As my last couple of posts tried to display, the upcoming midterms are most-incredibly-way-serious. However, not noted in importance in the upcoming election is climate change and the possible fate of humanity — nothing heavy.
Along with the last-chance situation for American democracy, if the Republican hordes of election-and-climate-change denialists take power we’re really screwed in the deep dark.
Funny, but a wrong approach toward fossil fuels:
Reporter: Mr. President! Mr. President!
Biden: Can you speak louder? pic.twitter.com/okIX1Bgurg— Acyn (@Acyn) October 19, 2022
The discussion should be loud and pressing — stop oil/gas/fuels production. Period.
Not this, though, economically sound, Joe Biden needs to re-word the call (CNBC this afternoon): ‘“My message to the American energy companies is this: You should not be using your profits to buy back stock or for dividends. Not now. Not while a war is raging … You should be using these record-breaking profits to increase production and refining.”‘
Increase the production intensity just as our oceans are overheating — a new study via The Washington Post, also this afternoon:
The world’s oceans have been warming for generations, a trend that is accelerating and threatens to fuel more supercharged storms, devastate marine ecosystems and upend the lives and livelihoods of millions of people, according to a new scientific analysis.
Published this week in the journal Nature Reviews, it finds that the upper reaches of the oceans — roughly the top 2,000 meters, or just over a mile — have been heating up around the planet since at least the 1950s, with the most stark changes observed in the Atlantic and Southern oceans.
The authors of the review, who include scientists from China, France, the United States and Australia, write that data shows the heating has both accelerated over time and increasingly has reached deeper and deeper depths. That warming — which the scientists said likely is irreversible through 2100 — is poised to continue, and to create new hotspots around the globe, especially if humans fail to make significant and rapid cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
…
“Global warming really does mean ocean warming,” Kevin E. Trenberth, a co-author of the review and a scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said in an interview from New Zealand.
“The best single indicator that the planet is warming is the ocean warming record.”That record, comprised of thousands of temperature measurements across the globe over decades, he said, shows a “relentless” trajectory.
“The warming has been accelerating, and the most rapid warming rates have been in the last 10 years or so,” he said.
And the trend continues:
Drought-stricken Mississippi River reaches all-time low at Memphishttps://t.co/dJWDWYihJ2
— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) October 19, 2022
Drought, heat, and climate change.
Although Joe Biden thinks he’s moving forward, there’s a deep-sling of another brick in the wall, or maybe another nail in the coffin — a new study published earlier this month hangs last summer’s heat dome weather on climate change.
From Switzerland’s public research university ETH Zürich News:
The 2022 Northern Hemisphere summer was one of the hottest ever recorded in Europe with over 24,000 heat-related fatalities, and brought intense heatwaves to parts of China and North America. It was also very dry, and the resulting drought caused widespread water shortages, wildfires and crop failures leading to higher food prices, as well as impacts on electricity supply.
An international team of climate scientists led by the research group of Sonia Seneviratne, Professor for Land-?Climate Dynamics at ETH Zurich, now analysed the possible influence of climate change on this extreme weather event. Their external pagestudycall_made published by the World Weather Attribution group estimates that human-caused climate change made soil moisture drought conditions in the Northern Hemisphere at least 20 times more likely, threatening crop production and adding further pressure to food prices and food security.
We’re on the brink. Time, I think, is ‘not‘ on our side:
Speak loud, louder, yet here we are once again…
(Illustration out front: ‘A Break in Reality,’ by Xetobyte, found here.)