Today’s News? – Page 159 – The Tarbabys Blog

Devastating consequences’: At least six dead as wildfires rage across West Coast

NBC News

Devastating consequences’: At least six dead as wildfires rage across West Coast

David K. Li and Matteo Moschella and Whitney Lee and Tim Stelloh and Sarah Kaufman September 10, 2020.

Scenes of devastation as two wildfires merge in Northern California

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said that in the last 24 hours, the state had “experienced unprecedented fire with significant damage and devastating consequences.”

“This could be the greatest loss of human lives and property due to wildfire in our state’s history,” she said at a news conference.

In Washington State, Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz said that a child had died in one of the state’s largest wildfires, the 163,00-acre Cold Springs fire. The blaze is burning mid-way between Spokane and Seattle. Franz didn’t offer details but said she was devastated by the death.

“The pain that family is going through is unfathomable,” she said.

In Oregon, wildfires burning east of the state capital tore through the small city of Lyons, killing Wyatte Tofte, 12, and his grandmother, Peggy Mosso, according to the boy’s father, Christopher Tofte. The boy’s mother, Angela Mosso, suffered severe burns and is in critical condition, he said.

And in Butte County, California, where the state’s deadliest fire on record killed 85 people and all but destroyed the town of Paradise two years ago, the remains of three people were found Wednesday after a wildfire burned through the area, Sheriff Kory Honea told reporters.

Two people were found at the same location, Honea said. The third was found elsewhere. Honea declined to provide additional details until the remains are identified.

In Southern Oregon, officials in the town of Talent told their 6,600 residents to stay outside the city limits because there’s scant electricity and it’s not safe stepping around fallen power lines.

While City Hall, the police department and other government buildings survived, there were whole neighborhoods and blocks of businesses completely gutted by the blaze.

“The fire ripped through the core of our (Oregon Route) 99 corridor,” the main stretch of town, Talent Mayor Darby Ayers-Flood told NBC News. “Where it burned, it burned completely and totally. I’m exhausted and shocked by it.”

City officials were hoping that their fast-acting residents, who evacuated Tuesday and Wednesday, would keep deaths at zero.

“I believe that most everyone is safe, it could have been far worse,” Ayers-Flood said.

Brown enacted a fire conflagration act for the first time in state history, with at least 35 fires scorching more than 300,000 acres of land in Oregon.

“Our number-one priority right now is saving lives,” Brown said on Twitter Wednesday. During the news conference, she said that six towns in Marion, Lane, and Jackson counties have been “substantially destroyed.”

Meanwhile, up the road in Medford, residents in the southern end of the city were ordered to evacuate on Wednesday as the Almeda Fire made its way north.

And to make matters worse, another blaze dubbed the Obenchain Fire was gaining strength north of Medford, according to Jackson County Emergency Management, prompting more evacuation orders.

“Level 3 (evacuation order), that’s as serious as it gets,” Rudy Owens, spokesman for the Oregon Office of State Fire Marshal, said of the emergency actions taken in and around Medford.

Huge swaths of tinder-dry brush across the western U.S. were ablaze on Wednesday as firefighters battled flames, hot weather and high winds.

There were 14,000 firefighters on the lines in California as 28 wildfires burned out of control, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

Near the Oregon border, a fire that began Monday had exploded to 30,000 acres by Wednesday and destroyed an estimated 150 homes in the small community of Happy Camp, the U.S. Forest Service said.

In the central part of the state, the Creek Fire had consumed nearly 167,000 acres by Wednesday evening, officials said. In Butte County, the blaze that killed three people, the Bear Fire, prompted evacuation warnings for part of the town of Paradise.

Remarkably, three other fires still burning on Wednesday — the August Complex, SCU Lightning Complex and LNU Lightning Complex blazes — were classified as the second, third and fourth biggest wildfires in state history, firefighters said Wednesday.

Before Wednesday, wildfires had killed eight people in California, including five during the LNU fire, which was sparked by a rare summer thunderstorm last month. The state has seen a record 2.5 million acres burn this year.

While these flames were burning well outside the state’s biggest cities, their smoke had enveloped large urban cores.

An eerie orange and brown glow filled the sky above the Bay Area, a mixture of fog and smoke from the fires that cast San Francisco in a perpetual rust colored haze on Wednesday.

Citing the “unprecedented” and “historic fire conditions” in California, 10 national forests were ordered closed on Wednesday, meaning that all 18 national forests in the state were shut down.

“These temporary closures are necessary to protect the public and our firefighters, and we will keep them in place until conditions improve and we are confident that National Forest visitors can recreate safely,” Regional Forester Randy Moore said in a statement.

Wildfires in the state of Washington also continued to burn on Wednesday, with more than 576,400 acres charred since a series of blazes were touched off on Labor Day, said state Department of Natural Resources spokesman Joe Smillie.

In the small community of Malden, near the Idaho state line, most of the town was destroyed by a fast-moving blaze that swept through the area Monday. Larry Frick, who stayed and fought the fire as it surrounded his home, compared the scene Wednesday to a war zone.

“There were explosions going off non-stop and some really big ones where I could feel it shake the ground,” he said in an interview.

Frick said he tried to save his neighbor’s house, but the wind-whipped flames roared through its facade, reducing the structure to rubble in what seemed like minutes. The fire, which has destroyed 98 buildings, had grown to nearly 18,000 acres by Wednesday, fire officials said.

The ugly numbers are finally in on the 2017 Trump tax rewrite

Salon

The ugly numbers are finally in on the 2017 Trump tax rewrite

David Cay Johnston, Salon September 7, 2020

The first data showing how all Americans are faring under Donald Trump reveal the poor and working classes sinking slightly, the middle class treading water, the upper-middle class growing and the richest, well, luxuriating in rising rivers of greenbacks.

More than half of Americans had to make ends meet in 2018 on less money than in 2016, my analysis of new income and tax data shows.

The nearly 87 million taxpayers making less than $50,000 had to get by in 2018 on $307 less per household than in 2016, the year before Trump took office, I find.

That 57% of American households were better off under Obama contradicts Trump’s often-repeated claim he created the best economy ever until the pandemic.

The worsened economic situation for more than half of Americans contradicts Trump’s frequent claims that he is the champion of the “forgotten man” and his vow that “every decision” on taxes “will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”

The figures in this story come from my annual analysis of IRS data known as Table 1.4. The income figures are pre-tax money that must be reported on tax returns. I adjusted the 2016 data to reflect inflation of 4.1% between 2016 and 2018 (slightly more than 2% a year).

This is the first data on the first full year when Trump was president. It also is the first year of the Radical Republican tax system overhaul, passed in December 2017. The Trump tax law, the most significant tax policy change since 1986, was passed without a single public hearing or a single Democratic vote.

High income households multiply

Trump policies overwhelmingly favor the top 7% of Americans. And, oh, do they benefit!

Prosperous and rich people, the data reveal, include half a million who are not even filing tax returns. Yet they are not being pursued as tax cheats, a separate report shows.

The number of households enjoying incomes of $200,000 or more soared by more than 20%. The number of taxpayers making $10 million or more soared 37% to a record 22,112 households.

Who saves on taxes

The Trump/Republican tax savings were highly concentrated up the income ladder with hardly any tax savings going to the working poor and only a smidgen to the middle class.

Those making $50,000 to $100,000 for example, paid just three-fourths of 1 percentage point less of their incomes to our federal government. People making $2 million to $2.5 million saw their effective tax rate fall by about three times that much.

Now let’s compare two groups, those making $50,000 to $100,000 and those declaring $500,000 to $1 million. The second group averaged nine times as much income as the first group in 2018.

Under the Trump tax law, the first group’s annual income taxes declined on average by $143, while the second group’s tax reduction averaged $17,800.

Put another way, a group that made nine times as much money enjoyed about 125 times as much in income tax savings.

This disparity helps explain Trump’s support among money-conscious high-income Americans. But given the tiny tax benefits for most Americans, along with cuts in government services, it is surprising Trump enjoys significant support among people making less than $200,000.

But realize none of the biggest news organizations do the kind of analysis you are reading, at least not since I left The New York Times a dozen years ago. Instead, the major news organizations quote Trump’s claims and others’ challenges without citing details.

Understating incomes

The figures I cite here understate actual incomes at the top for two reasons. One is that loopholes and Congressional favors allow many rich and superrich Americans to report much less income than they actually enjoy. Often they get to defer for years or decades reporting income earned today.

Second, with Trump’s support Congress has cut IRS staffing so deeply that the service cannot even pursue growing armies of rich people who have stopped filing tax returns. The sharp decline in IRS auditing means tax cheating—always a low-risk crime—has become much less risky.

Trump ignores rich tax cheats

In the three years ending in 2016, the IRS identified 879,415 high-income Americans who did not even bother to file. These tax cheats owed an estimated $45.7 billion in taxes, the treasury inspector general for Tax Administration reported May 29.

Under Trump more than half a million cases of high-income Americans who didn’t file a tax return “will likely not be pursued,” the inspector general wrote.

One of the Koch brothers was under IRS criminal investigation until Trump assumed office and the service abruptly dropped the case. DCReport’s five-part series last year showed, from a thousand pages of documents, that William Ingraham Koch, who lives one door away from Mar-a-Lago, is collecting more than $100 million a year without paying income taxes.

Borrowing to help the rich

Trump’s tax law will require at least $1.5 trillion in added federal debt because it falls far short of paying for itself through increased economic growth even without the pandemic. Most of the tax savings were showered on rich Americans and the corporations they control. Most of the negative effects will fall on the middle class and poor Americans in the form of Trump’s efforts to reduce government services.

The 2017 income tax law caused only a slight decline in the share of adjusted gross income that Americans paid to Uncle Sam, known as the effective tax rate. Adjusted gross income is the last line on the front page of your tax return and is in the measure used in my analysis.

The overall effective tax rate slipped from 14.7% under Obama to 14.2% under Trump.

Curious anomaly

In what might seem at first blush a curious development, Americans making more than $10 million received a below-average cut in their effective tax rate. The effective tax rate for these 22,000 households declined by less than half a percent.

The reason for that smaller-than-average decline is that these super-rich Americans depend less on paychecks and much more on capital gains and dividends that have long been taxed at lower rates than paycheck earnings.

The new tax data also show a sharp shift away from income from work and toward income from investments, a trend which bodes poorly for working people but very nicely for those who control businesses, invest in stocks and have other sources of income from capital.

Overall the share of American income from wages and salaries fell significantly, from almost 71% in 2016 to less than 68% in 2018.

Meanwhile, if you look just at the slice of the American income pie derived from business ownership and investments, it expanded by nearly one-tenth in two years. Income from such investments is highly concentrated among the richest Americans.

Infuriating fact

There’s one more enlightening and perhaps infuriating detail I sussed from the IRS data.

The number of households making $1 million or more but paying no income taxes soared 41% under the new Trump tax law. Under Obama, there were just 394 such households. With Trump, this grew to 556 households making on average $3.5 million without contributing one cent to our government.

Again, Trump seems to have forgotten all about the Forgotten Man. But he’s busy doing all he can to help the rich, then stick you with their tax bills.

Federal Report Warns of Financial Havoc From Climate Change

The New York Times

Federal Report Warns of Financial Havoc From Climate Change

Coral Davenport and Jeanna Smialek September 9, 2020

Southern California Wildfires — Fountain Valley, Caif., firefighters extinguish hot spots at a structure destroyed by the El Dorado wildfire on Monday, Sept. 7, 2020, near Yucaipa, Calif. A couple’s plan to reveal their baby’s gender went up not in blue or pink smoke but in flames when the device they used sparked a wildfire east of Los Angeles. The fire started Saturday morning in dry grasses at El Dorado Ranch Park, a rugged natural area in the city of Yucaipa. (Cindy Yamanaka/The Orange County Register/SCNG via AP)

WASHINGTON — A report commissioned by federal regulators overseeing the nation’s commodities markets has concluded that climate change threatens U.S. financial markets, as the costs of wildfires, storms, droughts and floods spread through insurance and mortgage markets, pension funds and other financial institutions.

“A world wracked by frequent and devastating shocks from climate change cannot sustain the fundamental conditions supporting our financial system,” concluded the report, “Managing Climate Risk in the Financial System,” which was requested last year by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and set for release Wednesday morning.

Those observations are not entirely new, but they carry new weight coming with the imprimatur of the regulator of complex financial instruments like futures, swaps and other derivatives that help fix the price of commodities like corn, oil and wheat. It is the first wide-ranging federal government study focused on the specific impacts of climate change on Wall Street.

Perhaps most notable is that it is being published at all. The Trump administration has suppressed, altered or watered down government science around climate change as it pushes an aggressive agenda of environmental deregulation that it hopes will spur economic growth.

The new report asserts that doing nothing to avert climate change will do the opposite.

“This is the first time a government entity has looked at the impacts of climate change on financial markets in the U.S.,” said Robert Litterman, the chairman of the panel that produced the report and a founding partner of Kepos Capital, an investment firm based in New York. “Rather than saying, ‘What’s the science?’ this is saying, ‘What’s the financial risk?’ ”

The commodities regulator, which is made up of three Republicans and two Democrats, all of whom were appointed by President Donald Trump, voted unanimously last summer to create an advisory panel drawn from the world of finance and charged with producing a report on the effects of the warming world on financial markets. The initial proposal for the report came from Rostin Behnam, one of the panel’s two Democrats, but the report is written by dozens of analysts from investment firms including Morgan Stanley, S&P Global and Vanguard; oil companies BP and ConocoPhillips; and agricultural trader Cargill, as well as academic experts and environmental groups.

It includes recommendations for new corporate regulations and the reversal of at least one Trump administration policy.

“It was shocking when they asked me to do this,” Litterman said. “This is members of the entire community involved in financial markets saying with one voice, ‘This is a serious problem, and it has to be addressed.’”

A White House spokesman, Judd Deere, declined Tuesday to comment on the report because the White House had not yet seen it.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a conservative research organization, who served as economic adviser to John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, said: “This was initiated by the Trump administration. It is the only document of its type.”

He added, “If you’re denying this exists, you don’t ask for a report on it.”

The Republican chairman of the CFTC, Heath Tarbert, acknowledged the risk of climate change, but he noted that the report also detailed what the regulators called “transition risk” — the financial harm that could befall the fossil fuel industry if the government enacted aggressive policies to curb carbon dioxide pollution.

“I appreciate Commissioner Behnam’s leadership on convening various private sector perspectives on the important topic of climate risk,” Tarbert said in a statement. “The subcommittee’s report acknowledges that ‘transition risks’ of a green economy could be just as disruptive to our financial system as the possible physical manifestations of climate change, and that moving too fast, too soon could be just as disorderly as doing too little, too late. This underscores why it is so important for policymakers to get this right.”

The authors of the report acknowledged that if Trump is reelected, his administration is all but certain to ignore the report and its recommendations.

Instead, they said they saw the document as a policy road map for a Joe Biden administration.

Biden’s climate policy proposals are the most ambitious and expensive ever embraced by a presidential candidate, and most of them would meet resistance in Congress. But even without legislation, he could press forward with regulatory changes. Lael Brainard, a Federal Reserve governor who is seen as a top contender to be Treasury secretary in a Biden administration, has called for financial regulators to treat climate change as a significant risk to the financial system.

Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, speaks in Wilmington, Del., Sept. 2, 2020. (Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times)

In calling for climate-driven policy changes, the report’s authors likened the financial risk of global warming to the threat posed by the coronavirus today and by mortgage-backed securities that precipitated the financial crash in 2008.

One crucial difference, they said, is that in the case of climate change, financial volatility and loss are likely to be spread out over time, as they hit different regions and markets. Insurance companies could withdraw from California in the wake of devastating wildfires, and home values could plummet on coastlines and in floodplains. In the Midwest, banks could limit loans during or after extended droughts that drastically lower crop yields. All of those problems will be exacerbated by climate change, but they are unlikely to hit all at once.

“Financial markets are really good at managing risk to help us provide credit, so that the economy can flourish,” said Leonardo Martinez-Diaz, an editor of the report who served as senior official at the Treasury Department during the Obama administration. But, he added, the system breaks down “when it’s no longer able to manage risk, when it’s invisible, it’s not captured by the price of stocks.”

“That’s what we saw in the financial crisis of 2008, and it’s as relevant now on climate change as it was then on mortgage-backed securities,” he said.

Among the first of those risks already pervading the markets, the report’s authors say, are falling home prices and rising mortgage default rates in regions where wildfires and flooding are worsening.

“Climate change is linked to devaluing home values,” said Jesse Keenan, an editor of the report and a professor of real estate at Tulane University in New Orleans.

“If in your town, your house is devalued, that makes it harder for your local government to raise money,” he said. “That’s one set of risks that could lead to a contagion and broader instability across financial markets.”

Extreme weather could cause swings in agricultural commodity prices, the report warns, and climate-spurred market volatility could afflict pension and retirement funds, which invest across a range of asset classes.

“Climate change is one of the top three risks to our fund,” said Divya Mankikar, an author of the report and an investment manager at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the country’s biggest public pension fund. “We pay pension and health benefits to over 2 million current and former state employees. So the payout is decades out.”

The report makes several concrete recommendations for inoculating the financial system against potential harm.

It emphasizes the need to put a price on carbon emissions, which is often done either by taxing or through an emissions trading system that caps carbon emissions and allots credits that polluters can buy and sell under that cap.

The report calls for the reversal of a proposed rule being put forward by the Trump administration’s Labor Department that would forbid retirement investment managers from considering environmental consequences in their financial recommendations.

“If there’s any class of investors that should be thinking about the long run, it’s retirement funds and pension funds,” said Nathaniel Keohane, an author of the report and an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group.

The report suggests that the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a Treasury Department-led body created in the wake of the 2008 crisis, incorporates climate risks into its annual report and its communications with Congress. It suggests that the Federal Reserve and other major financial regulators join international coalitions that focus on climate threats.

The report also suggests that bank regulators should roll out a climate risk stress testing pilot program. Such stress tests, which assess how bank balance sheets and the broader system would fare in bad climate-related economic scenarios, have been under development in Britain and elsewhere in Europe.

The authors also recommend that another financial regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, strengthen its existing requirements that publicly traded companies disclose the risks to their bottom lines associated with climate change.

Coca-Cola has noted in its financial disclosures that water shortages driven by climate change pose a risk to its production chains and profitability. But many other companies “just check the box” on that requirement, Keohane said.

Such disclosures should also include the risk to companies’ bottom lines posed by future policies designed to mitigate climate change, such as taxes or regulations on carbon dioxide pollution, which could hurt fossil fuel producers.

“If carbon risk is priced, this will add cost to the oil and gas industry,” said Betty Simkins, a report author and professor of finance at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. “But they need to be prepared for this. It’s better for the companies to disclose the risk and be as financially fit as possible.”

Summer 2.0 has reached B.C., here’s how hot it’ll get

The Weather Network

Summer 2.0 has reached B.C., here’s how hot it’ll get

Tyler Hamilton, The Weather Network September 6, 2020

Summer 2.0 has set in across British Columbia, and its accompanying warmth looks to stick around for a bit, will likely make up for lost ground.

Early summer was a bit of a bummer for the province, as below-normal temperatures spilled well into July.

By early next week, a record-breaking ridge that’s settled in offshore of the province is forecast to reach peak heights. Current modelling suggests temperatures could be up to 10 degrees above average for some as the atmosphere pushes outside the boundaries of climatology.

The province’s all-time temperature records for September are tough numbers to beat, as a similar setup in 2017 developed a thermal trough caused by down-sloping winds from the higher terrain inland. This pattern is known to bring warm, dry air down-sloping towards the ocean; consequently, shutting off the natural air-conditioning – onshore flow and marine air.

Here’s a fun hypothetical scenario: If this were winter, this same upper air pattern would likely bring low elevation snow down to sea-level. The warm, dry air would be dense, bitter air flowing out of the Fraser River.

Throughout the summer, the South Coast has dodged the forest fire smoke. The latest smoke models indicate this may change late-Thursday and beyond as the high pressure off the coast of California siphons smoke north.

Climate change has arrived

The Week

Climate change has arrived

The Week Staff September 6, 2020

The connection between hellacious weather and man-made climate change is becoming undeniable. Here’s everything you need to know:

What has shifted?

For years, climate scientists have been wary of attributing extreme weather directly to man-made atmospheric warming, but that’s changing in the face of historic heat waves and cascading natural disasters. In recent weeks alone, a “derecho,” a complex of unusually powerful, hurricane-like storms, tore through the Midwest, destroying homes and crops across a 745-mile path; Hurricane Laura crashed into the Gulf Coast with sustained 150-mph winds; and hundreds of California wildfires incinerated an area the size of Rhode Island in just a week. The Southwest suffered a punishing heat wave with a high of 130 in Death Valley, perhaps the hottest day in world history. It followed highs of 125 in Iraq and a record 100-degree day in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, a once-in-100,000-years event. These freak patterns, researchers say, are almost certainly the result of mankind pumping 2.6 million pounds of CO₂into the atmosphere per second. “We’ve gotten to the point where, when it comes to extreme heat waves, there is almost always a human fingerprint,” said UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain.

How strange is recent weather?

The expression “500-year storm” is losing its meaning: Houston has suffered five of them in a five-year span. California’s wildfires — ignited by 1,200 lightning strikes in a 72-hour span — produced the second- and third-worst blazes in state history, even without the aid of the fall’s strong Santa Ana winds. The Atlantic coast has seen 10 named storms so far this season, a mark typically hit in October, and upcoming storms are projected to be twice as intense as usual, because of extremely warm ocean waters. Hurricanes have done $335 billion in damage over the past three years, compared with $38.2 billion across the entire 1980’s, adjusted for inflation. Climate disasters of all types inflicted $807 billion in damage during the 2010’s, the hottest decade on record.

What’s the link to climate change?

Weather patterns are shaped by an intricate web of atmospheric and oceanic conditions, which is why scientists traditionally resist drawing causal links between climate change and any one event. But when both rising temperatures and disasters become consistent and pervasive, the connection becomes obvious. The average daily highs in Northern California during wildfire season are 3 to 4 degrees warmer than they were in 1900. Warming of the planet’s surface causes atmospheric instability than can producer stronger, more frequent storms, while rising ocean temperatures and unusually moist air spawn hurricanes that grow rapidly more powerful, then stall after making landfall and dump torrential rain.

Where is it worst?

The future of climate chaos is being previewed in northern latitudes, where a CO₂ domino effect plays out: Warm winters melt more snow, causing the ground to absorb more heat, which leads to dry soil that fuels wildfires and thaws permafrost, releasing carbon into the atmosphere. In Russia this summer, thawing permafrost caused a power-plant fuel tank to collapse, spilling more than 20,000 tons of diesel into the Ambarnaya River. Russia’s average temperature was nearly 11 degrees above its January-to-April norm, the largest anomaly ever for any country. In February, Antarctica hit a record 69 degrees, causing a 120-square-mile chunk of glacier to break off.

How else is climate change felt?

Disrupted weather patterns are rippling around the globe, creating bizarre, almost biblical catastrophes. Extreme temperatures in the Indian Ocean caused drought and wildfires in Australia while spawning cyclones in eastern Africa. The torrential rain there created perfect conditions for desert locusts, which reproduced at terrifying rates. By March, hundreds of billions of the finger-length insects swept across the region, devouring every crop in their path, and pushing tens of millions of Africans to the brink of starvation. People are even experiencing climate change through their sinuses. Airborne pollen increases as temperatures climb, which is why residents of Alaska, where warming is happening twice as fast as the global average, report especially bad allergies. “There’s irrefutable data,” said Jeffrey Demain, director of an Alaskan allergy center.

What does the future hold?

Much depends on the oceans, which play a critical role in absorbing CO₂ and heat, and regulating weather. “The amount of heat we have put in the world’s oceans in the past 25 years equals 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom bomb explosions,” said Lijing Cheng, a Beijing physics professor. Warming oceans are circulating more slowly — by about 15 percent in the Atlantic Ocean since 1950. The reduction in their moderating influence could cause warmer summers, colder winters, changing rainfall patterns, and more destructive storms. Climate change is no longer a theoretical threat. In California, average temperatures have climbed 1.8 degrees since 1980 while precipitation has dropped 30 percent, doubling the number of extreme-risk days for wildfires each year. A few weeks ago, rancher Taylor Craig drove for his life as flames raced toward his Northern California home. Later, sitting in a Walmart parking lot, Craig said he realized he had joined a new and growing club. “I’m a climate refugee,” he said.

A CO₂ silver lining

The pandemic forced automobile and airplane travel to fall off a cliff, and satellite images of pollution in the atmosphere offered a striking before-and-after contrast. At the height of April’s coronavirus lockdowns, Google’s mobility data indicated that 4 billion people cut their travel in half. As a result, worldwide daily CO₂ emissions dropped by an estimated 18.7 million tons, falling to levels not seen since 2006. Reduced car, bus, and truck traffic contributed to 43 percent of the drop-off, although emissions from residential buildings ticked up 2.8 percent, mostly from people running air conditioners while stuck at home. Scientists, however, are not celebrating. They anticipate just a 7 percent decline in carbon emissions this year, and point to historical evidence of emissions shooting back up after declines during recessions or world wars. “It goes to show just how big a challenge de-carbonization really is,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. To reach the global emissions targets of the 2015 Paris climate accord, CO₂ would need to drop as it did in 2020 every year for the next decade.

Winter suddenly arrives for the Rockies three days after temperatures hit 100 degrees

NBC News

Winter suddenly arrives for the Rockies three days after temperatures hit 100 degrees

Kathryn Prociv, NBC News September 8, 2020

The calendar might still read early September, but the snow and cold temperatures look and feel more like early November.

As many as 15 inches of snow fell over parts of western South Dakota overnight Monday into Tuesday, with heavy snow expected to continue through the day.

Across parts of the northern and the central Rockies, including Denver, some 6 million people were under winter alerts Tuesday. Across this region, 4 to 8 inches of snow could fall, with locally higher amounts of 12 to 18 inches at the highest elevations through Wednesday. As the day broke, snow was already falling across parts of Idaho, Utah and Wyoming and moving into northern Colorado. By mid-morning Tuesday, the snow was expected to spread across Colorado and last through Wednesday morning.

Winter hadn’t just arrived through precipitation: Temperatures 30 to 40 degrees below average were forecast to lead to numerous records Tuesday and Wednesday.

Lows were forecast to dip into the teens and 20’s with wind chills in the single digits, with highs that will struggle to get out of the 30’s for several locations from the Rockies to parts of the Plains.

The widespread record cold (and associated snow) is due to an anomalously strong dip in the jet stream causing cold air to blast down from Canada. The cold plunge is actually connected to Typhoon Maysak in the Pacific last week. As the calendar turns to the fall, typhoons in the Pacific often amplify the jet stream downstream, thereby influencing the weather in North America.

IMAGE: Snow in Arvada, Colo. (@Bartleb13 / via Twitter)

But what makes this preseason winter blast particularly remarkable is that the same areas seeing snow Tuesday experienced a stretch of record heat, which in some places exceeded 100 degrees, only a few days ago.

Take Denver: On Saturday, the city hit 101 degrees. Not only was that a daily record high, But it also set an all-time hottest temperature record for the month of September in the city, and it was the furthest into September the city had ever hit 100. The previous record was 98 degrees, set last September.

On Monday, Denver hit a high of 93 degrees, making it the 73rd day in 2020 to exceed 90 degrees. That tied the all-time record of 73 days set in 2012.

Just 12 hours later, Denver was nearly 60 degrees colder Tuesday morning, with light snow beginning to fall around the area.

So, in three days, Denver went from a record-shattering 101 degrees to one of its earliest snowfalls on record.

From sweating to snow shovels. “Rare” barely begins to describe the climate shifts.

Who will clean up Alaska’s ‘orphaned’ oil infrastructure?

Los Angles Times

Op-Ed: Who will clean up Alaska’s ‘orphaned’ oil infrastructure?

George Schaller and Martin Robards September 8, 2020

A small herd of musk oxen roam the Arctic refuge’s coastal plain. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / Associated Press).

You can feel the encroaching decay in the sides of buildings, in the limp remains of a once-proud drill rig slowly rusting into the waterlogged gravel and tundra. In the 1950’s, one of us, George, was part of the expedition that explored and then advocated for the formation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. At that time, he worried the region would end up resembling the disrupted skylines and greasy sheens of Texas’s aging and abandoned oil fields.

More recently, we visited the sprawling spaghetti of pipelines, metallic shells of buildings and this defunct drill rig, now worrying that a legal and regulatory morass will bring George’s dystopian fears to fruition. There has been little formal preparation for what happens when oil ends, even as the Trump administration has announced plans to fast-track the auction of leases for drilling in pristine areas of the Arctic refuge, with similar plans for parts of the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

If we ignore the costs for plugging and abandoning wells, dismantling and removing accompanying infrastructure, and fully restoring impacted tundra, we allow for a vast overestimate of the economic value of oil in these outstanding Arctic ecosystems. Unless the intent is to walk away and just leave the mess behind.

For generations, people arriving in Alaska have done just this. Alaska’s legacy of abandoned infrastructure and contaminants has wrought havoc on numerous remote sites, and for many communities. In our travels across the Arctic coastal plain, we encountered abandoned drill sites where metal shards and sun-bleached wood punctuate rotting gravel pads, the acrid smells a clear olfactory reminder of what should not be there.

In the absence of plugging and proper abandonment, fluids and gases left in wells and underground reservoirs can seep to the surface. Added to this chronic challenge are corrosion of well bores from salts and water, the settling of land and changes in the climate that contribute to erosion of the hard surface permafrost.

In a few decades, the bulk of revenues from Alaska’s North Slope will be dispersed, and this decaying industrial mess will be someone else’s problem, if it is dealt with at all.

The Government Accountability Office stated in 2002 that there were inadequacies in planning for the proper and effective cleanup of abandoned sites on the North Slope of Alaska. The GAO restated its concerns in 2003, 2010 and 2011. The Department of the Interior Inspector General in 2015 and the Congressional Research Service in 2018 echoed these concerns.

Other large oil fields, such as in Texas, Louisiana and California, do not offer much solace as the number of their “orphaned” wells grow. In Louisiana, there are over 4,000 abandoned and unplugged wells, many of them in deteriorating condition. Texas has over 6,000, and California another 5,500, that are abandoned or at high risk of becoming so. Thousands of inactive additional wells will likely add to these numbers as the years tick by.

The decline in oil prices since 2014 has exacerbated the trend of well abandonment, particularly among smaller operators who may also be facing bankruptcy. These declines further reduce the already-inadequate revenues allocated to cleanup funds for these abandoned sites.

Alaska is starting to experience these pressures. The bankruptcy of Aurora Gas in 2018 left the state the responsible party for cleaning up three wells on state land. Recent news that BP is closing shop in Alaska and selling to the smaller Hilcorp is consistent with this trajectory.

Decommissioning costs cannot be an afterthought. The Bureau of Land Management spent $90 million in northern Alaska, remediating just 18 of 136 “legacy wells” that the federal government drilled between 1944 and 1981. On Alaska’s North Slope, cleanup of a 60-acre oil-field logistics site ran up a $2-million bill and is still not complete. There are now over 3,000 active wells on the North Slope and another 800 suspended or idle, linked by a labyrinth of pipes, buildings and gravel roads.

Current bonding levels, the funds put aside by the industry to ensure adequate decommissioning of wells and other infrastructure, barely touch what’s needed for cleaning up what’s been built or drilled to date. Former State Commissioner Cathy Foerster previously expressed doubt that the bonds would “even pay for the engineering study needed to plan the plugging operations, much less any of the actual plugging costs” — and these plugging costs are just one small component of cleaning up the accumulated debris of a specific drill site, never mind the new oil fields that continue to sprawl outward from the Prudhoe Bay hub. Operators can hold blanket bonds for their entire operations that may not even cover a single site’s cleanup.

There has been reticence from the industry and regulators to absorb the burdens of decommissioning at the outset. However, if the state of Alaska or other local representatives do not insist on a bond to cover all costs of potential cleanup and restoration prior to approval of an operation, experience in North America and around the world strongly suggests it will not be done.

If we cannot afford a plan to fully clean up and restore an area, this is just one more of the many reasons why we cannot afford to drill new wells.

George Schaller is a senior conservationist at the Wildlife Conservation Society. Martin Robards is regional director for the Arctic Beringia program at WCS.

Arctic warming: are record temperatures and fires arriving earlier than scientists predicted?

The Conversation

Arctic warming: are record temperatures and fires arriving earlier than scientists predicted?

Christopher J White, Senior Lecturer in Water & Environmental Engineering, University of Strathclyde September 8, 2020

It was a grim record. On June 20 2020, the mercury reached 38°C in Verkhoyansk, Siberia – the hottest it’s ever been in the Arctic in recorded history. With the heatwaves came fire, and by the start of August around 600 individual fires were being detected every year. By early September, parts of the Siberian Arctic had been burning since the second week of June.

CO₂ emissions from these fires increased by more than a third compared to 2019, according to scientists at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. The wildfires produced an estimated 244 megatons of CO₂ between January and August, releasing thousands of years’ worth of stored carbon.

The summer of 2019 was already a record breaker for temperatures and fires across the Arctic. Seeing these events unfold again in 2020 – on an even larger scale – has the scientific community worried. What does it all mean for the Arctic, climate change and the rest of the world?

Sooner than predicted?

Even with climate change, the severe summer heatwave of 2020 was expected to occur, on average, less than once every 130 years. Wildfire observations in the Arctic are fairly limited prior to the mid-1990’s, but there is no evidence of similarly extreme fires in the years before routine monitoring started.

Higher temperatures globally are likely to be driving the increase in wildfire frequency and duration. But modelling wildfires is difficult. Climate models don’t predict wildfires, and they cannot indicate when future extreme events will occur year-on-year. Instead, climate modelers focus on whether they are able to predict the right conditions for events like wildfires, such as high temperatures and strong winds.

And these climate model projections show that the kind of extreme summer temperatures we’ve seen in the Arctic in 2020 weren’t likely to occur until the mid-21st century, exceeding predictions by decades.

So even though an increasing trend of high temperatures and conditions suitable for wildfires are predicted in climate models, it’s alarming that these fires are so severe, have occurred in the same region two years in a row, and were caused by conditions which weren’t expected until further in the future.

The Arctic is warming at a faster rate than the global average. Yelantsevy / Shutterstock

Climate feedback loops

So what is causing this rapid change? Over recent decades, temperatures in the most northerly reaches of Earth have been increasing at a faster rate than the rest of the world, with the polar region heating at more than twice the rate of the global average.

The fires caused by these hot, dry conditions are occurring in remote and sparsely populated forests, tundra and peat bogs, where there is ample fuel.

But these extreme events are also providing worrying evidence of climate “feedback loops”, which were predicted to happen as the climate warms. This is where increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere contribute to further warming by promoting events – like wildfires – which release even more greenhouse gas, creating a self-perpetuating process that accelerates climate change.

Record CO2 emissions released from burning Arctic forests during the summer of 2020 will make future conditions even warmer. But ash and other particulates from the wildfires will eventually settle on the ice and snow, making them darker and accelerating their melting by reducing how easily their surface reflects sunlight.

Climate change is not the direct cause of this summer’s fires, but it is helping to create the right conditions for them. The extreme temperatures and wildfires seen throughout the Arctic in 2020 would have been almost impossible without the influence of human-induced climate change – and they are feeding themselves.

Soot-stained ice absorbs more of the sun’s heat and melts more quickly. Trifonov Aleksey / Shutterstock

What about the rest of the world?

When we think of the Arctic, we don’t tend to picture wildfires and heatwaves – we think of snow and ice and long, brutal winters. Yet the region is changing before our eyes. It’s too early to say whether the last two summers represent a permanent step-change, or new “fire regime”, for the Arctic. Only observations over a much longer timescale could confirm this.

But these record-breaking events in the Arctic are being fueled by human influences that are changing our world’s climate sooner than many expected. With climate models predicting a future where already hot and fire-prone areas are likely to become more so, 2020’s record temperatures paint a worrying trend towards more of the same.

The Arctic is at the frontline of climate change. What we are witnessing here first are some of the most rapid and intense effects of climate change. While the impact is devastating – record CO₂ emissions, damaged forests and soils, melting permafrost – these events may prove to be a portent of things to come for the rest of the world.

The Conversation: Christopher White receives funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the Low Carbon Power and Energy Program, and various Australian and Tasmanian State Government research funding program.

Man who hasn’t visited a doctor for 70 years shares his two top tips for staying healthy

Yahoo – Style

Man who hasn’t visited a doctor for 70 years shares his two top tips for staying healthy

Caroline Allen, Contributor September 8, 2020

The 87-year-old, pictured here, hasn't been to the doctors in 70 years because of his good health. (SWNS) — The 87-year-old, pictured here, hasn’t been to the doctors in 70 years because of his good health. (SWNS)

Bernard Lawes has never taken a day off sick.

In fact, Bernard says the last time he went to the doctors was in 1950, aged 18, to have a fitness test for the National Service.

And if there were two things Bernard would have to pick to explain his remarkable constitution it would be at least one hot meal a day and a good walk up the stairs.

According to Bernard, the key to good health really is as simple as that – although it may also have something to do with the fact he has never drank alcohol or smoked.

Lawes takes regular walks up the stairs of his church to stay in shape. (SWNS)

Not just any hot meal will do. The pensioner recommends “plain English food” such as chicken or beef.

He also puts his good health down to climbing 110 stairs three times a week in order to wind the clock at his local church.

Bernard says he has climbed the same steps each week for the past 44 years, accumulating a total of some 750,000 steps throughout his time as a volunteer.

Before retiring aged 60, he used to walk four miles to and from work each day to stay in good physical condition.

While many people opt for more strenuous forms of exercise, simply walking each day has numerous health benefits from building stamina to improving heart health.

“Everything I have ever needed has always been in walking distance,” Bernard, who has never owned a car, explains.

“When I tell people I’ve not been to the doctor in 70 years, they can never quite believe it.

“There’s no real secret, I think staying active all these years is the main reason behind it and having at least one good hot meal a day is important.

Bernard Lawes and his late wife Veronica. (SWNS)

“I’ve always walked everywhere. You’ve got to keep active and going to meet people as well – that’s what life is all about.

“My time with the church must have helped to keep me fit with all those steps.

“It was 110 steps up and down the tower to wind the clock as well as clambering up an iron ladder which was as tall as a house.

“I only did it to help out one time and ended up winding the clock for the next 44 years.”

According to the NHS, keeping active is the key to staying fit, mobile and independent if you are elderly.

“Regular exercise can help reduce the impact of several diseases, for example osteoporosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke,” it says. “Regular exercise can also reduce arthritis related pain, improve sleep, prevent falls and fractures, and improve low mood and memory.

“In fact, taking regular exercise is one of the best things you can do to remain independent.”

Taking care of eyes and feet – which have doubtless come under a fair bit of strain over the decades – is also recommended.

Bernard retired to care for his wife, Veronica, who died from kidney failure in 2014.

“I’ve lost most of my family members now but there’s no point moping around and feeling sorry for yourself – you have to get up and go out,” he said.

“We didn’t have any children so it’s important that I keep friends around me. Lockdown was tough, it was for everyone, but now I can get back into town.

“I walk down there then walk back, you meet people then, that’s what does it, meeting people.

“Over the years, I’ve played sports like football, bowls and cricket – I still enjoy a spot of gardening too. My garden is 80 yards long so there’s plenty to do.

“It’s just about getting out and about. If you just sit about doing nothing – that’s the worse possible thing you can do.”

Fox News Reporter Snaps Back As Trump Demands Her Firing For Confirming War Dead Story

Huff Post

Fox News Reporter Snaps Back As Trump Demands Her Firing For Confirming War Dead Story

Mary Papenfuss September 5, 2020

A Fox News reporter staunchly defended her work Saturday after President Donald Trump demanded she be fired for confirming parts of The Atlantic’s bombshell story revealing the president’s insults about military service members.

“I can tell you that my sources are unimpeachable,” Fox News’ national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin said on-air (in the video above). “I feel very confident with what we have reported at Fox.”

She didn’t confirm “every line” of the report, but did confirm “most of the descriptions and the quotes in that Atlantic article … so I feel very confident in my reporting,” Griffin said. She also discovered as part of her reporting that Trump had once said that including “wounded guys” would not be a “good look” at a Fourth of July parade honoring the military, according to a source.

The Atlantic article cited multiple accounts of shocking incidents when Trump denigrated military service members, including referring to fallen war heroes as “losers” and “suckers.” It also revealed details of the president’s refusal to visit the graves of America’s war dead at Aisne-Marne Cemetery while he was in France in 2018. Trump has denied everything.

Griffin said she wasn’t able to confirm the “suckers” and “losers” portion of the Atlantic report about dead military heroes. But a source did confirm that Trump once said that anyone who served in the Vietnam War was a “sucker.”

While reporters at other news operations confirmed the Atlantic report, Trump singled out Griffin because a hit from Fox News, which is usually supportive of the president, is particularly damaging for him.

Trump cited a Breitbart article pointing out that Griffin had failed to confirm the “most salacious” (“suckers” and “losers”) details of the Atlantic story, written by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Trump called a “slimeball.” The president also declared that Fox News was “gone.”

Fox News was confused about where it stood on the story Friday. News hosts bashed the story before it was confirmed (by Griffin), then it was bashed again, then reconfirmed. News hosts also attacked the use of anonymous sources by The Atlantic, but then used anonymous sources to attack — and confirm — the story.

At least seven of Griffin’s colleagues — and a Republican congressman — supported her after the president’s tweet and after being bashed by Fox contributor Mollie Hemingway for using anonymous sources.

Illinois GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger also spoke up for Griffin on Saturday, calling her “fair and unafraid.”

Twitter critics are calling on two retired Marine Corps generals — former Defense Secretary James Mattis and ex-White House chief of staff John Kelly — to speak out about the Atlantic article.

Former NATO supreme commander and Navy Admiral James Stavridis tweeted Friday that the men’s “lack of denial” speaks volumes.