It's hot. Death Valley is recording temps of 120°F at night. A town in central Spain set a European record of 140°F. Last week saw three days in a row of the hottest global temperatures in modern history. Phoenix has recorded 18 consecutive days over 110°F. Just west of the Gobi Desert, China's Flaming Mountain reached a surface temperature of 176°F.
Is this just one of those things? Hardly. Here's what NOAA has to say about the growth of US heat waves over the past half century:
In the 1960s, we could expect maybe two heat waves of three days each in a typical year. Today we can expect six heat waves of four days each. The overall summer heat wave season has tripled from 20 days to 70 days.
If you wish, you're welcome to pretend this is just the normal variability of climate. Sometimes it's hot, sometimes it's cold.
But that would make you an idiot. This is all due to global warming, and it's an excellent example of how a smallish change in average temperature can produce massive extremes at the edges. The same phenomenon is at work with sea level changes, where a modest change of just a few inches can produce killer storm surges.
A dozen years ago I wrote:
The fact of climate change will become undeniable [by 2024]. The effects of global warming, discernible today mostly in scary charts and mathematical models, will start to become obvious enough in the real world that even the rightest of right wingers will be forced to acknowledge what’s happening.
I got the first sentence dead on. But I'm still not sure about the second. Right wingers have turned out to be far more stubborn than anyone could have imagined.
How about we raise taxes across the board to pay for all the stuff we need? Nope. Even democrats wants to cut taxes. Ok, not a problem really. We need economic growth and no one - not one person - is willing to sacrifice to the degree required to address this problem. Ok, fine. People will sacrifice and suffer through heat waves, droughts, sea level rise, and whatever else results. That’s perfectly acceptable. It will come one way or another.
And look… there are wars in Africa and Eastern Europe which make cooperation on climate change a laughable proposition. The evil governments in China and across large parts of the world are focused on the here and now with little regard for the welfare of people who might be living in 50 years.
So really… just quit bitching about it. Hunker down and adjust to this new reality.
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"Stubborn"? I guess that's shorter than "willfully, maliciously, and apocalyptically stupid."
❗️
Bingo.
"will start to become obvious enough in the real world that even the rightest of right wingers will be forced to acknowledge what’s happening."
And their solution will be to cut social security, medicare and a big tax cut for the rich and corps. Winning!!!
Plus, repeal all business regulation and environmental laws.
Force women to bear their rapists' babies while denying them healthcare because being female is a pre-existing condition.
Oh, please! We all know that a woman who has been legitimately raped cannot become pregnant:
https://theweek.com/articles/472972/rape-cant-cause-pregnancy-brief-history-todd-akins-bogus-theory
American Rightists do not reason from facts to conclusions the way normal people do; they reason the other way around, from conclusions (based on received Truth) to facts. This has two implications. First, mere facts will not budge them from their (preconceived) conclusions; their conclusions are fixed because they are True, so they cannot be changed. There is no such thing as anthropogenic global warming, and even if there is, we can't do anything about it, full stop. And second, facts that challenge their conclusions must be false, because they conflict with the Truth. Any data that suggest there IS global warming must be a hoax (likely Chinese) or the product of a conspiracy (among so-called scientists who just want government money), and any attempts to mitigate global warming are not just false (because there is none) but actively evil (part of the larger conspiracy to destroy the American way of life).
Every one of these outlandish claims has been widely promulgated by the American Right, up to and including the former President. That's how stupid they are. And that's why they won't acknowledge the reality of global warming, much less cooperate in mitigating it, under any circumstances, ever, no matter how hot it gets or how many disasters they suffer.
Moreover, an increasing fraction of the GQP are christianist fundamentalists, who long for Armageddon and the destruction of the world, which will precede the "second coming". Destroying the viability of human (and all other) life on Planet Earth (which is probably flat, ya know), fits right in with their agenda.
And they've long known that "reality has a liberal bias", and so they automagically reject it in favor of magical tales from con men.
God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water but fire next time.
QED
O!H! M!Y! G!L!O!D!!!!!!!
Glod is the Gay and Woke!!!
Never was your opening statement more graphically illustrated than in the torrent of drivel spewed by the right since a small amount of cocaine was found in a visitor's temporary storage locker in a White House vestibule. The immediate conclusion on the right was that it belonged to Hunter Biden. They will not be budged from this position by any amount of evidence or rational argument, all of which is nothing but a huge cover-up to protect the Bidens.
But, but, but...China is building coal-fired plants!!!!
Apparently that 140 temp in Spain was also a surface temp: "after the land temperature—how hot the land is to the touch—in Spain reached a record-high of 140 degrees"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2023/07/15/europes-dangerous-heat-wave-greece-closes-acropolis-as-warnings-issued-across-italy-spain-and-germany/
"Recently, Pew Research surveyed 19 countries about climate change. The American right stands out as uniquely deranged." -- Jonathan Chait
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/pg_2022-08-31_global-threats_0-06/
From the Wikipedia article "Highest temperature recorded on Earth"
The highest temperature recorded on Earth has been measured in three major ways: air, ground, and via satellite observation. Air measurements are used as the standard measurement due to persistent issues with unreliable ground and satellite readings. Air measurements are noted by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and Guinness World Records among others as the standard to be used for determining the official record. The current official highest registered air temperature on Earth is 56.7 °C (134.1 °F), recorded on 10 July 1913 at Furnace Creek Ranch, in Death Valley in the United States.[1] For ninety years, a former record that was measured in Libya had been in place, until it was decertified in 2012 based on evidence that it was an erroneous reading. This finding has since raised questions about the legitimacy of the 1913 record measured in Death Valley, with several meteorological experts asserting that there were similar irregularities...
The standard measuring conditions for temperature are in the air, 1.5 metres (4 ft 11 in) above the ground, and shielded from direct sunlight...
Measurements have also been taken in two other ways via ground and satellite readings. Temperatures measured directly on the ground may exceed air temperatures by 30 to 50 °C (54 to 90 °F). The theoretical maximum possible ground surface temperature has been estimated to be between 90 and 100 °C (194 and 212 °F) for dry, darkish soils of low thermal conductivity. While there is no highest confirmed ground temperature, a reading of 93.9 °C (201.0 °F) was allegedly recorded in Furnace Creek Ranch on 15 July 1972.[15] Temperature measurements via satellite also tend to capture the occurrence of higher records but, due to complications involving the satellite's altitude loss (a side effect of atmospheric friction), these measurements are often considered less reliable than ground-positioned thermometers. Satellite measurements of ground temperature taken between 2003 and 2009, taken with the MODIS infrared spectroradiometer on the Aqua satellite, found a maximum temperature of 70.7 °C (159.3 °F), which was recorded in 2005 in the Lut Desert, Iran.
Being social conservative is a pre-existing condition that radically limits their legal responsibility.
Why can we not agree on this?
Proof of concept:
“If you believe in God, then intellectually, you cannot believe in man-made global warming. You must be either agnostic or atheistic to believe that man controls something he cannot create.”
—Rush Limbaugh—
One of the few people who's smarter dead.
All these people moving to places like AZ, TX, and FL because they think it's cheap (not really) and low tax (only if you're a high earner) are in for a rude awakening: much of the year, the place is goddamn unliveable save for in massively air-conditioned buildings and it's only going to get worse, especially along vulnerable coastlines. Why anyone in their right mind would be pouring money into FL or AZ real estate right now is just beyond me...
Miami is still growing by 60,000 per year. The city will be under water within most of our lifetimes, yet people keep settling there.
Lemmings.
That said, even in the most progressive-minded nations and states, (a partial) net-zero is not plausible until 2035 at the earliest.
California's (with MD, NJ, NY, OR, WA, MA following CA's lead) ban on new ICE vehicle sales starts in 2035. The average lifespan of a vehicle is now roughly a decade. Normally, that might be a good thing, but in the transition away from fossil fuels, it means it'll be a while before California hits net-zero in transportation.
Some automotive manufacturers won't hit 100% by 2050, either.
Toyota says that by 2050 they'll hit 90% of global sales based on 2010 sales data, which obviously means that as a share of their total sales in 2050, it'll be far less than 90%.
Even without the American conservative, the world isn't taking climate change anywhere nearly as seriously as it should be.
I've got friends who work in various Science & Technology policy offices on the Hill, and their view on the House and Senate members on the Republican side is that they fall into two camps. There are the Tommy Tuberville's, who are truly idiots. But then you have a significant number that actually are intelligent, and know that climate change is real, and have known that it's real at *least* from the "Inconvenient Truth" days of 20 years ago.
But they also know that they got $$$ and votes based upon denying it and by riling up their base. They just figure American technology will eventually fix it, since it always comes through in the end. (E.g., we haven't run out of oil yet, like all those damn liberals said we would, since the exploration and drilling technology is truly remarkable.)
"This time is different" is not something they believe or want to hear. We'll just fix it when we have to, and we'll be fine!
Sadly, there seems to be no electoral consequences for getting it so wrong for so long.
There are PhDs and engineers all over the place who believe anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. To say nothing of the usual crowd of faux-libertarian Pangloss types who believe 1950 was the apex of human consciousness and gasoline the eternal nectar of perfection.
The level of cognitive dissonance is such that 90% of deniers are unreachable. Two generations of Americans are beyond hope.
Progress will come, one funeral at a time.
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When Florida is under water the fact of global warming will be undeniable to all but the most idiotic of the idiots.
Jesus returns in moose form,
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/14s227d/moose_running_very_fast_across_the_river/
"If you wish, you're welcome to pretend this is just the normal variability of climate."
Here's my way of knowing that it's carbon dioxide and global warming.
35 years ago at my house, it was rare to have minimum summer nighttime temps in the 70's. Now it seems rare if they fall below 70.
Nighttime is when the Earth loses heat due to infrared radiation loss. But not so much if greenhouse gases are blocking that infrared radiation loss and keeping the heat at the surface.
Ideology reaches its limit when it collides with personal experience. Years ago I read about a Republican mayor of an island in Georgia who said that he believed in climate change because it was flooding his streets at high tide. Soon the rest of the Republican Party will go the same way as that guy, for the same reason. You can't hide the weather.
Some Republicans have seized on a decades-old idea to rid the atmosphere of CO2: plant trees! https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/house-republicans-propose-planting-trillion-trees-rcna94836
This longstanding boondoggle appeals to investors because it allows them all sorts of tax deductions for tree planting projects which are hard or impossible for the IRS to verify, and which sometimes in the past didn't even exist. And they can eat beef and drive their gas-guzzling SUVs with the complacent smile of the environmentally virtuous!
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