IN HONOR OF COP27 AND OUR FUTURE

 

The multinational climate conference COP27 is meeting in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt this week in an attempt to hammer out new goals and objectives for addressing climate change around the globe. You can follow what's been happening at the conference elsewhere. I post this only to show my support for those who are working toward finding new solutions for the global warming, pollution and scarcity problems that are threatening our future on this planet.

 

Good luck to them all, 

Donna

 

DERECHO CREATES 'IOWA'S KATRINA'

The August 10 derecho had winds over 100 mph. in places.

It’s not enough that we are dealing with a plague that has killed more than 170,000 Americans so far this year, an extreme heatwave and wildfires in California and a burgeoning hurricane season. But the folks in the breadbasket of America, particularly in the state of Iowa, were struck recently with a massive straight-line storm with winds well over 100 miles per hour called a derecho. The storm blasted through parts of five states on August 10, leaving more than 600,000 people without power for days.

The storm flattened 37 million acres of ripening corn and soybeans in the fields, destroying up to one-third of the nation’s corn crop, and devastated homes and businesses in its path. More than 1000 homes in Cedar Rapids, Iowa alone were declared uninhabitable in the storm’s aftermath, blowing off the very roofs over residents’ heads while they tried to shelter from the pandemic. Coronavirus cases reached a new daily high of 832 in Iowa on August 15, in a state where Republican Governor Kim Reynolds has been reluctant to impose restrictions to curb the spread of the disease.

“This is a crisis within a crisis,” said Stacey Walker, a Democrat who serves on the Board of Supervisors for Linn County, which includes Cedar Rapids, referring to the storm on top of the pandemic. “This is Iowa’s Katrina. Literally Iowa was hit with a hurricane-style meteorological event. It seems crazy to say that, but it’s true.”

Government response to the disaster has been complicated—read slowed to a crawl—by several factors. First, a derecho combines the worst characteristics of both a hurricane and a tornado. That is, it can cover the wide swath of territory that a hurricane can, with the high, sustained winds that make hurricanes such a destructive force. As its name implies, a derecho moves in a straight line across that wide swath, the hurricane-force winds pushing out in front of the storm.

But unlike a hurricane, which is slow-moving and therefore predictable with modern technology, a derecho rises as quickly as a tornado and provides little or no warning to the people in its path. And given that its path is so wide, there would be nowhere to go to avoid it except an underground reinforced shelter. 

A derecho much bigger than this one hit parts of five states on August 10.

There was no option for a pre-disaster request from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for aid, as there might have been with a hurricane. And with cell towers and electrical transmission stations down after the storm, an accurate assessment of the damage was difficult. Still, it was nearly a week before any state request for assistance was made to FEMA and the ball got rolling to help people in need.

The coronavirus pandemic complicates any response, too, in multiple ways. Those in need will be reluctant to go to temporary shelters or food and water distribution points. There will be fewer volunteers, FEMA staff, insurance adjusters and health workers available to help. And people are struggling. 

Genevieve Adams, 48, a single mom with a teenage son, has been surviving on a cup of coffee and one meal a day since the storm destroyed her home. “A week later and we don’t even have food,” Adams said through tears. “It’s a struggle to make it on our own. They could at least have a truck or something out delivering meals.” 

Calvin Ross, 42, a construction day laborer, agreed. He lived in Cedar Rapids during the 2008 flood and remembers aid coming a lot faster. “Someone has to help,” Ross said. “Surely someone.”

In one sign of hope, Governor Reynolds formally requested an expedited Presidential Major Disaster Declaration for Iowa on August 16, including funding for 27 counties for assistance with housing, personal property replacement, medical expenses and legal services, and additional money for debris removal and replacement of public infrastructure in 16 counties.

But former FEMA administrator William “Brock” Long, now executive chairman of Hagerty Consulting, warns, “Expedited major disaster declarations are few and far between.”  Help for the victims of “Iowa’s Katrina” may be a while in coming.

And in the meantime, the wildfires burn in California and yet another hurricane season is brewing in the Atlantic. It’s enough to make you want to take ship for another planet.

With trepidation,

Donna

*Information provided for this post by “‘Iowa’s Katrina’: Help is slow to come for storm-battered state, local officials and residents say,” by Annie Gowen and Frances Stead Sellers, The Washington Post, August 17, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/iowas-katrina-help-is-slow-to-come-for-storm-battered-state/2020/08/17/4eac3574-e002-11ea-8181-606e603bb1c4_story.html

         

BLEAK SCIENCE BINGO

This week, more news from the world of science. And, given that this is 2020, the Official Year from Hell, get out your Apocalypse Bingo Cards, boys and girls, and prepare to play, because you won’t believe what the universe is throwing at us this time! 

 It’s not enough that we’ve had a worldwide pandemic, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, landslides, melting ice at both poles, an acceleration of species extinction, madmen in charge of governments around the world, wars, riots, locust invasions, Asian giant hornets and fill in the blank with whatever might be affecting your neck of the woods, now come the latest nightmares to disturb your sleep. Just shout Bingo! if you complete your row of unlikely crazy scenarios! 

Oh-so-appropriate meme courtesy Matt Jagger's Music FB Page

Don’t Plant The Seeds!—Folks in 27 states have received warnings from the U.S. Agricultural Service and the U.S. Postal Service about mysterious packages arriving in the mail containing unidentified seeds. The seeds, which appear to come from China, but which may or may not actually come from China, are unsolicited, and no one knows precisely what kind of plants will grow from them. Some people think the seeds are a plot to discredit the Chinese, some that they are simply a marketing tool to generate fake reviews on Amazon, though the senders (and the product) are obscure.  

The warnings, which have been splashed across traditional and social media are clear, though: DO NOT plant the seeds! Remember kudzu, “the vine that ate the South?” Over a hundred years ago, some bright bulb thought it would be a good idea to import it from Japan to stabilize eroded hillsides. Now we can’t get rid of it. The list of invasive plant species causing similar trouble in the U.S. because of someone’s lack of foresight is long and alarming. If you receive the seeds in the mail, contact your local post office and extension service, and mark off “alien seeds” on your Apocalypse Bingo card. 

Jumping Worms—As an organic gardener, I never would have thought an earthworm could have been the villain of the piece. In fact, I wasn’t aware there were parts of the country where earthworms weren’t native at all. But apparently New England, the upper Midwest and Canada, are devoid of native earthworms, due to the structure of the soil left behind by retreating glaciers after the last Ice Age. (Any earthworms to be found are likely imports of European species brought over in ship ballast, etc.) Forest floors don’t rely on earthworms to break down detritus, either. Other creatures—fungi, bacteria, millipedes and so on—do that job. 

Your common night crawler-type earthworm is no real threat to that kind of system. But according to an article in the New York Times, the invasive Asian jumping worm, which has been found in Oregon, the upper Midwest, parts of New England and the mid-Atlantic, and now even the southern Appalachians in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, can be devastating. It eats through masses of leaf litter and the top layer of soil much more quickly than other worms and leaves behind, not a fertile, well-aerated growing medium, but loose, crumbly, sterile soil that looks like coffee grounds and grows nothing. Yikes! They’re called “jumping worms” because of their exaggerated, thrashing movement when disturbed. They also have a distinctive whitish band around the top third of their bodies. If you find them in your yard or garden, call your extension agent right away. And, yes, you get another mark on your Apocalypse Bingo card! 

Finally, some almost good news—If you love horror movies in the apocalyptic or disaster vein, like I do, research shows you may be better equipped to deal with real-life disasters like the pandemic we’re currently enduring. A study from scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark (currently under peer review) monitored the enjoyment levels of people watching movies the scientists identified as “prepper” stories—tales of alien invasions, apocalypses and zombies—versus those of strictly “horror.” They then compared those enjoyment levels to the watchers’ reported positive experiences and “overall comfort level” during the pandemic. 

According to their results, those who most enjoyed watching the prepper stories reported the most positive experiences and higher comfort levels during the pandemic, indicating that their familiarity with the possibilities presented onscreen may have better prepared them for the reality they faced with the pandemic. They felt “better able to cope” compared to those who avoided watching movies like CONTAGION altogether. People who liked straight horror movies proved to be “psychologically resilient,” but not necessarily well prepared to deal with the realities of the moment. 

In an interview about the study with The Guardian ,Coltan Scrivner, a psychologist who specializes in morbid curiosity at the University of Chicago,said, "If it's a good movie, it pulls you in and you take the perspective of the characters, so you are unintentionally rehearsing the scenarios. We think people are learning vicariously. It's like, with the exception of the toilet paper shortage, they pretty much knew what to buy." 

So, keep watching those disaster movies, folks. You might learn something that helps you win Apocalypse Bingo! 

Cheers, Donna 

*Information for this post provided by:

 “Do NOT Plant The Mystery Seeds: People Across The US Receive Unsolicited Seed Packs From China,” by James Felton, IFLScience Newsletter, July 29, 2020. 

 “As Summer Takes Hold, So Do the Jumping Worms,” by Margaret Roach, The New York Times, July 22, 2020. 

 “Fans Of Horror And Disaster Movies May Be Better At Coping With The Covid-19 Pandemic,” by Rachel Funnell, IFLScience Newsletter, July 3, 2020.

CLIMATE CHANGE: A WORLD ON FIRE

The Amazon, parts of Australia, Indonesia, Siberia, California and even North Carolina are on fire. Southern France is inundated with flood waters. The permafrost in the Arctic Circle is melting, while travelers at Thanksgiving here in the U.S. faced the first “bomb cyclone” of the season. The devastating effects of global warming are not something we will see in the distant future. They are here. Now.

Signs of life? No, wildfires in Australia seen from space (NASA).

The United Nations annual climate conference is meeting this week in Madrid, (most) countries of the world confronting the ominous implications of scientific studies from all over the globe, summarized in the World Meteorological Organization’s annual state of the global climate report, issued Tuesday. In that document, spanning a decade of increasing global temperatures and more dramatic impacts, WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas states bluntly, “Things are getting worse.” He adds, “The only solution is to get rid of fossil fuels in power production, industry and transportation.” *

Meanwhile, folks in the United States are still trying to absorb the implications of last year's   National Climate Assessment, a collaborative document produced every four years by the combined efforts of over 300 scientists and analysts at NASA, NOAA, the Department of Defense and ten other agencies. The Federal report caused controversy when it was released a year ago without notice on Black Friday, a day when not even the most devoted environmental wonk would be scanning his or her news feed. The lead authors of the report themselves were given no advance warning of the change in release date; one scientist had to put Thanksgiving pie-baking on hold to do a quick read-through of the final report for the stealth launch. And no one knows, or will say, who ordered the quickie “Friday news dump.”

Still, the report was full of pertinent, if unwelcome, facts. After analyzing thousands of studies from every region of the country, the scientists concluded that, if unchecked, global warming will cost the United States economy billions of dollars per year and thousands of lives as well. Some effects will be devastating to communities in the short run—the loss of homes, businesses and crops; but many will be permanent—the extinction of species, for example, or the loss of fisheries, forests and coastlines.

The report pulls no punches in its conclusions, from its opening sentences: “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities. The assumption that current and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer valid.”

We have all heard, in isolated news reports, the damning evidence pinpointed in the Assessment: the rise in temperature in the U.S alone of 1.8 Fahrenheit since 1901; the shrinkage of the Western mountain snowpack in the last 50 years; 16 of the 17 hottest years on record since 2000; droughts, floods, wildfires.

 

These “can only be explained by the effects that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, have had on the climate,” the report says. The scientists go on to say that if we wish to avoid 3.6 degrees of warming, we must cut this kind of pollution by 2040. If we do nothing and greenhouse-gas emissions continue to rise, the Earth could warm by as much as 9 degrees by 2100.** 

Other scientists have stated even a two-degree rise in temperature will result in irreversible changes in our environment. Tolerating a 3.6 rise will mean major sacrifice at all levels of society and significant new technologies. Nine degrees is unthinkable. Our planet would not survive it. The Earth would be as uninhabitable as Mars.***

The problem is that 2100 seems like an impossibly long time in the future for most folks. My  grandchildren (and yours, if you have any) will be facing the nursing home by then, if they are still alive. But those climate changes won’t just happen in 2099. They will happen in 2020 and 2025 and 2030 and every year until 2100, gradually bringing more and worse disasters. We’ll very probably reach the point of no return (the “tipping point,” as scientists put it, the point where we can no longer reverse the damage) long before that distant date. Some scientists believe we have already passed that point. 

An even greater obstacle to climate action is that the effects of global warming fall disproportionately on the poor and disadvantaged of any country. Wealthy members of society can be insulated from the worst of what happens outside their penthouses. But the working class fishermen of Tangier Island in Virginia and the Pacific Islanders of Kiribati, the African-American communities in the low-lying parishes of New Orleans and counties of Eastern North Carolina, the Inuit/First Nations villagers of Arctic Canada and Alaska, the Native American tribes of the desert Southwest, the monsoon victims in the Indian subcontinent, the displaced of all the world’s drought-stricken, flood-prone, resource-short, or famine-ravaged nations—all feel the impact of climate change already. Every day. Every season. They have no way to escape it or ignore it.
  
But when the farmers in our Midwest see a new Dust Bowl, we will all feel it. When major cities like New York, Galveston, New Orleans and Miami sink beneath the waves; when L.A., Seattle, Portland and even Atlanta are choked with the smoke of wildfires; when Chicago and Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. are frozen and impassable for weeks at a time, we may decide something should be done.

Then it may well be too late.

Cheers, Donna

*Information provided from: “Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change,” by Henry Fountain, The New York Times, December 4, 2019.

**Information provided from: “A Grave Climate Warning, Buried on Black Friday,” by Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, November 23, 2018.

***Information provided from: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, by David Wallace-Wells, Tim Duggan Books, New York, 2019.