View from above: Aerial video shows Fort Myers Beach scars six months after Ian
Mark H. Bickel and Ricardo Rolón, F. M. News-Press March 29, 2023
The News-Press has provided special coverage for the six-month anniversary of Hurricane Ian. The Category 4 storm hit Southwest Florida on Sept. 28, 2022, leaving behind catostrophic damage and killing more than 160 people.
For a different perspective, Ric Rolon, a visuals journalist for The News-Press, piloted a drone that flew high above the beach recently and captured what things are lookings. While ongoing recovery efforts continue, the view remains one of a location that was pounded unmercifully by Hurricane Ian’s storm surge and winds.
This perspective is a unique layer to the coverage we have been providing and will continue to provide as Southwest Florida makes strides for a full recovery.
You can check out our coverage of the six-month anniversary of Hurricane Ian HERE.
See Stunning Photos of How Climate Change Is Altering Our World
Molly Taft – March 27, 2023
Photo: Paolo Patrizi
Beautiful and troubling photographs of how the world is changing and heating up are part of a competition to pressure one of the world’s leading camera companies to drop its controversial views on climate.
Business accountability watchdog Action Speaks Louder launched the “Cameras Don’t Lie” competition in February in order to pressure photography giant Canon to distance itself from the climate denial the group says is being perpetuated at a nonprofit Canon supports.
“Canon has two faces; while branding itself as an environmentally-friendly and socially responsible company, it has created a think tank, the Canon Institute for Global Studies (CIGS), which is a platform for climate denial,” the campaign’s website reads.
The Canon Institute for Global Studies was founded by Canon in 2008 “with the aim of contributing to the development of Japan and the rest of the world,” according to a company press release. As the Guardian reported last year, a fellow at the Institute, Taishi Sugiyama, has written multiple blog posts for the Institute that question the science behind climate change and endorse content and theories from prominent denier-led groups and institutions. A report released by a think tank last year also found that Canon has significantly lower climate ambitions than competitors like Nikon, Sony, and Panasonic, and recently lowered its emissions reductions targets.
Earther reached out to the Canon Institute as well as Canon for comment but did not hear back by time of publication. Multiple articles mentioned in the Guardian piece from Sugiyama, including one article calling Thunberg a communist as well as a description of a children’s book he wrote that encourages kids to “investigate the effects of global warming based on facts,” remain live on the site.
“The statements referred to by Action Speaks Louder are those published by Mr. Sugiyama, who is affiliated with CIGS. CIGS operates independently and is unrelated to the business activities of Canon. The research and statements published by Mr. Sugiyama are solely his own,” the company told PetaPixel early last month. “Therefore, Canon is not in a position to officially respond to inquiries from Action Speaks Louder. Global environmental issues are one of Canon’s management core pillars, and Canon remains committed to contributing, through a variety of means, to the realization of a net-zero CO2 emissions society.”
The finalists here were selected from more than 180 entries from 30 countries. The winning image, “Vanishing Island of Dhal Chor Bangladesh” by photographer Paolo Patrizi, shown above, was on display in Times Square in New York City in March, ahead of Canon’s shareholder meeting.
Click through to see the winning photograph and other finalists in the campaign.
Vanishing Island of Dhal Chor, Bangladesh
Photo: Paolo Patrizi
“Rapid erosion and rising sea levels are increasingly threatening the existence of islands off the coast of Bangladesh. Dhal Chor, Monpura and Bhola are some of many islands on the bay of Bengal affected by increasingly rapid erosion and some of the fastest recorded sea-level rises in the world,” Patrizi said of his photo. “These ‘vanishing islands’ are shrinking dramatically.”
Hatonuevo mining complex, Colombia
Photo: César David Martínez
Martínez told the campaign: “The biggest open pit mine in Colombia and one of the biggest in the world, shows the deep impact that the extraction of one of the worst polluter and greenhouse gases causes in nature and environment: The coal.”
Amami Oshima Island, Japan
Photo: Hisayuki Tsuchiya
Tsuchiya described his photograph: “The breeding and calving of humpback whales are gradually moving northward due to global warming. Microplastics are also increasing, and the ecosystem of whales is changing.”
Lake Abashiri, Hokkaido, Japan
Photo: Kanade Endo
“While traveling alone in Hokkaido, I noticed a strong smell of decay on the shore of Lake Abashiri. The source of the smell was diatoms that had grown so abnormally that they filled the sand of the lakeside and the rotting corpses of salmon,” Endo said.
Presqu’ile Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada
Photo: Katherine Cheng
Cheng said of her photo: “On the first day of 2023, the Presqu’ile Provincial Park and its coastal trails were flooded with water. Typically on January 1, the ground and nearby lake would be covered in ice and snow in Ontario. However, record-high temperatures have been broken across the province this year, leaving many trails, river ice rinks and ski hills closed.”
Mt. Zao, on the border of Yamagata and Miyagi Prefectures, Japan
Photo: Kazuaki Koseki
“On a clear night at the end of May, when the snow had melted from the trees, I looked up wistfully at the withered ice and the starry sky, and continued to gaze at these trees, clasping my hands and praying,” Koseki said. “Global warming and climate change are believed to be one of the reasons for the death of these trees. Other possible reasons include the impact of tourism development and attraction of tourism.”
Yosemite National Park, California, USA
Photo: Marcin Zajac
“I came to Yosemite to photograph something completely different and when I arrived to the park it was covered in smoke,” Zajac told the campaign. “I considered going back home to avoid camping in smoke, but eventually I stayed around. When at night the smoke cleared for a bit it was surreal to see the fire burning in the valley. The thick smoke didn’t seem to discourage climbers though – if you look carefully you can see lights from their headlamps as they climb up El Capitan.”
Ishigaki Island, Okinawa, Japan
Photo: Marie Abe
“In the summer of 2022, rising sea temperatures caused the coral reefs around Ishigaki Island to almost completely die after large-scale bleaching,” Abe said. “This is the appearance of the bleached coral with dazzling pastel colours that will be attractive for a little while before it decays.”
San Francisco, California, USA
Photo: Patrick Perkins
Perkins said of his photo: “The day before I took this photo, there had been severe fires all up and down the coast of California, Oregon and Washington. My sister’s house had burned down, and my father’s house had been threatened. My father told me that they had woke up at 2am to fight the fire from spreading onto their land, and my sister had drove home the next day to find her house burned down in a separate fire. The day after I heard that, the sky in San Francisco where I live turned orange from all the smoke. I went out with my camera to try to document what felt like a biblical event. This shot won Unsplash’s photo of the year in 2020.”
Kolkata, India
Photo: Satyaki Acharya
“A waterbody in Kolkata, India has dried up due to the intense heat event before the summer season has set in properly,” Acharya said. “The million footprints are proof of the struggle people undertake everyday for some water.”
Nyaung Oo Township, Mandalay Region, Myanmar
Photo: Wai Maung
“This photo shows the local people in central Myanmar were combating climate change by forest restoration and rehabilitation (i.e., planting trees in a barren land near their village),” Maung said of his photo. “Before planting, rectangular pits (trenches) were dug for capturing and storing sufficient rainwater. Cow dung & bio fertilizers were put inside the pits. The purpose of tree planting is to restore the watershed area and to create a fuel wood supply plantation. For survival and subsistence, planting trees is one of the local strategies to cope with harsh climatic and edaphic conditions.”
Florida’s Latest Tourism Problem Is Twice the Width of the United States
Jena Greene – March 27, 2023
The dreaded return of an invasive species could ruin beach-going up and down the coast.
Between hurricane season, rising water levels, ongoing feuds between Disney and the local government, and crazed spring breakers, Florida already has enough to worry about.
The last thing the state wants is a giant blob of seaweed headed directly for a coastal impact on its pristine sunny beaches — but it’s looking like that’s what it’s going to get.
Pedro Portal/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty
What is Sargassum Seaweed?
Buoyant brown seaweed, or The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt as it’s formally known, is something many Floridians have come to know. It’s an invasive species that’s something of a grim reaper for sea life; it kills some marine animals and destroys coral reefs in its path.
Sargassum is a brown, rubbery seaweed that releases a foul odor once it washes up on the beach and decays in the sunlight. In the ocean, the seaweed tends to bind up and reproduce, creating big, blobby problems for boaters and animals. It’s also one of the few marine species that replicates (and therefore, gets bigger) while on the water’s surface.
Once it’s washed up, it can take days or even weeks to remove the stuff. Since it smells sulphuric and makes beaches difficult to enjoy, some hotels even see decreased foot traffic while it’s around.
How Big Is the Seaweed Blob Heading for the U.S.?
Sargassum regularly washes up on coastal North and central America, particularly around Florida, Mexico and the Caribbean. But this year’s Sargassum is massive at 5,000 miles (8,000 km) long, and stretches between West Africa and the Gulf of Mexico. That’s nearly twice as wide as the U.S.
“What is unusual this year compared to previous years is it started early,” University of South Florida oceanography professor Chuanmin Hu said. “The algae generally blooms in the spring and summer, but ‘this year, in the winter, we already have a lot.'”
Experts say it’s already started showing up on Key West, FL. There’s already an estimated 10 million metric tons of the seaweed floating around in the middle of the ocean and it’s likely to get bigger before it washes up.
Sargassum Can Affect Travel and Tourism
It’s no surprise that many hotels view giant seaweed blobs as problematic for tourism, but there are several measures some can take to mitigate its impact.
“Keeping sargassum at bay from a beach where it’s determined to wash ashore is like fighting a rising tide,” Afar reports. “Apart from removing what washes ashore as it arrives, [USF professor Brian] Barnes says a hotel might consider installing a floating boom offshore (usually made of PVC and deployed parallel to the shoreline) with the goal of preventing sargassum from coming ashore. But again, it represents a small measure against a monumental task.”
Luckily, mild to moderate exposure to Sargassum doesn’t a major risk to human health, and some animals, including sea turtles, even dine on the stuff.
Kerry: Americans don’t need to have ‘lower quality of life’ to fight climate change
Ben Adler, Senior Editor – March 24, 2023
Americans do not have to compromise on their quality of life in order to help prevent catastrophic climate change, special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry told Yahoo News.
When asked about the recent backlash regarding proposals to restrict the use of private jets or gas stoves, Kerry argued that no such changes are necessary in order to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“When you say ‘change your lifestyle,’ people feel, ‘Oh, you’re challenging me to have a lower quality of life,’” the former secretary of state and United States senator said in a Friday interview at Yahoo News’ New York City offices. “No, we don’t have to have a lower quality of life.”
Climate czar John Kerry. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Ethan Hill for Yahoo News)
Even while addressing climate change, Kerry maintained, Americans will still be able to enjoy the comforts of modern life as long as they choose lower-emission alternatives as a part of their lifestyle.
“Do you have to change some of the choices you make in your life? Yeah, I have now a solar field outside the house that’s feeding the house,” Kerry said. “I drive an electric car now. I didn’t do that five years ago. And when I got in the electric car, I said, ‘Why did I wait so long?’ It’s a fabulous drive. So I think that, yes, we have to make different decisions, but they do not have to — and shouldn’t, absolutely shouldn’t — reduce the quality of life of our citizens.”
Although home solar panels and electric vehicles have long been unaffordable to many Americans, the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by President Biden last year, includes subsidies for families making less than $150,000 to buy EVs, solar panels and other low-emissions technology.
But even with the passage of Biden’s new climate law, the U.S. is projected to fall short of the president’s pledge to cut emissions by 50% by 2030. Kerry acknowledged that current policies are insufficient to achieve that goal and said new initiatives are needed to speed up the switch to clean energy.
“Despite all the efforts, we’re not at the pace we need to be to meet the goals we’ve set,” Kerry conceded. “So we have to pick up the scale, pick up the efforts of transition.
“Frankly, nobody should fear this,” he added. “It’s not a challenge to our quality of life. There are great jobs in this transition. Last year, the year before, the fastest-growing job in America was wind turbine technician and the third-fastest-growing job was solar panel installer.”
Kerry has been accused of hypocrisy by conservative media outlets such as Fox News for the fact that, until last summer, his wife’s family owned a plane through a charter-flight company. Studies have shown that private jets cause five to 14 times the amount of greenhouse gas emissions per passenger than commercial flights. Kerry noted that he doesn’t use a private jet to travel the world meeting with other governments to work on climate change agreements.
“I didn’t fly private while I was in this job,” Kerry said. “I’ve had one, maybe two private flights, which were military flights in order to get to China during COVID, where we were forced into that, but I fly commercially.” (A spokesperson has previously stated that Kerry isn’t an owner of the company that had the airplane.)
Carbon offset programs have come under increasing scrutiny, however, with critics accusing them of overestimating their environmental benefits.
Kerry went on to say that the aviation sector will ultimately see its emissions reduced through the substitution of biofuels, which are made from feedstocks like corn and manure, for traditional jet fuel.
“We’re already moving on sustainable aviation fuel,” Kerry said. “Boeing and United and others have joined in a pledge. Now 5% of the fuel they’re going to use is going to be sustainable aviation fuel — even though it’s far more expensive than other fuel available. … But we have to be thoughtful about [the fact that] we’re not going to suddenly wipe out every aircraft in the world and not fly.”
Similarly, Kerry suggested that gas stoves and home heating units won’t necessarily all have to be replaced with electric models, if their manufacturers can find a way of eliminating their emissions. “That’s the challenge for the industry, to capture their emissions,” the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee said.
Kerry, 79, is now a grandfather and has been in public service for the last four decades. Asked what the planet will look like when his young grandchildren are his age, he said the answer is up to the older generations.
“It depends entirely on the decisions their parents and grandparents make today,” he said. “We have it in our hands to guarantee them a healthy and strong future. We also — by virtue of indifference, arrogance, inattention — have it in our capacity also to really foul the planet beyond recognition.”
He also urged young people who will be most impacted by climate change to try to shape the future they will live in.
“Get involved,” Kerry said. “We need you desperately. Young people have, historically, in our country … been the agents of change. … It was kids in college who went down South and helped to break the back of Jim Crow.”
“I think that we need young people again to make sure they’re talking to their parents, their grandparents, and going out and acting on their beliefs,” he added.
Do Anti-ESG States Know They’re Facing Some of the Worst Climate Change Hazards?
By The Daily Upside – March 24, 2023
Unless the data are dead wrong, it is increasingly clear that many of the U.S. states facing some of the greatest climate change hazards appear to be the ones most virulently opposed to environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies.
The data also show something else that we don’t like to talk about: Americans are already dying due to climate change and have been since around 2005. U.S. cities from coast to coast are experiencing fatalities in the double digits yearly, especially south of the Mason-Dixon line, according to an in-depth project surveying more than 24,000 regions of the world, led by the United Nations Development Program and New York-based Rhodium Group, a provider of independent research, data and analytics tackling mission-critical global topics.
In Texas, the fatality rate due to climate change – for instance, from heat stroke or other underlying causes – is estimated to be 14 people a year per 100,000 of the population in both Dallas and Austin. Those numbers will rise to 38 and 39, respectively, by 2040, and leap to 130 and 131 people a year, respectively, by 2080, according to the data.
The situation in Phoenix is even more dire, with an annual fatality rate of 17 people per 100,000 of the population, climbing to 46 by 2040 and 148 people a year by 2080. In Atlanta, the fatality rate is estimated to be around 10 people a year per 100,000, with that number at 29 by 2040 and shooting to 100 people by 2080.
“The mortality impact is some of the most striking of the data,” says Hannah Hess, associate director at Rhodium, who worked on the project. “When you look at the year 2040, it can seem really far out and distant in the future, but the people most affected by the heat are 65 and older – those are people in their 40s today who will be impacted.”
By the same token, those in their 20s and 30s will be confronting even higher temperatures, and those who are currently in their teens or younger will be forced to contend with some of the most extreme climate challenges of anyone alive.
This week, President Biden cast his first veto since taking office, rejecting a bill that would have scuttled a Labor Department rule he put in place allowing money managers to account for climate change when making investment decisions for their clients’ retirement savings. The Biden rule supplanted a Trump-era rule that sought to impede the consideration of ESG principles in investing, “even in cases where it is in the financial interest of plans to take such considerations into account.”
In issuing the veto, Biden blasted “MAGA House Republicans” and others for risking Americans’ retirement plan savings by making it illegal to weigh ESG principles. “Your plan manager should be able to protect your hard-earned savings, whether Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene likes it or not,” he said, noting strong opposition from the Republican congresswoman from Georgia.
Two Democrats also backed the bill. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who charged that Biden’s veto was “absolutely infuriating” and denounced the administration’s “radical” and “progressive agenda,” and Jon Tester of Montana, who voted alongside the Senate’s Republicans to overturn the Biden rule.
Both Georgia and West Virginia are forecast to sustain pronounced effects from climate change relative to northern states, like Montana.
The ESG fight, not surprisingly, is focused on money – primarily, how resources will be marshaled or redirected in anticipation of future shifts that are expected to devastate real estate, housing and jobs markets. “Without concerted and urgent action, climate change will exacerbate inequalities and widen gaps in human development,” the UNDP projected at the end of last year.
A smattering of top money managers and private equity firms have begun to prepare for the transition, touting pro-ESG investing principles that aim to capture a profit. But they have also warned adopting these strategies poses heightened financial and reputational risks with the growing anti-ESG backlash.
The world’s biggest private-equity firm, Blackstone, disclosed in a recent filing that pushback from states across the country over so-called “boycotts” of investments in the fossil fuel industry could affect the company’s fundraising and revenue and will be perceived negatively by some stakeholders. Others signaling similar headwinds include KKR & Co., State Street, Carlyle Group, T. Rowe Price, TPG Inc., Ares Private Equity Group, Raymond James, and BlackRock.
While partisanship seems to be ruling the debate, it’s worth looking closely at what is forecast for some of the states that are most assiduously pursuing anti-ESG legislation, many of which are expected to experience some of the most serious fallout of climate change. Among them are Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Idaho, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, South Carolina and Florida.
Over the past few years, these states have sought to introduce or pass legislation barring companies from discriminating against investing in fossil fuel developers or energy companies contributing to climate change. Those succeeding in passing legislation against so-called “woke capitalism” include Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Idaho, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, South Carolina and Florida.
Other states that have tried or are still trying to pass anti-ESG legislation include North Dakota, South Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Arkansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a Denver nonpartisan research organization. Meanwhile, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Florida have more anti-ESG legislation pending, in addition to what they’ve already enacted, even though all of them are now dealing with fatalities from climate change.
Hess says research shows that some states’ attitudes may change on climate change as “those places start to feel the impact,” but, until then, states suffering the ongoing fatalities of climate change while fighting to ban ESG-friendly policies, sustainability practices and “social credit scores” to protect investments in fossil fuels is “an odd reality.”
Worth noting are the states that have pursued anti-ESG legislation, but will not feel the impact of climate change as strongly as some of the states mentioned above. They are Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Alaska.
The one state that will be hard hit by climate change but is working to bolster pro-ESG initiatives – and block any attempts to stop it from doing so – is California. According to the UNDP-Rhodium data, the state’s cities are already sustaining some of the highest annual fatality rates in the country due to climate change. At present, the death toll is estimated to be around a dozen people per 100,000 of the population in San Francisco and Sacramento, but is seen rising to 30 and 33, respectively, by 2040, and 104 and 113 people a year, respectively, by 2080.
Other cities that are being impacted by climate change include Los Angeles, Houston, San Antonio, Las Vegas, Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, Miami, Virginia Beach, Raleigh, Charlotte and Washington, DC, according to the data.
Interestingly, the data show a handful of states will see some benefits from climate change, at least in theory. Rising temperatures likely will contribute to fewer mortality rates in cooler cities such as Seattle, Portland, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Pittsburg, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. These benefits stem from the fact that, as temperatures rise, annual fatality rates resulting from cold weather will ease, Hess says.
Even with fewer fatalities in some regions, by the end of the century, the effects of climate change will eventually overtake much of the U.S., whether through rising temperatures, changes in precipitation, droughts, serious weather patterns, or what is expected to be an influx of displaced populations – also known as “climate refugees” – who will need to migrate to safer locations to survive. That means anyone living in safe zones will find their regions more and more crowded.
“Income will matter a lot in how people will be able to adapt and respond to the impact of climate,” Hess says.
Strawberry fields in Pajaro, Calif. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
A spate of heavy rains in California that have interfered with the strawberry harvest are having a negative economic impact on farmworkers and may soon hit consumers in the wallet too.
Since December, the state has been battered by unusually heavy snows and rains, and the effects of the extreme weather — which scientists say has been exacerbated by climate change — are hurting California’s key agricultural regions.
Tricia Stever Blattler, executive director of the Tulare County Farm Bureau in the San Joaquin Valley, told ABC News on Wednesday that the state’s Central Valley is dealing with a “catastrophic level of water.”
Flooded strawberry fields damaged beyond repair in Ventura, Calif. (Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
“There’s a lot of cropland underwater right now,” Stever Blattler said. “I can’t even begin to tell you the numbers — north of 50,000 acres. Maybe closer to 75,000, 100,000.”
Acreage for growing crops including tomatoes, onions, garlic and cotton “will be diminished for a while,” she said.
On Wednesday, the Community Alliance With Family Farmers told KCRA, a TV station in Sacramento, that hundreds of thousands of acres of California farms have been affected by the latest deluge, which hit the state earlier this week.
“The area some call ‘America’s salad bowl’ more resembles a soup bowl,” a reporter on Fox Weather quipped on Sunday, in reference to inundated portions of California’s Central Valley and coast. The state grows about half of all the fruits and vegetables produced in the United States, including 91% of U.S. strawberries, according to the Department of Agriculture.
“For the farms that were flooded, this catastrophe hit at the worst possible time,” California Strawberry Commission president Rick Tomlinson said in a statement. “Farmers had borrowed money to prepare the fields and were weeks away from beginning to harvest.”
Monterey County Farm Bureau executive director Norm Groot told Fox Weather that the latest round of flooding will likely cause even more damage than the estimated $330 million crop losses from the flooding that occurred in January.
Farmworkers wear protective gear while picking strawberries in a field in Oxnard. (Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
California farmworkers are also feeling the effects. Last week, more than 8,000 residents in Pajaro were forced to flee when a levee on the nearby Pajaro River broke. The community is composed largely of Latino farmworkers, and many saw their homes destroyed.
Last week, agricultural experts told the Associated Press that roughly one-fifth of strawberry farms in Watsonville and Salinas, areas near Pajaro, had been flooded. “When the water recedes, what does the field look like — if it is even a field anymore?” said Jeff Cardinale, a spokesperson for the California Strawberry Commission. “It could just be a muddy mess where there is nothing left.”
Cardinale told Bloomberg News that it’s too soon to know how much strawberry prices will be affected, but the outlet reported that they “almost are certain to rise.”
“There’s going to be an impact on national supply,” Nick Wishnatzki of Wish Farms, a berry grower that has farms all over the Americas, told Bloomberg.
Pajaro and its neighbors are just the latest in a series of California towns that were flooded this winter. In January, Fidencio Velasquez, a supervisor at Santa Clara Farms in Ventura County, told the Los Angeles Times that flooding had cost the farm upwards of $900,000 in damage to crops and equipment, and that 150 of its employees would be furloughed for weeks.
A worker at American Berry Farm in Ventura surveys the damage after a recent flood destroyed strawberry fields there. (Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Thousands of residents of Planada, an agricultural community an hour west of Yosemite National Park, saw their homes and cars laid to waste in January by a series of dramatic rainfall events. Now they must rebuild at a time when flooded fields cannot be harvested, crops are rotting and the workers have no income.
“The very workers who put food on our table are getting hot meals from the Salvation Army,” Antonio De Loera-Brust, a spokesperson for the United Farm Workers of America, told the New York Times in late February. “Whether California is on fire or underwater, the farmworkers are always losing.”
Wildfires and floods are both becoming more severe because of climate change. As UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain recently explained to Yahoo News, warmer temperatures are causing more evaporation, resulting in more moisture in the Earth’s atmosphere. But climate change is also increasing the likelihood of droughts.
Intense heat waves have led to worse wildfire seasons throughout the West in recent years. Smoke from those fires can destroy crops — ruining the taste of grapes, for example. Inhalation of wildfire smoke is also harmful to farmworkers, and working in extreme heat is a growing health hazard.
“We have compounding and cascading disasters from extreme storms, flooding, wildfires, heat waves and drought that are all impacting farmworkers,” Michael Méndez, assistant professor of environmental planning and policy at the University of California, Irvine, told the Los Angeles Times.
Said the United Nations chief in reaction to the report: “Our world needs climate action on all fronts — everything, everywhere, all at once.” The UN chief is calling on every country and every sector to massively fast-track efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
It’s mid-March and the Great Lakes are virtually ice-free. That’s a problem.
Caitlin Looby, Akron Beacon Journal – March 19, 2023
Trumpeter swans find some open water along the Lake Erie shore last month. The ice in Ottawa County has melted since then as temperatures have been unseasonably warm.
It’s the middle of March and the Great Lakes are virtually ice-free.
Ice has been far below average this year, with only 7% of the lakes covered as of last Monday — and no ice at all on Lake Erie. Lake Erie’s average ice coverage for this time of year is 40%, based on measurements over the past half-century. The lake typically freezes over the quickest and has the most ice cover because it’s the shallowest of the five Great Lakes.
But communities along Ohio’s north coast, including Cleveland, Sandusky and Port Clinton, have seen considerably less ice forming on Lake Erie in recent years.
No ice isn’t a good thing for the lakes’ ecosystem. It can even stir up dangerous waves and lake-effect snowstorms.
So, what happens when the lakes are ice-free? What does it mean for the lakes’ food web? Is climate change to blame?
Little ice cover can be disastrous
This winter has already proved how dangerous lake-effect snow can be.
At the end of November, more than 6 feet of snow fell on Buffalo, New York, which sits on the shores of Lake Erie. A few weeks later on Dec. 23, more than 4 feet of snow covered the city and surrounding areas once again. The storm resulted in 44 deaths in Erie and Niagara counties, which sit on Lakes Erie and Ontario, respectively.
Cleveland and Sandusky reside on the shores of Lake Erie as well. The 2022 storm that swept the region on Dec. 23 dropped relatively little snow, only about 2-4 inches, but created dangerous conditions nonetheless.
In some places in Northeast Ohio, temperatures dropped from nearly 40 degrees to zero and below. Wind chills fueled by hurricane-force winds dragged the temperature even lower to minus 30 or even 35 below zero. This storm was the first time in almost a decade that the Cleveland Weather Forecast Office issued a blizzard warning.
A 46-vehicle pileup killed four people injured many others on the Ohio Turnpike during a winter storm with whiteout conditions Dec. 23.
During stormy winter months, ice cover tempers waves. When there is low ice cover, waves can be much larger, leading to lakeshore flooding and erosion. That happened in January 2020 along Lake Michigan’s southwestern shoreline. Record high lake levels mixed with winds whipped up 15-foot waves that flooded shorelines, leading Gov. Tony Evers to declare a state of emergency for Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha counties.
And while less ice may seem like a good thing for the lakes’ shipping industry, those waves can create dangerous conditions.
The Great Lakes are losing ice with climate change
The Great Lakes have been losing ice for the past five decades, a trend that scientists say will likely continue.
Of the last 25 years, 64% had below-average ice, said Michael Notaro, the director of the Center on Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The steepest declines have been in the north, including Lake Superior, northern Lake Michigan and Huron, and in nearshore areas.
But this also comes with a lot of ups and downs, largely because warming is causing the jet stream to “meander,” said Ayumi Fujisaki Manome, a scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research at the University of Michigan who models ice cover and hazardous weather across the lakes.
There is a lot of year-to-year variability with ice cover spiking in years like 2014, 2015 and 2019 where the lakes were almost completely iced over.
Ice fishermen stay close to shore off of Bay Shore Park in New Franken, Wisconsin, in January, which saw relatively little ice cover on the Great Lakes.
No ice makes waves in the lakes’ ecosystems
A downturn in ice coverage due to climate change will likely have cascading effects on the lakes’ ecosystems.
Lake whitefish, a mainstay in the lakes’ fishing industry and an important food source for other fish like walleye, are one of the many Great Lakes fish that will be affected, said Ed Rutherford, a fishery biologist who also works at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.
Lake whitefish spawn in the fall in nearshore areas, leaving the eggs to incubate over the winter months. When ice isn’t there, strong winds and waves can stir up the sediment, reducing the number of fish that are hatched in the spring, Rutherford said.
Whitefish haul from the Great Lakes.
Walleye and yellow perch also need extended winters, he said. If they don’t get enough time to overwinter in cold water, their eggs will be a lot smaller, making it harder for them to survive.
Declining ice cover on the lakes is also delaying the southward migration of dabbling ducks, a group of ducks that include mallards, out of the Great Lakes in the fall and winter, Notaro said. And if the ducks spend more time in the region it will increase the foraging pressure on inland wetlands.
Warming lakes and a loss of ice cover over time also will be coupled with more extreme rainfall, likely inciting more harmful algae blooms, said Notaro. These blooms largely form from agricultural runoff, creating thick, green mats on the lake surface that can be toxic to humans and pets.
In this 2017 photo, a catfish appears on the shoreline in the algae-filled waters of Lake Erie in Toledo.
Lakes Erie and Michigan are plagued with these blooms every summer. And now, blooms cropping up in Lake Superior for the first time are raising alarm.
“Even deep, cold Lake Superior has been experiencing significant algae blooms since 2018, which is quite atypical,” Notaro said.
There is still a big question mark on the extent of the changes that will happen to the lakes’ ecosystem and food web as ice cover continues to decline. That’s because scientists can’t get out and sample the lakes in the harsh winter months.
“Unless we can keep climate change in check … it will have changes that we anticipate and others that we don’t know about yet,” Rutherford said.
Caitlin Looby is a Report for America corps member who writes about the environment and the Great Lakes. Beacon Journal reporter Derek Kreider contributed to this article.
Trump deregulated railways and banks. He blames Biden for the fallout
David Smith in Washington – March 18, 2023
Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images
When a fiery train derailment took place on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border last month, Donald Trump saw an opportunity. The former US president visited East Palestine, accused Joe Biden of ignoring the community – “Get over here!” – and distributed self-branded water before dropping in at a local McDonald’s.
Then, when the Silicon Valley Bank last week became the second biggest bank to fail in US history, Trump again lost no time in making political capital. He predicted that Biden would go down as “the Herbert Hoover of the modrrn [sic] age” and predicted a worse economic crash than the Great Depression.
Yet it was Trump himself who, as US president, rolled back regulations intended to make railways safer and banks more secure. Critics said his attacks on the Biden administration offered a preview of a disingenuous presidential election campaign to come and, not for the first time in Trump’s career, displayed a shameless double standard.
“Hypocrisy, thy name is Donald Trump and he sets new standards in a whole bunch of regrettable ways,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “For his true believers, they’re going to take Trump’s word for it and, even if they don’t, it doesn’t affect their support of him.”
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on 10 March and of New York’s Signature Bank two days later sent shockwaves through the global banking industry and revived bitter memories of the financial crisis that plunged the US into recession about 15 years ago.
Fearing contagion in the banking sector, the government moved to protect all the banks’ deposits, even those that exceeded the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation $250,000 limit for each individual account. The cost ran into hundreds of billions of dollars.
Trump with crates of Trump water in East Palestine after a train derailed in Ohio. Photograph: Alan Freed/Reuters
The drama reverberated in Washington, where Trump’s criticism was followed by that of Republicans and conservative media, seeking to blame Biden-driven inflation or, improbably, to Silicon Valley Bank’s socially aware “woke” agenda. Opponents saw this as a crude attempt to deflect from the bank’s risky investments in the bond market and more systemic problems in the sector.
The 2008 financial crisis, triggered by reckless lending in the housing market, led to tough bank regulations during Barack Obama’s presidency. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act aimed to ensure that Americans’ money was safe, in part by setting up annual “stress tests” that examine how banks would perform under future economic downturns.
But when Trump won election in 2016, the writing was on the wall. Biden, then outgoing vice-president, warned against efforts to undo banking regulations, telling an audience at Georgetown University: “We can’t go back to the days when financial companies take massive risks with the knowledge that a taxpayer bailout is around the corner when they fail.”
But in 2018, with Trump in the White House, Congress slashed some of those protections. Republicans – and some Democrats – voted to raise the minimum threshold for banks subject to the stress tests: those with less than $250bn in assets were no longer required to take part. Many big lenders, including Silicon Valley Bank, were freed from the tightest regulatory scrutiny.
Sabato commented: “The worst example is the bank situation because that is directly tied to Trump and his administration and changes made in bank regulations in 2018. Yes, some Democrats voted for it, but it was overwhelmingly supported by Republicans and by Trump who heralded it as the real solution to future bank woes.”
The minority of Democrats who supported the 2018 law have denied that it can be directly tied to this month’s bank failures, although Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, was adamant: “Let’s be clear. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank is a direct result of an absurd 2018 bank deregulation bill signed by Donald Trump that I strongly opposed.”
You do need government to regulate finance … but that point cannot be made if you’ve got Donald Trump inventing reality
Larry Jacobs
Sherrod Brown, a Democratic senator for Ohio who introduced bipartisan legislation to improve rail safety protocols, drew a parallel between the banks’ collapse to rail industry deregulation lobbying that contributed to the East Palestine train disaster. “We see aggressive lobbying like this from banks as well,” he said.
Trump repealed several Barack Obama-era US Department of Transportation rules meant to improve rail safety, including one that required high-hazard cargo trains to use electronically controlled pneumatic brake technology by 2023. This rule would not have applied to the Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine – where roughly 5,000 residents had to evacuate for days – as it was not classified as a high-hazard cargo train.
But the debate around the railway accident and bank failures points to a perennial divide between Democrats, who insist that some regulation is vital to a functioning capitalism, and Republicans, who have long claimed to believe in small government. Steve Bannon, an influential far-right podcaster and former White House chief strategist, framed the Trump agenda as “the deconstruction of the administrative state”.
Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist, said: “The Republican party has gotten by for many years on this idea that less is better. However, we’re now learning in this country that, as America continues to mature, in some cases more is better, and more has to be how we get to better. Otherwise the mistakes can spin out of control and cause generations of people long-term damage.”
A Norfolk Southern freight train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, on fire on 4 February 2023. Photograph: Gene J Puskar/AP
Biden called on Congress to allow regulators to impose tougher penalties on the executives of failed banks while Warren and other Democrats introduced legislation to undo the 2018 law and restore the Dodd-Frank regulations. It is likely to meet stiff opposition from the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and even some moderate Democrats.
Biden has also insisted that no taxpayer money will be used to resolve the current crisis, keen to avoid any perception that average Americans are “bailing out” the two banks in a way similar to the unpopular bailouts of the biggest financial firms in 2008.
But Republicans running for the 2024 presidential nomination are already contending that customers will ultimately bear the costs of the government’s actions even if taxpayer funds were not directly used. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, said: “Joe Biden is pretending this isn’t a bailout. It is.”
Another potential 2024 contender, Senator Tim Scott, the top Republican on the Senate banking committee, also criticised what he called a “culture of government intervention”, arguing that it incentivises banks to continue risky behavior if they know federal agencies will ultimately rescue them.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “This is familiar ideological territory. The battle lines between liberalism and a fake conservatism appear to be playing out here. But the tragedy of the situation is that the liberals are right.
It’s not new that the Republicans will deregulate an industry and then it collapses … look at American political and economic history of the last 50 years
Wendy Schiller
“You do need government to regulate finance and, when you don’t, you get mischief making and bank failures but that point cannot be made if you’ve got Donald Trump inventing reality. He’s demonstrated that facts and position taking don’t matter. It’s an extraordinary political strategy but it’s even more devastating to our whole political system and our media that this could be allowed.”
This poses a huge messaging challenge for Democrats, who after the 2008 financial crisis came up against the Tea Party, a populist movement feeding off economic and racial resentments. Long and winding explanations about the negative impacts of Trump era deregulation are a hard sell compared to the former president’s sloganeering in East Palestine.
Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “Once again we see that Trump is taking advantage of the Achilles’ heel of the Democratic party by telling voters that the Democrats like big government because it bails out industries and it never provides a bailout for the little guy.”
Democrats’ efforts to point out that Trump was responsible for deregulation are unlikely to cut through, Schiller added.
“Any time it takes more than 10 seconds to explain something, you’re done in politics. This is why Trump has catchy phrases, sound bytes. He understands that all voters see is that rich people made a bad investment and then more rich people are making sure that their money’s available to them within three days, coming off the heels of all the closures during Covid, lost business, lost income, people struggling, inflation.
“Democrats don’t want to call it a bailout but it is a bailout. The high visibility of this bailout smothers anything else the Democrats are doing for the average voter. It’s a perfect issue for the Republicans. It’s not new that the Republicans will deregulate an industry and then it collapses and the Democrats have to save it. Look at American political and economic history of the last 50 years: this is exactly what happens.”
Arctic sea ice thins in 2 big jumps, and now more vulnerable
Seth Borenstein – March 15, 2023
FILE – The midnight sun shines across sea ice along the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, July 23, 2017. A new study Wednesday, March 15, 2023, says the thickness of sea ice dropped sharply in two sudden events about 15 years ago. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Climate change attacked crucial Arctic sea ice thickness in two sudden big gobbles instead of steady nibbling, a new study says.
A little more than 15 years ago, sea ice quickly lost more than half its thickness, becoming weaker, more prone to melting and less likely to recover, according to the study that emphasizes the importance of two big “regime shifts” that changed the complexion of the Arctic.
Those big bites came in 2005 and 2007. Before then, Arctic sea ice was older and misshapen in a way that made it difficult to move out of the region. That helped the polar area act as the globe’s air conditioner even in warmer summers. But now the ice is thinner, younger and easier to push out of the Arctic, putting that crucial cooling system at more risk, the study’s lead author said.
Before 2007, 19% of the sea ice in the Arctic was at least 13 feet thick (4 meters) — taller than most elephants — but now only about 9.3% of ice is at least that thick. And the age of the ice has dropped by more than a third, from an average of 4.3 years to 2.7 years, according to the study in Wednesday’s journal Nature.
It cited “the long-lasting impact of climate change on the Arctic sea ice.”
“Ice is much more vulnerable than before because it’s thinner, it can easily melt,” said study lead author Hiroshi Sumata, a sea ice scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute. Thicker sea ice is crucial to all sorts of life in the Arctic, he said.
The study shows “how the Arctic sea ice environment has undergone a fundamental shift,” said Walt Meier, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who wasn’t part of the research. “This paper helps explain why the sea ice has not recovered from those big drops.”
Past studies concentrated more on the extent of Arctic sea ice, or how widespread it is, because that’s easily measured by satellites, which don’t observe volume well. But 90% of the sea ice eventually is pushed out of the Arctic through the Fram Strait by Greenland, so Sumata overcame the challenges of measuring from space by focusing his observations on that ground-based choke point.
He found that first ice was getting younger, which made it thinner and more uniform, and easier to push out through the Fram Strait. Thicker ice has all sorts of edges and weird shapes that make it harder to force out of the Arctic because of aerodynamics, but that’s not the case for sleeker, younger ice, Sumata said.
Scientists had known before that sea ice was shrinking in extent and getting thinner, but this “flushing” is key, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who wasn’t part of the study.
“Such flushing episodes have reduced the residence time of ice in the Arctic Ocean by more than a year so there’s less time for it to thicken and it’s the thick ice that’s resistant to melting out,” Serreze said in an email. “But since the Arctic is quickly warming up, we’re probably past the point of hoping the Arctic Ocean can recover.”
What likely happened in 2005 and 2007 were periods with warm, large, ice-free open water in the Arctic that exceeded periods of previous summers, Sumata said. White ice reflects the sun’s rays, but the dark ocean absorbs it and warms up — something called ice albedo feedback. This cycle of warmer water made it harder for ice to form, survive and get thicker, he said.
Once the ocean has accumulated that heat, it can’t go back easily. So in the future more big warmer shifts can happen to make ice thinner and weaker, but don’t count on sudden, healing cooling changes, scientists said.
Sumata and Serreze think those sudden warm jumps will happen soon and are surprised they haven’t quite happened yet. Recent projections predict the Arctic ocean will be ice free in parts of summer in 20 to 30 years.
Sea ice thickness and overall Arctic health is crucial even to areas thousands of miles away that don’t freeze up, Sumata said.
“It will affect the entire Earth because the north and south pole is something like a radiator of the Earth, the air conditioning system of the Earth,” Sumata said. “And the situation we observed indicates the air conditioner is not working well.”
