Category Archives: Anthropogenic Climate Disruption

Thought for Today: Climate Migration is also a Domestic Issue

12 Sunday Oct 2025

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Cover of Remain. Migrate. Return.: What Hurricane Katrina Teaches Us About Climate Migration – PDF Publication August 22, 2025
Photo Credit: Taproot Earth

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina caused record-breaking devastation across a 144 mile swath of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. A less often told story is that Hurricane Katrina sparked a mass migration of people. More than 1.5 million Hurricane Katrina survivors evacuated to all 50 states representing one of the largest and most abrupt relocations of people in U.S. history. As of 2015, Center for American Progress reported that 40% of the 1.5 million evacuees, or 600,000 people, were not able to return home. While the idea of “climate migration” is often talked about as an issue that exists only outside of the United States, Hurricane Katrina teaches us that climate migration is also a domestic issue that is already underway.

Excerpt from Remain. Migrate. Return.: What Hurricane Katrina Teaches Us About Climate Migration, PDF publication by Taproot Earth, USA, August 22, 2025, p. 6.

In the featured 2025 Taproot Earth report, Remain. Migrate. Return.: What Hurricane Katrina Teaches Us About Climate Migration, the term “climate migration” refers broadly to the movement of people because of climate change—whether gradual or sudden, voluntary or involuntary, temporary or permanent (p. 8).

Community responses to Hurricane Katrina (2005) taught them that the standards for climate migration are rooted in the Right to Remain, the Right to Migrate, and the Right to Return.

The Right to Remain is grounded in the principle that people have self-determination, power, and resources to remain on their lands and in their communities (pp. 9-11).

The Right to Migrate includes the principles of cooperation and solidarity, as well as legal protections (pp. 12-13).

The Right to Return includes principles of reclaiming power and culture, repairing and restoring the land, plus re-awakening and repairing the spirit (pp. 14-15).

Taproot Earth is a nonprofit organization, registered in Slidell, Louisiana, USA. Their work is rooted in the community responses to Hurricane Katrina (2005), BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Drilling Disaster in the Gulf (2010), and Hurricane Ida (2021). They honor and build on the efforts of Black and Indigenous communities by invoking accountability, abundance, and justice. Together, they are forging connections that strengthen and sustain frontline climate leaders across the Gulf and Global South.

Coping with Extreme Heatwaves on a Changing Planet

10 Sunday Aug 2025

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption

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NOAA USA Seasonal Temperature Outlook Jul-Aug-Sep 2025 – Issued June 19, 2025
Source Credit: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information

When you sell your soul to the highest bidders, your new masters will exact payment in diverse currencies. One such payment was made on July 29, 2025. Intent on turning back the tides of change, the said Master of Industry seeks to rescind the 2009 Endangerment Finding regarding greenhouse gases under section 202(a) of the EPA Clean Air Act. 

On that day in July at an auto dealership in Indiana, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin made the grand announcement. Also present were US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, as well as several Indiana officials: the Governor, Attorney General, and Secretary of Energy and Natural Resources. If finalized, the proposal would repeal all greenhouse gas emissions regulations for motor vehicles and engines, and other sources.

“With this proposal, the Trump EPA is proposing to end sixteen years of uncertainty for automakers and American consumers,” said EPA Administrator Zeldin.“In our work so far, many stakeholders have told me that the Obama and Biden EPAs twisted the law, ignored precedent, and warped science to achieve their preferred ends and stick American families with hundreds of billions of dollars in hidden taxes every single year. We heard loud and clear the concern that EPA’s GHG [Greenhouse Gases] emissions standards themselves, not carbon dioxide which the Finding never assessed independently, was the real threat to Americans’ livelihoods. If finalized, rescinding the Endangerment Finding and resulting regulations would end $1 trillion or more in hidden taxes on American businesses and families.” [Emphasis is mine.]

[Note to readers: Carbon dioxide comprises over 79% of all greenhouse gas emissions.]

For their part, the auto industry promises to give us “more safe and affordable cars.” The American Trucking Association promises a decrease in “the cost of living on all products that trucks deliver.”  

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Resilience against Tornadoes on a Changing Planet

08 Sunday Jun 2025

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, United States

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Tornado Damage Joplin – Missouri – June 1, 2011
Photo Credit: Bob Webster, Pryor/USA

As a resident of Southern California, I’ve yet to come face-to-face with one of those terrifying tornadoes I’ve seen in movies. Tornadoes don’t occur often in our state. Whenever they do occur, they are weak, ranked EF-0 in the Enhanced Fujita Scale, causing little damage. The reality of being pummeled by a violent tornado is a devastating, life-changing, traumatic experience. Such was the case for people living in Joplin, Missouri, on May 22, 2011, featured in the Netflix Documentary The Twister: Caught in the Storm, released on March 19, 2025.

The tornado that struck Joplin in 2011 was rated EF-5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, with maximum winds over 200 mph (320 kph). Ranked seventh among the top ten deadliest tornadoes in United States history, it is the deadliest so far in the 21st century.

With a population of more than 50,000 and a population density near 1,500 people per square mile, Joplin suffered extensive damage amounting to US$2.8 billion. According to the account recorded in President Obama White House Archives, the tornado first touched down in the southern part of the city at 5:41 p.m. local time. During the following 32 minutes, it headed eastward across the city, demolishing everything in its path for 13 miles (21 kilometers) and extending as much as a mile (1.6 kilometers) wide at its widest extent.

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Solidarity: The People’s Power

06 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Nature and the Environment, United States

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Hands Off Nationwide Protest – Los Angeles – California – April 5, 2025
Photo Credit: Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images

I know… I share your pain. I’m also scared. These are dangerous times for immigrants in America—scapegoats for the social and economic ills of our nation. Our trade partners, too, have come under attack. It’s now tit-for-tat for unfair trade practices. “Liberation Day” on April 2nd has unleashed import tariffs/taxes, ranging from 10 percent to 54 percent, for all countries that sell goods to the United States. What a high-risk economic strategy! But this is just the latest drastic change assaulting us daily since January 20, 2025.

Regardless of our political views or ideology, we the people will have to deal with the negative or unexpected consequences of dismantling our government agencies and picking a fight with our closest allies since the end of World War II. Judging from these developments, it seems that the globalized capitalist economic system is under stress. And so it should be. For how much longer can we sustain an economic model of continual growth and profits that is pushing our planetary life systems to their limits?

Non-human life faces extinction and more frequent, extreme weather events are disrupting and threatening human life. The minority billionaire ruling class (MBRC) believes that environmental and other deregulations are the answer to renewed economic growth. Their insatiable greed blinds them to all the warning signs of economic and societal collapse. Instead, they now grasp at AI, an energy guzzler, to preserve their way of life.

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Weather/Climate-Related Disasters in the USA 2024

02 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Economy and Finance, United States

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NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)
U.S. 2024 Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters (released Jan/2025)

During 2024, thousands of our American brothers and sisters lost loved ones, property, and jobs to various weather/climate-related disasters that struck their state. Many of them are still recovering from their losses. Without resources, others will never recover. Tragedy does not impact us all in the same way.

On January 10, 2025, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released the data and analysis quantifying the economic costs of the disasters that reached or exceeded US$1 billion. They confirmed 27 weather/climate disaster events, amounting to a total of US$182.7 billion. This places 2024 as the fourth costliest on record, trailing behind 2017 (US$395.9 billion), 2025 (US$268.5 billion), and 2022 (US$183.6 billion).

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Climate Crisis: Wildfires

02 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption

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Satellite Image of Smoke Plumes from Palisades and Eaton Wildfires – Los Angeles County – Southern California – January 7, 2025
Source : Copernicus European Union

On Tuesday, January 7th, in Los Angeles, our year began with wildfire like no other. I first learned about the Palisades Fire, which ignited at 10:30 a.m. in the affluent Pacific Palisades neighborhood, when I tuned into our local TV news broadcast at noon that day. At that moment, I was not alarmed. Like earthquakes, wildfires all year round have become a part of living in California. Besides, this was not the first wildfire in this area. On December 9th, 2024, the Franklin Fire had set more than 4,000 acres (16 square kilometers) ablaze in neighboring Malibu over nine days.

When I tuned in again that evening around eight o’clock, I was shocked to learn that a second wildfire, named the Eaton Fire, had ignited further inland in Altadena, a working-class community just north of Pasadena, where the New Year’s Day Tournament of Roses Parade had celebrated “Best Day Ever!” as its theme for 2025. Who knew then, that the best day ever would end in tragedy seven days later for thousands of Altadena residents?

Even more alarming, the Palisades Fire, driven by exceptionally fierce Santa Ana winds blowing offshore from over the San Gabriel Mountains, was spreading like the fiery breath of an angry dragon. On following the local live newsfeed, I learned that an Evacuation Order went out for an area in the neighboring city of Santa Monica on the southeastern edge of the fire. My heart fluttered. The Palisades Fire was advancing closer to our home. How could this be happening?

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Climate Crisis Update: “Perilous times on planet Earth”

10 Sunday Nov 2024

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption

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California Governor Gavin Newson (second from left) visits the Mountain Fire disaster area – Ventura County – Southern California – November 7, 2024
Photo Credit: Official Website of Governor Gavin Newsom

The news is not good. Here on Planet Earth, we live in perilous times. Such is the warning from fourteen climate experts from Australia, Brazil, China, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States in their article “The 2024 State of the Climate Report: Perilous times on planet Earth” published in the BioScience magazine on October 8, 2024.

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,” they warn. “This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”

Why the bleak prognosis? Of the 35 “planetary vital signs” they use to track the climate emergency, 25 are at record extremes. These include U.S. heat-related mortality, fossil fuel subsidies, coal and oil consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, per-capita meat production, global tree cover loss due to fires, ocean acidity and heat content change, glacier thickness change, and ice mass change in Antarctica and Greenland.

As demonstrated in “Table 1: Recent Climate Disasters from November 2023 to August 2024,” they emphasize the rapidly escalating climate-related impacts of our global failure to support a rapid and socially just fossil fuel phasedown. Not included in this list are the supercharged Hurricanes Helene and Milton that developed in the Gulf of Mexico in late September during publication of their report. Unforeseen, too, are the flash floods in Spain on October 29th triggered by an “extraordinary deluge” that dumped twenty months of rain in just eight hours. Sounds familiar?

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FEMA: When a Natural Disaster Strikes Across State Lines

13 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, United States

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FEMA Search and Rescue Teams Respond to Hurricane Helene – September 26, 2024
Photo by Patrick Moore / US Department of Homeland Security Media Library

My heart goes out to all the folks whose lives have been upended by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. As the warming of Earth’s oceans and atmosphere continues unabated—due to humanity’s inability to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels—tropical storms have become supercharged and more destructive over a much wider area.

Such was the case recently when America’s southeastern states were hit by Hurricanes Helene (September 26-28) and Milton (October 9-10). It’s not just their wind speeds that make these storms deadly. Their size, speed, and capacity to hold more moisture can wreak havoc over more extensive areas. What’s more, their rapid intensification has alarmed our meteorologists. Within just two days, the unusually warm water of the Gulf of Mexico transformed Hurricane Helene from a relatively weak tropical storm into a historic Category 4 hurricane for this time of the year. Not to be outdone, Hurricane Milton took just over 48 hours to intensify from a tropical depression to a Category 5 Hurricane, according to NOAA Climate.gov. This is bad news. Millions of people in their projected path may not have sufficient time in which to evacuate to safety.

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Thought for Today: Proposal to Break Up and Commercialize NOAA

06 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, United States

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NOAA Satellite Image of Hurricane Helene moving into the Gulf of Mexico – September 25, 2024
Image credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION (NOAA)

Break Up NOAA. The single biggest Department of Commerce agency outside of decennial census years is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and other components. NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the department’s $12 billion annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department’s personnel in non-decadal Census years (2021 figures).

NOAA consists of six main offices: The National Weather Service (NWS); The National Ocean Service (NOS); The Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR); The National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS); The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS); and The Office of Marine and Aviation Operations and NOAA Corps.

Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful func­tions. It should be broken up and downsized. [Emphasis mine.]

[…]

Focus the NWS on Commercial Operations. Each day, Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by local radio stations and colleges that are produced not by the NWS, but by private companies such as AccuWeather. Studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private com­panies are more reliable than those provided by the NWS.

The NWS provides data the private companies use and should focus on its data-gathering services. Because private companies rely on these data, the NWS should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.

Excerpt from “Chapter 21: Department of Commerce” by Thomas F. Gilman from Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project by The Heritage Foundation, Washington DC, USA, 2023 (pp. 674-675).

Thomas F. Gilman served as Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Administration and Chief Financial Officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce in the Trump Administration. Currently, he is a Director of ACLJ Action and Chairman of Torn­gat Metals. Gilman is the former CEO of Chrysler Financial and has had a 40-plus year career as a senior executive and entrepreneur in the global automotive industry, including roles at Chrysler Corporation, Cerberus Capital Management, Asbury Automotive Group, TD Auto Finance, and Automotive Capital Services. He holds a BS in finance from Villanova University.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is one of six agencies falling under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The agency’s mission is “to provide daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings, climate monitoring to fisheries management, coastal restoration, and the supporting of marine commerce. NOAA’s products and services support economic vitality and affect more than one-third of America’s gross domestic product. NOAA’s dedicated scientists use cutting-edge research and high-tech instrumentation to provide citizens, planners, emergency managers and other decision makers with reliable information they need when they need it.”

Thought for Today: Climate Change Policies at Risk

08 Sunday Sep 2024

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Front Cover: Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise by the Heritage Foundation
Photo Credit: The Heritage Foundation

The new energy crisis is caused not by a lack of resources, but by extreme “green” policies. Under the rubrics of “combating climate change” and “ESG” (environmen­tal, social, and governance), the Biden Administration, Congress, and various states, as well as Wall Street investors, international corporations, and progressive spe­cial-interest groups, are changing America’s energy landscape. These ideologically driven policies are also directing huge amounts of money to favored interests and making America dependent on adversaries like China for energy. In the name of combating climate change, policies have been used to create an artificial energy scarcity that will require trillions of dollars in new investment, supported with taxpayer subsidies, to address a “problem” that government and special interests themselves created.

Excerpt from “Chapter 12: Department of Energy and Related Commissions” by Bernard L. McNamee from Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project by The Heritage Foundation, Washington DC, USA, 2023 (pp. 363-364).

Highlighted below are the major proposals presented in Chapter 12 that place our current climate change policies at risk:

  • Eliminate the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) which focuses on climate change and green subsidies and sets energy efficiency standards for appliances. If EERE cannot be eliminated, its budget should be reduced (pp 378-379). [Learn more about EERE at http://www.energy.gov/eere/office-energy-efficiency-renewable-energy%5D
  • End the role of the Grid Development Office (GDO) in grid planning for the benefit of renewable energy developers and defund most of its programs (pp 380-381). [Learn more about GDO at http://www.energy.gov/gdo/grid-deployment-office%5D
  • Eliminate the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) established in December 2021 “[to] deliver clean energy demonstration projects at scale in partnership with the private sector to accelerate deployment, market adoption, and the equi­table transition to a decarbonized energy system” (pp 381-382). [Learn more about OCED at http://www.energy.gov/oced/office-clean-energy-demonstrations%5D
  • Eliminate the Clean Energy Corps, charged with delivering a more equitable clean energy future for the American people, by revoking funding and eliminating all positions and personnel hired under the program (p 386). [Learn more about the Clean Energy Corps at http://www.energy.gov/CleanEnergyCorps%5D

Bernard L. McNamee is an energy and regulatory attorney with a major law firm and was formerly a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He is also the Street Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the Appalachian School of Law. In addition to serving as a Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner, McNamee has served in various senior policy and legal positions throughout his career, including at the U.S. Department of Energy, for U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, and for Virginia Governor George Allen. McNamee also served four attorneys general in two states (Virginia and Texas).