July Was Warmest Month on Record

While some barely noticed, it is significant that last month was the warmest ever in our weather records. The previous record was 17 years ago and the new one will be ... next year?

Update (August 5, 2019):  It's been three years since the previous warmest month ever, but it's a record that's bound to be broken over and over in the years to come. This July was only 0.04 degrees Celsius above July 2016 (1.2 degrees above pre-industrial mean). But in a non-El Nino year.

Update (August 15, 2019):  NOAA confirms July was 0.03 degrees Celsius above the previous record.

Update (August 13, 2021):  So a new record for warmest month in the historical record--last month was 0.93 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average.

The picture is particularly bleak for the Northern Hemisphere, where the land temperature was 2.77 degrees Fahrenheit (or 1.54 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average.

Campaign Zero

People protest for a reason. Sophia Tesfaye examines the agenda.

Update (January 20, 2016):  Stephen Colbert discusses white privilege with Campaign Zero activist DeRay McKesson.

Colbert articulated a vulnerability that I think a lot of white Americans are afraid to cop to without resorting to anger or defensiveness: “I don’t know if I do understand [white privilege]. I can acknowledge it, but I don’t know if I understand what I can do to dismantle white privilege.” McKesson observed that Colbert has a platform and a fortune that he could mobilize; Colbert responded, with a response so straight-faced it went beyond deadpan: “You can’t have my money… And you can’t have my show.”

McKesson changed tactics. “Why do you think white people are uncomfortable talking about race?”

Colbert responded: “I can’t speak for other white people. I feel guilty for anyone who does not have the things I have. That includes black people or anyone, because I am so blessed — I think there’s always a fear that it will be taken from me.”

McKesson responded, with fully engaged sincerity: “What can you do to manage that guilt?”

And in what might be the most glorious cop-out in the history of television, Colbert joked, “I drink a fair amount,” before shifting in his seat uncomfortably, rebuttoning his blazer, and muttering, “I don’t know, I’m shooting from the hip here.” Colbert then looked at the camera for help, and perhaps sensing a chance to wrap things up, he deflected. “I had you on the show, does that help?”

It’s all there: discomfort, guilt, entitlement, and by the end, confusion. Colbert is the stubborn status quo, both trying to understand and disinterested in understanding past a certain point.

Overshoot Day

According to the Global Footprint Network, today is the earliest within the year that humanity has exceeded a sustainable level of natural resource consumption.

Update (August 22):  One aspect of our over-exploitation of the environment according to a study published in Science is that "humans function as an unsustainable 'super predator'".

Segregation and Poverty

A report by Paul Jargowsky documents how poverty is again becoming concentrated in neighborhoods along racial lines. Among the findings:

The number of people living in high-poverty ghettos, barrios, and slums has nearly doubled since 2000, rising from 7.2 million to 13.8 million.

Update (August 17):  Ben Adler highlights the role of suburban sprawl.

Voting Rights Act

President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act 50 years ago. But the battle isn't over. With new barriers to voting and the hijacking of our elections, much reform is still needed.

1. Add a Voting Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
2. National, uniform election administration
3. Automatic and same-day voter registration
4. A national holiday, weekend election day; Expanded early voting and vote-by-mail
5. End felony disenfranchisement and other racially biased discrimination like Voter ID
6. Require non-voters to opt out, rather than voters to opt in with negligible cost to them
7. Publicly fund campaigns and ban private campaign contributions
8. End gerrymandering and reform the rules concerning majority-minority districts
9. Consolidate state and local elections with presidential and congressional races
10. Abolish the Electoral College
11. D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood
12. Proportional representation and ranked-choice voting
13. End elections of judges and prosecutors

Update (August 11):  A study from Rice University finds that confusion over photo identification requirements in Texas discouraged up to 9 percent of registered voters from voting even though they actually had valid forms of ID.

Update (February 4, 2019):  Reed Hundt makes the case for abolishing the Electoral College with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

[I]f the national vote always chose the president, then the whole country would be far more likely to get what most people want from government than is the case today.

Update (November 22, 2020):  Paul Blumenthal points out how this year's election makes it even more imperative to abolish the Electoral College.

If the election were simply a measure of popular support, it would not matter if Biden prevailed in [the swing] states. And that means that [Dear Leader] would have no process to disrupt with his farcical claims of election fraud. He would also have no reason or ability to cajole, threaten or manipulate state and local officials to try to keep himself in office.

Hiroshima

Remembering 70 years since the first nuclear weapons used in war.

Protest

In the year since the death of Michael Brown and the protests that followed in Ferguson, Missouri, a poll from the Washington Post shows that 60 percent of Americans say the nation needs to continue making changes to give blacks and whites equal rights. That compares to 46 percent from a Pew Research Center poll prior to the Ferguson events.

Activism works. Inequality is a campaign issue (at least on the Democratic side). And as David Cay Johnston reminds us, it's about more than money:

It's also about education, environmental hazards, health and health care, incarceration, law enforcement, wage theft and policies that interfere with family life over multiple generations.

The Ferguson protests made a difference.

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar told The Huffington Post it was “a shame that we haven’t had the political will before 2014” to look at the municipal courts.   ..."[I]n areas that are not as affluent, and where folks really are struggling with issues of poverty and education and crime and everything else that goes along with it -- unemployment -- they don’t have the ability really to voice that opinion. They can’t leverage change. That’s a good thing that’s come out of all this.”

A shift in media behavior after a tragedy is not unusual, Sarah Oates, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, told The Huffington Post. Before Ferguson’s uprising, many media outlets tended to accept police accounts as fact. Now, reporters are asking why black communities are outraged with policing. 

“What’s sad is it often takes a tragedy,” Oates said. “What happened in Ferguson wasn’t unusual -- which is awful, but true. The response was unusual, and the depth and breadth of the protests was unusual. And you could kind of see it coming from Trayvon Martin ... This rising awareness [about] race and unfairness, and this real question about what was really going on.”

Black Lives Matter activists frequently extend the conversation beyond police brutality to economic, academic and other forms of inequality. 

“When we say Black Lives Matter, we are talking about the ways in which Black people are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity,” writes co-founder Alicia Garza on the movement’s website. “It is an acknowledgement [that] Black poverty and genocide is state violence.”

Point of No Return?

Eric Holthaus gives an overview of this year's climate disasters such as rampant wildfires, including the first in modern times in the Olympic rainforest. He mentions James Hansen's recent study which indicates sea levels could rise much faster than previously predicted. There's the study on the loss of plankton which caused an oceanographer to remark, "This was alarming to me because if the basis of the food web changes, then . . . everything could change, right?"

Maybe we just need to be beaten over the heads with this information constantly.

But for all the gloom of the report he just put his name to, Hansen is actually somewhat hopeful. That's because he knows that climate change has a straightforward solution: End fossil-fuel use as quickly as possible. If tomorrow, the leaders of the United States and China would agree to a sufficiently strong, coordinated carbon tax that's also applied to imports, the rest of the world would have no choice but to sign up. ...[A] potential joint U.S.-China carbon tax is more important than whatever happens at the United Nations climate talks in Paris.

Update (August 11):  Fires in Alaska are an additional threat to the permafrost. Melting permafrost adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Update (August 22):  How bad is it? And some balance.

Update (September 16):  Tom Dickinson writes about drought and wildfires.

Clean Power Plan

President Obama announced new emissions standards for power plants. The plan is already being challenged in courts.

Joe Romm sees it as a significant step to bring other countries along at the Paris negotiations later this year. Deeper emissions reductions would still be needed to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius.

Again, Paris is focused on stanching the bleeding with a tourniquet. The goal has always been to get firm global commitments from the big emitters to meet serious targets in the 2025-2030 timeframe so we can get off our current emissions pathway — a pathway that would blow past 4[degrees Celsius] (7[degrees Fahrenheit]) warming, ruin a livable climate for centuries and make feeding 9 billion people post-2050 an unimaginably difficult task.

Update (August 4):  A selection of editorial reactions and the Los Angeles Times notes that the plan doesn't go far enough. Gizmodo has an overview. Meanwhile, a study published in Energy & Science Engineering says methane leaks have been greatly underestimated. And Jason Box writes about how the world's ice is melting faster than forecast and why we're in for more surprises.

Will politicians (namely Republicans) continue to ignore the urgency?

Update (August 17):  Bruce Melton explains the IPCC position that emissions reductions are not enough--carbon dioxide removal is also needed.

Update (August 29):  Paul Rosenberg on the shortcomings of "neoliberal environmentalism".

Grassroots environmentalists — moved by nature, facts and concern for future generations — see one kind of pragmatism: what works to create a livable future. Neoliberal environmentalists see a very different kind of pragmatism: what’s politically achievable, whether or not it actually solves the underlying problems. Fundamentally changing the rules, so that polluting oligopolies no longer control the system, is simply unthinkable for them.

Update (November 26):  A report called "The Clean Energy Future" argues we can protect the environment, create jobs and save money.

Update (February 9, 2016):  The Supreme Court blocked implementation of the EPA rules until an appeals court rules on the legality.

Update (August 21, 2018):  Obama's proposal is now gutted. The new rule could cause 1400 premature deaths per year by 2030.

Update (August 24, 2018):  The EPA's new rule might be illegal according to Joanne Spalding.

You cannot give states a guidance document that’s required by the statute without criteria with which to judge that.