Dire Forecasts Research Articles

우리 안의/아닌 우리

How to make sense of what happened in Itaewon on October 29th? In hindsight, the catastrophic event which claimed the lives of 159 youths on the Halloween eve appears to have been a dire forecast of bizarre administrative debacles that were to follow under South Korea’s current regime. Yet if it seems too simplistic, or morally disingenuous, to shift the entire blame to the incompetence and misrule of the powers that be, it is because the tragedy, like so many others preceding it in Korea’s turbulent modern history, once again raises to the fore the problematic nature of communal being of which we are, even in the age of hyperreal modernity, still essentially constituted. By retracing a number of key themes running through the historic debate that took place between Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot in 1983 concerning the possibility (or the impossibility) of community―namely, myth, work, unworking, friendship, the death of the other, number, etc.―the present inquiry attempts to bring to bear the theoretical implications divulged in the debate upon the late Itaewon tragedy. If, as the two philosophers claim, one fundamental aspect of communal being consists in the responsibility to maintain the impossible memory the other, the other immemorially gone as well as imminently to come, then I argue that that unrepresentable other must encompass, as Derrida once argued, the non-human others.

The Future of Philosophy

In the past, philosophy, as it was brought to life originally by the ancient Greeks, was based on the audacious premise that the cosmos is intelligible, that human reason can come to understand reality at least in part. In the early to mid-twentieth century, however, philosophy was declared dead on both sides of the analytic-continental divide, so it seems appropriate to ask whether philosophy has a future and, if so, what sort of future this could and should be. In this essay, I first look at the claims of philosophy’s demise and their philosophical milieu, focusing on Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then I suggest a reason for the dire forecast, namely, the aftermath of what has been called the “Second Thirty Years’ War,” and respond to objections that can be raised against this explanation. Finally, I indicate the sort of future that I think we should envision for philosophy.

Spatially explicit analyses of environmental and health data to determine past, emerging and future threats to child health.

Dire forecasts predict that an increasingly hostile environment globally will increase the threats to human health. Infants and young children are especially at risk because children are particularly vulnerable to climate-related stressors. The childhood diseases most affected, the breadth and magnitude of future health problems and the time frame over which these problems will manifest remain largely unknown. To review the possibility that spacially explicit analyses can be used to determine how climate change has affected children's health to date and whether these analyses can be used for future projections. As an example of whether these objectives can be achieved, all available Australian environmental and health databases were reviewed. Environmental and health data in Australia have been collected for up to 30 years for the same spatial areas at 'Statistical Area level 1' (SA1) scale. SA1s are defined as having a population of between 200 and 800 people and collectively they cover the whole of Australia without gaps or overlap. Although the SA1 environmental and health data have been collected separately, they can be merged to allow detailed statistical analyses that can determine how climate change has affected the health of children. The availability of environmental and health datasets that share the same precise spatial coordinates provides a pathway whereby past and emerging effects on child health can be measured and predicted into the future. Given that the future health and well-being of children is one of society's greatest concerns, this information is urgently needed.

The End of Austerity as Common Sense? An Experimental Analysis of Public Opinion Shifts and Class Dynamics During the Covid-19 Crisis

ABSTRACT The Covid-19 pandemic is disrupting the international political economy unlike any event since WWII. Consequently, France reversed years of fiscal consolidation by instating, at least temporarily, a costly emergency furlough scheme reaching a third of the workforce. This provides a natural setting to investigate a potential ‘critical juncture’, and whether the French public still accepts austerity politics today, as it seems to have after the Global Financial Crisis. We observe crisis narratives’ salience across social classes, employing an original quantitative approach for Critical Political Economy, which uses panel data and two experiments. We test if citizens’ viewpoints are sensitive to the trade-off between health and economics, receptive to austerity and conditioned by their socioeconomic status. We find that public opinion shifted after an authoritative and dire economic forecast at the pandemic’s first peak in April 2020, but that acquiescence to austerity did not occur during the phase-out of the first lockdown in June, with the exception of the upper class. Overall, public support favours increased social spending, and pro-austerity crisis narratives might not shape the majority’s ‘common sense’, as they had after the GFC. We conclude with implications for the study of class and public policy in a post-pandemic world.

The role of nutrients in drought-induced tree mortality and recovery.

Contents 513 I. 513 II. 514 III. 517 518 References 518 SUMMARY: Global forests are experiencing rising temperatures and more severe droughts, with consistently dire forecasts for negative future impacts. Current research on the physiological mechanisms underlying drought impacts is focused on the water- and carbon-associated mechanisms. The role of nutrients is notably missing from this research agenda. Here, we investigate what role, if any, forest nutrition plays for survival and recovery of forests during and after drought. High nutrient availability may play a detrimental role in drought survival due to preferential biomass allocation aboveground that (1) predispose plants to hydraulic constraints limiting photosynthesis and promoting hydraulic failure, (2) increases carbon costs during periods of carbon starvation, and (3) promote biotic attack due to low tissue carbon: nitrogen (C:N). When nutrient uptake occurs during drought, high nutrient availability can increase water use efficiency thus minimizing negative feedbacks between carbon and nutrient balance. Nutrients are released after drought ceases, which might promote faster recovery but the temporal dynamics of microbial immobilization and nutrient leaching have a significant impact on nutrient availability. We provide a framework for understanding nutrient impacts on drought survival that allows a more complete analysis of forest ecosystem responses.

Simultaneous declines in summer survival of three shorebird species signals a flyway at risk

SummaryThere is increasing concern about the world's animal migrations. With many land‐use and climatological changes occurring simultaneously, pinning down the causes of large‐scale conservation problems requires sophisticated and data‐intensive approaches.Declining shorebird numbers along the East Asian–Australasian Flyway, in combination with data on habitat loss along the Yellow Sea (where these birds refuel during long‐distance migrations), indicate a flyway under threat.If habitat loss at staging areas indeed leads to flyway‐wide bird losses, we would predict that: (i) decreases in survival only occur during the season that birds use the Yellow Sea, and (ii) decreases in survival occur in migrants that share a reliance on the vanishing intertidal flats along the Yellow Sea, even if ecologically distinct and using different breeding grounds.Monitored from 2006–2013, we analysedseasonalapparent survival patterns of three shorebird species with non‐overlapping Arctic breeding areas and considerable differences in foraging ecology, but a shared use of both north‐west Australian non‐breeding grounds and the Yellow Sea coasts to refuel during northward and southward migrations (red knotCalidris canutus piersmai, great knotCalidris tenuirostris,bar‐tailed godwitLimosa lapponica menzbieri). Distinguishing two three‐month non‐breeding periods and a six‐month migration and breeding period, and analysing survival of the three species and the three seasons in a single model, we statistically evaluated differences at both the species and season levels.Whereas apparent survival remained high in north‐west Australia, during the time away from the non‐breeding grounds survival in all three species began to decline in 2011, having lost 20 percentage points by 2012. By 2012annualapparent survival had become as low as 0·71 in bar‐tailed godwits, 0·68 in great knots and 0·67 in red knots. In a separate analysis for red knots, no mortality occurred during the migration from Australia to China. In the summers of low summer survival, weather conditions were benign in the Arctic breeding areas.We argue that rapid seashore habitat loss in the Yellow Sea is the most likely explanation of reduced summer survival, with dire (but uncertain) forecasts for the future of these flyway populations. This interpretation is consistent with recent findings of declining shorebird numbers at seemingly intact southern non‐breeding sites.Policy implications. Due to established economic interests, governments are usually reluctant to act for conservation, unless unambiguous evidence for particular cause–effect chains is apparent. This study adds to an increasing body of evidence that habitat loss along the Yellow Sea shores explains the widespread declines in shorebird numbers along the East Asian–Australasian Flyway and threatens the long‐term prospects of several long‐distance migrating species. To halt further losses, the clearance of coastal intertidal habitat must stop now.

The Science of Climate Change

Michael Oppenheimer and Jesse Anttila-Hughes begin with a primer on how the greenhouse effect works, how we know that Earth is rapidly getting warmer, and how we know that the recent warming is caused by human activity. They explain the sources of scientific knowledge about climate change as well as the basis for the models scientists use to predict how the climate will behave in the future. Although they acknowledge the large degree of uncertainty that surrounds predictions of what will happen decades or even centuries in the future, they also emphasize the near certainty that climate change has the potential to be extremely harmful to children. Most children around the world will face hotter, more extreme temperatures more frequently. Higher temperatures will directly affect children’s health by increasing the rates of heatstroke, heat exhaustion, and heat-related mortality. Excessive heat is also likely to affect children indirectly by disrupting agricultural systems, driving up prices, and increasing food scarcity. Many of the world’s children may see local demand for water outstrip supply, as shifting precipitation patterns dry out some regions of the world, make other regions wetter, and increase the frequency of both unusually dry periods and unusually severe rains. Mountain glaciers will recede further, significantly reducing storage of winter snows and thus springtime runoff, which has traditionally been used to water fields and recharge reservoirs. Melting ice will also raise sea levels, triggering direct physical threats to children through flooding and erosion and indirect threats through migration and expensive adaptation. Climate change is also expected to make weather-based disasters more frequent and more damaging. This is particularly worrisome for children, not only because of the physical peril disasters pose but also because disasters can have debilitating long-term indirect effects on children. Damage to ecosystems from climate change may also harm children; for example, acidification the world’s oceans will reduce food supplies, and disease-carrying insects will invade new areas in response to changing rains and temperatures. In the face of such dire forecasts, Oppenheimer and Anttila-Hughes argue, climate change forces us to directly confront the value we put on future children’s wellbeing. Fortunately, we have reason for hope as well as for concern: “History,” they write, “has demonstrated time and again that humans can tackle uncertain threats in times of need.”

Turning conflict into collaboration in managing commons: A case of Rupa Lake Watershed, Nepal

A growing body of literature on the commons has provided fascinating and intricate insights on how some local institutions have successfully managed to avoid a seemingly inevitable “tragedy of the commons” once popularized by Garrett Hardin. Primarily benefitting from the recent studies on the commonpool resources conducted by Elinor Ostrom and colleagues, polycentric selforganization and autonomy, rather than the direct state or market control over the commons, are often recognized as key features of the long enduring commons. However, these commons are quite diverse and the outcomes are often multiple and complex, accentuating the needs to differentiate among multiple commons outcomes. Furthermore, relatively under-reported are the cases where the degradation of common-pool resources are actually halted, and even restored. This study examines both the turbulent history of fishery mismanagement in Rupa Lake, Nepal and its reversal built around the participation, engagement and inclusiveness in the governance of its watershed. We find that Rupa Lake’s experience tells two stories. Reflecting Hardin’s dire forecast, the Rupa Lake watershed verged on collapse as population grew and seemingly selfish behavior intensified under an open-access regime. But the users also found a way to rebound and reverse their course as they adopted a bottom-up approach to fishery management and established an innovative community institution, the ‘Rupa Lake Rehabilitation and Fishery Cooperative’, dedicated to the sustainable governance of the commons. This case highlights how one community at the threshold of ‘tragedy’ transformed itself by turning conflict into collaboration, which we hope contributes to the effort of better understanding multiple commons.

Climate Engineering Research: A Precautionary Response to Climate Change?

In the face of dire forecasts for anthropogenic climate change, climate engineering is increasingly discussed as a possible additional set of responses to reduce climate change’s threat. These proposals have been controversial, in part because they – like climate change itself – pose uncertain risks to the environment and human well-being. Under these challenging circumstances of potential catastrophe and risk-risk trade-off, it is initially unclear to what extent precaution is applicable. We examine what precaution is and is not, and make a prima facie case that climate engineering may provide means to reduce climate risks. When precaution is applied to the currently pertinent matter of small to moderate scale climate engineering field tests, we conclude that precaution encourages them, despite their potential risks.

New Basic Care Goals Seek to Rein In Global Rise in Cardiovascular Disease

LEADERS FROM THE CARDIOVASCUlar disease prevention community have joined forces to endorse a plan to reduce the global burden of noncommunicable diseases. The plan follows adoption of a global target to reduce premature noncommunicable disease mortality 25% by 2025 by ministers of health attending the World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland last May. Noncommunicable diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer, chronic respiratory disease, and diabetes mellitus, have replaced communicable diseases as the world’s major disease burden. Almost half of this burden comes from cardiovascular disease, which is the leading global cause of death, accounting for about 17.3 million deaths each year—a number expected to increase to more than 23.6 million by 2030. In addition, about 80% of these deaths occur in lowand middle-income countries, where human and financial resources are most limited. Members of the global public health community believe such dire forecasts can be minimized if nations implement simple and inexpensive therapies and lifestyle modifications within the next few years. To that end, leadership from the World Heart Federation, the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology Foundation, the European Heart Network, and the European Society of Cardiology issued an advisory September 17 that sets target levels for 8 cardiovascular disease risk factors. It also sets drug therapy target levels for individuals at high risk for myocardial infarction and stroke and calls for making available basic technologies and generic essential medicines required to treat major noncommunicable diseases.

Dire forecast: A theoretical model of the impact of climate change on crime

After providing an overview of climate change and its effects, this article draws on the leading crime theories to discuss the potential impact of climate change on crime. It is argued that climate change will increase strain, reduce social control, weaken social support, foster beliefs favorable to crime, contribute to traits conducive to crime, increase certain opportunities for crime, and create social conflict. An overall model of climate change and crime is then presented, along with suggestions for research. Even though neglected by criminologists, there is good reason to believe that climate change will become one of the major forces driving crime as the century progresses.

Weathering the Global Financial Crisis: Reflections on the Capacity of the Institutions of Australian Governance

The global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008 sent the economies of major developed nations into freefall. As credit markets froze and investor and consumer confidence collapsed to levels not seen since the Great Depression, governments clamoured to develop policies and interventions aimed at preventing wholesale economic meltdown. The Australian economy has come through the crisis relatively unscathed. In contrast to most other advanced economies, Australia avoided recession and, despite dire forecasts, has experienced only modest increases in rates of unemployment. Consumer confidence has recovered, investment is returning and the economy has performed consistently above expectations. What accounts for Australia's success in navigating the global financial crisis? Economists will emphasise the combination of monetary and fiscal policy responses – significant cuts to interest rates, large stimulus packages, bank guarantees and other stabilising measures that were rapidly deployed as the crisis unfolded; the underlying strength of the nation’s economy, surplus budgets, comparatively low rates of debt and effective prudential regulation. Each of these was undoubtedly crucial, but as this paper argues, features inherent to the institutions of Australian governance must also be taken into account. This paper examines the structures of advice and support to Australian decision-makers that enabled decisive action to be taken and decisions implemented as the financial crisis loomed. It highlights the significance of the economic policy settings established by successive Australian governments, supported by a cadre of economic advisers – career officials and partisans, whose experience and institutional memory proved valuable to the newly-elected Labor government. The paper argues that Australia's success owes much to timely and effective policy responses deployed quickly as the financial crisis loomed. The government's pre-emptive and aggressive response to the global financial crisis and the design of its fiscal policies was supported and enabled by an advisory system that had prepared for and which consciously drew on the lessons learned during earlier downturns. It concludes that the policy learning of key actors within the advisory and decision-making system was significant in helping to position Australia's economy to withstand the most significant economic shock since the Great Depression.

What Have Future Generations Done for Me Lately?: Climate Change Causes, Consequences, and Challenges in the New Millennium

It is a brave new world, where people across the planet increasingly grapple with the causes and consequences of climate change. Detrimental impacts and dire forecasts have now been well-catalogued. People deal with climate-related challenges in their material lives through their ability to meet livelihood needs, and in their social and discursive spaces in terms of how considerations for climate action are meaningful. Initiatives and plans that were formerly confined to the climate-controlled quarters of high-level policy briefing rooms and scientific conference halls are increasingly prevalent around the kitchen table, bar stool, front porch and corner shop. There is an explosion of books and news coverage on climate change, and climate issues increasingly permeate entertainment and leisure. As this engagement grows, social and cultural movements shift more rapidly than the physical climate, thereby reshaping the terrain of possibility for our collective future.

Refocusing and Reshaping of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Preventive Strategies in Rural Settings

2 Abstract: Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Type A H5N1 subtype is a viral zoonotic disease that has infected and killed birds and humans in SE Asia, Africa and Europe since late 2003. Incendiary media reports, mob hype, dire forecasts and misinformation have unintentionally portrayed this animal and human health issue as an inevitable global disaster. Infected and at-risk countries can implement preventive and corrective disease mitigation measures. This disease can be successfully managed at its source by channelling efforts into two areas: communication and education. If contact conditions between virus and healthy birds can be prevented or minimized; most other emergency corrective measures become provisional. Extensive public awareness about prevention needs to be raised, particularly amongst veterinary services and bird owners, keepers and caregivers.

La vulnérabilité stratégique des minéraux : les relations triangulaires entre la République fédérale allemande, l’Afrique du Sud et l’Union soviétique.

Resource diplomacy has emerged as a key element in international relations. The controversy over the use of the grain embargo and persistent concern about the Middle East has allowed food and oil to continue to gain a great deal of attention as weapons of resource diplomacy. Other raw materials, nevertheless, also lend themselves to analysis of this sort. Strategic minerals, in particular, have been increasingly looked at as means of influence in both North/South and the East I West contexts. This study hopes to contribute to this growing body of literature by examining the significance (and merger) of the North/South and East I West contexts in regard to strategic minerals with particular reference to the Federal Republic of Germany. The paper examines the triangular relationship in strategic minerals between the FRG, Southern Africa and the Soviet Union. A number of scenarios have been put forward pertaining to a Soviet threat to Western mineral imports from Southern Africa. The most plausible of these scenarios appears to be that rather than the Soviets initiating action in Africa they respond to events in order to undermine confidence in the West. Such a scenario has serious implications for the FRG. Still, our tentative findings are that dire forecasts about a Soviet stranglehold on the FRG in terms of minerals are overplayed. It is suggested that coping mechanisms do exist for the FRG's supplies of raw materials.

Spending more through “cost control”: Our obsessive quest to gut the hospital

The data presented by Katharine Levit and colleagues in Health Care Spending in 1994: Slowest in Decades ''1 are both reassuring and puzzling. On the one hand, they confirm that the growth of national health care spending has descended markedly from the Congress iona l Budget Office's (CBO's) dire forecast of 1993, according to which health spending in 1994 would have exceeded 15 % of gross domestic product (GDP) (instead of the actual estimated 13.7%)} There is reason to believe that by the year 2000 health spending will remain much below the alarming 18.9% of GDP that had been forecast by the CBO only 3 years ago. At the same time, however, one wonders why the United States still spends close to 14% of its huge GDP on health care, when all other industrialized nations had succeeded in stabilizing that ratio below 10% as early as 1980 and have remained at those much lower levels so far) Much is made in this country of California's

Canada's Wage-Earning Wives and the Construction of the Middle Class, 1945-60

The 15 years after World War II were far from the perceived simple precursor to the tumultuous 1960s. Shifts in the work experience of both sexes prompted uncertainty about the direction society was taking in the Cold War world. In particular, English-speaking Canada's popular press was drawn to the fate of the working sexes within a broadly based and obscurely defined middle class. Fears about men's roles provided a frequent subtext, but overt public concerns commonly focused on shifts in female experience. This article examines debales about wage-eaming wives and mothers within the popular press in anglophone Canada between 1945 and 1950. During this time magazines and newspapers were filled with dire forecasts and happy prognostications about the meaning of married women’s paid work. The fate of the poor, of women (immigrant and otherwise) employed because of economic necessity, was largely ignored in publications like Saturday Night, Chatelaine, and the Star Weekly Magazine. Above all it was supposedly middle-class while women faced with a choice of labour, whether al home or in the labour market, who disturbed post-war commentators. In the construction of the modem nation by the popular press, the realities of class and race were conveniently ignored.

Surviving Eco-Angst

It's a Matter of Survival is sure to induce a degree of eco-angst in any person who cares enough about the planet to pick it up and read it. Even if Gordon and Suzuki are only half right—or even 25 percent right—in their dire forecast of the future of the planet, we should pay heed, and quickly. Our own complacency and willingness to accept an optimistic view of the future is also likely to allow too many people to ignore the messages of this book. And there are many messages.

The Logic of Papandreou's Foreign Policy

Critical responses to the nationalist programme of Andreas Papandreou have ranged from suspicion to alarm. Dubbing him 'populist,' 'erratic,' 'pro-Soviet,' and 'antiAmerican,' critics have predicted that Greece's socialist premier would withdraw his country from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato), sever its link with the European Community (ec), eject United States bases from its soil, and commit a number of other related 'sins'. Roy Macridis, for example, has set out a series of sombre predictions based on Papandreou's ideological profile and the radical platform of his party; while John Loulis has argued that Papandreou's strategy has exhibited 'inconsistent and perplexing shifts,' although remaining essentially within a framework of 'antiAmerican' sentiments and 'pro-Soviet' inclinations.1 Clearly, if these dire forecasts were to come true, the consequences would be profound: the disintegration of nato's southern flank, increased opportunities for the Soviet Union to isolate Turkey, and the transformation of the Balkans into the powder keg it used to be. That none of these predictions has come to be suggests that they may have been founded on fallacies. Indeed, I will argue that Papandreou's critics have oversimplified, and hence distorted, his world view. Moreover, in personalizing their charges,

Forecasting--Fact or Folly?: ABSTRACT

Many dire forecasts about future hydrocarbon potential in the United States culminated in the pessimistic Club of Rome forecast and recent statements by officials of DOE that, cannot substantially increase our domestic production. Forecasts can be self-fulfilling, can impact the shape of the future, and should be examined in these terms. A look at energy supply and demand predictions made over the last 6 years in the United States is instructive. Forecasts made in 1973 for a 1990 energy demand of 67 million BCOE (barrels crude oil equivalent) and a domestic supply of 45 million BCOE indicated a short fall of 22 million BCOE. Today, forecasts indicate a demand of 50.4 million BCOE and a domestic supply of 37.3 million BCOE producing a short fall of 13.1 million BCOE. Because we appear to be in a domestic-supply-limiting situation, we must examine very carefully the supply analysis used in the forecast. Most forecasts contain a failure of imagination usually due to relying on today's logic. This disallows the possibilities of breakthroughs which are the real future. Most important in looking at the future is to (1) describe its volume, (2) determine what changes could affect the limits of the volume, (3) do research in areas End_Page 539------------------------------ where positive changes to the limits might be expected, and (4) obtain directionality from the forecast. End_of_Article - Last_Page 540------------