Climate change has had a dramatic effect on EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”). High temperature today was 90 degrees, 12.5% higher (using God’s preferred temperature units) than last year’s 80 degrees.
How about prices? We parked a car at the seaplane base this morning. It’s $25 to park for the day, 67% more than the $15 charged a year ago (the Biden administration says that inflation is 3%).
Speaking of the seaplane base, here’s a Cessna that was previously parked in a tow-away zone:
…and some general photos…
Finally, three cheers for AirCam. With two people on board, the twin came off the water after about 100′ with no apparent transition from plowing to step!
Following up on Ireland in the European heat wave… the latest map from the New York Times shows that Palm Beach County is suffering from 125-degree heat:
If it gets even 1 degree hotter, we might be into the “Extreme Danger” zone:
Due to a toilet trip lever failure (everything in this 20-year-old house seems to have been designed to last for exactly 20 years), we cautiously ventured out to Home Depot in the local strip mall (Palm Beach Gardens; 4 miles from the ocean). We decided to eat lunch at one of the high-end restaurants there and found that these two people had chosen to flirt with Danger at an outdoor table rather than enjoy the comfortable indoor air-conditioned environment where they’d received their food. Not shown: the person on the right (pronouns unknown) was wearing massive fuzzy bunny slippers, ordinarily marketed for use in frigid New England winters.
After stopping into PetSmart, we passed by a table-service restaurant in which a Floridian is wearing long pants and a sweater in what the New York Times says might be 125-degree heat:
Here’s what the Google says about afternoon temps in the heat dome over the strip mall:
Fortunately, I hope to be escaping to comfortable 93-degree weather in Oshkosh, Wisconsin for next week’s EAA AirVenture:
Below, a photo from last week in Ireland (ferry near Carlingford). Due to the brutal European heatwave, this family had already brought out their summer parkas.
European readers: How are you doing in this record-setting climate change-caused event? After a multicultural tram ride in The Hague 10 days ago, I told my host that it was “like being in Detroit, but without air conditioning.”
We, personally, have been living in “dangerous heat” here in South Florida, with a temperature of up to125 degrees according to the NYT on Tuesday:
We met a neighbor on yesterday morning’s dog walk. His son had on long pants and was heading out to play three games of baseball in the “danger” zone.
When the professional climate Scientists at the New York Times are forecasting 125 degrees, what are the amateur enthusiasts at the Weather Channel expecting for West Palm Beach? A high of 89 degrees:
Maybe the Danger will hit later in the week?
What’s the record high temperature for West Palm Beach in July, according to the National Weather Service? 101 degrees. That was set in 1942. How about the average July high temp for West Palm? The Google says it is 91 degrees. The NYT reminds us that “summer temperatures have become hotter and more extreme in recent decades.”
The forecast is for high temps right around the historical average high temp and the Scientists at the New York Times say that coastal South Florida is in a “Danger” situation. Was any relief in sight, as far as the NYT Scientists were concerned? No:
Related:
“World Swelters in Record-Breaking Heat” (New York Times, July 18): it’s the entire world and the “record-breaking temperatures are being driven by emissions of heat-trapping gases, mainly caused by humans’ burning fossil fuels”
Today, New Orleans will reach 113 degrees in the heat index. Houston will reach 111. Mobile, Ala., and Jackson, Miss., will also surpass 110. And those are only a few of the places that will experience dangerous heat this week.
In New Orleans, the heat index will hit 111 degrees today, climb to 115 by Thursday and remain above 110 for the week.
From the Google:
Whether the high temp this week will be 98 or 115, I hope that our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in New Orleans can find a way to stay comfortable.
Today is World Environment Day (which means we can ignore the environment for 364 days per year, cranking up the A/C in our pavement-melting SUVs?). What are you doing to mark this milestone?
Here’s Facebook back in May enforcing orthodoxy by augmenting one of my posts:
Every day is World Environment Day for the artificially intelligent robots at Facebook!
I returned to the Panama Canal last month after a 20-year absence (my previous trip inspired by reading Path Between the Seas). The Panamanians voted in 2006 to take on $billions in debt to expand the canal (nobody explained to them that proper governance means that $trillions can be borrowed without a vote) and the new locks were finished in 2016. Agua Clara:
The Panamanians like to highlight their environmentalist credentials, noting that using the canal saves our planet by making transportation less energy-intensive (compared to going around Cape Horn). Here are the Italian-made gates (up to 4,200 tons):
The canal, whose operation can yield more than $1 million per ship for the largest container ships, has made Panamanians the world’s only sincere environmentalists. They preserve the rainforest because they believe that cutting down all of the trees will result in reduced rainfall and, therefore, reduced opportunity to operate the canal (each operation of the locks costs fresh water, a limited resource).
I wonder if there is another climate change angle to the Panama Canal. If indeed our beloved Earth is going “full Venus” in 50-100 years due to CO2 we will need geoengineering to reverse the process, perhaps some combination of reducing new CO2 emissions, capturing existing CO2 in the atmosphere, and shading our home from the sun. The climate change alarmists say that the time to act is right now using the money and technology that we have in 2023. The French took this approach in 1881. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the hero of the Suez Canal and the husband of Louise-Hélène Autard de Bragard (43 years his junior), raised money and started digging. They wasted $287 million and 22,000 lives over 8 years before giving up in 1889. The Americans started around 1906 and finished ahead of schedule in 1914. Path Between the Seas attributes most of the Americans’ success to improvements in mining machinery during the intervening 20 years.
Maybe advanced humans will look back from the 2060s and laugh at the puny humans of the 2020s attempting to do geoengineering.
Separately, if we do master geoengineering will we keep cooling the earth until sea level is 10′ below its current level? The most valuable land is in coastal cities. Lowering sea level just a bit would add a tremendous amount of wealth to the world’s richest and most influential people. It would be like Battery Park City in every coastal city all around the world (on the ship that brought us to Panama we met a gal who is fully trained as an attorney, but hasn’t yoked herself to a law firm yet because she is the indirect beneficiary of a 30-year affordable housing contract in which a two-bedroom apartment in Battery Park City with a market value of $5,000/month is leased out for $1,000/month).
Joe Biden still has the U.S. in a declared Covid emergency. We’re informed that systemic racism is a public health emergency. Maybe the monkeypox emergency is still going on? And, of course, there is also the ongoing climate emergency. How could the situation get worse? Boston is in Day 1 of a three-day “cold emergency”:
Mayor Michelle Wu has declared a cold emergency in the City of Boston for Friday, February 3 through Sunday, February 5 due to the extreme cold weather that is forecasted for this time period.
How about the kids who missed 18 months of school? They’ll be at home getting reacquainted with all of their favorite videogames:
After careful consideration and discussions with our local partners regarding the safety of our young people, Boston Public Schools will be closed on Friday, February 3, 2023.
What’s the history of cold emergencies? I don’t remember hearing this term. Who can cite a “cold emergency” from pre-2020?
Mindy the Crippler never complained about the cold! Here she is enjoying a December 2016 snow experience:
The New York Times likes to remind us that we’re facing a climate emergency and/or a climate crisis. Our beloved Spaceship Earth has been infested with too many humans, each of whom emits too much CO2. Last week, however, China released stats showing that the population has leveled off at 1.4 billion. The good old days:
The world’s most populous country has reached a pivotal moment: China’s population has begun to shrink, after a steady, yearslong decline in its birthrate that experts say is irreversible.
Now, facing a population decline, coupled with a long-running rise in life expectancy, the country is being thrust into a demographic crisis that will have consequences not just for China and its economy but for the world.
The entire world is at risk due to China’s failure to push from 1.4 billion up toward 2.8 billion. Because the planet is in a crisis, “her body her choice” is no longer acceptable. Potentially pregnant people who refuse to do their share will be named and shamed:
“I can’t bear the responsibility for giving birth to a life,” said Luna Zhu, 28, who lives in Beijing with her husband. Both their parents would be willing to take care of grandchildren, and she works for a state-owned enterprise that offers a good maternity leave package. Still, Ms. Zhu is not interested in motherhood.
The news is not all bad. If you’re concerned about eliminating your credit card debt or the availability of a “final expense” insurance policy, phone calls from the subcontinent (with local caller ID) should continue to flood in:
Meanwhile, India’s total population is poised to exceed China’s later this year, according to a recent estimate from the United Nations.
Circling back to the first point… how can people who say that their first concern is a climate emergency also characterize a falling human population anywhere in the world as a “crisis”?
A week after Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to divest from fossil fuels, the Faculty Council of Harvard Medical School has issued a call of their own. Their overwhelming passage of a resolution calling for divestment and declaration of a climate emergency, which is yet another accomplishment of one of the largest faculty activism movements in university history, sends a clear message to university administration that it’s time for real climate action.
“The adoption of these resolutions will put Harvard Medical School in the best possible position to tackle the existential crisis of climate change….”
Attacked by a global pandemic and also by our own CO2 emissions, humanity is hanging on by a thread. Is the new Harvard president a solar cell engineer, a carbon capture engineer, a space-based solar shade engineer, a climate prophet, a virologist, a vaccinologist, a public health shutdownologist, or a maskologist? Here’s what Harvard says:
Gay is recognized as a highly influential expert on American political participation. Her research and teaching explore how various social and economic factors shape political views and voting behavior. She is the founding chair of Harvard’s Inequality in America Initiative, a multidisciplinary effort that has advanced scholarship in areas such as the effects of child poverty and deprivation on educational opportunity, inequities in STEM education, immigration and social mobility, democratic governance, and American inequality in a global context.
In other words, she’s an expert on Comparative Victimhood. She provide us with insight into “inequities in STEM education” when she herself would not be qualified to teach science in an elementary school (but maybe she could teach Science?).
Let’s look at Dr. Gay’s scholarly work from before she became an administrator. “Seeing Difference: The Effect of Economic Disparity on Black Attitudes toward Latinos” (American Journal of Political Science 2006). In other words, she can tell us what our Black brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters think of our Latinx neighbors, but why does it matter if we are plagued with Covidiots who won’t wear masks and who therefore put all 333 million Americans at risk of dying from the next virus? Our Black and Latinx neighbors will be equally dead (and also quite a few miles away if we were still living in our former suburb of Boston that was rich in BLM and No Human is Illegal signs).
Please don’t construe this blog post as conveying my personal opinion that Climate Change and respiratory viruses are existential crises for 8 billion humans or that Climate Change and respiratory viruses are more or less important than Comparative Victimhood. I’m only pointing out that it seems inconsistent for a research institution that has identified what it calls “existential crises” for humans to appoint as president someone who has no apparent qualifications for dealing with those crises.
For decades, vulnerable countries and activist groups have demanded that rich polluter countries pay for irreparable damage from climate change. This year, there may be a breakthrough.
What is owed to countries least responsible for the problem of global warming but most harmed by its effects — and by whom?
Year after year, calls have steadily grown louder for industrialized nations responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions already heating up the planet to own up to the problem — and pay for the damage.
This year, demands for redress have sharpened as climate justice has become a rallying cry, not just from countries in the global south, like Mr. Huq’s, but from a broad range of activists, especially young people, in the United States and Europe.
How much are we talking?
Estimates of the amount of money required to address loss and damage varies widely, from roughly $300 to $600 billion a year by 2030.
Less than the elites steal from the American working class every year via low-skill immigration! (Harvard study: $500 billion/year from the working class to the elites in pre-Biden money)
There’s additional scrutiny on the United States, in part because of its outsized role as history’s biggest polluter, but also because of the stated commitments of the Biden administration to climate justice.
The journalist and editors at the New York Times do not quote anyone who has an argument against paying. Is that because no argument can be made?
It’s Thanksgiving week. What about the fact that non-Western countries have gotten Western science (not Science in the form of cloth masks and vaccines that don’t prevent infection or transmission, but science as taught prior to 2020) for free? Shouldn’t these non-Western countries give thanks for Western science and engineering and maybe even give money (as an offset) for Western science and engineering?
How much are Michelle Faraday‘s descriptions of electrical phenomena worth? For a poor country that wishes to set up a power grid, what are Katherine Clerk Maxwell’s Equations worth? For people in poor countries who don’t want to die from infection, how much value did they receive from being handed the work of Louise Pasteur? If they want to get from place to place without having to build roads, aren’t they getting a lot of value from Katharine Wright‘s invention of the first practical flying machine? (assembled and piloted by her brothers) If they enjoy communicating and being entertained, they’re getting value from Wilma Shockley‘s invention of the transistor, no? If they don’t want to starve to death, they need the fertilizers that are made via the process that chemists Frida Haber and Carla Bosch developed.
It doesn’t make sense to start money flowing until both credits and debits have been tallied, does it? If we did that accounting, wouldn’t we likely find that poor countries were getting a lot more than $600 billion in value from Western science and engineering? World GDP is roughly $100 trillion.
Here are some October 2022 photos from Westminster Abbey. Important English and Scottish scientists, including Isabelle Newton, either get a tomb or a memorial or both.
Let’s not forget the monuments to British colonialism and an author whose low opinion of Jews is amply confirmed by Sam Bankman-Fried:
