Month: October 2024

Well known science denier Tucker Carlson explains that he was sleeping in his bed with 4 dogs, woke up with scratches, and immediately knew he had been attacked by a demon.
“I knew it was spiritual, immediately.”

That’s where we are in 2024. Looks like it only gets weirder from here.

If we remember how in a lawsuit, Tucker’s personal texts were revealed in which he reiterated his hatred for Donald Trump, and compare that to his current position of obsequious kissing of the orange ass, it’s clarifying that for Carlson, everything takes a backseat to the grift.

New York Times:

Documents released in recent weeks as part of a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems have revealed extraordinary private communications and depositions from the network’s star hosts and executives. In those statements, many of them expressed disbelief about President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, even though the network continued to promote many of those lies on the air.

Continue reading “Climate Denier: “I was Attacked by Demons in my Bed.””

And, no, it’s not Jim Gaffigan.

Rainn Wilson, (Dwight on The Office) has been using food to make climate points for ordinary folks.

Forbes:

Actor Rainn Wilson (The Office) made headlines last year when he changed his Twitter name to “Rainnfall Heat Wave Extreme Winter Wilson” to draw attention to climate change.

Along with social science expert Professor Gail Whiteman and writer/producer Chuck Tatham, Wilson co-founded Climate Basecamp, with the goal of using pop culture as a launchpad to educate the public on the science of climate change.

Rainn Wilson: I had this realization about six years ago that I really cared passionately about climate change and communicating climate science, but all I was doing was sending out dozens of angry tweets to climate deniers. That was the extent of my activism. I realized I needed to do something more and get off my butt. That’s when I started working with Gail [Whiteman].

The first thing we did together is we filmed a low-budget travel climate series called An Idiot’s Guide to Climate Change for my digital media company at the time, SoulPancake.

After that, I camped out with a bunch of climate scientists at Davos at the World Economic Forum on the grounds of a fancy hotel. We shipped an iceberg to the COP26 conference in Glasgow and had it set up outside; it was slowly melting as the delegates were entering the grounds.

Continue reading “A Free Vegan Hot Dog with Each Climate Factoid!”

Weather forecast for Election Day includes rain across battleground states.

You’ve been warned.

Yale Climate Connections:

In many parts of Latin America, when the dark of night descends, the vampire bat emerges.

Vampire bats are famous for feasting on the blood of live animals.

As the climate warms, they’re spreading farther north. And according to Luis Escobar, a wildlife biologist at Virginia Tech, they may soon reach the U.S.

Escobar: “We anticipate that this species is going to reach the U.S. and that we’ll notice its presence in the next five to 20 years.”

That’s concerning, as vampire bats are known carriers of rabies, a fatal disease.

Escobar: “When they bite the prey, they transmit the virus to the prey.”

So as the bats spread north, animals in the southern U.S. could be at risk of infection.

Escobar says vampire bats tend to avoid urban areas, which helps reduce the risk of rabies in cities.

But he says the bats are likely to spread the disease in more rural parts of the southern U.S., which has large populations of prey such as deer, wild boar, and farm animals.

The region’s sizable cattle industry will be especially vulnerable.

So he says it will be important for livestock owners to vaccinate their animals against rabies – and help keep this deadly disease at bay, even as vampire bats spread north.

New York Times:

Two weeks before world leaders meet to debate the climate crisis, a report released on Thursday shows the 10 deadliest extreme weather events in the past two decades were made worse by burning fossil fuels.

More than half a million people around the world were killed in those disasters since 2004.

“Many people now understand that climate change is already making life more dangerous,” said Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer at Imperial College London and co-founder of World Weather Attribution, the group that published the report. “What did not work yet is turning knowledge into action on a large-enough scale.”

Even with the abundance of evidence on how a warming world is endangering human life, the world keeps burning fossil fuels: 2023, the hottest year on record, also set a record for greenhouse gas emissions.

The stakes are high for how the world will respond in November, with a pivotal U.S. election and an annual climate summit of world leaders, known as COP29, hosted in Azerbaijan. Developing countries, hit hard by climate disasters, are pressing for rich countries to make good on their pledges to curb emissions and fund climate adaptation projects.

Continue reading “More Research Connecting Extreme Events to Climate Change”

Valencia meets Asheville.
The pictures look like out-takes from a lost Mad Max movie.

More rain coming.

Australian Broadcasting Company:

Valencia alone recorded a death toll of 92 after receiving what Spain’s weather service said was more rain in eight hours than it had received in the last 20 months.

But are torrential downpours just another act of nature — unavoidable and inevitable?

Scientists say a warming planet is at play, and extreme weather events are occurring more frequently and in much greater strength than ever before.

What’s behind the deadly floods?

Spain’s flash floods were caused by a destructive weather system in which cold and warm air meet and produce powerful rain clouds, a pattern believed to be becoming more prevalent due to climate change.

The phenomenon is known locally as DANA, a Spanish acronym for high-altitude isolated depression, and unlike common storms or squalls it can form independently of polar or subtropical jet streams.

When cold air blows over warm Mediterranean waters it causes hotter air to rise quickly and form dense, water-laden clouds that can remain over the same area for many hours, raising their destructive potential. 

The event sometimes provokes large hail storms and tornadoes as seen this week, according to meteorologists.

Eastern and southern Spain are particularly susceptible to the phenomenon due to its position between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Warm, humid air masses and cold fronts meet in a region where mountains favour the formation of storm clouds and rainfall.

Continue reading “Spain’s Aftermath is Apocalyptic”

More postcards for the future.
51 dead so far in Valencia.

Washington Post:

At least 51 people have died and many more are missing after torrential rains caused massive flooding in southeastern Spain, turning roads into rivers of floating cars and cutting off highways and access points, Spanish officials said Wednesday.

The deluge, which began Monday, reached the first floors of homes, swept away vehicles and in one instance — in footage captured on social media — knocked down a bridge. Authorities raced to respond to rescue calls, dispatching helicopters to pull people from inundated homes and cars in the Valencia region as well as other affected areas including Cuenca and Albacete.

But damaged infrastructure was hampering rescue operations, as harrowing accounts emerged of people trapped in cars and on the roofs of buildings. Local authorities opened emergency shelters for those left homeless.

Lucía Beamud, a city councilor and resident in the La Torre district of southern Valencia, told the Las Provincias news outlet Wednesday that the waters had risen “in a matter of minutes.”

Continue reading “Stunning Flooding in Spain”

Reading this story about climate impacts in rural Afghanistan, I couldn’t help but compare to the stories coming our of North Carolina and Tennessee.
Fundamentalist religion having a tough time adjusting to a climate changed world.

Washington Post:

With parched deserts and deforested, flood-prone valleys, Afghanistan is deemed by researchers to be among the 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change. Hundreds of people died, for instance, during recent flash floods that officials blamed on ominous changes in the climate.

Kanni Wignaraja, the regional director for Asia and the Pacific at the United Nations Development Program, said prolonged drought in Afghanistan has so hardened soils that flash floods are particularly violent here. “The damage is huge,” she said in an interview.

Before the Taliban takeover, international donors estimated that Afghanistan would need more than $20 billion between 2020 and 2030 to respond to climate change. The United Nations is still able to fund some projects in the country, but Wignaraja said the Taliban-run government is correct when it says that “global money for climate has dried up.”

While Taliban beliefs are rooted in centuries-old Pashtun culture and an extreme interpretation of Islam, the government affirms that climate change is real, that it’s destroying God’s work and that those in the world who reject the truth of climate change need to get on board. The Taliban has asked imams in Afghanistan’s tens of thousands of mosques to emphasize during Friday prayers the need for environmental protection.

Carbon footprints will weigh heavily on judgment day, said Kabul-based imam Farisullah Azhari. “God will ask: How did you make your money? And then he will ask: How much suffering did you cause in the process?” he said in an interview.

Continue reading “Climate Change Challenges Taliban”

Guardian:

As emergency crews work to help people experiencing grave losses after Hurricane Helene, a wave of misinformation has accompanied relief efforts, heightened by an existential election just a month away.

The upcoming election has ramped up the misinformation, a common thread of which happens after most big news events. These claims have found believers – or at least opportunistic fans – among top Republicans, who are now tying an unprecedented disaster to issues like immigration.

“There’s no question that this level of falsehoods would not be spread were there not an election a month away,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

The falsehoods started quickly and came from the top. Donald Trump, freshly landed in Georgia on Monday to see the storm’s devastation, claimedthat the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, had not been able to reach Joe Biden to talk about disaster aid. Kemp had already said earlier in the day that he’d spoken to the president, who offered any help the state needed and said to call him directly.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) put up a webpage this week to knock down the swirl of rumors it has faced – a sign of the increased myths. The American Red Cross posted on social media to dispel various falsehoods about its work. Members of Congress and state emergency management services have issued statements to insist they are working around the clock on disaster response. Elected officials who serve the area have asked constituents not to spread rumors and instead help each other.

Continue reading “Post Helene – Election Workers Deal with Conspiracies, Threats”

An Open Letter by Scientists to the Nordic Council of Ministers (emphasis mine):

We, the undersigned, are scientists working in the field of climate research and feel it is urgent to draw the attention of the Nordic Council of Ministers to the serious risk of a major ocean circulation change in the Atlantic.
A string of scientific studies in the past few years suggests that this risk has so far been greatly underestimated. Such an ocean circulation change would have devastating and irreversible impacts especially for Nordic countries, but also for other parts of the world.

Science increasingly confirms that the Arctic region is a “ground zero” for tipping point risks and climate regulation across the planet. In this region, the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Barents sea ice, the boreal permafrost systems, the subpolar gyre deep-water formation and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) are all vulnerable to major, interconnected nonlinear
changes. The AMOC, the dominant mechanism of northward heat transport in the North Atlantic, determines life conditions for all people in the Arctic region and beyond and is increasingly at risk of passing a tipping point.

Tipping point risks are real and can occur within the 1.5-2°C climate range of the Paris Agreement3. The world is currently heading well beyond this range (> 2.5°C). In the Synthesis report of the IPCC (2023) it is stated with high confidence that the likelihood of abrupt or irreversible changes in the climate system will increase with the level of global warming, and similarly the probability of outcomes that may be considered low-likelihood but are associated with potentially very large adverse impacts increases.

The IPCC further specifies that “risks associated with large-scale singular events or tipping points … transition to high risk between 1.5°C – 2.5°C” of global warming.

Continue reading “Scientist’s Open Letter to World: Atlantic Current Collapse”