Are We Screw (Wormed)?

“A challenge we thought we had beaten in the 1960s.”

Yeah, sort of like Measles, you dolt.

Weather Channel:

A flesh-eating New World screwworm was confirmed in a calf in Texas this week, news that could seriously damage the U.S. livestock industry and raise already high beef prices.

The parasitic larvae of the screwworm fly typically enter an animal through an open wound and feed on their flesh, eventually killing the animal if left untreated, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It is rare for people to contract screwworm, and they do not pose any food safety issues.

Weather and climate have kept screwworms from entering the U.S., but climate change is extending its range northward, according to the National Institutes of Health. Warmer climates would also increase cattle tick populations and their range, which would also increase the outbreak potential for screwworm.

The parasite’s presence in the U.S. could be the result of a warming climate. Screwworms are cold-sensitive — they can’t survive unless low temperatures are regularly above freezing, year-round, according to Drovers, the oldest livestock publication in the U.S. Ideal conditions for adult flies are temperatures between 77 and 86, with relative humidity between 30-70%.

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Trump Admin Moves to Dismantle Key Ocean Sensor System

They hate knowledge. They promote ignorance.
The whole premise of science is that there are facts – facts and physics that are not amenable to human whims. Nature does not respond to the Republican Party Platform.
Authoritarians find this threatening – they cannot mold science with a tweet.

New York Times:

The Trump administration is dismantling a $368 million deep-ocean observation system that was put in place a decade ago to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems and powerful currents that affect the global climate.

The National Science Foundation said it would send ships in June to begin removing more than 900 deep-sea instruments anchored off Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea.

Scientists have used data from the system to understand how the ocean is absorbing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, how changes in ocean temperature such as marine heat waves might affect fisheries or signal bigger shifts in the climate, and coastal flooding along the East Coast.

Administration’s explanation for removing key ocean sensing system
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Can Data Centers be Done Right? Is Michigan’s Stargate a Model?

I was able to tour the site of Oracle’s new Stargate Data Center in Saline Township, Michigan yesterday.
Couple of observations.
The site is big, but worth noting as the video above does, there is a thousand acres of land in this parcel, and the actual build is 250 acres. The rest is being left as is – some of which will continue to be farmed, I assume as rented land, and some will be left as wetland and wooded land.

“Leave it all as farmland” was not on the table here. The former owners of the site made it clear they were not going to continue farming. This area, close to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan, and squarely in the southeast Michigan Detroit Metro area, is under immense development pressure, and sprawl is rampant. The other option would very likely be to become a subdivided landscape of boxy MacMansions and concrete, which very often put greater pressure on local services without a commensurate increase in revenues.
Stargate will be paying the full cost for the wires and substations that will connect it to the larger grid. In addition, the project will be purchasing 1.4 gigawatts of battery storage that will be sited around the state, operated by the major utility DTE, and belong to the system and the ratepayer. That spend will provide more than half of the 2500 MW of storage mandated in the State’s climate legislation.

The project will be connected to the grid. On average, systems like DTE’s are utilizing about half of their built generation resources on any given day – the rest is overhead, that ratepayers are paying for, but only maxed out a few hours of the year, generally during the peak times in the hottest days of August.
Bringing in big new users who will soak up that excess capacity during the rest of the year helps amortize the system, and can be a downward pressure on electric rates. DTE has committed to foregoing any new rate requests for at least 2 years.

Continue reading “Can Data Centers be Done Right? Is Michigan’s Stargate a Model?”