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18649
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: As Earth Sizzles, Climate Denialists Rearrange Deck Chairs
URL: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/21/as-earth-sizzles-climate-denialists-rearrange-deck-chairs/
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July 21, 2023 As Earth Sizzles, Climate Denialists Rearrange Deck Chairs by Eve Ottenberg Mesquite Dunes and Grapevine Mountains, Death Valley National Park. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. For those climate change denialists who argue humanity is too puny to affect the earth system, take a look at the latest news on our species’ impact on the planet’s axis. Apparently around the start of this century, the earth’s centerline moved, the New York Times reported June 28, and “earth’s spin started going off kilter.” The cause? It’s twofold. First, polar ice sheet and mountain glaciers melting “changed the way mass was distributed around the planet enough to influence its spin.” Second: “Colossal quantities of water pumped out of the ground for crops and households.” This is alarming, to say the least. Because groundwater depletion ain’t about to stop anytime soon. Between 1960 and 2000, it “more than doubled, to about 75 trillion gallons a year.” That’s a lot of groundwater. It’s no wonder it shifted earth’s axis. “Variations in Earth’s gravity have revealed the staggering extent to which groundwater supplies have declined in particular regions, including India and the Central Valley of California.” At this rate, expensive ocean desalinization plants may well be the wave of the future. And, as the article notes, human activity and the global climate, which melt mountain glaciers and polar ice sheets, also shift the earth’s mass and hence its axis. So does impounding water behind dams. So if we mere, tiny humans can change our planet’s axis, it’s pretty darn likely burning fossil fuels, thus pumping a trillion and a half tons of carbon into the atmosphere over centuries, could heat things up. Indeed, the lousy climate news just pours in. July 3 was the hottest day ever, a record broken by July 4. In fact, that first week in July smashed records, going back, on the fourth, 125,000 years. Meanwhile Spain geared up for prolonged heat of 112 degrees Fahrenheit, while by July 16 parts of China were hotter than Death Valley. This is not normal. This is bizarre, much hotter and sooner than even the most pessimistic scientific predictions. That first week in July reached “the hottest global average since scientists began recording such data in 1979,” Truthout reported on the fifth. “The global temperature was bumped up by a heat wave blistering across the U.S. with an estimated 57 million people exposed to dangerous heat…with at least 14 heat related deaths across Louisiana and Texas as of last week and at least 112 deaths in Mexico…In June, a heat wave in India killed at least 96 people, and record heat is gripping swaths of China, northern Africa and the Antarctic.” Meanwhile on July 10, Miami hit a 109-degree heat index. It was the thirtieth consecutive day with a 100 degree plus heat index, while “nearly 50 million Americans are set to face triple-digit temperatures this week,” according to the Washington Post July 10. “Heat advisories are in effect in Florida, Texas and New Mexico, while excessive heat watches and warnings blanket much of Arizona, Southern California and Nevada.” Temperatures were predicted to soar to 117 degrees in Phoenix. Ditto in Las Vegas, the weekend of July 15. As much of the nation sizzled, freak floods drowned New England and New York state. By July 16 the heat wave stretching from Florida to Oregon and covering everything in between had peaked, but that doesn’t mean things cooled down dramatically. And lest anyone wonder about the dangers of this extreme calefaction – in 2022 over 61,000 people died from record-smashing heat. And that’s just the disaster on land. The oceans are too hot, also. On July 10 Colin McCarthy, an expert on extreme weather, tweeted: “A severe marine heatwave has emerged off the coast of Florida, as water temperatures have soared into the 90s. Multiple buoys in Everglades National Park are reporting water temperatures as high as 95 degrees Fahrenheit.” Worse is predicted for the planet’s oceans in August. That’s too hot. Such heat endangers marine wildlife and their ecosystems. It also means the ocean has difficulty acting as a heat sponge, which is, uh, a real problem. The oceans absorbed excess heat produced by us denizens of the capitalist west as we burned oil, coal and gas. Now, oceans begin to lose that capacity, and that spells trouble. To make matters worse, as the Washington Post headlined July 6, “Reeling Arctic glaciers are leaving bubbling methane in their wake.” This is called a feedback loop, exacerbated by the albedo effect, which means in the absence of snow and ice, earth absorbs, rather than reflects back, more heat. As for the feedback loop, methane is the guilty party, being 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Melting glaciers, polar ice caps and frozen tundra all release methane, lots of it, which in turn warms the atmosphere even more, causing more melt and more heat. “This is a feedback loop that’s caused by climate change,” one scientist told the Post, which then noted the very concerning apparent age of this methane: “The fact that it appears to be ancient suggests it could be coming from very large underground reservoirs with the potential to unleash lots of gas.” Some of these regions with gas flows are millions of years old. Does this mean that at the rate we’re going, there could be palm trees at the north pole in our grandchildren’s lifetime? Who knows? But our fossil fuel tycoons and witless leaders say, why not roll the dice? The problem is known. It has been known for generations, to scientists and to the oil, gas and coal companies who researched and then concealed the lethal effects of their product. Simply put, our social and political economy, structured around burning fossil fuels, heats the earth. The chief culprits in this profligate burning are wealthy countries and their massive organizations like the American military. Small, poor countries have small carbon footprints. This deadly pollution cannot be blamed on them or their so-called excessive birth-rate. At the same time, industrial agriculture and gargantuan plastic waste just aggravate the climate catastrophe. But fabulously wealthy oligarchs and the countries they own are addicted to all of these destructive activities and likely won’t abandon their improvident lifestyle until it’s too late. Still, there are solutions that maybe even plutocracy could accept. Like solar panels on every building in the world and massive investment in wind power. Also, we could speed up the switch to electric vehicles. Promoting sustainable, organic, peasant farming to replace industrial, pesticide-dependent agriculture would help too. That’s just a start, because there’s lots more. Everybody who could make a difference knows all of this. Will any of those people – hello Biden? – move against our fatal political inertia? Now is the time. Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Lizard People. She can be reached at her website. |
18653
From: kay.so.or, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: As Earth Sizzles, Climate Denialists Rearrange Deck Chairs
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when i was a little girl, i had a dream that we were encased in a glass bubble like a snow globe, and these giant people would just pick it up and give it a good shake and cause earthquakes, tsunamis an all the rest of our earth stuff...and then they put it down and let things quiet down....then they would come back and give it a shake again!!!they seemed to delight in scaring us! |
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18650
From: Jeff/Lake Almanor,CA, [DNS_Address]
Subject: You should have Cc'ed this to "Just for Laff's". What a kick.(NT)
| (NT) |
18651
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: You should have Cc'ed this to "Just for Laff's". What a...
| curious as to what you find funny about it... |
18652
From: Jeff/Lake Almanor,CA, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: You should have Cc'ed this to "Just for Laff's". What...
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I suppose it's the agenda based website. Not to mention the PHD Climate Scientist Jeffrey St. Clair, or whatever his agenda driven articles may produce any particular day. Talk about pollution, Counter Punch is at the top of the list of informational warfare. |
18656
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: You should have Cc'ed this to "Just for Laff's". What...
URL: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/21/roaming-charges-97/
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since you like jeffrey so much, here's a few more tidbits to chew on... + By Thursday of this week, the planet had experienced 18 consecutive days with global temperatures hotter than any prior days on record. + To date, the North Atlantic Ocean has warmed in one year by about the same amount as during the past 15 years, which was already a record period of warming. In fact, the current temperatures in the North Atlantic are as far above the previous record high as the previous record high was above the average high. + Sanbao, China, which is located at a latitude of 43N, hit 51.7C last weekend, smashing the previous Chinese national record by a full 1C ! China had five weather stations recording temperatures above 50C. Sanbao’s 51.7 is also a new world record for any location north of 40N latitude. + According to data collected by NOAA from the 50 largest cities in the US, the heatwave season is 49 days longer now than it was in the 1960s. A swath of global heat waves blankets the Northern Hemisphere Subtropics and lower Mid-Latitudes. Here's a look at some of the more notable records broken. pic.twitter.com/Pu7qSIYaUc — Jeff Berardelli (@WeatherProf) July 18, 2023 + Matthew Huber, a paleo-climatologist at Purdue University: “We are pushing temperatures up to Pliocene levels, which is outside the realm of human experience; it’s such a massive change that most things on Earth haven’t had to deal with it.” + One July 17, the Earth experienced one of its hottest nights ever. At 1 am in morning the temperature in Death Valley was 120°F, before slowly falling to 105°F at 7 am, when it began to rise again before topping out at 126F. + In Phoenix, America’s fastest growing city, which has now undergone 20 consecutive days with temperatures reaching 110F or higher, 85 people have suffered severe burns from contact with pavements heated up to 180F (82C), 7 of those people died. In total, at least 257 people had underlying cause of death listed as “exposure to excessive natural heat”. + More from excellent piece by John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times: “Between 1970 and 1990, an average of 16 people per year died in Arizona from ‘exposure to excessive natural heat.’ Between 1990 and 2015, the average rose to 38. In 2020 it was 210, and 2022 came in at 257.” + When the solution to the heat problem is fueling the heat problem: The U.S. is poised to burn a record amount of natural gas this summer to produce enough electricity to power the air conditioners needed to keep people safe from extreme heat. + Riders in the Tour de France had to wear “ice-vests” to keep from collapsing from heat stroke. + FEMA is nearly out of money and the hurricane season hasn’t powered up yet. + The new medical protocols for heat-stressed cities include doctors writing prescriptions for air conditioning and immersive cooling of patients in a “body bag filled with ice and zipped to about shoulder level.” + Canadian wildfires have now burned more than 10 million hectares of forest, about 10 times the amount of any year since 2016 and we’re not even halfway through the fire season. + This year alone China will install more solar capacity than the US in its entire history. + The Italian island of Sardinia experience temperature above 47C (117 degrees) this week, while Rome sizzled at 108F, three degrees above its previous all-time record. + Preliminary data from the World Meteorological Organization shows that the first week of July 2023 was the hottest week ever recorded, following the hottest June on record. + The drought in Spain has sent olive prices to all-time highs. + Remember when Obama and HRC (not to mention the Sierra Club) were promoting natural gas as an atmosphere-friendly “bridge” fuel? Now a new study by researchers from Harvard and Duke Universities and NASA finds that due to methane leakage burning natural gas can be just as bad for the climate as burning coal. + Declining water levels in rivers have so greatly reduced the power generated from hydroelectric dams that many states have been forced to tap into fossil fuel power plants instead, a shift that has increased U.S. carbon emissions by about 121 million metric tons over the last 20 years. + In southeast Alaska, the deathwatch is on for the King Salmon, who numbers continue to plummet. “General anxiety in southeast Alaska is through the roof. People are freaking out,” Ajax Eggleston, a salmon fisherman from Pelican, Alaska told the New York Times. “The health of the species? It’s doomed, man. I’m not optimistic about the future of trolling. We’ll be eating bugs and farmed fish from New Zealand.” + Both the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers are drying up for the second straight year. The problem isn’t simply ecological. The waters may get so low again that they snarl shipping traffic on two of the nation’s most vital freight routes. + Republicans have introduced legislation to block any president from declaring a climate emergency. Predictable, of course. Equally predictable: Biden not declaring a climate emergency, despite fires, floods, cities shrouded in smoke, hurricanes, power outages, droughts, insurance company bankruptcies, eroding coastlines, life-threatening heat waves … |
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18654
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: You should have Cc'ed this to "Just for Laff's". What...
| in other words, nothing wrong with the content, just the delivery mechanism? this current heat wave is just the "warm-up" act... |
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