2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #32

Posted on 11 August 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz

A listing of 36 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, August 4, 2024 thru Sat, August 10, 2024.

Story of the week

What’s our Story of the Week? Is it the AMOC being more likely than not to collapse by 2050? The eye-popping late-winter Antarctic heatwave? 

Ordinarily any of a half-dozen stories in this week’s listing could have been our focus. Instead, “we interrupt regular programming” to bring you a special bulletin, via ProPublica. This news is connected with Project 2025, a scheme fostered by the conservative (self-described) Heritage Foundation to jump start the next US presidential administration (of the politically Right variety) with a freeze-dried, fully comprehensive policy suite that if implemented will radically alter and many cases severely diminish services provided to the US public by the US government.

Expert analysis suggests that if signficantly executed, Project 2025 would leave the US federal government’s ability to inform public policy with cutting edge research severely degraded. And yes, of course there’s a climate connection. 

After barely a few months the United States will elect a president superseding the incumbent but possibly confronting us with a warmed-over replacement. US voters will choose between “reduce, reuse, recycle” and “let’s try a new product.” Whomever is elected in this cycle the outcome will be very unusual, with wildly different significances. The US may end up with its first female head of state, a historically unprecedented event. On the other hand, a recycled president and administration would play out as an extremely rare situation for the US, and— thanks to Project 2025— in this case there’s also distinct possibility of the rare circumstance of entirely novel, ground-breaking history being made. 

What could be so new and different about 45 becoming 47? Famliarity can be deceiving. From all indications, a recycled US president will include an entourage that has wasted few lessons learned from previous experience. As with the previous instance of this candidate’s service there is little hint that the candidate himself has organic instincts for creating a coherent public policy agenda; he claims to be ignorant of key actors in his previous administration, leaving little room for charitable interpretation. 

Nature abhors a vacuum. A public policy vacuum created by a president uninterested in serious effort on public service and its myriad of minutiae will be filled by whatever is most easily to hand. Common sense suggests that prefab policy encountering the path of least resistance is likely to fill this void. Project 2025 is chiefly authored by members of the recycled candidate’s previous administration, leaving ideally low friction for the fruit of their labor to find a home. 

But supposing we do end up with a belated redo of Donald Trump’s first term, how will Project 2025 reach fruition? A cold start of an entire presidential administration is a monumental task, after all. This is the subject of Project 2025’s so-called “4th Pillar,” a 180 day schedule for spinning up an new presidency while simultaneously bending  the US federal government into a new and unfamiliar shape.

The Heritage Foundation has been assiduously keeping this detailed implementation plan under wraps, a puzzling choice taking into consideration that reasonable people believe what’s kept hidden can’t suffer daylight for one reason or another. Now ProPublica has been supplied with what seems to be instructional material in connection with this secret 180 day plan (and yes, this does begin to sound like raving lunacy but here we are— arguable lunatics are in the room). Much of this material is fairly astounding in terms of discontuity with what we’ve come to understand as the US federal goverment. 

Here’s the climate connection; we’ll let it stand as metaphor for the whole enterprise:

In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to “control people.”

“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma says.

Bold ours. Notably the previous operational instance of this particular assemblage of policy influencers did indeed air-brush a lot of climate information from US government publications. Given the nature of Poject 2025 and the informed track laid by its authors, there’s every reason to believe they’ll be much more effective next time, should that come to pass. 

We encourage our readers to jump over to ProPublica and read the entire expose. 

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before August 4

• A critical system of Atlantic Ocean currents could collapse as early as the 2030s, new research suggests, Climate, CNN, Angela Dewan & Angela Fritz.
• Is the dream of nuclear fusion dead? Why the international experimental reactor is in ‘big trouble’, Energy, The Observer/The Guardian,, Robin McKie. “The 35-nation Iter project has a groundbreaking aim to create clean and limitless energy but it is turning into the ‘most delayed and cost-inflated science project in history’ “
• Skeptical Science New Research for Week #31 2024, Skeptical Science, Doug Bostrom & Marc Kodack.
• Tropical Glaciers in the Andes Are the Smallest They’ve Been in 11,700 Years, Science, Inside Climate News, Alexa Robles-Gil. “Four different glaciers along the Andes range no longer have hospitable conditions.”
• ‘Astonishing’ Antarctica heat wave sends temperatures 50 degrees above normal, Climate, CNN, Mary Gilbert.
• ‘No big plan B’: A global anti-Trump climate resistance struggles to gain ground, Energy, Politico, Karl Mathiesen & Zack Colman. “Diplomats and activists from around the world are discussing ways to keep up the fight against global warming, even in the face of an absent or hostile U.S. administration.”
• Fossil fuels made the Olympics 5 degrees hotter, World, Hetaed, Emily Atkin. “So did deforestation and animal agriculture.”
• Fires Have Burned 4.5 Million Acres This Year, Blanketing Much of North America in Smoke, Weather, New York Times, Claire Moses. “Nearly 90 large fires are raging across the United States, intensifying this year’s fire season. The forecast shows no sign of letting up.”
• Memo to the Supreme Court: Clean Air Act Targeted CO2 as Climate Pollutant, Study Says, Justice & Health, Nicholas Kusnetz. “The new paper digs into congressional archives to settle a legal debate, arguing that climate science had determined by 1970 that greenhouse gases would warm the planet—and that lawmakers knew.”