Tag: Noreen Malone

Did you know it’s been really hot this summer? Perhaps you noticed it, oh, anytime you’ve stepped outside of your door in New York City these last couple of weeks. (That’s assuming you have a decent cooling system jerryrigged; otherwise, you’ve noticed it every single second of every single day and wondered why you ever doubted the existence of hell.) Well, scientists are now pointing out that all the weird and warm weather we’ve been noticing this summer looks an awful lot like what the effects of global warming were expected to look like.  

For instance, in addition to the crazy heat we’ve been suffering through lately, there have been wildfires (over 2.1 million acres in the U.S), droughts (two thirds of the country), huge downpours, and a freak windstorm known as a derecho (D.C, you know what we’re talking about on that one). It is, to say the least, an eventful summer for weathermen.

 

Scientists won’t come out and say that this is global warming, because scientists are cautious types and it’s way too early to make that call on whether this is correlation or causation that’s making the collective backs of our sweaty thighs stick to our chairs, but it’s not great that 3,215 daily temperature records were set in June alone. And that of the 40,000 temperature records the country has set this year, just 6,000 have been cold related. “This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level,”  Jonathan Overpeck, a professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona, told the Associated Press. “The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.” It’s probably not an I-told-you-so with much pleasure attached. Unless that dude really, really likes sweating.

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Filed Under:
hot town
,global warming
,scary things

via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/07/this-weather-is-what-global-warming-looks-like.html

The vampire squid has lost another tentacle or two: Goldman Sachs quietly laid off around 50 employees last week, reports Dealbook. Many of those who got the ax weren’t just spreadsheet monkeys, either; they were managing directors on what the Times describes as the “higher end” of the pay scale for that job description, where the pay scale starts at about half a million.

These weren’t the first recent layoffs at the company — there have been about 3,000 jobs cut and $1.4 billion in expenses slashed from the budget in the past year, but that this targeted strike aimed higher up the food chain isn’t going to be exactly reassuring to employees inside Goldman; more layoffs look likely unless the firm’s performance (and the markets) rebound this year. That recent charm offensive of Goldman’s might have to be deployed inside the building, too.

Read more posts by Noreen Malone

Filed Under:
white men with money
,finance
,white men with less money than they’d hoped for
,goldman sachs

via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/06/goldman-sachs-laid-off-fifty-employees.html