Global warming

[pbrower2a]

Just a reminder: while we think of other things, like the political transition and COVID-19, severe drought remains a serious concern in most of the western USA


Do you remember what I said about the winter wheat belt? The drought is still there. 

Any comments on California, Eric? I can say this of Michigan: the Lower Peninsula of Michigan is in drought.

[pbrower2a]

It's back -- and it is bad. It's drought in the western United States. Except for the part of Montana bordering North Dakota (and America's winter wheat belt) it looks like what one would expect if the subtropical desert belt moved northward as a consequence of global warming. We have seen many recent years of this, including years in which San Francisco  got less rain than Phoenix usually does. When the winter rains fail, San Francisco has desert-like weather... if more like the Atacama than like the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona and the Mexican state Sonora. 



(National Geographic Magazine).

Quote:The conditions are influenced by many factors, including a La Niña event that began last fall, which scientists know can contribute to dry conditions in the Southwest. In a La Niña event, ocean surface waters in the Eastern tropical Pacific are relatively cool (in an El Niño, this part of the ocean is usually extra warm). That cooling shifts the position of towering high-energy clouds, which tend to form over warm water, further to the west, which in turn affects the shape of planet-spanning weather systems. The effect “is like dropping a pebble into a pond,” says Samantha Stevenson, a climate scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara; where the pebble is dropped affects where the waves of weather move.


The shape and pattern of the big weather ripples moving away from the Eastern Pacific toward the western U.S. make it more likely that precipitation-rich storm systems curve northward toward the Pacific Northwest and Canada rather than toward the Southwest.

A healthy dose of random chance also feeds into the weather patterns that keep the West dry. But underneath the weather vagaries, human-driven climate change is making those conditions more likely.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/envir...r-develops

If this is a long-term pattern, then desert and semi-desert zones will expand into the southwestern quadrant of the USA. 

Eric might not want to see cactuses appearing in the South Bay area.

[Eric the Green]

(05-29-2021, 01:50 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: It's back -- and it is bad. It's drought in the western United States. Except for the part of Montana bordering North Dakota (and America's winter wheat belt) it looks like what one would expect if the subtropical desert belt moved northward as a consequence of global warming. We have seen many recent years of this, including years in which San Francisco  got less rain than Phoenix usually does. When the winter rains fail, San Francisco has desert-like weather... if more like the Atacama than like the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona and the Mexican state Sonora. 



(National Geographic Magazine).

Quote:The conditions are influenced by many factors, including a La Niña event that began last fall, which scientists know can contribute to dry conditions in the Southwest. In a La Niña event, ocean surface waters in the Eastern tropical Pacific are relatively cool (in an El Niño, this part of the ocean is usually extra warm). That cooling shifts the position of towering high-energy clouds, which tend to form over warm water, further to the west, which in turn affects the shape of planet-spanning weather systems. The effect “is like dropping a pebble into a pond,” says Samantha Stevenson, a climate scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara; where the pebble is dropped affects where the waves of weather move.


The shape and pattern of the big weather ripples moving away from the Eastern Pacific toward the western U.S. make it more likely that precipitation-rich storm systems curve northward toward the Pacific Northwest and Canada rather than toward the Southwest.

A healthy dose of random chance also feeds into the weather patterns that keep the West dry. But underneath the weather vagaries, human-driven climate change is making those conditions more likely.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/envir...r-develops

If this is a long-term pattern, then desert and semi-desert zones will expand into the southwestern quadrant of the USA. 

Eric might not want to see cactuses appearing in the South Bay area.

Right. I don't like cactuses, and I don't like wildfires burning my neighbors' houses. I don't like paying more for less water. I don't like higher food prices. I don't like Republicans who have given us these conditions, just so a few CEOs can be more comfortable.

[pbrower2a]

It's weather and not climate, to be sure... but temperatures 30F above average are monumental heat. This could be moe likely as global warming intensifies.

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The Pacific Northwest sweltered Friday and braced for even hotter weather through the weekend as a historic heat wave hit Washington and Oregon, with temperatures in many areas expected to top out up to 30 degrees above normal.

The extreme and dangerous heat was expected to break all-time records in cities and towns from eastern Washington state to Portland to southern Oregon as concerns mounted about wildfire risk in a region that is already experiencing a crippling and extended drought.

Seattle was expected to edge above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) over the weekend and in Portland, Oregon, weather forecasters said the thermometer could soar to 108 F (42 C) by Sunday, breaking an all-time record of 107 F (42 C) set in 1981. Unusually hot weather was expected to extend into next week for much of the region.

Seattle has only hit 100 F three times in recorded history, the National Weather Service said, and there was a chance it could eclipse the record of 103 F (39 C) on Monday.

“If you’re keeping a written list of the records that will fall, you might need a few pages by early next week,” NWS Seattle tweeted, as it announced that the city had already tied a record Friday for the highest morning-low temperature.

The extremely hot weather comes a week after a heat wave in the intermountain West broke records from Montana to Arizona.

The Northwest heat wave sent residents scrambling in a region accustomed to mild summers where many people don’t have air conditioning. Stores sold out of portable air conditioners and fans, some hospitals canceled outdoor vaccination clinics, cities opened cooling centers, baseball teams canceled or moved up weekend games, and utilities braced for possible power outages.



Washington Gov. Jay Inslee lifted COVID-19 capacity restrictions on publicly owned or operated and non-profit cooling centers in light of the heat. Capacity is currently limited to 50% until the state fully reopens next Wednesday. And in Oregon, Gov. Kate Brown suspended capacity limits for movie theaters and shopping malls — places with air-conditioning — as well as swimming pools ahead of a statewide reopening Wednesday.

According to 2019 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, Seattle has the lowest rate of air-conditioned homes of any major American city. Only 44% of the homes in the metro area have air conditioning. In the Portland metro area, that figure was 79%.

At a hardware store in Seattle, about a dozen people lined up before opening hoping to snag an air conditioning unit. A worker opened the door at 8 a.m. with bad news: there were only three units.

One of the lucky buyers was Sarah O’Sell, who was worried for her cat amid predictions of triple digits.

“Unfortunately, we’re starting to see this year after year,” said O’Sell, who used a dolly to transport her new unit to her nearby apartment. “We’re going to be like California, and that’s going to be desert down there. It’s only going to get hotter.”

The sweltering temperatures expected on the final weekend of the U.S. Olympic Track and Field trials in Eugene, Oregon, also prompted USA Track and Field to reschedule several weekend events to times earlier in the day to avoid the peak heat.

The Portland Pickles, the city’s semi-professional baseball team, offered weekend tickets for $1.11 — the possible high on Sunday — to keep people in the stands. And families lined up in the beating sun for ice cream and a few precious hours at community pools still operating under capacity restrictions due to COVID-19.

Sara Stathos was selling ice cream from inside an air-conditioned food truck in Portland and said the business would shut down over the weekend because the ice cream “basically melts as we hand it to customers” in such hot weather.

“We don’t want people standing out in the sun, waiting and getting sick,” she said.

The extended “heat dome” was a taste of the future for the Pacific Northwest as climate change reshapes weather patterns worldwide, said Kristie Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington who studies global warming and its effects on public health.



“We know from evidence around the world that climate change is increasing the frequency, intensity and duration of heat waves. We’re going to have to get used to this going forward. Temperatures are going up, and extreme temperatures are going up even faster,” she said.

“I tell my students when they get to be as old as I am, they’re going to look back and think about how nice the summers used to be.”

The heat is also worrisome for the region because warm air sucks moisture out of the soil and vegetation more efficiently than cooler air and that makes everything more prone to fire, she said.

Oregon in particular was devastated by an unusually intense wildfire season last fall that torched about 1 million acres (404,685 hectares), burned more than 4,000 homes and killed nine people. Several fires are already burning around the Pacific Northwest, and much of the region is already in extreme or exceptional drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Fire crews were being positioned ahead of time in areas where fire risk was high. Counties and cities across the region enacted burn bans — in some cases even temporarily prohibiting personal fireworks for the July 4 holiday weekend.

___

Valdes reported from Seattle. Associated Press writers Gillian Flaccus in Portland and Rachel La Corte in Olympia, Washington, contributed. Cline is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/washingto...e7c9874fd2

[nguyenivy]

Canada set a new all-time record high of 46.6 ºC on Sunday only to be broken yesterday in the same town in BC by a new all-time high of 47.9 ºC. For people who use Fahrenheit, 120 ºF = about 48.9 ºC.

[Eric the Green]

Global warming/climate change is the most important issue of our time, besides the Republican Party itself. Whether or not our politicians and voters understand this or not is beside the point. We will be run over or destroyed by it anyway, this already having started now during this 4T. We'd better pay attention and demand our government and our business act.

We are in the anthropocene, in which humans drive conditions on earth, enough so we can compare it to other geological eras. We only have a few years to shift drastically, or we likely face hothouse Earth. As Prof. Steffen says here:





The graphs show also the acceleration in the global warming trends since neo-liberalism took control, as George Monbiot says in the video I have posted here: https://philosopherswheel.com/freemarket.html

See the global warming blog I started here on the old forum, and transferred to my own site:
https://philosopherswheel.com/globalwarming.html

[Eric the Green]

Always remember, the global warming, climate breakdown crisis is on the ballot. One political party in the USA supports meaningful action to reverse it; the other supports continued climate breakdown full speed ahead. The issue is on your ballot in every election.

https://scorecard.lcv.org/members-of-congress

[beechnut79]

(05-29-2021, 05:00 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(05-29-2021, 01:50 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: It's back -- and it is bad. It's drought in the western United States. Except for the part of Montana bordering North Dakota (and America's winter wheat belt) it looks like what one would expect if the subtropical desert belt moved northward as a consequence of global warming. We have seen many recent years of this, including years in which San Francisco  got less rain than Phoenix usually does. When the winter rains fail, San Francisco has desert-like weather... if more like the Atacama than like the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona and the Mexican state Sonora. 



(National Geographic Magazine).

Quote:The conditions are influenced by many factors, including a La Niña event that began last fall, which scientists know can contribute to dry conditions in the Southwest. In a La Niña event, ocean surface waters in the Eastern tropical Pacific are relatively cool (in an El Niño, this part of the ocean is usually extra warm). That cooling shifts the position of towering high-energy clouds, which tend to form over warm water, further to the west, which in turn affects the shape of planet-spanning weather systems. The effect “is like dropping a pebble into a pond,” says Samantha Stevenson, a climate scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara; where the pebble is dropped affects where the waves of weather move.


The shape and pattern of the big weather ripples moving away from the Eastern Pacific toward the western U.S. make it more likely that precipitation-rich storm systems curve northward toward the Pacific Northwest and Canada rather than toward the Southwest.

A healthy dose of random chance also feeds into the weather patterns that keep the West dry. But underneath the weather vagaries, human-driven climate change is making those conditions more likely.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/envir...r-develops

If this is a long-term pattern, then desert and semi-desert zones will expand into the southwestern quadrant of the USA. 

Eric might not want to see cactuses appearing in the South Bay area.

Right. I don't like cactuses, and I don't like wildfires burning my neighbors' houses. I don't like paying more for less water. I don't like higher food prices. I don't like Republicans who have given us these conditions, just so a few CEOs can be more comfortable.

But this monsoon season has seen near record rainfall in parts of the Southwest. And there is a month yet to go.

[pbrower2a]

From a spammer (possible copyright violation as a crude cut-and-paste, so no attribution needs be made):

Quote:On a sweltering Thursday evening in Manhattan last month, people across New York City were preparing for what meteorologists predicted would be the hottest weekend of the year. Over the past two decades, every record for peak electricity use in the city has occurred during a heatwave, as millions of people turn on their air conditioning units at the same time. And so, at the midtown headquarters of Con Edison, the company that supplies more than 10 million people in the New York area with electricity, employees were busy turning a conference room on the 19th floor into an emergency command centre.

   Inside the conference room, close to 80 engineers and company executives, joined by representatives of the city’s emergency management department, monitored the status of the city power grid, directed ground crews and watched a set of dials displaying each borough’s electricity use tick upward. “It’s like the bridge in Star Trek in there,” Anthony Suozzo, a former senior system operator with the company, told me. “You’ve got all hands on deck, they’re telling Scotty to fix things, the system is running at max capacity.”

   Power grids are measured by the amount of electricity that can pass through them at any one time. Con Edison’s grid, with 62 power substations and more than 130,000 miles of power lines and cables across New York City and Westchester County, can deliver 13,400MW every second. This is roughly equivalent to 18m horsepower.

   On a regular day, New York City demands around 10,000MW every second; during a heatwave, that figure can exceed 13,000MW. “Do the math, whatever that gap is, is the AC,” Michael Clendenin, a company spokesman, told me. The combination of high demand and extreme temperature can cause parts of the system to overheat and fail, leading to blackouts. In 2006, equipment failure left 175,000 people in Queens without power for a week, during a heatwave that killed 40 people.

   This year, by the evening of Sunday 21 July, with temperatures above 36C (97F) and demand at more than 12,000MW every second, Con Edison cut power to 50,000 customers in Brooklyn and Queens for 24 hours, afraid that parts of the nearby grid were close to collapse, which could have left hundreds of thousands of people without power for days. The state had to send in police to help residents, and Con Edison crews dispensed dry ice for people to cool their homes.

   As the world gets hotter, scenes like these will become increasingly common. Buying a VRF air conditioner is perhaps the most popular individual response to climate change, and air conditioners are almost uniquely power-hungry appliances: a small unit cooling a single room, on average, consumes more power than running four fridges, while a central unit cooling an average house uses more power than 15. “Last year in Beijing, during a heatwave, 50% of the power capacity was going to air conditioning,” says John Dulac, an analyst at the International Energy Agency (IEA). “These are ‘oh shit’ moments.”

The rest is my doing, so this should remain should the spammer be 'excised'. Moderator, I will not be offended if the material above in the quote is itself excised. Just preserve my material -- please!

Yesterday the temperature reached 91 F less than a week before the autumnal equinox, which isn't abnormal in a place like Dallas. It's the end of summer, so we can take it here... in southern Michigan. One effect of global warming is extended summers, and 91 F in mid-September isn't too bad because we are used to it after July and August. It may be odd to see leaves changing colors during such weather, but that is one of the anomalies that can happen.  But if the extension is on the other side, as in April, then it is really troublesome. Where I live April is our spring, because March is still wintry and May is practically summer.  

People who expect to solve the problems of global warming by using air conditioners or turning them on earlier and using them more often and later may not be thinking of one of the side-effects of air-conditioning: waste heat that goes into the atmosphere. I have gone outside on a hot day in Greater Dallas and walked past the exhaust from an air conditioner, only to experience a veritable inferno. 

Any mechanical process has waste heat as a consequence, and air conditioning units are no exception. Air conditioners take heat out of a house while cooling it from what might otherwise be 95F to perhaps 75F (if you are thrifty enough) or 68F or so (as in a place that needs cool temperatures, as in a nursing home) and puts it into the atmosphere. The waste heat cannot do work that has been paid for, most likely through the consumption of fossil fuels. If not fossil fuels -- let us say, hydroelectric power or solar energy -- then the waste heat still goes into the atmosphere.  This explains the heat islands (although there are plenty of other causes of waste heat such as vehicle use, industrial processes, and even the setting of cement)  in and around large cities. 

The first city in Michigan to go from a Dfa climate (hot summers, precipitation all year, and cold enough for persistent winter snow) to a Cfa climate (long hot summers and winters too warm for persistent snow) will be Detroit due to a heat island effect and not some community such as Niles, Sturgis, or Morenci practically on the state line. The climatic divide went through New York City during the last half century and is going through Providence and Boston about now. Heat strokes will become more commonplace in Detroit, Kalamazoo, and Lansing as summer temperatures go from unpleasantly hot to dangerously hot.
Let's remember something about grain production, which has much to do with climate: good crop yields from Ohio to the Dakotas depend upon real winters with real blizzards that cover the soil with snow that protects the soil from evaporation of ground water under winter winds and then melts in the spring just as crops are germinating and really need soil moisture. High crop yields keep food prices from soaring and causing economic distress for people who must work cheaply if the plutocratic economy is to supply us with cheap stuff.  Winter blizzards may not be pleasant, but farmers need those for good crop yields.  You need them for inexpensive food. 

OK, New York City isn't much of a crop-growing area, and neither is southern New England. But Michigan is. Agriculture is big in Michigan, and it is becoming more important to the economy as the auto industry loses its bloom and gets dispersed elsewhere. See also Ohio and Indiana, in which other industries once dominant a century ago are in decline. Agriculture increases as a share of the economy by default. 

Turning up the air conditioner will devour more energy and release more waste heat. It is like having a drink to solve a hangover.

[pbrower2a]

[quote (really an edit of material since deleted)']
North America has a weak monsoon effect in contrast to Asia. It could be that North America is large enough to have a slight monsoon effect. Africa is much larger than North America but had enough of a monsoon effect a few millennia ago (it extended into Arabia) that the Sahara was rich in vegetation:



Today the Earth is closest to the Sun on January 3, around which time the Sun seems to race against the Zodiac through Sagittarius. On July 3 the Sun moves slowly by contrast through Gemini, when the Earth is farthest away; this reflects Kepler's laws of planetary motion along an ellipse.  About 9000 years ago the perihelion of the Earth's orbit coincided more closely to the northern summer, and summers in the northern hemisphere were shorter but more intense (the change of position of the Earth's axial tilt is zodiacal precession). The intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) followed the intense heating of lands under the sun, putting a tropical low-pressure zone in what is now the southern Sahara. 

Today summers are longer but less intense solely due to the axial tilt putting the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere when the Earth is closest to the sun, and the ITCZ travels only a relatively short distance from the Equator in Africa. About 7000 years ago the Sahara was a great grassland, and not a desert. Except for the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea which, as today, get practically no summer rain. Animal and human life were both abundant, with tropical species such as hippos wallowing in the many waterways. Such artifacts as corded-wear basketry common in tropical Africa (the culture was sub-Saharan) appear in places once rich in life but now utterly desolate. Lake Chad, today a salty lake on the border of the Sahara, was gigantic.  As time passed, the summer heating weakened, and so did the summer rains from north to south. Grassland became what the map shows as "semi-desert", which was about like the Mojave or the Australian Outback look today. There are scattered shrubs and not an absolute barren waste as the Sahara is today.

Not on these maps is the easternmost extension of the subtropical desert zone in our time, the northwestern area of the Indian subcontinent, now the Thar Desert in lowlands of Pakistan and nearby sections of India. At the same time in which the Sahara was "green" or at least much "greener", the Thar Desert was "green" or at least "greener".



Around 5000 years ago, such people as there were in what had been the "Green Sahara" either died off, went south into those parts of Africa that still got rain and kept vegetation, or found their way into the Nile Valley, the only place that still had a reliable supply of water. That is where Egyptian civilization started. While the Sahara was moist, the Nile was a forbidding place of impenetrable reeds that made exploration of the Upper Nile Valley impossible to European explorers as late as the latter part of the 19th century. If people are desperate enough to survive, then they will chop down the reeds and dig irrigation and drainage ditches so that they can still eat. (Check Toynbee's Study of History for that explanation of the rise of Egyptian civilization, although one must be aware that Toynbee has nothing good to say about African blacks and their descendants. (Maybe if he weren't such a racist he would have recognized the Harlem Renaissance as having the potential to enrich modern Western civilization... and distinguish the USA from Europe).  That is where Egyptian civilization, which was very sophisticated very early, came into existence.

North and West Africa, and the closely-related Arabian Peninsula are huge. Under the right conditions they can have copious rainfall from a monsoon. Southern Africa is much smaller and does not have that effect even today when the summers are more intense.  

Is Africa at all relevant to North America, or at least the desert and semi-desert zones between the Antelope Valley of southern California (Lancaster and, Palmdale) to north-central Texas (roughly Dallas) for climate change? AGW does not quite work as does zodiacal precession, but it might come close. Monsoon conditions in North America have never been as strong as those in Asia or as they were in Africa during the time of the Green Sahara. It is also possible that the Subtropical High would advance north into North America and turn Dixie into a genuine desert.

... AGW is a dangerous gamble with high risks and slight rewards even if Humanity does win.

(my general source for the maps. There is much commentary to read at this site. I encourage you to read it.
[/quote]

In accordance with the legend, an extreme desert is a place of extreme barrenness such as most of the Sahara or Arabia. Plant life is extremely sparse due to extreme aridity. The Atacama and Namib deserts are examples of areas of moderate temperatures but extreme aridity. The Gobi and Takla Makan deserts in Asia are cold deserts. At the extreme are the Antarctic dry valleys, where rain is impossible due to the cold, and powerful winds evaporate whatever snow there is. Such places even have hyper-saline lakes and ephemeral streams... and they are the most barren locations on earth that are not outright ice caps.

Semi-deserts have considerable plant life. The Mojave Desert has scattered shrubs, and the Sonoran desert has its giant saguaro cactuses. Other places that have the semi-desert label include the Australian Outback and the Kalahari Desert.

Grasslands can be tall-grass prairie as in much of Illinois (which is arguably a mid-latitude savanna, as there are some trees) because the climate is just dry enough that forest fires would destroy any large groves of trees, or short-grass prairie as in eastern Colorado or western Nebraska. A tall-grass temperate savanna, as in Illinois or eastern Nebraska,  can well be used as excellent farmland. A short-grass prairie, in contrast, is too dry for such use (see western Nebraska) without irrigation. 

[pbrower2a]

It should be obvious by now that climatic change can shape historical events. It can force changes in how people live. The desiccation of the Sahara and Arabia eventually led to the establishment of agrarian civilizations in Egypt and Iraq, at least where water still flowed (Nile, Tigris-Euphrates valley... but it caused multitudes also to starve,  The hunter-gatherer way of life that flourished in the "Green Sahara" became impossible in the extreme desert that the Sahara became.

The Sahara was more extremely dry (if that is possible) and much larger during the Ice Age.

....Let's look at the smallest of the continents and some nearby (or 'sort-of-nearby') lands. Obviously another Ice Age would be one of the worst calamities possible for Humanity, and here is how Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand would have looked during the Ice Age at its most severe:



The shallow sea between Australia and New Guinea was bared to become tropical grassland. Tropical forests had completely disappeared in Australia itself, and the Outback expanded, becoming even more barren (much like the Sahara today) in its center. Even temperate forests practically disappeared in Australia, with "semidesert" appearing in Tasmania (where the highest mountains were glaciated).

New Zealand's South Island became thin grassland where the glaciers did not take over. North Island became woodland, sort of a mid-latitude savanna.

This is recent Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand.



This is when Australia had the greatest potential for settlement with the southeastern and southwestern corners, and maybe southern Queensland being suited to crop-growing. The Outback is at its worst like the Kalahari or Mojave deserts which are not quite as barren as the Sahara or most of Arabia... but Europeans obviously did not move there to become marginal herdsmen. The Darling Valley may be lost to farming this century. Signs of desertification include heatwaves and forest fires.

New Zealand is almost entirely temperate forest by nature, although the northern tip of North Island could become genuinely subtropical.

Well, here's climate in very recent times in Australia:

[pbrower2a]

Not too bad, although the Outback isn't very useful for growing anything?

Here's how Australian climates could well be about fifty hears from now:



The desert climates expand. South Australia practically vanishes as a farming area.

Don't knock the importance of agriculture. Local agriculture keeps food costs and the overall cost of living tolerable. Alaska (too cold for much agriculture) and Saudi Arabia (too dry) are expensive places in which to live.

[Eric the Green]

The time is up to put the anthropocene in order. We are on the edge of tipping points to hothouse Earth. Two senators stand in the way. Email them! The USA is the worst offender, and inequality and the neoliberal growth/predatory capitalism ideology behind it drives us to disaster.

[pbrower2a]

The car culture and perhaps even the single-family home must go. The economic elites of our society decided that fossil-fuel use was a good alternative to social equity and vibrant communities. The fossil-fuel business never pretended that the fuels had no cost, but they sought to compel us to ignore the consequences.

[David Horn]

(10-04-2021, 02:43 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The time is up to put the anthropocene in order. We are on the edge of tipping points to hothouse Earth. Two senators stand in the way. Email them! The USA is the worst offender, and inequality and the neoliberal growth/predatory capitalism ideology behind it drives us to disaster.

Let's be honest aout this.  

Joe Manchin started and his son still runs a coal company that pays him ~$500,000 a year.  His daughter runs a generic pharaceutical company.  Is he persuadable?  No.

Kyrsten Sinema was a radical Lefty who found a spotlight to stand in, and is now a total flake.  Is she persuadable? No.

Persuassion is out.  Threats need to be used or the entire enterprise is lost or so compormised that the difference is trivial.

[beechnut79]

(10-05-2021, 07:52 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The car culture and perhaps even the single-family home must go. The economic elites of our society decided that fossil-fuel use was a good alternative to social equity and vibrant communities. The fossil-fuel business never pretended that the fuels had no cost, but they sought to compel us to ignore the consequences.

And how about extreme corporate power to complete the trifecta?

[Eric the Green]

(10-05-2021, 11:44 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(10-04-2021, 02:43 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The time is up to put the anthropocene in order. We are on the edge of tipping points to hothouse Earth. Two senators stand in the way. Email them! The USA is the worst offender, and inequality and the neoliberal growth/predatory capitalism ideology behind it drives us to disaster.

Let's be honest about this.  

Joe Manchin started and his son still runs a coal company that pays him ~$500,000 a year.  His daughter runs a generic pharmaceutical company.  Is he persuadable?  No.

Kyrsten Sinema was a radical Lefty who found a spotlight to stand in, and is now a total flake.  Is she persuadable? No.

Persuasion is out.  Threats need to be used or the entire enterprise is lost or so compromised that the difference is trivial.

I don't know what threat can be used. If Manchin and Sinema think they will benefit politically if an infrastructure bill is passed, then the threat by the progressives in the House not to support it without the bigger bill that includes the climate change provisions, might work. Or, it might not. We don't know yet. Without it, we are back to depending on the market and some actions in blue states, as long as the Court doesn't interfere with their actions to hold back climate change, and to do what they can to equal-out the financial power among the people. Meanwhile, any pressure put upon them is all we can do, so not doing it is not an option. And I wrote to my representative to tell her to support the progressives' threat. That can be done too, if you have a reasonably-progressive representative (or whoever does who might read this).

[pbrower2a]

(10-05-2021, 01:37 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(10-05-2021, 07:52 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The car culture and perhaps even the single-family home must go. The economic elites of our society decided that fossil-fuel use was a good alternative to social equity and vibrant communities. The fossil-fuel business never pretended that the fuels had no cost, but they sought to compel us to ignore the consequences.

And how about extreme corporate power to complete the trifecta?

That's up to the People. It people keep believing that the rich-and-powerful are the only people who know what they are doing and are entirely benign, then they will fall for plutocratic slogans and policies.

Even if there are some good super-rich people, many are self-serving characters on par with the pigs in Animal Farm, and such people seem to be the majority of the people capable of buying the electoral process. The difference between the analogues to Orwell's pigs and ours is that our pigs do not claim to stand for any form of social equity. Maybe Orwell overplays the hypocrisy; in my experience the only hypocrites are either saints (how often do you meet a Francis of Assisi?) or an evil person proud of his own wickedness who does little to hide his evil character. think of the prolific criminal (he was a serial killer), Alton Coleman.  Coleman was not a successful businessman like John Gacy who cultivated an image as a civic leader; Ted Bundy posed as a harmless fellow before doing his rapes and murders. Hypocrisy is the norm in anyone who either tries to downplay his wickedness (most criminals), or among more ordinary people who have ideals that they cannot attain.

[Eric the Green]

Job One for Humanity
circa March 2020, likely updated
Using the information and analysis in the article linked below, it will quickly become clear to you if, in fact, we are or are not in a global extinction and collapse process!
You will discover:
1. The 12 most dangerous global crises both fueling and accelerating the unfolding of a global collapse that we will face over the next few decades.

2. The primary and secondary warning signs that many conditions essential to your survival will likely collapse, and that you need to get prepared, adapt, or get out of their way!

3. How the collective worsening of the 12 major global crises (listed below) will lead to the mass extinction of most of humanity by mid-century.

4. Almost everything you have been told about the worst climate change consequences arriving late in the 21st century is wrong. These worst consequences will be occurring not just in your children's lifetimes but in yours as well!

5. Almost everything you have been told that we still have until 2030, 2035, or 2050 to make critical extinction-preventing global fossil fuel reductions is also dead wrong.
And most importantly,

6. What we must and can still do to prevent, adapt to, slow down, and survive the cascading convergence of endless catastrophes from the worsening of the 12 global crises disrupting, interacting, and amplifying each other as well as going over their tipping points.

https://www.joboneforhumanity.org/world_...challenges

[Eric the Green]

New report from the UN highlights my global warming blog

https://philosopherswheel.com/globalwarming.html



UN releases dire climate report highlighting rapid environmental degradation



A new United Nations science report warned that the effects of climate change are growing faster and more severe than expected. It cited hunger, disease, poverty and other ills made worse by a warming planet and indicated the repercussions may soon outstrip humanity's ability to adapt. William Brangham reports.

See full report and video:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/un-rel...egradation

Listen to the Secretary General and Bill McKibben! Climate change and Putin aggression are linked. We must handle both together: