Delta variant: Doctor cautions Americans about traveling to Florida
Seana Smith, Anchor July 21, 2021
As the highly transmissible Delta variant spreads nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the State Department are urging Americans to avoid traveling to the UK.
But that’s not going far enough, U.S., Dr. Ebony Jade Hilton, GoodStock Consulting co-founder and medical director, told Yahoo Finance Live. In fact, Americans should be careful traveling to certain areas within the U.S.
“If we’re going to talk about traveling to the U.K., then we should also caution Americans about traveling to Florida,” Hilton said. “Right now, one in every five new COVID cases are coming out of Florida.”
In Florida, only 47% of the population is fully vaccinated as the state is seeing an average of 55.1 daily new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people, the highest rate in the country, according to data from the Brown School of Public Health. And according to the Florida Department of Health’s weekly COVID-19 report, the number of new COVID-19 cases nearly doubled in the state last week from the prior week.
‘The Delta variant is a game changer’
During a press briefing on Friday, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeffrey Zients said four states accounted for more than 40% of all cases in the past week, with 20% of new cases occurring in Florida alone.
Arkansas is also among the nation’s current pandemic hot spots. Brown School of Public Health data shows the state is reporting an average of 38.1 daily new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people, and is designated “red” on the risk-assessment map.
“We’re seeing an uptick across the Southeast, and even to the Midwest,” Hilton said. “We’re looking at places like Alabama and Arkansas. So we can talk about the rest of the world, but the United States really needs to hone in and focus on what is preventing us from having a successful vaccine rollout in those heavily hit areas.”
The CDC is urging caution about traveling to Florida amid the spread of the Delta variant. (Photo by Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Vaccinations are the key to slowing the spread of the Delta variant. In Alabama, where only about 33% of the population is fully vaccinated, the state department reported a 39% jump in COVID-19 cases from June 26 to July 9, and unvaccinated people represented 96% of COVID-19 deaths in the state since April 1.
Nationwide, Johns Hopkins University data shows a total of 243,110 new cases were reported last week as the Delta variant spreads, accounting for about 40% of the total cases in the past month.
“The Delta variant is a game changer,” Hilton said. “New cases nationwide are up 140% in the last two weeks. Our hospitalizations are up 34%, and our deaths, unfortunately, are increasing by 33%. We’re not finished with this pandemic.”
The largest wildfire in the U.S. advances toward Oregon mountain towns
Molly Hennessy-Fisk
Flames and smoke rise from the Bootleg fire in southern Oregon last week. The wildfire was burning northeast of the blaze that ravaged the Klamath Tribes’ community less than a year ago. (John Hendricks / Oregon Office of the State Fire Marshal)
In 20 years of Oregon firefighting, Wayne Morris has never seen anything like the Bootleg fire.
Fire commanders had planned to flank the blaze that erupted about 300 miles southeast of Portland around the Fremont-Winema National Forest on July 6. But the fire proved too fast and intense, scorching more than 388,000 acres of southern Oregon forest — half the area of Rhode Island — destroying at least 70 homes and forcing thousands to evacuate. No injuries or deaths had been reported as of Tuesday afternoon.
The fire was only 30% contained Tuesday and continued to advance toward mountain towns, even as 2,250 firefighters and others fought it. The blaze absorbed a smaller one this week to become the largest wildfire now burning in the U.S., and fourth-largest in state history — so big that it has created its own lightning.
“We’re seeing things we’ve never seen before as far as size and activity,” Morris said as his crew walked the fire line, extinguishing flames.
Firefighters came to help from as far away as Florida and Kentucky, along with many from California. At a fire base in the tiny community of Bly, firetrucks were on hand from Fremont, Rancho Cucamonga and San Bruno.
Firefighters were sooty and exhausted after days of being forced to retreat as the blaze leaped over fire lines.
Anaheim Fire Capt. Aaron Mooney arrived with his crew 10 days ago, and knows others in the area from Fullerton, Laguna Beach, Long Beach and Orange.
It was Mooney’s first time fighting fires in Oregon, but he said the Bootleg fire reminded him of those he had fought in recent years in Northern California. It was a timber-fueled fire as opposed to the wind-driven fires common in Southern California. He pointed to the towering pines that surrounded him, many of their trunks charred.
“It’s the timber litter — the ‘down and dead’ fuels, what falls out of the trees naturally,” Mooney said. He noted that it had been so unseasonably hot and dry in recent days that there was more than a 90% probability that new fires would be sparked.
On Tuesday, temperatures dipped, with clouds and even some spotty rain that helped firefighters tamp down lingering fires on the southern flank.
“We’re hoping to hold this line,” Mooney said as his team refueled a water truck.
The incident commander for the south side of the fire, Joe Hessel of the Oregon Department of Forestry, said Tuesday that he expected firefighters to gain control of the Bootleg fire’s southern flank within 48 hours.
Pointing to a map in his command post, set up at Lakeview High School on the fire’s southeast edge, Hessel traced the fire’s latest path northeast toward the rural communities of Paisley, Summer Lake and Silver Lake. Some residents who grew up around smaller wildfires had refused to evacuate, he said.
“They’ve lived with fire their whole lives,” he said. “But we’re not used to having million-acre fires” — which the Bootleg fire was shaping up to be.
The largest forest fire in Oregon’s recent history was the Biscuit fire, which burned nearly 780 square miles in 2002 in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest in southern Oregon and Northern California. Oregon’s megafires usually start after spring rains, and can burn until early winter. This year they started early, in March, before things had greened up, which firefighters said added to the fires’ strength.
On the Bootleg fire map, Hessel traced the western edge of Summer Lake’s basin, known as Winter Rim or Winter Ridge.
“If it goes over that rim, it’s going to get really challenging,” he said.
Hessel knows because he fought a fire in the area — the Winter Rim fire — in 2002, and remembers how it sucked hot air into the basin. That fire burned about 31,000 acres. The Bootleg fire was burning about as many acres each day.
In 38 years of firefighting, Hessel said, “I’ve never experienced that continuous, day after day fire behavior and growth.”
His counterpart to the north, Incident Cmdr. Rob Allen, was trying to stop the fire from reaching the lake’s rim Tuesday, sending helicopters to drop water and fire retardant, as firefighters on foot chopped logs and other brush that could feed the flames.
“Fighting this fire is a marathon, not a sprint,” Allen said. “We’re in this for as long as it takes to safely confine this monster.”
There’s a Wobble in the Moon’s Orbit. That’s Not Good.
Caroline Delbert
Photo credit: NASA/Earth Observatory
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High tides will get even higher as the sea level rises due to climate change.
The moon’s 18.6-year “wobble” will also affect the rising tides.
Altogether, these factors will lead to more “nuisance flood” days per year.
Thanks to rising sea levels and a wobble in the moon’s orbit, the 2030s will be marked by a record number of high-tide floods around the coastal United States, scientists warn in a new paper.
So-called “nuisance floods” occur when tides rise between 1.75 and 2 feet above the daily average high tide, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). These kinds of floods may not be as extreme as those caused by hurricanes or other natural disasters, but they can still cause water to back up into basements and gurgle from sewage drains.
NOAA reports that more than 600 nuisance floods occurred in the U.S. in 2019, and between May 2020 and April 2021, coastal communities saw twice as many high tide flooding days than they did 20 years ago. But new NASA-led research—published last month in the journal Nature Climate Change—suggests the trend will only grow more dramatic in the 2030s.
Photo credit: NOAA
Expect to see three to four times more high-tide flood days than at present, all concentrated in the space of a few months of activity each year. Floods may even occur in clusters that last a month or longer, leaving cities along the east and west coasts to deal with floods every day or two, according to NASA.
“It’s the accumulated effect over time that will have an impact,” lead study author Phil Thompson, an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii, says in a NASA press release. “If it floods 10 or 15 times a month, a business can’t keep operating with its parking lot under water. People lose their jobs because they can’t get to work. Seeping cesspools become a public health issue.”
Climate change, and the rising sea levels that come along with it, is only partly to blame. In fact, the main factor is a “wobble” in the moon’s orbit that regularly occurs every 18.6 years. The wobble isn’t new (it was first reported in 1728, according to NASA), but combined with the effects of climate change, it will create an unprecedented series of high-tide flooding.
Photo credit: tide-forecast.com
To understand the significance of this wobble, let’s first unpack the moon’s relationship with the ocean’s tides. The moon physically pulls on the oceans via gravity (for that reason, the sun also affects the tides, although less noticeably), causing high and low tides. High tide, when the ocean’s fluctuating level is at its most elevated, can already cause problems in coastal towns. It can cause backflow in rivers that empty into the ocean, for example—just check out the daily tide forecast for New York City.
A couple of times each month, high tides are made even higher by the combined factors from Earth, the sun, and the moon. These are called spring tides, and they also mean lower low tides—more extremes in both directions. But spring tides are just one way the high tide varies over time, NASA explains.
Let’s return to that moon wobble. The moon suppresses tides on Earth for half of the 18.6-year cycle, meaning high tides are lower than normal, and low tides are higher than normal. But during the other half of the time, the tides are amplified. We’re in the latter period of the moon’s cycle at the moment, but the sea level hasn’t risen enough yet from climate change for the effect to be compounded—yet.
Here’s an extremely professional illustration of how that effect “stacks” with the overall sea level during high tides:
Photo credit: Caroline Delbert
The next time we’re on the amplified side of this moon cycle, however, the combined higher sea levels and rising tides will cause a record number of nuisance floods along all of the mainland coastlines in the U.S., as well as in Hawaii and Guam.
As an example, the new paper highlights St. Petersburg, Florida, which is in the relatively low-lying Tampa Bay area. The researchers forecast just six “minor flooding” days per year between 2023 and 2033—a number that jumps to 67 days per year between 2033 and 2043. For La Jolla, California, the number jumps from one to 49 days per year. For Honolulu, Hawaii, it leaps from two to 63 days per year.
Photo credit: NASA
By 2030, the sea level will have risen by an estimated minimum of 1.4 inches, according to the Royal Society, the U.K.’s national academy of sciences. By 2039, that number will be more like 2.7 inches minimum. That, combined with the wobble effect, could leave beach communities at odds with nature, necessitating some serious infrastructure changes. Let’s hope stakeholders will take this new report seriously.
Western wildfire smoke creates fiery sunrise 2,000 miles away in New York City
By Jeremy Lewan and Kathryn Prociv July 20, 2021
Wildfires rage across 13 states as smoke swirls across the country creating hazy skies along the Eastern Seaboard from Toronto to Washington, D.C.
The sun rises above the CN Tower through a thick haze caused by smoke from forest fires burning in western Canada moving through the upper atmosphere July 19, 2021, in Toronto.Gary Hershorn / Getty Images
After baking in weeks of searing heat, the West is erupting in fierce wildfires so strong the smoke was visible Tuesday on the East Coast in cities such as New York and Washington, D.C.
Air quality alerts were issued for New York City on Tuesday, and the National Weather Service urged sensitive groups to remain indoors.
More than 75 wildfires have already scorched more than 1 million acres in 13 states. On Tuesday, 3 million people remained under red flag warnings blanketing eight states across the Northwest and the northern Plains, including the area of the Bootleg Fire in Oregon, currently the largest fire this year.
Now classified as a megafire,or a fire burning more than 100,000 acres, the Bootleg Fire has blazed over 350,000 acres, which is about half the size of Rhode Island, and was only 30 percent contained as of Tuesday.
Conditions surrounding the area have exhibited extreme fire behavior, and the massive inferno has been so powerful that it created its own weather, generating dangerous columns of lightning-charged smoke and ash, called pyrocumulus or pyrocumulonimbus clouds, reaching the stratosphere. These can reach more than 40,000 feet into the atmosphere – the altitude at which commercial airplanes fly.
The Beckwourth Complex Fire, raging in Northern California, has topped 100,000 acres burned, also earning the megafire title. With more than 1,000 firefighters working, the fire was nearly 90 percent contained Tuesday.
Pacific Gas and Electric, California’s largest utility, may be responsible for another blaze licking across Northern California. On Sunday, a spokesperson admitted that blown fuses on one of its utility poles may have sparked the over the Dixie Fire, which is 30,000 acres and growing. This comes after PG&E has taken responsibility for the devastating 2018 Camp Fire and the 2019 Kincade Fire that burned more than 100 square miles of Sonoma County.
According to an update Monday from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or CAL FIRE, compared to this same time last year, there are over 900 more fires and 165,000 additional acres burned. For context, 2020 was the worst Western fire season in history.
The situation has become so dire that the National Interagency Fire Center has upgraded the national preparedness level to the highest category, Level 5, signifying that at least 80 percent of wildland firefighters are currently responding to fires.
Wildfire growth and spread are expected to intensify through the week as yet another major heat wave roasted the high Plains and the Rocky Mountains, peaking Monday. Triple-digit temperatures, combined with humidity as low as 10 percent and wind gusts up to 40 mph, will produce ideal wildfire conditions. An additional major concern is the dry thunderstorms expected to flare along the interior Northwest, producing abundant lightning that could easily spark sun-baked vegetation.
Paul Krugman Points Out The Unusual Thing About The GOP Cult Of Donald Trump
Lee Moran
Economist Paul Krugman, in his latest column for The New York Times, pointed out the “unusual thing” about the GOP’s cult-like devotion to one-term, twice-impeached former President Donald Trump.
The party “doesn’t have a monopoly on power; in fact, it controls neither Congress nor the White House,” noted Krugman in his essay published Monday.
“Politicians suspected of insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump and Trumpism in general aren’t sent to the gulag. At most, they stand to lose intraparty offices and, possibly, future primaries,” Krugman continued. “Yet such is the timidity of Republican politicians that these mild threats are apparently enough to make many of them behave like Caligula’s courtiers.”
Krugman, who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2008, pointed out that “many people, myself included, have declared for years that the GOP is no longer a normal political party.”
But it now “bears a growing resemblance to the ruling parties of autocratic regimes,” he added.
The GOP “has become something different, with, as far as I know, no precedent in American history although with many precedents abroad,” Krugman concluded. “Republicans have created for themselves a political realm in which costly demonstrations of loyalty transcend considerations of good policy or even basic logic. And all of us may pay the price.”
The Democrat blocking progressive change is beholden to big oil. Surprised?
Alex Kotch
United States Senator from West Virginia
Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
As “thousand-year” heat waves caused by the climate crisis rock the west coast and biblical floods engulf major cities, Senate Democrats are negotiating a $3.5tn budget package that could include an attempt to slow the use of fossil fuels over the next decade.
One prominent senator is very concerned about proposals to scale back oil, gas and coal usage. He recently argued that those who want to “get rid of” fossil fuels are wrong. Eliminating fossil fuels won’t help fight global heating, he claimed, against all evidence. “If anything, it would be worse.”
Which rightwing Republican uttered these false, climate crisis-denying words?
Wrong question. The speaker was a Democrat: Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
West Virginia is a major coal-producing state. But Manchin’s investment in dirty energy goes far beyond the economic interests of the voters who elect him every six years. In fact, coal has made Manchin and his family very wealthy. He founded the private coal brokerage Enersystems in 1988 and still owns a big stake in the company, which his son currently runs.
In 2020 alone, Manchin raked in nearly $500,000 of income from Enersystems, and he owns as much as $5m worth of stock in the company, according to his most recent financial disclosure.
Despite this conflict of interest, Manchin chairs the influential Senate energy and natural resources committee, which has jurisdiction over coal production and distribution, coal research and development, and coal conversion, as well as “global climate change”.
He even gave a pro-coal speech in May to the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) while personally profiting from Enersystems’ coal sales to utility companies that are EEI members, as Sludge recently reported.
Manchin is one of many members of Congress who are personally invested in the fossil fuel industry – dozens of Congress members hold Exxon stock – but he is among the biggest profiters. As of late 2019, he had more money invested in dirty energy than any other senator.
How can this be? Wouldn’t basic ethics prevent someone from being in charge of legislation that could materially benefit them? Unfortunately, conflict-of-interest rules in the Senate are remarkably weak. And guess who is seeking to strip conflict-of-interest rules from a 2021 democracy reform bill?
His proposal “leaves out language that S 1 would add to federal statute prohibiting lawmakers from working on bills primarily for furthering their financial interests”, Sludge reported.
Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, has used the evenly split chamber to block Joe Biden’s agenda. In the process he has become arguably the most powerful person in Washington. Hardly any Democratic legislation can pass without his vote.
That’s a problem – especially given that Manchin sometimes seems like he’s an honorary Republican. Earlier this month the Texas Tribune and other publications reported that Manchin was heading to Texas for a fundraiser hosted by several major Republican donors, including oil billionaires.
Manchin, along with Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, has vowed to protect the filibuster – a rule, frequently used to empower white supremacists, that requires 60 votes for most Senate bills to pass. That includes vital voting rights legislation, passed by the House, that is the only way to stop the Republican party from eviscerating what’s left of our democracy in the name of the “big lie” of voter fraud.
Because of his uniquely powerful position as a swing vote, Manchin can rewrite major legislation to his liking – effectively dictating the legislative agendas of Congress and the White House.
It appears that Manchin will have his way with the White House’s infrastructure package as well, and his changes will probably be more devastating, given the climate emergency we live in.
Manchin isn’t just sticking up for the coal industry and his family’s generational wealth; he’s doing the bidding of oil and gas executives, who also stand to lose money if the nation transitions away from toxic fuels.
Manchin’s political campaigns are fueled by the dirty energy industry. Over the past decade, his election campaigns have received nearly $65,000 from disastrously dishonest oil giant Exxon’s lobbyists, its corporate political action committee, and the lobbying firms that Exxon works with. A top Exxon lobbyist recently bragged about his access to Manchin.
In the 2018 election cycle, his most recent, Manchin’s campaign got more money from oil and gas Pacs and employees than any other Senate Democrat except then North Dakota senator Heidi Heitkamp. Manchin was also the mining industry’s top Democratic recipient in Congress that cycle.
If Biden wants to have any kind of legacy, he needs to stand up to Manchin, a member of his own party, and work with the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, to get him in line. I don’t fully know why Biden permits the West Virginian to dictate his own presidential policy agenda. But what is crystal clear is that the leader of the United States should be doing a whole lot more.
Alex Kotch is an investigative reporter and editor with the Center for Media and Democracy, a nationally recognized watchdog that leads award-winning investigations into the corruption that undermines our democracy, environment, and economic prosperity
Tomato plants talk to themselves when approached by predators, study finds
Joe Pinkstone
Hydrogen peroxide, the same chemical in hair dye, is one compound which increased in concentration after the electrical signals were triggered, according to researchers – Moment RF/Getty Images
Had it tried, then the unsuspecting insect would have triggered an innate defensive mechanism of the fruit, which would make it taste worse – according to a study.
Researchers, led by a team from Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil, have witnessed and described this clever mechanism for the first time.
They found that a tomato fruit has the inherent ability to sense a nearby insect and produce a cascade of electrical signals.
These warning impulses are sent to the main plant from the fruit and allow other parts of the plant to set up their own defenses.
One of the botanical weapons it has at its disposal is the production of distasteful chemicals, which deliberately make the fruit less pleasant to fend off a hungry animal.
Hydrogen peroxide, the same chemical in bleach and hair dye, is one compound which increased in concentration after the electrical signals were triggered.
Preparing for a caterpillar attack
The finding helps revolutionize how we think of plants and their ability to communicate, the researchers say.
It has long been known that plants make and release chemicals to send messages, but usually it is from the plant to the fruit via the sap, not the other way round.
“Since fruits are part of the plant, made of the same tissues of the leaves and stems, why couldn’t they communicate with the plant, informing it about what they are experiencing, just like regular leaves do?” says Dr Gabriela Niemeyer Reissig, one of the report’s authors.
“What we found is that fruits can share important information such as caterpillar attacks – which is a serious issue for a plant – with the rest of the plant, and that can probably prepare other parts of the plant for the same attack.”
The researchers made the discovery by putting tomato plants in a Faraday cage with electrodes at the ends of each branch. This allowed them to measure the electrical impulses made by various parts of the plant, and where they were sent.
When caterpillars were introduced to the arena, the electrical signals changed drastically and so too did the chemicals produced by the plant.
The researchers now hope to see if other plants and fruits also have this ability.
The findings are published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.
With Disasters Mounting By The Day, The U.S. May Finally Enact Real Climate Policy
Alexander C. Kaufman
Detroit residents observe a stretch of I-94 under several feet of water after rains flooded parts of Metro Detroit last month. (Photo: SOPA Images via Getty Images)
It’s the summer of cascading disasters in the United States: Downpours have made rivers of major metropoles’ transit lines, a coastal condo collapsed, flames have engulfed vast swaths of land, and triple-digit heat has roasted typically temperate regions. The catastrophes have brought a mounting death toll and incalculable trauma.
But, for the first time in over a decade, the U.S. government may actually do something about the emissions destabilizing the climate.
This week, the Biden administration and its allies in Congress announced plans to pack the federal budget with resources and rules that could jolt a country long paralyzed by corporate obstruction and science denial into finally confronting an unprecedented crisis.
Democrats plan to use their slim majorities in Congress to pass a $3.5 trillion spending package that includes mandates to cut 80% of planet-heating pollution from the electricity sector by 2030, fund a new green jobs corps, and make it easier for drivers to swap gas guzzlers for electric vehicles.
Whether enough funding will make it into the final budget to make the programs significant remains unclear. By tacking the proposals to the budget process, which requires only 51 votes to become law, Democrats can circumvent the 60-vote threshold for passing traditional legislation that grants Republicans filibuster power.
But doing so gives Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), widely considered the most conservative Democrat in the caucus, kingmaker status, and already he’s signaled his opposition to anything that disadvantages fossil fuels.
There’s pull on the other end of Democrats’ ideological spectrum, too, as 16 senators, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), have vowed to vote against any budget that excludes climate provisions. But, as Mother Jones reported, those in the “No Climate, No Deal” contingent have yet to settle on any uniform demands about what kinds of policy they want to see in the budget.
“We cannot address a small sliver of our carbon pollution and call it a victory. We have to tackle this problem at scale,” Leah Stokes, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of ”Short Circuiting Policy,” wrote in The Atlantic this week. “The last chance we had for a federal climate bill was 12 years ago. I’m afraid that Congress will again fail to pass climate legislation that invests at the necessary level. I’m worried that we’ll keep burning time we no longer have.”
In this handout provided by the USDA Forest Service, the Bootleg Fire burns on July 12 in Bly, Oregon. The Bootleg Fire has spread over 212,377 acres, making it the largest among the dozens of blazes fueled by record temperatures and drought in the western United States. (Photo: Handout via Getty Images)
While negotiators hash out the budget, other lawmakers are proposing standalone legislation that could ultimately appear in the final funding bill.
The Senate Energy Committee approved Manchin’s bill directing $95 billion to carbon capture and storage technology in fossil fuel plants on Wednesday.
On Thursday, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.H.) unveiled a bill to provide Americans with rebates to buy efficient new appliances aimed at slashing the 37% of U.S. emissions that stem from household energy use.
And on Friday, Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) joined two Republicans to introduce legislation to give grants to financially imperiled nuclear power plants in hopes of maintaining the supply of the country’s biggest source of carbon-free electricity.
Progressives in the House of Representatives, meanwhile, are pitching their own vision for how to legislate on climate.
In March, lawmakers announced the THRIVE Act, a $10 trillion spending plan, their banner policy.
In April, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) put forward a plan to give $1 trillion in federal aid to cities, towns and tribes seeking to slash emissions in a bid to circumvent anti-climate mandates on the state level.
On Thursday, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) proposed what he called the “Green New Deal for public schools,” a $1.4 trillion package to fund major retrofits at schools, hire more teachers and help kids living in poverty.
The steeper price tags the left-leaning candidates are seeking may seem big. But the numbers are actually more in line with what economists on the left and right ― from the progressive Roosevelt Institute to George W. Bush-era Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson ― say is needed to rapidly scale down the U.S. output of planet-heating gases.
Yet President Joe Biden and his treasury chief, Janet Yellen, worry that borrowing more money to justify climate spending poses financial risks for the country, despite warnings from economists and forecasters that failing to invest enough now in decarbonization carries even bigger risks as warming worsens. Under those self-imposed restraints, the White House sought to offset all its infrastructure and climate spending with new taxes.
Facing ferocious blowback from industries and their allies in Congress, the federal policymakers could only come up with $2.4 trillion in direct revenue to offset the program and managed to muster another $1.1 trillion through accounting techniques with the budget.
And while the Biden administration has faced mounting protests from climate activists demanding more action to curb emissions, pleas for something as wonky as “more deficit spending” have yet to materialize or gain popularity.
The memorial site for the collapsed 12-story Champlain Towers South condo building on July 13, 2021, in Surfside, Florida. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images)
Despite far stricter budget constraints due to its multinational euro currency, the European Union this week took some even more aggressive climate steps, proposing a dozen bills that would, among other things, ban diesel- and gas-powered cars by 2035 and levy new taxes on heating gas.
Expanding on those efforts could prove crucial ahead of November’s United Nations climate conference in Scotland. The world is already 1.1 degrees Celsius hotter than in pre-industrial times, and even if every country adheres to its pledged emissions cuts, the planet would still be on pace to warm by at least another 2 degrees this century. Changing that trajectory depends not only on rich nations cutting emissions, but on poorer countries doing the same, and in many cases forswearing the development of heavily polluting industries that helped North America and Europe grow so wealthy.
If the U.S. and European Union — home to the people most responsible for the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere today — can’t rapidly slash emissions, convincing the majority of humanity in Africa, Asia and Latin America to do the same will be a tough sell.
Minnesota has always been blessed with an abundance of water, above ground and below.
But the drought shows how quickly something usually taken for granted can become a concern.
While the immediate Mankato area has been blessed with a few timely rains that have helped crops and lawns, the signs of this year’s precipitation shortage — 11 inches below normal — is visible. Rivers are extremely low and showing sandbars not seen in many years. Boaters at area lakes are finding public boat ramps more difficult or impossible to use because of falling lake levels.
Around much of the state, including the Twin Cities, restrictions on watering lawns are in effect or soon will be as concerns about falling well and aquifer levels increase.
The conditions show just how fast our life-giving water can be jeopardized. While not yet an emergency here, the searing droughts and growing water shortages in the western United States portend serious problems far into the future.
Already some water-thirsty states have proposed piping water from Minnesota’s aquifers or from the Great Lakes. Fortunately, those efforts have so far been thwarted as Minnesotans and neighboring states have refused to make our waters a commodity.
And while southern Minnesota continues to have a good underground water supply, much of central and northern Minnesota has seen too much demand, such as for irrigating potato fields.
Above ground, our lakes and rivers aren’t only falling but many are impaired. The MPCA lists 56% of lakes and rivers as impaired.
Whether the current drought pattern is contributed to or caused by climate change isn’t something anyone can answer. We’ve had severe droughts in Minnesota long ago and will again.
But what is certain is that climate change will make for more erratic weather, and demands on our water resources will continue to grow — be it from more droughts, local demand or from other states seeking new water sources.
Next time you turn on the garden hose or visit a lake or river, it’s worth considering the value of our rich resources.
Water is a public good that needs to be protected from pollutants and overuse.
How Bad Is the Bootleg Fire? It’s Generating Its Own Weather.
Henry Fountain
A column of smoke rises from the Bootleg Fire near Bly, Ore., on July 7, 2021. (U.S. Forest Service via The New York Times)
A towering cloud of hot air, smoke and moisture that reached airliner heights and spawned lightning. Wind-driven fronts of flame that have stampeded across the landscape, often leapfrogging firebreaks. Even, possibly, a rare fire tornado.
The Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon, spurred by months of drought and last month’s blistering heat wave, is the largest wildfire so far this year in the United States, having already burned more than 340,000 acres, or 530 square miles, of forest and grasslands.
And at a time when climate change is causing wildfires to be larger and more intense, it’s also one of the most extreme, so big and hot that it’s affecting winds and otherwise disrupting the atmosphere.
“The fire is so large and generating so much energy and extreme heat that it’s changing the weather,” said Marcus Kauffman, a spokesperson for the state Forestry Department. “Normally the weather predicts what the fire will do. In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do.”
The Bootleg Fire has been burning for two weeks, and for most of that time it’s exhibited one or more forms of extreme fire behavior, leading to rapid changes in winds and other conditions that have caused flames to spread rapidly in the forest canopy, ignited whole stands of trees at once, and blown embers long distances, rapidly igniting spot fires elsewhere.
“It’s kind of an extreme, dangerous situation,” said Chuck Redman, a forecaster with the National Weather Service who has been at the fire command headquarters providing forecasts.
Fires so extreme that they generate their own weather confound firefighting efforts. The intensity and extreme heat can force wind to go around them, create clouds and sometimes even generate so-called fire tornadoes — swirling vortexes of heat, smoke and high wind.
The catastrophic Carr Fire near Redding, California, in July 2018 was one of those fires, burning through 130,000 acres, destroying more than 1,600 structures and leading to the deaths of at least eight people, some of which were attributed to a fire tornado with winds as high as 140 mph that was captured on video.
Many wildfires grow rapidly in size, and the Bootleg Fire is no exception. In the first few days it grew by a few square miles or less, but in more recent days it has grown by 80 square miles or more. And nearly every day the erratic conditions have forced some of the nearly 2,200 firefighting personnel to retreat to safer locations, further hindering efforts to bring it under control. More than 75 homes and other structures have burned.
On Thursday night along its northern edge, the fire jumped over a line that had been treated with chemical retardant, forcing firefighters to back off. It was just the latest example of the fire overrunning a firebreak.
“This fire is a real challenge, and we are looking at sustained battle for the foreseeable future,” said Joe Hessel, the incident commander for the forestry department.
And it’s likely to continue to be unpredictable.
“Fire behavior is a function of fuels, topography and weather,” said Craig B. Clements, director of the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center at San Jose State University. “It changes generally day by day. Sometimes minute by minute.”
Redman said that nearly every day the fire had created tall updrafts of hot air, smoke and moisture called pyrocumulus clouds, some of them reaching up to 30,000 feet. One day, he said, they saw one of these clouds collapse, which can happen in early evening when the updraft stops.
“All that mass has to come back down,” he said, which forces air at the surface outward, creating strong, gusty winds in all directions that can spread a fire. “It’s not a good thing.”
Last Wednesday, though, conditions led to the creation of a larger, taller, cloud called a pyrocumulonimbus, which is similar to a thunderhead. It likely reached an altitude of about 45,000 feet, said Neil Lareau, who studies wildfire behavior at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Like a thunderhead, the huge cloud spawned lightning strikes, worrying firefighters because of their potential to start new fires. It may have also brought precipitation.
“Some of these events rain on themselves,” said John Bailey, a professor of forestry at Oregon State University.
Rain can be a good thing, by dampening some of the fuels and helping slow the fire. But by cooling the air closer to the surface, rain can also create dangerous downdrafts, Lareau said.
There have also been reports of fire whirls, small spinning vortices of air and flames that are common to many wildfires and are often inaccurately described as fire tornadoes. Fire whirls are small, perhaps a few dozen feet in diameter at their largest, and last for a few seconds to a few minutes.
But Lareau said there were some indications that the Bootleg Fire might have created an actual fire tornado, which can be several thousand feet in diameter, have wind speeds in excess of 65 mph, extend thousands of feet into the air and last much longer. “It looks like it’s been producing some pretty significant rotation,” he said.
Fire tornadoes occur as a plume of hot air rises within a fire, which draws more air from outside to replace it. Local topography and differences in wind direction, often caused by the fire itself, can impart a spin to this in-rushing air, and stretching of the air column can cause it to rotate faster, like a figure skater pulling her arms in to increase her spin.
Redman said the incident command had not received any reports of a fire tornado. “But it’s totally possible” for one to occur in a fire this big and intense, he said. “When we get these extreme events, it’s stuff we’ve got to watch for.”
Other kinds of extreme fire behavior are more common. But the duration of the extreme behavior in the Bootleg Fire has stunned some of those fighting it.
“It’s day after day of that extreme behavior and explosive growth,” Kauffman said. “And you can’t really fight fire under those conditions. It’s too dangerous.”
The root cause of most of the extreme behavior is the huge amount of heat the fire is pumping out.
The amount of heat is related to the dryness of the fuel — trees and other vegetation, both dead and alive. And the fuels in southern Oregon, as well as most of the West, are extremely dry, a result of the severe drought afflicting most of the region.
Clements likened it to a campfire. “You want the driest tinder and logs to get that fire going,” he said. “Same thing in a forest fire. That’s why we’ve been monitoring the drought.”
If vegetation is damp, some of the energy from burning is used to evaporate its moisture. If there is no moisture to evaporate, the fire burns hotter. “More heat is released,” he said. “The flames are bigger.”
Oregon was also hit in late June by an extreme heat wave, when record temperatures in some places were broken by as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit. That dried out the vegetation even more. In southern Oregon, the fuels were as dry as they’d be at the end of summer in a more normal year.
“We’ve had a lot of fuel that was ready to burn,” Bailey said.
What would help end the extreme behavior, and eventually the fire itself, is a good, widespread rain. But that doesn’t appear to be in the offing.
“We’re not seeing any significant relief in the next week at least,” Redman said. “But I don’t think we can get any worse.”
