In the News: Trump Decision to Exit Paris Accord "One of the Most Ignorant and Dangerous Actions Ever Taken by Any President"

Elizabeth Johnson says it best #ParisAgreement pic.twitter.com/9yF7HGNHYN

— NETWORK (@NETWORKLobby) June 1, 2017

In the News: Conservatives Respond Differently to Kathy Griffin's Tasteless Stunt Than to Online Pictures Showing Obama Hanged in Effigy — Why?

Items I've read online this morning, which catch my attention as important — and, for that reason, I want to share them with you. The unifying thread here is "this morning":

Politicians and Pundits Talking (or Not) about Global Warming Following Sandy

Politicians and pundits talking about climate change and global warming (or not talking, as the case may be) following megastorm Sandy:

Sane Moral Voices re: Global Warming after Sandy

Sane moral voices talking about global warming and climate change in light of Sandy, our latest megastorm:

Megastorm Devastation and Climate Change: A Selection of Articles for Background Reading

It hasn't been easy the last two days to think about much of anything other than the megastorm threatening the inhabitants of the northeastern U.S. and Canada.  I wonder, in particular, about the effects of this storm on the least among us, the homeless above all.  I'm not seeing much news coverage of that topic.  And, of course, I'm intently concerned about the effects of Sandy on all the inhabitants of the densely populated areas affected.  I have a niece in Manhattan, and good friends who are regular readers of and contributors to this blog in the region devastated by the storm.

Heat, Drought, Deer Grazing in Cities: Apocalypse Now and Papal Scripts to Turn History Upside Down

That small doe Steve and I saw standing stock-still on the perimeter of a park on 18 June, about which I blogged the following day: we spotted her again on our walk on the fourth of July.  This time, she bounded across the pathway of the park about 20 yards in front of us, heading down into the wooded side of the park that slopes to the Arkansas River, where herds of deer have long lived within the city, grazing along the banks of the river and sheltering themselves in the abundant copses that line the riverside.

More Global Warming Commentary, with Theological Reflection by Leonardo Boff

More commentary on the current excessively hot and dry summer many Americans are having, and the almost certain link between these weather events (which are becoming ever more common) and global warming:

"The Earth Is News": Global Warming Accelerates

Wendell Berry's poem "Morning News" (Farming, a Handbook [NY: Harcourt Brace, 1970]) says, "The earth is news."

Christian Parenti on a World in Which Bread Grows Scarce

I wrote a week ago, 

Hot, Hotter, Hottest: Middle America Cooks and No Relief in Sight

I'm reading HuffPo's latest report about the "heat dome" that is now stationary over the central part of the U.S.  The article quotes Maryland meterologist Eli Jacks: "It gets really hot."

Peter Finnochiaro at Salon: Global-Warming Denial Concentrated in States Now Burning Up

The irony to which I pointed yesterday--namely, that the ongoing drought in the southern sector of the U.S. is occurring in states that now most fiercely defend the "right" of corporations to destroy the environment, states in which there are large numbers of climate-change deniers: that irony is not lost on Peter Finnochiaro, either.

Global Warming and the Drought of the Southern U.S.

I'm glad to see Peter Finnochiaro call the New York Times' hand re: its recent reporting on the horrific drought from Arizona to Florida.  Both in its article yesterday on the drought and its editorial today, the Times conspicuously omits any mention of global warming as a cause of the excessive heat and lack of rainfall across the southern tier of states, and suggests that La Niña is to blame.

A Weather-Related Note

It occurs to me to share with readers information about the weather in my part of the country--in case the power in our community happens to be interrupted for extended periods of time in days to come.  As many of you know, I live in Little Rock, in the U.S. state of Arkansas.

Global Warming on the Micro-Scale: Japonicas in January

The English have long been not merely accomplished gardeners, but astute, careful observers of gardens as well, and of nature in general. Gilbert White kept such a meticulous garden journal for some years that, generations later, we can track with great precision when broad beans were planted in any given year, or when strawberries were ready to be picked.

I’ve often regretted that I have never had the foresight to record details of planting and budding and leafing out in the careful way that White, or his American successors Thoreau and Jefferson, thought to do. I have only my faulty memory on which to rely as I compare seasonal events from year to year.

As a result, I cannot be absolutely certain that trends I think I detect in my own tiny bit of ground are really there, and that I’m not imagining those trends. Even so, unless my memory is totally awry, I am convinced that I am seeing the effects of climate shift in my own garden, over my lifetime of more than a half-century.

In fact, I am certain that some of those shifts have occurred rather decisively in the past decade or so, and that they portend major shifts in our climate and the ecology dependent on the climate. This year, as in the last several years, jonquils began to spring up before the middle of January—something I am absolutely sure I never recall happening in my childhood. And, just as has been happening for several years now, the japonica began to bud before 15 January, and now has a few open blossoms on it.

These are flowers of early spring, not of winter, in our mid-South climate. In my childhood, they did usually appear before winter was quite over—often in the second half of February. Since central Arkansas used to have its fiercest snowstorms most often in that part of winter, too—when it used to snow at all, that is—people in this area often joked that we lived in the land of frozen daffodils. Just as the jonquils had bloomed, a big snow often fell: you could predict when we'd have snow when you spotted the jonquils.

Winter is—I’m sure of it—not what it used to be, here. The spells of balmy weather that encourage leaf and bud are more frequent and more protracted, interspersed with bitter cold snaps that nip anything that has begun to grow. Though some folks seem to think that the unusual cold of those cold periods disproves global warming, to my way of thinking, the extremes in temperature go hand in hand with the trend to warming. The climate is unsettled, and the swings from pole to pole are evidence of the unsettlement, not of any anti-warming trend. The tornadoes we've now had for some years not only in spring and fall, when the weather changes abruptly, but in winter itself, are evidence of the unsettlement.

Summers have been hotter and hotter here of late, it goes without saying, though it’s less easy for me to spot all the evidence for that in my piece of ground so clearly as I can see it in winter, when each leafing out is a dramatic event that provides striking evidence of nature's movement away from cold and dark. I do know with absolute assurance that plants I could not ever grow in this climate in seasons past—plants my grandmother longed to have in her garden, but which defeated her if she tried to grow them—now overwinter and thrive here.

These are plants we used to call semi-tropical, plants that grow in the gardens of the far Deep South—plants we went to New Orleans or Mobile to admire. About seven years ago, for instance, I put a small sweet-olive shrub into a sheltered bay on the south side of the house, hoping I could coax it along for at least a year or so, and have its heavenly aroma fragrance the air for a season or two.

The shrub has now grown to the size of a tree, taller than the lowest point of the roof on that side of the house, lording it over the fig tree downhill from it. Sweet olives in Little Rock? Unheard of, until recent years, especially when they grow so rank and prove so hale.

I’m having similar experiences with butterfly ginger and lantana, both of which were always grown here as annuals in the past. Now, they die back for winter and then spring forth again with warm weather, as good as new each year.

I remember driving through Georgia a year or so ago, when it was hot as blazes. The whole state was parched and brown in early summer. It was that summer that the lakes of the state began to dry up to such an extent that the water supply of Atlanta was threatened.

On that trip, I remember reading an op-ed piece in the Atlanta paper by some idiotic journalist who encouraged her fellow Georgians to welcome the warming trend, even if it was due to global warming. She spoke of all the wonderful new plants people could grow in north Georgia in recent years, of how she could sit on her deck late into the night even on spring days, enjoying a glass of iced tea. All compliments of a George W. Bush she deeply admired and had worked to put into office . . . .

I wondered whether, as the water supply of Atlanta dried up that year, she continued to hail global warming. I wondered if she was still enjoying that iced tea overlooking the lake with no water in it. I’m still wondering, as I watch my japonica begin blooming before February is even here, and as the maple in the front yard puts forth buds, and the jonquils send their green shoots through soil that should be at rest in the middle of winter.