Dangerous Lies

No one is above the law and the president of the United States should not be allowed to lie about a lawful, and necessary, investigation.

This was a coup. This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government. ... I think it's far bigger than Watergate. I think it's possibly the biggest scandal in political history in this country. Maybe beyond political. … This was a coup. This wasn't stealing information from an office in the Watergate apartments. This was an attempted coup.

Is this a threat to arrest anyone involved with the "coup"? That's how a dictator would deal with his political enemies.

Update (May 6):  There are some other dangerous signs out there--let's hope these don't become serious disputes. Laura Clawson:

[Fuckface von Clownstick] is grappling with the end of the Mueller investigation, and it’s getting scary. One minute [he] is insisting that he was completely exonerated by the Mueller report, and the next he’s showing just how terrified he is of Robert Mueller testifying before Congress. But the really worrying part is when [Dear Leader] suggests he should get two extra years in the White House to make up for the time he was under investigation.

And the Speaker of the House has a warning.

Nancy Pelosi predicted this weekend that [Orangeman] may not step down from power if he is defeated in the 2020 election.

[Pelosi cautioned] that unless Democrats defeat [Manbaby] by a margin "so big" that the legitimacy of the election is beyond dispute, the president could challenge the outcome.

Pelosi's solution is to run a center-left campaign and avoid impeachment. In an interview with Matthew Rozsa, Allan Lichtman disagrees.

[W]e have a rogue president who cannot be checked by what Nancy Pelosi is proposing. The only way to check this president is to hold him accountable, to strike at his power and his brand — and that can only be done by beginning an impeachment investigation. The argument that the House should not impeach because the Senate might not convict is constitutionally unsound, politically unsound and morally bankrupt.

Update (May 15):  Heather Digby Parton notes that the push to "investigate the investigators" is a form of intimidation and control.

[T]here can be no doubt about the chilling effect these investigations will have on FBI and intelligence officials throughout the government. They will think hard before they take another close look at [von Clownstick's] crimes going forward.

On a political level, Republicans are running a familiar game which nobody should toss off as mere partisan warfare. It's a crucial aspect of [Dear Leader's] re-election strategy. If they can engage the mainstream media and throw everything they have at it, they may succeed at confusing the public and convincing them that all this smoke they're blowing means there must be a fire.

Update (May 17):  Another dangerous lie:

My Campaign for President was conclusively spied on. Nothing like this has ever happened in American Politics. A really bad situation. TREASON means long jail sentences, and this was TREASON!

Update (May 21):  In Orangeworld, war crimes are to be rewarded. Heather Digby Parton:

Pardoning those who committed the crimes he explicitly endorsed on the campaign trail is just fulfilling one of his most important campaign promises. War criminals are his heroes.

And Ohio supporter Darrell Franks loves it.

What I want from a president is the rest of the world to look at him and go, "Don’t mess with that guy, he will get even".

Update (May 28):  James Comey explains why the Fuckface claim that the Russian investigation amounts to treason is such an enormous lie.

In April 2016, that adviser talked to a Russian agent in London, learned that the Russians had obtained “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails and that the Russians could assist the [von Clownstick] campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to Clinton. Of course, nobody from the ... campaign told us this (or about later Russian approaches); we had to learn it, months after the fact, from an allied ambassador.

But when we finally learned of it in late July, what should the FBI have done? Let it go? Go tell the [Republican] campaign? Tell the press? No. Investigate, to see what the facts were. We didn’t know what was true. Maybe there was nothing to it, or maybe Americans were actively conspiring with the Russians. To find out, the FBI would live up to its name and investigate.

Update (June 5):  In calling out "treason", Dear Leader actually named names of people who would presumably be facing execution. Meanwhile the Weak Bully is pissing off business leaders by threatening tariffs against Mexico. Heather Digby Parton:

The tariff ultimatum was made against the advice of just about everyone in the [von Clownstick] administration — except, that is, for Stephen Miller, the president's hard-line anti-immigrant adviser. The Atlantic reports that White House aides say this all stemmed from [Fuckface's] anger over Robert Mueller's appearance at the Justice Department last week, quoting an unnamed adviser who said, "Whenever a negative story comes around, his instinct is to pivot to immigration or trade. It’s kind of like his safety blanket." This was a twofer. [Von Clownstick] felt insecure so he shook up the financial markets and threatened to damage a vast segment of the American economy to make himself feel better. What's a little economic turmoil — and an unexpected tax on businesses and consumers — when the president needs his blankey?

Update (July 27):  I'm trying to keep up with the list of dangerous lies.

I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.

Update (July 28):  Paul Street suggests an appropriate response to this "fascist-style disdain for democratic and constitutional norms".

If we, the people, are serious about stopping [Dear Leader] and (more importantly) the system that hatched [him], we’ll take to the streets en masse to engage in extensive and unrelenting civil disobedience.

Update (August 14):  Dear Leader has no qualms about spreading conspiracy theories, even if it puts innocent people at risk due to his followers. Amanda Marcotte:

We can't know whether [Fuckface] is acting out of a guilty conscience. But whatever the reason for his behavior, it's a serious problem that the president of the United States casually retweets lunatics and tosses off false accusations of murder.

Update (June 27, 2020):  It's interesting how Fuckface can drop a charge of treason against Barack Obama and then the New York Times comes out with this:

American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there.

The intelligence finding was briefed to [von Clownstick], and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March. ... [B]ut the White House has yet to authorize any step.

Update (June 28, 2020):  Naturally Dear Leader needs to deny receiving any briefing about the Russian bounties otherwise the inaction does appear to be treason. Other Administration officials also deny any knowledge. Only Russia denies actual bounties. And yet even Representative Liz Cheney is asking the White House for answers about the plot.

Why weren’t the president or vice president briefed?

Could Fuckface be lying? Does the sun rise in the east? Jeremy Bash:

[I]ntelligence and national security leaders don’t appear to be rebutting the basis of the intelligence, but they appear to be saying the president and other senior leaders at the White House were not briefed, which I find totally inconceivable and totally noncredible.

Update (June 29, 2020):  VoteVets says Putin owns Fuckface. And Heather Digby Parton speculates on Dear Leader's knowledge of the situation.

Considering [his] lack of empathy for the 128,000-plus people who have died of COVID-19 in just four months, I think there's also a good chance that his aides told him about this, he only halfway listened and didn't much care. After all, it's obvious that [Fuckface] is more concerned about saving the statues of dead Confederate generals than he is about saving the lives of American citizens.

Late today, AP reports that the original briefing on Russian bounties was not in March this year, it was March of 2019 and was given by John Bolton.

Update (July 2, 2020):  Amanda Marcotte says there's an obvious reason Dear Leader doesn't want to do anything about Russian bounties to kill U.S. troops.

[He] wants Russia to help him cheat in 2020, just like they helped him cheat in 2016, and he's willing to do whatever he can to make sure that happens. If the price requires the blood of American soldiers, then so be it.

Update (July 13, 2020):  Gerald Sussman denounces hysteria over Russia.

The latest claim about Russia, that it sponsored a Taliban assassination program in Afghanistan, has been carried by all the troll farm mainstream media despite the absence of any confirmed evidence. On its face, the story is absurd, as Russia has been extremely hostile to the Taliban – among other reasons for the fundamentalist Islamic group’s active support of the Chechnyan uprising inside Russia.

Update (July 30, 2020):  David Masciotra says the obsession with Russia is based on a delusion.

[T]he posture that everything was going swimmingly with American democracy before [Putin] and Julian Assange screwed it up is willful blindness and stupidity. As long as liberals obsess over Russia, they will remain unable or unwilling to confront the escalating crises of their own country.

Superbugs

A report from the United Nations Interagency Coordination Group on Antimicrobial Resistance says drug-resistant diseases already kill 700,000 people per year and could reach 10 million per year by 2050.

Driving the threat of AMR are a number of factors, including misuse and overuse of existing antimicrobials in humans, animals, and plants; lack of sanitation and clean water; transmission of resistant pathogens along the food system; and poor waste management by healthcare, pharmaceutical, and agricultural facilities.

Update (November 17):  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds there are over 3 million antibiotic resistance infections in the U.S. each year with about 48,700 deaths. That's more than twice as many deaths as previously estimated six years ago.

Unprecedented

Jeremy Lent calls for a "Deep Transformation" rather than a "Deep Adaptation", Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen contrast the "Creaturely World" over the "Industrial World", and the Natural Climate Solutions campaign seeks "to prevent climate breakdown by restoring our life support systems". George Monbiot:

We don’t want natural climate solutions to be used as a substitute for the rapid and comprehensive decarbonisation of our economies. The science tells us both are needed: the age of carbon offsets is over. But what this thrilling field of study shows is that protecting and rewilding the world’s living systems is not just an aesthetically pleasing thing to do. It is an essential survival strategy.

Meanwhile, a study published in Nature finds that the world's glaciers are melting 18 percent faster than a previous calculation in 2013. Losses are five time faster than 50 years ago.

The glaciers shrinking fastest are in central Europe, the Caucasus region, western Canada, the U.S. Lower 48 states, New Zealand and near the tropics. Glaciers in these places on average are losing more than 1 percent of their mass each year.

And a paper published in Environmental Research Letters compiles 47 years of data for key indicators in the Arctic.

The Arctic biophysical system is now clearly trending away from its 20th Century state and into an unprecedented state, with implications not only within but beyond the Arctic.

Update (April 13):  Paul Street comments on how we got here and where we're going.

Update (April 19):  Robert Hunziker warns of the possibility of a "blue ocean event" (total loss of Arctic sea ice) and cites a study that found reduced sea ice in the past drove up temperatures around Greenland by as much as 16 degrees Celsius over a few decades.

And Paul Voosen reports on revised climate models that now calculate a climate sensitivity of 5 degrees Celsius for doubled carbon dioxide concentration (previously 2 to 4.5 degrees). It's not clear if this is an accurate representation.

Update (April 29):  Dahr Jamail in his latest roundup of recent research:

[T]he last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere (412 ppm), in the Pliocene Epoch 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago, sea levels were 20 meters higher than they are right now, trees were growing at the South Pole, and average global temperatures were 3 to 4 degrees Celsius warmer.

Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential candidates don't seem likely to do enough on this issue.

And Chris Hedges paints a heart-wrenching picture of life near the Cree reserve.

It is hard, until you come here, to grasp the scale of the tar sands exploitation. Surrounding Beaver Lake are well over 35,000 oil and natural gas wells and thousands of miles of pipelines, access roads and seismic lines. Giant processing plants, along with gargantuan extraction machines, including bucket wheelers that are over half a mile long and draglines that are several stories high, ravage hundreds of thousands of acres. These stygian centers of death belch sulfurous fumes, nonstop, and send fiery flares into the murky sky. The air has a metallic taste. Outside the processing centers, there are vast toxic lakes known as tailings ponds, filled with billions of gallons of water and chemicals related to the oil extraction, including mercury and other heavy metals, carcinogenic hydrocarbons, arsenic and strychnine. The sludge from the tailings ponds is leaching into the Athabasca River, which flows into the Mackenzie, the largest river system in Canada. Nothing here, by the end, will support life.

The Cree, the Dene and other tribes that live amid the environmental carnage and whose ancestral lands have been appropriated by the government to extract the tar sands oil suffer astronomical rates of respiratory and other illnesses. Cancer rates are 30% higher than in the rest of Alberta, according to the Alberta Cancer Board, which was disbanded soon after releasing this information in 2008.

Update (May 3):  A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that melting ice from Greenland has added a quarter inch to sea levels in the past eight years.

The paper casts the transformation of the Greenland Ice Sheet as one of the profound geological shifts of our time. Scientists measure the mass of ice sheets in "gigatons"—each unit equal to 1 billion metric tons, or roughly the same amount of water that New York or Los Angeles uses in a year. Greenland, according to the study, has lost 4,976 gigatons of water since 1972.

More worryingly, the paper finds that Greenland lost about half of that ice—roughly 2,200 gigatons—in the years between 2010 and 2018. The ice sheet has also failed to gain mass in any year since 1998.

Update (May 5):  Climate strikes continue to grow.

Update (May 10):  I haven't been paying attention to the extreme weather in the Midwest.

From the top of a lookout point on a clear day here, Joe Keithley could see the Missouri River spill over its banks into three states: Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska. Underwater farmland stretched to the horizon in all directions.

Driving around eastern Nebraska, Keithley and Gary Lesoing, an educator with the University of Nebraska Extension office in Nemaha County, reached a high point on Highway 159 with a clear view of flooding between Rulo, Nebraska, and Fortescue, Missouri, home of Keithley’s Missouri farm. Miles of farmland were once dotted with modest homes.

"See the water?" Keithley asked.

"It just blows your mind," Lesoing said.

Update (May 11):  Arctic sea ice reached a record low in April and there's revived coverage of geoengineering projects such as "refreeezing" the pole.

And in an interview with C. J. Polychroniou, Paavo Järvensivu explains how capitalism and climate change have been tightly bound through the use of fossil fuels.

Looking back, we can see that the growing use of fossil fuels was not an accidental but rather an elemental part of the growth of industrialized economies. We could not have had this kind of industrialization without catalyzing climate change. The growth in productivity was not only due to innovative technologies and human ingenuity in general; the machinery needed fossil fuels to function. Economic growth has meant growing energy use. Economic growth has stalled at the same time as the cheapest and best fossil fuel sources have become depleted and the costs of climate change have become more apparent.

Update (May 12):  Keeping in mind the Paris Agreement itself falls far short of the action needed, this comment from U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is especially dismal.

We are not on track to achieve the objectives defined in the Paris Agreement. And the paradox is that as things are getting worse on the ground, political will seems to be fading.

Update (May 21):  Places near the Arctic Ocean reached into the 80s which was about 40 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.

Possibly related, Robert Hunziker refers to a post at Arctic News that raises some doubts. The post uses a somewhat misleading trend line to forecast 420 ppm of carbon dioxide by 2020. The post also claims paleoclimate correlation indicates "abrupt climate change could result in a rise of as much as 18°C or 32.4°F by 2026".

That can’t possibly be true, or can it? The good news is nobody knows 100% for sure. But, here’s the rub: Some really smart well-educated scientists think it could happen.

Update (May 22):  The Guardian now prefers the terms "climate crisis" and "global heating" over "climate change" or "global warming".

Update (May 26):  Leta Dickinson reports on the unexplained rise in methane emissions.

Update (June 11):  Robert Hunziker is encouraged by an essay by Margaret Klein Salamon in which she discusses the Climate Emergency Movement:

This movement tells the truth about the scale of the crisis, and demands a "Green New Deal" or a WWII-scale climate mobilization — a 10-year transition to zero emissions plus drawdown. Led by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the Justice Democrats in Congress, the Sunrise Movement, Zero Hour, School Strikers, and Extinction Rebellion in the streets, this movement has burst forth with tremendous force and momentum.

Update (June 15):  More heat waves and record melting in Greenland.

Update (June 20):  Permafrost melting and methane dangers.

Update (June 21):  Robert Hunziker refers to the permafrost study.

[T]he show-stopping catastrophic collapse of permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic is hard evidence that climate scientists have been way too conservative for far too long.

Update (August 2):  Studies published in Nature and Geophysical Research Letters have a bit of a good news/bad news flavor. The aerosol masking effect is probably lower than previously believed, but the loss of sea ice could have a major impact.

The amount of additional heat introduced into the Earth system because of Arctic melt is equivalent to an increase in CO2 concentration from 400 to 456.7 parts per million.

Update (September 4):  Dahr Jamail reports that for the first time in weather records, there is no sea ice within 150 miles of the Alaskan coast.

Update (March 22, 2020):  Robert Hunziker cites a study indicating the rate of land ice loss at the poles has increased by six times as much over 30 years.

Here’s the horrifying truth: The combined rate of ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica averaged 89 billion tons per year in the 1990s. Yet, by the 2010s (if standing, please sit down) the average rate exploded to 523 billion tons per annum. That’s a shocker. It’s inconvertible evidence that global heat is coming on strong, way too strong, especially for coastal dwellers.

Update (April 25, 2020):  A study published in Geophysical Research Letters uses 40 climate models to project the fate of arctic sea ice. Ed Blockley:

Alarmingly the models repeatedly show the potential for ice-free summers in the Arctic Ocean before 2050, almost irrespective of the measures taken to mitigate the effects of climate change. The signal is there in all possible futures. This was unexpected and is extremely worrying.

Quaternary

The Quaternary period includes all recent glaciations--originally 41,000 year cycles and then about 100,000 year cycles. Research published in Science Advances aims to explain that change.

We show that a gradual lowering of atmospheric CO2 and regolith removal are essential to reproduce the evolution of climate variability over the Quaternary. The long-term CO2 decrease leads to the initiation of Northern Hemisphere glaciation and an increase in the amplitude of glacial-interglacial variations, while the combined effect of CO2 decline and regolith removal controls the timing of the transition from a 41,000- to 100,000-year world. Our results suggest that the current CO2 concentration is unprecedented over the past 3 million years and that global temperature never exceeded the preindustrial value by more than 2°C during the Quaternary.

Stephanie Pappas explains that the modeling used shows global temperatures at a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius abover preindustrial values around 2.5 million years ago and the carbon dioxide concentration was never above 400 ppm. Anthropogenic climate change is happening very fast.

Already, the globe is 2.1 degrees F (1.2 degrees C) warmer than the preindustrial average [while carbon dioxide concentration is 405 ppm and rising]. The 2016 Paris Agreement would limit warming to 2.7 F (1.5 C), matching the climate of 2.5 million years ago. If the world can't manage that limit and heads toward 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C), the previous international goal, it will be the hottest global average seen in this geological period.

Meanwhile, Alaska and Australia saw record-breaking heat last month. Australia is 2.2 degrees Celsius above normal for the first quarter of this year. And Robert Hunziker reports that places in Siberia no longer freeze in the winter.