Search This Blog

Search This Blog

Wikipedia

Search results

The Pentagong Show

The Pentagong Show
United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

The Heat is ON.



From Wunderground.com,

"When the sun rose at about 7 a.m. Monday, Miami was sitting at a miserable 81 degrees with a heat index of 86. But the low temperature for the day will go down in the record books as 80 degrees because it dropped to 80 just before midnight."

And that's not the worst of it:

"Regardless, Monday's low of 80 was not only its warmest low for April 13, but it was the city's all-time-warmest low for the entire month of April. That temperature is closer to Miami's average high for mid-April (83) than its average low (68)."

Perhaps not very eye-catching to you, but you hadn't written a post entitled:

  The Hoax that Chokes: "The Extremes" Greatest Hits.

Nor penned a piece opining that the corona virus was in the act of changing the weather as in, 

Australia Agonistes: Where the future is baked in and we're baked in the future.

Nor, and here I'm being presumptuous, read about the 3'rd, and worst, coral bleaching of the Great Barrier reef in five years, or

The rapidly growing ozone hole in the ARCTIC. And maybe you missed the Antarctica heatwave, forgotten about the Australian wildfires, ignored the Pacific typhoons ravaging Fiji and Tuvalu.

Nor have you ever asked, "Why isn't Florida suing Texas?" as I did in ... oh hell, who cares, citing is like, so annoying, it takes up more time than the actual writing, so I'll just go on to my next one: 

In an article in the South China Morning Post, the author asks, "Do air conditioners help spread coronavirus?",  having found that the direction of airflow from air-conditioning ventilation was found to be the key factor in what was believed to be droplet transmission.

Now let's go back to the first headline: 

"Miami was sitting at a miserable 81 degrees with a heat index of 86" ... while not half-way through April! So as the corona virus infections spike well into May, having Fun in the Sun suggests you'll get toasted, while sheltering in place will ensure you get roasted. And if you turn on the AC, you just may well be spreading deadly pathogens.

Much of India meanwhile is already being broiled in 100 degree heat ... but let's leave them be, as the next headline is from https://www.worldoil.com which is reporting on a deal between the Russians and BoneSaudi Arabia to curtail their petro output by millions of barrels/day, while "hopes that the U.S. would formally commit to its own curbs have evaporated", so at the moment, “This looks like a victory for the U.S."

But not for Florida.

"Miami is a warm place to begin with, but no one has ever experienced heat like this before here."

"McNoldy noted that one contributing factor to the recent South Florida heat is a weak southeasterly wind flow over "insanely hot water" for this time of year in the southwestern Atlantic Ocean. As of Wednesday, sea-surface temperatures there were running in the lower 80s, far above average for mid-April."

Now a few more threads need to be woven into this tapestry of looming disaster:

Those infamous "Freedom Molecules": that are composed of CO2, CH4, and H2O and other gases.

The amount of methane being released into the atmosphere has taken an unprecedented jump even as the amount of natural gas being flared in the Permian basin has increased twofold since the Trumpelstiltskin took office. What is being flared is basically methane. So even as the amount of methane escaping from wells and rigs rises to a stratospheric level, the flaring done to burn it off has increased even more, the exhaust of such flaring simply being set free to waft in the direction of the Gulf and the Southeastern Atlantic, collecting over it and producing "insanely hot water" as the sun's rays, no longer deflected back to space by jet trails, coal combustion's aerosols, and a shroud of auto exhaust, penetrate through a troposphere burdened now with 415 ppm of CO2. It's most concentrated load since prehistoric times.

And the hydraulic fracturing of the earth that is producing those potent GHG's, despite being given a perfect opportunity to curtail them, is instead set to proceed unabated, and that is being hailed as "a victory for the U.S."

One that has hidden in its laurels a disaster for the United States.

If the Leader of the richest country on the planet can point the finger of blame at another country on another continent, a country that manufactures absolutely No airplanes, for bringing a microscopic particle that wreaked havoc on our economy, how can it now maintain it is not responsible for the exhausting of its industries' waste into the atmosphere, when it actually brags about the fact, calling the CO2, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and  nitrogen oxides it produces, "Freedom Molecules". Even as it thereby boils Cuba:

"Cuba, some 300 miles south of Miami, has also been searing in record heat recently. An all-time record high for the entire country was set on three consecutive days, from Good Friday through Easter Sunday."

You could fry your Easter eggs on the pavement.

This is how one disaster feeds into another, for if the Chinese reporters are correct, as they have been all along, and AC helps spread the virus, the long hot summer we are about to experience could very rapidly turn into a nightmare, and Cuba just might have enough allies, new allies this administration's intractable stance toward it has recruited, to start having the balls to point out the harm the untrammeled growth in GHG gases (and our lack of enforcement of even the lax standards put into place with a wink of the eye to the oil producers ... seriously, the Texas Railroad Commission is going to enforce environmental law? You're kidding, right?) that the USA's maniacal "Energy Independence" goal is having on not just its neighbors, since exactly like the Corona Virus, those Freedom Molecules are free to go wherever they like, but the entire globe, maybe other Nations can finally demand that we STOP! CO2 respects national boundaries no more than virus particles do.

Because, should the US proceed in it's puerile "Blame China" tantrum, while other countries start experiencing record heat, they may finally grow a set and star blaming the US as the culprit. And they'll do so by using precisely the same logic that allows the President to continue to refer to a microbe as the Wuhan Virus. It is quite possible that, by the middle of August or so, the world will start referring to the New Normal of deadly heat as the American-induced Climate Emergency.

Because if the logic used to deduce that if any country can be blamed for the spread of Corona virus, it is China, is then applied to climate science, then if any country can be blamed for deliberately morphing Climate Change into a Climate Emergency, it is these United States. Because just as declaiming the Corona virus as a hoax doesn't make it so, insisting Climate Change is a Hoax has the exact same effect on the reality of the harm it's inflicting on those not actively stoking it: None. They suffer from from our actions without gatting even a dollop of the benefits.

At the end of the article about Australia's wildfires referenced above, Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch wrote,

"unless we get rid of the arsonists who are running too many countries and figure out a way to come together in human time, we’re likely to enter a world where there will be no fire fighters to save us".

Watching how the US has so haphazardly and off-handedly dealt with the catastrophic pandemic that is engulfing it, I would amend that statement to,  

"unless we get rid of the assholes who are running our country and figure out a way to come together in human terms, we’re likely entering a world where there will be no healthcare workers to save us".














No comments: