All Warmed Up
Weather
Anyone who lives just about anywhere in the world has felt the effects of the planet’s warming this year. In the southern hemisphere, South American countries experienced the hottest winter in decades. Globally, the last few months were the hottest since we started keeping records:
The June to August period was the planet’s warmest since records began in 1940, according to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
It feels like this year is different; like we’ve topped a rise, and on the other side is a cascading series of climate events we aren’t the least bit prepared for. Canada has seen months of massive wildfires, even in its eastern provinces where they rarely occur(ed). Maui experienced the deadliest US wildfire in a century. The Canary Islands burned.
While some parts of the world suffered drought and became tinderboxes, others got real wet. Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria were hit by huge rain storms with deadly flooding. Florida had a hurricane that scattered migratory flamingos all over the place. Vermont and Kentucky had record rainfalls and flooding. So did Pakistan. California was hit with its first tropical storm in 84 years, dumping half a year’s rainfall in a day.
There are new climate events happening almost daily, and it’s a lot to keep up with, but it’s not really our job to do so. In theory, governments and scientific groups should be coming together to fight climate change and solve these problems. Unfortunately, despite international climate accords and pledges from individual countries, too little is being done too slowly. In many cases - the US especially - we’re going in the complete wrong direction.
Groundwater
Much of the climate and conservation debate focuses on what’s happening above ground - in the air, streams, and forests. Much of the potable water humanity has relies on, however, comes from beneath the surface. It will probably not surprise you to learn that the US has rapidly and perhaps irreversibly drained its underwater aquifers:
Many of the aquifers that supply 90 percent of the nation’s water systems, and which have transformed vast stretches of America into some of the world’s most bountiful farmland, are being severely depleted.
Ninety! Percent! of the country’s water systems are supplied by underwater aquifers, and for decades we’ve treated them like we treat most things - as if they’re always going to be there, no matter how aggressively we abuse them. Well:
Groundwater loss is hurting breadbasket states like Kansas, where the major aquifer beneath 2.6 million acres of land can no longer support industrial-scale agriculture. Corn yields have plummeted. If that decline were to spread, it could threaten America’s status as a food superpower.
While I object to the framing of any country as a food ‘superpower’, the low cost produce and food we enjoy in the US is a major contributor to our economic success. We’ve talked before about the unconscionable amount of water it takes to grow our crops and raise our livestock, but depleting aquifers is also hitting Americans where it hurts the most - limiting suburban sprawl:
Around Phoenix, one of America’s fastest growing cities, the crisis is severe enough that the state has said there’s not enough groundwater in parts of the county to build new houses that rely on aquifers.
In other parts of the Southwest, depleted aquifers are causing sinkholes, buckling highways, and opening fissures in the fucking earth which is both a scene from a horror novel, and a predictable consequence of our rapacious use of natural resources.
Another way we’ve Americanized the crisis is by foregoing federal oversight and allowing states to cobble together a patchwork of often too-weak laws governing wells and use of groundwater. Some states allow the pumping of groundwater until it is completely gone:
Some areas have even set official timelines for how quickly they plan to use up groundwater over the next few decades.
The people sucking our aquifers dry like a Capri Sun pouch have the nerve to call us the doomers when they’re creating fucking PowerPoints predicting precisely when they’ll have used up all the water to grow alfalfa or irrigate their fucking golf courses. Fantastic.
One problem with aquifers is they aren’t entirely analogous to a juice box - removing too much water can cause them to settle and shrink, so that even if we had a record Californian rainstorm once a week, they wouldn’t return to their original capacity. Some aquifers are deep beneath the surface, and water can take a long time to work its way down - hundreds or thousands of years that humanity doesn’t have if we continue at the current rate of consumption.
It adds up to what the NYT calls a ‘climate trap’ - hot weather means less snowpack, which means drier rivers (when we aren’t sucking those rivers dry ourselves) which means we use more surface water on our golf courses, which means less makes it into the groundwater, which means the aquifers collapse, etc.
Less groundwater means less food, too. Crop yields shrink in line with the amount of additional irrigation farmers can provide. And, because we shifted most of our farming to the Midwest and western states because arid conditions are more predictable, that means our crop supremacy is in big trouble. Should we be growing corn in places that get less than two feet of rain a year? Too late to worry about that! We’re witnessing the beginnings of water scarcity in this country, which is no surprise since the NYT’s report this year is the first comprehensive survey of just how bad the groundwater problem has become. What will we do about it?
Foreign Policy
Despite our best efforts to singlehandedly destroy the planet, the US is a smol bean amongst bigger, more populous parts of the world. What we do have, if we decided to use it, is our status as a global superpower to achieve climate goals. We import a lot of stuff from nearly everywhere, and export a lot of tech and culture. We could act as a global leader on climate change, and coerce or cajole or threaten other countries into helping us save the planet.
Are we doing that? Hahahahaha, obviously no. We’ve finally got a White House that at least acknowledges climate change, but what are they doing about it?
The Biden administration’s 2022 national security strategy, which built on the 2018 defense strategy of the Trump administration, pledges cooperation with rival powers “to address shared challenges in an era of competition.” Among all of our shared international problems, it calls climate change “the greatest and potentially existential.”
The problem is, the US government is busy heaping sanctions and restrictions on China, our biggest geopolitical rival, because we’re worried about losing our global economic dominance rather than partnering with the other biggest carbon emitter to try and save the planet:
In July, US climate envoy John Kerry visited Beijing to restart climate talks after Biden took measures to restrict China’s access to semiconductors, a crucial component of both economic and military growth. Kerry wanted China to accelerate phasing out its carbon emissions, but as the economist Dean Baker explained, the argument that Beijing “must be denied the opportunity to improve the living standards of their people because we messed up the planet so badly” is unlikely to sway anyone in China.
In typical arrogant American fashion, we slapped China with sanctions while demanding they also decarbonize. The ‘stop hitting yourself’ foreign policy strategy may have worked in the past, but with China’s rise and its diplomatic and financial relationships with countries we’ve largely treated with disdain, they’re under no obligation to work with us.
Is this foreshadowing? Could a single or combination of climate events unseat American hegemony? Is there precedent for a major climate event bringing down an empire? As a matter of fact:
Recall that the ash spewed from a volcanic eruption in Iceland in 1783 is partly responsible for the French Revolution. The 120 million tons of sulfur dioxide released into the atmosphere caused such severe weather—including hailstones large enough to kill livestock—that it disrupted harvests to the point of rendering the French social contract unviable five years later.
What is the US plan when millions of refugees from equatorial nations flee wet bulb heats and the ensuing political instability? What is Europe’s plan? Thus far, Western nations have reacted to unrest by restricting immigration and demonizing immigrants. But, if world powers continue to focus on petty squabbles over intellectual property and treat environmental policy as a secondary concern, the consequences of their actions may end up on their doorsteps sooner than later.
Chemtrails
Joking! We are not talking about chemtrails but about contrails, the plumes of ice crystals that form in airplane exhaust and definitely do not poison you or make the frogs gay.
A couple weeks back we discussed the truly wild data suggesting that cutting Sulphur out of cargo ship fuel may be reducing ocean cloud cover and superheating the water. Which sucks, obviously. One proposed solution is putting particle sprayers on boats to ‘brighten’ clouds with non-toxic chemicals, which would create more cover and cool our boiling oceans.
So I was surprised to learn that contrails - particle clouds coming out of airplanes - actually heat the planet? The fuck?
These clouds trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, and if we could reduce them, scientists believe that it could slow global warming. And good news, according to researchers at Breakthrough Energy and Google: This is low-hanging fruit.
Basically, new AI flight planning tools can help planes avoid ‘ice supersaturated regions’ which condense in jet exhaust and create contrails. Which create clouds. Which are bad, because they trap heat. Not to be confused with the clouds ship exhaust creates, which are…good? I’m so confused.
Anyhow, Bill Gates and Google decided contrails are bad and are going to work with the airlines to reduce them. I am sort of hoping the debate boils down to dueling sides at a climate conference - the boat fan nerds and the AI plane nerds arguing back and forth over who is actually right and which kind of clouds we need to stop the Atlantic from turning into bouillabaisse.
Whoppers
All this climate talk is seriously gloomy, so here’s a story about one of our favorite topics around here - food lawsuits:
A U.S. judge has rejected Burger King's bid to dismiss a lawsuit claiming that it cheated hungry customers by making its Whopper sandwich appear larger than it actually is.
Ahhhhh yes, that’s the good stuff. At issue in the lawsuit is whether BK’s depictions of Whoppers on its in-store menus are misleading:
Customers in the proposed class action accused Burger King of portraying burgers with ingredients that "overflow over the bun," making it appear the burgers are 35% larger and contain more than double the meat than the chain serves.
I mean, sure? I guess? If you have made it to the year two thousand and twenty three entirely free of the notion that giant, professionally-styled photos of food do not look much or really anything like the product you’re about to receive at Burger King, I don’t know what to tell you. I also don’t know what the public gains from BK making its Whoppers look shittier in its own stores. But, you know what? Let the people decide:
Burger King, a unit of Restaurant Brands International, countered that it wasn't required to deliver burgers that look "exactly like the picture," but the judge said it was up to jurors to "tell us what reasonable people think."
Maybe fast food denizens are tired of being lied to by Big Burger, receiving scant Whoppers with no bun overflow. I have no idea. The judge did dismiss additional claims relating to TV and online ads, which, sure, fine. It would be an amusing legal loophole if you were allowed to zhuzh up your food in ads but on your restaurant’s menu it had to be depicted realistically.
Short Cons
NYT - “If you’re an N.F.L. fan, you’d probably know who Michael Oher is even if he had never met Leigh Anne Tuohy. The reverse is not true.”
Daily Beast - “Nate Holzapfel was an entrepreneur success story on ABC’s hit show. But he’s now in prison for running an elaborate scam that targeted cancer survivors, divorcees, and widows.”
Insider - “Corizon Health, once the nation's largest prison healthcare provider, reached a tentative bankruptcy deal last week that could leave hundreds of prisoners with pennies on the dollar for their medical malpractice claims.”
The Appeal - “The federal government has failed to count thousands of deaths in law enforcement custody over the past three years, the Department of Justice conceded in a report published last week.”
The Drive - “A British company that manufactures components for the most widely used jet airliner engine has been found to be distributing fake parts.”
Rolling Stone - “Shortly thereafter, Redd posted a photo of himself flipping the bird with the caption, “F@$K you and the Stool you came in on, Dave Douchebag. Your show sucks. You suck, and you truly are the classless tool I thought you are.””
The Verge - “A new study from the Mozilla Foundation found that all 25 of the car brands it reviewed had glaring privacy concerns, even compared to the makers of sex toys and mental health apps.”
WaPo - “More Americans are falling behind on their car loan and credit card payments than at any time in more than a decade, a troubling signal of consumer stress as higher prices and rising borrowing costs are squeezing household budgets.”
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