A Victim Treats His Mugger Right

From NPR

March 28, 2008 · Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

"He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, 'Here you go,'" Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."

The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, "like what's going on here?" Diaz says. "He asked me, 'Why are you doing this?'"

Diaz replied: "If you're willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me ... hey, you're more than welcome.

"You know, I just felt maybe he really needs help," Diaz says.

Diaz says he and the teen went into the diner and sat in a booth.

"The manager comes by, the dishwashers come by, the waiters come by to say hi," Diaz says. "The kid was like, 'You know everybody here. Do you own this place?'"

"No, I just eat here a lot," Diaz says he told the teen. "He says, 'But you're even nice to the dishwasher.'"

Diaz replied, "Well, haven't you been taught you should be nice to everybody?"

"Yea, but I didn't think people actually behaved that way," the teen said.

Diaz asked him what he wanted out of life. "He just had almost a sad face," Diaz says.

The teen couldn't answer Diaz - or he didn't want to.

When the bill arrived, Diaz told the teen, "Look, I guess you're going to have to pay for this bill 'cause you have my money and I can't pay for this. So if you give me my wallet back, I'll gladly treat you."

The teen "didn't even think about it" and returned the wallet, Diaz says. "I gave him $20 ... I figure maybe it'll help him. I don't know."

Diaz says he asked for something in return - the teen's knife - "and he gave it to me."

Afterward, when Diaz told his mother what happened, she said, "You're the type of kid that if someone asked you for the time, you gave them your watch."

"I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It's as simple as it gets in this complicated world."

Produced for Morning Edition by Michael Garofalo.

From Yahoo News
By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer

President Bush, stepping into the debate over global warming, plans to announce on Wednesday a national goal for stopping the growth of greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades.

In a speech in the Rose Garden, Bush will lay out a strategy rather than a specific proposal for curbing emissions, White House press secretary Dana Perino said Tuesday. She did not disclose details of his announcement and would not say whether the president would propose any kind of mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

The president wants every major economy, including fast-growing nations like China and India, to establish a national goal for cutting the emissions believed responsible for global warming.

In his remarks, Perino said, Bush will articulate a "realistic intermediate goal" for the United States. Bush will emphasize the importance of offering incentives to promote technology as an effective way to reduce green house gas emissions, she said.

Bush's announcement is expected to go beyond what he said in 2002. Then, he set a goal of reducing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, while taking into account economic expansion. His critics argued that would still allow actual emissions to rise as the economy grew.

The White House search for a new climate proposal comes amid growing indication that mandatory action to address global warming is highly likely - if not now, in the next year or so. At the same time, the administration is facing growing pressure to regulate carbon dioxide under the federal clean air law.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been told by the Supreme Court that carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas, is a pollutant and must be regulated if the EPA determines it is a danger to health and welfare.

At the same time, the Interior Department is under pressure to give polar bears special protection under the Endangered Species Act because of disappearing Arctic sea ice. A lawsuit has been filed under the same law for more protection for arctic seals.

Together these cases would pull the enforcement of the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act into the debate over climate change.

"Recent court decisions hold the very real prospect that the federal government will regulate greenhouse gas emissions with or without a new law being passed," Perino said. "To us, having unelected bureaucrats regulating greenhouse gases, at the direction of unelected judges, is not the proper way to address the issue."

She said Bush also is to talk about his concerns with legislative proposals likely to be considered during Senate debate in June. Perino called the legislative proposals "unrealistic" and said they would have a negative impact on the U.S. economy.

"We believe there's a right way and a wrong way to address this problem," Perino said, adding that there is no legislative proposal on Capitol Hill that the administration supports.

The speech comes a day before a meeting Thursday and Friday in Paris of the world's largest carbon polluters. Representatives from more than a dozen countries are expected to attend the meeting, the third in a series of talks that Bush organized last year.

A new global warming pact is being crafted to succeed the first phase of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. It requires 37 industrialized nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States is the only industrialized nation not to have ratified Kyoto, but it agreed with nearly 200 other nations at a conference in Bali in December to negotiate a new agreement by the end of 2009.

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Could this really be a sign of change or is it just more political posturing?  We will see....

Oh, on a personal note:  Last week I attended a lecture by a professor visiting my University from the Max Planck Institute.  It turns out that we really are in a catch-22 situation with global warming...  A rather significant factor that has been holding us back from the verge of really rapid climate change is the particulate matter that is floating in the air as a byproduct of coal power plants -- sulfur.  It seems that the sulfur floating around up in the atmosphere has been creating a slight global "dimming" effect and keeping the sun from heating our atmosphere more quickly.  As we put more and more of the coal burning power plants out of commission, the sulfur levels decrease, and the heating increases.  Hmmm...  We've really got ourselves in a pickle!

I've also been proofreading a scientific paper about surface water evaporation that one of the professors I work with is submitting to a scientific journal.  Scientists have recently noticed that surface water evaporation over the United States and China is steadily increasing.  This finding, along with the IPCC's drought prediction maps, scares me a bit.  I live in the desert southwest and have done so all of my life.  Is water going to dry up here completely?

We absolutely must make radical changes.  We need mandated restrictions on carbon emissions.  Is it going to happen? 

She glides through the midst of enchantment and mist

Where creation is quintessentially light

She dances unseen in meadows of green

In a diaphanous raiment of white

Unbound hair floating gentle on the breeze

Arms outstretched to love and life

Peace and Joy infuse her soul

Her path extends straight and true

Love enfolds her and walks by her side

Every bird's call welcomes her home

He calls to her heart across time and space

And touches her cheek in the night

Dancing his way across the sky

To lay on her pillow a sweet lullaby

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Strong present-day aerosol cooling implies a hot future
Andreae, Meinrat O | Jones, Chris D | Cox, Peter M
Nature [Nature]. Vol. 435, no. 7046, pp. 1187-1190. 30 Jun 2005.

Atmospheric aerosols counteract the warming effects of anthropogenic greenhouse gases by an uncertain, but potentially large, amount. This in turn leads to large uncertainties in the sensitivity of climate to human perturbations, and therefore also in carbon cycle feedbacks and projections of climate change. In the future, aerosol cooling is expected to decline relative to greenhouse gas forcing, because of the aerosols' much shorter lifetime and the pursuit of a cleaner atmosphere. Strong aerosol cooling in the past and present would then imply that future global warming may proceed at or even above the upper extreme of the range projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Excerpts:  "All aerosol types (sulphates, organics, mineral dust, sea salt, and so on) intercept incoming sunlight, and reduce the energy flux arriving at the Earth's surface, thus producing a cooling. Some aerosols (for example, soot) absorb light and thereby warm the atmosphere, but also cool the surface. This warming of atmospheric layers may also reduce cloudiness, yielding another warming effect. In addition to these ‘direct' radiative effects, there are several ‘indirect', cloud mediated effects of aerosols, which all result in cooling: more aerosols produce more, but smaller, droplets in a given cloud, making it more reflective. Smaller droplets are less likely to coalesce into raindrops, and thus the lifetime of clouds is extended, again increasing the Earth's albedo. Finally, modifications in rainfall generation change the thermodynamic processes in clouds, and consequently the dynamics of the atmospheric ‘heat engine' that drives all of weather and climate. The recent tremendous growth in knowledge of the climatic effects of aerosols, along with the emergence of the likelihood of positive feedbacks between climate and the carbon cycle have transformed the orderly picture of climate change of the early 1990s, dominated by GHG warming, into a complex mix of opposing effects."

"...research over the past decade has shown evidence of the importance of a considerable number of aerosol climatic effects, which on balance cool the Earth and have therefore reduced the effect of greenhouse warming. Because of the stabilizing emission of aerosols and their short lifetime, this ‘protection' will diminish in the future, leaving us vulnerable to both greater climate change and greater uncertainty."

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In short, this is the pickle we are in:  Global Dimming is caused by aerosols (airborne particulate matter). Aerosols can come from natural sources such as volcanoes, fires, dust storms and so on, but they can also come from human activities such as the burning of coal, oil, and other fossil fuels.  The Clean Air Act and other pollution-reducing legislation around the world reduced aerosol levels in our air.  Global Dimming effects have begun to diminish since these laws were enacted.  On the other hand, Global Warming has markedly increased and is predicted (as far as we can accurately predict right now) to continue increasing at a faster pace than scientists previously thought it would. 

So, what can be done?  Some have suggested that we counteract Global Warming by pumping more aerosols into the atmosphere, thereby creating a Global Dimming effect.  My take is that depending on the kind of aerosols used, this is either robbing Peter to pay Paul or a feasible solution.  The following is the abstract of a scientific paper published a number of years ago by the same scientist.  Note the source of the aerosols:

Oceanic phytoplankton, atmospheric sulphur, cloud albedo and climate
CHARLSON, ROBERTJ | WARREN, STEPHENG | LOVELOCK, JAMESE | ANDREAE, MEINRAT O
Nature. Vol. 326, pp. 655-661. 16 Apr. 1987

The major source of cloud-condensation nuclei (CCN) over the oceans appears to be dimethylsulphide, which is produced by planktonic algae in sea water and oxidizes in the atmosphere to form a sulphate aerosol Because the reflectance (albedo) of clouds (and thus the Earth's radiation budget) is sensitive to CCN density, biological regulation of the climate is possible through the effects of temperature and sunlight on phytoplankton population and dimethylsulphide production. To counteract the warming due to doubling of atmospheric CO₂, an approximate doubling of CCN would be needed.

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According to this paper, planktonic algae produce sulfates that become aerosolized and can contribute to Global Dimming and the cooling of the planet.