Is Trump Starting to Lose His Mind?

Trump had MRIs a few weeks ago and claimed to not know why his doctors were doing that. He said to ask them.

MRIs aren't usually part of a customary physical.

CBS News:
President Trump underwent "advanced imaging" of his abdomen and cardiovascular system for "preventative" reasons, the White House said Monday, one day after the president told reporters that he had "no idea" what body parts his MRI covered during his October physical at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Given what he said today about Somalians, a fair and necessary question is whether he is starting to enter some degree of senility. It was so shocking and revolting, as if he just can't hold his reptilian side in any more. There are reports he fell asleep in the meeting, that he's fallen asleep in other meetings, and brutal honesty like this can be a symptom of dementia, it seems, as the person loses some control over his/her body. This was odd even for Trump.

 
And we have 3+ more years of this? That's really worries me, about the decisions he will make if he's unable to control himself and think, act and talk rationally.

 
That could be a deep nightmare. And not just for the US, I'm afraid.

My Electricity Usage as a Function of Temperature

Here's my monthly electricity usage, in watts, plotted against the average monthly local temperature, in degrees Fahrenheit:

My base electricity rate is 7.54¢/kWh, but including all fees and taxes it averages 11.9¢/kWh. Not too bad. Lots of hydropower from river dams in the Pacific Northwest.

(100¢ = $1)

On average I use about 25 kWh/day, or for the year 7,500-10,000 kWh. Actual  average power consumption is 996 watts--that's the average amount of power I'm consuming all the time. 

The annual average daily temperature is 55°F. (daily temperature = average of daily maximum temperature and daily minimum temperature.) The maximum month was 76°F, and the minimum was 39°F. (monthly temperature = average of daily temperatures.)

So above about 65°F, when I don't use any heating and only a fan for intermittent cooling (no A/C), my electricity usage is a constant--enough to keep the refrigerator running, lights and computer, and cooking. That comes to about 400 kWh/month, or 550 watts. Then as it gets colder I turn on the heat (baseboard electric) and the electricity increase is close to linear with temperature (with a negative slope). 

The slope of the part of the graph below 65°F is about -68 kWh/°F, but it's not perfectly linear. 

As it get colder my monthly electricity cost increases by about $4.30/(-°F).

Here's my annualized (12-month total) electricity usage since June 2020:

Now it's time to turn the lights off and go to bed. Goodnight. 

Where We Are on Climate

I saw this on a climate change forum on Reddit and think it's an accurate, succinct summary of where I find myself right now. Apparently others too.

--

Trends in US Energy Consumption

The annual average energy use of Americans has dropped noticeably since 1973--about 25%. One-fourth.

kW=kilowatts

Source: US Energy Information Administration, Monthly Energy Review

Yet total energy consumption has only recently leveled off.

TW=terawatts

It looks like we finally got the enormous energy consumption of new babies controlled around 2005. 

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(That's a joke.)

Berkeley Earth's October, and Crimes Against Humanity

Berkeley Earth's global temperature for October. Above 1.5°C. It looks still in the running for the warmest year yet. Not that the fossil fuel companies who ran COP30 care. 

I found COP30 to be pretty depressing. It's causing me to somewhat give up on viewing potential solutions to climate change, and now just watching it in a detached, intellectual way just to see the numbers and what happens and how bad it will get, if I live long enough for that. I don't see a solution as possible--there is too much money in the game from fossil fuel interests and other corporations, and they control politics in the US especially. That's not going to stop in this uber-corrupt country. They flooded COP30 and it almost seems the conference was arranged for them. It's disgusting and they should have been banned from the being there. Why weren't they? Cowardice. Wouldn't make any practical difference but it might have sent just a little sign (that they could then promptly set alight). 

It's a near impossible problem to solve anyway--a "wicked problem"--and it seems impossible to make meaningful, definite progress. A decline in the trendline of positive CO2e emissions is not much to hang a hat on. Why bother not eating beef? I never ate much, it's not healthy, I can't afford much now anyway except cheap cuts. I don't need it but a steak is nice every once in awhile. It doesn't matter if I don't eat it. It's impossible to see my decisions about that propagating back through the beef industry to affecting emissions of methane and CO2 and a temperature decline. 

I was mostly interested in the science of global warming, the physics, the way the atmosphere works. I have opinions for sure but I've never been an activist, for anything. Partly from being shy and introverted, but I just can't connect tiny, little actions to the big picture. The big picture is just too big. 

Executives in the fossil fuel companies, and prominent deniers, are guilty of crimes against humanity. They would stand trial in a decent, courageous, spiritually clean world. Trump first but many, many others should be prosecuted too.

Our House

The house I grew up in, southwestern Pennsylvania.

Accidental Renaissance Image

A photograph taken just after the end of the recent New York Rangers vs Detroit Red Wings hockey game. The donnybrook started because a Red Wing shot the puck into the empty net a half-second after the final horn sounded, a major faux pas in hockey. Not unlike the Battle of Agincourt.

JMA: October25 was 3rd-warmest Oct.

The Japan Meteorological Agency says October was the third-warmest October in their records, which start in 1891.

2025 is almost certainly going to be the third-warmest year in their record, after 2024 (anomaly = 0.63°C relative to the 1991-2020 average) and 2023 (0.54°C). Through Oct25 this year is 0.48°C. 

Their 30-year trend is +0.22°C/decade. 20-year trend is +0.29°C/decade (that's 1.0°F in just 20 years).

Their total warming = 1.06°C since 1891. (1.91°F.)

Now that the US government is (unfortunately) open again, we might get numbers from NOAA and NASA soon.

You Lost, You Lost, You're Next

The Bugs Are Coming

I saw two articles in the last few days about bugs appearing where they have never been before, due to, at least in part, climate change:

• a women who says she hasn't recently been off Long Island in the US somehow acquired the viral disease chikungunya (NY Times, free article), "the first such case of local transmission ever recorded in New York."
• it's been confirmed that a mosquito has been in Iceland, the first.

Of course these could be one-offs. But it's the kind of thing scientists have talked about for decades. We'll see....

PS: Yes I used the word "bug" to describe a virus. Colloquial usage.

Chinese vs US Wind

Paul Krugman: "In his rambling speech at the United Nations, Donald Trump insisted that China isn’t making use of wind power: 'They use coal, they use gas, they use almost anything, but they don’t like wind.' I don’t know where Trump gets his misinformation — maybe the same sources telling him that Portland is in flames. But here’s the reality:" (link)

Krugman also gives this chart, regarding the US:

Grok says the average US home uses 1,232 watts of electricity, so the above projection change of about 40 GW is enough electricity for over 32 million homes! That's about 24% (!!) of Grok's estimated 134.3 M occupied households in the US in 2030. 

One-quarter of US homes.

I didn't realize Trump was fowling things up THIS badly....

Shelley's "The Cloud"

From the dedication page of Atmospheric Science: An Introductory Survey, 2nd edition (2006) by Wallace and Hobbs, dedicated to co-author Peter V. Hobbs.

2025 Will Likely be Third-Warmest Year

The last three years of monthly temperatures, via Copernicus. 

This year should easily be the third-warmest year in their record (which goes back to 1940; not sure how they got their 1850-1900 baseline). But probably no higher, even though this September saw a significant increase from August. 

The 2025 year-to-date average is 1.46°C relative to 1850-1900, so just below 1.5°C. September was 1.47°C. If the last three months of the year average 1.613̅ °C higher, the yearly average will be above 1.5°C. (That quasi-bar above the 3 means it's a repeating number ad infinitum; the exact number is 121/75.)

For comparison, 2023 averaged 1.48°C and 2024 averaged 1.60°C. Another year above 1.5°C would definitely be newsworthy, especially as 2025 has basically been ENSO-neutral. And then it would be the second-warmest year.  

PS: GISS and NOAA won't be updating their monthly numbers due to the US government shutdown. Not sure if they will even be allowed after Trump's anti-climate change orders. Same for PIOMAS Arctic sea ice volume. NSIDC sea ice extent & area numbers did arrive for September shortly after October started.

the UK (for now)

Antarctica Sea Ice Width is Decreasing

Of course it is. I recently heard that it had drawn 100 km closer to shore. Maybe it was 80 km. I thought I'd try to estimate that.

I'll assume Antarctica is a perfect circle, as well as the sea ice. So the sea ice is an annulus with width w, the distance between its outer and inner radii. Then it's real easy to calculate w of the sea ice from its area (not extent), 13.72 Mkm², and the average radius (R) of Antarctica, =sqrt(A_ant/pi):

where "si" is sea ice. Using average annual area, this gives the following graph:

I spent a lot of time trying to make a pretty graph on datawrapper.de, but it was too complicated to get exactly what I want. So this will have to do.

In 2023 it looked like the average width had shrunk by about 75 km, but by 2024, while perhaps an anomaly, reduced that to 50-60 km. Still good enough for approximate work.

HadCET At a Record

Just a short note: the year-to-date HadCET average monthly temperature (Hadley Central England Temperature (data)), is at a record high through September, tied with 2022. 

There's also a tie for second third place, between 2023 and 2024.  

In other words, the four warmest HadCET year-to-date averages, through Septembers, have been the last four years.

The record is now 367 years long.

That's really quite remarkable.

PS: The 50-year linear trend of HadCET is 0.32°C/decade. Also, the 10-year moving average is at a record high.

Jonathan Pie Works Through the Debris

This Is Fascism

Fascism: Words to be avoided or limited in government documents according to the Trump administration: female, females women victim, victims pollution climate science injustice bias, racism, trauma race, gender status (huh?) disability, disabilities plus many more. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

— David Appell (@davidappell.bsky.social) September 26, 2025 at 4:27 PM

Obvious Vaccine Question

I was wondering, given our idiotic Secretary of Health and Human Services (RFK Jr) and clownish president, who think vaccines and acetaminophen cause autism...What is the percentage of unvaccinated children who develop autism? 

It's an obvious question but I've never see Sec HHS ask it. Or provide research on it. They can just look at the MMR vaccine if they want, as they mistakenly believe it causes autism.... By now the US has a large enough cohort of unvaccinated children (7.5% according to Grok) to make such a study possible. 

====================

Or I could ask Grok:

For example, a 2019 Danish study of over 650,000 children found no difference in autism rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups.

I wish some reporter with press access to RFKJr and Trump would ask them this question. But from what I can tell they never ask hard questions. Seems they usually ask only about Gaza and Ukraine.

Ask Trump if he believes CO2 absorbs infrared radiation. Please....

====================

PS: Here's that Danish study.

China versus US Emissions

Inspired by this article in the NY Times (free link) titled "China Is the Adult in the Room on Climate Now," and this comment complaining that China burns more coal than the rest of the world combined, I did a little calculating. 

From ChatGPT and Grok I obtained this data:

So yes, China's per capita coal consumption is 3.5 t to the US's 1.0 t. 

But China's per capita CO2e emissions for 2024 were 11.2 t CO2e compared to the US's 15.7 t CO2e.

So it's hard to complain. Yes, China emits 3.0 times more CO2e than the US, but they have a much larger population. They're a much older country. When the US has been around 4,000 years it too could well have a population of 1.4 billion people.

Of course the US won't be around in 4,000 years. It might not be here next Wednesday. But if anyone can make it another 4,000 years it's probably China.

If, today, the US had China's population it would emit 22.1 Gt CO2e. That's 6.3 Gt CO2e more than China emits now. That's 118% of US emissions. 

118%. 

Naturally the planet doesn't care about our silly national boundaries, but the fact is the climate would be better off if the US emitted like China and not like it does now. 

If the US emitted like China its emissions would be 3.8 Gt CO2e, 29% lower than they are. Globally emissions would be roughly 4% lower. 

{I thought that last number would be bigger. CC really is a wicked problem.}  

Drug-induced Deaths in Europe

I'm really surprised about the Scandinavian countries:

 

US: "The age-adjusted rate of drug overdose deaths increased from 8.2 deaths per 100,000 standard population in 2002 to 32.6 in 2022." (CDC)

* I assume this doesn't include deaths from alcohol, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't have an original link for the figure.

Lunar Occultations of Saturn

Very cool. 

21 August 2024. BBC. 

NY Times, 2017:

August Temperatures, Brought to You by NASA GISS

August temperature anomalies from GISS are the highest in four months:

Global: 3rd-highest for the month of August, after 2024 and 2023

Northern Hemisphere: 3rd-highest after 2023 and 2024

Southern Hemisphere: 2nd-highest after 2024

Land-only: 2nd-highest after 2024.

The Southern Hemisphere could see a record high this year: the record was last year's 0.91°C, whereas through August its record is 0.90°C.

IRI says a La Nina is expected to develop this fall. What's going on with ENSO? It seems especially agitated lately.

Posting This Just On Accounta I Like It

 Iggy Pop and the Teddybears, Punkrocker:

Record Low for August Average Arctic Sea Ice Thickness

average thickness = sea_ice_volume_(PIOMAS)/sea_ice_area_(NSIDC).

A record low for August:

The linear regression trend is -3.0 cm/yr (for Augusts).

PS: Sorry, I couldn't get the chart to embed from Datawrapper, so had to cut-and-paste. So the links in the chart don't work.

Lately in America

Lately in America:

• There was a high school shooting in Colorado today -- three high students wounded (includes the shooter.)
• Prominent conservative podcaster and executive of a conservative activist organization was shot in the neck [WARNING: GRAPHIC] in Utah while speaking to a large group outdoors, and died. After a chase of a few hours the suspect is now in custody. 
• This activist, Charlie Kirk, once said that these kind of events are "unfortunately" worth it in order to keep the precious Second Amendment. 
• I think they really think a country where everyone is armed and carrying will be a much safer society.
• The US Secretary of the Interior recently said that an underwater “swarm drone attack” was part of the reason for the Trump administration’s decision to halt construction on the 704-megawatt (MW) Revolution Wind offshore wind farm, which had already reached 80 per cent completion. The Secretary told a CNN journalist there are “concerns about radar relative to undersea” and, in particular “undersea drones”.
• Apparently it was just discovered that Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" that funds everything, passed last month, "finds that President Trump’s flagship legislation will grant $40 billion in new subsidies to the oil and gas industry over the next decade."

That's enough for today. This country is really getting to be fracking exhausting.

--

Added 6:30 pm: Just to be clear, I am not trying to minimize Charlie Kirk's assassination. I am not implying he deserved it. Far from it. This was a horrible thing to happen--the guy has a family with children--and it's a terrible thing and you have to feel for the family. It's also a horrible thing because political violence seems to be rising in the US: Trump was almost assassinated last summer, two Democratic state representatives were killed just 6 weeks ago, and now this. And of course school shootings seemingly every other day. We are headed downhill and the slope is getting more negative.

The Lack of Peer Review for the DOE Climate Report

A clever depiction of the peer review process:

This if from The Climate Brink blog, where Andew Dessler addresses the lack of peer review for the DOE climate "assessment." Well-worth reading.

Of course, that assessment won't go anywhere. Like, nowhere. I truly feel sorry for its authors. 

Foreman Says These Jobs Are Going Boys, and They Ain't Coming Back*

* lyrics from Bruce

This is not a good sign: jobs available per unemployed Americans has decreased from 2 three years ago to a just under one now:

 

And that's with the arrest of about 60,000 immigrants this year. Those are supposed to be good jobs now opened up to Americans, like picking lettuce and slaughtering animals </s>. 

Or does it (also) mean jobs are disappearing due to AI?

Not looking good.

Updates on Sea Ice Extent at Both Poles

Here is the latest graph of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extents--specifically the 12-month moving averages, in millions of square kilometers. 

Projecting the 2025 final annual numbers based on the monthly anomalies year-to-date, 2025 is 4th-lowest since 1978, but only 0.18 Mkm2 higher than the lowest year of 2020. That's 1.8% higher. It's not inconceivable that Arctic SIE extent will set a record low soon for the 12-mth moving average. Except this August suddenly jumped to 5% higher than 12 months ago, when the monthly SIEs had been lower than last year's all months up to now. Maybe (?) it's the La Nina that seems to be trying to form?

Maybe useless numerics, but I find them fun.

Asimov on the American Cult of Ignorance

A comment on a NY Times op-ed from past directors of the US CDC (Center for Disease Control), which the dangerous idiot Robert F Kennedy Jr is decimating to enact his anti-vaccine, anti-science, anti-expert agenda:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

― Isaac Asimov, "A Cult of Ignorance," Newsweek, January 21, 1980.

It honestly seems like Kennedy is trying to kill Americans--he's already decided that Americans can't get a COVID shot unless they have special circumstances and a prescription from their doctor. He's cut research left, right and center. (Links in the essay.) And Trump is letting him--really, too ignorant to stop him. Someone else is pulling the strings attached to Trump anyway, likely the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 managers. They seem to be trying to destroy the country as a whole, not just the health of Americans.

Something very strange is going on behind the scenes.

This Photo is From Washington DC This Past Week

What other countries does this remind you of?

"...priests of the industrial system"

“Psychologists are in danger of becoming the priests of the industrial system.”

— Erich Fromm

Very perspicacious. I would say this is exactly what happened.

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Back-to-School Notebooks

 I just can't help myself this time of year when notebooks are 3 for $1.

Peak Oil Demand Again, by the Numbers

I couldn't resist analyzing the numbers in the peak oil demand projection chart in the previous post.

The peaks are at about 200 qBTU (quadrillion BTU). Silly, but that's the unit they use. That's about 2e20 joules. 200 exajoules. Used over a year, that comes to an average of 7 terawatts (TW). 

The last number I've seen for world energy consumption is about 20 TW. So about 35% of world energy consumption comes from driving ICE* cars (and sure, a little from heating). I don't know why but that's not hard to believe.

* Internal combustion heating

Trump is Angry Oil Demand Might Peak

Trump, of course, is angry that many groups are predicting global oil demand will peak by 2030. Or maybe has already. That's not what the oil companies bought him for!

From the NY Times:

Trump's administration is so angry at this they are threatening to leave the IEA (International Energy Agency, where the US gives 14% of their funding. That will show them not to dare make a projection Trump's purchasers don't like. Even though BP is making such a projection, and ExxonMobil is saying oil demand will flatten. 

La'An Noonien-Singh

Spock: They’ve become used to episodes of violence for centuries. The true cost of a civil war is abstract.

La'An Noonien-Singh: Not believing you’re gonna die is what gets you killed.

Star Trek - Strange New Worlds, S1E4.

Lieutenant La'An Noonien-Singh was a female Human Starfleet officer who lived during the 23rd century, and the sole survivor from a Gorn encounter that had eliminated her entire family.

There's a lot of truth in her sentence.

Cumberland Gap

I'm just posting this song because I really like it. And because I could have become the narrator of the song if I wasn't born intelligent and sensitive (which I got from my mother, definitely). I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania, which is considered northern Appalachia. There was no one around me, for miles, who went to college. Not until my aunt went to college to get a degree in teaching. Nobody was well off. We didn't have a bathroom in my house growing up, just a toilet under the stairs and a rusty shower down in the cold coal cellar. We took our baths in the kitchen sink until we were 5 or 6 years old. One winter all the pipes from our well froze up and we had to haul water from a spring a few miles up the road, in big plastic tubs. There was an abandoned strip mine (for coal) just a few hundred yards up over the hill behind our house--an abandoned mine and an abandoned pit and abandoned machinery and big mounds that were great to ride bikes up and down. My father, who dropped out of college after one semester then drove trucks then joined the Air Force and went to Korea as radio technician--wanted me to be a hunter and a fisher, and work on cars, but I was more interested in algebra and chess, and all he ever had me do was "hold the light," he never taught me anything about the mechanics. Nothing. And we had to crawl under the house in the "second basement" to thaw pipes with a butane torch in the winter in Pennslvania.) It eventually caused a big division between us--I completely failed when we went out hunting and fishing--and that and the fact that he abused my mother, and me and my brother a couple of times. I was done with him and we were estranged for 40 years, until his death. There wasn't even a funeral, because no one would have gone to it. He worked in a steel mill and didn't even care if I went to college. In fact, I came home for Christmas after my first semester as a freshman, and, when I was watching a Nova broadcast about 9 pm about Einstein and special relavitity (I was just then reading Ronald Clark's biography of Einstein, and planning to switch my major from electrical engineering to physics), my dad came home drunk and began berating me for not having a job. So I could have been this song's narrator if things had gone another way. I never thought about it much when I was younger, but I think about it now that I'm older, and my parents are dead, and now that the United States in a real decline. There are a lot of guys trapped in these small towns, their labor no longer needed or wanted. No other jobs, like in manufacturing or mining or construction. They're angry, and I don't blame them, and almost all of them voted for Trump. I'm very happy I escaped. Also, I like Jason Isbell's music a lot, his lyrics are often spot on ("Mustang Lounge" is the absolute perfect name for a bar in a rundown, declining coal town), it's such a raw, angry song--and it's my blog so I can post what I want.

US Electricity Prices

Saw this chart today on Paul Krugman's substack: Electricity prices under Trump:

 

So up 6%. US inflation is only up 1%.

As Krugman notes, Trump said during his campaign that he would cut electricity prices in half after 12 months in office. It's was a stupid claim, but a lot of the dumb MAGAts fell for it, just like him saying he would end the Ukraine-Russian war on his first day in office. It's so disheartening that his voters and the media let him get away with that kind of sh... crap.

Here's the full chart since 1979: 

Comparing that to US inflation, the average electricity price now is up, since Nov 1978, by 311%, whereas US inflation is up 377% over that time.

The last 5 years clearly show the introduction of huge AI data centers. We're all paying for it. [Maybe those companies should provide their own power. In fact, some are doing that.] So what does Trump decide to do? Reduce electricity supply by now wanting to deny permission for new solar and wind projects, calling them "the scam of the century." Ironic. It's just a huge payout to the fossil fuel industry who gave him $500 million for his campaign. That's it. Same for all the denial of climate change, undoing CO2 restrictions for cars, the phony new climate assessment report by deniers, eliminating climate science from NASA (i.e. GISS, where James Hansen led for a long time and now Gavin Schmidt), and on and on. It's said that Trump hates wind power because he thought the windmills in the ocean off his golf course in Aberdeenshire were ugly but the Scots wouldn't remove them. (He even took them to court, but lost.)  

By the way, here's a bit of the inside stuff on how the five climate deniers were chosen to lead the administration's climate assessment report. It's full of errors. Of course it is.

About Today's Earlier Graph

BTW, there are some interesting comments underneath Climate Town's post with the graph I just posted. 

1) NASA's data starts in 1880, not 1850, so I don't understand their graph. I also don't see how they got 1.4°C of total warming--GISS's data from 1880 gives (with a linear fit) 1.20°C. 

For the second point, below, I found better data in the mentioned paper that the P-T warming lasted over about 60,000 years, not 100,000 years. I've made corrections below:

2) Of course, warming was very likely not linear during the P-T Event, as volcanic traps pumped out CO2. (CO2 rose from about 400 ppm to 2,500 ppm.) Warming took place over about 100,000 years according to this 2021 Nature Communications paper. There may have been "short-term" warming spikes that did some of the damage. Total global warming was about 8°C. That would give an average warming rate ~ 0.0008°C/decade, compared to 1880-2025's average linear rate of 0.082°C/decade. That's a factor of 100. (Linear rate over the last 30 years = 0.25°C/decade => a factor of 310.) Warming took place over about 60,000 years according to this 2021 Nature Communications paper. Total global warming was about 8°C. That would give an average warming rate ~ 0.0013°C/decade, compared to 1880-2025's average linear rate of 0.082°C/decade. That's a factor of 60. (Linear rate over the last 30 years = 0.25°C/decade => a factor of 190)

3) The extinction may not be all due to warming.

Reminder: The graph under consideration:

Modern Warming Compared to P-T Mass Extinction

Climate Brief has this graph from Climate Town:

That's quite startling, to say the least; it's downright frightening, to say the most. 

I don't know exactly where the blue line is at the "present"-- maybe 0.03°C? So we've warmed about 50 times faster than the worst extinction event in Earth's history, the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction which ended about 90% of species on Earth. 

National Geographic:

...the greatest natural disaster in Earth's history. About 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, something killed some 90 percent of the planet's species. Less than 5 percent of the animal species in the seas survived. On land less than a third of the large animal species made it. Nearly all the trees died.

Trump is probably too stupid to understand this. But I really don't think he would care if he did. Not one bit.

Too Close to the Blowtorch of Progress

From Singularity Sky, a 2003 sci-fi novel by Charles Stross:

"If Burya had anything to do with it, they wouldn’t find anyone willing to cooperate in the subjugation of the civil populace, who were now fully caught up in the processes of a full-scale economic singularity. A singularity—a historical cusp at which the rate of change goes exponential, rapidly tending toward infinity—is a terrible thing to taste. The arrival of the Festival in orbit around the pre-industrial colony world had brought an economic singularity; physical wares became just so many atoms, replicated to order by machines that needed no human intervention or maintenance. A hard take-off singularity ripped up social systems and economies and ways of thought like an artillery barrage. Only the forearmed—the Extropian dissident underground, hard men like Burya Rubenstein— were prepared to press their own agenda upon the suddenly molten fabric of a society held too close to the blowtorch of progress."

Here's the basics on the idea of a Singularity, if you're unfamiliar. No, it hasn't arrived yet, but....

Intellectual Activity During Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism, from her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. Her writing is quoted with yellow lines to the left; in between is Paul Krugman from his substack.

Such persecution is now rampant in the Trump administration. I'm not going to depress myself by listing them, but you probably have some idea.

Trump is the most dangerous president who ever held the office, much worse than even Andrew Johnson (who succeeded Abraham Lincoln).

MAGA - Morons Are Governing America

[Title from Ken Caldeira on Bluesky.] 

 There are so many moronic things happening in America you almost can't help believing Trump & chronies are intentionally destroying the USA. Among them: This was a comment on a recent New York Times article that summarizes it all:

There's a great deal going on -- a fake US National Climate Assessment, a threat to rewrite all the past US National Climate Assessments, killing the Keeling Curve, the Endangerment Ruling, mRNA research and more. 

But I just don't want to feel angry about all of this. I've lost whatever spark was originally there and if a  majority of US voters want someone who will destroy the country there's nothing I can do about it. Frankly I just want to make enough money to move out of this country. It's not likely, but I'd like to. Otherwise I'll never be able to truly retire, I'd otherwise have to work until the day I die. The US has just gotten too expensive and it's only getting more expensive, quite fast. I'd rather just do nothing and read literature every day, watch some hockey, and keep a few spreadsheets on monthly temperature data and monthly sea ice and the like. I'm just too tired all the time, and I don't want to be angry all the time.

Arctic Sea Ice Extent Nearing a 12-month Low

Arctic sea ice extent (SIE) is closing in on a new low for its 12-month moving average:

The previous low happened in March of 2021. Maybe it was the pandemic.

SIE data sources, NSIDC:

• Arctic
• Antarctic

Posts by The Onymous Guy

Some very good recent posts by The Onymous Guy that I found informative:

Analysis of the 2024 Southern Hemisphere Ozone Hole, July 30, 2025.

It's closing, but not especially fast.

Would-be dictator names three climate deniers to Energy Department, July 10, 2025.

Putting current radiative forcing in context, Nov 27th 2024.

Great info.

and especially

Current Composition of the Atmosphere, November, 2024.

and this four-part series from last year discussing climate forcing in detail:

https://onymousguy.blogspot.com/2024/06/when-will-co2-part-v-when-will-aggi.html

China's Decreasing Population

I wasn't aware of this--China's population has been slightly decreasing since 2021, according to the US FRED database via the World Bank, when it peaked at 1.41236 billion. Since then its annual decrease has been -0.01%, -0.10% and -0.12% for 2022, 2023 and 2024 respectively. So the decrease is accelerating. (Sure, it's only three years of data.) Maybe it's a result of the COVID pandemic(?). I don't have a chance to look into any news stories right now, but just noticed this.

Have renewables decreased electricity prices?

Andrew Dessler's post mentioned below is here.

"Next time someone says, 'Germany installed a lot of wind and solar and it’s electricity prices skyrocketed,' you can let them know that was a consequence of increases in the price of natural gas." — from @andrewdessler.com's post on The Climate Brink.

[image or embed]

— Jay Turner (@jayturner.bsky.social) July 24, 2025 at 12:59 PM

. Again, Dessler's blog post is here.

More Outrageous Climate Cleansing

This is just as outrageous as my post yesterday. Today the Trump administration released an "A.I. Action Plan" that (free NYT link): "outlines measures to “remove red tape and onerous regulation, as well as make it easier for companies to build infrastructure to power A.I."

Here is the (most) frightening part:

The plan also calls for the government to give federal contracts to companies that “ensure that their systems are objective.” It said a government agency should revise guidelines for A.I.’s development to remove mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion, climate change and misinformation.

What??

They expect AI companies to suppress the actual truth--not just whether climate change is anthropogenic or not (of course it is anthropogenic)--they expect companies to remove all mention of climate change, as if it isn't even happening??

This almost rises to the level of a crime against humanity. I'm willing to call it that.

What kind of even moderately educated person is going to trust an AI whose programmers built in special checks for "climate change" and eliminate any mention of it? Let alone the other topics like DEI.

And what companies would go along with this? We all know who--Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, xAI--and all the corporations willing to sell their very soul to get big government contracts to, among other things, find new and more efficient ways to kill people. Expecting corporations to cooperate with government edicts, and then having them do it, is a big bullet point under the topic of "fascism." 

From now on the very first question I will ask a new AI (I was using CoPilot, then switched to Grok) will be "Is anthropogenic climate change real?" If it can't answer that question honestly, I'll go to some AI from China (DeepSeek?) or Europe or another part of the world.

Today Grok answered that question honestly. But it's too early to judge. 

Suppression of an entire body of knowledge. It's absurd, it's stupid, and I can't believe they think they can get away. I expect AI companies to push back hard, but am not at all confident they will do that. 

Another day, another step deeper into Trump's dystopia. 

Re: The Hitler of Climate Change

Maybe we can call what Trump is doing "climate cleansing." 

I like that. It fits.

The Hitler of Climate Change

This is absolutely obnoxious (NY Times):

Trump is trying to gaslight everyone--absolutely everyone--by pretending that climate change is not a problem. He literally thinks we're stupid and he literally does not care about future civilization. I'm so angry, mostly so at being lied to straight in my face. The denial is breathtaking. 

Trump will be remembered as one of the biggest climate criminals of all time. The Hitler of climate change.

More Outrageous Censorship

One of the sure signs of fascism is government censorship, and it's not just happening with respect to climate science. Here's what the Trump fascism is doing (free link to NY Times article):

At Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina, the Trump administration is set to review, and possibly remove or alter, signs about how climate change is causing sea levels to rise.

At Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, the administration will soon decide whether to take down exhibits on the brutality of slavery.

And at Castillo de San Marcos National Monument in Florida, Trump officials are scrutinizing language about the imprisonment of Native Americans inside the Spanish stone fortress.

Why?

In an executive order in March, the president instructed the Park Service to review plaques, films and other materials presented to visitors at 433 sites around the country, with the aim of ensuring they emphasize the “progress of the American people” and the “grandeur of the American landscape.

I find this exceptionally outrageous. It's simply an attempt to alter the truth. It's straight from Orwell's 1984. It's a terrible violation by government and pure propaganda, about the purest possible. And too  many Americans are dumb enough to fall for it.

There are Park employees who are being good little statists:

Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, said many Park Service employees are obeying the executive order even though they disagree with it.

They could, you know, just keep their big mouths shut and pretend they see nothing. For the good of truth and freedom. 

“Park staff are in a bind here,” Ms. Brengel said. “If they don’t comply with this directive, they could lose their jobs.”

I don't know how you can lose your job for not noticing or interpreting such passages otherwise. 

This is how ludicrous it gets:

At Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles Tennessee and North Carolina, park officials have also flagged for review a plaque about the harm that air pollution poses to plants and animals. The plaque notes that “fossil fuel-fired power plants, motor vehicles and industry are the primary sources of these pollutants."

and

At Cane River Creole National Historical Park in Louisiana, a park official noted an exhibit about slaves who tried to escape but were captured. The official was concerned because the exhibit identified the enslavers by name and mentioned that returned slaves were publicly whipped.

If my great-great-grandpap owned and whipped slaves, then yes, his name should be available for all to see and know. Wouldn't bother me one bit, as it's no reflection on me. (And if I owned and whipped slaves, my name should be out there too.) 

There is a campaign called Save Our Signs that is encouraging the public to take pictures of existing signs and upload them to the site--so far about 800 photos have been uploaded. At least it's something.

Magazine Subscription Prices

It's no longer possible to buy a print-only subscription to Scientific American. I'm not especially interested in a print+digital subscription, which is now $80/year(!), because I can find the digital new stories many other places for free (not all, for sure), and besides my bad neck means I just want to lay down and read Scientific American like I once could, not sit at a computer for 10-12-14 hours a day. (iPad isn't a lot of help.)

It's also no longer possible to do the same for the NY Review of Books, another magazine I used to read thoroughly in print-only form.

I know there's been inflation, but $80/yr seems like a lot to me. I heard someone today say that everything increased in price with COVID. In the US inflation during Biden's term was 21%, or 5.0%/year. A 1/5th increase in 4 years. And I'm not convinced that includes everything. So far under Trump inflation is 1.5%/yr in 5 months, but everyone expects that to explode due to his boneheaded tariffs. Might have to move to another country to survive.

Bribery and Censorship

Realclimate has a post with links to all the US National Climate Assessments published over the years, NCAs 1-5, from 2000 to 2023.

As they write, the NCA 6 is mandated by Congress to be completed over the next few years, but Trump has chosen again to break the law by removing funding for it. He apparently have a theory that if no one writes about climate change for the federal government, the problem no longer exists. I have a theory that eliminating the NCA 6+ are a gift to the fossil fuel industry for bribing giving Trump's 2024 campaign $500 million. (He asked for $1 B.) 

These are NOAA.com links, so the page could be censored disappear at any moment.

In more news about bribery, it seems the daily CO2 measurements from the peak of Mauna Loa in Hawaii may well be going away. It's the end of the Keeling Curve. This is a murder committed against science and will be brought up during the Trump Truth and Reconciliation Hearings when they begin.

One True Christian

If Animals Had a Religion

Europe: 175,000/year Dead from Heat

The United Nations says:

Heat claims more than 175,000 lives annually in Europe, latest data shows, 2 Aug 2024

This deserves more scrutiny than I can give it right now, just thought I'd put this up here. But it's a number larger than I would have guessed, by a factor of 2 or 3 or 5 or 10.

Dessert After Spaghetti

 

This is a good time in Oregon, with many fresh fruits available.

Yes I'm eating them in front of my computer.

More on Butterlies

From the comments on my last post about butterflies, EM wrote:

Yes.
https://www.sciencing.com/1859920/why-butterflies-disappearing/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7812787/
https://www.ceh.ac.uk/news-and-media/news/more-half-uk-butterflies-are-long-term-decline

I appreciate those links, and I certainly appreciate EM, who had been a long-time reader and valuable commenter.

But I replied

Thanks. I'll read those links eventually. When I wrote this post I was trying to avoid the science and numbers of the issue. I was just expressing my emotions about my realization and my anger and sadness at the butterfly situation. Butterflies are so beautiful. I'm angry they're no longer around. I'm angry that generations after me will never see them fluttering around. As a little kid I remember being in my yard, my mother handing up wet laundry on a clothesline, and butterflies were about. They were there easily. Now they've been mostly destroyed and why? Fucking homo sapien sapiens who destroy everything.

I think I'm being heavily influenced by this book I'm still reading, The Myth of Human Supremacy by Derrick Jensen. I don't buy everything he writes, like humans should live without electricity in order to save the rest of the biosphere. He's very angry at what humans--homo sapien sapiens, ha ha--have done to the planet and all the other species on the planet. I agree with some of what he writes. I'm really not sure if we (humans) wouldn't be better off living as indigenous people did 500 years. Without electricity. I certainly know their life wasn't perfect--and sometimes I think Jensen overlooks their suffering--and it sometimes involved warfare and the conquering of other tribes and their land.

But they weren't destroying the planet and heavily affecting a great many other species, plants and animals. (Jensen mostly overlooks plants.) 

He's an anarcho-primitivism and I'm really not sure that is so crazy. Living as before the Industrial Revolution. Has that transition really brought us that much? Has it caused more good than harm, or more harm than good? Not just good for us, but good for the entire Earth ecosystem, all the animals and plants that are trying to live besides us? Is science and its technology more good than bad? We've devastated the planet and many of its species and for what? To sleep in air-conditioned bedrooms? To be able to buy Pokémon cards and fresh fruit from South America?

Anyway, I'm just thinking. And kind of angry. Perhaps more later.