New York Times Editorial - "All the President's Crooks."

It's a red letter day, unless you're Donald Trump or a congressional Republican or a handful of their cronies.  The editorial board of The New York Times couldn't resist piling on to that orange bag of guts passing for president of the United States. And, Jeebus, didn't they lay into him.

From the start of the Russia investigation, President Trump has been working to discredit the work and the integrity of the special counsel, Robert Mueller; praising men who are blatant grifters, cons and crooks; insisting that he’s personally done nothing wrong; and reminding us that he hires only the best people.] 

On Tuesday afternoon, the American public was treated to an astonishing split-screen moment involving two of those people, as Mr. Trump’s former campaign chief was convicted by a federal jury in Virginia of multiple crimes carrying years in prison at the same time that his longtime personal lawyer pleaded guilty in federal court in New York to his own lengthy trail of criminality, and confessed that he had committed at least some of the crimes “with and at the direction of” Mr. Trump himself.

Let that sink in: Mr. Trump’s own lawyer has now accused him, under oath, of committing a felony. 

Only a complete fantasist — that is, only President Trump and his cult — could continue to claim that this investigation of foreign subversion of an American election, which has already yielded dozens of other indictments and several guilty pleas, is a “hoax” or “scam” or “rigged witch hunt.”

The conviction of Paul Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign for three months in 2016, was a win for prosecutors even though jurors were unable to reach a verdict on 10 of the 18 counts against him. On the other eight, which included bank fraud, tax fraud and a failure to report a foreign bank account, the jury agreed unanimously that Mr. Manafort was guilty. He is scheduled to go on trial in a separate case next month in Washington, D.C., on charges including money laundering, witness tampering, lying to authorities and failing to register as a foreign agent. Mr. Manafort faces many decades behind bars, although he will probably serve less than that under federal sentencing guidelines.

A few hundred miles to the north, in New York City, Michael “I’m going to mess your life up” Cohen stood before a federal judge and pleaded guilty to multiple counts of bank and tax fraud as well as federal campaign-finance violations involving hush-money payments he made to women who said they’d had sex with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen, who spent years as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and “fix-it guy” (his own words) was under investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, to whom Mr. Mueller referred his case. In April, F.B.I. agents raided Mr. Cohen’s office, home and hotel room looking for evidence of criminality on a number of fronts. Apparently they found it.

...Mr. Cohen didn’t agree at Tuesday’s hearing to cooperate with prosecutors, but if he eventually chooses to, that could spell even bigger trouble for Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen has been involved in many of Mr. Trump’s dealings with Russia, including his aborted effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, and could shed light on connections between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian officials involved in the 2016 election interference.

...As Mr. Trump rages on about the unfairness of the investigation, remember that Mr. Mueller has been on the job for just 15 months. For comparison, the Watergate investigation ran for more than two years before it brought down a president and sent dozens of people to prison. The Iran contra investigation dragged on for about seven years, as did the Whitewater investigation, which resulted in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. 

Also remember we still don’t know anything about the ultimate fate of several other Trump associates who have been under Mr. Mueller’s microscope, including Roger Stone, Carter Page and Donald Trump Jr. (“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer”).

For a witch hunt, Mr. Mueller’s investigation has already bagged a remarkable number of witches. Only the best witches, you might say.

Trump Overload. Michael Cohen Flips. Manafort Guilty on Eight Counts.

Bad day for Donald Trump. Earlier in the day it was announced that Trump's supposed lawyer and personal fixer, Michael Cohen, has cut a plea deal with the US attorney for the Southern New York District. He appeared in court today to enter guilty pleas.

And Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, has been found guilty on eight of the eighteen felony counts at trial. The jury was deadlocked on the remaining charges - i.e. he wasn't found "not guilty" on anything.

If You Can't Believe All This Alarming Climate Change News

If you're feeling overwhelmed, a bit like the three monkeys, that's understandable. Yes, the research on climate change has been pouring in, hot and heavy. Yes, the news is dire. Yes, it's almost unbelievable, impossible. This just cannot be happening, not to us, not now.

There's only one way to make sense of it, at least that I know of. It is in the context of what's been named, "The Great Acceleration." Just over a year ago I did a post about the Great Acceleration that incorporated all the graphs you can find at that link.

It's not remarkable that these developments are flooding in. It would be remarkable if they weren't. Just take a cursory glance at those graphs and you'll quickly grasp what I mean.

Have We Given Up the Fight Before We Even Began?

The problem with climate change is that you either fight it or it wins and fighting it is going to be painful, costly and immensely difficult. Even then there's no going back. A win for humanity and other life on Earth would be something short of extinction.

Chris Hedges threw in the towel yesterday in a thoughtful and well-reasoned essay.

Today, the Washington Post's Philip Bump laments that his country has decided to pass on the fight against climate change.

...to the extent that action on addressing climate change is still a viable fight in the capital, on Tuesday we could declare a winner: Climate change is here, and the United States has accepted it. President Trump’s decision to roll back even measured efforts to curtail carbon-dioxide emissions and news about Arctic sea ice combine to paint a picture of a country that’s living through climate change and deciding not to do anything about it.

...Trump made rejecting the need to address climate change central to his candidacy for the White House. Sure, he once signed an open letter calling on Congress and Obama to address climate change, but he renounced that position in short order. Before he announced his candidacy, his Twitter feed was littered with tweets of skepticism about global warming; afterward, he made an embrace of the fossil-fuel industry central to his pitch to voters.

On Tuesday, the administration announced a long-expected move: The Environmental Protection Agency was replacing Obama’s plan to limit pollution from coal-burning power plants with a plan of its own, which would allow more pollutants to escape into the atmosphere. That includes greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which get trapped in the atmosphere and keep heat from escaping into space. It also includes particulate matter, microscopic particles that can be inhaled and lead to health complications. As the New York Times notes, the EPA’s announcement itself estimates that 1,400 more Americans may die annually because of the increased number of particulates allowed to be emitted from power plants. 

At its heart, though, this is a decision about whether to make the decisions necessary to try to limit the long-term effects of climate change. Again, there’s little question in the scientific community that the climate is changing as a result of human activity, something that most Americans accept. The question is whether the country and planet decide to make the changes needed to reduce how severe the changes to the climate will get. Trump, true to his campaign promises, said no in the abstract last year when he pulled out of the global Paris climate accord. The decision on power plants, though, is more significant because it’s more concrete. Power-plant emissions are one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and the Trump administration has decided to set aside a significant effort to curtail them. 

That’s coupled with the administration’s decision this month to freeze fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles rather than allow mandated improvements to those standards to move forward. Vehicular emissions are the other biggest source of greenhouse gas in the United States.

As the Trump White House and the Republican Congress throw in the towel, their Canadian mini-me, the Trudeau government, will complacently bleat "competitiveness, competitiveness" and say they have no choice but to follow in Trump's path. Oh we'll do some meaningless gestural shit and preen over our goodness but we're America's satellite and we are locked into their orbit.

Meanwhile, Australia has joined the United States in backing out of its 2015 Paris Climate Accord commitments.

Mr Turnbull’s signature energy policy – the National Energy Guarantee – contained a pledge to cut Australia’s emissions by 26 per cent, based on 2005 levels, by 2030. The laws would have helped the country meet its obligations under the Paris climate agreement.

But after rebel Liberal Party MPs led by former prime minister Tony Abbott threatened to vote against the legislation – which would have triggered a crisis of confidence in Mr Turnbull – the PM decided to back down. 

It was Mr Abbott himself who signed Australia up to the Paris climate agreement, and it was he who at the time announced the emissions reductions target of 26 per cent from 2005 levels. 

In 2014 he even said Australia could reduce emissions by up to 28 per cent, saying: “There’s a definite commitment to 26 per cent but we believe under the policies that we’ve got, with the circumstances that we think will apply, that we can go up to 28 per cent.” 

Despite the boast, he was later reported to have told colleagues he was “misled” while in Paris, and recently argued that using energy policy as a means of reducing emissions is “madness”.

“In politics you have to focus on what you can deliver,” Mr Turnbull said on Monday, adding the legislation would not pass parliament if it contained an emissions target.

“Cheaper power has always been our number one priority when it comes to energy policy,” he told reporters.

Cohen Grasses on Trump

NBC News reports that the deal is done. Donald Trump's fixer and sometime lawyer, Michael Cohen, has cut his deal with the US attorney for the Southern District of New York. This is independent of the Mueller investigation which should make it more difficult for Trump to shut it down.

Cohen will plead guilty to charges stemming from a federal investigation in New York. A hearing in the Cohen case has been scheduled at federal court in Manhattan for 4 p.m. Tuesday.

The plea could have significant implications for Trump, who has blasted Cohen ever since his former fixer and his attorney, old Clinton hand Lanny Davis, began signaling this summer that Cohen might cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Will Trump Roll Back Canada's Automotive Fuel Standards?

It sounds as though we're about to get some lessons in just how little sovereignty Canada still has.

Reports are circulating that Mexico is about to ink a new trade deal with the US. Canada, which insisted on no NAFTA talks that did not include Mexico, might have been done in by the Mexicans and the Americans. If the rumours are accurate, we might be left bargaining from a position of real weakness.

That's the thing about Trump. To him, injury is just the steak. Insult is the sizzle.

Also on the chopping block will be Obama's auto fuel-efficiency standards adopted at the end of the Harper administration. Canada piggybacked on Obama's initiative, Harper crowing about the great things Ottawa was doing in the fight against climate change. Now it may fall to Trudeau and his hapless enviro-min, Dame Cathy, to dutifully follow Trump's lead.

Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna on Monday released a discussion paper that kicks off an evaluation of the existing 2022-25 vehicle regulations, which were put in place in partnership with the previous U.S. administration in 2014. The commitment to a midterm review was included in the 2014 regulations, when Ottawa did not anticipate a U.S. administration reversing direction. 

In a review this spring, the Environmental Protection Agency concluded those standards are not appropriate because they would drive up costs to the industry and motorists. Earlier this month, the Trump administration proposed freezing fuel-efficiency regulations at 2020 levels, and declared California no longer has the right to set its own standards, a decision that state has vowed to fight in court.

Canada should adhere to a single U.S. standard if there is one and make it continental, said Mark Nantais, president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association, which represents the Canadian units of the Detroit Three – Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co.

Wouldn't that be hilarious if Trudeau folded, backpedaled on an environmental initiative Harper begrudgingly introduced? The Tories will be laughing so hard they'll be peeing themselves.

Trudeau can only pray for a Blue Wave in the November mid-terms, something, anything to stop Trump's sadistic rampage. What if the Democrats don't prevail or, if they do, they still don't ride to our rescue? What if, heaven forbid, we're left to the iron resolve of prime minister "fold like a cheap suit" Trudeau and his feckless cabinet?

The "Old Guard" of Arctic Sea Ice is Breaking Up.

We're getting used to the loss of Arctic sea ice. There's less of it. What there is has thinned. Summers open ice free passages for navigation. But there's some Arctic ice that is thicker than most, ice that doesn't break up. Or, there was.

The oldest and thickest sea ice in the Arctic has started to break up, opening waters north of Greenland that are normally frozen, even in summer. 

This phenomenon – which has never been recorded before – has occurred twice this year due to warm winds and a climate-change driven heatwave in the northern hemisphere. 

One meteorologist described the loss of ice as “scary”. Others said it could force scientists to revise their theories about which part of the Arctic will withstand warming the longest.

... “Scary,” wrote Thomas Lavergne, a scientist at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, in a retweet of a satellite-gif of the blue water penetrating white ice and exposing hundreds of miles of the Greenland coastline.

He said this would flush chunks of thicker ice out through the Fram or Nares Straits into warmer southern waters.

“I cannot tell how long this open water patch will remain open, but even if it closes in few days from now, the harm will be done: the thick old sea ice will have been pushed away from the coast, to an area where it will melt more easily,” he added.

Well, kids, let that be a lesson to you. When temperatures are above freezing in the midst of the dark Arctic winter and climb above 90F in the summer, that ice is going to be lost. But look on the bright side. Think of all the new areas that will open up for seabed oil drilling.

Talk About Tone Deaf. Trudeau and the Kids Are Coming to Nanaimo.

The prime minister's cabinet retreat to Nanaimo this week (Aug 21-23) should be hilarious.  The official proclamation says Trudeau and his minions will be gathering to discuss seemingly everything but climate change and the toll it's now exacting on their host province.

Discussions will focus on diversifying international trade, eliminating trade barriers between provinces and territories, and maintaining the integrity and security of Canada’s borders.

I wonder if the Dauphin realizes there's an extreme smoke hazard warning in place for Nanaimo and vicinity. The setting sun as seen through the smoke is really spectacular. Scary but spectacular. Maybe Justin and Dame Cathy will set aside some time to go jogging and line their lungs with the same fine particulate stuff the locals are left to breathe day in and day out.

“I look forward to meeting with our new Cabinet in beautiful Nanaimo, British Columbia. Nanaimo is a gateway to Canada’s markets and a tourist destination known around the world. It is a perfect setting to discuss how we can promote Canadian exports, expand tourism, and diversify our trading partnerships, to continue making life better for people from Nanaimo to Corner Brook.”

—The Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada

Chris Hedges - "Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth"

Sorry to be piling on with climate posts. Today there's been something of a tsunami of climate stories. Atop the latest pile of research papers, Chris Hedges weighs in with his farewell to Planet Earth.

The planet is transitioning under our onslaught to a new era called the Anthropocene. This era is the product of violent conquest, warfare, slavery, genocide and the Industrial Revolution, which began about 200 years ago, and saw humans start to burn a hundred million years of sunlight stored in the form of coal and petroleum. The numbers of humans climbed to over 7 billion. Air, water, ice and rock, which are interdependent, changed. Temperatures climbed. The Anthropocene, for humans and most other species, will most likely conclude with extinction or a massive die-off, as well as climate conditions that will preclude most known life forms. We engineered our march toward collective suicide although global warming was first identified in 1896 by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius. 

The failure to act to ameliorate global warming exposes the myth of human progress and the illusion that we are rational creatures. We ignore the wisdom of the past and the stark scientific facts before us. We are entranced by electronic hallucinations and burlesque acts, including those emanating from the centers of power, and this ensures our doom. Speak this unpleasant truth and you are condemned by much of society. The mania for hope and magical thinking is as seductive in the Industrial Age as it was in pre-modern societies.

Ate and Nemesis were minor deities who were evoked in ancient Greek drama. Those infected with hubris, the Greeks warned, lost touch with the sacred, believed they could defy fate, or fortuna, and abandoned humility and virtue. They thought of themselves as gods. Their hubris blinded them to human limits and led them to carry out acts of suicidal folly, embodied in the god Ate. This provoked the wrath of the gods. Divine retribution, in the form of Nemesis, led to tragedy and death and then restored balance and order, once those poisoned with hubris were eradicated. “Too late, too late you see the path of wisdom,” the Chorus in the play “Antigone” tells Creon, ruler of Thebes, whose family has died because of his hubris.

The theory that intelligent life is self-extinguishing.

“We’re probably not the first time there’s been a civilization in the universe,” Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and the author of “Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth,” told me when we met in New York.

...“If you develop an industrial civilization like ours, the route is going to be the same,” Adam Frank said. “You’re going to have a hard time not triggering climate change.” 

Astronomers call the inevitable death of advanced civilizations across the universe “the great filter.” Robin Hanson in the essay, “The Great Filter—Are We Almost Past It?” argues that advanced civilizations hit a wall or a barrier that makes continued existence impossible. The more that human societies evolve, according to Hanson, the more they become “energy intensive” and ensure their own obliteration. This is why, many astronomers theorize, we have not encountered other advanced civilizations in the universe. They destroyed themselves.

...“Hundreds of millions of people in some of Earth’s most technologically advanced cities rely on the mild climate delivered by the Gulf Stream,” Frank writes in “Light of the Stars.” “But the Gulf Stream is nothing more than a particular circulation pattern formed during a particular climate state the Earth settled into after the last ice age ended. It is not a permanent fixture of the planet.”

...“Climate change is not a problem we have to make go away, in a sense that you don’t make adolescence go away,” Frank said. “It is a dangerous transition that you have to navigate. … The question is are we smart enough to deal with the effects of our own power? Climate change is not a pollution problem. It’s not like any environmental problem we’ve faced before. In some sense, it’s not an environmental problem but a planetary transition. We’ve already pushed the earth into it. We’re going to have to evolve a new way of being a civilization, fundamentally.” 

“We will either evolve those group behaviors quickly or the earth will take what we’ve given it, in terms of new climate states, and move on and create new species,” he said.

Frank said the mathematical models for the future of the planet have three trajectories. One is a massive die-off of perhaps 70 percent of the human population and then an uneasy stabilization. The second is complete collapse and extinction. The third is a dramatic reconfiguration of human society to protect the biosphere and make it more diverse and productive not for human beings but for the health of the planet. This would include halting our consumption of fossil fuels, converting to a plant-based diet and dismantling the animal agriculture industry as well as greening deserts and restoring rainforests.

The question then becomes are we even willing to try to reconfigure human society to salvage the biosphere? Put it this way. People who promote high-carbon fossil fuels when they should be shutting down fossil fuels entirely are not going to save our one and only biosphere. That's mass murder in slow motion.

Justin, Have a Word With Johnny.

He's one of the greatest climate scientists of our day. Hans Joachim "Johnny" Schellnhuber has been the head of Germany's Potsdam Institute and chief climate advisor to Angela Merkel and, despite his atheism, to the Vatican.

Schellnhuber believes 2018 is the year the world finally came to grips with the reality of climate change.

“I think that in future people will look back on 2018 as the year when climate reality hit,” said the veteran scientist. “This is the moment when people start to realise that global warming is not a problem for future generations, but for us now,” said the veteran scientist and outgoing director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts. 

The heatwave has dominated headlines across the northern hemisphere this summer. New temperature records have been set in Africa and cities in Australia, Taiwan, Georgia and the west coast of US. Heat stroke or forest fires have killed at least 119 in Japan, 29 in South Korea, 91 in Greece and nine in California. There have even been freak blazes in Lapland and elsewhere in the Arctic circle, while holidaymakers and locals alike have sweltered in unusually hot weather in southern Europe. 

Coming amid this climate chaos, the “hothouse Earth” paper by Schellnhuber and his co-authors struck a chord with the public by spelling out the huge and growing risk that emissions are pushing the planet’s climate off the path it has been on for 2.5m years. 

Schellnhuber said the paper’s release had accidentally been delayed, but the timing proved serendipitous. “It came out at a time when temperatures in Germany reached 38C so people could personally experience a heatwave. But this is just the beginning.”

And now a word for Justin Trudeau and the rest of the Petro-Pimps of Parliament Hill.

Schellnhuber said he was concerned about the widening gap between scientists’ increasingly alarmed descriptions of climate destruction and leaders’ weak statements of what is politically possible. 

“Politicians prefer small problems that they can solve and get credit for. They don’t like big problems that, even if they succeed, leave the rewards for their successors,” he said. “But once you pile up public pressure, politicians find it hard to avoid taking responsibility.”

This business about climate change and the economy going hand in hand is nothing short of dereliction of their fundamental responsibility to the security of Canada and the wellbeing of the Canadian people. The time for purely gestural responses such as "carbon pricing" is over. The problem is here. It's immediate. It is going to get worse, a lot worse. Your pathetic carbon taxes will not make a difference.

Schellnhuber is right. The world is waking up to the terrible situation we're in. Now it's time for the Trudeau Liberals to wake up.

Who Knew? Loads of People Knew.

Here are a couple of items plucked from the media around the turn of the last century. First up, an item published in a New Zealand paper in 1912.

Then there's this, of the same vintage, from Popular Mechanics.

The article ends with an ominous warning that rings true, even today. “….In light of all that is known it is reasonable to conclude that not only has the brain of man contrived machines by means of which he can travel faster than the wind, navigate the ocean depths, fly above the clouds, and do the work of a hundred, but also that indirectly by these very things, which change the constitution of the atmosphere, have his activities reached beyond the near at hand and the immediate present and modified the cosmic processes themselves.”

Hey, This Just In... Extreme Weather Gonna Get More Extreme. Crimes Against Humanity.

I know, this sounds a lot like the other blockbuster reports from last week and the week before that and all the weeks before those weeks. Sitting here at my keyboard as I see the smoke setting in on my street from the wildfires ravaging British Columbia, as work is about to resume on the Justin Trudeau Memorial TransMountain pipeline, it does seem fitting to get into yet another research report. Just a reminder of the death and dislocation these petro-pimps are visiting on our world.

Summer weather patterns are increasingly likely to stall in Europe, North America and parts of Asia, according to a new climate study that explains why Arctic warming is making heatwaves elsewhere more persistent and dangerous. 

Rising temperatures in the Arctic have slowed the circulation of the jet stream and other giant planetary winds, says the paper, which means high and low pressure fronts are getting stuck and weather is less able to moderate itself. 

The authors of the research, published in Nature Communications on Monday, warn this could lead to “very extreme extremes”, which occur when abnormally high temperatures linger for an unusually prolonged period, turning sunny days into heat waves, tinder-dry conditions into wildfires, and rains into floods.

Here's something to consider. All the "carbon pricing" gimmicks in the world aren't going to change any of this. Trudeau's talk is pure bullshit when he pursues his perverse project to flood world markets with the most toxic, highest-carbon ersatz petroleum of them all - bitumen. Just because the foul death sludge is shipped elsewhere that doesn't take us off the hook. Increasingly this is being seen for what it is - a crime against humanity.

“This summer was where we saw a very strong intensity of heatwaves. It’ll continue and that’s very worrying, especially in the mid-latitudes: the EU, US, Russia and China,” said one of the coauthors, Dim Coumou from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “Short-term heatwaves are quite pleasant, but longer term they will have an impact on society. It’ll have an affect on agricultural production. Harvests are already down this year for many products. Heatwaves can also have a devastating impact on human health.” 

Circulation stalling has long been a concern of climate scientists, though most previous studies have looked at winter patterns. The new paper reviews research on summer trends, where it says there is mounting evidence of planetary wind systems – both low-level storm tracks and higher waves in the troposphere – losing their ability to shift the weather.

...A separate new paper in Scientific Reports indicated that the trapping of planetary airstreams – a phenomenon known as amplified quasi-stationary waves – also contributed to the 2016 wildfires in Alberta, which took two months to extinguish and ended as the costliest disaster in Canadian history with total damages reaching 4.7bn Canadian dollars. 

However, scientists are also concerned that slowing circulation could produce “surprises”, by amplifying other climate changes. 

“Simple warming is well understood in climate models, but scientists are trying to understand non-linearities, how climate change effects interact with one another and how feedback processes are involved,” said Coumou. “Non-linearities can rapidly change weather conditions in a given region so you get more abrupt changes.”

... “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. By upsetting the energy balance of the planet we are changing the temperature gradient between the equator and the pole. This in turn sets in motion major reorganisations of the flow patterns of the atmosphere and ocean,” said Chris Rapley, professor of climate science at University College London. “The consequences are emerging and they are disruptive, and likely to become even more profoundly so. We are on a journey and the destination doesn’t look good.”

British Columbia is in a province-wide state of emergency as it battles more than 500 wildfires with no end in sight. Yet the rest of Canada is in an undeclared state of emergency. Killer heatwaves, drought, flash floods. Ten years from now you'll look back wistfully at the brutal summer we're having right now. And, when the Justin Trudeau Memorial TransMountain Pipeline comes to mind, you'll ask, much too late, "what the fuck was he thinking?"

Here's One You Might Never Have Heard Of - "Shit-Life Syndrome."

Where is Charles Dickens now that we need him back? Or even Mark Twain.

A word about "Shit-Life Syndrome." I didn't make that up. It's a term apparently coined by American doctors. It refers to the declining longevity in lower income groups in the United States and, wait for it, the United Kingdom.

Britain and America are in the midst of a barely reported public health crisis. They are experiencing not merely a slowdown in life expectancy, which in many other rich countries is continuing to lengthen, but the start of an alarming increase in death rates across all our populations, men and women alike. We are needlessly allowing our people to die early.

In Britain, life expectancy, which increased steadily for a century, slowed dramatically between 2010 and 2016. The rate of increase dropped by 90% for women and 76% for men, to 82.8 years and 79.1 years respectively. Now, death rates among older people have so much increased over the last two years – with expectations that this will continue – that two major insurance companies, Aviva and Legal and General, are releasing hundreds of millions of pounds they had been holding as reserves to pay annuities to pay to shareholders instead. Society, once again, affecting the citadels of high finance.

Trends in the US are more serious and foretell what is likely to happen in Britain without an urgent change in course. Death rates of people in midlife(between 25 and 64) are increasing across the racial and ethnic divide. It has long been known that the mortality rates of midlife American black and Hispanic people have been worse than the non-Hispanic white population, but last week the British Medical Journal published an important study re-examining the trends for all racial groups between 1999 and 2016 .

US doctors coined a phrase for this condition: “shit-life syndrome”. Poor working-age Americans of all races are locked in a cycle of poverty and neglect, amid wider affluence. They are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are drudge work paying the minimum wage, with minimal or no job security. They are trapped in poor neighbourhoods where the prospect of owning a home is a distant dream. There is little social housing, scant income support and contingent access to healthcare. Finding meaning in life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional resources. Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall and a very different and unattainable world presents itself. Knowing that you are valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze. You eat junk food and watch your ill-treated body balloon. It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.

...Shit-life syndrome captures the truth that the bald medical statistics have economic and social roots. Patients so depressed they are prescribed or seek opioids – or resort to alcohol – are suffering not so much from their demons but from the circumstances of their lives. They have a lot to be depressed about. They, and tens of millions like them teetering on the edge of the same condition, constitute Donald Trump’s electoral base, easily tempted by rhetoric that pins the blame on dark foreigners, while castigating countries such as Finland or Denmark, where the trends are so much better, as communist. In Britain, they were heavily represented among the swing voters who delivered Brexit.

Shit-life syndrome is not just a feature of a US city such as Baltimore, where the difference in life expectancy between the richer and poorer districts is as much as 20 years, it’s a feature of our cities, too. Within the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the difference in life expectancy between richest and poorest is 16 years.

Petro-State Purgatory for Canada

Worsening wildfires for British Columbia, perma-drought for the Prairies. How's that sound? 

A remarkably candid report from the Calgary Herald explores the future that awaits western Canada. Hint, it's not at all good.

Heat and drought. A longer fire season with more frequent wildfires and larger areas burned. That’s what’s in store for Canada, especially the prairie provinces, in the coming years, experts say, a situation that is being directly attributed to climate change. 

...“My colleagues and I attribute that to human-caused climate change. I can’t be any clearer than that,” said Mike Flannigan, professor with the Department of Renewable Resources at the University of Alberta. 

“We’re seeing more fire because our climate is changing, in particular because it is getting warmer.”

And along with the warmer the temperature comes an extended fire season. 

“In Alberta, our fire season used to start April 1. It now officially starts March 1 and not this spring, but in the spring and winter of 2015/2016, we had actionable fires in February,” said Flannigan.

“The warmer it gets the more lightning we see and, everything else being equal, more lightning equals more fire.”

...Flannigan said the reality is fire is a part of our future and a term people often use is this is our “new normal,” but he doesn’t like the use of it. 

“It sounds like it’s a plateau. But actually, we’re on a trajectory, perhaps a downward spiral. Things could get a lot worse,” said Flannigan.

A research scientist with National Resources Canada, Marc-Andre Parisien, claims that Alberta might more rain but not enough to offset extra drought caused by more heating.

“In the more pessimistic (climate scenario) cases, some people are saying an increase of four to six (degrees),” said Parisien. 

“I’ve even been seeing up to eight degrees celsius, on average per year, in the next 80 to 100 years or so. That is huge.” 

Although it is projected that Alberta will also see more rain, Parisien said the moisture may or may not be able to keep up with the increased temperature. He said that’s looking like this is the case right now. 

“There’s this rule of thumb that with every degree in increased temperature, you need about 15 per cent relative humidity increase to keep up,” said Parisien. 

“Any kind of increase in moisture, if there even is one, is really not keeping up with the increase in temperature, which leads to tree mortality and vegetation change.” 

Those conditions create the perfect recipe for more wildfires in our future, he said. 

“To put a value on it, it’s difficult. A lot of people have talked about it doubling or tripling,” said Parisien.

Another issue that's emerging is the impact of wildfire smoke on the respiratory systems of those in affected areas.

The long-term effects of breathing in smoke from wildfires is still unknown and Chris Carlsten, a respirologist at the University of British Columbia, said while the short-term effects are concerning, it is important to consider the upward trend of wildfire frequency.
“These have been such temporary events that we have thought of the adverse effects as short-term, but as they get longer, we start to blur the lines between acute and chronic,” said Carlsten.

“If these (wildfire) seasons become July, August, September, then you’re taking about 25 per cent of the year, and who knows — I don’t want to be alarmist. The trend is not good,” said Carlsten.
If the air quality worsens, Carlsten said a potential scenario is normally healthy people developing a chronic illness where there wasn’t one before. 

“If you’re getting repeated hits (of smoky air) and it’s three months then, theoretically, gradually, people will be more likely to develop more (chronic health issues) that won’t go away because the longer we are exposed, and the less clean (air) time, the harder is it is to repair these inflammatory insults.”

Just For the Record. Vanishing Arctic Ice and India's Monsoon

India is currently enduring the worst Monsoon flooding in at least a century. It doesn't sound that uncommon. Every part of the world is now hit by global weirding of one form or another - massive flooding, flash floods, mega-droughts, flash droughts, cyclonic storms (hurricanes, tornadoes), abnormal heatwaves, abnormal cold snaps and, for many, a combination of two or more of these unwelcome shifts.

It's therefore timely that an India's National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research, Goa,  has released a report linking the loss of Arctic sea ice to that country's worsening Monsoon flooding.

Besides sea level rise, the NCAOR has also found that warming at the poles and glacier melting is affecting India’s weather patterns, in particular, the South West Monsoon. 

An earlier study by the NCAOR have found a direct physical link between the warming climate and the monsoon. The increased melting of Arctic glaciers affected the difference between land and sea temperature, resulting in higher intensity of the monsoon rain.

Another day, another report.

India, of course, is an environmental mess. It's overpopulated. Too many of its people lack adequate water for drinking, cooking and sanitation. Its groundwater resources are fast depleting and it faces a return of food insecurity. Its major cities are also sinking just as sea level rise speeds up.

Between the top five metros—Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Bengaluru—the population is a whopping 37.8 crore and climbing; India is an urban disaster in the making. Forty million Indians are likely to be affected by rising sea levels as global warming drives temperatures up, causing ice sheets to melt. India is not saving up for a rainy day. Waterlogged roads, flood-related deaths and crippled infrastructure, urban displacement and economic loss make wearingly repetitive news every time it rains.

It is an interesting report that details conditions in India's major cities and projections of what they will face in decades ahead.

What is becoming apparent - in India as in pretty much every other country - is that our national governments are not remotely up to the challenges that will confront us, our children and grandkids. They're not really even trying. At least that is partly understandable. They're broke, they didn't see it coming, yada, yada, yada. What is not understandable is why, when they know the severity of these threats and their impotence to meet these challenges, they still persist in economic policies that will make a scary future almost certainly unbearable.

Too Important to Let Slip. How the Crash of '08 Upended Your World.

If economist Yanis Varoufakis thinks it's important, chances are good it's important. Which is why I decided to post on a book review Varoufakis wrote for The Guardian last week. The book, "Crashed, How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World," sounds like a must-read. Varoufakis observes with a chilling insight into what awaits:

Every so often, humanity manages genuinely to surprise itself. Events to which we had previously assigned zero probability push us into what the ancient Greeks referred to as aporia: intense bafflement urgently demanding a new model of the world we live in. The financial crash of 2008 was such a moment. Suddenly the world ceased to make sense in terms of what, a few weeks before, passed as conventional wisdom – even McDonald’s, for goodness sake, could not secure an overdraft from Bank of America!

...Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World combines simple explanations of complex financial concepts with a majestic narrative tracing the prehistory and destructive path of the crisis across the planet (including long, apt and erudite chapters on Russia, the former Soviet satellites, China and south-east Asia). It also offers original insights into the nature of the wounded beast (financialised capitalism). Of the myriad unacknowledged truths that Tooze illuminates, some examples follow.

Many economies (Ireland and South Korea for example) that were run according to what the global establishment considered “best practice” (government and trade surpluses, light regulation of banks and employers) crashed the moment 90% of global money flows dried up. Why? Because the establishment’s prescription had skilfully left out the crucial truth that the main threat came from the banking system (not the state) and from private (not public) debt. ...Meanwhile, American and European politicians, who had grown used to a cosy relationship with the bankers, converted a crisis of (super-rich) creditors into one of (poor and middle-class) debtors, pushing the losses of the former on to the latter – also known as socialism for bankers and austerity for the many.

...Back in 1967, John Kenneth Galbraith described how capitalism had shifted from a market society to a hierarchical system owned by a cartel of corporations: the technostructure, as he called it. Run by a global elite that usurped markets, fixed prices and controlled demand, the technostructure replaced the New Deal’s full employment objective with that of GDP growth. Though Tooze does not mention Galbraith directly, he implores us to grasp how Galbraith’s technostructure extended, post-Bretton Woods, its realm by adding the black magic of financialisation to its structure (through, for example, turning car companies like General Motors into large speculative financial corporations that also made some cars!), magnifying by a dizzying factor its power and, ultimately, replacing the aim of GDP growth with that of “financial resilience”: enduring paper asset inflation for the few and permanent austerity for the many.

...In the end, the financialised technostructure was saved by two governments (America and China), while the neoliberal populist myth (that wholesale deregulation will make everyone’s dreams come true under the rule of democracy) is now dead. Is it any wonder that racism and geopolitical tensions are all the rage? Was it not inevitable, as some of us have been warning since before 2008, that a “nationalist international” would soon gain power, on the back of an explicitly xenophobic narrative – in the White House, in Italy, Austria, Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, and shortly in Germany (once Angela Merkel is shoved aside)?

[The author] worries that, in this putrid political environment, the US and Chinese governments will never again be able to pull off a similar trick. To this I would add that the fantasy of apolitical macroeconomic management, promoted energetically by the technostructure, is the other side of the undeclared class war with which the establishment has been shifting all the risks and all the losses on to the weak, instructing them to “suffer what they must” – pushing them, in the absence of a progressive internationalist alternative, into the arms of a postmodern fascism. In his conclusion, Tooze draws a parallel between our present aporia and 1914, when an earlier illusion of some “great moderation” was shattered. On this I beg to differ. From where I stand, we are at a 1930 point – soon after the crash, and with a fascist moment upon us. If so, the pressing question is this: when will we rise up against the nationalist international bred across the west by the technostructure’s inane handling of its inevitable crisis?

NASA Report - The Onset of "Abrupt Thawing"

A new phenomenon has been detected in the far north - "abrupt thawing." NASA warns it could trigger an acceleration in the release of methane once safely sequestered in the permafrost.

New NASA-funded research has discovered that Arctic permafrost's expected gradual thawing and the associated release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere may actually be sped up by instances of a relatively little known process called abrupt thawing. Abrupt thawing takes place under a certain type of Arctic lake, known as a thermokarst lake that forms as permafrost thaws. 

The impact on the climate may mean an influx of permafrost-derived methane into the atmosphere in the mid-21st century, which is not currently accounted for in climate projections. 

The Arctic landscape stores one of the largest natural reservoirs of organic carbon in the world in its frozen soils. But once thawed, soil microbes in the permafrost can turn that carbon into the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, which then enter into the atmosphere and contribute to climate warming. 

"The mechanism of abrupt thaw and thermokarst lake formation matters a lot for the permafrost-carbon feedback this century," said first author Katey Walter Anthony at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who led the project that was part of NASA's Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE), a ten-year program to understand climate change effects on the Arctic. "We don't have to wait 200 or 300 years to get these large releases of permafrost carbon. Within my lifetime, my children's lifetime, it should be ramping up. It's already happening but it's not happening at a really fast rate right now, but within a few decades, it should peak."

If nothing else, this catastrophic work in progress is increasing our lexicon to include phrases such as positive feedback loops and tipping points, flash drought, wet bulb 35 and, now, abrupt thawing. And, unlike a lot of the stuff you learned in school, you won't be forgetting these because they're with you for good. They're part of your life and your kids' lives and your grandkids'.

The photo shows a thermakarst lake. The white areas beneath the ice are methane bubbles that form from the melting lakebed and, on breakup, will be added to the atmosphere.

A Memory of Aretha

Remember this?  Jake, Elwood and Aretha.

Hey Justin, We're Burning Out Here. Look What Fossil Fuels Have Done to Us.

There's so much smoke from so many wildfires, they can't see to count the fires any more. It's somewhere upwards of 500, that's all they know. Could be 600. Who knows? At this point does it really matter?

There are so many fires and so much smoke that it's making it hard for people to stay in their homes and hard for a lot of people to breathe including people nowhere near the fires. So many fires that they create their own weather patterns, inversions. So many fires that, in a lot of places, the sky has changed from blue to orange.

Justin Trudeau doesn't seem to want to come out and see for himself what mankind's fossil fuel addiction has wreaked on British Columbia. That might bugger his puerile narrative that we can flood world markets with bitumen and go green at the same time. Justin, that's like an alcoholic drinking himself to sobriety.

My place sounds like something out of Apocalypse Now with the distinctive slapping of Huey rotor blades overhead. We have a forest service training base for firefighting crews and helo pilots. The aircrews come here to qualify on the water bucket drops before heading out into the field. They must be processing a lot of pilots these days.

The west coast is on fire from Mexico all the way up into Alaska. The coastal fire season just keeps growing longer and longer, beginning sooner, ending later.

Now we're told this year's extreme summer conditions will probably continue for another four years, possibly ten, steadily warming year after year. My guess is that means more wildfires in those hotter years.

It also means more greenhouse gas emissions, CO2, and plenty more carbon soot carried aloft.  British Columbia used to be considered a massive "carbon sink." Our forests were thought to absorb a great volume of atmospheric carbon for photosynthesis.

Those forests are now a "carbon bomb." Global warming has meant warmer winters that are no longer cold enough to ensure a kill off of pine beetles that emerge in the spring to infest the inland forests and cause extensive forest die-offs. Those same bugs have now crossed the Rockies and have reached the northern boreal forests, Labrador bound.  Nothing burns quite so well as dead, dried-out forests.

It is not unfair to hold Justin Trudeau and our Liberal government complicit in this catastrophe. They, and their provincial counterparts, continue to lavish subsidies, direct subsidies, in excess of $3.3 billion a year, almost a hundred dollars for every Canadian man, woman and child. When it comes to oil and gas subsidies, Canada is the worst in the G7.  The International Monetary Fund takes a more expansive approach to subsidies, one that includes the value of natural capital and the emissions associated with fossil fuel production, and its number for Canadian government subsidies is $46 billion. That's the measure of our federal and provincial governments' complicity in this.

Meanwhile government revenues that once peaked at nearly $13 billion, are now dropping sharply.

A comprehensive report on Canada’s energy sector says the nation’s remaining fossil fuels “are being sold off in an environment of low prices with minimal and declining returns to governments.”

More than 30 years ago many Canadian governments earned substantial income from oil and gas production primarily through royalties or taxes, but that is no longer the case, says the report. 

Royalty revenue from hydrocarbon production has plummeted 63 per cent since 2000, and corporate taxes earned by government on drilling and refining activity have declined more than 50 per cent.

Unfortunately none of this matters to the sitting government. It didn't matter to the Harper government either. This is a political issue. It is part of an economic ideology that infests all petro-states. It's the face of neoliberal petro-politics.

It's sad that Justin refuses to draw the obvious link between what's happening to British Columbia's forests, what will soon spread through Canada's boreal forest, and this government's energy policy.  We know he won't. The lengths the Trudeau government went to in order to rig (yes, rig) the TransMountain pipeline initiative, show that there'll be no honest reckoning from Trudeau's government.

A Presidential Election Fought and Won on Climate Change?

What if, by the time Americans go to elect their next president in November, 2020, they have two more summers like this or worse under their belts?

Sooner than later, probably sooner, climate change is going to move near the top of the list on voters' minds. That's because climate change is becoming increasingly dangerous, more disruptive and, ultimately, way more costly. The New York Times' Tom Friedman thinks it could swing the vote in 2020 and that wouldn't be a good thing for Donald J. Trump.

What if all the extreme weather this year — linked to climate change — gets even worse and more costly? What if the big 2020 issue is not left-right — but hot-cold or wet-dry? What if the big 2020 issue is not “Who lost Russia?” or “Who lost North Korea?” but “Who lost planet Earth?” 

We’re talking about the natural world, so one has to be cautious. But if you look at all the destructive extreme weather buffeting the world this summer alone, it’s as if Mother Nature were saying to us: “Oh, you didn’t notice me tapping on your shoulder these past few years? O.K. Well, how about a little fire, Scarecrow? How about this: 

“How about I bake Europe, set the biggest wildfire California has ever seen and more active wildfires — 460 in one day — than British Columbia has ever seen, and also start the worst forest fires in decades in Sweden, even extending north of the Arctic Circle where temperatures this month reached 86 degrees. Meanwhile, I’ll subject Japan to the heaviest rainfall it’s ever recorded, and then a couple weeks later the highest temperature it’s ever recorded — 106 degrees in Kumagaya, northwest of Tokyo. And for a punctuation mark, I’ll break the heat record in Death Valley, reaching 127 degrees, and burn the worst drought in living memory into Eastern Australia, where the BBC last week quoted a dairy farmer as saying, “It’s gotten to the point where it’s cheaper to shoot your cows than it is to feed them.”

Friedman has a warning for presidential hopefuls but it holds true for what passes for political leadership everywhere, Canada included.

Mother Nature is done letting us pretend that we don’t know and can’t connect the dots — and that could create some very interesting politics.

...[Trump] doesn’t believe the climate science that NASA is telling him is true. He is trying to bring back coal precisely when wind, solar and efficiency are becoming cheaper, cleaner, healthier alternatives — precisely when four of the five biggest wind states are red states and precisely when China has committed itself to owning the clean power and electric car markets of the future! He’s trying to force the U.S. auto industry to bring back gas guzzlers when the last time we did that — from the 1980s to the 2000s — Japan and Korea bankrupted Detroit and we enriched petro-dictators from Venezuela to Russia to the Arab world to Iran. 

Trump is the president who’s throwing away our umbrella right before the storm.

... Clean power, clean cars, clean manufacturing and efficient buildings make everything we want to achieve in our society easier. They can lower our health care costs, cut heating bills for the poor, drive 21st-century innovation, foster decent jobs, mitigate climate change, create more competitive export industries, weaken petro-dictators — and enhance U.S. national security and moral leadership. 

Let Trump fight that idea. If Mother Nature keeps on this destructive track into 2020, well, Trump’s favorite mantra about strong women, “Lock her up,” will look awfully silly.