Disassociating the disasters with what we’re doing to the climate

Kos of Daily Kos wrote a Ukraine update in which he explains why he is annoyed with those complaining about the speed of the counteroffensive. Ukraine has liberated several hundred square kilometers of territory. The complaint is that at that pace Ukraine will need decades to liberate all its territory. We used to taunt Russia for its slow progress. I look at that complaint and see the logic flaw – that the pace now will be the pace forever. Kos agrees, though saying it in a different way. Ukraine is doing the standard military tactic of shaping the battlefield. Right now that has two parts. The first part is to clear the minefields. The second is to degrade Russia’s artillery advantage. And it is doing both rather effectively and in a methodical manner. Russia is also helping by fighting in front of their defensive works rather than in them. There are those who call for NATO to give Ukraine the F-16 fighters at an accelerated schedule. But, Kos says, fighter jets won’t help with what needs to be done – and Ukraine is doing – now. And Ukraine is doing quite well with the drones and artillery it has at a much lower cost. I didn’t know...

Airpower is expensive. A modern F-35, the newest NATO-standard aircraft, costs around $110 million per copy, including its ground support equipment; $7 million per year in basic maintenance; and $42,000 per hour to fly. Just that $42,000 would buy 100 kamikaze drones, able to hit far more targets than that aircraft in a one-hour sortie (plus the cost of the ordinance, which would run tens or hundreds of thousands more).

So let Ukraine take it’s time. Pushing Russia out of Ukraine will speed up soon enough. Following all the talk of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant perhaps facing an “accident” Tim Mak of the Kos community wrote about radiation risk. Kyiv now has radiation monitoring stations in addition to, and sometimes a part of, weather monitoring stations. Residents can check the current data. If any of these stations show higher than safe levels the Department of Civil Safety knows what to do. As for the actual plant, it is not at all like Chernobyl and cannot have the same type of accident. Ukraine learned from Chernobyl when designing Zaporizhzia. Even so Mak has a hazmat suit. I’m including an update by Mark Sumner of Kos from last Friday not because of the status of the various fronts where Ukraine is making progress, but because of the photo at the top of the post. The photo was taken on the north side of what used to be a reservoir before that dam was blown and shows the Zaporizhzhia plant on the south side. Much of the area in between is now mudflats. In another update Kos wrote about the current debate over cluster bombs in which one bomb has over a hundred, sometimes several hundred, smaller bombs that would be scattered over the area of a football field. Most countries have outlawed them because of the dud rate – unexploded bomblets can injure civilians after the conflict is over. Last year Kos had opposed their use. He’s changed his mind. His reasoning makes sense to me.

Does anyone think any civilians will be walking that front line anytime in the next decade? Unexploded cluster bombs will be the least of the problems with millions of buried anti-tank mines, anti-personnel mines, unexploded artillery shells, conventional grenades, degraded TNT, assorted booby traps, unexploded rockets and missiles, and god knows what else. The environmental pollution will add to the dangers. This isn’t a question about introducing a brand new UXO threat to a previously clean zone. This is a part of the front that will already require massive, sustained, and long-running UXO cleanup. And those dud cluster grenades will have the chance to be swept up in the cleanup along with the tons of other ordinance that will inevitably be left behind. Or put another way, those cluster munitions will not introduce any danger that doesn’t already exist. That’s not all. The desire to protect civilian lives is laudable. Yet right now, every day, Ukrainian civilians are being tortured, raped, murdered, deported, and subjugated under Russian rule. Every liberated city has borne witness to Russia’s depravity and cruelty. And where Russia doesn’t control, it rains rockets, missiles, and artillery, killing more civilians every single day. The quicker the war ends, the fewer civilians die in the long run. If the price is that a handful of future civilians meet an untimely demise at the hands of these weapons, that’s a tradeoff to which few will object.

Yesterday Sumner wrote again about the climate crisis. Floods are affecting large sections of Vermont, New York, and New England. Damage is significant. Strong storms are battering the Great Plains states, dropping hail on crops already stunted from the heat. Many of these farms won’t have a crop this year. Buoys off the Florida coast are recording water temperatures of up to 95F. That’s getting to be hot tub warm. Water that hot can’t hold enough dissolved oxygen. Sharks and dolphins don’t like it that hot and have left. The heat is not tolerated by reef-building coral. And water that hot will is just waiting to give massive amounts of energy to any hurricane coming that way. Thankfully, none are expected in the next few days. And another heat wave is about to cover Arizona and may extend to Louisiana.

We’ve gotten so used to the idea that today will be a little warmer than yesterday, which was a little warmer than the day before, which was definitely warmer than the previous year … that many people have skipped straight from climate crisis denial to.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted several people. First up is David Gelles of the New York Times.

And yet even as storms, fires and floods become increasingly frequent, climate change lives on the periphery for most voters. In a nation focused on inflation, political scandals and celebrity feuds, just 8 percent of Americans identified global warming as the most important issue facing the country, according to a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. As climate disasters become more commonplace, they may be losing their shock value. A 2019 study concluded that people learn to accept extreme weather as normal in as little as two years.

I can think of another issue as or more important – restoring a proper democracy. Without wresting government away from the billionaires we may not be able to adequately address climate change. Justin Rowlatt of BBC News wrote:

When we think about how hot it is, we tend to think about the air temperature, because that's what we experience in our daily lives. But most of the heat stored near the surface of the Earth is not in the atmosphere, but in the oceans. And we've been seeing some record ocean temperatures this spring and summer. The North Atlantic, for example, is currently experiencing the highest surface water temperatures ever recorded.

Ricardo Santos of Lisbon-based Mensagen (translated by Vanessa Sarmiento of World Crunch) wrote of another aspect of the heat:

In situations where the temperature reached extreme values, that is, between 42ºC and 45ºC, the prevalence of tweets that included hate speech increased by 22%, when compared to tweets that were made in a context of moderate temperature.

In the comments Denise Oliver Velez posted a collection of cartoons, beginning with a few featuring Moms for Liberty – which I’ve heard has now been designated a hate group. The first cartoon is a woman in a “Moms for Liberty” shirt reading to a young girl. The books is Mein Kampf.