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The Club PUBlication 09/30/2024

9/30/2024

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GLOBAL WARMING
How are we doing?

For the first time the world was 1.5 degrees warmer compared to pre-industrial times. It was actually anticipated that this important threshold would only be reached in the next few years or the next decade. Recently, scientists expressed "alarm" over the latest findings that the so-called AMOC, a system of ocean currents in the Atlantic, is about to shift due to rapid ice melt. If it were to fail, Europe would see a dramatic drop in temperatures of up to 10 degrees on average. In southern hemisphere countries, warming could intensify, and in the Amazon region, the rainy and dry seasons could be reversed. Sea levels would rise at a speed that would make it impossible for humans to adapt in time. Have we already exceeded the key 1.5-degree limit agreed in the Paris Climate Accord for good?

And so my fellow frogs, perhaps it's time we open our eyes and take whatever action we can to help preserve our planet.

I'M PRETTY SURE THIS IS NORMAL!

The Frog in the Pot
Once upon a time, a frog was placed in a pot of cold water. As the water was slowly heated, the frog swam around comfortably. The water grew warmer and warmer, but the frog didn't notice the change. Little by little, the temperature increased until the frog was boiled alive.
The moral of the story is that sometimes we don't realize the danger we're in until it's too late. It's important to be aware of our surroundings and to make changes before it's too difficult to do so.
Harv

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The Club PUBlication 09/23/2024

9/23/2024

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By DAN STILLMAN The Washington Post

You just lived through the most humid summer
Warm air clearly holds more moisture and produces more intense rainfall, scientists say.

The United States and the entire planet are poised to clinch their most humid summer on record, scientists say. The sweltering conditions, which have pushed this year's heat close to the limits of survivability in some areas and fueled flooding downpours, are part of a long-term increase in humid heat driven by human-caused climate change.

Climate models have long predicted that a warming world would lead to higher humidity, because warmer air evaporates more water from Earth's surface and can hold more moisture. The consequences of more humid heat include greater stress on the human body, increased odds of more extreme rainfall, warmer nights and higher cooling demand.

With only a few days left in meteorological summer, defined as June to August, this summer is on track to be the most humid in the United States in 85 years of record-keeping based on observations of dew point — a measure of humidity — compiled by Hudson Valley meteorologist Ben Noll. It's also likely to end up being the most humid summer globally, Alaska-based climate scientist Brian Brettschneider said in an email to the Washington Post.

If both trends hold, then five of the most humid summers in both the United States and worldwide will have occurred since 1998.

"I have been tracking increasing surface moisture at the monthly time scale. June 2024 and July 2024 both set records for highest dew point for their respective months," Brettschneider said. "I expect August 2024 to be a record too. Summer 2024 should break the record set in summer 2023."

This summer's surge in humidity continues a trend that goes back several decades, with extreme humid heat having more than doubled in frequency since 1979, according to a 2020 study led by UCLA climate scientist Colin Raymond.

Increasing humidity "makes summer heat feel more relentless, with a particular effect on nighttime temperatures," Raymond said in an email. "That means more demand for cooling, and worse health consequences when cooling is unavailable or unaffordable."

Another study, published in 2022 by climate scientists in the U.S. and China, found that increasing humidity has "led to more frequent and stronger extreme events such as heat waves, hurricanes, convection storms, and flash floods."

To cool itself down, the human body reacts to heat by sweating. The evaporation of sweat into the surrounding air is what cools the body. But evaporation occurs more slowly when the air is humid, making it harder to cool off and increasing the risk of heat-related illness or death. The heat index measures how hot the air feels when factoring in the humidity.

In one of the most extreme episodes of heat, portions of the Persian Gulf saw the heat index exceed 140 degrees in both mid-July and this week as dew points soared to around 90 degrees. In the United States, any dew point over 70 degrees is usually considered uncomfortable. The extreme humidity levels were tied to bathtub-like sea-surface temperatures as high as 95 degrees in the Persian Gulf.

A Post analysis found that heat and humidity levels in northern India in May, part of a broader heat wave that spanned much of South and Southeast Asia, surpassed a threshold that researchers have identified as posing a risk to human survival if such heat is prolonged.

"In places like India and areas near the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, the increase in moisture and higher temperatures drives [conditions] to near the point where heat illness is almost certain without air conditioning," Brettschneider said.

Record heat and humidity also have scorched large portions of the United States. Historically hot conditions arrived in Florida in May. That's when Key West, Fla., one of the nation's southernmost points, tied its highest heat index on record at 115 degrees. Northern locales have seen humid heat, too, as the heat index in Preston, Minn., surged to 120 earlier this week as the dew point climbed to 86 degrees, just two degrees short of the state record. On Tuesday, the heat index in Chicago spiked to 115.

Globally, July was the world's warmest July on record and the 14th consecutive month of record global heat, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was a month in which the planet saw its four hottest days ever observed and followed the warmest January-to-July period in 175 years of recordkeeping. "There is a 77% chance that 2024 will rank as the warmest year on record," NOAA said.

Even before summer started, more than 1.5 billion people worldwide experienced at least one day between January and May in which the combination of heat and humidity reached a threshold defined as "dangerous" by the National Weather Service.

While it's challenging to quantify the contribution of global warming to any one flood event, scientists say that warm air is clearly prone to holding more moisture and producing more intense rainfall.

High humidity near the ground, as well as record amounts of moisture from the ground to the top of the atmosphere, has helped fuel at least 10 significant flood events in the United States this year, including severe flooding in northeast Vermont after 8 inches of rain fell in just six hours. Other notable flood events occurred in Minnesota and in western Connecticut and Long Island, while Tropical Storm Debby flooded portions of the eastern United States from Florida to New York earlier this month.

In several cases, the National Weather Service had to issue a flash flood emergency, its most dire flood alert, reserved "for the exceedingly rare situations when extremely heavy rain is leading to a severe threat to human life and catastrophic damage from a flash flood."

The nonprofit Climate Central says the atmosphere holds 4% more moisture for every one degree Fahrenheit of climate warming, which "supercharges" the water cycle and accounted for more than one-third of the $230 billion in damage from inland flooding in the country from 1988 to 2021.

THINK - VOTE - HARV

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The Club PUBlication 09/02/2024

9/2/2024

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Dems wary of plans to subvert vote
By AMY GARDNER and YVONNE WINGETT SANCHEZ
The Washington Post

CHICAGO
As invigorated Democrats celebrated Vice President Kamala Harris's nomination, some of them were doing so with a wary eye on new developments in what they fear could be efforts by former President Donald Trump's allies to create doubt about the election and muddy the result should it not go his way.

In Atlanta, the Georgia State Election Board on Monday approved a rule that critics said would empower county election officials to withhold certification of results without justification, potentially thwarting a popular result.

The board's Trump-supporting majority also signaled plans to adopt nearly a dozen additional rules in coming weeks despite warnings from state and local officials that the lateness of the calendar all but guaranteed confusion and mistakes.

Also this past week, election officials in at least three battleground states received nearly identical letters from the American Conservative Union explaining its plan to monitor ballot drop boxes and scrutinize those using them to vote.

The letters prompted concerns from election officials about the possibility of voter intimidation.

"The whole thing is an absurd sham to cover up direct efforts to intimidate voters by a bunch of CPAC-recruited vigilantes," said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes. The effort's purpose, he added, is "to intimidate voters — and we absolutely will not be cooperating with them."

In Wisconsin, meanwhile, the Texas-based group "True the Vote", which peddled false claims of widespread ballot fraud after the 2020 election, is teaming with sympathetic sheriffs to monitor polling locations and drop boxes. True the Vote's founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, said in a text that the program is "mainly focused" in Wisconsin "but we do have a scalable program."

With Democrats' renewed optimism has come concern among some that the newly competitive race will invite election interference. Trump has said that the only way Democrats can win is by cheating, and he has not committed to accepting the results if he loses.

Democratic election officials and nonpartisan democracy advocates gathered in Chicago last week to assess the threat — and to explain what they are doing to address it.

Their greatest worry, several said at an event hosted by the Brennan Center for Justice, is the possibility of civil unrest.

Even if efforts to subvert election results fail, they said, an army of angry Trump supporters could resort to violence just as they did at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

"Those who are trying to destroy our election system don't believe in the fairness of the game," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said.

" They don't believe in letting the people decide."
Those pushing for tighter election rules and more surveillance of voting say the steps they are advocating will increase public confidence in the November results.

"My interest is in the cleanest, most transparent accountability rules under the existing laws that I can get before voting starts," said Ken Cuccinelli, former Homeland Security deputy secretary under Trump and a former Virginia attorney general who now leads the Election Transparency Initiative and is supporting many of the new rules being adopted in Georgia.

"I want to see good rules in place before the voting starts, and I want to see them followed. And that didn't necessarily happen everywhere in 2020."

Trump's efforts to overturn the results in 2020 centered on the six most competitive battleground states that year, where Biden's razor-thin victories fueled conspiracy theories about forged ballots, intentional miscounts and other false claims of fraud.

Democrats and voting rights advocates said they are paying particularly close attention to efforts to empower local election officials not to certify results, which could impede the process of declaring a winner and create an opportunity for violence or disorder by stoking unsubstantiated worries that fraud tainted the election.

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The Club PUBlication 09/30/2024

And so my fellow frogs, perhaps it's time we open our eyes and take whatever action we can to help preserve our planet. ​

The Club PUBlication 09/23/2024

By DAN STILLMAN The Washington PostYou just lived through the most humid summer​Warm air clearly holds more moisture and produces more intense rainfall, scientists say.​

The Club PUBlication 09/02/2024

Dems wary of plans to subvert voteBy AMY GARDNER and YVONNE WINGETT SANCHEZ The Washington Post

Archives

And so my fellow frogs, perhaps it's time we open our eyes and take whatever action we can to help preserve our planet.

By DAN STILLMAN The Washington Post

You just lived through the most humid summer
Warm air clearly holds more moisture and produces more intense rainfall, scientists say.

Dems wary of plans to subvert vote
By AMY GARDNER and YVONNE WINGETT SANCHEZ
The Washington Post