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Climate Change Is Supercharging Disasters

The climate change denying Trump regime is about to take over the White House and is likely to seek to undo climate legislation passed by the Biden administration.  Trump and his puppeteer Elon Musk are disseminating lies and attacking Democrats in the midst of the Los Angeles wild fires and offer no real solutions to a growing danger from climate change supercharged fires, hurricanes, sea level rise - something I am very conscious of given that I live on a tidal creek and previously lived in a home that flooded during hurricanes -  and other damaging climate change powered storms. Meanwhile, the scientific community is unanimous in its conclusion that climate change is not only real but that it is making natural disasters far worse.  Sticking one's head in the sand or believing that where one lives will protect you from climate change impacts is delusional, yet is all that Trump and Republicans are offering.  With friends impacted by the hurricanes this past summer in both Florida and Ashville, and now Los Angeles it is far past time that climate change denial end and serious efforts undertaken to slow the increasingly adverse effects of climate change.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the reality of climate change and the Trump/GOP dissemination of lies and falsehoods.  Here are excerpts:

As Los Angeles burned for days on end, horrifying the nation, scientists made an announcement on Friday that could help explain the deadly conflagration: 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history.

With temperatures rising around the globe and the oceans unusually warm, scientists are warning that the world has entered a dangerous new era of chaotic floods, storms and fires made worse by human-caused climate change.

The firestorms ravaging the country’s second-largest city are just the latest spasm of extreme weather that is growing more furious as well as more unpredictable. Wildfires are highly unusual in Southern California in January, which is supposed to be the rainy season. The same is true for cyclones in Appalachia, where Hurricanes Helene and Milton shocked the country when they tore through mountain communities in October.

Wildfires are burning hotter and moving faster. Storms are getting bigger and carrying more moisture. And soaring temperatures worldwide are leading to heat waves and drought, which can be devastating on their own and leave communities vulnerable to dangers like mudslides when heavy rains return.

Around the globe, extreme weather and searing heat killed thousands of people last year and displaced millions, with pilgrims dying as temperatures soared in Saudi Arabia. In Europe, extreme heat contributed to at least 47,000 deaths in 2023. In the United States, heat-related deaths have doubled in recent decades.

“We’re in a new era now,” said former Vice President Al Gore, who has warned of the threats of global warming for decades. “These climate related extreme events are increasing, both in frequency and intensity, quite rapidly.”

The fires currently raging in greater Los Angeles are already among the most destructive in U.S. history. . . . . As of midday Friday, at least 10 people were dead, and losses could top $100 billion, according to AccuWeather. . . . . the Los Angeles fires are being driven by a number of factors that scientists have linked to fire weather and that are becoming increasingly common on a hotter planet.

Last winter, Southern California got huge amounts of rain that led to extensive vegetation growth. Now, months into what is typically the rainy season, Los Angeles is experiencing a drought. . . . . Temperatures in the region have also been higher than normal. As a result, many of the plants that grew last year are parched, turning trees, grasses and bushes into kindling that was ready to explode.

That combination of heat and dryness, which scientists say is linked to climate change, created the ideal conditions for an urban firestorm.

As the Los Angeles fires consumed some of the most valuable real estate in the world, an unfolding tragedy became fodder for political attacks.

President-elect Donald J. Trump blamed Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, for the disaster. Mr. Trump inaccurately claimed that state and federal protections for a threatened fish had hampered firefighting efforts by leading to water shortages.

And on Thursday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and an ally of Mr. Trump, inserted himself into the debate over the role climate change plays in wildfires.

“Climate change risk is real, just much slower than alarmists claim,” Mr. Musk wrote to his 211 million followers on X, the social media site he owns. He said the loss of homes was primarily the result of “nonsensical overregulation” and “bad governance at the state and local level that resulted in a shortage of water.”

Those claims were rebutted by scientists, who noted that, as humans continue to warm the planet with emissions, extreme weather is becoming more common.

News that 2024 was the hottest year on record was hardly a surprise. The previous hottest year was 2023. All 10 of the hottest years on record have come in the last decade.

“We sound like a broken record but only because the records keep breaking,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which monitors global temperatures. “They will continue to break until we get emissions under control.”

In late September and early October, Hurricane Helene, which scientists said was made worse by climate change, roared across the Southeast, unleashing deadly floods and landslides in several states, including North Carolina.

In May, scientists found the fingerprints of climate change on a crippling heat wave that gripped India, and found that an early heat wave in West Africa last spring was made 10 times more likely by climate change.

Heat waves. Drought. Fires. Superstorms. Floods. Mudslides. These are the growing threats of a rapidly warming world, and scientists say nowhere is entirely protected from the effects of climate change.

“We think sometimes that if we live in a city, we’re not vulnerable to natural forces,” Dr. Schmidt said. “But we are, and it comes as a huge shock to people. There’s no get out of climate change free card.”

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Meta's Capitulation to Trump Shows Its Moral Hollowness

The parade of tech giants and news organizations (such as the the now worthless Washington Post) to prostitute themselves to Donald Trump has been disturbing.  Many tech leaders have visited Mar-A-Lago to kiss Trump's ring and donate a $ million each to Trump's inaugural fund (personally, I'd love to see a massive blizzard hit DC on January 20th), but Meta - Facebooks parent - went even further by ending fact checking which obviously helps Trump and his supporters since little, if anything they post is true.  In the wake of Mark Zuckerberg's announcement - done while he was wearing a $900,000 watch - there have been a plethora of outrageous Facebook posts about Zuckerberg seeming to test Meta's resolve to allow "free speech"  and to make fun of his self-prostitution to Trump. A piece in the New York Times looks at Meta's decision to become Trump's political whore all in an effort to protect and/or maximize corporate income while jettisoning all morality and the truth. The Founders believed that a free press was essential to protecting the nation and reigning in would be despots. Far too much of the press cares only about money and to hell with any sense of civic duty.  Here are highlights from the Times piece:

For years, Mark Zuckerberg tried to keep his social networks above the fray of partisan politics.

And why not? Meta’s flagship apps — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — were rowdy nation-states unto themselves, with billions of users, fragile internal politics, skittish advertisers, perpetually aggrieved influencers and a sprawling, uneven enforcement regime (known as “content moderation”) that was supposed to keep the peace. . . . the last thing Mr. Zuckerberg wanted was to become too enmeshed with actual governments — the kind that could use the force of law to demand that he censor certain voices, thumb the scale on politically sensitive topics or threaten to throw Meta executives in jail for noncompliance.

But that was then. Now, on the eve of a second Trump term, Mr. Zuckerberg is giving his company a full MAGA makeover.

In the process, he is also revealing that Meta — a shape-shifting company that has thrown itself at every major tech trend of the last decade, from crypto to the metaverse to generative A.I. to wearable computing — has a fundamental hollowness at its core. . . . it will adopt whatever values Mr. Zuckerberg thinks it needs to survive.

The most recent changes started before the election, when Mr. Zuckerberg — whose contributions to election integrity efforts in 2020 had led Mr. Trump to threaten him with lifetime imprisonment — called Mr. Trump’s recovery from an assassination attempt “badass.” But they have accelerated in recent weeks, after Mr. Trump and Mr. Zuckerberg met at Mar-a-Lago to mend fences.

On Monday, Meta announced the appointment of three new board members, including Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close friend and political ally of Mr. Trump’s.

And on Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg — wearing a $900,000 wristwatch and an air of strained enthusiasm — announced in an Instagram Reel that Meta was replacing its fact-checking program with an X-style “community notes” feature. The company is also revising its rules to allow more criticism of certain groups, including immigrants and transgender people, letting users see more “civic content” in their feeds and moving its content review operations from California to Texas to avoid, he said, the appearance of political bias.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s stated reason for these changes — that Meta had realized that its old rules had resulted in too much censorship and that it should return to its roots as a platform for free expression — was nonsense. (For starters: Which roots? Facebook was inspired by a hot-or-not website for Harvard students, not a Cato Institute white paper.)

In reality, Mr. Zuckerberg changed his views on speech many times, usually in the direction of the prevailing political winds. And the details of the latest changes (a laundry list of right-wing speech demands) as well as the method of delivery (Mr. Kaplan went on “Fox & Friends” to announce them) made it clear what the real purpose was.

The most popular theory about Mr. Zuckerberg’s motives is that he is just doing the politically expedient thing: cozying up to the incoming Trump administration, the way many Silicon Valley tycoons have, in hopes of getting better deals for himself and Meta while Mr. Trump is in office.

A different theory — one supported by conversations I’ve had with several friends and associates of Mr. Zuckerberg’s in recent months — is that the billionaire’s personal politics have shifted sharply to the right since 2020, and that his embrace of Mr. Trump may stem less from cynical opportunism than real enthusiasm.

I can’t prove or disprove this theory. Mr. Zuckerberg, unlike Elon Musk, doesn’t broadcast his unfiltered political opinions dozens of times a day. But I find it plausible. I’ve spent a lot of time studying the right-wing conversion narratives of disaffected liberals, and Mr. Zuckerberg’s recent arc fits the bill surprisingly well: . . . . grows annoyed by the woke left and angry at the mainstream media, rebrands himself as a bad boy, and adopts the label of a “classical liberal” while quietly supporting most of the tenets of MAGA conservatism.

Whatever the cause, these changes amount to Meta’s biggest political realignment since 2016, when it responded to rampant misinformation on Facebook and widespread criticism over its role in Mr. Trump’s election by revamping its rules and investing billions of dollars in content moderation.

The list of people hurt by Meta’s new rules may be long: Immigrants, transgender people, victims of online bullying and harassment, the targets of future QAnon-style conspiracy theories and Facebook and Instagram users who want to see reliable information when they log on.

But the most unexpected casualty may be Mr. Zuckerberg himself, who has always strained to avoid being painted into a corner by political pressure, and will now (at least for the next four years, or until the winds shift again) be judged by his willingness to surrender to the right on issues of speech.

He may find that his new allies on the right make more censorship demands of him, and are less forgiving of his mistakes, than the left ever was.

Meta’s real problem, though, is that the company still doesn’t know what it is. Is it a purveyor of aging (though still profitable) social media apps? A champion of open-source A.I. development? A creator of next-generation augmented-reality hardware? A way for people to connect with their families and friends? A TikTok-style algorithmic feed, filled with a mix of professional influencers and A.I. slop? A builder of immersive virtual worlds? Some other, weirder thing?

A political reset might buy Mr. Zuckerberg some time to answer these questions. But in order for Meta to thrive beyond the Trump years, he’ll have to do more than bend the knee.

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Democrats Prevail in Virginia Special Election Races

 

With all sorts of batshit craziness flowing from Donald Trump's mouth - and he hasn't even been sworn in yet - it is hard to find reasons for optimism.  Yet, special elections in Virginia saw Democrats retain seats up for special elections and control of the Virginia General Assembly, thus providing a bulwark of sorts against Republican insanity at the state level in Virginia and keeping Glenn Youngkin as a lame duck.  With Virginia statewide elections in November, it will be crucial for Democrats to retake the governor's mansion and continue to control both houses of the Virginia General Assembly. In 2017, ten plus months of Trump in the White House helped buoy Democrat victories and hopefully Virginians' dislike of Trump will grow and provide a drag on Republican chances. With the equally batshit crazy Winsome Sears as currently the only Republican gubernatorial candidate, one can only hope the toxicity of the GOP in Virginia will be further amplified. A piece in the New York Times looks at this development (I have canceled my subscription to the Washington Post controlled by Trump self-prostituting Jeff Bezos).  Here are highlights:

Democrats on Tuesday held two key state legislative seats in Virginia, retaining their majorities in the General Assembly in the first special elections since President-elect Donald J. Trump won back the White House.

The results were expected in overlapping House of Delegates and State Senate districts in Loudoun County, a Washington suburb. Democrats have traditionally occupied the seats, which became vacant when the local state senator was elected to Congress and the delegate subsequently resigned to run to replace him.

But Democrats, who held single-seat majorities in both chambers, had worried that a shift toward Republicans in Loudoun County could accelerate after Mr. Trump’s victory. They poured far more resources into the contests than Republicans did.

Kannan Srinivasan, a Democrat who had held the State House seat for the last year, won election to the State Senate, defeating Tumay Harding, a Republican schoolteacher, according to The Associated Press. JJ Singh, a former Capitol Hill aide, won Mr. Srinivasan’s old State House seat, topping Ram Venkatachalam, an information technology consultant . . . .

In the end, the margins in both Loudoun races tracked the difference between Vice President Kamala Harris and Mr. Trump from November — even though the turnout is just a fraction of the presidential contest.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, has one year left in his term.

Democrats focused their efforts on the Loudoun contests, with elected officials from across Virginia and beyond traveling to the districts to help get out the party’s vote in what was expected to be a low-turnout special election.

“In Virginia, everything was at stake,” said Roger Lau, a deputy executive director for the Democratic National Committee. He added, “As we face increasing extremism at the federal level, it’s more important than ever for Democrats to fight back in the states.”

Mr. Srinivasan and Mr. Singh campaigned on the importance of retaining Democratic control of the General Assembly in Richmond, where their party aims this year to advance state constitutional amendments on abortion rights, same-sex marriage and the restoration of voting rights for felons.

“Our win today shows the power of compelling candidates focused on unlocking Virginians’ potential and protecting their rights,” said Dan Helmer, the campaign chair for the Virginia House Democratic caucus. “It bodes well for expanding our majority and taking back the governor’s mansion.”