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. They 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.

• 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
• "… all you can talk about is money, and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!" — Greta Thunberg (address to the UN, 2019)
• "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
• "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
• Here's the 10-day weather forecast for Mattawa, Ontario, where we have a farm, away from the noise of that blowhard, the liar-in-chief. I try to spend as much time as I can on the farm.
• "[Y]ou cannot postpone a rendezvous with reality forever." Nick Cohen, Observer columnist
• "I want to be a great ancestor…." Overheard on an ACLU zoom call….

September 23-30, 2020

9/30/2020

• Drilling Permits Cancelled For Underground Natural Gas Storage Project: According to an order from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, permits to drill three three Class III solution mining wells in Monroe County, Ohio were cancelled on Sept. 21. Cancellation was requested by Powhatan Salt Company LCC. The proposed wells are associated with the Mountaineer NGL Storage project, a multi-million dollar underground natural gas liquids storage project.
  • In July, Mountaineer finalized an agreement with the developers of a proposed petrochemical plant in nearby Belmont County, Ohio. The plant would use natural gas liquid ethane to produce the feedstock for plastics and chemicals. Earlier in July, one of the plant’s investors pulled out of the project. Last week, the plant’s developers signed a contract with gas supplier Range Resources to provide the yet-to-be-built plant with ethane feedstock.
  • “This is a solid market signal that plans for a petrochemical buildout in Ohio and western Pennsylvania are on shaky ground,” he said. “Local and state economic development officials would serve the public better by looking for jobs and taxes in other areas of the economy that are actually profitable and growing and can be good neighbors to the communities that host them.”
• Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Is ‘Very Likely to Work,’ Studies Suggest: A series of research papers renews hope that the long-elusive goal of mimicking the way the sun produces energy might be achievable.
  • Construction of a reactor, called Sparc, which is being developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a spinoff company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, is expected to begin next spring and take three or four years, the researchers and company officials said…. This ambitious timetable is far faster than that of the world’s largest fusion-power project, a multinational effort in Southern France called ITER, for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. That reactor has been under construction since 2013 and, although it is not designed to generate electricity, is expected to produce a fusion reaction by 2035.
  • Like a conventional nuclear fission power plant that splits atoms, a fusion plant would not burn fossil fuels and would not produce greenhouse-gas emissions. But its fuel, usually isotopes of hydrogen, would be far more plentiful than the uranium used in most nuclear plants, and fusion would generate less, and less dangerous, radioactivity and waste than fission plants.
  • Since experiments on fusion began nearly a century ago, the promise of a practical fusion device that can produce more energy than it uses has remained elusive. Fusion power has always seemed to be “just decades” away. That might turn out to be true in this case as well. But in seven peer-reviewed papers published Tuesday in a special issue of The Journal of Plasma Physics, researchers laid out the evidence that Sparc would succeed and produce as much as 10 times the energy it consumes.
  • William Dorland, a physicist at the University of Maryland and editor of The Journal of Plasma Physics, said the journal had asked some of these fusion projects “to tell us their physics basis.” The M.I.T. and Commonwealth Fusion group quickly said yes, he said. “From my perspective, it’s the first of these groups that have private money that actually is saying very clearly what they’re doing,” Dr. Dorland said. “Reasonable people disagree about whether it works,” he said. “I’m just happy that they stepped up and are telling us in normal science speak what’s going on.”
• Pendley’s Dismissal Threatens Trump’s Oil Agenda: A federal court just ruled that the BLM's leader was serving illegally, with plans to reconvene next week to consider if all of his actions were illegal, too
  • Ready for some good news? Following a lawsuit filed by Montana governor Steve Bullock, on Friday a federal court ruled that William Perry Pendley’s tenure running the Bureau of Land Management was illegal and immediately ordered an end to his authority. The decision has the potential to invalidate hundreds of decisions issued by the agency, dating all the way back to July 2019, when Pendley first assumed the role.
  • No one’s quite sure how it happened, but sometime during July 2019, this comic-book villain appeared atop the BLM’s org chart. Soon after, interior secretary David Bernhardt (also a lobbyist for the oil and gas industries) appointed Pendley to the position of acting BLM director…. Bernhardt went on to “redelegate” Pendley’s authority roughly every 90 days, in an effort to keep him in the role without confirmation. Pendley was eventually nominated for an official role in late July of this year, only to have that nomination withdrawn two weeks later, after GOP senators in swing states apparently complained that voting for him could scupper their attempts to greenwash their images ahead of the November election.
  • As if this whole thing couldn’t get more ridiculous, it turns out that Pendley himself actually authored and authorized the succession order that altered the agency’s normal leadership heirarchy, allegedly permitting him to lead.
  • The Western Values Project has compiled an initial list of 85 specific policy actions and 500 rate cuts and suspensions for extraction leases that could be impacted, in addition to the areas cited in Governor Bullock’s suit. The ruling could also open up the potential for litigation or legal discovery around the BLM’s controversial relocation of its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to an office building in Grand Junction, Colorado, that’s shared with oil and gas firms. There’s speculation that if Pendley can be shown to have participated in any of the above, then those actions could be ruled illegal as well. “The scale of all this is mind-boggling,” one congressional staffer, who wishes to remain anonymous, told me during a phone call. The staffer says that, while all of this is certainly capturing the attention of lawmakers, they’re currently taking a hands-off approach while the original suit remains ongoing, and they may wait until further lawsuits (described as “inevitable”) are filed before bringing the matter before Congress. I asked about a time line for that and was told it could happen “next year.”
• The childcare crisis is hurting the planet: The mom behind a viral tweet about pandemic parenting says our inability to prioritize child care is harming the climate movement.
  • Readers often ask me about this newsletter’s focus on intersectionality. This is a climate change publication, so why not focus strictly on climate? Why write about seemingly separate issues, like dating and racism? The answer, of course, is that these issues are not separate. The wounds we’ve cut into our planet bleed into every single thing we do, like dating. And our collective inability to address society’s other wounds, like racism, harm our ability to bandage and heal.
  • EA: And what’s the workload like right now? GG: We’re slammed. Every day, we’re hit with another example of science being sidelined. Things that years ago might have been a full-court press are now barely a blip on the map. Things that would have been a really big deal in another time are now just, “add it to the list,” because we just don’t have the ability to devote so much capacity to individual issues. We’re just drowning in cases to react to.
  • EA: I know you’re busy (obviously) and probably have to run; but could you tell me briefly what else you’re working at UCS on right now as you balance your kids’ needs with the planet’s? GG: We are developing solutions to a lot of the scientific integrity challenges that we have observed in the past four years. We’re trying to think about how we strengthen the use of science in the federal government, and what protections we can put in place to prevent a lot of the attacks on science that we've been seeing in the future. We’re really trying to be forward thinking about what we do about this, in addition to continuing to track all of the problems that we see, and helping to demonstrate the harm caused by these anti-science actions.
• Brazil moves toward transfer of deforestation and fire monitoring to military: In a recent announcement, Brazilian Vice President Hamilton Mourão defended the creation of a new agency that would have full authority over Amazon deforestation and fire monitoring satellite alerts. For three decades, INPE, Brazil’s civilian space agency, has held that role, making data publicly available.
• Greenland ice sheet on course to lose ice at fastest rate in 12,000 years, study finds: By 2100, the ice sheet will shrink to the size it was during the last time the world was hotter than today.
  • The Greenland ice sheet is on track to lose mass at about four times the fastest rate observed over the past 12,000 years. At its current trajectory, such melting would dump huge quantities of freshwater into the sea, raising global sea levels and disrupting ocean currents, scientists concluded in new research Wednesday.
  • The new findings, published in the journal Nature, warn that the only way to avoid a drastically accelerated meltdown of the massive ice sheet in coming decades is for the global community to curtail emissions of greenhouse gases in the near-term.
  • The researchers’ projections show that after little change in ice mass loss over thousands of years, a sudden, precipitous uptick occurred in recent decades. This steep rise is projected to accelerate through 2100, if the world fails to drastically cut the greenhouse gas emissions fueling the globe’s warming.
  • 
  • “To my knowledge, it’s the first evidence that shows that we are reaching levels of mass loss that are comparable to what happened last time when things were, so to say, bad — meaning massive sea level rise,” he said of the study, in which he was not involved.
  • The new study’s projections are in line with findings from other recent research, which shows that Greenland is losing ice at an increasing rate. A study published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, showed that Greenland’s glaciers went from dumping about 51 billion tons of ice into the ocean between 1980 to 1990, to 286 billion tons between 2010 and 2018. The result is that out of nearly 14 millimeters of sea level rise in total caused by Greenland since 1972, half of it has occurred in the past eight years, researchers found.
  • “Imagine yourself with wide open arms in front of a tsunami and trying to stop it,” he said. “If we don’t stop what creates the tsunami, we can’t stop the freaking tsunami."
• The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning: Has a desire to keep the coronavirus out of schools put children’s long-term well-being at stake?
  • Prince Edward County, in Virginia, is one of the most wrenching examples of such disruptions. In 1954, when the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, ruled against school segregation, districts across the South threatened to close their public schools to avoid integrating them. But only one place actually did so for an extended period: Prince Edward County, west of Richmond. In 1959, the county board of supervisors eliminated the entire school budget for some 21 schools and an estimated 3,000 students. White families raised tens of thousands of dollars for a new private high school and received offers of temporary space from, among others, the Presbyterian Church, the Moose Lodge and the Woman’s Club House. Textbook suppliers donated books, other districts donated buses and leaders of the new academy stripped the public schools of books, desks and football goalposts.
  • The county’s Black community lacked the resources to establish private schools for the roughly 1,500 Black students. About 61 of them were taken in by Kittrell College, a Black institution in North Carolina. Other children went to live with relatives in Philadelphia, Boston and New York; in some cases, siblings were dispersed permanently. Many kids simply went without school. Ricky Brown, who would have been in kindergarten that year, spent his days idly, occasionally joining some 75 students who attended “training centers” set up in the basement of the Reverend L. Francis Griffin’s church. “The only thing I got out of that was how to spell my name and the alphabet,” Brown told Kristen Green, in “Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County,” her 2015 book on the shutdown. That was more education, though, than McCar­thy Eanes received: Green recounts that Eanes and his 15 or so school-age siblings stayed home on their family’s tobacco farm.
  • The closure lasted five years, until the Supreme Court ordered the county schools to reopen and desegregate. When they did open, in the fall of 1964, as few as eight of the roughly 1,500 students were white. The Michigan State University researcher Robert L. Green estimated that 1,300 Black children in the county received no formal education during the closure. He also found that the illiteracy rates for Black students under 22 went from 3% to 23%. Years later, Doug Vaughan, who became a garment worker, tried to teach himself to read using Harlequin romances. “I always wondered, ‘Where would I be if I had gone to school, completed it, and gotten an education?’” he told Kristen Green. “Where would I be in life?”
  • On July 7, President Donald Trump held a series of events at the White House with Betsy DeVos, his secretary of education, to demand that schools open. “We’re very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools,” he said. “It’s very important for our country. It’s very important for the well-being of the student and the parents. So we’re going to be putting a lot of pressure on: Open your schools in the fall.” The effect of Trump’s declaration was instantaneous. Teachers who had been responsive to the idea of returning to the classroom suddenly regarded the prospect much more warily. “Our teachers were ready to go back as long as it was safe,” Randi Weingarten, the longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, told me. “Then Trump and DeVos played their political bullshit.” Ryan Hooper, the former soldier, saw the effect on his colleagues. “It was really unhelpful,” he said.
  • Some of the unions’ concerns were hard to dispute. The Trump administration offered little funding for PPE or building upgrades, and Hogan and Salmon did not do much more to help. “There was a concerning lack of robust leadership from the superintendent’s office,” Leslie Margolis, a managing attorney for Disability Rights Maryland, which advocates for people with special needs, told me. “A lot of school systems were looking for guidance.” (A spokesperson for Hogan said that his hands-­off approach was intentional: “The Governor was one of the most outspoken advocates for ensuring that these decisions were made locally.”)
  • I kept thinking of something Karen Ngosso had told me about Shemar. “His story, it could be any number of kids,” she said. “There’s thousands of him. There’s millions of him.”
• New super-enzyme eats plastic bottles six times faster: Breakthrough that builds on plastic-eating bugs first discovered by Japan in 2016 promises to enable full recycling
  • The super-enzyme, derived from bacteria that naturally evolved the ability to eat plastic, enables the full recycling of the bottles. Scientists believe combining it with enzymes that break down cotton could also allow mixed-fabric clothing to be recycled. Today, millions of tonnes of such clothing is either dumped in landfill or incinerated. Plastic pollution has contaminated the whole planet, from the Arctic to the deepest oceans, and people are now known to consume and breathe microplastic particles. It is currently very difficult to break down plastic bottles into their chemical constituents in order to make new ones from old, meaning more new plastic is being created from oil each year.
  • The super-enzyme was engineered by linking two separate enzymes, both of which were found in the plastic-eating bug discovered at a Japanese waste site in 2016. The researchers revealed an engineered version of the first enzyme in 2018, which started breaking down the plastic in a few days. But the super-enzyme gets to work six times faster.
  • French company Carbios revealed a different enzyme in April, originally discovered in a compost heap of leaves, that degrades 90% of plastic bottles within 10 hours, but requires heating above 70C. The new super-enzyme works at room temperature, and McGeehan said combining different approaches could speed progress towards commercial use: “If we can make better, faster enzymes by linking them together and provide them to companies like Carbios, and work in partnership, we could start doing this within the next year or two.”
  • Combining the plastic-eating enzymes with existing ones that break down natural fibres could allow mixed materials to be fully recycled, McGeehan said. “Mixed fabrics [of polyester and cotton] are really tricky to recycle. We’ve been speaking to some of the big fashion companies that produce these textiles, because they’re really struggling at the moment.”
• Ocean Heat Waves Are Directly Linked to Climate Change: The “blob” of hotter ocean water that killed sea lions and other marine life in 2014 and 2015 may become permanent.
  • Six years ago, a huge part of the Pacific Ocean near North America quickly warmed, reaching temperatures more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Nicknamed “the blob,” it persisted for two years, with devastating impacts on marine life, including sea lions and salmon. The blob was a marine heat wave, the oceanic equivalent of a deadly summer atmospheric one. It was far from a solitary event: Tens of thousands have occurred in the past four decades, although most are far smaller and last for days rather than years. The largest and longest ones have occurred with increasing frequency over time.
  • In a world with no human-caused warming, a large marine heat wave would have had about a one-tenth of 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year — what is called a thousand-year event. But with the current rate of global warming, an ocean heat wave like that could soon have as much as a 10 percent chance of occurring, the study found.
  • That study showed that a 2018 marine heat wave off the Gulf Coast formed when the passage of a tropical storm, Gordon, in early September was followed by an atmospheric heat wave. Brian Dzwonkowski, a researcher at the University of South Alabama and the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, and the study’s lead author, said the tropical storm had stirred cold water up from the bottom, mixing it with warm surface water to make uniformly warm conditions. The atmospheric heat wave then warmed the waters further, putting them past the heat threshold that defines a marine heat wave. The relatively shallow coastal waters were “supercharged from top to bottom,” Dr. Dzwonkowski said.
  • In mid-October another tropical cyclone, Hurricane Michael, came along. The warm water helped it rapidly strengthen to a powerful Category 5 storm, with a devastating result. Nearly 60 people were killed when the hurricane made landfall in Florida.

9/29/2020

• The War Crime No One Wants to Talk About: Soviet soldiers harass a woman in Leipzig in 1945. The Red Army assaulted hundreds of thousands of women across Germany, Christina Lamb writes in “Our Bodies, Their Battlefields.”
  • The atrocities in “Our Bodies, Their Battlefields” horrify, as they should. Lamb, a veteran foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times of London, does society a service by forcing us to look. Rape, she writes, is the “most neglected” war crime of the 1949 Geneva Convention. It’s rarely prosecuted. It’s rarely written about. Here, she provides one of the first exhaustive examinations of sexual violence as a deliberate weapon, used to inflict terror and humiliation. Her book is painful to read but should be required for everyone interested in military and global affairs.
  • Combatants get away with sexual pillage, Lamb argues, because men in power haven’t stopped them: “War rape was met with tacit acceptance and committed with impunity, military and political leaders shrugging it off as a sideshow. Or it was denied to have ever happened.”
  • The sheer scope of wartime rape is staggering, though as Lamb points out exact numbers are hard to come by. Most of us never learned about war rape in school — from the thousands of German women raped by Stalin’s Red Army during World War II to the thousands of Asian women coerced into sexual slavery by the Japanese during the same period.
  • “We are like dead women walking,” says Victoire Mukambanda, who lost count of the number of rapes she endured during Rwanda’s genocide. Left for dead in a latrine pit, she feels unlucky to have survived.
  • The first prosecution of rape as a war crime occurred in 1998, at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, half a century after the Geneva Convention declared it such. The International Criminal Court has a sorrier record. Created in 2002, it has secured only one conviction for sexual slavery and rape, in the 2019 case of a Congolese warlord. (A previous conviction was overturned.) More than half of the 90 war criminals convicted by the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia were found guilty of sexual violence, but this, Lamb writes, is a “fraction considering the tribunal received reports of more than 20,000 rapes.”
  • Recently there have been signs that the international community is finally waking up. The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize went to two campaigners against wartime rape: Nadia Murad, a Yazidi repeatedly assaulted by ISIS militants, and Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist called “Dr. Miracle” for his genital repairs of thousands of victims of sexual crimes. Yet the devastation will persist without recognition that rape is as heinous as murder. Witnesses will remain silent out of fear of stigma or a lack of access to lawyers.
• Behind the White House Effort to Pressure the C.D.C. on School Openings: Documents and interviews show how senior officials sought to play down the risks of sending children back to the classroom, alarming public health experts.
  • Top White House officials pressured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this summer to play down the risk of sending children back to school, a strikingly political intervention in one of the most sensitive public health debates of the pandemic, according to documents and interviews with current and former government officials. As part of their behind-the-scenes effort, White House officials also tried to circumvent the C.D.C. in a search for alternate data showing that the pandemic was weakening and posed little danger to children.
  • The documents and interviews show how the White House spent weeks trying to press public health professionals to fall in line with President Trump’s election-year agenda of pushing to reopen schools and the economy as quickly as possible. The president and his team have remained defiant in their demand for schools to get back to normal, even as coronavirus cases have once again ticked up, in some cases linked to school and college reopenings. The effort included Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, and officials working for Vice President Mike Pence [ael: my emphasis], who led the task force. It left officials at the C.D.C., long considered the world’s premier public health agency, alarmed at the degree of pressure from the White House.
  • In another instance, Dr. Birx took a direct role in an effort to push the C.D.C. to incorporate work from a little-known agency inside the Department of Health and Human Services, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. [ael: jail Dr. Birx!]
  • The internal battle began in July, weeks after a group of C.D.C. career employees began drafting what would become the agency’s guidance to assist parents in making decisions about whether to send their children back to school. Mr. Trump had publicly made his preference clear. “We want to get them open quickly, beautifully, in the fall,” he said, adding that “young people do extraordinarily well” in avoiding the disease.
  • The White House drafted materials that C.D.C. officials originally believed were intended to be posted on the White House website, including an illustrated slide presentation emphasizing the “high costs of keeping schools closed,” while asserting that school-age children face minimal risks from the coronavirus. The C.D.C. raised objections to the presentation, and it was never published.
  • On July 23, with hours to go before the new guidance was to be published, the White House staff secretary further stunned C.D.C. officials by emailing the guidance to a long list of top White House officials, asking for any “critical edits” by 1 p.m. The list included Mark Meadows, the chief of staff; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser; Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council; and Stephen Miller, a White House policy adviser. By the time it was published, it contained information that C.D.C. officials had objected to earlier in the week, suggesting in particular that the coronavirus was less deadly to children than the seasonal flu.
• Ontario in grip of second Covid-19 wave that will be 'worse than first', officials say: Canadian province logs record 700 new daily infections; Rise in cases follows gradual reopening and return of schools
  • Ontario logged 700 new Covid-19 infections on Monday – well above the previous highest daily total of 640 on 24 April – as the premier, Doug Ford, warned residents to expect a “more complex” and “more complicated” surge of the virus in the coming weeks. “We know it will be worse than the first wave, but we don’t know how bad the second wave will be,” said Ford. “Our collective actions will determine if we face a wave or a tsunami.”
  • The surge is a bitter turn for the province, which was able to get new daily infections below 100 earlier in the summer. But a gradual reopening – which eased restrictions on social gatherings and permitted indoor dining and drinking – has eroded many of the hard-won gains.
  • As public health officials grappled with the grim new figures, the president of Ontario’s hospital association called on the government to move swiftly in implementing new restrictions, including closing non-essential locations like gyms and movie theatres…. Last week, Ontario reduced operating hours for bars and restaurants and ordered all strip clubs closed after a string of outbreaks.
  • Related: Canada: 550 people exposed to Covid-19 at Toronto strip club: Potential exposure took place just days after the Brass Rail Tavern, one of the city’s best-known strip clubs, was allowed to reopen
    • “You know how long it’s going to take them to chase down 550 guys, half of which probably gave fake ID or information,” Andrew Morris, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Toronto told the Associated Press. Toronto health officials suggested their initial investigation found the club to be lacking when it came to following the required protocols, which include distancing between staff and customers and the use of a Plexiglass shield when this is not possible.
  • In neighbouring Quebec, the province recorded 750 new cases. The health minister, Christian Dube, called the situation in urban centres “very worrying” and warned that both Montreal and Quebec City would be designated as “red zones” later on Monday – the province’s highest alert level.
  • Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party has urged parliament to swiftly pass its Covid-19 relief bill, which promises income support and paid sick leave for residents. Opposition parties balked at the request, pointing out that it was the prime minister’s decision to prorogue parliament which prevented debate for nearly two months.
• As Miami Keeps Building, Rising Seas Deepen Its Social Divide: Ignoring sea level rise and intensifying flooding, Miami has continued to build luxury real estate near the water at a rapid pace. But as developers eye higher ground, communities of color will likely bear the heaviest burden from the changes wrought by climate change.
  • There is an inescapable truth about life in South Florida: This low-lying region is set to be swallowed by the sea. An array of powers — municipal, state, federal, and private — have begun to plan and borrow and spend to defend Miami and its environs. But as sea levels steadily rise, the porous limestone rock its residents walk on every day means there is no stopping the Atlantic Ocean. [ael: my emphasis. And… what…? Gonna do anything about it? We're just going to say "Ho hum", and keep on rolling. We're just going to get our kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames….]
  • The sea at the southern end of the Florida Peninsula has risen a foot since the 1900s, and almost 5 inches since 1993. The ocean reclaims chunks of land in the fall and spring during so called “sunny day” floods, which have become four times more common today than 15 years ago. Some scientists say that another 6 inches of sea level rise could very well arrive by 2030, and infrastructure planners are bracing for 2 feet by 2060. Five to 6 feet of sea level rise by 2100 is likely, and likely catastrophic: An inundation of this magnitude would physically displace some 800,000 residents of Miami-Dade County — nearly a third of the current population — and render a large portion of the city uninhabitable.
  • To see why lower-income residents are likely to be on the losing end of the dramatic changes bearing down on Miami-Dade, you need to understand a little about South Florida’s inherent inequality. This is a place that has 35 billionaires — about 5 percent of the U.S. total — and a minimum wage of $8.56 an hour. If you look past the glittering skyscrapers and mega-yachts, you will see that the City of Miami has a relative rate of inequality similar to that of developing countries like Paraguay and Colombia. Forty percent of the households in Miami-Dade County — of which the City of Miami is part — are working poor, with little savings and few assets. Nearly one-fifth live below the poverty line.
  • Those economic divisions are also racial divisions. A 2019 study found “major disparities in wealth accumulation and income across various racial and ethnic groups in metropolitan Miami.” Predictably, non-Latinx white households are by far the most prosperous, with a median net worth of $107,000. The next-closest group, Cuban households, had a median wealth of $22,000.
  • Meanwhile, at the upper end of the socio-economic scale, the Miami real estate market hums along, even as the giant residential real estate firm, Zillow, says the City of Miami — population 470,000 — is home to 26 percent of all U.S. homes at risk from rising seas. According to studies conducted by the Risky Business Project, $15 billion to $23 billion of property here could be underwater by 2050.
  • High-end real estate developers are economic and political powerhouses in Miami. They shape the city’s housing policy. They help elect (or depose, in the case of the county’s last mayor) local politicians. But because they often don’t hold onto the buildings they build for more than a few years, they have little incentive to change their ways in the face of climate upheaval. When I asked Ben Solomon — a real estate lawyer who sits at the nexus of realtors, construction companies, and developers — about the threats posed by global warming, he replied, “I just hope that this thing is far enough away that we have five or six more business cycles left.”
  • Should seas rise 2 feet, that increase would render hundreds of thousands of residential septic tanks inoperable because the tanks don’t work when groundwater tables rise along with sea level. Miami-Dade County has 108,000 properties on septic systems, most of them owned by middle-class residents. The county estimates that it would cost about $3 billion to build out a sewer system that reaches everyone, but that figure does not include the cost per homeowner of hooking a house up to the system, which can range from $15,000 to $50,000.
  • “This project is on some of the highest land in all of South Florida,” Neisen Kasdin, the former mayor of Miami Beach and the attorney for the project, told me. Magic City’s construction plan promises to create 2,500 residential units, stores, and restaurants, and a public park, all on land that is likely to remain above sea level at least until the end of the century. [ael: ah, well then: we're good.]
• New York City is testing electric garbage trucks: Trash pickup could get a lot quieter (and cleaner).
  • A new garbage truck making the rounds on Brooklyn streets might look similar to the thousands of other garbage trucks in New York City. But it’s nearly silent, and there isn’t a tailpipe belching diesel emissions. Huge letters on the side of the truck spell out the difference: “Fully Electric.” “This is an environmental justice issue and a quality-of-life issue,” says Joshua Goodman, a spokesperson for the New York City Department of Sanitation, explaining that moving to electric heavy equipment is a key way for the city to reduce emissions. Electric garbage trucks, like other electric vehicles, can help reduce air pollution that’s linked to thousands of premature deaths in the city each year. The technology could also help the city work toward its goal to become carbon neutral by 2050. By 2040, the city is planning to electrify its entire fleet.
  • In some ways, garbage collection is well-suited for electrification: The constant starts and stops mean that regenerative braking—where energy from the brakes helps charge the battery—is especially potent. Electric motors also work particularly well at low speeds. And the routes are predictable, with time for the trucks to charge when they’re not in use.
• Neftalí Durán is Using Indigenous Wisdom to Educate Eaters and Address Inequity: The food activist and co-founder of the I-Collective sees the work of his elders as the foundation for promoting economic, racial, and environmental justice.
  • 
  • Hunger, driven by a lack of access to nutritious foods, has been a serious problem in Indigenous communities since long before the pandemic began. One study based on data collected between 2000 and 2010 found that Native Americans and Native Alaskans had an average food insecurity rate of 25 percent, compared to 10 percent among white Americans. Other studies have identified much larger numbers; one that looked at communities in the Klamath River Basin near the Oregon-California border found that 92 percent of households had experienced food insecurity.
  • Originally from Oaxaca, Mexico, Durán is of the Ñuu Savi, or “People of the Rain,” Mixtec Indigenous people. To be Indigenous in Mexico, Durán explains, is essentially to live under a modern-day caste system, with white Mexicans at the top of the system, and Afro-Mexican and Indigenous Mexicans at the bottom.
  • We know that the amount of SNAP recipients has increased dramatically. I believe we went from like 40-ish million [food insecure] people to 50 million [during the pandemic]. And we also have to remember the numbers we know are only the people who qualify or were able to [receive the] benefits. Not everyone that [needed them] applied, [and] you can apply and not receive anything.
  • In most states, if you have a felony, you don’t qualify for benefits. You don’t qualify for SNAP or housing. If you’re undocumented, obviously, you’re not going to qualify for any state support. And there are other people, people who even if documented are scared to apply for SNAP [because] they don’t want that to prevent them from the process of applying for citizenship.
  • For example, it is well known that the community supported agriculture (CSA) model specifically caters to wealthier people, who happen also to be white. We should stop replicating that. We should move to a model where that nice CSA also agrees to have a partnership with communities of color that lack that kind of access.
  • We are building a new organization in the city of Holyoke, Massachusetts—The Holyoke Food and Equity Collective. It is going to be an anti-racist organization that focuses on food, the food system, and food sovereignty for our community. The collective hopes to promote economic, racial, and environmental justice in collaboration with the local city government.
• The Sudbury model: How one of the world’s major polluters went green: Volunteers have worked for decades in Sudbury, Ontario, to restore the land in the once-polluted mining town. They say their work holds lessons for breaking the endless cycle of conflict between industry and environmentalists.
  • When the Superstack was constructed in 1972, it was the tallest structure in Canada – and the tallest smokestack in the world. At 1,250 feet, it’s visible from every vantage point in the area. It can be seen from the bustling streets of downtown to the quiet cul-de-sacs of residential neighborhoods. It looms large in the distance from highways that feed into a city that is home to one of the largest mining complexes in the world.
  • Whether or not the structure remains a fixture on the skyline when it’s taken out of operation, it tells a powerful tale of renewal. The stack was built as part of an industrial complex that denuded the land here of any kind of vegetation, leaving blackened rocks and lakes without fish. The landscape drew comparisons to moonscapes and barren Martian worlds. At one time the smelters in Sudbury were the largest point source of sulfur dioxide in the world.
  • It got so bad that scientists, politicians, industry officials, and the community finally came together to halt the pollution, replant the trees, and restock the lakes. It has been 40 years of toil and triumph, and the story is not over yet. But today Sudbury enjoys some of the cleanest air quality in Ontario. Residents swim and fish in the 330 lakes inside the city’s boundaries. And those here say the community of 165,000, at the gateway of northern Ontario, offers a lesson in how to break the cycle of conflict that the current climate crisis often creates, pitting industry against the environment.
  • This area was once called Ste. Anne of the Pines for the old-growth forest that flourished here. Later, after the logging industry moved in, lumber harvested from the prized trees was shipped far and wide – including to Chicago to help rebuild after the Great Fire of 1871. Environmental devastation accelerated after the 1880s when metal deposits were found along a crater formed by a prehistoric meteorite impact. The deposits, discovered during the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, represented one of the largest concentrations of sulfide ore in the world. The metals forged in huge foundries here were used to build armaments during both world wars. Early methods of roasting the ore polluted the landscape locally, while later smelting techniques expanded the damage regionally. Dr. Pearson, who arrived from a coal mining town in northern England, remembers distinctly how bad the air smelled one day in 1969. “It was perhaps humid, and [the plume] came down to ground level,” he says. “And I parked in the parking lot, and I had to run in order to be able to hold my breath long enough to get into a building because the smell of the sulfur dioxide was so powerful even in my car. … I had never experienced anything nearly as penetrating a pollution as this.”
  • Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Sudbury was a company town. At its peak, 20,000 miners worked underground – the ebbs and flows of the city defined by worker shifts. No one dared speak out against the industry. But then Laurentian University was established in 1960. “Nobody was going to say anything against the company, essentially,” says Peter Beckett, an ecologist at the university and chair of the city’s advisory panel on regreening. “And so the university was kind of the first independent thing in the town, and people started asking questions: ‘Can one do anything about the landscape?’”
  • As it turns out, they could. Biologists at both the university and at Inco had been experimenting with regreening, first potting plants and then moving to plots outside. By 1975, the “Sudbury recipe” was created – the basis for a massive liming project that would neutralize the soil and allow for replanting.
  • The effort coincided with a downturn in the nickel industry and worries on the part of local politicians that the town wasn’t going to survive unless it reinvented itself. Regreening became a communitywide endeavor. Unemployed miners and student volunteers alike wielded lime sacks and scattered seed. Dr. Beckett remembers the first year in 1978, when the community landscapers would scour their Garden of Eden for the first shoots. “After the Aug. 15 [heavy rains] that first year, every member of the committee was out every day looking constantly at the same area to see if any green fuzz was coming up,” he says. “And then one day, about a week later, everybody just shouted, ‘eureka,’ just like the Greeks.”
  • None of this would have been possible without tough regulations, though. When the Superstack was built, mining’s motto for the era was “Dilution is the solution to pollution.” New technology and evolving processes helped reduce emissions in Greater Sudbury, but the Superstack dispersed them further afield, to neighboring provinces, and as far as the United States and Greenland. It essentially turned a local problem into an international one.
• CDC’s credibility is eroded by internal blunders and external attacks as coronavirus vaccine campaigns loom: For decades, the agency stood at the forefront of fighting disease outbreaks. This time, it’s dealing with a crisis of its own.
  • The agency’s response to the worst public health crisis in a century — the coronavirus pandemic — has been marked by technical blunders and botched messaging. The agency has endured false accusations and interference by Trump administration political appointees. Worst of all, the CDC has experienced a loss of institutional credibility at a time when the nation desperately needs to know whom to trust. This harsh assessment does not come from political or ideological enemies of the CDC. It comes from the agency’s friends and supporters — and even from some of the professionals within the agency’s Atlanta headquarters.
  • “It’s been a terrible year for the CDC,” said Ross McKinney Jr., chief scientific officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges. “There’s no question that their credibility and effectiveness have been damaged by a combination of external threats, leadership that has been perceived to be ineffective and mistakes they have made internally.”
  • Inside the CDC, staffers acknowledge Redfield’s limitations as a leader but are fearful that, if he is ousted or quits, the White House will install someone of a more distinctly political or ideological bent — such as Scott Atlas, a Stanford University neuroradiologist and Trump pandemic adviser. Atlas, who has said pandemic fears are overblown, has become a Trump favorite and has publicly criticized Redfield in recent days. Atlas has no experience in infectious diseases but attends all meetings of the White House coronavirus task force.
  • But the agency’s most chronic problem has been the inability to speak directly and persuasively to the American public. To a large extent, that’s because it has been muzzled — and sometimes directly criticized — by political operatives in the Trump administration. Michael Caputo, a political appointee and the top spokesman at HHS, this month falsely declared that CDC scientists were political partisans dedicated to opposing the president. He later apologized and is on medical leave. That accusation came after Caputo and one of his advisers had tried to get the CDC to alter or delay its regular scientific missives, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, if they deviated from the president’s upbeat coronavirus message. Redfield told Congress this month that the “scientific integrity” of his agency’s reports “has not been compromised and it will not be compromised under my watch.” [ael: sorry, Redfield: actions speak louder than words.]
• World leaders pledge to halt Earth’s destruction ahead of UN summit: France, Germany and UK among more than 60 countries promising to put wildlife and climate at heart of post-Covid recovery plans
  • "Leaders from the United States, Brazil, India, Russia and China are notably absent", noted Nature.
  • The announcement comes ahead of a major UN biodiversity summit on Wednesday, which will be hosted virtually from New York, and part way through negotiations on a Paris-style international agreement on nature. The speaking slots at this week’s summit are oversubscribed, with more than 116 heads of states and governments asking to address the event. “Science clearly shows that biodiversity loss, land and ocean degradation, pollution, resource depletion and climate change are accelerating at an unprecedented rate. This acceleration is causing irreversible harm to our life support systems and aggravating poverty and inequalities as well as hunger and malnutrition,” the pledge reads.
  • Other signatories to the pledge include the leaders of Bangladesh, Bhutan, Colombia, Costa Rica, Fiji, Kenya, Seychelles and Mexico. The presidents of the US, Brazil and China – Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Xi Jinping – have not signed the pledge, despite Xi spearheading global biodiversity talks. Earlier this month, the UN announced that the world failed to meet a single target to slow the loss of the natural world for the second consecutive decade, including goals to protect coral reefs, preserve natural habitats and reduce plastic and chemical waste to levels that do not damage ecosystems.
  • “Many of the most important countries in the world that are causing climate change due to their emissions of greenhouse gases, and/or are destroying their biodiversity, are not signatures to this pledge. Without countries such as the USA, Brazil, China, Russia, India, and Australia we cannot succeed in achieving the Paris Climate goal or halting and ultimately reversing the loss of biodiversity,” he told the Guardian.
• New Study Shows a Vicious Circle of Climate Change Building on Thickening Layers of Warm Ocean Water: Global warming is deepening blankets of warmer water that alter ocean currents, hinder absorption of carbon, intensify storms and disrupt biological cycles.
  • A new study shows more heat is building up in the upper 600 feet of the ocean than deeper down. That increasingly distinct warm layer on the surface can intensify tropical storms, disrupt fisheries, interfere with the ocean absorption of carbon and deplete oxygen, Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State, said. The intensified layering, called ocean stratification, is happening faster than scientists expected, an international team of researchers reported in the study, published Sept. 28 in the journal Nature Climate Change. And that means the negative impacts will arrive faster and also be greater than expected, said Mann, a co-author of the study. [ael: my emphasis — once again, we've been low-balled….]
  • "The take-home point, here, is that once again we are learning that the uncertainties are not breaking in our favor," he said. "If anything, the impacts of climate change are proving to be worse than we predicted."
  • The observed increase in ocean stratification is "yet another climate science prediction come true," said climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf, with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research, who was not involved in the study. The increase in layering means there is less exchange between the surface and deeper oceans, "which is generally bad news on a number of fronts," he said. "For example it reduces the oxygen supply to the waters below the ocean surface, which is bad for marine life. Oxygen-depleted dead zones are already spreading in the oceans."
  • Mann said a warm upper ocean cannot hold as much dissolved gas, whether it's carbon dioxide or oxygen, just like a warm soda can't hold its fizziness. "That's a double whammy. In the first case, that means that the oceans are less able to take up CO2 from the atmosphere, and so atmospheric CO2 builds up even faster. The ocean becomes less effective as a "carbon sink," he said. "In the second case, it means that the oceans hold less oxygen. That's problematic for sea life that, like us, needs oxygen. It's a threat to the food web, including fish."
• Sylvia Earle: How to protect the oceans: Legendary ocean researcher Sylvia Earle shares astonishing images of the ocean — and shocking stats about its rapid decline — as she makes her TED Prize wish: that we will join her in protecting the vital blue heart of the planet. (2009)

9/28/2020

• Saving Western Canada’s only endangered tree: Whitebark pine is facing down the triple threat of climate change, habitat loss and disease. Restoration projects by northwest B.C. researchers may be the tree’s best chance for survival
  • The tree is whitebark pine, the first and only tree in Western Canada to be designated an endangered species and the only coniferous tree in the country with the designation. Facing the combined threats of habitat loss, climate change, the mountain pine beetle and an invasive fungus called blister rust, the tree was added to the federal endangered species register under the Species At Risk Act in 2012.
  • And whitebark pine does have advantages over other trees. It can grow right on the edge of the alpine, withstanding brutal weather conditions, and on landscapes where there are recurrent outbreaks of fire and bark beetles.
  • “It’s just such a badass tree,” Clason says, crouching down on a rocky slope, looking at a tiny seedling. “Who wants to grow here? There’s hardly any soil. And it’s just like, ‘Yeah, I can do it.’ ”
  • Clason says it’s hard to get people to care about something that’s not cute and cuddly. Then she suddenly reaches down, grinning, and gently touches another seedling poking out from under the branches of a larger tree. “But just look at it — how could you not think that’s cute?”
    
  • “That’s one of the really sad things about the mountain pine beetle,” Haeussler says. “It took out almost all of the low-elevation stands, which is where the trees are bigger and they produce a ton of cones and the seeds are way better.” While the mountain pine beetle finally put the tree on officials’ radar, it has been under attack for much longer. Climate change has impacted whitebark pine since the early 1800s, Haeussler says, and blister rust has been attacking the tree for at least 50 years. “There wasn’t a magical date when everything suddenly began to fall apart. This crisis has been building for a very long time.”
  • As climate change continues to create warmer environments at higher elevations, other conifer species spread and compete with the tree for habitat. “These other faster-growing tree species are going to move up that slope and sort of squish out those places where whitebark has been able to eke an advantage,” Clason explains. [ael: this is the resplendent quetzal of trees; the quetzal moves higher up the cloudforest in Costa Rica, but the toucan is right behind, chasing it up, and out.]
  • Forestry management practices like fire suppression have also reduced areas where whitebark pine can find an advantage over competing species. After a wildfire, whitebark pine is one of the first trees to take root. The open spaces created by natural fires in the subalpine are ideal for the sun-worshipping tree. Preventing or limiting natural fire events means there are fewer places where the tree is able to repopulate the landscape.
  • Unlike the mountain pine beetle, blister rust is indifferent to elevation. However, it needs an alternate host to survive. In the subalpine, that’s a wildflower. The weather clears briefly and Haeussler stops to take photos of the subalpine landscape, saying she’ll be guiding a group of naturalists here the following day. Clason points out examples of the flower. It’s a showy red wildflower and there are plenty of them, punctuating the meadows of green and yellow and purple that descend down the slope toward the timberline.
  • Haeussler and Clason’s work through the Bulkley Valley Research Centre involves collecting and studying seeds to identify trees that are rust resistant and then trying to propagate healthy trees on restoration plots. “We’re just trying to help evolution move a little bit quicker,” Clason says.
  • Whitebark pine is a keystone species in a complex ecosystem
    • Understanding whitebark pine means understanding its role and interactions within the ecosystem. Because the tree often grows on steep, exposed, rocky ridges, its roots stabilize those slopes and help build up snowdrifts, which melt more slowly than the rest of the snowpack. This means that melt can help sustain other subalpine species such as lichens, grasses and wildflowers, and reduce flooding events at lower elevations.
    • But the real star of the whitebark pine story is its seeds. Unlike most of its coniferous cousins, whitebark pine seeds are not dispersed by wind or fire. Instead, their dispersal is almost exclusively dependent on a single bird: Clark’s nutcracker. “It cracks open the seeds in the cones and flies away and caches them,” Clason says. “Nutcrackers are in the corvid family, so they have this incredible memory. They’re able to go back and retrace their steps and find those caches, and then feed the seeds to their young.”
    • “If we focus only on helping the tree move more quickly to develop rust resistance, but we don’t spend any time thinking about where we want the system to stay intact, then we’re going to break that connection between whitebark and Clark’s nutcracker,” Clason says. And if that breaks, then we’ve kind of lost the system.”
  • Despite its status as an endangered species, whitebark pine is also still being logged. As The Narwhal reported last year, since achieving its official designation as endangered in 2012, more than 19,000 cubic metres of whitebark pine have been logged in B.C.
  • Last fall, whitebark pine trees were cut down to make way for the Coastal GasLink pipeline [ael: run by TC Energy, aka TransCanada]. The company was required to collect the cones from felled trees so viable seeds could be used in replanting projects, but in June it was served a stop-work order by the Environmental Assessment Office for failing to do so. [ael: imagine — the company road roughshod over environmental concerns]
• Pakistan’s Most Terrifying Adversary Is Climate Change: The country debates women’s honor inexhaustibly but pays little attention to the ferocious and imminent dangers of climate disasters.
  • In August, Karachi’s stifling summer heat was heavy and pregnant. The sapodilla trees and frangipani leaves were lush and green; the Arabian Sea, quiet and distant, had grown muddy. When the palm fronds started to sway, slowly, the city knew the winds had picked up and rain would follow. Every year the monsoons come — angrier and wilder — lashing the unprepared city. Studies show that climate change is causing monsoons to be more intense and less predictable, and cover larger areas of land for longer periods of time.
  • On Aug. 27, Karachi received nearly nine inches of monsoon rain, the highest amount of rainfall ever in a single day. Nineteen inches of rain fell in August, according to the meteorological officials. It is enough to drown a city that has no functioning drainage, no emergency systems and no reliable health care (except for those who can pay). Thousands of homes and settlements of the poor were subsumed and destroyed, and more than 100 people were killed.
  • 
    A funeral being held in Karachi, Pakistan, in August for some victims of the flood caused by relentless monsoon rains.Credit…Fareed Khan/Associated Press [ael: notice the lack of social distancing, and few masks. Science is ignored in so many ways. People will believe what they want to believe, until the truth smashes into them, their families; into their lives. But the truth must smash: we're not smart enough, in general, to prevent a lot of pain.]
  • The terror of our coming era will be born of heat and fire and ice. Some years ago, I was in a village in Sindh after a massive flood had devastated it. Thousands were displaced overnight. The blistering heat soaked the faces of displaced young women in sweat thick like glycerin. I was unsure what would be more lethal — the drowning or the heat.
  • Not far from that drowned village in Sindh is the city of Jacobabad, where temperatures in the summer run as high as 124 degrees Fahrenheit. It is the hottest city in Asia, if not the world. Jacobabad has long electricity blackouts. Its poor die as they toil in the fields.
• Many Americans face bleak winter as Covid takes toll on mental health: Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) affects 5% of US adults at the best of times – ‘and this is not the best of times’
  • “SAD is a huge problem at the best of times, and this is not the best of times,” said Norman Rosenthal, the South African psychiatrist who first described SAD or winter depression in the 1980s. “I’ve been in the United States for 45 years, and these are among the toughest times I’ve seen.”
  • According to one study, failing to heal the nation’s economic and emotional pain and suffering could result in as many as 75,000 excess deaths of despair – lives lost as a result of substance misuse and suicide – over the next decade in the US.
  • It’s not just the pandemic. Rosenthal also points to current fears about racism and voter suppression in this year’s elections – especially the uncertainty surrounding the safety of in-person voting and postal ballots being counted – as additional stressors that could exacerbate mental distress. A lack of political consensus on a range of critical issues including police brutality, the post office, wearing face masks, unemployment benefits and going back to school have fuelled the unsettling sense of chaos, division and uncertainty.
• Some covid-19 rule-breakers could be narcissists, experts say. Here’s how to approach them.
  • Susan Whitbourne was shopping recently in her neighborhood Whole Foods in Framingham, Mass., when another patron caught her eye. The man, who was chatting on his cellphone as he meandered around the store, had pulled his face covering down — a violation of Massachusetts’s statewide mask mandate. Summoning her courage, Whitbourne, a professor emerita of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, approached the unmasked shopper and reminded him of the rules. He replied, “Well, I’m talking on the phone,” she recalled. Whitbourne believes that “teeny, tiny slice of behavior” may have been a sign of an unwholesome personality trait that could explain some of the resistance to masks in America: narcissism. Several recent studies have similarly concluded that narcissistic behavior may be contributing to noncompliance with public health guidelines during the coronavirus pandemic.
  • According to psychologists, that mind-set is commonly observed in narcissists, who characteristically lack empathy, have high levels of entitlement and grandiosity, and chronically seek validation, admiration and control. Together with Machiavellianism and psychopathy, narcissism makes up one-third of the “Dark Triad,” personality patterns often linked to “a lack of niceness,” said W. Keith Campbell, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia. “If you’re narcissistic, you’re going to do what you want,” said Campbell, the author of the upcoming book “The New Science of Narcissism.” “If what you want isn’t the same as what the guidelines are, you’re not going to do the guidelines.”
  • This unwillingness to follow pandemic guidelines, despite the fact that health experts and scientific data support their efficacy, has become a widespread issue in the United States, and reflects its reputation as a society with higher levels of attitudes associated with narcissism, said Ramani Durvasula, a licensed clinical psychologist and professor at California State University at Los Angeles.
  • Consider your language: This is especially important for public health messaging, said Craig Malkin, a clinical psychologist and lecturer at Harvard Medical School. To encourage change in people who are behaving narcissistically, Malkin recommended using “we” language to emphasize interconnectedness and appealing to that population’s drive to feel special. For example, “You can make the difference between life and death because we’re all in this together.” “The less significant they feel in all of this, the more they’re going to have to pound their chests and push back against what’s being expected to feel like they matter,” Malkin said. But he noted that there are limits to the effectiveness of language, depending on how disordered a person might be.
  • Be respectful: Narcissists are impulsive, reactive and very sensitive to threats, Durvasula said. A simple eye roll directed at a narcissist who isn’t wearing a mask or is wearing it improperly “will be enough to spin them into a rage,” she said. Campbell suggested speaking in a calm, respectful voice and avoiding confrontational comments like, “Your mask is wrong.”
  • Avoid escalation: It is critical to watch your tone when engaging with a narcissist, Durvasula said. She recommended using a “hostage negotiator voice” and keeping responses minimal. “In an era where we know that this infection is spread by droplets, someone screaming at you, that’s droplet city,” she said. If the situation starts to get out of hand, Durvasula recommended “gray rocking.” “Gray rocking literally means what it sounds like — you turn into a gray rock,” she said. “A completely inert, uninteresting, unengaged object.”
• ‘Apocalyptic’ fires are ravaging the world’s largest tropical wetland: Infernos in South America’s Pantanal region have burnt twice the area of California’s fires this year. Researchers fear the rare ecosystem will never recover.
  • A common destination for ecotourists, the Pantanal is the world’s largest tropical wetland, home to Indigenous peoples and a high concentration of rare or endangered species, such as jaguars and giant armadillos. Small fires occur every year in the region, which sprawls over parts of western Brazil and extends into Bolivia and Paraguay. But 2020’s fires have been unprecedented in extent and duration, researchers say. So far, 22% of the vast floodplain — around 3.2 million hectares (see ‘Biodiversity Hotspot Under Threat’) — has succumbed to the flames, according to Renata Libonati, a remote-sensing specialist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, whose data are being used by firefighters to plan containment. That’s more than twice the area that has burnt in the record-breaking fires in California this year.
  • “It’s apocalyptic,” says Leite, who studies humanity’s relationship with nature at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil. “It is a tragedy of colossal proportions.”
  • 
  • Unlike in the nearby Amazon Rainforest, vegetation in the Pantanal has evolved to coexist with fire — many plant species there require the heat from fires to germinate. Often caused by lightning strikes, those natural fires tend to spring up at the end of the dry season, in September. They run out of fuel quickly, and the surrounding floodplains prevent them from spreading. What’s different this season is that the region is facing its worst drought in 47 years, says Luisa Diele-Vegas, a Brazilian ecologist at the University of Maryland in College Park. And 2019’s fires were also intense, contributing even further to the unusually dry conditions and exacerbating the fire risk this year.
  • The flames have also breached five territories in the Pantanal where Indigenous communities live. More than 80% of the land in each of the three most affected — Baía dos Guató, Perigara and Tereza Cristina — has been consumed by fire. A number of locals have jumped in to rescue as many animals as possible from the flames and smoke. Eduarda Fernandes Amaral, who works as a guide in the Encontro das Águas State Park, is among them. As of 20 September, more than 83% of the park, which is home to a large number of jaguars, capybaras and alligators, had been destroyed.

9/27/2020

• E.P.A. to Promote Lead Testing Rule as Trump Tries to Burnish His Record: The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to overhaul the way communities test their water for lead, a policy change that will be pitched ahead of Election Day as a major environmental achievement for a president not noted for his conservation record.
  • But a draft of the final rule obtained by The New York Times shows the E.P.A. rejected top medical and scientific experts who urged the agency to require the replacement of the country’s six million to 10 million lead service lines, an expensive but effective way to avoid crises like the one still afflicting Flint, Mich.
  • But rather than enact the sweeping changes that some health leaders say are necessary, the E.P.A. is opting for more modest improvements. Some experts and critics said the new rule actually weakens the current rule in significant ways, for instance, by more than doubling the amount of time utilities can have to replace water systems with serious levels of lead contamination.
• Seeing Our Own Reflection in the Birth of the Self-Portrait:
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9/26/2020 — Minnijean Brown day

• Little Rock Nine: Decades-long battle for school equity began with nine Black students facing angry white mob
  • A group of white girls followed Minnijean Brown through the hallways of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, stepping on her heels until they bled, spitting at her, telling her she stinks, saying she was ugly and calling her the N-word. After nearly a week of this racist bullying, it finally went too far. As Brown was about to enter her homeroom, one of the girls threw a purse full of combination locks and struck her in the head. Responding to this painful assault, Brown threw down the purse and said, “Leave me alone, white trash.” For that, she was expelled from school. The girls who attacked her suffered no consequence.
  • The incident was one of many examples of physical, verbal and psychological abuse that Brown and eight other Black students constantly endured after integrating the previously all-white school on Sept. 25, 1957.
  • 
    An alternate-angle view of Elizabeth Eckford on her first day of school, in a photo taken by an Associated Press photographer. Hazel Bryan can be seen behind her in the crowd. (Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)
  • 
    Hazel Bryan was just 15 when the photo was taken, but her actions on September 4, 1957—and the hatred on her face—turned her into an infamous symbol of the bigotry of Jim Crow and the intolerance faced by the students who tried to go to school that day. (source)
  • The Little Rock Nine would not enter the school for classes until three weeks later, following the NAACP’s court battles and Eisenhower’s decision to federalize the Arkansas National Guard and send in the 101st Airborne Division. “Those are the toughest soldiers in the whole country, and they kept order,” she said. “They dispersed the mob.” Inside the school, a soldier was assigned to protect each student. There were bomb threats every day. The lockers had to be checked each night to see if there were any explosives. The Black students were safer in the hallways, but white students still found ways to harass and attack them.
  • “They hated the guards too,” Brown said, adding that the white students would insult the guards and call them traitors. She described the situation as “American terror.” Today, Brown, who changed her last name to Brown-Trickey and moved to Canada after getting married in 1967, has earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work, has served under the Clinton administration as deputy assistant secretary for workforce diversity at the Department of the Interior, and is now a social justice activist.
  • Recently, Brown-Trickey reunited on Facebook with the white soldier who guarded her in the hallways of Central more than 60 years earlier. At the time, Black soldiers were not allowed in the school – and Black students could not speak with the white soldiers who protected them. “He said, ‘You dropped me a note that says, ‘Thank you for keeping me safe,’ and I’ve kept it all this time.’”

9/25/2020

• Trump administration rescinded Courage Award for woman who criticized Trump, then gave false explanation for its decision, watchdog finds:
  • “The Inspector General’s report is another somber example of how fear and partisanship have permeated our nation’s foreign policy and diplomacy under the Trump administration,” said Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who along with seven other senators requested the investigation.

9/24/2020

• Gale Sayers Dies; Elusive Hall of Fame Running Back Was 77: Though his career was cut short by injuries, he was regarded as one of the N.F.L.’s greatest players. The movie “Brian’s Song” spread his name beyond the sports world.
  • Gale Sayers, the will-o’-the-wisp running back who in a short but brilliant career with the Chicago Bears left opponents, as they used to say, clutching at air, died early on Wednesday at his home in Wakarusa, Ind. He was 77. His stepson Guy Bullard said the cause was complications of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
  • In March 2017, his family revealed that Sayers had dementia after he had publicly displayed symptoms of it for four years. He joins a growing list of football players who developed dementia and died of brain damage.
  • But 1969 became a somber season. For two years the Bears had matched players by position when they shared hotel rooms on the road. Sayers, who was Black, was paired with his backup, Brian Piccolo, who was white — apparently the first time a Black and white player had shared a hotel room for an N.F.L. team. The two men bonded, partly through racial jokes. But that November Piccolo was found to have embryonic cell carcinoma of the lungs. Sent to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, he underwent surgery to remove a malignant tumor, but doctors found that the disease had spread to other organs.
  • The following May, Sayers was given the George S. Halas Award, which recognizes the league’s most courageous player. In his acceptance speech, he said: “I love Brian Piccolo. I might have received this award tonight, but tomorrow I will take it to Brian Piccolo at Sloan Kettering. When you hit your knees tonight, please pray for Brian Piccolo.” Piccolo died on June 16, 1970, at 26. Sayers was a pallbearer at his funeral.
• Device to curb microplastic emissions wins James Dyson award: Tyre attachment designed by four students aims to reduce road transport pollution
  • 
  • Every time a vehicle brakes, accelerates or turns a corner, the tyres wear down through friction and tiny particles become airborne. This produces 500,000 tonnes of tyre particles annually in Europe alone. Globally, it is estimated tyre wear accounts for nearly half of road transport particulate emissions. It is also the second-largest microplastic pollutant in the oceans after single-use plastic. The winning device is fitted to the wheel and uses electrostatics to collect particles as they are emitted from the tyres, taking advantage of air flows around a spinning wheel. The prototype, which the designers said is a world-first, collected 60% of all airborne particles from tyres under a controlled environment on a test rig.
• 'Tiny wind turbine' can collect energy from a walker's swinging arm: Researchers say device can generate sustainable power from gentle breeze
  • The device comprises two plastic strips in a tube that flutter or clap together in the presence of airflow. A gentle breeze of 1.6 metres a second is enough to power the device, but it performs best at a speed that ensures the two plastic strips flutter in sync, when wind velocity is between 4 and 8 m/s, the researchers said.
  • The device appears to be a simple, reliable method of generating a small amount of energy that could then be deployed in a variety of ways such as powering remote sensors, security cameras or even a weather station on top of a hill that is otherwise difficult to reach, said Richard Cochrane, associate professor of renewable energy from the University of Exeter, who was not involved in the study.
• Melting Antarctic ice will raise sea level by 2.5 metres – even if Paris climate goals are met, study finds: Research says melting will continue even if temperature rises are limited to 2C
  • Even if temperatures were to fall again after rising by 2C (3.6F), the temperature limit set out in the Paris agreement, the ice would not regrow to its initial state, because of self-reinforcing mechanisms that destabilise the ice, according to the paper published in the journal Nature. “The more we learn about Antarctica, the direr the predictions become,” said Anders Levermann, co-author of the paper from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “We get enormous sea level rise [from Antarctic melting] even if we keep to the Paris agreement, and catastrophic amounts if we don’t.” [ael: my emphasis]
  • The Antarctic ice sheet has existed in roughly its current form for about 34m years, but its future form will be decided in our lifetimes, according to Levermann. “We will be renowned in future as the people who flooded New York City,” he told the Guardian. [ael: my emphasis]
  • If temperatures rose by 4C above pre-industrial levels, which some predictions say is possible if the world fails to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly, then the sea level rise would be 6.5 metres from the Antarctic alone, not counting the contribution from Greenland and other glaciers. That would be enough eventually to inundate all of the world’s coastal cities and cause devastation on a global scale. [ael: again, my emphasis]
• Kentucky’s climate is suffering. Can the state slip the industry ties that prevent change? Mitch McConnell has long resisted climate action even as the farm and coal sectors suffer, but a growing movement could bring change
  • April 15. That’s the traditional frost-free date in Schochoh, the small community in south-central Kentucky, where Sam Halcomb and his family own and operate Walnut Grove Farms. In April, the soft red winter wheat that Halcomb grows, which finds its way into McDonald’s biscuits and grocery store pancake mixes, is flowering and especially vulnerable to cold. The frost-free date is an estimate, based on years of experience. If you make it past that date, you’re likely to have a healthy harvest. This year, a freeze came on exactly April 15, with early morning temperatures dropping into the mid-20s Fahrenheit. “We were all smacking our heads, saying, ‘Ah, we almost made it’,” Halcomb said. Then, on May 9, another freeze hit.
  • Two late freezes in one season was “completely unheard of,” said Halcomb, a sixth generation farmer. “In my whole life, I don’t remember ever having a freeze that late.” A typical wheat yield at Walnut Grove is 85 bushels per acre; this year, it was closer to 60. Halcomb’s losses totaled about $200,000.
  • Kentucky is a microcosm of the nation’s climate dilemma: the effects of the climate crisis are clear here, but legacy interests and the forces of change are at an impasse. “There’s a lag between where we need to be and where we’re at right now,” said Lane Boldman, who directs the Kentucky Conservation Committee, a nonprofit environmental policy group. “And there really isn’t a lot of time.”
  • That’s not to say coal has been good to Kentuckians, of late. The coal industry employed some 38,000 Kentuckians when McConnell took office in 1985; it’s below 4,000 today. Workers in the mountainous eastern part of the state have found themselves laid off and uncompensated for their work by coal bosses. And deregulation has led to one of the worst black lung epidemics on record. Eastern Kentucky counties are among the poorest in the nation, with poverty rates around 40%. The water in some of those counties is either undrinkable or unaffordable.
  • Three of the five wettest years on record in the state have been in the last decade, and this summer saw the most rain of any two-month period on record going back to 1895. More rain can boost crops, but in many parts of Kentucky rain now comes in unhelpful torrents. In both the eastern mountains and urban areas, excessive rain has contributed to severe and frequent flooding. In Louisville, this year, rain has turned neighborhoods into swamps and devastated businesses.
• The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music
  • Listening to music on the Internet feels clean, efficient, environmentally virtuous. Instead of accumulating heaps of vinyl or plastic, we unpocket our sleek devices and pluck tunes from the ether. Music has, it seems, been freed from the grubby realm of things. Kyle Devine, in his recent book, “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” thoroughly dismantles that seductive illusion. Like everything we do on the Internet, streaming and downloading music requires a steady surge of energy. Devine writes, “The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time during recorded music’s previous eras.” He supports that claim with a chart of his own devising, using data culled from various sources, which suggests that, in 2016, streaming and downloading music generated around a hundred and ninety-four million kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions—some forty million more than the emissions associated with all music formats in 2000. Given the unprecedented reliance on streaming media during the coronavirus pandemic, the figure for 2020 will probably be even greater.
  • When the compact disk entered circulation, in the nineteen-eighties, audio snobs attacked it as a degradation of listening culture—a descent from soulful analog sound to soulless digital. In environmental terms, however, the CD turned out to be somewhat less deleterious. Devine observes that polycarbonate, the medium’s principal ingredient, is not as toxic as polyvinyl chloride. Early on, the widespread use of polystyrene for CD packaging wiped out that advantage, but a turn toward recyclable materials in recent years has made the lowly CD perhaps the least environmentally harmful format on the market. [ael: my emphasis]
• Leaving forests to regrow naturally 'could be better option than replanting': Study says potential for natural regrowth to absorb carbon has been substantially underestimated
  • “We know there is no single, one-size-fits-all solution for addressing climate change,” said Nancy Harris, of the World Resources Institute, co-author of the study. “Our goal was to show where forests can capture carbon fastest on their own, a mitigation strategy that complements keeping forests standing. If we let them, forests can do some of our climate mitigation work for us.”
• 'Totally awakened': how tragedy has left Italians alert to deadly virus: Memory of crammed hospitals lingers in adherence to Covid rules and Italy is faring better than others
  • Morena Colombi, from Truccazzano, a small town near Milan, was among the first people in Italy to test positive for Covid-19 and knows only too well the impact of the virus. The 59-year-old suffered a mild initial illness, but months after being declared recovered she is among Italy’s post-Covid ‘long-haulers’ – struggling daily with muscle pain, chronic tiredness and occasional memory loss.
  • “My real problems have been what the virus left behind,” she said. “And this was something that nobody expected.” The lingering effects of a tough two-month lockdown and the horror experienced at the height of the emergency – when the country held one of the highest death tolls in the world – may however help to explain why Italy, the first European country to be hit by an outbreak, appears to be more successful than its neighbours in containing a resurgence. On Tuesday, it recorded 1,392 new cases compared with 10,799 in Spain, 10,088 in France and 4,926 in the UK.
  • The majority of Italians still diligently follow safety rules, even wearing face masks outside even though it is not compulsory. Images of people being treated in intensive care units in overwhelmed hospitals and coffins piling up in churches and being transported in army trucks away from Bergamo, the worst-hit city, as morgues struggled to cope, are firmly etched into the national psyche.
• 'Close to 100% accuracy': Helsinki airport uses sniffer dogs to detect Covid: Researchers running Helsinki pilot scheme say dogs can identify virus in seconds
  • A dog is capable of detecting the presence of the coronavirus within 10 seconds and the entire process takes less than a minute to complete, according to Anna Hielm-Björkman of the University of Helsinki, who is overseeing the trial.
  • After collecting their luggage, arriving international passengers are asked to dab their necks with a wipe. In a separate booth, the jar containing the wipe is then placed next to others containing different scents, and the dog starts sniffing. If it indicates it has detected the virus – usually by yelping, pawing or lying down – the passenger is advised to take a free polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test using a nasal swab to verify the dog’s verdict. In the university’s preliminary tests, dogs – which have previously been used to detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes – were able to identify the virus with nearly 100% accuracy, even days before before a patient developed symptoms.
  • Although Covid-19 is known to infect mink and cats, dogs do not have the receptors necessary for the virus to readily gain a foothold and do not appear to be easily infected, according to Hielm-Björkman. There is no evidence that they can transmit the virus to people or other animals.
• Why dangerous ‘forever chemicals’ are allowed in US drinking water: The federal government has still not set limits for PFAS compounds, and some allege that could be because it is a polluter of them itself
  • In 2014, residents of Horsham Township, near Philadelphia, learned that their water had been contaminated with potentially toxic chemicals linked to an array of health problems, including learning delays in children and cancer. Those residents include Frank and Lisa Penna, who allege in a lawsuit that their water was among the contaminated supplies.
  • Known as PFAS, for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the chemicals in this class of approximately 5,000 substances have become notorious as much for their potential danger as for their perseverance. Because the chemical bonds that hold the compounds together don’t break down easily, they last a very long time – a reality that has led to a commonly used name for the group: “Forever chemicals.”
  • And an examination by Consumer Reports found that while the EPA’s power to regulate chemicals in water is limited, the agency has waffled for years. “The EPA hasn’t taken a science-based approach to this issue,” says Brian Ronholm, CR’s director of food policy. “It’s imperative for Congress to pass legislation that establishes PFAS limits in drinking water.” That lack of a national standard has implications not just for tap water but also for bottled. That’s because bottled water is overseen by the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates contaminants in bottled water after the EPA sets a limit for tap water.
  • CR recently tested 47 bottled waters and detected PFAS in 43 of them. Carbonated waters were more likely to contain PFAS, with several–including Topo Chico, Bubly, and Polar–showing levels above the scientist-recommended 1 ppt limit.
  • Consumer watchdogs and researchers have long called for action on PFAS. “I first asked the EPA more than 19 years ago … and we are still waiting for a comprehensive, national response,” says Robert Bilott, an attorney who led a class action lawsuit in the 2000s that accused the chemical company DuPont of contaminating drinking water in the Ohio River Valley with PFAS.
  • Frank and Lisa Penna, the Horsham Township couple, allege one possible explanation for the EPA’s delay: the government itself is a major PFAS polluter and is avoiding substantial cleanup costs. In a 2016 lawsuit, the Pennas allege that PFAS migrated from the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Willow Grove, near their home, into groundwater. Thousands of gallons of firefighting foam, which contains PFAS, had been dumped at the base during exercises over many years, they allege.
  • One key piece of evidence is a 2013 study partly funded by the EPA and led by Harvard environmental health professor Philippe Grandjean that showed a decreased vaccine response in children exposed to PFAS. Grandjean’s paper recommended a drinking water limit for PFAS of 1 ppt. Last year, the EWG recommended 1 ppt for all PFAS, citing Grandjean’s work along with other research associating the compounds with delayed mammary gland development in rodents.
  • Linda Birnbaum, the recently retired director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Science and now a scholar-in-residence in the department of environmental sciences and policy at Duke University, says there is an even simpler solution. “I keep asking: why the heck are we making chemicals that are never going to go away?”
• Nearly 500 former senior military, civilian leaders signal support for Biden:
  • Nearly 500 retired senior military officers, as well as former Cabinet secretaries, service chiefs and other officials, have signed an open letter in support of former vice president Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, saying that he has “the character, principles, wisdom and leadership necessary to address a world on fire.” The letter, published Thursday morning by National Security Leaders for Biden, is the latest in a series of calls for President Trump’s defeat in the November election.
• E.P.A. Rejects Its Own Findings That a Pesticide Harms Children’s Brains: The agency’s new assessment directly contradicts federal scientists’ conclusions five years ago that chlorpyrifos can stunt brain development in young children.
  • The Environmental Protection Agency’s assessment of the pesticide, which is widely used on soybeans, almonds, grapes and other crops, is a fresh victory for chemical makers and the agricultural industry, as well as the latest in a long list of Trump administration regulatory rollbacks.
  • In announcing its decision, the E.P.A. said on Tuesday that “despite several years of study, the science addressing neurodevelopmental effects remains unresolved.” However, in making its finding, the agency excluded several epidemiological studies, most prominently one conducted at Columbia University, that found a correlation between prenatal exposure to chlorpyrifos and developmental disorders in toddlers.
  • As a result, the assessment may be the first major test of the Trump administration’s intention, often referred to as its “secret science” proposal, to bar or give less weight to scientific studies that can’t or don’t publicly release their underlying data. This controversial policy would eliminate many studies that track the effects of exposure to substances on people’s health over long periods of time, because the data often includes confidential medical records of the subjects, scientists have said.

9/23/2020

• Tommy DeVito, Original Member of the Four Seasons, Dies at 92: He sang behind Frankie Valli in a hit-making harmony group that gained a new audience when “Jersey Boys” stormed Broadway. He died of the coronavirus.
  • 
    The Four Seasons early in their career, from left: Bob Gaudio, Frankie Valli, Nick Massi and Tommy DeVito
  • Tommy DeVito, an original member of the Four Seasons, the close-harmony quartet that rocketed to fame in the early 1960s with “Sherry” and other hits and earned new generations of fans when the Broadway musical “Jersey Boys” told a semi-factual version of the group’s story, died on Monday in Henderson, Nev. He was 92. Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio, the two surviving original members of the group, announced his death. A spokeswoman for Mr. Valli said the cause was the novel coronavirus. Mr. DeVito had moved to Las Vegas decades ago after leaving the Four Seasons in 1970.
  • Before long Mr. Valli was part of the group, which went through name and lineup changes before becoming the Four Seasons. “Sherry,” the group’s breakout hit, topped the charts in 1962, and a stream of hits followed, including “Walk Like a Man” (1963) and “Rag Doll” (1964).
• How beavers became North America's best firefighter: The rodent creates fireproof refuges for many species, suggesting wildlife managers should protect beaver habitat as the U.S. West burns.
  • A new study concludes that, by building dams, forming ponds, and digging canals, beavers irrigate vast stream corridors and create fireproof refuges in which plants and animals can shelter. In some cases, the rodents’ engineering can even stop fire in its tracks. “It doesn't matter if there’s a wildfire right next door,” says study leader Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California State University Channel Islands. “Beaver-dammed areas are green and happy and healthy-looking.”
  • For decades, scientists have recognized that the North American beaver, Castor canadensis, provides a litany of ecological benefits throughout its range from northern Mexico to Alaska. Beaver ponds and wetlands have been shown to filter out water pollution, support salmon, sequester carbon, and attenuate floods. Researchers have long suspected that these paddle-tailed architects offer yet another crucial service: slowing the spread of wildfire.
  • Despite all the good that beavers do, thousands are killed every year for flooding roads, cutting down trees, and causing other damage to human property. Employing smarter, more humane policies—using nonlethal flood-prevention devices like “Beaver Deceivers,” for example, and relocating trouble-making individuals instead of killing them—could heal our relationships with beavers and wildfire alike, Fairfax says.
• Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial:
  • America is now under siege by climate change in ways that scientists have warned about for years. But there is a second part to their admonition: Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed.
  • This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America — are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity’s willingness to take action.
  • That price — more vicious heat waves, longer wildfire seasons, rising sea levels — is now irretrievably baked in. Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.
  • “Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” he wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.”
  • One hope raised by some experts is that the current onslaught of fires and storms — the death, the destruction, the apocalyptic skies — might motivate people to unite behind calls for action. “Those orange skies — I mean, that was scary,” said Kris May, a climate scientist and coastal engineer in San Francisco, referring to the midday tangerine glow over Northern California this month, a consequence of smoke from wildfires.
• CDC director's office ordered softening of Covid safety protocols: In a TRMS exclusive, Rachel Maddow reports on the CDC changing the language on its own coronavirus safety protocols for a South Dakota Smithfield meat processing plant to make the language more optional on orders from CDC Director Robert Redfield's office.

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