There Will Be No New Normal

 

At least five people have been found dead in Italy following violent storms in the north and wildfires in Sicily.

The government is considering declaring a state of emergency in the hardest-hit regionshttps://t.co/5JRVjmA9jv pic.twitter.com/sWzTqYBRHV

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) July 26, 2023

I've been to Sicily a couple of times and it is fiercely beautiful. I am heartbroken for what is happening. The temperature in Palermo a couple of days ago was 47°C, which is astonishing not only because it is a local record, but because it is a record likely to be demolished soon. 

(Giorgia Meloni has said fine things about environmentalism that she certainly doesn't believe because the fascisti attitude is ne me frego.)

Algeria is facing wildfires and temperatures of about 120° F. The heat index at the Persian Gulf airport in Iran reached 152° F. These are conditions that suggest an unlivable future. 

Scientists are saying that there is no "new normal"--the term is a lie. We won't really have time to acclimate to anything we are seeing because it will just change faster than we can get used to it. I've been staring at this idea unable to strike another mode than elegiac. Or at least poetic. I don't want to succumb to "doomerism". The problem is that I understand enough of biology to know that if ocean temps are over 100° F this is very bad for cold-blooded things. And then, warm-blooded things. It's like feeling a mass disturbance in the Force. 

But back to the presentiment of doom--I don't know how we walk back tipping points we might have already crossed. The idea that the Gulf Stream collapses during my lifetime is not something I have words for. Poetic or otherwise.

Those things are hard to fathom (though we need to figure out how to), but in the meantime, if we value eating, if we value culture, if we value any of the standard of living we associate with civilization, we need to reckon with the idea that some sacrifices must be made now to prevent the losses of things beyond price. Not for the sake of our great-grandchildren. I'm talking about the intolerable conditions we will spend what we have of our old age in. 

Climate Sunday: Water Everywhere, Except Where We Want it

 

The UN convened a global conference on water--which is something absolutely basic to life on earth. I shouldn't actually have to say something as dull as "Water is important to life" but apparently, this kind of true thing isn't obvious to everyone. I have it top of mind at the moment because thousands of gallons of latex-related chemicals just got dumped into the Delaware Rive late Friday and we are finding out now that we probably want to drink bottled water here in Philadelphia. 

Water is necessary to the entire food chain, and we threaten to tip weird chemicals into it all the time. Even from fracking and oil spills and whatnot. And that's a real problem, Because we're already overtaxing our aquifers, and have been for a while. And we really can't afford to fuck up our drinking water.

So says the CSO of PepsiCo. They bottle a lot of water and soft drinks and looking at a timeline of TWO THE FUCK YEARS! for half the world to be in scarcity for drinking water is very uncomfortable. It's their business, and they are looking at the logistics of transporting water to where it isn't. 

This isn't just about thirst-quenching, though--it's about agriculture. Right now, Argentina is having an insane drought. Just a total loss on all major crops, with devastating effects for feeding livestock (this is a glimpse from last year). Some can say there's no obvious relationship to global climate change, but some areas have gotten wetter--like the floods of Pakistan, and the barrage of atmospheric rivers that have buffeted California. And it is devastating. In California, crops are wiped out by flooding and a whole lake appears where once was farmland.  So while we lose a Lake Mead in one place, and a Lake Tulare comes back--but no one can plan for that happening in a whole minute!

It's really no joke--the Great Salt Lake is not so much, and the Great Lakes themselves are becoming Meh Lakes. And the solutions to this problem aren't going to be easy at all.

Combine this with the realization that increased CO2 isn't actually going to be the monster bonus to global greening, and you have a potential agricultural nightmare. Some crops never start, some drown. And don't get me started on what is happening to our pollinators, because if I start thinking about the problems of the birds and the bees, I won't sleep tonight. 

Anyway--we should probably ship chemicals very carefully, use fossil fuels less, conserve water religiously and not be greedy arseholes as a society. It's literally life and death. Like, literally.  Because you can't drink oil and you can't eat coal. 

Climate Change is Terror

 

I have never seen climate carnage on the scale of the floods here in Pakistan.

As our planet continues to warm, all countries will increasingly suffer losses and damage from climate beyond their capacity to adapt.

This is a global crisis. It demands a global response. pic.twitter.com/5nqcJIMoIA

— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) September 10, 2022

 I know this is a hell of a message to send on the 21st anniversary of 9/11, but I can't hear the skirling bagpipes deliver "Amazing Grace" one more time without thinking about the future pressures of what colonialism and global commodification of the planet will mean for future generations. We've been looking at the war on terror as about a lot of things, but about oil and water, not so much--maybe we should. About self-determination, and the world corporations would leave us to--not so much. Maybe we should.  We were lost, but will we be found? We were blind, but will we see? 

We tend to want to put a face on our terrors and consider the villain as "the other". Nature, in its raw power and inexorableness, seems to us to act in ways so removed from our capability to harness it--but we harnessed the atom. We can make use of the energies of water and wind and even capture lightning in a bottle and the sun in a mirror. I think we should be able to understand that over 30 million people are displaced and maybe thousands have died or will, and a third of a large country is under water, destroying crops and homes and livelihoods, because for over a hundred years, we, humanity, did something to the atmosphere that made storms more potent and the future more uncertain. 

The Fall of Icarus

 

I've been thinking about one of my favorite poems, lately:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree....

 because suffering in the sense of grave and unmistakable tragedy has struck with alarming regularity. Of course, there's COVID-19, which has become the fatal backdrop, our mise en scene. But recently, a small town in Canada suffered a heat dome for several days, enduring temperatures wildly uncommon to that area, and basically spontaneously combusted. In Europe, massive flooding events have occurred, causing the loss of lives and previously unimaginable damage. In Florida, we have witnessed a residential building fall in the night, where residents went to sleep never suspecting the terrible changes to come.  (Sinkholes are so common to this area that I tend to assume either dramatic subsidence or building that didn't meet the requirements of the environment the building was sitting in.)

Our world is changing, and tragedy related to climate is becoming a norm,  And yet it stays, in some peculiar sense, a tragedy taking place as if always elsewhere and elsewhen. Faith might be part of the reason why--whether to laugh or cry about that, I can not say.  

I think the ancients knew the better part of the cause--hubris. Like the fall of  Icarus, tragedy befalls people when the protagonist (all of us) can not take the good advice of others and do sensible things, can not hear the warnings and portents of our Daedalus, but fall prey to a fatal flaw. We soar on technological wings, but can't moderate and bristle at the idea of accepting nature's limits. We are fucked and fall, hard, limbs thrashing into the drink. 

But it needn't be that way. Daedalus understood the dangers and as he flew, he did not fall. Also, I think of another case so similar--that of Phaethon driving the fiery chariot of Helios across the sky, and losing control (a metaphor for climate change if I ever heard one). His father had warned him, but this was because he was all too familiar with the rigors of the diurnal journey.

It's not that living with technology and doing it well and without further harm to environment can't be done, it's just that it has to be done skillfully and mindfully. We can survive as a species, but only if we pull our heads out of our asses. We need to grow up and be responsible and ever so careful. In the Anthropocene, we need to become the fathers and mothers, the good stewards, of the planet. 

Otherwise, we fail.

The America First Problem

“As we outpace what we need we’re going to be sending [ventilators] to Italy,” Trump insisted at his coronavirus briefing. “We’re going to be sending them to France.” https://t.co/1iE0uCD9wz

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 31, 2020

It's hard for me not to hear that Trump envisions ventilators sent all over the world "as we outpace what we need" without sarcastically wondering if he might consider "America first". After all, in the weeks after the first COVID-19 case was detected in the US, instead of ramping up national stockpiles and proceeding with a plan for testing and containment, the administration thought to bundle up medical supplies for China. Which was awful nice of the US, truly. Maybe it was supposed to help with trade talks or something. But it didn't do much for us here (and makes a bit of a mockery of the claims that the Obama Administration left stockpiles so low--so, after three years, we had enough to give away? And Trump and friends couldn't figure out how to fix that? At some point, Trump gets to own the results of his particular form of leadership. (And yes, the problem is his.)

I guess I also wonder about this because there's a nonzero possibility that all states are not going to be treated equally. Beyond his petty slams at Governors Whitmer and Inslee for not being sufficiently grateful for his interest in doing his job and his fairly straight-forward discussion of the need for Governor Cuomo to basically kiss his ass publicly to get what he needs (for the people of New York, who last I checked were Americans), there's little things like the 170 broken ventilators that were sent to California. I'm not saying something like that was on purpose. I've just got no reassurances from available data that it can be ruled out. When Illinois gets a shipment of the wrong type of masks, certainly it could be just a clerical issue, but is it, though?

I note with a little irony that some stooges for the administration are admitting that Trump didn't have his eye on the ball, but whiffed the potential pandemic response because of the impeachment. To which I guess I'd have to say, he should have realized he didn't have the range for the job before he tried fancy extras like extorting foreign allies if he couldn't hang. Also, too, the Republicans in the Senate acquitted him (despite his having pretty much used Godfather-esque language to shake down a foreign leader) even if they should have realized his general attitude towards government was self-directed. Except for the one guy who--get this, was a nominee for that job and had an appreciation for the intelligence involved. Also ironically, this scenario was a part of the discussion for whether this exact attitude of Trump's was reason enough for him to be removed:

Serving as one of several expert witnesses in the first public impeachment hearing in the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Karlan said:

"Imagine living in a part of Louisiana or Texas that's prone to devastating hurricanes and flooding. What would you think if you lived there and your governor asked for a meeting with the president to discuss getting disaster aid that Congress has provided for? What would you think if that president said, 'I would like you to do us a favor? I'll meet with you, and send the disaster relief, once you brand my opponent a criminal.'

Wouldn't you know in your gut that such a president has abused his office? That he'd betrayed the national interest, and that he was trying to corrupt the electoral process? I believe the evidentiary record shows wrongful acts on those scale here."

Karlan used this analogy to contextualize Trump's broad efforts to urge Ukraine into launching investigations that would aid his reelection campaign.

And just like a Republican president before him, it wasn't that he was never warned that there would be a problem with a potential pandemic, or that he had inadequate warning about this one (regardless of whatever happy horseshit we suspect China was putting out so as not to looked weakened). We had the intelligence. Trump just didn't see fit to act. Maybe he might have even considered waiting a virtue, against messing up his economy with uncertainty, or letting bad infection counts mess with his poll numbers. He could allow a little epidemic (as a treat) and then somehow, things would shake out (a vaccine or a cure) and he'd be golden again! (He doesn't know any better. He doesn't know that you can't just change the label on a flu vaccine and confuse the new bug with it. His fixation with chloroquine stems from the same hope for a miracle delivery.)

And he believes his flummery over how good testing is going now ("we're testing more than anyone else!") as if in denial that we're doing more testing, in part, because of the poor start we had. He has told governors he "hasn't heard" there was a problem with testing, which is dangerously absurd.

Trump hasn't. in all of this, been putting America first at all. He's using press conferences with random CEOs who praise his leadership to the high heavens (like the "My Pillow" guy!) to look in charge when he should probably shut the heck up, and leave the talking to the experts. "America First" was always just a racist slogan to discuss a certain kind of white, English-speaking American who Trump wanted to represent. And now his failure to actually know how to put anyone besides himself first is going to get that American's mom-mom killed. And his Administration's attitude to non-citizens, like the folks who plant and pick our food and work in our food producing factories? Here, in what some people still call a "first world" nation, we very probably will even see food shortages.

How was anyone, so unaware and ignorant of what even made America livable, going to make America great? How would this flag-humping signifier pretend to put America First, when he himself is only tolerable to a certain population (who somehow can't separate his reality show self from the one in the mainstream news) once he wrapped himself in a flag and had solemn grifting snake oil squeezers rap Biblically over him? His core is nuclear waste.

Of course he's incapable. He will never put America first, and will play games with aid, and people will die. Didn't you all watch Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria? When he threw paper towels and lied about how much aid they already got and slandered people because he didn't want them to get more? And how he denied the death toll because it made him and his response look bad? And they are Americans. And we are all seeing what that Puerto Rico treatment looks like when applied all over the rest of the US.

"America first" was a slogan. The truth is Trump does Trump. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Fire and Water to Start the New Year

More than half a billion animals and plants die in fires as Australian officials warn the worst is yet to come pic.twitter.com/QyuLIq6fxY

— The Independent (@Independent) January 2, 2020

It's hard to imagine the scale of these fires and the sheer area of damage, but it is necessary to try, because when people talk about "new normal", it means this is what wildfire season will mean.

At least 21 people have died in severe flooding in Indonesia's capital, Jakarta

The city is having its most intense rainfall in 24 yearshttps://t.co/e3yh1kSbb2 pic.twitter.com/GZ1bo2Lwdj

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) January 2, 2020

Jakarta has been sinking; rising seas and more intense storms are a part of climate change. Such phenomena will be devastating to coastal cities in the near-future.

I wish I'd been able to start the new year with a happier post, but I also can't help but think of people who are facing death, loss, and massive disruption from these events, and how humanity has to look at what is going on to find our way past our destructive practices in order to continue surviving. My thoughts are with those impacted, now and in the future.

If you were Wondering--

Is the PR debt the reason Trump isn't rushing any military assistance, like the USNS Comfort,  down there?  He is Commander-in-Chief after all. Also, I would say as a good old fashioned techno-capitalist, if Google isn't shushing on down there with Project Loon and AT&T and others aren't thinking of ways to get them some cell-signal boosts--they are missing out (I am serious, they need this help, but let me talk dollars and cents) on a great display of technical know-how and a great advertising opportunity.

Same deal, you guys who do solar panels and electric generators. If you have the warez, send 'em down PR way. They need it. The Virgin Islands also need your skills. Bring them, and show off what you can do. We are on a warming planet where floods and disasters like these are going to occur more and more. Display that you have the know-how to sort out these technical difficulties. You will get repaid, I can goddamn guarantee.

It looks like the US Government is not the best of us at the moment (except for you civil service professionals that I know are champing at the bit to help)--so it might just be up to the rest of us. No grifters need apply. But these folks haven't just lost domiciles and cell connections--the island of Puerto Rico has had its vegetation stripped and its potable water fubar'd--inventors and investors, bring your solutions. These people need you.

These are Americans, and their status as debtors means not one thing at all. They are our brothers and sisters, and they need help.

Climate Sunday: The End of Breathable Air?

While the COP21 talks continue, let's take a minute to talk about breathable air. Normally, when I talk about breathable air around here, I'm talking about the kind of air pollution in Beijing that makes simple breathing the equivalent of smoking 40 cigarettes a day. (And wouldn't you know, it's about as bad as it ever was.) This time, however, what I want to talk about is a recent finding that at 6 degrees C increase in oceanic temperature, we could be seeing the end of actually breathable air--not air that is too dirty to safely breathe, but air without enough oxygen to sustain aerobic life. This comes about due to a die-off of the phytoplanktons that produce most of the oxygen in our atmosphere, similar to the die-offs we see in the current mass coral bleaching event.

This is why it's imperative that fossil fuels like coal are quickly phased out in countries like India, which has made the case that as a matter of economic justice, they will continue to use coal due to its price point over other energy sources. Leaving aside that coal has been determined to be irredeemably "dirty" in CO2 terms, and that increasingly severe weather events from climate change, such at the devastating floods occurring just now in the Tamil Nadu region are not without economic impact, they have a point--and my feeling is that economic aid should be gathered in a trust managed by the UN for the purposes of subsidizing the necessary transitions, which needn't be painful, and which may prove to be even more outstandingly effective than low-cost coal use from an economic point of view, once it's off and running. It's necessary to think in these terms, because India's energy needs show no signs of decrease any time soon. (On the other hand, China, which is still using coal hand over fist, should basically just stop because they should, and shouldn't need paying off to do so.)

Ben Carson's Pyramid Scheme

He's so amazing--the idea that the pyramids are granaries is basically a medieval concept. The Pyramids are not hollow. You could not store much grain in there at all.

 Also, as to his supposed "Marine Todd" moment with a physicist and the idea that the Big Bang theory isn't compatible with the first law of thermodynamics--sometimes, when a person does not answer you it's because they have decided you are a crazy person or they think you would not understand the answer. Okay--he doesn't get the Heisenberg Theorem. But the point you need to know is--if something blew up in the Big Bang, something had to exist. The organization of the matter that was thrown out by the BB followed along the lines of other laws of thermodynamics. The matter was only transformed by an event--which Einstein already told us could happen.

I'm more of a life sciences gal, but really, this is not good understanding of physics at all. But it's also pretty bad history, sloppy Bible study, and not exactly unlike his understanding of things like the economy or foreign policy. He is Head Professor of Made-up Shit at the Dunning Kruger Institute of Things Anally Extracted. He is a Norwegian Blue pining for the fjords.

This man has no pants.

Climate Sunday: Ted Cruz, Climate Blasphemer Edition

Via Right Wing Watch, here's a clip of Ted Cruz (I'm sorry I'm on his case as of late) explaining that climate change alarmists are actually in a religion because they "never" argue from facts, and that being called a denialist proves it, because he thinks he's really a "skeptic". Bless his heart.

He's precious. I think it's kind of weird to hear a flat-out statement that people persuaded by climate change theory don't have facts, because it seems to me like I'm stuffing all sorts of observable data into my Climate Sunday posts. I think it's also adorable that he defines the business of a skeptic as being the business of science, which in effect is correct--but he isn't a skeptic, because he himself isn't engaging with the business of disproving squat, he's just ignoring whatever evidence does exist while providing disproved anecdata about an 18 year gap which is cherry-picked nonsense. That there isn't scientific--that's just political Lysenkoism.

In keeping with his idea that being a climate change evangelist makes me a religious adherent, then, I dub Cruz a climate blasphemer. The spit should dry up in his mouth like the Texas drought, and then the sweat should pour from his face like the Texas floods. This is my malocchio against him.

Climate Sunday: Jeb Bush Edition

As is the tradition Strangely Blogged (me) just made up this year, this edition of Climate Sunday is named after the not-necessarily-smarter-brother, Jeb! who reveals his energy policy in this slightly dismal-ending Guardian article:

After the former governor left, the press tent was overcome with fumes from one of the several generators that had been set up in the parking lot.

That's sad, but Bush's energy plan is also pretty damn sad as well, what with calling for relaxed EPA regulations (that certainly isn't acknowledging climate reality!) treating fracking for natural gas like it was the holy grail of clean fossil fuel (it ain't) and saying that approving the Keystone XL pipeline is like low-hanging fruit. He's really got no idea--tar sands are dirty, and Alberta's premier, Rachel Notley, says there's no future in tar sands, the particularly dirty source of fossil fuel that the pipeline is intended to carry, the production of which would financially (short term) affect her area more than it would impact ours. (Unless the pipeline sprung a leak in the midst of America's breadbasket or something, like pipelines sometimes do--that would be a nice terrible impact of no small proportion.)

Jeb Bush, a convert to Catholicism, had also name-checked the Pope, who he prefers to ignore regarding the climate-change issue, which gives me an entry to issuing a bit of a mea culpa: although I might have seemed to have been signing on 100% to the Pope's climate message, there is one area in which it falls short: population control. Without reducing our number of eaters and energy-users on this planet, we are going to continue to create climate-deficits.

It seems like Jeb Bush's notions regarding the environment are about as "stuff happens" in nature as his ideas on gun control, or women's health. Which is a pity, because we are already in the midst of the kind of climate changes where an Alaskan village might want to move to a more environmentally secure area, and where extreme weather events affect people globally, and  at home.

The grim reality of the thousand-year flood of South Carolina should tell us that climate change, and the preparations that need to be made, can't be ignored. Some changes will involve new thinking about city planning and updates to more creative and adaptable technology.

But the biggest change has to be not taking a "stuff happens" attitude with so much on the line. An actual leader needs to have vision and a plan that isn't just more of the same, but prepares us for the future.

Climate Sunday--Megadroughts and Megafloods.

As the NE US is gripped with cold, and especially the New England region is inundated with record snowfalls, I think I might like to make this Climate Sunday post short, although not especially sweet. As needs to be regularly stated, while winters will still be cold, climate change as a result of general global warming is responsible for larger amounts of moisture being retained in the atmosphere, which creates more massive storms. This phenomenon can result in megafloods. But in areas that receive less moisture altogether, the dry ground will be less receptive to even the little rain it gets, so areas such as the American Southwest will experience megadroughts.  States like California and Texas already have a pretty good idea what that kind of water scarcity might look like, and in the Northeast we need to shore up our infrastructure so it will withstand what looks like fiercer storms (a la Superstorm Sandy).

Basically, as far as climate change goes, the time for "skepticism" is over, because we are already in it.

Climate Tuesday--Fire and Water

Wildfires are raging in the west, with one in Alaska currently about the size of the entire city of Chicago. That isn't necessarily out of line for a wildfire in that area, but it is coming early, as conditions make it dry and warm enough to spark a conflagration sooner--and if that dry and warm pattern endures for a little longer it will make future wildfires for the season likely.   What we know is that wildfires are liable to increase under climate change, as some areas become drier and more drought-prone, but the sad kicker to that is that wildfires themselves contribute to the conditions that spur climate change. Some areas are going to be drier because they will lack the snow pack that once lent much needed-moisture to the otherwise combustible terrain. In any event, we've a situation where fires will happen--and forest management in terms of controlled burns comes with risks.