Joseph Burns

In 1849, Henry David Thoreau, of Concord, Massachusetts, wrote one of his most famous essays, Civil Disobedience, on the virtues of following one’s own conscience. The Thoreau Society says the original title of the work was “Resistance to Civil Government.”

On May 15, 2013, Ken Ward and Jay O’Hara, took their lobster boat, the Henry David T.. up the Taunton River to Somerset, Mass., in an act of civil disobedience. Their goal that day was to block a shipment of 40,000 tons of coal bound for the Brayton Point Power Plant. Since then, federal regulators have cited the coal-fired plant as being one of the state’s heaviest polluters.

For Ward and O’Hara, the act of blocking the coal delivery was designed to bring attention to global warming. Although they were charged with disturbing the peace, conspiracy, failure to avoid collision, and negligent operation of a motor vehicle, according to The Providence Journal, they succeeded in bringing attention to their cause. Their arrests were covered here in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Then as the trial date approached the issue drew more attention in part because they faced as much as six months in jail on the misdemeanor charges. That’s when the case took a surprising turn.

During their appearance in Fall River District Court on Sept. 8, 2014, Bristol County District Attorney Sam Sutter announced he had reached a plea agreement with the pair, essentially dropping the charges. Sutter agreed with their position, telling The Boston Globe that global warming is one of the greatest crises the planet faces. Ward, a carpenter from Corbett, Ore., and O’Hara, a sail maker from Bourne, Mass., paid $2,000 each in restitution.

To read more about this case, see the coverage O’Hara and Ward have collected on this issue, and see videos here  and here.

On Friday, Dec. 27, the crew of the research vessel MV Akademik Shokalskiy was  trapped in the Antarctic ice. The 48 scientists and journalists on board had set sail on Dec. 8 from Bluff, New Zealand, and crossed the Southern Ocean as part of the Australiasian Antarctic Expedition 2013-2014. They were commemorating the voyage of Sir Douglas Mawson 100 years earlier.

The Shokalskiy’s progress was halted on Christmas Day when the vessel became trapped in the ice, as journalists Alok Jha and Lawrence Topham reported for The Guardian.

Right now the continent has us in its grasp and, though help is coming, the continent will decide when to let us go,” Jha and Topham wrote on Dec. 26.

French and Chinese flagged icebreakers seeking to free the Shokalskiy had to turn back, according to a report Dec. 28 in the International Business Times.

Meanwhile, Jha and Topham continued to post updates.

On Dec. 20, Jha visited the huts Mawson and his crew built at Camp Denison a century earlier. “Mawson’s 1911–1914 expedition successfully charted the Antarctic coastline, investigated the ocean between Australia and Antarctica, and examined Macquarie Island,” the Australian government reported.

Previously, Mawson had explored the Antarctic as a member of Ernest Shackleton’s expedition in 1907–1909 aboard the Nimrod. 

In a fascinating article in today’s Sunday New York Times, writer Elizabeth Rosenthal outlines in detail why we as consumers of health care here in the United States pay so much more for health care than consumers pay in other countries.

“Whether directly from their wallets or through insurance policies, Americans pay more for almost every interaction with the medical system. They are typically prescribed more expensive procedures and tests than people in other countries, no matter if those nations operate a private or national health system. A list of drug, scan and procedure prices compiled by the International Federation of Health Plans, a global network of health insurers, found that the United States came out the most costly in all 21 categories — and often by a huge margin,” she writes.

We pay about four times more for a hip replacement than patients pay in Switzerland or France and three times more for a C-section than residents of New Zealand or the UK, Rosenthal says. Citing a report from The Commonwealth Fund, she adds that a hospital stay in the United States costs about three times what it does in other, similar countries even though the length of stay is about the same.

“While the United States medical system is famous for drugs costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and heroic care at the end of life, it turns out that a more significant factor in the nation’s $2.7 trillion annual health care bill may not be the use of extraordinary services, but the high price tag of ordinary ones,” the article says.

As an example, Rosenthal explains that colonoscopies are the most expensive routine screening test for Americans, costing more than childbirth or an appendectomy in other similar countries. While many less expensive alternatives are available, Americans often are steered to choose the most costly options, as is the case with colonoscopies, she writes. Also, she adds, unlike what happens in most  industrialized nations, the United States does not regulate or intervene in medical pricing in the private market.

Earth’s climate has been warming up sharply, according to recent research from scientists at Oregon State and Harvard universities. After reviewing data from 73 sites around the world that involved looking back more than 11,000 years, the scientists report temperatures are warmer today than they have been in 4,000 years. Also, as one might imagine, there is a  pattern of  sharp warming from the 20th century onward, according to an article on the study in The New York Times.

Based on this research, the scientists predict that in the coming decades temperatures likely will risk above those recorded since before the last ice age.

For a report on the study, The Times quoted Michael Mann, distinguished professor of meteorology and director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, who said:

 “The key take-home conclusion is that the rate and magnitude of recent global warmth appears unprecedented for at least the past 4,000 years and the rate at least the past 11,000.”

To estimate past temperatures, Shaun Marcott,  a postdoctoral researcher at Oregon State University, and colleagues analyzed data from microscopic, temperature-sensitive ocean creatures, according to an article in The  Times. The research by Marcott and colleagues was published in Science, ‘A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperatures for the Past 11,300 Years.’

The Times also published a detailed analysis of the study in an article on the opinion pages, saying ‘Scientists Find an Abrupt Warm Jog After a Very Long Cooling.’

In the New England Journal of Medicine, physician-researchers writing on the topic of gun violence explained that efforts by Congress in 1996 have “sharply reduced support for firearm injury research.” The article,“Silencing the Science on Gun Research,” by Arthur L. Kellermann, MD, MPH, the Paul O’Neill Alcoa Chair in Policy Analysis at the RAND Corporation; and Frederick P. Rivara, MD, MPH, of the Department of Pediatrics, Child Health Institute, at the University of Washington, explains the issue thoroughly. For example, Kellermann and Rivara say the nation might be in a better position to act on the issue of gun violence such as that in Newtown, Conn., earlier this month:

… if medical and public health researchers had continued to study these issues as diligently as some of us did between 1985 and 1997. But in 1996, pro-gun members of Congress mounted an all-out effort to eliminate the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Although they failed to defund the center, the House of Representatives removed $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget—precisely the amount the agency had spent on firearm injury research the previous year. Funding was restored in joint conference committee, but the money was earmarked for traumatic brain injury. The effect was sharply reduced support for firearm injury research.

To ensure that the CDC and its grantees got the message, the following language was added to the final appropriation: “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”