Donald Trump has attacked a majority-black district represented by an African-American lawmaker as a ‘disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess’.
Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the president of
‘racist attacks’ after a stream of tweets targeting congress critic
representative Elijah Cummings.
Mr Trump lashed out at the powerful House Oversight Committee
chairman, claiming his Baltimore-area district in Maryland, US, is
‘considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United
States’.
Ms Pelosi was among Democrats to slam the tweets, saying Mr Cummings
was a ‘champion in the Congress and the country for civil rights and
economic justice, a beloved leader in Baltimore, and deeply valued
colleague’.
She added: ‘We all reject racist attacks against him and support his steadfast leadership.’
President Donald Trump took aim at the radical left-wing
movement Antifa on Twitter Saturday, writing that the organization was
being considered for dedication as a terror organization.
Trump waved off the group as a collection of “gutless Radical Left Wack Jobs” who had enacted violence on “only non-fighters.”
“Consideration is being given to declaring ANTIFA, the gutless Radical Left Wack Jobs who go around hitting (only non-fighters) people over the heads with baseball bats, a major Organization of Terror (along with MS-13 & others),” Trump wrote. “Would make it easier for police to do their job!”
We can’t escape the fact that we all exist under the all-encompassing system known as Capitalism. Capitalism is about concentrating power in and enriching a tiny minority at the expense of the vast majority. Capitalism involves huge inequalities so that the vast majority of people are denied any opportunity to realise their potential.
The climate crisis – the state we’re in – has developed under Capitalism. Capitalism is concerned only with creating and accumulating private and corporate wealth. Capitalism has no concern for the environment or the climate crisis it has created. Big oil knew fifty years ago that it was destroying the planet and did it regardless. There were groups and projects promoting ‘alternative’, renewable energy in the 1970s.
There is a huge problem that many people cannot even imagine a system other than Capitalism. It is regarded as the natural order because it is so pervasive. Business as usual continues despite the climate crisis because people are so set in their ways/thinking.
There is the further huge problem that we are constrained by Capitalism. Capitalism is creating wealth by destroying the planet through burning fossil fuels. This is the reason for calls for system change.
Real wealth is about having good health, friends and relationships, about leading a good life, caring for others and enjoying a healthy, natural environment.
We should realise that Capitalism is not the natural order and that is is instead permitted, allowed [11.55am tolerated] to destroy the planet.
Likely to be revised.
[11.55am Police helicopter harassing me since I posted this. Policeman in car harassing me yesterday.]
The scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming is
likely to have passed 99%, according to the lead author of the most
authoritative study on the subject, and could rise further after
separate research that clears up some of the remaining doubts.
Three studies published in Nature and Nature Geoscience use extensive
historical data to show there has never been a period in the last 2,000
years when temperature changes have been as fast and extensive as in
recent decades.
It had previously been thought that similarly dramatic peaks and troughs might have occurred in the past, including in periods dubbed the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Climate Anomaly. But the three studies use reconstructions based on 700 proxy records of temperature change, such as trees, ice and sediment, from all continents that indicate none of these shifts took place in more than half the globe at any one time.
…
“This paper should finally stop climate change deniers claiming that the recent observed coherent global warming is part of a natural climate cycle. This paper shows the truly stark difference between regional and localised changes in climate of the past and the truly global effect of anthropogenic greenhouse emissions,” said Mark Maslin, professor of climatology at University College London.
No apology is due for being anti-Capitalist, anti-Fascist and anti-Racist. That’s how it should be.
I hold Capitalism responsible for destroying the planet because Capitalism is concerned only with making profit.
I regard Anti-Fascism as subsuming Anti-Racism.
12.47p.m. I am writing in a personal capacity and should not be regarded as any way proscriptive. I am proud to be anti-Capitalist, anti-Fascist and anti-Racist.
I expect team Corbyn to do well in any elections. Corbyn has demonstrated that there is a need for traditional Socialist representation. Combined with real action on the climate crisis and an opposition tearing itself apart, Corbyn and the Labour party are the winners.
John Reid yesterday accused the government’s anti-terror critics of putting national security at risk by their failure to recognise the serious nature of the threat facing Britain. “They just don’t get it,” he said.
The home secretary yesterday gave the thinktank Demos his strongest hint yet that a new round of anti-terror legislation is on the way this autumn by warning that traditional civil liberty arguments were not so much wrong as just made for another age.
“Sometimes we may have to modify some of our own freedoms in the short term in order to prevent their misuse and abuse by those who oppose our fundamental values and would destroy all of our freedoms in the modern world,” he said.
Mr Reid said Britain was now facing “probably the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of the second world war” and that the country was facing a new breed of ruthless “unconstrained international terrorists”.
The European human rights convention had been drawn up 50 years ago to protect against fascist states but now the threat came from “fascist individuals” unconstrained by such conventions, agreements or standards. Everyone across the political, media, judicial and public spectrum needed to understand the depth and magnitude of the threat.
The majority of the public understood its seriousness but there were those who “just don’t get it” …
Record temperatures across much of the world over the past two weeks could make July the hottest month ever measured on Earth, according to climate scientists.
The past fortnight has seen freak heat in the Canadian Arctic, crippling droughts in Chennai and Harare and forest fires that forced thousands of holidaymakers to abandon campsites in southern France and prompted the air force in Indonesia to fly cloud-busting missions in the hope of inducing rain.
If the trends of the first half of this month continue, it will beat the previous record from July 2017 by about 0.025C, according to calculations by Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford, and others.
The scientists stressed that this outcome is uncertain because conditions could change in the second half of the month, but it underscores a broader pattern of steadily rising temperatures caused by increasing emissions of carbon dioxide from power plants, deforestation, cars, planes and other sources.
Editor’s note: A new study by scientists in the United States, China, France and Germany estimates that the world’s oceans have absorbed much more excess heat from human-induced climate change than researchers had estimated up to now. This finding suggests that global warming may be even more advanced than previously thought. Atmospheric scientist Scott Denning explains how the new report arrived at this result and what it implies about the pace of climate change.
1. How do scientists measure ocean temperature and estimate how climate change is affecting it?
They use thermometers attached to thousands of bobbing robots floating at controlled depths throughout the oceans. This system of “Argo floats” was launched in the year 2000 and there are now about 4,000 of the floating instruments.
About once every 10 days, they cycle from the surface to a depth of 6,500 feet, then bob back up to the surface to transmit their data by satellite. Each year this network collects about 100,000 measurements of the three-dimensional temperature distribution of the oceans.
The Argo measurements show that about 93 percent of the global warming caused by burning carbon for fuel is felt as changes in ocean temperature, while only a very small amount of this warming occurs in the air.
The new study finds that since 1991, the oceans have warmed about 60 percent faster than the average rate of warming estimated by studies summarized by the IPCC, which are based on data from Argo floats. This is a big deal.
Most of the difference comes from the earliest part of this period, before there were enough Argo floats in the oceans to properly represent the three-dimensional distribution of global water temperatures. The new data are complete all the way back to 1991, but the Argo data were really sparse until the mid-2000s.
The implication of faster ocean warming is that the effect of carbon dioxide on global warming is greater than we’d thought. We already knew that adding CO2 to the air was warming the world very rapidly. And the IPCC just warned in a special report that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels – a target that would avert many extreme impacts on humans and ecosystems – would require quickly reducing and eventually eliminating coal, oil and gas from the world energy supply. This study doesn’t change any of that, but it means we will need to eliminate fossil fuels even faster.
To limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the IPCC warns that greenhouse gas emissions would need to be drastically reduced over approximately the next decade.IPCC, CC BY-ND
3. What did these researchers do differently to arrive at a higher number?
They have measured tiny changes since 1991 in the concentrations of a few gases in the air – oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide – with incredibly high precision. This is really hard to do, because the changes are extremely small compared to the large amounts already in the air.
Some of these gases from the air dissolve into the oceans. The water’s temperature dictates how much it can absorb. As water warms, the amount of a gas that can dissolve in it decreases – that’s why a soda or beer left open on the kitchen table goes flat. That same temperature dependence allowed the scientists to calculate total changes in global ocean heat content from 1991 to now, just using very precise measurements of the air itself.
4. If this study is accurate, what does it suggest we should expect in the way of major climate change impacts in the coming decades?
This study did not address climate impacts, but they are already well known. As the world warms, more water vapor evaporates from both oceans and land. This means that when big storms develop, there’s more water vapor in the air for them to “work with,” which will produce more extreme rain and snow and resulting winds.
What this study suggests is that the climate is more sensitive to greenhouse gases than we previously thought. This means that in order to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, emissions will need to be cut faster and deeper.
Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe explains the consequences of two degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels.
5. How will we know whether these findings hold up?
There are other groups making precise gas measurements, and many of them have data going back to the 1990s. Others will repeat the analyses made by these authors and check their results. There will also be careful work to reconcile the increased warming rate of the oceans with the Argo temperature data, the surface air temperature record, atmospheric data from balloons and measurements made from satellites. The real world must be consistent with all of the observations taken together, not just a subset.
This study very cleverly used data from the composition of the air itself going back nearly 30 years. We didn’t have Argo floats back then, but air samples are still available that can be analyzed decades later. Using a longer record of warming is much better for estimating the rate, because it’s less sensitive to year-to-year variations than a shorter record.
These scientists have given us a new and independent way to assess the sensitivity of long-term global warming to changes in atmospheric CO2 levels. I expect the findings will indeed hold up, and that we will be hearing a lot more about this new method in the future.
