Democracy Has Prevailed.

December 14, 2016

The Arctic Is Getting Warmer

From Time Magazine:
A series of records collapsed in the Arctic this year as the region faced unprecedented changes due to man-made global warming, news with wide-ranging implications for the health of the planet, according to a new report.

The report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that in 2016 the Arctic experienced the warmest land temperatures on record, the lowest snow cover on record and the lowest fall sea-ice cover on record.
Some sciency details from the report:
  • The average surface air temperature for the year ending September 2016 is by far the highest since 1900, and new monthly record highs were recorded for January, February, October and November 2016.
  • After only modest changes from 2013-2015, minimum sea ice extent at the end of summer 2016 tied with 2007 for the second lowest in the satellite record, which started in 1979.
And so on.

Of course it's all a Chinese hoax (did President-elect Trump's SVR handlers tell him that??).  And we know the little-handed pussy-grabber knows this by his cabinet nominations.

For example, Montana's Representative in the House, Ryan Zinke, is Trump's nominee for Interior Secretary.

In 2014, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported:
Zinke said he is a geologist and that he has seen no scientific evidence that fracking is environmentally dangerous or that climate change is changing the weather.
And they reported that he said this in an earlier radio interview:
I’m a conservationist, but when there’s a volcano in the Philippines that erupts and produces more C02 than humans have produced in 200 years – is C02 really the problem?
Let's start there. In their very next paragraph, The Bozeman fact-checks Zinke:
A U.S. Geological Survey fact sheet on volcanic carbon dioxide production cited peer-reviewed scientific studies that concluded human activities produce 35 billion metric tons per year, dwarfing the 0.26 billion metric tons produced by volcanoes.
So that would mean that Zinke was either a) mistaken or b) lying.  In either case, he should know better.

And as far as the science showing that climate change is "changing the weather", all we need do is to refer to the above NOAA report about the Arctic.

Meanwhile, Michael Moore thinks Trump is going to get us all killed and Bill Moyers asserts Trump's a traitor:
In 1964, when Barry Goldwater ran against Lyndon Johnson, a man named John A. Stormer self-published a book called None Dare Call It Treason. It accused America’s left-leaning elites of paving the way for a Soviet victory in the Cold War. The book sold 7 million copies, but Johnson crushed Goldwater in the election.

Now that the CIA has determined that the Russians intervened in the presidential election to help Trump win, the Cold War politics of left and right have been flipped. If Stormer rewrote his book for 2016, its thesis might go like this:

Beware of Donald Trump. Witlessly or willfully, he’s doing the Kremlin’s bidding. Anyone who enables him — on his payroll or in the press, by sucking up or by silence, out of good will or cowardice — is Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. This is a national emergency, and treating it like normal is criminally negligent of our duty to American democracy.
So we're all gonna die and/or Trump's Putin's useful idiot (as are many many others) so what's a little less Arctic ice when we're talking about the (possible) end of American democracy?

The coming Trump presidency is not normal. Resist it.