Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press

News Summaries For 20180818

 


Ryan_Zinke_Uses_Climate-Fueled_Wildfires_to_Boost_the_Timber_Industry_-_and_It's_Not_the_First_Time

Contributed by: photosymbiosis

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PHOTO: Logs are stacked above Cle Elum Lake in Washington, where a crew is thinning a 100-acre patch on private land owned by the Nature Conservancy on Feb. 22, 2017, part of a plan to restore the pine forests of the Central Cascades so they are more resilient to wildfires. Photo by: Elaine Thompson/AP

In between the dry fire years, California will have to deal with massive floods, as the climate grows more unstable under fossil-fueled global warming:

Californians should expect more dramatic swings between dry and wet years as the climate warms, according to a new study that found it likely that the state will be hit by devastating, widespread flooding in coming decades.

No worries, “liberal” Jerry Brown is busy handing control of California’s energy grid over to Donald Trump and Warren Buffett to please the big-money Democratic donors - the Koch Brothers are having a good laugh about it.

Gov. Jerry Brown, rapacious billionaire fossil energy tycoon Warren Buffett, and monopoly utilities like PG&E, SDG&E, Edison and SoCal Gas (Sempra), are colluding, by the end of August, to shove several bills through the California legislature that will deeply undermine our local clean energy movement, set California’s climate goals back by at least a decade, and bring us more devastating fire storms caused by utility transmission lines.

Conclusion: the United States from the ‘left’ to the ‘right’ has the most corrupt politicians one can imagine, absolute tools of the plutocratic and oligarchic class. I mean, Donald Trump and Jerry Brown aligning to serve Warren Buffett’s financial interests, even if it destroys the economy and the environment? Rotten to the core.

This trending of increasing climate instability and steadily rising global temperatures has no end in sight. Conisder 2016:

July wasn't just hot - it was the hottest month ever recorded, according to NASA. And this year is likely to be the hottest year on record. Fourteen of the 15 hottest years have occurred since 2000, as heat waves have become more frequent, more intense and longer lasting. A study in the journal Nature Climate Change last year found that three of every four daily heat extremes can be tied to global warming.
NYT article

It's going to be like this for the rest of the century, with each decade breaking the records of the previous decade:

Earth's globally averaged temperature for 2017 made it the third warmest year in NOAA's 138-year climate record, behind 2016 (warmest) and 2015 (second warmest).
NOAA article

The only hope of slowing this trend is a complete abandonment of fossil fuels within a few decades, and that's not a plan that the oligarchs and plutocrats have any interest in, not in the United States, not in Russia, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Australia, not in India - they want to sell all the fossil fuels they can, and if the world burns, they figure they'll be the ones who can afford air conditioning. This is just as true for their servants - the Wall Street Democrats, the Exxon - Chevron Republicans, they're not much different. The Democrats claim to be concerned but then do nothing (except promote more fracking), and the Republicans are just denialists.



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