Grist says pushing people into climate change actions can backfire — so what next?

Here's the big takeaway, in a piece it wrote about a paper to that end in Nature Sustainability:

It found that climate policies aimed at forcing lifestyle changes — such as bans on driving in urban centers — can backfire by weakening people’s existing pro-environmental values and triggering political backlash, even among those who already care about climate change. The findings suggest that how climate policy is designed may matter as much as how aggressive it is.

So, what next? 

First, note that "can" is not "will." I'm not saying ignore the study's findings and damn the torpedoes. I am saying that mandates can be framed in certain ways.

First, there can a be a push-pull setup, kind of like the "nudge" so beloved of neoliberal behavioral economists. (The last one-third of the piece discusses that.)

Second, there can be non-financial "pulls," like appeals to patriotism or whatever.

That said — and the research in "law-abiding" Germany, not the US — the problem is worse than with COVID lockdowns:

While researchers found a backlash effect, or “cost of control,” in both instances, it was 52 percent greater for climate than COVID policies.

INteresting. 

The last one-third also discusses financial "pushes." Make keeping a climate-unfriendly older heater, or some similar situation, for people who can afford to change on their own, especially, so expensive that, unless they're millionaires determined to cut off their noses to spite the government's face, they'll change.

And, per Grist, the study's authors acknowledge that even in "law-abiding"™ Germany, this isn't 1960:

The authors also emphasize that they aren’t claiming mandates or bans never work — seatbelt laws and smoking restrictions have become commonplace, for instance. But those were enacted in a different era and there was little public dissent about their benefits to personal health.

Times have indeed changed.

To me, the study, or at least how Grist extracts it, misses a possible, though not guaranteed, elephant in the room.

What if a lot of people who say they care about the climate are actually virtue signaling more than anything else, especially when the need for stronger and stronger action becomes more and more urgent? 

This is an idea that's not brand new to my mind by any means. That said, Peter Brannen's new book, "The Story of CO2 is the Story of Everything," which I read last month and which discusses just how dire the situation is and just how urgent the need is for serious, global action, has reinforced that.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a Greta Thunberg, or the guy out west who basically won't do anything in life. (I exaggerate.) I currently drive a gasoline-only vehicle (but it was cheap and doesn't need to go to the dump), fly the occasional airplane (noting that that flight is a sunk carbon cost), eats some meat (but in the bottom 15th percentile, if not even lower, of Americans) and other things. On the other hand, I've called for carbon taxes for years, even though not that high on the American economic pedestal. 

Science news roundup: Dian Fossey, shark and rhino geography, more

Reading the non-fictionalized story of her life and death in Rwanda, Dian Fossey, who died 40 years ago today, comes off as a racist in many ways, in addition to generally being clueless about anything of sociology or social psychology that might have helped her deal with the locals in her research 

==

Sharks on the mountaintops? Well, if they're undersea mountain "constellations," you bet. Seamounts support high oceanic biodiversity in general, so that's where the sharks head.

==

Rhinos in the Arctic tens of millions of years ago do more than show the mobility, and evolutionary mobility, of mammals.

They also show the possible future of climate change. Unfortunately, that wasn't discussed. The reality is that, if we hit 5°C by the end of this century, you'll have rhinos wanting to move into Europe and northern Asia out of Africa and southern Asia, at least. Of course, due to human population and larger habitat destruction, that won't be easy. Nonetheless, NPR had an opportunity to talk here.

So, Michael Shellenberger is behind the new nuclear power push?

Atomic Dreams: The New Nuclear Evangelists and the Fight for the Future of Energy by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

That's probably the biggest thing I learned from this ill-informed book. 

I actually should say I relearned it, as I had written about this in 2022, linking the same Counterpunch piece that's below and mentioning Shellenberger in passing.

I don't think the author is duplicitous. I think, rather, she's a mainstream neoliberal-type Democrat who doesn't know better, didn't want to look under the hood at some of the sources of some of her information, and more.

Let's look at that, in an expanded version of my Goodreads review. I will note that learning Shellenberger and various minions of his are behind various astroturfing and semi-astroturfing pro-nuclear power groups is probably the single biggest thing saving this book from a one-star rating.

I begin with some "negatively rhetorical" questions. 

So, nuclear power plants are as low-carbon through their entire lifecycle as solar and wind?

Maybe not, if you look at research not done by the U.S. Department of Energy, nuclear power advocates, utility companies and nuclear plant manufacturers. Per Counterpunch with extensive links on this and other nuclear power matters, at worst-case scenario, nuclear is as carbon-intense as natural gas.

OK, Counterpunch is ardently anti-nuclear, more so than I am, but with reasons far beyond this which I agree with more, but let’s split this in half. If nuclear is halfway between wind and solar on one hand, and gas on the other, then it’s still somewhat better than gas, and a lot better than coal, but not the panacea advocates claim, even without all its other issues. Tuhus-Dubrow halfway admits that in the epilogue, but only in passing.

This was, halfway through the book, one of multiple issues that had already cost it 2 if not 2.5 stars, meaning the best it could do was 3 stars and more likely was 2.5 rounded up.

If breeders, molten salt reactors and the long-touted thorium ones are such hot stuff, then why isn’t heavily nuclear France, with top-down national not federal government, not pushing them more? Why isn’t command economy China?

In reality, there’s only five fully commercial breeder reactors in the world. There’s no current commercial thorium-cycle reactors, and thorium, other than possible abundance levels, offers no other major advantages over uranium. There’s no commercial large-scale molten salt reactors, whether thorium fuel cycle ones or not. If nothing else, the two 1970s oil embargoes, before climate change, would have been enough of a research kick that if something viable was there, it would have taken off. Addendum: Via Counterpunch, which discusses how a company like Holtec, which has never ever built a nuclear reactor before (and elsewhere tells us to follow the capitalist money, folks) read this about the truth on small modular reactors vs what the book's interlocutors, and by extension, the author herself, claims.

As for Trump 1.0 taking the gloves off of regulations theoretically hindering new nuclear plant designs?

None of that exists in China. Or Russia. Or, not much so in India.

Next? Cooling a light water reactor in the era of climate change. France had to shut down some of its reactors during the last huge European heat wave in 2022 because streams and rivers adjacent to them were too warm to be effective coolers. This will happen in the US Southwest, too, with drought expected to continue through the end of this century. Inland lakes, rivers and streams will be too warm — and possibly too scarce on water — in southern California and Arizona, and nobody will build or be allowed to build another nuke plant in coastal California. Ditto on water supply in Texas west of I-35. None of this is in the book. The water issue is among the additional items at that Counterpunch link.

Long-term waste? Perhaps Fukushima did say we shouldn’t be alarmist, but that’s not long-term. Citing Sweden’s community model for long-term waste storage? Nice. Omitting France’s top-down national government solution of telling an economically depressed area in Lorraine that “you WILL take it” and here’s some money? Not mentioned. Nor is Russia, China, etc.

Why aren’t pro-nuclear people, whether climate scientists like James Hansen or Michael Schellenberger’s groupies, focused more on getting states outside of California and Aridzona changing state laws on things like “feed-in tariffs” to bolster rooftop solar? (My Texas is horrible compared to California on this.) Apparently the author never asked. She never even thought to ask. Maybe she assumes regulations on renewables are the same from state to state.

And, beyond all this? What gets an additional ding is the old missing index. I mean, this book isn't that long, but it mentions a lot of people and issues.

And beyond this? Not telling the full truth about Shellenberger, who is, say, at least halfway to being Jordan Peterson, and supports fracking among other anti-environmental things. He has written for Bari Weiss’ genocidal Free Press, as well as his own Substack, dived deep into the Twitter Files, is listed on staff at that wingnut University of Austin and more. Is it any wonder that the likes of Eric Meyer, even if not the two women from Canyon Diablo, are perfectly OK with anti-renewables state energy support laws as long as they support nuclear? This LA Review of Books piece has more beyond Wikipedia. It also notes that his re-conversion back to Christianity appears to be of a conservative, fundagelical type, including Genesis 2 and human dominion over the earth. "Evangelist" indeed.

His own Substack posts and notes, beyond what I already noted about him writing for Bari Weiss, show him as a techdudebro fellow traveler, an anti-immigrationist and more.

Weirder yet, which I did not know before, is that he appears to be a real believer on UFOs visiting earth.

Yes, all of this added together is enough to discredit him as a nuclear evangelist. Tuhus-Dubrow does tell you small parts of the above, in brief, and that’s it.

Safety? Directly or indirectly, a lot more people died or will die from Chernobyl than 31 direct deaths. The real answer is thousands at minimum, tens of thousands to approaching 100,000, at upper estimates.

As for waste disposal? Tuhus-Dubrow doesn’t mention that WIPP, near Carlsbad, NM, the main depository for low-level waste, has had problems.

Further discrediting the author? Not mentioning that the Democratic Party stole its Green New Deal, lite version, from the Green Party’s original.

To summarize a review of this book and the larger situation both?

To pun on nuclear reactors? Shellenberger is nuclear poison. Hansen, Bill McKibben, etc., should fully dissociate from him.

Second? The author didn’t do a lot of research, or else she started out with the mindset of ignoring contradictory research to some of her information.

Third, to riff on Michael Grunwald’s new book, energy investment, like land, is not free. Believing in nuclear power silver bullets may undercut research into further improvements in solar, tidal power or other options. M.V. Ramana, among others, has more on that.

There is also the issue, per Ramana, on capitalism and nuclear power. Like Bozo Bezos investing in small-scale nuclear via Amazon and his on Washington Post not mentioning that in a house editorial column. And, like climate change minimizer Bill Gates, who wants to restart Three Mile Island, Bezos wants this for those AI slop data centers that we don't need.

There's also the issue, per my top link, of build-out time for nuclear. Demented Don (I see what I did) may waive every regulation he wants to, but the lawsuits will keep on coming. Meanwhile, wind and especially solar keep improving in efficiency. Your typical light water reactor is not THAT efficient.

Mentioned only in passing by the author? The perils of uranium mining. I grew up in Gallup, New Mexico, and remember when the berm-dam for the tailings pond at the Church Rock mine (owned by a Kerr-McGee subsidiary, by the way!) broke. I've written about that, the economic destructiveness of uranium busts, the environmental damages of uranium ore dust and more. 

Yes, today's injection mining may not create radiation-toxic dust in desert and semidesert lands, but it uses a lot of water and could cause problems with aquifers. See here for more. 

This Inside Climate News piece notes that currently, very little uranium is mined in the US, but how there's a push to both open new mines and reopen old ones, either on the Colorado Plateau where Gallup is, or the Wyoming Basin. And, this includes the Church Rock mine.

It also notes the US currently has just one diffusion plant for enrichment, just one for processing into fuel and has NO domestic facilities for the fuel needed by more modern plants. Anything we need right now? We get mainly from the Russkies. 

There's also the problem that mines in the Southwest, while generally on federal land, also generally abut Indian sacred sites.

Some of the fast-tracked New Mexico mines border the lands of the Acoma and Laguna pueblos. In the nearby Navajo Nation, the new activity has sparked concern. 

The Navajo Nation “continues to be affected—not only from abandoned uranium mines and mill sites—but also from other contaminants,” said Perry Charley, chair of the Diné Uranium Remediation Advisory Commission, at a public meeting in August in Shiprock, New Mexico. 

From 1944 to 1986, mining activities left more than 500 abandoned mines and an enormous amount of uranium waste in various regions of Navajo land.

Once again, rich White America has zero sensitivity or care. 

Let's have Hansen, Bill McKibben et al support not just a robust carbon tax, but one with higher rates on things outside of agriculture and conventional industry. Let's have them speak to Navajos, Laguna and Acomas, then breathe infested sand. That's in part because Bezos and Gates want to inflict these data centers on the whole world, not just the US.

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There are no magic silver bullets on agriculture and climate change

Unfortunately, of two recent reads, one gets that right, but then gets one issue wrong and others partially wrong, while the other, allegedly informed by the "protagonist" in the first book, isn't informed enough.

I'm going to mash together versions of both Goodreads reviews with additional comment, the second being shortened.

We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate by Michael Grunwald
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Low-till and no-till will save us, right? Wrong.

A raft of new plants, like Kernza, a perennial-plant riff on wheat, will save us, right? Mostly wrong.

Veggie burgers will save us, right? Wrong as currently entailed, though with some missing information.

Lab meat will save us, right? Wrong totally, but also with some missing information.

GMOs could save us, right? He doesn’t get explicit, but seems to have “yes with caveats” as his answer. I offer a bigger yes with more caveats.

And, he has one good point at the end — we should bring back individual shaming, as well as stop looking for magical silver bullets. You bought the SUV. YOU bought the 1/3 pound hamburger.

Grunwald uses Timothy Searchinger as, well, the nonfiction equivalent of a protagonist for much of this book, though he also has other skeptics of the silver bullets above as well. (This is the muse cited by "Sea of Grass," below, for helping straighten them out on biofuels, though apparently they didn't read closely enough.) Overall, the book is somewhere between good and very good. I hit on 3.75 stars rounded up, because most of the 3-starrers wrongly in my opinion thought it too long, and it needed to be this detailed.

He does a generally good job, but not perfect, especially later in the book.

No spoiler alerts on what he gets right, above. So, we'll tackle what's less than fully correct.

Grunwald ignores that Impossible Burger actually has as much saturated fat, and more sodium, than conventional food. Fake cheese, at least mainline commercial varieties, do have less saturated fat than the real deal, but do have more sodium, as I have discussed in some depth. It's also pretty highly processed.

Also, Grunwald got "golden rice" wrong. Wrong. Its problem was not the "mean greenies" opposing it as much as, even after it cleared that hurdle, for basically another decade, it had lower yields than conventional rice.

Heralded on the cover of Time magazine in 2000 as a genetically modified (GMO) crop with the potential to save millions of lives in the Third World, Golden Rice is still years away from field introduction and even then, may fall short of lofty health benefits still cited regularly by GMO advocates, suggests a new study from Washington University in St. Louis.  

Golden Rice is still not ready for the market, but we find little support for the common claim that environmental activists are responsible for stalling its introduction. GMO opponents have not been the problem,” said lead author Glenn Stone, professor of anthropology and environmental studies in Arts & Sciences.

I told you more than a decade, did I not? Stone goes on to explicitly refute the idea that "mean greenies" inhibited golden rice's adoption. And, he has supported GMO crops in general.

On this issue, Grunwald comes close to believing, by non-condemnation, in GMOs as a silver bullet. 

On lab meat? He doesn’t delve enough into the energy inputs it will need to scale up, let alone the need for computer chipmaking type clean room sterility. Grunwald should have, if he didn’t want to voice it himself, gotten a true skeptic for more comment on this. Indeed, he should have looked at the energy inputs for scaling up Impossible Burger type foods.

The book is otherwise pretty good and almost very good until around 250. Frank Mitloehner claims there’s no more “stooping labor” with today’s Big Ag animal farms. Really? There is. It’s called “illegal immigrants.” (I don’t know if the new round of people from the Levant and Africa get pushed into the same in Europe or not.) But, no, there's still plenty of “stoop labor” in US agriculture. And, while that's not the focus of the book, we need to do more than one-shot ethics in the world of modern ag.

As for Ethiopians with stunted growth because of lack of animal protein? It may in part being stunted due to lack of protein period during Ethiopia’s famines.

The highly touted ranch in Brazil's Cerrado? Grunwald rightly notes that Brazil's tropical latitude means this can't be done well in the US. That said, he also has it looking as good as it does in part by comparing it to rundown neighboring ranches. I'm sure a 1920s or 1930s US ranch would come off just about as badly.

Animal cruelty? Grunwald mentions modern poultry occasionally breaking legs. Doesn’t mention cows with what are likely painful udders. Or young bullocks-to-be castrated into steers. He does mention California’s “free roaming” pigs laws and says Searchinger is OK with them, if they don’t cut hog production too much. Well, that’s nice. Or "nice." Am I somewhat of a hypocrite? Yes, I still eat real cheese. That said, it's all minimum of Cabot or Tillamook. Hopefully they don't use quite as bloated of cows along with not using bovine growth hormones in specific.

Grunwald touches a bit on the water issue, but not as much as he could. The Ogallala Aquifer that waters all the High Plains farms that provide feed for all the High Plains feedlots, or the Big Ag High Plains beef rancher that has his own feedlot? Never mentioned, and when I checked the index when I was up to about page 280, and noticed that, that became the tipping point to drop from 5 stars to 4. This book could have used a good dosage of “Cadillac Desert.” Yes, GMOs let alone CRISPR may increase dryland yields even more (see "Sea of Grass") but they'll still be less than Ogallala-watered corn, milo and beans. So, the issue of water is indeed indirectly, even semi-directly, related to the issue of climate change and agriculture.

Finally, I can’t totally buy a key sub-thesis. I think not only is transitioning beef eating to chicken good, but lessening beef eating beyond that, and chicken eating as well is even better. It's another way of reducing Big Ag, animal division's stress on the land. (Grunwald didn’t mention recent outbreaks of avian flu, as a reason to cut chicken raising and worry about chicken, and egg, costs.) He also comes off as too sanguine about how much, and how cleanly, factory fish farming can scale up. I’m not saying we need to have the entire world go vegetarian, let alone vegan. But, the whole Western world could eat less of all meats, and all dairy products. If you do that, people might have less of a hankering for meat substitutes, which have the health issues noted above, and even with veggie burgers, not to mention lab meat, the energy input issues and more. 

I confess to being somewhat of a hypocrite on these issues. But, I have eaten vegetarian for stretches of three months or more at a time. And vegetarian, not just beef-omitting like Grunwald. Per the individual shaming that he mentions, we can all do better.

That said, vegetarianism will leave you B12 deficient without eating fortified foods and veganism even more so. Plants do not have B12, and mushrooms and other fungi have very little. See here. Now, yes, this is the naturalistic fallacy, but our ancestors, since or before the last common ancestor with bonobos and chimpanzees, ate insect and grub meat, at a minimum, in all likelihood. Besides, it's fun to hoist people like this with the naturalism petard.

But, we can all do better. If, on average, Americans ate no more than 1.5 ounces of ALL types of meat per day, the planet would be much better off.

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Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie by Dave Hage
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is somewhere between 2.75 to 4.25 stars, depending on how much knowledge one brings to the issue already, per a guide I use more and more in my own reading of nonfiction books.

For me, there were two main things I learned.

One was the use of tile drains in the boggy Midwest. Via Marc Reisner's "Cadillac Desert," I have long been familiar with them in irrigated areas of the desert Southwest, to reduce salinity in the soil water level beneath roots and carry off the salts in the West's alkaline water. The broad principles are the same.

The second was the development of new corn and soybean seed types for the northern high plains. This is problematic, per Grunwald above noting land is not free. The reason this is being done is for more corn and beans for biofuels, a climate-wrecker.

That said, the authors appear to pull some punches, and to miss some things.

One pulled punch? Bison in Yellowstone National Park almost certainly do NOT transmit brucellosis to cattle. That said, elk on the adjacent National Elk Range, fed hay in winter as if they were cattle, almost certainly DO, but ranchers and hunters in Montana and Wyoming don't like to talk about that.

Second and related, and also tied to a 2-star reviewer here? The degree of animus from ranchers toward bison, though mentioned, seemed downplayed.

Third, the degree to which it's not an either or of conventional big ag or people in West Virginia or New Delhi starving is underplayed.

Fourth, the degree to which Big Ag lobbyists control discussion on any possible changes to farm legislation, from expanding the conservation reserve program through expanding the types of crops eligible for insurance to sliding scales on insurance coverage. The authors here, especially, come off as "Minnesota nice."

There's lesser pulled punches here and there in the book.

One, partially but not totally beyond this book? Just how "hollowed out" much of the plains is, not only from larger farm and ranch size, but consolidation in the agribusiness world, especially in things like meatpacking.

So, if you don't know what a local soil conservation district is, you might learn a fair amount. If you do? Not so much.

Speaking of, the authors don't discuss the thousands of SCD check dams across the country, backing up large ponds or small lakes, many of them constructed during the Depression and at the end of their estimated or expected life spans.

I thought about giving this a starless review but ended at 3 stars.

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Texas Progressives talk environment, more

Off the Kuff notes the latest Republican effort, this one driven by Trump, to make voting harder. 

SocraticGadfly talks two water and environment issues. FIrst, he notes that Texas and New Mexico, with the feds properly looped in, settled the Rio Grande water rights suit, while noting that still doesn't solve the problem of less and less water availability with nearly a century of long-term drought likely ahead. Second, he salutes the city of Corpus Christi for pulling the plug on its desal project while wondering what's next, since the city has not pulled the plug on committing to a refining-and-fracking economy.

The Trib doesn't tell you, sadly, that the parental consent law for school nurses has been made vague deliberately, for the same reasons the "medical treatment that's not abortion" definitions were made vague.  And that's why Jeff Leach et al won't give non-vague comments.

If the Texas GOP succeeds in its suit to force closed primaries, the wingnuttery level of nominees will only go higher.

The Barbed Wire discusses and discusses again the "bounty hunter for abortion medications" law and its likely impact. The Monthly discusses the work in getting an out-of-state abortion.

Per the Monthly, yes, go see Charles Butt's modern art collection, starting at the Amon Carter, then elsewhere.

Neil at the Houston Democracy Project said it is good for Houston Councilmember Martinez to support striking workers at the Hilton Americas. He can also call for light HPD hand with pro-democracy protesters & for end of HPD cooperation with ICE.

The TSTA Blog warns that you will like the STAAR replacement less than you liked the STAAR. (The Texas 2036 group of Bushie Republicans sent out a mass blast newspaper column last week, with nothing from either TSTA or TASB.)

G. Elliott Morris shows why you can't replace polling with AI.

Steve Vladeck analyzes the court rulings that the Trump tariffs are illegal.

Both The Barbed Wire and the Current delve into a report debunking the existence of a "Rainey Street Ripper" in Austin.

In the Pink Texas tries in vain to find a COVID shot.

Houstonia reviews the lessons of the Trump Burger saga.

Texas, New Mexico settle Rio Grande water rights suit

Several years after the Supreme Court tossed an earlier settlement deal because the feds hadn't been looped in enough, a new agreement on part of the water rights issues, which includes federal sign-off, has been reached. The full deal was set to be reviewed by the special master judge in the case at the end of the month.

First of all, killing that original deal, on those grounds, was the correct legal action. The Rio Grande is governed by international treaty from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico; the federal government had to have a say on Texas-New Mexico dealings.

Part 1 of this deal:

Under the settlement, New Mexico could transfer water rights from the Elephant Butte Irrigation District (EBID) in Southern New Mexico in order to meet its obligations to Texas. The state agrees in the settlement that it would compensate EBID.

The case began when Texas alleged that groundwater pumping in Southern New Mexico deprives the state of water it is owed under the Rio Grande Compact. Colorado and the United States are also parties to the case. Local irrigation districts, cities and agricultural interest groups have been involved as friends of the court. The case has evolved from a dispute between Texas and New Mexico to encompass conflicts between groundwater and surface water users in the area.

The backstory:

The Rio Grande Compact, signed in 1938, lays out how much water Colorado, New Mexico and Texas can use from the Rio Grande. The compact only addresses surface water in the river. But hydrologists now understand that aquifers and rivers are connected. Wells drilled into adjoining aquifers can reduce the flow of water into the Rio Grande.

There's a history of hypocrisy on Texas' side. It and New Mexico have different state rules on connecting groundwater to riparian water, namely, that Texas generally considers the two entirely severable. Texas wants New Mexico to follow its law on this, but refuses to adopt anything similar on its side of the state line.

I tie that issue with Texas wingnuts claiming that killing the original deal was kind of like Agenda 21 in this piece.

The deal also notes that the Bureau of Reclamation will make changes to its operations manual for the Rio Grande Project. No details on what that will mean as of this time.

What's next?

Judge Smith, the special master, has called the parties to appear in court in Philadelphia on September 30 to explain the agreements. The details of the other parts of the settlement package have not been made public.

Finally, how much water will New Mexico have to deliver? Not much:

The settlement comes as Elephant Butte reservoir is at less than four percent capacity, nearly a record low, and the Rio Grande south of Albuquerque has run dry for over a month.

And, is this being factored in? Tex-ass' state government, and Trump 2.0, are both filled with climate change minimalists and deniers.

But, versus your lies and denialism, I have the facts that the U.S. Southwest will likely stay in drought for the rest of this century and maybe beyond. That's why a drying Rio Grande won't fix itself.

Abandon hope and abandon the Desert Southwest while you still can — if you can

 Expect the water behind Glen Canyon Dam to become even scarcer, and the red rocks surrounding that, even hotter,  in years and decades to come. (Author photo.)

Via Inside Climate News, a new study from The University of Texas says that the recent ongoing drought in the Southwest is likely to last THROUGH 2100.

That is far longer than the drought that drove the Anasazi from the land 700 years ago.

The lead graphs deserve an extended quote:

The drought in the Southwestern U.S. is likely to last for the rest of the 21st century and potentially beyond as global warming shifts the distribution of heat in the Pacific Ocean, according to a study published last week led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Using sediment cores collected in the Rocky Mountains, paleoclimatology records and climate models, the researchers found warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions can alter patterns of atmospheric and marine heat in the North Pacific Ocean in a way resembling what’s known as the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), fluctuations in sea surface temperatures that result in decreased winter precipitation in the American Southwest. But in this case, the phenomenon can last far longer than the usual 30-year cycle of the PDO 

“If the sea surface temperature patterns in the North Pacific were just the result of processes related to stochastic [random] variability in the past decade or two, we would have just been extremely unlucky, like a really bad roll of the dice,” said Victoria Todd, the lead author of the study and a Ph.D student in geosciences at UT Austin. “But if, as we hypothesize, this is a forced change in the sea surface temperatures in the North Pacific, this will be sustained into the future, and we need to start looking at this as a shift, instead of just the result of bad luck.”

The story goes on to say:

“Planners need to consider that this drought, these reductions in winter precipitation, are likely to continue, and plan for that,” said Tim Shanahan, an associate professor at UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences and co-author of the study.

Yeah, that's not happening until, per Max Planck, an old generation of planners (and politicians in general) all die. 

But wait, it gets worse:

The study also revealed that current climate models are underestimating drought conditions, Todd and Shanahan said, and they hope to find better ways to approximate aridity going forward.

So, it's even worse than we have thought. 

I said that instead of HARP and HAMP in the The Great Recession, Dear Leader should have paid new moves with underwater loans to leave Phoenix and Las Vegas and never come back. And, to prevent realtors, developers and mortgage brokers from getting federal guarantees on new mortgages until all the old houses were sold, at a minimum.

Update, Aug. 13: Yale Climate Connections reports on a Nature study on the PDO that largely mirrors the one above. It also notes this issue is making El Niño effects and predictions tougher to determine.

Update, Aug. 20: Aridzona mayors, all surely eyeing the rooftops of development, have their greedy paws out for "their" portion of river water, while not asking their legislature to fix the four-lot development loophole on water supply, and also inviting ZERO leaders of Indian tribes in Aridzona to their "poor us" confab. 

This nation, once again, is so fucking screwed. 

Familiarity breeds semi-discontent in re Friends of Hagerman NWR's Photo Club

NWR, for the non-environmental types, is a national wildlife refuge. All national wildlife refuges in the U.S., including Hagerman in north Texas, are parts of, and run by, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Hagerman, like some other larger, and generally more popular and visited, NWRs, has a "friends of" support group. It has a Facebook page, restricted to members.

The friends group, in turn, has a nature photography group Facebook page, NOT limited to official friends supporters, of which I am a member.

And, that brings us to the header.

For nearly a month straight in early summer (starts in May here in my climatological definitions) and into early June in full summer, most of Hagerman was underwater due to heavy rains.

To explain, Hagerman was created after the feds bought land on both sides of the Red River in the 1930s while Denison Dam, built to impound today's Lake Texoma, was being built, in anticipation of floods at times putting most this land underwater. This year, my area near and upstream of the dam got about 11-12 inches of rain, on average, in April, hugely above normal, and about 7-8 in May, a fair amount above normal. It's very flat land, largely surrounding Big Mineral Arm of the lake.

There's an additional twist, which ties indirectly with the header.

The feds bought ONLY the surface estate of all this land in the 1930s, primarily out of cheapness. Well, soon, the first exploratory drilling happened, and yes, found oil. There are still-active muleheads / nodding donkeys on pads within Big Mineral Arm, as well as in higher areas, in the latter case, having oil tank storage batteries with them.

Well, greenhouse gases and climate change, right?

A few of the members have talked at times about climate change, though none has talked about the climate crisis. And none of them batted an eye when a regional FWS admin this spring gave a presentation about how good the awl bidness was to FWS, as I wrote here, when I accused the friends group, since this was a regular event sponsored by IT, not Hagerman FWS, of whoring themselves out.

This:

Learn all about the oil rigs on the refuge, and the ways in which they benefit Hagerman NWR.

Along the lines of eXXXon saying "Carbon brings things to life," is whoring yourself out.

Few of the people there seem to have any idea how anti-environmental FWS is in general, specifically on things right here in Tex-ass like the dunes sagebrush lizard (with original help there from then-Texass Comptroller Susan Combs, then from O'bummer's Interior Secretary Kenny Boy Salazar), so bad it led to a new lawsuit, and the monarch butterfly, where even the Center for Biological Diversity fell for kind of a head fake — since Kenny Boy Salazar was involved. They just want to see purty birdz, probably mainly while driving in their cars.

Or now, FWS being a sellout again, this time on the lesser prairie chicken. (And, yes, that's in part Trump-related, but I'm sure not entirely) 

That's part 1 of the discontent.

==

Part 2? Non-locals, like people from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metromess, asking all during this time "Is it above water yet," and some even driving up here.

Admins have written occasional posts about how long it would still be before it aired out. But, they never "pinned" a post to the top of the Facebook page to cut off such dumb questions.

They never went beyond that and suggested to Metromessers alternatives to Hagerman, like I did in comments to two of the posts.

And there are!

From where I live, within 40 miles, there's national grasslands near Alvord, Texas, a city lake with 3-4 miles of trails at Muenster, Texas, and a city nature preserve at the northeast corner of Denton. In Fort Worth, Samson Park gives you up-and-down hiking and as for birds, I've seen a black-crowned night heron there. You can see all sorts of birds in the Trinity parks complex there, or White Rock Lake in Dallas, or one of the undeveloped Dallas County parks, all of which I've been to. 

During the "wet" time, I saw dickcissels, painted buntings and yellow kingbirds at Muenster, and further away, black-capped and white-eyed vireos at Wichita Mountains NWR.

Of course, at all these places, you have to actually get out of your vehicle and hike, per Cactus Ed Abbey.

==

Part 3?

Some of the newer members of the photo club.

There's one whose Hucksterman profile calls herself "digital creator," and whose home page says "Owner/Manager/CEO at Backroad Photography," with no website, in other words: 

"I'm a person who has a camera and shoots photos in the country."

To make it worse, her first profile photo looked like someone playing with Photoshop while indulging substances and who should have their Photoshop privileges revoked.

As it turns out, her "organization" actually a Hucksterman group created by said person. She's about the only person who posts there herself, and a bunch of it is cheesy 3-D Hucksterman photo effects that confirm what I just said above. Fortunately, she doesn't try this on the Hagerman site, or else they don't let her. 

That said, to sidebar? Hagerman photo group admins DID let one person, a very occasional poster, post a picture of a Brahminy kite from India claiming they'd seen one in or near Hagerman. Worse? It was the actual illustration photo on Wikipedia's article. He either hauled it down himself, or  admins did. I don't know if he got booted; he should have.

Back to the person at hand. I suppose I should salute their love of nature, but I don't, because of how it's expressed.

==

Part 4?

I've often suspected the photo group of playing favorites. And, the most recent Facebook "header" photo? The shooter said it was in a small pond "near Hagerman." As in, not inside refuge boundaries.

Add that to "overposters," who have to dump photos from a month earlier?

Off-putting.

"Hagerman influencers" would be another way to describe them.

==

Part 5? Friends of Hagerman itself.

I know more than most people about how "managed" many national wildlife refuges are, primarily to serve the "hook and bullet" constituency. So, "Adopt a Goose"? Uhh no. First, I'm not a total fan of the overseeding, any more than water diversions out west to places like Sonny Bono and Bosque del Apache. (Interestingly, a state part or wildlife refuge in the same area doesn't have the same problems right now.) Also, why not get the oil industry best buds to take up the slack? 

Fuck r/NationalPark for a duopoly tribalist ban

Posting correct information about Obama's neoliberal National Park Service centennial, then telling all the downvoters to keep downvoting me because I don't vote for either duopoly party is NOT NOT NOT trolling!

The message is as follows.

Hello, You have been permanently banned from participating in r/NationalPark because your comment violates this community's rules. You won't be able to post or comment, but you can still view and subscribe to it.

Note from the moderators:

TROLLING/FALSE OR MISLEADING INFORMATION

I replied telling them the facts, and also telling them that I suspected they would not unban me. So, r/nationalpark fuck off, assuming my guess is right. If not? I'll apologize here.

Fact is, both that and the other main national parks site are loaded with duopoly tribalism. The downvotes I had gotten on the initial comment about the fire at the North Rim:

Part of a trend. Obama's centennial celebration had a bunch of corporate sponsors and I remember the concern when he picked Jewell from REI.

I then added to when I hit 22 downvotes:

(I don't vote for either "duopoly" party, but do tell the truth about this, about both parties on climate change and more. Keep downvoting; I won't die.)

And was at 37 by the time I got banned.

No, Obama didn't cut firefighting? Or maybe he did. He DID, per the one commenter, get in bed with Xi Jinping to make the Paris Accords totally voluntary Jell-O. Too bad that doesn't fit the left hand of the dupoly's narrative.

And, maybe not targeted to firefighters, but Obama DID cut the budget for individual national parks. There you are, certain Reddit soy boy.

That link comes off Google's AI, which also returned all of this:

In February 2012, a National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) announcement noted that President Obama's proposed budget included cuts exceeding $20 million for the parks themselves, leading to a net reduction of 218 full-time rangers and other park service staff. (That's also the link above.)

The NPS budget for deferred maintenance (addressing the backlog of repairs) was reportedly cut during the first three years of the Obama Administration, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior (.gov). (link was dead, to Trump content)

The National Park Service (.gov) confirmed in 2015 that the President's Fiscal Year 2013 budget included $67.2 million in "strategic reductions" in park and program operations, construction, and heritage partnership programs.

An ABC News article from 2012 reported on potential staffing cuts for national parks under Obama's budget, particularly affecting seasonal staff. 

I focused on stuff that came out of Obama's presidential budget.

Here's more on that third bullet point:

The President's Fiscal Year 2013 budget released today requests $2.6 billion to support the bureau's critical national recreation, preservation and conservation mission. The 2013 President's budget request fully funds $27.0 million in fixed costs and provides increases totaling $39.2 million to fund essential programs and emerging operational needs. Reflecting the President's call for fiscal discipline and sustainability, the budget also includes $67.2 million in strategic reductions in park and program operations, construction, and heritage partnership programs. 

This is the same O'Bummer who listened to Rahmbo Emanuel on cutting the size of his stimulus. 

As for my original comment? Even before the NPS centennial celebration itself, here's Dear Leader already pushing backdoor privatization at the Park Service.

You Dumbocrats keep falling for this. 

You fall for Bears Ears. Neither Obama nor Biden made it part of the National Park Service with orders to phase out multi-use shit, even though we see how problematic Grand Staircase-Escalante has been. 

Then you keep attacking the messengers of truth.

And, then, many of you claim people like me "really" voted for Trump. 

==

This is the second duopoly-tribalist site that has banned me for telling non-duopoly truth. R/Texas is the other; I even called them Nazis, but, they're politics-driven ones, per the poll at top right. And, the same untrue claim was made about what I was saying. 

This, per the poll, is versus the non-tribalist, non-duopoly, plain old Reddit Nazi moderators. At my other site, I noted the boot I got at r/AcademicBiblical.

Texas Progressives talk flooding

SocraticGadfly taking note of the reality and seriousness of climate change, has both an extensive look (going back to Obama-administration issues) at too much water on the Guadalupe followed by too little water on the Rio Grande.

Off the Kuff looks at the Lege's missed opportunity to bolster emergency preparedness in the state, and Kerr County's many failed attempts to do something about installing flood alarms.

Lone Star Left has a pseudo-appropriate response to Ron Filipkowski. And I have a fully appropriate for Lone Star Left — Democrats cock-blocking third party voting in Texas are full of hypocritical shit.

 Bayou City Sludge meditates on the disaster and presents her emergency preparedness kit. 

Suzanne Bellsnyder asks why a bill to boost disaster warning capability failed to get a vote in the Senate after overwhelmingly passing in the House.

Mimi Swartz is not running here until she talks about Dick Eastland grifting for an Obama-era FEMA floodplain exemption.

Tots and pears on the Guadalupe, non-duopoly version

As the death toll hit 70 Sunday morning from the Guadalupe River flooding, several questions abound. And have grown since it crossed 100.

The biggest was about warnings. Even with local and state officials offering caveats about lack of prediction in location, nonetheless, with the initial warning of 7 inches in the area already early afternoon on July 3, followed by the first flash flood warning early July 4, I think, per the Trib:

“The heartbreaking catastrophe that occurred in Central Texas is a tragedy of the worst sort because it appears evacuations and other proactive measures could have been undertaken to reduce the risk of fatalities had the organizers of impacted camps and local officials heeded the warnings of the government and private weather sources, including AccuWeather,” AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter wrote in a statement Saturday morning.

That Kerrville and Kerr County officials are full of shit.

Second question, not even being addressed yet by Tex-ass Rethuglican Congresscritters who voted for Trump's bigly ugly bill? How much will it reduce the accuracy, and cut the amount of advance notice, that the NWS was able to offer in this case, even though it went largely unheeded?

Here's the same second link on that, at least at the professionals' level:

The flooding came amid concerns about staffing levels at the NWS, after the Trump administration fired hundreds of meteorologists this year as part of Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts. The NWS Austin/San Antonio office’s warning coordination meteorologist announced in April that he was retiring early due to the funding cuts, leading to speculation that vacancies could have impacted forecasters’ response.

As I've half-jokingly said elsewhere, the "Gulf of America" will get renamed back to "Gulf of Mexico" the first major hurricane that spawns in it hits the Texas or Louisiana coast.

Per later comment in the story, they're adequately staffed NOW. Six months from now? A year? 

Zeynep Tufekci talks more about that official, Paul Yura, in a column asking other questions, like — why haven't more camps moved their camping areas just, even a few feet higher and a few yards further away from the course of the river? 

[A]t Camp Mystic, where at least 27 campers and counselors were washed away, the kids whose cabins were on just slightly higher ground all survived. Only those in the lower cabins were lost. Those lower cabins were less than a quarter of a mile away from the higher cabins. Every moment would have counted.

There you are. 

On Yura, it's not just about total staffing; it's about loss of experience. But, per places like LinkedIn, you'll see capitalist America, like the Elmo Musk behind DOGE, can't and/or won't put a dollar value on that. (Neither will neoliberal Democrats except when it's worth political haymaking.) 

Update: It does appear that NWS cuts grounded several warning balloons. 

The first piece has bullshit from dog-shooting Homeland Security head Kristi Noem trying to hand-wave away these concerns. 

The third question? How much do Democrats really want to politicize this, since Dear Leader's administration is partially to blame, at least career staffers in it? How much do you want to politicize it, per two paragraphs above, because Dear Leader was one of two people to make sure the "vaunted" Paris climate accords are voluntary unenforceable Jell-O? How much do they want to support putting Tweety Eastland, the surviving Mystic spouse, on the legal hook publicly?

How much of this is the fault of the youth camps' staff? After all, both the 1 am and 4 am July Fourth alerts were available by cellphone alerts. Mystic's co-owner Dick Eastland is among the dead, so he can't be asked, but other owners of other camps, and managers of them, certainly can be. Or, per The Barbed Wire's piece that references self-backpatting of state and federal officials, will this get swept under the rug?

And, to go there? These are Christian girls camps, even if not affiliated with a particular church? How many girls are told that climate change is a myth? What about camp owners and staffers?

Refudiating the likes of Chip Roy in that Barbed Wire piece? This was not a once in a century flood. The Monthly, like others, references the 1987 flood in Comfort. 

So does the first Trib piece, at top link, which has a good "wrap-up" on some of these issues:

Billy Lawrence, a 73-year-old San Angelo man, has dealt with this type of tragedy before. During flooding in the summer of 1987, he spent more than 30 days looking for bodies. The first one he found was of a child in a tree, 20 feet up.

But he said this flood is twice as bad as it was in 1987. On Saturday, he was back patrolling the river for bodies. A former volunteer with the Red Cross, he said he's gotten used to the morbid practice.

“I’m used to death. I’ve been around it a lot," Lawrence said.

He noted there are about 20 camps along the river in this area and said the camp counselors should receive training to check the weather every night.

"I'm not blaming them. They just have to do that,” he said.

Refudiating Danny Goeb, the jefe during this with Strangeabbott out of the Pointy Abandoned Object State? His Tex-ass Senate, and Rethuglicans in the House, killed HB 13, a bill that would have updated state warning systems. 

Tots and pears are no substitute for training and the acceptance of modern realities.

And, even if campers can't have cell phones on, per this Texas Monthly story, at least at that particular camp, camp counselors, managers and owners sure as hell can. Or you can have a weather-band radio that gets the same type of emergency alerts.

As for the climate change issue? You don't have to go back to that 1987 flood, per the top link:

The region has experienced catastrophic flooding before, including the 2015 Wimberley flood that left 13 people dead, as well as major floods in 2007 and 2002.

Notice how close together these things are now getting?

Last week, moved from the Texas Progressives Roundup, we had Evil MoPac grappling with the Hill Country flooding tragedy. I moved it here because after it going all nice and polite on getting to the bottom of things, this:

There will be a thorough accounting of what infrastructure issues and human errors may have been present and, hopefully, there will be common sense policy changes to try to reduce the terrible human and propery tolls of Texas floods in the future.

And this:

But we also need to grapple with the fact that this tragedy and the incredible rainfall amounts that caused it were not totally unprecedented and the impacted area has long been at risk for this type of event, even if rare. It’s that feeling of helplessness that will be one of the hardest things to process going forward: we can make improvements (including to local warning systems) and increase spending to try and solve the flooding problem, but it might never be enough.

Are both untrue.

The former is untrue per what I said about climate change and Tex-ass Rethuglican leadership, if nothing else. Any "changes" will be a right-wing corporate socialism bailout of capitalism.

The latter will be untrue starting with climate change, which the "we" wingnuts running Tex-ass won't grapple with. It's also untrue in that, from all I read, ownership and management of the various camps easily could have done a better job with the resources they had — ie, smartphone warnings — as could have local governments.

That's as Inside Climate Change notes this is more and more NOT a one-off — as the death toll crosses 100 July 8. 

And, per my update about the killed HB 13? Stop cutting these people slack, you fucktard. 

I suspect lawsuits are coming — and they need to come.

(I mean, good old BlueAnon Neil Aquino gets it right on this being a political issue, but gets it wrong of course on not looking at how it's various forms of business as usual for both duopoly parties.)

And, Blue Anons, do you REALLY want to politicize the FEMA angle of removing parts of Camp Mystic from the 100-year floodplain? Per the AP, via the Trib, that would be the OBAMA-era FEMA. 

In response to an appeal, FEMA in 2013 amended the county's flood map to remove 15 of the camp's buildings from the hazard area. Records show that those buildings were part of the 99-year-old Camp Mystic Guadalupe, which was devastated by last week's flood. After further appeals, FEMA removed 15 more Camp Mystic structures in 2019 and 2020 from the designation. Those buildings were located on nearby Camp Mystic Cypress Lake, a sister site that opened to campers in 2020 as part of a major expansion and suffered less damage in the flood. ..

[Syracuse University associate professor Sarah] Pralle said the appeals were not surprising because communities and property owners have used them successfully to shield specific properties from regulation.

Ooopppssss .... 

But wait, there's more! 

Pralle, who reviewed the amendments for AP, noted that some of the exempted properties were within 2 feet of FEMA's flood plain by the camp's revised calculations, which she said left almost no margin for error. She said her research shows that FEMA approves about 90% of map amendment requests, and the process may favor the wealthy and well-connected.

And, with that, we have the answer that, in the past at least, the Eastlands were partially responsible for the current deaths. And, we have material evidence of negligence, even willful negligence, when somebody drops this nice polite ownership bullshit and sues. 

Will Texas Monthly mention that? Mimi Swartz's hagiography of the Eastlands and Forest Wilder's laundry list of what went wrong both failed to. 

Abrahm Lustgarten, who has a great book on climate change, now weighs in at Pro Publica. 

Climate realism or climate cynicism?

The New Republic transitions quickly from calling it the former to calling it the latter, businesses and think tanks ditching the baseline idea of the Paris accords and accepting that we're not just going to hit 2C, we're going to hit 3C or more.

It's all about capitalism, even more than TNR shows.

First, Paris was always just aspirational Jell-O, as I wrote at the time. And, two people made sure it would be just that — Xi Jinping and .... Merikkka's Dear Leader. Why? Capitalism.

What does this mean?

First, banksters, hedge funds and others, pivoting from backing decarbonization, which they never really backed, and carbon offsets and other such kabuki theater pretendianism on fighting climate change, to touting investments in air conditioning and other such businesses.

Second, especially as more and more countries eye a selective isolationism or increased efforts at autarky, it means upping the ramparts against climate destruction from outside the doors. And, TNR notes that think tanks as "venerable" as the Council on Foreign Relations are signing off on at least some of this.

This:

The brand of climate cynicism being voiced by the Council on Foreign Relations is more novel. In an essay outlining the founding principles of the Climate Realism Initiative, Varun Sivarum—the program’s director and a former top aide to Biden-era U.S. climate envoy John Kerry—describes a zero-sum, catastrophically climate-changed world where “other countries will single-mindedly prioritize their own interests” and the United States should do the same. Facing climate-fueled mass migration “of at least hundreds of millions of climate refugees [that] could upend the international order, and increasingly grisly natural disasters,” the U.S. “should provide the support it can, cooperate with countries on building resilience capabilities, and protect its borders,” as well as “prepare for global competition for resources and military positioning that is intensifying in the melting Arctic.”

As emissions continue to rise from emerging economies, Sivarum calls on policymakers to treat climate change as a “top national security priority—on the level of averting nuclear war and engaging in great-power competition with China,” working with allies to penalize countries whose emissions continue to rise. Acknowledging that such an approach is “fundamentally unfair,” Sivarum makes the case for an America First climate policy. “Nevertheless, the fact is that foreign emissions are endangering the American homeland,” he argues. “Every tool of the U.S. and allies’ arsenals, spanning diplomatic and economic coercion to military might, should be on the table.”

Donald Trump and his top allies don’t seem to think climate change is real, or that it’s a bad thing. But as the White House threatens to invade Greenland for its minerals and disappears people into Salvadoran prisons, it’s helping to build precisely the kinds of climate resilience that the Council on Foreign Relations—with its roster of Biden and Obama White House alumni—seems to be championing. Bleak as warming projections are, a planet where governments and businesses fight to the death for their own profitable share of a hotter, more chaotic planet is bleaker still.

What it really means is that, as income inequality looks to rise even more in both developed and upper-tier developing nations, is that, within countries, the poor and the precariat will get screwed even more, while being exploited in the name of economic nationalism.

What it means for me personally as far as political activism, is that this remains, or increases, as another reason to say "fuck the Democrats" as well as "fuck the Republicans."

Science news: Climate change cheating at Paris, atmospheric red flags — important as COP29 approaches

Not that this will actually affect anything undertaken at COP29, starting with the hypocrisy of it once again being held in a petrostate, this time, Baku Azerbaijan. (Yale Climate Connections notes that countries of the world need a "quantum leap" just on meeting current, and currently unfulfilled, commitments from past climate "accords.")

==

The cheating at Paris? I'm talking about the Paris round of climate change "accord" talks, which I have long ago called "Jell-O" that was made such by two people: Dear Leader Obama and Xi Jinping.

Now, more evidence in that general direction? Two Swedish academics talk about what was essentially game-rigging on trying to stay below 1.5°C, which we of course have broken already.

(S)oon, the ambitious Paris agreement limit turned out to be not much of a limit at all. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC, the world’s foremost body of climate experts) lent its authority to the 1.5°C temperature target with its 2018 special report, something odd transpired.

Nearly all modelled pathways for limiting global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels involved temporarily transgressing this target. Each still arrived back at 1.5°C eventually (the deadline being the random end point of 2100), but not before first shooting past it.

OK ....

They then spell this out:

De facto, what they said was this: staying below a temperature limit is the same as first crossing it and then, a few decades hence, using methods of removing carbon from the atmosphere to dial temperatures back down again.

From some corners of the scientific literature came the assertion that this was nothing more than fantasy. A new study published in Nature has now confirmed this critique. It found that humanity’s ability to restore Earth’s temperature below 1.5°C of warming, after overshooting it, cannot be guaranteed

Fantasy! Many of us have already faulted the IPCC for being overly conservative. Now, per further items in the piece, it appears that this overt conservativism (contra climate change Obamiacs like Michael Mann and Katharine Hayhoe, with Mann even attacking James Hansen) was deliberate for political reasons.

Read on, MacDuff: 

If reversal cannot be guaranteed, then clearly it is irresponsible to sanction a supposedly temporary overshoot of the Paris targets. And yet this is exactly what scientists have done. What compelled them to go down this dangerous route?

Our own book on this topic (Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, published last week by Verso) offers a history and critique of the idea.

When overshoot scenarios were summoned into being in the early 2000s, the single most important reason was economics. Rapid, near-term emissions cuts were deemed prohibitively costly and so unpalatable. Cost optimisation mandated that they be pushed into the future to the extent possible.

Politics! Also note the phrase "Climate Breakdown," in the book.

Politics!

(B)ecause modellers could not imagine transgressing the deeply conservative constraints that they worked within, something else had to be transgressed.

One team stumbled upon the idea that large-scale removal of carbon might be possible in the future, and so help reverse climate change. The EU and then the IPCC picked up on it, and before long, overshoot scenarios had colonised the expert literature. Deference to mainstream economics yielded a defence of the political status quo. This in turn translated into reckless experimentation with the climate system. Conservatism or fatalism about society’s capacity for change flipped into extreme adventurism about nature.

There we are.

And read that Nature study. (I'll be trying to find that book!) It notes the real cost is that of carbon removal. IF possible. It also goes into more detail about how climate change feedbacks that are likely already being cooked into the system can't necessarily be undone by negative human GHG emissions.

Update, Nov. 25: Grist takes a further look at "Overshoot," the book by the academics, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton.

“Overshoot is here not a fate passively acquiesced to,” Carton and Malm, both professors at Lund University in Sweden, write in the book’s introduction. “It is an actively championed programme for how to deal with the rush into catastrophe: let it continue for the time being, and then we shall sort things out towards the end of this century.”

And, this is part one of a two-part book set, reportedly.

AND? They're reportedly Marxists. If that's behind callouts like this of Nordhaus:

One of the first examples of overshoot thinking in the mainstream was an influential 1991 paper by the economist William Nordhaus, referred to by Carton and Malm as “the Genghis Khan of bourgeois climate economics.” The article, titled “To Slow or Not to Slow: The Economics of the Greenhouse Effect,” asked what an optimal economic policy would be for dealing with climate change. Nordhaus concluded that a rapid transition away from fossil fuels would carry a steep cost for the economy and that the task should be put off for future generations. Fossil fuels will help the world develop faster, he reasoned, making societies richer and better equipped to deal with climate fallout. (Despite experts flagging a number of errors with this logic, Nordhaus won a Nobel Prize for his life’s work in 2018.)

All the better.

And, per that Jell-O I mentioned up top?

This:

“If there was equality in Paris, it came in the form of a shared unaccountability: the agreement required that no one was required to act at any certain level,” Carton and Malm wrote. “Now what do you get when a seemingly strict target is combined with such lax rules? You get overshoot.”

Is so true. 

Finally, the authors tackle the issue of stranded assets, and note how much of an obstacle they will continue to be.

Sadly, nobody will be listening.

==

The atmospheric red flags connect. A new study shows that global methane emissions continue to rise. And, guess who's one of the worst offenders of a 2021 global methane emissions agreement? China is also in the top five, as are the rest of the BRICS countries not named South Africa.

==

And, a friendly reminder — it's not fundagelicals vs the liberally religious that's the big divide on taking climate change seriously, as a climate crisis. It's secularists/non-metaphysicians/atheists vs everybody else AND that "everybody else" includes the so-called Nones or religiously unaffiliated.

Earth Overshoot Day — the issue and various partial answers

Many capitalist Americans have heard of "tax-free day," the date in which the average American (these things are always done by the mean, not the median, so of limited insight) has earned enough to be free and clear of government obligations.

Far fewer have heard of Earth Overshoot Day, the day in which the planet "goes into debt" for the rest of the year of capitalist Americans and other world island citizens raping it, not just raping it "at par," but beyond what is sustainable. We hit that last month.

As the link notes, climate change is but one symptom of broader Earth Overshoot. But, it gets even less attention. Usually, far less.

Per that chart, we've been in overshoot for more than 50 years, and it has generally continued to worsen until about the time of the Great Recession.

Many organizations pushing more activism on the issue have focused on population growth. Regardless of any ethical issues on forced limits on population growth (you, China) and how that affects longer-term society to boot, such activists are all wet.

Yes, we're a bit over 8 billion, but the UN has indicated we'll probably peak somewhere between 9 and 10 billion, and won't get close to 11 billion. That means limiting population growth is not really a part of the solution, with the exception of one country, possibly two. More below. Consumption is. If you won't be honest about that as the bottom line, you're not being honest.

It should also be noted that, while things haven't gotten better, contra the natalists, they haven't gotten worse since the Western world's Great Recession, even as population has continued to rise, even soar, in places like India and sub-Saharan Africa.

The one country? India, especially as long as its Hindutva-fascist leadership sees "more people" as a key part of policy. The possible second country? Pakistan, if triggered by Indian birtherism.

On consumption and the developing world? It is the developed world's responsibility, just as it is with the Earth Overshoot subset of climate change, to help the developing world avoid our mistakes and past history — help that must be financial as well as technological, and "open" — untariffed, unburdened by intellectual property restrictions or pseudo-restrictions, etc.

Beyond that, touting antinatalism as "the" answer looks racist, even if not meant that way. And, there's a history of White environmentalism that's racist that's not just "history." It's still out there today.

RIP Steve Curry

 Golden Canyon at sunset (my photo).

Steve Curry was nobody famous. He was just someone who loved to hike, and who fatally pushed his luck in Death Valley. (Yes, this story is a year old, but I saw it via another website, which talked about how climate change is making med-evac helicopter rescues in summer in the Southwest more and more problematic, because of lesser air lift in hotter temperatures.)

Since he's not famous, this isn't a takedown obit, but it IS a precautionary obit.

First, he was 71 years old. By no means does that mean, go to a retirement home. It does mean work within your limits, and know that as we (I'm no spring chicken any more) get older, our bodies get less efficient at thermoregulation in both extreme heat and extreme cold.

I hate rock circles and cairns, but this was 20 years ago, and at least I played with it in Photoshop. Golden Canyon, my photo. And, a reminder to enjoy hiking.

Second, know your adaptedness to the conditions. He was from Sunland, a "foothills" neighborhood in Los Angeles. He didn't regularly get exposed to Death Valley weather or close to it. Me, I'm in Tex-ass. Not the most humid part, but certainly not the least humid part. I'm used to 100-degree temperatures with 40 percent or more humidity, which produce heat indexes near 110. Also, even North Texas (not the Panhandle) is at a lower latitude than LA, so I'm used to sun more nearly directly overhead than Curry was.

Badwater Basin from the west side; HDR photography. Author photo. Click to embiggen.

Related? It sounds like he'd never hiked DV in anywhere near full summer, and like some of the nutbar Germans who do similar, decided he had to do this:

But on Tuesday, Curry collapsed after completing a hike in Death Valley, one of the hottest places on the planet, and died of what officials believe were heat-related causes.

“He went having accomplished something he wanted to do,” said Rima Evans Curry, his wife of 29 years. “He wanted to go to Death Valley. He wanted to do a hike.”

The temperature in the park Tuesday was unbearably hot, but Curry was intent on completing his round trip from Golden Canyon to Zabriskie Point, a scenic overview overlooking the sun-drenched moonscape. ...

More later on that:

“He had talked about Death Valley for at least a week or more,” his 76-year-old wife said. She told him she was worried about the temperature. “But once he got an idea like that ...” she trailed off.

Wrong move, if you hadn't done this before.

That leads to No. 3.

I've done Zabriskie Point and Golden Canyon before. In January and in April. I would never do that in July, because I know this:

Around 10 a.m., Curry stopped to rest under a metal sign, the only spot of shade at Zabriskie Point. He declined offers of assistance, determined to finish what he set out to do.

Yeah, wrong.

Fourth? Stop comparing yourself to others.

It had taken him about two hours to reach Zabriskie Point — and the return hike would take longer — but he said he was mostly worried that he wasn’t keeping pace with younger people he had seen out walking.

Since I'm not a spring chicken, whether it's in the Desert Southwest or a 14er in Colorado, as was the case last year? I expect to get passed left and right by younger people. Sadly, tying this in with Point 1, it sounds like he couldn't accept that he was 71 years old.

Fifth? Know what other things will and will not do.

SPF 50 sunscreen? Great at keeping you from sunburn. Does nothing to cool you off, other than the cooling from not being sunburnt. In other words, it's not spray-on Freon. (And, please, folks, don't think that a bottle of computer keyboard cleaner will get you around DV incident-free, either.)

Fifth, part 2? Per what I said about that environmental website, know that, even in what seems to be a well-traveled place, medical help may not get to you. This is also going to apply to some degree to other popular state and federal outdoors sites in the U.S. Southwest. In other words, don't be a Steve Curry at Mojave National Preserve, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, Joshua Tree National Park, etc. Also, contra both German tourists and some Americans, don't listen to Google Maps.

Sixth, here's more to know on what heat can do to you.

If you want to "visit" Zabriskie Point with fiery heat, do it another time, and do a Michel Foucault, drop a tab of acid there, and wait for a fiery vision. And also, be poetic about your deserts.

Yes, AC is making most of you Tex-ass Texans wimps

I say YOU and not ME because, per this Texas Monthly story on the issue, I rarely use it, and basically never have it running during the daytime when I am home and yes, you read that right. And, yes, with strategic shutting of vents and use of box and ceiling fans, it IS possible to sleep at, or at least near, that 82°F overnight temperature the EPA suggests; Vox discusses that and daytime temps as well.

At home, I benefit from an apartment complex swimming pool, I should add.

And, since I run a small biz where I'm the only full-time on-site employee, it runs somewhere between 78 and 80 there. 

I HATE places that run it anywhere below 74. Yes, 72, not just 70, is loathsome, ridiculous and ...

Climate killing. So, librulz who claim to care about the environment? Look in the mirror.

The reality is that if you get outside and exercise in the outdoors enough, you'll grow at least somewhat heat-tolerant. 

Update: No, I am not joking, per this story about permanent residents of Death Valley:

Those who are here that long have more blood in their systems, which allows the body to more efficiently carry heat from the core to the skin. They’re also able to sweat more to shed heat.

There you go.

Even if my daytime numbers are too high for you, by not running it at all? The EPA still says 78 for daytime; I'd set it at 80, even. And, if 82 is too hot at night? You should be able to do 80, or 78 to start, with enough fans. (I have two box, a smaller oscillator, and a ceiling fan in my bedroom.)

The story is interesting in noting Japan ranks right up alongside the US in degree of AC "penetration." Lots of Japan can be pretty humid, but, lots of it can also be not that hot.