Pence, Biden warn of high stakes
of the Georgia Senate runoffs
ATLANTA, Ga. — President-elect Joe Biden on Monday told Georgia Democrats they had the power to “chart the course” for a generation and Vice President Mike Pence urged Republicans to vote for “the last line of defense” in Washington in a series of final pleas ahead of runoff elections that will determine control of the U.S. Senate.
The men spoke hours before President Donald Trump was due to make his case to voters at a nighttime rally in north Georgia, where Republicans were banking on strong voter turnout on Tuesday to reelect Sen. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue and hold control of the chamber.
Biden campaigned with Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Atlanta, hoping he could recreate the coalition that secured him a narrow victory in the presidential race in November.
“Folks, this is it. This is it. It’s a new year, and tomorrow can be a new day for Atlanta, for Georgia and for America,” Biden said at a drive-in rally. “Unlike any time in my career, one state — one state — can chart the course, not just for the four years but for the next generation.”
The stakes have drawn hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign spending to a once solidly Republican state that now finds itself as the nation’s premier battleground. Biden won Georgia’s 16 electoral votes by about 12,000 votes out of 5 million cast in November, though Trump continues pushing false assertions of widespread fraud that even his now-former attorney general and Georgia’s Republican secretary of state — along with a litany of state and federal judges — have said did not happen.
Many more in the GOP rejecting
Trump’s bid to undo his defeat
WASHINGTON — With mounting desperation, President Donald Trump appealed to Republican lawmakers Monday to reverse his election loss to Joe Biden when Congress convenes for a joint session this week to confirm the Electoral College vote.
Trump’s unprecedented attempt to overturn the presidential election i s splitting the Republican Party. Some GOP lawmakers backing Trump are rushing ahead, despite an outpouring of condemnation from current and former party officials warning the effort is undermining Americans’ faith in democracy. All 10 living former defense secretaries wrote in an op-ed article that “the time for questioning the results has passed.”
It’s unclear the extent to which GOP leaders in Congress will be able to control Wednesday’s joint session, which could drag into the night, though the challenges to the election are all but certain to fail. Trump himself is whipping up crowds for a Wednesday rally near the White House.
Trump’s allies are taking up his unfounded claims of voter fraud. But according to a consensus of election officials in the states he’s disputing — as well his former Attorney General William Barr — there is no evidence of fraud that could change the election outcome. Officials who have control over elections in their states, including battlegrounds Biden won, have certified those results as valid.
Of the more than 50 lawsuits the president and his allies have filed challenging results, nearly all have been dismissed or dropped. He’s also lost twice at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Study: Warming already baked
in will blow past climate goals
The amount of baked-in global warming, from carbon pollution already in the air, is enough to blow past international agreed upon goals to limit climate change, a new study finds.
But it’s not game over because, while that amount of warming may be inevitable, it can be delayed for centuries if the world quickly stops emitting extra greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, the study’s authors say.
For decades, scientists have talked about so-called “committed warming” or the increase in future temperature based on past carbon dioxide emissions that stay in the atmosphere for well over a century. It’s like the distance a speeding car travels after the brakes are applied.
But Monday’s study in the journal Nature Climate Change calculates that a bit differently and now figures the carbon pollution already put in the air will push global temperatures to about 2.3 degrees Celsius (4.1 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times.
Previous estimates, including those accepted by international science panels, were about a degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) less than that amount of committed warming.
