Stephan: For months now the whole country has been focused on the Covid-19 pandemic and the startling incompetence of Trump and his fellow grifters. But earth itself all this time has been following different trends, all centered around climate change. And the message coming out of those trends is just getting worse and worse. And once again it is a story with one overriding theme: water is destiny, something I have been telling you for almost four decades. The Republican Party and certainly its "Dear Leader" Trump doesn't believe in climate change and, like the pandemic, as a result we are woefully unprepared for what is coming. But the scientific truth is clear: Either too much water or too little water is going to shape the future of every nation, and every person living in those nations So, today, I am focusing on that. We'll start with aridification.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain
Discussions of drought often center on the lack of precipitation. But among climate scientists, the focus is shifting to include the growing role that warming temperatures are playing as potent drivers of greater aridity and drought intensification.
Increasing aridity is already a clear trend across the western United States, where anthropogenic climate warming is contributing to declining river flows, drier soils, widespread tree death, stressed agricultural crops, catastrophic wildfires and protracted droughts, according to the authors of a Commentary article published online May 19 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
At the same time, human-caused warming is also driving increased aridity eastward across North America, with no end in sight, according to climate scientists Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Michigan and Bradley Udall of Colorado State University.
“The impact of warming on the West’s river flows, soils, and forests is now unequivocal,” write Overpeck, dean of the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability, and Udall, senior water and climate scientist at Colorado State. “There is a clear longer-term trend toward greater aridification, a trend that only climate action […]
Stephan: The Magas of South Carolina will probably vote true to form in November, which is to say they will vote entirely on their emotions and prejudices with no reference to any actual facts, and will thus elect morons like Lindsey Graham. Earth doesn't care, and has its own agenda. Because of the stupidity and greed of humans like Graham and the damage they have done to the Earth's meta-systems, South Carolina is rapidly going to become a very different state. Boohoo Magas.
Aerial view of the Sampit River in South Carolina. As saltwater encroaches due to rising sea levels and climate change, the vast cypress forests have been ravaged by high salinity, leaving only skeletons of a once thriving freshwater system. Credit: Mac Stone/ProvidedMac Stone
The oldest living tree in the eastern continent has stood for more than 2,000 years in a cypress swamp just over the North Carolina border.
Seventy miles to the south, young cypress trees are dying from salt intrusion on the Sampit River in Georgetown.
The contrast is just that stark between how the vibrant South Carolina coast looks today and how it could largely look not so far into the future — skeletal patches of drowning seascape and dying wetlands.
The outer barrier islands in the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge already are getting overrun by tides. The sand needed to create new islands and beaches has been blocked by lake dams, coastal groins and jetties.
The 400,000 or so acres of marsh in the South Carolina estuaries — the miles of sweeping grasses that are a vital water […]
Stephan: Here we see yet another Maga state that is going to be pulled out of its Trumpian racist fantasies. I expect Louisiana will vote for Trump and his climate change denial in November, even as the Earth changes the ground beneath their feet. We will see how these Maga states deal with that. This article may be considered the Best Case Scenario, and I do not think it is accurate. Schwartz' Law says when it comes to accounts of climate change the reality will come quicker and be much worse than predicted.
So what will Louisiana do over the next couple of decades? My prediction is Louisiana will become even more than it currently is less a state and more a third world country, and they will look to the federal government, which will use the largesse of the Blue states to bail them out. All these Red states already get more back than they put into the federal treasury.
As a nation just as with the pandemic we are idling away the time with our leader playing golf instead of planning. It is all in the prep, and we are unprepared.
Aerial view of Louisiana wetlands Credit: Times-Picayune
Because of increasing rates of sea level rise fueled by global warming, the remaining 5,800 square miles of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands in the Mississippi River delta will disappear. The only question is how quickly it will happen, says a new peer-reviewed study published Friday in Science Advances.
“This is a major threat not only to one of the ecologically richest environments of the United States but also for the 1.2 million inhabitants and associated economic assets that are surrounded by Mississippi Delta marshland,” the report concludes.
The new study reviewed the rates of sea-level rise that caused wetlands to disappear along Louisiana’s coast during the 8,500-year history of the current Mississippi River delta. It found that at rates of relative sea level rise — the combination of rising water and ground subsidence — of between 6 and 9 millimeters a year , ancient coastal marshes would turn into open water within 50 years. At rates of 3 millimeters a year, it would take a few centuries.
The globally averaged rate of sea-level rise between 2006 and […]
Stephan: The thing about climate change is these forces care not a whit about national borders. Indeed the conceits of national borders work against humanity's ability to remediate what we have done to produce climate change. Will humanity be intelligent enough to recognize that the only way to deal with climate change is to cooperate and deal with it on a planetary level? With enflamed nationalism a growing trend probably not.
Siberian temperature map
Siberia is experiencing record high temperatures that are nearly 40 degrees Fahrenheit above average. To put things in perspective, The Washington Post writes that some areas are hotter than Washington right now. Snow cover is disappearing, sea ice is melting, and in 2020 fashion, we now have “zombie blazes” — really intense fires that are raging.
Just to show you how hot it’s been in some areas of Siberia, several stations in North Central Siberia recorded temperatures that climbed well into the 80s! That is south Louisiana temperatures. Khantanga, a town that is located north of the Arctic Circle, recorded 78 degrees Fahrenheit on Friday. The normal temperature is 32 degrees.
Image courtesy Berkeley Earth
Regarding those zombie fires, Russian officials are expecting that the summer will be the hottest the region has ever seen. They think there will be an unusually destructive fire season — last year, the fires burned 7 million acres of Siberian forests. So far this year, 1.5 million acres have burned.
Regarding the sea ice melting in the Kara Sea, Labe noted that it recently reached a […]
HAL BRANDS and JAKE SULLIVAN, Henry A. Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies / Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. - Foreign Policy
Stephan: Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo are so outclassed by the Chinese leadership, I am not sure they even understand what is happening geopolitically. I have been following this for years and have been amazed at how amateurish the Trump administration's choices have been. People who do understand what is going on see a major power realignment occurring amongst the world's nations, with the United States being greatly diminished. Here is a good assessment of the situation, one in which we are all, one way or another, going to be affected.
Be clear, this is not going to be like the Cold War with the Soviets. Russia had no trade power -- did you ever know anyone who bought a Russian laundry machine -- and, even today, the Russian economy is little more than oil-based, and that is a declining economic sector. China, in contrast, comes into its power struggle with the U.S. as a major trade partner with all the nations of the world. And then there is the trillion-dollar debt the U.S. owes China.
Xi Jinping’s China is displaying a superpower’s ambition. Only a few years ago, many American observers still hoped that China would reconcile itself to a supporting role in the liberal international order or would pose—at most—a challenge to U.S. influence in the Western Pacific. The conventional wisdom was that China would seek an expanded regional role—and a reduced U.S. role—but would defer to the distant future any global ambitions. Now, however, the signs that China is gearing up to contest America’s global leadership are unmistakable, and they are ubiquitous.
There is the naval shipbuilding program, which put more vessels to sea between 2014 and 2018 than the total number of ships in the German, Indian, Spanish, and British navies combined. There is Beijing’s bid to dominate high-tech industries that will determine the future distribution of economic and military power. There is the campaign to control the crucial waterways off China’s coast, as well as reported plans to create a chain of bases and logistical facilities farther afield. There are the systematic efforts to refine methods of converting […]
