Here's the part of the article about Trump:
President Trump, who has faced unyielding — and bipartisan — criticism after saying that there was “blame on both sides” in Charlottesville, tweeted Saturday that he wanted “to applaud the many protestors in Boston who are speaking out against bigotry and hate. Our country will soon come together as one!”Nothing in the Times about Trump's need to delete and retweet after misspelling "heal" as "heel," a topic of mirth in the lesser New York paper, The Daily News, where the headline is "Trump roasted over pair of tweets saying country must ‘heel.'"
He also wrote: “Our great country has been divided for decades. Sometimes you need protest in order to heal, & we will heal, & be stronger than ever before!”
It was an abrupt shift in tone. The president posted earlier Saturday that it appeared there were “many anti-police agitators in Boston.”
That's not just a nonsense misspelling like covfefe. "Heel" has meaning, as a tweeter named @dexter_doggie barked: “Donald Trump intends to bring you to heel."
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305 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 305 of 305Achilles:
Democrats are going to lose elections badly.
...
These people are traitors and enemies of freedom.
And liars extraordinaire, too, who along with their press, spin and wind the ball of yarns larger and tighter.
That said, can the Republicans stand on principles and do better?
A large contingent is Pro-Choice of varying degrees and kinds. A larger contingent, it seems, has overlapping and convergent interests.
"Lot's of people don't have state ID, lot's of people don't drive,
Everyone needs a photo ID to function in today's society. You know that. Every Democrat knows that.
You just want to cheat at elections.
"I put it that physicists are united by a common set of equations..."
None of which have convinced them that atmosphere has no impact on climate, but the opposite.
The physicist approach is that we can't solve it so we don't know and we're not going to know. I talk about the Navier Stokes equations and simple fluid flow in the atmosphere, but the system is thousands of times harder. It's sufficient though to know about one thing you can't do that you need to do.
The climate scientist approach is we need funding and power regardless.
mainstreet turns what she wants to deny about Nazis and Confederates into a referendum of my own personal knowledge of a local stormtrooper dead by 1930 - probably because she has no actual point and instead just wants to obscure clarity and turn ordinary rational discourse into a bunch of ad hominem appeals to authority.
As usual.
Also, The French Revolution! Or something.
Also, she has determined that ASSHOLES are what matter. At least, according to her determination of who is or is not one. (Hitler followers, I suppose, do not count. Neither, apparently, do Hitler apologists - as her taskmasters in Rome have often played the part of).
You must love it in that byzantine Ivory Tower. Keep obscuring.
The physicist approach is that we can't solve it so we don't know and we're not going to know.
There is nothing to solve, Rain Man. Atmosphere regulates climate and that's the end of the story. Different gases absorb heat differently (some not at all) and that's the end of the story.
The climate scientist approach is we need funding and power regardless.
Talk about confusing sociology with science.
I'm happy you finally googled Horst Wessel. Read up on Marat and learn something about yourself.
"You must love it in that byzantine Ivory Tower."
LOL. Ritmo don't need none of that fancy book-larnin'!
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
"None of which have convinced them that atmosphere has no impact on climate, but the opposite."
*************************************************************
It is blindingly obvious that without an atmosphere, there is no climate.
The Moon is a perfect example.
So just who is it that is making that absurd claim?
You just want to cheat at elections.
That's not what Mike Turzai told us, and the world.
No one believes you. Just stop gerrymandering, if you want credibility. Turn the districting over to independent commissions and stop dumping the voters you hate - the majority of them - into tracts of land that follow nothing but a highway for dozens of miles.
You won't do that. You want power instead. You need it. You can't live without it.
LOL. Ritmo don't need none of that fancy book-larnin'!
Not when it comes to Nazis and Confederates. They're not that hard to understand.
But I understand you identify with folks who have a long legacy of needing to humanize and overly complicate evil and dictate to you any understanding of it.
There is nothing to solve, Rain Man. Atmosphere regulates climate and that's the end of the story. Different gases absorb heat differently (some not at all) and that's the end of the story.
Alas you have to know how the system responds. Hotter means more sun-reflecting clouds or not? Ocean heat transport changes how? It's a question of system stability and there's no idea how the system works at all. You can't simulate it on a computer.
The earth has been through aeons of huge cycles in climate so apparently it's not unstable or it would have run off to one extreme or another already.
But we don't know and won't know.
So take a live and let live approach to what you don't know. Asteroid wipe-outs are similar. Men lived for thousands of years without worrying about it. Now there's power in worrying about it, just like climate change.
n.n said...
"That said, can the Republicans stand on principles and do better?"
If there is no reasonable alternative Elected Republicans will regress to the lowest necessary level.
Democrats are so pathetic and frankly dangerous to freedom right now republicans don't need any principles to beat them. Without the need they will eschew principles and chase donor money.
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
You just want to cheat at elections.
That's not what Mike Turzai told us, and the world.
*********************************
Man, there's some Olympic-class conclusion jumping, right there!
Turzai's point that voter ID would stop voter fraud.
Case in point:
http://www.theamericanmirror.com/new-hampshire-investigating-458-voter-fraud/
Hotter means more sun-reflecting clouds or not?
Probably not. Water phase changes have a much greater equilbrium, turning from cloud to rain and then evaporating. Do hotter regions have more clouds? Doesn't look like it. You're better off worrying about something that doesn't phase change into a non-heat retaining form at temperatures common on earth - like the atmospheric component CO2 or other carbon-based greenhouse gases.
Ocean heat transport changes how? It's a question of system stability and there's no idea how the system works at all. You can't simulate it on a computer.
The only reason you would need to do that is if, as with apparently ice core or other data, you have a modernist bias and feel a need to reject all historical and prehistoric data. Ignoring prehistoric data is as dumb as rejecting geologic data, though - in which case we have no basis for the age of 4 billion years for the earth and have to go back to what the bible told us about 6,000 years prior to Sir Charles Lyell and his recent predecessors in the field.
The earth has been through aeons of huge cycles in climate so apparently it's not unstable or it would have run off to one extreme or another already.
You have not defined "unstable," other than, I presume, to confuse what is or is not stable to modern human civilization with what was, hilariously, stable broadly to bacterial and/or other non-human "civilization". But there have been five great extinctions before the one we're doing now, and IIRC at least one caused by the same phenomenon we're trying out now.
The radiative effect is real, characterized in isolation in a laboratory. For purposes of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, this model was then extrapolated to global proportions, thus the need for progressive adjustments (i.e. "fudge" factors) in both time and space, past, present, and future.
With a tweet, the most amphorous, meaningless form of communication ever devised, Trump can make his enemies sit up and howl like dogs. I wonder if they even realize they're being conditioned to respond in a desired manner.
TTR,
Quite seriously, if you don't know who Horst Wessel is, then your use of "Nazi" is just a formulaic and empty epithet. You may as well be standing on a street corner shouting "racist!" at every passing car. Unlike cut'n'paste commandos like Inga and ARM, you put quite a bit of effort into your commenting. It's a shame your content isn't on par with your volume.
Cracker Emcee Activist also sounds like a Holocaust Denier with his appeals to authority to demand that unless this detail or that is recited about Nazi history, then nothing can be said about them. It's retarded and inane. How about this? I'm sure I'm nowhere near the expert authority that you are on Nazis or their history. But then, I am also not an expert authority on witchcraft or murder methods either. So congratulate yourself.
Urinating all over yourself is probably not the most impressive response, either.
You the one referencing comedy about Nazi pow camp. Real funny subject, Americans being mistreated by nazis.
You have never seen Hogan's Heroes, have you? The joke was that the Nazis were incompetent and stupid. Hogan ran a resistance cell from the camp.
I'll leave impressions to you, Cracker Emcee.
For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities.
"Not when it comes to Nazis and Confederates. They're not that hard to understand.
Yeah, I guess those hundreds of historians who devoted years to studying them were just wasting their time. Nothing useful in trying to figure why the best educated country in the world elected Hitler or why millions of Southerners who did not own slaves fought for the Confederacy.
Ritmos Book of History is like a child's Little Golden Book: "BAD! GOOD! ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW!"
It's truly entertaining to see you defend your own ignorance.
Stable means whether a perturbation grows or decays. If it grows, it takes over until some nonlinear effect saturates it, which I call hitting an extreme.
We have a data point. The earth is here and not at an extreme. That says something about the system because it's been hit with all kinds of perturbations already and none of them have taken over.
A house with a thermostat is stable too. If you light candles, it will make the house hotter, says the candle expert. He does not consider the effect on the thermostat, which is a big mistake.
Climate science does not have peer review that would pass a physicist's standards and so knows lots of stuff that it simply does not know.
"The joke was that the Nazis were incompetent and stupid."
Two things the Nazis were not were incompetent and stupid. Evil yes.
Nothing useful in trying to figure why the best educated country in the world elected Hitler or why millions of Southerners who did not own slaves fought for the Confederacy.
That wasn't the point I made but thanks for trying to play the game, anyway - as dishonest and inept as you are at it. Maybe less straw men and distractions next time. If you were less defensive of white supremacists maybe you could make clearer and more topical points or responses. But alas, you are a Trump supporter. So that's a luxury not available to you.
Climate science does not have peer review that would pass a physicist's standards and so knows lots of stuff that it simply does not know.
That's a lie too, Ornithological Rain Man. Physicists are agreed that the the CO2 humans release affects climate and to plead ENDLESS UNCERTAINTY! is as dumb as saying that you can't know for certain how much arsenic will definitively kill this person or that, so keep trying it until the informative outcome is achieved anyway. How much blunt force trauma will kill as opposed to simply maiming. UNCERTAINTY. Life and science's minor but infinite numerical uncertainties don't change the relationships between its realities or even the realities themselves, Rain Man.
Well, its a lovely summer afternoon here, too nice to waste time ridiculing the wannabe Marats of the Left. Off to lounge by the pool and read and swim and have a Margarita or two. Have fun, kids!
Lighting candles doesn't affect the temperature of the house. Why?
Mainstreet waves her surrender flag in the form of a picnic blanket. Very nice!
Come on, Ritmo. Hit that Caps Lock button. You know you want to.
Unlike you, Ritmo I have a life and friends.
The climate science division that's slightly AGW is studying what it calls natural variability.
It's sort of a compromise between disavowing the hysteria but not disavowing funding, which is probably the best you can hope for.
It's a big industry.
Hogan's Heroes is about bureaucracy, not Nazis.
American know-how. Bricolage.
I didn't care for Hogan's Heros though my father did. I already had a play for pay job.
Get Smart was the good series. The left as KAOS needs to be explored.
We don't shush here.
"Unlike you, Ritmo I have a life and friends."
LOL, I doubt that. Maybe her dog.
I have a life and friends.
Nice!
And so did many Nazis!
Crazy people always, always, resort to cap locks, their most reliable rhetorical tool.
TTR:
How would you propose to measure the temperatures of Venus and Mars, if satellites aren't an option? The trends of three planets are identical. You can disagree with that if you like.
Further, TTR, I will point out that my question is about the temperatures of three planets. Any answer you give that ignores two of the three planets about which I am asking is not responsive.
You failed in your first effort to pose anything resembling an answer.
And I don't think your secular religion, self-imposed, can allow you to acknowledge data that will call into question your dogma. Watching the truly religious operate is fascinating.
Ben Sasse said ...
"I wish more folks understood how many of the monuments now being debated are not really from the post-Civil War period as a way to remember war dead. Rather, contrary to popular understanding, many of these statues were explicitly erected as Segregation Monuments in the twentieth century, during Jim Crow, as a way of shouting – against the American Idea – that public spaces were to be whites-only spaces. Tragically, many of these monuments were erected exactly when lynchings of black Americans were being celebrated in those communities – and the timing overlap here was not accidental. (It's also worth noting that Gen. Robert E. Lee had opposed erecting Confederate Memorials because he worried, wisely, that they would become scabs of bitterness to be endlessly picked at.)"
TTR:
You convince courts to interpret the VRA differently and take away all those majority-minority districts. And as a good Leftist Collectivist I'll leave it to you to take responsibility for telling the CBC you're a Democrat and you're just carrying on the long line of Democrat efforts to disenfranchise blacks.
Change the law. Convince the courts. Tell blacks they lose their representatives in Congress. You can be done by noon on Monday with all the gerrymandering.
"Crazy people always, always, resort to cap locks, their most reliable rhetorical tool."
Yes! Just like the person who commented at 12:43 PM.
ARM
Not sure Ben Sasse is an expert on the topic but I will concede that the dates support his contention. Most of the money for the statues, however, was raised by sentimental old white ladies who wanted to honor the dead and I doubt if they gave a moment's thought to Jim Crow or segregation (a defecto state of the south). But have it your way, or Sasse's way. Tear them down. That is what the progressive movement is about. The liberal curriculum has been dismantled, the music is crass, the art is transgressive (or was when the movement began a hundred years ago), logic is not taught, philosophy is ignored, religion mocked (except the religion of peace, of course), a significant underclass permanently ensconced and unable to speak or write formal English and the idea of free speech being hollowed out as fast as possilbe. But tear down the statues. That will make it all good.
Unknown: You recognize the meaning of quotation marks around words attributed to others? You are more stupid than you are boring.
Toothless, you dropped your claim about ozone like a hot potato.
Why?
We can all agree that Democrats should not have erected all those statues.
Like cockroaches crawling around a picked-over dumpster, it's fun to watch Jay Elink, Birkel and Michael scurrying about a thread lost on their views as if there were still scraps available for the three of them to gobble down.
We can all agree that Democrats should not have erected all those statues.
Good point. Republicans should have erected them, since they're the ones defending them today.
Marat denounced Lavoisier for rejecting a paper that Marat submitted.
The problem for Leftists with just ignoring climate change is how then to kill off Big Oil and their wars? Not to mention that a 1st World carbon tax could finance a hell of a lot of social programs. Doing away with the Climatr Change issue -- politically -- will be tougher than swamp draining.
TTR:
Do you have a theory for why Venus, Earth, and Mars share the same pattern of heating and cooling according to satellite observation?
It is amazing. When confronted with a fact that is nowhere in dispute (three planets show the same pattern) that cannot be squared with a theory that is part of the religious catechism of the Leftist Collectivist, the Leftist must - without fail - ignore the undisputed and indisputable fact.
The cognitive dissonance required to hold such faith is remarkable. I have little doubt it is an unhealthy condition.
Take another thing Leftists assume: Trump and Republicans are in trouble.
To the average Leftist posting on Althouse this is not only true, but an article of faith that cannot be disputed by any "right thinking" people.
Republicans have more than 1000 major elected offices now than they did in 2009.
Meanwhile, Republicans have won special elections.
Republicans are fundraising much more effectively than Democrats.
The DNC has a similar amount of debt and cash on hand.
Republicans have more money on hand and no debt.
Democrats have many more Senate seats to defend and many of them are in states that will be difficult for Democrats to win.
Republicans have very little risk of incumbent losses in 2018.
But ask any Democrat you know if Trump and Republicans are "in trouble".
There will be no effort to understand these facts by true believers.
(Personally, I'd like a bunch of Republicans to lose and be replaced by conservatives, btw.)
Do you have a theory for why Venus, Earth, and Mars share the same pattern of heating and cooling according to satellite observation?
Can you provide links to this assertion? Because all I can find is that there might be some warming at the poles on Mars, but we really don't have enough information to know if Mars is actually warming or not. Saying it shares the same pattern is bullshit. As for Venus, I can't find any claim that Venus is warming at all, let alone that it shares the "same pattern" as warming on Earth.
Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientists Say
Kate Ravilious
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html
Global Warming on Venus in Perspective - San Jose State University
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/GWvenus.htm
Freder,
Next time you start a comment with "I know fuckall" could you please refrain from calling what you don't know bull shit? Good show.
In the 1960s and 1970s, observations of Mars and Venus showed that planets that seemed much like the Earth could have frightfully different atmospheres. The greenhouse effect had made Venus a furnace
https://history.aip.org/climate/Venus.htm
Other warming worlds
Others have pointed out anomalous warming on other worlds in our solar system.
Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University who monitors studies and news reports of asteroids, global warming and other potentially apocalyptic topics, recently quoted in his daily electronic newsletter the following from a blog called Strata-Sphere:
“Global warming on Neptune's moon Triton as well as Jupiter and Pluto, and now Mars has some [scientists] scratching their heads over what could possibly be in common with the warming of all these planets … Could there be something in common with all the planets in our solar system that might cause them all to warm at the same time?”
Peiser included quotes from recent news articles that take up other aspects of the idea.
“I think it is an intriguing coincidence that warming trends have been observed on a number of very diverse planetary bodies in our solar system,” Peiser said in an email interview. “Perhaps this is just a fluke.”
https://www.livescience.com/1349-sun-blamed-warming-earth-worlds.html
(There is, to be fair, disagreement about what it all means. But then disagreement and not consensus is the hallmark of science.)
(same article)
Recent studies have cast doubt on this relationship, however. New estimates of the total change in the brightness of the Sun during the Maunder Minimum suggest it was only fractions of a percent, and perhaps not enough to create the global cooling commonly attributed to it.
“The situation is pretty ambiguous,” said David Rind, a senior climate researcher at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has modeled the Maunder Minimum.
Based on current estimates, even if another Maunder Minimum were to occur, it might result in an average temperature decrease of about 2 degrees Fahrenheit, Rind said.
(Two degrees Fahrenheit is a lot, even in an article that pretends that an increase in solar output would not increase temperatures much. Query why a decrease in solar output could cause a two degree drop but an increase in solar output could not produce a two degree increase. Does that make sense to anybody?)
Next time you start a comment with "I know fuckall" could you please refrain from calling what you don't know bull shit? Good show.
As I clearly said I looked into it and found that there is some evidence of warming on Mars and could find nothing about warming on Venus.
As far as I can tell, unless you can provide a link, your assertion that both Mars and Venus share the same pattern of warming and cooling as Earth is bullshit.
Fullmoon: Did you even bother to read past the National Geographic article headline? As for the second article, it doesn't say that Venus is warming in a similar pattern to the Earth, so it is irrelevant.
So now you are admitting your original assertion was bullshit?
Fullmoon: Did you even bother to read past the National Geographic article headline? As for the second article, it doesn't say that Venus is warming in a similar pattern to the Earth, so it is irrelevant.
8/20/17, 3:58 PM
No, what did it say? Is venus warming, or not? Mars? Are we all gonna die, still?
"...Neptune's moon Triton as well as Jupiter and Pluto, and now Mars..."
Freder,
Can you concentrate on what those four celestial bodies have in common with Earth?
Go ahead.
Freder, forgive me for my lack of fear. Walked my neighborhood today. Filled my plastic WalMart bag(ten cents, used to be free) with oranges, apricots, lemons, limes and green apples. All growing in separate front yard trees. Tomatoes and zucchini in my back yard, avocados in back yard across the street. Sun is shining, nothing has changed.
What is the worst thing you have personally experienced re climate change?
FullMoon,
Do you mind if I answer for Freder? Good. Thanks.
Freder personally witnessed when George W. Bush used the White House weather machine to attack New Orleans. It was awful.
What is the worst thing you have personally experienced re climate change?
Hurricane Katrina.
Birkel said...
FullMoon,
Do you mind if I answer for Freder? Good. Thanks.
Freder personally witnessed when George W. Bush used the White House weather machine to attack New Orleans. It was awful.
8/20/17, 4:15 PM
That was different, because "George Bush hates black people".
See? Without irony Freder Frederson beclowns himself.
Another Down Year in USA For Tornadoes & Major Hurricanes
http://www.climatedepot.com/2016/12/06/another-down-year-in-usa-for-major-hurricanes-tornadoes/
Over the weekend and on Tuesday Trump abdicated his moral responsibility as President. He can't reclaim it now. Trump the Baloney.
Labor day hurricane 1935 and Camille 1969 both more powerful than Katrina.
Over the weekend and on Tuesday Trump abdicated his moral responsibility as President
It is the President's moral responsibility to pit people against each other based on breathless news reports? To tell us that it is OK to hate certain groups. Punch a Nazi. Punch a Hippie. He isn't our Pastor. Our Therapist.
It isn't his job to pit Americans against each other. Obama seemed to think that was his job, but it isn't.
I think he took a rather neutral position in that violence is not good, not acceptable and that the blame for these riots lies on both/all sides.
That you don't like it is just tough titties.
Blogger Brookzene said...
Over the weekend and on Tuesday Trump abdicated his moral responsibility as President. He can't reclaim it now. Trump the Baloney.
8/20/17, 4:24 PM
Pussy grabber divorced twice Trump never aspired to moral authority. You are stupid, again. His job is to hire the right people to bring jobs to poor unemployed and to provide school choice for poor kids. Your kind oppose that, god only know why
Leftists have preached and preached that a venusian nightmare is just around the corner; instead they've given us a venereal one.
I cannot wait to read the comments about Trump disbanding a climate change study group.
Comedy gold.
To tell us that it is OK to hate certain groups. Punch a Nazi. Punch a Hippie. He isn't our Pastor. Our Therapist.
It isn't his job to pit Americans against each other.
Right. The groups that long for the days when they could disunite America along lines of racial supremacy and those that oppose that should be seen as having equally legitimate positions in the eyes of the American president. What a crock. Methinks someone didn't read the job description too closely.
Both Bidet Birkel and FullMoon's articles date back to 2007 - more than ten years of time after which to find evidence for bolstering the suggestions (not strong assertions) made in those articles, evidence which had obviously not been found or he would have posted something more recent. How fucking desperate. What's next? A paper from 1600 on how phlogiston filled the ether and made combustion possible? Yes, let's throw out that whole oxygen theory. Get the fuck out of here.
TTR said..
"How fucking desperate. What's next?"
Since you want to discuss global warming it is time to crush you again.
What is the correlation coefficient of the relationship between CO2 and Temperature? You have 4 billion years of evidence. What is your confidence interval?
Show us what you have ritmo. I expect you will embarrass yourself just like last time. Now you can't use studies that are 10 years old as evidence? You don't seem to understand how science or the scientific method work.
And yes, people have done the work. You can probably figure out why you haven't heard of it.
I have a life and friends.
Ritmo: Nice!
And so did many Nazis!
8/20/17, 1:28 PM
And so do most people whether Nazis or not.
But not you.
It's not difficult to understand why.
I've actually got a paper written by the ancient Aztecs on how solar eclipses are a manifestation of the moon god eating the sky god, before barfing him back out.
And you call yourself a scientist! What's the t-test on your so-called "newer science" for the explanation YOU provide?!!!
Since you want to discuss global warming it is time to crush you again.
Oh, you're such a knowledgeable little nitwit.
It's a wonder you don't make a living doing this science stuff.
Confidence intervals. Is that your big word of the day? You think you're a genius because some speculative bullshit that never went anywhere from ten years ago was actually.... reported! Oh wow. Yippee!
Yes, science never has any dead ends or cold leads like that. Ever. What a brainiac you are. I expect you will be receiving your Nobel in the mail by next Wednesday.
What's the confidence interval for human evolution?
All the creationists trip me up on that one.
Evolution can't predict which species will evolve. Let alone when.
This means it's obviously false.
Earth has warmed a little and most people worldwide are better off than their parents and grandparents. The people benefiting the most are those on the margins of steppe to desert and those on the margins between ice and tundra.
"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."
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html
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.
Climates differ and plants vary, but the basic rule for staple cereal crops grown at optimal temperature is that for every degree of warming, yields decline by 10 percent. Some estimates run as high as 15 or even 17 percent. Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, we may have as many as 50 percent more people to feed and 50 percent less grain to give them. And proteins are worse: It takes 16 calories of grain to produce just a single calorie of hamburger meat, butchered from a cow that spent its life polluting the climate with methane farts.
Pollyannaish plant physiologists will point out that the cereal-crop math applies only to those regions already at peak growing temperature, and they are right — theoretically, a warmer climate will make it easier to grow corn in Greenland. But as the pathbreaking work by Rosamond Naylor and David Battisti has shown, the tropics are already too hot to efficiently grow grain, and those places where grain is produced today are already at optimal growing temperature — which means even a small warming will push them down the slope of declining productivity. And you can’t easily move croplands north a few hundred miles, because yields in places like remote Canada and Russia are limited by the quality of soil there; it takes many centuries for the planet to produce optimally fertile dirt.
Drought might be an even bigger problem than heat, with some of the world’s most arable land turning quickly to desert. Precipitation is notoriously hard to model, yet predictions for later this century are basically unanimous: unprecedented droughts nearly everywhere food is today produced. By 2080, without dramatic reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought, much worse than the American dust bowl ever was. The same will be true in Iraq and Syria and much of the rest of the Middle East; some of the most densely populated parts of Australia, Africa, and South America; and the breadbasket regions of China. None of these places, which today supply much of the world’s food, will be reliable sources of any. As for the original dust bowl: The droughts in the American plains and Southwest would not just be worse than in the 1930s, a 2015 NASA study predicted, but worse than any droughts in a thousand years — and that includes those that struck between 1100 and 1300, which “dried up all the rivers East of the Sierra Nevada mountains” and may have been responsible for the death of the Anasazi civilization.
Remember, we do not live in a world without hunger as it is. Far from it: Most estimates put the number of undernourished at 800 million globally. In case you haven’t heard, this spring has already brought an unprecedented quadruple famine to Africa and the Middle East; the U.N. has warned that separate starvation events in Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Yemen could kill 20 million this year alone.
Climate Plagues
What happens when the bubonic ice melts?
Rock, in the right spot, is a record of planetary history, eras as long as millions of years flattened by the forces of geological time into strata with amplitudes of just inches, or just an inch, or even less. Ice works that way, too, as a climate ledger, but it is also frozen history, some of which can be reanimated when unfrozen. There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years — in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice.
The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million — about 5 percent of the world’s population and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.
Experts caution that many of these organisms won’t actually survive the thaw and point to the fastidious lab conditions under which they have already reanimated several of them — the 32,000-year-old “extremophile” bacteria revived in 2005, an 8 million-year-old bug brought back to life in 2007, the 3.5 million–year–old one a Russian scientist self-injected just out of curiosity — to suggest that those are necessary conditions for the return of such ancient plagues. But already last year, a boy was killed and 20 others infected by anthrax released when retreating permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the bacteria at least 75 years earlier; 2,000 present-day reindeer were infected, too, carrying and spreading the disease beyond the tundra.
What concerns epidemiologists more than ancient diseases are existing scourges relocated, rewired, or even re-evolved by warming. The first effect is geographical. Before the early-modern period, when adventuring sailboats accelerated the mixing of peoples and their bugs, human provinciality was a guard against pandemic. Today, even with globalization and the enormous intermingling of human populations, our ecosystems are mostly stable, and this functions as another limit, but global warming will scramble those ecosystems and help disease trespass those limits as surely as Cortés did. You don’t worry much about dengue or malaria if you are living in Maine or France. But as the tropics creep northward and mosquitoes migrate with them, you will. You didn’t much worry about Zika a couple of years ago, either.
As it happens, Zika may also be a good model of the second worrying effect — disease mutation. One reason you hadn’t heard about Zika until recently is that it had been trapped in Uganda; another is that it did not, until recently, appear to cause birth defects. Scientists still don’t entirely understand what happened, or what they missed. But there are things we do know for sure about how climate affects some diseases: Malaria, for instance, thrives in hotter regions not just because the mosquitoes that carry it do, too, but because for every degree increase in temperature, the parasite reproduces ten times faster. Which is one reason that the World Bank estimates that by 2050, 5.2 billion people will be reckoning with it.
From the 3:54 PM comment above
Two degrees Fahrenheit is a lot, even in an article that pretends that an increase in solar output would not increase temperatures much. Query why a decrease in solar output could cause a two degree drop but an increase in solar output could not produce a two degree increase. Does that make sense to anybody?
Two degrees Fahrenheit is a lot, even in an article that pretends that an increase in solar output would not increase temperatures much. Query why a decrease in solar output could cause a two degree drop but an increase in solar output could not produce a two degree increase. Does that make sense to anybody?
Not at all. Incredible that no one's obviously looked into this. What a genius you are! All that data, all those scientists, and no one's bothered to look into it. Hooray for citizen scientist-wanna-be's!
This is a public-service announcement. If you're tired of reading the tired old leftist tripe spouted by TTR, Inga/Unknown, and all the other usual suspects, get the KillFile extension for your browser. You can click a button next to the name of any commenter and get instant relief. It makes reading the comments here far more enjoyable.
TTR
I know you're peevish but you do understand I am criticizing the reporting, right?
Luckily for everyone else, Mark Jones, your lack of comments prevents them from having to read anything to do with you at all.
No, I didn't know that, BIrkel.
You see, TTR, in the article they write two degrees down is no big deal. That decrease would be caused by the sun, see?
I'm the same article, TTR, they suggest two degrees warming represents calamity, somehow. (The IPCC says two degrees C over 100 years will be calamitous and can only be stopped by redistributing wealth.)
No explanation for why two F colder is totes kewl and two degrees C warmer over 100 years is WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE!!!
Thing is, I don't normally fill all the blanks for people. I could but I charge.
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
Since you want to discuss global warming it is time to crush you again.
Oh, you're such a knowledgeable little nitwit.
It's a wonder you don't make a living doing this science stuff.
Confidence intervals. Is that your big word of the day? You think you're a genius because some speculative bullshit that never went anywhere from ten years ago was actually.... reported! Oh wow. Yippee!
Yes, science never has any dead ends or cold leads like that. Ever. What a brainiac you are. I expect you will be receiving your Nobel in the mail by next Wednesday.
Poor TTR.
First he has to explain why it is ok to call everyone he disagrees with Nazi's and have thugs beat them all up.
Then he gets into an argument he can't win or really even participate in over global warming.
Not hearing much about that Russian Collusion story. Or the DNC IT scandal. We will very soon though.
A lot of democrats going to jail.
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.
So...eggs, omelettes. How do I get the catalytic converters off my truck?
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