Study: California fire killed 10% of world’s giant sequoias
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California Wildfires Redwoods Killed
FILE – In this April 22, 2021, file photo, provided by the National Park Service, shows a smoldering tree in Sequoia National Park, Calif. The giant sequoia was found smoldering and smoking in an area of the park burned by the 2020 Castle Fire. At least a tenth of the world’s mature giant sequoias were destroyed by a single California wildfire that tore through the southern Sierra Nevada last year, according to a draft report prepared by scientists with the National Park Service. (Tony Caprio/National Park Service via AP, File)
SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, Calif. (AP) — At least a tenth of the world’s mature giant sequoia trees were destroyed by a single California wildfire that tore through the southern Sierra Nevada last year, according to a draft report prepared by scientists with the National Park Service.
The Visalia Times-Delta newspaper obtained a copy of the report that describes catastrophic destruction from the Castle Fire, which charred 273 square miles (707 square km) of timber in Sequoia National Park.
Researchers used satellite imagery and modeling from previous fires to determine that between 7,500 and 10,000 of the towering species perished in the fire. That equates to 10% to 14% of the world’s mature giant sequoia population, the newspaper said.
“I cannot overemphasize how mind-blowing this is for all of us. These trees have lived for thousands of years. They’ve survived dozens of wildfires already,” said Christy Brigham, chief of resources management and science at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
The consequences of losing large numbers of giant sequoias could be felt for decades, forest managers said. Redwood and sequoia forests are among the world’s most efficient at removing and storing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The groves also provide critical habitat for native wildlife and help protect the watershed that supplies farms and communities on the San Joaquin Valley floor.
Brigham, the study’s lead author, cautioned that the numbers are preliminary and the research paper has yet to be peer reviewed. Beginning next week, teams of scientists will hike to the groves that experienced the most fire damage for the first time since the ashes settled.
“I have a vain hope that once we get out on the ground the situation won’t be as bad, but that’s hope — that’s not science,” she said.
The newspaper said the extent of the damage to one of the world’s most treasured trees is noteworthy because the sequoias themselves are incredibly well adapted to fire. The old-growth trees — some of which are more than 2,000 years old and 250 feet (76 meters) tall — require fire to burst their pine cones and reproduce.
“One-hundred years of fire suppression, combined with climate change-driven hotter droughts, have changed how fires burn in the southern Sierra and that change has been very bad for sequoia,” Brigham said.
Sequoia and Kings Canyon have conducted controlled burns since the 1960s, about a thousand acres a year on average. Brigham estimates that the park will need to burn around 30 times that number to get the forest back to a healthy state.
The Castle Fire erupted on Aug. 19 in the Golden Trout Wilderness amid a flurry of lightning strikes. The Shotgun Fire, a much smaller blaze burning nearby, was discovered shortly afterward, and the two were renamed the Sequoia Complex.
The headline of this story has been corrected to say the fire destroyed 10% of all giant sequoias, not 10% of all redwoods.
A 20-Foot Sea Wall? Miami Faces the Hard Choices of Climate Change.
Patricia Mazzei
A high rise apartment building in the Brickell neighborhood of Miami on May 19, 2021. (Zack Wittman/The New York Times)
MIAMI — Three years ago, not long after Hurricane Irma left parts of Miami underwater, the federal government embarked on a study to find a way to protect the vulnerable South Florida coast from deadly and destructive storm surge.
Already, no one likes the answer.
Build a wall, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed in its first draft of the study, now under review. Six miles of it, in fact, mostly inland, running parallel to the coast through neighborhoods — except for a 1-mile stretch right on Biscayne Bay, past the gleaming sky-rises of Brickell, the city’s financial district.
The dramatic, $6 billion proposal remains tentative and at least five years off. But the startling suggestion of a massive sea wall up to 20 feet high cutting across beautiful Biscayne Bay was enough to jolt some Miamians to attention. The hard choices that will be necessary to deal with the city’s many environmental challenges are here, and few people want to face them.
“You need to have a conversation about, culturally, what are our priorities?” said Benjamin Kirtman, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami. “Where do we want to invest? Where does it make sense?
“Those are what I refer to as generational questions,” he added. “And there is a tremendous amount of reluctance to enter into that discussion.”
In Miami, the U.S. metropolitan area that is perhaps most exposed to sea-level rise, the problem is not climate change denialism. Not when hurricane season, which begins this week, returns each year with more intense and frequent storms. Not when finding flood insurance has become increasingly difficult and unaffordable. Not when the nights stay so hot that leaving the house with a sweater to fend off the evening chill has become a thing of the past.
The trouble is that the magnitude of the interconnected obstacles the region faces can feel overwhelming, and none of the possible solutions is cheap, easy or pretty.
For its study, the Corps focused on storm surge — the rising seas that often inundate the coastline during storms — made worse lately by stronger hurricanes and higher sea levels. But that is only one concern.
South Florida, flat and low-lying, sits on porous limestone, which allows the ocean to swell up through the ground. Even when there is no storm, rising seas contribute to more significant tidal flooding, where streets fill with water even on sunny days. The expanding saltwater threatens to spoil the underground aquifer that supplies the region’s drinking water and crack old sewer pipes and aging septic tanks. It leaves less space for the earth to absorb liquid, so floodwaters linger longer, their runoff polluting the bay and killing fish.
And that is just sea-level rise. Temperatures have gotten so sweltering over recent summers that Miami-Dade County has named a new interim “chief heat officer.”
“What you realize is, each of these problems, which are totally intersecting, are handled by different parts of the government,” said Amy Clement, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Miami and the chair of the city of Miami’s climate resilience committee. “It’s divided up in ways that make things really, really difficult to move forward. And the bottom line is, it’s way more money than any local government has to spend.”
The state could help, to a point. Republican lawmakers, who have controlled the Florida Legislature for more than 20 years, acknowledged in late 2019 that they had ignored climate change for so long that the state had “lost a decade.” They have begun to take steps to fund solutions, directing more than $200 million in tax dollars, collected on real estate transactions, to sea-level rise and sewer projects. Legislators also designated $500 million in federal stimulus money for the fund.
The price tag for all that needs to be done, however, is in the billions. The estimate for Miami-Dade County alone to phase out some 120,000 septic tanks is about $4 billion, and that does not include the thousands of dollars that each homeowner would also have to pay.
Enter the Corps, whose engineering projects, if funded by Congress, are covered 65% by the federal government and 35% by a local government sponsor.
No one wants to turn away a penny from Washington, but the proposal for a massive sea wall along one of Miami’s most scenic stretches has produced a rare moment of agreement between environmentalists and real estate developers, who fear harm to the bay’s delicate ecology and lower property values.
“We were like, ruh-roh,” said Ken Russell, the Miami city commissioner whose district includes Brickell. “The $40 billion in assets you’re trying to protect will be diminished if you build a wall around downtown, because you’re going to affect market values and quality of life.”
Other parts of the Corps’ draft plan, which includes surge barriers at the mouth of the Miami River and several other waterways, are more appealing: fortifying sewer plants and fire and police stations to withstand a crush of seawater. Elevating or flood-proofing thousands of businesses and homes. Planting some mangroves, which can provide a first line of defense against flooding and erosion. Miami-Dade County wants all of those portions to take priority; a final draft of the plan is due this fall.
Sticking points remain. Among the homes proposed to be elevated on the taxpayer dime are multimillion-dollar waterfront mansions — a result of the Corps’ mandate to efficiently protect as much life and property as possible, which critics say inevitably leads to more protection for the wealthy, whose properties are worth more.
And then there are the walls. The inland walls — some fairly small, but others up to 13 feet high — would divide neighborhoods, leaving homes on the seaward side with less protection. The sea wall along Biscayne Bay, which could rise to 20 feet and look as formidable as the sound barriers along Interstate 95, would reverse decades of policies intended to avoid dredging and filling the bay.
To some critics, the plan harks back to more than a century of dredging and pumping the Florida Everglades, which made way for intensive farming and sprawling development but disregarded the serious damage to the environment that the state is still wrestling with.
“It is my sense that most Floridians would live with the risk of water to preserve their lifestyle,” said Cynthia Barnett, a Gainesville, Florida-based environmental journalist who has published books about rain and the fate of the oceans. “This idea of working with water rather than always fighting against it is really the lesson of Florida history. If Florida history has taught us one thing, it’s that hardscaping this water that defines us will bring hardships to future generations.”
When local governments have asked the public how they would like to tackle climate change, residents by far prefer what is known as green infrastructure: layered coastal protection from a mix of dunes, sea grasses, coral reefs and mangroves, said Zelalem Adefris, vice president for policy and advocacy at Catalyst Miami, which works with low-income communities in the county.
“The Army Corps’ plan just looks so different,” she said. “It seemed to be really incongruous with the conversations that are being had locally.”
Officials with the Corps, though, say — gently — that they see no way around what they call structural elements. The storm surge threat to Miami-Dade County is just too grave.
“It’s going to be a part of the solution,” said Niklas Hallberg, the study’s project manager.
He said the Corps is committed to working with the community in the next phase of design for the project so “maybe it doesn’t look like so much of a wall.”
That sounds like inching toward the vision that emerged from engineering consultants hired by Swire Properties, a big local developer, after the Corps’ draft plan alarmed Miami’s Downtown Development Authority. The consultants suggested building a berm of earth and rock that could be further elevated over time. (A landscape architectural firm brought in by the Downtown Development Authority developed renderings of the Corps’ plan showing dirty brown water in the bay and, yes, “Berlin” graffitied on the wall.)
On a recent afternoon along the stretch of Brickell Bay Drive where a wall might go, Rachel Silverstein, executive director of Miami Waterkeeper, an environmental research and activist group, stood next to high-rises built right up to the water, which she called “the fundamental problem with Miami” because they leave the storm surge with nowhere to go.
(Silverstein is in the camp of people who favor more natural structural elements to combat storm surge, such as bolstering coral reefs that would also provide an ecological benefit to the bay.)
She pointed over the shimmering blue-green bay.
“Instead of seeing this beautiful water, you would see a gross wall,” she said.
Drought saps California reservoirs as hot, dry summer looms
Adam Beam
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California Drought-Reservoirs
A home destroyed in the 2020 North Complex Fire sits above Lake Oroville on Sunday, May 23, 2021, in Oroville, Calif. At the time of this photo, the reservoir was at 39 percent of capacity and 46 percent of its historical average. California officials say the drought gripping the U.S. West is so severe it could cause one of the state’s most important reservoirs to reach historic lows by late August, closing most boat ramps and shutting down a hydroelectric power plant during the peak demand of the hottest part of the summer. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
OROVILLE, Calif. (AP) — Each year Lake Oroville helps water a quarter of the nation’s crops, sustain endangered salmon beneath its massive earthen dam and anchor the tourism economy of a Northern California county that must rebuild seemingly every year after unrelenting wildfires.
But the mighty lake — a linchpin in a system of aqueducts and reservoirs in the arid U.S. West that makes California possible — is shrinking with surprising speed amid a severe drought, with state officials predicting it will reach a record low later this summer.
While droughts are common in California, this year’s is much hotter and drier than others, evaporating water more quickly from the reservoirs and the sparse Sierra Nevada snowpack that feeds them. The state’s more than 1,500 reservoirs are 50% lower than they should be this time of year, according to Jay Lund, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California-Davis.
Over Memorial Day weekend, dozens of houseboats sat on cinderblocks at Lake Oroville because there wasn’t enough water to hold them. Blackened trees lined the reservoir’s steep, parched banks.
At nearby Folsom Lake, normally bustling boat docks rested on dry land, their buoys warning phantom boats to slow down. Campers occupied dusty riverbanks farther north at Shasta Lake.
But the impacts of dwindling reservoirs go beyond luxury yachts and weekend anglers. Salmon need cold water from the bottom of the reservoirs to spawn. The San Francisco Bay needs fresh water from the reservoirs to keep out the salt water that harms freshwater fish. Farmers need the water to irrigate their crops. Businesses need reservoirs full so people will come play in them and spend money.
And everyone needs the water to run hydroelectric power plants that supply much of the state’s energy.
If Lake Oroville falls below 640 feet (195 meters) — which it could do by late August — state officials would shut down a major power plant for just the second time ever because of low water levels, straining the electrical grid during the hottest part of the summer.
In Northern California’s Butte County, low water prompts another emotion: fear. The county suffered the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century in 2018 when 85 people died. Last year, another 16 people died in a wildfire.
Walking along the Bidwell Canyon trail last week, 63-year-old Lisa Larson was supposed to have a good view of the lake. Instead, she saw withered grass and trees.
“It makes me feel like our planet is literally drying up,” she said. “It makes me feel a little unsettled because the drier it gets, the more fires we are going to have.”
Droughts are a part of life in California, where a Mediterranean-style climate means the summers are always dry and the winters are not always wet. The state’s reservoirs act as a savings account, storing water in the wet years to help the state survive during the dry ones.
Last year was the third driest on record in terms of precipitation. Temperatures hit triple digits in much of California over the Memorial Day weekend, earlier than expected. State officials were surprised earlier this year when about 500,000 acre feet (61,674 hectare meters) of water they were expecting to flow into reservoirs never showed up. One acre-foot is enough water to supply up to two households for one year.
“In the previous drought, it took (the reservoirs) three years to get this low as they are in the second year of this drought,” Lund said.
The lake’s record low is 646 feet (197 meters), but the Department of Water Resources projects it will dip below that sometime in August or September. If that happens, the state will have to close the boat ramps for the first time ever because of low water levels, according to Aaron Wright, public safety chief for the Northern Buttes District of California State Parks. The only boat access to the lake would be an old dirt road that was built during the dam’s construction in the late 1960s.
“We have a reservoir up there that’s going to be not usable. And so now what?” said Eric Smith, an Oroville City Council member and president of its chamber of commerce.
The water level is so low at Lake Mendocino, along the Russian River in Northern California, that state officials last week reduced the amount of water heading to 930 farmers, businesses and other junior water-rights holders.
“Unless we immediately reduce diversions, there is a real risk of Lake Mendocino emptying by the end of this year,” said Erik Ekdahl, deputy director for the State Water Board’s Division of Water Rights.
Low water levels across California will severely limit how much power the state can generate from hydroelectric power plants. When Lake Oroville is full, the Edward Hyatt Power Plant and others nearby can generate up to 900 megawatts of power, according to Behzad Soltanzadeh, chief of utility operations for the Department of Water Resources. One megawatt is enough to power between 800 and 1,000 homes.
That has some local officials worrying about power outages, especially after the state ran out of energy last summer during an extreme heat wave that prompted California’s first rotating blackouts in 20 years. But energy officials say they are better prepared this summer, having obtained an additional 3,500 megawatts of capacity ahead of the scorching summer months.
The low levels are challenging for tourism officials. Bruce Spangler, president of the board of directors for Explore Butte County, grew up in Oroville and has fond memories of fishing with his grandfather and learning to launch and drive a boat before he could drive a car. But this summer, his organization has to be careful about how it markets the lake while managing visitors’ expectations, he said.
“We have to be sure we don’t promise something that can’t be,” he said.
Low lake levels haven’t stopped tourists from coming yet. With coronavirus restrictions lifting across the state, Wright — the state parks official for Northern California — said attendance at most parks in his area is double what it normally is this time of year.
“People are trying to recreate and use facilities even more so (because) they know they are going to lose them here in a few months,” he said.
Associated Press writer Brian Melley in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
The Everglades are dying. An alliance between Biden and Republicans could save them
Francisco Alvarado
Photograph: Jupiter images/Getty Images
For years environmental groups warned the Florida Everglades, a vast 1.5m-acre (607,000-hectare) subtropical preserve, may be doomed to extinction. Agricultural pollution, saltwater intrusion and rampant real estate development had turned the waterways toxic and the state’s environmental landmark was left to slowly choke to death. Perhaps until now.
A sweeping Everglades restoration effort decades in the making is finally seeing renewed optimism thanks to a cast of unlikely champions: Florida state Republicans. In April, Ron DeSantis, the governor, signed an agreement with the US Army Corps of Engineers to build a massive $3.4bn reservoir west of Palm Beach, which would help restore the flow of freshwater to the Everglades. Other state-funded projects to revitalize the region’s delicate ecosystem are already months ahead of schedule, DeSantis said.
And now, the Everglades have a new ally in the White House. Last week Joe Biden included $350m in his 2022 budget proposal to apply toward environmental restoration efforts in south Florida, a $100m increase from the previous year. But will it be enough? Florida’s congressional delegation, led by Republican Senator Marco Rubio, had previously requested more than double that amount in federal assistance, while local advocates argued the price tag should be closer to $3bn over four years.
There’s also a possibility that Congress could add more federal dollars to Biden’s proposal, especially now that five members of Florida’s congressional delegation sit on appropriations committees, said Chauncey Goss, board chairman of the South Florida water management district, which oversees the state’s Everglades infrastructure projects.
“The $725m would be better, but I am not going to laugh at the $350m,” Goss said. “It’s not exactly what we wanted, but it is really up to Congress.”
Still, Biden’s proposed funding is substantial, Goss added, and will allow the army corps to begin work on the federal portion of the reservoir project, such as building new canals from Lake Okeechobee. “This will definitely keep the ball moving down the field,” he said.
An alligator floats in an algae bloom in Lake Okeechobee on 26 April.Photograph: Joe Cavaretta/AP
Efforts to restore the Everglades’ unique ecosystem hinge on Lake Okeechobee, Florida’s largest body of freshwater located near Palm Beach county. The lake has been used as a dumping ground for farmland pollutants for several decades, allowing high concentrations of phosphorus and nitrates from fertilizers to leach into the soil. During heavy rains and storms, runoff water from the tainted soil flows into dozens of intersecting canals that end up in Lake Okeechobee. To avoid the lake from overflowing and bursting its levee during storm events, the tainted water is often released into rivers that flow to the ocean and the Everglades.
The goal is to treat overflowing dirty water from Lake Okeechobee so that by the time it reaches the Everglades, the water is mostly free of the nutrients that cause toxic algae blooms. Construction is under way to create a network of marshes spanning 6,500 acres made up of non-native plants that act as a natural filtration system to suck up fertilizer nutrients from contaminated water, which will flow from the planned 10,500-acre reservoir that will store excess water that builds up in Lake Okeechobee during rainy months of the year.
John Kominoski, a biological sciences professor at the Florida International University Institute of Environment, says the reservoir project will probably play a critical role in alleviating overflows in Lake Okeechobee during Florida’s wet season, which will be used to replenish the Everglades.
“This reservoir is very important for Everglades restoration,” he added. “It will enable the clean-up of more of the dirty water and hold more of the water longer as opposed to dumping it out to sea.”
Still, environmental advocates remain split about whether the Everglades restoration projects are enough. Some worry the reservoir and the marshes will not have a meaningful impact in reversing decades of pollution and water diversion. Others are concerned the restoration could be upended by recent attempts to bring industrial and commercial activities closer to the ecosystem. Eve Samples, executive director of the advocacy group Friends of the Everglades, said the 17,000-acre footprint for the reservoir and the adjoining wetlands are not large enough to achieve the amount of water flow to keep the River of Grass healthy.
“When the project was first envisioned 20 years ago, it was in the neighborhood of 60,000 acres,” Samples said. “In 2017, when we had the toxic algae blooms on the east and west sides of the state, the project got accelerated. But by the time the bill was approved, the reservoir and the wetlands portion were shrunken down to 17,000 acres.”
One key reason the reservoir was scaled back was due to politics. The state legislature barred the South Florida water management district from using eminent domain to acquire sugar cane fields and farms. To compensate for the lost acreage, state and federal environmental agencies made the reservoir 23ft (7 meters) deep with 37ft (11 meters) high retention walls.
“This project is a shadow of its former self,” Samples said. “It doesn’t look like anything in nature.”
A mangrove tunnel in Everglades national park in Florida.Photograph: Francisco Blanco/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo
Another key worry is the compounding threat brought by climate change, Kominoski says. Weather changes in recent years have severely impacted the transition from Florida’s dry season to the wet season, which typically begins in late April and lasts until mid-November. “Last year, the wet season didn’t start until late May,” he said. “We are losing about a month of our wet season window.”
As a result, mangroves and other plant life that help filter pollutants are drying out and dying. “We need water flowing so the wetlands don’t dry out,” he said.
Jason Totoiu, senior attorney with the Center of Biological Diversity’s south-east division, agreed, noting the restoration projects like the $3.4bn reservoir and marshes can significantly increase the flow of freshwater to the Everglades as long as farm pollutants are effectively filtered out. Increasingly hotter summers are threatening large swaths of the Everglades, Totoiu said. “We are seeing an increasing amount of saltwater that can dramatically alter natural habitats,” he said. “Rising sea levels could be a tipping point there.”
The reservoir project and other Everglades infrastructure proposals are about more than just revitalizing Florida’s most important ecosystem, added Julie Wraithmell, executive director of Audubon Florida. “It is also about protecting our vibrant tourism economy, the drinking water for all residents and visitors and against sea level rise,” she said. “With so many projects lined up, it makes sense to strike while the iron is hot.”
Fighting to save the Everglades has been a daunting endeavor for many decades, but Republican and Democratic elected officials on the local, state and federal levels are now putting in the work, Wraithmell added.
“Whether you are far left or far right, everyone has a vested interest in dealing with the effects of climate change,” she said. “There is great reason for optimism.”
Is it covid or Lyme Disease? If you’re vaccinated and have a rash, it’s easier to diagnose
Tom Davidson, The Tribune-Review, Greensburg
June 3rd—It’s tick season, and with it comes an increased risk of contracting Lyme disease or another tick-borne illness.
Diagnosing the disease can be trickier this year amid the covid-19 pandemic, as some of the symptoms of the diseases are similar.
“There’s a lot of overlap,” Dr. Amesh Adalja said of the symptoms between Lyme disease and covid-19.
Adalja is a Pittsburgh-based infectious disease expert and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Lyme disease and covid-19 both can cause fever and aches and pains associated with the flu. But each have symptoms that help to distinguish one from the other, Adalja said.
With Lyme disease, a bull’s-eye skin rash develops around the spot of the tick bite.
With covid, the flu-like symptoms are generally accompanied by respiratory problems not associated with Lyme.
“Most tick bites are innocuous and do not transmit an infection,” Adalja said.
But there are a host of bacterial and viral illnesses, including Lyme disease, that are spread by exposure to certain ticks.
In the U.S. there are 16 different diseases transmitted by ticks, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The most common among them in Western Pennsylvania is Lyme disease, transmitted by the deer tick, according to the Allegheny County Health Department.
In 2019, the latest year that data is available, there were 6,763 confirmed and 2,235 probable cases of Lyme disease in Pennsylvania, according to the CDC. Between 2000 and 2018, there have been more than 106,000 cases in the state, according to tickcheck.com, a site managed by Pennsylvania-based tick researchers.
In Allegheny County there were 2,306 cases of Lyme disease reported in 2019, an 11% decrease from the 2,605 cases in 2018, according to the county health department.
Westmoreland County had 435 confirmed cases of Lyme disease in 2019, down from 496 in 2018, according to CDC data. The county had a high of 577 cases in 2017.
To prevent Lyme disease, one needs to use common sense and do things that may be unpopular when spending time outdoors, Adalja said.
They include wearing clothing that covers the arms and legs, using tick repellent, being careful in wooded areas and looking for ticks that may have latched on.
Otherwise, if someone is bitten by a tick, they don’t need to seek immediate medical treatment.
Instead, they should be aware “for the next several weeks” should they develop a rash, fever or muscle aches that are associated with Lyme disease, which is signaled by a “bull’s-eye rash” around the bite.
“Lyme can be treated with an antibiotic,” Adalja said.
Because the symptoms of fever and flu-like symptoms are similar to covid-19, people who may have been exposed to ticks should advise their doctor of it.
He again advised people to get vaccinated for covid. If they are vaccinated against covid and develop symptoms of Lyme disease, they should tell the doctor about their vaccination in order to speed the diagnosis.
For more on Lyme disease, click here for information from the Allegheny County Health Department or click here for information from the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
A Fatty Heart Puts Your Health at Risk No Matter Your Weight, New Study Suggests
Arielle Weg
Photo credit: Rasi Bhadramani – Getty Images
Having high pericardial fat volume—fat around your heart—can increase your risk of heart failure regardless of your bodyweight, a new study suggests.
More than 6 million people in the U.S. are impacted by heart failure, a condition in which the heart can’t pump enough blood for the body’s needs.
To reduce the risk of excess pericardial fat, experts recommend working toward habits that contribute to better heart health overall.
Pericardial fat—the fat that surrounds your heart—may be a strong risk factor for heart failure regardless of your bodyweight, according to new research from Mount Sinai in New York.
For the study, which was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, researchers used CT scans to determine the connection between pericardial fat volume and newly diagnosed heart failure, a condition in which the heart can’t pump the amount of blood the body needs to function. More than 6 million people in the U.S. have heart failure, which a person can develop suddenly or over time.
The CT scans were sourced from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis sponsored by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and included scans from 6,785 men and women between the ages of 45 and 84 without pre-existing cardiovascular disease.
The researchers found that, even though women typically had less pericardial fat than men, women who did meet the criteria for high pericardial fat volume (70 cubic centimeters or more) had double the risk of developing heart failure. Men who met the fatty heart criteria (120 cubic centimeters or more) had a 53% increased risk.
What’s more, a higher amount of pericardial fat was dangerous regardless of the participants’ body weight. That means being thin didn’t necessarily prevent harmful fat build-up around the heart.
The researchers also adjusted for other well-known risk factors for heart failure such as age, tobacco use, alcohol consumption, a sedentary lifestyle, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and previous heart attacks. Results were similar across all racial backgrounds.
“The fat around the heart is known to be a predictor of heart disease, largely because it can be associated with other risk factors like obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure,” explains Eugenia Gianos, M.D., associate professor of cardiology at the Zucker School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. “The fact that this association held true even after accounting for all these factors indicates that the fat may have a direct effect on the heart muscle that contributes to the abnormalities associated with heart failure.”
When there is extra fat surrounding your heart, fatty droplets may begin to accumulate within the heart muscle cells, says lead study author Satish Kenchaiah, M.D., associate professor of medicine and cardiology specialist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. These droplets can interfere with how your heart chamber expands and reduce your heart’s ability to pump blood properly, setting the stage for heart failure, he says.
A fatty heart is also related to plaque buildup in the coronary arteries that supply blood to the heart muscles. This is a known risk factor for heart attacks, which could subsequently increase the risk of developing heart failure down the line, he adds.
Dr. Kenchaiah says more research is needed to determine how to reduce and prevent excess pericardial fat, but working toward habits that contribute to better heart health overall is a good place to start. To keep your ticker in tip-top shape, he recommends the following:
Eat a Mediterranean-style diet, which is rich in colorful fruits and vegetables, fiber-rich whole grains and legumes, olive oil, nuts and seeds, and lean proteins like seafood and poultry.
Aim for 75 minutes of heart-pumping exercise (such as running) or 150 minutes of moderate activity (like brisk walking) throughout the week.
Avoid excessive alcohol intake, which is considered no more than one drink per day for women and two for men.
Work with your doctor to lower high blood pressure, high blood sugar, or high cholesterol levels—all of which increase your risk of heart disease.
Worst Drought in Decades Escalates Threats Across U.S. West
Brian K. Sullivan
(Bloomberg) — Almost three-fourths of the western U.S. is gripped by drought so severe that it’s off the charts of anything recorded in the 20-year history of the U.S. Drought Monitor. Mountains across the West have seen little precipitation, robbing reservoirs of dearly needed snowmelt and rain, said Brad Rippey, a meteorologist and Drought Monitor author with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The parched conditions mean the wildfire threat is high and farmers are struggling to irrigate crops. Meanwhile, dropping water levels in Lake Oroville, one of California’s largest reservoirs, forced authorities to remove more than 100 houseboats, according to the Weather Channel. “Water supply is the big story for the West, and we are getting in trouble with all the interests that try to compete for a slice of that water,” Rippey said by telephone. “There is not a lot to go around this year.”
Unlike the eastern U.S., in the West most water comes in winter months in the form of rain that gushes into reservoirs or snow that piles up on mountainsides. Last year, drought cost the nation $4.5 billion, according to the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information. This year, what little snow that fell soon melted away and seeped into dusty ground rather than rivers, streams and reservoirs.
For a photo essay of California’s worsening drought, click here. “We have never seen a drought at the scale and the intensity that we see right now, and it is possible that this may be the baseline for the future,” Elizabeth Klein, senior counselor for the Department of Interior told a Congressional hearing last week. “California is currently experiencing its third-driest year on record; the second two driest years on record, and the driest year since 1977.”
Through the end of April, 1.7 million acre-feet of water melted off California’s mountains, down from the normal rate of 8 million, Rippey said. In the last two years, there has only been 4 million. “This is, by far, the worst recharge year in modern history,” Rippey said. In addition to the drought figures, officials are concerned about the Colorado River, which powers hydroelectric plants and provides drinking and irrigation water across much of the Southwest and parts of Mexico. So much water is taken out of the Colorado, in fact, that it rarely ever makes it to its historical delta in the Gulf of California. Based on paleohydrology, scientists say the Colorado is experiencing one of its driest periods in 1,200 years, Klein said.
Surge in Early Retirements Exposes Inequalities Among U.S. Baby Boomers
Alex Tanzi
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Surge in Early Retirements Exposes Inequalities Among U.S. Baby Boomers
(Bloomberg) — The surge in early retirements spurred by the pandemic is increasing inequality among Baby Boomers in the U.S., with older Black workers without a college degree more likely to be forced to exit the labor market prematurely, a study showed.
At least 1.7 million older workers retired early because of the pandemic crisis, according to a report by the New School for Social Research’s Retirement Equity Lab.
The Covid-19 health crisis is creating two classes of early retirees. People who have investments are taking advantage of the unprecedented surge in shares and home values to enjoy their silver years.
Read More: Millennials at 40 Are Falling Behind Their Parents in Every Way
Meanwhile, many low-paid workers without much retirement savings found themselves forced out of their jobs with little prospect of finding employment again. Retiring before the full retirement age will result in a cut in their Social Security benefits, by as much as 30%.
The few years before 65 are crucial to prepare for retirement and unplanned exits can lead to downward mobility and even poverty for these workers, according to Teresa Ghilarducci, economist and director of the Retirement Equity Lab.
“The pandemic is revealing the main fault line in our broken retirement system — inequality,” said Ghilarducci, who’s also a Bloomberg Opinion contributor.
Workers age 55 to 64 without a college degree retired at a 5% faster pace during the pandemic, while retirement for that age group with a college education declined by 4%, according to the Retirement Equity Labreport. At older ages, over 65, college-degree holders were more likely to exit the labor market than pre-Covid, however.
Black workers without a college degree experienced the highest increase in retirement rate before 65, jumping from 16.4% to 17.9% between 2019 and 2021, the data show.
The researchers found that older workers without a college degree had median household retirement savings of only $9,000 in 2019, compared with $167,000 for those with a college degree.
Watch Plastic Waste Become ‘Lumber’ for Adirondack Chairs
Daisy Hernandez
As the global demand for lumber continues to skyrocket, it’s time to think hard about using alternatives to wood. So, why not plastic?
In the latest episode of the Popular Mechanics series “MADE HERE,” we tour the factory for Polywood, a company that takes recycled plastic (mostly milk jugs), turns it into “lumber,” and uses it to fashion outdoor furniture.
“Recycled plastic is important because the nature of the materials—can be used infinitely,” says Doug Rassi, the founder and CEO of Polywood. “You can remake them and remake them, and you never ever have to throw these materials away.”
Polywood pulls its materials from U.S. recycling centers and “ocean-bound hotbeds throughout the world,” says Bryce Glock, a retail sales manager with Polywood. Then the work begins.
First, machines process, clean, flake, and pelletize the plastic bales. Next, vacuums move the pellets into storage silos until they’re ready to blend with extra materials before becoming Polywood lumber boards. Before workers can cut the boards, though, they have to color them with dye and form them (in a heater) to match the size needed for specific pieces of furniture.
Then, the boards move through cooling tanks, and finally, a CNC machine cuts them. For the last step, Polywood staffers box up the pieces and prep them for shipping.
Rassi hopes Polywood’s products show plastics can always find new lives, and don’t need to end up in landfills or the sea.
“Plastics [have] this disposable connotation to them,” says Rassi. “It’s very ingrained into our culture, and we’re working very much to change that.”
Such a premise would have been considered absurd through much of history. But since Trump left office after destroying the tradition of peaceful transfers of power in a failed attempt to steal the 2020 election, it has become clear that his insurrectionism was only the first battle in a longer political war as his allies tout ridiculous fantasies about returning him to power to applause and online acclaim.
The mechanisms of American institutions that barely survived Trump’s attempt to illegally stay in power are still being manipulated by Republicans to make the country less democratic. The GOP’s efforts to stack the electoral decks are staggeringly broad. From Georgia to Arizona and Florida and in many other states, Republicans are mobilizing behind efforts to shorten voting hours, crack down on early and mail-in balloting and to throw out legitimate ballots — all under a banner of election security.
While Trump may be banned from Twitter, he sends out daily statements pulsating with lies and incitement that percolate among supporters on social media. The ex-President’s planned resumption of rallies next month will bring that anti-democratic stream of falsehood to a wider audience.
And in the US Senate, Republicans will use filibuster rules — which critics see as the antithesis of democracy — to thwart Democratic legislation that seeks to combat all those efforts.
President Joe Biden, who is in the White House because American democratic guardrails stood firm after his victory last November, raised the alarm on Tuesday after another bout of the GOP flexing its anti-democratic muscles. Just as Republicans are using the institutions to damage democracy, Biden and Democrats are targeting new laws that they believe would preserve it.
Biden tasked Vice President Kamala Harris with leading an effort to protect the right to vote. “This sacred right is under assault with incredible intensity like I’ve never seen … with an intensity of aggressiveness we’ve not seen in a long, long time,” Biden said in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The President was marking the 100th anniversary of a massacre of Black Americans, a scar on US history that he implicitly placed in the wider struggle of generations to perfect US democracy.
But time is short to reverse democratic rollbacks by Republicans that are already causing fears that GOP officials could overturn future elections if their candidates are rejected in a majority vote. Trump tried to do exactly this with his unsuccessful pressure on local officials to steal the 2020 election in Georgia. The GOP capture of the House in 2022 midterm elections could make such a stolen election scenario a real threat in 2024.
“By the time we get to the 2024 election, my fear is that election will be sent to the House of Representatives to decide if there are disputed electors,” Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard professor and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die,” told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead.”
“You could very well imagine a situation where the 2020 and the 2021 January crisis was a dress rehearsal for what’s to come in 2024.”
Tough path for new laws
As Democrats try to prevent that happening, the Senate will shortly consider sweeping voting rights laws designed to establish national standards on issues like early voting, and to restore protections for Black voters removed by the Supreme Court and GOP legislators.
A preview of that battle in Washington is currently playing out around the nation in the country’s statehouses, most recently in Texas.
Democratic state lawmakers in the Lone Star State walked out of their chamber over the weekend to deprive their Republican colleagues of a quorum needed to pass a restrictive voting bill built on Trump’s Big Lie of election fraud.
But Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, is vowing to call lawmakers back in a special session to pass the legislation and threatening to halt their pay over the walkout. He collected his reward on Tuesday with a reelection endorsement from the former President.
The two voting rights bills in the US Senate face an unpromising future, since Republicans are vowing to halt what they are branding a Democratic power grab. Several Democratic senators, including West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, would have to drop their firm opposition to abolishing or amending supermajority filibuster rules for the bills to pass.
For the second time in a week Tuesday, Biden — who preaches national unity and bipartisanship and has treated Manchin with kid gloves — flashed irritation about the limitations of deadlocked Washington politics. Last week he held up a list of GOP senators who voted against his Covid-19 rescue law but claimed credit for some of its provisions among their constituents. In Tulsa, the President aimed an apparent swipe at Sinema and Manchin.
“I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’ Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends,” he said.
‘A hell of a lot of work’
It is not clear, given these apparently cemented political realities, exactly how Harris can turn back the tide of challenges to democracy. She could bring more visibility to the cause and perhaps help to organize popular opposition to restrictive voting bills. And she could be a powerful galvanizing force for Democratic turnout in 2022 that could make an end run around some new laws.
But the entrenched reality of Republican power in many states and the obstructive mechanism of the Senate makes progress difficult. Harris may be able to test whether there is scope for a reworking of bills like the For the People Act to attract the support of more lawmakers. But there is concern even among some Democrats that the legislation is too broad, including as it relates to campaign finance regulations. It is highly unlikely she can persuade Republicans to vote for a measure that would reverse many state-level efforts to fortify their chances against demographic changes that threaten to consign White, conservative, religious Americans to permanent minority status.
In a statement sent first to CNN, Harris said she would “work with voting rights organizations, community organizations, and the private sector to help strengthen and uplift efforts on voting rights nationwide. And we will also work with members of Congress to help advance these bills.”
A second bill — The John Lewis Voting Rights Act, also passed by the House of Representatives — is awaiting Senate action. The measure would restore a requirement for states with a record of racial discrimination in elections to submit changes to electoral laws to the federal government for review. The protections were gutted by a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that opened the way for a raft of current efforts to prejudice the rights of minority voters.
A troubling coup allusion
While the GOP seeks to tilt elections, some of its members are pressing ahead with a whitewash of the 2020 contest.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, adding to the growing blanket of denial around Trump’s Capitol insurrection on January 6, says he’s conducting his own investigation to create an “accurate historical record” after voting against a bipartisan, independent probe into the outrage that would have done just that.
The Republican filibuster blockade against the commission was a transparent attempt to protect Trump from further damaging revelations, after the ex-President all but ordered GOP leaders in the Senate and House to oppose it.
But the attempt to pervert American democratic freedoms is not limited to elected Republicans. Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn indicated over the weekend the US needed a coup like the one in Myanmar.
The Southeast Asian nation has been ruled by a paranoid and brutal military junta for much of the last 60 years. In its most recent coup, it moved to thwart a tentative path towards full democracy and the military has opened fire on hundreds of peaceful protesters and detained many more in inhumane prisons where torture is rife.
Flynn later tried to walk back his comments, but the lack of any condemnation by senior Republican figures of his actions reflects a party wherein extremism is tolerated and therefore grows.
Asked how worried he was about American democracy on a scale of 1-to-10, Ziblatt replied, “Eight,” and pointed out that Trump had never been supported by a majority of Americans. But he also explained to Tapper why the current raft of anti-democratic actions in US institutions by Republicans was so concerning.
“As long as the majority can speak, democracy is safe,” Ziblatt said.
“I think the thing we have to worry about is that the institutions are being manipulated in a way to try to create a much more uneven playing field and that would be very dangerous.”
