Month: September 2019

News from Crazy Town: Hurricane Dorian – False Flag of the Deep State?

Just a reminder what we’re up against.

The Friendly Atheist:

Right-wing commentator and conspiracy theorist Chris McDonald, who just last week said on his “The MC Files” show that Christians who oppose Donald Trump were betraying God, is showing just how seriously he takes that theory.
Along with “firefighter prophet” Mark Taylor, the subject of the Liberty University-connected film The Trump Prophecy, McDonald said last night that Hurricane Dorian was a “false flag.”
I repeat: They said the hurricane that is currently ravaging the Bahamas and has already killed 5 people is just a piece of fiction designed by the “Deep State” to make Trump look bad.

McDonald insisted that it was not a coincidence that just as the news was focused on the fact that even though the Department of Justice had decided not to prosecute Comey for leaking memos chronicling his conversations with President Trump, the president and his associates were suggesting that Comey’s legal troubles were not over, when suddenly everyone turned their attention to the hurricane.Right-wing commentator and conspiracy theorist Chris McDonald, who just last week said on his “The MC Files” show that Christians who oppose Donald Trump were betraying God, is showing just how seriously he takes that theory.
Along with “firefighter prophet” Mark Taylor, the subject of the Liberty University-connected film The Trump Prophecy, McDonald said last night that Hurricane Dorian was a “false flag.”
I repeat: They said the hurricane that is currently ravaging the Bahamas and has already killed 5 people is just a piece of fiction designed by the “Deep State” to make Trump look bad.

Stalling Storms a Climate Trend?

What’s frightening me about this storm is it’s another example of something we have been seeing more of in recent years – powerful storms that make landfall and then stop, grinding away with wind and dumping incredible amounts of rain.

It doesn’t take much imagination to picture this happening over Florida.

More science needed, but questions being asked as to whether this is a product of a generally slower jet circulation.

Inside Climate News:

Hurricane Dorian’s slow, destructive track through the Bahamas fits a pattern scientists have been seeing over recent decades, and one they expect to continue as the planet warms: hurricanes stalling over coastal areas and bringing extreme rainfall.
Dorian made landfall in the northern Bahamas on Sept. 1 as one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record, then battered the islands for hours on end with heavy rain, a storm surge of up to 23 feet and sustained wind speeds reaching 185 miles per hour. The storm’s slow forward motion—at times only 1 mile per hour—is one of the reasons forecasters were having a hard time pinpointing its exact future path toward the U.S. coast.
With the storm still over the islands on Sept. 2, the magnitude of the devastation and death toll was only beginning to become clear. “We are in the midst of a historic tragedy in parts of our northern Bahamas,” Prime Minister Hubert Minnis told reporters.

Recent research shows that more North Atlantic hurricanes have been stalling as Dorian did, leading to more extreme rainfall. Their average forward speed has also decreased by 17 percent—from 11.5 mph, to 9.6 mph—from 1944 to 2017, according to a study published in June by federal scientists at NASA and NOAA.
The researchers don’t understand exactly why tropical storms are stalling more, but they think it’s caused by a general slowdown of atmospheric circulation (global winds), both in the tropics, where the systems form, and in the mid-latitudes, where they hit land and cause damage.
Hurricanes are steered and carried by large-scale wind flows, “like a cork in a stream,” said Tim Hall, a hurricane researcher with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and author of the study. So, if those winds slow down or shift direction, it affects how fast hurricanes move forward and where they end up.

Continue reading “Stalling Storms a Climate Trend?”

Amazon Elder’s Plea for Survival

Raoni Metuktire, Chief of the indigenous Brazilian Kayapó people, in the Guardian:

For many years we, the indigenous leaders and peoples of the Amazon, have been warning you, our brothers who have brought so much damage to our forests. What you are doing will change the whole world and will destroy our home – and it will destroy your home too.

We have set aside our divided history to come together. Only a generation ago, many of our tribes were fighting each other, but now we are together, fighting together against our common enemy. And that common enemy is you, the non-indigenous peoples who have invaded our lands and are now burning even those small parts of the forests where we live that you have left for us. President Bolsonaro of Brazil is encouraging the farm owners near our lands to clear the forest – and he is not doing anything to prevent them from invading our territory.
We call on you to stop what you are doing, to stop the destruction, to stop your attack on the spirits of the Earth. When you cut down the trees you assault the spirits of our ancestors. When you dig for minerals you impale the heart of the Earth. And when you pour poisons on the land and into the rivers – chemicals from agriculture and mercury from gold mines – you weaken the spirits, the plants, the animals and the land itself. When you weaken the land like that, it starts to die. If the land dies, if our Earth dies, then none of us will be able to live, and we too will all die.
Why do you do this? You say it is for development – but what kind of development takes away the richness of the forest and replaces it with just one kind of plant or one kind of animal? Where the spirits once gave us everything we needed for a happy life – all of our food, our houses, our medicines – now there is only soya or cattle. Who is this development for? Only a few people live on the farm lands; they cannot support many people and they are barren.

So why do you do this? We can see that it is so that some of you can get a great deal of money. In the Kayapó language we call your money piu caprim, “sad leaves”, because it is a dead and useless thing, and it brings only harm and sadness.

Continue reading “Amazon Elder’s Plea for Survival”

The Proud Boys of Climate Denial

Above, “comedy” video from the “Media Research Center – Your one-stop-shop for the best conservative videos!”

The punch line here, apparently, is that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is saying some more or less sensible things about climate change.
Get it?

Salon:

Climate change may not seem like a gendered issue, but leave it to conservatives to inject sexism into everything they do.
That much was made evident on Thursday, when the right-wing Media Research Center tweeted out a video of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., talking about the need for rapid decarbonization to prevent catastrophic environmental changes due to climate change. The video is labeled “Shallow Thoughts” and treacly music is played behind it, in order to indicate how viewers are meant to read this video, which is as an indictment of Ocasio-Cortez’s intelligence.

Despite the heavy-handed presentation, if a viewer actually listens to what Ocasio-Cortez is saying, it’s quite clear she’s making a cogent and intelligent case, and understands the actual scientific evidence far better than her detractors.
It’s equally clear that Media Research Center doesn’t expect its conservative audience to actually listen to what she’s saying. Instead, sexist stereotypes are doing the heavy lifting here. Ocasio-Cortez is young, female and pretty, and as such, the target audience for this video is predisposed  to think of her as a bimbo, and is ready to write off anything she says as dumb lady yapping, without bothering to absorb the actual contents of her speech.
Ocasio-Cortez, always good at using social media, seized on this gap between the sexist assumptions of conservatives and the reality of her actual intelligence, and tweeted out the video herself.

Continue reading “The Proud Boys of Climate Denial”