... and this episode doesn't feature a small Mississippi town in the mid-1980s but rather the largest city in Texas in the all-too-present day. Neither does it star the late lamented Carroll O'Connor but instead every suffering Houstonian who has to leave her or his air-conditioned home for more than 10 minutes during the afternoon.

But the good Dog knows the heat part is certainly here. One of Houston's broadcast TV meteorologists has forecast, starting today, not less than a solid week of temperatures 100°F or greater. That's actual temp, not heat index. And we're not talking about a Dallas 100°F, but the typical humidity-laden Houston 100°F. The kind of heat that regularly kills people: old people who exhibit poor judgment in leaving home without their hats, sunscreen, heavy-duty sunglasses, etc., or children whose parents show even worse judgment by leaving them in the unairconditioned car "for only 10 minutes" while they run into a convenience store for a carton of something more carcinogenic, but no more deadly, than the excessive heat buildup inside that car.

Speaking of people sensible enough NOT to live in hot climates, Happy Birthday to NTodd; may this bright and still quite young man live to see many more!

Robert Reich has completed, not his scheduled ten, but an even dozen videos succinctly expressing the great ideas essential to making the American economy more robust for all its participants and transforming American society into one more committed to equality of treatment of all its members under the law.

The 12 Videos appear (in reverse order) in the right-hand column of Reich's blog, and each video runs about 2-3 minutes. I can't think of a better way for an adult or adolescent American to spend about a half hour than in watching these videos. (In addition to his insight, Reich has a great hand as a cartoonist, which he exercises along with voiceovers on the current topic. You'll have fun learning some excellently framed talking points!)

Tom Engelhardt is, of course, pitching his book, The End of Victory Culture. But I believe he is also saying some profound things about a fundamental change in history, from the story of the rise and fall of empires, to the story of a single empire dominating the only planet humanity has... and contributing to the physical decline of that planet.

With luck, HPL will have the book. If not, it may be a while before I read it. Meanwhile, the linked essay is a good start.

... and probably not just the putz, but more than a few bucks, stopped here: Last weekend, Obama golfed with oil executives, at the very moment 40,000 protesters besieged the White House regarding the Keystone XL pipeline.

An old union song from almost a century ago came to my mind: Which Side Are You On? (YouTube, Pete Seeger) One could well ask Obama that question, based not only on his campaign promises and inaugural speech, but even on the climate change references in his State of the Union speech... and I, at least, would not feel a great deal of confidence if he were to answer, "Yours!"

It's time to prove that, Mr. President. Stop playing with the petroleum pro's. Stop contributing to climate change!

Carl Franzen at TPM:

NASA really rocked the boat around the world in February when it announced the discovery of a 19-mile-long crack off the Western side of Antarctica, a crack poised to calve off an iceberg the size of New York City.

On Monday, NASA released a new video of the latest aerial observations of the crack — located on Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier. What NASA discovered was not only has the crack widened and lengthened, but it’s also led to a smaller, secondary crack.

NASA Goddard Flight Center calving specialist Kelly Brunt explained in the video that although the cracks in the glacier are evidence that the ice in region is thinning and the flow accelerating, and in turn, adding to a rise in sea level, it’s still within what can be considered “normal” annual fluctuations in the ice levels.

“Even calving when we use small states of the island or Manhattan as a unit of measure, this is generally normal, it’s part of the process,” Brunt said.
That said, the new calving site is the furthest inland that’s been observed in the past 40 years.

...

NASA expects the New York City-sized glacier to calve off any day now.

TPM has a photo and a video.

Do I even need to comment on this?

Tim Profeta of Duke University, writing at National Geographic, reminds us of perhaps the most important issue you never heard mentioned by the presidential campaigns:

In his re-election victory speech, President Barack Obama finally touched on a seldom-mentioned issue of the campaign—climate change: “We want our children to live in an America … that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” ... New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made the issue the centerpiece of his endorsement of Obama last week...

A number of environmental groups have expressed hope Obama will finally be at liberty to take steps to address the issue. “I do think there’s an opportunity, if the president chooses to take it, to show leadership and get attention on the cost that climate change is likely to cause,” said Kevin Kennedy of the U.S. Climate Initiative of the World Resources Institute. ...

But the future of U.S. climate policy is far from certain. With comprehensive climate legislation dead in Congress, many see the path forward in continued regulation of carbon emissions from power plants. Sen. Harry Reid said he hopes the Senate, where the Democrats have expanded their majority, can address climate change, but he didn’t offer any specifics. ...

...

The article is short and worth your time to read, but it is also discouraging. After the election, Mr. Obama is theoretically free, indeed arguably has a mandate, to act on this most significant of all issues. But he is surely still beholden to corporate interests which funded his campaign and which anticipate direct or indirect profits from older, dirtier methods of energy generation. Coal isn't going away on its own!

I don't even need to say that an Obama presidency opens the possibility of addressing climate change in a way that a Rmoney presidency would have shut off within five minutes of his election. But even with Obama, this will not be easy; it is incumbent (heh) on us to make sure the president is under as much pressure from environmentally concerned citizens as from big-money contributors. We have to sell our politicians on renewable sources of energy... sell them, and sell them again, until they are irrevocably sold on them.

Another approach, one at which Americans have proven themselves time and time again over more than a century, doesn't get mentioned often enough. That is building devices that use less energy. From computers to cars to industrial plants, we can provide incentives for technology companies to build energy conservation measures into their products from the moment they are designed. Are you, say, 50 years old or more? Chances are good the first computer you ever used filled a sizable room, required A/C in immense amounts, and drew power in quantities comparable to a small housing subdivision. Today, there's your iPad... even if your company has 50 employees each with an iPad or a small laptop, with a local network, all together they don't begin to touch the energy requirements of one old-fashioned room-sized computer. This can be done with other technologies. It can even be done with cars... the Tesla is just the beginning. Energy conservation... what a concept!

Isaac is part of a new type of hurricane, a type that we've seen only in the past few years which does its damage not with wind but with water. When I read the NHC site a half hour ago, top winds were only 70kt (80mph)... a category 1 hurricane... and not a very strong one at that.

But Isaac's span of coastline is huge, and its motion is slow, when it moves at all. That means two things: massive storm surge and overwhelming flooding. From NBC News:

Updated at 11 a.m. ET: New Orleans' levees and pumps were holding up to the rain and storm surge caused by Hurricane Isaac, but areas outside the defense network saw flooding, including an 18-mile stretch to the south where up to 12 feet of water invaded streets and homes.

Officials in Plaquemines Parish, where the surge overtopped an 8-foot levee, said National Guardsmen and even residents were trying to rescue people trapped in homes. Up to 60 people appear to be trapped, NBC's Gabe Gutierrez reported from the area. Rescuers earlier pulled several dozen to safety.

"We have flooding, inundated four-to-nine feet in areas on that side" of the levee, parish emergency management official Guy Laigast told the Weather Channel. "We've got homes that have been inundated. We have folks who are trapped in their residences."

...

My heart goes out to those people. We coast-dwellers build in areas vulnerable to storm surge for very persuasive economic reasons and recreational convenience, but once in a while, we pay the price. My expectation is that the phenomenon "it's the water, not the wind" will prevail more and more often in the near future. Look for "storm surge exceedance" among the products on the NHS site.

Via Dr. Jeff Masters of Weather Underground, it's official (if preliminary): July 2012 is America's hottest month on record, ever. It was slightly hotter than July 1936, which inflicted drought and brought on the great Dust Bowl, devastating farms and more. This follows a succession of other "hottest month" records in 2011 and 2012, and is reflected in 24 state "hottest 12 months" records; please read Dr. Masters's post.

We did this. If you doubt it, see the recent post on Dr. James Hansen's NASA Goddard report. And I seriously doubt it's going to get any better. We made our bed, and now a lot of people are going to have to lie about it.

Somewhere on Earth

That's right. NASA scientist James Hansen's column, "Climate change is here — and worse than we thought," is published in the op‑ed section, under the header "Opinions." His article is paired with one of those "but on the other hand" articles, presumably to appease the right-wing nut-jobs who increasingly control the paper (no link from here, mofo's).Yeah, right, all that A/C we're using just to keep the temp in Our House tolerable is caused purely by opinions. Still, as expected, Hansen makes a compelling argument that most of today's extreme weather events are indeed due to climate change; please read the article. Opinion, my ass. Maybe I need a new section label something like "when good newspapers go bad." Still, at least they published it somewhere. Here's a sample:

...

In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.

This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

...

Taylor Creek, MT, July 2012

As somebody said in Bored of the Rings, "the fewmets have hit the windmill." Global climate change is not an opinion: it's a demonstrated fact, supported by  both scientific and casual observation (see photo, right). Not even a WaPo editor can change that fact.

Should Republicans care? Here's Hansen again:

This is the world we have changed, and now we have to live in it — the world that caused the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed more than 50,000 people and the 2011 drought in Texas that caused more than $5 billion in damage. Such events, our data show, will become even more frequent and more severe.

Climate change deniers: do you want Earth to look like Mars? or maybe Venus? do you want to spend billions attempting to repair the damage, and yet failing? Sorry, but... no. It's your world, but it's not your world to spoil.

From NASA Goddard, here is the research news release including two videos, and the science brief, presuming you're not scared of charts. Here is an abstract, which I reproduce in full here:

"Climate dice," describing the chance of unusually warm or cool seasons, have become more and more "loaded" in the past 30 y, coincident with rapid global warming. The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased. An important change is the emergence of a category of summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (3°) warmer than the climatology of the 1951-1980 base period. This hot extreme, which covered much less than 1% of Earth's surface during the base period, now typically covers about 10% of the land area. It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small. We discuss practical implications of this substantial, growing, climate change.

And finally, here is the rather long .pdf of the report itself.

ASIDE: at Our House, we are on a 100% wind power plan. Apart from busting our budget, we at least don't contribute to the problem.

Dr. Jeff Masters will tell you about it. Under some very reasonable assumptions, "the July 2012 drought is second only to the great Dust Bowl drought of July 1934 in terms of the area of the contiguous U.S. covered by moderate or greater drought." You might even think it was a symptom of global climate change. But... oh, look, Al Gore wants to take away your guns and place you on death panels! [/snark]

That would be 2012, the warmest year in the US in recorded history. Let David Dayen at FDL tell you about it.

UPDATE: NTodd, in comments, points us to an article at MediaMatters, Why George Will Is Wrong About Weather And Climate, which contains graphics that should clarify matters for all but the most stubborn climate change deniers. The short version is that the climate trend rides atop the weather cycle, so that extreme individual weather events, whether or not a given event can be attributed to climate change, become more frequent over the years as climate changes. Lately the frequency of such weather events has leaned disproportionately toward heat events rather than cold events, and the change in frequency of heat events has accelerated in a very small number of years, as shown in this government chart borrowed from the linked article:


Will these events become even more frequent over the course of this century? The following map, taken from the government report Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, answers with an emphatic yes:


Confronted with this projection, deniers can either dispute the science (usually by finding contrarians willing to go on record saying things far from the consensus opinion among climate scientists), dispute the magnitude of the effect (harder to do every year, as shown above) or shrug and say "It's not our problem," meaning "We won't be alive by then; let our children deal with it." Most of the deniers I have encountered are on the political right, with everything that entails including the typical arrogant self-assurance; it occurs to me that they may also have financial motives to keep things just as they are until it's too late... if it isn't already too late.

Welcome to our world: created by idiots, maintained by imbeciles and led by morons. A bit more intelligence would be very helpful about now...

David Atkins (thereisnospoon) at Hullabaloo expands on a theme by David Roberts at Grist: not only is global climate change worse than you think, not only is some degree of it inevitable even at this point, but there is, at ground, no solution as long as we insist on approaching the problem through nation-states and (allegedly) free markets. Please go read those two posts before you undertake any serious dispute of that assertion on threads here. (Warning: at the moment, the Roberts/Grist article is serving atrociously badly on their web site. Expect a long wait.)

Many of you will quite understandably shrug, acknowledging the assertion as having already long since proved itself.

Some of you, though... probably not many who bother to read this blog... will object to the whole thesis of global climate change, or dispute its inevitability, or use old science or current papers by pseudo-scientists to dispute the fact of impending climate change, or tell me that God is going to save us. To those few of you, I say this: save your breath; if you're young now, you're going to need it when the shit hits the fan in a few decades.

Contrary to claims you've almost surely heard, science is not a matter of opinion (though there's no shortage of opinions among scientists) nor is it something you believe or don't believe, like a religion. Science is a collection of methods for creating effective explanations, together with the current versions of those explanations themselves. Science contains few if any eternal truths, but it offers the best way of obtaining the current best assessment of what is factually true, and how those facts interrelate. And in matters of global climate change, the best science indicates that, sooner rather than later, a lot of our coastal towns and cities will be under a lot of water, the life cycles and breeding patterns of many species will be unable to accommodate regional temperature changes (with extinction the likely consequence), and humans will continue to ignore the most basic markers of the human condition by fighting wars over what is left, and by suffering plagues we can only imagine. It is not a pretty picture, and it is already underway.

I wish I could propose some marvelous action you could take to avert this catastrophe, but I am afraid that flight departed a while ago. As for "free market solutions," I cannot even fathom what kind of virtuous investment strategy would induce corporations to take the needed actions soon enough to mitigate the worst effects of climate change... the free market is designed to operate on an extremely compressed time scale, and anything that happens a century from now, even if predictable, simply does not seem real to the people and institutions investing in industries whose actions may or may not make climate change happen.

So I have no preachy advice for you. Being who I am, I can't even provide you a tip on a hot new stock, and besides, the heat of that stock would contribute to the problem...

Yesterday's high temperature in Houston was 105°F, a mark which ABC13 News tells me ties the all-time Houston record for the month of June since they started recording temperatures. That record was set about a year ago. The overall Houston record high was in September, 2000, and again in August, 2011: 109°F. (Source: Wikipedia.)

105°F... that's not Houston weather, that's Dallas weather. Or at least it used to be. Houston's hottest average month is July, 84.4°F; that's part of what makes it bearable (and affordable) to live here. Nonetheless, today is forecast at 101°F.

But it doesn't have anything to do with global climate change. Oh no it doesn't. Because... oh, hey, look, Al Gore is getting old! [/snark]

Dr. Jeff Masters of Weather Underground tells us about a hailstorm... a hell of a hailstorm:

Insured damage from a massive 3-hour hailstorm that pummeled Dallas, Texas on Wednesday, June 13, may reach $2 billion, said the Southwestern Insurance Information Service (SIIS) on Friday. If true, this would be the fourth billion-dollar U.S. weather disaster of 2012. A cluster of three severe thunderstorms dropped hail the size of baseballs over a heavily populated area, damaging thousands of cars, puncturing skylights at a local mall, and shattering the expensive tile roofs of hundreds of homes. It was the second major hailstorm to hit the region this year; an April 3 event cost close to $500 million, and damaged 110 airplanes at the DFW airport. ...

There's a photo with the post, of hail falling into White Rock Lake... and onto some rather pricey-looking boats. Individual hailstones are visible in the photo.

And the nut-jobs say there's nothing going on with the climate...