Category: Climate Change

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Scientific Kattenstoet — When madness organizes

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 19th 2024

Going clear back to the 1980s, the scientific community and millions of other educated people have been warning about global warming and its knock-on effects. For decades, people in the know have advised us that among many other things, warmer ocean temperatures combined with warmer air would result in bigger and far more destructive hurricanes.

Despite the gravity of the looming catastrophe, most people chose to simply ignore the warnings, a sense of denial bolstered by a coalition of filthy-fuel corporations and their fascist enablers in right-wing media, who assured their panting morons that “climate change” was just a conspiracy theory fostered by people who wanted us all to live in caves and hate capitalism.

To say that this caused a lot of frustration among sane people is an understatement.

An unforgettable example of this occurred as hurricane Milton was approaching Tampa Bay about a month ago. A Miami TV weatherman, John Morales, saw the numbers that suggested that the storm was undergoing “bombogenesis”–a sudden and large intensification. The phenomenon, not widely known twenty years ago, is a major factor in estimating the power and destructiveness of an approaching hurricane. Normally, a drop of 25mb in the central eye pressure in 24 hours indicates such a phenomenon is taking place. Milton dropped FIFTY millibars in that period, and Morales understood—and dreaded—the implications. He burst into tears over the damage to come.

Global warming means bigger, stronger storms. And a host of even more serious problems, but that was probably the easiest one to predict decades ago. And the American South has always been the area most vulnerable to landfalls from such storms.

So while Helene and Milton this year may have caused despair among climate scientists, they certainly did not cause surprise. And they’ll be the first to say it’s only going to get worse.

In fact, here in northern California, it’s just starting to snow this morning. A system is approaching the Oregon coast, and while not a hurricane, is developing similar intensity. The central pressure is expected to plunge about 40mb today, with central winds over 90 mph and waves in some areas 60 feet high. I’m 100 miles inland and at 3,300 elevation, and expect heavy snow for three days, and heavy rain after that. Nothing too extraordinary for us, but along the coast from the Bay area northward, it could have storm-of-the decade elements. Climate change didn’t cause the storm, but it does influence its power.

It’s not surprising that climate denialism—the refusal to accept that human emissions are having a major effect on climate world-wide—is losing popularity. When you get several storms-of-the-century or drought of a lifetime in the past decade, there is a dawning awareness that Something Is Going On Here.

Of course, this is the age of Trump, and so there’s no reason to suppose that dawning awareness is going to be constructive, or even sane.

Enter Veterans on Patrol (VOP). This outfit apparently actually did start out as a veterans advocacy group, but like so many elements in American life, it has been taken over by heavily-armed howling nuts from the far right.

Now, normal people, and by ‘normal’ I mean ‘not in the terminal stages of tertiary syphilis or convinced that their cat is telling them to assassinate Taylor Swift,’ actual normal people might assume that Helene was a pretty clear consequence of a hurricane supercharged by several trillion tons of greenhouse gases which might go where hurricanes frequently go and cause more damage than usual. Normal people might think that because, you know, normal.

But not our demented heroes of the VOP. A sample of their email conversations was in the Guardian today, and it read like this: “The US Military destroyed multiple communities and murdered hundreds by steering Weather Weapon Helene into Appalachia country, what should we do?” The answers offered were “Target military equipment and destroy the [directed energy weapons] easily accessible by the public”; “Destroy power and water lines that feed military bases”; “Locate all Top Brass bold enough to walk in public and detain them for murder”; “ALL 3 ABOVE”.

Well, that seems reasonable. After all, we all know from bad movies on the SciFi channel that one mad general, armed only with a black box the size of a shoe box and powered by a single D cell battery can steer a storm system 500 miles across and containing between 5 to 20×1013 watts of energy (200,000,000,000,000 watts) like it was a Hot Wheels toy and send it a thousand miles inland to strike Moscow.

Rather than accept that what happened is exactly what every climate scientist in the world has been warning will happen for debates, it’s easier to believe something that is nefarious, evil, sinister, and utterly demented.

But VOP has a constructive answer to this: “VOP News is openly requesting the public to provide the locations of all USMIC equipment used to control the weather. We intend to destroy this equipment in order to save lives.”

Yes, and Taylor Swift will be safe just as soon as we round up and kill any and all cats using mind control who don’t like Taylor Swift. What could be easier?

VOP is far from alone in this steadfast lunacy. Millions of Americans believe nonsense like this, and even zanier shit.

It’s not limited to America, or the twenty first century. In Europe in the thirteenth century, the Church hit on the notion that cats were evil and needed to be killed (“Kattenstoet”). The idea caught on, and most of Europe’s cat population was massacred. This allowed the rodent population, a favorite vector for the fleas that cause the plague, to explode.

There probably isn’t a culture on Earth without similar tales of mass idiocy, usually conducted with horrible consequences in their past and even their present.

Humans are all too frequently subject to conspiracy theories and similar idiocies. An uncharitable person might call them gullible, and I’m not feeling particularly charitable. They are gullible, and a lot of them are also mean and destructive and delight in the damage they cause.

The only solution is time, and sometimes even that doesn’t work. Ypres, Belgium, still celebrates Kattenstoet, although in a major victory for humanity and sanity, they now only throw plush toy cats off the belfry. See? Progress is possible, even if humans are involved.

But the madness will continue as America continues to lose its way. Climate scientists and even TV weather presenters get death threats from people who believe they are so intellectually superior they can envision D cell batteries steering hurricanes.

Oddly enough, no matter how many people they round up, the hurricanes will just keep on getting worse.

Obviously, Taylor Swift and the cats are behind that. Right?

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The Dark Age — Once again, dear friends…

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 6th 2024

First, I want to apologize to my readers. I really blew it on my forecast on how this election was going to turn out. I’m especially sorry to those who took my forecast in good faith—I’m sure it added to the pain you are feeling now, and I deeply regret that.

I’ve been contemplating overnight and this morning over how I—and others, including the Harris campaign—so totally got it wrong.

I don’t have any real answers and indeed, more questions than I began with. How could such a large number of Hispanics support Trump? He’s made it clear that they are one of his target groups; when he says “illegal immigrants” he’s including Hispanics born here, or naturalized. They’re part of the twenty-two million people he wants to mass deport. He isn’t doing it to “save the economy.” He’s doing it because he’s a bigot, pandering to other bigots.

I don’t understand the self-professed Christians who supported him. He is the antithesis of everything they supposedly stand for.

And most of all, I don’t understand the women who voted for Trump. In seven states, freedom of reproductive choice was on the ballot, and many women in those states voted for reproductive freedom and then went ahead and voted for the man who destroyed that right in the first place!

I underestimated the power of the aggrieved anger that the right wing media—mostly run by plutocrats who wanted to use the mob to destroy the safeguards the constitution has to protect that same mob—and there was one thing I did get right; the economy is extremely strong, but it hasn’t really reached the lower middle class and the poor, even as conditions were beginning to improve.

A friend of mine once told me that revolution and revolt was most likely, not when things were at their bleakest, but when things were starting to improve. He told me that some forty years ago, and a close look at major upheavals throughout history confirms this to be true. Not always, but usually.

I have friends in the scientific community, so I was already aware of an on-going effort to save and secure date In The Event Of. Efforts will be redoubled; some of the incoming administration regard such data as either blasphemous or economically inconvenient.

America is heading for a scientific dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

The Ukraine will be on their own now, along with the states surrounding the genocidal Netanyahu. Trump wants to end NATO, which will give his buddy Putin license to invade much of eastern Europe, and he won’t stop there. The NATO nations need to start gearing up for a war footing NOW. There may be a general war in Europe within two years. The middle east will become a sea of flames, and before his mad reign ends, Netanyahu will have slaughtered millions. Other major nations currently not involved, such as Canada, Japan, India and China—may step in.

America is heading for a geopolitical dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Project 2025 is alive and well, with all its draconian plans. I was compiling data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics today for a Trump-loving client, and it occurred to me to advise him that when this annual task comes due next year, neither I nor the BLS may be around.

America is heading for a governance dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Putting tariffs on most foreign imports and deliberately destroying over half the agricultural production force isn’t going to lower costs or put food on the table. Destroying nearly all federal jobs is going to create a huge labor surplus. States attempting to fill the huge gaps left will have to double, triple, quadruple taxes.

America is heading for an economic dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Trump will pursue his mad aim to encourage profligate use of fossil fuels, dooming the already inadequate efforts to mitigate climate change. The world has already entered a catastrophic zone: America is now a major part of the problem.

America is heading for an environmental dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

With the Department of Education gone, public schools will fall prey to the same people who have already benefited from spreading misinformation, disinformation, and slowing the spread of scientific and historical knowledge. Thousands of books will be banned “for the children” and eventually, movies and other forms of communication. Literacy will fall, both by design and through sheer incompetence.

America is heading for an educational dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Rights will rapidly contract and then vanish altogether. People will be told that the era between 1865 and 2025 was an aberration in American culture, and that life under our caring despots who safeguard our morals and thoughts is what the Founders really intended.

America is heading for a humanitarian dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Here in California, and other deep blue states, talk of secession is mounting rapidly. It may, in the end, be the only way we can protect ourselves from the libertarian and fundamentalist quagmire that Trump plans. It would mean dissolution of America, and/or civil war. A peaceful way back may not be possible.

America is heading for a dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

To the rest of the world: help us where you can, but remember our leaders will be inimical, and this sort of madness can be contagious.

We’re on our own.

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Trump and the Seven Calls — What are he and Putin up to?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 10th 2024

When Bob Woodward, renowned investigative journalist, revealed in his just-published book War that Trump had secretly sent Vladimir Putin seven COVID testing machines, possibly dooming hundreds of Americans, I shook my head in disgust. But I didn’t expect much to come of it.

Trump would issue a blanket denial, and his mindless supporters would immediately reduce it to the level of “he said – he said.” A normal person wouldn’t have much trouble of weighing the veracity of Bob Woodward against that of Donald Trump, but Trump’s followers have pretty much abdicated all human skills of judgment. They would dismiss it, just as they have dozens of other stories about Trump, many of them proven, that would have destroyed the career of any public figure who wasn’t a cult leader. Cults are dangerous, and about one third of American voters have been brainwashed into becoming followers of a cult.

But then something unexpected occurred. The Kremlin weighed in on the story. Per Bloomberg News, “Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that the tests had been sent, but denied the book’s claim that the two leaders had spoken by phone several times since Trump left office.”

I had just expected the Kremlin would issue a denial, or more likely, just ignore the story altogether. After all, the Russian disinformation media loves to portray Trump as a brave hero beset by liberals and Jews in the American press. This would have fed right into this narrative. (One Russian outlet today managed to find a way to portray Hurricane Milton as being somehow Jewish! Dot’s funny…Milton doesn’t look Jewish…)

That was devastating to Trump, and not because I expect the scales to fall from the eyes of his followers. That’s not going to happen overnight. But it struck me as a clear signal that Putin and his mob have written Trump off as a useful asset and no longer expect him to regain the White House. Clear and independent thinking around exactly staples of the Putin regime, but careful analysis and calculation are. They no longer think Trump is useful. Oh, they’ll keep spreading disinformation on his behalf and supporting him because anything that destabilizing to the United States is for the good, but they no longer take him seriously as an ally. (They already reported today that Milton destroyed Disneyland, which will come as a surprise to the City of Anaheim in California). Keep up the good work, Ivan. There will be an extra potato in your paysack this week!

Now, about the seven calls. There may be tapes—there’s reason to suspect both the FBI and CIA have been monitoring Trump’s calls abroad because of suspicion he is a foreign agent. That’s speculation, of course, but not wholly unwarranted speculation.

But it was JD Vance who tried to ride to the rescue aboard the epileptic cow he calls a brain, telling reporters, “I honestly didn’t know that Bob Woodward was still alive until you just asked me that question.” Dismissing Woodward as a hack, he went on to say, “Even if it’s true, look, is there something wrong with speaking to world leaders? No. Is there anything wrong with engaging in diplomacy?”

Well, actually, yeah, there is. Trump is a private citizen, and there’s this thing called the Logan Act. It says, “Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.” It was passed in 1799, so if any of the stooges on the Supreme Court are minded to bring up their originalist bullshit, they might consider that the people who passed the Act were either founders or knew them personally. You might think someone running for Vice President with an ailing 78 year old man a heartbeat away from Ayn Rand heaven would know that, yeah?

Vance clearly thought that was a valid defense. Vance is a moron. But it wasn’t a confession the phone calls took place. The twin enigmas-wrapped-in-a-riddle-wrapped-in-a-mystery, the Kremlin and Mar-A-Lago, have both denied the calls took place.

But Donald couldn’t resist the opportunity to swan about in his own imagined importance, trumpeting it was “a good thing, not a bad thing,” that he got along with Putin “very well.” “A lot of people think that’s a bad thing,” Trump said. “No, no, that’s a great thing.”

I’m guessing those calls did take place. And they didn’t benefit the United States in any way. Hopefully the FBI and CIA are on this, and we won’t have to wait three years while Merrick Garland dithers.

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In the Wake of Helene — Trump finds new lows

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 6th 2024

In the days following the passage of Hurricane Helene through the deep South, the shitposters came swarming out of Truth Social, Newsmax, and other anal orifices of the web to decry the horrible, even non-existent response by the Biden administration in the way of disaster relief.

It’s going to be a while before we can even really assess the amount of damage Helene did. Certainly, the region suffered more damage than it did during the Civil War. The number of homeless may number in the millions. A lot of regions are accessible only by helicopter, due to the number of roads and bridges that were swept away.

But to the right wing shitposter, no crisis should go to waste. The tone was often openly gleeful; it would make Harris look bad, which would help Trump, so the more dead Americans the better. They even showed up in non-political corners of the web (non-partisan weather-related sites were especially targeted) to spray lies about the catastrophe like AR-15s in a kindergarten. Biden wasn’t answering calls from southern governors. FEMA was showing a clear “anti-Republican bias” in aid efforts. In a bout of wishful thinking, the Lord Haw-Haws reported the entire nation was furious over the lack of response. Harris spent all the FEMA money on “illegals.” Over a billion dollars was supposedly missing. And there were no signs of rescue operations at all in North Carolina.

These were all blatant lies, easily debunked. Some didn’t even make sense on the face of it. The Vice President has no say in FEMA spending, or access to same. Air traffic over NC was triple what it would normally be due to the huge amounts of helicopters flying food, water and shelter in to ruined areas.

The source of these lies was easy to pinpoint: it was Donald Trump himself. The king of American shitposters. Just last night, he posted, “This has been the worst Hurricane Response by a president and vice president since Katrina—and this is simply unacceptable… Kamala wined and dined in San Francisco, and all the people in North Carolina—no helicopters, no rescue. They’re offering $750 to people whose homes have been washed away—meanwhile, they send our money to other countries by the billions.”

It’s a disgraceful response by a disgraceful man. But his followers are ecstatic. They flooded social media with an AI picture purporting to show Trump, in full business suit, wading into floodwater to rescue victims of the storm. No, really. It’s a shame the image isn’t real; they desperately need rafts down there right now, and Trump would make a fine raft.

Normally these shenanigans wouldn’t warrant a response from me. We’re all so used to self-serving, self-aggrandizing bullshit from Trump and his followers that ranting more about it would just put my readers to sleep. Some of you are probably nodding off like Trump in a courtroom right now.

But there’s a couple of more elements to all this that put this up to a higher level.

First, FEMA really is nearly out of funds. Like most of the rest of government, they’ve been getting by on Continuing Resolutions, which means they aren’t even getting cost-of-living adjustments, let alone funds to deal with the ever-increasing weather disasters that stem from climate change. And no, the money wasn’t spent on undocumented immigrants by Kamala Harris.

Congress is in recess. All the representatives are at home for the campaign, sucking for dollars. But responsible members from both parties have been clamoring for an emergency session to provide FEMA with the needed funds. That seems like a no-brainer, and I’ll repeat that the demands are bipartisan.

The man empowered to call Congress back into session isn’t Joe Biden. The President doesn’t have that authority. Neither is it Kamala Harris, even in the role of Presiding Officer of the Senate. Only House Speaker Mike Johnson can do that.

And he will NOT be calling the House back early to vote on a disaster aid supplemental He told Politico’s Olivia Beavers the cost of damages has to be ‘tabulated’ before a supplemental is considered. And that could take some time.

Remember that $750 that Trump was sneering at? It wasn’t to “rebuild homes”–it was just to give people in areas not totally destroyed money to get food, water and shelter right now in order to stay alive. And it will save thousands of lives. Johnson, in effect, is saying “don’t do anything for desperate people until we have some idea of how much they lost.”

I don’t know if it’s an act of political calculation or just pure sociopathy, but Johnson obviously sees merit in crippling rescue and recovery operations. I’m sure that Trump is delighted.

But there’s more. Another hurricane is coming. Hurricane Milton. It is aiming straight toward Tampa Bay, Florida, and is projected to arrive as a major hurricane. It’s a nightmare scenario, since the heavily populated areas around Tampa Bay are particularly vulnerable to storm and tidal surges. It will arrive at new Moon, when tides are particularly high. The result could be a far smaller area devastated, but far more deaths and property damage than we have seen from Helene.

But not to worry. Congress will reconvene after the election, and if they aren’t too busy figuring out how to steal the election for Trump, they might consider throwing a few bucks to the survivors, even if the survivors were too thoughtless to submit an itemized bill first. It’s the Christian Nationalist thing to do, after all.

Also, the long range is hinting at another hurricane which may sweep up past Miami and up the eastern seaboard and into New England. Unlike Milton, it’s far enough in the future to hope that it won’t happen, but it’s a signal that the climate isn’t finished with us just yet, no matter what Congress thinks.

Call your own reps and demand they meet to establish emergency relief aid. It is critically needed, and it will get far worse in the next week. Or go here (https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/hurricane-helene-how-to-help/story?id=114345534 ) and donate to the charity of your choice.

And if you encounter Trump’s shitposters, don’t bother being polite. They don’t deserve any human courtesy.

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Walzing to a Win — Vance dance slick, but hobbled by Trumpentruths

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 1st, 2024

On the surface, tonight’s vice-presidential debates harkened back to debates prior to the Trump era. Both candidates were articulate, reasonable-sounding, and civil. If you stripped the content of the debate of all context, they seemed evenly matched. Give Vance credit: he came across as human, a feature he has struggled with since he was nominated.

But he was badly crippled by the fact that he had to present the general lunacy of Trumpentruths. Thus, he had to spout utter absurdities as “Trump saved the ACA” Really? Nobody remembers Trump’s campaign to repeal it, a drive that was stymied in the final minute by a dramatic midnight thumbs-down gesture by a dying John McCain? Walz, thinking fast, immediately brought up that seven years later, Trump only has a “concept of a plan” to deal with health care.

He had to mirror Trump’s waffling on the issue of bodily autonomy. So he had to simultaneously pretend that Trump ended abortion while saying that the public wanted the states to determine a woman’s right to abortion. Walz parried it beautifully, noting that fundamental rights should not be subject to geography. It was the perfect response to the GOP pretense that it’s a states’ rights issue: the constitution supersedes states in the matter of establishing rights, and no state may suborn a national civil right.

On health care, in addition to the ACA blunder, Vance tried to argue that costs of health care needed to be distributed, and not the sole domain of government. He managed to say it in such a way that he wasn’t saying people should depend on churches for health care.

Vance had to evade answering the yes-no-no question, “Is the climate changing?” His response went, “One of the things that I’ve noticed some of our Democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions, this idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change … let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of argument.” He fluffed the question, saying that the all-powerful Harris should have reduced pollution by bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US, saying (falsely) that the US has the cleanest economy in the world. He claimed, again falsely, that solar panels are all made in China, although when pressed, he muttered that the parts that go into solar panels were made there. Under Biden, of course, manufacturing jobs have been returning to the US (Harris may have supported him, doubtlessly did, but vice presidents don’t have any particular authority on this). He tried saying that Trump did not consider climate change despite the fact that Trump is on record, repeatedly, for making that very claim.

Vance had to bash immigrants since that’s the centerpiece of Trump’s Naziesque hate campaign. He tried blaming immigrants for the high cost of housing, but had to back off when Walz noted that immigration was dropping. I would have noted that few immigrants are financially able to buy a home.

Confronted with the fruits of his hate campaign against Springfield, Ohio, he tried saying that the only reason they were there was because Harris (apparently the most powerful vice president in history) let them in under a special refugee law. They did in fact enter under such a law—one signed by Donald Trump. Oh, and at the invitation of Springfield, which needed labor.

Finally, and this was where Vance successfully knocked himself out, he tried the pretense that Trump did not want to overturn the 2020 election, and wanted only a peaceful protest at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. He couldn’t handle the question that he had stated that if he had been vice president instead of Mike Pence, he would have rejected the electoral vote citing “questions” and thrown it to Congress. (In the event of a legitimate tie in the electoral college, Congress could vote on who won. And it isn’t a straight up-and-down vote: each state gets one vote, and in 2021, the outgoing Congress had a majority representation in 27 states. They might have overturned the election had Mike Pence not done his job.)

A lot of people have said that Trump made a poor choice when he selected JD Vance as his running mate. But watching him squirm and battle to toe the party line, the absurd Trumpentruths that have turned the GOP into an anti-American and savage cult, I think it wasn’t Trump who made the bad choice for a running mate. It was JD Vance who made the poor choice for a running mate.

Vice Presidential debates rarely shift votes, and it’s unlikely this one did. Walz won, both on presentation and debate points. It wasn’t the utter carnage of the first two presidential debates, and won’t get a lot of attention.

But watching Vance, and how slick and mentally agile he was, I realized how fantastically dangerous this soulless man would be if he elects to run in 2028, armed with his own Trumpentruths.

 

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Helene of Tories — Trump stumps sump dump

Helene of Tories

Trump stumps sump dump

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 30th 2024

We’re with you all the way, and if we were there, we’d be helping you,” Trump said. “You’ll be okay.”

He said that the day after Hurricane Helene, by then a tropical depression, had finished wreaking havoc over a quarter of the United States and was coming to a wet fizzley end clear up in Ontario. Helene, as forecast, was a major disaster. The known death toll is mercifully low (91 so far) but the damage will be in the tens of billions of dollars. Many parts of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee were flooded, dozens of roads and freeways washed out, and at least several dams failed.

When I first heard Trump’s latest burst of idiocy, I remembered how he famously “was there to help” in the wake of Hurricane Maria in San Yuan, Puerto Rico in 2017. He tossed paper towels to a group of survivors, an action on a par with dropping packets of chewing gun over an area suffering from famine. The BBC reported it this way: “Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz described his televised meeting with officials as a ‘PR, 17-minute meeting’. The sight of him throwing paper towels to people in the crowd was ‘terrible and abominable’, she added. Mr Trump tweeted it had been a ‘great day’ in Puerto Rico.”

He no doubt would have consoled the people hit by Helene with $10 coupons to use to buy his $500 watches. Trump, after all, is the grift that keeps on grifting.

Trump and the Republicans had waved away reports that Helene was going to be a monster. Part of it stems from their insistence that global warming is just a myth spread by liberals and communists to destroy American capitalism. Part of it is their libertarian fascist drive to convince people that government agencies such as the National Weather Service and NOAA (which runs the vital National Hurricane Center) are just propaganda organs for the left and serve no useful purpose.

As the damage became clear, Trump backtracked in his usual awkward and shameless way, saying, on Sunday, that the storm as “a big monster hurricane” that had “hit a lot harder than anyone even thought possible.” (Anyone except NWS, every reputable meteorologist in the country, and pretty much everyone with enough weather knowledge to know what ‘bombogenesis’ means.)

He criticized Harris for attending weekend “fundraising events with her radical left lunatic donors” in California while the storm hit. “She ought to be down in the area where she should be,” Trump said. I didn’t notice Trump going down there during the storm, did you? In fact, he decided Mar-A-Lago was uncomfortably close to the storm (it wasn’t) and watched from a safe distance—New York.

Per ABC News, “The White House said Harris would visit impacted areas ‘as soon as it is possible without disrupting emergency response operations.’ She also spoke with Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, and she received a briefing from Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell while she was traveling.

Trump, of course, can’t be arsed with waiting until emergency response operations have ended and things shift to recovery mode. He’s going to Valdosta Georgia today to swan around. While the water supply is now safe, Valdosta is still under an emergency curfew, much of the town is still flooded, and in addition to the 17 known dead, many more are still missing. He’s going to have his security detail shut down several blocks so he can pose, even as city authorities are begging people, “Text. Don’t Call: Texting leaves lines open for emergencies.” I’m sure he’ll be a big help.

No doubt, Trump will blame Harris for the damage. You know he will. I’ll bet the mortgage he will. As far as he’s concerned, any crisis must be used to blame Harris, real or conjured, natural or caused by Republicans. In Trump World, no crisis should go to waste, and the more dead Americans he can blame on Democrats, the better.

Remember, too that under Project 2025, the Republicans want to eliminate FEMA.

But since FEMA hasn’t yet been removed as part of the GOP’s Ayn Rand’s hellscape America, it’s still massively useful. If you want to help people in the affected areas, go here: https://www.fema.gov/press-release/20240928/how-help-after-hurricane-helene

And if you’re a Trump supporter, stay true to your principles and send rolls of paper towels.

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Harris Brought The Mop — Trump can try claiming he cleaned the floor…

Harris Brought The Mop

Trump can try claiming he cleaned the floor…

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 10th, 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

That had to be the most one-sided debate I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been watching debates since 1960.

Kamala Harris took control quite literally in the first seconds by striding across the stage, past the traditional half-way mark right up to Trump’s podium and Trump himself and stuck out her hand for the traditional handshake. A very reluctant Trump returned the shake, his normal physical dominance lost to her assertive pose.

After that, the debate was along the lines of Abraham Lincoln versus a speak-n’spell toy. It was well-known that Trump did little or no debate prep, instead preferring to keep to the salesman’s patter that he uses in lieu of campaign speeches. The result was the same lies, absurdities, and utter lack of focus that has been the hallmark of his efforts to stay out of jail.

Earlier today, I had suggested that Kamala Harris mug for the camera at his responses, and she did, with a devastating effectiveness. She’s a master-class prosecutor, and knows exactly how much a lifted eyebrow or a head tilt can do during defense’s closing argument to sway a jury without getting called out by the judge or opposing lawyer.

Trump did a fantastic job of self-destroying. When challenged by the surprisingly competent moderators on his claim that the world laughed at the US under Biden (and he seemed confused about who he was running against) to name an example, he could only come up with…Victor Orbán. Ouch.

He tried claiming that John McCain voted against continuing the ACA (Obamacare) when it was his very famous thumbs-down at midnight in the Senate that scuttled Trump’s scheme to end it.

He challenged Harris to go to the White House to “fix the border crisis,” saying, “She’s been there for three-and-a-half years. They’ve had three-and-a-half years to fix the border. They’ve had three-and-a-half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about. Why hasn’t she done it? She should leave right now, go down to that beautiful White House, go to the Capitol, get everyone together and do the things you want to do, but you haven’t done it and you won’t do it because you believe in things that the American people don’t believe in.”

Well, maybe he thought she was Joe Biden, or in Congress, since only Congress can pass bills, and only a President can sign a bill into law. Trump, of course, returned over and over to immigration for purposes of hate mongering. And finally, he went there: the most absurd right wing moral panic since litter boxes in school bathrooms: immigrants in Springfield eating ducks and cats.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats … they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame,” The moderators called him out on that, leaving him sputtering.

He bombed on abortion, first repeating his utterly false claim that nearly everyone wanted Roe V. Wade “returned to the states,” waffled hopelessly on his own stance on abortion, and repeated his favorite blood libel, that women were aborting babies that were already born.

He ranted about NATO, and Harris deftly laid a trap for him, saying that if he was in office, Putin would be in Kiev, eyeing the rest of Europe. Including Poland. Harris sweetly added the 800,000 Polish American voters in Pennsylvania would be interested to hear that.

Meanwhile, Harris was pitch perfect: knowledgeable, unflappable, confident. She dominated Trump from the get-go and never let up. All the shouts and all the lies couldn’t save him. “I have talked to many military leaders, many of whom worked under you, and they say you are a disgrace.” Strong words, and Trump had no response.

“I have to tell you, if it weren’t so dangerous, it reminds you of an old man yelling at the clouds. That was his thing: ‘Get off my yard,’” said Tim Walz, the vice-presidential candidate. Grandpa Simpson was definitely in the house, with Trump repeating himself obsessively and with a total lack of self-awareness.

I will say to Trump supporters that after tonight’s performance, and if you watched it, and you still support Trump, There. Is. Something. Very. Wrong. With. You. No reasonable or fair minded person could support enabling that shambling psychotic ruin of a human being to have the nuclear codes.

Moments after the debate, in an unexpected coda, Taylor Swift posted her unalloyed support for Kamala Harris, pointedly including a photo of herself holding her lovely cat. Swift is childless, of course, and I doubt she’s planning to serve her cat to the local immigrant family.

Now there’s a paragraph I didn’t envision myself writing on any of the previous debates I’ve seen. The wonder of it all.

Still a long way to election night, and many efforts to undermine and defray the vote await us. But tonight, in a no-doubt-about-it way, was Harris’ night. She has a plan. Trump, in his words, “has the concept of a plan.”

Trump utterly disgraced himself.

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Turning Up the Burn — Sudden Widespread Catastrophic Warming

Turning Up the Burn

Sudden Widespread Catastrophic Warming

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 4th 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Back about twenty years ago, I was asked to write a piece on the effects global warming would have on our specific locale in the northern California mountains.

Well, an honest essay would have taken five seconds to write: “I don’t know.” I suggested this to my editor, who was unamused and gave me the Editor Glower. So, OK. Write something that won’t be too embarrassing.

I hit on a simple model. Suppose a uniform rise in temperature of three degrees Fahrenheit? Uniform. Every day exactly three degrees warmer than what the latest 30 year model showed as averages for each date.

Of course it was absurd on the face of it. “Average temperature” in the mountains is at best a polite suggestion, and in some years, a bad joke. Well, anywhere, really, but especially in the mountains where the weather is particularly variable. Microclimates rule. “If you don’t like the weather, move over five feet.” The almanacs list “first frost” and “last frost” but in any given year that can vary by six weeks in either direction—or more. “Playing to the averages” is how casinos make money and their customers don’t.

So I took the most simple-minded approach possible. I simply transposed the averages from a town at slightly less than 1,000 feet lower elevation than ours, and described the lengths of seasons, growing seasons, and the effects on regional vegetation. I even shifted the climate/weather bands south, giving us the weather patterns for Seattle. Why not? We already share volcanoes and a snotty attitude towards Los Angeles. One thing I got (sorta) right: even with more rain, there would be more drought. My editor, who normally was scientifically literate, didn’t understand that theory at all.

It made for a dramatic piece, even if it had all the scientific validity of phrenology.

But now it’s 2024, and we’ve just had the hottest month in recorded history. Not just here, but world-wide. Locally, it’s been pretty dramatic. At the time I wrote that piece, the hottest day I had recorded at the house was 98. We broke 100 for the first time in 2012, hit it five times last year, and thirteen times (so far) this year, including our hottest day to date—109. Nights are warmer, as well. Mornings it didn’t get below 60 used to be very rare, happening maybe once every other year. This year we’ve had ten nights where it stayed that warm, including a new record—a low of 69. Perhaps in a few years, I (or somebody) will be musing about how lows above 70 used to be unheard-of.

At least now a lot of local residents understand the concept of transpiration and evaporative rates. We’ve just had two very wet water years, running 150% of normal between them for a total of 150” inches over those two years. The first winter we saw vast amounts of snow—sixteen feet where I live. The reservoirs were all full this spring, the conifers lush and green. A lot of people relaxed a bit, reasoning this would be a mild fire season. People who did know better engaged in frantic brush clearance around the local towns. We have eighteen towns in this county, and ten of them have had major wildfire damage over the past ten years, some of them more than once.

And sure enough, by July 22nd, we were officially listed as being in moderate drought. And we’ve been getting red flag warnings and fire weather advisories. The Park Fire exploded out of Chico’s Bidwell Park, and in just six days became the third biggest fire in California history, racing over the grass, brush and chaparral of the Sierra foothills.

Not only has it been insanely hot, but unusually dry—we haven’t had any measurable rain here since April 25th. So we’re in drought. Imagine if one or both winters had been drier than usual.

Remember that sixteen feet of snow I mentioned? It isn’t a record for the town: we got twenty-two feet in the winter of ‘51-52, nearly all of it in February in two titanic storms. But in recent decades we had seen our annual average drop from fourteen feet in the thirties to just eight feet in the 2010s. Partly that was from the creation of Shasta Lake, which warmed our winters (by way of example, 2022-23 was the coldest winter the town had experienced in thirty years. But in the town’s 140 year history, it was only the 77th coldest winter!) and partly because of prolonged and severe droughts.

That sixteen feet was also a result of global warming. While temperatures between storms were persistently cold, temperatures during the storms were a couple of degrees above normal. And if it was usually 28 degrees when snowing and was now 30, that may not sound like much, but the warmer systems can hold a LOT more water—or in this case, snow. We got very heavy wet snow, both in terms of amount and in terms of water equivalent—the snow was wetter and heavier than normal, and did a fair bit of damage.

So we’re seeing some of the more obvious complications of global warming now, and people are noticing. There’s many more to come, and the ones that worry me are the ones we can’t see coming. But it’s safe to say we won’t like it when they do arrive.

As mentioned, the hot July was world wide. That was already the case before the numbers came in from Antarctica.

Across the entire southern polar ice cap, an area roughly the size of the lower 48, temperatures for the month were a staggering 10 degrees Celsius—or 18 degrees Fahrenheit—above normal. Nobody saw that coming.

To the hundreds of people living there, it probably wasn’t noticeable except on the thermometer readings. After all, it’s deepest darkest winter in July, and there isn’t a whole lot of discernible difference between minus fifty eight and minus forty. Fortunately, this weirding heat wave didn’t reach the coasts of the continent, where temperatures are milder and glaciers and sea ice are already melting at a frightening rate.

A heat increase on that scale was utterly inconceivable. On any other continent, such a thing would cause the deaths of millions and perhaps billions of people. Widespread famine, incredible fire storms, and complete destruction of entire ecosystems would ensue.

So now we have to consider this most terrifying of possibilities: sudden widespread catastrophic warming. I would have considered what happened in Antarctica impossible, along with pretty much all climate scientists. But now that it has happened, what if it happened someplace else in the world?

Writing a simple-minded piece on what effects it would have locally would be pretty easy: Just say, “Death Valley, with a bit of Venus mixed in. And we’re all dead.”

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Daniel in the Liars’ Den — The assault on science and sanity continues

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 17th, 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

The Guardian on February 14th had a story by Aliya Uteuova with this lede: “Nearly 15% of Americans don’t believe climate change is real, study finds.” The University of Michigan poll continued, “Denialism highest in central and southern US, with Republican voters less likely to believe in climate science.”

My first thought was that this was actually kind of reassuring. Thirty percent of Americans don’t know the Earth revolves around the sun. Forty percent believe in angels. This poll showed that only one in seven respondents were total idiots who couldn’t see irrefutable evidence even as it was biting them on the ass.

It’s been quite a while since I stopped assuming climate denialists—the remaining ones—were acting in any sort of good faith. The ones remaining are getting more strident, perhaps reflecting the more intense propaganda emanating from the filthy fuels industries and the rightwing thinktanks. Certainly I am encountering more in social media, and seeing peripheral effects from the constant attacks on people acknowledging climate change.

Some are easy to ignore. The moment someone starts babbling about how climate change can’t exist because god swill and puny humans can’t change the divine plan, I just block them. They are at best delusional and at worst total morons, and no amount of logic or persuasion is going to convince them that I’m anything other than hellbound, along with Taylor Swift and Joe Biden.

Some parrot the same talking points we’ve been hearing for the past forty years. Climate change isn’t because of volcanoes, sunspots, Milanković cycles, end of an ice age, orbital perturbations, yada yada yada.

If I’m not busy, I’ll stick around to politely and firmly refute the points made. Even if I’m not feeling particularly charitable, I know this approach is by far the most effective. Usually they just run away. Being polite and earnest stymies trolls and confuses the more strident ones who think they can annoy the opposition into making silly mistakes.

Lately, I’ve seen more blatant lies. For instance one claim I saw was that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere dropped by 20% during the pandemic-related shutdown.

Well, that would be lovely. Having the concentrations drop to 340ppm would ensure a habitable Earth 50 years from now. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. The rate of increase dropped by 20% in 2019, but that meant concentrations only increased from 417ppm to 419ppm.

Another claim was that the Harvard Climatology Department had PROVED that the only reason Earth was warming was because we were coming out of an ice age. Needless to say, nobody at Harvard has made any such claim, and the records indicate that, if anything, we probably would be going into an ice age about now.

However, with greenhouse gases at their current levels, no ice ages are in the offing, no matter what they might do for Ray Romano’s career.

But it’s the residual ripple effects of the propaganda that can be the most pernicious. The public at large has a mistrust of scientists, one carefully fostered by fundamentalists, oil-industry flacks, and the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues, ie, the galaxy of think tanks, radio show hosts, big churches, and Faux news and its clones, and the poison blogosphere.

The other day, just as a reminder that their standard tactics of smearing and lying have become more expensive, climate scientist Michael Mann won a million-dollar defamation suit against conservative bloggers who accused him of falsifying data and once compared him to a convicted child abuser.

A few days ago, I passed along a link to an article that Stanford Magazine did about Dr. Daniel Swain to some friends. It was a good article, and Swain’s expertise would be useful for that group.

But I got one response that caused my jaw to drop. “He’s a media whore,” my friend wrote.

Now, my friend has been a bit tetchy ever since the Dodgers signed Ohtani and Yamamoto. And while the article itself was well done, the magazine cover was, to put it mildly, a bit over the top. It portrayed a colossal Daniel Swain a good half a mile tall, striding through heavily-forested foothills, his head well above the clouds. I could see where someone might detect a slightly fawning note from Stanford, based on that cover. And from that, it could be inferred that it suggested the sort of treatment Swain might be expecting from the press.

Except I’ve been a regular on his blog, weatherwest.com, for most of a decade. I was familiar with his style and approach from before he became famous. (The way he became famous was unlikely in the extreme. In trying to describe a persistent blocking high in the Gulf of Alaska that was causing a massive drought in California, he coined the phrase “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge.” It caught the popular imagination. Now, only Swain knows if he ever actually sought fame, but I seriously doubt he sat up in bed one restless night and shouted, “I know! I’ll coin an awkwardly alliterative analogy! Eureka!”)

Swain does appreciate the opportunity to convey his expertise to the world. He puts in long hours doing just that—not just interviews, but in serious scholastic research and considerable effort in keeping his relatively small audience on his blog well informed, and encourages others of similar expertise to contribute freely.

I know a couple of people who are well known and who are media whores. They constantly self-promote, resent anything resembling competition, and pretend they have the answers. They’re depressingly easy to spot. I find them annoying.

But Swain is not one of them.

Indeed, the same day I had that email exchange, he did one of his “office hours” on YouTube. Anyone watching those quickly realizes that this is not a man basking in the effusive glow of public acclaim. As he often does, he was fielding questions from the chat thread, and he got one about Rossby waves. Those are defined as a “large horizontal atmospheric undulation that is associated with the polar-front jet stream and separates cold polar air from warm tropical air.” per Brittanica. There’s a hypothesis that decreasing ice cover in the Arctic Ocean and subsequent warming has caused the waves to increase in amplitude and decrease in frequency, allowing polar air to sweep into the middle latitudes. It caught the media’s fancy, since it was a handy explanation of big cold snaps in the midst of a warming climate. I admit I’ve based arguments on that myself.

Swain said that while he generally accepted the thinking behind the hypothesis, there just wasn’t any solid evidence that it was happening at this time. It was a very ‘Daniel’ sort of answer. If there isn’t a solid, concrete answer, he won’t hesitate to say so, and go on to discuss the elements that prevent a hard-and-fast answer. It’s exactly the sort of response a responsible scientist would give.

Certainty in the face of randomness and complexity is the mark of a charlatan.

But it’s not an answer a media whore—or any whore—should give. Don’t tell the marks what they need to know; tell them what they want to hear! It’s rule number one. If I was Swain’s unscrupulous agent, I would draw him aside and say, “Son, you’re doing it all wrong. I say, I say, son, you don’t get the return business if you’re saying things to the John like ‘You call that loving, mister? You sound like a Yugo with a flat tire!’ or ‘Oh, come on. That thing looks like the ghost of a poison mushroom. Can’t you at least paint it orange like the original?’ Nah, you gotta make them happy. Make ‘em feel big, y’know? Now, let’s hear your ecstatic moan.”

OK, he wouldn’t benefit from having me as an agent. Or as he might put it, I would be a “piss poor pimp.”

So why does a guy who normally is responsible, reasonably liberal, and scientifically literate declare a scientist who is the antithesis of a publicity hound a “media whore?”

Inculcation. Propaganda. The public at large is inclined to assume the worst of any responsible figure who challenges the present public gestalt.

That current gestalt is very toxic indeed. It’s pervasive, and manages to be both blatant and subtle at the same time. People honestly believe George Soros is giving scientists billions of dollars to push us all back to the stone age by destroying technology. And people don’t realize the people promoting such ideas are spending billions in order to protect trillions in profits made at our expense. It has to stop.

There’s no quick cure to it. It will take time. The parties dumping the poison into public discourse have to be called out, again and again, their lies shown for what they are, and the vacuity of their attacks exposed.

George Orwell once said, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” He also said, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” It is not the freedom to say two plus two make five.

Be a revolutionary. Tell the truth, no matter how much people don’t want to hear it. Be like Dr. Daniel Swain.

In America, the number of people accepting the truth of climate change has climbed to 85%. Keep telling the truth, and truth will prevail.

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Meltdown — Making our brains run in slime

Meltdown

Making our brains run in slime

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 24th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Some cheeky sort named “Anotherdumblib” posted this on Truth Social today: “First the Kraken, then the Cheeseball, and now Tell Us Ellis. $5,000 fine, five years probation, gotta write a letter of apology, and some community service. Fani Willis has to be pretty happy right now.” That should push Donnie’s diastolic into the triple digits.

He hasn’t been doing well lately. The other day, he confused Turkey and Hungary. Granted, he’s getting on, and the nurse probably forgot to give him his Ensure before he went on stage and started babbling. He KNOWS Turkey is in Argentina and Hungary is a Canadian province. He was just feeling peckish, is all.

But his mind is still ticking like one of those boxes where you turn the crank and a clown pops out. He was, according to himself, the first to ever notice that the abbreviation for the United States and the pronoun “us” were spelled exactly the same! Ha! Top THAT, Neil Degrasse-Tyson!

That Jenna Ellis became the third of Trump’s lawyers to cop a plea in the Georgia election tampering case and, like Powell and Cheseboro, got slaps on the wrist, bodes very poorly for our Donnie. Those three, among them, pretty much know where ALL the bodies are buried.

I doubt Trump is going to be the Republican candidate next year. In fact, I’m not sure that party will even HAVE a candidate. Or rather, several versions of the party, all calling themselves “The REAL Republican Party” will have candidates. I mean, look at the House. These are the same pack of clowns who have to figure out who their presidential candidate should be—and the main guy is now very clearly going down in flames. One of the candidates—probably a pro-Israel holocaust-denying civil libertarian who wants Jesus to run the country and birth control outlawed—might win pluralities in some place like Oklahoma or Idaho, but essentially, Biden will run unopposed. Not that I think Biden hasn’t earned a second term, but one-party rule is a bad thing, even if it’s the party with the grown-ups.

The Republicans who aren’t convulsing in the House are planning another unwatched shouty match. NBC, who really should know better, will be carrying it. I don’t plan to watch, but the expressions on Rachel Maddow’s face afterward should be entertaining as hell. Imagine the look on King Charles’ face if you walked up to him and offered to slip a live trout down his pants. Yeah. That expression. Rachel is sane and intelligent. Sane and intelligent people shouldn’t have to deal with Republican candidates. In fairness, the king of England shouldn’t have to deal with people like me, who suggest accosting the royal personage with fish.

The debate is going to be streamed exclusively by Rumble, a place that brags that it is home to people too disgusting and bent for any of the other streaming services. Lots of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism, and conspiracy theories. One of the sponsors of the debate is an outfit called “The Republican Jewish Coalition” which apparently is fine with a venue that is holocaust-denying (except for the ones who are pro-holocaust) and Hitler-praising. Yeah, that seems like an apt site for the GOP to engage in Jewish outreach.

Between Russia’s inept invasion of Ukraine, and the vicious attack by Hamas on Israel followed by the even more vicious Netanyahu retaliation, the world is teetering on the brink of a possible global war. But Vivek Ramaswamy thinks this is a good time for the US to pull out of NATO, and maybe the UN, as well. Because, like the GOP in the late 1930s, this iteration also believes the best way to deal with those foreign dictators they admire so much (they make the trains run on thyme, you know, very aromatic) is to embrace isolationism. Vivek isn’t the only Republican who feels that way, of course. Most of the ones getting their strings pulled by the rapidly-dwindling Trump profess the same nonsense.

Putin is continuing his not-so-subtle sabre-rattling, and is now threatening to pull out of the 1963 test ban treaty. But Donnie and his crowd still worship Putin. He makes the trains run in rhyme, you know, very poetic.

Meanwhile, there’s this: Dr Christopher Wolf, at Oregon State University (OSU) in the US and a lead author of the report, [told the Guardian]: “Without actions that address the root problem of humanity taking more from Earth than it can safely give, we’re on our way to the potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems and a world with unbearable heat and shortages of food and freshwater.

“By 2100, as many as 3 billion to 6 billion people may find themselves outside Earth’s livable regions, meaning they will be encountering severe heat, limited food availability and elevated mortality rates.”

We won’t need to wait until 2100. Our current “Super El Nino” is building, and this winter should see weather that will displace millions of people and kill thousands. Meanwhile, south of the equator, this summer should be a real horror show. About the only thing in Australia not at risk of burning is Ayer’s Rock (now called Uluru, but since Australians voted last week to not give Aboriginals full citizenship, perhaps they’ll show the same grace and charm of our Republicans and change the name back to the British appellation.)

Grim times, yes. You a gotta laugh, right? It’s that, or walk into a jet intake.

Hm. I wonder if we can convince Donnie to wear a longer tie when he’s around Trump Farce One. Or would that suggestion just get me a visit from the Secret Service?

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