Doug the Dem
Doug the Dem's JournalAir Canada Flight Nearly Causes "One of the worst" Disasters in Aviation History
CBS SF Bay Area
Published on 11 Jul 2017
Gee whiz, killing all those people doesn't seem polite AT ALL, eh?
So, you think sea-level rise will be our worst global warming problem? SUCKER!
The Uninhabitable Earth
By David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine
Over the past few decades, the term “Anthropocene” has climbed out of academic discourse and into the popular imagination — a name given to the geologic era we live in now, and a way to signal that it is a new era, defined on the wall chart of deep history by human intervention. One problem with the term is that it implies a conquest of nature (and even echoes the biblical “dominion”). And however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have already ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. That is what Wallace Smith Broecker, the avuncular oceanographer who coined the term “global warming,” means when he calls the planet an “angry beast.” You could also go with “war machine.” Each day we arm it more.
Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having to continually cool off, like panting dogs. For that, the temperature needs to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing heat off the skin so the engine can keep pumping. At seven degrees of warming, that would become impossible for large portions of the planet’s equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem; in the jungles of Costa Rica, for instance, where humidity routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when it’s over 105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal. And the effect would be fast: Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out.
Climate-change skeptics point out that the planet has warmed and cooled many times before, but the climate window that has allowed for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history. At 11 or 12 degrees of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat. Things almost certainly won’t get that hot this century, though models of unabated emissions do bring us that far eventually. This century, and especially in the tropics, the pain points will pinch much more quickly even than an increase of seven degrees. The key factor is something called wet-bulb temperature, which is a term of measurement as home-laboratory-kit as it sounds: the heat registered on a thermometer wrapped in a damp sock as it’s swung around in the air (since the moisture evaporates from a sock more quickly in dry air, this single number reflects both heat and humidity). At present, most regions reach a wet-bulb maximum of 26 or 27 degrees Celsius; the true red line for habitability is 35 degrees. What is called heat stress comes much sooner.
Actually, we’re about there already. Since 1980, the planet has experienced a 50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or extreme heat; a bigger increase is to come. The five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002, and soon, the IPCC warns, simply being outdoors that time of year will be unhealthy for much of the globe. Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today. As Joseph Romm has put it in his authoritative primer Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain “would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.” The high-end IPCC estimate, remember, is two degrees warmer still. By the end of the century, the World Bank has estimated, the coolest months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century. Air-conditioning can help but will ultimately only add to the carbon problem; plus, the climate-controlled malls of the Arab emirates aside, it is not remotely plausible to wholesale air-condition all the hottest parts of the world, many of them also the poorest. And indeed, the crisis will be most dramatic across the Middle East and Persian Gulf, where in 2015 the heat index registered temperatures as high as 163 degrees Fahrenheit. As soon as several decades from now, the hajj will become physically impossible for the 2 million Muslims who make the pilgrimage each year.
It is not just the hajj, and it is not just Mecca; heat is already killing us. In the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population has chronic kidney disease, including over a quarter of the men, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago. With dialysis, which is expensive, those with kidney failure can expect to live five years; without it, life expectancy is in the weeks. Of course, heat stress promises to pummel us in places other than our kidneys, too. As I type that sentence, in the California desert in mid-June, it is 121 degrees outside my door. It is not a record high.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html
Shout-out to DUer turbinetree, who also has a post concerning Wallace-Wells' article here, though he came to it through a different source.
The piece is very long, but believe me, if you have children or grandchildren, read it! And BE Alarmed! Be scared shitless! That's the ONLY way to regard the situation!
DEVELOPING: Russian Dirt on Clinton? 'I Love It,' Donald Trump Jr. Said
Source: New York Times
By JO BECKER, ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZOJULY 11, 2017
The June 3, 2016, email sent to Donald Trump Jr. could hardly have been more explicit: One of his fathers former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton.
The documents would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father, read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its governments support for Mr. Trump.
If the future presidents eldest son was surprised or disturbed by the provenance of the promised material or the notion that it was part of a continuing effort by the Russian government to aid his fathers campaign he gave no indication.
He replied within minutes: If its what you say I love it especially later in the summer.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/trump-russia-email-clinton.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=span-ab-top-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Four days later, after a flurry of emails, the intermediary wrote back, proposing a meeting in New York on Thursday with a “Russian government attorney.”
Donald Trump Jr. agreed, adding that he would most likely bring along “Paul Manafort (campaign boss)” and “my brother-in-law,” Jared Kushner, now one of the president’s closest White House advisers.
On June 9, the Russian lawyer was sitting in the younger Mr. Trump’s office on the 25th floor of Trump Tower, just one level below the office of the future president.
Over the last several days, The New York Times has disclosed the existence of the meeting, whom it involved and what it was about. The story has unfolded as The Times has been able to confirm details of the meetings.
But the email exchanges, which were reviewed by The Times, offer a detailed unspooling of how the meeting with the Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, came about — and just how eager Donald Trump Jr. was to accept what he was explicitly told was the Russian government’s help.
Howard Dean: Ridiculous to Think Trump Knew Nothing of Sons Meeting With Russian Lawyer
Published on 10 Jul 2017
Dean should be running this party again!
Lavrov: Moscow mulls retaliatory steps in diplomatic row with U.S.
Source: Reuters
Tue Jul 11, 2017 | 7:23am EDT
Moscow is outraged that Washington has not yet resolved the issue of Russia's diplomatic property arrested in the United States, state Rossiya 24 TV channel showed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying on Tuesday.
"It is just shameful for the United States to leave this situation hanging in the mid-air," Lavrov said, adding that the outgoing administration of U.S. President Barack Obama had tried to "poison to a maximum U.S.-Russian ties" when it took the move last December.
Moscow is considering retaliatory steps, Lavrov said. He said Russia would not discuss its planned steps in public.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-usa-lavrov-idUSKBN19W15X?il=0
Gee, I guess Trump wasn't sufficiently obsequious to Putin at their G20 meeting, huh?
Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian Effort to Aid Campaign
Source: New York Times
By MATT APUZZO, JO BECKER, ADAM GOLDMAN and MAGGIE HABERMAN
WASHINGTON — Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.
The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.
Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information. It does not elaborate on the wider effort by Moscow to help the Trump campaign.
There is no evidence to suggest that the promised damaging information was related to Russian government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails. The meeting took place less than a week before it was widely reported that Russian hackers had infiltrated the committee’s servers.
But the email is likely to be of keen interest to the Justice Department and congressional investigators, who are examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government tried to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-russia-email-candidacy.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Whack.
The Deep Industry Ties of Trumps Deregulation Teams
Source: New York Times
By DANIELLE IVORY and ROBERT FATURECHI JULY 11, 2017
WASHINGTON — President Trump entered office pledging to cut red tape, and within weeks, he ordered his administration to assemble teams to aggressively scale back government regulations.
But the effort — a signature theme in Mr. Trump’s populist campaign for the White House — is being conducted in large part out of public view and often by political appointees with deep industry ties and potential conflicts.
Most government agencies have declined to disclose information about their deregulation teams. But The New York Times and ProPublica identified 71 appointees, including 28 with potential conflicts, through interviews, public records and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/business/the-deep-industry-ties-of-trumps-deregulation-teams.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Republicanism is now simply Nihilism.
Trump backtracks on cyber unit with Russia after harsh criticism
Source: Reuters
Sun Jul 9, 2017 | 10:29pm EDT
By Phil Stewart and Valerie Volcovici | WASHINGTON
U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday backtracked on his push for a cyber security unit with Russia, tweeting that he did not think it could happen, hours after his proposal was harshly criticized by Republicans who said Moscow could not be trusted.
Trump said on Twitter early on Sunday that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed on Friday forming "an impenetrable Cyber Security unit" to address issues like the risk of cyber meddling in elections.
The idea appeared to be a political non-starter. It was immediately scorned by several of Trump's fellow Republicans, who questioned why the United States would work with Russia after Moscow's alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
"It's not the dumbest idea I have ever heard but it's pretty close," Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told NBC's "Meet the Press" program.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-cyber-idUSKBN19U0P4?il=0
Actually, it IS the dumbest idea I'VE ever heard.
Vlad, the Trump Impaler
Maureen Dowd JULY 8, 2017
Why doesn’t Trump channel all that bile against the establishment and show us his purported negotiating skills by sitting down and working out an actual deal that could benefit a lot of the people in Trump country who need health care rather than backing the “mean” House and Senate plans that are going to hit rural America particularly hard?
Instead, he is down the rabbit hole with Vladimir Putin. Much of his base does not appreciate it when the American president stands in the Oval Office yucking it up with Russian diplomats, oversharing our secrets and calling the F.B.I. director he just fired “a nut job.” Even a lot of Trump voters are mystified about why Trump can’t put a lid on his id long enough to acknowledge that Russia besmirched our elections.
“It could very well have been Russia but I think it could well have been other countries, and I won’t be specific but I think a lot of people interfere,” President Trump said in Warsaw. “Nobody really knows.”
He inanely tweeted from the G-20: “Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!”
Even for a U.F.O. believer like Podesta, Trump’s claim was out of this world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/opinion/sunday/putin-trump-bannon-taxes.html?ref=opinion
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