My favorite of this week's Andy Borowitz satires -- his take on Trump's West Point moment. Tom
"Arguing that “there’s something going on” with the nation’s sloping surfaces, Donald J. Trump has ordered Attorney General Bill Barr to launch a Department of Justice investigation into the United States’s vast collection of ramps.
“It’s something we’re looking into quite strongly,” Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House. “Ramps have treated me very unfairly.”
"The decision to probe the nation’s ramps came after a night of Trump feverishly retweeting anti-ramp conspiracy theories, including one claiming that George Soros had plotted to make American ramps steeper and slipperier than they were during Barack Obama’s Presidency.
"Trump told reporters that he was also considering signing an executive order requiring all ramps to have an incline of zero degrees, rendering them completely flat.
“Those would be perfect ramps,” he said.
"Responding to this proposal, CNN’s Jim Acosta asked if, by making ramps flat, Trump would in effect be making the nation’s ramps no longer ramps at all.
“You’re a terrible person,” Trump replied."
Just a reminder that whatever else is going on -- from Donald Trump to Covid-19 -- we are also increasingly on a different planet than the one humanity has known all these thousands of years. Here's the latest on the Siberian version of this from Damian Carrington of the Guardian. Tom
"A prolonged heatwave in Siberia is “undoubtedly alarming”, climate scientists have said. The freak temperatures have been linked to wildfires, a huge oil spill and a plague of tree-eating moths. On a global scale, the Siberian heat is helping push the world towards its hottest year on record in 2020, despite a temporary dip in carbon emissions owing to the coronavirus pandemic.
"Temperatures in the polar regions are rising fastest because ocean currents carry heat towards the poles and reflective ice and snow is melting away. Russian towns in the Arctic circle have recorded extraordinary temperatures, with Nizhnyaya Pesha hitting 30C on 9 June and Khatanga, which usually has daytime temperatures of around 0C at this time of year, hitting 25C on 22 May. The previous record was 12C.
"In May, surface temperatures in parts of Siberia were up to 10C above average, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). Martin Stendel, of the Danish Meteorological Institute, said the abnormal May temperatures seen in north-west Siberia would be likely to happen just once in 100,000 years without human-caused global heating.
"Freja Vamborg, a senior scientist at C3S, said: “It is undoubtedly an alarming sign, but not only May was unusually warm in Siberia. The whole of winter and spring had repeated periods of higher-than-average surface air temperatures.
“Although the planet as a whole is warming, this isn’t happening evenly. Western Siberia stands out as a region that shows more of a warming trend with higher variations in temperature. So to some extent large temperature anomalies are not unexpected. However, what is unusual is how long the warmer-than-average anomalies have persisted for.”
"Marina Makarova, the chief meteorologist at Russia’s Rosgidromet weather service, said: “This winter was the hottest in Siberia since records began 130 years ago. Average temperatures were up to 6C higher than the seasonal norms.”
Robert Rohde, the lead scientist at the Berkeley Earth project, said Russia as a whole had experienced record high temperatures in 2020, with the average from January to May 5.3C above the 1951-1980 average. “[This is a] new record by a massive 1.9C,” he said. In December, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, commented on the unusual heat: “Some of our cities were built north of the Arctic Circle, on the permafrost. If it begins to thaw, you can imagine what consequences it would have. It’s very serious.”
"Thawing permafrost was at least partly to blame for a spill of diesel fuel in Siberia this month that led Putin to declare a state of emergency. The supports of the storage tank suddenly sank, according to its operators; green groups said ageing and poorly maintained infrastructure was also to blame.
"Wildfires have raged across hundreds of thousands of hectares of Siberia’s forests. Farmers often light fires in the spring to clear vegetation, and a combination of high temperatures and strong winds has caused some fires to burn out of control.
"Swarms of the Siberian silk moth, whose larvae eat at conifer trees, have grown rapidly in the rising temperatures. “In all my long career, I’ve never seen moths so huge and growing so quickly,” Vladimir Soldatov, a moth expert, told AFP.
"He warned of “tragic consequences” for forests, with the larvae stripping trees of their needles and making them more susceptible to fires."
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That is Siberian warming, not global warming. A recent study by researchers at Columbia University and the University of Toronto found that most of the warming over the arctic is being caused by ozone depleting substances, not CO2:
https://www.utoronto.ca/.../substances-created-hole-ozone...
https://www.utoronto.ca/.../substances-created-hole-ozone...
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The study fails to mention or consider the impact of the feedback mechanism of the dark colored exposed water and does not specifically exclude global warming.
"...Smith, who received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for her research, says an important next step is explore the mechanisms behind how ODS amplify Arctic warming despite their very low atmospheric concentrations compared to other greenhouse gases.
“The focus of greenhouse gas emissions and their contribution to climate change has been on carbon dioxide, and rightfully so based on concentration,” says Smith, who is the director of the master of environmental science climate change impacts and adaptation program.
“In terms of the global average, ODS do not play as big of a role as carbon dioxide in causing global warming, but in Arctic regions we see about double the warming.”..."
On the globalization of the Green New Deal.
—Erika
—Erika
Civilization is at a crossroads. The pandemic has only deepened social and economic inequalities that were already intolerable. It is now necessary to look again at alternatives that only a few months ago seemed unviable in order to find a different way out of this crisis. As seldom before, the pandemic impels us to stop seeing the state, markets, family, and community in the usual distorted way. In light of our social vulnerability and our human condition as inter- and eco-dependent beings, we must think again about a comprehensive reconfiguration of society, health, the economy, and the environment, in a way that pays tribute to life and people.
This means that the capacities of the state, now revealed to be essential to overcome the crisis at global and national level, must be placed at the service of a major Green New Deal or Grand Ecosocial and Economic Pact (Gran Pacto Ecosocial y Economico, or Gran Pacto) to transform the economy by means of a holistic plan that will save the planet and seek to achieve a fairer and more equal society. The worst-case scenario is that states around the world, in their drive to return to economic growth, will legislate against the environment — bailing out fossil-fuel companies and further accelerating the environmental crisis — as well as increasing inequality between rich and poor, the global North and the global South. We must understand, once and for all, that environmental justice and social justice go together. One is no use without the other.
In our view, the Gran Pacto should have five fundamental components: a universal citizen’s income, a progressive tax reform, the suspension of external debt payments, a national system of care, and a serious and radical proposal for the socioecological transition.
The present crisis makes clear that everyone should have a guaranteed basic income to enable them to lead a dignified life. As has long been promoted in Argentina by the economist Rubén Lo Vuolo, among others, eligibility for this income should be guaranteed to all, without conditions — other than being alive, and thus being a citizen. In contrast to the fragmentary social policies implemented in Latin America in recent decades, the universal citizen’s income should be available to everyone, regardless of one’s earnings, and should be sufficient for every person to afford basic goods.
Once dismissed as impossible to implement, the universal income is now at the center of the debate on the global agenda, as is the proposal to reduce working hours and set a limit of no more than thirty to thirty-six hours per week, with no cut in wages. This would not only improve workers’ quality of life but also enable new jobs to be created to cover the reduced hours. In addition to this, a job-sharing proposal would be a proactive way to address the creeping automation of production processes and the advance of the digital society, without increasing unemployment or job insecurity in the process.
For a universal income to be feasible, we need a progressive tax system. Argentina’s tax system is regressive, based on indirect consumption taxes (such as VAT) and an income tax that hits people with middle and low incomes the hardest. Vast wealth, inheritance, environmental damage, and capital gains are hardly taxed at all in Argentina. The country desperately needs to reintroduce the inheritance tax, which was abolished with the stroke of a pen by José Alfredo MartÃnez de Hoz during the last military dictatorship, as well as new green taxes on corporate polluters.
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