Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

WILDFIRES IN HAWAII killing over 100 people. Antarctic sea ice hitting record lows. This past July breaking records as the hottest month in known history.

All these purported “events” and more have been drilled into the heads of every American. Except — none of it is actually happening. Nothing about global warming has ever happened. It is all a hoax concocted by China.



Many people, when forced to confront these facts, will respond “wrong” or “no” or “Do you consume enough iodized salt to prevent ‘brain collapse’?”



Let’s take a quick look at the evidence that Donald Trump was right about this all along — and that in fact the Chinese government has been fooling us for the past 160 years.

1863
The Civil War was raging in the United States; Abraham Lincoln was president. And the Irish physicist John Tyndall proposed in a paper for the the London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science that variations in atmospheric composition could cause changes in the climate.

China was then ruled by Emperor Muzong of the Qing Dynasty. In 1863, he was a devious, far-sighted 7-year-old. A message from him to Tyndall leaked from the Chinese imperial archives shows him directing Tyndall to concoct a false theory about weather — but to be sure to “make it sound science-y.”

In a separate memo, Muzong wrote a note in his own hand that roughly translates to “I adore climate misinformation and look forward to deceiving the West for 100 more years in collaboration with our Occidental lackeys, the Biden Crime Family.”

1896
At the end of the 19th century, the same publication, the Philosophical Magazine, ran a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius titled “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature on the Ground.” Except Arrhenius never existed: He and his paper were entirely fabricated by the Qing Dynasty, then in its final dotage.

In retrospect, it’s obvious they were yanking our chain, since Svante Arrhenius is not a real name. Then in 1903, “he” won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, illustrating just how deep this rabbit hole goes.

1912
After an extremely hot year, Popular Mechanics published an article in 1912 titled “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate — What Scientists Predict for the Future.” It stated that the effect of burning coal on the temperature “may be considerable in a few centuries.”

But who then owned Popular Mechanics? Would you be surprised to learn it was China? Perhaps you would, because there’s absolutely no evidence for this. But come on: The Republic of China had just been established following the Xinhai Revolution, and Job No. 1 for them as they consolidated power across a vast territory would obviously be undermining the industrial development of the United States.

Also, consider that the Chinese mandarins carrying out this plot would probably think that Americans had small heads and were asleep and easy to deceive. Chillingly enough, “Popular Mechanics” is an anagram for “Microcephalus Nap.”

1956
The Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass published a paper sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research titled “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change.”

Several years previously, the Chinese Communist Party had won the country’s civil war and established the People’s Republic of China. The little-noticed Chapter 2, Section VII of the new Chinese Constitution reads: “All aspects of society shall be continuously revolutionized, except like all previous Chinese governments, we’ll keep hoaxing Americans about global warming. One good way to do this is via our control of the U.S. Navy.” Then it says, “Don’t put this part on the internet.”

1969
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then serving in the Nixon administration, wrote a memo for his superiors warning about global warming. It could, he stated, cause “apocalyptic change. … [It] could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York.”

By then, China was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, following Mao Zedong’s May 16 Notification. A top secret annex to the document reads, “The objective of this great struggle is to obliterate representatives of the anti-Party and anti-Socialist bourgeoisie. But maybe we can make an exception for the ones like Moynihan. He does such great work.”

1977 – 2003
For a period of 26 years starting in the 1970s, scientists at Exxon Mobil produced internal studies that purport to estimate the impact of fossil fuels on global warming.

However, an examination of Exxon’s corporate archives shows repeated references by top executives to “those graphs and math stuff we fabricated at the behest of our natural ideological allies at the Chinese Communist Party. By doing this we will please our masters in Peking [Beijing] and also make this company less profitable. So a double win.”

Today
That brings us to now, and a new front launched by the Chinese government. Recently, homeowners have reported Ring security camera footage of legions of Chinese citizens sneaking into their homes at night. Meanwhile, high-resolution photographs taken by U.S. spy satellites show billions of intentionally defective thermometers being pumped out of factories in Sichuan. Put it together and you’ll realize they’re secretly replacing your red-white-and-blue thermometers with these CCP thermometers that look exactly the same, except they make us think it’s 20 degrees hotter than it actually is.

What can one do in the face of this monstrous Marxist fraud?

First, do your own research. Remember that all human institutions are corrupt, and thus you should only trust long, barely coherent threads by anonymous strangers on Twitter.

Second, gather together with the like-minded, ideally at a remote location that could be referred to as a “compound.” Become conscious of the many traitors in your midst, and begin plotting to eliminate them.

Third, look into the moon landing. Did it really happen, or did China pay Stanley Kubrick to film it on a soundstage? Did Kubrick also direct the following moon landings, or were they done by journeymen and Kubrick just executive produced?

Fourth and finally, consider unloading that seaside timeshare, just in case Trump and Sen. Marsha Blackburn turn out to be wrong.

The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
Jeff Goodell
Little, Brown (2023)

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration
Jake Bittle
Simon & Schuster (2023)

For authors of books on climate, this has been a wonderful year. Whatever they may warn about, it’s happening to someone every day: floods in Beijing and Nova Scotia, droughts in British Columbia and California, wildfires from Alberta to Maui, stupefying heat waves in Arizona and Chile (where it’s supposed to be winter).

Two such books deserve close attention. Both are by excellent reporters who see the telling details. Both argue that inequality makes some of us far more vulnerable than others. And both explore aspects of climate change that will bring political and economic upheavals very soon — around the world and here in B.C. They leave it to us to respond to those upheavals.

Jeff Goodell, author of The Heat Will Kill You First, has been writing articles and books on climate change for years. In this wide-ranging book, he shows us we have evolved to cope with heat, first by developing sweat glands and then by losing body hair to make sweating more efficient. But we have now unleashed heat on a scale not seen on this planet in a million years, and evolution would be too slow to save us. We are also likely too slow to save ourselves.

An early and powerful chapter deals with Jonathan Gerrish and his wife Ellen Chung, a California couple who went for a hike with their baby daughter Miju and their dog Oski on a hot day in the Sierra Nevada foothills. They were all dead within hours, victims of heat stroke on an exposed, unshaded trail.

“Broadly speaking,” Goodell writes, “there are two kinds of heat stroke: classic and exertion. Classic heat stroke hits the very young, the elderly, the overweight and people suffering from classic conditions like diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.... Exertional heat stroke, on the other hand, often hits the young and fit. Exercise drastically accelerates temperature rise.”

‘Your body unravels’

Goodell describes how the heart beats faster to circulate the blood and try to cool down (which is why so many of the 600-plus fatalities in our 2021 heat dome were from cardiac arrest). “At body temperature of 105 to 106 degrees,” Goodell goes on, “your limbs are convulsed by seizures. At 107 and above, your cells themselves literally break down or ‘denature.’ Cell membranes… literally melt. Inside your cells, the proteins essential to life… unfold and the bonds that keep the structures together break.... At the most fundamental level, your body unravels.” Something like that happened to the Gerrish-Chung family.

Another chapter describes Harold Goodman, a terrible driver who collected expensive cars. He could afford to, because he’d built a company in Houston, Texas that made cheap, reliable air conditioners. Thanks to him, Houston and countless other cities in the U.S. South and Southwest could actually grow and prosper.

But air conditioning has been a Pyrrhic victory in the climate war: as Goodell observes, it creates intense demand for electricity, often from fossil fuels, and it just moves the heat outside. Worse yet, it exposes the poor to greater danger.

He describes the case of Stephanie Pullman, a 72-year-old retiree in Phoenix living on a pension of less than $1,000 a month. In the summer of 2018, Arizona Public Service cut off her electricity because she owed $51.84. A week later, Pullman’s daughter found her mother dead in her bed, a victim of heat exposure. An inquiry revealed that APS had cut off its customers 39,000 times between May and September of that year.

In effect, Goodell argues, “the future of Phoenix and Chennai, and many cities like them, is a kind of temperature apartheid, where some people chill in a bubble of cool and others simmer in debilitating heat.”

The critical element in Goodell’s book is not the statistics or the authorities he cites, but the people he writes about. We can identify with the Gerrish-Chung family, with Stephanie Pullman, with John Orlowski, who goes into the Arizona desert to leave water and food for illegal migrants, and a host of other people dealing right now the heat. Knowing something about them and their backgrounds makes them — and their situation — far more real.

Roast or go broke

If the heat doesn’t kill you first, it’s likely to bankrupt you. That’s the thesis of Jake Bittle’s excellent book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. Bittle looks at communities that have suffered disasters from various effects of climate extremes: fire, flood, hurricanes, drought, rising sea levels.

Like Goodell, Bittle finds humans have often contributed to the disasters; like Goodell, he also finds the poor and marginalized suffer more than the affluent and powerful. And like Goodell, he shows us specific people and places.

Hurricane Floyd put Lincoln City, a Black suburb of Kinston, North Carolina, under five feet of water. It was not the first time. The Federal Emergency Management Agency offered to pay residents for the value of their property if they would move away. Most did, though it was agonizing to leave homes that had been theirs for generations.

Ironically, Kinston fell on hard times after its Black community scattered, but a former Lincoln City resident, Eartha Mumford, organized annual reunions of the Lincoln City diaspora. Thousands fondly remembered their old community, and the gatherings “began to provide the city of Kinston with a much-needed boost to its lagging tourism industry.”

MétéoSuisse said the zero-degree line – the altitude at which the temperature falls below freezing, considered a key meteorological marker particularly in mountainous regions – was measured at 5,298 metres overnight.

The figure, which registered by a weather balloon flown from Payerne in western Switzerland, constituted “a record since monitoring began in 1954”, the service said, and surpassed the previous high of 5,184 metres that was “only set in July last year”.

July was the hottest month in modern times. Now, August is shaping up to be a month of extremes.

In the United States alone, a tropical storm swept across the Southwest, another struck Texas, Maui burned, and a blistering heat dome sat atop the middle of the country. In India, torrential rains triggered deadly landslides, Morocco and Japan hit new heat records, and southern Europe braced for another scorching heat wave.

Those extremes have also brought high-stakes tests for public officials: Where public alerts and education worked, death and destruction were minimized. Where they didn’t, the results were catastrophic. Maui has so far recorded more than 100 deaths from the blaze that started Aug. 8, and that number is projected to rise.

Not all of the extreme weather events can be immediately attributed to climate change. But they reflect the hazards that much of the world needs to prepare for as El Niño, a natural weather pattern that can play out over several years, aggravates the weather extremes fueled by the burning of fossil fuels.

Compared with the start of the industrial age 150 years ago, the average global temperature is at least 1.2 degrees higher, and rising still, as the world continues to burn more fossil fuels, the principal cause of global warming. Scientists have repeatedly warned of more heat, wildfires, droughts and intense rainfall with every degree of future warming. For local communities and their government officials, that means having to adapt to sometimes unpredictable hazards and making hard choices about where and how to rebuild after disaster strikes.

The Union of Concerned Scientists said that 103.7 million Americans live in areas that are under extreme weather alerts on Tuesday.

“Twenty years from now, a summer like this is going to feel like a mild summer,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles, in an online briefing Monday afternoon. “In terms of incredibly frenetic pace of global extremes we are seeing this summer, in terms of temperatures and precipitation, that’s only going to get worse as the climate continues to warm.”

Weather records have been broken all summer long around the world. Southern Europe saw record hot days in July, so much so that one Italian newspaper likened it to a “tongue of fire.” Beijing recorded more extreme-heat days this year than ever before since record-keeping began. The fires that raged across the breadth of Canada in July eclipsed annual fire records. In the Florida Keys, sea-surface water temperatures were the hottest on record, climbing into the 90s.

Then, on Sunday came Hurricane Hilary. It dropped a record 13 inches of rain in 24 hours on the Mexican state of Baja California Sur before turning into a tropical storm, barreling up the bathwater-hot Gulf of California and bringing record rainfall to Southern California.

Tropical storms are rare for this part of the world. But in a hotter climate, scientists said, California can expect to get more extreme rains. Southern California got a taste of that earlier this year, with a parade of powerful storms that drenched the region.

“Regardless of the source of the rain, we need to prepare for a lot more of it, even in our drought-prone state,” said Morgan E. O’Neill, an assistant professor of atmospheric science at Stanford University.

By and large, the two biggest cities in the region, Los Angeles and San Diego, escaped deaths and major damage, according to local and state officials Monday. It will take several days to thoroughly assess the effects on smaller towns and rural communities in desert and mountain areas in Southern California. Homes flooded in and around Palm Springs, parts of Riverside County were knee-high in mud and Death Valley National Park was closed, its 3.4 million acres of desert wilderness littered with debris from flash floods.

Speaking at a news conference in Los Angeles Monday morning, Paul Krekorian, the City Council President, urged city residents to look ahead and get ready for the next disaster. “Use this as your opportunity to consider what can you and your family do better to prepare for the next incident,” he said. “Because we know there will be one,”

The contrast with Maui is striking.

The wildfires centered around the historic town of Lahaina are one of the country’s deadliest disasters. Local officials are under mounting scrutiny for failing to activate the island’s network of emergency sirens.

A spokesman for the state’s emergency management agency said other alert systems were activated, including on cellphones, but many residents said they didn’t receive warnings. Damage to cellphone and electric lines played a role. Ten days after the fire, Maui’s emergency management director resigned.

Maui’s fire risks have been steadily growing.

Hawaii overall has been getting less rainfall over the past 30 years. More than a third of Maui county has been classified as severe or moderate drought this summer. Invasive grasses, left unmanaged, have become ready fuel for fires. Average temperatures have risen, as they have worldwide, drying out vegetation even faster. In short, Hawaii is more flammable.

Maui County cited those growing wildfire risks when it sued oil companies for what it called a “coordinated, multifront effort” to conceal that the burning of their products fuels climate extremes. A spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group, has called the litigation “meritless.” The case is pending.

Burning of fossil fuels made fires at least twice as likely, and the fire-prone weather at least 20% more intense, study shows.

The conditions that caused Canada’s extreme spate of wildfires this year, which resulted in parts of the US and Canada to be blanketed in toxic smoke, were made at least twice as likely due to the human-caused climate crisis, scientists have found.

Antarctica is likely warming at almost twice the rate of the rest of the world and faster than climate change models are predicting, with potentially far-reaching implications for global sea level rise, according to a scientific study.

Scientists analysed 78 Antarctic ice cores to recreate temperatures going back 1,000 years and found the warming across the continent was outside what could be expected from natural swings.

14 September 2023
WASHINGTON — Earth’s land masses have a higher chance of becoming wetter than drier as temperatures rise. In a new study, researchers found that co-occurring precipitation and heat extremes will become more frequent, severe and widespread under climate change, more so than dry and hot conditions.

When wet-hot conditions strike, heat waves first dry out the soil and reduce its ability to absorb water. Subsequent rainfall has a harder time penetrating the soil and instead runs along the surface, contributing to flooding, landslides and crop failures.

“These compound climate extremes have attracted considerable attention in recent decades due to their disproportionate pressures on the agricultural, industrial and ecosystems sectors — much more than individual extreme events alone,” said Haijiang Wu, a researcher at China’s Northwest A&F University and the lead author of the study. The research was published in Earth’s Future, AGU’s journal for interdisciplinary research on the past, present and future of our planet and its inhabitants.

The team used a series of climate models to project compound climate extremes by the end of the century if carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise.

They found that while some regions of the world will become drier as temperatures rise — such as South Africa, the Amazon and parts of Europe — many regions, including the eastern United States, eastern and southern Asia, Australia and central Africa will receive more precipitation. Wet-hot extremes will also cover a larger area and be more severe than dry-hot extremes.

In the future, wet-hot extremes will become more likely because the atmosphere’s capacity to hold moisture increases by 6% to 7% for every 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature. As Earth gets hotter, the warmer atmosphere will hold more water vapor, meaning more water will be available to fall as precipitation.

The regions likely to be hit hard by wet-hot extremes host many heavily populated areas that are already prone to geologic hazards, such as landslides and mudflows, and produce many of the world’s crops. An increase in severe rainfall and heatwaves could cause more landslides that threaten local infrastructure, while floods and extreme heat could destroy crops.

Many parts of the world are already experiencing wet-hot extremes. In western Europe, climatic conditions led to deadly flooding in 2021. That summer, record high temperatures dried out the soil. Soon after, heavy rainfall poured across the parched soil’s surface and triggered massive landslides and flash floods that washed away entire houses, claiming more than 200 lives.

The increase in wet-hot extremes, like the conditions of the European floods of 2021, creates a need for climate adaptation approaches that take wet-hot conditions into consideration.

“Given the fact that the risk of compound wet-hot extremes in a warming climate is larger than compound dry-hot extremes, these wet-hot extremes should be included in risk management strategies,” Wu said.

While heat waves and heavy rainfall can be dangerous on their own, their combined impacts can be even more devastating. “If we overlook the risk of compound wet-hot extremes and fail to take sufficient early warning, the impacts on water-food-energy security would be unimaginable,” Wu said.

Abstract

Marine heatwaves (MHWs) are becoming increasingly common, with devastating ecosystem impacts. However, MHW understanding has almost exclusively relied on sea surface temperature with limited knowledge about their subsurface characteristics. Here we estimate global MHWs from the surface to 2,000 m depth, covering the period 1993–2019, and explore biodiversity exposure to their effects. We find that MHWs are typically more intense in the subsurface at 50–200 m and their duration increases up to twofold with depth, although with large spatial variability linked to different oceanographic conditions. Cumulative intensity (a thermal stress proxy) was highest in the upper 250 m, exposing subsurface biodiversity to MHW effects. This can be particularly concerning for up to 22% of the ocean, where high cumulative intensity overlapped the warm range edge of species distributions, thus being more sensitive to thermal stress. Subsurface MHWs can hence drive biodiversity patterns, with consequent effects on ecological interactions and ecosystem processes.