THE HAMMER OF THOR… AND LIZ AND BARBRA AND GEORGE AND KAMALA
Lately, I’ve returned to my roots in investigative journalism. I’m trying to get to the bottom to a recurrent episode of collective madness where every four years a marauding posse of celebrities, media figures, and supreme court justices go rampaging through the political landscape w...
That didn’t take long. Recall that just a few weeks ago climate change deniers were crowing about the "missing" global warming because the latest draft IPCC report on the state of the climate noted that in the years since 1997 the rate of warming seemed to have dropped. Part of the answer -- ignored by the denier crowd -- was that trends had been distored by the super El Nino of 1998. Now it seems that even with that skew there was no pause in warming.
From the climate modelers’ go-to site, realclimate.org, comes news of a study of global temperatures that argues that between 1997 and 2012 the world warmed at twice the rate reported in the latest draft IPCC report. According to Stefan Rahmstorf at RealClimate, the findings weren’t used by the IPCC because the researchers, Kevin Cowtan and Robert Way, responsibly waited until their report was published by the Royal Meteorological Society before going public. Basically, the scientists found that there were big gaps in temperature data from the Arctic (which has undergone extraordinary warming) because of the paucity of weather stations, and they figured out how to fill in those gaps using satellite data. Once adjusted, the global trend rose from 0.05 degrees C per decade to 0.12 degrees C per decade, which is in line with previous warming.
Presto! No more pause. No doubt the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and the hundreds of other media outlets that made a big deal out of the “missing” global warming will now issue retractions and updates.
The American Meteorological Society names Fire and Flood its book of the year for 2023, awarding it the Louis J Batton Author's Award.
"Eugene Linden wrote his first story on climate change, for Time magazine, in 1988; it was just the beginning of his investigative work, exploring all ramifications of this impending disaster. Fire and Flood represents his definitive case for the prosecution as to how and why we have arrived at our current dire pass, closing with his argument that the same forces that have confused the public’s mind and slowed the policy response are poised to pivot with astonishing speed, as long-term risks have become present-day realities and the cliff’s edge is now within view.
Starting with the 1980s, Linden tells the story, decade by decade, by looking at four clocks that move at different speeds: the reality of climate change itself; the scientific consensus about it, which always lags reality; public opinion and political will, which lag farther still; and, arguably, most importantly, business and finance. Reality marches on at its own pace, but the public will and even the science are downstream from the money, and Fire and Flood shows how devilishly effective monied climate-change deniers have been at slowing and even reversing the progress of our collective awakening. When a threat means certain but future disaster, but addressing it means losing present-tense profit, capitalism's response has been sadly predictable.
Now, however, the seasons of fire and flood have crossed the threshold into plain view. Linden focuses on the insurance industry as one loud canary in the coal mine: fire and flood zones in Florida and California, among other regions, are now seeing what many call climate redlining. The whole system is teetering on the brink, and the odds of another housing collapse, for starters, are much higher than most people understand. There is a path back from the cliff, but we must pick up the pace. Fire and Flood shows us why, and how." From Catalog Copy
