[POST] Marching to our own heat
America is going-it-alone on climate change under Trump
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This is the scientific observation:
Berkeley Earth, a California-based non-profit research organization, has been preparing independent analyses of global mean temperature changes since 2013. The following is our report on global mean temperature during 2024.
We conclude that 2024 was the warmest year on Earth since 1850, exceeding the previous record just set in 2023 by a clear and definitive margin. This period, since 1850, is the time when sufficient direct measurements from thermometers exist to create a purely instrumental estimate of changes in global mean temperature.
The last ten years have included all ten of the warmest years observed in the instrumental record.
The warming spike observed in 2023 and 2024 has been extreme and represents a larger than expected deviation from the previous warming trend. The spike has multiple causes, including both natural variability and man-made global warming from the accumulation of greenhouses gases; however, as discussed below, we believe additional factors are needed to explain the full magnitude of this event. Reductions in low cloud cover and man-made sulfur aerosol pollution are likely to have played a significant additional role in recent warming.
Over the previous 50 years, global warming has preceded in an almost linear fashion, consistent with an almost linear increase in the total greenhouse gas forcing. The warming spike in 2023/2024 suggests that the past warming rate is no longer a reliable predictor of the future, and additional factors have created conditions for faster warming, at least in the short-term.
To orient you further regarding our world:
Per my argument in America’s New Map:
The old Global North (North America, Europe, advanced Asia) is producing the vast bulk of CO2 emissions, while suffering the least vulnerability on climate change.
The new Global North (China, India) are high emitters and slated for great vulnerability.
Russia is a big and empty place not ready for what’s coming.
The Global South will be hit very hard, particularly demographically rising Africa — just when it can least afford it.
In the Western Hemisphere, it is Anglo America (Canada, US) versus Latin America over climate migrants, a hot-button issue now intertwined with the usual drug charges that have haunted immigrant populations seemingly forever in the US.
My definition of Middle Earth (30 degrees north and south of the equator) captures the greatest zone of vulnerability.
It is very remisicent of my Core-Gap map.
Observe, orient … and America’s decision under Trump 2.0 is?
We pretend it’s all a hoax and do a complete 1984 on the subject, erasing it from official memory.
Our top officials denigrate any consideration of what is happening to our planet.
“We’re not doing that climate change, you know, crud, anymore,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told Fox Business on May 8.
Thank God we’re past linking climate change to agriculture! Enough with the “climate lunatics!” says Trump.
So, what do we do?
We withdraw (again!) from the Paris Climate Agreement, ghetto-ing us alongside such global pillars as Iran, Yemen, and Libya — you know, the strategic visionaries of our age.
We immediately stop all US financial commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and rescind the US International Climate Finance Plan set up to help developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate change.
We reverse everything Biden ever did on the subject, freezing funds from the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that supported clean energy, electric vehicle infrastructure, and other climate mitigation projects.
We fast-track permits for fossil fuel projects.
We declare a “national energy emergency” despite being the biggest producer of oil in the world right now and its biggest natural gas exporter.
We terminate rules that restrict oil, gas, and coal development, prioritizing their development.
We purposefully limit the growth of wind energy and other renewables.
We repeal the Clean Power Plan, thus allowing power plants to increase CO2 emissions.
We forbid USG agencies from considering climate change in environmental reviews.
We limit environmental assessments to two years, allowing us to minimize such considerations in federal decision-making.
We eliminate consideration of the “social cost of carbon” in regulatory decisions, dismissing it as nonsense.
We refuse to recognize any connection between national security and climate change.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the Pentagon will no longer "do climate change crap"
We rescind or weaken most of the environmental regulations designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions or protect public lands from fossil fuel extraction.
The sum total of our decisions?
NYT: The U.S. Under Trump: Alone in Its Climate Denial
Per the Times, we are “undermining the nation’s ability to understand and respond to a hotter planet.”
We observe a world having its climate remade.
We orient ourselves — and North America — in opposition to the rest of the world, threatening to take Canada hostage if need be.
We decide we are not going to participate in any national, regional, hemispheric or global solutions and/or adaptations to all this climate change.
The result? Our actions isolate us in the world on the subject most important to this world this century.
Our actions also distance us from being able to handle what’s coming at us:
At the same time, through cuts to the National Weather Service and by denying disaster relief through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the administration has weakened the country’s ability to prepare for and recover from hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather that is being made worse by climate change.
And when you ask?
Under Trump, FEMA has denied federal assistance to Arkansas, West Virginia and Washington state, and refused North Carolina’s request for extended relief funding following Hurricane Helene, according to Stateline.
Gov. Huckabee Sanders thereupon pleads directly to Trump and some money flows, so I guess it all comes down to whom you know.
But what about Missouri and Kentucky just getting trashed by tornadoes?
From today’s Economist newsletter on the US:
In a statement, a spokesman for the National Security Council said that when disasters strike, states must have “an appetite to own the problem.”
Herbert Hoover much?
Oh, the states are working up an appetite alright …
Where is the mandate here?
I mean, I’ve heard so much about the “77 million Americans” who voted to have everything Biden ever did erased, but what does the polling indicate about our preferences here?
Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults are concerned about global warming or climate change, with 61% worrying about it “a great deal” (40%) or “a fair amount" (21%). Separately, nearly half of Americans (45%) believe global warming will pose a serious threat to themselves or their way of life in their lifetime.
As for the wider world?
According to Peoples’ Climate Vote 2024, the world’s largest standalone public opinion survey on climate change, people everywhere are experiencing climate change in increasingly disruptive ways.
The results of the survey, which statistically represent 87 percent of the world’s population, show that climate change is on people’s minds everywhere. Globally, 56 percent said they were thinking about it daily or weekly.
Additionally, 53 percent of people worldwide are more worried about climate change now than they were a year earlier … More than two out of five people (43 percent) think extreme weather events were worse this year than last. Nearly eight in 10 people (78 percent) want more protection for people at risk from extreme weather.
Strikingly, almost two thirds (63 percent) are starting to take climate change impacts into consideration when making decisions like where to live or work and what to buy …
Four out of five people around the world (80 percent) want more climate action from their country.
As OODA Loops (observe, orient, decide, act) go, America seems completely divorced from the rest of the planet — the worst form of unilateralism in which we don’t even share with others a common picture of our world.
Three structural changes confront us this century: climate change, demographic aging, and the rise of a South-centric global majority middle class.
We are in denial mode on climate change.
We are choking off immigration — the only thing preventing our rapid aging as a nation.
And we are ceding the Global South to China on virtually any front you can name — with me here naming the Green Energy Revolution.
So, where does that leave us, per the NYT:
Taken together, these moves are poised to leave the world’s biggest economy less informed, less prepared and, over time, more polluted.
I just rewatched the Manchurian Candidate on TV.
It is almost impossible to dream up a candidate more capable of disabling the US as a superpower than Trump. Why? Because the man only knows extremes.
After unleashing a globalization dynamic that renders all the world’s states immensely interdependent with one another, America decides it wants to go it alone.
Species the world over are moving up in elevation and toward the poles, as I noted in America’s New Map. Our planet is literally being remapped in an environmental sense, affecting how and where we live, how and where we grow food, how and where we can find sufficient water, and — most permanently — which species go extinct in our lifetimes.
And America has decided to … just sit this one out.
Again, the parallels to Hoover and the Great Depression are apt. Trump is, despite all his activity, a man too small for the job. He may have the right instinct to shift America from sole market-maker to just another market-playing superpower, but he has no sense of proportions, no capacity to broad frame the consequences of his action, and no vision for a future that extends beyond our borders.
Meanwhile, where does all that risk go? Where it always goes — downhill economically.
“The longer we go without these programs, the more risk will accrue to these communities and the nation,” said Mr. Kaniewski, who is now a managing director at Marsh McLennan, an insurance broker and risk adviser. “And soon enough, we’ll all bear the consequences.”
Where does that position the US competitively?
Around the world, countries are racing to adapt to a rapidly warming planet, reduce pollution and build clean energy. China, the only other superpower, has made a strategic decision to adopt clean energy and then sell it abroad, dominating the global markets for electric vehicles, solar panels and other technologies. Even Saudi Arabia, the second-largest producer of oil after the United States, is spending heavily on wind and solar power.
It puts us way behind the pack.
Or let me put it this way, when the Saudis evince more strategic vision on Green Energy than you do, you’re pretty much screwed — competitively speaking.
I wish I could spin it better.
Another banger, so frustrating to watch. As you said it is literally like we are amidst a modernized Manchurian Candidate theatrical release.