Wildfire smoke congests skies across U.S. West, prompting air quality warnings
Ivana Saric
Smoke from wildfires burning across the West has clogged skies in the U.S. and Canada and prompted air quality warnings in several states, the National Weather Service (NWS) said Wednesday.
Since June 1, at least 67 weather stations have recorded temperatures that either tied or broke all-time heat records, per the NWS.
The big picture: On Wednesday the NWS issued air quality warnings due to wildfire smoke to parts of Washington, Idaho, Minnesota, Colorado, Oregon.
“Thick density smoke” also covers California, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, and parts of New Mexico and Texas, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In states such as Minnesota and North Dakota, the poor air quality is being driven by crossover smoke from the Canadian fires, AP reports.
“We expect more acres to burn. We expect more smoke,” Andrew Wineke, communications manager at the Washington State Department of Ecology, told local news.
Satellite imagery on Wednesday evening showed smoke from the North American fires moving over southern Greenland and the North Atlantic.
24-year-old who needed double lung transplant wishes he’d been vaccinated for COVID-19
David Knowles, Senior Editor July 14, 2021
A 24-year-old Georgia man who contracted COVID-19 and required a double lung transplant, and who remains hospitalized, has expressed his regret he did not get vaccinated for the virus, which has so far killed more than 607,000 Americans.
Blake Bargatze had told his parents he was putting off receiving a COVID-19 vaccine because he felt uncertain about its possible side effects, WSB-TV in Atlanta reported.
“He wanted to wait a few years to see, you know, if there’s any side effects or anything from it,” said Paul Nuclo, his stepfather. “As soon as he got in the hospital, though, he said he wished he had gotten the vaccine.”
Bargatze was the only member of his family who passed on getting vaccinated, Cheryl Nuclo, his mother, told Fox 5 Atlanta. Once hospitalized, however, he asked to be inoculated.
“The night before he was intubated, he wanted it,” Nuclo said. “So it was a little bit too late then.”
Bargatze, who had no preexisting medical conditions and has endured prolonged intensive care stays at hospitals in three different states over the last three months, believes he contracted COVID-19 during an April visit to Florida.
“He had called me that Friday when he got the results,” Bargatze’s mother told WSB-TV, “and he’s like, ‘Mom, you’re going to be mad. I got COVID.’”
A GoFundMe page set up by Bargatze’s friends is raising money to help cover his medical bills.
Blake Bargatze. (GoFundMe)
“He was initially admitted to ICU at St. Mary’s in West Palm Beach, FL on April 10th, and then he was air transported to Piedmont Atlanta Hospital on April 24th to be placed on ECMO,” the GoFundMe page states, referring to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine. “Many complications occurred during his hospital stay that caused extensive damage to his lungs, requiring the need for a double lung transplant to survive. Blake was transferred to the University of Maryland Medical Center on June 12th. He remains on the ventilator and ECMO as he waits for the lung transplant.”
Thanks to the spread of the Delta variant of COVID-19, the number of new cases has increased nationwide by a staggering 109 percent over the last two weeks. Deaths from the disease, which had fallen precipitously as more Americans were vaccinated for it, have also begun ticking back up as vaccination rates have stalled.
Bargatze’s mother said her son wants vaccine skeptics to learn from what happened to him and to get vaccinated for COVID-19.
“Maybe if some people were kind of on the fence and swaying, he wants them to see what might be the extreme of what can happen,” she told WSB. “Not using a fear tactic — but it can happen.”
West on fire, East under water as climate change fuels extremes
Kathryn Prociv
There were two intense areas of heavy rain in the Northeast on Monday afternoon and evening. Across Bucks and Burlington counties in southeast Pennsylvania, 6 to 12 inches of rain fell in a few hours, prompting high water rescues across the area. Farther north, radar reports estimated that 3 to 5 inches of rain had fell in western Passaic County and far western Bergen County in New Jersey.
As of Tuesday morning, it had rained 9 out of 13 days so far this month in New York City. And with 8.49 inches of rain so far, the Big Apple is now having its seventh wettest July on record.
The stats are even more extreme for Boston, where it has rained every day this month, leading to 8.9 inches of rain.
By Tuesday, all flood alerts had expired but more showers and thunderstorms were possible across the Northeast. There is also a slight risk of severe storms for a small area in the interior sections of the northeast from Buffalo, New York, to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The greatest risk will be damaging winds followed by hail and an isolated tornado. The best chance for heaviest rain will be in western New York, where 1 to 3 inches of rain is possible through Wednesday.
A warmer atmosphere is able to hold more water, which means heavy rain events like what happened Monday in Pennsylvania and New Jersey are becoming more prevalent with climate change. The Northeast, specifically, is the region that has seen the highest increase in heavy rainfall events, more than any other region, since the 1950s.
And it’s not just the East seeing extreme weather events fueled by climate change.
The West continues to bake under excessive and record-setting temperatures while the wildfire risk continues to grow.
About 10 million people remained under heat alerts across the West on Tuesday for temperatures 5-15 degrees above average. A couple of spotty records are possible for locations like Reno and Tahoe in Nevada, but the heat dome is forecast to shrink as temperatures cool to closer to the average by the end of the week.
But even as temperatures improve, the wildfire risk remains.
Even though temperatures won’t be as hot, low humidity and wind gusts up to 30 mph will continue to lead to an elevated to critical fire risk across portions of Washington, Oregon and northern California.
The Bootleg Fire in Oregon is currently over 150,000 acres and zero percent contained. It could become the first 200,000-acre wildfire of the year for the U.S.
This year is already off to a faster wildfire start compared to 2020. According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, compared to this same time last year, there has been more than 700 wildfires and over 103,000 more acres burned.
This is alarming, considering 2020 set a record for most acres burned in California, at a staggering 4.3 million acres.
Extreme temperature is one of the weather events that can be most strongly attributed to climate change. The warmer atmosphere is leading to heat waves that are more intense, more frequent and last longer.
Climate change is also increasing the risk of larger, more intense wildfires, as warmer and drier conditions allow fire to spread faster and farther. Higher temperatures mean more evaporation, which worsens drought and dries out vegetation, increasing the flammability of the landscape and thus the ability to ignite and burn. Studies have found that climate change has resulted in a doubling of forest fire acres from 1984 to 2015. Other studies have linked global warming to a five-fold increase in the annual number of acres burned in California from 1972 to 2018.
Severe drought threatens Hoover dam reservoir – and water for US west
Oliver Milman at Hoover dam
Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Had the formidable white arc of the Hoover dam never held back the Colorado River, the US west would probably have no Los Angeles or Las Vegas as we know them today. No sprawling food bowl of wheat, alfalfa and corn. No dreams of relocating to live in a tamed desert. The river, and dam, made the west; now the climate crisis threatens to break it.
The situation here is emblematic of a planet slowly, inexorably overheating. And the catastrophic consequences of the extreme weather this brings.
Hoover dam is the height of a 60-story building and is 45ft thick at the top and 660ft at the bottom. Its construction, in the teeth of the Great Depression, was a source of such national pride that thousands of people journeyed through the hostile desert to witness the arrival of what has become an enduring monument to collective effort for the public good.
The engineering might of Hoover dam undoubtably reshaped America’s story, harnessing a raucous river to help carve huge cities and vast fields of crops into unforgiving terrain. But the wellspring of Lake Mead, created by the dam’s blocking of the Colorado River and with the capacity to hold enough water to cover the entire state of Connecticut 10ft deep, has now plummeted to an historic low. The states of the west, primarily Arizona and Nevada, now face hefty cuts in their water supplies amid a two-decade drought fiercer than anything seen in a millennium.
“We bent nature to suit our own needs,” said Brad Udall, a climate and water expert at Colorado State University. “And now nature is going to bend us.”
Surveying the dam’s sloping face from its curved parapet, Michael Bernardo, river operations manager at the US Bureau of Reclamation, admits the scarcity of water is out of bounds with historical norms. While there is no “average” year on the Colorado River, Bernardo and his colleagues were always able to estimate its flow within a certain range.
But since 2000, scientists say the river’s flow has dwindled by 20% compared to the previous century’s average. This year is the second driest on record, with the flow into Lake Mead just a quarter of what would be considered normal.
“These are scenarios that aren’t necessarily where we expect to be in our models,” said Bernardo, whose work helps deliver a reliable level of water to thirsty western states. Nearly 40 million people, including dozens of tribes, depend on the river’s water. “We’re getting those years that are at the extreme ends of the bell curve. We’ve seen extremes we haven’t seen before, we now have scenarios that are very, very dry.”
In June, the level of Lake Mead plunged below 1,075ft, a point that will trigger, for the first time, federally mandated cuts in water allocations next year. The Bureau of Reclamation (the government agency originally tasked with “reclaiming” this arid place for a new utopia of farmland and a booming western population), expects this historic low to spiral further, dropping to about 1,048ft by the end of 2022, a shallowness unprecedented since Lake Mead started filling up in the 1930s following Hoover dam’s completion. This will provoke a second, harsher, round of cuts.
“We’ve known this point will arrive because we’ve continued to use more water than the river provides for years,” said Kathryn Sorensen, a water policy expert at Arizona State University. “Things look pretty grim. Humans have always been good at moving water around but right now everyone will need to do what it takes to prevent the system from crashing.”
Seven states – California, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Nevada – and Mexico are bound by agreements that parcel out the river’s water but those considered “junior” partners in this arrangement will be hit first.
Should second tier cuts occur, Arizona will lose nearly a fifth of the water it gets from the Colorado River. Nevada’s first-round cut of 21,000 acre-ft (an acre-ft is an acre of water, one foot deep) is smaller, but its share is already diminutive due to an archaic allotment drawn up a century ago when the state was sparsely populated.
The latest era of cooperation between states that rely upon the Colorado River has now entered the “realm of lose-lose”, according to Colby Pellegrino, deputy general manager of resources for the Southern Nevada Water Authority. “Everyone’s going to have to do more with less, and that’s really going to be challenging for people,” she said. “‘Drought’ suggests to a lot of people something temporary we have to respond to, but this could permanently be the type of flows we see.”
The decline of Lake Mead is apparent even at a cursory glance. The US’s largest reservoir is now barely a third full, the dark basalt rock of its canyon walls blanched by a distinctive white calcium ring where the water level once was. This level has plunged by about 130ft in the past 20 years and is currently receding by about a foot a week as farms hit their peak irrigation period.
The pace of change has been jarring to the millions of people who regularly boat, fish and swim on the lake, with the National Park Service recently laying down new steel platforms to extend launch ramps that no longer reach the water. Some marinas have been wrenched from their moorings and moved because they have been left marooned in baking sediment.
Seen from above in time lapse over the years, Lake Mead looks like a spindly puddle withering away in the Mojave Desert, as nearby Las Vegas, which gets almost all of its water from the lake and went a record 240 days last year without rain, balloons in size. The west’s ambitions have crunched into the searing reality of the Anthropocene.
The Colorado River rises in the lofty Rocky Mountains, before tumbling through 1,450 miles of mountains, canyons and deserts until it reaches the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. Seasonally melting snow has traditionally replenished the river but snowpack on mountaintops in the west has declined by an average of 19% since the 1950s, while soaring temperatures have dried out soils and caused more water to evaporate.
This morphing climate, plus the rampant extraction of water for everything from golf courses in Phoenix to vegetables growing in California to gardens in Denver, means the Colorado fizzles out in dry riverbed before it even reaches its Mexican delta.
Only 1.8% of the west is not in some level of drought, with California, Arizona and New Mexico all experiencing their lowest rainfalls on record over the previous 12 months. Lakes in Arizona are now so low they can’t be used to fight the fires themselves spurred by drought, while the retreat of Lake Folsom in California uncovered the wreckage of a plane that crashed 56 years ago. The governor of Utah has resorted to asking people to pray for rain.
The white ‘bathtub ring’ around Lake Mead shows the record low water levels as drought continues to worsen in Nevada.Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images
The heat has been otherworldly, with Phoenix recently enduring a record six straight days above 115F (46.1C). A “heat dome” that settled over the usually mild Pacific north-west pushed temperatures to reach a record 108F (42.2C) in Seattle and caused power lines to melt and roads to buckle in Portland. A few hundred miles north, a fast-moving wildfire incinerated the town of Lytton in British Columbia the day after it set a Canadian temperature record of 121F (49.4C). Barely into summer, hundreds of people have already died from the heat along the west coast.
The west has gone through periods like this “megadrought” , with only occasional respite, for the past two decades. But scientists have made clear the current conditions would be virtually impossible without human-caused climate change, pointing to a longer-term “aridification” of the region. All of the water conservation efforts that have kept shortages at bay until now risk being surpassed by the rising heat.
“The amount of water now available across the US west is well below that of any time in modern civilization,” said Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist at Columbia University. Research by Williams and colleagues last year analyzed tree rings to discover the current dry period is rivaled only by a spell in the late 1500s in a history of drought that reaches back to around 800, with the climate crisis doubling the severity of the modern-day drought.
“As the globe warms up, the west will dry out,” said Williams. “The past two years have been shocking to me, I never thought I would see downtown LA reach 111F as it’s so close to the ocean, but we have some of the driest conditions in 1,200 years so the dice are loaded for more heatwaves and fires. This could be the tip of the iceberg, we may well see much longer, tougher droughts.”
In the guts of the Hoover dam, down bronze-clad elevators and through terrazzo corridors, a line of enormous turbines help funnel water out downstream, creating hydro-power electricity for more than 1m households in the process. Five of the 17 turbines, each weighing the same as seven blue whales, have been replaced in recent years with new fittings more suited to operating in lower lake levels.
Even with these adaptions, however, the decline of Lake Mead has caused the amount of hydro power generated by the dam to drop by around 25%. The drought is expected to cause the hydro facility at Lake Oroville, California, to completely shut down, prompting a warning from the United States Energy Association that a “megadrought-induced electricity shortage could be catastrophic, affecting everything from food production to industrial manufacturing”. The association added that such a scenario could even force people to move east, in what it called a “reverse Dust Bowl exodus”.
Bernardo said a similar shutdown of the Hoover dam would require more than 100ft in further water level retreat, which is not anticipated, although he finds himself constantly hoping for the rains that would ease the tightening shortages.
“We all want the nice weather but we need those good storms to build everything back up,” he said.
“We’d need three or four above average years, back to back, to restore the lake. Your guess is as good as mine whether we’ll get that. I’ll continue to watch the weather, every day.”
St. Petersburg mayor to DeSantis: ‘We need your help’ with Red Tide
Zachary T. Sampson, Tampa Bay Times
ST. PETERSBURG — Mayor Rick Kriseman said Wednesday that the city is straining its resources to pick up dead sealife from the current Red Tide crisis and called for more help from the state and Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“Our city teams can only keep at this for so long,” he said during a news conference held in waterfront Crisp Park, backed by a crew scooping dead fish with pool skimmers and a fishing net off a sea wall. “We are asking the governor, please … we need your help.”
As of Tuesday morning, Kriseman said, the city had collected 477 tons of dead marine life. A day later, that total has surely risen, and the mayor estimated it is likely over 500 tons.
City council members and the city’s lobbyist have reached out to the governor’s office, Kriseman said, but the mayor’s office has not yet heard back. The Tampa Bay Times is seeking comment from DeSantis’ office. A spokeswoman did not immediately answer the phone Wednesday morning or reply to an email.
Ben Kirby, a spokesman for the mayor, said the city specifically wants help securing more shrimp boats to cast their wide nets and collect dead fish in the water before the carcasses lap against St. Petersburg’s shore.
A few such boats are already out in the water and Kriseman said they are the most effective tool for removing the rotting marine life. He described a difficult process on land, with catfish becoming tangled frequently in small nets and city workers having to use grabber tools to remove dead fish stuck in mangroves.
More than 200 St. Petersburg employees are involved in the response, officials said. That has diverted attention from other routine tasks, like mowing parks, repairing sidewalks and cleaning gutters. Kriseman said he did not know the cost to date but believes it is in the six figures.
“We’re going to have to juggle resources to cover it,” he said. “This is obviously not something we budgeted for.”
“They can spend hours out here picking stuff up and then another tide comes and brings stuff in,” Kriseman said.
As the mayor wrapped up, the workers pulling fish behind him gathered around a new carcass at the seawall. It was bloated, gray and enormous.
It was a juvenile goliath grouper, a behemoth of its kind formerly targeted by anglers. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission says people have been banned from keeping such fish since 1990. The Times confirmed the fish’s species with a researcher.
The St. Petersburg crew said they have seen several dead goliath groupers this month.
Because Fracking Wasn’t Already Toxic Enough, the Oil and Gas Industry Decided to Add ‘Forever Chemicals’ to the Mix
Hannah Murphy
GettyImages-Fracking-520681118 – Credit: J Pat Carter/Getty Images
A fresh hazard has been uncovered in the oil and gas industry: For the past decade, the Environmental Protection Agency has knowingly allowed oil companies to use chemicals that could break down into PFAS — a class of highly toxic, long-lasting compounds also known as “forever chemicals,” which have been linked to cancers, birth defects, and other serious health problems, a new report has found.
The report, released by Physicians for Social Responsibility and first reported by The New York Times, is based on internal EPA documents obtained using the Freedom of Information Act. The documents show that the agency approved three new chemicals for use in drilling and fracking in 2011, despite clearly stated concerns about their safety: namely, that as the chemicals broke down, they would become PFAS, which, the agency said, could create a persistent, toxic threat. (The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The EPA didn’t keep public records of where these chemicals were used, but through the FracFocus database, which tracks chemicals used in fracking around the country, the advocacy group determined that at least 1,200 wells across Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas, and Wyoming used PFAS — or chemicals that, once degraded, turn into PFAS — between 2012 and 2020. But because many states don’t require companies to report the chemicals that they inject, that number could be much higher.
The chain of possible exposure is vast — from workers in the oil fields, to truckers that haul the chemicals to disposal sites, to the communities and waterways that surround them. “The evidence that people could be unknowingly exposed to these extremely toxic chemicals through oil and gas operations is disturbing,” Dusty Horwitt, the author of the report, said in a statement. “Considering the terrible history of pollution associated with PFAS, EPA and state governments need to move quickly to ensure that the public knows where these chemicals have been used and is protected from their impacts.”
Details about the chemicals used in fracking and drilling are notoriously difficult to bring to light. The documents were heavily redacted — concealing trade names of chemicals and even the name of the company that applied for approval — likely due to a loophole that allows oil companies to conceal information about the chemicals they use as “trade-secrets.” But testing of oil and gas waste has found a wealth of carcinogens, heavy metals, and radioactive elements. One 2016 report from the EPA found more than 1,600 different chemicals involved in fracking alone.
But this is the first time that the use of PFAS in oil and gas drilling has been publicized, and the chemicals add a new layer of hazards to the industry.
There are thousands of PFAS chemicals — all man-made compounds of carbon and fluorine — and they are toxic even in minuscule concentrations; as little as one cup in 8 million gallons of water is enough to make the water toxic.
Of the thousands of PFAS compounds that have been developed, only some have been studied for their health impacts, but so far, they’ve all raised alarms. PFOA — the PFAS chemical that contaminated the drinking water around a DuPont Teflon plant in West Virginia and inspired the 2019 film Dark Waters — is linked to cancers, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, pre-eclampsia, and ulcerative colitis. In an EPA assessment of the two most common PFAS chemicals, studies found connections to birth defects, accelerated puberty, and damage to the liver and immune system. One study even found that infants who are exposed to PFAS have a weakened response to vaccines.
The dilemma, though, is that “PFAS are really useful chemicals,” said Linda Birnbaum, a toxicologist and former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, in a press conference yesterday. They’re exceptionally slippery, and good at repelling water and oil — which is why, in the decades after their invention in the 1930s, they were used in everything from stain-resistant carpeting to fire-fighting foam to the plastic lining inside popcorn bags. And while the EPA documents don’t indicate how or where the chemicals were used in the process of oil and gas extraction, a 2008 paper written by a DuPont researcher found that the “exceptional” water-repelling characteristics of chemicals like PFAS showed promise for use in oil and gas extraction.
But for all of their usefulness, the chemical bonds in the man-made PFAS are impossible to break down, so the chemicals accumulate in our environment and in our bodies, earning them the nickname “forever chemicals.” One 2007 study found that more than 98 percent of Americans have them in their bloodstream. Parents are even able to pass PFAS to their children through breastfeeding.
For that reason, the EPA worked with manufacturers to phase out the use of PFAS chemicals, and they haven’t been produced in the U.S. since 2012. But it’s still possible to use existing stores of the chemicals, or to import products that use them, a workaround that the oil and gas industry appeared to use. The report found that oil companies started importing the chemicals for commercial use in November 2011, shortly after they were approved by the EPA, and continued until at least 2018.
In the report, Physicians for Social Responsibility urges the EPA to issue a moratorium on the use of PFAS in the oil and gas industry, track where they’ve been used, and begin health assessments on the communities and wildlife that surround the wells.
They also insist that the government hold the oil and gas industry responsible for removing PFAS from the environment, but that won’t be easy. Because PFAS compounds don’t break down, “once it’s in the environment, there’s no easy way to get rid of it,” said Birnbaum.
The leading cleanup method requires activated charcoal, “similar to what you find in a Brita filter, except the quantities have to be much, much greater,” explained Horwitt, the study’s author. “And then once that carbon fills up with PFAS — and perhaps other contaminants — you’d have to dispose of it somewhere. And landfills can be reluctant to accept this waste.”
Even if a system of removal and disposal was accessible to oil and gas companies, it’s still unlikely that the oil and gas industry will ultimately pay for this damage. They’ve already shirked responsibility for millions of “orphaned” wells across the country — which could cost as much as $300 billion to clean up. Not to mention that fracking and drilling companies have been declaring bankruptcy at an unprecedented pace. By the time the government could get around to holding them responsible, those companies are likely to be gone, says Silverio Caggiano, a hazardous waste expert who contributed to the report. “It’s going to be the taxpayer that gets caught with a bill for cleaning this all up.”
Opinion: Microplastics are getting into our bodies. We need to understand what that means
Caroline Petrow-Cohen
Large pieces of plastic waste ultimately break down into tiny particles called microplastics. (Worradirek / Getty Images / iStockphoto)
Nobody wants to snack on plastic bags or soda rings, but according to a 2019 study from the University of Newcastle, we could be consuming roughly a credit card’s worth of plastic every week.
Microplastics, which are less than a quarter-inch in size and come in various shapes and textures, have contaminated the natural world and infiltrated our bodies. These particles are just about everywhere on Earth, including in drinking water and the air we breathe, but until recently we didn’t know how ubiquitous they really were.
Microplastics were first discovered in our oceans, and the vast majority of studies published since then focus on marine environments only. The threat to our oceans is indeed huge, but it’s not the full picture anymore.
The first clue to microplastic exposure in humans came around 2013, when scientists discovered plastic particles in seafood prepared for consumption. But by 2019, when the University of Newcastle study was published, the scientific community understood that the problem was considerably broader.
“We started to realize that we have exposure that’s much greater than just a fish at the grocery store,” said Dr. Chelsea Rochman, a University of Toronto professor who helped produce a report on microplastics in April for the California Ocean Science Trust. “The trend of the research at first was just to show that we were exposed, and then it became clear that we needed to understand how this impacts human health.”
Microplastics shed off of clothes and tires and have been found in beer, honey, table salt and other food items. We inhale plastic suspended in the air and drink plastic floating in our beverages. It’s no stretch to conclude that our exposure is significant. What we don’t know is what this means for us.
Researchers started to look seriously into the human health impacts of microplastic ingestion and inhalation just a few years ago. We’ve started to ask the right questions, but there’s a long way to go. If we’re going to get the answers in time, we need to prioritize this area and funnel resources into science that analyzes how microplastics interact with our bodies.
The amount of evidence collected on this subject is growing rapidly, according to Scott Coffin, a toxicologist also involved with the state report. Studies done on mice and rats have found that plastic contamination can reduce fertility, alter the gut microbiome and cause oxidative stress, which can severely damage cells.
These results aren’t directly translatable to people, however, and there are gaps in the research that make it difficult to draw conclusions. Most studies rely on polystyrene spheres, a specific kind of microplastic that can be purchased commercially but doesn’t reflect the vast range of plastics and chemicals in the natural environment.
Susanne Brander, an Oregon State University professor who also worked on the recent report, acknowledges these shortcomings. “More studies are needed on environmentally relevant plastic types before we can say with full confidence that the plastics you’re exposed to every day could harm you in these ways,” Brander said. “But I think it’s safe to say that it’s a concern, and if we’re seeing responses in mouse models, it’s likely that humans are also being affected.”
Toxicologists, ecologists and other scientists have been digging deep into these questions, but the scientific process is still in its infancy. Meanwhile, major environmental agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and National Science Foundation have not provided funding for microplastic research regarding human health.
We already know enough to take action on the microplastics problem, but without all the details, it’s much more challenging to bring about change. If we could bring specifics to the table — for example, that these plastics cause cancer, damage organs, reduce fertility — there would be more pressure on public officials to pass sweeping regulations.
“We have to make a bit of a leap and say, whatever’s happening in rodents is happening at similar quantities in humans,” Coffin said, “and there is a little bit of a precautionary principle baked into that assumption.”
But will we be willing to make that leap? Because microplastics are too small to clean up, the only solution is to stop plastic waste at the source. And doing so would take a radical adjustment, given that plastics are deeply embedded in our economy and lifestyle. Weaning ourselves from them would fundamentally affect countless industries, including textiles, transportation and manufacturing.
“I think we’re going to need to have more studies coming out that are directly related to human health before we see a lot more concern from the general public,” Brander said. “It takes a lot to convince people that something that is really convenient for them to use is something they should sacrifice.”
The question of microplastics and human health needs more attention — from the scientific community, the general public, the government and funding groups. The issue isn’t being ignored, but it’s not being prioritized either.
In a perfect world, the knowledge we have now would be enough impetus for policy change. But in a society stuck in its ways and reluctant to alter the status quo, we need more than precaution to move the needle.
These Scientists Linked June’s Heat Wave to Climate Change in 9 Days. Their Work Could Revolutionize How We Talk About Climate
Alejandro de la Garza
Lighting strikes over Lake Mead as a storm rolls through the area Tuesday, June 29, 2021. Credit – Allen J. Schaben—Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Long before most people in the U.S. Pacific Northwest had woken up on June 28—the hottest day in last month’s record-breaking heat wave—European climate scientists Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and Friederike Otto were preparing to determine the connection between that deadly weather phenomenon and the broader state of the global climate.
“Friederike and I looked at each other over the Zoom,” Van Oldenborgh told Dutch newspaper NRC on July 5. “The heat wave would peak that day. We said, ‘This is so beyond the expectation of a heat wave. We must investigate this.’”
So began a nine-day round-the-clock scientific sprint, with dozens of climate researchers worldwide working in shifts to analyze the unprecedented temperatures that killed hundreds and hospitalized thousands across Oregon, Washington and Canada’s British Columbia. While it was clear that the blistering temperatures were caused by a heat dome—an atmospheric phenomenon wherein air heated by the ocean gets trapped over large areas of land—Van Oldenborgh and Otto’s team was racing to determine what role global warming played in triggering that condition. The results of that work—published on July 7, just days before another heat wave descended on the West Coast—were headlined by a disturbing conclusion: the heat wave that sent temperatures spiking to an unheard-of 116℉ in Portland, Ore. last month would have been virtually impossible without the effects of human-caused climate change.
Damaged structures are seen in Lytton, British Columbia, on July 9, 2021, after a wildfire destroyed most of the village on June 30.Darryl Dyck—The Canadian Press/AP
A decade ago, it might have taken months for such work to be published. The ability for scientists to determine within days the role human-caused global heating played in a given weather phenomena—a complex statistical process known as “extreme event attribution,” involving enormous quantities of weather data and cutting-edge climate models—has been years in the making, though it’s recently been accelerated by improved methodology and coordination among a small group of climate researchers, including Van Oldenborgh, of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute, and Otto, of the University of Oxford.
For those seeking to point to big, newsworthy weather events to emphasize the need to address climate change, such speed is crucial. Being able to confidently say that a given weather disaster was caused by climate change while said event still has the world’s attention can be an enormously useful tool to convince leaders, lawmakers and others that climate change is a threat that must be addressed. But that speed hasn’t been possible until relatively recently, thanks to the work of Van Oldenborgh, Otto and others like them.
“The problem has always been [that] if you want to have a very sophisticated statistical attribution, usually you’re not going to have the answer until the event itself is out of the news cycle,” says Jonathan Overpeck, a professor of environmental education at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in Van Oldenborgh and Otto’s recent study.
People visit the unofficial thermometer reading 133 degrees Fahrenheit/56 degrees Celsius at Furnace Creek Visitor Center on July 11, 2021 in Death Valley National Park, California. David Becker—Getty Images
The science of extreme event attribution began after a disastrous 2003 European heat wave killed at least 30,000 people over a series of blistering weeks hotter than anything recorded on the continent in 500 years. Scientists were eventually able to link the event to climate change, but those results were published more than a year after the phenomenon left the headlines. Scientists have since refined the basic methods used in that research, and in 2016 the U.S. National Academies of Science published a study of extreme event attribution that climate scientists say was pivotal in establishing confidence in the methodology. There was one problem, though: even as the science behind event attribution gained wide acceptance, it still wasn’t producing results fast enough to get attention from people outside the climate science world.
That’s changing thanks to the World Weather Attribution initiative (WWA), a global group of climate scientists led by Van Oldenborgh and Otto, which in 2014 set out to dramatically speed up the work of linking weather events to climate change. The WWA, which published the aforementioned Pacific Northwest heat wave report, has only gotten faster at its work in recent years. Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and a co-author of the July 7 report, says it’s difficult to put an exact figure on the team’s improvement, but his sense is that it does the same scientific work two or three times faster than it did just five years ago, allowing for such breakneck speeds as seen with its latest report
It’s difficult to attribute those improvements to any one factor. Better forecasts have enabled scientists to start examining extreme weather events before they reach peak intensity, then retroactively plug in numbers from observations recorded on the ground. New, more powerful computers have allowed researchers to run more detailed climate models more frequently, and scientists have developed a wider variety of climate models since the early days of extreme event attribution, more of which are tuned specifically to answer questions about extreme weather events.
“Years ago, most of the questions were still about, ‘Is the climate changing, and, if it is, are humans to blame?’” says Van Aalst. “Now we’re really interested in the questions, ‘If the climate is changing, how is it going to materialize? What sort of impacts should we be worried about? How fast is it changing? And particularly not just how the average is changing, but how are these really extreme events that hit us much harder changing?’”
Experience has made a difference as well, with the teams’ efforts becoming more seamless and coordinated over time. “It’s partly the quality of the tools and the number of tools,” Van Aalst says, explaining how the attributions have gotten faster. “But it’s particularly our fine-tuning of the process. We’ve got these steps; we know what we need to do. We know how we need to line up with each other to be able to put these pieces together.”
“The group is often made up of people across many time zones,” adds Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton University climate scientist involved in the recent study. “You’ll see the edits in the documents to proceed with the sun as it’s day somewhere.”
Pablo Miranda cools off in the Salmon Springs Fountain on June 27, 2021 in Portland, Oregon.Nathan Howard—Getty Images
The group’s findings on the recent heat wave sent ripples through the climate journalism community, shifting vague, hedging language (“likely linked to climate change”) into a more definitive and urgent framing backed up by the data—that this event would have been essentially impossible without human climate impacts. WWA scientists say they’re often able to analyze heat waves faster than other events, like hurricanes or drought, because the connection between a warming climate and localized temperature extremes is relatively straightforward, atmospherically speaking. (Attributing the catastrophic 2019-2020 Australian Bushfires to climate change, for instance, was a more complicated task, partly because the fires were driven by many different weather factors, like heat and lack of rain, each with their own relationship to the global climate.)
The report also noted other disconcerting implications of the heat wave that have made clear the importance—and sheer strangeness—of what occurred in the atmosphere over western North America last month, the period that the study covered. Namely, the Pacific Northwest heat wave was so extreme that it would be highly unlikely to occur even accounting for global warming caused by greenhouse gases, suggesting either climatory bad luck or a gap in scientific understanding of extreme heat events.
“We have to ask ourselves, ‘Are we missing something?’” says Vecchi. “It’s always possible that we were just unlucky; really, really unlucky. And it’s also possible that there is something that we still need to learn how to account for better.”
Even so, the WWA’s work represents a paradigm shift in a research world that typically runs at the months- or years-long timescales of journal publication and peer review. (The group submits its work for peer review, but publishes in pre-review form.) Facing a deepening climate crisis and continuing fossil fuel-sponsored misdirection and “greenwashing” initiatives, climate scientists may have little choice about changing the nature of their work to suit the times, both by accelerating their efforts and focusing on news-making and alarming events, like the recent heat wave.
“Now the studies are targeted to pick on events that are particularly important to people, and which the media might actually pay some attention to,” says Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton climate scientist who serves on the board of Climate Central, a group that helped launch WWA. “There’s no point going through this exercise involving dozens of scientists if it’s something that you think no one’s going to care about.”
Red tide is impacting humans’ own everyday lives — beyond impacting our wildlife — in ways large and small.
🐟 St. Pete has removed more than 15 tons of dead fish from its waterways.
🏝 Hillsborough County closed the beaches at Apollo Beach Nature Preserve and E.G. Simmons Conservation Park on Friday due to public health concerns.
🏖 The National Weather Serviceissued a beach hazards statement Saturday night, in effect through tonight, advising people to avoid going into the water in coastal southern Pinellas County.
What they’re saying: People who live along the water in Coquina Key told WTSP they’ve never seen this many fish die because of red tide.
What we’re seeing: I went to Indian Rocks Beach on Saturday morning and, after a swim and about 20 minutes of sunning, was ready to pack it in.
My throat was itchy, my nose burned, and I noticed many beachgoers coughing.
‘Anarchy and chaos’: Michael Bender book describes turmoil in Trump White House
Matthew Brown, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON – Furious arguments, abrupt decision changes, perpetual dismay and “anarchy and chaos” defined the finals days of the Trump administration, according to The Wall Street Journal’s senior White House correspondent, Michael Bender.
Bender’s book, “‘Frankly, We Did Win This Election’: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” compiles interviews with dozens of former Trump staffers and allies, as well as two interviews with former President Donald Trump himself.
The book depicts the inner workings of a White House and presidential campaign in turmoil, as Trump’s subordinates fought each other for influence and grappled with obeying presidential orders that often contradicted basic democratic and constitutional norms.
Bender recounted that Trump called for whoever “leaked” information on him staying in a bunker during protests in 2020 to be “executed” for their actions.
Trump was infuriated after The New York Times reported he, first lady Melania Trump and their son, Barron, had been put in a bunker beneath the East Wing as racial justice protests in Lafayette Square, near the White House, were cleared by federal, local and military police.
At a meeting with top law enforcement, military and policy aides, Trump “boiled over as soon as they arrived,” according to Bender. “It was the most upset some aides had ever seen the president.”
The book recounts: “‘Whoever did that, they should be charged with treason!’ Trump yelled. ‘They should be executed!’” White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who “repeatedly tried to calm the president as startled aides avoided eye contact,” Bender wrote, promised Trump the officials present would find whoever leaked the story.
A new book on the Trump White House by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender reveals turmoil and chaos, particularly related to the handling of the pandemic and the 2020 campaign.
“Well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” Trump reportedly remarked to White House chief of staff John Kelly, a former four-star Marine general. “You cannot say anything supportive of Adolf Hitler,” an astounded Kelly replied, “You just can’t.”
Much of the chaos of the Trump campaign and White House in 2020, Bender wrote, centered on the administration’s missteps in its pandemic response and the subsequent economic downturn and the social upheaval brought by the death of George Floyd, a Minneapolis Black man murdered by a police officer.
Trump had a visceral response to the Floyd video, calling the event “terrible.” He tweeted his support for the Floyd family, promising that “justice will be served.” His tone shifted rapidly as protesters calling for racial justice filled the streets of cities and towns.
Bender’s work depicts frantic scenes of Trump administration aides deeply concerned over the president’s cavalier desire to deploy military troops against peaceful protesters and rioters alike.
“The country had turned into a tinderbox. And inside the Oval Office was a president who liked playing with matches,” Bender wrote, describing aides he spoke with as horrified by the president’s behavior.
Trump calls for military intervention
Multiple times, Trump called for the military to be deployed and to use live ammunition against protesters, aides said.
In one tense exchange, senior adviser Stephen Miller, an ardent Trump ally, told a group of aides that “these cities are burning,” which justified intense military intervention.
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reportedly told Miller to shut up, using expletives.
“Let me show you what I can do with the National Guard before we make that next jump,” said Milley, who was unnerved by the prospect of U.S. troops being deployed against civilians, according to Bender.
Campaign in disarray
In the weeks approaching the presidential election, the Trump campaign was beleaguered in internal disputes and self-confidence issues, Bender wrote.
After a story pitched by Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and Robert Costello about Joe Biden’s son Hunter failed to catch steam in the media, followed by Trump’s hospitalization with the coronavirus, the campaign became insular and doubtful, according to the book. At rallies, Trump lamented his poor polling among constituents such as suburban women.
“I didn’t love it,” Trump conceded to Bender on his experience with the coronavirus. Bender described the Trump campaign’s data and media advertising campaigns in disarray despite a $2 billion war chest.
The replacement of campaign manager Brad Parscale with Bill Stepien in the fall led to further financial mismanagement, the book says. Bender quoted Stepien as complaining in the run-up to Election Day that he “has $65 million to spend on digital, and I don’t know whether to put it in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and at what levels.”
“Bill is locked in decision paralysis,” Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a senior adviser, told Katie Walsh, White House deputy chief of staff, offering Walsh the job to replace Stepien.
Post-election chaos
The disorganization of the campaign bled into efforts to contest the election after the president’s loss, the book says. A defiant Trump ordered aides to pursue dozens of lawsuits and to pressure government aides and allies at the state and federal levels to help him overturn the election results.
Officials at the Justice Department were horrified, Bender wrote, when department attorney Jeffrey Clark aided Meadows in concocting a plan to oust acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and overturn the election results in Georgia.
In addition to pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump leaned on Supreme Court justices in North Carolina and pressured aides to convince GOP lawmakers in swing states to help overturn the election.
The insurrection by Trump supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and its aftermath further demoralized those closest to Trump, Bender wrote, though many saw the attack as a “horrifying but inevitable conclusion” to the president’s time in office.
Bender described an aggrieved and somewhat directionless Trump determined to win back power.
“What am I going to do all day?” Trump asked one aide upon landing at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after leaving the White House. The former president’s future remains unclear, though his power within conservative politics is unquestioned.
“Trump was in transition. Weeks earlier he’d been the leader of the free world. Now he was King of Mar-a-Lago,” Bender wrote.
