How 'Bout That Weather, Huh?

Here's the money shot:

From March 2010 to November 2012 in Australia, insanely heavy rains dispersed so much water, global sea level rise was reversed for 18 months.

How Can We Measure Droughts and Deluges? Weigh the Planet.

Scientists have long cautioned that warming temperatures would lead to wetter and drier global extremes — increasingly severe rainfall, more intense droughts. A new study shows where that may already be happening.

Source: Rodell and Li, Nature Water (2023), based on analysis of NASA Grace and Grace-FO data.
Note: Multi-year events are assigned to the year with peak intensity.

The study provides an emerging picture of distortions in the total amount of water both above ground and also in aquifers deep beneath the Earth’s surface, where most of the freshwater that humans depend upon comes from.

It relies on data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment mission, known as Grace, which uses satellites that can detect changes in gravity to measure fluctuations in water where other satellites can’t see. That way, it can provide information about locations where there are otherwise no gauges or wells.

“For most of the world, we just don’t have data on how groundwater storage is changing,” Matthew Rodell, the deputy director of earth sciences at NASA Goddard, said. “Grace sort of breaks those boundaries and provides information everywhere.”

In a paper published Monday in the journal Nature Water, Dr. Rodell and Bailing Li, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland, analyzed the satellite data to measure water-cycle extremes. They uncovered 505 wet and 551 dry episodes between 2002 and 2021, then assigned each one an “intensity,” in order to rank them. The intensity rankings took into account the severity of an episode as well as its duration and the amount of land area affected.

One aspect of the Grace data is that it measures changes that persist over longer periods of time. In effect it tracks slower-moving disasters that unfold over months or years, not momentary flash floods during an otherwise normal season.

Dr. Rodell and Dr. Li initially set out to rank the worst droughts and periods of increased rainfall over the past 20 years of available satellite observations. When reviewing the results, however, they soon realized both types of events were more common — and were growing more severe — toward the end of the study period.

To see if global warming could be behind the changes, the researchers compared the correlation of monthly wet and dry intensities with global average temperatures and other known climate factors.

They found that global average temperatures had a more significant correlation than the other indicators, including El Niño, the occasional shift in Pacific Ocean water temperatures that can have significant effects on heat and precipitation. The finding strengthens the possibility that, as the world warms, we’ll see more frequent and stronger extremes.

A few regions stood out. The tropics are experiencing more intense wet spells, and continental regions are seeing a trend toward drought.

However, 20 years of observations is short in terms of climate time scales. Simply looking for correlations like this “is going to be limited in its ability to tease these things apart. It’s not trivial to do,” said John Fasullo, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who wasn’t involved in the study.

There are other limitations to the Grace data. Global measurements are monthly and are published with a delay, making it impractical for tracking events as they unfold. The data also has an effective resolution about the size of the state of Illinois, which isn’t ideal for seeing changes on a more local level.

The analysis also excludes regions known to be undergoing long-term human impacts or persistent ice melt that were identified in a previous study led by Dr. Rodell. They include California’s Central Valley, where agricultural use has depleted aquifers, and Greenland, where the ice sheet has melted.

Groundwater changes, particularly at the extremes, remains a topic in need of further study, especially to analyze the influence of global warming. But for precipitation over shorter time periods, the relationship is more clear. “One of the robustly detected aspects of water cycle extremes is the increase of intense precipitation with climate change,” said Dr. Fasullo.

Today's Today

HAPPY PI DAY, YOU MAGNIFICENT NERDS

Deep Thought

Dark matter accounts for the majority of the volume of the universe, and dark energy is what keeps the universe expanding in spite of enormous gravitational pull.

The smartest people in the world tell us Dark Matter and Dark Energy make up 97% of the "known" universe, and that they call those things "dark" because they have no fucking clue what either of them actually is.

Today's Brian

From the Shitty Irony File:

The only people the MAGA rubes trust enough to listen to are the people lying to them the most.

Fixing A Problem

It seems pretty important for companies to take criticism to heart, look for and recognize problems, and then push themselves (and in turn push each other) to find solutions - to face the objections head-on.

I guess the Wind Energy sector can handle that, while the only thing the Dirty Fuels Cartel ever comes up with is better PR, flimflam, and fuckery to get people off their backs.

Bird deaths down 70 percent after painting wind turbine blades

The study ran for nine years at Norway's Smøla wind farm.

Something as simple as black paint could be the key to reducing the number of birds that are killed each year by wind turbines. According to a study conducted at a wind farm on the Norwegian archipelago of Smøla, changing the color of a single blade on a turbine from white to black resulted in a 70-percent drop in the number of bird deaths.

Wind power is surging right now, with more than 60GW of new generating capacity added worldwide in 2019. As long as you put the turbines in the right spot, wind power is reliably cheaper than burning fossil fuels. And most people would prefer to live next to a wind farm than any other kind of power plant—even solar.

Not everyone is a fan of wind turbines, however, because of their impact on local populations of flying fauna like birds and bats. Politicians with axes to grind against renewable energy say that we should continue to mine coal and extract oil because of the avian death toll, and US President Donald Trump has called wind turbines "bird graveyard[s]." Estimates from the US Fish and Wildlife Service calculated that approximately 300,000 birds were killed by wind turbines in 2015 (which is probably two orders of magnitude fewer than die as a result of colliding with electrical power lines each year), and bird deaths from turbines are trending down as the industry moves to larger turbine blades that move more slowly.

Wind power prices now lower than the cost of natural gas

Bird deaths caused by wind power may be overstated then, but they do still occur. Previous laboratory studies have suggested that birds may not be very good at seeing obstructions while they're flying, and adding visual cues like different colored fan blades can increase birds' chances of spotting a rapidly rotating fan.

At the Smøla wind farm, regular checks of four particular wind turbines—each 70m tall with three 40m-long blades—found six white-tailed eagle carcasses between 2006 and 2013. In total, the four turbines killed 18 birds that flew into the blades over those six years, along with five willow ptarmigans that are known to collide with the turbine towers rather than the blades. (Another four turbines selected as a control group were responsible for seven bird deaths, excluding willow ptarmigans, over the same timeframe.)

And so, in 2013, each of the four turbines in the test group had a single blade painted black. In the three years that followed, only six birds were found dead due to striking their turbine blades. By comparison, 18 bird deaths were recorded by the four control wind turbines - a 71.9% reduction in the annual fatality rate.

Digging into the data a little more showed some variation on bird deaths depending upon the season. During spring and autumn, fewer bird deaths were recorded at the painted turbines. But in summer, bird deaths actually increased at the painted turbines, and the authors note that the small number of turbines in the study and its relatively short duration both merit longer-term replication studies, both at Smøla and elsewhere.

Today's Tweet

Oh, pretty good - how's your day goin'?

Just another day on the outskirts of Bakhmut recorded by the Ukrainian defender. pic.twitter.com/W9t82CUIMm

— Maria Drutska 🇺🇦 (@maria_drutska) March 13, 2023

DumFux News

Veterans, active military, guard and reserve comprise a significant segment of voters who typically go with the GOP - almost 2-to-1.

15% of the Jan6 defendants have experience in the US military.

DumFux News has been used to propagandize people in uniform.

Recent revelations should have the effect of stripping off some of that GOP support.

We'll see.

Tea Leaves And Crystal Balls

Information travels at the speed of light, while the systems of government still proceed with all the alacrity, grace, and speed of the average tectonic plate.

There's lots of space to fill on lots of webpages and cable shows, and lots of ads to put in front of lots of people, and lots of demand for lots of opportunity to sell everything from ankle socks to Zyrtec and back to anal beads.

So it seems like we get lots of fairly high-paid fortune tellers "journalists" who try to see into the future and guess what's going to happen, presumably because we're out here expecting our favorite news hounds to pre-inform us so we can - what, exactly? So we can look smarter than average during the argument at the bar next Wednesday? So we can smile knowingly and pretend we had it all figured out ahead of time and that gives us some kind of bragging rights?

I'm not saying we shouldn't know stuff about what's going on. And I'm not saying we shouldn't try to be a little prepared for whatever shit's being rolled down the hill in our direction.

It's just that sitting around waiting for the next shoe to drop can give us a way of rationalizing a tendency to read far more into every little detail than is necessary.

That can be good - checking small things is never a bad idea. But it can have a very negative effect when it builds an expectation that's not realistic, or when you catch one small thing that you don't tag as purely speculative, and then misremember it later as fact, which ends up contributing to general feeling of justice denied, which in turn can give us reason to walk away from something we should be paying a lot of attention to.

Ain't politics a bitch.

Little-Known Lawyer, a Trump Ally, Draws Scrutiny in Georgia

A special grand jury looking into election meddling interviewed Robert Cheeley, a sign that false claims made by Donald J. Trump’s allies loom large in the case.

ATLANTA — At a Georgia State Senate hearing a few weeks after President Donald J. Trump lost his bid for re-election, Rudolph W. Giuliani began making outlandish claims. “There are 10 ways to demonstrate that this election was stolen, that the votes were phony, that there were a lot of them — dead people, felons, phony ballots,” he told the assembled legislators.

After Mr. Giuliani’s testimony, a like-minded Georgia lawyer named Robert Cheeley presented video clips of election workers handling ballots at the State Farm Arena in downtown Atlanta. Mr. Cheeley spent 15 minutes laying out specious assertions that the workers were double- and triple-counting votes, saying their actions “should shock the conscience of every red blooded Georgian” and likening what he said had happened to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

His comments mostly flew under the radar at the time, overshadowed by the election fraud claims made by Mr. Giuliani, who was then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, and by other higher-profile figures. But Mr. Cheeley’s testimony did not end up in the dustbin. He was among the witnesses questioned last year by a special grand jury in Atlanta that investigated election interference by Mr. Trump and his allies, the grand jury’s forewoman, Emily Kohrs, said in an interview last month.

The fact that Mr. Cheeley was called to appear before the special grand jury adds to the evidence that although the Atlanta investigation has focused on Mr. Trump’s biggest areas of legal exposure — the calls he made to pressure local officials and his involvement in a scheme to draft bogus presidential electors — the false claims made by his allies at legislative hearings have also been of significant interest. Mr. Giuliani has been told that he is among the targets who could face charges in the investigation.

“He did testify before us,” Ms. Kohrs said of Mr. Cheeley in the interview.

His appearance left such an impression that Ms. Kohrs began reciting from memory the beginning of Mr. Cheeley’s remarks at the State Senate hearing. Asked if his testimony to the special grand jury had been credible, she said, “I’m going to tell you that Mr. Cheeley was not one that I’m going to forget.”

Mr. Cheeley did not return calls for comment for this article, and he was not present when a reporter visited his office on Wednesday in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. The fact that he testified before the special grand jury was not previously known.

In an interview in January, he remained steadfast in his belief that President Biden had not won the election fairly. “If we lose confidence in the integrity of the elections, we won’t have a country much longer,” he said at the time.

Mr. Cheeley, who is little known outside Georgia, has a long track record as a plaintiff’s attorney and has been involved in lawsuits brought against Ford, General Motors and other automakers. More recently, his legal work has delved deeply into politics. He is a lead lawyer on one of the last pro-Trump election lawsuits that is still standing, an effort to review tens of thousands of 2020 ballots that are being kept in a Fulton County warehouse.

He has also represented one of the fake electors who tried to circumvent Mr. Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia. And he was a lawyer for David Perdue, a Republican former United States Senator, during Mr. Perdue’s unsuccessful run for governor last year.

Mr. Cheeley appeared at the State Senate hearing on Dec. 30, 2020, the last of three legislative hearings that month about the election at which Mr. Giuliani appeared in person or remotely. In each of the hearings, Mr. Giuliani and other Trump allies laid out a broad array of baseless allegations that the election had been stolen.

John C. Eastman, another Trump lawyer, for example, erroneously claimed at one of the hearings that as many as 66,000 “underaged individuals” were allowed to register in Georgia. A review by The New York Times found only about a dozen Georgians on the 2020 voter rolls who were listed in state records as having been 16 at the time, but even those cases appeared most likely to be data-entry errors.

“We talked a lot about December and things that happened in the Georgia legislature,” Ms. Kohrs said of the special grand jury’s deliberations.

Ms. Kohrs, who gave a brief flurry of interviews last month but has not publicly commented since then, said that the special grand jury had recommended indicting at least a dozen people. Its recommendations were delivered in a final report in January, most of which remains sealed. The report is now in the hands of Fani T. Willis, the district attorney for the Atlanta area, who has been leading the investigation for the last two years.

Ms. Willis will make her own decisions about who, if anyone, she will seek to indict, and will then need to go before a regular grand jury to secure those indictments.

Georgia has laws against making false statements in official settings. Those who testified falsely before the legislature “may also face liability under Georgia’s conspiracy to commit election fraud statute,” said Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment, and who co-wrote a report by the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning research organization in Washington, examining the Georgia case.

Conspiracy charges could be considered for Trump allies who spoke at hearings and other official events, “to the extent their statements and other conduct were part of the larger Trump-led scheme to interfere in the election in the state,” Mr. Eisen said. Ms. Willis has also, according to interviews and court records, weighed the possibility of bringing racketeering charges, which could be broadly applied.

After hearing from a number of nonpartisan elections experts, as well as witnesses like Mr. Cheeley who believe the election was stolen, the grand jurors unanimously found that there was no evidence of significant vote fraud in Georgia in the 2020 election, according to a portion of their final report that was publicly released.

Surveillance footage from State Farm Arena after the 2020 contest shows some election workers running ballots through scanners more than once, leading Mr. Cheeley to claim at the December 2020 hearing that the workers were double- and triple-counting votes from Atlanta, a Democratic stronghold. “One man, one vote, just went out the window at the State Farm Arena,” he told the lawmakers, while talking over video clips.

But Georgia’s Republican leaders, including Gov. Brian Kemp, have repeatedly said that there was no conspiracy to steal the election.

“The standard operating procedure on a high-capacity scanner is that if there is a misread, you take that batch, press a button, delete that batch, and take that batch and put it back in again,” said Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer in the office of the Georgia Secretary of State, in an interview. “We also know, if there had been multiple scans, there would have been a lot more votes than there were ballots.”

As Mr. Sterling, a Republican, once put it: “It’s not like this is an ‘Ocean’s Eleven’-level scheme that was put together in the middle of the night.”

There has been no shortage of sparring over the investigation, including a number of social media posts from Mr. Trump tarring it. The vitriol is likely to grow more intense as Ms. Willis nears her decision over indictments. Last weekend, Mr. Trump hailed Republican state lawmakers for seeking new checks on the power of local district attorneys, who are elected in Georgia.

“They want to make it easier to remove and replace local rogue prosecutors who are incompetent, racist or unable to properly do their job,” he wrote on Truth Social, commending lawmakers for acting “boldly, fairly, and fast!”

Today's PG

Leigh McGowan gets it. She spent some time not long ago complaining about how Democrats kinda suck at messaging. But she's come to understand that most of what was "wrong with the Dems" was a problem with Republicans lying their asses off and media outlets repeating what they said instead of telling us what horseshit was constantly pouring out of their faces.

Tis is good advice.

Today's Best Joke

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may have thought he was mocking those he has railed against when posing with a handmade snowflake. However, its hidden message showed that he was the subject of the joke.

In an image that has gone viral, the Republican seemed unaware of the word "fascist" that appeared in the framed gift handed to him at a GOP political rally in Davenport, Iowa. Steven Goffman of The Washington Post tweeted that the state's Republican Governor Kim Reynolds had also been given the gift.

"My friend makes snowflakes to give to politicians who come to Iowa—there are special messages for odious Republicans—please look at the snowflake carefully," tweeted Iowa Captive of the image. As of Saturday, it had been viewed more than 1 million times, prompting wry comments.

"If the snowflake fits," tweeted the Democratic Senator Bob Duff, who is majority leader, of the Connecticut Senate. Right-wing commentator Laura Loomer wrote on Twitter: "DeSantis got trolled in Iowa. Read the snowflake."

The term fascist has been bandied around to describe some of the actions of DeSantis in running the Sunshine State.

Earlier this March, Florida Democratic congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost said that DeSantis's policies targeting Black, transgender and LGBTQ people smacked of "fascism."

In 2022, DeSantis signed into law the Parental Rights in Education bill, also known as the "Don't Say Gay" bill. It stopped sexual orientation or gender identity being discussed in kindergarten through third grade and limited such instruction in other age groups.

DeSantis was also criticized for barring the teaching of an Advanced Placement African American studies course in the state-school curriculum.

The Washington Post reported that GOP lawmakers in Florida have proposed legislation that includes requiring teachers to use pronouns of children's sex as assigned at birth.

Although he has not declared his intentions, DeSantis is considered a key contender to be the GOP nominee in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

However, a leading expert on fascism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, from New York University, warned this month that DeSantis would "destroy our democracy" if he were to take the White House.

DeSantis's Iowa trip faced another glitch when a video truck appeared outside the event, playing clips that showed his conflicting statements on social security. He has distanced himself from his previous support for privatizing the program and raising retirement age.

A DeSantis run for president would involve a clash with Donald Trump, who mocked the Florida governor's visit to Iowa on his Truth Social account. "Very small crowds for Ron DeSanctimonious in Iowa," wrote the former president.

"He's against farmers, Social Security, and Medicare, so why would people show up—other than fake stories from the fake news!"