More red in the recent maps

Snow through the daylight hours today here near Detroit. I haven’t been outside to measure how much. Why shovel the stuff while it’s still falling? Besides, since I didn’t rush out one of my neighbors used his snowblower and saved me the trouble. Great neighbors.

The forecast is for really cold temperatures. High tomorrow of 16F, -2F on Wednesday, and 4F Thursday with frightful wind chill numbers all week. And rain next Monday with a high of 43F.

So this weather forecast for Richmond from 2012 put a smile on my face.



Speaking of weather…

Robert Rohde is a lead scientist at Berkeley Earth. He has an updated chart of global warming 1850-2018. The chart has 169 images of the world temperature map, one for each year. Each one is too small to see any detail. But it is obvious the maps from the last 20 years have significantly more yellow and red than the ones showing the world before 1910.



The Pew Research Center has released a survey of what Democrats and Republicans think are the highest priorities. The differences are sometimes quite large. The GOP top priorities are terrorism, economy, Social Security (perhaps a priority to end?), immigration, and the military. At the bottom of their list is: climate change, environment, and race relations. For Dems the top priorities are health care costs, education, environment, Medicare, the poor and needy, and climate change. Their lowest priorities are the military, global trade, immigration, and reducing crime. The topics with the biggest difference between the two parties are climate change (46 point spread), environment (43 point spread), and the military (34 point spread).



Meteor Blades creates a roundup of news pundits for Daily Kos. For his roundup for last Thursday he quotes a piece from Elizabeth Zach of Rural Community Assistance Corporation. She will soon marry and move to Cologne, Germany, where her future husband lives. She’ll take her mother with her, so has looked at care facilities there. After a tour she talked about price. The German social worker was afraid the price would scare Zach away. But it’s half of what she’s currently paying in Sacramento.

We laughed, but joking aside, agreed: Growing old—or falling ill—in the United States is not for the poor.

Benjamin Verghe of Caring Across Generations explains:

There is no organized system for eldercare in the United States, while Germany has a social insurance program. Also, healthcare in the United States is mostly private providers, and since individuals have no leverage to bargain, costs are higher. In Germany, there is a budget for healthcare, whereby the government negotiates prices with providers. Everyone pays in, creating a whole nation of clients and a viable business model.

Want affordable care in your old age? Leave the US.