Today at 2:20 p.m. Eastern, most Americans will simultaneously feel their cellphones vibrate, hear them make a loud sound and see a push alert pop up on their screens. Most radio and television stationswill broadcast an alert at the same time for about one minute.
There is no national emergency, no reason to panic and nothing you need to do about the alerts. It is, as the text will say, just a test.
It’s a test of the national emergency alert systems, which are designed to let the government reach hundreds of millions of people in the United States immediately if there is a disaster affecting the entire country. TheFederal Emergency Management Agency and the Federal Communications Commission are conducting the coordinated test to see if the technology is working as designed and if any improvements are needed.
And of course, because we live in the stupidest timeline, there’s this:
I’ve documented the plight of farmers and landowners in Montcalm County, Michigan, who are seeking to site clean energy on their lands. They have been threatened, bullied, shouted down and harassed by local groups of Facebook enflamed conspiracists.
Now, opposition to an EV battery facility, in adjacent Mecosta County, has been organized on the same facebook sites, using the same tactics of paranoid Flashmobs seeking to take over normally sleepy township meetings. The only difference is, instead of “wind turbines will electrify your ground water”, it’s “Chinese missiles will be hidden in cooling towers.”
Media tiptoeing around and both-siding as usual, completely missing the obvious fossil fuel fingerprints all over this.
Yard signs along the quiet country roads of Green Charter Township, Mich., home to horse farms and a 19th-century fish hatchery, blare a message that an angered community hopes is heard by local leaders, the Biden administration and China: “No Gotion.”
The opposition is to a plan by Gotion, a subsidiary of a Chinese company, to build a $2.4 billion electric vehicle battery factory on roughly 270 acres of largely uninhabited scrub land. An investment of that magnitude can transform a local economy, but in this case it is unwelcome by many. Residents fear that the company’s presence is a dangerous infiltration by the Chinese Communist Party and it has led to backlash, death threats and an attempt to unseat the elected officials who backed the project.
The debate over the factory has turned a township of about 3,000 people located 60 miles north of Grand Rapids against each other and into an unlikely battleground in the economic contest between the United States and China. The resistance is part of a broader movement by states to erect new barriers to Chinese investment amid concerns about national security and growing anti-China sentiment.
“It’s the Communist influences that I’m bothered by, because they have shown repeatedly that they don’t care about our rules, our laws or anything,” said Lori Brock, who lives on a 150-acre horse farm near where the battery factory is being built. “They shouldn’t be able to buy here.” That sentiment has been reverberating in the United States and on the Republican presidential campaign trail this year. In August, the campaign of Nikki Haley called Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a “comrade” for backing the Gotion factory. On Wednesday, Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican candidate who has called for banning Chinese investments, will hold a rally at Ms. Brock’s farm.
UAH Global Temperature Update for September, 2023: +0.90 deg. C
With the approaching El Nino superimposed upon a long-term warming trend, many high temperature records were established in September, 2023.
The Version 6 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for September, 2023 was +0.90 deg. C departure from the 1991-2020 mean. This is above the August 2023 anomaly of +0.70 deg. C, and establishes a new monthly high temperature record since satellite temperature monitoring began in December, 1978.
The linear warming trend since January, 1979 still stands at +0.14 C/decade (+0.12 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.19 C/decade over global-averaged land). —
Roy Spencer, aka, “the Official Climatologist of the Rush Limbaugh Program”, has long been a favorite go-to for climate deniers. He’s a former NASA scientist, who administers the satellite temperature data base at the University of Alabama – Huntsville, (known as UAH), one of the commonly cited temperature data sets. Generally, the UAH shows less warming than the other data sets, such as NASA GISS.
There are a number of reasons for this, that I went through in a video several years ago, still worth a watch, below:
Climate scientists have in the past decade and a half, been subjected to continued harassment from Republican lawmakers seeking to acquire emails and other private materials, in the hopes of finding out of context quotes or remarks that can be used to embarrass or discredit academics.
Above, Malcolm Hughes, as one of the world’s foremost experts on reading tree rings, became a target, because his research was a key part of the famous, and now richly validated, “Hockey Stick Graph”. He describes it as “like living in a police state.” Most of these initiatives have been pushed back. Now, North Carolina seeks to formalize this process with, in effect, an unaccountable Secret Police force.
Buried in North Carolina’s 600+ page budget is a little-noticed provision that creates a secret police force, controlled by Republicans, with extraordinary powers
The budget grants the Gov Ops Committee the right to seize “any document or system of record” from anyone who works in or w/state & local government
This includes contractors or any entity that directly or indirectly receives state funds, including charities and colleges
It gets worse. Gov Ops staff will be authorized to enter “any building or facility” owned or leased by a state or non-state entity without a judicial warrant.
This includes private homes, if it includes a home office of a contractor.
Alarmingly, public employees under investigation will be required to keep all communication and requests “confidential.” They cannot alert their supervisor of the investigation nor consult with legal counsel.
Those who refuse to cooperate face jail time and fines of up to 1K.
Gov Ops is dominated by Republicans and pursues partisan investigations. It is co-chaired by Senate Leader Phil Berger (R) and House Speaker Tim Moore (R).
Gov Ops launched an inquiry into diversity training programs at the University of North Carolina earlier this year.
Berger and Moore claim this is all about oversight and transparency. But a separate provision of the budget allows them to reject any public records requests concerning the operation of Gov Ops.
CNN’s Abby Phillips made a supercut of Fox New’s destruction of consensus reality, including disinformation about vaccines and climate, and the deep damage to democracy that is his evil life’s legacy. I was unable to find the original piece, but this Meidastouch summary is pretty good.
Nice to see some plain talk about the toxicity of Fox News from a serious journalist, as opposed to the normal both-sides tiptoeing.
Surprised, but not really, by this revelation from Thom Hartmann about what Rupert’s Father was doing during World War 2:
There was even a hint of propaganda being used against America in WWII, sometimes — like today — coming from sources that are supposedly “on our side” of the conflict.
American soldiers were even the victims of propaganda in WWII in Australia, a story that gives us insights into rightwing media today. Over a million American GIs were stationed in that country at one time or another during the war, and at first they were warmly welcomed.
“As American soldiers began arriving in numbers during the early months of 1942, they were greeted with tremendous enthusiasm by the Australians, many of whom couldn’t hide their immense relief at the soothing presence of the GIs. … Appreciative crowds gathered at piers and station platforms to greet incoming ships and troop trains. Waving and cheering, they studied the newcomers with great curiosity.”
But a major newspaper owner in that country thought he could make a pile of money by turning Australians against Americans. Inflaming nationalist and xenophobic sentiments would sell papers, goose advertising, and make the publisher rich.
“A chain of newspapers owned by Sir Keith Murdoch, father of latter-year media magnate Rupert Murdoch, earned a reputation among the yanks as relentlessly anti-American. Truth, a particularly brassy Melbourne tabloid, often published lurid tales of GI rapes of innocent Australian girls and seduction of married women.
“On occasion, Australian soldiers vented their frustration over such tales with violence. Small groups of Diggers roamed around some of the cities, beating up any American soldiers whom they saw dating local girls. … An American soldier was even shot and killed one morning as he emerged from the house of a married woman.”
Eventually, the hate against Americans that Murdoch had stirred up blossomed into full-fledged riots in multiple Australian cities, creating a real problem for the war effort but boosting Murdoch’s newspaper sales (and, presumably, profits) into the stratosphere.
Canada’s wildfire season, already the worst on record, went “completely off the rails” during the past week, scientists tell Axios.
The big picture: Enough land area burned in the past week to make the seven-day-period comparable to nearly an entire typical fire season across Canada, according to Merritt Turetsky of the University of Colorado.
While five provinces and territories, stretching from Nova Scotia to the Northwest Territories, saw record amounts of land burned this season, western Canada has been hit the hardest, she said in an interview.
“Things have just continued to play out in kind of a hellish way in western Canada,” she said.
During the past few days, smoke from wildfires in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories has tinted the skies over Greenland and northern Europe.
These fires are burning at a time of year when Canada’s fire activity tends to be on a sharp decline.
“The sudden increase in the fire emissions for Canada between 23-25 September was very surprising for the time of year, and following 21 weeks of continuous fires,” Mark Parrington, a senior scientist with the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, said via email.
He said that three-day emissions total was about 50 megatonnes of carbon, “As much as some previous summer or annual total estimated fire emissions for the country,”
Of note: A little over 70,000 square miles of land has burned since May in Canada, equivalent to the entire state of Washington.
“This is going to go until we have deep snow,” Turetsky said.
With hundreds of wildfires still burning, there is the potential for more air quality degradation in the U.S. through the fall.
Zoom in: In addition, the fires have emitted at least as much carbon and other greenhouse gases to be on par with Canada’s typical annual emissions.
In fact, said Mike Flannigan, a researcher at Thompson Rivers University, the emissions estimates to date are likely underestimating the magnitude of emissions.
Given that climate change played a key role in setting off this conflagration, the emissions will only serve to worsen global warming, thereby making parts of the globe even more prone to fire in a positive feedback loop.
David Lobell is the Benjamin M. Page Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science and the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He is also the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy and Research (SIEPR).
Dr. Lobell is interviewed here by atmospheric scientist Andrew Dessler PhD of Texas A&M.
The “CO2 is Plant Food” crock has been around since at least the early 90s, when the Western Fuels Association produced the film “The Greening of Planet Earth” to promote the idea that carbon pollution was “good for plants”.
There is an argument made that “NASA research says the Earth is actually getting greener”, which needs a little attention.
Over the last two decades, the Earth has seen an increase in foliage around the planet, measured in average leaf area per year on plants and trees. Data from NASA satellites shows that China and India are leading the increase in greening on land. The effect stems mainly from ambitious tree planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries.
China’s outsized contribution to the global greening trend comes in large part (42%) from programs to conserve and expand forests. These were developed in an effort to reduce the effects of soil erosion, air pollution and climate change. Another 32% there – and 82% of the greening seen in India – comes from intensive cultivation of food crops.
Land area used to grow crops is comparable in China and India – more than 770,000 square miles – and has not changed much since the early 2000s. Yet these regions have greatly increased both their annual total green leaf area and their food production. This was achieved through multiple cropping practices, where a field is replanted to produce another harvest several times a year. Production of grains, vegetables, fruits and more have increased by about 35-40% since 2000 to feed their large populations.
How the greening trend may change in the future depends on numerous factors, both on a global scale and the local human level. For example, increased food production in India is facilitated by groundwater irrigation. If the groundwater is depleted, this trend may change.
“But, now that we know direct human influence is a key driver of the greening Earth, we need to factor this into our climate models,” Nemani said. “This will help scientists make better predictions about the behavior of different Earth systems, which will help countries make better decisions about how and when to take action.”
The researchers point out that the gain in greenness seen around the world and dominated by India and China does not offset the damage from loss of natural vegetation in tropical regions, such as Brazil and Indonesia. The consequences for sustainability and biodiversity in those ecosystems remain.
