The Long Hot Summer Thread

[K-Dog]

Democracy Now!

Goes hardcore!  David Wallace-Wells as a guest has something to do with it no doubt.

Hard hitting, diluted by describing project 2025 (as if climate problems were the resulting from partisan politics).  David Wallace-Wells brought things back into perspective.

The Heritage Foundation is populated by ghouls I agree.  But that is a different subject.

[K-Dog]

A large hurricane, drought, and perhaps even invasive grasses have fueled devastating fires in Hawaii.



Earlier this week several wildfires engulfed parts of the Hawaiian island of Maui, killing at least three dozen people, burning multiple homes and businesses, and forcing more than a dozen people to flee into the ocean for safety.

Numerous brush fires have burned hundreds of acres in Hawaii and utterly decimated Lāhainā, the tourism heart of the island and the largest city in its west. Hospitals are overrun with burn patients, thousands of people have lost power, and as of Wednesday morning, 911 service was down.

"We have suffered a terrible disaster," Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said Wednesday. "Much of Lāhainā on Maui has been destroyed and hundreds of local families have been displaced."

Wildfires were once rare in Hawaii, largely ignited by volcanic eruptions and dry lightning strikes, but human activity in recent decades has made them more common and extreme. The average area burned each year in wildfires, which tend to start in grasslands, has increased roughly 400 percent in the last century, according to the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, a nonprofit group.

Part of the problem is that climate change is making Hawaii drier, so it's more likely to ignite when there's an ignition event (most Hawaii wildfires are sparked by humans, though the source of the current blazes is unknown). The spread of highly flammable invasive grasses is also to blame. Native to the African savanna, guinea grass and fountain grass, for example, now cover a huge portion of Hawaii, and they provide fuel for wildfires, as Cynthia Wessendorf has written in Hawaii Business Magazine.



These factors are at play today, as is a storm hundreds of miles away. Here's why these fires have become so intense so quickly.

Hawaii is dry right now and getting drier

The simplest reason why parts of Maui are burning is that it's hot and dry — summer is the dry season. And dry, hot weather provides the foundation for extreme wildfires by sucking moisture out of vegetation and essentially turning it into kindling. (That's partly why the Canada wildfires have been so severe this year, too.)

Zooming out, carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels are making the planet hotter and deepening droughts around the world. Hawaii is no exception. Today, there's less rainfall in 90 percent of the state compared to a century ago, according to the state government.

Winds from a major hurricane sweep through Maui

The wildfires burning today are also made worse by a powerful hurricane churning hundreds of miles offshore in the Pacific Ocean. Although Hurricane Dora is not expected to make landfall in Hawaii, it's pushing strong winds that can, in turn, fuel wildfire blazes, according to the National Weather Service.

The winds not only help fire spread quickly but make it difficult for firefighters to put them out. Heavy gusts can knock down trees near roads, blocking access to certain regions, and can also ground helicopters that dump water to quell the blaze. It's an important example of how hurricanes and wildfires — both of which are set to become more extreme under climate change — interact with each other.

There is more fuel for fires to burn

The last reason has less to do with climate and more to do with ... grass.

Unlike fires on the mainland — which are large and spread in forests, burning hundreds of thousands of acres in a given year in places like California — those in Hawaii are typically small and ignite in grasslands. They tend to burn something on the order of tens of thousands of acres a year across the state.

But over the last century or so, humans introduced a variety of nonnative grasses to the state, such as guinea grass, which is often used as feed for livestock. These plants are known to outcompete native grasses, and they grow incredibly quickly after rainfall, which can produce an enormous amount of fuel for wildfires.


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[K-Dog]

The Rate of Global Warming During Next 25 Years Could Be Double What it Was in the Previous 50, a Renowned Climate Scientist Warns

Former NASA climate scientist James Hansen urged Congress decades ago to act on climate change. Now he says he expects reduced aerosol pollution to lead to a steep temperature rise.

James Hansen, a climate scientist who shook Washington when he told Congress 33 years ago that human emissions of greenhouse gases were cooking the planet, is now warning that he expects the rate of global warming to double in the next 20 years.

While still warning that it is carbon dioxide and methane that are driving global warming, Hansen said that, in this case, warming is being accelerated by the decline of other industrial pollutants that they've cleaned from it.

Plunging sulfate aerosol emissions from industrial sources, particularly shipping, could lead global temperatures to surge well beyond the levels prescribed by the Paris Climate Agreement as soon as 2040 "unless appropriate countermeasures are taken," Hansen wrote, together with Makiko Sato, in a monthly temperature analysis published in August by the Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions center at Columbia University's Earth Institute.

Declining sulfate aerosols makes some clouds less reflective, enabling more solar radiation to reach and warm land and ocean surfaces.

Since his Congressional testimony rattled Washington, D.C. a generation ago, Hansen's climate warnings have grown more urgent, but they are still mostly unheeded. In 2006, when he was head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, George W. Bush's administration tried to stop him from speaking out about the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Source Link

I hope this does not mean geoengineering.  The human race does not have the discipline to maintain geoengineering projects and all attempts to implement geoengineering projects in the current system will lead to exploitation by the elite.

[K-Dog]

There should be some kind of social law that says elites will always game institutions to their advantage.  Start geoengineering as things are now, and the global entity running it will soon have more ritual than the Catholic Church.