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California's "climate apocalypse" shows the future scientists have warned about is here

13 September 2020
 Dan Ackermann

"California is being pushed to extremes," the L.A. Times reports in today's lead story. "And the record heat, fires and pollution all have one thing in common: They were made worse by climate change."

Why it matters: "Their convergence is perhaps the strongest signal yet that the calamity climate scientists have warned of for years isn’t far off in the future; it is here today and can no longer be ignored."

  • Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather said: "People who have lived in California for 30, 40 years are saying this is unprecedented, it has never been this hot, it has never been this smoky."

The big picture ... California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), on Friday: "California, folks, is America — fast forward." (hat tip: ABC's "This Week")

Photo: Nick Otto for The Washington Post, via Getty Images

This photo of downtown San Francisco was taken at 11:15 a.m. Wednesday, with the city blanketed in an eerie haze from wildfires.

The WashPost pulls back the camera and declares, "The California Dream has become the California Compromise":

  • The San Francisco cityscape "resembles the surface of a distant planet, populated by a masked alien culture. The air, choked with blown ash, is difficult to breathe."
  • "There is the Golden Gate Bridge, looming in the distance through a drift-smoke haze, and the Salesforce Tower, which against the blood-orange sky appears as a colossal spaceship in a doomsday film."

What's next, per The Post: "California has become a warming, burning, epidemic-challenged and expensive state, with many who live in sophisticated cities, idyllic oceanfront towns and windblown mountain communities thinking hard about the viability of a place they have called home forever."

  • "For the first time in a decade, more people left California last year for other states than arrived."
Via CNN

Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times

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Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.

Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.

The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.

  • The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.

What the transcripts say:

  • Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
  • The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
  • Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."

Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.