(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Overnight News Digest: Climate change models likely severely underestimate economic damage [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-05 Tonight’s news awaits your comments. Everyone is encouraged to share their 2¢ or articles, stories, and tweets. This is an open thread. The Boston Globe Executives at Suffolk Construction, owned by John Fish, have used the Boston-based company’s private jet nearly 250 times since last year to fly from Hanscom Field to destinations such as Aruba and Aspen, Barcelona and Rome, Martha’s Vineyard and Napa Valley, according to a new report. Private jet flights have increasingly become a target of criticism from climate advocates, given the large amount of pollution generated to transport usually just a few people. […] The report, released Monday, analyzed 18 months of flight data from Hanscom starting in January 2022, and found that some 31,000 flights by 2,915 private jets such as Suffolk’s produced an estimated 107,000 tons of carbon pollution. About half the flights were probably for recreational or luxury purposes, based on their resort destinations and weekend flight dates, the authors said. Starlink carbon footprint up to 30 times size of land-based internet (alt link) New Scientist The space race that is seeing SpaceX, Eutelsat and Amazon launch thousands of satellites capable of providing internet service will probably carry a significant environmental cost. That is what the first attempt to calculate the carbon footprints associated with each company’s operations has concluded. The analysis, conducted by researchers in the US and UK, found that the carbon footprint of each satellite constellation is potentially 14 to 21 times higher per internet subscriber than the emissions associated with land-based mobile internet – primarily because of rocket launch emissions like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. What’s more, the polluting potential of satellite internet services may actually be much higher than this initial calculation. When the study authors considered the possible impacts of additional rocket launch particles – such as black carbon, aluminium oxide and water vapour exhaust – they calculated that the carbon footprint per subscriber might rise to between 31 and 91 times that of a land-based internet option. South American monsoon heading towards ‘tipping point’ likely to cause Amazon dieback The Guardian The South American monsoon, which determines the climate of much of the continent, is being pushed towards a “critical destabilisation point”, according to a study that links regional rainfall to Amazon deforestation and global heating. The authors of the report said they found their results “shocking” and urged policymakers to act with urgency to forestall a tipping point, which could result in up to 30% less rainfall, a dieback of the forest and a dire impact on food production. The study, published on Wednesday in Science Advances, examines how forest degradation and monsoon circulation are interlinked. […] Human degradation of the Amazon – by land clearance, fire, logging and mining – is pushing that system towards a tipping point, after which drier conditions would be expected to cause an abrupt “regime shift” in the rainforest, which would be unable to sustain itself and transport moisture. Yes, there was global warming in prehistoric times. But nothing in millions of years compares with what we see today Michael E. Mann at The Los Angeles Times “The climate is always changing!” So goes a popular refrain from climate deniers who continue to claim that there’s nothing special about this particular moment. There is no climate crisis, they say, because the Earth has survived dramatic warming before. Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy recently exemplified misconceptions about our planet’s climate past. When he asserted that “carbon dioxide as a percentage of the atmosphere is still at a relative low through human history,” he didn’t just make a false statement (carbon dioxide concentrations are the highest they’ve been in at least 4 million years). He also showed fundamentally wrong thinking around the climate crisis. What threatens us today isn’t the particular concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the precise temperature of the planet, alarming as those two metrics are. Instead, it’s the unprecedented rate at which we are increasing carbon pollution through fossil fuel burning, and the resulting rate at which we are heating the planet. Climate change threatens fish in Michigan’s Great Lakes Bridge Michigan Geologically speaking, the Great Lakes and the aquatic life within them are relatively young at a few thousand years old. Yet in their short life, they’ve contended with many changes, from invasive species to overfishing. Now, climate change poses a new existential threat. As fossil fuel consumption heats the world’s atmosphere, the fallout extends to a Great Lakes ecosystem that’s home to 150-plus native fish. Warming waters are already changing the distribution of freshwater fish in the basin, causing warm water fish like bass to move into areas that formerly were too cold for them to thrive. And conversely, warming temperatures threaten the future of cold water fish like whitefish and burbot, which spawn on ice-covered Great Lakes reefs. New technology uses good old-fashioned wind to power giant cargo vessels NPR News Well over a century after the Age of Sail gave way to coal- and oil-burning ships, climate change concerns are prompting a new look at an old technology that could once again harness wind to propel commercial cargo ships — this time with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Imagine what looks like Boeing 747 wings with movable flaps, set vertically on a ship's deck. The vessel cruises under minimum power from its giant engine as computerized sensors adjust the fiberglass wings to take advantage of the wind's speed and direction. This wind-assisted propulsion saves a substantial amount of fuel and reduces the carbon belching from the ship's stack. Many experts think the idea has the potential to navigate the notoriously dirty shipping industry toward a greener future. "Shipping is kind of unique," says Gavin Allwright, secretary-general of the International Windship Association (IWSA), a not-for-profit trade organization that advocates for wind propulsion in commercial shipping. From antiquity, ships used clean and free wind energy, "then we carbonized and now we're going back to zero carbon." At least that's the hope. Wildfires, Flooding, Heat: How Climate Changed Upended Summer The New York Times […] As humans continue adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, record-breaking heat will become even more common, as will extreme weather events like droughts, wildfires and floods. This summer alone, floods ravaged Vermont and upstate New York; the seawater in South Florida was so hot it felt like a Jacuzzi; choking smoke from vast Canadian wildfires enveloped the skies over the Northeast and Midwest. Even the mosquito population in Texas suffered. In cities like New York and Chicago, a wave of summerlike temperatures flowed into September and October. To many Americans, the season felt like a climate inflection point: a peek at what the country is facing in the future, and a new definition of summer. Wildfire smoke from Canada has drifted as far south as Florida USA Today Skies over a swath of Florida were beginning to clear Wednesday as haze dissipated from smoke that swept down thousands of miles from lingering, unrelenting wildfires that have plagued Canada for months. […] "Hazy conditions will continue this morning, however, conditions should gradually improve as the day progresses," the National Weather Service in Miami said Wednesday. […] Historic summer wildfires prompted evacuations across much of Canada as more than 6,000 blazes burned. Smoke from Canadian wildfires has blanketed skies in parts of the United States for days at a time. […] Natural Resources Canada stopped updating its daily fire report last week. But at that time 800-plus fires were still burning, the majority of them uncontrolled. More than 44 million acres of land burned in Canadian wildfires this year. For perspective, Florida has 39 million acres of land. Simultaneous large wildfires will increase in Western U.S. ScienceDaily Simultaneous outbreaks of large wildfires will become more frequent in the Western United States this century as the climate warms, putting major strains on efforts to fight fires, new research shows. The new study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), focused on wildfires of 1,000 acres or larger. It found that wildfire seasons in which several such blazes burn concurrently will become more common, with the most severe seasons becoming at least twice as frequent by the end of this century. […] "Higher temperatures and drier conditions will greatly increase the risk of simultaneous wildfires throughout the West," said NCAR scientist Seth McGinnis, the lead author of the study. "The worst seasons for simultaneous fires are the ones that are going to increase the most in the future." California weighs use of catastrophe models in home insurance E&E News California appears likely to allow insurance companies to consider risks from climate change when calculating premiums, marking a major shift in state policy as underwriters reduce their coverage amid soaring disaster costs. State Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara plans to rewrite insurance regulations to allow wider use of catastrophe models in the nation’s most populous state for the first time in 35 years. The change is meant to entice insurers to expand their coverage to homeowners in areas that face growing perils from extreme weather. It comes as major insurers such as State Farm have stopped writing new policies in California and other states following an intensifying barrage of disasters that, along with expanding real estate development, has fueled economic losses. The move follows a catastrophe-filled summer in which high temperature records were broken around the world. Glacial lake bursts in India leaving 100 missing and 14 dead CNN More than 100 people are missing in India’s northeast after heavy rain caused a glacial lake to burst, leading to flash floods which ripped through the Himalayan state of Sikkim Wednesday, killing at least 14 and washing away roads and bridges, according to the state government. A “sudden cloudburst” over Lhonak Lake, in the northern part of the state, sent fast-moving torrents of water surging down the Teesta River in Sikkim’s Lachen valley, raising water levels 15-20 feet higher than normal, the Indian Army said in a statement. A cloudburst is a very sudden and destructive rainstorm. Chungthang Dam, also known as the Teesta 3 dam and part of a major hydropower project in the state, was “washed away,” according to a statement issued by the National Disaster Management Authority on Wednesday night. Australia state swings from bush fires to flash floods in 24 hours Reuters Less than 24 hours since residents in parts of Australia's Victoria state fled bush fires, authorities warned on Wednesday of flooding as heavy rain douses flames and swells rivers in the southeastern state. Flash flooding is expected through Wednesday afternoon in northeastern Victoria, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, as rain drenched parts of the state where as recently as Tuesday about 17,000 hectares were ablaze. […] The rain comes during an unseasonably dry Australian spring, which began in September. Last month was the driest September on record, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, with rainfall 71% below the 1961-1990 average. How Carbon Capture and Storage Projects Are Driving New Oil and Gas Extraction Globally DeSmog When Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber opens the 28th annual UN climate conference in Dubai in November, he will be juggling two roles – convincing the world of the United Arab Emirates’ leadership in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while preserving the very industry that’s causing them. In addition to his job as summit president, Al Jaber heads the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), which plans to increase its oil and gas output by 11 percent by 2027. The company says that more oil will mean less emissions, however — provided the industry builds enough facilities to capture carbon dioxide (CO2), the main gas causing the climate crisis. “We must be laser-focused on phasing out fossil fuel emissions, while phasing up viable, affordable zero carbon alternatives,” Al-Jaber said at a pre-COP 28 event in Bonn in June. The statement was widely interpreted as a pitch for carbon capture. Dubai Firm Wants a Fifth of Zimbabwe Landmass for Carbon Credits (alt link) Bloomberg Blue Carbon, a Dubai-based company, signed a memorandum of understanding with Zimbabwe to generate carbon credits from about a fifth of the African country’s 150,000 square-mile landmass. The planned deal, which Blue Carbon Chairman Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum said may bring $1.5 billion of climate finance into the country, was announced on Friday in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. […] A single carbon credit is equivalent to one ton of carbon dioxide or its equivalent either removed from the atmosphere or prevented from entering it in the first place. The offsets are bought by emitters of the climate warming gases to compensate for their activities. The biggest problem with carbon offsetting is that it doesn’t really work Greenpeace Airlines and oil companies love talking about carbon offsetting. But to be serious about tackling climate change, they need to stop carbon emissions from getting into the atmosphere in the first place. […] Don’t get me wrong – protecting forests and restoring natural ecosystems is vital both for wildlife and the climate, but we should be doing that as well as cutting emissions directly, not as a substitute. The big problem with offsets isn’t that what they offer is bad – tree planting or renewable energy and efficiency for poor communities are all good things – but rather that they don’t do what they say on the tin. They don’t actually cancel out – er, offset – the emissions to which they are linked. Spain hit hard by rising price of olive oil as climate change takes its toll on production EuroNews Drought and extreme heatwaves have halved Spanish olive oil production. The price at origin has increased by 112 per cent since last year. […] Drought and extreme heatwaves have halved Spanish olive oil production. The price at origin has increased by 112 per cent since last year, but farmers like Jesús Anchuelo of the Small Farmers Union say they're losing money. "We've had higher production costs, historical ones, like never before. This oil that is now being sold, whose price is rising every second week, was paid to us at a price that we could barely cover production costs." Critics Furious Microsoft Is Training AI by Sucking Up Water During Drought Futurism Microsoft's data centers in West Des Moines, Iowa guzzled massive amounts of water last year, the Associated Press reported earlier this month, to keep cool while training OpenAI's ChatGPT-4, the Microsoft-backed company's most advanced publicly available large language model. Critics point out a further inconvenient detail: this happened in the midst of a more than three-year drought, further taxing a stressed water system that's been so dry this summer that nature lovers couldn't even paddle canoes in local rivers. "It's a recipe for disaster," Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement organizer Jake Grobe told Futurism. "ChatGPT is not a necessity for human life, and yet we are literally taking water to feed a computer." Central Oregon cities poke holes in state plans to tighten groundwater rules OPB News Oregon water managers are considering the most consequential water policy changes the state has seen in decades. These changes would crack down on new groundwater rights, making it more difficult for people to drill wells. Advocates say this is critical to protect the environment and ensure future water supplies, but opponents, such as leaders from Central Oregon’s fast-growing cities, say the state is going too far. The Oregon Water Resources Department wants to overhaul its rules for issuing new groundwater rights. Under the proposed changes, applicants would have to show at least five years of data to prove the groundwater is stable in the area they want to access. State law since the 1950s has called on water regulators to protect “reasonably stable” aquifer levels, but officials have never defined what that means, until now. Regulators also want updated criteria to define how wells could impact surface water. That’s because wells siphon away flows that would otherwise bubble up to feed rivers and streams. Oregon’s past approach to groundwater rights was much more permissive. For decades, regulators allowed people to pump without knowing if water was sustainably available. As a result, farmers in some places take more than nature replenishes. […] Both cities and farms have argued that the state’s proposed rules would effectively create a moratorium on new water rights, with painful economic fallout. Vaccine Scientist Warns Antiscience Conspiracies Have Become a Deadly, Organized Movement Scientific American Peter Hotez is no stranger to scientific backlash. The esteemed pediatrician and vaccinologist has been working to develop vaccines for neglected tropical diseases for decades and has encountered fierce opposition to his work. But in recent years the backlash has gained momentum and spread beyond vaccines to science and scientists in general. Hotez, who is dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, chronicles this movement in his new book The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science. The book traces Hotez’s experiences battling the false belief that vaccines cause autism (a condition that his daughter has), the highly partisan backlash to the COVID vaccines (a low-cost version of which Hotez and his colleagues helped develop) and the authoritarian roots of the antiscience movement. Scientific American spoke with Hotez about the book, the experiences he’s had as a target of antiscience attacks and the things that should be done to combat such threats. Treasury's Yellen says US overdependent on China for critical supply chains Reuters Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Tuesday the United States has become overly dependent on China for critical supply chains, particularly in clean energy products and needs to broaden out sources of supply. […] She said that she has not been "a strong believer" in industrial policy, but that the United States had stood by for too long while other countries built up semiconductor industries with massive subsidies. The U.S. would face national security concerns without a robust semiconductor sector of its own, she said, adding that last year's Chips and Science Act will help reverse that trend. Lego ditches oil-free brick in sustainability setback (alt link) Financial Times Lego has abandoned its highest-profile effort to ditch oil-based plastics from its bricks after finding that its new material led to higher carbon emissions, in a sign of the complex trade-offs companies face in their search for sustainability. The world’s largest toymaker announced two years ago that it had tested a prototype brick made of recycled plastic bottles rather than oil-based ABS, currently used in about 80 per cent of the billions of pieces it makes each year. However, Niels Christiansen, chief executive of the family-owned Danish group, told the Financial Times that using recycled polyethylene terephthalate (RPET) would have led to higher carbon emissions over the product’s lifetime as it would have required new equipment. Lego has instead decided to try to improve the carbon footprint over time of ABS, which currently needs about 2kg of petroleum to make 1kg of plastic. Why Clarence Thomas’ Trip to the Koch Summit Undermines His Ethics Defense ProPublica For months, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his allies have defended Thomas’ practice of not disclosing free luxury travel by saying the trips fell under a carve-out to the federal disclosure law for government officials. But by not publicly reporting his trips to the Bohemian Grove and to a 2018 Koch network event, Thomas appears to have violated the disclosure law, even by his own permissive interpretation of it, ethics law experts said. The details of the trips, which ProPublica first reported last month, could prove important evidence in any formal investigation of Thomas’ conduct. Thomas’ defense has centered on what’s known as the personal hospitality exemption, part of a federal law passed after Watergate that requires Supreme Court justices and many other officials to publicly report most gifts. […] But there’s an additional reason the newly revealed trips should have been disclosed. Biden Admin. Waives Dozens of Federal Laws to Build New Border Wall RollingStone The Biden administration announced on Wednesday that it is waiving 26 laws to expedite the construction of about 20 miles of a border wall in Starr County, Texas. In an announcement posted by the Department of Homeland Security on the Federal Registry, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas wrote that “there is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States” in areas of “high illegal entry.” The notice outlines a series of laws that will be waived in order to speed up the construction, many of them related to environmental regulations and reviews typically required of large-scale construction projects. They include the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Noise Control Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act, the Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act, the Fish and Wildlife Act, and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. With Iranian Girl in Coma, Suspicion Falls on Government The New York Times The 16-year-old girl, her short black hair uncovered, entered a subway car in Tehran early Sunday on her way to school, security camera footage broadcast by Iran’s state television showed. Minutes later, she was dragged out unconscious and laid on the train platform. All week, the girl, Armita Geravand, has been in a coma, guarded by security agents in the intensive care unit of a military hospital in Tehran and evoking broad comparisons with Mahsa Amini, who died last year at 22 in the custody of the morality police after being accused of violating Iran’s hijab rules, which require women to cover their hair. Exactly what happened to Armita on Sunday is not clear, and the government has not released footage from inside the train that would reveal what made the teenager collapse. Russian missile strike kills 50, Ukraine says, in one of the war's worst attacks on civilians NBC News A Russian missile tore into a small village in eastern Ukraine on Thursday as residents were gathering for a memorial service, killing more than 50 civilians, including a 6-year-old child, in one of the war’s deadliest attacks, officials in Kyiv said. The strike killed at least 51 people and wiped out around 1/6th of the entire village of Hroza, in the eastern Kharkiv region, according to Ukrainian officials. It came as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attended a summit of European leaders in a bid to shore up support for his country's fight amid fears of a U.S.-led wobble. "A demonstrably brutal Russian crime — a missile attack on an ordinary grocery store, a completely deliberate act of terrorism," Zelenskyy wrote on the messaging app Telegram. "Russian terror must be stopped." At least 80 killed as Syrian military college hit in drone attack Al Jazeera A drone attack on a military college in Syria’s Homs province during a graduation ceremony has killed at least 80 people and wounded 240 others, the Syrian health minister has said. Health Minister Hassan al-Ghabash said that civilians, including six children, and military personnel were among those killed. There were concerns the death toll could rise further as many of the wounded were in serious condition. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. U.S. F-16 fighter jet shoots down an armed Turkish drone over Syria CBS News A U.S. F-16 fighter jet shot down an armed Turkish drone that was operating near American troops in Syria Thursday after several warnings, according to U.S. officials. The shoot down came after repeated communications to stay away from U.S. ground troops near al Hasakah in northeastern Syria. This is believed to be the first time the U.S. has shot down a drone from Turkey, a NATO ally. […] There are about 900 U.S. troops operating in Syria as a part of the mission to defeat ISIS. Turkey has for the past several days been retaliating against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) for a suicide bombing that took place in Ankara Sunday. Turkey considers the Syrian Democratic Forces – who partner with the U.S. in the mission to defeat ISIS – as an arm of the PKK, which it has deemed a terrorist organization. McCarthy ouster exposes the Republican Party’s destructive tendencies The Washington Post Nine months into their reign as the majority party in the House, Republicans have brought the legislative body to a halt and themselves to an inflection point. By ousting Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) as speaker and exposing anew the destructive tendencies of their most extreme members, Republicans now risk being returned to minority status by voters in next year’s election. […] The blow was far more to the status of the Republican Party. And what is the party today? It is a party whose leader for its presidential nomination sits in a New York courtroom, who faces four other trials for criminal indictments ahead, and who promises vengeance and retribution if elected in 2024. It is also a party with a tight group of rebels in the House who have shown that they can make turmoil the order of the day in Congress. That doesn’t mean Republicans will lose the election in 2024, given how closely divided the country remains politically. But nothing that happened on Tuesday can be seen as helpful in achieving that goal. Trump allegedly discussed US nuclear subs with foreign national after leaving White House: Sources ABC News Months after leaving the White House, … Donald Trump allegedly discussed potentially sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines with a member of his Mar-a-Lago Club -- an Australian billionaire who then allegedly shared the information with scores of others, including more than a dozen foreign officials, several of his own employees, and a handful of journalists… Prosecutors and FBI agents have at least twice this year interviewed the Mar-a-Lago member, Anthony Pratt, who runs U.S.-based Pratt Industries, one of the world's largest packaging companies. In those interviews, Pratt described how -- looking to make conversation with Trump during a meeting at Mar-a-Lago in April 2021 -- he brought up the American submarine fleet, which the two had discussed before, the sources told ABC News. Judge Tries to Stop Trump From Hiding His Money The Daily Beast The judge who doomed Donald Trump’s family business last week took an aggressive and preemptive step on Wednesday to ensure the former president can't secretly shift assets to salvage his real estate empire. In an order that was posted on the fourth day of the former president’s bank fraud trial, Justice Arthur F. Engoron commanded that the Trumps identify any corporations they have—and come clean about any plans to move around money in an attempt to hide or keep their wealth. It's a powerful maneuver meant to counter the sort of underhanded moves Trump has displayed so far during the three-year investigation. The Next Targets for the Group That Overturned Roe The New Yorker Magazine On March 15, 2023, two conservative Christian lawyers asked a federal judge in Amarillo, Texas, for a ruling that they privately considered an almost impossible long shot. They demanded a nationwide ban on mifepristone, a pill used in half the abortions in America. The drug had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for more than twenty years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. During the pandemic, the agency began allowing prescriptions to be filled by mail, to accommodate social distancing. But the lawyers, from a group called Alliance Defending Freedom, were on a winning streak. Founded three decades ago as a legal-defense fund for conservative Christian causes, A.D.F. had become that movement’s most influential arm. In the past dozen years, its lawyers had won fourteen Supreme Court victories, including overturning Roe v. Wade; allowing employer-sponsored health insurance to exclude birth control; rolling back limits on government support for religious organizations; protecting the anonymity of donors to advocacy groups; blocking pandemic-related public-health rules; and establishing the right of a baker to refuse to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. Capitalizing on its success, A.D.F. had tripled its revenue over that period, to more than a hundred million dollars a year. It now had seventy or so in-house lawyers, including the former solicitors general of Michigan and Nebraska and the former United States Attorney for Missouri. The lawyers sent to Amarillo were Erik Baptist, a former top lawyer for the Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald Trump, and Erin Hawley, a Yale Law graduate who had clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, advised the Attorney General under President George W. Bush, and worked on the team that overturned Roe. (She is married to Senator Josh Hawley, of Missouri.) Thanks to the rightward shift of the courts under Trump, A.D.F. lawyers now often find a sympathetic audience on the federal bench. FBI interviewed individuals who accuse Amy Coney Barrett faith group of abuse The Guardian The FBI has interviewed several individuals who have alleged they were abused by members of the People of Praise (PoP), a secretive Christian sect that counts conservative supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett as a lifelong member, according to sources familiar with the matter. The individuals were contacted following a years-long effort by a group called PoP Survivors, who have called for the South Bend-based sect to be investigated for leaders’ handling of sexual abuse allegations. The body, which has 54 members, has alleged that abuse claims were routinely mishandled or covered up for decades in order to protect the close-knit faith group. It is not clear whether the FBI has launched a formal investigation into the PoP. Marshals sent to seize helicopter owned by WV Gov. Justice business over debt to owner of Russian mining company West Virginina Metro News U.S. marshals are being instructed to seize a 2009 Bell helicopter belonging to a company owned by Gov. Jim Justice and his family because of unpaid debt. Caroleng Investments Limited, parent company to the Russian mining company Mechel that bought and sold properties with Justice, is seeking the seizure over a debt of $8.4 million already recognized and awarded in the federal court system. A supplemental writ of execution filed in federal court today instructs marshals to seize the helicopter located at the Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional Airport in Virginia “or elsewhere in this district, including all logs and records, all accessories, attachments, parts, repairs, additions, accessories, substitutions, exchanges related to the helicopter.” Bizarre year for sea ice notches another record Ars Technica Sometimes, data points deemed to be “outliers” are met with suspicion—possibly the result of an error in the measuring process, for example. But outliers can also represent a puzzling thing that really happened. This year’s floating sea ice cover around Antarctica falls into that latter category. On September 25, the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) published preliminary dates and numbers for the annual maximum sea ice coverage in the Antarctic and minimum coverage in the Arctic. With the last few days of September in the books, NSIDC noted Wednesday that those determinations have held. […] Focusing just on 2023, it’s not easy to pin down the combination of factors responsible. But some research is pointing to water temperatures, which have been notably warm recently. But this, too, depends on more than global warming pushing heat into the ocean, as the variable circulation of seawater is important to local temperatures. Climate Collapse Could Happen Fast The Atlantic [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/5/2197632/-Overnight-News-Digest-Climate-change-models-likely-severely-underestimate-economic-damage?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/