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<font size="+2"><i><b>September 19, 2021</b></i></font><br>
<br>
<i>[Difference between light and heavy rains]</i><br>
<b>Rain helps, but not enough: Oregon wildfires still burning</b><br>
WILDFIRES<br>
Bull Complex Fire only 15% contained...<br>
- -<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
A Level 1 “Be Ready” evacuation order for Breitenbush Hot Springs
remains in effect...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.koin.com/news/wildfires/rain-helps-but-not-enough-oregon-wildfires-still-burning/">https://www.koin.com/news/wildfires/rain-helps-but-not-enough-oregon-wildfires-still-burning/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[What else could possibly be more important?]</i><br>
<b>The Disaster We Must Think About Every Day</b><br>
Sept. 17, 2021<br>
By Tressie McMillan Cottom - - Opinion Writer<br>
[from NYT]<br>
<p>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.</p>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
- - <br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
- -<br>
<b>I am preparing for disasters.</b><br>
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.<br>
<br>
<b>I am going to compost.</b><br>
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.<br>
<br>
<b>I will drive less and drive an electric vehicle when I do drive.</b><br>
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.<br>
<br>
<b>I nixed the lawn mafia.</b><br>
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.<br>
<br>
<b>I am sunbathing.</b><br>
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...<br>
—<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/opinion/climate-change-environment.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/opinion/climate-change-environment.html</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[She is a hero]</i><br>
<b>How to Talk About Climate Change Across the Political Divide</b><br>
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.<br>
By Eliza Griswold -- September 16, 2021<br>
- -<br>
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...<br>
- - <br>
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.”...<br>
- -<br>
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.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/how-to-talk-about-climate-change-across-the-political-divide">https://www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/how-to-talk-about-climate-change-across-the-political-divide</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[global warming and hot, drought soils ]</i><br>
<b>A deadly fungal disease on the rise in the West has experts
worried</b><br>
Zoya Teirstein -- Sep 15, 2021<br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
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. ..<br>
- -<br>
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.<br>
<p>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. <br>
</p>
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...<br>
- -<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.
<br>
- -<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.”...<br>
- -<br>
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. <br>
<br>
“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.” <br>
<br>
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.”...<br>
- -<br>
“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.” <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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....<br>
- -<br>
“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.<br>
<br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://grist.org/health/valley-fever-rising-us-west-wildfires-cocci-fungus/">https://grist.org/health/valley-fever-rising-us-west-wildfires-cocci-fungus/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><i>[Book talk, all about water, really, water - video
presentation]</i><br>
<b>Giulio Boccaletti: Water—A Biography</b><br>
Sep 14, 2021<br>
Town Hall Seattle<br>
“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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzLz_87kvHM&t=813s">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzLz_87kvHM&t=813s</a></p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[Present and future waters are ready for changes]</i><br>
<b>The social impacts of glacial melts</b><br>
Sunil Acharya | 8th September 2021 <br>
Glacial melt due to climate breakdown is already having rapid
impacts on vulnerable communities.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<b><br>
</b><b>Melting</b><b><br>
</b>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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Some parts of the Himalayan region are warming fast, three times
faster than the global average.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
At the current rate of global greenhouse emission and warming, the
Himalayas could lose two thirds of its glaciers by 2100.<br>
<br>
<b>Scarcity</b><b><br>
</b>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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<b>Relocation</b><br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
In 1941, a single devastating flood from Lake Palcacocha killed more
than five thousand people and destroyed the city of Huaraz.<br>
<br>
Climate change has made this deadly lake more dangerous for current
and future generations.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Governments, motivated by their development partners, build
infrastructure in the Himalayan region without giving proper
consideration to geological and environmental risks.<br>
<br>
<b>Hydropower</b><br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Dams also displace and the majority of displaced people are
indigenous communities who have made their homes in the mountains.<br>
<br>
Dams also increase the risk of earthquakes (in an already vulnerable
region).<br>
<br>
<b>Development</b><br>
A study conducted after the 2015 Nepal earthquake called for an
urgent revaluation of hydropower development in the region.<br>
<br>
It reported that about 25 percent of hydropower projects are likely
to be damaged by the landslides triggered by earthquakes.<br>
<br>
Similarly, road projects across the Himalayan region pose threats to
the fragile ecosystems.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<b>Silencing</b><br>
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?<br>
<br>
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?<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<b>Transition</b><br>
We need to examine the merit of these proposals from the perspective
of the Global South.<br>
<br>
This framework alone cannot drive the fundamental systemic shifts
required to transition away from our shared crises.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<b>This Author</b><br>
Sunil Acharya is the regional advisor for Climate And Resilience
Practical Action in Kathmandu, Nepal.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://theecologist.org/2021/sep/08/social-impacts-glacial-melts">https://theecologist.org/2021/sep/08/social-impacts-glacial-melts</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[Stunning images across brief time]</i><br>
<b>Stunning photos show drought’s impact on huge California
reservoir</b><br>
Historic California drought has pushed water level at the San Luis
Reservoir and other bodies of water to alarming lows<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/09/17/before-and-after-see-the-impact-of-the-california-drought-on-san-luis-reservoir/">https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/09/17/before-and-after-see-the-impact-of-the-california-drought-on-san-luis-reservoir/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
<i>[The news archive - looking back]</i><br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming
September 19, 2015</b></font><br>
September 19, 2015:<br>
<br>
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:<br>
<br>
"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.<br>
<br>
"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.<br>
<br>
"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.<br>
<br>
"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.<br>
<br>
"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.<br>
<br>
"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.<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/19/opinion/a-wet-winter-wont-save-california.html?ref=opinion">http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/19/opinion/a-wet-winter-wont-save-california.html?ref=opinion</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<p>/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/</p>
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