Monday, August 29, 2022

Last Call For Climate Of Emergency, Con't

Earth is on course to lose at least 3% of the Greenland ice sheet by the end of the century, contributing at least a foot in sea level rise.


Human-driven climate change has set in motion massive ice losses in Greenland that couldn’t be halted even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, according to a study published Monday.

The findings in the journal Nature Climate Change project that it is now inevitable that 3.3 percent of the Greenland ice sheet will melt — equal to 110 trillion tons of ice, the researchers said. That will trigger nearly a foot of global sea-level rise.

The predictions are more dire than other forecasts, though they use different assumptions. While the study did not specify a time frame for the melting and sea-level rise, the authors suggested much of it can play out between now and the year 2100.

“The point is, we need to plan for that ice as if it weren’t on the ice sheet in the near future, within a century or so,” William Colgan, a study co-author who studies the ice sheet from its surface with his colleagues at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, said in a video interview.

“Every study has bigger numbers than the last. It’s always faster than forecast,” Colgan said.

One reason that new research appears worse than other findings may just be that it is simpler. It tries to calculate how much ice Greenland must lose as it recalibrates to a warmer climate. In contrast, sophisticated computer simulations of how the ice sheet will behave under future scenarios for global emissions have produced less alarming predictions.

A one-foot rise in global sea levels would have severe consequences. If the sea level along the U.S. coasts rose by an average of 10 to 12 inches by 2050, a recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found, the most destructive floods would take place five times as often, and moderate floods would become 10 times as frequent.
 
The race to stop global climate change has been lost. Now the race is survival, and the fact we're going to have to relocate 20% of America's population out of flood zones. $180 billion in relocation now would save $1 trillion decades from now, but we'll never do it. New Orleans, Miami, NYC, San Francisco, a lot of cities are going to be gone in the years ahead.

Don't say you weren't warned.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't


Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday warned of “riots in the streets” if former President Trump is prosecuted for his handling of classified materials found when the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago home.

“If there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information, after the Clinton debacle … there’ll be riots in the streets,” Graham told former South Carolina congressman Trey Gowdy, who now hosts Fox News’s “Sunday Night in America.”

Trump shared a clip of the interview on Truth Social later Sunday evening.

Gowdy was chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which probed the 2012 terror attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead and uncovered a private email server used by Clinton.

Graham expressed concern that Trump is treated with “a double standard” and repeated his warning of riots regarding the Georgia special grand jury investigating attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election results in the state.


Graham himself has been subpoenaed in that probe in connection with phone calls made to Georgia election officials seeking to change the election results in the state.
 
The party of January 6th wants every day to be January 6th until all Democrats and their voters are gone. They want us to fear them, they want us to change political policy for them in order to stop them from killing us.

That's terrorism.

Graham is a terrorist.

The GOP is the party of white supremacist domestic terrorism.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

The power crisis in Europe, stemming from both major climate change issues and Russian gas holding the continent hostage as part of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, has now reached levels forcing the EU to take drastic action.
 
The European Union is planning urgent steps to push down soaring power prices, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Monday.

“The skyrocketing electricity prices are now exposing, for different reasons, the limitations of our current electricity market design,” von der Leyen said in a speech at the Bled Strategic Summit in Slovenia. “It was developed under completely different circumstances and completely different purposes.”

She added, “That’s why we are now working on an emergency intervention and a structural reform of the electricity market.”

The unprecedented spike in power prices, which have soared almost 10-fold in the past year, has fueled inflation and increased the economic burden on businesses and households recovering from the pandemic. More and more member states are calling for a price cap and the Czech Republic, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU, plans to convene an extraordinary meeting of energy ministers on Sept. 9.

The exact details of an EU intervention plan are still being developed, and EU diplomats said the EU’s executive arm could offer a detailed plan as soon as this week.

With Russia squeezing gas deliveries and power-plant outages further sapping supply, the pressure is growing on EU leaders to act quickly or risk social unrest and political upheaval. Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala is seeking backing for his price-cap plan and plans to discuss possible limits with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

“High energy prices are a Europe-wide problem that we need to tackle at European level,” Fiala said on his Twitter account. “Ahead of the EU Energy Council we want to find a way to help people and businesses that we can agree on with other European leaders.”

Czech officials are proposing to cap prices of natural gas used for power generation, Industry and Trade Minister Jozef Sikela said on Monday.

“We may open the question of emission allowances, as some other member states have done in past, that also present a major part of the total price,” Sikela said. “We may open the question of the overall market regulation, total decoupling of the prices,” adding that the bloc cannot meddle too much with the market or fuel speculation.
 
Russia has successfully leveraged its natural gas resources as both an economic and political weapon against the EU in the continuing Russian war in Ukraine. It's safe to say at this point that while Russian sanctions are hurting Moscow, Russia cutting off the EU from natural gas has also crippled the continent. 
 
All indications are that, while Ukrainian forces with EU/US help have stalled Russia in the Donbas militarily, if even the stodgy EU is talking about emergency measures to prevent widespread riots and worse because of massive power bills and electricity shortages, Russia is absolutely winning this political part of the war.
 
On top of all this, Russian forces continue to hold the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, with growing fears of meltdown in Europe's largest nuclear facility.

The pressure on the EU to surrender Ukraine to Moscow will only increase in the weeks ahead. Imagine what adding an extra zero to your monthly power bill would do here in the US, and you have an idea of what's going on in Europe right now.

It's not good, folks. Putin is risking nuclear disaster and millions of deaths from cold, starvation, or worse in the months ahead in order to force the EU to give up. And if the EU does give up, Putin will do all this again to take his next target, and his net, and his next...