" WASHINGTON — Hurricane Florence has drenched eastern North Carolina with more than 30 inches of rain, an all-time record for the state. Last year, Hurricane Harvey stalled over Houston and dumped more than 60 inches of rain, an all-time record for the whole country. Also last year, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island of Puerto Rico and caused, according to an independent study, nearly 3,000 deaths.

Welcome to the new normal.

Tropical cyclones are nothing new, of course. But climate scientists say that global warming should make such storms wetter, slower and more intense — which is exactly what seems to be happening. And if we fail to act, these kinds of devastating weather events will likely become even more frequent and more severe.

Climate change is a global phenomenon. Authorities in the Philippines are still trying to assess the damage and death toll from Super Typhoon Mangkhut, a rare Category 5-equivalent storm that struck the archipelago on Saturday with sustained winds of 165 miles per hour. Mangkhut went on to batter Hong Kong, and now, as it weakens, is plowing across southern China.

Every human being on the planet has a stake in what governments do to limit and adapt to climate change, including those who, like President Trump, prefer to believe global warming is some kind of hoax. I doubt the citizens of Wilmington — a lovely resort town that Monday was turned into an island by widespread flooding — feel there is anything illusory about the hardship they’re going through.

As I noted last month, scientists are now cautiously making the first serious attempts to gauge the impact of climate change on specific weather events such as storms, monsoons, droughts and heat waves.

The most ambitious attempt to quantify the link between climate and weather — a blue-chip international consortium called World Weather Attribution — has not yet made an attempt to estimate any possible effect global warming may have had on Florence or Mangkhut.

But another group of researchers, the Climate Extremes Modeling Group at the Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, estimated Sept. 12 that Florence would produce 50 percent more rainfall than if human-induced global warming had not occurred.

You don’t have to be a scientist to understand why that makes sense.

We know from direct measurement that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by more than 40 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when humans started burning fossil fuels on a large scale. We know from direct observation that carbon dioxide traps heat. We know from direct measurement that both atmospheric and ocean temperatures have been rising sharply. We know from direct measurement that warmer water takes up more space than cooler water, which is the main reason why ocean levels are rising.

We know that warmer water is more easily evaporated, which means there is more moisture available to fuel a storm like Florence or Harvey — and to be released by such storms as rainfall.

If humankind suddenly stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, we would still have to adapt to the climatic changes we have already set in motion. The excess carbon dioxide we have pumped into the atmosphere will remain there for thousands of years. We will be coping with massive tropical storms, tragic coastal and riverine flooding, deadly heat waves and unprecedented wildfires for the rest of our lives.

At the very least, we should be trying to reduce carbon emissions and keep global warming to a manageable level. With the landmark Paris Agreement, the nations of the world agreed to try. But Trump foolishly pulled the United States — the world’s second-biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, behind only China — out of the deal.

The administration has already proposed weakening restrictions on carbon emissions from automobiles and coal-fired power plants. And last week, there were reports that the administration also wants to loosen rules governing the release of methane, which traps even more heat than carbon dioxide.

Climate change is no longer theoretical. It is real, it is all around us, and it is going to get much worse.  "

" They didn’t quite get it all scrubbed from cyberspace quickly enough. High School yearbooks from Holton Arms preparatory school (Bethesda, Maryland, 1982-1985) purportedly show Brett Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey-Ford as a wild party girl in a wild party era, with yearbook passages by classmates bragging of spending the night with adult men during “Beach Week” and enjoying male strippers in G-strings for “Sweet 16” birthday parties. 

Let the slut shaming allegations begin. As Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s rape accuser today finally reaches terms for an invited offer for Senate testimony Thursday, (after initially refusing a Monday testimony deadline, saying through her attorney that a Monday timeframe set by Republicans was quote, “arbitrary,”) the inevitable levy break of background information allegedly reveals Christine Blasey-Ford as a prolific high school party girl who is alleged to have bragged to a friend of having 54 sexual partners prior to college.  If true, the emergence of five high school yearbooks from exclusive college preparatory school, Holton Arms (Bethesda, Maryland) destroys Blasey-Ford’s self portrayal as an innocent coed “church mouse” taken advantage of by an aggressive sexual predator.

Even summarizing the totality of what the yearbooks contain is difficult, given that it paints a picture of hedonistic, debauched teenage behavior in which Christine Blasey-Ford is alleged to have not only indulged but promoted and led as an acknowledged focal point of American Pie, or Animal House-style fraternizing with eager young men, often in (by Holton Arms classmates’ descriptions) alcohol-saturated social settings that left participants unable to recall exactly what had taken place.  One excerpt from a yearbook entry detailed the philosophy of binge drinking to memory loss as a necessity of the Holton Arms party scene:

One friend, (identified briefly on social media) alleges Blasey-Ford (Holton Arms, Class of 1984) suffered no memory loss whatsoever in describing and bragging about her sexual conquests and paramours, identifying 54 sexual partners between her junior year of high school and enrollment in college. The social media post (below) claims Blasey-Ford previously allegedly admitted to being an alcoholic in high school and regretted, “being so easy,” in high school.  She is alleged to have told the best friend that she had 54 sexual partners between 11th grade and enrollment in college.  The post also identified Blasey-Ford as a liberal activist with an obvious sensitivity to Supreme Court ideology, once writing on social media, “Scalia-types must be banned from law!”

As quickly as the images began to emerge on social media Monday, Blasey-Ford’s supporters worked this week to scrub them or have them taken down from various outlets. The entries describe wild drunken romps with boys, binge drinking blackouts, birthday parties with male strippers and the benefits of passing out drunk to avoid guilt and shame of alleged sexual activity.  On one yearbook page, a passage is dedicated to artful description of a “Sweet 16” birthday party for one Blasey-Ford, Holton Arms classmate, complete with a male stripper wearing a gold G-string and dancing to the delight of the obviously underage attendees:

“The tenth grade taught us how to party also and Martha (redacted) usually provided the circumstances in which to do so. Celebrating her sweet sixteen or just the weekend. Martha managed to entertain her guests with her hospitality, her pool (after descummification), and her erotic male dancer, the latter in his gold G-string, being by far the most effective.”

Multiple Holton Arms yearbook entries show racy images purported to be Blasey-Ford in evocative clothing and sensuous repose, including photos of three minors dressed provocatively in Playboy Bunny and French maid costumes. (Redacted photos are allegedly much racier.) The caption describes underage high school girls dancing seductively in the middle of a highway during “Beach Week,” and then enticing some (adult?) men to come back to their apartment for binge drinking and a night of whatever libidinous fun might have transpired:

“Beach week culminated the year for those of us lucky enough to go. With school and our minds in temporary recess, we were able to release all those troubling inhibitions of the past year. While dancing in the middle of coastal Highway, Ann [redacted last name] and friends picked up some men who passed out in their apartment…”

Other passages hint at the dating habits and adventurous process of selecting boys for romantic interest and activity, indicating that some female members of the Holton Arms senior class preferred freshman and sophomore boys as their companions:  “Other seniors preferred to expand their horizons and date younger men, usually sophomores, who could bring the vitality and freshness of innocence to a relationship.”

It’s not clear who began redacting the photos and entries and who spearheaded the scrubbing operation that became a race against independent outlets who snapped up the photos as soon as they became public knowledge.

What is known is that Blasey-Ford avoided public revelation of her accusations until the conclusion of Kavanaugh’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearings and now, shows no interest in meeting a Friday deadline to testify under oath to her allegation of sexual assault against him, which in context, even if it were true, seems one of the tamer things that might ever happened in her high school career in what public yearbook accounts reveal as a WASP-ish, elitist East Coast, upper crust bacchanal scene in the 1980’s.

Blasey-Ford has now agreed tentatively to testify Thursday (9/27) before the Senate Judiciary Committee, though sources say fine details of that appearance are still a matter of discussion between Blasey-Ford’s attorneys and GOP Senate leadership. "

"  Is the Korea denuclearization process for real? "

David Ignatius on Sep 21, 2018

" WASHINGTON -- After the big bang of the Singapore summit in June, with its showy but vague North Korean commitment to denuclearization, many analysts doubted that the deal had any real substance. But we're beginning to see the first signs of what a serious accord would look like.

This week's North-South summit meeting in Pyongyang produced accord on some basic essentials of a real denuclearization process. North Korea agreed to accept internal inspectors to monitor destruction of one of its test sites, a first step toward the broader inspection process that will be essential for any verifiable pact.

North Korea also agreed in principle to dismantle its main nuclear-weapons facility at Yongbyon, though the details are fuzzy and its offer is conditioned on reciprocal U.S. "corresponding measures." Finally, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week floated a timetable (without objection from North Korea) for completion of denuclearization by 2021. That is aspirational, to put it generously, but it at least provides a baseline for the U.S. to protest if Pyongyang delays.

The Trump administration seems willing to offer some version of the desired "corresponding measures" as a confidence-building step that would facilitate the Yongbyon shutdown. North Korea wants a formal declaration of the end of the state of war, but it's unclear what precise formula the U.S. will propose.

Meanwhile, President Trump continues his mutual flattery with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Trump keeps cheerleading for a deal, tweeting Tuesday that emerging signs of detente between the Koreas are "very exciting." And Kim said this week that he wants a second meeting with Trump to ratify the moves toward nuclearization.

This week's summit between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in also advanced Kim's fundamental goal of economic modernization. That's the significance of the proposed bid for a joint North-South Olympics in 2032. Managing such a global event would be impossible without massive upgrading of the North's infrastructure over the next decade.

Steve Biegun, the State Department's special envoy, will be traveling soon to Pyongyang with Pompeo. One thing Biegun brings to the table is his experience as a Ford Motor Co. executive, which will help him explain, in business terms, what it would mean for North Korea to join the global economy.

What's not to like about this week's Korean diplomacy? First, there are still far more questions than answers. Framing this agreement is a bit like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. You find the straight edges that define the parameter, then start inserting the hard-to-fit pieces in the center. The most difficult pieces are usually saved for last, and negotiators could be left with a big empty space in the middle of this deal.

A second concern is that the diplomacy is driven by the two Koreas and their reunification ambitions. Reunification is popular in both countries, but problematic for regional neighbors and for the countries themselves. Will South Korea really bankroll modernization of a country that is anti-democratic, xenophobic and has a history of belligerence?


U.S. military officials, and their counterparts in Japan, will want to look very carefully at details of the inter-Korean military agreement announced this week. According to South Korea's Yonhap News Agency, it may include "pulling out some border guard posts and setting up air, maritime and ground buffer zones." The U.S. military command in Seoul said Thursday it would "thoroughly review" the pact, which indicates the U.S. hadn't cleared it beforehand.

A final problem for this deal is that it's too linked to Trump, a polarizing and politically fragile president. North Korean commentators continue to anchor their denuclearization offer to Trump. A commentary last weekend in the state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper stressed that "President Trump ... repeatedly expresses his thanks" for recent progress.

The Rodong Sinmun piece also included this backhanded statement of North Korea's expectation that Trump will offer the key concession Pyongyang wants: "We have not heard him saying that he will not do a declaration of the end of the war." And the commentary offers this obtuse reassurance: "Doing what we say we will do and seeing what we have started through to the end is our mettle and temperament."

"I worry that in terms of the U.S. political calendar, we are already over the cliff, and that Korea policy is going to be a victim," cautions Robert Carlin, a former CIA analyst who has traveled to North Korea more than two dozen times.

Is the Korea denuclearization process for real? Many hardline U.S. military and national-security officials remain skeptical. The outer boundaries of the agreement are becoming clearer. But the middle is a big blur. "