Although a bit warm for this late in September, still near-picture-perfect out-of-doors this late afternoon Friday here in California’s Central Valley.
Meanwhile, the out-of-doors elsewhere sucks like shit: ‘Bob Van Dillen, a meteorologist for Fox Weather, rescued a woman live on air while reporting from flooded Atlanta. ”I heard this lady screaming for help in a car with water rising up on it,” he said. When 911 responders, swamped with calls, couldn’t come, “I just dropped everything and went after her.”‘
Of course, just about every kind of media is inundated with reports on the horror inflicted by Hurricane Helene, and frightful images of massive flooding with cars submerged in water with only the roofs exposed, people flailing around in heavy, hard-bashing winds, drone shots of giant squashes of neighborhoods scattered in pieces across a weird-ass landscape. Last night, Helene hit the Gulf Coast’s Big Bend region of Florida as a Cat 4 storm, the biggest ever — as an aside, I grew up in the panhandle of Flordia, attended high school, graduated from the University of Florida in Gainsville, though, haven’t been back since the mid-80s — now as I type this, 43 known dead due to Helene with millions without electrical power across the South.
Nutshell status report via ABC: ‘Helene has since weakened and is now post-tropical, but its remnants will continue to produce dangerous weather. The center of the storm is now over Kentucky with heavy rain and gusty winds across a large area from Missouri to Ohio to the Carolinas.‘
There are way-plenty of reports and news stories across the InterWebs to choke a climate-change denier so I will jump to a humongous terror tied directly to Helene and the future of our only habitat’s environment — T-Rump and the immoral, dangerous Republicans waiting in the wings:
Project 2025 gets rid of the folks who track hurricanes.
But maybe this guy will toss you some paper towels https://t.co/14hjuekvqr— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) September 27, 2024
Details per Poynter this morning:
Project 2025 is the conservative Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint for a Republican administration. Trump has disavowed it, but it was written by several former Trump administration officials. In 2022, when Trump gave a keynote speech at a Heritage event in Florida, he said the organization would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
Project 2025 includes about four pages on NOAA and the National Weather Service. That part was written by Thomas F. Gilman, who was an official in Trump’s Commerce Department.
The document describes NOAA as a primary component “of the climate change alarm industry” and said it “should be broken up and downsized.”
The National Weather Service, one of six NOAA offices, provides weather and climate forecasts and warnings. The National Hurricane Center is part of the National Weather Service within NOAA.
Project 2025 would not outright end the National Weather Service. It says the agency “should focus on its data-gathering services,” and “should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”
Craig Fugate, President Obama’s FEMA administrator: ‘“While Project 2025 doesn’t call for the elimination of the NWS, it places restrictions on research, climate products, and potentially limiting access to the NWS forecasters and centers such as the National Hurricane Center.”‘
Just as storms will become more and more, along with being bigger and badder.
As the T-Rump is shown in the tweet above, his asshole running partner, JD Vance, had two events canceled due to Helene and the weather it produced — not to the liking of MAGA hatters.
Background per the Guardian, also this morning:
The Trump campaign said that Vance’s events would be rearranged “as soon as possible”, but climate campaigners claimed the Ohio senator had been hit in ironic fashion by the consequences of global heating. Vance has said he is “skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man” and called efforts by Joe Biden to address it a “green scam”.
Not only is the burning of fossil fuels and other human activity the cause of 100% of warming since 1950, scientists say it is also causing hurricanes like Helene to become fiercer and accelerate more quickly.
The average intensification rate of hurricanes today is nearly 30% greater than it was before the 1990s due to a hotter atmosphere and oceans, according to a study published last year. The path of Helene across the Gulf of Mexico has been exceptionally hot this year, with this increased heat made at least 200 times more likely due to human-caused climate change, according to Climate Central.
Vance’s campaign cancellations expose “the dangerous hypocrisy of climate deniers”, said Cassidy DiPaola, a campaigner at the Make Polluters Pay Campaign. “Vance and Trump can run from a storm, but they can’t hide from the reality of the climate crisis they continue to deny.”
Vance attended two fundraising events thrown by oil industry executives in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, on Tuesday. He was at a lunch hosted by Cody Campbell, co-chief executive of Double Eagle Energy Holdings and then a $100,000-a-couple dinner organized by Ray Washburne, chair of the fuel distributor Sunoco.
Trump has promised the oil and gas industry a rollback of environmental rules in return for campaign donations, along with the deletion of “insane” spending on clean energy projects flowing from landmark climate legislation signed by Biden, should he return to the White House.
However, the former president’s campaign has still had to contend with the scorching temperatures, as well as severe storms, that are being spurred by the burning of fossil fuels. In June, 24 people at a Trump rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, required medical attention due to severe heat, while a further 11 people were sent to hospital for heat exhaustion at a separate Trump rally in Phoenix, Arizona.
“I’m up here sweating like a dog,” Trump complained from the podium during the Las Vegas rally, where temperatures hit 102F (38C). “They don’t think about me. This is hard work.”
Whine like a baby — and even the shits: ‘Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which published the policy blueprint, on Wednesday defended Project 2025’s positions. He also dismissed the overwhelming consensus that humans are warming the planet, telling a New York Times event that “it sounds like weather to me.”‘
We be fucked in so many different, horrible ways if the T-Rump is re-elected in a few weeks. Climate change, though, is a breakdown of living.
Worse than CGI in real-time:
Voting this round is life-or-death, or not, yet once again here we are…
(Illustration out front: Salvador Dali’s ‘Soft Watch at the Moment of First Explosion,’ found here.)