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How Scientists Are So Confident They Know What’s Causing This Insane Weather

Daily Beast

How Scientists Are So Confident They Know What’s Causing This Insane Weather

Mike Pearl July 5, 2021

Dale Durran just endured a historic heatwave in Seattle, and perhaps more than most residents, he’s got good reason to be confident climate change had something to do with the regional madness that proved especially extreme next door, in Oregon, where dozens died.

The professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington told The Daily Beast that this past week’s monstrous stretch—which topped out at a blistering 108 degrees on Monday—was “so outside the range of previous hot spells in Seattle that it really stretches the credibility of anyone suggesting it is simply natural variability.”

Durran isn’t someone who blames climate change every time he breaks a sweat. But he does think about this issue: of accurately attributing seemingly insane weather events, like an entire village being on fire in Canada this past week, to a heating planet.

Last year, in his jargon-heavy paper “Can the Issuance of Hazardous-Weather Warnings Inform the Attribution of Extreme Events to Climate Change?” Durran closely examined something called the “probability of detection” and the “false alarm ratio.”

“The point of this article,” he explained, “is that demanding scientific certainty in the face of an event such as our recent record-crushing heatwave in the Pacific Northwest before accepting the need to take action to stem global warming is as ridiculous as demanding 100 percent certainty before issuing a tornado forecast.”

He’s not alone in thinking the doubters have run out of room—that events have overtaken any shred of sane skepticism.

According to legendary Princeton geoscientist Michael Oppenheimer, scientists are no longer guessing when it comes to tying extreme events like this to climate change, because a whole new field now exists that aims to tie a nice neat bow around these very questions.

“There is now a well developed science of ‘event attribution’ which deals with uncertainty,” Oppenheimer told The Daily Beast. (His own research over the years has focused on what the specific hazards of climate change will be, not necessarily event attribution.)

Here’s Oppenheimer’s explanation of how event attribution scientists do their jobs: They use Fractional Attribution of Risk (FAR), which he said is “the fraction of the intensity of an event (like a heatwave) that can be attributed to human-made greenhouse gases.” For example, event attribution scientists calculated the FAR on 2017’s Hurricane Harvey—after the fact—and it had, Oppenheimer explained, about two times what would have been the case without the greenhouse gases at 2017 levels. That gave Harvey a FAR score of 0.5.

Got all that?

It doesn’t really matter right now, because, according to event attribution specialist Emily Williams—currently still a Ph.D. student in geography at UC Santa Barbara—there’s no FAR score for what just happened to the West Coast. “Until a formal attribution study is done on this current heatwave,” Williams, who co-authored her university’s fact sheet on heatwaves and climate change, told The Daily Beast, “we won’t be able to say specifically how much more intense or likely climate change made it.”

However, Williams said, it’s nonetheless a “pretty safe bet to venture out and say that climate change likely at least exacerbated” the situation.

That’s because what scientists call the overall “probability distribution” of heatwaves has now shifted. So even though they haven’t looked backward at this latest event (or series of events) and tied it to climate change, enough science has been done to safely say the reverse—they more or less predicted this heatwave would happen. What those past scientists have already demonstrated, according to Williams, is that we’re now twice as likely to experience record breaking temperatures, that 16 percent of North America is now exposed to extreme heatwaves, and that when heatwaves arrive, “they’re now hotter.”

Matthew Hurteau, biology researcher at the University of New Mexico, studies the interaction between human behavior and the climate system, with an emphasis on fires—like the one that just consumed an entire Canadian town that had just set a national heat record of 121 degrees. Hurteau conducts his research by looking at reality, and a model of an unchanged climate.

“When I look at the climate change fingerprint on fire in my own research, it typically involves running simulations with and without the climate changing,” he told the Daily Beast.

But he doesn’t always need a model to be certain in his own mind that climate change is to blame when he sees a fire. “When the Creek Fire was burning in the Sierra Nevada last fall and I was looking at the energy release data from satellites and how long into the year it was actively burning,” he said, “it was clear that there was a climate change amplification of that fire.”

Still, it’s worth noting that some scientists find this comparison-to-an-unchanged-world methodology unsatisfying. Not because they believe recent extreme events should be regarded as normal, but simply because we live in the aforementioned changed world, and the other one is fake.

Matthew Igel, an atmospheric scientist focused on clouds at the University of California Davis, told The Daily Beast that now that we’ve filled our atmosphere with greenhouse gases, “We will always lack a realization of Earth without climate change regardless of how excellent our models are or become.”

According to Igel’s explanation, you can think of each attribution study almost as a science-fiction story about someplace called “Earth 2,” where anthropogenic climate change didn’t occur—perhaps because humans don’t exist there. And it’s only by creating a model of Earth 2 that we can understand why it’s so hot here on Earth 1, a.k.a. the only Earth that actually exists. “Our statistical knowledge of truly extreme events from some baseline climate will always be poor,” Igel said. “And regardless, just because we have never observed something before, doesn’t mean that it was impossible, only that it didn’t happen.”

By no means did Igel dismiss the usefulness of attribution science—he’s just hesitant to call it conclusive. “These are the questions that keep me up at night,” he explained.

But the attribution scientists can offer about the connection between climate change, and, for instance, your house being burned down in a wildfire, is good enough to be used in court. At least according to Michael Burger, Columbia Law professor, and executive director at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, which cooks up legal techniques to be used in the fight against climate change.

“There is nothing new about courts, or policymakers, making decisions in the face of probability calculations and varying degrees of scientific uncertainty. That’s the nature of the beast,” Burger explained. “As a lawyer, you have to deploy the science to make your case, and fit it to the relevant standard for the particular legal issue you are addressing.”

“Attribution Science has improved the precision of climate data with respect to delineation of atmospheric conditions with and without human caused greenhouse gases,” added Lindene Patton, a lawyer at the legal and advisory company Earth and Water Law Group.

When it comes to expert commentary before a judge, she said, “The state of the art attribution science is good enough—as good as morbidity data or demographic or other data we use.”

So the evidence—as in courtroom evidence—for climate change being the culprit in this heatwave, isn’t in quite yet. But that doesn’t mean the case against the defendant, anthropogenic climate change, isn’t looking extremely strong.

“Climate change caused by high levels of greenhouse gas changes all such events to some degree,” Oppenheimer said, “and I wait to see what the scientists who do these calculations say before deciding specifically how the character of an event was affected by the greenhouse gas buildup. That is precisely what I am waiting for now with regard to the recent heatwave in the Pacific Northwest.”

However, Oppenheimer added, “some events are so off the chart that you can say right off that there was very likely a big greenhouse gas contribution.” Hurricane Harvey, he said, was one of these instances where he didn’t need to wait for the evidence to be pretty sure. “There was no precedent even close to it in the local historical record. I think the same is true for the recent Pacific Northwest event.”

According to Williams, the UC Santa Barbara attribution specialist, events like this are “both a window into the future, and a reminder of why it’s so important that we take action now to transition to a just, low-carbon economy.”

Such a “just, low-carbon economy,” is still a long way off, and those who would stand on the sidelines poking holes in scientific conclusions have helped slow down its creation. According to Durran, we need to stop letting that happen, even if attribution science gets it wrong from time to time.

“Some errors will always occur both when issuing weather warnings and when distinguishing natural variability from human-induced climate change,” he said. “In neither case can we let the possibility of error completely paralyze our response.”

A map shows the 12 states most at risk from COVID-19, all with high levels of Delta and below-average vaccination rates

Business Insider

A map shows the 12 states most at risk from COVID-19, all with high levels of Delta and below-average vaccination rates

Dr. Catherine Schuster-Bruce July 5, 2021

NJ covid test — COVID-19 testing. Rick Pescovitz

The 12 US states at most risk from COVID-19 include Arkansas, Nevada, and Missouri, according to Covid Act Now.
The organization uses CDC data and is partnered with Stanford, Harvard and Georgetown Universities.
The highest risk states include those with lower vaccination rates and more cases of the highly infectious Delta variant.

The US states most at risk from COVID-19 include those with below-average vaccination rates and high levels of the infectious Delta variant, according to data from an influential non-profit that’s partnered with Stanford, Harvard and Georgetown Universities.

Twelve states including Arkansas, Nevada, and Missouri are now at “high risk” from COVID-19, according to Covid Act Now’s US COVID risk and vaccine tracker, which mostly uses Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data. There are just two states at low risk from COVID-19 – Massachusetts and Vermont.

Risk level according to US state by Covid Act Now — Risk level by US state – Covid Act Now covidactnow.org

The 12 states at high risk from COVID-19, according to Covid Act Now, are: Nevada, Utah, Missouri, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina.

Covid Act Now’s risk calculations are based on six factors that include infection rates, the percentage of people vaccinated, capacity at intensive care units, and socio-economic vulnerabilities that may impact recovery. There are five levels of risk: severe risk, very-high risk, high risk, medium risk and low risk.

Professor Eric Topol, director at the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said on Twitter on Friday that states had moved up risk categories as the Delta variant continued to spread, citing Covid Act Now. He said Delta accounted for at least 35% of new cases in these high-risk states.

Thirty-six states are at medium risk, while two – Massachusetts and Vermont – are low risk, according to Covid Act Now’s data. Both of these states have low levels of Delta variant, according to Scripps Research’s Outbreak.info.

More than 80% of people are fully vaccinated in both states, according to data from Johns Hopkins University – well above the nation’s 47% average.

By comparison, the Delta variant accounts for more than 80% of new cases in Arkansas, Nevada, and Missouri, according to Outbreak.info. The number of people fully vaccinated is 34% in Arkansas, 42% in Nevada, and 39% in Missouri.

Actual figures may vary because there can be delays in uploading data, or it may not be available. Insider’s Aria Bendix reported on Friday that the CDC stopped monitoring non-severe COVID-19 cases among vaccinated people in May. The number of tests sequenced also differs. For example, the data from Massachusetts is based on more than 18,000 sequenced tests, and Arkansas’ data comes from just over 960 sequenced tests, according to Outbreak.info.

It’s not clear how the level of risk will translate to new infections.

Topol said it was promising that the number of new daily cases was still low. “But rising,” he added.

The hardest question about the Florida condo collapse: Is it worth rebuilding in a city that could be underwater in 30 years?

Business Insider

The hardest question about the Florida condo collapse: Is it worth rebuilding in a city that could be underwater in 30 years?

Tyler Sonnemaker July 3, 2021

Two luxury condominium buildings under construction on Fisher Island in Miami, Florida.

The cause of the Florida condo collapse is still unknown, but climate change is among early theories.
Experts say rising sea levels will pose major risks for other coastal residents in the near future.
Yet Miami real estate prices are soaring, even as some experts warn against new development.

A week after the Champlain Towers South condo building in Surfside, near Miami, Florida, collapsed, 22 are dead and more than 100 are still missing.

While speculation is already swirling about what caused the collapse, with observers blaming everything from inaction by the condo board to lax building regulations to rising sea levels, investigators are likely still months from a definitive answer.

One thing is certain, however: Climate change is already threatening to leave substantial parts of coastal areas like Miami underwater in the coming decades, meaning more buildings and infrastructure could be wiped out.

Despite the ominous signs, Miami real estate prices continue to soar and new development projects move forward, in what some experts say is a detachment from the environmental – and economic – reality.

In Florida alone, $26.3 billion worth of coastal property, housing more than 90,000 people, is at risk of becoming “chronically inundated” – that is, flooding at least 26 times per year – by 2045, according to Insider’s analysis of a 2018 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

By those estimates, homebuyers taking out a 30-year mortgage today would likely see their homes flooding every two weeks by the time their loan term expires.

“Florida is ground zero for sea level rise in the United States,” Kristy Dahl, a senior climate scientist at UCS, told Insider.

That rise is causing more of the state to experience flooding, not just during so-called “king tides,” but also during normal high tides, Dahl said, adding that “seawater that’s flooding communities is incredibly corrosive.”

“Regular high-tide flooding will affect all kinds of infrastructure in the coming decades,” she said, pointing out a UCS study that showed how flooding could derail Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor route by 2050.

“A way to drive our economy”

After Hurricane Andrew devastated the state in 1992, Florida passed a wave of new building codes to mitigate future storm damage. The Palm Beach Post reported Friday that the collapse in Surfside could similarly push lawmakers to abandon the state’s historically hands-off approach to regulation in favor of more stringent rules for aging condo buildings.

Following decades of denialism, more Florida Republicans have also begun to acknowledge the reality of climate change and the risks it poses for their coastal communities, paving the way for more aggressive, bipartisan efforts.

Florida’s state legislature recently authorized $640 million for climate resiliency initiatives, while the mayors of Miami, Miami Beach, and Miami-Dade County have rolled out a strategic plan outlining steps to prepare the region.

Some developers are also beginning to see a business case for investing in climate resilience.

“We need to understand about how much it’s going to cost, but ultimately… we found that the return on investment is significant and it will create thousands of jobs,” Alec Bogdanoff, CEO of Brizaga, a Florida-based civil and coastal engineering firm, told Insider.

“We’re not only investing in adaptation and resilience because we have to, but it’s actually a way to drive our economy and grow our economy,” he said.

But some experts worry that trying to adapt to the climate – through evolving construction techniques, pump systems, and raised buildings and sidewalks, for example – may still not be enough to save cities like Miami.

“Why the heck are we letting people build?”

“We know seawater is going to arrive,” Harold Wanless, a professor and chair of the department of geological science at the University of Miami, told Insider. “What we should be doing is saying: ‘Why the heck are we letting people build in an area that’s going to be flooded by rising sea levels?”

Wanless said that a 2-3 foot rise in sea level, which estimates predict could happen in Miami by 2060, would also cause 100 to 200 feet of beach erosion, a rate that would make it too expensive to combat by simply adding more sand.

“At that point, you don’t fight it, and we should be realizing that’s where we’re headed,” Wanless said.

But many still don’t, partly because various financial incentives keep pushing developers to build in high-risk areas, including their outsize influence over local politics and wealthy buyers’ ability to withstand losses, according to a report last year in Yale’s Environment360.

That report argues that the “narrow path for survival” for Florida’s coastal counties involves, among other strategies, “orderly retreats from most vulnerable coastal neighborhoods.”

But withdrawing from coastal properties, despite the science, would run up against another obstacle, according to Dahl: human nature.

“We’re still drawn to the water just as we always have been, and I think that’s going to be a really difficult cultural shift to make,” she said, especially given the lack of disclosure about climate risks in real estate listings.

In 2019, journalist Sarah Miller pretended to be interested in buying a luxury home in Miami Beach so she could ask realtors about climate-related risks, detailing the “cognitive dissonance” she witnessed in an article for Popula.

In response to a friend’s skepticism about whether cities could become climate-proof through resilience alone, Miller wrote: “This is the neoliberal notion, that the reasonable and mature way to think about this stuff is: Get more efficient and find the right incentives to encourage the right kinds of enterprise. But my friend wondered, what if the mature thing to do is to mourn – and then retreat?”

Former Fox Exec Calls Network ‘Poison For America’ In Blistering Rebuke

HuffPost – Politics

Former Fox Exec Calls Network ‘Poison For America’ In Blistering Rebuke

By Josephine Harvey July 5, 2021

Rupert Murdoch “owes himself a better legacy than a news channel that no reasonable person would believe,” Preston Padden wrote.

A former top Fox Broadcasting executive has voiced a searing condemnation of Fox News, calling it “poison for America” and saying even the network’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, doesn’t believe its coverage.

“Rupert Murdoch, whom I served for seven years, has many business and journalistic achievements. He owes himself a better legacy than a news channel that no reasonable person would believe,” wrote Preston Padden in an op-ed for The Daily Beast.

Padden served as president of network distribution at the Fox Broadcasting Company in the 1990s and played a role in the launch of Fox News, which was started with a goal to fill “an opening for a responsible and truthful center-right news network,” he said.

But in recent years, he continued, things have gone “badly off the tracks at Fox News.”

He accused the channel, particularly its prime-time opinion programming, of making a substantial and direct contribution to: COVID-19 deaths via vaccine and mask misinformation; societal divisions by stoking racial animus and spreading falsehoods about Black Lives Matter protests; former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election; and the violent Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol led by his supporters.

“Fox News has caused many millions of Americans — most of them Republicans (as my wife and I were for 50 years) — to believe things that simply are not true,” he wrote.

Preston Padden has been in the media industry for more than two decades. In that time, he's served as an executive at Fox Bro — Preston Padden has been in the media industry for more than two decades. In that time, he’s served as an executive at Fox Broadcasting, ABC, the Walt Disney Company, among other organizations.

He referred to polling that indicates a significant portion of Republicans blame “left-wing protesters” for the Jan. 6 attack. “Of course, that is ludicrous,” he wrote. He also pointed to statistics that suggested two-thirds of Republicans believe or suspect the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

“This ridiculous notion has been thoroughly refuted,” Padden continued. “But millions of Americans believe these falsehoods because they have been drilled into their minds, night after night, by Fox News.”

He said the “greatest irony” lay in his belief that most of the falsehoods on Fox News did not reflect Murdoch’s own views. He added:

I believe that he thought that it was important to protect his own health by wearing a mask during the pandemic and he encouraged me to do the same. I believe that he thought that it was important to protect his own health by getting vaccinated at the earliest opportunity and he encouraged me to do the same. And I believe that he thinks that former President Trump is an egomaniac who lost the election by turning off voters, especially suburban women, with his behavior.

Padden, who currently serves as the principle of a consulting business and as an advisory board member for a private equity investment firm, said he had tried and failed over the past nine months to make Murdoch understand the damage Fox News is doing to America.

“I am at a loss to understand why he will not change course,” he said.

Fox News did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

Personalities at the network are known to spout dangerous and misleading claims about the coronavirus pandemic and 2020 election, manufactured and divisive political controversy, white supremacist rhetoric and revisionist history about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, among other false and misleading claims.

Read the full op-ed in The Daily Beast here.

The GOP’s main voter bloc is shrinking

The Week – Analysis

The GOP’s main voter bloc is shrinking

The electorate is shifting — and not in the Republican Party’s favor

David Faris July 6, 2021

Trump supporters and a young Biden supporter.

Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock

A new deep dive into the 2020 electorate by Pew Research contains mostly bad news for Republicans, whose approaching demographic doom is less racial than it is generational. While it shouldn’t be news to anyone at this point that young voters are a solidly blue voting bloc, the more worrisome developments for the GOP are the unexpectedly elderly nature of the party’s coalition and the unyielding Democratic lean of younger voters as they age. If Pew’s numbers are to be believed, the only solidly Republican age demographic last year was 75 and over, meaning that every time the sun comes up, the GOP’s struggle to win a majority of American voters gets harder.

Pew’s in-depth study uses validated voter files – matching panelists to a registration database confirming whether or not they turned out – to offer a different, and possibly more accurate, view of the electorate than the exit polls taken on Election Day. Often this new data can challenge narratives that set in stubbornly and immediately after the votes are counted – in 2016, for example, Pew’s research found that Donald Trump won white women by a considerably smaller margin than Election Day surveys indicated, upending one prevailing story about who was most responsible for Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss.

There were some important differences between exit polls and the new study. For example, Pew found that Trump did better with Latino voters, and worse with Black voters, than exit polls indicated. Still, both sets of numbers showed Trump making modest inroads with these groups, easily the most concerning development for Democrats because of their centrality to the party’s coalition. Exit polls had Trump winning married men by 11 points, while Pew gave this group to Biden by 5. Trump, seemingly paradoxically, lost ground with men and gained some with women, narrowing the overall gender gap. It’s pretty difficult to discern a pattern in these differences, and the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

But then there are the age numbers. Biden, predictably, obliterated Trump with the youngest voters – members of the so-called Generation Z, born after 1996, as well as younger millennials. Exit polls had Biden winning 18- to 29-year-olds by 24 points, 60-36, whereas Pew pegs it at 58-38. Exit polls also showed Trump with just a 52-47 edge among voters over 65, and Pew’s numbers came in almost identical – 52-48 for Trump over Biden. And if those were the only topline stats you saw, you wouldn’t think there was a huge problem for Republicans.

But Pew also broke the survey down into not just age groups but generational cohorts. And it’s here where you’ll find the most terrifying information for the GOP. According to Pew, Trump won a decisive majority only with members of the “Silent Generation,” those born between 1928 and 1945 (and the extremely tiny number of living people older than that). Trump dominated that cohort by 16 points, 58-42. That means that the only reliably Republican voter bloc will shrink considerably between now and 2024, and that 65- to 74-year-olds must have been a much more blue-leaning group in 2020 to produce Trump’s comparatively narrow 4-point margin with all over-65s.

You don’t need a degree in actuarial science to know that in general, 65- to 74-year-olds will be around considerably longer than 75- to 102-year-olds. According to the Social Security Administration, a 65-year-old man has a remaining life expectancy of almost 18 years. At 75, it’s just over 11 years, and at 85 it’s less than six. Members of the Silent Generation are expected to shrink from 9 percent of the voting eligible population in 2020 to 7 percent in 2024. And while I hope that my over-75 parents are around as long as humanly possible, if I were a GOP operative I would be apoplectically trying to figure out ways to make the age profile of the average party supporter substantially younger, rather than tripling down on whatever Fox-driven cultural hysteria is dominating headlines in the conservative media. This stuff is not resonating with anyone who has more than 30 years to live.

Perhaps even worse for former President Trump and his acolytes, the Pew data showed little erosion in the millennial preference for Democrats over Republicans. Fifty-six percent of millennials voted for Clinton in 2016, and 58 percent voted for Biden in 2020. Remember, the first millennials voted in 2002, and as a group they simply have not budged. “Elder millennials” are turning 40 this year and they don’t love the Republican Party any more than they did when George W. Bush was lighting several trillion dollars on fire prosecuting a pointless war in Iraq. And that’s terrible news for the GOP’s hopes of ever becoming a majority party again, because if they keep losing the youngest voters by double digits election after election, they need a significant number of them to get more conservative as they age just to hold current margins in place.

That doesn’t mean Democrats are guaranteed to win the next several elections, even if the playing field is fair. “Demography is destiny” as a theory has aged badly, largely because Republicans remain competitive at the national level even as the country becomes more diverse and less white. Trump’s gains among Latino voters helped avert a total bloodbath in 2020, and there is no particular reason why Republicans couldn’t do better with them in 2024, in theory.

After all, Democrats’ deteriorating performance with non-college educated white voters over the past decade offset the ongoing diversification of the electorate. But according to Pew, the rightward march of white voters was halted and marginally reversed by Joe Biden in 2020, who did 4 points better with non-college-educated whites than Clinton. Republicans may have already run headlong into a white ceiling.

Republicans also continue to make up zero ground with young people. This year’s Harvard Youth Poll of 18- to 29-year-olds was the same horror show for the GOP that it has been for years, and it included yet another year of newly eligible voters who are repulsed by the dyspeptic, off-putting spectacle of the modern Republican Party, whose leading thinkers and politicians are staking their 2022 election strategy on a Woke Panic gambit dependent on demonizing an obscure academic concept (Critical Race Theory) and convincing voters that their imminent (and completely imagined) “cancellation” is their most important problem.

Thirty percent of Americans under 29 think Donald Trump was the worst president in American history. Sixty-five percent have an unfavorable view of the former president. Just 18 percent watch Fox News, the primary national vector for viral paranoia and disinformation, regularly. The Pew report is just a brutal document for Republicans. And it suggests that the light at the end of the tunnel, far from illuminating a path out of the wilderness for the GOP, is instead an oncoming, hostile generation poised to put Republicans at a decisive disadvantage in national elections for years.

Jimmy, Rosalynn Carter marking 75 years of ‘full partnership’

Politico

Jimmy, Rosalynn Carter marking 75 years of ‘full partnership’

By Associated Press July 4, 2021

ATLANTA — The young midshipman needed a date one evening while he was home from the U.S. Naval Academy, so his younger sister paired him with a family friend who already had a crush. Rosalynn Carter et al. looking at the camera: President Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter lead their guests in dancing at the annual Congressional Christmas Ball at the White House on Dec. 13, 1978.

Rosalynn Carter et al. looking at the camera: President Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter lead their guests in dancing at the annual Congressional Christmas Ball at the White House on Dec. 13, 1978.

Nearly eight decades later, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter are still together in the same tiny town where they were born, grew up and had that first outing. In between, they’ve traveled the world as Naval officer and military spouse, American president and first lady, and finally as human rights and public health ambassadors.

“It’s a full partnership,” the 39th president told The Associated Press during a joint interview ahead of the couple’s 75th wedding anniversary on July 7.

It will be another milestone for the longest-married presidential couple in American history. At 96, Carter also is the longest-lived of the 45 men who’ve served as chief executive. Yet even having reached that pinnacle, Carter has said often since leaving the Oval Office in 1981 that the most important decision he ever made wasn’t as head of state, commander in chief or even executive officer of a nuclear submarine in the early years of the Cold War.

Rather, it was falling for Eleanor Rosalynn Smith in 1945 and marrying her the following summer. “My biggest secret is to marry the right person if you want to have a long-lasting marriage,” Carter said.

The nonagenarians — she’s now 93 — offered a few other tips for an enduring bond.

“Every day there needs to be reconciliation and communication between the two spouses,” the former president said, explaining that he and Rosalynn, both devout Christians, read the Bible together aloud each night — something they’ve done for years, even when separated by their travels. “We don’t go to sleep with some remaining differences between us,” he said.

Rosalynn Carter noted the importance of finding common interests. Even now, she said, “Jimmy and I are always looking for things to do together.” Still, she emphasized a caveat: “Each (person) should have some space. That’s really important.”

As first lady, Rosalynn Carter carved her own identity even as she supported her husband. Building on her predecessors’ efforts to highlight special causes, she went to work in her own East Wing office, setting a standard for first ladies by working alongside her husband’s West Wing aides on key legislation, especially dealing with health care and mental health. She continued that focus as the couple built the Carter Center in Atlanta after their White House years.

Certainly, a 75-year marriage hasn’t been seamless, the couple acknowledges.

Jimmy was initially on course to be an admiral, not commander in chief, and Rosalynn appreciated their life beyond Plains, home to fewer than a thousand people, then and now. But when James Earl Carter Sr. became sick and died in 1953, his son cut short his Navy

career and decided the family would return to rural Georgia.

The former president has written that in retrospect he finds it inconceivable not to discuss such a life-changing decision with his wife, who was unhappy with the move. Now, they see the blossoming of their partnership in that challenging juncture.

“We developed a partnership when we were working in the farm supply business, and it continued when Jimmy got involved in politics,” Rosalynn Carter told AP. “I knew more on paper about the business than he did. He would take my advice about things,” she added, drawing a laugh and affirmation from her husband.

Jimmy Carter also didn’t seek Rosalynn’s permission to make his first bid for office a few years later. In that instance, she was on board anyway.

“My wife is much more political,” he said.

She interjected: “I love it. I love campaigning. I had the best time. I was in all the states in the United States. I campaigned solid every day the last time we ran.”

That didn’t help avoid a rout by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980. But it further cemented Rosalynn — who’d originally given up her own opportunity to go to college when she married at age 18 — as equal partner to the leader of the free world. And it marked Jimmy Carter’s evolution as a spouse.

He’s since been an outspoken voice for women’s rights, including within Christianity. Carter left the Southern Baptist Convention in 2006, denouncing what he called “rigid” views that “subjugated” women in the church and in their own marriages.

The former president ratified those views again, as well as his support for the church recognizing same-sex marriage. “It will continue to be divisive,” he said. “But the church is evolving.”

The Carters plan to celebrate their own marriage milestone a few days after their anniversary with a party in Plains. Decades removed from inaugural balls and state dinners, the most famous residents of Sumter County said they have mixed feelings about the spotlight.

“We have too many people invited,” Rosalynn Carter said with a laugh. “I’m actually praying for some turndowns and regrets.”

Welcome to Socialism

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Girl’s prayer at collapse site leads to meeting with Biden

News 4 Jax

Girl’s prayer at collapse site leads to meeting with Biden

Adriana Gomez Licon, Associated Press July 2, 2021

SURFSIDE, Fla. – Gazing at the mountain of rubble that had buried her father, uncle and dozens of others, a 12-year-old girl moved away from her relatives, sat down by herself and pulled out her phone. She opened a collection of Psalms and began to pray.

Elisheva Cohen’s moment of reflection at the site of the Florida condominium collapse captivated the Surfside mayor and led to an introduction to President Joe Biden, who asked to meet her Thursday when he arrived to console families affected by the disaster.

For days, families were kept away from the collapse site, which had been deemed unsafe. Then earlier this week, relatives were taken there briefly. Some shouted the names of loved ones and friends, hoping to hear their cries for help. Others cried.

Elisheva sat down alone, away from her mother and brother, and began to read prayers.

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett soon noticed her. He knelt down beside her to ask if she was OK.

“Yes” the girl told him.

“And that really brought it home to me,” Burkett said. “She wasn’t crying. She was just lost. She didn’t know what to do, what to say, who to talk to.”

Only six months ago, Elisheva celebrated her bat mitzvah with her mother and father, Dr. Brad Cohen, one of about 120 people missing under the rubble. The year that precedes the religious ceremony involves intensive study of Hebrew, the Bible and history.

That night, Dr. Cohen was proud. His youngest daughter was growing up and reaffirming her Jewish identity. Her father instilled a love for the teaching in both Elisheva and her teenage brother.

Before Dr. Cohen completed his medical residency and internships, he had spent weekends staying at the home of his mentor Rabbi Yakov Saachs, always desperate to learn more about his faith.

On his long commutes, he played cassette tapes, hungry to learn the teachings.

“Even though he was dog tired, it was a priority for him to try and glean as much information as he could,” Saachs told The Associated Press in a phone interview.

At Brad Cohen’s urging, the entire family became “more observant,” the rabbi said, following customs about not driving or doing business on the Sabbath.

The night before the collapse, her mother sent a message to Cohen with a selfie taken by Elisheva in front of a mirror. She wore a pink T-shirt with a high ponytail. They were staying in separate homes.

“Look how pretty,” the message read.

She was wearing the same outfit the next morning, when her mother “frantically woke her up” to tell her about the collapse.

For several days, Burkett shared Elisheva’s story far and wide. After Biden’s visit was announced, the girl’s mother, Soriya Cohen, bought her a new blue and white dress for the occasion. Her teenage brother was the first one in the family chosen to meet Biden. He had rushed home from a kibbutz in Israel as soon as he heard about the collapse.

But the teen had already arranged to have a class with a rabbi in Miami during the president’s visit.

“He said, ‘I already made a commitment,’” Saachs said. “So he said no.”

The mother also skipped the meeting with Biden, saying she felt the president’s visit was a diversion from the search efforts. Elisheva went with another family member.

The mayor said the most moving moment of Biden’s visit was when he shared Elisheva’s story with the president.

“I wanted him to know and see the face of that little girl who is praying for her father across from the rubble,” he said. “He looked at me and said, ‘Would you please bring her to me right now?’”

Police went to get Elisheva. Biden walked up to her and they hugged.

Associated Press Writer Kelli Kennedy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, also contributed to this report.

The Mega Heat Dome Over The Pacific Northwest Has Brought Death, Fire, And Misery

BuzzFeed News

The Mega Heat Dome Over The Pacific Northwest Has Brought Death, Fire, And Misery

Nicole Fallert July 2, 2021

Across the Pacific Northwest and into Canada, a record-breaking heat wave has pushed death tolls into staggering territory. In British Columbia alone, at least 500 heat-related deaths have been recorded since last Friday. In Oregon, 95 deaths have been attributed to scorching temperatures, as well as about 20 in Washington.

The past week has brought unprecedented temperatures to a region of North America ill-equipped to handle extreme heat as authorities struggle to respond to thousands of emergency calls, hundreds of deaths, and explosive wildfires. The unprecedented event is also a sign of more danger to come as climate change leads to more extreme weather across the country.

Many of the people killed or at risk of heat-related illness were children, older people, or those who live alone in a region where many people do not have air conditioning.

“For some folks, especially those who are elderly and those who are otherwise ill, they may not have the same [bodily] mechanisms built in. And if you don’t have access to clean water, if you don’t have access to a place to get cool, you could get overheated very quickly,” said Vasisht Srinivasan, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Washington. “It’s a very serious problem. When you have folks who are poor or don’t have access to stable housing, who don’t have access to housing with temperature control … the problem really starts to compound itself.”

David Jones, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, said one difficulty in treating heat-related illness is recognizing the symptoms, which can range from grumpiness to feeling lightheaded and cramping.

“It may not even be the heat that is the problem, but it is kind of exacerbating their own underlying condition,” Jones said. “And because of the heat, it kind of puts an extra stress on their body … which makes it dangerous for them.”

Srinivasan said that pandemic-era restrictions made people afraid to leave their homes for crowded cooling centers, and the heat wave forced hospitals to dip into reserves of cooling blankets and fans.

“Now on top of [COVID], you add a temporary, but very real, additional health crisis and hospitals are finding themselves sort of at the brink,” Srinivasan said. “This weekend, when dozens of patients arrived simultaneously with the same problems, resources tend to get strapped very quickly.”

The heat wave began last Friday when high pressure in the atmosphere forced warm air toward the ground. The compressed, warm air has been trapped under that high pressure in what meteorologists call a heat dome, which is rare for the Pacific Northwest region.

“The North West Territories have recorded their all-time highest temperatures not just in June, but at any point in the year,” Armel Castellan, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, said

in a statement, adding that fewer than than 40% of homes on the coast have air conditioning. “We are setting records that have no business in being set so early in the season.”

Vancouver police spokesperson Tania Visintin confirmed 53 sudden deaths, in which the cause of death is not known and a coroner is called in to run an investigation, were reported on Tuesday alone, bringing the total since last Friday to 98. Two-thirds of the victims were 70 or older and the vast majority of deaths have occurred in homes.

“At times, there were officers going from one sudden death to another for their entire 12-hour shift,” Visintin said, adding that the department was forced to stop answering any nonurgent calls and deploy extra officers. “It is typical for three to four sudden death calls to come in each day in the city. But to have 53 in one day is unprecedented … it is truly gut-wrenching.”

The spokesperson added that “heat is looking like the obvious factor for most of the deaths,” although the British Columbia Coroners Service is still investigating. As of Thursday afternoon, the spokesperson said names and descriptions of the victims could not be provided.

“We’ve never seen anything like this, and it breaks our hearts,” Vancouver Police Sgt. Steve Addison said in a statement. “If you have an elderly or vulnerable family member, please give them a call or stop by to check on them.”

Scientists and health experts have attributed the record-setting temperatures to the climate crisis — and warn that it’s only going to get worse going forward.

“We cannot just turn up the AC; we have to turn up our level of efforts fighting the underlying cause of our changing world — climate change,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee wrote Tuesday in a Seattle Times op-ed. “Our recent discomfort is but the tip of the melting iceberg. What we felt this week is just the opening act in a looming global disaster.

The Oregon state medical examiner reported 95 heat-related deaths as of Friday. Temperature records were set across the state, with Portland reaching an all-time high of 116 degrees on Monday, the Oregonian reported.

“I’ve lived in Portland for the past 10 years, and when I got here, Portland was a very temperate city,” Jones said. “And over the course of that time, I think, in the wintertime, we’re seeing more snow, and in the summertime, we’re seeing more prolonged heat spells.”

He added that the city will have to adapt to address public health threats as heat waves become a more permanent presence.

“That’s going to mean more cooling stations throughout the city, that’s going to mean easier access to water, that’s going to mean shade and shelter, either provision or opportunities for people,” Jones said. “It’s one thing to talk about a hot day, it’s a whole other thing to talk about a hot two weeks.”

The casualties reveal the dangers of extreme weather to laborers too. Sebastian Francisco Perez, a 38-year-old farmworker from Guatemala, died in Oregon after being found unresponsive in a field as temperatures reached 104 degrees. A spokesperson for the Oregon Health and Safety Administration said the agency is investigating Brother Farm Labor Contractor and Ernst Nursery and Farms regarding his death last week

The farm declined BuzzFeed News’ request for comment.

Rebecca Muessle, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Portland, told BuzzFeed News the region has gone more than 40 years “without hitting a record like this,” adding that the rarity of the event makes it difficult to conclude that the heat wave is in fact indicative of future weather patterns.

Muessle said this particular heat wave had all of the right “ingredients” to be particularly brutal: the high pressure system, easterly winds bringing additional warmer air into the area, and the “incredibly deep layer of hot air” that manifested the heat dome system. Also missing were westerly winds that are typically responsible for bringing in cooler air from the Pacific Ocean.

“We just had no reprieve,” Muessle said. “So it was just almost like a blow-dryer of hot easterly winds that just kept the temperatures rising and rising.”

In Washington, Seattle set an all-time record on Monday when temperatures reached 107 degrees. A spokesperson for the Washington Department of Health told BuzzFeed News that since June 25, there have been 1,792 emergency department visits reported by hospitals for suspected heat-related illness across the state. Nearly 400 of those led to an inpatient admission and nearly 40% of patients seen for suspected heat-related illness were 65 years and older.

Seattle Fire Department spokesperson Kristin Tinsley told BuzzFeed News there have been “many sleepless nights for our on-duty crews who work 24-hour shifts.”

“We first set the record on June 27 for the busiest day of Seattle Fire medical and fire responses, 386 responses, and then a day later on June 28, we broke the record again with 544 responses,” they added.

Kevin Mundt with the Seattle Human Services Department told BuzzFeed News that of the 118 combined heat-related medical responses between June 26 and June 28, 11% were for unhoused people. The median age for heat-related medical responses was 67 years old, and most involved older people overheating in indoor living quarters, he added.

“Not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to gain access to [cool places],” Srinivasan said. “Lots of people in Seattle decided to pick a mini staycation and go get a hotel room for the weekend. Now, that’s great for the people who are able to do that, to have the resources to be able to do that, but unfortunately not everyone is able to do that.”

Raging wildfires spurred by the record-setting temperatures and drought paint an even grimmer picture in the Northwest down into California. On Thursday, more than 1,200 firefighters attacked the Lava fire near Mount Shasta, which had grown to nearly 24,000 acres.

Lytton, British Columbia, was almost entirely razed by a fast-moving wildfire Wednesday, forcing most of the town’s 1,000 residents to flee in record heat that hit 121 degrees.

And in Oregon, Gov. Kate Brown declared a state of emergency in response to the 10,000-acre Wrentham Market fire, the Statesman Journal reported. Another blaze, the Sunset Valley Fire, broke out Thursday near the Dalles, burning brush and wheat and causing evacuations and road closures.

Brown said in a statement on Wednesday that a large portion of the state was in extreme fire danger, and she readied every possible resource to combat the blazes.

“There’s a very real chance that we’re going to get more of these in the future,” Srinivasan said of the climate crisis. “And these aren’t going to be surprise isolated heat waves: ‘Oh my god, once in a century.’ I think this is going to be ‘Cool, it’s that time of year again,’ where this happens every year now.”

In push to end gerrymandering, an unlikely state steps into the spotlight

NBC News

In push to end gerrymandering, an unlikely state steps into the spotlight

Erin Einhorn July 3, 2021

PORT HURON, Mich. — In a country where Democrats and Republicans have spent the past year battling over allegations of election fraud and attempts at voter suppression, the earnest scene playing out in a conference room here last week almost didn’t make sense.

The stakes were high. A commission charged with redrawing Michigan’s political boundaries was preparing to make crucial decisions that could affect the future of the state — and even the nation.

Yet there was no heckling, no chanting, no catcalls.

Instead, the roughly 70 people gathered in a brightly lit convention hall at the base of an international bridge that connects Michigan with Canada listened respectfully as one speaker after another offered ideas for how the state’s legislative and congressional districts should be drawn.

An environmental advocate asked for a district linking towns along the nearby St. Clair river so future representatives might prioritize its water quality.

A Methodist pastor requested a district that would consider the needs of religious voters, keeping churchgoers together.

A farmer and union leader asked for the rural and tourism communities in Michigan’s thumb region — named for its location in the mitten-shaped state — to be grouped together in a district separate from the industrial areas closer to Detroit. That way, he said, the thumb would have elected officials focused on agriculture rather than on industry.

“I don’t think we get a fair shake up here,” said the farmer, Dick Cummings, 78.

Image: Public hearing, Michigan (Brian Wells / Times Herald via Imagn)

This genteel display of civic discourse was part of a new nonpartisan effort by Michigan to redraw its political boundaries this year. The approach — handing redistricting power over to a 13-member independent citizens commission — is being watched by other states with interest, said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center For Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy organization at New York University Law School.

“I can’t overstate how many eyes are on Michigan right now,” Li said.

Michigan has some of the most gerrymandered political boundaries in the nation, Li said. The sprawling districts twist and turn to give electoral advantages to Republicans, who drew the lines a decade ago.

The state has also had some of the fiercest political fights of recent years. Protesters stormed the statehouse with assault weapons to protest Covid-19 restrictions last spring, and supporters of former President Donald Trump pounded on the windows of a Detroit convention center as election workers counted votes after the November election. Last fall, 13 men were charged with attempting to kidnap the state’s Democratic governor.

So if an independent commission can draw fair political districts here that meet legal requirements and that can survive an expected flood of court challenges, it could serve as a model for other states to follow, Li said. Eventually, that could lead to fairer elections across the country — and maybe even a less rancorous political dynamic.

“A lot of people are rooting for Michigan now because the state looked hopeless in a lot of ways,” Li said.

If Michigan can do it, he added, “there’s a lot of hope for other places that also might seem hopeless.”

‘Just trying to work together’

Most states are preparing to redraw legislative and congressional districts after the 2020 federal census in the same way they always have: People in power will work behind closed doors to create districts designed to give their party an electoral edge for the coming decade.

The traditional partisan method has led in the past to strangely shaped districts in some states that zigzag to ensure that as many districts as possible are “safe” for the party drawing them up. The opposing party either gets packed into single districts, or carved up so its political power is diluted.

Critics say the approach — called gerrymandering — is a major reason the nation’s politics have become so deeply partisan. Since candidates running in safe districts typically don’t need to worry about the general election, they’re more likely to cater to the hard-core party stalwarts who vote in low-turnout primaries by adopting more extreme views.

“Some of the divide we’re seeing right now is that legislatures know they don’t have to be 100 percent responsive,” said Hannah Wheelan, a senior analyst with the electoral innovation lab at Princeton University. “A lot of their districts are safe, and they’re going to be able to win them no matter what.”

Voters then don’t feel like their votes matter, she said, which drives down turnout and puts even more power into the hands of party bosses.

Gerrymandering in Michigan 10 years ago, after the last census, was so effective for the Republican Party that the GOP has maintained a majority in both legislative houses for the last decade, though Democrats have won a majority of votes in some elections, including 2018 when they swept four statewide offices and earned more votes in legislative races overall.

This time, however, the process will be different, thanks to a grassroots effort that began in 2016, when a Michigan woman lamented the effects of gerrymandering on Facebook.

Her post went viral, bringing out volunteers who gathered more than 400,000 signatures to put a proposed redistricting change on the state ballot. The measure overcame a host of legal challenges and, in 2018, won overwhelming support from voters who amended the state Constitution to create the independent commission.

The voters made Michigan one of four states, along with Arizona, California and Colorado, that have removed elected officials and political parties from the process of redrawing political lines.

Michigan’s new process doesn’t even use elected officials to choose the members of the commission.

The 13 commissioners — four Democrats, four Republicans and five independents — were chosen by lottery from among 9,000 applicants. The secretary of state last summer randomly selected 200 semifinalists using a statistical weighting process to ensure diversity and statewide representation. Political parties only had the power to remove a limited number of candidates who they thought would be particularly partisan before the 13 commissioners were randomly chosen.

The commissioners, including lawyers, a retired banker, a medical student and a trauma practitioner who works with survivors of violent crimes, will start drawing political lines this summer or fall once final census numbers are available. The maps will apply to Congressional and legislative races next year.

Districts must comply with state and federal laws and be similarly sized with reasonable, not zigzagging shapes. The commission, which does its work in public meetings, must also consider “communities of interest,” which could be anything — a religious group, a group of people who work in the same industry or people who send their children to a particular school. The goal is to keep voters in those communities together in a district, so that they can more powerfully lobby for their views.

Learning about these communities was one the goals of the 16 public meetings the commission held in May and June, including the one last week in Port Huron.

More than a thousand people have addressed the commission. Hundreds more have submitted comments and proposed maps online.

All of the public meetings have been as peaceful and civil as the one in Port Huron, said Douglas J. Clark Jr., 74, a Republican commissioner from the Detroit suburb of Rochester Hills. At some meetings, he said, people have applauded every speaker.

Not everyone will be happy with the new districts, said Clark, a retired operations and development manager. That’s not possible given the broad range of opinions people have expressed. But he believes the lines drawn through this process will be better than the ones drawn by political parties.

“We’re going to represent the public a lot better than they did,” Clark said. “The Republicans aren’t forcing anything Republican. The Democrats aren’t forcing anything Democrat. We’re all just trying to work together to get these maps drawn in a nonpartisan way.”

‘David overcoming Goliath’

The commissioners’ goals are lofty, but the process could be messy. A couple of lawsuits have already tried to stop the commission’s work — unsuccessfully, so far — and more are likely once maps are drawn, said Nancy Wang, the president of Voters Not Politicians, the nonpartisan advocacy organization that wrote the constitutional amendment and led the campaign to pass it.

Many in Michigan oppose the process, particularly Republicans who would have had the power to draw districts again this year.

Tori Sachs, the executive director of the conservative Michigan Freedom Fund, whose former director filed a lawsuit last year to stop the commission, said in a statement that the focus on communities of interest seems like just another form of gerrymandering.

“Activists are asking the Commission to gerrymander maps that divide communities based on partisan political issues,” she said in the statement, citing reports that describe potential communities of interest formed around political issues like the environment or immigration.

“That’s a mistake,” Sachs said. “Voters established a nonpartisan commission to draw fair maps and avoid gerrymandering. They deserve a commission that does what it promised.”

Advocates for overhauling redistricting across the country worry that a botched process in Michigan, whether that’s maps thrown out in court, a chaotic rollout or unfair lines that everyone hates, could harm the national movement. But, as Wang sees it, the fact that the process is happening here at all is a sign of progress.

“This really was David overcoming Goliath,” she said. “People in power are doing everything they can to fight this, but this is what the people want.”

When Arizona became the first state to use an independent redistricting commission after the 2000 census, it was something of a curiosity, Wang said.

When California followed suit in 2010, the effort won attention and applause. But Colorado and Michigan adopting the approach this year has the potential to show that the idea can work more broadly, Wang said.

“If you add Michigan to the mix, it just builds a case that you can’t really refute.”