Murdoch tabloid leads charge as big freeze persists – could the mayor please do something about the weather?
It snowed two weeks ago in New York. Since then, the temperature has barely risen above freezing – a temperature science naturally dictates is necessary to melt snow and ice.
But science isn’t enough for some US political critics, however, who have instead blamed Zohran Mamdani, New York’s new socialist mayor, for the snow not having melted and still clogging up some of the city’s streets.
The New York Post, the rightwing tabloid and a frequent Mamdani critic, has led the charge. This week the newspaper claimed that “slushy streets” were “ruining travel for everyone”.
They didn’t take this chance to criticize global warming?
Trump did almost immediately…
But that’s only because people who think they understand it but don’t keep saying “global warming” instead of climate change
As long as naive idiots who think they understand keep saying “global warming” you can’t expect the other idiots to understand the problem.
But good luck convincing any of them to stop using the phrase they learned 30 years ago, or to incorporate new information.
In 30 more years they’ll all be acting like boomers because they never actually understood any of this, they’re literally doing the same as boomers and insisting what they were told in he high will always be true
It’s incredibly depressing knowing it’s gonna keep happening.
The only benefit of “climate change” over “global warming” is that it does not suggest it will get warmer everywhere, though in turn it fails to communicate that the global annual temperature is steadily increasing.
And worse yet, the change in terminology suggests a retreat from a prior position, allowing denialists to suggest that scientists changed their mind and they are two distinct concepts.
It’s a terminology change not worth arguing about. Global warming causes local climate change, and climate change is just the local effect of global warming.
We should absolutely use whichever term communicates best with the audience we are trying to reach, but mocking someone for the terminology they use is counterproductive and reinforces the fallacy that the ideas are meaningfully different.
The main benefit of rhetorically talking about “climate change” instead of “global warning” is that “climate change” sounds fairly innocuous to the layperson, and can be easily misconstrued as “natural”.
How many conservatives have you heard say something like “of course the climate changes, it happens every day!”
There’s a reason the bush administration pushed the “climate change” narrative so hard.
These deep freezes are literally caused by global warming.
The higher layers of the atmosphere are unusually warm, causing instability in the arctic weather systems which lead to these jet streams escaping the vortex, blasting freezing air way farther south than it usually goes.
I’ve tried explaining this to my conservative family and they just stare at me blankly and nod like they think it’s a cope that doesn’t deserve their attention…
Isn’t this also a La Niña season? They typically bring such freezing weather to the northeast US.
Though global warming is impacting the El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle, and that influences everywhere else. It’s all interconnected. Unfortunately, the more complicated the system, the harder it is for conservatives to understand.
If the ocean currents change, which they could, it could usher in chronically colder temperatures for parts of the northern hemisphere, namely the north atlantic. It’s only the warm caribeean water that circulates up there that keeps it habitable it is pretty far up there. If that changes, or any number of other ocean currents, there really could be a day after tomorrow type situation, even as it could be warmer elsewhere. Ocean currents are the main drivers of climate, and there are too many interconnected variables we don’t have the values for to predict no matter how big the computer.
You’re right, but if ocean currents collapse it would be due to unusual warming. So even that type of freeze would be due to global warming
Yes of course, it’s all from greenhouse gasses. In the ice ages too, while North America was like half glacier, all of siberia was open, there was a glacier around scandanavia. But the Mammoth Steppe, what they called Siberia/Eurasia there, the Steppes of Asia now, the limitless expanse of grass and fields from Ukraine to Mongolia and beyond, held an incredible diversity and amount of life for a place so far north. It actually got colder in Siberia from the ice ages, at least in the far north, what is now the permafrost, had plants and animals in the ice ages, as I understand it.
As such there is a lot of co2 trapped in organic matter up there under that permafrost, 2x as is in the atmosphere just in siberian permafrost they figure. Then huge swamps, methane sinks. The arctic is warming way faster than the rest of the world too, and as the permafrost melts that methane floods the atmosphere, (methane has been estimated to be 30% of warming so far,) and bacteria work on the organic matter in the permafrost and release that CO2, making the mother of all positive feedback loops once it gets going to that point.
It’s not the total co2 that causes mass extinctions either, it’s the rate of increase, if it happens slowly the earth will absorb it as it goes, when it happens too fast, it overwhelms the systems that abosorb it. A previous mass extinction also centered around Siberia, huge lava flows a thousand miles long for centuries, all absorbed in time, until one hit a giant deposit of coal and other hyrdrocarbons, and overwhelmed the co2 absorbing systems, along with all the other byproducts of coal and molten rock and burning oil. The oceans turned into toxic soup, oxygen left huge swaths of the ocean, most everything went extinct and anaerobic life made a comeback. Can’t recall if that’s the Permian extinction I should look up that podcast I heard on the guardian long read about it earlier this summer.
So the only thing we know for certain, is we can’t know how it will play out, but that it will be faster than “expected,” as monied interests make sure we expect less severe outcomes because more realistic ones would require us to change our behavior. And of course they seize on the uncertainty of it to discredit it, to do nothing, to attack. It’s all rather hopeless without an organized resistance to monied interests and we don’t have that, same as with politics honestly. Without good people being organized and real leadership directing them, we lose to organized monied interests that set us against each other and in the wrong directions and waste out time fighting under doomed to fail candidates and strategies.
We need to organize, it doesn’t seem to matter the subject, we need to organize, and we need real leadership.
Yup, we’re basically accelerating towards becoming the next Venus…
And I used to be really motivated to change course, but I didn’t only meet resistance from entrenched monetary interests, but also from among my peers among the proletariat who seemed more intent on reminding me to check my white/male privilege at every step than they did on actually collaborating towards shared goals and advancing class solidarity.
So I’ve long since given up, I can’t change the tides of history, and no one wants me to try. Not even the people who would benefit from a tide change.
It’s not like I’ll ever have kids, womankind has unanimously rejected me. So why should I care about the future? Sure, I love plants and animals. I find the loss of biodiversity to be tragic, and would love to see a more beautiful world of peace and universal prosperity. But I can’t do anything about those things, so I’m at the “accept the things I cannot change” stage.
If people wanted me to fight for them, they had their chance. But I’m not gonna keep fighting for people who actively fight against me. I’m tired, boss.
Don’t sell yourself short with meeting woman. It’s hard to meet people, it’s not just you, no one can meet people well now, and we are at the mercy of online dating, which could be putting their thumbs on the scale against you without you ever knowing. You can and will find someone, whether you have kids or not, woman have not rejected you, you just haven’t met the right woman yet, as you haven’t been in a position to meet them yet. Join groups around your interests and meet people, you will get there.
That all said, I know what you mean, the left is overrun by divisive people, it’s said half of people join left groups to kick the other half out. And any groups seem to be filled with cliques more intent on keeping control of the group and any revenues it produces than achieving any actual goal. The divisive people you are dealing with there are the worst to deal with too, those are the ones that the right wing media/influencers find, interview, highlight, to paint an insufferable caricature of “the left,” that is used to tar the entire group.
It works too, for instance the classic is they find the sassy young woman to tell them that whites are going to be a minority soon (kind of a misnomer anyway, whites won’t be larger than all the other minorities combined, they will still be the largest group,) and then things are going to change and so forth. It’s incredibly damaging, and just plain wrong. We are in a class struggle and race is just used to divide us; and framing issues like that prevents getting support to change the issue.
But they play up the fear of minorities rigging the game against whites, all while pitting white verses minorities, when it’s the monied interests that are making life hard, cheating us, rigging the game against us all.
That is why the organized interests frame our issues like that, why when we make a point about how after the new deal a job could pay for a family with a dignified life. They will break in well minorities were mistreated, and try to change the subject.
First of all, minumum wage applied to all non farm workers, so minorities got it as well. Second of all at no point in human history was anything perfect, if you discount everything from a period because they didn’t live in an egalitarian society where injustice didn’t exist, there would be no time in history you could use, no person you could admire, especially not our own time, and anyone alive now. The sheer ridiculousness of the logic is maddening but it’ is used to great effect to derail real conversations, and campaigns.
We do want your help fighting, and we want to help fight. It’s just we have no leadership, and no organization, and are being led by the enemy in effect. We are purposefully set against each other, misdirected, and led to fight under people that cannot and will not win, in doomed to fail strategies, leaders whose reason for being is preventing popular reform, not beating the other guys or achieving the stated goals of the organization. All of our resulting energies are wasted as such, or misdirected, we are attacked, criticized, our allies are goaded into attacking us, or quieting us, recruitng us to fall in line behind leaders that can’t and won’t win. All while being associated with charicatures of insufferable people used to alienate us and our campaigns from the general public.
It’s all because we don’t have organization, and leadership. Without that, we cannot fight no matter what the subject. We are sticking our necks out for nothing, and earn nothing but grief that ultimately stems from those that want to prevent change, as they manipulate us all, with no one to direct our efforts in an organized credible fashion. Step 1 is to organize, and amongst other things find popular reform minded leadership.
I’m not going to sell myself like a product on a dating app while simultaneously doxxing myself. I’ve tried that anyway, regrettably, and it doesn’t work. Real women filter me out cause I’m not 6’ or because I can’t take a good selfie (it’s not the sort if thing I practice), or because I can’t contain my entire personality in a few sentences without sounding either cliché, phony, or cringe, or because I can’t say anything witty and unique that stands out over text without also sounding contrived, or without info-dumping. Literally the only matches I ever got turned out to be either trying to sell me crypto or recruit me as an instagram follower.
And I’m not gonna go out in public looking for someone to try to get numbers, because then they’ll label me as a potential predator and spread my description around on social media. Even if I join a hobby group and decide I like someone there, one wrong move could destroy all the goodwill I’ve cultivated with the entire group. It could be as simple as asking someone out for coffee, and then suddenly I’m being shunned. It’s not worth it.
Anyway, I digress. It’s impossible to organize the left because everyone has their pet causes and favored interest groups, no one wants to work together on a unified front. Plus, most leftists are allergic to effective leadership because it smells too much like hierarchy. You can already see self-proclaimed “socialists” trashing Mamdani online. As soon as he gets elected to a leadership position where he can actually make a difference for the working class, tankies come out of the woodworks to call him a fascist or a zionist or whatever else. Some of them might be russian bots intentionally sowing discord, but unfortunately they’re effective and when I call it out I get labeled a conspiracy theorist.
I’m fucking done. Fuck this shit.
The MAGA Mantra: Don’t bother me with facts, my mind is made up.