Globally NOAA just reported that June is the fourth month in a row of record global temperatures, and the first half of 2010 is on a record pace.  This is all the more powerful evidence of human-caused warming “because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect,” as a recent NASA paper noted.

Globally nine countries have smashed all-time temperature records, “making 2010 the year with the most national extreme heat records,” as meteorologist Jeff Masters has reported.

“This is a serious abnormality. The Russian weather service has never measured such temperatures in Moscow in July,” said Dmitry Kiktyov, Deputy Director of the Hydrometeorological Center of Russia.

Daily highs outpaced daily lows across the United States nearly 5-to-1 in June and over 3-to-1 in July — whereas the ratio for the decade of the 2000s was 2.04-to-1, up from 1.36-to-1 in the 1990s (see below).

Sunday, the New York Times dedicated six stories on the weather across the country.  Six!  There were four regional “human interest” stories:

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Scientific American:  Study in Krakow, Poland, corroborate NYC findings that links children’s lower IQ scores with mothers’ exposure to compounds created by burning of fossil fuels

In a sweltering summer in New York City back in 1999, Yolanda Baldwin was eight months pregnant with her first child. She lived near a gas station and across the street from an intersection choked with exhaust-spewing cars and buses. Sometimes the air was so thick with pollution that she could see it, breathe it, smell it, even taste it. And she often wondered what it might be doing to her unborn child.

Now Baldwin and several hundred other mothers whose sons and daughters have been monitored for a decade have an answer: Before children even take their first breath, common air pollutants breathed by their mothers during pregnancy may reduce their intelligence.

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Tony Hayward, the BP CEO who wanted his life back after the travails of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, will be replaced by managing director Robert Dudley on October 1. Hayward was excoriated for minimizing the disaster and complaining about the public outcry. Media reports on the expected transition emphasize that the little-known Dudley is an American from Mississippi, now in charge of BP’s Gulf Coast response. However, there is little reason to expect that the incoming BP CEO will change anything other than the accent. In his public appearances, Dudley has defended Tony Hayward, minimized the toxic threat, and greenwashed BP’s chaotic record:

Describing the dispersant Corexit, a combination of petroleum distillates, propylene glycol, and dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate:

It is essentially like soap. It’s like dish soap. [PBS Newshour, May 19]

On Corexit, again:

It’s not far off of the toxicity levels of dish soap. [PBS Newshour, July 1]

Dismissing the threat of oil to the Gulf Coast:

We’re not seeing anything like what you see in Louisiana in any of the other states.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Yet, you’re saying?

ROBERT DUDLEY: I don’t think that’s going to happen, Judy. [PBS Newshour, May 25]

Blaming the blowout preventer for the disaster:

The failure of the blowout preventers, which is the ultimate multiple redundant fail-safe system, has not happened like this before. [CNN State of the Union, May 30]

On Tony Hayward:

I think he’s done a great job of leading a company to stand up and do the right thing. . . . I think Tony’s doing a fantastic job. [Meet the Press, May 30]

Why America needs to let BP keep making huge profits:

I think I would look at some of the process today as just making sure that through that sentiment we don’t actually shoot the dog who is trying to bring home the bone and meet its obligations all across the Gulf, and we are going to be there a long time. [Fox News, June 16]

Whatever Bob Dudley’s roots, he is now, like Tony Hayward, a millionaire living in England with the mission of converting oil into cash. Dudley will return to BP’s London headquarters to run the toxic oil giant, continuing its shareholder-focused gamble on extreme deepwater drilling and catastrophic pollution throughout the world, from Azerbaijan to Libya.

He’s off to Siberia … literally, switching jobs with Bob Dudley who headed Russian operations “before leaving in disgrace”

Tony Hayward, who became the face of BP’s flailing efforts to contain the massive Gulf oil spill, will step down as chief executive in October and be offered a job with the company’s joint venture in Russia, a person familiar with the matter said Monday.

Looks like BP reads Climate Progress after all (see “Time to fire BP CEO Tony Hayward).

Seriously, though, while Hayward tried to blame his predecessor and pretty much everybody else for this disaster — see Is BP the Goldman Sachs of Big Oil? CEO Hayward says to fellow executives: “What the hell did we do to deserve this?” — let’s remember that even though Hayward became CEO in May 2007, Hayward became “Chief Executive of exploration and production in January 2003.” Hayward created whatever safety culture the explorers and producers have that led to the disaster.

The BBC notes “Mr Hayward began his career with BP 28 years ago as a rig geologist.”  As CEO, Hayward also put the company through ruthless cost-cutting that certainly lead to fatal corner cutting (see”The three causes of BP’s Titanic oil disaster: Recklessness, Arrogance, and Hubris“).

Now here’s where things get weird — no, I mean, really weird — Hayward has not been fired, so he retains his mammoth pension (see update below).  Instead, he is apparently switching jobs with BP’s Bob Dudley and, as Business Insider reports, “Dudley was the head of Russian operations before leaving in disgrace“:

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The Audacity of Nope: Republicans embrace Marxism

Groucho Marx, that is:

I was reminded of that song by the Washington Post story, “GOP lawmakers optimistic about ‘no’ votes“:

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Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Tom Toles for thee!

The Pulitzer prize-winner once again shows a cartoon is worth a thousand tweets — plus a bonus Meat Loaf video below:

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