San Diego and coastal areas of California got off easy on Sunday as former Hurricane Hilary made its way north out of Baja California. Areas west of the mountains along the southernmost portions of the coastline saw light but steady rain with breezy conditions throughout the day.
From the Los Angeles Times:
Surprisingly, the San Diego area had averted heavy rains for much of the day.
That was largely because of the storm’s positioning and the way the mountains were blocking some of the wind and rain coming from the east, said Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist.
“There have been some wind gusts up above 80 mph so far in the San Diego County mountains, but there hasn’t been very much wind down at ocean level in San Diego County. That’s because the mountains are both blocking the wind and intercepting a lot of the precipitation,” Swain said. “So San Diego is ironically in the rain shadow.”
Once the sun set, the backside of the storm made itself known as the intensity of rain and winds increased.
For many San Diego city dwellers, Hilary will be remembered as a storm not that different from the annual Pineapple Express waves coming through in December. Residents of Baja California saw the weather events through a different lens.
The real story about Hilary is about context: rainfall records throughout the region were historic for the month of August, which is historically dry as a bone. The National Weather Service says three local climate stations posted record rainfall for the entire month of August–(previous records in parentheses.)
Escondido - 2.66" (2.20 in Aug 1945)
Vista - 2.12" (1.78 in Aug 1977)
Cuyamaca - 4.11" (4.10 in Aug 1977)
The more Eastern parts of our region took a much bigger hit. Beyond the pictures of flash flooded arroyos, the long term disruption of desert and semi-arid ecosystems doesn’t easily fit into a news bite.
The conditions making Hilary possible are part of a larger trend in this region.
From the Los Angeles Times:
…globally, July set a record for the highest monthly ocean surface temperature in NOAA’s 174-year history. And specifically, ocean temperatures off the coast of Baja California are higher than normal, due to the warming effects of El Niño and the proliferation of fossil fuel emissions.
“Over the last 40 years, climate change has made hurricanes more powerful, both in terms of wind speed and the amount of water they deliver as rain,” said Kristy Dahl, principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Massachusetts. “To see a storm of this magnitude in this part of the world — and at this time of year — is highly unusual.”
While the chat on social media alternated between highly selective urgent media reports and coastal denizens calling the storm’s performance a dud, the global significance weather events of this month needs to be given the attention it deserves..
Hilary struck amid a string of unusual world weather events:
Massive wildfires are burning in western Canada and the northwestern U.S. (Hilary’s path inland won’t be any help.) Smoke is now drifting over the coastal regions of Washington and Oregon.
Higher water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico along with parts of the Caribbean and the Atlantic are killing off coral reefs. Areas in the South of Florida have water temps in the high nineties. Those water temperatures are optimal for the formation of hurricanes and tropical storms.
South Texas will have heavy rains over the next several days from an unnamed system.
There are three named systems in the North Atlantic and Caribbean, along with a promising band off the west coast of Africa headed in our direction.
A severe drought in Panama has caused water levels in the Panama Canal to drop; fewer ships can now fit in the canal; cargo and shipments are backing up. Supply chains and pricing of goods are expected.
It’s hot all over. Europe has been experiencing an ongoing heat wave that started on July 10 and will likely run through August 25. It’s even been named: Cerberus, after the hound of Hades from Greek mythology. Temperatures in Southern Europe are the highest in recorded history.
New York Times image
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Studies show climate change has increased the likelihood and intensity of extreme weather events. There is growing concern among scientists that these occurrences are worsening even faster than anticipated.
There is an excellent article at Axios with an overview of these concerns.
Some scientists, such as Michael Mann of Penn State and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, have shown that even the most up-to-date climate models fail to capture one of the main mechanisms that's contributing to some of these extremes — a phenomena known as "planetary wave resonance."
Such weather patterns feature stuck, sharply undulating jet stream patterns, like a meandering river of air at high altitudes, which can lock weather systems in place for long periods. This type of weather pattern existed across the Northern Hemisphere in the run-up to and during the Pacific Northwest heat wave.
"We can either assume that the [Pacific Northwest heat] event was a remarkable fluke, or that the models are still not capturing the relevant processes behind these events," Mann told Axios. "Occam's razor, in my assessment, supports the latter of these two possibilities."
Oh, and by the way… it ain’t over until it’s over.
From the Union-Tribune:
But it’s possible it won’t be the last to occur this year. The National Hurricane Center on Sunday reported that a tropical depression may be coming to life off the southwest coast of Mexico, in the same general area that Hilary did.
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Fox News found a way to (maybe jokingly) blame President Biden for the hurricane:
“The wrath of tropical storm Hillary. 42 million desperate souls in the path of the storm which made landfall several hours ago, but they let it right into the country because it’s Biden’s America.”
The facts presented in my account today should be alarming. But we’ve been down this road before– warnings about human involvement in climate change and specifically extreme weather event are met with a flood of industry propaganda designed to blunt the probability of our institutions responding in a manner putting the welfare of the planet’s inhabitants first.
Facts don’t cut it, as the dirty energy industry and its apologists know. As I’ll be the first to tell readers, declaring “war” on some entity or concept means you should grab your wallet. But in this particular situation, we’ve had war declared on humanity as part of a crusade for the supremacy of finance in society. And we largely don’t even know we’re standing in the middle of the battlefield.
There’s a story about saving the planet to be told and there are now increasing numbers of events validating it.
Let’s not get fuzzy about saying what needs to be said: the garbage being dumped into the atmosphere is going to kill us. If you’re against this premise, then you are against humanity. Period. No excuses. If a news story on weather doesn’t include a reference to the death of the earth’s atmosphere, it’s fake news. No what-about-isms need be spoken.
From an overview published last year written by David Fenton at The Hill:
UC Berkeley Professor Emerita of Linguistics George Lakoff explains that people from the humanities, sciences and law fields — who make up most of advocacy organizations and government — are trained to believe that the facts persuade by themselves. They look down on the idea of selling ideas. Lakoff calls it “the enlightenment fallacy.” They are up against people who went to business school, who had to master cognitive and marketing science to advance their careers. They learn the way to change public opinion or behavior is to guarantee the repeat delivery of simple messages, over and over, embedded in moral and emotional narratives. Scientists and some advocacy organizations, on the other hand, love complexity, and usually hate to simplify or repeat themselves. They almost never spend funds to ensure their message reach target audiences. In other words, they recoil from the very approach proven to work.
In the U.S., although environmental advocacy organizations bring in billions of dollars a year, almost nothing goes to public communication, and most of that is for fundraising. This guarantees failure on the battlefield of public opinion. Plus, the very language of the climate movement is largely inscrutable to much of the public. Research shows that people do not much know what terms like “net zero,” “carbon,” “emissions” and “climate justice” even mean. Biden clearly cares about climate change. Yet, he talks about it as an “existential threat,” a term few Americans understand.
The climate foundations devote the bulk of their funding to the supply of policy, commissioning studies, think tanks, reports, conferences, etc. Yet, we have no shortage of great policy ideas to solve climate change. What we lack is demand for these policies, otherwise known as political will. No one is yet funding the massive public climate education and mobilization needed at scale that would create it. And it isn’t because of a lack of resources. It just isn’t their worldview.
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It’s Just Another Manic Monday
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Why an Unremarkable Racist Enjoyed the Backing of Billionaires Via the New York Times Jamelle Bouie. Eugenics lives; in fact it never went away.
If some groups — and really, if some individuals — are simply meant to be at the top, then there are no questions to ask about their wealth, status and power. And as my friend John Ganz notes in his newsletter, the idea of race hierarchy “creates the illusion of cross-class solidarity between these masters of infinite wealth and their propagandist and supporter class: ‘We are of the same special breed, you and I.’” Relations of domination between groups are reproduced as relations of domination between individuals.
This, in fact, has been the traditional role of supremacist ideologies in the United States — to occlude class relations and convert anxiety over survival into the jealous protection of status. The purveyors of supremacist ideologies have worked in concrete ways to bind the two things, survival and status, together; to create the illusion that the security, even prosperity, of one group rests on the exclusion of another. (The history of segregated housing in this country is testament enough to the success of that ideological project.) With enough time to grow and take root, these ideologies branch out with a life and logic of their own, reproduced by people who believe they have something new, novel and forbidden.
Why are billionaires backing an unremarkable racist as he tries to find a place in polite society? Because his interest in a hierarchical society built on racism serves their interest in a hierarchical society built on class — and ruled by capital.
It’s the same, then, as it ever was.
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Why Trump Constitutionally Can’t Run for President Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson
On August 14 an article forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Law Review by William Baude of the University of Chicago Law School and Michael S. Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas School of Law became available as a preprint. It argued that the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment is still in effect (countering arguments that it applied only to the Civil War era secessionists), that it is self-executing (meaning the disqualification of certain people is automatic, much as age limits or residency requirements are), and that Trump and others who participated in trying to steal the 2020 presidential election are disqualified from holding office.
This paper was a big deal because while liberal thinkers have been making this argument for a while now, Baude and Paulsen are associated with the legal doctrine of originalism, an approach to the law that insists the Constitution should be understood as those who wrote its different parts understood them. That theory gained traction on the right in the 1980s as a way to push back against what its adherents called “judicial activism,” by which they meant the Supreme Court’s use of the law, especially the Fourteenth Amendment, to expand the rights of minorities and women. One of the key institutions engaged in this pushback was the Federalist Society, and both Baude and Paulson are associated with it.
Now the two have made a 126-page originalist case that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits Trump from running for president. Their interpretation is undoubtedly correct. But that interpretation has even larger implications than they claim.
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People Don't Know Anything About the Government by Hamilton Nolan
I started thinking about all of this the other day as I read about the proposal of newbie Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a man who is full of shit even by the standards of Republican presidential candidates, to abolish the Department of Education. Okay dude. Sure. This is a good way to make policy for a nation of 330 million people: First, you have Fox News run a story about how school libraries are carrying books that will make your child gay, and then, you abolish the department that oversee federal student aid. A simple two step process. Great. We cannot stop Republicans from clamoring to shut down the Department of Education—they’ve been doing that since it was established, because its existence makes it somewhat harder for local schools to be wildly racist—but we can go to the people in the crowd at a Vivek Ramaswamy rally and say, “What exactly do you think the consequences of shutting down the Department of Education would be?” and marvel at the vacuity of all of the answers, and stop taking them seriously..
The same thing goes for the candidates who want to eliminate the EPA and the CFPB, who want to reduce the federal workforce by a specific percentage, who want to “unleash energy” by slashing climate change regulations. It very much goes for Trump’s plan to scrap civil service protections and purge the federal work force if he is reelected. We must always keep in mind that the voters who are being recruited to support these candidates don’t have any fucking idea what the true consequences of these moves would be. This is a separate and distinct thing from saying that these policies are bad ideas; it is saying that you are not equipped to know if they are bad ideas. Ideally, seeing a politician try to slip in some highly specific government policy measure under cover of grand appeals to patriotism and/ or hate would always prompt skepticism and requests for more information. In practice, this two-step move is one of the most common things in all of politics. It works well.
If we can’t stop the politicians from doing it, we can, at least, stop giving it any credence in political reporting. It is one thing to say, “Mike Pence wants to abolish the CFPB,” but it is quite another to say, “Mike Pence’s supporters want to abolish the CFPB.” The second thing is false. Do they really? All those debt-ridden small farmers in Indiana can’t wait to see more predatory debt collection practices and scam robocalls? No. That is not true. They don’t know what the hell the implications of the policy are. The press unwisely and illegitimately gives power to dishonest politicians when it conflates all the crooked shit they are trying to usher in with the genuine will of the voters. “Voters” is another word for “people.” One thing about people is: most of them don’t know what the government is doing. Can we find out? Yes! We can find out! That’s a good thing for the press to help us with, actually. But treating voters as oracles, as consultants, as wise architects with their fingers on the pulse of the sprawling federal government, with strongly held feelings about how to right-size agency staffing levels… that is stupid.
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