Lawyers with business before the Supreme Court made undisclosed direct payments to a Clarence Thomas' aide via Venmo, labeling the gifts as for Thomas' "Christmas Party"

If this isn't the appearance of corruption, I don't know what is.

Let’s be clear: If we allow a former president to completely avoid accountability for inciting an insurrection against the U.S. government, we will be inviting it to happen all over again.

Prosecute Donald Trump.

Andrew Dessler (@andrewdessler) has a timely reminder for us about non-linearity, especially as it relates to the climate crisis...
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If you’re struggling to understand why the impacts of climate change suddenly seem so awful, it’s time we discuss a key scientific term: non-linearity.

In a linear system, changes occur in a straight line. If climate impacts were linear, each 0.1°C increase in temperature would produce the same increment of damage. In that world, things slowly get worse over decades until, later this century, the accumulations of slow impacts becomes truly terrible.

But impacts of climate change are different — they are non-linear. In a rain event, for example, the first few inches of rain typically produce no damage because existing infrastructure (e.g., storm drains) were designed to handle that much rain.

As rainfall continues to intensify, however, it eventually exceeds the capacity of the storm runoff infrastructure and the neighborhood floods. You go from zero damage if the water stops half an inch below the front door of your house to tens of thousands of dollars of damage if the water rises one additional inch and flows into your house.

Thus, the correct mental model is *not* one of impacts slowly getting worse over decades. Rather, the correct way to understand climate change is that things are fine until they’re not, at which point they’re really terrible. And the system can go from “fine” to “terrible” in the blink of an eye.

The speed of us passing limits is mind-bending. People who are impacted are often shocked and we frequently see people bemoaning the fact that some impact never happened before — this is the calling card of non-linear effects.

So when we see all of the climate impacts of the last few years suddenly appearing, it shouldn’t surprise us. The very rapid warming we are experiencing is pushing us past many thresholds in our human and natural systems.
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FULL ESSAY -- https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/why-are-climate-impacts-escalating

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency

The world is shifting towards a superheated climate not seen in the past 1m years, prior to human existence, because “we are damned fools” for not acting upon warnings over the climate crisis, according to James Hansen, the US scientist who alerted the world to the greenhouse effect in the 1980s.

#climateChange #climateCatastrophy #climateEmergency #climateBreakdown #tippingPoint

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/19/climate-crisis-james-hansen-scientist-warning