Whatever he says, believe the opposite

 

America is hot

 

Maybe, but not the way he meant it.

Climate change is woke

 

Is it progress if they've gone to calling it climate change instead of jeering at the idea of "global warming" every winter?

"Bad news for the climate sysem and humanity"

The scientists say
It will all wash away
But we don't believe any more

--Sin City
Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman

“What surprised us was the rate at which tipping occurs,” said the paper’s lead author, René van Westen, of Utrecht University. “It will be devastating.”

He said there was not yet enough data to say whether this would occur in the next year or in the coming century, but when it happens, the changes are irreversible on human timescales.

In the meantime, the direction of travel is undoubtedly in an alarming direction.

“We are moving towards it. That is kind of scary,” van Westen said. “We need to take climate change much more seriously.”

  Guardian

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Seriously not good

We've failed miserably

People think Musk and Besos are engaged in rivaling vanity projects building rocket ships. I have another belief: they're planning their escapes from the planet.

There is “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place”, the UN’s environment agency has said, and the failure to reduce carbon emissions means the only way to limit the worst impacts of the climate crisis is a “rapid transformation of societies”.

The UN environment report analysed the gap between the CO2 cuts pledged by countries and the cuts needed to limit any rise in global temperature to 1.5C, the internationally agreed target. Progress has been “woefully inadequate” it concluded.

Current pledges for action by 2030, if delivered in full, would mean a rise in global heating of about 2.5C and catastrophic extreme weather around the world. A rise of 1C to date has caused climate disasters in countries from Pakistan to Puerto Rico.

If the long-term pledges by countries to hit net zero emissions by 2050 were delivered, global temperature would rise by 1.8C. But the glacial pace of action means meeting even this temperature limit was not credible, the UN report said.

[...]

New reports from the International Energy Agency and the UN’s climate body reached similarly stark conclusions, with the latter finding that the national pledges barely cut projected emissions in 2030 at all, compared with 2019 levels.

[...]

The UNEP report said about a third of climate-heating emissions came from the global food system and these were set to double by 2050. But the sector could be transformed if governments changed farm subsidies – which are overwhelmingly harmful to the environment – and food taxes, cut food waste and helped develop new low-carbon foods.

[...]

The UNEP report said the required societal transformation could be achieved through government action, including on regulation and taxes, redirecting the international financial system, and changes to consumer behaviour.

  The Guardian

Well, that's not going to happen. 

Those reports are just further confirmation of the elite class belief that it's too late to save the planet and therefore they should keep on partying like there's no tomorrow. Because, in this sense, there isn't. Politics is the distracting game we play while we kill ourselves and everything around us.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Apocalypse preppers

Years ago I read an article about climate disaster and how the wealthy and politically connected have already decided there's no going back, so they're simply working to amass all they can now in the hopes of protecting themselves.

I've been searching for that article ever since with no luck. Today, however, this article showed up in my news feed.

Excerpt:

Here was a prepper with security clearance, field experience and food sustainability expertise. He believed the best way to cope with the impending disaster was to change the way we treat one another, the economy, and the planet right now – while also developing a network of secret, totally self-sufficient residential farm communities for millionaires, guarded by Navy Seals armed to the teeth.

  Guardian

Read it. Really.

The important conclusion to draw is not that the whole shebang is going to collapse - that's inevitable, and it could be sooner than later at the rate we're going. The important thing to understand is that many of the people at the top of the economic/political pyramid don't give a shit if you survive or not. What's important for them is to keep you divided against each other so they can maintain their privilege and power.

So, if you have descendants you care about, when you vote, choose the people who are showing you (not telling you) they maybe give at least a little shit about humanity, about feeding, clothing, educating and securing the health of the masses. Because if you are here, no matter how you see yourself, you are most definitely not the elite (no matter what some conman might tell you). You are somewhere on the scale that defines the masses, and that means your children and their children will be also.

As the world burns

Europe has joined the US and Australia in widespread forest fires.

UPDATE:

UPDATE 7/19:

Even Alaska.

Alaska has seen more than 500 forest fires since the beginning of April, which have forced the evacuation of mining camps, villages, and remote cabins.

By 15 June, more than 1m acres (405,000 hectares) in the state had already gone up in flames, about the amount of acres that would normally burn in an entire fire season. By mid July, more than 3m acres of land had been torched, putting the state at risk of breaking its 2004 record of 6.5m acres (2.6m hectares) burned.

Today 264 individual fires are burning across the state.

  Guardians

SCrOTUS

The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling this month hobbling the Biden administration’s efforts to rein in greenhouse gases.

  Politico

Well, that's just swell. Aside from attempting to overthrow the government and kill democracy, Trump/McConnell's more impactful coup is packing the Supreme Court.

The upcoming decision on the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate oversight offers the conservative justices an opportunity to undermine federal regulations on a host of issues, from drug pricing and financial regulations to net neutrality.

[...]

The Supreme Court and several Republican-appointed judges have invoked the same principle repeatedly during the past year to strike down a series of Biden administration responses to the coronavirus pandemic. Liberal legal scholars worry that the EPA case could yield an aggressive version of that thinking — unraveling much of the regulatory state as it has existed since the New Deal.

That has implications for other major rules that President Joe Biden’s agencies are writing or defending in court, including wetlands protections, limits on car and truck pollution, insurance coverage for birth control under Obamacare, and even the Trump administration’s attempts to lower drug prices.

“A narrow reading of what the federal agencies can do is going to literally handcuff the federal government from taking action to protect Americans’ health safety and the environment,” said Lawrence Gostin, a public health law professor at Georgetown University.That has implications for other major rules that President Joe Biden’s agencies are writing or defending in court, including wetlands protections, limits on car and truck pollution, insurance coverage for birth control under Obamacare, and even the Trump administration’s attempts to lower drug prices.

“A narrow reading of what the federal agencies can do is going to literally handcuff the federal government from taking action to protect Americans’ health safety and the environment,” said Lawrence Gostin, a public health law professor at Georgetown University.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Tackling the climate crisis

Joe Biden has invited 40 world leaders to a virtual summit on the climate crisis, the White House said in a statement on Friday.

Heads of state, including Xi Jinping of China and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, have been asked to attend the two-day meeting meant to mark Washington’s return to the front lines of the fight against human-caused climate change, after Donald Trump disengaged from the process.

[...]

The start of the summit on 22 April coincides with Earth Day, and will come ahead of a major UN meeting on the crisis, scheduled for November in Glasgow, Scotland.

Biden’s event is being staged entirely online due to the coronavirus pandemic.

[...]

The return [to the Paris Climate Agreement] of the world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide [the USA] became effective on 19 February and means almost all countries are now parties to the agreement signed in 2015.

[...]

The US has invited the leaders of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, which includes the 17 countries responsible for about 80% of global emissions and GDP, as well as heads of countries that are especially vulnerable to climate impacts or are demonstrating strong climate leadership.

The US president has placed global heating at the heart of his agenda and has already made waves domestically by pledging to make the energy sector emissions-neutral by 2035, followed by the economy as a whole by 2050.

He has also placed a hold on new oil and gas drilling on federal lands and offshore and is expected to soon seek a $2tn infrastructure package from Congress that would serve as the engine of future economic growth.

Biden dispatched his climate envoy, the former secretary of state John Kerry, to prepare the ground for the summit in meetings with European leaders earlier this month.

[...]

In an assessment of pledges made in recent months by around 75 countries and the European Union, UN Climate Change said that only about 30% of global emissions were covered in the commitments.

  Guardian

No more cow farts?

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)'s affiliate company Future Feed developed a cattle feed with seaweed that cuts down on the amount of greenhouse gases the animals emit into the atmosphere.

[...]

The organization garnered recognition and was awarded the Food Planet Prize for its innovation, which Future Feed director Michael Battaglia said can virtually eliminate methane from cattle's bodies.

"We know that just a handful [of the product] per animal per day, or 0.2 percent of their diet can virtually eliminate 99.9 percent of methane," Battaglia said.

[...]

"We think we can tackle the dairy and the feedlot part of that pretty simply, which may be 5 megatons in Australia and globally 500 megatons of emissions," Battaglia said. "That's equivalent to taking 100 million cars off the road."

CSIRO-affiliated company Future Feed hopes to use its winning to help communities gain income from selling and growing seaweed through an international commercial fund, ABC News reported.

  The Hill

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Get ready for another GOP immigrant scare

A few hundred Hondurans formed a caravan bound for the United States on Wednesday after hurricanes battered the country, posing a fresh challenge to efforts to stem immigration from Central America on the cusp of a new US administration.

[...]

Striking just two weeks apart in November, hurricanes Eta and Iota hammered infrastructure, homes and crops, killing about 100 people in Honduras. The neighbouring countries of Guatemala and Nicaragua also suffered widespread damage.

[...]

Guatemala’s migration authorities warned the approaching migrants that to enter the country, they would need negative coronavirus tests and passports.

[...]

Trump, who is due to leave office on January 20, has made curbing illegal immigration a top priority, and has put pressure on Mexico to help him. A caravan of thousands moving through Central America was broken up in October.

[...]

And as a last-minute immigration crackdown that incoming president Biden will likely try to reverse, the Trump administration finalised a regulation on Thursday that greatly restricts access to asylum in the US.

The final rule cuts off asylum access for most migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border through a series of changes to eligibility criteria. [...] [I]t directs immigration judges and asylum officers to deny broad types of asylum claims, such as those based on domestic abuse and gang violence, with some exceptions.

[...]

The latest restrictions are set to take effect on January 11, just nine days before Biden takes office.

  alJazeera

Thar she blows

All you folks who were raised (or are still) in a church that actually reads the christian bible: remember when god promised not to destroy the world by flood again, but by fire?  (That's actually really evil, when you think about it.)  Promises made, promises kept. (Caveat: we're the god that's doing all the things ascribed to CG.)

Add this to your California and Australia fires:

Scientists have found evidence that frozen methane deposits in the Arctic Ocean – known as the “sleeping giants of the carbon cycle” – have started to be released over a large area of the continental slope off the East Siberian coast, the Guardian can reveal.

High levels of the potent greenhouse gas have been detected down to a depth of 350 metres in the Laptev Sea near Russia, prompting concern among researchers that a new climate feedback loop may have been triggered that could accelerate the pace of global heating.

[...]

Methane has a warming effect 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide over 20 years.

[...]

The international team onboard the Russian research ship R/V Akademik Keldysh said most of the bubbles were currently dissolving in the water but methane levels at the surface were four to eight times what would normally be expected and this was venting into the atmosphere.

“At this moment, there is unlikely to be any major impact on global warming, but the point is that this process has now been triggered."

[...]

The scientists – who are part of a multi-year International Shelf Study Expedition – stressed their findings were preliminary. The scale of methane releases will not be confirmed until they return, analyse the data and have their studies published in a peer-reviewed journal.

But the discovery of potentially destabilised slope frozen methane raises concerns that a new tipping point has been reached that could increase the speed of global heating.

  Guardian