This is not Normal

 

How do you confront a man who has done a lot of damage in a very short period of time, and promises to get up in front of the American people and lie about everything? Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D., NM) chose to hold a simple sign: "This is not normal."  (It was snatched from her by Republican Rep. Lance Gooden.)

What the folks who attended or tuned into this speech beheld was a long rally speech--not really like a State of the Union speech at all. Trump called out the head of DOGE, Elon Musk (who isn't supposed to BE the head of DOGE, allegedly, for some sort of legal reason). He dwelled on the ideas of immigrant crime and trans people in sports for some reason. (Divisiveness. Feeding the bigotry beast.)

There will obviously need to be heroic fact-checking. This is a speech where Trump blamed Biden for the economy that he has actually contracted, threatening higher prices and a recession. Economists were not predicting a recession with Biden's policies--only with what Trump has been doing so far. 

But we aren't new to this game. Trump lies. Trump blames other people. Trump comes up with proposals that might just be a puppet show in a madhouse. We are in a trade war with our North American neighbors. Trump has openly sided with Russia in the Russo-Ukrainian war. 

This is, in fact, not normal. A ketamine-fueled megalomaniac with poor sleep habits is Peter-Panning his crazy ass through our government with his Lost Boys, looking to move fast and break stuff--not really understanding what he's breaking, just hoping to get the contracts to fix whatever it is. Daddy Ourbucks rose for a little applause during the speech. 

One could almost wonder why he didn't give speech himself. Shy? 

We Have Met the Stupid, and it is Us

 

I have talked about the stupidity of using polling as a "story" for news purposes before. People are measuring opinions, but you can't measure facts. If an opinion is just wrong as to the facts, what did you learn? People might not answer honestly. They might be just vibing and have never thought about your question before. It might be useful for a news organization to see what sorts of things the public needs to be more educated about--but is it news?

Look, the above chart is from two years ago, about when I wrote the post I linked to. Yougov.com found that people wildly misestimate the size of various groups. When you see that people are estimating 21% of the population is transgender, bathroom panic starts to make more sense, until you ask yourself if people responding to the question even really understand fractions. Do people really think one out of five people are trans? Do they think like one in four are Muslim, and that one in three are atheist? 

These numbers don't jibe with anything in people's actual lived experiences. What this poll shows is that people are innumerate. Their mental math is broken. They aren't converting their concept of how many people per are anything--they are just really bad contestants on "The Price is Right".  

Giuliani and the Boomerang

 

The Bullshit Artist formerly Known as "America's Mayor", who lied about the 2020 election and had to admit that he didn't have any proof whatsoever that the election was stolen, has been ordered to start turning his various valuable personal belongings into receivership to satisfy a judgment against him for defaming two election workers who were endangered by his lies and had actually not done anything wrong. 

Some people believe in karma. I don't know if I do--but I do believe if you throw shit around, don't be surprised if a stiff wind blows it right back in your face. You shouldn't be surprised if what you put out there comes back to you.

This man used to have a good reputation (I don't know to what degree he earned it, but he did). Then he decided to use up everything he was for Trump. And now he can lose everything he had. 

There's an example in there.

Coleoptera

Minus the Southern patois that sounds like Senator John Kennedy as rendered by bad AI, Donald Trump talking about groceries sounds like Jerry Lewis talking about "coleoptera" at about 2 minutes in. 

Just so we are clear, Trump thinks no one can afford bacon and we need to show ID at the grocery store to buy anything.  But long story short, if we made more gas and had less windmills and had huge tariffs on food not made here, you could probably buy a banana for ten dollars. Isn't that what a banana should cost? 

Now, I totally understand how windmills are killing the pork industry because that is exactly what you would expect--when pigs fly. Somewhere in Trump's mind, he's got it imbedded that if the costs for goods in the US market were higher because of tariffs, they (I think, China) would have to produce at a lower cost, which means they deregulate (snerk), and try to whoop up more "productivity" at lower costs from their workers. 

Kristi Noem, Dog Assassin

 

SD Gov. Kristi Noem is getting a roasting over her depiction of killing a backwards "untrainable" puppy as well as a smelly goat that came from her political memoir No Going Back: Descriptive Stuff After the Colon. A lot of people on social media are posting pictures of their own good doggos--and that's great. But to give her her due, sometimes a dog just is either traumatized or dimwitted, or for some other reason has misplaced aggression issues, and they aren't fit to their environment. You could try rehoming them with a family--hopefully in a "single pet, no small children" situation, but once they have demonstrated they will kill livestock, like a neighbor's chickens, there's a real chance they aren't "fixable". She may have simply made a pragmatic choice with the dog because she didn't want to see it turn and attack a human--especially not a little one. 

There's more humane ways to put down an animal, though--we aren't living in Little House on the Prairie times. And also killing (poorly) a goat because it is smelly and misbehaved just feels gratuitous, because what do you expect from adult goat? And wasn't she responsible for how the dog was trained and controlled (crated or fenced?) Feels like she might have set that pup up by not preparing it for success.

Climate Sunday: Rough Winds do Shake the Early Buds of...February?

 

At some point this past week, I exited my car for the half-block walk from the parking lot to my office building without a jacket at all, because it was well and truly warm enough. I even ran the fan in my car on my commute home because it got warm in the parking lot sun. And there have been a few days like this--in February. This isn't usual--my early remembrances of February here in the upper Mid-Atlantic is it snows and gets really freaking cold.

It did not do that here. Well, not yet, but as we mosey into March and advance into April, while I know we've had bad storms in these months, I feel like the ghost of winter starts to vanish--and maybe it isn't a good augur for those of us aware of climate change. Spring has been springing early for a while--as if some areas aren't getting the winter we've been used to. 

Now, California--they are having a winter! That's also not a great sign.

Both of these scenarios feed into the denialist vortex in that they create possible "debunking" narratives: either mild winters in the NE aren't so bad, or blizzards in California prove there's no climate change at all. I guess the question is: when does weird weather get weird enough for the jaded and denialist mind to see it? 

And how do changing weather patterns affect wildlife? When crops and flowers start to habitually bloom too early, and the actual wild of winter bullshit starts a bit too late? 

The rhythm we expected from nature is thrown off, and the dancers can't pick up the pace when it too rapidly changes. This will affect crops we eat and animals like wild fish we rely upon for food. We will notice higher prices for foods--at first, because most people don't understand the relationship between nature and what's at the end of their fork. Then we will be scared. 

I don't want to wait until we are scared about where our food is coming from to get concerned about climate change. It's bad enough we tolerate the growing threat of disease and violence. We should not be so stupid we forget that we need to eat. 

Famine of Choices

WATCH: As California farmers make the hard decision to plow through crops no one is buying, analysts say the drop in food supply will be felt in a few months by consumers eager to buy produce at grocery stores https://t.co/F4LVLT5Gct pic.twitter.com/ecrWcGja7c

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 16, 2020

Some portion of my ancestors came to the US because there was, quite purposefully, no food where they came from. The one crop poor people mostly ate, failed. Just about every other kind of food a rich land produced, was exported. If it mattered enough, just a tweak of economics could have saved lives (a million people may have died, maybe a million more were saved by leaving). It wasn't that they couldn't have lived off what the land provided--it's that that nourishment was intended for other paying customers' tables. This sort of thing happens the whole world round. People starve not for a lack of food, but because the political climate doesn't allow it to be on their plates. It's either deliberately withheld, as can happen where the government is oppressive, or because there is no foresight on a government's behalf that food insecurity is a national security issue.

It's not just in light of the above story I consider that--it's a painful thing for farmers to produce good food and watch it go to waste and also know that it isn't just money they are out for their labor, but that the demand exists (people still need fed), it only needs a different path to the ultimate consumer. It's in light of images like this:

image of the line of cars waiting for food aid. Surely, they has to be a way for other plans to be made for more produce to be canned, dairy to be powdered, etc. possibly by an act of government, to make food more available for the people temporarily in want? The logistics for such a thing must exist. I know when I was a kid, people talked shit about government cheese (but it was good for grilled cheese) but that was a staple. We need the USDA to get it's top game on.

I'm not a logistics kind of person that knows exactly how to translate not plowing crops under into filling the bellies of people who just need tiding over until this virus crisis is licked, but taking inspiration from folks like Chef Andres, I know if the will existed we could find a way to do it.

That's the kind of thinking we should want in government. And the sort of thing I think government can make happen on a meaningful scale--but which shouldn't stop food relief groups, local governments, etc. from trying to manage, because I think the crisis is still unfolding, and future food shortages could drive inflation and just some really fucked-up realities. Basically, capitalism Venezuela. I could be wrong about that part, but I am not wrong about feeding the people and subsidizing the farmers. We all need to eat and we all need to take care of one another when things are rough. We are all in this together.

That is what makes a nation great.

Climate Sunday: Cherry Blossoms and Daffodils

Yep, that's the National Mall today! Fall-blooming blossoms going strong in the warmth. https://t.co/VTxrTLH8En pic.twitter.com/OdHVZJCbrX

— Capital Weather Gang (@capitalweather) December 9, 2015

We are enjoying a particularly mild December here in the East Coast. Just yesterday my dad had to mow his lawn. Fall-blooming cherry blossoms are still going strong in DC. Buffalo, NY just had its first little bit of snow, the latest snow has started there since 1899. We're not alone. All of the lower 48 states have had higher-than-normal temps, and daffodils have bloomed in the UK. It's weird, but it's sort of a pleasant-weird for many of us. Looks like I'll be in shorts for Christmas Eve instead of dashing through the snow. I can deal with that.

But as you've probably guessed, I know this pattern is largely to do with current weather conditions, and isn't necessarily "proof" of global warming. (Although the last five years having all been records pretty much is.) And, as you've also probably guessed, I'm just starting on a pleasant note before launching into my weekly warnings and portents.

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.)

Climate Sunday: Mike Huckabee's Sunburn Edition

They believe climate change is a greater threat than Islamic extremism, that a sunburn is worse than a beheading. It's nonsense! #DemDebate

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) October 14, 2015

Welcome to another edition of our Sunday Climate Round-up, this time named after Mike Huckabee's go-to "hot take" on how terrorism is scarier than...a sunburn, which is what absolutely no one who is discussing climate change is seriously talking about, ever. But I'll bite, because I've hit this one before, poll your friends and neighbors and see who can admit to having had a really terrible sunburn. Go on to see how many of them have had a skin lesion looked at or removed.

Now think about how many of your friends and neighbors have been beheaded. Statistically, it is way more likely for a US American that everyone you know has had sunburn, and a few of them have had something suspicious scraped. Skin cancer is pretty scary. But you are less likely to know someone who was beheaded by terrorists--which isn't to minimize the threat of terror at all, only to put it in perspective.

Climate Sunday: In Honor of Ted Cruz

 



I've been remiss in not doing more "Climate Sunday" pieces, but just recently 2016 Presidential Primary Candidate, Senator Ted Cruz explained at the Koch brothers' Freedom Partners' forum that "the facts and data don't support" climate change. He dismissed it as a hoax and also probably worked that "not a scientist" thing in there, too. Cruz isn't uneducated and he isn't stupid--but the only bit of that I'll agree with is, well, no, he certainly isn't a scientist.

So in honor of Ted Cruz and the other politicians hewing to basically that same line--this post's for you!

 

With no further ado:

Climate models are proving to be deadly accurate. We can joke about the accuracy of weather people, but in the broader sense of being accurate about overall climate, we've seen conditions shape up pretty much as climatologists have predicted. They may have actually understated the case on ocean level rising, but it certainly has happened that, while pockets like the US east coast haven't been unusually warm, most of the planet has had successively warmer years. (The impact on oceans from the melting of ice can have impacts well beyond mere water-level rises, as well.)

 

We think of the Middle East in general as pretty hot, but this week Iran's heat index was an enormous 163 degrees. I'm not sure how people can breathe or move in that kind of swelter. In neighboring Iraq, people took to the street to protest electricity shortages that have cut A/C, which is absolutely a requirement to deal with day time temperatures that have reached 120 degrees. (The electricity has never been reliable since the US invasion.) Thailand has also suffered terrible heat and drought this year, with a terrible likelihood of crop failure for their essential staple, rice.

 

Here in the US, despite some rains, the Pacific coast is still suffering from extraordinary heat conditions. It's hot enough to cause a couple hundred thousands of salmon to die. Part of the problem seems to be a "blob" of unusually warm water, which is causing the deaths of many animals in the Pacific NE ecosystem, although this condition seems to be ideal for producing a toxic algal bloom. (The West Coast isn't alone--severe algal bloom is likely for Lake Erie, as well.) Things are tellingly bad when wildfire rips through rainforest. 

Basically, the facts and data from news stories that are pretty current actually very well support the idea that the planet is warming and lots of weird stuff is going on as a result. But I'm sure the comments of Cruz and his denialist coterie sounded awfully nice to the billionaire campaign donors who were likely in attendance at that forum. And the fact that they can buy an awful lot of air time for the candidates that they favor certainly contributes something to the cause--more hot air.

Climate Sunday: No, Additional CO2 is not Better For Plants

So, this is the fertilizer that Sen. Jim Inhofe, climate change denier, was spreading just recently:

“Counter to the doomsday predictions of climate alarmists, increasing observations suggest a much reduced and practically harmless climate response to increased amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide,” Inhofe said. “Also missing from the climate alarmists’ doomsday scenarios and well-scripted talking points are the benefits from increased carbon that has led to a greening of the planet and contributed to increased agricultural productivity.”

Oh, and one other thing.

“People do not realize that you cannot grow things without CO2,” Inhofe said. “CO2 is a fertilizer. It is something you cannot do without. No one ever talks about the benefits that people are inducing that as a fertilizer on a daily basis.”

Happy Earth Day, If You Want It

It makes sense that President Obama gave an address about global warming on Earth Day in the Everglades National Park, because this sensitive region has dozens of species of plant and animal life that would be impacted by sea level rise. But let's make no mistake: even if we discount the loss of irreplaceable habitat, the advance of climate change will have significant impact on the livelihood of people living in regions like Florida, with impacts to fishing, tourism, agriculture and real estate.

Addressing climate change isn't the job-killer--climate change is.

It also makes me a little happy to see the President take a message about climate change to Florida in light of word that "climate change" is forbidden as a topic of conversation for officials in that state. That strikes me as nonsensical, and even a little chilling. (Really? Recommending someone seek a mental health evaluation for indulging in a little "politically incorrect" truth-telling? That seems like some kind of Soviet tactic, to me.)  I hope the whole affair gave Governor Scott the vapors.

In other news, WI Governor and likely 2016 GOP Presidential Primary contestant Scott Walker decided Earth Day is exactly when you propose to cut 57 employees from the Department of Natural Resources. (Gov. Walker does not seem especially sentimental regarding his state's natural resources or popular input regarding them.) Wisconsin is another state where discussion of climate change has been, well, chilled. Which is a damn shame, because ground water is at risk in case of climate-change related drought even if WI is a land of lakes and streams--and as dairy country, watering and having lush grazing land for livestock is at a premium. I am a bit of a cheese fan. I would like my supply guaranteed, please.

One might take a moment to reflect that, while climate change is global, all politics is local. Responsible conservation begins with people electing responsible state government to act as stewards of the people's resources. Making the Earth cleaner, safer, less-polluted, and less at-risk of large-scale awfulness seems remote, but in many ways involves managing what you can--like not having people who regard your state as so many saleable resources to unload, as opposed to a precious place to sustain for your family and future generations to enjoy, as your governor.