July 21-31, 2021

Thanks

Much of my climate news comes from The Daily Climate, whose wonderful subscription service clues me in to what's going on each day. Another great source of stories (and commentaries) comes from my friend Jim Poyser, at Apocadocs. Unfortunately he and his pal Michael stopped collecting news at the election of U.S. Unindicted Co-conspirator Forty-Five, which was a frickin' party pooper of a day, I'll tell ya. Their recovery scenario is perhaps more progressive than the Green New Deal (and their book is darkly inspirational, and terribly funny — and free).

Quotes

  • James Baldwin:
    • "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction…." — Notes of a Native Son
    • "It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have." — No Name in the Street
    • "Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced." — As Much Truth As One Can Bear
  • "If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there." — Malcolm X, TV interview, Mar. 1964
  • "… all you can talk about is money, and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!" — Greta Thunberg (address to the UN, 2019)
  • "Poverty is the worst form of violence." — Mahatma Gandhi
  • "The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands." — Genesis 9:2
  • "[Y]ou cannot postpone a rendezvous with reality forever." Nick Cohen, Observer columnist
  • “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” — Voltaire
  • "Any course in US history is inauthentic — worse, is a lie — if it doesn't teach the experiences of people like Fannie Lou Hamer." [ael: me, late to the game…:(]
  • "I want to be a great ancestor…." Overheard on an ACLU zoom call….
  • "A question ain't really a question if you know the answer too." John Prine (Far from me)

And Now for the News:

July 21-31, 2021

7/30/2021

  1. ‘Climate change has become real’: extreme weather sinks prime US tourism site: At Lake Powell on the Arizona-Utah border, the water line has dropped to a historic low, taking a heavy toll on the local industry
    • [ael: first world problems….] Chaos erupted at Bill West’s business in Page, Arizona, last week when he was forced to tell dozens of paid clients their summer vacations were either canceled or on hold – effective immediately.
    • “We are devastated that our vacation was cancelled,” said Dooley. “We had a really tough year with deaths in the family and all of us being together was going to be our saving grace. But then the lake level dropped and, boom, our vacation is gone.” [ael: your planet is next!]

7/29/2021

  1. Dusty Hill, Long-Bearded Bassist for ZZ Top, Dies at 72: The band, known for its hard-charging, blues-inflected rock, was one of the biggest acts of the 1980s, selling more than 50 million albums.
    • The bassist Dusty Hill, left, and the guitarist Billy Gibbons performing with ZZ Top in 2005.
      merlin_11980445_b6c99e12-800c-4fa5-93b8-dffb8ace0ebf-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp&w=600
      Credit…Jeff Topping for The New York Times
  2. He Wrote a Gardening Column. He Ended Up Documenting Climate Change. Over 45 years, his advice to Alaskans has changed with the transformation of the planet.
    • In the summer of 2019, Jeff Lowenfels told me, one of his friends successfully grew okra in Anchorage. Lowenfels could not believe it. The crop was shorthand for all the change he has witnessed since he moved to the city in the 1970s, a distance between past and present that he has measured in vegetables and fruits — from cabbage, snow peas and potatoes to tomatoes, pumpkins and now, incredibly, okra. “Holy crow!” he said. “We can grow anything!”
    • He also observes. Gardening is fundamentally a local endeavor, an experiment in fitting plants to a specific soil and climate. For more than 40 years, Lowenfels has noted Alaskans’ successes with new plants, tracked the lengthening stretch of frost-free days and recorded the arrival of new horticultural pests.
    • Until the recent past, few people ever set out to create a long-term record of climate change, says Abe Miller-Rushing, an ecologist at Acadia National Park in Maine. [ael: Alexander MacKay did! The story we spun from his work is [told well by the https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/alexander-mackay-climate-change-children-science-1.5063352 CBC], in Canada.] Many have done so by accident, though. Foresters write down when trees bud. Flyfishers monitor when aquatic insects hatch. Birders track when migrating birds appear in their yards. Phenology, the study of climate-related biological rhythms — when flowers bloom, for instance, when frogs sing, when birds migrate — had long been viewed as boring, Miller-Rushing says. “Once you had things figured out, you had it figured out, because it happened the same every year.” But then it began to become clear that things weren’t happening the same every year.
    • Since 2003, Miller-Rushing has pored over dozens of long-term records. He has scoured data from the diaries of Henry David Thoreau for notes on when flowers bloomed. Others have been searching French ledgers that stretch back to the Middle Ages for wine-grape harvest dates, sifting through imperial Chinese documents for mention of the arrival of locust swarms, examining 17th-century Japanese diaries for information about the timing of the annual cherry-blossom festivals. These documents — often created for mundane reasons, because flowers and harvests and pests are what gardeners have always concerned themselves with — have become sources of useful data. “It’s really valuable to have those kinds of observations,” Miller-Rushing says. “How things have changed over the past hundred or 200 or more years can really tell us a lot about the changes we can expect over the next hundred or 200 years.”
    • In 2002, Lowenfels was converted. The epiphany came from an image, captured by an electron microscope, of fungal hyphae strangling a nematode that was attacking a tomato root. A fellow garden writer had sent it to him. He was stunned, suddenly realizing his ignorance. He read everything he could about the soil food web. “I didn’t sleep for 24, 48 hours,” he told an Anchorage Daily News reporter in 2006. Was that true? It doesn’t matter. He was changed. For decades, he had encouraged readers to douse their yards with pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers. “No longer,” he wrote. “Not here.”
    • The yearly publishing rhythm began to reflect his new faith. In spring, he told readers not to rototill their gardens. In summer, he implored them not to use pesticides and fertilizers. In fall, he urged them not to rake their lawns — fallen leaves are nature’s fertilizer. Feed your soil bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi. Embrace the mushrooms sprouting in your yard. Yellowjackets eat aphids; they are our friends. Use corn gluten to prevent dandelions from germinating.
    • November 2006 marked 30 years of columns. The next decade seemed to go quickly. Zucchini, once exceptions, became standard. Pumpkins were possible. Bolivian sun roots were worth a try. Tomatoes were no longer the holy grail — peppers were the holy grail. Invasive species were “terrorist cells.” His New Year’s wish was that “each and every one of us will resolve to turn our backs on the use of chemicals.” Discussion of climate change was in regular rotation. More and more, there were flashes of anger. “Why are we so hellbent on ruining the environment,” he wrote, “just so we can have a perfect lawn or flawless flower or even a record-breaking cabbage?”
    • It was a summer of extremes. Throughout June 2019, Southcentral Alaska was unusually warm and dry. On July 4, Anchorage hit 90 degrees, smashing the city’s previous all-time record high, set in 1969, by five degrees. Little rain fell the rest of the month. A fire on the nearby Kenai Peninsula swelled past 100,000 acres, shrouding the city in smoke for weeks on end. By August, the region’s plants were ailing, needles reddened and leaves browned, like fall come early. That month, a group of researchers made a projection: By the middle of this century, Alaska’s forests, now dominated by spruce, would give way to forests of deciduous trees, like birch, aspen and cottonwood. In Anchorage, the shift seemed to be well underway.
    • The next week was devoted to zinnias. The week after that, he urged readers to prepare their garden for the first frost, admitting that he had “no idea” when it would arrive. In the months that followed, he reminded them not to rake their lawns, urged them to leash their cats outdoors and suggested they try growing luffa and pawpaws. Why not? Just see that they don’t escape. The pandemic arrived in March. He answered questions about tomatoes, about repelling hares (try human urine [ael: ah ha! Finally, some love….]) and about eating slugs (cook them first). November marked the beginning of his 45th year as a columnist. He asked readers not to sterilize their soil, advised them on ornamental kale, offered tips on the care of poinsettias and Christmas cactuses. On and on he continued, week after week, as spring stretched into summer.

7/28/2021 — Jocelyn Bell Day

  1. Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery changed astronomy.: Her male supervisor won the Nobel Prize for it.
    • In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell made an astounding discovery. But as a young woman in science, her role was overlooked.
    • [ael: a beautiful story, very sad, but Dr. Bell has put the very best spin on it. Wonderful comment on Fred Hoyle.]
  2. They Survived Covid. Now They Face Eviction.
    • The true extent of the threat has been masked by a national moratorium on evictions. But that ban will expire on Saturday, allowing landlords to start or continue eviction proceedings in most states. See the share of households at risk by entering your county in the search field below….
  3. Critical measures of global heating reaching tipping point, study finds: Carbon emissions, ocean acidification, Amazon clearing all hurtling toward new records
    • A new study tracking the planet’s vital signs has found that many of the key indicators of the global climate crisis are getting worse and either approaching, or exceeding, key tipping points as the earth heats up. Overall, the study found some 16 out of 31 tracked planetary vital signs, including greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat content and ice mass, set worrying new records.
    • The study also found that ruminant livestock, a significant source of planet-warming gases, now number more than 4 billion, and their total mass is more than that of all humans and wild animals combined. The rate of forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon increased in both 2019 and 2020, reaching a 12-year high of 1.11 million hectares deforested in 2020.
    • However, there were a few bright spots in the study, including fossil fuel subsidies reaching a record low and fossil fuel divestment reaching a record high. In order to change the course of the climate emergency, the authors write that profound alterations need to happen. They say the world needs to develop a global price for carbon that is linked to a socially just fund to finance climate mitigation and adaptation policies in the developing world.
  4. How many years until we must act on climate? Zero, say these climate thinkers: We asked a panelist of experts on when we need to start changing our economies and ways of consuming and producing. Their answer: now
    • Peter Kalmus: ‘Zero years’
      • We have zero years before climate and ecological breakdown, because it’s already here. We have zero years left to procrastinate. The longer we wait to act, the worse the floods, fires, droughts, famines and heatwaves will get.
    • Jennifer Francis: ‘We cannot wait’
      • We need to immediately stop subsidizing all aspects of the fossil fuel industry. According to this report, the fossil fuel industry received $66bn in 2016, while renewables (excluding nuclear) only received $9.5bn. We should instead use those billions of subsidy dollars to ramp up the renewable energy industry: generation (wind, solar, nuclear), distribution (smarter grid), storage and electric transportation.
    • Michael Mann: ‘Strictly speaking, zero’
      • How many years do we have to act? Strictly speaking, zero – which is to say, that we must act, in earnest, now. We have a decade within which we must halve global carbon emissions. As I argue in The New Climate War, this requires dramatic systemic change: no new fossil fuel infrastructure, massive subsidies for renewables, carbon pricing and deploying other policy tools to accelerate the clean energy transition already under way.
    • Holly Jean Buck: ‘We need action now’
      • We need to ramp up action now in order to transform all of our major systems by 2050: energy, transportation, industry, agriculture, waste management. We’ll need to eat less meat, farm in ways that store more carbon in the soils, reforest degraded or abandoned land and restore wetlands.
  5. Beyond human endurance: How climate change is making parts of the world too hot and humid to survive
    • At a certain threshold of heat and humidity, “it’s no longer possible to be able to sweat fast enough to prevent overheating,” said Radley Horton a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Scientists have found that Mexico and Central America, the Persian Gulf, India, Pakistan and Southeast Asia are all careening toward this threshold before the end of the century.
    • Protecting yourself from such stress is inextricably tied to socioeconomic status and resources. “The poorest people are the most vulnerable, and they are already suffering,” Cavazos said, noting that Sonora depends on farming, meaning a lot of people have to engage in physical labor in the dangerous heat.
    • In regions like the Persian Gulf, extreme heat is the new normal: Qatar has adapted so extensively to the blistering climate that it air-conditions the outdoors. But not everyone has access to outdoor air conditioning, including those building the facilities that have them. When the wealthy country began construction on venues to host the 2022 World Cup, it faced an uproar over its treatment of workers building the stadiums. In 2019, the United Nations warned during the four hottest months of the year, outdoor laborers in Qatar were working under "significant occupational heat stress conditions.“ Qatar in May imposed regulations expanding the number of hours that prohibits outdoor labor from taking place to 10 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. during the hotter months of the year, while also outlawing any work if the wet-bulb temperature is more than approximately 89 degrees Fahrenheit.

7/27/2021 — Eric Carle Day

  1. The Enduring Whimsy and Wonderment of Eric Carle: By Jonathan Kozol
    • Collection of Eric and Barbara Carle. 2015 Penguin Random House LLC., via The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.
      Kozol-sub-final-jumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp
      Credit…Eric Carle, Illustration for The Nonsense Show.
    • At one point around that time, I fell into the habit — probably a bad one from the point of view of logic and continuity — of interrupting a lecture I was giving to an audience of teachers or college undergraduates who were planning to be teachers, and talking about the safe and healing world that Eric Carle created. If I had a copy of one of those books, I’d hold it up so they could see the picture of the mouse or bear or whatever other creature might be on the cover. I did this, in part, to clear the air for a moment or two of my usual solemnity, but I also hoped to get across that there’s nothing wrong with treating children or yourself to a bit of whimsy and wonderment and unimportant foolishness in a world that’s all too full of tears.
    • Jonathan Kozol is a recipient of the National Book Award and the author of 13 books on race and education. He is writing his final book on social justice in the nation’s schools.
    • Related: Eric Carle, Author of ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar,’ Dies at 91: A self-described “picture writer,” he wrote and illustrated more than 70 books for young children, selling more than 170 million copies.
      • The author and artist Eric Carle with his best-known book in 2002. Since it was published in 1969, “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” has sold more than 55 million copies around the world.
        00Carle1-superJumbo-v2.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp&w=600
        Credit…Jodi Hilton
  2. Scores Die in India as Monsoon Rains Swamp Towns and Send Boulders Tumbling: Every monsoon season poses risks to the country, but this one is shaping up as especially destructive as climate change turbocharges rainfall.
    • At least nine people were killed when a boulder struck their vehicle. Their deaths added to a toll of at least 164, with 100 reported missing, on the country’s western coast, where heavy rains have deluged entire towns and villages.
    • Record rainfalls in central China and Western Europe have killed scores in recent weeks and displaced many others. On Saturday, the authorities in the Philippines evacuated thousands of residents after a tropical storm flooded the capital, Manila, and nearby provinces. In the last few months, India, a nation of 1.4 billion people, has experienced two powerful cyclones and deadly floods in the Himalayas. It has also suffered through extreme temperatures, including a heat wave that killed thousands of people.
    • Video footage showed heavy rocks knocking down a metal bridge. The boulders pounded vehicles and fell into a nearby river, making giant splashes and sounds akin to exploding bombs.
    • India’s agrarian economy depends heavily on monsoon rain. Too little means a drought, and too much can cause catastrophic flooding. Extreme rainfall washes away fertile topsoil, while droughts deplete groundwater reserves that have been declining rapidly in many parts of the country for years. Together, they have caused misery and death on India’s farms.
  3. Wildfires Ravage Sardinia in ‘a Disaster Without Precedent’: A 25-mile swath of vegetation, farms and villages is hit by one of the largest wildfires in decades, devastating the Italian tourist destination.
    • Flames ran through hectares of cork and holm oak forests that are native to the region. A thousand-year old olive tree that was the symbol of the hilltop village of Cuglieri was destroyed by the fire.
    • “These are extraordinary fires for the magnitude, but also ordinary for the season and the speed, unfortunately,” said Gianfilippo Micillo, head of the Italian firefighters’ wildfires coordination department. “Summer blazes in Sardinia with so much dry vegetation, the strong winds and the high temperatures take place every year. These fires create their own microclimate and propagate very fast.”
  4. CDC to urge vaccinated people in high-transmission areas to resume wearing masks indoors as delta variant spreads: The agency will recommend that all teachers, staff members and students in schools wear masks, regardless of their vaccination status, and that vaccinated people in high-transmission areas wear masks in indoor public spaces.
    • Top health officials, who were debating the new masking guidance on Monday afternoon, said the game-changer was new data showing that vaccinated people infected with the delta variant carry the same viral load as unvaccinated people who are infected, according to three people familiar with the data. Vaccinated people are unlikely to become severely ill, but the new data raises questions about how easily they can transmit the disease, said the three individuals. Such transmission was not believed to happen in any significant way with earlier variants.
    • “Hospitalizations in Florida, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri are where they were this winter and rising rapidly,” said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Indoor masking is a simple intervention that will help slow the spread.” News of the changed guidance was welcomed by medical and public health experts, given the surging cases in the United States.
    • James Musser, chair of the Department of Pathology and Genomic Medicine at Houston Methodist Hospital and Research Institute, said he thinks the vaccines are still superb at preventing severe illness. Nonetheless, he said, about 20 percent of the covid-19 patients in his organization’s eight hospitals have breakthrough infections after being vaccinated — most of whom have serious underlying medical conditions.
  5. Jesse Frost Wants to Help Produce Farmers Stop Tilling Their Soil: The farmer and author of ‘The Living Soil Handbook’ talks about reducing labor, repairing ecosystems, and boosting photosynthesis by leaving the soil intact.
    • Jesse Frost and his wife Hannah Crabtree have been farming together since 2011, when they met working as apprentices on a small organic farm in southern Kentucky. Eventually, they started their own small market garden operation nearby, Rough Draft Farm, where they started experimenting with cutting down on tillage a few years later. By 2017, they had gone completely no-till.
  6. Plant Absorbs Toxic RDX Contamination: Modified switchgrass can sop up weapons chemicals on military ranges
    • For three years the team tested soil and water pumped from plastic-lined plots where modified plants, wild plants or no plants grew, painstakingly removing seeds from the modified switchgrasses to prevent cross-pollination with local varieties. They found that the modified plants took up RDX, lowering levels significantly in the surrounding water, and broke it down—RDX did not appear in the modified plants' tissues, but it did in wild plants.
    • [ael: how do we know that the switchgrass is not exhaling the RDX?]

7/26/2021 — Happy Birthday, Anna!

  1. Toyota Led on Clean Cars. Now Critics Say It Works to Delay Them. The auto giant bet on hydrogen power, but as the world moves toward electric the company is fighting climate regulations in an apparent effort to buy time.
    • Together with other automakers, Toyota also sided with the Trump administration in a battle with California over the Clean Air Act and sued Mexico over fuel efficiency rules. In Japan, Toyota officials argued against carbon taxes.
    • Toyota’s lobbying also comes as the Japanese automaker’s political donations have come under scrutiny. Last month, the nonprofit watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics tallied campaign contributions and found that Toyota was the largest corporate donor by far this year to Republicans in Congress who disputed the 2020 presidential election result.
    • “I think hydrogen holds promise, but it’s at least a decade behind batteries right now,” said David Friedman, vice president of advocacy at Consumer Reports and former acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “And Toyota is saying, ‘No, we’ve got to hold off, we’ve got to wait till they’re ready with hydrogen.’ But the climate can’t wait.” Toyota also argues that hybrid technology — that is, vehicles powered by an internal combustion engine and an electric motor — is an easier first step toward fully electric cars and could help get more people into cleaner cars more quickly until hydrogen becomes widespread. Toyota has made major investments in hybrid technology as well. The company has outlined a vision for a product lineup dominated by hybrids through 2050 — far later than when many analysts say new cars must be zero-emission.
    • [ael: I used to love Toyota. Not anymore….]
    • “Toyota followed G.M. and other American automakers to produce gas-guzzling pickups and S.U.V.s in large numbers,” said Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Transport Campaign at the Center for Biological Diversity.
    • Jeffrey K. Liker, professor emeritus of industrial and operations engineering at the University of Michigan and author of “The Toyota Way,” said that there were other factors slowing Toyota’s push. A famously cautious company, Toyota has researched solid-state batteries, which are safer than the widely used lithium-ion technology, but readying that technology has taken longer than they expected, he said. Toyota has also spoken about not wanting to lay off employees or bankrupt suppliers in a rapid transition to electrics.
  2. Minimum-wage lessons for the U.S. from the other side of the world: As the United States debates the effects of raising the federal minimum wage, an instructive experience can be found across the Pacific. Australia has one of the world’s highest pay floors and relatively low unemployment, offering a case study in the modern economic theory that raising wages doesn’t kill jobs.
    • In the early 1990s, Australia’s minimum wage was equal to about 65 percent of the median wage; now it’s 54 percent, according to OECD data. (The U.S. figure is 32 percent — the lowest of any industrial country.)
  3. Richard R. Ernst (1933—2021): Nobel prizewinner who revolutionized nuclear magnetic resonance.
    • Richard R. Ernst turned applications of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) into methods for daily use in chemistry, structural biology and medical diagnosis. His introduction of Fourier transform-nuclear magnetic resonance (FT-NMR) in the 1960s paved the way for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to be widely used in medical diagnosis and in materials research.
  4. Climate Scientists Meet As Floods, Fires, Droughts And Heat Waves Batter Countries: More than 200 of the world's leading climate scientists will begin meeting today to finalize a landmark report summarizing how Earth's climate has already changed, and what humans can expect for the rest of the century.
    • The report is the sixth edition of an assessment of the latest climate science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body that coordinates research about global warming. The last edition of this report came out in 2013 — an eternity in the world of climate science, where the pace of both warming and research are steadily accelerating.

7/25/2021 — Bob Moses Day

  1. Bob Moses, Crusader for Civil Rights and Math Education, Dies at 86: Mr. Moses developed a reputation for extraordinary calm in the face of violence as he helped to register thousands of voters and trained a generation of activists in Mississippi in the early 1960s.
    • Bob Moses was teaching math at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx when scenes of Black people sitting at lunch counters across the South inspired him to become an activist.
      00xp-moses2-02-jumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp
      Credit…Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press
    • Typically dressed in denim bib overalls and seemingly more comfortable around sharecroppers than senators, he insisted that he was an organizer, not a leader. He said he drew inspiration from an older generation of civil rights organizers, like Ella Baker, a leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and her “quiet work in out-of-the-way places and the commitment of organizers digging into local communities.”
    • White segregationists, including local law enforcement officials, responded to his efforts with violence. At one point during a voter-registration drive, a sheriff’s cousin bashed Mr. Moses’ head with a knife handle. Bleeding, he kept going, staggering up the steps of a courthouse to register a couple of Black farmers. Only then did he seek medical attention. There was no Black doctor in the county, Mr. Moses later wrote, so he had to be driven to another town, where nine stitches were sewn into his head. Another time, three Klansmen shot at a car in which Mr. Moses was a passenger as it drove through Greenwood, Miss., Mr. Moses cradled the bleeding driver and managed to bring the careening car to a stop.
    • In a 2014 interview with Julian Bond, Mr. Moses credited his parents with fostering his love of learning, recalling that they would collect books for him every week from the local library in Harlem.
    • In the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis touched off global protests against systemic racism and police brutality, Mr. Moses said that the country seemed to be undergoing an “awakening.” “I certainly don’t know, at this moment, which way the country might flip,” Mr. Moses told The New York Times. “It can lurch backward as quickly as it can lurch forward.”
    • Related: Bob Moses's comments regarding the George Floyd aftermath: 7 Lessons (and Warnings) From Those Who Marched With Dr. King: The tumult and passion of the past weeks have left the surviving veterans of the civil rights era with trepidation and hope.
  2. US set for punishing temperatures as huge ‘heat dome’ to settle over country: Heatwave to next week roast areas already gripped by severe drought, plunging reservoirs and wildfires
    • Climate scientists have said the barrage of heatwaves over the past month, which have parched farms, caused roads to buckle and resulted in the obliteration of long-standing temperature records, are being fueled by predicted human-caused climate change – but admit to being surprised at the ferocity of the onslaught.
    • “You expect hotter heatwaves with climate change but the estimates may have been overly conservative,” Wehner said. “With the Pacific north-west heatwave you’d conclude the event would be almost impossible without climate change but in a straightforward statistical analysis from before this summer you’d also include it would be impossible with climate change, too. That is problematic, because the event happened.”
    • “It’s a teachable moment in many ways for the public that climate change is here and now and dangerous. It isn’t our grandchildren’s problem, it’s our problem. But it’s been a teachable moment for climate scientists too.”
  3. The Fisherwomen, Chevron and the Leaking Pipe: Big Oil has a filthy legacy in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. One prominent environmentalist said: “They are moving out and leaving all the mess behind.”
    • So began a battle between Chevron and hundreds of fisherwomen in the Niger Delta. Chevron denies that oil was spilling from its pipes. But the women insisted that this was just another instance of oil companies refusing to take responsibility, and decided to take the fight to the oil company’s doors. “You want to kill us with your oil,” Ms. Joseph said, growing emotional. “We’ll come to you so you can kill us yourselves. In person.”
  4. Trash Parrots Invent New Skill in Australian Suburbs Sydney’s clever and adaptable sulfur-crested cockatoos learn how to pry open garbage bins by watching one another.
    • The cockatoos’ new skill opens up a whole new resource for the birds. This is adaptive cultural evolution, spreading at lightning speed compared to biological evolution. Dr. Klump noted that culture has been called a second inheritance system and that applies to both humans and animals, allowing us and them to quickly adapt and change our behavior.
    • It’s impossible to know which bird or birds first developed the trash bin technique, but apparently there is not one lone cockatoo genius. During the course of the study, the behavior popped up a second time in a suburb too far away from the first for the spread to be by social learning, Dr. Klump said. The technique was invented again.
  5. Wet-bulb temperature is important, climate experts say. So what is it? Wet-bulb temperature accounts for both heat and humidity, unlike the standard temperature measurement you see on your weather app. It reflects what that combination means for the human body’s ability to cool down.
    • Wet-bulb temperature accounts for both heat and humidity, unlike the standard temperature measurement you see on your weather app. It reflects what that combination means for the human body’s ability to cool down.
    • Radley Horton, one of the study’s authors and a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, explained that the study reported for the first time that there are places in the Persian Gulf and Pakistan that have already crossed a wet-bulb temperature of 95 degrees Fahrenheit. That kind of temperature would make it impossible to sweat enough to avoid overheating, organ failure and eventual death, “even [for] someone in the best shape, in the shade, relaxing, with an endless supply of water, not wearing heavy clothes,” Horton said.
  6. Power outages cripple parts of the Middle East amid record heat waves and rising unrest:
    • Temperatures in several Middle Eastern countries this summer have topped 122 degrees Fahrenheit — 50 degrees Celsius — including in Iran, which hit 123.8, and Iraq, which nearly matched last year’s record of 125.2. Decades of neglect and underinvestment have left power grids unable to cope. Drought has crippled hydroelectric generation. Economic crises roiling several countries mean governments are now even struggling to purchase the fuel needed to generate power.
    • In a photograph from one of the Basra protests, a teenager’s eyes bored into the camera as he held his sign aloft. “Corruption is killing me,” it said. The proliferation of generators may be doing the same, health experts say. A team of chemists at the American University in Beirut, led by Najat Saliba, estimated this month that Lebanon’s nearly 24-hour reliance on generators is poisoning the air eight times as fast as when Beirut was operating generators on average only several hours a day.
  7. Yep, it’s bleak, says expert who tested 1970s end-of-the-world prediction: A controversial MIT study from 1972 forecast the collapse of civilization – and Gaya Herrington is here to deliver the bad news
    • Herrington, a Dutch sustainability researcher and adviser to the Club of Rome, a Swiss thinktank, has made headlines in recent days after she authored a report that appeared to show a controversial 1970s study predicting the collapse of civilization was – apparently – right on time.
    • Research by Herrington, a rising star in efforts to place data analysis at the center of efforts to curb climate breakdown, affirmed the bleaker scenarios put forward in a landmark 1972 MIT study, The Limits to Growth, that presented various outcomes for what could happen when the growth of industrial civilization collided with finite resources.
    • Herrington, 39, says she undertook the update (available on the KPMG website and credited to its publisher, the Yale Journal of Industrial Ecology) independently “out of pure curiosity about data accuracy”. Her findings were bleak: current data aligns well with the 1970s analysis that showed economic growth could end at the end of the current decade and collapse come about 10 years later (in worst case scenarios). The timing of Herrington’s paper, as world economies grapple with the impact of the pandemic, is highly prescient as governments largely look to return economies to business-as-usual growth, despite loud warnings that continuing economic growth is incompatible with sustainability.
    • “The key finding of my study is that we still have a choice to align with a scenario that does not end in collapse. With innovation in business, along with new developments by governments and civil society, continuing to update the model provides another perspective on the challenges and opportunities we have to create a more sustainable world.” At the same time, she says, the primary concern of the MIT study have been supplanted. “Resource scarcity has not been the challenge people thought it would be in the 70s and population growth has not be the scare it was in the 90s. Now the concern is pollution and how it perfectly aligned with what climate scientists are saying,” she said.
  8. Amid summer of fire and floods, a moment of truth for climate action: ‘We are all in the same boat,’ says one diplomat from the developing world. ‘That is what this summer is telling us.’
    • The panicked commuters of Zhengzhou, China, could only stand on seats and cling to poles in a desperate attempt to keep their heads above the muddy torrent this past week, as floodwaters from record-breaking rains inundated the subway system.
    • On the other side of the planet, in Gresham, Ore., a 61-year-old maker of handcrafted ukuleles slowly died in June as searing temperatures made an oven out of his lifelong home — one of at least 800 victims of what one scientist called “the most anomalous heat event ever observed on Earth.”
    • Massive floods deluged Central Europe, Nigeria, Uganda and India in recent days, killing hundreds. June’s scorching temperatures, followed by a fast-moving wildfire, erased a Canadian town. More than a million people are close to starvation amid Madagascar’s worst drought in decades. In Siberia, tens of thousands of square miles of forest are ablaze, potentially unleashing carbon stored in the frozen ground below.
    • “What more can numbers show us that we cannot already see? What more can statistics say about the flooding, the wildfires, the droughts and hurricanes and other deadly events?” United Nations Climate Change Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa told a gathering of energy and environment ministers from G-20 nations. “Numbers and statistics are invaluable, but what the world requires now, more than anything else, is climate action.”
    • As forests burn and cities drown, as crops wither and people die, the question looms louder than ever this summer: What will it take for leaders to finally act?
    • “It is, without exaggeration, about survival,” U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John F. Kerry said in a speech in London this past week. He appealed to nations — particularly China — to overcome political hurdles and commit to drastic change. “Cooperation,” Kerry said, “is the only way to break free from the world’s current mutual suicide pact.”

7/23/2021

  1. Extreme weather events put spotlight on climate change's toll on US infrastructure:
    • With roads buckling in the Pacific Northwest, a deluge drenching a New York City subway station and fatal flooding across Europe, scientists say climate change is here and immediate action is needed. The country's crumbling infrastructure has commanded attention as the US has faced the unprecedented heat, drought and wildfires and the Biden administration has pushed costly proposals to address it. "I think people see it, but I'm not sure they realize how much worse it's going to get and how quickly," Josh DeFlorio, head of climate resilience for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, told CNN.
  2. How do you insure yourself against climate change? Wildfires in Australia, blizzards in Texas, now flash floods in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands: The growing likelihood of extreme weather has insurers and homeowners alike wondering how to best manage risk.
    • Our changing climate poses a conundrum for insurance companies, whose business model relies on their ability to quantify the risk of an event happening and bear the cost should it actually occur. This translates into collecting enough money in premiums to cover the cost of claims. And managing this won't be as simple as raising premiums to reflect higher risk.

7/22/2021

  1. Are Wind Turbines a Danger to Wildlife? Ask the Dogs.: Humans are terrible at finding bats and birds killed by wind turbines. Dogs are great at it.
    • The best dogs for this work are misfits of the pet world. They have to be utterly obsessed with play—to a point that most humans would find exhausting. “All the dogs that we have in our program, they're either rescues … or they’re an owner surrender, where they just say they’re out of options and even a shelter won’t take them,” says Heath Smith, the director of Rogue Detection Teams, a conservation-detection-dog company. The dogs have too much energy and an “insatiable drive to play fetch,” which is not great for a family pet but very useful for motivating a dog to find birds or bats so they can get their favorite toy as a reward. (Barley, Fratt says, was “a pain in the butt” when he was younger. The work gives him an outlet for all that energy.) Some dogs love their ball, others a rope or squishy toy; one of Smith’s dogs has taken to an empty food bowl that he likes to scoot around…. Her hours are odd, and the work is exhausting, but she gets to be around dogs who are so happy to be on the job. “Imagine you have three co-workers in your car and everybody is throwing a party,” she said. That’s what driving to work every day is like.
    • On wind farms, a patchwork of federal, state, and local regulations might govern how companies have to monitor wildlife deaths, but reporting requirements vary widely. This means that reliable data on deaths are hard to come by. Estimates suggest that turbines in North America kill 600,000 to 949,000 bats and 140,000 to 679,000 birds a year. Dogs are, by far, the quickest and most effective way to find them.
  2. Lifting Weights? Your Fat Cells Would Like to Have a Word.: A cellular chat after your workout may explain in part why weight training burns fat.
    • After the rodents’ resistance exercise, which consisted of walking around, though, the animals’ leg muscles appeared depleted of miR-1. At the same time, the vesicles in their bloodstream now thronged with the stuff, as did nearby fat tissue. It seems, the scientists concluded, that the animals’ muscle cells somehow packed those bits of microRNA that retard hypertrophy into vesicles and posted them to neighboring fat cells, which then allowed the muscles immediately to grow. But what was the miR-1 doing to the fat once it arrived, the scientist wondered? To find out, they marked vesicles from weight-trained mice with a fluorescent dye, injected them into untrained animals, and tracked the glowing bubbles’ paths. The vesicles homed in on fat, the scientists saw, then dissolved and deposited their miR-1 cargo there.
    • Soon after, some of the genes in the fat cells went into overdrive. These genes help direct the breakdown of fat into fatty acids, which other cells then can use as fuel, reducing fat stores. In effect, weight training was shrinking fat in mice by creating vesicles in muscles that, through genetic signals, told the fat it was time to break itself apart.
  3. ‘Everything is on fire’: Siberia hit by unprecedented burning: Locals fear for their health and property as smoke from raging forest fires shrouds an entire region of eastern Russia
    • The extraordinary forest fires, which have already burned through 1.5m hectares (3.7m acres) of land in north-east Siberia have released choking smog across Russia’s Yakutia region, where officials have described this summer’s weather as the driest in the past 150 years. And that follows five years of hot summers, which have, according to villagers, turned the surrounding forests and fields into a tinderbox.
    • “There never used to be summers with such large fires,” said Nikolai Verkhovov, a native of Srednekolymsk, a village on the River Kolyma more than 750 miles from Yakutsk. “But last year a village in my district nearly burned down.” He suggested that budget cuts to forest ranger services and corruption could play a role in the fires.

7/21/2021

  1. Death toll rises and thousands flee homes as floods hit China: Torrential rainfall and burst rivers swamp Henan cities, with commuters trapped on subway trains
    • At least 25 people have been killed and seven are missing in the provincial capital, Zhengzhou. The provincial authorities issued its highest level of weather warning. A year’s worth of rain – 640mm – fell in just three days. The city’s weather bureau said more than 552mm of rain had fallen between 7pm on Monday and 7pm on Tuesday, including 202mm between 4pm and 5pm on Tuesday.
    • The casualties are expected to rise as rescue work continues in the days to come. Chinese media call the rainfall “unseen in the last 1,000 years”. Some worry that given the scale of the damage, the post-disaster reconstruction will be particularly challenging for one of the most populous provinces in China.
    • In the city of Luoyang, local authorities said the rainfall had caused a 20-metre breach in the Yihetan dam, which “could collapse at any time”. Early on Wednesday, a division of China’s military were sent out to the site to carry out emergency blasting and flood diversion.
    • In June, Hotan city, in the far-west region of Xinjiang, had record-breaking rainfall, causing one resident to comment on social media that “the rainfall [this month] is equivalent to the combined rainfall of the past two years”.

What went on: 2021

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What went on: 2018

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What went on: 2015

What went on: 2014

RClimate Examples

  • Here's the 10-day weather forecast for Mattawa, Ontario, where we have a farm, away from the noise of that blowhard tRump, the once-and-always-liar-in-chief. I try to spend as much time as I can on the farm.
  • Public News Service - Environment
  • More quotes:
    • Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world. HANNAH ARENDT. From the Introduction to “Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism”, by Henry Giroux.
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