August 26, 2020: Antarctic Ice Shelves Fracturing - Trump Lays Imaginary Groundwork to Contest Election

 

8/26/20: While Trump supporters were worrying about Joe Biden’s plans to “abolish the suburbs,” scientists were worrying about multiplying signs of climate change. In a newly released study, experts warn that 60 percent of Antarctic ice shelves may be subject to “hydrofracturing.” Cracking in the ice will be accelerated by melt water from the surface  flowing into crevasses and enlarging them. These ice shelves currently serve like dams to “buttress” inland ice. If shelves collapse, inland ice flows to the sea, crumbles and melts, and oceans rise.

Scientists are worried. President Trump is clueless.

 

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The goddam Antarctic is melting. It’s more evidence of climate change. Don’t be stupid. Do something!

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These “hoaxsters,” as President Trump might call them, published their report in the latest issue of the journal Nature. You can catch their drift if you read nothing more than the first paragraph. “Atmospheric warming,” is the cause. 

If you dive deeper, you will…okay…you won’t get most of what they’re saying (unless you’re smarter than this blogger). 

A typical sentence: 

We therefore used a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), the U-Net29, to identify the fracture-like features in the relatively low-resolution, but continent-wide, MOA imagery. We trained the DCNN with a subset of MOA imagery in which fracture features were manually labelled (Extended Data Fig.1c).

 

So, let’s put it in English we can all understand. They used sophisticated satellite images to measure melting. 

The goddam Antarctic is melting. It’s more evidence of climate change. Don’t be stupid! Do something!** 

The End. 

 

** Scientists don’t really call readers stupid. What they really said: “If warming allows meltwater to enter the vulnerable buttressing regions we have identified, hydrofracture-driven ice-shelf collapse is possible, which could have major consequences for Antarctic mass [ice] loss and global sea-level rise.”

 

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SCIENTISTS aren’t the only ones worrying about climate change and its results. A hotter, drier California is going up in flames. Trump doesn’t care if a blue state burns. Florida is a different matter. 

Floridians might vote for him. 

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, a 42-year-old Republican, doesn’t need sophisticated satellite imagery to see what’s happening to his city. (Miami is six-and-a-half feet above sea level – or less.) He warns that it is time for his party “to stop ceding ground on issues that are important issues to my generation [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted].” One is immigration. The other is “the environment.” Suarez can see with the naked eye, what is happening. “Sea level rise,” he warns, “which is something we are seeing in our city and the environmental impacts we are seeing … have a huge economic impact.” He says the Republican Party “shouldn’t abandon an issue” like that. 

A little more digging, and we find a story from 2017, in the Miami Herald. Trump fans will ignore a story like this and argue that scientists – for example at NASA – are liars, and we should listen to Tin Pot Don. The story focuses on the threat from more powerful hurricanes, fueled, as scientists have long predicted, by higher water temperatures which turbocharge storms. 

“Given what we know now about how the ocean expands as it warms and how ice sheets and glaciers are adding water to the seas, it’s pretty certain we are locked into at least 3 feet of sea level rise, and probably more,” said Steve Nerem of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and lead of the Sea Level Change Team, a NASA collaboration. “But we don’t know whether it will happen within a century or somewhat longer.”

 

Trump won’t be around to find out the answer. Future generations will. I suspect they will rue his name. 

Meanwhile, the National Weather Service is warning residents along the Louisiana and Texas coasts to evacuate in the face of Hurricane Laura. Expected to make landfall today, the Category 4 storm may bring an “unsurvivable” storm surge with it, with waves 20 feet high, and waters flowing 30 miles inland. Experts warn that “large and destructive waves will cause catastrophic damage from Sea Rim State Park, Texas, to Intracoastal City, Louisiana.”

 

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PRESIDENT TRUMP is already laying the groundwork to contest the outcome of the coming election, telling supporters that foreign nations plan to manipulate the mail-in vote. He hints darkly that it will be “the scandal of our times.” 

“RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS,” Trump tweeted in June. “IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!” 

The Office of the Director on National Intelligence responds with this statement: “We have no information or intelligence that any nation-state threat actor is engaging in any activity to undermine the mail-in vote or ballots.”  

The F.B.I. is also dubious: 

“We have not seen to date a coordinated national voter fraud effort during a major election,” an official said. “It’s extraordinarily difficult to change a federal election outcome through this type of fraud alone.”

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IN OTHER NEWS, the Trump administration stops and starts and stops and starts new rules on COVID-19 testing. When it comes to important policy, President Trump has a turnstile mind. 

First, CDC issues guidelines for opening schools safely. Then those guidelines are scrapped in the face of White House pressure. Then CDC says we need more testing to get a grip on the virus spread. Someone in the administration puts pressure on the scientists and, lo, CDC announces Monday that people who are asymptomatic need not bother with tests. 

You know, as Trump says, if we didn’t have so many tests, we wouldn’t know how many cases of COVID-19 we have. 

The same logic applies to tests for breast cancer, tuberculosis, and smallpox, one would suppose.

 

When medical experts began protesting, and reporters began asking questions, no one seemed to want to own the new policy. The people at CDC said, hey, it wasn’t us. Contact HHS. The people at HHS said CDC did it, not them. Adm. Brett Giroir claimed that everyone had discussed the change, and they loved it, including Dr. Anthony Fauci. 

Fauci immediately cast doubt on that statement, saying that at the time the decision was made, he “was under general anesthesia in the operating room [for removal of vocal nodules] and was not part of any discussion or deliberation regarding the new testing recommendations.” 

Experts of all kinds were baffled by the change in position. Most responded with scientific warnings. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, was more pointed in a tweet. 

“Now what the hell kind of CDC recommendation is this? We need to be doing MORE testing, not less,” she wrote. 

The Hill noted that, “According to multiple reports, top political officials forced the CDC to make the change.” 

Krys Johnson, an assistant professor of instruction in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Temple University in Pennsylvania, was blunt in response. “It is unconscionable that recommendations, which should follow only the science, are being modified to enable [maybe even ensure] underreporting of COVID-19 cases at this critical juncture.” 

Nor was Ms. Johnson some liberal college professor hating on Team Trump. The American Medical Association, representing hundreds of thousands of professionals was quick to say, in politer fashion: “HOLY SHIT! WHOSE BONEHEAD IDEA IS THIS?” 

Or to be more exact, Susan Bailey, president of the AMA, put her group on record against the change: 

Months into this pandemic, we know COVID-19 is spread by asymptomatic people. Suggesting that people without symptoms, who have known exposure to COVID-positive individuals, do not need testing is a recipe for community spread and more spikes in coronavirus.

 

The AMA was quickly supported by The Infectious Diseases Society, whose members called for an “immediate reversal” of CDC’s changed position. 

At least one insider, described as “a person who works with the White House Coronavirus Task Force,” told ABC News, “The people in the trenches are horrified by this. It gives the impression that asymptomatic people cannot transmit the disease, which is not true. Community spread is driven by asymptomatic people.”