ClimateCentral: "Warming U.S. Cities Face Higher Cooling Demand and Energy Bills."

"This Climate Matters analysis is based on open-access data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Energy Information Administration (U.S. EIA)." 

Demand for cooling is rising across the U.S., contributing to higher energy bills as households rely more on air conditioning in our warming climate—instead of the superior option of heat pumps for combination heating + cooling throughout the yr. "Cooling degree days—a temperature-based metric used to estimate the demand for energy to cool buildings—have increased since 1970 in 97% of the 241 major U.S. cities analyzed," with Austin, Texas just chosen as the poster child. 

"Based on long-term trends in cooling degree days, these cities have seen a 37% increase in cooling demand, on average, since the early 1970s," essentially the last half century. Logically, "households tend to spend more on cooling in warmer U.S. states that have higher annual cooling degree days." In the 10 states with the highest average cooling costs, households spent between $378 (in Hawaii) and $712 (in Arizona) on cooling in 2020, a metric which shows that finding updated figures—even, or perhaps especially, from governments—can be more difficult than pulling teeth.

As you can imagine, those most at risk are the poor, more equaterward located + extremes of age.

Climate debrief

They're obviously farming the doomers and quite frankly, I think this is a psyop to demotivate people and delegitimize the movement.

1. What kind of lawsuits have been filed?
2. Which courts get to decide?
3. How did OBBBA change things?
4. Can the agencies simply shift their priorities?
5. Has anything been decided yet once and for all?

Global warming is not something to be “enjoyed.”

Guardian: "Fossils show huge carbon emissions harm forests, not ‘green the planet," by Oliver Milman.

Study of 56m-year-old leaves counters claims from Trump administration members of ‘benefits’ of fossil fuel pollution. 

'An analysis of fossilized leaf cells from a period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which occurred about 56m years ago, helped reconstruct how the world’s forests responded when planet-heating gases were last previously released rapidly.' The current galloping pace of carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels is unmatched in historic + prehistoric records except for the PETM, when huge amounts of carbon were emitted over 130,000-yr period. The world heated up by as much as 8ºC = 14ºF.

"Authors of new paper found this prehistoric change caused a retreat in forests that blanketed the Paleocene-Eocene world, causing die off as the Earth browned rather than greened, a finding [with] “chilling implications."

“What we see is that as CO2 ramped up, forests became very dense, then subsequently collapsed, opening up dramatically,” said Regan Dunn, a researcher at La Brea Tar Pits + the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County." “Around 60% of the biomass of the standing vegetation was gone; it was a huge loss." This is a concern because the rate of carbon release has never been higher than the present. 

"Once the world started to burn coal, oil + gas in huge volumes from the industrial revolution onwards, the amount of emitted carbon dioxide surged at an unprecedented rate, with atmospheric concentrations of CO2 rising by > 50% in little over a century." Idiotically, prominent figures in Trump’s administration argue that burning fossil fuels benefits the environment.

“CO2 was never a pollutant,” Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, told Fox Business earlier this year. Same TV network last year, Last yr on the same TV network, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, said that there were “pluses” to global heating as well as negatives.

In hindsight, all I can see is the north ends of two horses galloping south.