We Are Unbelievably Screwed

A pre-peer review study has concluded that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) may already be in the early stages of an irreversible collapse.

If this happens, we could see temperature drops of 5-15° C in parts of Europe and devastating temperature increases in the south east United States, along with sea level rises well in excess of a meter.  (Probably enough to submerge Mar-a-Lago, but I'm looking on the bright side here.)

As Earth rapidly warms, fears over the collapse of a critical ocean current system are mounting. This event would wreak havoc on the global climate, and the latest research suggests this catastrophe may already be inevitable.

In a study that has yet to undergo peer review, researchers used a climate model to estimate how likely it is that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, is “locked in” to collapse. Under conservative assumptions of Greenland ice sheet melt—a key driver of AMOC slowdown—they estimate a 10% chance that collapse is certain, rising to 80% by 2100 under the worst-case emissions scenario. The findings are currently available on the preprint server Earth ArXiv.

Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany who was not involved in the research, noted in an X post that the study is based on a single model. However, he said its conclusions are plausible based on overall knowledge of how fragile the AMOC currently is. Rahmstorf has studied this current system for more than 35 years.

………

If the AMOC shut down, it would trigger global climatic changes with catastrophic regional impacts. Sea levels would rise dramatically along the U.S. East Coast and other densely populated shorelines. There would also be major temperature shifts—in northern Europe, for example, the average temperature could drop by 9 to 27 degrees Fahrenheit (5 to 15 degrees Celsius). The world would see changes in extreme weather too, including more severe storms and a shift in the tropical rain belt, causing widespread drought in some areas and excessive rainfall and flooding in others.

And all of this can happen WITHOUT the collapse of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. 

We Are F%$#ed

The worst El Niño in decades has officially arrived.

Clearly, anthropogenic climate change is a myth.

After months of anticipation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officially declared the onset of El Niño today. It could become one of the strongest El Niño events in history.

According to the agency, there is now a 63% chance of El Niño intensifying to “very strong” status between November and January, potentially ranking among the largest events in the historical record going back to 1950. Extreme climate and weather impacts are more likely to occur during stronger El Niños. Over the past several weeks, meteorologists have warned that this event could lead to record-shattering temperatures, supercharged storms, regional droughts, wildfires, or floods, and global food shortages.

A so-called “super” El Niño would also have major implications for the climate crisis. “Starting soon all months will be the warmest on record once El Niño kicks into high gear,” Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist and climate specialist for WFLA Tampa Bay, posted on X yesterday. “Biggest impacts on global temp will be later this year into next year. It will set a new precedent… for a couple of years… until it’s broken again.”

Same as it ever was,
Same as it ever was,
Same as it ever was,
Same as it ever was.

………

Human-caused climate change will add a layer of complexity to the 2026-2027 El Niño. As carbon emissions have continued to crank up Earth’s temperature, it’s become increasingly difficult for meteorologists to separate the affects of anthropogenic warming from the natural climate variation of ENSO, meteorologist Ben Noll explains in an article for the Washington Post. 

To address that problem, NOAA and other agencies now use a climate change-adjusted El Niño index called the Relative Oceanic Niño index, or RONI. According to that index, sea surface temperatures in the central equatorial Pacific during this El Niño will get an additional boost of 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 degrees Celsius) from climate change, Noll reports.

Even without factoring in climate change, models are predicting a potentially historic Pacific warmup. According to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the ensemble shows sea surface temperatures rising up to 6.8 degrees F (3.8 degrees C) above average by December. That’s well into “super” El Niño territory.

This is going to be grim,  

I Did Not Think That it Was Possible

I have had no personal or professional encounters with Linus Torvalds, but I am aware of his "Take no crap attitude, which rivals that of the much memed Honey Badger.

When he says that he will, "Start being more hard-nosed," regarding pulls from the Linux kernel, my first reaction was disbelief.

This is NOT a man known for suffering fools gladly. 

Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has signaled he’ll push back when he receives irrelevant pull requests, after complaining that developers are making badly timed and trivial submissions, sometimes after using AI to review code.

Torvalds foreshadowed changes in his weekly state of the kernel update, which on Sunday announced the release of a fifth release candidate for version 7.1 of the Linux kernel.

“To the surprise of absolutely nobody by now, rc5 is pretty big. Quite a bit bigger than rc5's have traditionally been,” Torvalds wrote, before revealing “I'm not entirely happy about it - most of this is totally trivial stuff to random drivers, which obviously makes it all less scary, but at the same time I'm really not convinced the churn is worth it at rc5 time.”

The Linux kernel development cycle usually sees Torvalds open a two-week window during which contributors submit code they hope will make it into the next release. Seven release candidates (rc1-7) follow, with each supposed to represent a step towards delivering a stable update. Revised code always arrives during that process. But high volumes of new contributions to rc5 add complexity at a time work on the new kernel is usually close to completion.

this boggles the mind.

We Are F%$#ed

It looks like the collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is even more imminent than previously thought.

The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system and was already known to be at its weakest for 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis. Scientists spotted warning signs of a tipping point in 2021 and know that the Amoc has collapsed in the Earth’s past.

Climate scientists use dozens of different computer models to assess the future climate. However, for the complex Amoc system, these produce widely varying results, ranging from some that indicate no further slowdown by 2100 to those suggesting a huge deceleration of about 65%, even when carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning are gradually cut to net zero.


The research combined real-world ocean observations with the models to determine the most reliable, and this hugely reduced the spread of uncertainty. They found an estimated slowdown of 42% to 58% in 2100, a level almost certain to end in collapse.

This would upend weather and climate in Western Europe and across the globe.

This is real end of the world stuff, and the actual situation is likely worse, since every major prediction regarding anthropogenic climate change has been too conservative.

It might happen in my lifetime. 

 

We Are F%$#ed

It turns out that the emissions creating anthropogenic climate change may not just broil us, it mayd strangle us directly as well.

Short version of this study: They collected blood test results over the past roughly 20 years, and there are increasing signs of CO2 toxicity, and the trend indicates that there may be acute health impacts from this by 2075 or so.

On the bright side, I'll be dead then.

Abstract

Anthropogenic activities are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere. There is mounting experimental evidence that lifetime exposure to these increasing atmospheric CO₂ levels can negatively impact the normal physiology of organisms. However, directly assessing this in humans is very difficult. We analysed serum bicarbonate (HCO₃⁻), calcium (Ca) and phosphorus (P) levels from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 1999 to 2020 as indirect proxies for atmospheric CO₂ exposure. Over this period, average bicarbonate levels in this population show an increasing trend which parallels rising atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. Both Ca and P have decreased steadily over the same period. If these trends continue, blood bicarbonate values could be at the limit of the accepted healthy range in half a century, and Ca and P will be at the limit of their healthy ranges by the end of this century. Studies indicate that, after this time, elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide, leading to CO₂ accumulation in the body, has the potential to cause a range of adverse health effects. These findings highlight the urgent need for significant reductions in anthropogenic CO₂ emissions to safeguard public health.

 

How Scary are the MAGAts?

So scary that it scares sovereign citizen nut-job Ammon Bundy.

Not so long ago, Ammon Bundy was the most famous right-wing militia leader in America. His two armed standoffs with federal agents had made him the face of the Patriot Movement: a loose assemblage of anti-government extremists, Second Amendment maximalists, and more than a few white nationalists. Even some mainstream elements of the Republican Party embraced him as a modern folk hero. But Bundy’s criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown now threatens to make him a pariah within his own community.

In November, Bundy self-published a long essay titled “The Stranger,” in which he labeled the Trump administration’s treatment of undocumented immigrants a “moral failure.” “To call such people criminals for lacking official permission” to be in the country, he wrote, “is to forget the moral law of God, the historical truth of our own founding, and the Constitutional ideals that continue to define justice.” On a recent livestream following the killing of Renee Good in Minnesota, Bundy told his audience that ICE’s conduct “clearly looks like tyranny.” If the government threatened his family, he said, he would fight back by whatever means necessary.

I did not have that on my bingo card. 

Partying Like It's 2009

In both Finland and Canada investors, many of them small investors are suddenly discovering that the real estate investment funds that they had their savings in will not let them withdraw money.

It ain't exactly a money market breaking the buck, as happened at the start of the Great Recession, but it seems to me that it might be the tide going out as the tsunami comes in.

Real estate funds have long been sold as low-risk investments, but that has not turned out to be the case as Finland's housing market started dropping.

Today, ten real estate funds in Finland have restricted investors' ability to withdraw their money.

Two years ago, many small-time investors had a rude awakening when they realised that they could not redeem their holdings in almost a dozen real estate funds.

As the housing market slowed, many investors began wanting to sell their fund shares. But with few buyers for the underlying properties, the funds lacked the cash to honour redemptions.

The lockup began in September 2023, when Ålandsbanken's housing fund — with over 6,000 owners and assets exceeding 700 million euros — became the first to postpone redemptions.

………

Ålandsbanken told Yle it is protecting the fund's value by not selling properties at a loss. 

Let me translate, "Protecting the fund's value by not selling properties at a loss," from the original Finnish.  It translates to, "We are insolvent, but we hope to keep the game of musical chairs going until things work out."

And, oh! Canada:

Andre El-Baba never imagined an investment fund could trap him.

A lifelong property manager from Vancouver, he’d spent decades navigating real estate markets and thought he understood risk. So when he put money into Romspen Mortgage Investment Fund in 2022, it felt like a safe, sensible choice. Such private real estate funds had become a popular way for Canadians to invest in developing new houses and condominiums, riding a construction boom that had lasted two decades. They offered solid returns, regular payments and the ability to cash out at will.

Then the gate slammed shut.

Not long after he and his father invested a combined C$2 million ($1.5 million), Romspen announced it was blocking withdrawals — a last-resort tactic that lets funds avoid selling assets when too many clients want to pull out their money. The principal Andre assumed would always be within reach was suddenly sealed off, with no timeline for release. He’s getting only a thin, 2% stream of monthly income in return — far less than expected. Every month, Andre’s account statements tell the same story: The cash is still there, but he can’t move it.

………

To be sure, this is not Canada’s Lehman Brothers moment. The development industry has other sources of capital, including C$13 billion of government money Carney plans to inject into a new agency to build affordable homes. But the gating crisis is a harsh reckoning for everyday Canadian investors, who for decades treated real estate as a safe bet.

Let me translate THIS from the original Canadian, "This is not Canada’s Lehman Brothers moment," translates to, "This is not Canada’s Lehman Brothers moment……… SO FAR." (Ce n'est pas encore le moment Lehman Brothers pour le Canada... JUSQU'À PRÉSENT. for the Quebecois out there)

This is going to get ugly fast.   

Signs of the Apocalypse

This was a documentary

Rampaging sheep in Germany.

About 50 wayward sheep broke off from their flock and stormed a discount supermarket in a German town, startling and delighting customers as the animals rushed to explore the aisles before being escorted from the premises.

The woolly incursion occurred on Monday during a routine seasonal migration of the sheep in the Bavarian municipality of Burgsinn. A few dozen of the sheep had other ideas about the route and made their way into a store of the Penny retail chain.

“It was impossible to tell whether the sheep were looking for something particular on offer or just wanted to warm up,” the company said in a statement, noting that the flock seemed particularly fond of the checkout area where shoppers and staff were present.

Witnesses said that while the animals resisted the urge to nibble their way through the fresh produce on display, their foray into the store left a path of destruction in the drinks section as their bustling knocked glass bottles and other products from the shelves.

This won't end well.

Now Ted Cruz?

Ted "Joseph McCarthy Without the Charm" Cruz has said something that I actually agree with.

Yes, I know, if you chain enough monkeys to typewriters, you will get the complete works of Shakespeare, but his calling describing FCC Chair Brendan Carr's and Donald Trump's behavior as something akin to threats from a gangster was not on my bingo card.

Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, compared Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr’s threats to revoke the broadcast licenses of ABC stations over late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s commentary to “mafioso” tactics similar to those in Goodfellas, the 1990 mobster movie.

“Look, Jimmy Kimmel has been canned. He has been suspended indefinitely. I think that it a fantastic thing,” Cruz said at the start of the latest episode of his podcast Verdict with Ted Cruz. There were, however “first amendment implications” of the FCC’s role, the senator, a Harvard Law School graduate who clerked for US supreme court chief justice William Rehnquist, added.

Cruz, a formerly fierce political rival of Donald Trump turned strong supporter, called Carr’s comments “unbelievably dangerous” and warned that government attempts to police speech could harm conservatives if Democrats return to power.

“He threatens explicitly: ‘We’re going to cancel ABC’s license. We’re going to take him off the air so ABC cannot broadcast any more’ … He says: ‘We can do this the easy way, but we can do this the hard way.’ And I got to say, that’s right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it,’” Cruz said.

 I guess that Cancun Ted had to be right about something eventually.

We Are F%$#ed

A new study of changes in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation shows that the current that keeps Europe out of the deep freeze is far more likely to collapse than previously thought.

The collapse of a critical Atlantic current can no longer be considered a low-likelihood event, a study has concluded, making deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions even more urgent to avoid the catastrophic impact.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system. It brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. The Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis.

Climate models recently indicated that a collapse before 2100 was unlikely but the new analysis examined models that were run for longer, to 2300 and 2500. These show the tipping point that makes an Amoc shutdown inevitable is likely to be passed within a few decades, but that the collapse itself may not happen until 50 to 100 years later.

The research found that if carbon emissions continued to rise, 70% of the model runs led to collapse, while an intermediate level of emissions resulted in collapse in 37% of the models. Even in the case of low future emissions, an Amoc shutdown happened in 25% of the models.

Scientists have warned previously that Amoc collapse must be avoided “at all costs”. It would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50cm to already rising sea levels.

This is real end of the world sh%$.

We Are Unbelievably Screwed

It appears that anthropogenic climate cghange driven temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that may create a permanent draught in the US Southwest

You know, the sort of things that decimated Anasazi society in pre-Columbian times.

Waters in the northern Pacific Ocean naturally cycle between patterns of cool and warm temperatures every few decades. But hundreds of simulations from climate models suggest human-caused warming may have locked this cycle into a pattern that is driving a megadrought in the western US – and could extend this dynamic for decades.

“We expect that as long as greenhouse gas forcing continues to increase, there will be continued meteorological drought in the western United States,” says Jeremy Klavans at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Since the 1850s, sea surface temperatures in the northern Pacific Ocean have regularly cycled between a positive phase, with temperatures above average in key parts of the ocean, and a negative one, characterised by cooler-than-average temperatures there. This slow cycle, which takes place over the course of decades, is called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).

However, since the late 1980s, this cycle has undergone an extended negative trend. The ocean’s surface has maintained a horseshoe shape of cooler-than-average water surrounding a warmer interior. Last month, this negative phase saw its cooler-than-average temperature anomaly hit a new record. 

………

The finding also suggests climate models could have a bias towards underestimating human influence on major temperature cycles in the ocean and atmosphere, says [Syracuse University climate scientist Tripti] Bhattacharya. “We know that the Earth system models have persistent biases in certain regions, and the north Pacific is one of them.”

So, things are going to hell in a handbasket, and existing models are almost certainly underestimate the severity of the climate change. 

The Trump Trial of Danielle Sassoon - WSJ

I mentioned earlier that Trump appointees at the DoJ that corruption charges against Eric Adams be dropped for what are clearly political and corrupt reasons.

This was not a surprise.

Neither was it a surprise that numerous lawyers in the New York US Attorney's office resigned rather than do this. (Well maybe the interim US Attorney Danielle Sassoon, she clerked for Antonin Scalia was a bit of a surprise)

What is a surprise is a Wall Street Journal editorial lauding Ms. Sassoon and lambasting Trump and his Evil Minions™.

The worst and most dishonestly right wing OP/ED page in the nation is doing the right thing.

I did not see that coming:

The resignations of prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York this week are playing in the press as typical “resistance” to Donald Trump. They’re far from that, and the real story speaks well of the prosecutors but sends a rotten message to any lawyer who might want to join the Trump Administration.

The story begins with the memo this week by acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove instructing the Southern District to drop criminal charges without prejudice against New York Mayor Eric Adams. The memo cited two grounds for dismissal: The prosecution was an example of lawfare because Mr. Adams had criticized President Biden’s immigration policies, and Mr. Trump needs Mr. Adams to help on immigration enforcement.

………

Ms. Sassoon is a member of the Federalist Society and clerked for two conservative pillars of the judiciary, Justice Antonin Scalia and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. She led the prosecution of crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and is a rising star in conservative legal circles.

Her memo to Ms. Bondi explained in detail that the prosecution wasn’t a case of weaponized politics and why it is improper to dismiss a case based on a quid pro quo for policy cooperation by Mr. Adams. “Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged,” Ms. Sassoon wrote, “I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations.”

If the meeting with the AG didn’t take place, Ms. Sassoon said she’d resign. This is how a public official is supposed to behave when disagreeing on policy or ethical principle. If you can’t in good conscience follow instructions, you should offer to resign so your bosses can do what they want.

………

The Trump Administration is acting on its belief in the unitary executive that enforces discipline across the executive branch, and we sympathize with that goal. But one argument against the unitary executive is that there is no check on corruption. The Adams case, with its tolerance of alleged corruption, isn’t a good look to persuade judges ruling on its executive actions.

This is a monumental statement against interest.

We are Unbelievably Screwed

The second largest reservoir in the United States, Lake Powell is in danger of having its level fall so low that the flow of the Colorado river will simply stop.

There would still be a lake over 100 miles long behind the dam, but the level of the water would be below the lowest outlet from the dam, so even that meager supply would simply sit and evaporate.

The consequences would be catastrophic, leading to immediate mass water shortages for 10s of millions of people:

………

Back then, the idea of draining Lake Powell was fringe, attractive to anti-government extremists and radical environmentalists. Those who advocated a legal decommissioning of the Glen Canyon Dam, including supporters of the Glen Canyon Institute in Salt Lake City, were often laughed out of the room.

In those years, the dam was working as intended. Lake Powell was nearly full in the late ‘90s. Hydropower production was going full tilt, and millions of people were visiting the reservoir annually to fish, houseboat, and water ski.

But since the year 2000, Lake Powell has been in decline. Climate change has reduced runoff throughout the Colorado River Basin by around 20% compared to the previous century. In 2022, the reservoir — the second-largest in the country after Lake Mead — was less than a quarter full.

Nearly every boat ramp on Lake Powell was unusable last spring, and there was barely enough water to sustain hydroelectric generation. One more bad snow year would have pushed the Colorado River system to the brink of collapse, dropping the reservoir’s surface toward the lowest outlets on the Glen Canyon Dam–a point known as “dead pool.”

That’s because there is a significant design flaw in the dam: There is no drain at the bottom. Billions of gallons of water would be trapped in the dead-pool reservoir with no easy way to release them into the Grand Canyon.

………

At dead pool, the 27 million people who rely on Colorado River water downstream from the dam would likely be forced to reduce water use quickly and involuntarily.

But Lake Powell would still stretch 100 miles into Glen Canyon at dead pool.

At some point in the not too distant future, we will discover that large swaths of the United States, and the rest of the world, will no longer be able to accommodate their current population densities. 

There may be some technical fixes out there, but I do not see them as being sufficient support the viability Lake Powell, or for that matter, the entire Colorado river basin.

BTW, you can find an academic article discussing this here.

"Thus, the Tipping Time Is Estimated to Be in the Year 2057"

See the blue spot south of Greenland and IcelandIn the journal Nature Communications, Peter & Susanne Ditlevsen did an analysis of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), the ocean current responsible for warming Europe significantly  and have predicted that there is a 95% probabability of this current shutting down between 2025 and 2095, with the most likely time for this event being 2057.

That's in my potential lifetime. (I would be 95, so not so likely).

Basically they look at physics and statistics as well as the temperature drop in an area known as the Irminger Sea, and determine when the flow is likely to stop.

This is difficult to predict.  While it would start as a gradual change in flows, at some point, it would abruptly stop, resulting in a temperature drop on the order of 5-15°C (9-27°F) in a matter of a year or so.

We are unbelievably screwed.

Go to the link for pictures and lots of complex equations.

We Are F%$#ed

Here is an interesting anthropogenic climate change data point, July 21, this Sunday, was the hottest day ever recorded on the planet Earth.

Admittedly, records only go back a few hundred years, but it isn't even August:

On Sunday, the Earth sizzled to the hottest day ever measured by humans, yet another heat record shattered in the past couple of years, according to the European climate service Copernicus on Tuesday.

Copernicus’ preliminary data shows that the global average temperature Sunday was 17.09 degrees Celsius (62.76 degrees Fahrenheit), beating the record set just last year on July 6, 2023 by .01 degrees Celsius (.02 degrees Fahrenheit). Both Sunday’s mark and last year’s record obliterate the previous record of 16.8 degrees Celsius (62.24 degrees Fahrenheit), which itself was only a few years old, set in 2016.

………

“What is truly staggering is how large the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 months and the previous temperature records,” Copernius Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement. “We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years.”

While 2024 has been extremely warm, what kicked Sunday into new territory was a way toastier than usual Antarctic winter, according to Copernicus. The same thing was happening on the southern continent last year when the record was set in early July.

But it wasn’t just a warmer Antarctica on Sunday. Interior California baked with triple digit heat Fahrenheit, complicating more than two dozen fires in the U.S. West. At the same time, Europe sweltered through its own deadly heat wave.

“It’s certainly a worrying sign coming on the heels of 13 straight record-setting months,” said Berkeley Earth climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, who now estimates there’s a 92% chance that 2024 will beat 2023 as the warmest year on record.

While 2024 has been extremely warm, what kicked Sunday into new territory was a way toastier than usual Antarctic winter, according to Copernicus. The same thing was happening on the southern continent last year when the record was set in early July.

But it wasn’t just a warmer Antarctica on Sunday. Interior California baked with triple digit heat Fahrenheit, complicating more than two dozen fires in the U.S. West. At the same time, Europe sweltered through its own deadly heat wave.

“It’s certainly a worrying sign coming on the heels of 13 straight record-setting months,” said Berkeley Earth climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, who now estimates there’s a 92% chance that 2024 will beat 2023 as the warmest year on record.

This is real end of the world stuff.

I may not see that, I'm old, but my kids almost certainly will.

All because we cannot push back against the belief that, "The most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone," to quote (Not) John Maynard Keynes.

Quote of the Day

I Said My Plan Is to Come to Your House with a Gun and Shoot You and Take Your Motorcycle, that's my plan.

—Kara Swisher on the New Yorker Radio Hour, about how she responded to a Silly Con Valley billionaire, who detailed his climate "Brilliant" climate apocalypse, and asked her what her plan was.

Here's the bit with the leadup: (and some minor editing for clarity)

David Remnick: (18:20)	Everybody else is stupid that this is psychology as well as an emerging politics. Talk about what that politics is in 2024 and who's got it.
Kara Swisher:	It's literally people who are safe and rich and are unaffected and will be building that little castle in the sky that they're going to fly to when the rest of us are choking down here and they know better. You're wrong. You've done it wrong. The media's done it wrong, the government's done it wrong. We know better. When they have lives full of mistakes, they just paper them over. They have such a cynical view of people and ultimately I don't think they like people.
………
David Remnick: (27:20)	Arguably the worst problem we face is is climate change. Is technology going to have a magic wand for that?
Kara Swisher	And my fear is their plan is to [abandon the rest of us]. There's one. I'm not going to say who it is, but one of these guys told me their plan for ecological collapse, like the apocalypse ……… They had a motorcycle at their house, a speedy motorcycle that would get them to their place in Big Sur And and they told me where it was. You know, like that it's here and it's got a bunker. It goes down. It locks this, I've got this food. I've got this. ……… They had everything. They had a garden. They had the whole water, blah, blah, blah, blah, electricity generator. And they said, "What's your plan?" And I said my plan is to come to your house with a gun and shoot you and take your motorcycle. That's my plan, and I'll invite all my friends. ……… I could hear the click, click, click in their head, like, how am I going to stop this lesbian with a gun? What am I going to do? Because they're pretty good with guns, those lesbians. And you could hear it. He was like, "That was a contingency I hadn't thought of."

Here is the whole interview embedded:

We Are Unbelievably Screwed

While the melting of the polar ice caps is worrying, particularly for polar bells and their ilk, but the true threats dome from the ice fields on Greenland and Antarctica, which, unlike the north polar regions, are supporeteed by land, and so will raise sea levels ……… A lot.

So the news that 40% of Antarctic coastal ice shelves are shrinking more quickly than previously observed is very worrying.

More than 40 percent of Antarctica’s ice shelves have dwindled in the past 25 years, potentially accelerating sea level rise by allowing more land ice to flow into the ocean, according to new research released Thursday. The extent of ice shelves thinning is more widespread than previously thought, the results show, providing increasing evidence that the continent is feeling the effects of higher global temperatures.

“The surprising result to me was just how many ice shelves are deteriorating that substantially and continuously,” said Benjamin Davison, lead author of the study. “Lots of ice shelves, not just the big ones, are steadily losing mass over time with no sign of recovery.”

………

Analyzing more than 100,000 satellite images from 1997 to 2021, Davison and his colleagues found that 71 of the 162 ice shelves surrounding Antarctica reduced in volume. Almost 50 lost more than 30 percent of their initial mass during those years. The team also found 29 shelves gained mass during the study period and an additional 62 did not change mass significantly.

………

“We’re just seeing them get smaller and smaller and smaller for 25 years ... often with no sign of any advance or growth in that time,” Davison said. “That’s not consistent with what we expect from the natural cycle of an ice shelf.”

Every time that there is a new analysis of the data it gets worse.

Even if we successfully reduce emissions to zero in the near future, the melts will continue, and ocean rice will be measured in meters, not millimeters.

On the bright side, it looks like the Port of Baltimore will be just down the street from me.

We ……… Are ……… F%$#ed

The Gulf Stream has slowed down by 4% over the past 4 decades with a 99% certainty.

That is a 25th of total flow, not a minuscule amount.

The Gulf Stream transport of water through the Florida Straits has slowed by 4% over the past four decades, with 99% certainty that this weakening is more than expected from random chance, according to a new study.

The Gulf Stream—which is a major ocean current off the U.S. East Coast and a part of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation—plays an important role in weather and climate, and a weakening could have significant implications.

"We conclude with a high degree of confidence that Gulf Stream transport has indeed slowed by about 4% in the past 40 years, the first conclusive, unambiguous observational evidence that this ocean current has undergone significant change in the recent past," states the journal article, "Robust weakening of the Gulf Stream during the past four decades observed in the Florida Straits," published in Geophysical Research Letters.

The from the article abstract:

We find with virtual certainty (probability P > 99%) that Gulf Stream volume transport through the Florida Straits declined by 1.2 ± 1.0 Sv [Sv stands for Sverdrup, 1 million m3/second] in the past 40 years (95% credible interval). This significant trend has emerged from the data set only over the past ten years, the first unequivocal evidence for a recent multidecadal decline in this climate-relevant component of ocean circulation.

Even assuming the low end, and assuming a 2°C temperature drop (my WAG, probably low) and a 0.2 Sv flow, the energy contained is 200,000,000 kg/second of water x 2°C x 4182 J/kg°C. = 1,672,800,000,000 J/s or 1,672,800 MW of heat not heading north.

By comparison, the US generated 4,243 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, and 8760 hours in a year, so the average power output of the United States is 484,361 MW, so the heat not being carried is almost 4 times that of total US power generation.

That is a f%$# tonne of heat, and that is still likely a gross understatement of the ΔQ.

I Hate Reruns

Here it is, just 15 years after the last time, and we are back at the the housing market crashing again.

This sucks like a thousand [Herbert] Hoovers all going at once:

The slump in US home prices is becoming more widespread, with the share of markets seeing declines at the highest in over a decade.

According to a National Association of Realtors report Tuesday, 31% of US housing markets experienced declines. That's the highest in 11 years and up from 11% of markets that saw price declines in the fourth quarter.

It turns out that the people who addressed this problem over a dozen years ago, I'm looking you, Obama and Geithner, took their cues from the Bourbon Restoration.

To quote not Tallyrand, "They have learned nothing and they have forgotten nothing." 

It took 70 years to erase the lessons of the Great Depression, it only took 15 to erase the lessons of the Great Recession, if they had ever been taken to heart.

Can we start jailing banksters?

We are Unbelievably Screwed

This is not a boating accident

We have the latest data on ocean temperatures, ane there is an unprecedented heating event going on.

The numbers are worrying, put putting it in context with a picture makes it f%$#ing terrifying: (See the black line)

To call what’s happening in the oceans right now an anomaly is a bit of an understatement. Since March, average sea surface temperatures have been climbing to record highs, as shown in the dark line in the graph below.

Since this record-keeping began in the early 1980s—the other squiggly lines are previous years—the global average for the world’s ocean surfaces has oscillated seasonally between 19.7° and 21° Celsius (67.5° and 69.8° Fahrenheit). Toward the end of March, the average shot above the 21° mark and stayed there for a month. (The most recent reading, for April 26, was just a hair under 21°.) This temperature spike is not just unprecedented, but extreme.

“It’s surprising to me that we’re this far off the trajectory,” says Robert Rohde, lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit that gathers climate data. “Usually when you have a particular warming event, we’re beating the previous record by a little bit. Right now we’re sitting well above the past records for this time of year, for a considerable period of time.”

Rohde points out that temperatures this week were just under two-tenths of a degree warmer than the previous record. “Two-tenths doesn’t sound like a lot—but in ocean terms two-tenths is actually a lot because it doesn’t warm as quickly as the land,” he says.

This is a F%$# tonne of energy.

………

We're gonna need a bigger boat


Enough with the Jaws quotes, we are f%$#ed

Last year, researchers reported that climate change has made extreme heat events in the ocean the new normal. Thanks to historical data collected from ships all over the world, they determined the highest surface temperatures between the years 1870 to 1919—essentially setting a baseline for extremes. They found that in the 19th century, 2 percent of the ocean was hitting these extremes, but because of climate change it’s now 57 percent. In other words, extreme heat events in the ocean are now typical. (These differ from an overall increase in heat, in that temperatures come down from extreme peaks, but the general upward trend isn’t reversing itself.)

At this point, disaster is largely inevitable.  The only question is how bad it is going to get.

I think that it is inevitable that we will see significant areas of the world rendered uninhabitable for humans for at least part of the year, and a sea level rise of at least 3 meters.

What's more, I expect to see this earlier than anyone is predicting, which is not an unreasonable supposition given that the actual progress of anthropogenic climate change has exceeded the worst case scenarios from climatologists.