[✔️] September 19, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*September 19, 2021*/

/[Difference between light and heavy rains]/
*Rain helps, but not enough: Oregon wildfires still burning*
WILDFIRES
Bull Complex Fire only 15% contained...
- -
Fire officials said 1.25 to 2 inches of rain is forecast to fall over 
the fire area through Sunday evening. Temperatures in the area were 
cooler Saturday, in the mid-50s. But the forecast calls for warmer and 
drier conditions early next week.

As of Saturday, the Bull Complex Fire has burned 22,432 acres and is 
only 15% contained. It began August 2 with a lightning strike. 
Containment is not expected until the end of October.

A Level 1 “Be Ready” evacuation order for Breitenbush Hot Springs 
remains in effect...
https://www.koin.com/news/wildfires/rain-helps-but-not-enough-oregon-wildfires-still-burning/



/[What else could possibly be more important?]/
*The Disaster We Must Think About Every Day*
Sept. 17, 2021
By Tressie McMillan Cottom - - Opinion Writer
[from NYT]

I am from a place where it is impossible not to have the idea of climate 
disaster circling about my head. My family is from the rural part of 
eastern North Carolina. Environmental justice, as a term, emerges from 
the sit-ins that happened in Warren County, N.C., when Ben Chavis 
interjected environmentalism into the mainstream Black American civil 
rights movement frame.

Eastern North Carolina was the site for that movement for at least three 
big reasons. The biggest reason is that the area has a significant 
Native American population — particularly the Lumbee and Haliwa-Saponi 
tribes — that coexists with a significant Black American population. 
That makes the region one where Indigenous sensibilities about the 
natural world mesh with Black oral traditions and social movements. 
Second, the place is known for the smell of meat processing waste.

That part of the state has a lot of chicken and hog processing plants 
that are central to the multi-billion-dollar food-processing 
distribution chain. You may be familiar with one of the more devastating 
workplace crises to ever happen, at the Imperial Foods processing plant 
in 1991. The Hamlet, N.C., food processing plant went up in flames and 
out of 81 workers present that day, 25 were killed and 40 injured. The 
third reason is that the fast-growing Hispanic and Latinx population, 
pushed by poor economic prospects and pulled to the region by dangerous 
low-wage work like farmwork and food processing, are remaking the area’s 
cultural fabric.

Those three things taken together are how I know intimately that climate 
disaster is coming, first and foremost, for the world’s poorest people. 
Those people include a lot of Black people and Hispanic people and 
Native American people and Indigenous people, because poverty always has 
a racial character. That is true whether you’re talking about Bangladesh 
or you are talking about New Orleans. But, despite being from where I’m 
from, and despite being a good, far-left-of-center person who is 
intellectually committed to combating climate change and to the project 
of radical and necessary national and global climate-change policy, I 
haven’t done a whole lot to combat it in my everyday life.
- -
You just need to pick a thing. Part of picking your thing is trusting 
that your fellow human beings, your neighbors on this planet, are also 
going to pick a thing, and together we’ll pick enough things to start to 
move the needle...
- -
You do this knowing that individual actions cannot solve the climate 
crisis. We still need nation-states to enact the double-whammy: 
common-sense, significant regulation of the fossil fuel industry, 
combined with long-term infrastructure investment in alternatives to 
fossil fuels and the conventional food supply chain. But picking a thing 
does something really important. And it does something really important 
that is related to the second thing she said that really made an impact 
on me. She said, “We have to start talking about climate disaster and 
climate change in everyday, quotidian terms.”

The second thing Dr. Johnson said was more philosophical than I would 
have imagined. That may be why it had the greatest impact on my 
thinking. When I asked her, “What should I do when our conversation is 
over today?” she responded by saying that as creative people, we have 
the power to create popular culture in which climate is the backdrop of 
everything we consume. Dr. Johnson added, “The climate should be the 
context of every story we tell.”

And that really hit at the center of my intellectual and creative soul. 
That every story I tell, every talk I give, every book and every article 
I write, the context of that should be that we are living amid rapid, 
currently declining trend lines of climate disaster and change that are 
impacting how people can self-actualize and flourish in human societies. 
That should be the backdrop of everything, from laughing about Tinder 
dates to thinking about whom we vote for to the chorus in a pop song. 
Everything should have that backdrop.

During the Covid pause I was fortunate enough to have, I have started 
with her first recommendation: Pick a thing. Because I cannot help 
myself, I have picked five things.
- -
*I am preparing for disasters.*
I’ve bought an emergency-preparedness kit that I’m almost embarrassed to 
share with you. It’s called Judy. It is gendered and very popular with 
the Kardashians. That is my shame to carry. The kit is one of many such 
items that make up the fast-growing disaster-preparedness consumer 
market. I chose this brand because it doesn’t have the whiff of 
doomsday-prepperdom that some of the other products do. I associate the 
camo design aesthetic and overwrought last-days marketing of other 
brands with a far-right, libertarian ideology that I do not want to 
bring into my life. At the same time, I wasn’t going to build this bag 
myself. I’m just going to be real with you about that. I bought one that 
did not have that political valence and it’s by Judy.

*I am going to compost.*
I preordered a kitchen composter by a start-up firm that is my 
introduction to the world of composting. I decided I will be a person 
who will make good compost and I will share it with my neighbors. 
Despite my altruistic fantasy of skipping along my suburban streets 
delivering the gift of fresh compost, I needed something that would also 
be design-forward and aesthetically pleasing. I have spent a lot of time 
and energy designing my home, and I don’t want a big, greasy, 
nasty-looking bucket in the middle of my kitchen. Plus, touching garbage 
is gross. I barely like to touch the garbage bags. I’m just going to be 
honest about that.

*I will drive less and drive an electric vehicle when I do drive.*
I am purchasing my first electric hybrid vehicle. To start that process, 
I have to have an EV charger installed in my home. I did almost no 
homework on how electric vehicles work. I trusted the wisdom of the 
crowd, by which I mean I posted something on Twitter and asked people 
how they liked their electric vehicles. It seemed like we were at a 
point in the process where electric vehicles have become stable and 
reliable enough that it made sense for me to make this my next mode of 
transportation. I’ll check back with you on that, owing to how crazy the 
car market is right now. I’ve ordered the car, but it will be a few 
months before it arrives. In the meantime, I am having an electric 
vehicle charger installed and mapping out charging stations along some 
of my favorite routes.

*I nixed the lawn mafia.*
I’ve changed all of my lawn maintenance to a company that uses 
eco-friendly products and technologies. Not only does the low-level hum 
of gasoline-powered lawn equipment drive me batty but it turns out they 
are also an environmental nuisance. Investing in a manual lawn mower and 
requiring lawn services to use greener equipment is a no-brainer.

*I am sunbathing.*
Well, my house will be sunbathing. A solar panel consultant is walking 
me through installing solar panels. When I purchased my home I did look 
for one that was certified by the National Green Building Standard. To 
be transparent, I did not know exactly what that entailed. It felt like 
a responsible thing to do. Consequently, my home is prepped for solar 
panels. The state of North Carolina does not offer a state solar 
incentive, but I may still qualify for the federal solar incentive. If I 
do not qualify for anything, I will settle for living on a habitable 
planet...
—
That’s where I am on my climate journey and how I plan to bring it into 
my daily life. I will periodically update you on how my green life is 
going, as a person who is never going to become an environmental expert 
but thinks it totally matters and is going to try to do her best. That’s 
the thing, isn’t it? None of us are going to be great at this, but that 
cannot stop us from trying.

Here’s what I’ve determined so far in the journey: It is hard. It takes 
a lot of time. One of the reasons white men have been so dominant in 
this discourse is because they are disproportionately the ones who have 
the time and the status to figure all of this stuff out. The information 
asymmetry is a real burden to get over. That’s true, even if you have 
some economic privilege, as I do. But it’s totally worth it.

It’s worth it because these changes bring climate change into my 
everyday practice. By putting these symbols of climate change in my 
view, like having something on my kitchen counter, having the car in my 
garage, having the panels on my home, it becomes a tactical reminder for 
me that this thing is happening and it’s happening right now.

And no, that doesn’t equate to a direct effect on the decline of, say, 
gas emissions. But it does keep climate in our daily view in a way that 
makes us ask those questions politically, so that we start to assume 
that a person should have a plan and that those people will include 
corporations and political actors. Shifting our awareness to making 
demands of politicians and corporations for doing their outsize share 
starts by putting the little symbols of climate in our daily view.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/opinion/climate-change-environment.html


/[She is a hero]/
*How to Talk About Climate Change Across the Political Divide*
Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and evangelical Christian, 
has written a book that lays out strategies for discussing the climate 
crisis in a divided country.
By Eliza Griswold -- September 16, 2021
- -
At its root, she notes, the climate-change divide isn’t a disagreement 
about facts. “In a study of fifty-six countries, researchers found 
people’s opinions on climate change to be most strongly correlated not 
with education and knowledge, but rather with ‘values, ideologies, 
worldviews and political orientation,’ ” she writes. One salient problem 
is an aspect of human behavior that researchers have termed “solution 
aversion.” Solving the climate crisis will require ending our reliance 
on fossil fuels, which people believe would involve major sacrifice. “If 
there’s a problem and we’re not going to fix it, then that makes us bad 
people,” Hayhoe said. “No one wants to be a bad person.” So instead 
people are happy to seize on excuses not to take action. Most are what 
she calls “science-y sounding objections, and, in the U.S., religious-y 
sounding objections.” Hayhoe often hears that the Earth has always 
heated and cooled according to its own intrinsic cycle, or that God, not 
humanity, controls the fate of the planet. These objections can then 
harden into aspects of our political identity...
- -
Only the remaining eight per cent of Americans fall into the final 
category, dismissive. Hayhoe eschews the term “climate denier,” saying 
that she has “seen it applied all too often to shut down discussion 
rather than encourage it.” Nevertheless, she doesn’t spend much time 
engaging dismissives. “Once in a while, maybe one time out of one 
thousand, there’s a miracle,” she told me. But research has shown her 
that dismissives are nearly impossible to influence. They are also few 
enough that it should be possible to build political will around 
fighting climate change by focussing on others. The doubtful, unlike 
dismissives, can be swayed. (She noted the example of the Republican Bob 
Inglis, who didn’t accept the realities of climate change until his son 
told him that he would only vote for him if he changed his mind on the 
issue.) “It’s not about the loudest voices,” Hayhoe told me. “It’s about 
everyone else who doesn’t understand why climate change matters or what 
they can do about it.”...
- -
Prophets have often stood at the edge of society, warning of the need to 
change the status quo. Although Hayhoe would be reluctant to make the 
comparison, her own work also served as a warning. “The window of time 
to alter our current pathway is closing fast,” she told me. Prophets 
often speak of the need to repent for past wrongdoing, but Hayhoe 
doesn’t urge guilt on her listeners. She only urges that we change our 
trajectory. “That’s all repentance means,” she said. “To turn.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/how-to-talk-about-climate-change-across-the-political-divide


/[global warming and hot, drought soils ]/
*A deadly fungal disease on the rise in the West has experts worried*
Zoya Teirstein -- Sep 15, 2021
Researchers haven’t pinned down exactly what’s behind the rise in Valley 
fever cases or how to stop it. One thing is nearly certain, though: 
Climate change plays a role...
- -
By the time his primary care doctor discovered a six-centimeter mass in 
his lung, Jesse was starting to think that whatever disease he had might 
actually end up killing him. He was scheduled for a biopsy and a spinal 
tap — last-ditch efforts to find the source of his illness. But on the 
morning of the procedures, a team of infectious disease specialists 
appeared in his hospital room. “It was like I was on an episode of House 
or something,” Jesse said, chuckling. The biopsy and the spinal tap were 
suddenly irrelevant. The specialists were able to give him what his 
regular doctor couldn’t: a diagnosis.

Jesse had a disease called Valley fever. It’s caused by one of two 
strains of a fungus called Coccidioides, Cocci for short, that thrive in 
soils in California and the desert Southwest. The mass in his lung 
wasn’t cancer, it was a fungal ball — a glob of fungal hyphae, or 
mushroom filaments, and mucus. The infectious disease specialists 
started him on an intravenous drip of fluconazole, an antifungal 
medication. “Instantly, I started feeling better,” Jesse said.

Jesse got lucky that day. The infectious disease experts were in the 
right place at the right time. Some 60 percent of Valley fever cases 
produce no symptoms or mild symptoms that most patients confuse with the 
flu or a common cold. But 30 percent of those infected develop a 
moderate illness that requires medical care, like what Jesse had. And 
another 10 percent have severe infections — the disseminated form of the 
disease, when the fungus spreads beyond the lungs into other parts of 
the body. Those cases can be fatal...
- -
Doctors don’t know why certain people experience no symptoms while 
others wind up in the emergency room. But they do know that pregnant 
people, the immunocompromised, African Americans, and Filipinos are 
especially at risk. And they also know that Cocci is a generalist. Any 
person, dog, or other mammal who breathes in air laced with the fungal 
spores is at risk of developing the disease, which kills roughly 200 
people in the U.S. every year. No vaccine currently exists, and the 
antifungal treatment is a bandaid, not a cure.

Jesse’s difficulty getting a fast and accurate diagnosis isn’t an 
isolated incident. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or 
the CDC, estimates that some 150,000 cases of Valley fever go 
undiagnosed every year, though that’s likely just the tip of the 
iceberg, doctors and epidemiologists told Grist. The disease is only 
endemic to certain geographic areas and it’s technically considered an 
“emerging illness,” even though doctors have been finding it in their 
patients for more than a century, because cases have been sharply rising 
in recent years. In some places, astronomically so. According to CDC 
data, reported Valley Fever cases in the U.S. increased by 32 percent 
between 2016 and 2018. One study determined that cases in California 
rose 800 percent between 2000 and 2018.

In most states where the disease is endemic, public health departments 
have been slow to grasp and advertise the breadth and potential impact 
of the illness, experts say, and the federal government could be doing 
more to fund research into a cure or vaccine for the infection. To date, 
there’s only been one multi-center, prospective comparative trial for 
the treatment of Valley fever. And, more troubling, researchers haven’t 
pinned down exactly what’s behind the rise in cases or how to stop it. 
One thing is nearly certain, though: Climate change plays a role...
- -
In 1892, a medical student in Buenos Aires named Alejandro Posadas met 
an Argentinian soldier who was seeking treatment for a dermatological 
problem. Posadas documented a fungal-like mass on the patient’s right 
cheek. Over the course of the next seven years, the soldier experienced 
worsening skin lesions and fever, and eventually died. His story is the 
first case of disseminated Coccidioidomycosis on record. ..
- -
Over the next few decades, as more people got sick with 
Coccidioidomycosis and died, doctors figured out that the organism 
causing this disease often entered victims through the lungs. In 1929, a 
26-year-old medical student at Stanford University Medical School cut 
open a dried Coccidioides culture and accidentally breathed in its 
spores. Nine days later, he was bedridden. But this time, the patient’s 
conditions improved and he eventually recovered. His illness would soon 
help doctors make a crucial connection.

It was only a few years later that the Kern County Department of Public 
Health in California began investigating the causes of a common disorder 
called “San Joaquin fever,” “Desert fever,” or “Valley fever,” which got 
its name from the state’s Central Valley, where the disease was 
prevalent. As doctors reviewed evidence from Kern County, they noticed 
commonalities between cases of Valley fever there and the disease the 
Stanford student experienced. Valley fever, they hypothesized, 
represented the Coccidioidomycosis infection.

Over the following decades, researchers would discover some important 
truths about Valley fever. They found that it is endemic to certain 
areas of the world, that the fungus that causes the disease lives in 
soil, that a majority of people infected by it are asymptomatic, and, 
crucially, that weather patterns and seasonal climate conditions have an 
effect on the prevalence of Coccidioides...
- -
A few years ago, Morgan Gorris, an Earth systems scientist at Los Alamos 
National Laboratory in New Mexico, decided to investigate an important 
question: What makes a place hospitable to Cocci? She soon discovered 
that the fungus thrives in a set of specific conditions. U.S. counties 
that are endemic to Valley fever have an average annual temperature 
above 50 degrees Fahrenheit and get under 600 millimeters of rain a 
year. “Essentially, they were hot and dry counties,” Gorris told Grist. 
She stuck the geographic areas that met those parameters on a map and 
overlaid them with CDC estimates on where Cocci grows. Sure enough, the 
counties, which stretch from West Texas through the Southwest and up 
into California (with a small patch in Washington State) matched up.

But then Gorris took her analysis a step further. She decided to look at 
what would happen to Valley fever under a high-emissions climate change 
scenario. In other words, whether the disease would spread if humans 
continued emitting greenhouse gases business-as-usual. “Once I did that, 
I found that by the end of the 21st century, much of the western U.S. 
could become endemic to Valley fever,” she said. “Our endemic area could 
expand as far north as the U.S.-Canada border.”

There’s reason to believe this Cocci expansion could be happening 
already, Bridget Barker, a researcher at Northern Arizona University, 
told Grist. Parts of Utah, Washington state, and Northern Arizona have 
all had Valley fever outbreaks recently. “That’s concerning to us 
because, yes, it would indicate that it’s happening right now,” Barker 
said. “If we look at the overlap with soil temperatures, we do really 
see that Cocci seems to be somewhat restricted by freezing.” Barker is 
still working on determining what the soil temperature threshold for the 
Cocci fungus is. But, in general, the fact that more and more of the 
U.S. could soon have conditions ripe for Cocci proliferation, she said, 
is worrying.

There is a massive economic burden associated with the potential 
expansion of Valley fever into new areas. Gorris conducted a separate 
analysis based on future warming scenarios and found that, by the end of 
the century, the average total annual cost of Valley fever infections 
could rise to $18.5 billion per year, up from $3.9 billion today.

Gorris’ research investigates how and where Cocci might move as the 
climate warms. But what’s behind the rise in cases where Cocci is 
already well-established, like in Ventura, where Jesse Merrick’s family 
home burnt down, is still an area of investigation.

Jesse thinks the cause of his Valley fever infection is obvious. “I 
clearly see a correlation between the fires and Valley fever,” he told 
Grist. But scientists aren’t exactly sure what environmental factors 
drive Cocci transmission, and neither are public officials.
- -
What experts do know, however, is that disturbing soil, especially soil 
that hasn’t been touched in a long time, in areas that are endemic to 
Cocci tends to send the dangerous fungal spores swirling into the air 
and, inevitably, people’s lungs. That’s why wildland firefighters tend 
to get Valley fever, not necessarily from the flames themselves, but 
from digging line breaks in the soil to help contain fires. Construction 
sites are responsible for a huge quantity of Valley fever infections for 
the same reason.

And the fact that researchers haven’t been able to find a link between 
wildfires and Cocci doesn’t necessarily mean that Jesse’s theory about 
how he contracted his illness is incorrect. Researchers have documented 
the Cocci fungi living in many parts of California. But the fungus isn’t 
evenly distributed throughout the areas where it grows. Think of a 
mountainside covered in wildflowers, John Galgiani, director of the 
Valley Fever Center for Excellence in Arizona, told Grist. Wildflowers 
grow in swaths across mountains, not evenly saturated throughout the 
landscape. Coccidioides similarly grows in flushes across the landscape. 
That means a wildfire that breaks out in an area that is endemic to 
Valley fever won’t necessarily encounter a vein of Cocci fungi.

“If a fire happened to be where there was Valley fever fungus in the 
soil, then that would be a risk,” Galgiani said. “But that’s a little 
different statement than all wildfires cause Valley fever.”...
- -
The connection between climatic changes and Valley fever is a bit 
clearer. Researchers speculate that a pattern of intense drought 
followed by intense rain may be driving the rise in Valley fever cases. 
When there’s a prolonged drought, the fungus in the soil tends to dry up 
and die. But no drought goes on forever — at least not in most parts of 
the U.S. When the rains eventually come back, the fungus flourishes. 
Then when the next drought hits and soils and the fungus dry out again, 
it is easy for wind — or a firefighter’s shovel or a hiker’s boot — to 
disturb and disseminate the abundant rain-spurred spores.

“The big issue is drought, it’s dryness,” Julie Parsonnet, a specialist 
in adult infectious diseases at Stanford University, told Grist. “And 
after a period of rain it’s even worse.” Parsonnet sees the real-world 
consequences of that dry-wet cycle at Stanford, where she works at a 
referral center that sees patients with even worse Valley fever than 
Jesse had — the really bad cases. “We see really terrible disease with 
the fungus affecting their brains and their bones,” she said. “In terms 
of how severe it is and the lifelong requirement for some of these 
people for treatment, it’s worrisome. We don’t want to see it. It would 
be a bad thing to see more Cocci than we have already.”

Parsonnet has been at Stanford for three decades, and over that time, 
she’s not only seen more Valley fever cases, but more severe cases. “In 
the last few years, I’ve been taking care of three or four Valley fever 
patients at any given time,” she said. “In the first 20 years I was 
here, I saw maybe one or two total.”...
- -
“It’s not like COVID where you’re well one day and dead the next week,” 
Parsonnet, from Stanford University, said. “If you have bad Cocci it’ll 
drag on for years and maybe even decades. And for that reason it makes 
less of a splash.”

Out of all the states in the U.S. that are endemic to Valley fever, 
Arizona is best equipped to handle the rise in Cocci cases. The state 
public health department keeps close tabs on Valley fever and regularly 
reports cases to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The 
Valley Fever Center for Excellence, housed within the University of 
Arizona, helps facilitate collaboration between doctors and researchers 
across multiple counties within Arizona and develops strategies for 
diagnosing and treating Valley fever. The Arizona Department of Health 
Services, the state’s public health department, has spent time and 
resources trying to raise Valley fever awareness among Arizonans.

There’s a reason Arizona is ahead of the curve. It has the highest rates 
of Valley fever in the nation. “Arizona is a special case because it’s 
hard for them to ignore it,” Galgiani said. “It’s the second or third 
most frequently reported public health disease in the state. That’s not 
the case anywhere else in the country.” Other states like Utah, Texas, 
New Mexico, and Washington are also clocking rising rates of Valley 
fever, but it may be some time before the disease poses a big enough 
risk to residents that public health departments in those states start 
dedicating significant time and resources to it. West Texas, for 
example, is an “intensely endemic” region, Galgiani said. But the Texas 
Department of State Health Services doesn’t even report Valley fever 
cases to the CDC yet....
- -
“I think it’ll probably take expanding numbers to get people’s attention 
to make this a higher priority among everything else that needs 
attention,” Galgiani said.

There’s evidence that that is already starting to happen in California, 
where Valley fever is becoming an increasingly serious public health 
threat. In an email to Grist, a spokesperson for the California 
Department of Public Health noted that Valley fever cases in the state 
nearly tripled between 2015 and 2019, from roughly 3,000 cases to 9,000. 
“The annual number of reported cases has increased significantly since 
2010,” the spokesperson said. The Department of Public Health got 
funding from the CDC in 2012 to hire an epidemiologist to study fungal 
diseases in the state, and it launched a $2 million Valley fever 
awareness campaign in 2018. “I think there is a kind of an awakening of 
the understanding that this is a problem,” Mirels said...
- -
Valley fever on its own is a formidable and expensive illness to contend 
with. But it’s not the only fungal pathogen lurking beneath our feet. 
There are three main types of fungi that cause lung infections in humans 
in the U.S., including Cocci. Histoplasmosis and blastomycosis also pose 
risks to humans. It’s possible that the same environmental conditions 
that may be helping Cocci spread into new areas and become more 
prevalent are also motivating those fungi. Researchers can’t say for 
sure whether that’s happening yet, but it’s something they’re working on...
- -
For most of the rest of us, the pathogens hiding in the ground aren’t 
much of a consideration at all. That applies to Jesse Merrick, too. For 
him, Valley fever is a distant, if terrible, memory now. He doesn’t let 
it stop him from doing the things he wants to do. He still goes on hikes 
and visits his mom in California. And he recently moved to Las Vegas, 
Nevada, an area that is endemic to Valley fever. “It’s in the back of my 
head but nothing where it’s something I think about daily or anything 
like that,” he said.

It may only be a matter of time before we start thinking about fungus 
more often, Barker said. “I honestly think that the fungal pathogens are 
going to be a huge problem for us going forward.”
https://grist.org/health/valley-fever-rising-us-west-wildfires-cocci-fungus/



/[Book talk, all about water, really, water - video presentation]/
*Giulio Boccaletti: Water—A Biography*
Sep 14, 2021
Town Hall Seattle
“If there is magic on this planet,” anthropologist Loren Eiseley said, 
“it is contained in water.” Humans have been trying to contain that 
magic for millennia. Giulio Boccaletti knows this more than most anyone. 
With Water: A Biography, Boccaletti showcases the revealing history of 
how the distribution of water has shaped human civilization.

We all need water to survive. It is essential to every plant and animal 
on this earth. Boccaletti offers up a wide-ranging environmental and 
social history, beginning from the earliest civilizations of sedentary 
farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and Euphrates Rivers. 
Those early civilizations’ farming techniques forever changed the world. 
Their irrigation systems led to multiple cropping which, in turn, led to 
a population explosion and labor specialization.

The development of humankind flows with the development of water 
infrastructure. Irrigation’s early structure informed social structure. 
The invention of the calendar, for example, sprung from agricultural 
necessity. In ancient Greece, a community’s water well laid the 
groundwork for democracy. During the Roman Empire, water security led to 
systems of taxation. The control of water continues today, and is 
becoming increasingly important, as societies far and wide are dealing 
with water, and the lack thereof, with increasing regularity because of 
human-induced climate change. There’s no better time to understand our 
relationship to the most elemental substance on earth than now.

Giulio Boccaletti is a physicist and climate scientist, holding a 
doctorate from Princeton University, where he was a NASA Earth Systems 
Science Fellow. He is an honorary research associate at the Smith School 
of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzLz_87kvHM&t=813s



/[Present and future waters are ready for changes]/
*The social impacts of glacial melts*
Sunil Acharya | 8th September 2021
Glacial melt due to climate breakdown is already having rapid impacts on 
vulnerable communities.
The climate crisis and current Covid-19 pandemic has presented the 
opportunity to rethink how we address poverty, economic injustice and 
the climate crisis - even at the cost of having exposed the thin margins 
on which the global economic order runs, and how it is devoid of the 
capacity to deal with shocks and uncertainties.

Way back in 1920, the Indigenous peoples of the sacred Tsum Valley in 
the foothills of the northwest Nepal Himalaya made a collective 
commitment for the conservation of biodiversity and culture of their  
local area for the benefit of the many generations to come.

The valley residents were gearing up for centennial celebrations to 
reaffirm and renew the commitments in a cultural festival to be 
organised in April 2020. They were forced to postpone the event until 
further notice due to Covid-19.

This series of articles has been published in partnership with Dalia 
Gebrial and Harpreet Kaur Paul and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in 
London. It first appeared in a collection titled Perspectives on a 
Global Green New Deal.
*
**Melting**
*While they have always remained the custodians of nature, a much 
greater threat looms large – the threat of climate change – with the 
prospect of displacing them and their culture entirely.

Around 1.9 billion people across the South Asian subcontinent depend 
upon Himalayan glaciers for drinking water, agriculture and energy. Due 
to climate change, these glaciers are melting twice as fast as they were 
in the year 2000.

Some parts of the Himalayan region are warming fast, three times faster 
than the global average.

In 2019, a comprehensive climate change study focused on the Hindu Kush, 
Himalaya found that even if global collective action can contain the 
temperature rise to 1.5°C, at least one third of the Himalayan glaciers 
would melt by the end of this century.

At the current rate of global greenhouse emission and warming, the 
Himalayas could lose two thirds of its glaciers by 2100.

*Scarcity**
*Glacial lake outburst floods will wash away people and infrastructure 
in the mountain slopes with more frequent floods (in the already fragile 
region) until around 2050, increasing river discharge.

In the longer term, we will see persistent droughts with glacier-less 
mountains and water-less rivers. Scores of villages in the Himalayas 
have already been forced to relocate elsewhere due to scarcity of water.

One example is residents of Dhye village in Mustang District of Nepal. 
The village people have historically adjusted their agriculture-based 
livelihood to an arid environment and have been balancing their material 
needs within nature’s limits. However, climate change has rendered their 
livelihoods more difficult.

*Relocation*
The Dhye villagers were forced to relocate to a nearby area, Thanchung. 
The government calls this relocation illegal and encroachment of 
national property thus rendering Dhye villagers ‘climate refugees,’ 
albeit displaced internally within Nepal.

The Andes have also been impacted. Peru alone has lost up to 50 percent 
of its glacial ice in the past three to four decades. Glacial lake 
outburst floods have resulted in the loss of thousands of lives.

In 1941, a single devastating flood from Lake Palcacocha killed more 
than five thousand people and destroyed the city of Huaraz.

Climate change has made this deadly lake more dangerous for current and 
future generations.

While the countries of these regions have made negligible contributions 
to climate change and resulting impacts, the dominant approach to 
development and its pathway is hastening the crisis.

Governments, motivated by their development partners, build 
infrastructure in the Himalayan region without giving proper 
consideration to geological and environmental risks.

*Hydropower*
In the rush for short term economic growth, hydropower promotes 
enrichment for the companies that own the dams with negative impacts to 
local communities many of whom live with energy poverty as the water 
generated energy is exported to other regions and countries.

Over 20 million people in Nepal, 82 percent of the population, lack 
access to clean and safe methods of energy for cooking, 
disproportionately exposing the women who undertake this labour to toxic 
air.

Household air pollution from unventilated cooking with fuelwood and 
charcoal presents a serious public health hazard, contributing to 
asthma, acute respiratory infections, tuberculosis, strokes, low birth 
weight, and cataracts, among other healthcare risks.

Dams also displace and the majority of displaced people are indigenous 
communities who have made their homes in the mountains.

Dams also increase the risk of earthquakes (in an already vulnerable 
region).

*Development*
A study conducted after the 2015 Nepal earthquake called for an urgent 
revaluation of hydropower development in the region.

It reported that about 25 percent of hydropower projects are likely to 
be damaged by the landslides triggered by earthquakes.

Similarly, road projects across the Himalayan region pose threats to the 
fragile ecosystems.

By-passing the required environmental assessments and management plans, 
they tear through pristine areas that have been protected by indigenous 
communities for hundreds of years.

*Silencing*
All these damages are mistakenly viewed as the necessary costs of 
development but these dominant views do not answer: for whose benefit is 
this development? What does development mean if it takes away so much?

If development is the story of who we want to become, whose story is 
promoted while silencing others? What are we leaving for future generations?

While the climate crisis and current Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the 
thin margins on which the global economic order runs, and how it is 
devoid of the capacity to deal with shocks and uncertainties, it has 
also presented the opportunity to rethink how we address poverty, 
economic injustice and the climate crisis.

One framework that is creating a vision to build a healthier, more 
resilient and sustainable future is the Green New Deal, propagated 
mostly from the industrial world.

*Transition*
We need to examine the merit of these proposals from the perspective of 
the Global South.

This framework alone cannot drive the fundamental systemic shifts 
required to transition away from our shared crises.

Unless those on the frontline of disaster development, climate change 
and marginalisation are participating in discourses meaningfully, and 
leading our visions for alternative futures, we will forever make 
cosmetic changes to a system that has historical roots in exploitation, 
extraction and displacement.

*This Author*
Sunil Acharya is the regional advisor for Climate And Resilience 
Practical Action in Kathmandu, Nepal.
https://theecologist.org/2021/sep/08/social-impacts-glacial-melts



/[Stunning images across brief time]/
*Stunning photos show drought’s impact on huge California reservoir*
Historic California drought has pushed water level at the San Luis 
Reservoir and other bodies of water to alarming lows
https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/09/17/before-and-after-see-the-impact-of-the-california-drought-on-san-luis-reservoir/




/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming September 19, 2015*
September 19, 2015:

In a New York Times op-ed, Noah S. Diffenbaugh, an associate professor 
of earth system science at Stanford University, and Christopher B. 
Field, a director of the department of global ecology at the Carnegie 
Institution for Science, observe:

"As wildfires rage, crops are abandoned, wells run dry and cities work 
to meet mandatory water cuts, drought-weary Californians are counting on 
a savior in the tropical ocean: El Niño.

"This warming of the tropical Pacific occurs about every five years, 
affecting climate around the globe and bringing heavy winter 
precipitation to parts of California. The state experienced two of its 
wettest years during two of the strongest El Niños, in 1982-83 and 1997-98.

"Now climatologists have confirmed that a powerful El Niño is building, 
and forecasts suggest a high likelihood that El Niño conditions will 
persist through the next several months. So we in California expect a 
rainy winter.

"But before everyone gets too excited, it is important to understand 
this: Two physical realities virtually ensure that Californians will 
still face drought, regardless of how this El Niño unfolds.

"The first is that California has missed at least a year’s worth of 
precipitation, meaning that it would take an extraordinarily wet rainy 
season to single-handedly break the drought. Even if that happened, we 
would most likely suffer from too much water too fast, as occurred in 
the early 1980s and late 1990s, when El Niño delivered more rainfall 
than aquifers could absorb and reservoirs could store.

"The second is that California is facing a new climate reality, in which 
extreme drought is more likely. The state’s water rights, infrastructure 
and management were designed for an old climate, one that no longer exists.

"Our research has shown that global warming has doubled the odds of the 
warm, dry conditions that are intensifying and prolonging this drought, 
which now holds records not only for lowest precipitation and highest 
temperature, but also for the lowest spring snowpack in the Sierra 
Nevada in at least 500 years. These changing odds make it much more 
likely that similar conditions will occur again, exacerbating other 
stresses on agriculture, ecosystems and people."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/19/opinion/a-wet-winter-wont-save-california.html?ref=opinion


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