‘Trump Effect’ the Future

April 26, 2017

Light, misty-drizzle this early Wednesday on California’s north coast, and with low clouds/fog, a much-wet environment.
If we can just get through today, hopefully/reportedly real-good weather starting tomorrow and carrying on for more than a week. I’m way-so over this rain season…

Yet I’ve got to handle it — climate change is making a headway in influencing our weather. A new study and ‘daily events’ (via UCLA): ‘“Our results suggest that the world isn’t quite at the point where every record hot event has a detectable human fingerprint, but we are getting close,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, professor of Earth system science at Stanford, who led the research and the effort to hone the methodology.’

Warm air carries more moisture and with the heat, more rain/snow — as witnessed by California’s incredible drought-busting wet weather this year.

(Illustration: MC Escher’s engraving, ‘Old Oliver Tree,’ found here).

And even to the point of being way-over it.
In this narrative, however, it could rain all year…

Regarding impact of that new study — from Grist:

Last year, the National Academies published a fat report on attributing extreme weather events to climate change.
The report said that, although science can’t deliver an absolute verdict about what caused a specific heatwave or hurricane, it can tell us how much climate change boosted the likelihood or intensity of that event.
In other words, science deals in probabilities, not absolute certainties.
But as the science improves, with papers like this latest one, those probabilities get higher and higher.

Not helping the situation — from Scientific American last week:

On Tuesday, the Mauna Loa Observatory recorded its first-ever carbon dioxide reading in excess of 410 parts per million (it was 410.28 ppm in case you want the full deal).
Carbon dioxide hasn’t reached that height in millions of years.
It’s a new atmosphere that humanity will have to contend with, one that’s trapping more heat and causing the climate to change at a quickening rate.
In what’s become a spring tradition like Passover and Easter, carbon dioxide has set a record high each year since measurements began.
It stood at 280 ppm when record keeping began at Mauna Loa in 1958.
In 2013, it passed 400 ppm.
Just four years later, the 400 ppm mark is no longer a novelty.
It’s the norm.
“Its pretty depressing that it’s only a couple of years since the 400 ppm milestone was toppled,” Gavin Foster, a paleoclimate researcher at the University of Southampton told Climate Central last month.
“These milestones are just numbers, but they give us an opportunity to pause and take stock and act as useful yard sticks for comparisons to the geological record.”

In that regard, and on the vile subject of the T-Rump — per Inside Climate News yesterday:

President Donald Trump‘s planned climate change policies could lead to an extra half a billion tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 2025, according to a new analysis.
That is equal to the annual electricity emissions of 60 percent of U.S. homes.
Climate Advisers, a Washington consultancy, predicts that U.S. carbon emissions, which have been falling, will begin to flatten or increase by 2020 if the Trump administration succeeds in repealing the Clean Power Plan and other Obama-era regulations.
In other words, decisions made today will have a delayed effect—but a prolonged one.
“We found that the ‘Trump Effect’ really begins to bite into the U.S. emissions trajectory in 2025 — since many of the factors influencing today’s emissions trajectory can’t be reversed quickly,” the report said.

Raining shit — and worse. From Vice yesterday:

Legislation proposed across the country since Donald Trump’s election threatens to bring climate change denial into the classroom under the guise of “academic freedom.”
Currently, six states have legislative measures pending or already on the books that would allow anti-science rhetoric, including the rejection of global warming, to seep its way into schools’ curricula.
While these types of proposals have become fairly routine in certain states, some of the most recent crop have advanced farther than in the past.

These old proposals are being made new again along with a stark ideological switch at the federal level.
The president has called climate change a “hoax.”
The EPA administrator doesn’t believe carbon dioxide contributes to global warming.
And the White House’s continued rollback of environmental regulations reflects those viewpoints.
In fact, a series of Pew studies shows 2016 marked the largest gap yet between Republicans and Democrats over belief in human-caused global warming.

Crazy timing, huh?

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