News bits: Climate science modeling advances, etc.

Climate models start to get a grip

on the influence of clouds

A WaPo article discusses recent research on how clouds affect climate. The thin wispy clouds way high up in the air (cirrus clouds) have been known to tend to trap energy and increase global warming. Big fat clouds closer to the ground have been known to reflect solar energy, which tends to decrease warming. Advances in models are now digging into effects on clouds. The models are starting to generate predictions about what will happen to clouds and the impact on global warming that projected changes in clouds will probably exert.

Cirrus clouds are heat trappers

The WaPo writes:

First, the high, wispy cirrus clouds that trap the Earth’s radiation are expected to shift upward in the atmosphere, to lower temperature zones. Thanks to a complicated relationship between clouds and the radiation of the Earth, that will increase the amount of radiation that the cirrus clouds trap in the atmosphere. “When they rise, their greenhouse effect, or warming effect, on the Earth tends to increase,” Myers said.

That result has been known for about a decade, and indicates that clouds are likely to amplify global warming. But just in the past few years, researchers have also discovered that the number of low-level stratus or stratocumulus clouds are expected to decrease as the planet continues to warm. One study, in the journal Nature Climate Change, used satellite observations to discover how cloud formation is affected by ocean temperatures, wind speed, humidity and other factors — and then analyzed how those factors will change as the world warms.

“We concluded that as the ocean warms, the low-level clouds over the oceans tend to dissipate,” said Myers, one of the authors of the study. That means that there are fewer clouds to reflect sunlight and cool the earth — and the change in low-level clouds will also amplify global warming.

Researchers have also begun to understand how clouds will be affected by certain changes beyond warming — such as the reduction of artificial aerosols in the atmosphere. Clouds form around particles floating in the atmosphere, such as aerosols; it is possible, therefore, that low-level clouds would have decreased even more if not for human-induced air pollution. According to another study released last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sulfate aerosols have spurred cloud formation, thus masking some of the global warming that has already occurred. “There’s potential that as we clean up air pollution, we unmask global warming,” said Casey Wall, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo. 

Combined, these new findings have helped scientists zero in on how much the planet will warm if carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere were to double from preindustrial times. (Before the industrial revolution, CO2 concentration was around 280 parts per million, or ppm; now it has reached 412 ppm, and is still rising.) Scientists once estimated that if CO2 reached 560 ppm, the temperature would increase between 1.5 and 4 degrees Celsius — a range that spans a “still very livable planet” to “near-apocalypse levels of warming.” 

The new cloud research indicates that the lower estimates for warming are highly unlikely. Instead, the recent papers estimate that CO2 levels of 560 ppm would probably result in at least 3 or 3.5 degrees of warming. 

That doesn’t mean that the world will definitely hit 3 degrees of warming — if countries continue to shift to clean energy, CO2 in the atmosphere could be stabilized at a level significantly below 560 ppm. But it does mean that the most optimistic estimates for how warming will unfold have been taken off the table.

No doubt, the pro-pollution radical right propaganda Leviathan will spin this into a narrative something rationally incoherent but partisan coherent like this: “See, we told you, trying to clean up pollution makes things worse. The evidence shows that sulfur pollution is good for the good clouds. Your idiotic warnings about climate change are just hysterical socialist alarmism and lies. We are defenders of the good clouds and freedom.”

Cumulus clouds, the juicy good ones

The fentanyl plague 

The WaPo writes:

During the past seven years, as soaring quantities of fentanyl flooded into the United States, strategic blunders and cascading mistakes by successive U.S. administrations allowed the most lethal drug crisis in American history to become significantly worse, a Washington Post investigation has found.

Presidents from both parties failed to take effective action in the face of one of the most urgent threats to the nation’s security, one that claims more lives each year than car accidents, suicides or gun violence. Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 49.

The Drug Enforcement Administration, the country’s premier anti-narcotics agency, stumbled through a series of missteps as it confronted the biggest challenge in its 50-year history. The agency was slow to respond as Mexican cartels supplanted Chinese producers, creating a massive illicit pharmaceutical industry that is now producing more fentanyl than ever.

The Department of Homeland Security, whose agencies are responsible for detecting illegal drugs at the nation’s borders, failed to ramp up scanning and inspection technology at official crossings, instead channeling $11 billion toward the construction of a border wall that does little to stop fentanyl traffickers.

“Law enforcement did the best it could,” said David King, executive director of a federal drug task force in San Diego. “We can only do so much. But in Washington, they have been very slow to respond to this and now we are at the confluence of paralysis.”

The DEA said it is now taking direct aim at the Mexican cartels and the fentanyl epidemic. DEA Administrator Anne Milgram acknowledged that the government remained too focused on heroin at the onset of the crisis, as Mexican traffickers ramped up production of synthetic opioids. 

The agency continues to count the death toll for 2021 — in a provisional tally seven months ago, it calculated the overall number of drug overdoses at 107,622. Two-thirds were due to fentanyl. 

There is one federal system that collects both fatal and nonfatal overdose data in real-time in several regions of the country. But the system, called ODMAP, is kept from public view. .... Without comprehensive data, the federal government is driving blind.

When President Richard M. Nixon launched America’s first war on drugs 51 years ago, annual overdose deaths stood at 6,771.

At a lethal fentanyl overdose scene

San Diego, Nov. 10, 2022

There you have it. A confluence of government paralysis helps build a useless wall and creates a situation that kills tens of thousands of people each year. Good job gridlocked government! Good job war on drugs! We went from 6,771 corpses/year to some unknown number over 100,000. That's a smashing success by any drug cartel’s standards!! MAGA!!

So one question pops up, which party is more responsible for the gridlock, the useless wall and the failed war on drugs, or are they both at about the same level of incompetence, or if you are a drug lord, competence?

My assessment:

~65% Republican Party

~35% Democratic Party

The Tijuana border crossing south of San Diego

From the poisonous MAGA!! files: 

MAGA!! poisons Germany

An opinion piece in The Hill comments:

The terrorist plot foiled by German security services makes abundantly clear that far-right extremism is not a uniquely American problem, but a pervasive threat to Western democracy.

In a series of raids across Germany, 3,000 members of law enforcement apprehended 25 people suspected of plotting a coup.

Eerily reminiscent of certain aspects of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. capitol, the plan called for storming the Bundestag (parliament), murdering the chancellor and seizing ministers.

The plotters are associated with the Reichsbűrger movement, an anti-government group with approximately 21,000 followers that denies the legitimacy of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany). Like anti-government groups in the United States, the Reichsbűrgers resist what they consider government overreach. Some refuse to pay taxes and engage in other forms of civil disobedience.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased support for the far right in America and Europe. COVID-deniers, vaccine skeptics and people angry at lockdowns have found extremist movements attractive.

Conspiracies fuel extremism on both sides of the Atlantic. The German prosecutor’s office explained that the Reichsbűrger followers “are firmly convinced that Germany is currently governed by members of a so-called ‘deep state.’”

QAnon followers in the United States have long believed that pedophile Satan worshipers control the government. They expect Donald Trump to return to power and defeat them.

The Reichsbűrger movement has a disturbing similarity to its American cousin the Oath Keepers. Both groups recruit former and active-duty military and police. 

This is more evidence of the poison stew of irrational, toxic rage, fear and hate that bigoted, authoritarian Trump and his corrupt, morally rotted Republican Party have unleashed on the America and the world. They continue to unleash the same poison stew today.  

From the fascist Republican criminals and politicians files:

MTG would have overthrown the government

if she and Bannon had been in charge

The Hill writes:

The White House lashed out at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Monday for saying the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol would have been armed and successful if she planned it, arguing her rhetoric is violent.

Greene on Saturday appeared to hit back at claims that she and former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon were involved in planning the Jan. 6 riots.

“And I will tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed,” she said at a gala for the New York Young Republicans Club on Saturday.