These parts of California could get a year’s rain in a few days thanks to Hurricane Hilary
Grace Toohey, Hayley Smith, Rong-Gong Lin II – August 18, 2023
Surf roils off Medano Beach at a Los Cabos resort in Baja California on Friday. (Alfredo Estrella / AFP via Getty Images)
Some areas of Southern California and southern Nevada could see a year’s worth of rain in the coming days as Hurricane Hilary arrives.
Historic flooding could hit a wide swath of Southern California and the Las Vegas area, especially in San Bernardino and Inyo counties, with Death Valley and the Morongo Basin expected to see the most major flooding.
Hilary is likely to have weakened to a tropical storm by the time it leaves Mexico and enters California. But officials are sounding the alarm for potential flooding.
Everyone “should prepare for the potential for significant flash flooding. This is not the time to wait to prepare; this forecast is unlikely to improve,” said the National Weather Service in Las Vegas, which also issues forecasts for Death Valley and Morongo Valley.
Some areas could even see as much as a year’s worth of rain in a 24-hour period Sunday — and if not then, over the next few days. “This will not be a constant rainfall, but rather several rounds of moderate/heavy rainfall,” from Friday through Monday, the weather service said.
“Once impacts begin in your areas, they will likely worsen as we head into next week,” forecasters said. Sometimes the rain “could be slowly compounding. Other times, it could be flash flooding. Not much time between rounds of rain for conditions to improve.”
Other desert areas are also expected to receive at least a year’s worth of rain during the storm, officials with the National Weather Service said.
Palm Springs and Yucca Valley both average 4 to 5 inches of rainfall per year, but the forecast shows a deluge of 4 to 7 inches falling between Saturday and Monday, according to Elizabeth Adams, a meteorologist with the weather service in San Diego.
“The amount of moisture we’re getting is just unbelievable,” Adams said. “The rain rates could potentially be really extreme as well — over an inch or 2 inches of rain in an hour will be possible.”
Even higher rainfall totals of 6 to 10 inches are possible along the east-facing desert slopes of the Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego County mountains, Adams said.
She advised residents in the storm’s path to monitor forecast updates and ensure they have multiple methods of receiving warnings, including wireless emergency alerts, weather apps and local TV, radio and news stations.
In Yucca Valley, officials are warning residents to take precautions and avoid unnecessary travel, as access to some local roads may be limited.
“As the ability to travel may be reduced over the next two days, residents are reminded to keep a supply of necessary provisions and medications on hand,” Yucca Valley officials said on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Be sure to bring pets inside. Never use generators, outdoor heating or cooking equipment indoors.”
The National Weather Service office in Phoenix, which issues forecasts for portions of southeastern California, said it’s likely the storm will bring “significant and rare (and potentially destructive) impacts.”
Current models show moisture anomalies that are “off the charts,” the agency wrote in its latest forecast — “and almost unbelievably more extreme than previous iterations. Essentially every standardized field measure is pegged at a climatological extreme for this time of year at multiple time scales.”
The rains expected with Hilary are rare and bring a “life-threatening” risk of flash floods from Baja California to southern Nevada.
A tropical storm watch is in effect across much of southwestern California, from the California-Mexico border into parts of Los Angeles County, something the National Hurricane Center said is a first for this area.
A watch indicates that tropical storm conditions — meaning sustained winds of more than 39 mph — are possible within 48 hours, according to the hurricane center.
‘Life-threatening flash flooding’
While high winds are creating the unusual tropical storm conditions, officials continue to emphasize that rain remains the greatest concern.
“This could [bring] rare and life-threatening flash flooding in the heaviest areas of rainfall. That is especially going to be prevalent Sunday evening through Monday morning,” said Elizabeth Adams, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in San Diego.
A high-risk warning for excessive rainfall was issued for much of inland Southern California — from the San Bernardino Mountains through the Coachella Valley and down into the Anza Borrego Desert — indicating the high probability for flash flooding Sunday and Monday.
The warning was issued for the first time in more than a decade for the low deserts east of the Southern California mountains, which are typically the drier-facing slopes, Adams said.
Rainfall is expected as early as Saturday morning for the Southland’s mountains and deserts, continuing through Monday — with eastern-facing mountains likely to see the most extreme amounts of rain, from 6 to 10 inches, and up to a foot in some isolated areas. Three to 6 inches of rain will be expected across the deserts.
Precipitation will move into the coasts and valleys, including the Inland Empire, likely by late Saturday, Adams said, where 2 to 4 inches will be expected through Monday.
According to the National Weather Service, Big Bear Lake, Julian, Idyllwild, and Mt. Laguna could get up to 7 inches of rain between Saturday and Monday. The Coachella Valley, including Palm Springs, could see up to 5 inches. Hemet, San Bernardino, Hesperia and Victorville could see up to 4 inches.
Coastal areas
High surf (5-9 feet)
Strong winds
Dangerous rip currents
Coastal flooding/beach erosion
Dangerous conditions for south- and southeast-facing harbors
Catalina Island could see hazardous winds and reduced visibility
Deserts and mountains
Intense rainfall in mountains, more than 10 inches in isolated areas
Coachella Valley could see up to 5 inches of rain
Flash flooding possible in some areas
Five to 7 inches of rain possible in Wrightwood, Big Bear and parts of Imperial County
This Network of Regenerative Farmers Is Rethinking Chicken
The team at Tree-Range Farms is pioneering an approach to raising chickens and trees in tandem, storing more carbon and water in the soil while providing an entry point for new and BIPOC farmers often left out of the conventional system.
By Twilight Greenaway – August 16, 2023
Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, the founder of the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance and co-founder of Tree-Range Farms. Together the nonprofit and for-profit business have created an “ecosystem” that includes more than 40 farms and a processing plant in the Upper Midwest. (Photo credit: Leia Marasovich, Farmer’s Footprint)
This article was produced in partnership with Edible Communities; a version of this article will appear in future issues of local Edible magazines.
When you approach the poultry paddocks at Salvatierra Farms outside Northfield, Minnesota, you might not notice how many chickens are hiding among the tall grasses and young hazelnut trees at first. And that’s by design.
On a warm afternoon in June, 1,500 7-week-old hens had come out to mill around—lured by feed and water stations—but many were hard to find.
“There’s an eagle that comes around here,” says Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, the farmer and visionary behind the operation. “It has flown over a few times, and it just keeps going.” Soon, he adds, the trees and other perennials will be tall enough to provide cover for the birds, but the grass will suffice in the meantime.
One of several flocks raised at Organic Compound Farm in Fairibault, Minnesota, which helped pioneer and has been using the Tree-Range system for six years. (Photo courtesy of Wil Crombe/Organic Compound.)
Salvatierra, which was a conventional corn and soy operation until Haslett-Marroquin bought it three years ago, is in the midst of a wholesale transformation. He has planted more than 8,000 hazelnut trees there, created a water catchment pond, begun managing the forest that frames it on two sides, and leveled the land where he plans to build a home for his family.
This summer, he also raised the first flocks of chickens there. As it comes into maturity, Salvatierra stands to become a central hub around which a growing network of farmers, scientists, nonprofits, and funders will rotate—all in the name of regenerative poultry farming.
Regenerative is a complex term with many interpretations. Haslett-Marroquin’s approach combines what he learned growing up in Guatemala—where chickens thrive in multi-story jungles—with a deep understanding of the Midwest’s native ecosystems. Unlike the pasture-based model of poultry production which typically uses mobile barns and is sometimes also referred to as “regenerative,” it involves raising the birds in one spot, alongside trees and other perennial crops as a way to build soil that is rich with organic matter and carbon, capture and store water, and make the land on which it takes place more resilient in the face of the climate crisis.
The birds are fed outdoors, and the placement of the feeders help draw them out of their barns to eat insects and some plants. (Photo courtesy of Wil Crombe/Organic Compound.)
At the core of the effort in Minnesota is Tree-Range Farms, the company Haslett-Marroquin co-founded, and a growing network that includes more than 40 farms in the region. The Regenerative Agriculture Alliance (RAA), the nonprofit he founded and now sits on the board of, also plays a key, ongoing role in developing the infrastructure behind the network and has plans to scale it up to extend across the upper portion of the corn belt.
“Everything that is part of the standard was tried and tested, from breeds to how long you feed them, to the right kind of welfare aspect to consider in the coop construction.”
But the grand vision doesn’t end there. There are also farms using Haslett-Marroquin’s approach in Guatemala, Mexico, and in several Native American communities, including the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. And if its advocates have their way, the core practices and the philosophy behind it could be replicated in many parts of the world in the years to come.
And at a time when Americans eat more than 160 million servings of chicken every day and industrial poultry farming is known for polluting ground water, air, and waterways, as well as causing health issues for people who live nearby, it could be a welcome change.
How the Model Works
Like the chickens hiding in the grass, the sophistication of Haslett-Marroquin’s regenerative poultry system may be hard to spot for the untrained eye.
For years, he collaborated on research and development on his first farm, Finca Marisol, and on a nearby farm called Organic Compound in Faribault, Minnesota, to establish a production standard with very specific parameters.
Each poultry flock or “unit” includes 1,500 chickens, a barn, and 1.5 acres of land divided into two fenced in areas, or paddocks. The birds spend every day outside—where they eat a combination of dry grain, sprouted grain, bugs, and plants—in one paddock, and when the plants there have been sufficiently grazed down, they’re moved to a second one. Farms typically start with one unit, but they can also opt to start with half a unit if land is scarce.
Each flock in the Tree-Range system is made up of 1,500 birds on 1.5 acres of land. Most farmers raise more than one flock. (Photo courtesy of Wil Crombe/Organic Compound.)
“Everything that is part of the standard was tried and tested, from breeds to how long you feed them, to the right kind of welfare aspect to consider in the coop construction,” says Diane Christofore, the current executive director of the RAA, which brought in the funding for the research and development behind the standard. The organization recently launched an online course to train farmers in the practices and philosophy behind the standard; it is also making a number of scholarships available and will release a version in Spanish soon.
In addition to trees, farmers are encouraged to plant other perennials such as grasses, elderberry bushes, and comfrey. And if they grow corn and soybeans on the property, they are invited to diversify their rotations by adding oats for soil health. In eight to 12 weeks, farmers can take the birds to the small-scale processing plant that the RAA runs in Northern Iowa.
If they opt to sell them under the Tree-Range label, storage, distribution, and marketing are all taken care of, as the birds make their way to consumers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region. Soon, Tree-Range plans to expand its reach to add retailers in Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago.
The hope is to provide a relatively easy point of entry for beginning and immigrant farmers looking for a way to start earning capital quickly. With their short lifecycle and relevance across many cultures, chickens allow farmers to get onboard and join the network—or the “ecosystem,” as RAA refers to it—while renting land and/or working other jobs. Once the barn has been built—or adapted from an existing structure—the required labor is concentrated in the mornings and evenings, making it a relatively easy lift for new farmers.
“We’re creating this for the people that don’t have access to the [resources to engage in large-scale agriculture], but you’re also working with people who are still engaged in conventional ag, watching this, and asking, ‘How could I transition?’” says Christofore.
Many of farms raising birds for Tree-Range are run by former immigrants, such as Callejas Farm, where Jose and Erica Callejas, formerly from El Salvador, raise multiple flocks of chickens each year with their daughters. Or Carrillo Brother Farms, where Jesus and Aldo Carrillo—who immigrated from Mexico—raise one flock a year alongside a wide array of fruit and vegetables.
Feed the People Farm Cooperative is another interesting example. There, Cliff Martin has been raising two flocks a year on land that his dad owns as part of a collective with three other young farmers, including Helen Forsythe and Bec Ersek (who also works at the RAA’s business administrator).
They see the farm as part of a larger collective movement and the money they earn from the flocks goes toward maintaining the land, holding trainings and events for other young community organizers in the region. They’re also working on adding a composting processing site, neighbor approval pending. “We simply wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t for the RAA’s infrastructure and support,” Forsythe said during a recent farm visit.
Haslett-Marroquin says there are more interested farmers than the RAA has the bandwidth to support at this point, so he’s confident that the network will continue to grow.
For one, he says, the modular approach to adding flocks to farms makes it relatively simple to replicate. After years of prototyping the system at Finca Marisol, he says everything fell into place very quickly at Salvatierra Farms, where he is starting with three units and plans to add three more in the coming year.
“There was no guesswork,” he says. “This thing happened as if I had done it a million times. And we could take 1,000 acres, 10,000 acres, or 1 million acres, and we’d know exactly what to do. That’s the difference between farm-level thinking and system-level thinking. And at the end, it’s that large scale that makes it truly regenerative, not the farm itself.”
Feed conversion ratio—or the relationship between the feed that goes into the animals and the final product—is a common metric for measuring financial success and environmental impact in meat production. But the RAA’s definition of regenerative turns that equation on its end.
“We are unleashing the original Indigenous intellect that makes us so powerful as human beings.”
The chickens in that system eat more grain than chickens raised solely in a barn because they move around much more. But the farms have an overall smaller footprint, because the added chicken manure boosts the productivity of the hazelnuts and other companion crops, without synthetic fertilizer. On 1.5 acres, mature hazelnut trees will produce around 800 to 1,200 pounds of nuts.
“Once you add up the output of meat, the output of hazelnuts, the large-scale sequestration of carbon,” Haslett-Marroquin says, “you can’t even compare it to a confinement model. It’s not apples to apples.”
At the core, his approach to food production is one that places productivity within a larger context of a balanced living system. It’s about “stewarding the transformation of energy from non-edible forms to edible ones,” and it’s a process that isn’t new, but on the contrary, quite old.
“We are unleashing the original Indigenous intellect that makes us so powerful as human beings. It is the one thing that all capitalistic, extractive, destructive systems hate. That’s why they will go and massacre Indigenous communities at mass scale, because they know that that intellect is so powerful that it can overcome the extractive system. And it can, in the end, save the planet,” he says, adding, “If you restore the people to the land, you can’t exploit them.”
The young farmers at Feed the People Farm, a collective operation that works with Tree-Range. (Photo courtesy of the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance)
The Science
Haslett-Marroquin is confident that the system he has developed works, but he knows that Western scientific research is key to scaling it up.
Beth Fisher, a soil scientists and assistant professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, is part of a team of scientists in Minnesota that started measuring the health of the soil, water, and the emissions released from farms in 2021.
Fisher says she was approached by Haslett-Marroquin, who asked her to gather evidence to add validation to what he had long observed and understood intuitively about the way regenerative practices work on the ground. She was interested in the approach, but it was the visit to Finca Marisol, the first farm where birds and trees had been raised side by side for almost a dozen years, that sealed the deal.
“The soil structure is beautiful—you pull up a scoop and how it holds together on its own, is held together by the ooey gooey stuff that organic critters put into the soil,” she says. “Water infiltrates beautifully. It has a wonderful collection of organic matter.”
Since then, she and the undergraduate students she works with have been gathering samples of soil on a handful of farms in the network, as well as conventional corn and soy farms that neighbor them.
“At Finca Marisol, the comparison farm is considered reduced-till better practice. And it’s night and day; the [water] infiltration is way slower on the reduced till practice, the carbon storage is way less, and that farmer has been doing it for decades, really trying to do better in his practice. And the effect on his soil is negligible,” she says.
“At The Organic Compound, where they’ve raising chickens using regenerative practices for six years, they’re already in better shape than the neighboring conventional farm,” adds Fisher, who is hoping to start publishing some preliminary data soon.
Farmer and Tree-Range Farms co-founder Wil Crombie stands among the mature chestnut trees at the Organic Compound in June 2023. (Photo by Twilight Greenaway)
“We’ll be disseminating the results, both in the academic peer-reviewed literature, but also, I think it’s so important for it to find its way into the context where farmers can hear about it.”
Carrie Jennings, who is research and policy director at the nonprofit Freshwater, and an adjunct professor and researcher at the University of Minnesota, is another scientist engaged in the research. She points to the fact that the Cannon River, which runs through Minnesota and down to the Mississippi River, is one of the bodies of water that is most polluted by agriculture chemicals in the nation.
“The soil structure is beautiful…Water infiltrates beautifully. It has a wonderful collection of organic matter.”
And she has seen strong initial evidence that regenerative poultry system is sending water down into the aquifers below, rather than adding to that pollution. This is rare in Minnesota and other the parts of the corn belt, where the water on millions of acres drain directly to waterways due to the ceramic pipes, or drainage tiles, that were installed below farmland over the last century. The roots of the trees and other perennial plants on the farms in the RAA network, however, often break up and clog the tiles, preventing runoff and sending the water into the aquifer below.
Jennings is closely tracking the funds Minnesota is directing toward regenerative practices. “We want to make sure they’re funding the right practices; we don’t want them throwing away tax money on things that aren’t going to improve water, soil, and climate,” she says.
Jennings also wants to provide hard evidence for farmers looking to change their practices. “Farmers notice that their lives and waters are degrading over generations, and even within a generation. They’re not exactly happy about it, either. They know that they’re spending more than they should on chemicals. So, if someone like Regi[naldo], who is innovative and experimental entrepreneurial, can show that this works then it’s more likely to be adopted.”
She also points to the fact that General Mills has been funding the research for the first two years, as evidence of the potentially influential nature of Haslett-Marroquin’s approach. “They need to make sure [crops] can continue to be grown in this rapidly changing world. It’s important to the companies and the consumers of those products,” she adds.
Today’s food system is complex.
In addition to the research, General Mills is also funding the RAA’s farmer training and the establishment of its demonstration farm. “We have been inspired by the RAA’s thought leadership and continue to learn from the deep and holistic way they approach regenerative agriculture,” said a company representative in a statement to Civil Eats.
RAA collaborated with Oatly, General Mills, and number of other nonprofit and research entities in the region, on a $5 million climate-smart commodities grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) aimed at “support[ing] poultry producers who follow diversified, regenerative, climate-smart grain production methods incorporating small grains such as oats, no-till, and cover crops, integrated agroforestry practices.”
“It’s an opportunity now to start to produce grains within [the regenerative] system, because 70 percent of the cost to farm business is feed,” says Christofore.
Rethinking Processing and Growing the Network
Lack of accessible meat processing is a common barrier to entry for small-scale poultry producers. So, in prototyping a regional network of producers, the RAA—whose express goal is to make regenerative poultry production the norm—has invested in its own processing facility as a separate LLC.
A relatively small building in Northern Iowa—just over an hour south of Northfield—the facility was acquired in late 2021. That first year, the small staff processed 1,000 chickens. In 2022, it processed 50,000, and manager Arnulfo Perrera says he hopes to reach 80,000 to 90,000 birds this year.
After attending agricultural school in Honduras, Perrera came to the U.S. to work as a manager for Smithfield Foods, the nation’s largest pork producer. “That was not really like my calling—raising hogs in barns in the conventional systems,” he says of the experience.
A decade later, with a long-awaited green card, Perrera was able to leave Smithfield to take a role managing the RAA processing plant in 2022. Since leaving what he calls “the dark side,” he has staffed it up 14 people, despite its isolated rural location and the challenge of competing with larger companies in the region that can offer higher pay.
The Regenerative Ag Alliance processing team. (Photo courtesy of the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance)
But, ultimately, Perrera hopes to help create a new model, in an industry where ever-faster line speeds, crowded facilities, underage workers, and resistance to protecting workers’ health have become the norm. “I believe strongly that if the food is going to be sustainable and regenerative, it needs to be that way throughout [the food chain]. On the farm side, as well as the processing,” he says.
For Jose Morales, who has been at the plant since the RAA took ownership, the difference is palpable. The facility he worked at previously slaughtered 13,000 chickens every day of the year; 2,000 workers arrived in three shifts and worked 24 hours a day. He felt like one small cog in an enormous machine.
At the RAA facility, Morales says, he has had a say in shaping the workday and he’s helped train other employees. “We came up with a plan. Each person will be doing each job for two, maybe two and a half hours. So, you’re not doing the same thing all day.” It’s less repetitive motion, which is less difficult on everyone’s bodies, and all the workers at the plant are trained to work in all the roles. “It’s harder in the beginning, but then it’s better. When somebody’s calls in sick, or they don’t have a babysitter, we have somebody to call.”
Nonprofit meat processing plants are very rare, but Christifore, Haslett-Marroquin, and the rest of the team see the fact that they don’t have shareholders to appease as key to their approach.
The goal is to enable the proliferation and growth of the network of farms, and provide better jobs than many meat processing facilities. “If you’re doing it with integrity, there is not a lot of money to be made at that level of the supply chain,” says Christofore.
In stepping down from leading the RAA, Hasslet-Morroquin hopes the network moves toward a collective model of leadership based on a Mayan diagram that looks more like a circle than a pyramid. The idea is to create a strong system wherein everybody leads and follows at the same time, a reciprocal form of relationship-based accountability. “And if you do that, you unleash the energy of the people, and it is unbelievable. That’s why we call this an intellectual insurgency.”
Christofore echoes that idea. “We expect a certain level of participation, from those who want to commit to the ecosystem. And that’s when you start to care about things; it’s when you start to have ownership. It comes with a lot of responsibility and does require risk. But what comes with it is an opportunity to be a part of a culture and a community that’s growing.”
Hasslet-Morroquin has his sights set on reaching 250 farms on 50,000 acres in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. From there, he can see the network expanding to five or six other regions around the U.S. until it reaches 500 million chickens. That type of growth sounds enormous, but it would still only be 5 percent of the total chicken raised in the U.S. And at that point, he says, a truly regenerative system would have some real leverage.
“At that point, we’ll look at the industry—the USDA, investors, markets, everybody, and say, ‘OK, folks, why should we only do 5 percent of the total poultry system this way when we can do 100 percent?’” says the visionary farmer. “I may not get there myself, but somebody else could get us there. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. We don’t plan for the next year to two; this is about the seven generations in front of us.”
Twilight Greenaway is the executive editor of Civil Eats. Her articles about food and farming have appeared in The New York Times, NPR.org, The Guardian, Food and Wine, Gastronomica, and Grist, among other.
For Decades, Our Carbon Emissions Sped the Growth of Plants — Not Anymore
Yale Environment 360 – August 14, 2023
A forest afflicted by drought. pxfuel
For the last century, rising levels of carbon dioxide helped plants grow faster, a rare silver lining in human-caused climate change. But now, as drier conditions set in across much of the globe, that uptick in growth is leveling off, a new study finds.
Through photosynthesis, plants convert water and carbon dioxide into storable energy. By burning fossil fuels, humans have driven up carbon dioxide levels, from around 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to 417 parts per million last year. That extra carbon dioxide has sped up photosynthesis, spurring plants to soak up more of our emissions and grow faster. Since 1982, plants globally have added enough leaf cover to span an area roughly twice the size of the continental U.S.
But the effect appears to be wearing off. While carbon dioxide levels continue to climb, more than a century of warming has also made the climate more hostile to plants. Drier conditions in many parts of the world mean that, even as plants get more carbon dioxide, they are getting less of the other key ingredient needed for photosynthesis — water.
For the new study, scientists gathered data from ground monitors measuring levels of carbon dioxide and water in the air from 1982 to 2016. They compared these data with satellite images of forests, grasslands, and farms, using artificial intelligence to spot changes over time. Small differences in the green hue of plants, for instance, indicate a shift in the rate of photosynthesis.
The study found that photosynthesis sped up until around the year 2000, at which point it began to level off. Looking ahead, authors say, the rate of photosynthesis could flatten out entirely, making it harder to keep rising carbon emissions — and warming — in check. The findings were published in the journal Science.
Humans have pumped so much groundwater from the Earth that it’s actually caused the planet’s axis to shift, a new study found
Carla Delgado – August 11, 2023
We’re moving so much water from under the continents to the oceans that it’s affecting our axial tilt, a new study found.DrPixel / Getty Images
New research shows that persistently pumping groundwater has shifted Earth’s axis.
The reason is that we’re moving all that water mass from under the continents to the oceans.
Most groundwater ends up in our oceans and raised sea levels by 6.24 mm from 1993-2010.
Below the Earth’s surface lies over a thousand times more water than all the rivers and lakes in the world.
This groundwater accounts for almost all the freshwater on the planet.
But in many areas of the world, groundwater is being extracted faster than the rate that it naturally recharges.
A recent study found that humans are pumping so much groundwater that it’s not only increasing sea levels, it’s actually shifting the entire planet on its axis.
How groundwater depletion affects Earth’s rotational pole
The Earth’s rotational pole normally changes and wanders by about several meters each year.
Many factors contribute to this axial wobble, including the melting of snow and ice in the Northern Hemisphere every spring, which significantly changes the distribution of water mass on Earth.
Extracting groundwater also redistributes water mass. Groundwater naturally exists under continents, but about 80% finds its way to the ocean through rivers after extraction, therefore shifting all that water mass from Earth’s continents to its oceans.
And we’ve been extracting so much groundwater that it caused the Earth’s rotational pole to drift 78.48 cm toward 64.16 degrees east at a rate of about 4.36 cm per year from 1993 to 2010, researchers reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in June.
For comparison, a different study reported that the accelerated melting of the glaciers drove a polar drift of 26 degrees east at about 3.28 milliarcseconds (or about 9.84 centimeters) per year after the 1990s.
Since Earth’s rotational pole periodically wanders by several meters per year, this contribution of a few centimeters from groundwater depletion is unconcerning, one of the researchers told Insider.
“What we found in this study about drift of the pole would be negligible compared with such several meters oscillations. So, at this point, we wouldn’t worry about it,” said Ki-Weon Seo, geophysicist and associate professor in the Department of Earth Science Education at Seoul National University, who led the study. He added that the rotational pole returns to previous positions most of the time.
What is concerning, however, is groundwater’s contribution to sea level rise.
Why humans pump so much groundwater and its negative effects on the Earth
Groundwater is used for about 40% of global irrigation and provides almost half of all drinking water.
To put it simply, groundwater depletion contributes to sea level rise because water is being transferred from the continents to the oceans.
The recent study found that groundwater depletion caused a 6.24-millimeter rise in global sea level from 1993 to 2010. This is significant because each millimeter rise in sea level is said to make the shoreline retreat an average of 1.5 meters.
Pumping too much groundwater too quickly can also decrease water flow from natural streams, another study found. Groundwater naturally feeds into streams, but when groundwater levels drop due to human extraction, it can reduce or even stop streamflow altogether.
In turn, this threatens the many ecosystems that rely on water flow both in and around streams.
Without better management, an estimated 42% to 79% of all watersheds that pump groundwater may no longer be able to maintain healthy ecosystems by 2050.
Correction August 10, 2023 — An earlier version of the article misstated how much Earth’s rotational pole has drifted. Earth’s rotational pole has drifted 78.48 cm toward 64.16 degrees east at a rate of about 4.36 cm per year.
Bone dry on the range: Texas cattle ranchers battle drought, extreme heat
Evan Garcia – August 10, 2023
Cattle move throughout a pasture during a heat wave in Tennessee ColonyRancher David Henderson watches his herd of cattle after pouring them animal feed on his ranch in Tennessee ColonyCattle gather in the shade during a heat wave in Tennessee Colony
TENNESSEE COLONY, Texas (Reuters) – The brown and black cattle of Texas, beloved symbols of the Lone Star state, walk through desiccated grass and stand in shrunken watering holes while their ranchers struggle to get them enough food.
For the second summer in a row, drought and extreme heat are stressing the health of cattle in Texas – the top beef-producing state in the U.S. by far – leading some ranchers to think about thinning their herds to save money on animal feed and hay.
“The grass is just not growing and primarily because it’s thirsty,” said rancher David Henderson. “Now we hit August and this is normally our hottest, driest time of the year … and the only thing I can think of, sometimes it calls for selling cows.”Henderson, 62, manages a herd of about 150 cows in Tennessee Colony in East Texas, and said he sold roughly 30 cows in 2022 due to the drought.
Dry conditions last year drove ranchers in East Texas to sell more than 2.66 million cattle from January 2022 through August 2022 — an increase of more than 480,000 cattle compared to that time period the previous year, according to the Texas Farm Bureau.
Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon predicts extreme heat spurred by global warming will become the norm.
“Well, certainly for the next few decades, the trends are going to continue,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “This sort of heat will become normal in the summertime for Texas. And that, in addition, means that the heat extremes will be that much hotter and that much more severe.”
The drought, triple-digit heat and lack of food impacts just about every facet of the cattle industry – how much milk the calves get, how the cows fatten up, how much they reproduce, and how much that coveted steak will cost.
Jimmy Reed owns the Cattle Ranch Supply store in Tennessee Colony and, with pastures diminished, has been sending out feed deliveries to ranchers in early August instead of the normal time in mid-November.
“With everybody wanting to eat that rib eye and that T-Bone or those ribs, there’s going to be less supply. So the price of beef will once again take a rise,” Reed said.
Rancher Corey Davis, 39, said after plentiful spring rains he had been optimistic.
“This year, I thought being a young farmer, I said, ‘Well, we’re going to make a bunch of hay,'” Davis said.
“I was excited and you know, four or five months later, no rain for a month. So, we’re back in a drought again.”
(Reporting by Evan Garcia; Writing by Mary Milliken; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
Some of the ways extreme heat will change life as we know it
Julia Jacobo – August 10, 2023
Some of the ways extreme heat will change life as we know it
Life as we know it could soon change if extreme, dangerous heat continues to inundate regions for longer stretches of time and at higher temperatures, according to experts.
A large part of the U.S., including much of the southern portion stretching from the West Coast, across Texas and to the Southeast, has been experiencing triple-digit temperatures and heat indexes for weeks on end.
Record-breaking temperatures have been the norm in several cities in recent weeks, including Phoenix, which has now seen more than 40 consecutive days at about 110 degrees.
Hotter-than-ever temperatures, and longer periods of time when they occur, will become the norm unless greenhouse gas emissions are drastically curbed, mitigating further global warming, according to climate scientists. Americans could see an average of 53 more days of extreme heat by 2050, if emissions aren’t reduced, according to climate modeling data released by the ICF Climate Center in June.
The increased heat is guaranteed to alter how society operates, experts told ABC News.
Summer is synonymous with time spent outdoors for school-aged children all over the world.
But parents may be cautious about letting their kids spend prolonged periods of time outdoors when temperatures are nearing triple digits, especially if air quality is poor or UV indexes high, experts told ABC News.
“The great outdoors go from being a magical place of exploration to a threatening place, full of fear,” Lise Van Susteren, a general and forensic psychiatrist who has researched how climate change has affected the psychological health of young people, told ABC News.
PHOTO: A World Youth Day volunteer uses a small fan to cool off from the intense heat, just outside Lisbon, Portugal, Aug. 6, 2023. (Armando Franca/AP)
Less time outdoors could also be detrimental for children’s development. Research shows outdoor time is linked with improved motor development and lower obesity rates and nearsightedness in children. Outdoor play also promotes curiosity, creativity and critical thinking and is linked with behavior displaying less anger and aggression, studies have shown.
Few things could be more injurious to a child’s development than to be cooped up inside year-round, Van Susteren said, adding that humans have evolved to find the sounds and sights of nature meaningful and necessary for a healthy outlook.
“Yeah, you could always build something artificial. But don’t expect it to do for us mentally, which includes our ability to empathize and be generous, and to feel a sense of adventure,” she said.
Evidence that being holed up indoors is detrimental to kids’ mental health surmounted during the COVID-19 pandemic, which added more to the preexisting psychological distress among young people, according to the U.S. Surgeon General.
Athletes of all ages and levels will likely need to alter their training to stay safe during extreme heat, but those training for intense competitions that take place in a scorching climate need to be especially careful, said Brian Maiorano, coach liason for Core, a wearable tech that allows athletes to measure their core body temperature on the go.
Those training for competitions and races will need to adapt to the higher temperatures in order to participate safely, said Maiorano, who has coached athletes for running competitions and triathlons for 15 years.
“The human body is extremely adaptable, if given the right training,” he said.
Rather than training indoors in a climate-controlled setting, athletes will need to train outside and get their core body temperature to a level that will cause physiological adaptions, Maiorano said. Otherwise, athletes will suffer on race day.
Temperatures in the 90s are considered extreme for endurance athletes, while temperatures in the 80s would be considered extreme for those training for an event with even more difficulty and physical exertion, like the Ironman Triathlon, Maiorano said. About 80% of the heat in the body is generated by the power in the muscles, he said.
“It’s like literally having a space heater inside of you,” he said.
PHOTO: Baltimore Ravens tight end Mark Andrews gets relief from the heat next to a water mister during the team’s NFL football training camp, July 29, 2023, in Baltimore. (Nick Wass/AP)
Up until a few years ago, heat training was an “imprecise practice,” Maiorano said.
People training for events in warm climates — like the Hawaii Ironman and the Western States Endurance Run, which is a 100-mile race through the desert in California — were likely told by their coaches to go out during the hottest part of the day while wearing multiple layers of clothes.
“Cook yourself, but don’t overcook yourself, which is some really vague guidance,” Maiorano said. “It’s guidance you can give to a top athlete and hope that they don’t cause themselves heatstroke, but it’s not something that you can tell an age group athlete to do.”
Extreme heat will affect travel decisions people make in the summer, the peak travel season while kids are out of school, Erika Richter, spokesperson for the American Society of Travel Advisers, told ABC News.
“The climate crisis will impact where we go, when we go, and, in some cases, if we go,” Richter said.
The travel industry is already seeing shifts for travel to Greece, France and Spain, Richter said. While the peak tourist season is typically around July, Europe has been reaching record temperatures in recent years during that time. Combined with wildfires, the climate is causing people to travel to those destinations in the spring or early summer instead, Richter said.
People are also starting to choose cooler places for the summer travel season, such as Northern Europe, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, Richter said.
PHOTO: Tourists refresh with water near the Parthenon temple at the Acropolis hill during a heat wave on July 20, 2023 in Athens, Greece. (Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)
Extreme heat is also heavily affecting air travel.
It is difficult for planes to take off in hot temperatures because as the air warms, it expands, so the number of molecules available to push the plane up is reduced. In June, Richter experienced a six-hour delay on a flight from Washington, D.C., to Portland because the plane could not take off with the number of passengers, she said.
While some passengers took the $1,000 credit offered to give up their seat, the originally nonstop flight had to stop in Missouri to refuel, because the plane could not handle the fuel load needed for the transcontinental flight, Richter said.
Extreme heat can also increase the amount of turbulence passengers experience. A 2017 study found that climate change may cause nearly three times as much clear-air turbulence as current conditions by the period between 2050 and 2080. Clear-air turbulence, which occurs without a visual warning like clouds or thunderstorms and is usually at high altitudes, is currently on the rise worldwide and at varying altitudes, the study found.
There have been several reports of heavy turbulence this summer, including a Hawaiian airlines flight in July that injured several flight attendants and passengers.
The wildfires in Canada, which have been so severe this season in part due to higher temperatures and drought, have impacted travel in the U.S., Richter said.
With more heat and humidity comes the possibility of thunderstorms grounding flights, as well, Richter said.
“We’re used to the thunderstorms for summer travel season,” she said. “But they are becoming much more violent, and they are grounding many more flights.”
As climate change continues to worsen, regions that traditionally did not need air conditioning may need to brace for more heat waves by installing equipment to keep their homes cool.
In places like the Pacific Northwest and the San Francisco Bay Area, the majority of households are not equipped with central air conditioning. In 2021, when a historic heat wave struck the region, window and portable air conditioners were flying off the shelves, Jennifer Amann, senior fellow of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy’s building program, told ABC News.
Incorporating efficient cooling methods, like using the same pumps that heat homes to cool them, as well, and using efficient window air-conditioning units, will help households keep temperatures bearable in their homes, Amann said,
PHOTO: Ben Gallegos sits on the porch of his family’s home with his dog as the daytime high temperature soars toward triple digits, July 27, 2023, in north Denver. (David Zalubowski/AP)
Heat is the No.1 weather-related killer, with more than 600 people dying from heat-related illnesses every year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When temperatures do not cool down overnight, it exacerbates the risk to human health.
Buying an air conditioner is the short-term solution, but people will also need to adapt their homes to better deal with extreme heat, and builders will need to design new homes with more passive mechanisms to navigate the changing climate, Amann said.
MORE: Dangerous temperatures have been recorded in the US for weeks. Is the extreme heat coming to an end soon?
Countries in Europe like France, Italy, Spain, Romania and Germany have been the most affected by climate-related disasters over the past 20 years, an analysis by the Centre for Economic Policy Research found.
Domestically, Texas loses an average of $30 billion a year due to its climate and the large number of people working outdoors, according to a 2021 report by the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
PHOTO: A tour guide fans herself while working in Times Square as temperatures rise, July 27, 2023, in New York City. (John Minchillo/AP)
The cumulative global economic loss between 1992 and 2013 reached between $5 trillion and $29.3 trillion due to the impact of human-caused heat waves, according to a study published in 2022 in Science Advances.
The poorest countries in the hottest climates suffered the most, researchers found.
Heat also affects people’s moods, which is essentially survival mode kicking in, Van Susteren said.
“If we’re in a bad mood, we’re not buying,” she said.
Scientists warn that extreme ‘wet bulb temperature’ events are becoming more common with human-caused climate change (Frederic J. BROWN)
Scientists have identified the maximum mix of heat and humidity a human body can survive.
Even a healthy young person will die after enduring six hours of 35-degree Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) warmth when coupled with 100 percent humidity, but new research shows that threshold could be significantly lower.
At this point sweat — the body’s main tool for bringing down its core temperature — no longer evaporates off the skin, eventually leading to heatstroke, organ failure and death.
This critical limit, which occurs at 35 degrees of what is known “wet bulb temperature”, has only been breached around a dozen times, mostly in South Asia and the Persian Gulf, Colin Raymond of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told AFP.
None of those instances lasted more than two hours, meaning there have never been any “mass mortality events” linked to this limit of human survival, said Raymond, who led a major study on the subject.
But extreme heat does not need to be anywhere near that level to kill people, and everyone has a different threshold depending on their age, health and other social and economic factors, experts say.
For example, more than 61,000 people are estimated to have died due to the heat last summer in Europe, where there is rarely enough humidity to create dangerous wet bulb temperatures.
But as global temperatures rise — last month was confirmed on Tuesday as the hottest in recorded history — scientists warn that dangerous wet bulb events will also become more common.
The frequency of such events has at least doubled over the last 40 years, Raymond said, calling the increase a serious hazard of human-caused climate change.
Raymond’s research projected that wet bulb temperatures will “regularly exceed” 35C at several points around the world in the coming decades if the world warms 2.5C degrees above preindustrial levels.
– ‘Really, really dangerous’ –
Though now mostly calculated using heat and humidity readings, wet bulb temperature was originally measured by putting a wet cloth over a thermometer and exposing it to the air.
This allowed it to measure how quickly the water evaporated off the cloth, representing sweat off of skin.
The theorised human survival limit of 35C wet bulb temperature represents 35C of dry heat as well as 100 percent humidity — or 46C at 50 percent humidity.
To test this limit, researchers at Pennsylvania State University in the United States measured the core temperatures of young, healthy people inside a heat chamber.
They found that participants reached their “critical environmental limit” — when their body could not stop their core temperature from continuing to rise — at 30.6C wet bulb temperature, well below the previously theorised 35C.
The team estimated that it would take between five to seven hours before such conditions would reach “really, really dangerous core temperatures,” Daniel Vecellio, who worked on the research, told AFP.
– The most vulnerable –
Joy Monteiro, a researcher in India who last month published a study in Nature looking at wet bulb temperatures in South Asia, said that most deadly heatwaves in the region were well below the 35C wet bulb threshold.
Any such limits on human endurance are “wildly different for different people,” he told AFP.
“We don’t live in a vacuum — especially children,” said Ayesha Kadir, a paediatrician in the UK and health advisor at Save the Children.
Small children are less able to regulate their body temperature, putting them at greater risk, she said.
Older people, who have fewer sweat glands, are the most vulnerable. Nearly 90 percent of the heat-related deaths in Europe last summer were among people aged over 65.
People who have to work outside in soaring temperatures are also more at risk.
Whether or not people can occasionally cool their bodies down — for example in air conditioned spaces — is also a major factor.
Monteiro pointed out that people without access to toilets often drink less water, leading to dehydration.
“Like a lot of impacts of climate change, it is the people who are least able to insulate themselves from these extremes who will be suffering the most,” Raymond said.
His research has shown that El Nino weather phenomena have pushed up wet bulb temperatures in the past. The first El Nino event in four years is expected to peak towards the end of this year.
Wet bulb temperatures are also closely linked to ocean surface temperatures, Raymond said.
The world’s oceans hit an all-time high temperature last month, beating the previous 2016 record, according to the European Union’s climate observatory.
There’s a very distinct possibility we could trigger our own extinction or, at the very least, greatly reduce our population while completely altering the way we currently live. Little things like going outside during daylight hours or growing food in the dirt could become relics of the past, along with birds, insects, whales and many other species. War, famine, pestilence and death — that dreaded equine quartet — threaten to topple our dominance on this planet. We are destroying our own home, sawing off the very branch we rest on.
Those who refute this reality, or climate change deniers, misinterpret the same sets of data showing a clear anthropological cause as being part of the “natural” cycle of the planet. Things are warming, they argue, and that is normal. Only, it really isn’t normal.
Climatologists and scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades: Global temperatures and planetary homeostasis are spiraling out of control, and we’re to blame. The climate crisis is no longer a hypothetical future. It’s the tangible present, and the evidence is clear in every grueling heatwave, not-so-uncommon “freak” storm and raging wildfire.
On the opposite extreme is a vocal minority, the accelerationists and nihilists who accept that humanity is overwhelmingly destructive to nature, but argue our extinction would be a welcome relief. I received many such comments on social media after interviewing Peter Ward, a paleontologist and professor at the University of Washington, about his “Medea hypothesis,” a theory that life is not a benevolent force and often causes its own extermination. Many species in Earth’s history became so successful that they wiped themselves out — and we could do the same.
In response to that article, many readers said something such as, “Humans are a virus and should be eradicated.” Obviously, inducing human extinction is an outcome for which only a very cynical personality would advocate. But what about the first part of that statement? Are humans really like a virus, a pathogen, a cancer?
Dr. Warren Hern, a Colorado-based physician and author of the new book “Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth,” argues that human civilization indeed has many similarities with cancer. This isn’t a metaphor, but rather a literal diagnosis — and it can be addressed in the same way that an actual cancer diagnosis can be the first step to treatment.
Salon recently spoke with Hern about his new book, which acts partially as a memoir, textbook, dire diagnosis and poetic ode to a disintegrating planet, discussing the implications for such an urgent prognosis, a new name for the human species that reflects our true nature and how we can still fix this crisis.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
My opinion is that humans are part of nature — we are not separate from it. After I came across your book, I began asking myself, “Are humans really a cancer on the planet?” I thought, “Aren’t we part of this whole ecosystem?” I initially set out to disprove what you’re saying, but the argument you make is so extremely convincing. I know from your writing that when you were first conceptualizing the notion that humans are a cancer on the planet, it was very unpopular. But now it seems like this idea has earned some mainstream acceptance. Is that true?
This is a fundamental scientific and philosophical question. And, first of all, I agree with you that we are part of nature. We evolved in a natural ecosystem, and we have obviously very intimate close ties with other species, other animals. Humans are unique in that they have culture, although we’re learning that other animals have certain levels of culture also, like whales. So, we are really not unique in that sense, but we have a different and higher level of culture that allows us to dominate other species and ecosystems.
These are cultural adaptations that allow us to survive, but they have become malignant maladaptations because they are now threatening our survival and millions of other species. We have essentially made a decision at this point as a species to go extinct. That’s what we’re doing — we’re eliminating our biosphere and our planetary support system. Consciously or not, and I think mostly unconsciously.
When I first came onto this in the late ’60s, I was horrified. It’s not an analogy; nobody ever died from an analogy. It’s a diagnosis, and that’s different. The diagnosis is the same as the hypothesis. The guy comes into the emergency room with a sore belly, and he has right lower quadrant pain. Your diagnosis is appendicitis until proven otherwise. But that’s a hypothesis because he might have some other disease, or if it’s a woman, they might have an ovarian cyst.
I work with the idea from Karl Popper that science is not advanced by proving anything, but by disproving false hypotheses. The purpose of a hypothesis is to explain reality and predict events. This hypothesis [humans as a cancer] explains what we see going on in reality around us — and has for a long time — and it predicts what is going to happen. And that means the prognosis, in medical terms, for cancer is death. The cancer continues until the host organism dies.
The difference between us and a cancer — the only difference — is we can think, and we can decide not to be a cancer. If the diagnosis is correct, things will continue until we are extinct. The biosphere can’t go extinct; it can’t die, but we can alter it to the point that we can no longer survive. And that will take out millions of other organisms. Clearly, plenty of organisms are going to survive that process. They might even be more intelligent than us. I don’t know.
That’s sort of the general picture. And whether people accept this or want to even listen to it is another thing. For example, in the book, I talk about the guy who took over the anthropology section at AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] back in the early ’90s. He didn’t like this idea, and he wanted them to drop it from the schedule because his wife had cancer and he was very offended by it. I told him, “Well, I’m really sorry that your wife has cancer, and I certainly hope she recovers. This doesn’t have anything to do with your wife’s cancer.”
I hope people can see that because it’s such a good diagnosis. I mean, it really does fit the bill. You look at maps of cities and tumors, and you can see how they kind of grow similarly. But the similarities don’t end there.
The basic premise is that humans have the capacity of developing culture, and that has millions of manifestations, everything from language and speech and mathematics to constructing shelters, building weapons and having medical care to keep us alive. These adaptations have allowed us to go from a few separate species of skinny primates wandering around in Africa a couple of million years ago to being the dominant ecological force on the planet to the point we’re changing the entire global ecosystem.
These cultural adaptations have now become maladaptive. They do not have survival value. And they are, in fact, malignant maladaptations because they’re increasing in a way that cancer increases. So, this means that the human species now has all of the major characteristics of a malignant process. When I was in medical school, we had four of them that were identified: rapid, uncontrolled growth; invasion and destruction of adjacent normal tissues — in this case, ecosystems; metastasis, which means distant colonization; and dedifferentiation, which you see very well in the patterns of cities.
That’s only one example. We now have 10 or 15 other new characteristics of cancer, and the human species fits all of them. And so the disturbing thing about this? If you have any two of the first four characteristics of cancer, it’s cancer until proven otherwise. And cancer does not stop until the host organism has ceased to function, which for our purposes is the biosphere.
Now, I have given the book the name “Homo Ecophagus.” That is my new name for the human species, which currently has the scientific name of Homo sapiens sapiens, or wise, wise man, which makes us the most misnamed species on the planet. Homo ecophagus means the man who devours the ecosystem — and that’s what we are doing.
We are in the process of converting all plant, animal, organic and inorganic material on the planet into human biomass and its adaptive adjuncts or support systems. The evidence for that is all around us.
So, that’s the basic idea in a nutshell, and then the rest of the book is simply manifestations of this malignancy and an explanation of the analysis. And so, the next question is: Can we do anything about this? Should we do something about this? It’s very hard under the circumstances, for example, to think about Vladimir Putin sitting down with Zelensky if they can fix the ecosystem in Ukraine.
Right, it’s a very, very difficult problem. It’s the biggest problem our society faces right now. Literally, nothing else matters if we don’t address this problem.
That’s the point: It’s an existential crisis. Yes.
I have to say that it seems like we’re not going to solve this problem. I don’t want to be negative and despair that we’re all simply going to die from climate change. I recently made a move across the country from California to Illinois. Everywhere you go, you get that dedifferentiation that you speak of, where everything looks the same. Every freeway has the same strip malls. You see all these people in these giant pickup and semi trucks and all this overconsumption. I just don’t see people giving it up. I just don’t see it happening. Not fast enough, at least.
This is what I call the “ecophasic imperative.” Robert Ardrey, a brilliant anthropologist, about 40 or 50 years ago wrote a number of outstanding books. One is called “The Territorial Imperative,” which is about how humans have an imperative need to have and expand their territories.
One of the most lurid manifestations of what we have right now is Donald Trump. Another one is Putin and the war on Ukraine, but humans have been doing this forever. And now our malignant melanoma patients have been put in a position where we are devouring the Earth. We are devouring the ecosystem. We have an imperative to do that. Look at the open pit mines that we have of various kinds. The whole alternative energy programs depend on destroying certain ecosystems to get the rare metals that we need to do that stuff.
I do not want to be negative, either. I’m basically an optimistic and positive person. I’ve been my whole life. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives us a list of horribles, and it gets more horrible every year. But what’s the underlying dynamic? I say this is a malignant process going on for hundreds of thousands of years.
This is not new. When the Australian Aborigines arrived on the continent of Australia, they started changing the ecosystem in very dramatic ways, and a lot of species went extinct. My colleague here at the University of Colorado, Giff Miller, has been one of the people showing that it happened in North America. It happened in the Pacific Islands. It happens every place. Humans have made other species extinct wherever they show up.
Of course, it takes individual actions. The obvious side to that is people can make changes in their lives. I’m in Boulder, Colo, for example, where they have a lot of recycling going on, and people are very conscious of that. But, at the same time, you have China putting in a coal-fired power generation plant every week. So, it’s very hard to see how all these individual actions can really have that effect that we want.
Do you have hope for the future, or maybe feel despair about everything? I often get a little bit paralyzed and feel like there’s no point to anything, like we’re all just going to go off the cliff. I’m hoping something will change, that something will shift on a major level, that we’ll all kind of come together on this issue. But I feel like I’ve been waiting for that moment for years.
It’s hard to know how to answer your question when you ask me, “Is there hope?” One of my main answers — which is true — is that young people like you give me hope, people who are looking at this stuff and thinking about it and figuring out what to do. When I look at the current political scene in the United States, it’s very hard to be optimistic because we have a violent fascist movement that occupies the attention of at least a third, if not more, of the population, supporting a man who is a sociopathic criminal.
I think that we make the decisions about these situations — the environment and our survival — through our political process. I want to be optimistic. Let me just share a little example of something with you. A week ago, I went to New Mexico to attend a special memorial service for Dave Foreman.
The meeting was held in a campground outside of Los Alamos, and we were a scruffy-looking bunch of backpackers and tree huggers. I felt right at home with these wonderful people, who were some of the hardcore environmentalists of this country, and people who really, really were dedicated, spent their lives working on protecting the environment. We’ve been talking about people with advanced degrees, with PhDs in ecology and biology, wolf conservation, I don’t know what else.
They were an impressive bunch of people. I enjoyed meeting them, and I participated in this meeting. I admire Dave, who was a friend of mine. And I have his books, and they’re worth reading. OK, this is a highly energetic, wonderful, dedicated, altruistic group in this country. What’s been happening since they started Earth First!? Things are a lot worse than they were.
And it’s very hard to see how that has really influenced the broad scale of things, even though they’ve had a lot of very specific local victories. More people need to understand that we are in an impending extinction crisis for ourselves and for the rest of the ecosystem and other species. We are destroying the planet as we speak — as rapidly as possible — and that must stop. We must find ways to do things differently, and that’s going to make big changes in our lives.
And as concerning as these developments are, scientists have long worried about even more dramatic, looming and irreversible changes to the planet that could happen quickly. Even in the past year, there’s evidence some of these scenarios are becoming more likely.
A paper in the journal Science in 2022 looked at several climate “tipping points” – conditions beyond which changes become self-perpetuating and difficult or impossible to undo. While the concept raised the hackles of some scientists, who suggested it was overly simplistic, the paper suggested even the possibility of such no-going-back points provided compelling reasons to limit warming as much as possible.
But the news isn’t all bad: There’s some good news in the Amazon. And scientists continue to say that if humanity takes climate threats seriously and quickly moves to end carbon emissions, the scenarios below become less likely or at least less extreme.
Here are five tipping points scientists say could start to teeter sooner rather than later:
A July 2022 photo of melting summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean near Greenland.
As of July 18, Antarctic sea ice was more than 1 million square miles below the 1981-2010 average. That’s an area larger than the seven southwestern states, including Utah and Texas, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. It is also more than half a million square miles lower than last year, which had also been the previous record low.
In Greenland, temperatures over the country’s central-north ice sheet between 2001 and 2011 were the warmest in the past 1,000 years, said Maria Hörhold, a glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany and author of a study published this year.
Critical Atlantic ocean currents could stall, reshape climate in US and Europe
What could happen: Massive ocean currents that move hot and cold water around could grind to a halt. Some studies have called it an “irreversible transition.”
When could it happen: New research suggests it could occur this century.
What would the effect on Earth be: Scientists aren’t sure, but some say a stoppage could trigger rapid weather and climate changes in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. It could bring about an ice age in Europe and sea-level rise in cities such as Boston and New York, as well as more potent storms and hurricanes along the East Coast.
What changed since last year? Recent analysis shows the current appears to be weakening or slowing down.
It’s far from certain and many scientists say there’s not enough data yet to tell if there’s a trend that could mean a sudden collapse is in the offing.
FILE – Smoke rises from a fire near a logging area in the Transamazonica highway region, in the municipality of Humaita, Amazonas state, Brazil, Sept. 17, 2022. Brazil has a major role to play in addressing climate change as home to the world’s largest rainforest, but after the Sunday, Oct. 2, election, the subject is less likely to come up than ever. (AP Photo/Edmar Barros, File) ORG XMIT: CLI301More
What could the effect on Earth be? The Amazon’s 2.5 million square mile rainforest, sometimes called “the lungs of the plant,” is so vast it creates half of its own rainfall and is home to 10% of the world’s species. It also stores a substantial amount of the world’s carbon.
As temperatures rise and droughts become more common, the ability of the forest to grow back after fires or logging is of concern. That’s especially a problem in the Amazon where the trees themselves capture water through their roots and then release moisture back through their leaves. It’s estimated a single tree can emit 265 gallons of water a day.
If drought or logging kills trees there may not be enough left to bring water to the area, meaning what grows back in their place would instead be grassland.
July 2, 2023 : Flames from the Donnie Creek wildfire burn along a ridge top north of Fort St. John, British Columbia.
Wildfires could reshape Alaska and Canada, turning forests into grassland
What could happen: Massive wildfires could mean North America’s vast northern forests – sometimes called “snow forests” – could face a future as mostly treeless grasslands.
What would the effect on Earth be: These cold-weather forests run across Alaska and Canada and are estimated to store more than 30% of all forest carbon on the planet. Without them, huge amounts of greenhouse gases would be released into the atmosphere, worsening global warming.
Forests have always burned but what’s happening now is on a different scale, in every part of the country, said Marc-André Parisien, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service.
This summer has been a historically bad fire season in Canada. As of August 4, a remarkable 1,054 active fires were burning, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.
While boreal forests are highly adapted to wildfires, the climate in the forested areas is now hotter and windier than before, making it harder for the seedlings to reestablish themselves. The concern is that in some areas what grows back after these megafires might not be today’s endless forests but instead grassland and shrubland, interspersed with smaller areas of trees.
“The climate in the northern forests has always been changing since the end of the Ice Age,” Parisien said. “But just the sheer speed at which things are happening now is surprising.”
Underwater photo of coral bleaching and hard coral Acropora sp turns white due to high sea surface temperature and climate change
World’s coral reefs could be cooked by the ocean
What could happen: Rising ocean temperatures are literally cooking coral to death. If localized die-offs happened across the world’s oceans, it would fundamentally change and diminish undersea life.
When could it happen: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that 1.5°C of global warming would result in between 70 and 90% of the world’s coral reefs disappearing – which could happen in the early 2030s.
What would the effect on Earth be: Corals are vital to the health of the oceans. Although they cover only 0.2% of the ocean floor, they are home to at least a quarter of all marine species. They provide safety for juvenile fish and are home to small organisms and fish that provide food for larger fish. A report released last year showed that almost 15% of the planet’s reefs have vanished since 2009.
Coral reefs can survive within only a relatively narrow temperature band. The coral that build the reefs get much of their food from algae living in their tissues. When the seawater is too warm, the coral’s stress response is to expel algae, causing the coral to turn white. The process is called coral bleaching, and if it lasts too long, the coral can starve – turning a thriving ecosystem into a cemetery of dead, white shells.
The Coral Restoration Foundation, a group centered around restoring and protecting Florida’s coral reefs, said it visited the Sombrero Reef off the Florida Keys on July 20 and found “100% coral mortality.” The discovery means all corals on the Sombrero Reef, a popular snorkeling area, have died and the reef will not recover on its own without active restoration, the foundation said.
Students from the Urban Homeschoolers in Atwater Village march through the neighborhood chanting and carrying signs on their way to the Los Angeles River and then an overpass on Interstate-5. Photo by Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY staff
Action, not despair
Even though it appears humanity is on track to miss the United Nations’ hoped-for limit of a temperature rise of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, giving up is not the answer, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
No specific number signifies that all hope is lost. Instead, it’s a call for action.
“It’s not like we fall off the edge of the world,” he said. “We can still make a big difference and every single tenth of a degree is enormously important.”
Leprosy could become endemic to Florida. Here is what to know.
Brandon Girod and Kinsey Crowley – July 31, 2023
Rising cases of leprosy in the Southeast U.S. point to the possibility of the disease becoming endemic to the region, and a high concentration of those cases were reported in central Florida.
In a recently published research letter, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that Florida is witnessing an increase in leprosy cases lacking traditional risk factors and recommending that travel to Florida be considered when conducting leprosy contact tracing in any state.
The number of reported leprosy cases across the country has doubled over the past decade, according to the CDC. Citing data from the National Hansen’s Disease Program, the CDC says there were 159 new cases reported in the U.S. in 2020. Nearly 70% of these new cases were reported in Florida, California, Louisiana, Hawaii, New York and Texas.
Leprosy, scientifically known as Hansen’s disease, has never been common in the U.S., with most cases previously involving people who immigrated from leprosy-endemic areas. But the new report shows that about 34% of the reported cases between 2015 and 2020 were locally acquired.
A 54-year-old man in central Florida was diagnosed with lepromatous leprosy in 2022.
About the Florida leprosy outbreak
According to the report, Florida may represent an endemic location for leprosy and recommends that physicians consider leprosy in the appropriate clinical context in patients who have traveled to the area, even in the absence of other risk factors. Here is why:
Florida is among the top reporting states for cases of leprosy.
80% of cases in Florida were in central Florida.
Central Florida alone accounted for nearly 20% of the total number of cases reported nationally.
Several new-case patients in central Florida demonstrated no clear evidence of zoonotic exposure or traditionally known risk factors.
What is leprosy and where did it come from?
Leprosy is a chronic infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae that primarily affects the skin and peripheral nervous system. It can sometimes infect other parts of the body like the lining in the airway passages of the nose, according to the Florida Department of Health. It has been around for thousands of years, with the earliest known records appearing in China and India around 600 B.C.
Despite its biblical description, the disease is not easily spread and about 95% of people have natural protective immunity, according to the FDOH. Leprosy can be easy to treat, especially if it’s addressed early. However, going without treatment can result in permanent nerve damage.
The Mycobacterium leprae bacteria is slow growing and it can often take years for signs and symptoms to develop following exposure to the bacteria. Once the first sign of infection appears, it can take anywhere between two weeks to months for it to progress.
Can leprosy be cured?
Yes, leprosy is a curable disease. Doctors prescribe antibiotics to patients with leprosy. Patients are typically no longer infectious after a few days of antibiotics, but the treatment lasts between one to two years due to the bacteria’s slow growth.
What are the signs and symptoms of leprosy?
Early signs of leprosy include pale or slightly red areas or rash on the body that is often associated with a loss of sensation in the affected area, according to the FDOH.
Other symptoms include:
Loss of feeling in hands and feet
Dry, stiff and sometimes painful skin in the affected area
Thinning of the eyebrows and eyelashes (if the face is involved)
Nasal congestion is sometimes reported
If the disease goes untreated, weakness in the muscles of the hands and feet can also occur.
Leprosy is contagious and can be transmitted by untreated people infected with the disease, however, most people have natural protective immunity. Exposure to people infected with leprosy should still be avoided, especially among family members as protective immunity is genetic.
How leprosy is transmitted isn’t fully known due to how uncommon it is. Scientists do know it’s not spread through casual contact, sexual transmission or from mother to fetus. The prevailing theory is that high levels of the bacteria are developed in a person’s nose and are spread to others not immune through prolonged contact.
The CDC hopes that local physicians can help identify and reduce the spread of the disease through their efforts to report cases and their support in further research to assess routes of transmission.
Can you get leprosy from armadillos?
Yes. A genetic study conducted at the National Hansen’s Disease Program found that armadillos in the southern U.S. develop a high number of M. leprae, that bacteria that causes leprosy. Transmission between animals to humans is low, but the program advises that people still take proper precautions around armadillos.
Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, the founder of the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance and co-founder of Tree-Range Farms. Together the nonprofit and for-profit business have created an “ecosystem” that includes more than 40 farms and a processing plant in the Upper Midwest. (Photo credit: Leia Marasovich, Farmer’s Footprint)
