September 14: Trump - a Walking, Talking Environmental Disaster

 

9/14/20: President Trump headed for California on Monday to raise money for his campaign. With the state in crisis, he stopped to talk to California leaders in one of his most useless meetings ever.

 

There to offer solace for a state on fire, he smirked.

 

Challenged by a fire official to face up to the fact that climate change had made the situation more dire, and that the science was clear, the president responded, “It will start getting cooler. Just watch.” 

“I don’t think science knows, actually,” he added.

 

Trump had previously blamed the wildfires on poor forest management by Democrats who run the state. At one point he told his underlings that he wasn’t going to give the people whose homes had burned down federal disaster aid, because they hadn’t voted for him. Now Gov. Gavin Newsom pointed out that 57% of the land in his state was federally-owned forest. 

So, you might say: Trump had the burden on his shoulders, and it would be nice if he did his part. 

 

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a ballot…” 

If you don’t follow environmental issues closely, you may not realize how terrible Donald J. Denier has been in regard to climate change, or even protecting clean air and water. In another clear sign of the growing danger – not counting the fact a good chunk of the United States is in flames – and more named hurricanes have formed already this year than in any  year since record keeping began in 1851 – 170 environmental organizations have united to warn their members. Do not to vote for the Green Party in November. Do not sit out the election and pout, just because Joe Biden’s policies might not go as far as you want. Fifty years of advocacy for cleaner air and water, and the health of the planet, have taught these organizations hard truths.

 

The bitter lesson of 2016 cannot be repeated – when enough “green” votes in several key states went to a third party candidate and allowed Trump to clinch his wide-bottom seat in the Oval Office.

 

Leaders of the group write in a joint letter:

 

Elections matter most in the end. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a ballot is a good guy with a ballot, and this year, our ballots will be cast for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

 

Many of us have voted for third-party candidates in other elections, convinced that a party called “Green” was the only principled choice. Not this year. This year the only meaningful green votes will be cast for the single candidate who can end Trump’s disastrous presidency [emphasis added]. Only by rallying behind the Democratic Party can we end the Trump administration’s unprecedented malignancy, fear mongering, pathological lying, and atrocious policy making. This is not the year to…waste a single vote.

 

They present two starkly different options:

 

Sure, [Biden] isn’t perfect. Which of us is? But in the 2020 election, the most crucial since 1864, we have only two meaningful options: we can make a lifetime humanitarian our president, backed by a able cabinet and a progressive Congress; or expand the strongman rule of Donald Trump, who desecrates his office every day, spreads racism and a fatal virus for political gain, ignores environmental justice, embraces the fossil fuel industry, and calls the climate crisis a hoax.

 

Every generation is accountable for its leaders, and we are accountable for Trump. We can beat him and his congressional enablers at the polls or help him stay in power by wasting our votes or staying home, and tell children not yet born we were too pure to vote for Democrats.

 

All we have to lose are our country and the planet.

 

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QUOTING Joe Biden, who recently labeled Trump a “climate arsonist,” would be too easy. Biden was right, but it may sway a few people if we pay attention to warnings within the Republican Party. Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, is backing Biden, in large part because of the president’s retrograde environmental policies. 

“It’s mind-boggling, the ignorance that he displays on this subject,” Ms. Whitman said in an interview this week. “He doesn’t understand climate change. He doesn’t particularly believe in science. It’s all about him and his re-election.” 

“He doesn’t govern for all Americans.” 

Worse, he doesn’t govern for future generations. If he wins a second term, that’s as far as his thinking extends. 

You can see many of the massive western fires from outer space.

Bootleg Fire in Oregon, seen from space.

 

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“Everything about it, was fucking appalling.”

 

In other news, Tim Miller, former spokesman for the Republican National Committee, lets rip after watching Trump conduct a campaign rally in Henderson, Nevada. Bad enough, in these days of mass coronavirus spread, that he joked about his followers crowding together and howling in anger. “The spittle was flying,” Miller said. “So were the lies.” He called the whole affair “a public-health monstrosity.” He went on to describe the president’s appearance as “a shocking and unimaginably wheels-off undertaking given that it came amid a pandemic that is still killing a thousand Americans a day and with wildfires making much of the West Coast uninhabitable.”

 

Miller went on to list the various lies of President Trump – including at least one new one, that when he took over grass was growing on the “runways” used by NASA. But let’s just sum it all up.

 

“Everything about it,” Mr. Miller said of the rally, “was fucking appalling.”

 

In fact it was so appalling that it would stand out as the single most appalling and reckless political event hosted by any presidential nominee in my lifetime before yesterday by a long shot, if you just didn’t count anything else that Donald Trump did.

 

And that’s the problem. Somewhere along the way he removed many people’s ability to be appalled. 

July 22, 2021: The Age of Megafires - Climate Change

 

7/22/21: The massive 617-square-mile Bootleg Fire in Oregon continues to burn, with smoke causing hazy skies as far away as New York City. Seventy homes have been destroyed, 2,000 evacuated. (This is the second year that smoke has traveled so far to the east.) Fire season has come early again in the American West, with at least 78 major fires blazing, Bootleg being the largest.

 

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“The Age of Megafires.”

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People who deal with fire are warning this is the start of another horrible summer and fall, as climate change continues to heat up and dry out large parts of the nation. “I would categorize this fire season thus far as historic in terms of the amount of resources we’ve deployed, how many times we’ve deployed – within a three-week period, we’ve mobilized to six conflagrations,” a spokesperson with the Oregon fire marshal’s office told reporters earlier this week. This “is the earliest and most significant mobilization to date.” 

Fires have wrought destruction across the West. In California, a new fire, near the site of the Paradise fire of 2018, which killed 85 people, has forced a new round of evacuations and blackened 133 square miles. In Idaho, 18 major forest fires are burning. In Montana, families in parts of Missoula County, near Lolo Pass, are under a mandatory evacuation order. The Slough Grass Fire has incinerated 9,700 acres, roughly fifteen square miles. The National Interagency Fire Service calls it “zero percent contained.” The Northern Rockies are at Level 5, the highest warning stage, due to widespread fire activity. Six large fires are active in Alaska. 

In fact, for all you climate change-deniers out there, this screenshot of a map from the University of California for today might give you some sense of what is transpiring this summer. 

And again, we are early in the fire season.

The Bootleg Fire in Oregon has been so massive and intense, it’s creating its own weather. As vast amounts of heat and smoke rise, cooler air is sucked in around the perimeter. This acts essentially like some giant blowing on a giant campfire, causing it to burn ever hotter. Huge updrafts, reaching as high as 30,000 feet into the air create clouds. When the heated air finally cools and the draft collapses, it can create strong, gusty winds in all directions, spreading burning embers everywhere. One huge cloud, estimated to have reached 45,000 feet sparked its own lightning. Freakish winds can also create mini-tornadoes on the ground. 

Or, as experts at Yale explained last year, the world has hit a “climate tipping point” and we have entered “The Age of Megafires.” 

Evidence sited includes the largest fire in recorded human history, the Black Dragon, which destroyed 18 million acres across northern China and southern Russia, the 1988 wildfire in Yellowstone, which destroyed a third of the park, and the fire near Canberra, Australia in 2003 that spawned an F-2 level tornado. Scientists at first found it hard to believe the fire had caused a tornado to form. But in the Carr Fire in California in 2018, F-3 level winds were created.

 

You could find plenty of evidence of growing danger – as climate change altered the basic dynamics of nature. Or you could listen to right-wing deniers, like former-president Donald J. Trump. Ignoring the larger issues, he focused on government regulations requiring us all to buy energy-efficient lightbulbs and dishwashers. 

Meanwhile, the experts kept seeing evidence of danger. A fire in Alaska in 2007 destroyed 270,000 acres of tundra, when fires a hundredth that size had been unheard of in that region. Another massive blaze in Alaska in 2015, generated its own weather and shot out 65,000 lightning strikes, igniting 250 secondary fires. A fire in Canada gave birth to lightning, with one bolt traveling twenty miles and triggering another blaze. In fact, lightning increases by roughly 12% for every one degree Celsius increase in temperature. So: more lightning = more fires. Then you had massive destruction that resulted when megafires swept Australia in 2020. Finally, you had record-setting burns in Siberia in 2010, again in 2012, again in 2015, and again in 2019 and 2020.

 

As this blogger understands it: Some of the same conditions that wiped out Pompeii in 79 A.D. are now found out West. The firebombing of Dresden, Germany in 1945 also created similar problems. When vast amounts of heat rise, cooler air is sucked into the spot where the fire is burning, and the fire intensifies. At Pompeii, when the pillar of volcanic ash reached high enough altitudes to finally cool, it collapsed, and rolled down the mountain like a super-heated cloud, blanketing the unfortunate town. With much of Dresden in flames, heat rose, air was sucked into the fire, and high fire-generated winds uprooted trees and blew people into the flames. 

(Don’t quote me, however. I’m no scientist. Still, on this issue, I’m a hundred times smarter than Donald J. Trump)

August 22, 2021: July 2021 Proves Hottest Month Ever

 

8/22/21: Despite the fact that the Afghan collapse has been dominating the news, the really big story continues to be climate change. And so long as conservative types refuse to admit we have a problem – and so long as Trump fans continue to adore a man who calls the existential crisis for humanity a “hoax” – this liberal blogger will gladly remain a liberal, heart and soul.

Melting on the Greenland ice sheet.

 

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An average global temperature 1.67° F above historic norms.

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While you might have been focused on the debacle in Southwest Asia, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that July was the hottest month, globally, ever recorded, with an average temperature 1.67° F above historic norms. June was “only” the fifth warmest June in 142 years of records. And, because right-wingers like to find nuggets of information and argue the whole story of climate change is drummed up so liberals can knock hamburgers out of their mitts, NOAA also notes that sea ice in the Antarctic actually increased. 

Otherwise, the news so far this month has been grim. The Dixie Fire in bone-dry Northern California has reduced 721,298 acres of forest, homes, and entire towns to ash. It’s only 37% contained. That’s one fire – burning up an area the size of Rhode Island. Last week, the town of Susanville, with 15,000 residents, was endangered by the flames and had to be evacuated. 

The picture is black across much of the U.S. The Bootleg Fire in Oregon burned up another 400,000 acres before it was contained. The National Interagency Fire Center reported on Saturday that 96 large fires, as far east as Minnesota, were burning. More than 2.4 million acres had gone up in smoke. Montana, with 22 large fires, Idaho, with 21, and Washington State, with 19, have the most blazes to combat. Fires burning in other states: California (11), Oregon (11), Utah and Wyoming (3 each) and Alaska (2), Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Minnesota (1 each).

 

On the other end of the climate change spectrum, scientists note that for the first time, on August 14, it rained for hours at the highest point in Greenland, a development heretofore unknown. On that day, temperatures remained above freezing for nine hours, also unheard of, according to scientists at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center. A U.S. agency I am sure most Trump-lovers did not realize existed. 

(Or Trump. Who can forget that immortal day when he suggested the U.S. buy Greenland from the Danes?) 

“That’s not a healthy sign for an ice sheet,” Indrani Das, a glaciologist with Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory explained – although it’s not hard to grasp. “Water on ice is bad. … It makes the ice sheet more prone to surface melt.” A melting ice sheet in Greenland, would be bad for humanity, itself. 

“This alarming rain at the summit of Greenland is not an isolated event,” said Twila Moon, deputy lead scientist with the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.

 

Along with rising floods, fires, and other extremes, it is one of many “alarm bells” signaling the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, she said.

“We really have to stay laser-focused on adapting, as well as reducing the potential for those to become truly devastating.”

 

According to Martin Stendel, a senior researcher at the Danish Meteorological Institute, , relying on ice-core samples, above-freezing temperatures have occurred at the Greenland summit only six times in 2,000 years. Now, there have been three events in just the last decade: 2012, 2019 and 2021.