Not a lot is known about Amy Coney Barrett’s views on climate change, but this exchange on day two of the Senate hearings was telling.

Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) questioned Barrett, trying to prove a point about Democratic objections to her confirmation: “My colleagues think you’re only qualified if you’re dumb, if you have a blank slate. If you’ve never thought about the world. Have you thought about the world?”

Barrett answered that indeed she had. He asked her if she’d thought about social problems and economic problems.

She answered yes to both.

“I’ve read about climate change,” she said. “I’m certainly not a scientist. I mean, I’ve read things on climate change. I would not say I have firm views on it.”

The use of a boilerplate phrase often trotted out by Republican lawmakers – who often default to insisting they are not scientists – raised eyebrows among those concerned about how the 48-year-old judge will rule on climate cases should she get a lifetime appointment. Kennedy certainly didn’t mean to make this point in his questioning, but the exchange made the point environmentalists’ have saying, that is, a 6-3 conservative majority on the court would be disastrous for combating the climate crisis.

But a Supreme Court appointment is for life.

A common understanding and joke both inside and outside the Wash. D.C. beltway is that the modern Republican party, aka the GOP, has long since left behind the Grand Old Party for the party of Gas Oil Pollution.

It’s a story of follow the money.

From decades of oily and contaminated dollars flowing into Republican Party and PAC coffers, bias Think Tanks, and even some Universities.  Yes, the Democratic Party has its own history of oil & gas donors, but dark money from fossil fuel interests has been a trickle compared to the gusher of dollars spilling over onto Republican candidates and office holders.

Then along comes Donald Trump, TV personality, self-proclaimed genius, and other labels which apply – most recently, President of the United States, now seeking to remake the world in his image, and very happy to follow the money, so long as it flows his way.

From day one when Trump took office, he brought with him to the White House, Rex Tillerson, as his Secretary of State.  Tillerson was the former CEO of Exxon, a global oil and gas leader in exploration, production, and class A polluter (including two of the nation’s most disastrous oil spills in history; Alaska and the Gulf).

Tillerson was also a high profile climate science denier, and likely the primary enabler of  Trump’s campaign promise to immediately exit the global (197 country agreement addressing global warming) Paris Climate Accord. The Accord was clearly a threat to big oil profits and in the crosshairs of Tillerson and all other fossil fuel-vested interests.  Sure enough, the one campaign promise Trump prioritized ahead of all others: exit the Paris Climate Accord on day one happened without delay or a lot of forethought, and as they say, the rest is history.

Among 20 of the most powerful people in government environment jobs, most have ties to the fossil fuel industry or have fought against the regulations they now are supposed to enforce.

Under the Trump administration, the people appointed to those positions overwhelmingly used to work in the fossil fuel, chemical and agriculture industries. During their time in government they have been responsible for loosening or undoing nearly 100 environmental protections from pollution and pesticides, as well as weakening preservations of natural resources and efforts to curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

At least four have direct ties to organizations led by Charles G. and the late David H. Koch, who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat climate change and clean energy measures.

Trump Appointed Key Cabinet and Agency Positions Controlled by Fossil Fuel Money Interests:

Two major Antarctic glaciers are tearing loose from their restraints, scientists say …

The new findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from analysis of satellite images. They show that a naturally occurring buffer system that prevents the glaciers from flowing outward rapidly is breaking down, unleashing far more ice into the sea in coming years.

It’s just the latest in a flurry of bad news about the planet’s ice.

The mayor of Portland declared a state of emergency as fires burned toward the city. California and Washington State are battling growing fires, too.

Multiple mega fires are now burning more than three million acres, millions of residents in California, Oregon,and Washington are being smothered in toxic air, experiencing rolling blackouts, and triple-digit heat waves. No this is not a script for an apocalyptic movie — it’s not a movie, it’s real, it’s now, and it’s Climate Change and its effects.

The West Coast is on fire; towns are being decimated by infernos, and firefighters are stretched  beyond their limits.

The climate crisis now unfolding is not limited to the Western United States, or the nation’s most populous state, but what is happening in California is more than just an accumulation of individual catastrophes, it is an example of something climate experts have long worried about, but which few expected to see so soon: a cascade effect, in which a series of disasters overlap, triggering or amplifying each other.

“You’re toppling dominoes in ways that Americans haven’t imagined,” said Roy Wright, who directed resilience programs for the Federal Emergency Management Agency until 2018 and grew up in Vacaville, Calif., near one of this year’s largest fires. “It’s apocalyptic.”

San Francisco Bay Bridge, 10:30 AM, Thursday

From LA to San Francisco, orange-red skies choking with smoke require driving with headlights in the middle of the day.

Wildfires continued their explosive spread along the West Coast on Thursday, scorching entire neighborhoods and forcing mass evacuations across California, Oregon and Washington State as a record-breaking fire season continued.

West Coast firefighters continued their efforts to contain fires that had caused extensive damage and killed at least seven people.

In California, hundreds of fires blazed across the state, including in the Mendocino National Forest in Northern California and Fresno in the central part of the state, as well as areas near Los Angeles and in Silicon Valley. Because of the extraordinary number of fires, California’s forces have been stretched, preventing them from sending firefighters to Oregon, where multiple fires, including the Almeda Fire, have caused extensive damage.

A barrage of scientific evidence shows that climate change has intensified droughts and hotter, drier weather across the Western United States, which has made brush, trees and other organic matter more combustible. According to one study, between 1984 and 2015, climate change contributed to the near-doubling of the geographical area vulnerable to wildfires in the West.

Officials said hundreds of homes had been consumed by flames and aerial images of towns like Talent and Medford, Or., showed streets lined with homes that were charred, if not destroyed.

Living in the West, the connection between climate change and fire is unavoidable. A month ago, California suffered a record-breaking heat wave that baked the earth into kindling. Then the match was struck. The Bay Area woke up to a sky flashing blue with dry lightning — lightning unaccompanied by rain. Nearly 9,000 strikes hit the ground, sparking fires across the region.

Can the climate-denying right really continue to ignore this basic cause-and-effect? Trump’s brand of denial is hardly unique. In some ways, it is embedded in our political system. Trump has ignored climate change because it’s been politically easy to do so. The effects of climate change are imprecise, and in the case of the wildfires, they’re almost not his problem, as the Electoral College allows him to write off the West Coast entirely. (Trump often tweets as if “blue states” are not even part of the country.)

Climate Change is going in one direction – a Hotter Hawaii

Hawaii maybe in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but it cannot escape the impacts of global warming and its Climate Change side effects —  no longer theory, but now fully engaged globally.

For Hawaii, an island state, sea level rise is major concern…

Global warming is behind the recent acceleration of sea level rise observed since record keeping began in 1880. The ocean, which has absorbed 93 percent of the heat that human activities have added to the climate system, expands as it warms, which pushes up sea levels. Warming also melts glaciers and ice sheets on land, with the run-off adding to sea levels.

The sea level anomalies recorded in Honolulu during May-August have been the highest ever, with observed values of 20 centimeters (8 inches) above normal in April, +17 centimeters (6.7 inches) during May, +9 centimeters (3.5 inches) in both June and July, and +10 centimeters (4 inches) in August.  Data from the Honolulu tide gauge shows the increasing trend in sea-level since 1905, with the recent events in 2017 above all others.

Sea surface temperature has increased as the amount of heat absorbed by the oceans has surged in the past few decades, causing marine heat waves and contributing to more intense storms, sea level rise, sea ice melt, and widespread ecosystem change.

…

While heavy precipitation events in most parts of the United States have increased in both intensity and frequency, there are important regional and seasonal differences in total precipitation change. Climate change is linked to increased total precipitation and flood risk

Sea surface temperature has increased as the amount of heat absorbed by the oceans has surged in the past few decades, causing marine heat waves and contributing to more intense storms, sea level rise, sea ice melt, and widespread ecosystem change.

Extreme Weather Swings from excessive rainfall to droughts

Abundant rainfall occurred throughout most of the U.S. Pacific island region during the first half of 2017, with almost all recording stations reporting above-average first-half totals.  It was one of the wettest spring periods on record in Pohnpei, with flash flooding reported from American Samoa to Hawaii.  However, rainfall patterns over the last three months of June, July, and August have been much drier than normal across the region.

Extreme Heat and Heat Waves

Global warming has amplified the intensity, duration and frequency of extreme heat and heat waves. The National Academy of Sciences reports and validates numerous studies as well as two major science assessment reviews that definitively identify the fingerprint of human influence in driving the changes observed to date.

The climate has shifted significantly, leading to more heat records in every season. The number of local record-breaking average monthly temperature extremes worldwide is now on average five times larger than expected in a climate with no long-term warming.

NOAA reports that global warming has contributed to the severity and probability of 82 percent of record-hot days globally.

Sea surface temperatures

Sea surface temperature data from NOAA’s Optimum Interpolation Sea-Surface Temperature (OISST) dataset indicate that many areas were warmer than normal across much of the Pacific during the first 8 months of 2017, with a small, localized region of cold anomalies now starting to develop along the equatorial eastern Pacific.

Daily global CO2 emissions decreased by about 17% during the height of the global shutdown, according to research in the journal Nature, was a relatively small drop, especially considering just how many millions of people were avoiding driving and flying.

For decades fossil fuel companies have pushed the idea of a personal carbon footprint, a metric that ignores the fact that more than 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions comes from energy production.

To ward off the worst effects of climate change, scientists say we must make massive shifts in our behavior to prevent the planet from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2040. Hawaii state engaged scientists and climate specialists to conduct a one year study on climate changes throughout the state. The project Hawaii 2040 investigated communities around Oahu, Maui, Kauai and the Big Island, looking into present day and projected climate changes in various impacts and form from sea level rise, wildfires, coral bleaching, extinction, disease, to watersheds.

For example, the study determined what was already suspected, Climate Change is as much an economic issue as it is environmental. Three feet of sea level rise is estimated to cause more than $20 billion in damage to coastal businesses, roads and land. That doesn’t economic impact on the state does not include the compounding effect on tourism, the loss of environmental assets, and other industries that drive the state’s economy.

As a coral reef scientist, Mark Hixon of Honolulu said he is appalled at how unprepared Hawaii is for forthcoming massive coral bleaching events. His focus is on saving the uhu, a parrotfish whose feeding habits make reefs more resilient.

Edward Matukawa of Kapaa, Kauai, said the unprecedented flooding in April 2018 impacted his family’s rental property in Hanalei. He’s worried about what he and other property owners should do in light of rising seas and stronger storms.

The state has policies and data that identify the many indicators of a changing climate, the 2050 sustainability audit (produced in 2008), noted how 70 percent of Hawaii’s coastline is eroding, streams are drying, rainfall is decreasing and corals are bleaching.

The March audit concluded that comprehensive planning would help the state adapt, but it hasn’t happened in a meaningful way.

“Through the course of the past 12 years, the Hawaii 2050 Sustainability Plan was disregarded,” the audit said.

2020, the year Climate Change Predictions

Turned Real, and Beyond Denial

Waterworld was a big screen production filmed off the Big Island in 1995. The film depicted a post-apocalyptic world in which human-driven global warming of the planet had reached its final conclusion, after the melting of Greenland and the polar ice caps, leaving most of the globe underwater.

Waterworld screenwriter, Peter Rader, says he was an early adopter to climate change warnings, which provided part of the inspiration for Waterworld. “I wrote the original draft in 1986 very much thinking about global warming, even back then. We didn’t have Google at the time, but if you went to any library you could easily find out that if all the ice melted, the sea would rise and cover much of the Earth’s land mass.”  

Fast forward your VCR to today, and thanks to environmental activists like Greta Thunberg, and the near daily reports of climate warming impacts from around the world, public awareness and concerns have moved climate-related topics to the front page of the world’s media – a hot topic, especially among America’s younger generations who will live with the global failure of humankind to take immediate measures to address global warming and mitigate its fossil-fueled consequences.  For them, Waterworld isn’t just a movie: It’s a dire warning call of a world to come.

Loss of Greenland Ice Sheet Reached a Record Last Year

The ice loss in 2019 was more than twice the annual average since 2003.

Greenland lost a record amount of ice in 2019, researchers reported Thursday. Nearly half of it was lost in July, when the region roasted from an unusual heat wave.

The net ice loss of more than 530 billion metric tons was more than twice the annual average since 2003, the scientists said. In July, when warm air from Europe moved north, leading to temperatures that were well above normal and causing widespread surface melting of the ice sheet, the loss was roughly equal to the average loss in a full year.

Greenland’s ice sheet is nearly two miles thick in places, and if all the ice were to melt, sea levels would rise about 24 feet.

That kind of catastrophic melt down could take a century or two. But since the 1990s, as the Arctic has warmed faster than any other part of the planet, ice loss from Greenland and its contribution to sea level rise have accelerated.

But ice loss can vary from year to year. So far in 2020, he said, net ice loss appears to be a little below average.  Both 2017 and 2018 had colder-than-usual summers, when cold air flowed from the north along the west coast of Greenland, reducing ice loss. But in 2019 that circulation pattern was reversed, with warm air coming from the south.

Many scientists are increasingly seeing a link to global warming that is made worse by sea-ice loss in the Arctic Ocean.

In Greenland, ice loss results from runoff of surface meltwater and from discharge of ice from glaciers that serve as outlets for the ice sheet, connecting it to the ocean. Accumulation results from snowfall that, compressed over years, eventually becomes ice. When runoff and discharge exceed accumulation, the result is net loss.

“Mass (ice) loss is not going away anytime soon,” Dr. King said, said the study’s lead author. “But of course we have control over the rate by taking steps to mitigate climate change“.  “It’s not a throw-your-hands-up kind of situation,” she said.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, reassured members of Congress and the public last Friday that the United States would likely have a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine by the end of this year or early in 2021, and pointedly cast doubt on efforts by Russia and China.

Dr. Fauci Reassures Congress “U.S. Will Likely Have Vaccine By Year’s End or Early 2021”

“I do hope that the Chinese and the Russians are actually testing the vaccine before they’re administering the vaccine to anyone,” Dr. Fauci said, adding, “I do not believe that there will be vaccines so far ahead of us that we will have to depend on other countries to get us vaccines.”

Dr. Fauci also cast doubt on a study, touted by Mr. Trump and conservatives, conducted by Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit that showed an apparent benefit for hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug that President Trump has touted as a Covid-19 treatment. “That study is a flawed study,” Mr. Fauci said.

–  what to expect

On Jan. 20, just nine days after Chinese health authorities published the DNA sequence for a new coronavirus that had sickened dozens of people in China, Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, wrote in an email: “I’m certain this will cause our next pandemic.”

The next day the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first U.S. case of someone infected with what became known as COVID-19. Since then, as outbreaks intensified and the virus spread to Europe, and then the Americas, Osterholm, a flu expert with experience working in the CDC who heads up the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, has become one of the nation’s leading voices on the pandemic, weighing in on everything from masks to contact tracing.

“Everyone is looking at the vaccine as being a light switch: on or off. And I look at it as a rheostat, that’s going to take a long time, from turning it on from its darkest position to a lightest position. If you’re anticipating a light switch, you’re going to be concerned, confused, and in some cases very disappointed in what it might look like in those first days to months with a vaccine”, said Dr. Osterholm.

The White House has described the COVID-19 pandemic, when the president, on the rare occasion, acknowledges the full extent of it, has repeatedly set expectations of the virus is at the stage of the “beginning of the end”.  Dr. Osterholm and others within the medical community disagree with that optimistic assessment.

Dr. Osterholm went on to add… “We will be dealing with this virus forever. Effective and safe vaccines and hopefully ones with some durability will be very important, even critical tools, in fighting it. But the whole world is going to be experiencing COVID-19 ‘til the end of time.

“We’re not going to be vaccinating our way out of this to eight-plus billion people in the world right now. And if we don’t get durable immunity, we’re potentially looking at revaccination on a routine basis, if we can do that. We’ve really got to come to grips with actually living with this virus, for at least my lifetime, and at the same time, it doesn’t mean we can’t do a lot about it.”

The one of the main questions yet be answered and Administration’s, so-called “Wrap Speed” eight billion dollar (and counting) to push drug companies to rush development of a viable vaccine, are we going to see some of these vaccines fail in clinical studies?

One of the challenges we have, Dr. Osterholm explained, is what do we mean by fail? “What’s the definition? Some people right now have a view that any vaccine that isn’t like the measles vaccine is going to be a challenge, meaning they’ve got to work 93% to 98% of the time. I don’t think there’s any sense that that’s going to happen with this vaccine.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t going to be an effective vaccine at 50%, 60% or 70%.”

Osterholm went on to explain, “We’ve never had a pandemic due to coronavirus before.”

“We’ve had influenza pandemics. With an influenza pandemic, you do get true waves, meaning you get a first big peak of cases, then the numbers come down substantially without any human intervention. It’s nothing we do. We’ve never understood why that happens, and then a few months later you get a second wave. At this point, that’s not what’s happening here.”

“This is like a forest fire and wherever there’s human wood to burn, it’ll do it. What we see, though, are these spikes in cases where human mitigation strategies ended, or they’re not adhering to them … This is just one constant pressure that’s occurring.”

Pandemic response failure – a befuddled White House response and an absence of Federal leadership — on this point, Osterholm explain, “We’ve failed because we declared victory over the virus when we had no business doing so. This virus has been poised to be transmitted in our communities, and we thought we had done enough to get it down, and then we gave up.”

At Today’s House hearing

Democrats on the House panel wasted little time in pointing out that the caseload is much lower in Europe and Asia than in the United States. Mr. Clyburn, the No. 3 House Democrat and chairman of the subcommittee, displayed a chart showing the disparity. Pressed to explain, Dr. Fauci said countries in those parts of the world were more aggressive about shutting down as the pandemic raged.

“When they shut down, they shut down to the tune of about 95 percent, getting their baseline down to tens or hundreds of cases a day,” Dr. Fauci said.

By contrast, Fauci went on to explain that, “…only about 50 percent of the United States shut down, and the baseline of daily cases was much higher — as many as 20,000 new cases a day — even at its lowest. More recently, the United States has recorded as many as 70,000 new cases a day.

Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, suggested that lack of social cohesion and political leadership was to blame. To that Dr. Fauci said, “I think there was such a diversity of response in this country from different states that we really did not have a unified, bringing everything down.”