There are lots of theories about what names do to us.  The trends in the naming of babies also say things about what is happening in our culture. 

It was only about a decade ago that "Noah" suddenly took the lead as top boy's name...suggesting to me that a lot of people from a Christian culture were getting worried about some great catastrophe like maybe sea level rise.  Instead of thinking that your kiddos are going to suffer because of global warming, it's much more enjoyable to convince yourself that they will be saviors.

I just read that since 2015 the name "Donald" is down by 11%, whereas "Melania" is up 227% and "Ivanka" is up 362%.  Guess the women in that family are more worthy.

This from the editor's letter in The Week dated August 10, 2018:

This summer, forests are bursting into flame all over the world.  More than 50 wildfires have scorched a shocked Sweden--some of them north of the Arctic Circle--as temperatures have soared into the 90s amid withering drought.  In normally chilly Oslo, the mercury climbed past 86 degrees for 16 consecutive days.  The Brits have been gobsmacked by 95-degree weather; it hit 98 in Montreal; and in Japan, 22,000 people were hospitalized when temperatures climbed to a record 106.  In Arizona, Southern California, Pakistan, and India, summer's broiler has been turned up to unbearable levels, past 110 degrees, and people are dying.  Heat, drought, and fires of this scale and scope are not normal--or perhaps they now are.  Climate change, says Elena Manaenkova of the World Meteorological Organization, "is not a future scenario.  It is happening now."

It is human nature to postpone change and sacrifice as long as possible.  We don't act, especially collectively, until a crisis is upon us.  This penchant for procrastination is why the national debt of $21.3 trillion is climbing at a rate of nearly $1 trillion a year, and why we're doing nothing to address the approaching funding shortfalls of Medicare and Social Security.  Why deal with such unpleasantness now, when we can push decisions off into the future?  So it goes for greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.  The evidence clearly shows that the planet is warming, that the jet stream and other wind patterns have been disrupted, that ancient ice is melting and seas are rising, and that weather extremes such as droughts, heat waves, torrential rains, and flooding have all become more common and more prolonged.  And the consequences have just begun.  But what's most important is our comfort today, the next quarter's GDP, and the re-election of incumbent politicians.  Climate change?  The national debt?  Social security?  Let our children and grandchildren deal with all that.  We'll be dead by then, suckers.

--William Faulk, editor in chief 

"Mr. Trump, you appear to be laboring under the delusion that you have the necessary qualifications to be president. The manifest failure of almost everything you have attempted during your first six months, coupled with the anarchic chaos that pervades your White House, should give you pause--or would give pause to any person of normal sensitivity...

Get all your news, not from FOX but from all the sources available to a president, many of them not available to the rest of us. Announce your decisions after due consideration and consultation, not impulsively on Twitter. Cultivate common good manners when dealing with people. Do no be misled by the crowds thatcheer your boorish rudeness: they are a minority of the American people.

Listen to experts better qualified than you are. Especially scientists. Be guided by evidence and reason, not gut feeling. By far the best way to assess evidence is the scientific method. Indeed, it is the only way if we interpret "scientific" broadly. In particular--since the matter is so urgent and it may already be too late--listen to scientists when they tell you about the looming catastophe of climate change."

--Richard Dawkins, when asked by John Horgan in interview, "What would you say to Trump if you had his ear"?

The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspetive on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today.  Don't believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature.  Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving th emost plant and animmal species to their extinctions.  We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.
--Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 2015, p74.

Sounds like the planet's overall temperature increased by a whole degree in one year.  It may be time to stop trying to stop global warming, and start making plans about what to do about rising seas, receding ice, and the other direct impacts to people's lives.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/un-weather-agency-reports-2015-is-hottest-year-on-record/

(**tag note: merged "global warming" into "climate change")

A recent hike up onto the side of Mt Hood showed me how tiny our resident glaciers have gotten. It won't be long, at this rate, before we have none.

They're melting faster than we've ever seen:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/glaciers-melting-fastest-rate_55bf7090e4b06363d5a2a494

This is an order of magnitude greater moral offense...because what is at stake is the fate of the planet, humanity, and the future of civilization, not to be melodramatic.

—Alyssa Bernstein, ethics expert at Ohio U, comparing Exxon's funding deniers (despite knowing about climate change since the 80's) to the tobacco industry denying the link between smoking and cancer.

http://www.iflscience.com/environment/epa-barred-getting-advice-scientists

No independent scientific input is allowed!
What a crock.