Monbiot Backs Scottish Independence

Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, writes that the U.K. government is "politically dead from neck down" and Scots would be smart to get out while they can.

Whenever I visit Scotland, I’m reminded that Britain is politically dead from the neck down. South of the border, we tolerate repeated assaults on the commonweal. As the self-hating state destroys its own power to distribute wealth, support public services and protect the NHS from ruin; as it rips up the rules protecting workers, the living world, our food, water and the very air we breathe; as disabled people are pushed off a cliff and poor people are evicted from their homes, we stand and stare. As the trade minister colludes with the dark money network on both sides of the Atlantic, threatening much that remains, we shake our heads then turn away.

Sure, there are some protests. There is plenty of dissent on social media; but our response is pathetic in comparison with the scale of what we face. The Labour opposition is divided, directionless and currently completely useless. But north of the border politics is everywhere, charged with hope, anger and a fierce desire for change. Again and again, this change is thwarted by the dead weight of Westminster. Who would remain tethered to this block, especially as the boat begins to list?

Scotland could wait to find out what happens after Brexit, though it is hard to see any likely outcome other than more of this and worse. Or it could cut the rope, pull itself back into the boat, and sail towards a hopeful if uncertain future. I know which option I would take.

Who Says Progressive Values Defy Definition.? Oh Yeah, that Guy.

For a guy who doesn't hesitate to self-identify as a progressive, a certain outspoken Liberal doesn't seem to have a clue what that means. That much came through when, in a recent post, he wrote: 

"I was listening to a cabinet minister on the radio this morning. He was invoking the penultimate progressive political totemic, the vaunted “middle class.” (The ultimate progressive divinity being “progressive values,” which no progressive can define, and which therefore makes it the very problem it seeks to address.)"

Apparently this fellow finds progressivism undefinable which begs the question how he so boastfully wears the progressive mantle. What's clear is that he's made no effort to understand what the term means. Perhaps he's not familiar with "the Google" although, given his political posturing, I suspect he'd ditch the label if he understood its meaning.

Progressivism traces back to the heady days of America's Progressive movement in the early years of the 20th century. Progressive values go back even further, as far back as Abraham Lincoln.

So what are these progressive values that our Liberal friend finds so elusive? They are perhaps best restated in Theodore Roosevelt's "Square Deal" speech of 1910. It's not a difficult read and I'm sure our friend can manage it.

Progressive values are rooted in the notion of advancement of the individual and the public interest over special or private interests. It includes regulation of the struggle of labour and capital and the expulsion of corporate power from the realm of politics. It doesn't shy away from concepts such as income and wealth distribution to reflect the contribution of labour to the creation of that wealth. It's largely the opposite of the neoliberal order that prevails today.

Progressivism ought to be non-partisan, capable of being embraced across the political spectrum. That it has become associated with the left and centre-left is largely due to its rejection by the right,  a political choice that is manifest today in America's "bought and paid for" Congress and the suppression, if not outright abandonment of democracy. Left unchecked it results in what has befallen America today - first political capture, then regulatory capture and, now, the capture by special interests of the executive branch.

Progressivism sometimes overlaps with social democracy. Just today Ed Broadbent released a call to renew social democracy which had been largely driven out of his New Democratic Party by first Layton and then Mulcair (both of whom Broadbent supported).  That said, I wish Broadbent well in his quest.

Our friend's own Liberal Party jettisoned any progressive pretensions when it marched to the right under Ignatieff. Trudeau teased Canadians with his supposed progressive street cred only to reveal himself a devout neoliberal in his first few months in office.

So our Liberal friend need fear no longer that progressive values are too elusive that they defy definition. They're not elusive, not at all. They are as clear as they are compelling. You just gotta look.

Holy, Holy Shit.

You might find this a bit unsettling. The latest thing in nuclear war is cyber warfare, hacking an enemy's control systems to either disable his nuclear deterrent or, worse, launching his missiles.  From The New York Times:


In 2010, 50 nuclear-armed Minuteman missiles sitting in underground silos in Wyoming mysteriously disappeared from their launching crews’ monitors for nearly an hour. The crews could not have fired the missiles on presidential orders or discerned whether an enemy was trying to launch them. Was this a technical malfunction or was it something sinister? Had a hacker discovered an electronic back door to cut the links? For all the crews knew, someone had put all 50 missiles into countdown to launch. The missiles were designed to fire instantly as soon as they received a short stream of computer code, and they are indifferent about the code’s source.

It was a harrowing scene, and apprehension rippled all the way to the White House. Hackers were constantly bombarding our nuclear networks, and it was considered possible that they had breached the firewalls. The Air Force quickly determined that an improperly installed circuit card in an underground computer was responsible for the lockout, and the problem was fixed.

But President Obama was not satisfied and ordered investigators to continue to look for similar vulnerabilities. Sure enough, they turned up deficiencies, according to officials involved in the investigation.

...

Cyberwarfare raises a host of other fears. Could a foreign agent launch another country’s missiles against a third country? We don’t know. Could a launch be set off by false early warning data that had been corrupted by hackers? This is an especially grave concern because the president has only three to six minutes to decide how to respond to an apparent nuclear attack.

This is the stuff of nightmares, and there will always be some doubt about our vulnerability. We lack adequate control over the supply chain for nuclear components — from design to manufacture to maintenance. We get much of our hardware and software off-the-shelf from commercial sources that could be infected by malware. We nevertheless routinely use them in critical networks. This loose security invites an attempt at an attack with catastrophic consequences. The risk would grow exponentially if an insider, wittingly or not, shares passwords, inserts infected thumb drives or otherwise facilitates illicit access to critical computers.

Why Fareed Sees Putin, Not Trump, as the World's Most Powerful Man.

America's economy dwarfs Russia's. America's military might eclipses the Russians' except, perhaps, in nuclear warheads. Overall Russia can't hold a candle to the United States of America.

So why does Fareed Zakaria believe Putin, not Trump, is the world's most powerful man?

The power of a head of state is determined both by the country's strength and the capacity he or she has to exercise that power, unilaterally, unconstrained by other institutions, parties and political forces. And combining those two metrics, it's easy to see why Vladimir Putin rises to the top of list.

Putin has created what he calls a "vertical of power," something unlike any we see in other great nations. As the Russian chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov -- himself a harsh critic of Putin -- has noted, the entire structure of Russian political power rests on one man. When the czar died, you knew the structure that would endure and the process by which his successor, his son, would be elevated. When the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party died, the Standing Committee and the Politburo would select his successor. But when Putin dies -- I almost wrote if -- what will happen? No one knows.

...

Putin understands Russia. But he also understands the world. He is not foolish enough to make a frontal assault on America or Europe. Instead, he knows how to use power asymmetrically, with cyber tools and disinformation.

He also understands the vulnerabilities of free societies -- their internal divisions and discord, and their gaping openness. He understands the fragility of institutions like the European Union and ideas like integration and diversity.
In other words, Vladimir Putin understands us very well. But all that begs an important question: Do we -- and does Donald Trump -- really understand him?

The Great Arctic Raincoast, Coming Soon.

All my life I came to think of the Arctic as a place of ice and snow. It appears that's about to change.

The Arctic is set to get drenched in the next century.

Globally, precipitation is projected to increase by 2 per cent for every degree the planet warms, but in the Arctic that figure is double. By 2091, the Arctic will see a dramatic increase in overall precipitation and most of it won’t come in the form of snow – instead it will be rain.

“It’s quite a bit, a 50 to 60 per cent increase Arctic-wide. We found that most of this increase is due to the retreat of sea ice because of the Arctic warming,” says Richard Bintanja, a climate researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute who combined data from 37 climate models to predict precipitation in the Arctic between 2091 and 2100.

When You Put It That Way

She's a legend, Tracey Ullman.

It's a Dam Shame

Get this. More than 4,000 dams in the United States are now rated unsafe because of structural and other problems. It's a safe bet we're in the same boat in Canada.

The more urgent problem is that, old and weary as many of these dams have become, they were never designed to deal with our rapidly changing climate. The recent debacle at California's Oroville dam is a good example. The reservoir behind the dam was nearly dry last year but atmospheric rivers of torrential rain brought it to overflowing this year and, when that extra water was diverted to the dam's concrete spillway, the concrete failed. This triggered the evacuation of several towns downstream of the dam.

The cost of rehabilitating dams has led to some 700 of them simply being removed. This should restore fish habitats but a new study shows it's not that simple.

Now, however, a new study in Biological Conservation takes the science of dam removal in an unexpected direction. Although acknowledging that reopening rivers usually leads to “increased species richness, abundance and biomass,” a team of South African and Australian authors argues that in some cases threatened species may actually benefit from keeping existing dams intact.

The idea for the study arose because both South Africa and Australia are now experiencing “an incredibly dry period,” says co-author Olaf Lawrence Weyl, a specialist in endangered fish with the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity. Many native fish species have been “pushed right back into headwater streams” by competition with alien fishes, typically introduced for sportfishing and by “dewatering of entire rivers” to supply irrigation water for crops, Weyl adds. In some cases, the streams and reservoirs backed up behind dams are the only remaining aquatic refuges for endangered species.

It's "Put Up or Shut Up" Time on Climate Change - and "Shut Up" Has a Big Lead Going Into the G20 Summit

Is the G-20 about to kick climate change to the curb? Apparently so, at least according to Bloomberg.

Finance ministers for the U.S., China, Germany and other members of the Group of 20 economies may scale back a robust pledge for their governments to combat climate change, ceding efforts to the private sector.

Citing “scarce public resources,” the ministers said they would encourage multilateral development banks to raise private funds to accomplish goals set under the 2015 Paris climate accord, according to a preliminary statement drafted for a meeting that will be held in Germany next week.

The statement, obtained by Bloomberg News, is a significant departure from a communique issued in July, when finance ministers urged governments to quickly implement the Paris Agreement, including a call for wealthy nations to make good on commitments to mobilize $100 billion annually to cut greenhouse gases around the globe.

“It basically says governments are irrelevant. It’s complete faith in the magic of the marketplace,” John Kirton, director of the University of Toronto’s G-20 Research Group, said in an interview. “That is very different from the existing commitments they have repeatedly made.”

 The shift in tone comes as U.S. President Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, prepares for his first G-20 meeting, scheduled for March 17 to 18 in the spa town of Baden-Baden. While European nations including Germany have been at the forefront of combating global warming, Trump has called climate change a hoax.

So that $100 billion a year promise? Yeah, sorry. Don't worry, the private sector wants to gift you that money. Honestly. They do, really.

Oh Dear, About Those Pipelines.

The history of the Athabasca Tar Sands reveals an on-again/off-again project. In the postwar years there was massive support for development of the bitumen basin. The Canadian government even signed off on an idea to use underground nuclear explosions to liquify the sludge that it might be more easily pumped out of the depths.

Then the whole business came to a crashing halt with the discovery of a massive, conventional oil field in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Eventually, however, world oil prices climbed high enough to return to bitumen extraction although profits and lasting prosperity remained elusive. Still the uncertainty and prospects of a carbon bubble haven't deterred the Alberta or the federal government's enthusiasm for pipelines and getting bitumen to tidewater.

Remember Prudhoe Bay (see above)? We may be seeing a replay of the Prudhoe Bay/Athabasca tug of war soon. The Spanish energy company, Repsol, has announced the discovery of a big new field, 1.2-billion barrels of conventional crude oil, beneath Alaska's North Slope. The company expects to bring production to 120,000 barrels a day as soon as 2021. It's America's biggest onshore find in 30 years.

About Televisions That May Be Spying on You. John Oliver's Perspective

In domestic spying, perspective is everything. No, you don't have to ditch your Samsung flatscreen.

The Biggest of Big-Tent Moments

Chances are you've read at least a couple of them: Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here," George Orwell's "1984," Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," Hannah Arendt's "The Origin of Totalitarianism," or Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale." John Pfeffer, author of "Splinterlands" and director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies writes that dystopian novels won't pull America out of the Trump crash dive. It's time to win back Trump voters awash in buyer's remorse.


I took a course in college on the rise of Nazism in Germany. At one point, the professor showed us Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s famous 1935 documentary that covered the Nazi Party Congress of the previous year and featured extensive footage of Adolf Hitler addressing the faithful. Triumph of the Will was a blockbuster film, our professor assured us. It spread the name of Hitler worldwide and established Riefenstahl’s reputation as a filmmaker. It was so popular inside Germany that it ran for months on end at movie theaters, and people returned again and again to watch it. Our teacher promised us that we would find it fascinating.

Triumph of the Will was not fascinating. Even for students engrossed in the details of the Nazi surge to power, the nearly two-hour documentary was a tremendous bore. After it was over, we bombarded the teacher with questions and complaints. How could he have imagined that we would find it fascinating?

He smiled. That’s the fascinating part, he said. Here was this extraordinarily popular film, and it’s now nearly impossible for Americans to sit through the whole thing. He wanted us to understand that people in Nazi Germany had an entirely different mindset, that they were participating in a kind of mass frenzy. They didn’t find Nazism abhorrent. They didn’t think they were living in a dystopia. They were true believers.

Many Americans are now having their Triumph of the Will moment. They watch Donald Trump repeatedly without getting bored or disgusted. They believe that history has anointed a new leader to revive the country and restore it to its rightful place in the world. They’ve been convinced that the last eight years were a liberal dystopia and what is happening now is, if not utopian, then the first steps in that direction.

A hard core of those enthralled by Trump cannot be convinced otherwise. They hold liberal elites in contempt. They don’t believe CNN or The New York Times. Many subscribe to outlandish theories about Islam and immigrants and the continuing covert machinations of that most famous “Islamic immigrant” of them all, Barack Obama. For this hard core of Trump supporters, the United States could begin to break down, the economy take a nosedive, the international community hold the leadership in Washington in contempt, and they will continue to believe in Trump and Trumpism. The president could even gun down a few people and his most fervent supporters would say nothing except, “Good shot, Mr. President!” Remember: even after Nazi Germany went down in fiery defeat in 1945, significant numbers of Germans remained in thrall to National Socialism. In 1947, more than half of those surveyed still believed that Nazism was a good idea carried out badly.

But plenty of Trump supporters -- whether they’re disaffected Democrats, Hillary-hating independents, or rock-ribbed Republican conservatives -- don’t fit such a definition. Some have already become deeply disillusioned by the antics of Donald J. and the demolition derby that his advisers are planning to unleash inside the U.S. government, which may, in the end, batter their lives badly. They can be brought over. This is potentially the biggest of big-tent moments for launching the broadest possible resistance under the banner of a patriotism that portrays Trump and Bannon as guilty of un-American activities.

And it’s here in particular that so many dystopian novels provide the wrong kind of guidance. Trump’s end will not come at the hands of a Katniss Everdeen. A belief in an individual savior who successfully challenges a “totalitarian” system got us into this crisis in the first place when Donald Trump sold himself as the crusading outsider against a “deep state” controlled by devious liberals, craven conservatives, and a complicit mainstream media. Nor will it help for Americans to dream about leading their states out of the Union (are you listening, California?) or for individuals to retreat into political purism. Given that the administration’s dystopian vision is based on chaos and fragmentation, the oppositional response should be to unite everyone opposed, or even potentially opposed, to what Washington is now doing.

As readers, we are free to interpret dystopian fiction the way we please. As citizens, we can do something far more subversive. We can rewrite our own dystopian reality. We can change that bleak future ourselves. To do so, however, we would need to put together a better plot, introduce some more interesting and colorful characters, and, before it’s too late, write a much better ending that doesn’t just leave us with explosions, screams, and fade to black.

And So, I Told My American Friends Who Used to Mock Obama. Oh, Here, Just Read the Email.

Hi guys:

Just days away from two months of Trumpland. How’s that going anyway?

It doesn’t seem to be going too well for el presidente himself. The guy’s already looking worn out, like a bag of hammers, and those pre-dawn tweets suggest a mind that’s not firing on all cylinders. People are beginning to suggest that the boss may be a limo ride away from the Laughing Academy. Sad, very sad. Nixon at least was “scare the living shit out of Hanoi” crazy.

For all of that he’s certainly generating plenty of work for Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Rex Tillerson and James Mattis as they travel far and wide from Asia to Europe telling folks to ignore Trump’s deranged babbling. They – all of ‘em – call the boss a bullshitter AND they keep their jobs. Donald is the best bullshitter you’ve ever known. Nobody is a better bullshitter than the Donald. He’s got all the best bullshit. Do you get the faint whiff of Charlie Sheen on crystal meth?

Apparently ISIS is still around. Maybe they didn’t get the message that Trump was going to rid the world of these murderous swine within 30 days of assuming office. The Iraqis are slowly pushing them back but, like al Qaeda, they’re popping up elsewhere. Let’s hope Trumpy gets on with their extermination pretty soon.

Then there’s that wall on the Mexican border. How’s that going? Do you know that Erwin Rommel built the Atlantic Wall, Festung Europa, in just two years and it stretched all the way from the southern coastline of Norway to the border between France and Spain and it included beach obstacles, minefields, wire, machine gun nests,  trenches  and massive concrete bunkers for coastal artillery emplacements? Two years. The best part is that a lot of it was built by forced labour from the occupied countries so, in effect, Rommel got those territories to pay for it. Festung Amerika doesn’t seem to be getting off the ground.  Sad, very sad.

At this point Hillary was supposed to be in an orange jump suit with a tray in hand lining up for lunch in some prison cafeteria. Remember when Mike Flynn led the “lock her up, lock her up” chant at Trump rallies? Now it’s Flynn, the undisclosed “foreign agent” who’s looking at felony time. 23-days and out as NSA. A record. I never watched Trump’s reality show but I assume most of the contestants must have lasted longer than Flynn held onto his office. Sad, so sad.

Then there’s the failing Jeff Sessions. What’s with that guy?

With this crushing workload it’s a good thing Trumpy was able to hand over the businesses to the kids, ‘Tardo Junior and Ambergris. I’m sure they’ll do fine.

If all that wasn’t enough, now it’s on to scrapping Obamacare and replacing it with Trumpcare. He’s already got the slack-jawed, mouth-breathing Gullibillies who handed Trump the presidency and the Repubs both houses of Congress up in arms now that they figured out that the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare were just two names for the same thing. They’re howling like cut cats now they realize their healthcare is heading straight down Paul Ryan’s shitter. Well at least that’ll free up room for more tax cuts for the rich.

It’s not all bad. Vlad Putin is happy. He’s loving the chaos that’s spreading across the U.S. and Europe. Making Russkie hay while the sun shines. Along with the Chinese, they’re moving in to the Middle East – big time or, as Trumpy would put it, "bigly." Nervous Euros are also looking a bit more kindly on Moscow, not that they’ve got a lot of choice.

Meanwhile the Chinese are beginning to consolidate their sphere of influence across Asia Pacific. The big, unmentioned issue is the dismemberment of the Monroe Doctrine. China’s biggest banks are now the number one and number two lenders to Latin America. America’s influence across the western hemisphere is oh so gradually evaporating. Latin America and, for that matter, the rest of the world – failing, so overrated.

This is like so awesome. All of this in less than two measly months. Just imagine what Trump can do to America in four years? Wowser.

Check Please! America Wants Cambodia to Pay Up.

In the course of America's ill-fated war in Viet Nam, U.S. forces lavished half a million tonnes of high explosives on the territory of Cambodia.  By one count, America's carpet bombing claimed the lives of 500,000 Cambodians.

Now the United States of Trump wants bygones to be bygones, just as soon as
Cambodia repays a 550-million dollar war debt, the current value of what began as a $274 million loan for food supplies.

William Heidt, the US's ambassador in Phnom Penh, said Cambodia's failure to pay back the debt puts it in league with Sudan, Somalia and Zimbabwe.

"To me, Cambodia does not look like a country that should be in arrears…buildings coming up all over the city, foreign investment coming in, government revenue is rapidly rising," Mr Heidt was quoted as saying by the Cambodia Daily.

Apparently Ambassador Heidt isn't interested in talking reparations for the death and destruction the U.S. lavished on Cambodia and its people during the Viet Nam war.

"I'm saying it is in Cambodia's interest not to look to the past, but to look at how to solve this because it's important to Cambodia's future," he said, adding that the US has never seriously considered cancelling the debt.

Of course the United States doesn't want to look to the past but, then again, it doesn't want to look to the future either. Why, if it started negotiations with Cambodia for its years of relentless carpet bombing in that country, next thing you know the Vietnamese would be at the door looking for a mega cheque for the ongoing deaths, birth deformities and mutilations caused by spraying Agent Orange in that country. If you can stomach it, here's the Americans' handiwork that is expected to persist for up to 600 years. Coincidentally, here's a story from today's Daily Mail about Vietnam's endless agony.

Elections B.C. Calls In the Mounties

The Trump administration isn't the only regime under investigation. Now you can add Christy Clark's B.C. Liberal cabal.

Elections BC says it has referred the investigation into alleged violations of political donation laws to the RCMP.

“This investigation has been referred to ensure that it will in no way impede Elections BC’s administration of the provincial general election scheduled for May 9,” said a statement from Chief Electoral Officer Keith Archer.

“This referral will also ensure that there is no perception that Elections BC’s ability to administer the general election in a fair, neutral and impartial manner is in any way compromised,” it said. “The potential scope and timing of this matter make the RCMP the most appropriate agency to continue this investigation.”

The investigation follows reports in the Globe and Mail that lobbyists have been making political donations to the BC Liberals under their own names and then being reimbursed by clients, thus obscuring the real source of the contributions. The report also raised the question of whether some lobbyists may have claimed tax credits for those donations.

B.C. is among a minority of Canadian provinces that have no limits on how much donors can give. Corporate and union donations and political contributions from outside the province — or country — are allowed.

So outrageous has it become that, in January, the New York Times published a piece headlined, "British Columbia, the Wild West of Canadian Political Cash."

Even the Malaysian family behind Vancouver's new Trump Tower made sure to kick in a tidy quarter million to the B.C. Liberals.

That Big Blue Marble, She's Getting Hotter

One of the lesser known aspects of climate change is the role played by oceans as a "heat sink." Oceans absorb a lot of heat from the atmosphere with currents and prevailing surface winds sometimes driving that captured heat deep into the ocean depths.

We might think that oceanic heat goes down into the cold depths and just disappears only it doesn't. The first law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy, holds that energy can not be created or destroyed. It can merely be converted from one form to another. In other words oceans absorb that surface energy, heat from direct sunlight and from the warming atmosphere, and, in the right circumstances, store it in very deep water until, again in the right circumstances, it may be returned to the surface. This stored ocean heat is believed to be a driving force behind the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Climate scientists have been keeping a close eye on ocean temperatures, especially the rapid pace of ocean warming. Their concern is that a powerful positive phase could see much of that heat energy released back into the atmosphere creating a big spike in global warming.

The science types now have even more cause for concern.  A new study finds that the oceans are warming 13% faster than previously estimated and that the rate of increase is accelerating.


Since about 2005 a new type of sensing device has been deployed (the Argo float system). These floats (approximately 3500 in total at any time) are spread out across oceans where they autonomously rise and fall in the ocean waters, collecting temperature data to depths of 2000 meters.

When they rise to the ocean surface, they send their data wirelessly to satellites for later analysis. Hence we can now map the ocean heat content quite well. But what about the past, when we mainly had measurements from expendable bathythermographs deployed mainly along major shipping routes and largely confined to the northern hemisphere? Putting data from these various sensors together has been a struggle and has been a major impediment to an accurate quantification of the ocean’s temperature history.
...

Lead author, Lijing Cheng says:

"We know that ocean observations were very sparse until the Argo era. There were major gaps in data, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere. Our challenge was to assess the changes to global ocean heat and fill data gaps. A major issue is to ensure gap-filling is reliable. It is this issue that motivated the study. We proposed an advance gap-filling strategy and used it to attain near global coverage. We rigorously evaluated the reliability of our approach and as a result, we have much higher confidence that the ocean and the Earth are warming at a faster rate than previously thought."

One of the co-authors, John Fasullo added:

"This study shows that more heat is likely to have been absorbed by the oceans over the past 50 years than had previously been reported. With upward revisions in our estimates of the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases and the associated resultant sea level rise."

Our team’s press release noted:

"we know the oceans are much warmer now and they contain the memory of climate change. Higher sea surface temperatures are continually reinforced by the extra heat beneath the ocean surface. The oceans are affecting weather and climate through more intense rains. This process is a major reason why 2016 was the hottest year ever recorded at the Earth’s surface, beating out 2015 which was the previous record. Additionally 2015 was a year with record hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, and wild-fires around the world."

The knowledge about how the ocean has warmed, and how the warmth has spread in depth and over the different oceans is consistent with theory and models, and grounds the theories of human-induced climate change. The memory of past warming is in the oceans, and even though there are weather events that alter the details daily, the atmosphere above the oceans is warmer and moister than it used to be.

It is these changes that affect storms, such as the deluges that have recently affected California, or which have led storms to produce “thousand year floods” as has been seen in the Carolinas with Hurricane Matthew, or the Louisiana floods in August last year, or the Houston floods in April, and so forth. This kind of knowledge and understanding has profound consequences.

Of course this new data on the degree and rate of ocean warming means a lot of other temperature based projections, notably sea level rise, will have to be recalculated - and not in a good way.

EPA Woes. Scott Pruitt is a Believer.

Trump's administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency is a believer.

The attorney and Republican hack from Oklahoma "believes" that carbon dioxide emissions are not a major cause of global warming.

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,” he told CNBC.

This stance puts Pruitt at odds with his own agency, which states on its website that carbon dioxide is the “primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change”. This finding is backed by Nasa, which calls CO2 “the most important long-lived ‘forcing’ of climate change”.

Pruitt’s comments were quickly condemned by scientists, environmental activists and even his immediate predecessor as EPA chief, Gina McCarthy.

“The world of science is about empirical evidence, not beliefs,” said McCarthy, an appointee of Barack Obama. “When it comes to climate change, the evidence is robust and overwhelmingly clear that the cost of inaction is unacceptably high.

Pruitt sued the EPA 14 times while attorney general of Oklahoma and has worked in concert with fossil fuel interests in many of these cases. The recent release of thousands of Pruitt’s emails during his tenure showed an extremely close relationship between Pruitt’s office and oil and gas companies.

It Does Seem Like They're Closing In on Donald J. Trump

Some pretty top notch journalists and columnists see the writing on the wall for Donald Trump and his presidency.

The Sydney Morning Herald's chief foreign correspondent, Paul McGeough, has produced a good body of reports on Trump's looming downfall.

Foreign Policy's right-of-centre columnist and Council on Foreign Relations Fellow, Max Boot,  has produced his own body of analysis. Most recently he's written that Trump knows the feds are closing in and that WikiLeaks has become Trump's preferred source of intelligence.  Boot writes that Assange has joined the Trump administration. Of course, he jests.

On Saturday, recall, Trump was making wild-eyed accusations that Obama had ordered the U.S. intelligence community to wiretap him. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp (sic) my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” The White House could not come up with one iota of evidence to support this irresponsible allegation, which was denied by FBI Director James Comey and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. But Trump would not be dissuaded from pursuing this charge, which serves as a convenient distraction from the far more serious accusations of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin while Russia was interfering with the presidential campaign.

Is it just a coincidence that WikiLeaks dumped a massive database pertaining to CIA hacking and wiretapping just three days after Trump made wiretapping a major political issue? Perhaps so. But there is cause for suspicion.

In the first place, WikiLeaks has often timed its leaks for maximum political impact. It released 20,000 stolen DNC emails just three days before the Democratic National Convention on July 25, 2016. As expected, WikiLeaks generated headlines about DNC staffers disparaging Sen. Bernie Sanders, buttressing a Trump campaign effort to prevent Clinton from consolidating Sanders supporters. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned as a result, and the Clinton campaign suffered significant public relations damage.

But what about Assange, the guy who said he'd turn himself in to American authorities if only then president Obama would free Chelsea Manning only to change his mind once Obama did just that? 

It's said you can tell a man by the company he keeps and none other than Trump's British water boy, Nigel Farage, just happened to swing by the Ecuadorean embassy in London today where Assange is holed up for a 40-minute visit only to emerge saying he couldn't remember what he'd been doing there. Right, Nige, of course you can't remember.

And then there's Trump's longstanding pal, confidante and career dirty trickster, Roger Stone.

Over the weekend when Trump went through his Twitter meltdown, accusing Obama of having illegally wire tapped his campaign, Stone had a Twitter meltdown of his own in which he admitted that, on behalf of the Trump campaign, he colluded with Assange on the release of the hacked Clinton emails.

But wait, there's more. Now The Smoking Gun reports that Roger Stone was also in contact with Guccifer 2.0, the group that hacked the DNC computers.

Though “Guccifer 2.0” maintained that he was a lone “hacktivist” committed to “fight all those illuminati,” a U.S. intelligence assessment concluded with "high confidence" that the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence service, was operating the “Guccifer 2.0” persona, which communicated through Twitter, a WordPress blog, and a series of burner e-mail accounts.

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Like Trump, Stone is vain, vindictive, and prone to declarations untethered to the truth. Both men are protégés of Roy Cohn, the reptilian attorney whose career initially blossomed at the elbow of Senator Joseph McCarthy and ended in disbarment weeks before his death from AIDS in 1986.

Stone began working for Trump’s presidential campaign months before the Republican candidate famously descended Trump Tower’s escalator in June 2015. Two months after Trump’s announcement, Stone--who had clashed with campaign manager Corey Lewandowski--was gone. Stone told reporters he quit, while Trump said he fired the veteran consultant, who was paid a total of $50,000 for his campaign work, Federal Election Commission records show.

Meanwhile, remember that Trump "dossier" prepared by former MI6 spy, Chris Steele, and almost instantly dismissed? Well, Rachel Maddow, has been showing how facts coming out are corroborating Steele's allegations that Trump is beholden to Vlad Putin.

At Foreign Policy in Focus, editor John Feffer writes that Trump has already given Putin everything he wanted - and more.

Even Fox News' Shep Smith can't take the endless, constant lying any more.

WikiLeaks Under a Cloud. First Things First.

WikiLeaks is in the news for dumping thousands of documents allegedly detailing CIA techniques for hacking and surveillance. The documents are bound to embarrass the intelligence agency.

In this case the timing is suspect. The revelations come just as America's worst ever president is at war with America's intelligence community, including the CIA and the FBI. Trump is alleging that his predecessor even tapped Trump's phones during the election campaign and afterward. Presumably these documents will be manna from heaven to the Great Orange Bloat.

The timing is suspect, coming just days after Trump confidante. dirty trickster and some time advisor, Roger Stone, tweeted that WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, collaborated with the Trump campaign.

Trump loyalist and former top adviser Roger Stone claimed on Twitter that he had a back channel to work with Julian Assange at Wikileaks to spread damaging leaked Clinton emails.

US intelligence has unanimously said that Russia interfered in the US election in what it called a "multifaceted campaign" of "cyber espionage", and that Clinton's emails were obtained by Russian hackers.

Stone's claim that he worked with Assange to spread Clinton's emails comes amid growing reports of Trump staffers meeting with Russian officials, then lying about it.

Stone later deleted the tweet.

Neither Assange nor WikiLeaks has responded to Stone's allegation that they worked with, aided and abetted, the Trump campaign to damage Hillary Clinton's run for the presidency. That brings into question the timing of today's revelations.

Assange has a vested interest in currying favour in Washington. If he can get a deal from the sitting administration, amnesty perhaps, he can get out of his self-imposed house arrest in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Trump is looking for something, anything to support his bare allegations that, during the campaign and after, he was subject to wiretapping.

Roger Stone's twitter rants are enough to put a cloud over WikiLeaks, one that both it and Assange need to address before it can again be deemed credible. If it's disseminating information, selectively, to advance its own or its founder's interests, everything it releases is suspect at best.

Meanwhile, the British paper, The Express, comes right out and asks if Trump will grant Assange immunity for WikiLeaks election help?

What Dave Said...

My parents generation had Jack Paar, Steve Allen and Johnny Carson. My generation had Letterman and Leno. Today it's Kimmel, Corbin, Fallon and Meyers.

The new crop are pretty good but I still think Letterman is a notch above. Which is why I devoured the New York Magazine interview with Dave in which he lays into Trump and Company.  A few excerpts:

Donald Trump can be Donald Trump, but if he doesn’t help the people that need help, then he’s just a jerk. That press conference that he held berating the news media? I mean, how do you build a dictatorship? First, you undermine the press: “The only truth you’re going to hear is from me.” And he hires the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Steve Bannon, to be his little buddy. Bannon looks like a guy who goes to lunch, gets drunk, and comes back to the office: “Steve, could you have just one drink?” “Fuck you.” How is a white supremacist the chief adviser to our president? Did anybody look that up? I don’t know.

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Kellyanne Conway was my favorite for a long time. This thing about her telling everyone, “Go buy Ivanka’s shoes; I’m going to go buy Ivanka’s shoes. Hell, I’ll buy you a pair of Ivanka’s shoes.” Then they had to counsel her. Boy, if this administration decides you need counseling — whoa. And poor Sean Spicer is a boob who just got out of a cab and now here he is. Then the other kid, is it Miller?

Wow, that guy [Miller] is creepy. He fell out of a truck. And the guy from Exxon, Rex Tillerson. Don would say, “Rex, if you’re talking to your friends, ask them” — I’m sure the Russians groomed Trump. They gave him tips: “You want to be an authoritarian dictator? Sure, that’s not a problem. We’ll tell you how to do it, for God’s sake.” I think it was just all like that, because that’s the way Trump does business: “See if they’ll give us the tar coating? They’ll throw that in? Great, great. And by the way, we’re not paying the last 10 percent of the bill.” I think it’s the same shit.

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If he could do just one more show, it'd be all Trump.

I would just start with a list. “You did this. You did that. Don’t you feel stupid for having done that, Don? And who’s this goon Steve Bannon, and why do you want a white supremacist as one of your advisers? Come on, Don, we both know you’re lying. Now, stop it.” I think I would be in the position to give him a bit of a scolding and he would have to sit there and take it. Yeah, I would like an hour with Donald Trump; an hour and a half.

Murmurs From the Asylum.

This must be just a horrible dream. Listen as Trump's housing secretary, Dr. Ben Carson, explains how his own ancestors, who arrived in America in the holds of slave ships, were actually hard-working immigrants who came to America with a dream of a wondrous future for their children and grandchildren.



This man, much like the president he serves, is unhinged, utterly delusional.