Taxes on cigarettes are considered "sin taxes," costs intended, in part, to punish bad behavior. One bad behavior that cigarette taxes in New York punish: being poor.

Photo by DucDigital.

From the AP:

Low-income smokers in New York spend 25 percent of their income on cigarettes, according to a new study, which led advocates for smokers’ rights to say it proved high taxes were regressive and ineffective. …

In New York, which has the nation’s highest cigarette taxes, a pack of cigarettes can cost $12, though many smokers have turned to buying cheaper cigarettes online or to using roll-your-own devices.

Wealthier smokers -- those earning $60,000 or more -- spend 2 percent on cigarettes, according to the study. ...

[The American Cancer Society's Russ] Sciandra said state statistics showed that smokers earning less than $30,000 a year paid 39 percent of state and city taxes on cigarettes. He added that more of the cigarette tax revenue should be used to finance smoking-cessation programs.

To some extent, this is a function of percentages. If you only have $100, $25 will seem much more dear than if you have $1 million. But the impact is real. The Atlantic's Derek Thompson wrote about how people at various income levels spend their money. For an average low-income household, housing, utilities, and transportation alone generally eat up almost three-quarters of the budget.

Pretty soon there's going to be a new world's biggest ship. Cool, right? It's probably going to sail the seas, laden with toys for children and cute animals, and bring joy to every dock. Like a reverse pirate ship, sent on missions to cheer up any city that needs it, overflowing with wonderful goodies and puppies and tons of mylar balloons with smiley faces on them. Right? That's probably what it's going to carry.

Shell will forge the hull of a floating [liquefied natural gas] plant in South Korea by year-end that will be the world’s largest vessel, weighing six times the biggest aircraft carrier, a Nimitz-class warship. Some 5,000 workers will build the factory to produce LNG off Australia’s northwest coast in a $13 billion project that also will shield Shell from escalating costs it would have to pay at the country’s onshore plants.

Rivals from Malaysia’s Petroliam Nasional Bhd. to GDF Suez SA of France likewise want to turn gas into liquid at sea, where many of the largest finds were made in the last decade. It’s a generational change for a land-based industry that started about 50 years ago in Algeria, where Shell provided technology for Camel, the first commercial LNG plant. Today those facilities typically cost at least $20 billion to build.

“We remove the need for the pipeline and use about 50 percent of the raw materials for an equivalent onshore plant,” said Neil Gilmour, Shell’s FLNG general manager. He’s overseeing construction of the world’s first floating LNG vessel, which will be as long as the Empire State Building, for use by the Prelude venture partners.

World's biggest ship sails past world's worst soccer field. (Image courtesy of Royal Dutch Shell Plc/Bloomberg.)

Oh, so it's going to be a giant gas refinery. That's cool too, I guess.

In at least one respect, climate math just got simple. A 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature yields 10 percent heavier rainfall extremes in the tropics. I mean, it's algebra. Where t is temperature and r is rainfall extreme:

t + 1 = r x 1.1

There you go. Oh, we should probably note, this is bad news for the tropics. From MIT's description of its study that produced this formula:

Extreme precipitation in the tropics comes in many forms: thunderstorm complexes, flood-inducing monsoons and wide-sweeping cyclones like the recent Hurricane Isaac.

Global warming is expected to intensify extreme precipitation, but the rate at which it does so in the tropics has remained unclear. Now an MIT study has given an estimate based on model simulations and observations: With every 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature, the study finds, tropical regions will see 10 percent heavier rainfall extremes, with possible impacts for flooding in populous regions. ...

[MIT assistant professor of atmospheric science Paul] O’Gorman found that, compared to other regions of the world, extreme rainfall in the tropics responds differently to climate change. “It seems rainfall extremes in tropical regions are more sensitive to global warming,” O’Gorman says. “We have yet to understand the mechanism for this higher sensitivity.”

Climate Central points out what should already be obvious: As it's getting hotter, we're seeing more wildfires -- and the wildfires are getting bigger.

Even as the 2012 wildfire season continues -- there are nearly 1 million acres actively burning right now -- the site parsed the data to pick out long-term trends linking fires, size, and heat. Here are some of the key findings from its report.

We're seeing more big fires.

Click to embiggen.

Climate Central compared recent and historical data.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service posted an update on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's Facebook page.

As of yesterday, there is almost no arctic sea ice in the Beaufort Sea offshore of Arctic Refuge. The closest ice is at least 300 miles from our shore. (NOAA and FWS)

As of writing, four people like this. You should not like this, people. This is why Facebook needs a thumbs-down button, to express disapproval at the warming climate and, with it, the melting Arctic ice that promises a chilly winter. Dislike.

The good news is that, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, Arctic sea ice has finished melting for the year. Ice cover hit its lowest point on Sept. 16, with only 3.41 million square kilometers of ice remaining -- an area that would cover just over 40 percent of the continental U.S.

Oh, man. From the Guardian:

The mass slaughter of millions of farm animals across the world is expected to push food prices to their highest ever levels.

Farmers across the world have begun a mass slaughter of their pig and cattle herds because they cannot afford the cost of feed, which has soared following the worst US drought in living memory, according to a report published on Wednesday.

Experts at investment bank Rabobank warn that the mass "herd liquidation" will contribute to a 14% jump in the price of the average basket of food [in the United Kingdom] by next summer.

Once again: thanks, drought.

Dead corn means dead animals.

It's important to note that this slaughter and the resulting food price spike is still mostly in the future. Mostly.

Hey, guys! Here's a fun thing that someone said.

Gary Doer, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, is confident enough that the U.S. will approve the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline that he’s willing to bet beer on it.

“I will bet a six-pack that it is going to happen,” Doer said Tuesday.

Candian ambassador Gary Doer is at left. Not pictured: his moose-down hat, icicles. (Photo by US Mission Canada.)

Ha ha! How fun! That Gary Doer seems like a fun guy, having a good time talking about that little ol' pipeline that a major Canadian corporation wants to build across the United States to carry toxic tar-sands oil to refineries on the Gulf Coast. LOL, good stuff. Clearly Doer has too much time on his hands for some reason if he's spicing things up with such high stakes.

I mean, nothing bad could ever happen to this place.

Last week, the prime minister of Japan indicated that his cabinet would adopt a new energy policy including a phaseout of nuclear power.

Today, in an "abrupt turnabout," the cabinet didn't. The New York Times:

The reversal came after intense opposition to the plan from business groups and communities that host the country’s nuclear power plants, which have warned that abandoning nuclear power will damage Japan’s economy.

The cabinet of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda instead endorsed a vague promise to “engage in debate with local governments and international society and to gain public understanding” in deciding Japan’s economic future in the wake of the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima.

The cabinet on Wednesday said only that it would “take into consideration” the goal to eliminate nuclear power by 2040, laid down in a policy document released last week. …

The deadline “was not a viable option in the first place,” Tadashi Okamura, chairman of the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said at a news conference, calling the government’s move “welcome.”

The Chinese icebreaker Xue Long. (Photo by Timo Palo.)

The New York Times has a story that's getting a lot of traction today: The melting Arctic has set off a gold rush. Which … we knew. The Times article's focus, though, is largely on one player: China.

While the United States, Russia and several nations of the European Union have Arctic territory, China has none, and as a result, has been deploying its wealth and diplomatic clout to secure toeholds in the region.

“The Arctic has risen rapidly on China’s foreign policy agenda in the past two years,” said Linda Jakobson, East Asia program director at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, Australia. So, she said, the Chinese are exploring “how they could get involved.” …

To ... improve relations with Arctic nations, its ministers visited Denmark, Sweden and Iceland this summer, offering lucrative trade deals. High-level diplomats have also visited Greenland, where Chinese companies are investing in a developing mining industry, with proposals to import Chinese work crews for construction.

One point the Times raises (which I hadn't thought of) is that last month's successful voyage through the Northwest Passage by China's icebreaker Snow Dragon was probably as much a test run as anything.

Mitt Romney, reeling from leaked footage from a fundraiser at which he derides low-income Americans, this morning released two ads emphasizing his support for the coal industry.

As we've mentioned before, Romney's affection for coal is a relatively recent development. But Big Coal is not a fan of the president, so Romney's doing what he can to stoke the fires.

Here, via the Washington Post, is one of the spots.

The spot is called "War on Coal," in a nice little bit of subtlety. Oh, but wait. Did you see this shot?

That was filmed at Romney's August rally in Beallsville, Ohio. Compare it to the image at the top of this Toledo Blade story about the rally, for example, or any of these from a Google image search.

The Beallsville rally, you may remember, is the one at which miners were told that attendance was mandatory -- and they were docked a day's pay for the privilege of showing up.