The Climate Is Still Changing

Given the calm weather the Northeast has been having of late and the return of normal weather to Europe in time for fall, a lot of people might think that climate change is not as bad as once feared. Actually, it's worse. The drought in the West is deepening, California is still burning, a third of Pakistan is flooded, and Alaska is getting the remnants of a typhoon that are causing more problems up there than the remnants of Hurricane Ida caused in New Jersey in 2021.  

"But Steve," you might ask, "look at the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season! Only three named storms before early July, then nothing, then three named storms in September!  At this time in 2020 we had had 21 named storms!"

Yes, but the last three storms have all been hurricanes.  And while none of these hurricanes have been major (Category 3 or higher) and two have been so-called fish storms, not affecting land, the third September storm, Hurricane Fiona, just laid waste to Puerto Rico and caused a huge power outage.

"Well," you might ask, "how many people on the island have lost power?"

How many people are there on the island?

"No, Steve," you're probably asking, "I'm asking how many people on the island have lost power."

And I'm asking how many people are there on the island!

"Oh, quit pussyfooting around," you're probably asking, "and just tell me - How many people on the island of Puerto Rico have lost power?"

All of 'em, boy!

Just be glad Trump is no longer President.  He'd be throwing them paper towels.

Trumptonite

You might remember the Mississippi rock band 3 Doors Down, not to be confused with Three Dog Night.  Back in 2000 (let that sink in for a moment), they were a top band on what passed for rock radio in America, and they were apparently hoping to replace the Allman Brothers Band as the Beatles of the South.  But, like so many rock bands that proliferated in the quarter century after the grunge revolt, they were gone almost as soon as they'd arrived, and to this day I still can't name a single member of 3 Doors Down without checking out their Web site or their Wikipedia biography.  By 2017 they'd fallen so far that they were one of the (very) few pop acts to accept an invitation to play at Trump's inauguration; their appearance suggested imagining the Beatles not having another hit after "Love Me Do" and playing a Tory rally on the occasion of Margaret Thatcher's assumption of the prime ministership of Great Britain seventeen years after.  As a result of this gig, 3 Doors Down lost numerous fans, shrinking their already pathetically small audience.

Ironically, their only hit of any consequence was a song called "Kryptonite."

Since 3 Doors Down killed their already-dead careers with their Trump gala gig, many Trump watchers have been patiently waiting for the one thing that would destroy Trump's Presidency - the equivalent of kryptonite, the one thing that could kill Superman.  This past week proved once and for all that nothing - and I mean nothing - can kill his political career.  Trump imposed steel tariffs on our closest allies - Canada, Mexico, the European Union countries - and our ex-friends vowed to retaliate.  At that news, the stock market plunged a couple hundred points. Then the next day, he leaked the latest unemployment statistics before the Labor Department could officially release them, sending stocks back up.  A friend of mine says Trump did this to manipulate the stock market to his advantage.  Maybe.  But he did manipulate the news to his advantage; thanks to the good jobs report and the headlines about a robust economy, you don't hear much concern about tariffs.

All right, so import taxes that could undermine future American economic growth didn't kill him.  How about the aftereffects of Hurricane Maria, and the news that, while only 64 people on the island of Puerto Rico died directly from the storm, over 4,600 Puerto Ricans died indirectly from the hurricane's damage - mainly because of the interminable blackouts and the disruption of the territory's services?  Certainly Trump's failure to react sufficiently to the damage from Maria would kill his Presidency!  That is, until the National Hurricane Center announced that the 2018 hurricane season, having just gotten under way, is expected to be an average season, lessening the chances of another storm like Maria, which allowed people on the mainland to shrug off last year's hurricane season as old news.  So what if Puerto Rico was turned into a wasteland? So what if Puerto Rico isn't even prepared for even a storm just short of Category 1 status? >:-(

But of course, there was the North Korean situation.  Trump felt the need to cancel his summit with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, which denied him to burnish his foreign policy credentials (even though he actually has none.  What a setback.  Until the North Koreans and the Trump administration worked out their differences over the proposed meeting.  Now the summit is back on.  Trump is back on top.

Nothing can kill him.

At this point, we have to realize that if Trump's Presidency is going to be brought down, it won't be brought down by circumstances beyond his control.  Whether or not he survives depends on a strong opposition.

It's too bad that the Democratic Party is prone to kryptonite poisoning.

3 Doors Down records, anyone?  

Trump's PR Problem

Donald Trump's response to the devastation in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria got off to a shaky start and has been progressively worsening ever since.  His initial explanation that Puerto Rico's geography was a detriment to aid-delivery efforts didn't go over to well with folks who were never going to take his comments at face value anyway, but there was an element of truth to it - with the island a thousand miles away from the American mainland, it is more difficult to send aid there than to send aid to an area in the lower forty-eight in need of help, and the ships and planes needed to send aid to Puerto Rico were impeded by damage done by the storm to the airport at the territory's capital, San Juan, as well as to the city's harbor (the "rich harbor" where San Juan was established less than five hundred years ago gave the island its name).  Puerto Rico's governor, Ricardo Rosselló, was, at first, very complimentary toward Trump and his administration for their response to the crisis and the handling of the situation.

So where's the aid?  Uh, yeah, that's the part Trump can't figure out - actually getting all of the supplies to the island.

It's been nearly a week since Trump said he was taking charge, and many if not most Puerto Rico residents are still without clean water, electricity is sporadic at best, and gasoline lines are rivaling those of the 1973 fuel crisis that affected the fifty states as well as the territories.  A hospital ship based in Norfolk just left for the island over the weekend and is not supposed to arrive there until later this week, having set sail later than she could have.  Supplies are taking forever to get to Puerto Rico, and both the geography issue and the damaged-port defense are wearing awfully thin.  Rosselló has grown more impatient.  But Trump still brags about the "fantastic job" that thousands of federal employees are doing in putting everything back together.  And, to paraphrase the late Muhammad Ali, it's called bragging only when you can't back it up.

But get this.  Trump not only said that Puerto Rico is to blame for its own troubles because of all of the mismanagement of the island's finances that occurred before Maria (imagine Obama telling New Jersey after Sandy that the state's financial troubles brought the aftereffects of the storm on itself - you can't, can you?) but he's also blasted San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz for poor leadership.

You mean leadership like this?

Oh yeah, he also said that Puerto Rico residents aren't doing enough to help themselves and shouldn't rely so much on outside help.

Uh, they're on an island with no phones, no lights, practically no gas for their motorcars . . .. Even Gilligan and his fellow castaways had more luxuries!

Thus was the last straw for Americans of Puerto Rican descent, including Broadway star Lin-Manuel Miranda, who minced no words and pulled no punches when it came to expressing his thoughts about Trump. "You're going straight to hell," he told Trump via Twitter. "No long lines for you. Someone will say, 'Right this way, sir.'  They'll clear a path."

And maybe he'll meet Rick Scott on the way down.

But then Trump is not only evil, he's stupid. He explained Puerto Rico's geographic isolation by saying that it is "an island surrounded by water, big water, ocean water"  (of course it's surrounded by water, it wouldn't be an island otherwise, would it?) and also that it's sitting in "the middle of the ocean" when it is in fact a part of a chain of islands separating the Atlantic from the Caribbean.  He didn't think to waive a law protecting an American monopoly on interstate and state-to-territory maritime commerce that is responsible for making things in Puerto Rico expensive until enough people complained about it.  And his advisers are no help.  Acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke probably cost herself the job on a permanent basis by saying that it was a "good news story."

Puerto Rico is an island of nearly three and a half million people, all of them American citizens (not too many people seem to know that!).  Yet Puerto Rico residents cannot vote in presidential elections and their non-voting territorial delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives can't even vote in the Committee On the Whole (which I explained here).   They have no political power outside the island, and now they have no electrical power either.  They're in dire straits.  And Trump is wagging his short finger at the people of Puerto Rico and telling them to pull their own weight in this crisis while bragging about what a wonderful job the federal government is doing when he can't make the claim?  No!  This is not a good news story.

Trump is trying to convince everyone that he's on the ball with this crisis, but here's the truth.  He has a catastrophic mess on his hands in Puerto Rico, and his efforts to make himself look good with a smarmy public relations campaign make him look exponentially worse.

In other words, he has a bad PR situation compounded by a bad PR situation.

Hence, the double-entendre title of this post.

Maria, Maria, Maria, Maria . . .

The most frightening sound I’ve ever heard.  All the horrifying sounds of the world (particularly the sounds of climate change) in a single word.

Hurricane Maria went full tilt boogie over Puerto Rico, setting that island back about five hundred years.  There isn't a single resident of the island with electricity, and only one in ten residents of Puerto Rico have running water.

I'm sorry to say that restoring power there isn't going to be a piece of cake.  San Juan may be without power for up to six months.  It's worse than Irma hitting Florida. Not everyone lost power, and those who did got help from utility companies outside Florida, like Public Service Electric and Gas (PSE&G) of New Jersey and New York), whose crews drove their trucks down to the Sunshine State  to get everyone who lost power back online.

I regret to point out that Puerto Rico is different for one obvious reason: PSE&G doesn't have boats. :-(

And Maria's future path?  Computer projections have mostly been consistent showing a scenario that involves Maria coming north along the East Coast and making a close call - the Outer Banks of North Carolina and either Virginia Beach or the Delmarva Peninsula would be likeliest places for a glancing blow - but the upper air patterns steering the storm and jet stream going over the continent, the idiosyncrasies of which I do not pretend to understand, could move Maria toward a possible landfall.  Some forecasts even note a disturbance coming in from the east that could interact with Maria and create a Sandy-type "superstorm."

Also, Jose - now a tropical storm is doing what the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) said it would do, even though it seemed comical at the time - looping around in a cloverleaf off the coast of Massachusetts, like it had done near the Bahamas, and possibly heading back to the coast near the Delaware Bay as a depression.  This looping could either help steer Maria out to sea or pull Maria into the East Coast and cause to make landfall somewhere between Virginia Beach and New York City.  Or, Jose could dissipate and allow Maria to go out to sea or make landfall.

Got all that?

Anyway, here's an ensemble of all the hurricane path projections as of 6 PM Eastern, September 20, from the Global Ensemble Forecast System, courtesy of weather geek Levi Cowan's Tropical Tidbits Web site:

As you can see, the ensemble is very confident that, despite everything in play, Maria will miss the East Coast completely.  But because everything is in play, landfall somewhere north of the 36th parallel can't be ruled out yet, and as Mr. Cowan noted on this very map, you should not use this map to plan or decide anything.  After all, this is projection and not a forecast.

On a personal note, this September has been a lousy month for me.  I've had issues too personal to share here, and I've had to deal with a lot of crap in between.  With all that in mind, and after anxiety over Irma and Jose, the last thing I need is yet another hurricane to worry about, especially if this one turns out to have a better chance of hitting the area where I live than the previous two.  I just hope everyone in Puerto Rico - including someone I know and friends of relatives of mainland Puerto Ricans I know personally - are all right. :-(