About The Weather

When I woke up yesterday, Memeorandum was offering only one story-- out of scores-- that wasn't Kavanaugh-related, a Washington Post piece by Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney: Trump administration sees a 7-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100. "Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous 7 degrees by the end of this century." Earlier the NY Times had run a unintentionally related piece by Coral Davenport, E.P.A. to Eliminate Office That Advises Agency Chief on Science.

Among the many reasons for which a sane society would be clamoring for immediate impeachment of Trump is his regime's nonchalance-- at best-- towards climate change. Axios' recent reporting would have us believe there's little to worry about because Big Oil is taking up the slack: The oil industry takes on climate change despite Trump's rollback. So even if the Trump regime's ideological attitude is putting the planet at risk, "a tangible shift over the last two years is sharpening among the world’s biggest oil companies, including in America, to more readily acknowledge and address climate change. The trend, fueled by investor and lawsuit pressure, is underway regardless of, and partly in response to, President Trump’s retreat on the matter... Goldman Sachs’ co-head of global natural resources, Gonzalo Garcia, said in a presentation at a conference in Norway Wednesday that he’s "probably spent more time talking with oil company executives about the energy shift and renewables in the last two years than the previous 23 put together." Garcia says he predicts U.S. companies like Exxon and Chevron will invest in renewables like their counterparts in Europe.

A week earlier, the same reporter, Amy Harder, wrote that Some of America’s most powerful U.S.-based oil companies-- ExxonMobil, Chevron and Occidental Petroleum-- are joining a global consortium of oil and gas producers seeking to address climate change. "The companies," she wrote, "are the first U.S.-based members of the group, called the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative. This is one of the strongest signs yet of how America’s biggest oil companies, under pressure from investors and lawsuits, are joining most other U.S. corporations in working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions despite President Trump reversing America’s course on the matter." Exxon CEO Darren Woods: "It will take the collective efforts of many in the energy industry and society to develop scalable, affordable solutions that will be needed to address the risks of climate change."

CEOs of several major, publicly traded oil companies say they support carbon taxes and back a separate group writing a proposal for one. But the companies are not actively lobbying Congress to embrace the policy. That disconnect will grow harder to reconcile as their public commitments to address climate change, such as through groups like this, grow.

No doubt. Meanwhile, in the real world, the Weather Channel reported this week that NASA says that Climate Change Is Causing Earth to Wobble on Its Axis, NASA Says. No, really.

For the first time, scientists have identified why Earth wobbles as it spins.

The decrease in Greenland's ice mass is the main reason for the wobble, NASA says.

Changes in the Earth's wobble could impact the accuracy of satellite tools like GPS systems, according to NASA.

Climate change is impacting how Earth spins on its axis, NASA says. Over the past century, Earth’s axis-- the imaginary line that passes through the North and South Poles-- has drifted about 4 inches, and a decrease in Greenland's ice mass is the main contributor to the wobble, the space agency has announced.

As temperatures increased throughout the 20th century because of humans, Greenland's ice mass decreased.

"A total of about 7,500 gigatons-- the weight of more than 20 million Empire State Buildings-- of Greenland's ice melted into the ocean during this time period," NASA said in a press release. "This makes Greenland one of the top contributors of mass being transferred to the oceans, causing sea level to rise and, consequently, a drift in Earth's spin axis."