Veterans – Patriotism – Page 174

Evicted, Despite a Federal Moratorium: ‘I Do Not Know What I am Going to Do’

The New York Times

Evicted, Despite a Federal Moratorium: ‘I Do Not Know What I am Going to Do’

Neil MacFarquhar August 11, 2021

Vanessa Merryman stands for a portrait outside of the Las Vegas Justice Court in Las Vegas on Aug. 4, 2021, after finding out she would be evicted from her home. (Joe Buglewicz/The New York Times)

LAS VEGAS — Inside Courtroom 8A of Las Vegas Justice Court last week, the benches were packed with renters and landlords battling over evictions that continued at a brisk pace despite a last minute, two-month extension of the federal protections meant to keep people in their homes.

Vanessa Merryman, 41, was among the tenants ordered to leave her apartment.

“I have never been homeless in my life,” she said through tears, slouched on a metal bench outside the courtroom as the scorching Las Vegas sun beat through the windows. She was shell-shocked that the court session that upended her life lasted all of 15 minutes. “I do not know what I am going to do,” she said. “It is really scary.”

The federal moratorium on evictions — combined with billions of dollars in rent subsidies — was supposed to avert the scenario of millions of Americans being turned out of their homes after they lost their jobs during the pandemic and were unable to afford their rent.

Yet despite these efforts, many local governments and courts were not sure how to apply the extension, and desperate tenants continued to flood local government websites seeking rental assistance that was usually slow in coming.

“The lay of the land has been confusing at every level, not just to tenants, but also to landlords, court personnel and judges,” said Dana Karni, manager of the Eviction Right to Counsel Project in Houston. “While the extension of CDC protections is much needed, the confusion that surrounds its existence waters down its impact.”

In extending the moratorium last week, the Biden administration hinged it to high local coronavirus infection rates — the idea being that protection was warranted in areas where the virus was surging. Clark County, including Las Vegas, was among hundreds of counties that meet the criterion for high infection rates, but the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave some leeway to judges to instead apply state laws, which at times allowed for evictions.

For many tenants, it was too late anyway. With state moratoriums expiring and the expectation that the federal guidelines would be gone soon, court dockets like those in Las Vegas overflowed with eviction cases. Tenants had to actively file for protection under the CDC measures, but many of them were unaware of that. And as eviction proceedings rolled forward, some landlords won, citing reasons other than nonpayment of rent for seeking to remove tenants.

More than 1.4 million Americans expect to be evicted in the next two months, according to a survey completed by the U.S. Census Bureau in early July. For another 2.2 million people, the prospect is “somewhat likely.”

The areas bracing for the hardest hits are in high-population, high-rent states such as California, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas, along with other states across the South including Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

Organizations that advise low-income tenants from Atlanta to Houston to Las Vegas all said that they feared the fallout.

“The volume is unlike anything we have ever seen before,” said Bailey Bortolin, the statewide policy director for the Nevada Coalition of Legal Service Providers.

The moratorium is intended to help states buy time to distribute the aid. Congress allocated some $47 billion in rental assistance, but just $3 billion had been distributed by June, according to the Treasury Department. Many county governments, the branch usually designated to process applications, are straining to build systems from scratch to distribute the money even while the tempo of evictions increases.

Georgia has paid out just over $16 million from $989 million in federal rental assistance funds. Florida got $871 million, but has only disbursed $23.2 million.

In Clark County, home to most of Nevada’s population, the CARES Housing Assistance Program has distributed more than $162 million in rent, utilities and mortgage payments to more than 29,500 households since July 2020, but that is still less than half the state’s full allocation.

Around 50,000 people are behind on rent and could face eviction in Clark County, where the state moratorium expired on June 1, said Justin Jones, a county commissioner.

“It would be devastating if we have that number of people evicted from their homes in the near future,” he said. “The reality is that we do not have anywhere for them to go.”

Thousands of homeless people already crowd downtown Las Vegas and elsewhere in the county.

After the state moratorium expired, Nevada implemented a new law pausing evictions so long as the tenant had an application for rental assistance pending.

At the Las Vegas Justice Court, the largest of some 40 courts hearing eviction cases in Nevada, Hearing Master David F. Brown did not allow for much wriggle room. If tenants showed proof that they had applied for rental assistance, they could stay in their homes. If not, or if they had more than a year of late payments, the maximum amount covered by the assistance program, they were usually forced out. Nevada judges tended to emphasize state laws rather than the CDC guidelines.

Dejonae King, 33, held back tears after she lost her eviction appeal. King was laid off from Walgreens and has been without a job for most of the pandemic. She had not paid the $253 weekly rent on her one-bedroom apartment since July 2020.

“I thought the rules would protect me,” she said.

Merryman had managed to pay $10,000 in rent from government subsidies last year, but she lost her business and her boyfriend’s lengthy struggle with COVID interrupted her efforts to apply for more. It took her four months to reset her lost password for the website to apply for government payments.

Meanwhile, many landlords are caught in a vicious cycle, constantly in court but never quite made whole, said Susy Vasquez, executive director of the Nevada State Apartment Association, the largest organization for landlords.

Ron Scapellato, 54, a landlord in Clark County with 50 units and an air-conditioning business, said he soured on the moratorium after he watched some tenants spend their stimulus checks on new televisions rather than paying back rent. His mortgage and other bills continued to pile up, he said, so he went to court.

“I understand that they do not want to throw people out, but I also want my rent,” he said.

The extension still might face legal challenges. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court questioned whether the CDC had the authority to issue such a sweeping national mandate.

Because the federal moratorium technically lapsed for a few days, some landlords went ahead with evictions.

Hours before the reprieve from the White House, sheriff’s deputies arrived outside Hope Brasseaux’s house in Columbus, Georgia, to implement an eviction order issued a month earlier. Brasseaux, an unemployed waitress, received just 12 hour’s notice. She applied for assistance toward her $700 monthly rent in the spring, but the government portal shows her request as still under review.

“I wish it would have happened a day sooner,” she said of the two-month extension by the Biden administration.

In Nevada, evictions are designed to move faster than in most states, with renters in debt typically given seven days to pay what they owe or move out. Unique to the state, the onus is on the renter to initiate a court challenge, which can pause the process, but many residents do not know that.

Most evictions do not make it to court, Bortolin said. “When people hear the word moratorium they think they don’t have to act,” she said. “Thousands of people in Nevada alone were evicted because they thought they could not be.”

The strain of the pandemic has been especially hard on hourly workers in Las Vegas. Unemployment in Clark County hit a high of almost 370,000 in April 2020, more than 33%. It remains at almost 10%, according to state labor statistics.

After the casinos shuttered last year, Stephanie Pirrone, 52, said her husband’s Lyft customers disappeared, while she lost her job at an Amazon returns center.

She and her husband, angered that their landlord chipped away at their $15,000 government rental assistance with late fees and other fines, decided to fight their eviction, but many of their neighbors did not, she said. “People are scared so they just move out.”

Tawana Smith, who in April 2020 lost her $45,000-a-year job managing a convenience store, has returned to Las Vegas Justice Court three times since November to fight eight attempts at eviction.

The moratorium had blocked the first few attempted evictions, said Smith, whose five children range in age from 2 to 12.

But when the most recent notice appeared last week, she decided to relinquish the low, brown stucco house that her family has called home for almost two years, paying $1,400 in monthly rent.

The family tried unsuccessfully to raise the $5,000 needed to rent a different house by selling crafts and through a crowdfunding campaign. They now dread the next step, living in one hotel room, she said. Smith said she wanted to avoid getting the children settled in school and then pulling them out when one eviction notice or another eventually succeeded.

“We don’t want to fight anymore to stay here,” she said. “We want to put this madness behind us.”

The war against the coronavirus is now a ‘war against ourselves:’ Doctor

Yahoo – Finance

The war against the coronavirus is now a ‘war against ourselves:’ Doctor

Anjalee Khemlani, Senior Reporter August 10, 2021

Government officials and health experts are leaning on the private sector to lead the U.S. out of a coronavirus surge caused by the highly infectious Delta variant.

The reason lies largely in the fact that the federal government won’t issue a blanket mask or vaccine mandate, and some states are actively fighting mitigation measures.

“We don’t have the ability to function as a country,” said Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and a top infectious disease expert.

We are facing a “formidable version of the virus, and we have no unity in the battle against it,” he added.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said as much on MSNBC Tuesday, noting that while the federal government won’t implement mandates, “under certain circumstances, mandates should be done” in the U.S.

New York and Washington are among states mandating government employees be fully vaccinated, while Florida’s governor has threatened to withhold funding to schools and salaries of school officials that try to implement mask mandates.

On the flip side, the private sector has taken on the burden to implement mandates — whether it be mask mandates in buildings or vaccinations for employees.

Netflix (NFLX) and Citigroup (C) are among the latest to join the ranks, while Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCLH) is embroiled in a legal battle with Florida as it seeks to mandate passengers be fully vaccinated — which goes against Florida’s vaccine passport ban.

“I think it’s sad that it’s come to that, we shouldn’t need to do that,” said Dr. Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a top vaccine expert.

Offit told Yahoo Finance that in addition, vaccination certificates or vaccine passports — required in some European countries and, similarly in New York City — are another key tool the U.S. is not implementing.

It’s why the steps Norwegian has taken against Florida could just be the first of many, as the private sector takes on the role of public health officiant, he said.

“That’s the fight you’re about to see,” Offit said.

“It’s hard to watch us fight in this because it’s not a war just against the virus. In many ways, it’s become a war against ourselves,” he said.

Offit had particularly strong words for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for his school mask moratorium. “The governor of Florida has served as a friend of SARS-CoV-2 virus,” he sad. “For children less than 12 years of age, the only chance they have of avoiding this virus is to mask. That’s it.”

Florida, along with Arkansas and Louisiana, currently have the most new reported COVID-19 cases in the past week (based on population).

Though while the surge is mostly in the South, it could move north, Topol said.

Another concern is that the U.S. is unable to accurately track cases — as it is not monitoring how many breakthrough cases of vaccinated individuals are among the newly reported cases.

Topol said the U.S. is “flying blind,” setting the nation up for an even more difficult experience. And reports that the vaccine is 99.99% effective against breakthroughs leading to hospitalizations are misleading Americans into a false sense of security,

The vaccine trials didn’t turn up similar results, so the reports are “a bad, disingenuous presentation of data,” Topol said.

The one silver lining, he noted, is that other countries have seen a short burn time for Delta surges, so it could be a few more weeks before the rise in cases tapers.

“I still think within three to four weeks we may see things get better,” Topol said. “Everywhere the Delta is, it makes an abrupt turn at some point because it burns through. It’s so efficient, and it doesn’t find any more hosts.”

But until then, the full picture is out of view.

“We don’t know what’s going on. We just know that it’s bad,” Topol said.

Criminal Justice Prof Set Blazes Across NorCal as Dixie Fire Raged: Cops

Daily Beast

Criminal Justice Prof Set Blazes Across NorCal as Dixie Fire Raged: Cops

Blake Montgomery August 10, 2021

A criminal justice professor allegedly went on an arson spree in Northern California along the edges of the gargantuan Dixie Fire in late July.

Gary Maynard, age 47, set a series of fires in Lassen National Forest and Shasta Trinity National Forest, an area in rural Northern California near where the Dixie Fire, the second-largest in state history, still burns, federal prosecutors allege. California Forestry Department agents arrested him Saturday. He is charged with intentionally setting fire to public land and is being held without bail in the Sacramento County Main Jail.

“There are simply no conditions that could be fashioned that could ensure the safety of the public with respect to this defendant,” a federal prosecutor told the presiding judge Tuesday, according to the Sacramento Bee.

Police described Maynard’s temperament as highly flammable.

He has denied the allegations against him. According to court filings, he screamed at police in the Lassen County Jail, “I’m going to kill you, f—king pig! I told those f—kers I didn’t start any of those fires!”

Maynard appears to have taught at Sonoma State and Santa Clara Universities, according to faculty pages at both colleges, which list a Dr. Gary Maynard as a lecturer in criminology. His research covers “criminal justice, social science research methods, cults and deviant behavior.” Maynard’s Sonoma State faculty page describes him as having three master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in sociology.

A spokesperson for Sonoma State told the Bee was a part-time lecturer in the Criminal Justice Department filling in for a faculty member on leave.

“He was employed with Sonoma State University in Fall 2020, but did not have an appointment for Spring 2021. He taught two seminars in Criminology and Criminal Justice Studies in Fall 2020,” she said.

Forest Service agents began looking into him on July 20, when an agent discovered him on Mount Shasta beneath his Kia Soul, the wheels of which were stuck in a ditch. The investigator had come to the area after mountain bikers reported a burgeoning fire. When the agent asked Maynard to come out from under the car and identify himself, the professor refused, only murmuring words the agent could not hear.

The agent eventually coaxed Maynard out from under the car and asked him about the fire, to which the professor said he did not know anything about any fires. Maynard asked for assistance towing his vehicle, and when the agent said he could not help, Maynard became “uncooperative and agitated” and crawled back underneath. A witness said they later saw Maynard brandishing a large knife.

Forest Service investigators said they found tracks similar to Maynard’s Kia near a fire that began overnight at a different location on Mount Shasta.

In the course of their investigation of Maynard, Forest Service investigators placed a tracker on the Kia. The tracker allegedly showed them that the academic traveled to the areas within Lassen National Forest where both the Ranch and Conard fires sparked Saturday night. Forest Service agents arrested Maynard later that day.

Court filings describe the professor’s behavior in blunt terms: “It appeared that Maynard was in the midst of an arson-setting spree.”

Maynard even allegedly attempted to trap firefighters between the fires he was setting and the boundaries of the Dixie Fire.

“He entered the evacuation zone and began setting fires behind the first responders fighting the Dixie Fire,” court filings read. “In addition to the danger of enlarging the Dixie fire and threatening more lives and property, this increased the danger to the first responders.”

In photos: 7 countries where wildfires are raging right now

Axios

In photos: 7 countries where wildfires are raging right now

Ivana Saric August 10, 2021

Wildfires raging around the world this week have forced thousands of people to evacuate as flames raze homes and burn across hundreds of thousands of acres of land.

Why it matters: Record heat waves propelled by human-caused climate change have triggered many of the fires burning across the U.S. West, Canada, Russia, Greece, Turkey, Algeria and Italy. A new climate report from the UN’s IPCC concludes that human influence on the climate system “is now an established fact.”

Greece

A volunteers holds a water hose near a burning blaze as he tries to extinguish a fire in the village of Glatsona on Evia (Euboea) island, on Aug. 9. The IPCC report concluded human activities are making extreme weather and climate events more common and severe — including droughts, heat waves, and wildfires. Photo: Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP via Getty Images

What’s happening: Dozens of wildfires broke out in Greece last week after the country suffered its worst heat wave in decades.

Firefighters are facing extremely dry conditions. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called the situation a “nightmarish summer.”

U.S. West

A home and garage destroyed by the Dixie Fire sits on the roadside on Aug. 9 near Greenville, California. Photo: Maranie R. Staab/Getty Images

What’s happening: 108 large fires or complexes are burning in 15 U.S. western states. Many of these states are in a climate-related drought.

The largest burning in the U.S. is California’s Dixie Fire — the second-biggest wildfire in the state’s history. Thousands of residents have been evacuated as the blaze has razed nearly 500,000 acres.

Algeria

A house burns during a wildfire in Tizi Ouzou, one of the most populous cities in Algeria’s Kabylie region, on Aug. 10. Photo: Ryad Kramdi/AFP via Getty Images

What’s happening: Wildfires in Algeria’s north have killed 42 people, including 25 soldiers who helped evacuate residents.

Dozens of fires broke out in the remote Kabyle region and elsewhere on Monday.

Russia

Extinguishing works continue for the wildfire in the village of Kuel in Yakutia, Sakha, Russia on Aug. 8. Photo: Ivan Nikiforov/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

What’s happening: Intense wildfires burning across Siberia’s Sakha Republic have been active for months.

Smoke has these fires has reached the North Pole.

Canada

Wildfire smoke shrouds Vancouver, Canada, Aug. 1. Photo: Liang Sen/Xinhua via Getty Images

What’s happening: Firefighters have been battling dozens of massive wildfires in British Columbia since early last month following a deadly heat wave.

The Canadian province surpassed its 10-year wildfire average by 87% as thousands remained under evacuation notices on Tuesday, CBC notes.

Turkey

Burned facilities after a wildfire raged in Milas, Mugla province, Turkey, on Aug. 9. Photo: Xinhua via Getty Images

What’s happening: More than 100 blazes broke out in Turkey at the start of the month, forcing thousands of people to evacuate.

At least eight people have died as the fires ripped through tourist resorts this weel, per the BBC.

Italy

A wildfire in Sicily’s Etna regional park has triggered a large deployment of both ground and air forces to combat the blaze that’s fueled by the wind on Aug. 5. Photo: Salvatore Allegra/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

What’s happening: Wildfires have been raging across southern Italy since last month, with many regions under evacuation orders.

The islands of Sicily and Sardinia have been among the hardest hit.

Nearly 200 million in U.S. under heat advisories, warnings as two heat domes form

Axios

Nearly 200 million in U.S. under heat advisories, warnings as two heat domes form

Andrew Freedman August 11, 2021

Nearly 200 million Americans are under heat advisories or excessive heat warnings as dual “heat domes” affect the Pacific Northwest, Central states and East Coast.

Why it matters: Extreme heat can kill, and it can also greatly aggravate wildfire conditions, making it even harder for thousands of firefighters to contain California’s Dixie Fire, the state’s second-largest on record.

Although it is summer, it’s unusual to see so much of the Lower 48 states experiencing extreme heat simultaneously.

The big picture: An area of upper level high pressure, also known as a heat dome, is parked over the Pacific Northwest, just off the coast of Washington State. The air circulation around this high is bringing winds off land areas land areas in British Columbia, rather than the typical cooling ocean breezes that this region is more known for.

The Northwest is a region that has already seen a record-shattering heat wave that set all-time temperature milestones in late June into early July.
High temperatures in Portland, Ore., are forecast to reach 98°F Wednesday, and 100°F on Thursday and Friday before cooling down for the weekend. The typical high temperature in Portland at this time of year is 83°F.
Red flag warnings are up for wildfire zones in northern California and parts of Oregon, and excessive heat warnings stretch from extreme northern California into Washington State. A state of emergency due to the heat wave is in effect in Oregon.
The heat is also worsening fire conditions in British Columbia, where blazes started during the June heat wave.
Heat advisories also extend from Michigan to Texas, with high humidity making for especially dangerous conditions near the urban heat islands of Kansas City and St. Louis.

Threat level: Heat advisories also stretch from North Carolina to Maine, which are under the influence of a “Bermuda High,” so named for its tendency to be located near Bermuda or between Bermuda and the East Coast at this time of year.

Currently, the high pressure area is located over the Southeastern U.S. and the southwesterly flow of air up the East Coast is bringing the heat and humidity.
Excessive heat warnings, which are a more severe type of alert, are in effect for New York City and Philadelphia, where heat indices will reach or even exceed 105°F on Wednesday and Thursday, with the hottest conditions expected Thursday.
“Extreme heat and humidity will significantly increase the potential for heat related illnesses, particularly for those working or participating in outdoor activities,” the National Weather Service said.
Washington, D.C. could hit 100°F on Thursday, with a heat index higher than that.

Context: Climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels for energy is causing a significant rise in the intensity and probability of extreme heat events, a landmark U.N. sponsored scientific panel in a report released Monday concluded.

It warned of even more “unprecedented” heat events, like the one in the Pacific Northwest in June, to come as global warming continues.

What’s next: The heat in the Pacific Northwest should abate during the next several days, while conditions gradually moderate in the East as well. However, an overall pattern of above average temperatures in the West, in particular, is likely going to continue, in large part due to the severe drought in place in the region.

From the looks of things, willful ignorance is going to be the death of us | Opinion

Miami Herald

From the looks of things, willful ignorance is going to be the death of us | Opinion

Leonard Pitts Jr. August 10, 2021

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Martin Luther King

Dr. King didn’t know the half of it.

Those words, after all, are from 1963. Back then, the idea of U.S. citizens and lawmakers attacking their own democracy would have been unthinkable, flouting precautions in a deadly pandemic unimaginable, ignoring a threat to our very planet inconceivable. Of course, back then, information came through a few reliable conduits: Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, the local paper.

There was no social media. The production and distribution of information had not yet become the province of any and everybody.

Things have changed. The unthinkable, the unimaginable and the inconceivable are hard upon us. We face not one, but three simultaneous existential emergencies, and while each is distinct, it’s time we understood that, ultimately, they are not different threats at all, but rather different manifestations of the same threat. Meaning that the insurrection crisis, the COVID crisis and the climate-change crisis are really, at bottom, just facets of a misinformation crisis.

If you consider how belief in risibly false information ginned up by social media — e.g., Donald Trump won, vaccines magnetize skin, cold snaps disprove global warming — has impeded if not paralyzed our response to these and other issues, the truth of it becomes evident. Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley are long dead, the local paper just a shadow of itself. Social media purport to fill the void and as a direct result, misinformation has reached critical levels.

It’s not that no one saw this coming. Warnings go back at least two decades, including in this very space. But the threat seemed so theoretical. Who knew that it would have such real and profound effects? Who knew it would cleave this country — this planet — like an axe, splitting the informed off so decisively from the proudly misinformed, the adherents to crackpot theories and screwball beliefs that would have been laughed off the public stage in 1963 but that, in 2021, find strength in numbers and validation online? And that now emerge as a clear and present danger.

Just this week, for instance, a United Nations panel issued a report warning that climate change has brought us to the point of catastrophe: “code red for humanity.” It’s a truth underscored by our own eyes, by the hundred-year events that now happen every year: devastating floods, blistering heat, raging fires, rampaging storms. The damage, we are told, is irreversible. We can only mitigate it.

You’d think such a dire prognosis would leave us united on the need for immediate action, but Fox “News” saw little to worry about, bringing on climate denier Marc Morano to assure viewers that the U.N. just wants to take their cars. “You’re being conned,” he said, “if you’re falling for this U.N. report.”

And so it goes.

The need to teach our children well — media literacy and critical thinking, in particular — has never felt more urgent. Indeed, it is not too much to call it a matter of survival. After all, the insurrection crisis threatens our country, the COVID crisis threatens our health and the climate crisis threatens the only planet we’ve got. But the misinformation crisis either caused or exacerbated them all. So the obvious epitaph if we do not survive these challenges would be ignominious, but fair:

Too stupid to live.

Judge asks why Capitol riot damage restitution is $1.5 million when cost to taxpayers is $500M

Axios

Judge asks why Capitol riot damage restitution is $1.5 million when cost to taxpayers is $500M

Axios August 9, 2021

Of note: D.C. Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell’s comments come some two weeks after she questioned whether it’s appropriate for prosecutors to offer defendants misdemeanor plea deals in cases that saw insurrectionists “terrorizing members of Congress.”

Driving the news: Howell made the costing comments during the plea hearing of Glenn Wes Lee Croy, 46, of Colorado Springs, Colo., who “pleaded guilty to parading, demonstrating or picketing in a capitol building” after attending a pro-Trump rally, according to KUSA.

What they’re saying: Howell questioned why the U.S. attorney’s office was looking to “require only $2,000 in each felony case and $500 in each misdemeanor case,” the Washington Post notes.

“I’m accustomed to the government being fairly aggressive in terms of fraud when there have been damages that accrue from a criminal act for the restitution amount,” she said, according to WashPost.
“Where we have Congress acting, appropriating all this money due directly to the events of January 6th, I have found the damage amount of less than $1.5 million — when all of us American taxpayers are about to foot the bill for close to half a billion dollars — a little bit surprising.”
Prosecutor Clayton O’Connor told the judge he’d be “happy” to get her the answer to her costings question, Politico reports.

Context: Congress last month passed a $2.1 billion Capitol security bill to help cover the costs incurred during the deadly insurrection.

This included $70.7 million for the Capitol Police response to the attack and $521 million to reimburse the National Guard for deploying guards to help with security efforts on Jan. 6 and after.

Background: Prosecutors announced riot damage estimate of “approximately $1,495,326.55” in June. While it was unclear how it arrived at this figure, it seems to be related to damages such as broken windows, per WashPost.

A spokesperson for the Architect of the Capitol said the agency “gave damage assessments to the Justice Department, which calculated the per-case penalty, and separate assessments to House and Senate appropriators for wider security costs,” the outlet reports.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office has declined to comment on Howell’s latest remarks beyond what was said in court.

Learn from Miami regarding NC 12. Start planning now for it to disappear.

The News & Observer

Welcome to NC Voices, where leaders, readers and experts from across North Carolina can speak on issues affecting our communities.

Learn from Miami regarding NC 12. Start planning now for it to disappear.

Staff August 10, 2021

The Army Corps of Engineers is planning to build sea wall around downtown Miami, 20 feet high in places, to protect the city from storm surges and flooding.

The problem is that Miami sits atop porous limestone through which rising sea waters will soon flood the city — a 100-foot seawall would not make a difference. The rising water from below is well known and understood, and it may have played a role in the recent Miami area building collapse.

It seems some planners in Miami just can’t get their heads around the catastrophe that the city faces — a catastrophe that could lead to eventual abandonment and 4 million environmental refugees fleeing north.

The Highway 12 situation along the Outer Banks has similarities to the Miami situation. There is not the slightest doubt that N.C. 12 is a goner. The only question is when.

University of Miami geologist Hal Wanless argues that a 2- to 3-foot sea level rise will halt development on all the world’s barrier islands. It’s not that the islands will be under water; it’s that low spots will be under water and access roads will be flooded and washed away.

Current estimates of global sea level rise range from 3 to 8 feet max by the end of this century assuming that we don’t reduce the rate of carbon dioxide release.

The evidence pointing to intensifying storms and accelerating rise in sea levels is clear. Oceanographer John Englander has shown that based on satellite observations the sea level rise rate more than doubled between 2000 and 2020.

The Highway 12 situation is not only ripe for increased rates of erosion and island overwash, but the possibility of damaging seaward overwash is greatly increased because of the large bodies of water behind the islands — Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds.

Barrier island dwellers should accept these facts as the gospel truth. They should not delay until the wolf is at the door, which is the case in Miami. Instead, learn from Miami and start planning now.

For planning purposes, I believe the assumption of a decade long maximum future lifespan for N.C. 12 is a reasonable one.

Orrin H. Pilkey. The writer is a professor emeritus of Earth Sciences at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

Geoengineering marks scientific gains in U.N. report on dire climate future

Reuters

Geoengineering marks scientific gains in U.N. report on dire climate future

Jake Spring August 10, 2021

(Reuters) – Geoengineering science is advancing, but the question remains – should we use it?

The U.N. climate report https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1 released Monday presents a major leap forward in predicting how geoengineering to limit global warming might affect the planet, although scientists said the greatest hurdle remains deciding whether to use the controversial methods.

Geoengineering involves large-scale interventions that shift the climate, generally with an aim of cooling the earth.

The United Nations panel addressed two types of geoengineering in the report – solar radiation management and greenhouse gas removal.

But the report makes no recommendations on whether to use either method. The panel could give guidance on how decisions on geoengineering should be made in another report due in 2022.

Solar radiation management techniques generally control how much sunlight is reflected back out into space, preventing it from heating the earth.

Climate models previously focused on how solar radiation management would change the planet’s overall average temperature. But the models run on supercomputers have rapidly become much more sophisticated in predicting variations from the earth’s poles to equator and between hemispheres, said Govindasamy Bala, a lead author of the report from the Indian Institute of Science.

They can also better project how geoengineering could alter the amount of rain and snowfall, he said.

This would allow for more advance uses of multiple forms of solar radiation management at the same time to control for both temperature and precipitation.

For example, humans could spray sulfate aerosols – tiny reflective particles – into the stratosphere 20 to 25 kilometers (12 to 16 miles) above the earth’s surface to reflect more sunlight back into space, which lowers global temperatures.

But sulfate aerosols have the side effect of also lowering average precipitation. A separate method to thin out cirrus clouds in the upper atmosphere could offset the effect and increase precipitation, Bala said.

“The science is there,” Bala said.

“I think the next big question is, do you want to do it? … That involves uncertainty, moral issues, ethical issues and governance,” he said.

That’s because every region would be affected differently. While some regions could gain in an artificially cooler world, others could suffer by, for example, no longer having conditions to grow crops.

He said his personal assessment is that a world that overshoots the Paris Agreement targets of limiting warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius would be better off using geoengineering. But he is pessimistic the world’s governments could come to agreement on it.

Paulo Artaxo, another lead author and an environmental physicist at University of Sao Paulo, said he interprets the report as still emphasizing caution when it comes to geoengineering.

“Basically the message is more or less the same as (the previous report): The science is not mature enough,” Artaxo said.

“The side effects of any of the known geoengineering techniques can be very significant… Society has to consider if these side effects are too big to try any strategy.”

CARBON REMOVAL

While solar radiation management remains on the periphery of climate discussions, carbon dioxide removal has been accepted as a necessary tool for mitigating climate change, said Chris Field, an earth scientist at Stanford University.

“That’s become more clear with the recognition we’re going to need negative emissions…and almost by definition negative emissions have to be through some kind of carbon dioxide removal,” said Field, who was not involved in this IPCC report.

This U.N. report expressed much higher confidence regarding the use of carbon dioxide removal to help limit rising levels of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, said Leticia Cotrim da Cunha, a lead author and oceanographer at Rio de Janeiro State University.

There are a wide variety of methods of greenhouse gas removal including technological solutions like using massive machines to filter carbon dioxide out of the air, or capturing carbon emissions from factories or fossil fuel drilling and injecting it into certain underground rocks to contain it.

Carbon dioxide can also be removed from the atmosphere by using forests or by encouraging plant growth in the ocean.

The report focuses on greenhouse gas removal as a whole without making recommendations on the merits of individual methods, Cunha said.

Greenhouse gas removal cannot solve climate change by itself and must go together with cutting back how much carbon dioxide is being emitted in the first place, she said.

“We can’t go on emitting this much CO2 and just try to remove all the excess CO2 from the atmosphere,” Cunha said.

“We would need an extra planet to put all the CO2.”

(Reporting by Jake Spring in Brasilia; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Heat, drought and fire: how climate dangers combine for a catastrophic ‘perfect storm’

The Guardian

Heat, drought and fire: how climate dangers combine for a catastrophic ‘perfect storm’

Gabrielle Canon August 10, 2021

<span>Photograph: Fred Greaves/Reuters</span> — Photograph: Fred Greaves/Reuters

Northern California’s Dixie fire this weekend swelled to become the single largest fire incident the state has ever recorded, a mammoth that has leveled mountain towns, produced flames that shot 200ft in the air, and scorched through close to 490,000 acres.

“It is just the perfect storm,” says Rick Carhart, the California department of forestry and fire protection (Cal Fire) public information officer, adding that the difficult and steep terrain, parched vegetation, and hot, dry weather had all come together to fuel the conflagration that has sent flames 200ft into the sky.

And, he says, the Dixie fire was just one of a series of large blazes that have affected the area in recent years. “It has been giant devastating fire after giant devastating fire.”

Researchers are concerned that the Dixie fire’s record won’t hold for long. The parched landscapes and increased temperatures that set the stage for bigger blazes this year are not anomalies – they are trends. And the conditions are going to get worse.

A climate crisis trifecta

Drought, extreme heat, and destructive infernos are each devastating in their own right, but together they cause calamity. The combination augments their effects and causes each individual condition to intensify. Scientists say they are seeing the trifecta more frequently in the west and that climate breakdown is the key culprit.

“This is what climate scientists have been warning about for years now,” says Park Williams, a hydro-climatologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Drought and fire have always been part of the climate in the western US, but increasing heat, which scientists say is directly attributable to human-caused climate change, has had a devastating impact. “These things amplify each other,” Williams says, adding that the effects exponentially increase.

The climate conditions don’t act alone, and fire and and water policies play a part in increasing risks and determining the outcome as well. Most fires are still started by people. The expansion of communities in forested and fire-prone areas adds new dimensions that complicate containment efforts when blazes get big. But what’s happening in the environment has made fires much harder to fight.

That’s why new records don’t just nose out the old ones – they obliterate them. In 2020, the 4.2m acres that burned in California was nearly triple the previous record. This year, fires have burned more than three times as much land as they had by this point in 2020, according to Cal Fire.

“And there’s really no end in sight for the capacity for that type of thing to happen again,” Williams says.

A vicious cycle of heat and drought

Heat affects drought in several ways. Higher temperatures cause precipitation to fall as rain rather than snow. Snow that does fall melts away much more quickly, leaving less to trickle into streams, rivers, and reservoirs. People, plants and animals depend on the snowpack to feed the water systems and with less available, the landscape and anything living in it or off of it will feel the strain.

Heat also bakes moisture right out of the landscape. The hotter it is, the more water plants and animals need to regulate themselves, and that increases water scarcity even further. What makes all this more complicated is that the relationship works in the other direction as well – drought conditions increase heat.

“Heat is both a response to drought and also a driver of drought,” says Andrew Hoell, a meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s physical sciences laboratory. Dry soils radiate and reflect the sun’s energy that otherwise would be used in evaporation. That pushes surface temperatures even higher.

“Just like we get cold when we climb out of a swimming pool, the earth cools off when water evaporates,” Hoell says. “When soils are dry, when it’s hot out, there isn’t as much water available to evaporate. That means the earth doesn’t get to cool off.”

That’s why Hoell calls climate change a “threat multiplier”. As the region becomes hotter and drier, the risk of small sparks quickly igniting into enormous and erratic wildfires magnifies.

Fires add another dimension to the threat

New research also suggests that the wildfires themselves will increase drought and heat, adding a new dimension to the catastrophic cycle. Researchers are discussing hypotheses, Hoell explains, that smoke and aerosols released into the atmosphere by wildfires can alter weather patterns. There are already studies that show wildfires influence the formation of clouds in the sky and could decrease precipitation.

“It is very dynamic and very complicated but that’s where we are going as a science community – we are trying to figure out how wildfires feed back on to drought,” he said.

Researchers are also investigating how reduced canopies from forests decimated in fires expose the snowpack that was once shaded to the sun.

Although more research is needed to better understand these complex relationships, the scientific record is clear that rising heat will lead to an increase in extreme events.

“Global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered,” according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its sixth report, released on Monday, which went on to detail and list the expected increase in both frequency and intensity of hot extremes, ecological droughts, and the reductions in Arctic sea ice, snow cover and permafrost, along with other catastrophic conditions.

“Under all future scenarios and global warming levels, temperatures and extreme high temperatures are expected to continue to increase,” the report said of North and Central America, attributing the rise to “human influence”.

Models show that extreme heatwaves are expected to happen more frequently, more intensely, and across larger areas of land in just the next three decades. “Historically we have had between four and six extreme heat events in any given year,” said Steve Ostoja, director of the USDA California Climate Hub. “By 2050, we expect that number to go somewhere between 25 and 30 events. That’s a huge difference. That basically means it is going to be that hot all the time.”

No time to lose

The trends are already being felt. Currently, about half of the contiguous US is in drought, according to federal agencies. The entire state of California is experiencing drought conditions, with more than 88% of the state in the “extreme drought” category, as determined by the US Drought Monitor. Meanwhile, dozens of climate stations across the west documented the warmest June and July on record, as extreme heatwaves spiked temperatures across the region.

Stressed ecosystems have already become more vulnerable. The disasters have taxed trees, which are being ravaged by diseases and pests. Studies show roughly 150 million trees died in the last period of drought and billions of creatures living along the coasts perished during heatwaves this summer.

Climate scientists say that there is still time to make big changes, and there’s a chance that the worst effects of the changing climate can be staved off. But there’s no time to lose.

In the west, the wildfires, drought, and heat are already wreaking havoc. Williams, the climate scientist from UCLA, says there are clear indications that places like California won’t look like they do now for much longer. The landscape is growing arid, and as it gets drier and hotter, there will be more fires. That will lead to fewer forests and more grasslands, shrublands, and deserts.

“Fire has been around for hundreds of millions of years and it is a critical part of the earth’s system,” he said. But the fires of the future will do much more than clear the underbrush. “Now the fires we are seeing are eliminating giant patches of forest entirely,” he added, explaining that many tree species had not evolved to repopulate the giant gaps quickly.

“It could take hundreds of years for ponderosa or Jeffrey pine – which we see a lot of in the Sierra Nevada – to actually reoccupy giant patches of forest,” he said. “By that time the climate might be totally inappropriate for those species anyway.”