Cretinism

By Rick McKee 

I'm driving the car with my mind

by Monte Wolverton 

Slowmo Antoinette

 The latest idiocy from our PM:  if you can't afford to pay the rent, buy a house!  

Why haven't you ended the pandemic?

 A cartoon by Mike Luckovich

Scott Morrison and Oz's climate emergency

 Oz's PM (Prime Minister) is a born-again evangelical Xtian who leads the completely misnamed "Liberal" Party of Australia.  It is in coalition with the so-called "National" Party which used to be called the Country Party, but is really an agrarian socialist party, which wants protection for agriculture and lots of subsidies from the government when there are droughts, floods, etc.  They want to socialise the losses (of the bad years) and keep the profits (in the good years).  The "Liberal" Party is the party which favours the rich and companies, and is in favour of cutting taxes on the rich, cutting welfare for the poor, cutting minimum wages, and nobbling Oz's free health system.  The Liberal/National Party coalition (known for short as the LNP) is most infamous for its demented climate denialism and its passion for fossil fuels, reflecting its largest donors.  This denialism and delayism is also driven by the "National" Party which fears that country regions would suffer if Oz adopted a reasonable climate target.  

This image comes from the Twitter page of Scott Ludlam who was one of the Green Party's (Federal) senators for a couple of years.  The cretin in the picture is our PM.  He once brought a lump of coal into Parliament and said we don't have to be afraid of it.  The map of Australia behind the PM shows the temperatures in Oz on a heatwave day.  The BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) has had to create new colours to show the new high temperatures being reached on our continent.

Pro-Trump counties have triple the death toll of pro-Biden ones

 From Raw Story

MSNBC's Chris Hayes on Wednesday reported on the higher death toll in the most Republican counties vs the most Democratic ones.

Hayes pointed to a new report that was published by data journalist Christopher Ingraham under the headline, "GOP COVID policy is killing GOP voters".

Ingraham's data showed that in counties where Trump received less than 20% of the vote, the death toll in August was 4.89 per 100,000 residents. However, in counties where Trump received more than 80% of the vote, the death toll was 14.89 per 100,000.

"That is more than three times as many people dying from COVID as in those most, pro-Biden counties," Hayes said.

Hayes says the data gives "some real empirical weight to the evidence we've seen, for months and months and months, that the delta wave is wreaking havoc disproportionately in red America."

Hayes noted that with vaccines, the deaths were "largely preventable."

"It is happening because the agenda of the Trump, MAGA, Republican Party has been, by-and-large, to ignore the risks of COVID, refuse to protect yourselves, others from it, and when people die, it is 'freedom' or something," Hayes said.

 

Source: GOP Covid policy is killing GOP voters

Who is to blame for this?  Individuals must take some of the blame.  The evidence has been clear.  On the other hand, most of them watch Fox News, which has consistently downplayed Covid, screeched about mask mandates, and spread fatal misinformation about the vaccines.  And of course, the Republican Party,  which has demonised all attempts to reduce the threat of Covid.

Rampant cretinism

 Even the Gods themselves struggle against stupidity.  It's so stupid, one suspects it's fake.

QAnon explained

 A cartoon by Dave Coverly

He tells it like it is

 A cartoon by Paul Noth

The "nanny state", 1848

There have always been ppl like this ......

The coronavirus test

A cartoon by Clay Bennett

The Trumptini

Coronavirus's explosive growth

An excellent chart from John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times (or FT)

Note that the Y-axis is a logarithmic scale.  See how the number of cases goes from 200 to 20,000 in just 15 days.  Without action the number of new cases rises by 33% EVERY DAY.  At some point, emergency departments are overwhelmed and then the death rate will rise sharply too from 1% to 5% in the general population and from 5% in the over 60s to 25%.  When overwhelmed health systems have to choose between saving the life of an old person and of a young person they will choose the young person. 

This is a catastrophe, and the US is the advanced country most incapable of dealing with the crisis because of its health system and President Trump.  Note: because of too few testing kits, the number of US cases is prolly grossly understated. 

3 metres of sea level rise

A researcher holds ancient air trapped as gas bubbles within ice.
Photograph: AntarcticScience.com

From The Guardian:

Mass melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet, driven by warmer ocean temperatures, was a major cause of extreme sea level rise more than 100,000 years ago, according to new research.

A research team, led by scientists at the University of New South Wales, examined the cause of high sea levels during a period known as the last interglacial, which occurred 129,000-116,000 years ago.

Their study finds that melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet caused a sea-level rise of more than three metres and it took less than 2C of ocean warming for that to occur.

The study’s lead author Chris Turney is a climate change and earth scientist at UNSW [University of New South Wales].

He said the West Antarctic was particularly vulnerable to ocean warming because it sits mostly on the sea bed, rather than on land.

“This has been a big concern and is what the concern is in the present day,” Turney said.

“So the question is how much could fall into the ocean and this is where the last interglacial [period] is so important.”

To trace Antarctica’s potential contribution to this sea-level rise, the scientists travelled to West Antarctica to the Patriot Hills Blue Ice Area, which is on the periphery of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

Blue ice areas are created by katabatic winds. When these winds blow over mountains, they remove snow and ice, allowing ancient ice to come to the surface.

A lot of Antarctic research involves deep ice core drilling to study years of climate history.  In this study, the researchers used what they called “horizontal ice core” analysis, which involved simply walking across the valley towards the mountain.

“As you walk towards the mountain, you walk over increasingly older ice,” Turney said.

They used some shallow drilling to take ice samples from the surface. Through isotope measurements, they found a gap in the ice sheet record immediately prior to the last interglacial.  Turney said this gap coincided with an extreme rise in sea level and suggested a period in which there was no ice accumulating in that valley.

“It means that a large part of the west Antarctic almost certainly disappeared in the last interglacial. It melted. It flowed rapidly into the ocean,” he said.

He said the research also suggested this mass melting happened quite early during the ocean warming “somewhere between zero and 2C”. 

Turney said the current summer in Australia alone had shown the dangers of a warming world just at 1C.   “What these results suggest, or show, is that when people talk about a 2C warmer world as a good thing, actually what it shows is we don’t want to get close to 2C,” he said.

The paper says ocean temperatures during the last interglacial were likely up to 2C warmer than they are today and global sea levels were 6-9 metres higher.

3 metres is 10 feet in the old measurement.  And that's just the first stage.  The sea level will rise another 3 to 6 metres after that, and if temperatures go on rising, more and still more.  We can kiss the Netherlands and Denmark and Finland and London and Bangladesh and Alexandria and Miami goodbye.  And hundreds of other towns and villages.  Or we can build prodigiously expensive dikes, which will have to be 9 metres high (to allow for storm surges).  And we can't even do that for Miami, because it's built on an ancient coral reef, which is porous.  In Miami, they still vote for the denialist Republican Party.  Against stupidity, the Gods themselves are helpless.

All because the human race is too stupid, too greedy, too focussed on the short-term, too ignorant to bother finding out the truth, too lazy to act on it.  And because of the contemptible lies and disinformation spread by fossil fuel companies and parroted by right-wing commentators, news media and politicians.

Amazon deforestation may start feeding on itself

Source: The Economist

From The Economist:

SINCE THE 1970s nearly 800,000km² of Brazil’s original 4m km² (1.5m square miles) of Amazon forest has been lost to logging, farming, mining, roads, dams and other forms of development—an area equivalent to that of Turkey and bigger than that of Texas. Scientists worry this is uncomfortably close to the threshold for tree loss, of between 20 and 25%, beyond which deforestation begins to feed on itself, turning much of the Amazon basin into drier savannah known as cerrado. Under Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing president of Brazil who was inaugurated in January, the Amazon appears to be rushing towards that tipping point.

The deforestation rate had slowed between 2004 and 2012, when the government beefed up its environmental protection agency, Ibama, and an international Amazon Fund was created to pay for conservation projects. But it began ticking up again after a weakening of environmental legislation and budget cuts during Brazil’s recession of 2014-2016. Between August 2017 and July 2018 Brazil lost 7,900km² of Amazon forest—nearly a billion trees. This year’s figure is almost sure to be higher. Preliminary satellite data showed that 920 km² were cleared in June, 88% more than the same month in 2018. In July 2,255 km² were cleared, a startling 278% more than the same month last year (see chart).

Environmentalists blame Mr Bolsonaro’s insouciance about the Amazon. It is a “virgin” that should be “exploited” for agriculture, mining and infrastructure projects, he says. The environment minister, Ricardo Salles, fired 21 of Ibama’s 27 heads; he has yet to replace most of them, crippling the agency’s enforcement duties. In response to increasing alarm about the jump in tree-clearing, Mr Bolsonaro fired the head of the agency that tracks deforestation, called the data “lies” and told a journalist that those concerned about the environment should eat less and “shit every other day.”

The consequences of the destruction of the Amazon rain forest will be severe.

The forest also influences the water cycle on a regional and perhaps even global scale. As moisture comes off the Atlantic Ocean it falls on the forest as rain. This water gets sucked up by deep roots, then moves through plants and across the surface of leaves before returning to the atmosphere. Winds blowing over the uneven forest canopy create turbulence, which allows the atmosphere to absorb more moisture.

All this water then moves like a giant flowing river in the sky, falling as rain and then evaporating again and again until it reaches the Andes. Ultimately, the forest produces at least half of its own rain.

"One water vapor molecule may be recycled five to seven times before it leaves the system, either through the atmosphere or the Amazon River," says Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist with the University of Sao Paulo's Institute for Advanced Studies.

But experts increasingly fear this delicate exchange could collapse. The loss of just a fraction more of this moisture-creating forest could lead far more of it to dry out, which would reduce rainfall even more, in a self-reinforcing spiral. Already, climate change, decades of logging, and land-clearing by intentionally set wildfires have sparked record-setting droughts in 2005, 2010, and 2015-2016.
Even as Bolsonaro prepares to take office, the Amazon is already changing.

The dry season is lengthening and rainfall has dropped by a quarter in some regions. Meanwhile, precipitation, when it comes, sometimes arrives in more intense bursts, leading to massive floods in 2009, 2012, and 2014. The region's climate system is oscillating more wildly.

In the study she led, published in the journal Global Change Biology with more than a hundred other scientists as co-authors, Esquivel-Muelbert found that during the past 30 years, more drought-tolerant plant species have appeared in the Amazon, while species that predominantly emerge in wet areas are declining. Fast-growing trees and taller trees that are better at accessing the sun are outcompeting shorter, damp-loving species.

[Read more here]

Brazil's (and Indonesia's) massive deforestation more than undoes the rest of the world's reforestation efforts.  Sometimes I am convinced that mankind is doomed, thanks to our own greed and stupidity.  And what is it about the extreme right that they are so hostile to facts?

Get screened for wind turbine cancer today!

From Climate Denial Crock of the Week

The Trump Zeppelin

cartoon by Drew Sheneman

New fast train service

From Australia's satirical magazine, The Shovel:

The Morrison Government today unveiled plans for the nation’s first fast train service, which will revolutionise train travel in Australia, according to the Prime Minister. 

The early election promise is one of a range of new ideas Mr Morrison has put forward to modernise the country’s infrastructure and boost the coal industry. Dubbed ‘Barnaby’, the service will cover the busy Sydney to Canberra route. Although buses will be needed between Sydney to Bungendore due to track incompatibility, it is expected to cut hours from the current horse and carriage time. 

The Shovel is mocking the sadly-misnamed Liberal/National government, which wants to go back to the coal era.  The new PM, Morrison, even brought a piece of coal into Parliament and advised people "not to be afraid of it".

Crazy how nature does that ....

The Flat Earth Society still exists. Fortunately, unlike the case with climate denialism, they have no influence over policy or debate.  But climate denialists are in the same camp: the science haters.

Immigrants are stripping Europe of her culture

Dear old Donald.  Such a star.