TUESDAY, AUGUST 6 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
Politics & the Nation
BY BRADY DENNIS
AND ANDREW FREEDMANDuring the hottest month that
humans have recorded, a local
television station in the Nether-
lands aired nonstop images of
wintry landscapes to help viewers
momentarily forget the heat wave
outside.
Officials in Switzerland and
elsewhere painted stretches of rail
tracks white, hoping to keep them
from buckling in the extreme heat.
At the port of Antwerp, two
alleged drug dealers called police
for help after they got stuck inside
a sweltering shipping container
filled with cocaine.
On Monday, scientists officially
pronounced July 2019 the warm-
est month the world has experi-
enced since record-keeping began
more than a century ago.
How hot was it?
Wildfires raged across millions
of acres in the Arctic. A massive ice
melt in Greenland sent 197 billion
tons of water pouring into the
Atlantic Ocean, raising sea levels.
And temperature records evapo-
rated, one after another: 101.7 de-
grees Fahrenheit in Cambridge,
England, and 108.7 in Paris. The
same in Lingen, Germany.
“We have always lived through
hot summers. But this is not the
summer of our youth. This is not
your grandfather’s summer,” Unit-
ed Nations Secretary General
António Guterres told reporters
as July gave way to August.
The Copernicus Climate
Change Service, a program of the
European Union, calculated that
last month narrowly edged out
July 2016 for the ominous distinc-
tion of hottest month on record.
The month beat July 2016 by
about 0.07 degrees (0.04 Celsius).
Scientists found that the planet
is headed for one of its hottest
years, and the period from 2015 to
2019 is likely to go down as the
warmest five-year period in mod-
ern times.
“July has rewritten climate his-
tory, with dozens of new tempera-
ture records at [the] local, nation-
al and global level,” Petteri Taalas,
secretary general of the World Me-
teorological Organization, said in
announcing the month’s historic
implications. “This is not science
fiction. It is the reality of climate
change. It is happening now, and
it will worsen in the future with-
out urgent climate action.”
The Copernicus ranking was
generated by taking millions of
readings from weather balloons,
satellites, buoys and other sources
on an hourly basis and feeding
them into a computer model.
The results still must be
checked against data from thou-
sands of temperature measuring
sites around the world. Those
readings ultimately will be report-
ed by NASA, the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration,
and other agencies in the coming
weeks. While their rankings could
vary, the final results are not likely
to differ significantly, according to
scientists.
Notably, July’s monthly tem-
perature record comes without
the added influence of a strong “El
Niño” in the tropical Pacific
Ocean, which adds heat to the
oceans and atmosphere and helps
boost planetary temperatures.
The 2016 record, for example, oc-
curred during a year with an ex-
tremely strong El Niño.
“While we don’t expect every
year to set a new record, the fact
that it’s happening every few years
is a clear sign of a warming cli-
mate,” said Zeke Hausfather, a cli-
mate scientist with Berkeley
Earth.
From scorching heat in Europe
to gargantuan wildfires in Siberia
and Alaska, the record heat of July
2019 left its mark on people and
the ecosystems they depend on.
The monthly temperature
spike was driven largely by record
warmth in Western Europe, in-
cluding the searing heat wave that
made its way to the Arctic and
culminated in one of the mostsignificant melt events ever re-
corded in Greenland. The Green-
land ice sheet poured 197 billion
tons of water into the North Atlan-
tic in July alone — enough to raise
global sea levels by 0.5 millime-
ters, or 0.02 inches.
Alaska also saw its warmest
month on record. There and else-
where across the Arctic, simulta-
neous and massive wildfires
erupted, consuming millions of
acres and emitting startling
amounts of greenhouse gases.
Arctic sea ice was at a record low
for the month.
In Canada, a military installa-
tion in Alert, Nunavut — the
northernmost permanently in-
habited place on Earth — record-
ed 69.8 degrees on July 14, break-
ing a record set in 1956. The aver-
age July high for the outpost, some
600 miles from the North Pole, is
44.6 degrees.
In Belgium, one zoo fed its ti-
gers with chickens frozen into
blocks of ice. In Paris, local offi-
cials set up impromptu “cooling
rooms” in each neighborhood
where people could find air condi-
tioning and cold water.
In parts of Germany, authori-
ties were forced to lower auto-
bahn speed limits over concernsthat the high-speed motorways
might suffer heat damage. Unde-
terred, one motor scooter rider
took to the roads of eastern Ger-
many but was stopped after offi-
cers spotted him wearing nothing
aside from a helmet.
Residents took matters into
their own hands in the German
capital, Berlin, circulating maps
on social media that showed the
locations of air-conditioned pub-
lic spaces. Portable air condition-
ers and fans quickly sold out, and
one company that installs air con-
ditioners suspended its phone
service. A recorded voice message
cited a flood of calls that it was no
longer able to handle.
Damodhar Ughade, a cotton
farmer in the village of Seeras in
western India’s Vidarbha region,
felt like he was reliving a night-
mare in July after a devastating
heat wave the month before.
While droughts due to delayed
monsoons are not infrequent, this
year was the worst since 1972,
when scores of people left their
arid villages and migrated to cit-
ies. As temperatures soared to 102
degrees, his fields lay parched, his
livestock starved, and the village
ran out of drinking water.
“There were two-foot cracks inmy field. It was impossible to even
walk on it,” he said by phone. The
lack of reliable water led women
to walk two hours to other villag-
es, carrying earthen pots on their
heads in search of water. Men
rented small vehicles and carried
tankers to nearby cities to buy
water.
The scarcity was so severe that
there was not enough water to
share with the oxen. About 15 died
in the village, he said.
In England, 22-year-old Andrea
D’Aleo had the unenviable job of
shuttling passengers down the
River Cam — the main river that
flows through Cambridge, a sce-
nic university town about 60 miles
north of London. He was standing
at the back of a long, flat-bot-
tomed boat, digging a long pole
against the river bed. Normally, he
said, umbrellas are used to fend
off rain showers, but on Thursday,
tourists used them as parasols.
“It was challenging,” D’Aleo
said of working as a tour guide in
the intense heat. “I was talking to a
bunch of umbrellas while dying in
the sun.”
Four years ago in Paris, world
leaders committed to doing all
they could to prevent the globe
from warming more than 3.6 de-grees Fahrenheit (2 Celsius), with
the goal of keeping warming to no
more than 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit
(1.5 Celsius), compared with pre-
industrial levels.
But the commitments that
countries made in Paris are far too
modest to meet those targets. Last
week, as the head of the United
Nations recognized the likelihood
that the world had just experi-
enced its hottest month on record,
he pleaded with national leaders
to summon the will to take the
kind of aggressive action that
could put the globe on a more
sustainable trajectory.
“This year alone, we have seen
temperature records shattered
from New Delhi to Anchorage,
from Paris to Santiago, from Ade-
laide and to the Arctic Circle,”
Guterres said. “If we do not take
action on climate change now,
these extreme weather events are
just the tip of the iceberg. And,
indeed, the iceberg is also rapidly
melting.”Amanda Coletta in Toronto, Michael
Birnbaum in Prague, Niha Masih in
New Delhi, Karla Adam in London,
Rick Noack in Berlin and James
McAuley in Paris contributed to this
report.BY PHILIP BUMP
AND DEVLIN BARRETTnew york — Cesar Sayoc, a
fanatical supporter of President
Trump who last year mailed
explosive devices to prominent
Democrats and media figures,
was sentenced Monday to 20
years in prison after a judge
concluded that Sayoc hated his
victims but had not meant to kill
them.
Prosecutors had sought a life
sentence for the 57-year-old for-
mer pizza deliveryman and strip
club worker whose “campaign of
terror,” they said, coincided with
the run-up to the 2018 midterm
elections. In all, he mailed 16
inoperative pipe bombs target-
ing, among others, former presi-
dent Barack Obama, former sec-
retary of state Hillary Clinton
and the New York offices of CNN,
acting out his paranoid delu-
sions and intense adoration for
Trump.
“I am beyond so very sorry for
what I did,” Sayoc told U.S.
District Judge Jed Rakoff. “Now
that I am a sober man, I know
that I was a sick man. I should
have listened to my mother, the
love of my life.”
Prosecutors and defense law-
yers spent much of Monday’s
hearing wrangling over how dan-
gerous the packages truly were to
those who handled them.
“What counts is what he did,
and what he intended at the time
that he did it,” Rakoff said,
calling Sayoc’s actions “by any
measure horrendous.”
The judge concluded that Say-
oc, “though no firearms expert,
was fully capable” of building a
functioning bomb if he had
wanted to do so. “He hated his
victims,” the judge added, “but
did not wish them dead, at least
not by his own hand.”
Sayoc’s defense lawyer Ian
Marcus Amelkin pushed for a
10-year sentence, saying he was
using large quantities of steroids
when he became obsessive in his
support for Trump, consuming
conspiracy theories from Fox
News and elsewhere that fed his
rising paranoia.
“It is impossible to separate
the political climate and his
mental illness when it comes to
the slow boil,” Marcus said.
Marcus said that Trump’s rhet-
oric in office contributed to Say-
oc’s beliefs, noting that the pros-
ecution — working for Trump’s
Department of Justice — failed to
make mention of the president in
its prosecuting documents.
Prosecutors downplayed
Trump’s rhetoric as a cause.
“He’s offered a whole slew of
excuses blaming politicians, pol-
itics and the news media” for his
actions, said Assistant U.S. Attor-
ney Jane Kim. She said Sayoc’s
goal was to “deter and chill
political activity.”Rakoff broadly agreed with
Kim’s assessment, saying that he
“wasn’t particularly impressed”
by the defense team’s claims
about the influence of Trump or
others, calling that a “sideshow.”
Rakoff said Sayoc’s mental
state provided a stark example of
“how dysfunctional life, even in
our great society, can sometimes
be.”
Sayoc’s sentencing comes justtwo days after the massacre of
nearly two dozen people at a
shopping center in El Paso, a
horrific act of violence allegedly
undertaken out of anger towardimmigrants. Several Democrats
seeking to challenge Trump in
the 2020 election have connect-
ed the president’s rhetoric to
Saturday’s bloodshed.
The Sayoc case began weeks
before the 2018 congressional
elections. The suspicious packag-
es prompted a nationwide man-
hunt, a trail of evidence pointing
investigators to the Fort Lauder-
dale, Fla., area and, eventually, to
Sayoc, who lived out of a white
van plastered with pro-Trump
images. He worked as a DJ or
bouncer at strip clubs, and was
once charged with threatening
the local power company.
After his arrest, Sayoc pleaded
guilty in March to 65 counts.
Officials said he targeted current
and former government officials
across the country. In addition to
Clinton and Obama, he sent
devices to former vice president
Joe Biden, Sen. Cory Booker
(D-N.J.), former CIA director
John Brennan, former director of
national intelligence James R.
Clapper Jr., actor Robert De Niro,
Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.),
former attorney general Eric
Holder, billionaires George Soros
and Thomas Steyer, and Rep.
Maxine Waters (D-Calif.).
At Sayoc’s guilty plea, he in-
sisted that the devices were “in-
tended to look like pipe bombs”
but that he did not mean for
them to detonate. Pressed by the
judge to explain further, Sayoc
added, “I was aware of the risk
that they would explode.”
Federal officials called the
wave of potential explosive de-vices a “domestic terror attack”
and accused Sayoc of endanger-
ing numerous lives. Prosecutors
said Sayoc began searching for
the homes of some people target-
ed as early as last July and
continued into the fall.
The first package was found
Oct. 22, and the investigation
and anxiety grew as more devices
were identified in the days that
followed. CNN’s New York offices
were evacuated when a package
addressed to Brennan was found
in the mail room, a situation that
played out on live television.
Other packages were soon found
in Florida, Delaware and Califor-
nia.
Within days, authorities
closed in on Sayoc outside an
auto supply store in Plantation,
Fla., after finding what Christo-
pher A. Wray, the FBI director,
said was a fingerprint on one of
the envelopes containing a de-
vice. Wray also said there were
potential DNA matches connect-
ing Sayoc to some of the devices.
While none of the devices
detonated, Wray said they were
“not hoax devices.” Authorities
have described them as “impro-
vised explosive devices,” and
they said that each of the 16
devices was placed in a padded
envelope and filled with explo-
sive material and glass shards
meant to function as shrapnel.
Outside of each was a photo-
graph of the intended victim
with a red “X” marking, officials
said.
[email protected]
[email protected]Across the globe, ‘this is not your grandfather’s summer’
Man who sent explosive devices to Trump’s critics is sentenced to 20 years
Hottest month on record
leaves its mark on people
and ecosystems
JOHANNES EISELE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
In the Canadian province of Newfoundland, an increased number of icebergs that shear off from Greenland has created a new form of tourism, as people flock to see the floes.
Meanwhile, the northernmost permanently inhabited place on Earth recorded 69.8 degrees on July 14, breaking a record set in 1956.Cesar Sayoc ‘hated his
victims but did not wish
them dead,’ judge saysNATALIE B. KLINECesar Sayoc, right, mailed 16
inoperative pipe bombs to
targets including Barack
Obama, Hillary Clinton and
CNN in New York. Evidence led
investigators to Florida, where
Sayoc lived in a van plastered
with pro-Trump images.