Because air rotates clockwise around high-pressure systems in the Northern Hemisphere, this caused hot and humid southerly winds to frequently blow across central and eastern states.

But importantly, ocean temperatures in the western Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico — where the air is coming from — have been running higher than normal, adding more moisture and heat to the equation as those winds blow into the United States.

That would have been a great place to mention the weakening AMOC and its potential to drive nonlinear regional increases in the future.

These proposed cuts to NASA science are significantly harming not only the national security interests of the United States, but also the lives, safety, and resilience of citizens across the country and globe. While NASA’s astrophysics and planetary science divisions monitor and explore worlds and the Universe beyond our own, including potentially hazardous asteroids and comets, it’s NASA’s Earth science and heliophysics divisions that teach us things that directly impact our planet.

NASA’s Earth observing satellites and stations are key to monitoring climate, water resources, natural disasters and their impacts, air pollution, wildfires, droughts, and key infrastructure components all across the world. Satellite instruments monitor stores of groundwater, and can identify weather events even as they’re still forming over the oceans.

Thank you, this is very helpful perspective and it’s new to me.

People don’t get excited to vote against candidates/platforms nearly as much as they do to vote for them. The choices may not be equally bad but that’s surprisingly irrelevant. South Park’s Turd Sandwich is pretty spot on.

But to your point, most of them didn’t vote for the climate change apocalypse, they voted for the racism.

Some of them undoubtedly did vote for the apocalypse, because their religious views include hastening the end so they can get to the rapture. That’s terrifying and underreported, but I suspect it’s a minority. There’s nothing Great Again about destroying the world, unless you’re a rapacious billionaire who wants to sit on a larger stack of toys in your cool bunker. Most of the idiots won’t realize how they got swindled until it’s far too late.

My conclusion is that he’s the culmination of the US losing the Cold War. Putin has been investing in kompromat on all the red politicians for a long time, and this is the era of profit taking.

“What that means is that you can probably keep growing timber and and hold lots of carbon at the same time,” Schwarzmann said.  “If you’re having (forestland) devoted just for carbon storage, you’re more likely to have even larger carbon sequestration levels on some of these forests.”

He said the findings could be used to re-evaluate timber harvest of older forests, noting logging could still occur while leaving a higher number of trees on the landscape to store carbon.

Forests are part of the carbon cycle, not effective long-term storage. It’s an easy mistake to make, thinking that since wood is made from carbon, growing trees should help remove carbon from the atmosphere. Trees can live for hundreds of years, which sounds like a long time to humans, but it’s not. Trees die and their carbon mostly returns to the atmosphere as they decompose or burn in a fire. Living trees are best represent a temporary carbon buffer, not sequestration.

Humans have been bringing sequestered carbon out of retirement - oil represents plants and animals that lived millions of years ago, that got trapped deep underground mostly by happenstance. To effectively remove carbon from the atmosphere, we must take the built up material and store it deep below the earth’s surface. I don’t think burying trees in a big pit will ever become especially popular.

There is particular concern about the continuation of the monitoring at Mauna Loa that began in 1957 – the longest continuous record of CO₂ at a single site. NOAA assists the Scripps-led monitoring there.

“Without NOAA involved, it will be difficult but not impossible to continue measurements nearby,” says Keeling.

I find that hopeful. This is the first I’ve read that there’s any chance of continuing measurements at Mauna Loa against trump’s wishes. I had assumed that the current buildings and equipment are under federal control, as is all nearby land. It would be nice to see some elaboration on how continuation might be possible.

The billionaires are this much in charge, and I fear for the political future of the US. They will never give back willingly either the control or the climate data. The US rich have reached an inflection point in escaping their increasingly flimsy pen, helped greatly by the Russians in a surprise twist Pandora’s box delayed ending to the Cold War, smoldering for years like a peat bog fire. European power will collapse following AMOC collapse. Russia and China win every step of the way. Too much of the US populace is under the spell of an old, unhealthy mad man. Some billionaires will attempt to choose his replacement, more corruptly than the last time.

Climate change is WWIII.

Use Signal.

Support free and open source software.

I’m sorry, -An American.

Happy 4th of July. There will be fireworks tonight.

The agency said its actions were warranted because the employees had signed the letter using their official titles and because the letter had denigrated the agency’s leadership. “The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November,” the E.P.A. press secretary, Brigit Hirsch, wrote in an email.

What an unpleasant snowflake!

One recent podcast episode that explains how BlackRock originally got into caring about ESG, and what that meant in a way that doesn’t at all imply improved morality. Episode two describes in depth the original creation of the Texas blacklist and putting Blackrock onto it.

Both are well produced by American Public Media.

@silence7@slrpnk.net just a quick shout out that I appreciate you, and your continuing cultivation of this space with excellent content. The future feels bleak and difficult to confront, but I’m glad to be reading well-written nonfiction doom and gloom.

Espousing more radical ideas (as opposed to advocating similar ideas in a more radical fashion) also makes the moderate viewpoint seem more moderate. That’s how the Overton window (of the acceptability of ideas in public discourse) shifts over time.

NYT says

In February, scientists had submitted a detailed outline of the next assessment to the White House for an initial review. But that review has been on hold and the agency comment period has been postponed.

I hope someone at least publishes/leaks that detailed outline.

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Sure, that can help, although I think it mostly counts as public charging infrastructure since it’s out of the control of the EV owner.

It also doesn’t help for the many units in my city that rely on street parking. And it’s an extra feeling of uncertainty if you’re thinking about buying an EV but you change apartment leases every year or three - it’s like getting a dog and thereby limiting the available pool of apartments that you might consider in the future.

All of that is to say that true public charging is really critical for a lot of people to feel secure enough to invest new car dollars into an EV, so presidential headwinds against it are devastating.

That’s a very single-family-home perspective. Lots of people live in apartments, only some of which provide assigned off-street parking at all, but there’s generally no way to install your own charger. Public charging infrastructure is absolutely critical for all apartment dwellers to be able to consider EVs.

In a funny coincidence, April 19 also happens to be the day that officially started the American revolutionary war exactly 250 years ago.

Traditional lithium rock ore mining is a dirty, polluting process that also uses huge amounts of fresh water. But that’s not all necessarily inherent. There are several projects around the Salton Sea in California that promise not only to extract lithium cleanly, but also to generate a lot of GHG-free electricity along the way, because the ore is hot salty corrosive water extracted from deep underground. optimistic podcast episode 1 podcast 2 website article

Water Cycle 101: The oceans are salty because rain water has been flushing salt downstream for billions of years. Salt also collects in endorheic basins such as the Great Salt Lake and Mono Lake, for the same reason. Rain clouds form primarily from evaporation of ocean water, which leaves behind slightly increased salinity, although its effect is widely geographically distributed.

There’s a difference between that distributed evaporation and the concentrated salinity increase of effluent from a reverse osmosis desalination plant or a hypothetical hydrogen plant, but the basic answer is yes, leave the salt in the ocean. It will be fine.