Month: April 2022

I don’t drink often. But I need a drink.

Washington Post:

CHUCA, Australia — A dust cloud soars behind farmer Tim Kingma’s pickup truck as he drives down a gritty dirt track to a neat row of pig sheds. The landscape is flat and muted: dry, mostly treeless ground and patchy grass. At this farm in the southeastern state of Victoria, there are hundreds of flies and not a single visible mosquito. It’s a world away from the verdant places one might expect to find fatal tropical diseases.

Yet a month ago Kingma’s sows started birthing stillborn piglets. Some of the animals emerged shriveled and desiccated, like little mummies. Alarmed, he called state authorities, who tested the animals and confirmed the diagnosis: Japanese encephalitis. Within weeks, he learned a few dozen farms had been affected. More shockingly, the viral illness was killing Australians. By the start of this month, authorities had counted 34 human cases and three deaths.

Japanese encephalitis is rare and mostly asymptomatic. In 99 percent of cases it passes through the body without causing symptoms. But of the unlucky 1 percent, nearly a third die, and about half the survivors are left with permanent problems. There is no cure, and Australia is spending millions of dollars in a rush to import vaccine doses.

Public health professionals say the appearance of Japanese encephalitis here is just the latest example of how global warming is contributing to the spread of disease. Six years ago, melting permafrost in Siberia released frozen anthrax, which infected an Indigenous community. In 2007, the tropical chikungunya virus was detected in Europe for the first time in two Italian villages and has since appeared in France. In the United States, Lyme disease cases have doubled over 30 years as warmer conditions create longer tick seasons. And in Australia, experts warn Japanese encephalitis could be the first of several illnesses to spread south.

Tim Inglis is the head of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Western Australia.

Continue reading “Climate Disseminates Disease DownUnder-and Damn, it’s a Dandy”

“The sort of event that is becoming much more widespread.”
Michael Mann continues to sound the alarm, both on BBC this week, and earlier in an Op-Ed in Time magazine.

Michael Mann and Susan Joy Hassol in Time:

 We are at an agonizing moment in world history. The combined stresses of the war in Ukraine, the climate crisis, and economic troubles stemming from spiking oil and gas prices, inflation, and growing global inequality have pushed us to our limits— geopolitically, environmentally, and psychologically. After centuries of colonialism, intensive resource extraction, and narrow, short-term thinking, the chickens have come home to roost. But what if we could feed three birds with one scone?

Following the release of climate reports, such as the recent IPCC assessments, we often observe a surge of doomism. When headlines proclaim it’s “now or never” to limit warming, some assume we won’t do what’s needed in time. And if you think there’s nothing we can do, why bother trying? Some well-meaning people can be weaponized by those who stand to benefit if we throw up our hands in surrender rather than challenging the fossil fuel industry’s social license. We must stress the urgency. There is clearly no time to waste. But there is agency too. The problem with “now or never” is that it implies a hard threshold at 1.5°C that if we fail to achieve, it’s game over. But this game will never be over. There is no point beyond which we shouldn’t keep trying to limit warming. Every fraction of a degree matters to the level of suffering climate disruption will rain down on us.

We are reaping what we’ve sown in a world that has remained dependent on fossil fuels for far too long. Bad actors like Russia and Saudi Arabia (which have done everything they can to block global climate action) have gained tremendous wealth and influence from our dependence on fossil fuels. And they have long held the world hostage with their leverage over oil and gas markets. They have weakened our ability to respond to their various aggressions from a place of strength.

With so many crises competing for our attention and concern, how can we prioritize the greatest threats when the more immediate ones so often displace the most important? Someone needs to be thinking about the future, and fittingly, those who will inherit it, are. More than 80 percent of young people are worried about climate change. And they are angry, as well they should be. Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Villaseñor, Vanessa Nakate, and other leaders of the youth climate movement are fueled with righteous anger against those who have stood by and watched as the world burned.

Continue reading “Michael Mann on South Africa’s Flooding Disaster”

More from my interview with Amber Sullins, Chief Meteorologist of ABC 15 in Phoenix.
“Heat is the number one weather-related killer”.

New York Times, August 11, 2021:

During the deadly heat wave that blanketed Oregon and Washington in late June, (2021) about 600 more people died than would have been typical, a review of mortality data for the week of the crisis shows.

The New York Times’s analysis, based on mortality data reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by the two states, covers all causes of death, including Covid-19. But the public health agency’s initial calculations indicate that only about 60 deaths in the region were related to the coronavirus that week.

The figures are preliminary. C.D.C. officials said the death count could rise further in coming weeks as the states continue to report. “Consider it a floor,” said Lauren Rossen, a health statistician at the agency who works with the mortality data.

The Times’ estimate “is entirely consistent with a large body of knowledge indicating that days of extreme heat are dangerous and can lead to excess deaths,” said Greg Wellenius, a professor in environmental health at Boston University who has studied heat-related mortality.

Continue reading “In Arizona – Heat is Climate’s Silent Killer”

Associated Press:

Heavy rains and flooding have killed at least 341 people in South Africa’s eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, including the city of Durban, and more rainstorms are forecast in the coming days.

The death toll is expected to rise as scores of people, including whole families, are missing, officials said Thursday. 

The persistent rains have wreaked havoc in the province, destroying homes, collapsing buildings and washing away major roads.

‼️ #Heavyrains caused #flooding in KwaZulu-Natal, #SouthAfrica. Sadly, at least 20 people have died and several people are still missing. Due to #weather and #floods, major roads in #Durban and #Umlazi have been closed.#GlobalCrisis #DurbanFloods #Durbanweather #flood pic.twitter.com/Ae3Fi48i88

— Global Crisis (@_GlobalCrisis_) April 12, 2022

Allegedly.

Really painful and disgusting local news report from Fox 2 in Detroit.
I get ads for this company popping up on YouTube all the time. Looks like a lot of people are being taken in.
Slick salesmen know how to push the “getting off the grid” and “saving the planet” buttons, as well as the “there’s government subsidies in it for you” line.
But wait till you see the fine print in the contracts here.

One unwary homeowner was given a solar array installed on a north-facing roof.
One clue that might have alerted folks that the “Billion Dollar Solar CEO” they were dealing with was a scam artist, below.

More from my series of interviews with leading TV meteorologists from around the country.
I hope to put all these together for a Yale Climate Connections piece next week, but talking to Amber Sullins, Chief Meteorologist at ABC 15 in Phoenix, yesterday, gave me some key puzzle pieces.

Amber is a true pro and has been patiently communicating on climate in her market for a decade. Those efforts are bearing fruit.

You can’t make a terror weapon out of a wind turbine.
A nuclear plant, at least the current generation of nuclear plants, that’s something else.
Above, very informative and unsettling account of recent (presumably Russian) forays into the cybernetic infrastructure of the US grid.

An attack on the grid as it exists could be devastating – but with an interlinked series of microgrids that are “islandable” – can function independently, and has local solar or wind power production – a country could make itself much more secure from emerging threats, including malicious attack, and increasingly extreme weather events.

This is not new.

New York Times, March 15, 2018:

The Trump administration accused Russia on Thursday of engineering a series of cyberattacks that targeted American and European nuclear power plants and water and electric systems, and could have sabotaged or shut power plants off at will.

United States officials and private security firms saw the attacks as a signal by Moscow that it could disrupt the West’s critical facilities in the event of a conflict.

They said the strikes accelerated in late 2015, at the same time the Russian interference in the American election was underway. The attackers had compromised some operators in North America and Europe by spring 2017, after President Trump was inaugurated.

In the following months, according to a Department of Homeland Security report issued on Thursday, Russian hackers made their way to machines with access to critical control systems at power plants that were not identified. The hackers never went so far as to sabotage or shut down the computer systems that guide the operations of the plants.
–

In December, the White House said North Korea had carried out the so-called WannaCry attack that in May paralyzed the British health system and placed ransomware in computers in schools, businesses and homes across the world. Last month, it accused Russia of being behind the NotPetya attack against Ukraine last June, the largest in a series of cyberattacks on Ukraine to date, paralyzing the country’s government agencies and financial systems.

But the penalties have been light. So far, Mr. Trump has said little to nothing about the Russian role in those attacks.

The groups that conducted the energy attacks, which are linked to Russian intelligence agencies, appear to be different from the two hacking groups that were involved in the election interference.

Continue reading “Russian Cyber Threat Shows Grid Vulnerability”

I’m going to watch just to hear that voice again. The man might have a future in this.

Laura Manske in Forbes:

Get set to get inspired by Netflix’s breathtakingly beautiful new five-part series, Our Great National Parks, premiering April 13th. This stellar documentary is narrated and executive produced by Barack Obama, who has protected more public lands and water than any other U.S. president. If you’ve been longing to savor travel sights and sounds in exceptional wild yonder (particularly after two years of pandemic lockdown), then view this inviting unveiling of ravishingly varied landscapes, seascapes, and surprising animal escapades. Its cinematography wows with grand sweeps of secluded terrain and astonishingly intimate close-ups of colorful creatures. “A fish that can walk. Surfing hippos that want to catch the waves. Species found nowhere else on earth,” says Obama in his soothingly optimistic voice. “Join me in the celebration of our planet’s greatest national parks and wildernesses…. A journey through the natural wonders of our shared birthright.”