News Articles | August 14, 2022

August 14, 2022August 14, 2022 Robert Heston arctic, big oil, big pharma, California, China, civilization, corporate, economy, Global Warming, inflation, Israel, Palestine, Politics, public schools, vaccine

Commentary

Gestapo the Steal

To America’s political Left, serving its masters in the runaway deep state, reality itself must be portrayed as “baseless,” as in nothing to see here, folks. Is it any wonder, then, that half the country has gone mental. The reality they don’t want you to see is that the intel-and-surveillance agencies of our Republic have taken on a rogue life of their own as a dominant “fourth branch of government,” and that some time ago they embarked on a crime spree against anyone threatening their operations.

That would include especially target number one: Donald Trump. For a masterful explication of how this amazing clusterfuck developed, I commend you to The Conservative Treehouse website where the writer who styles himself as “Sundance” put together a four-part report on how the original sin of RussiaGate metastasized into the stage-four cancer of institutional necrosis that culminated in this week’s raid on Mar-a-Lago.

The gist is: it turns out that the president does not have sole authority, in practice, to declassify and release government documents. With the rise of the security state, many new procedures have been erected within that massive labyrinth to prevent it or slow-walk it. The most effective has been to make the president himself a target of, or a material witness in, drawn-out investigations. That was the exact purpose of the Mueller exercise. Any exculpatory documents released by Mr. Trump — for instance, the complete unredacted text exchanges of FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page — could have been used to hang an obstruction of justice charge on the president.

Mr. Trump adroitly avoided that trap, and many other legal pitfalls the deep state laid for him, and might have won reelection but for the well-organized ballot fraud of 2020. But the epic blunders of “Joe Biden” are giving Mr. Trump, and the movement behind him, a pretty good shot at routing the incumbent regime. Doing so, first in the 2022 midterms and then in the 2024 presidential election, portends a now quite visible effort coming to dismantle that reckless, unelected “fourth branch” of government. So, the intel-and-surveillance agencies are fighting for their lives — and the actual humans in charge must be keenly aware of their criminal liabilities.

Despite all attempts to disable him in office, Mr. Trump, as president, got to see an awful lot of classified material, including all the evidence of Hillary Clinton’s Russia Collusion hoax, abetted by the FBI, the DOJ, CIA, and DOD, plus all the lawless shenanigans that took place in the FISA court. A lot of it was assembled when, late in the game, Mr. Trump was finally able to appoint Directors of National Intelligence he could trust — Ric Grenell and then John Ratcliffe — who wrested many documents out of the foot-dragging agencies. Further maneuvers by artful Attorney General William Barr — the appointment of John Durham as Special Counsel and his drawn-out investigations — kept Mr. Trump from releasing any declassified RussiaGate material ever since. The catch was: he still had bales of that evidence in his possession among the personal papers he took with him from the White House.

Now, it also happens that in March of this year Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit in Florida against Hillary Clinton and many entities and persons who abetted the construction of RussiaGate. The person assigned to preside over the case was magistrate judge Bruce Reinhart, a one-time DOJ attorney who had been involved in the 2007 Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking prosecution, and who then mysteriously switched sides in mid-litigation and signed on as a lawyer for Epstein. Epstein was soon let off of serious charges with a wrist-slap, amid suspicions that he was an intel agency operative who required protection. And, of course, now Mr. Epstein is dead, offed under highly mysterious circumstances while in federal custody.

Bruce Reinhart was involved in the 2013 government defense of IRS officer Lois Lerner, who never answered for targeting conservative organizations for tax punishment and “losing” thousands of emails pertaining to the cases. Bruce Reinhart also left a long record of social media posts denouncing Mr. Trump for one thing or another. Yet, he remained as presiding judge over the Trump lawsuit against Hillary, et al., in Florida since March and then suddenly recused himself on June 22 of this year. Naturally, many of the aforesaid unclassified documents in Mr. Trump’s possession would be introduced as evidence in an effort to prove that Hillary Clinton sought to defame and defraud him over the confected Russia Collusion story.

And so it happened that Bruce Reinhart was just the right person for the FBI to seek a warrant from, though the choice looks ludicrous now. And hence, the desperate raid on Mar-a-Lago to get that trove of evidence, especially with an election looming that could transform congress and lead next year to a raft of investigations into the corrupt intel-and-surveillance deep state. Of course, it’s laughable to imagine there aren’t copies of all that material in other places, so it’s not as though the FBI can make the evidence just disappear. But the apparent object of the move is to hastily convict Mr. Trump in a DC federal district court on any Mickey Mouse charge involving his dispute with the National Archives that would, theoretically, prevent him from running again in 2024.

One must wonder if Mr. Trump did not catch the FBI (and DOJ) in a “rope-a-dope” operation of his own. He’d just come off a successful primary season in which over 90 percent of his endorsees won their races. The midterm elections look increasingly dire for the Democrats, the Party of Chaos, as led by the transcendentally incompetent “Joe Biden.” In June, Mr. Trump had met at Mar-a-Lago with FBI agents and produced many documents requested under a subpoena. Were the FBI and DOJ alarmed by what Mr. Trump handed over then, and did it suggest there was plenty of other material, possibly more damaging, in the former president’s collection headed into court? The momentous lawsuit against Hillary — which gets no coverage in the Left agit-prop news media — is not over.

In any case, the FBI and DOJ ended up embarrassing themselves with the August 8 Mar-a-Lago raid, an act as ham-fisted and tone-deaf as any in the nauseating annals of “Joe Biden’s” sinister regime. They outed themselves as an American Gestapo, dedicated chiefly to persecuting the ruling regime’s political enemies, and they probably succeeded in galvanizing even sturdier opposition to be expressed at the polling places this November, at great peril to the agencies’ officers, and perhaps even the agencies’ continued existence.

James Howard Kunstler | Clusterfuck Nation

Arctic sea ice August 2022

Ocean currents keep pushing heat toward the Arctic Ocean

Arctic sea ice is getting very thin, as temperatures keep rising and ocean currents keep pushing heat toward the Arctic, as illustrated by the NOAA image below that shows sea surface temperatures as high as 33°C or 91.4°F on August 13, 2022.

The Gulf Stream is an ocean current that extends into the Arctic Ocean, as pictured below and discussed at this page. It is driven by the Coriolis force and by prevailing wind patterns. It contributes to the stronger and accelerating warming of the Arctic (compared to the rest of the world), which in turn causes deformation of the Jet Stream, and this can at times cause strong winds to speed up this ocean current, resulting in large amounts of salty, warm water entering the Arctic Ocean, as discussed in an earlier post and at the feedbacks page.

[ from earlier post ]

Latent heat

Latent heat is ocean heat that is, or rather was previously consumed by melting of the sea ice underneath the sea surface.

[ The Latent Heat Buffer ]

This ice has meanwhile all but disappeared, so without this latent heat buffer further incoming heat must go elsewhere, i.e. the heat will further raise the temperature of the water and it will also cause more evaporation to take place where the sea ice has disappeared altogether, and this in turn will further heat up the atmosphere over the Arctic.

The nullschool.net image below shows sea surface temperature anomalies from 1981-2011. At the green circle, anomalies were 16.1°C or 29°F on August 9, 2022. Back in 1981-2011, the temperature at that spot was 0°C.

Thin layer of sea ice

The image below, adapted from University of Bremen, shows Arctic sea ice concentration on August 12, 2022, with concentration in a large area close to the North Pole as low as 0%.

The image below, from NSIDC, also shows sea ice concentration on August 9, 2022.

The Naval Research Laboratory image below, a forecast for August 18, 2022, run on August 10, 2022, shows that the sea ice is getting very thin.

[ click on images to enlarge ]

There still is a relatively extensive but very thin layer of sea ice present at the surface, as illustrated by the NSIDC image on the right that shows an Arctic sea ice extent of 6.438 million km² on August 11, 2022. This relatively large extent is due to the suppression of air temperatures that comes with the current La Niña (see images further below).

As long as air temperatures are low enough to keep this surface ice frozen and as long as there are no strong winds pushing the ice out of the Arctic Ocean, this thin layer of ice will act as a seal, preventing transfer of heat from the Arctic Ocean to the atmosphere.

The larger the remaining sea ice is in extent, the less ocean heat can be transferred from the Arctic Ocean to the atmosphere, which means that more heat will remain in the Arctic Ocean.

[ The Buffer has gone, feedback #14 on the Feedbacks page ]

The danger is that ocean heat keeps arriving in the Arctic Ocean, while the latent heat buffer is gone. As a result, more of this heat could reach sediments at the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean, threatening to destabilize hydrates in these sediment, resulting in methane eruptions both from these hydrates and from free gas underneath these hydrates.

Record high methane levels

Methane levels are already at record high and growth is accelerating, even without an extra burst of seafloor methane.

NOAA registered a globally averaged marine surface April 2022 mean of 1909.9 ppb, which is 18.7 ppb higher than April 2021, as illustrated by the image on the right. By comparison, the highest annual growth on the NOAA record is 18.31 ppb for 2021.

NOAA's data are for marine surface measurements. More methane tends to accumulate at higher altitudes, as illustrated by the image on the right.

The MetOp satellite recorded a mean global methane level of 1971 ppb at 293 mb on August 11, 2022 am. When using a 1-year GWP of 200, this translates into 394.2 ppm CO₂e.

As the image underneath also shows, the MetOp satellite also recorded a peak methane level of 3009 ppb at 469 mb on August 9, 2022 pm.

Record high carbon dioxide levels

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels have been quite high over the past few months. Monthly CO₂ was 420.99 ppm both in May and in June 2022. Some hourly CO₂ measurements were well above 422 ppm in May 2022. On May 28, 2022, one hourly average at Mauna Loa was recorded of 424 ppm.

When adding this monthly CO₂ concentration of 420.99 ppm to the above 394.2 ppm CO₂e for methane, that gives a total of 815.19 ppm CO₂e.

Clouds feedback

The clouds tipping point could be crossed due to an additional 5 Gt of methane from an abrupt eruption of the seafloor, which is only 10% of the 50 Gt that Natalia Shakhova et al. warned about long ago, while 50 Gt is in turn only a small fraction of all the methane contained in sediments in the Arctic. On its own, such an eruption of seafloor methane could raise the global mean methane concentration by another 1969 ppb which, at a 1-year GWP of 200, would translate into another 393.8 ppm CO₂e, which when added to the above 814.79 ppm CO₂e, gives a total of 1208.59 ppm CO₂e.

[ from earlier post, click on images to enlarge ]

So, that would abruptly cause the joint CO₂e of just two greenhouse gases, i.e. methane and CO₂, to cross the 1200 ppm clouds tipping point and trigger a further 8°C global temperature rise, due to the clouds feedback alone.

There are further forcers and feedbacks to be taken into account, which means that the clouds tipping point could be crossed even with a far smaller abrupt release of seafloor methane. While it would take longer for the clouds tipping points to get crossed that way, the associated temperature rise could be enough to drive humans into extinctions well before the tipping point was even reached. A rise of 3°C above pre-industrial could occur on land and drive humans into extinction by 2025.

La Niña

[ adapted from NOAA - click on images to enlarge ]

As said, sea ice extent is relatively large at the moment, because we are currently in the depths of a persistent La Niña, which is suppressing the temperature rise.

El Niños typically occur every 3 to 5 years, according to NOAA and as also illustrated by the NOAA image below, so the upcoming El Niño can be expected to occur soon.The NOAA image below indicates that going from the bottom of a La Niña to the peak of an El Niño could make a difference of more than half a degree Celsius (0.5°C or 0.9°F).

Furthermore, the rise in sunspots from May 2020 to July 2025 could make a difference of some 0.15°C (0.27°F). The next El Niño looks set to line up with a high peak in sunspots, in a cataclysmic alignment that could push up the temperature enough to cause even more dramatic sea ice loss in the Arctic, resulting in runaway temperature rise.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there is a growing risk that methane will erupt from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean, which could cause a dramatic rise in temperature.

Even without such eruption of methane from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean, temperatures could rise strongly, as we move into an El Niño and face a peak in sunspots. The resulting temperature rise could drive humans extinct as early as in 2025 with temperatures continuing to skyrocket in 2026, making it in many respects rather futile to speculate about what will happen beyond 2026.

At the same time, the right thing to do now is to help avoid the worst things from happening, through comprehensive and effective action as described in the Climate Plan.