many homeowners would claim that there are too few of them. Now, not all exotic species provide ecosystem services; indeed,

some may be disruptive or have no instrumental value. n357 This also may be true, of course, of native species as well, especially because all exotics are native somewhere. Certain exotic species, however, such as Kentucky blue grass, establish an area's sense of identity and place; others, such as the green crabs showing up around Martha's Vineyard, are nuisances. n358 Consider an analogy [*909] with human migration.
Everyone knows that after a generation or two, immigrants to this country are hard to distinguish from everyone else. The vast majority of
Americans did not evolve here, as it were, from hominids; most of us "came over" at one time or another. This is true of many of our fellow species as well, and they may fit in here just as well as we do. It is possible to distinguish exotic species from native ones for a period of time, just as we can distinguish immigrants from native-born Americans, but as the centuries roll by, species, like people, fit into the landscape or the society, changing and often enriching it. Shall we have a rule that a species had to come over on the Mayflower, as so many did, to count as
"truly" American? Plainly not. When, then, is the cutoff date? Insofar as we are concerned with the absolute numbers of "rivets" holding ecosystems together, extinction seems not to pose a general problem because a far greater number of kinds of mammals, insects, fish, plants, and other creatures thrive on land and in water in America today than in prelapsarian times. n359 The Ecological Society of America has urged managers to maintain biological diversity as a critical component in strengthening ecosystems against disturbance. n360 Yet as Simon Levin observed, "much of the detail about species composition will be irrelevant in terms of influences on ecosystem properties." n361 [*910] He added: "For net primary productivity, as is likely to be the case for any system property, biodiversity matters only up to a point; above a certain level, increasing biodiversity is likely to make little difference." n362 What about the use of plants and animals in agriculture? There is no scarcity foreseeable. "Of an estimated 80,000 types of plants [we] know to be edible," a U.S. Department of the Interior document says, "only about 150 are extensively cultivated." n363 About twenty species, not one of which is endangered, provide ninety percent of the food the world takes from plants. n364 Any new food has to take "shelf space" or "market share" from one that is now produced. Corporations also find it difficult to create demand for a new product; for example, people are not inclined to eat paw-paws, even though they are delicious. It is hard enough to get people to eat their broccoli and lima beans. It is harder still to develop consumer demand for new foods. This may be the reason the Kraft Corporation does not prospect in remote places for rare and unusual plants and animals to add to the world's diet. Of the roughly 235,000 flowering plants and 325,000 nonflowering plants (including mosses, lichens, and seaweeds) available, farmers ignore virtually all of them in favor of a very few that are profitable. n365 To be sure, any of the more than 600,000 species of plants could have an application in agriculture, but would they be preferable to the species that are now dominant? Has anyone found any consumer demand for any of these half-million or more plants to replace rice or wheat in the human diet? There are reasons that farmers cultivate rice, wheat, and corn rather than, say, Furbish's lousewort.
There are many kinds of louseworts, so named because these weeds were thought to cause lice in sheep. How many does agriculture really require? [*911] The species on which agriculture relies are domesticated, not naturally occurring; they are developed by artificial not natural selection; they might not be able to survive in the wild. n366 This argument is not intended to deny the religious, aesthetic, cultural, and moral reasons that command us to respect and protect the natural world. These spiritual and ethical values should evoke action, of course, but we should also recognize that they are spiritual and ethical values. We should recognize that ecosystems and all that dwell therein compel our moral respect, our aesthetic appreciation, and our spiritual veneration; we should clearly seek to achieve the goals of the ESA. There is no reason to assume, however, that these goals have anything to do with human well-being or welfare as economists understand that term. These are ethical goals, in other words, not economic ones. Protecting the marsh may be the right thing to do for moral, cultural, and spiritual reasons. We should do it-but someone will have to pay the costs. In the narrow sense of promoting human welfare, protecting nature often represents a net "cost," not a net "benefit." It is largely for moral, not economic, reasons-ethical, not prudential, reasons- that we care about all our fellow creatures.
They are valuable as objects of love not as objects of use. What is good for [*912] the marsh may be good in itself even if it is not, in the economic sense, good for mankind. The most valuable things are quite useless.
(M. Beenstock1, Y. Reingewertz2, and N. Paldor3 1Department of Economics, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus Campus,
Jerusalem, Israel 2Department of Economics, the George Washington University, 2115 G St, Washington DC, USA 3Fredy and Nadine Herrmann
Institute of Earth Sciences, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Edmond J. Safra Campus, Givat Ram, Jerusalem, Israel, 11/21/12, Earth System
Dynamics, “Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming,” AS)
We have shown that anthropogenic forcings do not polyno- mially cointegrate with global temperature and solar irradi- ance.
Therefore, data for 1880–2007 do not support the an- thropogenic interpretation of global warming during this pe- riod
. This key result is shown graphically in Fig. 3 where the vertical axis measures the component of global temper- ature that is unexplained by solar irradiance according to our estimates. In panel a the horizontal axis measures the anomaly in the anthropogenic trend when the latter is derived from forcings of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. In panel b the horizontal axis measures this anthropogenic anomaly when apart from these greenhouse gas forcings, it includes tropospheric aerosols and black carbon. Panels a and b both show that there is no relationship between tem- perature and the anthropogenic anomaly, once the warming effect of solar irradiance is taken into consideration.
However, we find that greenhouse gas forcings might have a temporary effect on global temperature
. This result is il- lustrated in panel c of
Fig. 3 in which the horizontal axis measures the change in the estimated anthropogenic trend. Panel c clearly shows that there is a positive relationship between temperature and the change in the anthropogenic anomaly once the warming effect of solar irradiance is taken into consideration.
Currently, most of the evidence supporting AGW the- ory is obtained by calibration methods and the simulation of GCMs.

Calibration shows
, e.g. Crowley (2000), that to explain the increase in temperature in the 20th century, and especially since 1970, it is necessary to specify a sufficiently strong anthropogenic effect. However, calibrators do not re- port tests for the statistical significance of this effect, nor do they check whether the effect is spurious
12.
The implication of our results is that the permanent effect is not statistically significant.
Nevertheless, there seems to be a temporary an- thropogenic effect. If the effect is temporary rather than per- manent, a doubling, say, of carbon emissions would have no long-run effect on Earth’s temperature, but it would in- crease it temporarily for some decades
. Indeed, the increase in temperature during 1975–1995 and its subsequent stabil- ity are in our view related in this way to the acceleration in carbon emissions during the second half of the 20th century (Fig. 2).
The policy implications of this result are major since an effect which is temporary is less serious than one that is permanent
.The fact that since the mid 19th century Earth’s tempera- ture is unrelated to anthropogenic forcings does not contra- vene the laws of thermodynamics, greenhouse theory, or any other physical theory.
Given the complexity of Earth’s cli- mate, and our incomplete understanding of it, it is difficult to attribute to carbon emissions and other anthropogenic phe- nomena the main cause for global warming in the 20th cen- tury.
This is not an argument about physics, but an argument about data interpretation.
Do climate developments during the relatively recent past justify the interpretation that global warming was induced by anthropogenics during this pe- riod? Had Earth’s temperature not increased in the 20th cen- tury despite the increase in anthropogenic forcings (as was the case during the second half of the 19th century), this would not have constituted evidence against greenhouse the- ory. However, our results challenge the data
interpretation that since 1880 global warming was caused by anthropogenic phenomena
. Nor does the fact that during this period anthropogenic forcings are
I(2), i.e. stationary in second differences, whereas Earth’s temperature and solar irradiance are I(1), i.e. stationary in first differences, contravene any physical theory. For physical reasons it might be expected that over the millennia these variables should share the same order of integration; they should all be I(1) or all I(2), otherwise there would be persistent energy imbalance. However, dur- ing the last 150 yr there is no physical reason why these vari- ables should share the same order of integration. However, the fact that they do not share the same order of integration over this period means that scientists who make strong in- terpretations about the anthropogenic causes of recent global warming should be cautious
. Our polynomial cointegration tests challenge their interpretation of the data.Finally, all statistical tests are probabilistic and depend on the specification of the model. Type 1 error refers to the probability of rejecting a hypothesis when it is true (false positive) and type 2 error refers to the probability of not rejecting a hypothesis when it is false (false negative). In our case the type 1 error is very small because anthropogenic forcing is I (1) with very low probability, and temperature is polynomially cointegrated with very low probability. Also we have experimented with a variety of model specifications and estimation methodologies. This means, however, that as with all hypotheses, our rejection of AGW is not absolute; it might be a false positive
, and we cannot rule out the possibility that recent global warming has an anthropogenic footprint.
However, this possibility is very small, and is not statistically significant at conventional levels.

Jeffery, Writer for wired.com, “The Promise and Pitfalls of Democracy”, Wired.com, 12-11-12, http://www.wired.com/2012/12/the-promise-and-pitfalls-of-science-diplomacy/
On July 17th, 1975, Alexei Leonov and Tom Stafford did something extraordinary: they shared a meal of canned beef tongue and black bread. It may not have been the most delicious culinary experience the men had ever had, but the setting of the meal was slightly more noteworthy: outer space, where two spacecraft had docked and were orbiting the earth at nearly 18,000 miles per hour. The two men and their crews conducted scientific observations, exchanged gifts, and spoke intermittently in English, Russian, and “Oklahomski,” the Soviet commander’s description of Stafford’s drawl. Far below Leonov and Stafford, their political leaders – Leonid Brezhnev and Gerald Ford, respectively – were embroiled in the maneuverings of the Cold War. Diplomatic tensions ran deep, but with the Space Race to the Moon in the rearview mirror, joint missions seemed to operate above the fray of political discourse. The Apollo-Soyuz episode was a unique moment in American space exploration history, a pivot from antagonism and competition to measured cooperation that previewed a similar move toward engagement in the political arena over a decade later. Indeed, crosstalk between members of supposedly clashing countries is a common feature of the scientific enterprise. These sorts of collaborations may not directly solve the issues at the heart of tense diplomatic situations, but they do get parties on either side talking. The very neutrality of the subject matter – the pursuit of “truth” – may actually help the process, allowing mistrust to thaw and preconceptions to crumble while engaging in a shared aim.
This notion of science as a diplomatic tool – its use as an entry point to a recalcitrant society that simultaneously breaks down politically steeped preconceptions and offers tangible benefits – is a promising mode
of development and a constructive brand of international relations
. The Obama Administration understands the value of science diplomacy; last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the expansion of the Science Envoy program, appointing Barbara Schaal of Washington University in St. Louis, Bernard Amadei of the University of Colorado, and Susan Hockfield of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the position. These prominent scientists represent the third class of envoys – the program began in 2009 and has sponsored visits to nearly 20 countries.
The philosophy behind the
envoy program is noble
, but its current directive is a bit vague. As noted in the State Department’s official release, “the science envoys travel in their capacity as private citizens and advise the White House, the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. scientific community about the insights they gain from their travels and interactions.”
A recent assessment
of the program by envoy Elias Zerhouni
noted the challenge of following through on initiatives predicated on the personal credibility
and contacts of the individual envoys.
Leveraging the networks of world-renowned scientists within the framework of a
coherent policy of international relations is difficult
, particularly when funding for longer-term projects is uncertain.
The trust of international partners requires a predictable political and financial environment
. When President Obama launched the program during a speech in Cairo, he said that the envoys would “collaborate on programs that develop new sources of energy, create green jobs, digitize records, clean water, and grow new crops.” Whether these programs are mandated by the executive branch or are the responsibility of the envoys is unclear. A more explicit structure could allow science diplomats to be more effective, building on the strong record of science as an invaluable tool in the soft power arsenal.
(The National Research Council (NRC) is the working arm of the United States
National Academies, which produces reports that shape policies, inform public opinion, and advance the pursuit of science, engineering, and medicine, “U.S. and International Perspectives on Global Science Policy and Science” *pgs.33
-34, http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13300&page=33KW, 2012, 7/31/14, MEM)
Many
workshop participants underlined the failure of scientists to effectively engage policy makers
and the public in the understanding the role of science and its
potential
value in diplomacy and in development
.
According to Volker ter Meulen, the main challenges are the lack of a unified voice to speak on behalf of
science and the lack of experience within the political institutions to use science and effectively communicate with the science community. This challenge is often compounded by the multiplicity of other voices in a crowded world.
In a very complicated diplomatic system
, involving NGOs, intergovernmental organizations, media, and new communication modes and networks, the scientific community must learn how to
inform and engage more effectively with
all these groups and
governments.
Furthermore, several participants underscored the importance or recognizing that many of the major policy challenges require science in diplomacy across a broad front. For example, tackling the Millennium Development Goals requires understanding and action on food, health, and the environment, which involves multiple government departments and requires a coherent and integrated policy.

Unfortunately,
noted one discussant, there are often organizational barriers within and between governments, in addition to the low public understanding and support for such policies.
(The National Research Council (NRC) is the working arm of theUnited States
National Academies, which produces reports that shape policies, inform public opinion, and advance the pursuit of science, engineering, and medicine, “U.S. and International Perspectives on Global Science Policy and Science” *pgs.33
-34, http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13300&page=33KW, 2012, 7/13/14, MEM)
A
serious lack of human capital, coherent national
science and technology strategies, and research infrastructures in
potentially partnering countries was identified
by some workshop participants as an important
barrier to more effective international engagement.
Gebisa Ejeta and others stated that weak human capacity
, in part owing to brain drain, and the lack of adequate research infrastructure in
developing countries has too often
derailed promising science-based developments or worse,prevented their successful exploitation.
Ejeta also underlined the differences in goals and aspirations between
institutions in the United States and
those in developing countries
that often
create anawkward dialogue about the objectives of collaborative
partnerships.
Most of the advanced research institutions in the developed world aim at creating a global public good; in contrast, research centers inmost developing countries focus on the development of locally needed products and services. Nevertheless, he believed that the two goals are mutually supportive, and if the parties communicate and work together, a win-win scenario often can be reached. He also noted an overreliance in developing countries on external funding to capitalize on science diplomacy and global science cooperation opportunities, which is, of course, largely because of insufficient local resource commitment to science. There is a shortage of functional research centers and science support architecture such as science and technology commissions merit-based funding mechanism, or science academics in the developing world. Several participants identified building such structures as an important goal of science diplomacy.
(The National Research Council (NRC) is the working arm of the United States
National Academies, which produces reports that shape policies, inform public opinion, and advance the pursuit of science, engineering, and medicine, “U.S. and International Perspectives on
Global Science Policy and Science” *pgs. 33-34, http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13300&page=33KW, 2012,
7/31/14, MEM)
Despite the many efforts put forward by the U.S. government, the discussion identified difficulties forforeign organizations in engaging U.S. governmental science agencies
. Discussion leader Michael Cleggpointed to the diversity and the structural complexity of the U.S. science agencies and the lack of mechanism for coordinating and integrating diplomatic activities undertaken by the government, businesses, and
NGOs.
Existing bureaucratic diversity and inflexibility
, he said, often makes communication with U.S. agencies difficult and inhibits science diplomacy endeavors
. Eric Bone alsonoted the disconnect between the form that science diplomacy is taking today and the currentorganizational structure. Volker ter Meulen , of University of Wurzburg and former president of theGerman Academy of Sciences Leopoldina,
underlined the common inflexibility in decision-making processes
and described a political culture of “short - termism”
among policy makers, where science is expected to provide easy answers quickly and contribute on short notice to single issues
. Instead, hesuggested building longer-term relationships between scientific and political communities based ontrust and mutual confidence. He also noted the importance of creating and maintaining flexibility in political decision making and of being “prepared for the unexpected” to be able to deal with future developments and a changing evidence base.
(The National Research Council (NRC) is the working arm of theUnited States
National Academies, which produces reports that shape policies, inform public opinion, and advance the pursuit of science, engineering, and medicine, “U.S. and International Perspectives onGlobal Science Policy and Science”, *pg.35—http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13300&page=33KW, 2012, 7/31/14, MEM)
Some workshop participants felt that another challenge to effective science diplomacy is the failure of governments to implement commitments made
in bilateral, summit, and other meetings, thus undermining the credibility of the science diplomacy process.
As observed by Michael Clegg, the United States and other
advanced

nations make commitments that they do not always honor. For example, unmet expectations
of U.S. agency participation in joint project of the U.S.-Mexico Foundation for Science, created by good intentions, have led to an awkward situation between the two partners.
Larry Weber of NSF noted a similar situation after the U.S government put forward abroad Middle Eastern agenda, fueling large expectations in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Considerable efforts and progress have been made, yet financial support was insufficient to meet high expectations created by publicly announced agendas. There may be too much of a tendency to assume that new initiatives are needed, noted Gebisa Ejeta. In many cases there are already existing programs and agencies for international cooperation that have important goals and have built capabilities but do not have enough resources, and it may be effective to provide the programs already in place with needed resources.
(Daryl Copeland, a Research Associate at CIPS and a former Canadian Diplomat, “Science Diplomacy: What’s
It All About?”, Center for International Policy Studies,http://cips.uottawa.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Copeland-Policy-
Brief-Nov-11-5.pdf, 2011, 7/31/14, MEM)
However, there exists an even more fundamental ¶ difficulty:
S&T issues are largely alien to, and
¶
almost invisible
within, most international policy
¶
(IP)
institutions.
S&T and IP are effectively two
¶
solitudes, existing in
separate floating worlds that
¶
rarely intersect. When diplomats or politicians
¶
talk about IP, you
rarely hear anything about S&T.
¶
Similarly,
when scientists get together to discuss
¶
their work, it is rarely incthe context of diplomacy
or
¶
international policy. Indeed,
scientists,
besides being
¶
notoriously poor communicators,
tend to cherish their
¶
independence from politics and government.
The skill ¶ sets, activity time frames and orientations ofthe ¶ two groups differ markedly. It must be asked: How ¶ many diplomats are scientists? How many scientists ¶ are diplomats? How often doscientists and diplomats
¶
mix? Foreign ministries, development agencies, and
¶
indeed most multilateral organizations are without ¶ thescientific expertise, technological savvy, cultural ¶ pre-disposition or R&D network access and crosscutting linkages required to understand andmanage
¶
S&T issues effectively.
¶
Add up all of this, and a rather disturbing picture
¶
emerges. It is something akin to a “triple whammy”.
¶
Inmainstream popular culture, (a)
diplomacy is seen
¶
as irrelevant and ineffective;
(b) international policy ¶ is viewed asesoteric and exotic; and (c)
science is
¶
perceived as complex and impenetrable
. Raise any
¶
one of these subjects on itsown and most people’s
¶
eyes glaze over. Put all three together, and you have a
¶
combination capable of stopping just about any dinner ¶ party conversation in its tracks.
(Rohald Bailey, science correspondent for The Reason, “Cancun Climate Change Breakthrough Greatly
Exaggerated”, http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/14/cancun-climate-change-breakthr, 12/4/10, 7/31/14, MEM)
The United Nations climate change conference in Cancun is being hailed
by many news outlets and environmentalactivists
as a “breakthrough.”
For example, the liberal magazine, Mother Jones headlined it as “Cancun Climate Breakthrough;”Canada’s
Globe and Mail declared, “Global accord on climate change hailed as breakthrough;” and National Journal asserted, “B reakthrough Made in U.N. Climate Talks.”
Breakthrough is generally taken to mean an activity t hat is characterized by major progress in overcoming someobstacle.
Are the Cancun
Agreements really a breakthrough
when it comes to addressing the issue of man-made globalwarming?
Not so much.
¶ Let’s start with the future of the Kyoto Protocol *PDF+.
Under the Kyoto Protocol rich countries agreed in 1997 to reduce their emissions
of greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide, by an average of 5 percent below their 1990levels by 2012. The United States never ratified the treaty.
At the Cancun conference, the developing countries insisted that rich countries agree to continue and increase
their commitments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions
past the 2012 end of the Kyoto Protocol.
Poor countries
actually wanted the rich countries to commit to more than Kyoto
— they lobbied for cuts of 25 to 40 percent below their
1990 emissions levels.
They didn’t get that commitment.
¶ In fact, the
negotiators merely agreed that the
Conference of the Parties “shall aim tocomplete its work”
[PDF] on extending the Kyoto P rotocol with the goal of having “its results adopted by the Conference of theParties...as early as possible and in time to ensure that there is no gap between the first and second commitment periods.”
The operative phrase is “shall aim.” It is clear that the rich countries did not agree to continue the
Kyoto Protocol
;they agreed to continue talking about continuing the Kyoto Protocol. It is also worth noting that both Russia and Japan flatly stated that theywere dropping out of the Kyoto Protocol after 2012. ¶ What about legally binding emissions reductions commitments by the rich countries? Asthe Copenhagen climate change conference came to its chaotic end last year, the U.S., China, India, South Africa, and Brazil hastily put togetherthe face-saving Copenhagen Accord.
Under the Accord both rich and poor countries could make voluntary pledges to cut their greenhouse gasemissions and engage in other activities with the aim of mitigating future man-made climate change. The Accord had no official status underthe United Nations climate negotiation process. The Cancun Agreements now take note of the emissions reduction targets promised under the Copenhagen Accord, but the crucial point is that the pledges remain voluntary, they are not legally binding. ¶ The spin coming out of Cancun isthat these pledges now have official status under the U.N. negotiations process, so that they can form the basis for

future legally bindingcommitments.
In plain fact, developed and developing countries not are legally bound to do
anythingabout their emissions under the Cancun Agreements.
(The National Research Council (NRC) is the working arm of the United States
National Academies, which produces reports that shape policies, inform public opinion, and advance the pursuit of science, engineering, and medicine, “U.S. and International Perspectives on
Global Science Policy and Science” *pg.26+ http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13300&page=33KW, 2012,
7/31/14, MEM)
Youssef noted that one of the international science community’s main objective s, trust building, isnot
compatible with the idea of soft power. According to her, even though science diplomacypromises to rise above conflict, the term raises serious ideological questions and practical challenges.Such challenges are apparent in the Middle East, where U.S. policies evoke doubts about true intentions. John Boright,
executive director for international affairs for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), cautioned against implying that potentially divisive national agendas are being pursued when using the term
“science diplomacy,” in cases where the motivation is simply advancing science, addressing common problems, and building personal relationships. Scientific cooperation andexchanges between the United
States and Iran were cited as an example of cases in which the labelscience diplomacy could affect scientific counterparts negatively.
(Harvey Newman, is an expert in experimental high energy physics. “Session Y5 at the April meeting”, http://www.aps.org/units/fip/newsletters/201109/y5.cfm, 2013, 7/31/14, MEM)
Speaking on "Science Diplomacy in Large International Collaborations
", Barish spoke of the emergence of such collaborations in several fields of physics as the result of the imperative to combine resources, skills and ideas in a shrinking world empowered by communications an
d collaborative technologies, and theimplications for U.S. science policy. The importance of pursuing each project varies from national priorities (ITER) to strategic priorities in the South Pole laboratory to transformational science and frontier research in ALMA, AUGER, LHC, AMS,ILC, SKA and
many others . The tangible side benefits of such large scale projects are many, from the World Wide
Web to accelerator development driving materials science as well as medical and industrial applications, and the development of large state-of-the-art facilities "advances technological technology applications for society, often in unpredictable ways."
¶ After commenting on thevaried forms of partnership in the projects mentioned, Barish returned to his central themes: "
Developing and supporting such large facilities must be an important part of U.S. Science Policy, in order to keep U.S. science at the forefront
", and "the U.S. must be part of the most important science to be most competitive and to have the biggest impact on society." Heused the progress of the ILC Global Design Effort as a success example, while highlighting the key role of governments in establishing global projects
that can move forward to successful completion over a period of one or moredecades. He highlighted the challenges of integrating the U.S. system, with its one-year funding cycle and particular ways of governance,project management and accountability with those of other countries and/or international organizations. Looking to the future, if the U.S. aspires to host a major international project
to do frontier science, Barish said: “we
must solve problems of governance, visas, in-kind contributions, accountability, contingency and
[the way we handle] cost overruns" to work effectively with our international partners.
¶ Speaking on "A Scientist’s Approach to Diplomacy – First Listen andLearn", Lane opened by quoting J. Thomas Ratchford (FIP Chair in 1996):
" Physics is perhaps the most international of all
human endeavors. Physicists naturally think internationally, and their closest research collaborators are as likely to be across the world as across the hall…" This helps explain why scientists, and physicists in particular, have been so effective in facilitating or paving the way for international lcooperation, along with the simple fact that many scientists have the ability to listen and learn.
Lanespoke of two angles on science diplomacy: Diplomacy for Science which includes "research collaborations, international conferences and sharedfacilities" and
Science for Diplomacy that includes the "use of scientific research to improve relations between nations; help solve worldproblems; protect the earth's environment

and biodiversity, etc." As a former NSF Director, he reflected on NSF's many international activities,noting that NSF funding is largely reserved for international research and education activities in the U.S., or by the U.S. participants in aninternational collaborative project. ¶ Lane discussed nanotechnology with China‟s
President Jiang Zemin in 2001
(Alex and E. William, science and technology adviser to the administratorof the U.S.
Agency for International Development, science and technology adviser to the U.S. secretary of state, “Development Science and
Science Diplomacy”, http://www.sciencediplomacy.org/perspective/2012/development-science-and-sciencediplomacy, 12/7/12, 7/31/14, MEM)
Cooperation on science, technology, and engineering around development challenges provides
U.S.diplomats with a significant opportunity to leverage science as a tool of smart power. U.S. scientific
expertise is highly regarded around the world, even in areas where U.S. popularity may be low.
Despite fierce competition and rapidly increasing parity in science, technology, and engineering assets among nations, the United States remains predominant in most fields and is a world leader in education, research, and innovation. Scientific engagement serves U.S. interests to promote stability by empowering a traditional source of moderate leadership. Scientists frequently are the intelligentsia
a of society and play important roles as leaders in many developing countries. The values inherent inscience honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, transparency and openness, meritocracy, accountability,tolerance, and hunger for opposing points of view are values that Americans cherish.
They are also values that achieve political goals, such as improving governance, transparency, and the rule of law. Scientific engagement can also build long-term frameworks that reinforce and support official relationships between the United States and other countries. Science diplomacy is not the relationship itself, but provides the scaffolding essential for the relationship to thrive.
(Robert D. Hormats, Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, Science Diplomacy and Twenty-First Century Statecraft, http://www.state.gov/e/rls/rmk/2012/182545.htm, 3/1/12, 7/31/14, MEM)
Science diplomacy is a central component of America’s
twenty-first century statecraft agenda. The United
States must
increasingly recognize the vital role science
and technology can play in addressing
major challenges, such as making our economy more competitive, tackling global health issues, and dealing with climate change.
American leadership in global technological advances and scientificresearch, and the dynamism of our companies and universities in these areas, is a major source of oureconomic, foreign policy, and national security strength. Additionally, it is a hallmark of the success ofthe American system. While some seek to delegitimize scientific ideas, we believe the United Statesshould celebrate science and see it — as was the case since the time of Benjamin Franklin — as anopportunity to advance the prosperity, health, and overall well-being of Americans and the globalcommunity. ¶ Innovation policy is part of our science diplomacy engagement. More than ever before,modern economies are rooted in science and technology . It is estimated that America’s knowledge -based industries represent
40 percent of our economic growth and 60 percent of our exports.
Sustaining a vibrant knowledge-based economy, as well as a strong commitment to educational excellence and advanced research, provides an opportunity for our citizens to prosper and enjoy upward mobility.
America attracts people from all over the world — scientists, engineers, inventors, and entrepreneurs — who want
the opportunity
to participate in, and contribute to, our innovation economy
.
¶ At the same time
, our bilateral and multilateral dialogues support science, technology, and innovation abroad by promoting improved education; research and development funding ; good governance and transparent regulatory policies; markets that are open and competitive; and policies that allow researchers and companies to succeed, and, if they fail, to have the opportunity to try again
. We advocate for governments to embrace and enforce an intellectual property system thatallows innovators to reap the benefits of their ideas and also rewards their risk taking. Abraham Lincolnhimself held a patent on an invention, a device for preventing ships from being grounded on shoals. Hesaid in his "Second Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions" in 1859 that patents "added the fuel ofinterest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things." ¶
The practice of science is increasingly expanding from individuals to groups, from single disciplines to interdisciplinary, and from a national to an international scope
. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reported that from 1985 to 2007, the number of scientific articles publishedby a single author decreased by 45 percent. During that same period, the number of scientific articlespublished with domestic co-authorship increased by 136 percent, and those with international co-authorship increased by 409 percent. The same trend holds for patents.

Science collaboration
is excitingbecause it takes advantage of expertise that exists around the country and around the globe .American researchers, innovators, and institutions, as well as their foreign counterparts, benefit throughthese international collaborations.
Governments that restrict the flow of scientific expertise and data will find themselves isolated, cut off from the global networks that drive scientific and economic innovation.
¶ While the scientific partnerships that the United States builds with other nations, andinternational ties among universities and research labs, are a means to address shared challenges, theyalso contribute to broadening and strengthening our diplomatic relationships.
Scientific partnerships are based on disciplines and values that transcend politics, languages, borders, and cultures.
Processesthat define the scientific community — such as merit review, critical thinking, diversity of thought, andtransparency — are fundamental values from which the global community can reap benefits.
¶
History provides many examples of how scientific cooperation can bolster diplomatic ties and cultural exchange.
American scientists collaborated with Russian and Chinese counterparts for decades, even asother aspects of our relationship proved more challenging. Similarly, the science and technology behind the agricultural "Green Revolution" of the 1960s and ‘70s was the product of American, Mexican, and Indian researchers working toward a common goal
. Today, the United States has formal science and technology agreements with over fifty countries
. We are committed to finding new ways to work withother countries in science and technology , to conduct mutually beneficial joint research activities, andto advance the interests of the U.S. science and technology community.
¶ Twenty-first centurystatecraft also requires that we build greater people-to-people relationships.
Science and technology cooperation makes that possible. For example, through the Science Envoy program, announced by President Obama in 2009 in
Cairo, Egypt, eminent U.S. scientists have met with counterparts throughout Asia, Africa, and the
Middle East to build relationships and identify opportunities for sustained cooperation. With over half of the world’s population under the age of thirty, we are developing new ways to inspire the next generation of science and technology leaders.
Over the past five years, the Department of State’s International Fulbright Science &
Technology Award has brought more than two hundred exceptional students from seventy-three different countries to the UnitedStates to pursue graduate studies.
Through the Global Innovation through Science and TechnologyInitiative, the United States recently invited young innovators from North Africa, the Middle East, andAsia to post YouTube videos describing solutions to problems they face at home. The top submissionswill receive financial support, business mentorship, and networking opportunities. ¶ Advancing the rightsof women and girls is a central focus of U.S. foreign policy and science diplomacy. As we work toempower women and girls worldwide, we must ensure that they have access to science education andare able to participate and contribute fully during every stage of their lives.
Recently, we partnered withGoogle, Intel, Microsoft, and many other high-tech businesses to launch TechWomen, a program thatbrings promising women leaders from the Middle East to Silicon Valley to meet industry thought-leaders, share knowledge and experiences, and bolster cultural understanding. ¶
Science diplomacy
is not new. It is, however, broader, deeper, and more visible than ever before and its importance will continue to grow.
The Department of State’s first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development R eviewhighlights that "science, engineering, technology, and innovation are the engines of modern society anda dominant force in globalization and international economic development."
These interrelated issues are priorities for the United States and, increasingly, the world.
¶
The Department of State is committed to utilizing our capabilities in Washington, D.C. and throughout the world to connect with scientists, entrepreneurs, and innovators for the mutual benefit of all of our people.
In addition toEnvironment,
Science and Technology, and Health Officers stationed at U.S. embassies, almost fiftydoctoral-level scientists and engineers work at the Department of State through the AAAS DiplomacyFellows program and the Jefferson Science Fellows program.
Through this cadre of science and foreignpolicy experts, the Department of State will continue to advance policies that bolster the globalrepertoire of scientific knowledge and further enable technological innovation.

Robert D. Atkinson, President of IT and Innovation Foundation in Washington DC, “Why the Current Education
Reform Strategy Won’t Work“, Issues.org, 10-27-13
The third myth is that more students would become STEM graduates if they knew how important or
“cool” STEM is
.
In other words, solving the pipeline problem is a marketing challenge
. The National Science
Board’s (NSB’s) National Action Plan 2007 reflected this view when it called for the National Science Foundation (NSF) to “continue to develop and fund programs that increase public appreciation for and understanding of STEM.”
This view, however, ignores the fact that U.S. culture is already enthusiastic about science
. For example, one survey reported by the NSB in Science and Engineering
Indicators 2010 found that 80% of respondents stated that they were “very” or “moderately” interested in new scientific discoveries
. Most people hold scientists in very high regard, ranking them second
(behind military leaders) in terms of public confidence
. Overall, the public’s enthusiasm for science rivals (if not exceeds) that of people in China and South Korea, while far outstripping that of Europeans, Russians, and the Japanese. But that does not deter the “make science cool” effort, even though it has not been shown to work. In 1994, a survey by the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) found that only 6% of disadvantaged minorities were graduating from high school with the math needed for an engineering or related degree. The survey also found that students did not recognize the importance of math as a foundation for later achievement
. To reverse these trends, NACME launched the public service campaign Math is Power, which included targeted television advertisements emphasizing the importance
of math to jobs with higher wages. Four years later, NACME found in a follow-up survey that “
Half of all students
surveyed are aware of the campaign
, with a majority of them familiar with at least one of its key messages and that overall students had more favorable attitudes towards math.”
However, its impact on behavior was negligible
. In fact, students were
“ less likely to think that the decision to take math and science classes is an important one
.
They are also less likely to view math as important for their careers as they were six years ago.” The results suggest that using mass media to reshape student attitudes may in fact work, but the changed attitudes do not necessarily translate to changed behaviors.
Michael S. Teitelbaum is a senior research associate with the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. He is the author of Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent, The Myth of the Science and Engineering
Shortage, 6/19/14, http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-the-science-and-engineeringshortage/284359/
Everyone knows that the United States has long suffered from widespread shortages in its science and engineering workforce, and that if continued these shortages will cause it to fall behind its major economic competitors. Everyone knows that these workforce shortages are due mainly to the myriad weaknesses of American K-12 education in science and mathematics, which international comparisons of student performance rank as average at best.
¶ Such claims are now well established as conventional wisdom. There is almost no debate in the mainstream. They echo from corporate CEO to corporate CEO, from lobbyist to lobbyist, from editorial writer to editorial writer. But what if what everyone knows is wrong? What if this conventional wisdom is just the same claims ricocheting in an echo chamber?
¶ The truth is that there is little credible evidence of the claimed widespread shortages in the U.S. science and engineering workforce
. How can the conventional wisdom be so different from the empirical evidence? There are of course many complexities involved that cannot be addressed here. The key points, though, are these: ¶
Science and engineering occupations are at the leading edge of economic competitiveness in an increasingly globalized world
, and science and engineering workforces of sufficient size and quality are essential for any 21st century economy to prosper. These professional workforces also are crucial for addressing challenges such as international security, global climate change, and domestic and global health. While they therefore are of great importance, college graduates employed in science and engineering occupations
(as defined by the
National Science Foundation) actually comprise only a small fraction of the workforce
.
¶ Some of the largest and most heavily financed scientific fields are among those with the least attractive career prospects.
¶ A compelling body of research is now available,

from many leading academic researchers and from respected research organizations such as the National Bureau of Economic Research, the
RAND Corporation, and the Urban Institute.
No one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelors degrees or higher, although some are forecasting high growth in occupations that require post-high school training but not a bachelors degree.
All have concluded that U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings—the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more.
Were there to be a genuine shortage at present, there would be evidence of employers raising wage offers to attract the scientists and engineers they want. But the evidence points in the other direction:
Most studies report that real wages in many—but not all—science and engineering occupations have been flat or slow-growing
, and unemployment as high or higher than in many comparably-skilled occupations. ¶ Because labor markets in science and engineering differ greatly across fields, industries, and time periods, it is easy to cherry-pick specific specialties that really are in short supply, at least in specific years and locations. But generalizing from these cases to the whole of U.S. science and engineering is perilous. Employment in small but expanding areas of information technology such as social media may be booming, while other larger occupations languish or are increasingly moved offshore. It is true that high-skilled professional occupations almost always experience unemployment rates far lower than those for the rest of the U.S. workforce, but unemployment among scientists and engineers is higher than in other professions such as physicians, dentists, lawyers, and registered nurses, and surprisingly high unemployment rates prevail for recent graduates even in fields with alleged serious
“shortages” such as engineering (7.0 percent), computer science (7.8 percent) and information systems (11.7 percent).
¶
Over time, new technologies, price changes, or sharp shifts in the labor market can create rapid rises in demand in a particular occupation. When that happens, the evidence shows that the market seems to adjust reasonably well. Entire occupations that were previously unattractive and declining, such as petroleum engineering in the 1980s and 1990s, have rather suddenly become attractive and high-paid—due to increased energy prices and new technologies for domestic extraction of oil and gas. Others, such as those linked to manufacturing and construction—industries in which well over half of all engineers are employed—have declined over the same period. Surprisingly, some of the largest and most heavily financed scientific fields, such as biomedical research, are among those with the least attractive career prospects, as a recent blue-ribbon advisory committee reported to the Director of the National Institutes of Health. Biomedical Ph.D.s are unusually lengthy and often require additional years of postdoctoral training, yet after completion those with such degrees experience labor market demand and remuneration that are relatively low.
¶ Labor markets for scientists and engineers also differ geographically. Employer demand is far higher in a few hothouse metropolitan areas than in the rest of the country, especially during boom periods. Moreover recruitment of domestic professionals to these regions may be more difficult than in others when would-be hires discover that the remuneration employers are offering does not come close to compensating for far higher housing and other costs. According to the most recent data from the National Association of Realtors, Silicon
Valley (metro San Jose) has the highest median house prices in the country, at $775,000—nearly four times higher than the national median.
¶
Far from offering expanding attractive career opportunities, it seems that many, but not all, science and engineering careers are headed in the opposite direction: unstable careers, slow-growing wages, and high risk of jobs moving offshore or being filled by temporary workers from abroad. Recent science Ph.D.s often need to undertake three or more additional years in low-paid and temporary “postdoctoral” positions, but even then only a minority have realistic prospects of landing a coveted tenure-track academic position.
¶
Among college-educated information technology workers under age 30, temporary workers from abroad constitute a large majority. Even in electrical and electronic engineering—an occupation that is right at the heart of high-tech innovation but that also has been heavily outsourced abroad—U.S. employment in 2013 declined to about 300,000, down 35,000 and over 10 percent, from 2012, and down from about 385,000 in 2002. Unemployment rates for electrical engineers rose to a surprisingly high 4.8 percent in 2013.
¶ Claims of workforce shortages in science and engineering are hardly new.
Indeed there have been no fewer than five “rounds” of “alarm/boom/bust” cycles since World War II. Each lasted about 10 to 15 years, and was initiated by alarms of “shortages,” followed by policies to increase the supply of scientists and engineers. Unfortunately most were followed by painful busts—mass layoffs, hiring freezes, and funding cuts that inflicted severe damage to careers of both mature professionals and the booming numbers of emerging graduates, while also discouraging new entrants to these fields.
¶
Round one from the decade immediately following World War II, waning a decade later.
¶ Round two following the Sputnik launches in 1957 but waning sharply by the late 1960s, leading to a bust of serious magnitude in the 1970s.
¶ Round three from the 1980s Reagan defense buildup, alarming Federal reports such as “A Nation at Risk” (1983), and new Federal funding for the “war on cancer.” Most of these had waned by the late 1980s, contributing to an ensuing bust in the early 1990s.
¶ Round four from the mid-1990s, driven by concurrent booms in several high-tech industries (e.g. information technology, internet, telecommunications, biotech), followed by concurrent busts beginning around 2001.
¶ Round five from the rapid doubling of the
National Institutes of Health budget between 1998 and 2003, followed by a bust when subsequent funding flattened.
¶
Each of these rounds was accompanied by excessive claims, and a notable lack of credible evidence. Rounds one through three were motivated by existential Cold
War concerns, with advocates focused on expanding the numbers of US students pursuing higher education and careers in science and engineering. As I discovered while researching my book, during rounds four and five, after Cold War security concerns had waned, shortage claimants focused on visa policies that enabled U.S. employers and universities to recruit large numbers of temporary workers and graduate students from countries (especially China and India) that had rapid growth in science and engineering graduates but much lower income levels.
¶
One thing we might reasonably conclude is that over the past six decades there has been no shortage of shortage claims. But what about the present and foreseeable future? ¶ Since 2005 a series of influential reports have been produced by respected organizations and individuals, once again pointing to alarming current (or more commonly “looming”) shortages due to failing K-12 education. Three such reports were published in 2005 alone, by the Council on Competitiveness, by a special committee appointed by the National Research Council, and by a group of 15 business and technology organizations. Were these the opening salvos of the “alarm” stage of another 10-15 year cycle of alarm/boom/bust, the sixth such cycle since World War II? A deep recession with high unemployment has intervened, and in any case we would not be able to know for sure until another 5 or more years have passed.
¶ These publications report correctly that the average performance of American K-12 students is middling in international testing. These data also show that this average performance results from large numbers of both high-performing and low-performing US students. The average national scores reflect both ends of the scale, yet there continues to be a large pool of top science and math students in the U.S. OECD data on “high-performing” students suggests that the U.S.

produces about 33 percent of the world total in this category in the sciences, though only about 14 percent in mathematics.
¶
Related Story
¶
Why the S in STEM Is Overrated ¶ No one should conclude from this that American K-12 science and math education does not need major improvement. Emphatically to the contrary: Every high school graduate should be competent in science and mathematics—essential to success in almost any 21st century occupation and to informed citizenship as well. But there is a big disconnect between this broad educational imperative and the numerically limited scope of the science and engineering workforce. ¶ Editorial writers in respected publications continue to assert that American student interest in these fields is low and declining. Yet according to a recent report from ACT, the college admissions testing service, “student interest in STEM [Science,Technology, Engineering, Mathematics] is high overall,” characteristic of some 48 percent of high school graduates tested in 2013.
American high-school students are taking more math and science courses than ever before.
Meanwhile UCLA’s respected annual surveys of entering college freshmen show that over the past several years nearly
40 percent have been reporting intentions to major in a STEM subject, not only a large fraction but also a substantial increase from past decades—this percentage was about 32 to 33 percent from 1995 to 2007.
¶ Some of these students do change their minds and complete their degrees in different fields, but others shift into science and engineering majors. As noted earlier, the outcome is that the numbers of science and engineering graduates is at least double those being hired into such occupations each year.
¶
The evidence all points to high levels of student interest, high-performance levels among the students most likely to pursue majors and careers in science and engineering, and large numbers of graduates in these fields
.
¶
Ironically the vigorous claims of shortages concern occupations in science and engineering, yet manage to ignore or reject most of the science-based evidence on the subject. The repeated past cycles of “alarm/boom/bust” have misallocated public and private resources by periodically expanding higher education in science and engineering beyond levels for which there were attractive career opportunities. In so doing they produced large unintended costs for those talented students who devoted many years of advanced education to prepare for careers that turned out to be unattractive by the time they graduated, or who later experienced massive layoffs in mid-career with few prospects to be rehired.
¶ Recent forecasts of looming shortages of scientists and engineers may prove to be self-fulfilling prophecies if they result in further declines in the attractiveness of science and engineering careers for talented American students.

NOAA doing exploration now and that is bad- NOAA initiates programs are bad- ocean satellites- this is what NOAA is doing and increase because militarized
** note that in their solvency card- they never specify that NOAA Is key- nowhere does it say NOAA solves
(Rachel J. Shucksmith and Christina Kelly, Marine Spatial Planning Manager at NAFC Marine Centre “Data collection and mapping – Principles, processes and application in marine spatial planning”, published by Elvesier Marine
Policy Journal, http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0308597X14001365/1-s2.0-S0308597X14001365-main.pdf?_tid=ff1d312a-
0bb9-11e4-bacd-00000aab0f6c&acdnat=1405385600_e0d187308a2cf5e87a7dee268613a084)
Our incomplete understanding of the marine environment can be manifested in data sets which do not fully reflect all spatial and temporal elements of the uses and values associated with marine features. Data sets
may be out of date or ma y not detail the effects of competition or co-dependency of outside actors
[25,39]. Whilst data and mapping outputs can offer a useful baseline for further investigation it is important that the data's limitations and accuracy are fully recognized
before it is used as a decision support tool in the MSP process or by third parties. In some cases data sets may only be suitable as baseline information and should not replace marine planner's or user's obligation to consult with stakeholders or preclude the need to collect new or more detailed data.
An example of this complexity is examined by the authors in [25], who examine the drivers causing fisheries utilization
.
Changes in fishing patterns can be linked to regulation including spatial and non-spatial measures such as catch limits, rolling closures, zoning and MPAs
[38]. They could also be linked to technological changes or advancements.
The socio-economic benefits derived from fisheries locations at sea will be linked to an onshore community
[25]. Whilst efforts can be made to map activities such as fishing grounds through participatory mapping, as external factors shape user choices data sets be subject to frequent temporal and spatial changes. Biophysical ecosystem features may also show temporal and spatial fluctuations caused by user–environment impacts, climate change and natural fluctuations (e.g., [40]). Historical records can be used as a baseline to guide further surveying [41].
Due to the complexity of the marine environment and temporal fluctuations it is unlikely that our understanding of the marine environment will ever be complete, regardless of the level of resource allocated to data collection, mapping and modelling. This incomplete understanding may limit the potential detail of future planning.
Where data sets are limited strategic decision making will be limited to high level decision making. At a regional level it may be easier to collect more detailed data to provide fine scale guidance, however it is perhaps unrealistic and unnecessary for this level of detail to be collected at a national level. Where our knowledge or understanding of some uses is stronger than others, mapping outputs have the potential to create or reinforce bias towards certain types of use. Where there are significant data gaps and/or the data is out of date then the confidence of any mapping output is reduced.
Projecting an incomplete understanding of the complexity of ecosystems and services into a 2-D map requires a number of assumptions and simplifications
[39]. Robust strategies for dealing with complexity are therefore especially import for marine planners [3].
Inadequacies in the mapping process have the potential to further exclude certain groups or types of use from the MSP process.
This may be of particular relevance to cultural ecosystem services which can be under-represented in mapping [25]. Therefore, whilst mapping can be an important tool for the management of the marine environment care should be taken in its use as a decision-support tool

(et al; D. Nakashima – Head, Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (LINKS) programme UNESCO – “The Contribution of
Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems to IPBES: Building Synergies with Science” – IPBES Expert Meeting Report 9-11 June
2013 Tokyo – http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002252/225242e.pdf
In the face of the global biodiversity crisis and its emerging challenges and unknowns, it is essential that decisionmakers and practitioners base policies and actions on the best available knowledge. The biophysical and social sciences contribute significantly to our collective understanding of earth systems, social systems and their interactions.
However, there has been a growing awareness that scientific knowledge alone is inadequate for addressing the erosion and degradation of biodiversity and ecosystem services
. In particular, the knowledge of indigenous peoples and local communities – often referred to as local, indigenous or traditional knowledge – is increasingly recognized as a source of vital importance.
Dr. Malte-C. Gruber, Academic Council, a breeder at the Faculty of Law of the JW Goethe University in Frankfurt – “What Is It
Like to Be Unborn?: Our Common Fate with Future Generations” – Modified for gendered language – http://www.jura.unifrankfurt.de/44269233/Gruber_02_110603.pdf
As long as economic perspectives assume unquestioning, that
culture and nature and especially biodiversity are to be safeguarded for the sake of (hu)mankind alone, they will not be able to overcome the short-term perspective
– not even if they apply the interest of these, traditional knowledge communities who are hard pressed by the economic powers.
It is only a short-term benefit
for the indigenous population and not a long-lasting one
if they are included legally and financially in patents that are developed on the basis of their knowledge pool.
Participation in a modern market development process may be conducive to the wellbeing of present indigenous groups and may help to secure their existing bodies of knowledge.
However, at the same time the processes
of generating new traditional knowledge and thus the future basis of existence
of indigenous cultures are thereby jeopardised
.
Meryl J. Williams is Chair of the FAO Advisory Committee on Fisheries Research, and of the Board of Management, Australian
Centre for International Agricultural Research. She is also a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Census of
Marine Life. Journal of international Affairs, Fall/Winter 2005, vol. 59, no. 1. Obtained via OmniFile Full Text Select (H.W.
Wilson)
In recent years, fishery science has been not only the preserve of publicly funded government and university experts; it has also become a weapon for non-government
conservation groups that advocate sustainability and conservation
.44
But while scientific and conservationist approaches may overlap, in the end, they require the same key actors
: governments
and the fishing and seafood industries. 45 Conservationists attempt to shift political power from the fishing industry, thereby creating more space for governments to act. Both approaches rely on scientific information and value systems that target more sustainable outcomes. 46
Past failures to heed scientific and conservationist advice,
however, have been numerous, and they suggest that information and knowledge alone will not save high seas fisheries.
Political support and technologically feasible methods are also needed.

Reiner Grundmann studied in the School of Languages and Social Science, Aston University, Birmingham and UK “Climate
Change and Knowledge Politics”http://stsclimate.soc.ku.dk/papers/grundmannclimatechangeandknowledgepolitics.pdf
The role of the IPCC is to review and assess the published scientific literature on climate change, its costs, impacts and possible policy responses.
It also plays a role in assessing scientific and technical issues for the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change. Founded in 1988
, it
attempts to reach a consensus view on the scientific aspects of global climate change as this is seen as necessary for obtaining policy decisions that are based on best available knowledge
.
When
the first chairman of the IPCC
, Bert Bolin, explained that the IPCC was designed in order to boost trust in the science among nations, this was an expression of an intuitive political strategy assuming that a greater and wider participation would ensure a stable political outcome. With hindsight we may say that this hope has been disappointed. This should not come as a surprise to social scientists.
In its first report the IPCC stated
that continued greenhouse gas
(GHG) emissions
would enhance the greenhouse effect
(Houghton et al., 1990).
In its second report, it affirmed that ‘the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on climate change’
(Houghton et al., 1996). In its third report, it noted that over the last century, the earth has warmed by 0.68C, and the increase is at least partly due to the anthropogenic release of GHGs (Houghton et al., 2001).3
From around the world, more than 2000 scientists have contributed to these reports. The IPCC likes to present itself as the international authoritative body pronouncing scientific expertise on the issue.
However, some ‘contrarian’ scientists and other critics think that the IPCC misrepresents the state of knowledge and exaggerates the size and urgency of the problem. While the sceptics accuse IPCC scientists of being environmentalists in disguise, others point to the processes of exclusion of specific social groups representing different knowledge claims
(Boehmer-Christiansen, 1994a, b; Miller & Edwards, 2001).
The IPCC has been described as a hybrid organization, mixing policy and science
(Miller, 2001). There is no agreement among commentators about who is ultimately more influential, the scientists or government officials.4 Be that as it may, it seems as if the strong presence of US scientists does not always dovetail with the line of the US government
. In other words, even if politicians have a say in the wording of the IPCC reports, this does not mean that governments are equally happy with the results.
It is obvious that various US governments have ignored the IPCC while others
(especially in
Europe) have endorsed it. The notion of the IPCC being a hybrid.

Joan Bondareff is a practicing lawyer focused on marine transportation, environmental, and legislative issues and Blank Rome.
Prior to joining Blank Rome, Ms. Bondareff was chief counsel and acting deputy administrator of the Maritime Administration,
U.S. Department of Transportation. She was also former majority counsel for the House Committee on Merchant Marine and
Fisheries 6-18-2013 “United States: The Budget Outlook For Maritime Programs For FY2014” http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/245562/Marine+Shipping/The+Budget+Outlook+for+Maritime+Programs+for+FY201
4 DA: 6-7-14
The President's budget request
for FY2014, usually delivered in February of the year prior to the beginning of a fiscal year, was delivered late this year. The President's budget arrived
in Congress in the midst of
two very different views of the budget
passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate in the form of budget resolutions. These resolutions, while non-binding, provide guidance to their respective appropriation committees. The House passed its budget resolution on March 14, 2013. The House resolution calls for cuts in high-speed and intercity rail projects and would balance the budget in approximately ten years. The Senate Budget Resolution, passed on March 23, 2013, includes $100 billion for infrastructure and job creation and is much closer to the President's vision for the budget. Prior to the release of his budget request, in the State of the Union Address on February 12, 2013,
President Obama proposed a "Fix-It-First Program to put people to work as soon as possible on our most urgent [infrastructure] repairs, like the nearly 70,000 structurally deficient bridges across the country." He also proposed a Partnership to Rebuild America to attract private capital to upgrade infrastructure, including
"modern ports to move our goods." The President amplified on these remarks in his FY2014 request for the Department of Transportation, which contains a new request for $50 billion to provide immediate transportation investments in key areas, including ports, to spur job growth and enhance our nation's infrastructure. Of this amount, $4 billion is to be allocated to a TIGER like grant program for infrastructure construction grants. For the Maritime Administration ("MARAD"), the
President has requested a total of $365 million in budget authority, or 3.8% over the enacted 2013 level. The MARAD budget includes $208 million for the Maritime
Security Program; $81 million for the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy; $25 million "for a new initiative aimed at mitigating the impact on sealift capacity and mariner jobs resulting from food aid program reform" (caused by last year's sudden cut to the cargo preference requirements for food aid shipments on U.S. flag ships from 75 to 50%); $2 million for a new Port Infrastructure Development Program; and $2.7 million for administrative costs of managing the Title XI loan guarantee program. The President's budget continues to zero out funding for new loan guarantees. In the meantime, Congress is considering legislation to restore the cargo preference cuts. (See H.R. 1678: Saving Essential American Sailors Act, introduced by Congressmen Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and Scott Rigell (R-VA).) For the Coast Guard, the President has requested a total of $9.79 billion, or 5.6% less than the FY2013 enacted level. This request includes $743 million for the continued purchase of surface assets, including funding for the seventh National Security Cutter, procurement of two Fast Response Cutters, and pre-acquisition activities for a new Coast Guard polar icebreaker for Arctic and Antarctic missions, expected to replace the POLAR STAR at the end of its life (projected to be 2022).
Also funded under the DHS budget are FEMA and CBP. These agencies would receive $13.45 billion and $12.9 billion, respectively. As part of the FEMA budget, the
President has proposed $2.1 billion for a new consolidated National Preparedness Grant Program, which merges all state and local and port security grants into one discretionary pot. Last year, Congress did not agree to this request for consolidating the grants into one block grant. We expect the CBP budget for border security will remain steady or increase if comprehensive immigration reform legislation is passed this year. For NOAA, the President has requested a total of $5.4 billion, an increase of $541 million over the 2012 spending plan. The budget includes $929 million for the National Marine Fisheries Service; $529 million for the National
Ocean Service, of which the Marine Debris Program has increased by $1 million (total $6 million), and the Regional Ocean Partnership Grants, which have been increased by $1.5 million; a total of $2.186 million for the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, including $954 million for two new GOES weather satellites; and an increase of $21 million to support an additional 1,627 days-at-sea for NOAA's oceanographic research fleet. Summary The House and
Senate are currently holding a series of hearings featuring Administration witnesses to delve into the President's budget requests.
The House
of
Representatives is likely to pass
appropriation bills
that are vastly
different from the White House's request
. In fact,
Members
of the House Appropriations Committee, such as Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA), Chair of the Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriation
Subcommittee, have
already questioned whether
full funding can be provided for the
Commerce/
NOAA
budgets.
It also remains to be seen whether Congress can revert to regular order,
i.e., by passing the individual appropriation bills to keep the government operational in 2014, or whether another CR will be adopted. Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) has a desire to return to regular order, but this
is not likely to happen in the near term except for defense agencies where bipartisan agreement is more likely to be reached.
The government keeps limping along with cuts from sequester
, delays in Congressional approval for spending plans, and uncertainties in the outcome
for 2014. These challenges will also have a significant effect on their constituents as contracts and grants are delayed.
The House and Senate will once again have to debate their respective visions
for the 2014 budget and come to some agreement on funding levels for 2014. In the meantime, Congress will have to raise the debt ceiling once again and decide whether to do so without a fight over offsetting budget cuts.
Given the current revenue situation, a fight over the debt ceiling is expected to be postponed to the fall.

(Heather Maughan, writer and microbiology Consultant, “US Science Diplomacy Bills Stuck in Congress”, http://www.scidev.net/global/communication/news/us-science-diplomacy-bills-stuck-in-congress.html, 9/19/12, 7/31/14,
MEM)
Two bills aiming to increase the coordination and support for US science diplomacy in developing countries are unlikely to be passed
by the US House of Representatives this summer, according to insiders.
The bills aim to coordinate US research agencies' cooperation with developing countries and to boost the number of
US scientists travelling to developing countries as diplomatic staff. The 'International Science and
Technology Cooperation Act
of 2012' (H.R. 5916) was introduced by representatives Russ Carnahan (Democrat) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
(Republican) in June. [1] It has support from both parties and is officially endorsed by the US Civilian Research Development Foundation (CRDF Global) — a nonprofit organisation that promotes international scientific collaboration for peace — and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The bill proposes establishing a body responsible for coordinating inter-agency goals on domestic science and technology, couched within the framework of US foreign policy
. The body would seek to advance US science and foreign policy priorities through new international research and training partnerships. Anna Quider, one of Carnahan's staff, said the bill would charge the Office of Science and Technology Policy with creating the body and deciding which agencies to include. The second bill, the 'Global Science Program for
Security, Competitiveness, and Diplomacy Act'
(H.R. 6303) introduced in August by Carnahan, proposes increased diplomacy through collaboration with scientists in low- or lower-middle-income countries,
countries with a
Muslim majority, and countries in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. [2] Activities, including provision of grants and capacity building, would be managed and implemented by the Secretary of State and the National Science Foundation. They would include specific programmes in which US scientists hold diplomatic positions and serve as envoys and 'embassy science fellows' to eligible countries.

Ryan, Subsea hydraulics engineer, B.S. in Chemical Engineering, “Why Don't We Spend More On Exploring The Oceans, Rather
Than On Space Exploration?” Forbes, 1/31, http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/01/31/why-dont-we-spend-more-onexploring-the-oceans-rather-than-on-space-exploration/#THUR
So as someone whose job deals with exploring the ocean deeps — see my answer to Careers: What kinds of problems does a subsea hydraulics engineer solve? — I can tell you that the ocean is excruciatingly boring
. The vast majority of the seafloor once you get >50 miles offshore is barren, featureless mud.
On face, this is pretty similar to the empty expanses of outer space, but in space you can see all the way through the nothing, letting you identify targets for probes or telescopes. The goals of space exploration are visible from the Earth, so we can dream and imagine reaching into the heavens. But in the deep oceans, visibility is less than 100 feet and travel speed is measured in single-digit knots. A simple seafloor survey to run a 100 mile pipeline costs a cool $50 million
. The oceans are vast, boring, and difficult/expensive to explore — so why bother
? Sure, there are beautiful and interesting features like geothermal vents and coral reefs. But throughout most of the ocean these are few and far between. This is a pretty normal view from a subsea robot: Despite the difficulty, there is actually a lot of scientific exploration going on in the oceans. Here’s a pretty good public website for a science ROV mission offshore Oregon: 2009 Pacific Northwest Expedition To reinforce my point about it being boring, here’s a blog entry from that team where they talk about how boring the sea floor is: 2009 Pacific Northwest Expedition What IS really interesting in the deep ocean is the exotic life. You see some crazy animals that are often not well-known to science. Something floats by the camera 5000 ft down, and you say “what the hell was that?” and no one knows. Usually it’s just some variety of jellyfish, but occasionally we find giant* isopods: Source: Giant isopod *This is a moderately small specimen. They have been recorded at 2.5 ft long. Or giant alien squid monsters: Unfortunately, deep-sea creatures rarely survive the trip to surface. Their bodies are acclimated to the high pressures (hundreds of atmospheres), and the decompression is usually fatal. Our ability to understand these animals is very limited, and their only connection to the surface biosphere is through a few food chain connections (like sperm whales) that can survive diving to these depths.
We’re fundamentally quite disconnected from deep ocean life.
Also, there is no hope of ever establishing human habitation
more than about 1000 ft deep.
The pressures are too great, and no engineering or materials conceivable today would allow us to build livable-sized spaces on the deep sea floor
. The two times humans have reached the deepest part of the ocean, it required a foot-thick flawless metal sphere with barely enough internal space to sit down. As far as I can tell, seafloor living is all but impossible — a habitable moon base would be vastly easier to engineer than a seafloor colony. See my answer to International Space Station: Given the actual space station ISS, would it be cheaper to build the equivalent at 3-4-5 miles deep underwater? Why? To recap: we don’t spend more time/money exploring the ocean
because it’s expensive, difficult, and uninspiring. We stare up at the stars and dream of reaching them, but few people look off the side of a boat and wish they could go down there.

(P. & R., “Conserving Australia’s Marine Environment: Key Directions Statement, Australian Committee for IUCN”,
SydneyConserving Australia’s Marine Environment, 2012, http://aciucn.org.au/wpcontent/uploads/2013/08/Marine_Statement_Web.pdf)//krishnik
Australia is a unique continent surrounded by a vast ocean territory containing biologically diverse ecosystems
¶
reliant on marine processes and interactions with the coastal environment. Australia’s marine jurisdiction is the third
¶
largest on this planet, with our ocean territory larger than the size of our land
.
Complex systems of currents and
¶
diverse underwater seascapes stretch from the north’s warm tropical waters to the cool waters in the south
¶
influenced by the Southern Ocean.
We have the largest single coral reef system and the third largest mangrove area,
¶
with over half of the world’s mangrove species and more than half of the world’s seagrass species. Southern ¶
Australian marine systems are characterised by high levels of diversity and very high endemism
- most species in
¶
the region are found nowhere else on the planet.
These systems in turn support further outstanding marine species ¶ biodiversity including 4000 fish species - 20% of the world’s total - six of the world’s seven marine turtles and 45 of ¶ the known species of whales, dolphins and porpoises
.
¶
Australians and the marine environment¶ Australians have a special bond with their marine environment
. Many Australian Indigenous communities have ¶ profound reliance on and responsibility for their Sea Country which provides spiritual, cultural, social and livelihood ¶ benefits to communities. ¶ With more than 85% of the Australian population living within 50 kilometers of a coastline ‘the beach’ is truly a ¶ uniting icon of most Australians. Beaches, bays, estuaries provides spaces for recreation, relaxation and
¶
connections with nature with strong cultural, social and heritage benefits. Marine wildlife is increasingly a source of ¶ fascination and a key tourism resource as people revel in the beauty of coral reefs and in the sight of whales, ¶ dolphins, sharks and turtles. As a result, the marine environment is intrinsic to the health and wellbeing of all
¶
Australians. As Australia’s population grows, it will become increasingly reliant on the life-support services and
¶
associated health and well-being benefits supplied by our marine environment
(International Union for Conservation of Nature, “Australia creates world’s largest network of marine reserves”, 12/13/12, http://www.iucn.org/about/work/programmes/marine/?11659/Australia-creates-worlds-largest-network-of-marinereserves)//krishnik
In November 2012 the Australian Government announced the creation of the world’s largest network of marine reserves. The government proclaimed 44 marine reserves a network, covering 2.3 million square kilometres, a full third of Australia’s ocean territory
. The reserves are home to 45 of the world’s 78 whale and dolphin species, six of the seven known species of marine turtle, and 4,000 fish species. The government received support from over 500,000
Australians, who commented positively on the creation of the network. “
The marine reserves will protect a diversity of
Australia’s ocean ecosystems, including reefs and waters in the Coral Sea, majestic seamounts off the east coast, the mysterious deep waters of the Diamantina Fracture Zone and the waters of the Great
Australian Bight
,” said Dr. Paul Sinclair, the Healthy Ecosystems Programme Manager for the Australian Conservation Foundation.
The announcement includes ocean areas that harbor some of the world’s richest marine biodiversity, and the resulting network will further protect fish stocks and fragile and critical marine environments
, according to Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, the Director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland.