Steve Schmidt, bless his pointy Republican head, makes a very important point here.
And to underscore the point, let me ask you this: How do we go from having an “election” to having a “president elect”?
The process is actually a bit subtle and somewhat more complicated than one might think. Election day happens, but there is no “president elect” in any official, constitutional, way, for a very long time thereafter.
Though this can vary, the first possible date that we will have a “president elect” in the current election cycle is on January 6th, 2017. Not before.
Of course, what really happens, is that the country’s news agencies, in an uncoordinated yet organically coordinated way, decide which of the states, and thus their electoral votes, goes to each candidate, and if they become certain at some point that 270 or more electoral votes will go to one of the candidates, then they declare that person the winner.
But, what really reallyhappens, as pointed out as Steve Schmidt, is that the loser apparent of the election becomes the first person to address, usually by a phone call, the winner apparent. John McCain called up Barack Obama and called him “Mr. President.” Al Gore called up George Bush and called him “Mr. President.”
Watch the video to see what a former Republican looks like, and to get some interesting perspective on Trump’s claims that the election is being rigged. More importantly, listen to what Schmidt says about the importance of the apparent fact that Donald Trump has no intention of ever calling Hillary Clinton “Madam President.”
And that could be a problem.
Watch the whole thing:
The founding fathers were unwilling or unable to do two things. One was to see centuries into the future, and thus avoid certain ambiguities, missing elements, or general silliness in their founding father’s document, the Constitution of the United States of America. The other was to tie up certain details so that procedure was set in stone, as opposed to followed by somewhat flexible agreed upon convention.
If the Congress is a GOP congress, and they continue to act as they have been acting with respect to the Supreme Court nomination, when January 6th comes around, Donald Trump may well become the president. Or at least, they could try that.
And there would be a Civil War.
The first Civil War was fought over slavery. The second Civil War will be fought over racism and misogyny.
On April 14th, 1912, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg during her maiden voyage. The collision occurred at 11:40 PM ships time, and by 2:20 AM the ship broke apart and foundered with over a thousand people still on board. Of the 2,224 people on board just over 700 were rescued.
There have been a number of theories about the iceberg; where did it come from, why were there so many icebergs in the area at the time, how big was it, and so on. It has become general belief that the number of ice bergs in the area was exceptionally large. However, a new paper released a few minutes ago suggests that this is not the case, and also questions some of the other theories about ice berg calving that year are also now in question.
Yes, there were a lot of icebergs that year, about 2.5 times above the average year. Iceberg experts focus on the number of ice bergs that float south of 48 degrees N latitude, and during the iceberg season of 1912 it is estimated that 1038 of the things passed that line. So that’s a lot, but according to this research, it is less than the 90th percentile for the century-plus period for which data are available.
Importantly, the number of icebergs in the region has gone up recently. Figure 4 from the paper shows the erratic annual data, with a clear increase in the last several decades.
There are probably a few reasons for this. The main reason is probably the IIP itself, which keeps track of icebergs and provides important information to the ships. Another set of reasons probably has to do with the technology of seeing icebergs and communicating about them. This makes the iceberg situation along the Labrador and Newfoundland coast a microcosm of a larger question we have these days about the effects of climate change. There has been a recent and rather heated debate about this. Roger Pielke Junior has produced a number of studies that seem to show that there has been no effect of climate change on the outcome of natural disasters such as major storms. There are a number of reasons that this research is probably wrong, including the fact that the effects of major storms has increased in some cases because of factors directly linked to climate change. The most obvious of this includes increased sea surface temperatures powering up a handful of otherwise already large hurricanes to cause more of a punch (eg. Katrina, Haiyan, Sandy) and increased sea levels resulting in higher storm surges. But also missing from Pielke’s analysis is the fact that some of the effect, or more exactly, the cost, of such events is prepaid in the form of preparation. New York City was aware of the fact that their subways were likely to flood when Superstorm Sandy came along (which itself may have been an effect of climate change due to increased sea surface temperatures and unusual steering winds resulting from Arctic Amplification effects) so they were able to shut down or otherwise secure certain systems. For that to happen there needed to be an ongoing system of making predictions about tropical storms. Similarly, rebuilding or retrofitting infrastructure to handle larger storm surges is something we are going to see all along coastal areas. Also, properties that may have been high value because of their sea-side location in many areas now have very little residential or commercial value because they have to be disoccupied.
In the case of North Atlantic Icebergs, ships don’t run into them because we have spent time, effort, and money to not let that happen, every year since the Titanic. If one did a Pielke style analysis of the effects of icebergs in the region it might look like this:
A Pielke Style Analysis of the effects of climate change via iceberg-ship collisions
And that would be misleading.
The current budget of the IIP is just under 6.0 million dollars a year, which doesn’t seem like much given the benefits, but to this we must add the additional costs of ships following suboptimal routes because of iceberg threats and the costs of all those technologies and procedures that they follow. The point is, the cost of increased icebergs in the North Atlantic is not zero based on a lack of collisions. It is non-zero and to the extent that there is a correlation between bad iceberg years and costs, it is increased with more icebergs and there are more icebergs.
The researchers carried out a nifty modeling program of iceberg formation in the Titanic year, in part to test some of the ideas previously presented. One of the more interesting ideas was that an exceptionally high tide had lifted the glacial margins more than usual and this caused the production of more icebergs than usual. But this research sowed that the Titanic iceberg came from a part of the Greenland coast that would have been frozen fast during that short interval, so this is unlikely. Also, the increase that year as well as at other times of iceberg formation is thought to be related to a change in weather conditions in Greenland. This is complicated and not well understood, and the subject of work in progress by one of the authors. For now, it appears that relatively warm conditions in the Arctic result in changes in snowfall pattern that affect iceberg formation in the fall, which then propagates to additional icebergs passing south of 48 degrees North latitude over the next few years.
Between the increase in iceberg formation under current warm Arctic conditions and the extreme lack of sea ice in the region which tempts ships north, we can expect there to be more potential contacts between boat and ice over coming years. I’m thinking the International Ice Patrol should get a funding bump. Just in case.
