click a pic
Sep 5, 2021
Today's Reddit
Nature can be ugly nasty and mean, but we tend to overlook all that when something like this comes along.
Today's Tweet
Dunno where she is, but are you willing to bet it's somewhere other than a "red state" &/or somewhere in the south?
16-bed overflow ICU opened yesterday. We have had a huge influx of travel nurses and FEMA is sending more nurses next week...but the Covid patients KEEP COMING!
— NurseSheepie 💙 (@NurseSheepie) September 4, 2021
They have now moved our peak date out 3 days to 9/14. That is when we PEAK!!!! We have ordered refrigerated truck.
COVID-19 Update
Good news - bad news - who the fuck knows news.
The covid endgame: Is the pandemic over already? Or are there years to go?
It’s basically over already. It will end this October. Or maybe it won’t be over till next spring, or late next year, or two or three years down the road.
From the most respected epidemiologists to public health experts who have navigated past disease panics, from polemicists to political partisans, there are no definitive answers to the central question in American life: As a Drudge Report headline put it recently, “is it ever going to end?”
With children returning to classrooms, in many cases for the first time in 18 months, and as the highly contagious delta variant and spotty vaccination uptake send case numbers and deaths shooting upward, many Americans wonder what exactly has to happen before life can return to something that looks and feels like 2019.
The answers come in a kaleidoscopic cavalcade of scenarios, some suggested with utmost humility, others with mathematical confidence: The pandemic will end because deaths finally drop to about the same level we’re accustomed to seeing from the flu each year. Or it will end when most kids are vaccinated. Or it will end because Americans are finally exhausted by all the restrictions on daily life.
Innumerable predictions over the course of the pandemic have come up lame. Some scientists have sworn off soothsaying. But as they learn more about the coronavirus that bestowed covid-19 on mankind, they build models and make projections and describe the hurdles that remain before people can pull off the masks and go about their lives.
The good news is there is some fuel for optimism.
“I truly, truly think we are in the endgame,” said Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist and professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. “The cases will start plummeting in mid- to late September and by mid-October, we will be in a manageable place, where the virus is a concern for health professionals, but not really for the general public.”
Gandhi bases her optimism on the fact that all previous epidemics of respiratory viruses have ended through the acquisition of immunity, whether by vaccination or natural infection. Although viruses do keep changing, potentially circumventing people’s defenses, “they mutate quickly, at a cost to themselves,” weakening over time. Gandhi said she believes the delta variant that has hit the United States so hard that this summer will mark the peak of this virus’s strength.
But Gandhi warns she has been wrong before: In February 2020, she said the United States would not tolerate a disease that killed 100 Americans a day; people would come together to do whatever it took to stop that. That didn’t happen.
The bad news is there is too much cause for doubt.
“We’re in a moment of uncertainty, and humans don’t do well with uncertainty,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “Telling people it’s going to be two or three more years of this is really hard, but I don’t think anyone can be comfortable with the current state, with a lot of kids ending up in the hospital and a thousand deaths a day. That’s not returning to normal.”
Emanuel, too, notes that his crystal ball has suffered occasional cloudiness: In March 2020, he said the country would get back to normal around November 2021. For that, his friends dubbed him “Mr. Pessimist.” Now, his message is at least as unwelcome: It’s going to be at least spring 2022 and possibly much longer before most people are ready to resume normal activities, because of the spread of the delta variant, continuing resistance to vaccines and widespread anxiety, especially about children who are not yet eligible to get vaccinated.
Despite the disparities in experts’ opinions, there is a consensus bottom line about the biggest question: Pandemics do end, sort of. (Though there are exceptions, such as malaria.) Only smallpox has been effectively eradicated by human intervention. But many pandemics become endemic, meaning they morph into something that is no longer an emergency, but rather an annoyance, an ugly, even painful fact of life that people simply learn to cope with, like the flu or common cold.
The question is when and how we get to that point.
Some of the nation’s most prominent epidemiologists and public health experts say we are already there — for different reasons.
“The emergency phase of the disease is over,” said Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine and health economist at Stanford University. “Now, we need to work very hard to undo the sense of emergency. We should be treating covid as one of 200 diseases that affect people.”
The pivotal engine driving a return to normal life for Bhattacharya has been the vaccines, “which really do protect against death,” he said. “It’s a miraculous development, and we should just be celebrating it.” By driving down deaths and hospitalizations, especially for the most vulnerable populations — the elderly and people with preexisting health problems — “we have greatly succeeded, and to me, that’s the endpoint of the epidemic because we really can’t do better than that.”
The virus will continue to mutate and there will continue to be outbreaks, both seasonal and in geographic clusters, but “panicking over case numbers is a recipe for continuing unwarranted panic,” he said.
Bhattacharya is ready to resume most pre-pandemic activities. He recently made his first overseas trip, to England, “and it was wonderful,” he said, “even with a mask.”
Gandhi, too, has concluded that as scary and dangerous as the delta variant has been, “we’re sort of at the peak of the pandemic because the delta variant is causing immunity like crazy. Delta comes in like a hurricane, but it leaves a lot of immunity in its wake.”
Although its rapid spread and severe impact on some people are scary, the delta version has a hidden benefit: It makes future variants less likely to be more lethal, Gandhi said.
Covid isn’t going away — “we’re going to get it,” Gandhi said — but as immunity increases, the virus will cause less harm. People will come to terms with it as they have with the common cold or the flu.
“Unless you just sit in your room, you’re going to get it in your nose,” she said, “but at least in this country, it will be manageable.”
The big problem now, Gandhi said, is fear, “excessive fear of the pandemic on both sides,” she said. “Democrats overestimate the death rate and Republicans underestimate it.”
That produces the psychological and political hurdles that are preventing a return to normal life, she said. Recent polling indicates most Americans’ perception of the pandemic has shifted markedly this summer, as the delta variant swept away the optimism of springtime. In NBC News polls in April and August, the percentage of Americans saying that the worst of the coronavirus is behind us collapsed from 61 percent to 37 percent.
Gandhi said the trouble lies with some Democrats resisting resuming activities they take part in during flu season without hesitation and some Republicans refusing to take the vaccine or wear masks in crowded indoor spaces.
“I live in the bluest city in one of the bluest states, and I see this profound fear of the virus leading to extraordinary acceptance of lockdowns and keeping schools closed,” she said. But Gandhi says those hesitations can melt away quickly as case numbers fall.
Julie Swann views Gandhi as overly optimistic about how and when normal life might return. “She’s wrong,” said Swann, a systems engineer at North Carolina State University who advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the H1N1 pandemic. “And I hope it takes longer than she’s saying because that will be much safer.”
Gandhi said the trouble lies with some Democrats resisting resuming activities they take part in during flu season without hesitation and some Republicans refusing to take the vaccine or wear masks in crowded indoor spaces.
“I live in the bluest city in one of the bluest states, and I see this profound fear of the virus leading to extraordinary acceptance of lockdowns and keeping schools closed,” she said. But Gandhi says those hesitations can melt away quickly as case numbers fall.
Julie Swann views Gandhi as overly optimistic about how and when normal life might return. “She’s wrong,” said Swann, a systems engineer at North Carolina State University who advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the H1N1 pandemic. “And I hope it takes longer than she’s saying because that will be much safer.”
Swann said Gandhi’s argument that the delta variant will create so much immunity that life can return to normal “is a really apocalyptic way of getting there. Do you want delta to burn through the population, creating immunity at a very high cost, or would you rather just wear a mask?”
The key factor for Swann as she creates models projecting how the virus is likely to play out is the role children play in spreading the disease. The path to normal life is through getting children vaccinated, she said, and that is not likely to happen in large numbers until early next year.
“Children transmit viruses to each other, to their families, to their communities,” Swann said. “The first step toward normalcy is getting children vaccinated, at least for ages 5 and up. Right now, unfortunately, what we’re seeing in Florida is many, many children getting infected.”
Swann sees several possible routes back to normal life, including letting the virus burn through the population, focusing on masking and hybrid schooling, or a return to lockdowns. But her preferred pathway is mass vaccination of children — which can only happen after the vaccines are approved for the 5-to-11 age group, a step that’s not expected until at least later this year — along with masking and increased testing.
Ten years from now, the coronavirus “will be like influenza — it can cause death, but nothing like what we see now,” Swann said. But in the next year or so, the best Americans can hope for is a partial return to normalcy, with hospitals no longer being crushed with covid patients and occasional surges of covid in communities with low vaccination rates.
“We are not New Zealand,” she said. “We neither have the will nor the ability to control every case coming into our country. But if we can vaccinate most kids, we will get to a point where we no longer need masks in schools, and we’ll have a return to normalcy, though it will look different in different places.”
For now, Swann has started traveling again domestically, though she can’t imagine taking a foreign trip or going to a party until after her child has been vaccinated, probably around next February. “That changes the whole ballgame,” she said.
The wild card, as it has been for adults, is how quickly and widely children are vaccinated.
And the national divide over vaccines, masks and other such politicized public health measures could well end up being the reason the pandemic persists in the United States, said Alex Berenson, a novelist and former New York Times reporter. Berenson’s agitation against the vaccine has become a popular source of succor for many who have refused to get the shot, but it also got him permanently banned from Twitter for what the company called “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules.”
“I don’t know how we get there politically,” Berenson said of the quest for an endgame. “We are at a very confused moment.”
He said his readers “are long done with covid. And personally, I have not worn a mask for months, and no one has challenged me anywhere about whether I am vaccinated or not.” (He’s not.)
But “obviously some large number of Americans feel differently,” he said. “They are happy to live under government strictures indefinitely. . . . These two populations cannot comfortably exist. This is not a medical problem. . . . This is a political and social problem and it will have to be resolved politically, I suppose.”
Berenson said he believes Americans can return to normal life right now, without mask mandates, contact tracing or vaccine passports. But “can” and “will” are different, and he expects it might be late 2023 or later — perhaps after the next presidential election — before any consensus might develop about returning to normal life.
Any consensus on ratcheting down the fear and anxiety that the virus has spawned is more likely to emerge from public health campaigns than political campaigns, said Bhattacharya, the Stanford professor. It’s up to public health officials to persuade Americans that if they are vaccinated, they can return to many pre-pandemic activities, he said.
Bhattacharya, for example, is looking forward to teaching in person this fall and said he will happily meet with students, as Stanford is requiring vaccinations for everyone on campus.
In contrast, as Emanuel returns to teach at Penn, “I’m nervous,” even with vaccination and mask mandates, he said. “I’ll be testing myself and students will be tested, and I’m bringing a HEPA [air] filter into the classroom, and I’m still a little nervous about long covid. We’re still unclear on the direction of this thing. It’s plausible that we’ve hit the peak, but it’s also plausible that other mutations will be even more efficient.”
Emanuel will know it’s time to resume normal behavior “when this thing looks like a flu, when the health-care system is operating normally, when my friends aren’t constantly asking me, ‘What can I do to stay safe?’ ”
That time will come only after there’s more data about how and when people get long covid, about what happens when people mix different vaccines, about the pace and character of the virus’s mutations.
“People are pretty burned out 18 months into this thing,” Emanuel said. “And the exhaustion has been made worse by the rapid seesaw we’re having — take your masks off, put them back on. It’s all very confusing, but we have to be honest: We don’t know when, we don’t know how. We don’t know.”
The pivotal engine driving a return to normal life for Bhattacharya has been the vaccines, “which really do protect against death,” he said. “It’s a miraculous development, and we should just be celebrating it.” By driving down deaths and hospitalizations, especially for the most vulnerable populations — the elderly and people with preexisting health problems — “we have greatly succeeded, and to me, that’s the endpoint of the epidemic because we really can’t do better than that.”
The virus will continue to mutate and there will continue to be outbreaks, both seasonal and in geographic clusters, but “panicking over case numbers is a recipe for continuing unwarranted panic,” he said.
Bhattacharya is ready to resume most pre-pandemic activities. He recently made his first overseas trip, to England, “and it was wonderful,” he said, “even with a mask.”
Gandhi, too, has concluded that as scary and dangerous as the delta variant has been, “we’re sort of at the peak of the pandemic because the delta variant is causing immunity like crazy. Delta comes in like a hurricane, but it leaves a lot of immunity in its wake.”
Although its rapid spread and severe impact on some people are scary, the delta version has a hidden benefit: It makes future variants less likely to be more lethal, Gandhi said.
Covid isn’t going away — “we’re going to get it,” Gandhi said — but as immunity increases, the virus will cause less harm. People will come to terms with it as they have with the common cold or the flu.
“Unless you just sit in your room, you’re going to get it in your nose,” she said, “but at least in this country, it will be manageable.”
The big problem now, Gandhi said, is fear, “excessive fear of the pandemic on both sides,” she said. “Democrats overestimate the death rate and Republicans underestimate it.”
That produces the psychological and political hurdles that are preventing a return to normal life, she said. Recent polling indicates most Americans’ perception of the pandemic has shifted markedly this summer, as the delta variant swept away the optimism of springtime. In NBC News polls in April and August, the percentage of Americans saying that the worst of the coronavirus is behind us collapsed from 61 percent to 37 percent.
Gandhi said the trouble lies with some Democrats resisting resuming activities they take part in during flu season without hesitation and some Republicans refusing to take the vaccine or wear masks in crowded indoor spaces.
“I live in the bluest city in one of the bluest states, and I see this profound fear of the virus leading to extraordinary acceptance of lockdowns and keeping schools closed,” she said. But Gandhi says those hesitations can melt away quickly as case numbers fall.
Julie Swann views Gandhi as overly optimistic about how and when normal life might return. “She’s wrong,” said Swann, a systems engineer at North Carolina State University who advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the H1N1 pandemic. “And I hope it takes longer than she’s saying because that will be much safer.”
Gandhi said the trouble lies with some Democrats resisting resuming activities they take part in during flu season without hesitation and some Republicans refusing to take the vaccine or wear masks in crowded indoor spaces.
“I live in the bluest city in one of the bluest states, and I see this profound fear of the virus leading to extraordinary acceptance of lockdowns and keeping schools closed,” she said. But Gandhi says those hesitations can melt away quickly as case numbers fall.
Julie Swann views Gandhi as overly optimistic about how and when normal life might return. “She’s wrong,” said Swann, a systems engineer at North Carolina State University who advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the H1N1 pandemic. “And I hope it takes longer than she’s saying because that will be much safer.”
Swann said Gandhi’s argument that the delta variant will create so much immunity that life can return to normal “is a really apocalyptic way of getting there. Do you want delta to burn through the population, creating immunity at a very high cost, or would you rather just wear a mask?”
The key factor for Swann as she creates models projecting how the virus is likely to play out is the role children play in spreading the disease. The path to normal life is through getting children vaccinated, she said, and that is not likely to happen in large numbers until early next year.
“Children transmit viruses to each other, to their families, to their communities,” Swann said. “The first step toward normalcy is getting children vaccinated, at least for ages 5 and up. Right now, unfortunately, what we’re seeing in Florida is many, many children getting infected.”
Swann sees several possible routes back to normal life, including letting the virus burn through the population, focusing on masking and hybrid schooling, or a return to lockdowns. But her preferred pathway is mass vaccination of children — which can only happen after the vaccines are approved for the 5-to-11 age group, a step that’s not expected until at least later this year — along with masking and increased testing.
Ten years from now, the coronavirus “will be like influenza — it can cause death, but nothing like what we see now,” Swann said. But in the next year or so, the best Americans can hope for is a partial return to normalcy, with hospitals no longer being crushed with covid patients and occasional surges of covid in communities with low vaccination rates.
“We are not New Zealand,” she said. “We neither have the will nor the ability to control every case coming into our country. But if we can vaccinate most kids, we will get to a point where we no longer need masks in schools, and we’ll have a return to normalcy, though it will look different in different places.”
For now, Swann has started traveling again domestically, though she can’t imagine taking a foreign trip or going to a party until after her child has been vaccinated, probably around next February. “That changes the whole ballgame,” she said.
The wild card, as it has been for adults, is how quickly and widely children are vaccinated.
And the national divide over vaccines, masks and other such politicized public health measures could well end up being the reason the pandemic persists in the United States, said Alex Berenson, a novelist and former New York Times reporter. Berenson’s agitation against the vaccine has become a popular source of succor for many who have refused to get the shot, but it also got him permanently banned from Twitter for what the company called “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules.”
“I don’t know how we get there politically,” Berenson said of the quest for an endgame. “We are at a very confused moment.”
He said his readers “are long done with covid. And personally, I have not worn a mask for months, and no one has challenged me anywhere about whether I am vaccinated or not.” (He’s not.)
But “obviously some large number of Americans feel differently,” he said. “They are happy to live under government strictures indefinitely. . . . These two populations cannot comfortably exist. This is not a medical problem. . . . This is a political and social problem and it will have to be resolved politically, I suppose.”
Berenson said he believes Americans can return to normal life right now, without mask mandates, contact tracing or vaccine passports. But “can” and “will” are different, and he expects it might be late 2023 or later — perhaps after the next presidential election — before any consensus might develop about returning to normal life.
Any consensus on ratcheting down the fear and anxiety that the virus has spawned is more likely to emerge from public health campaigns than political campaigns, said Bhattacharya, the Stanford professor. It’s up to public health officials to persuade Americans that if they are vaccinated, they can return to many pre-pandemic activities, he said.
Bhattacharya, for example, is looking forward to teaching in person this fall and said he will happily meet with students, as Stanford is requiring vaccinations for everyone on campus.
In contrast, as Emanuel returns to teach at Penn, “I’m nervous,” even with vaccination and mask mandates, he said. “I’ll be testing myself and students will be tested, and I’m bringing a HEPA [air] filter into the classroom, and I’m still a little nervous about long covid. We’re still unclear on the direction of this thing. It’s plausible that we’ve hit the peak, but it’s also plausible that other mutations will be even more efficient.”
Emanuel will know it’s time to resume normal behavior “when this thing looks like a flu, when the health-care system is operating normally, when my friends aren’t constantly asking me, ‘What can I do to stay safe?’ ”
That time will come only after there’s more data about how and when people get long covid, about what happens when people mix different vaccines, about the pace and character of the virus’s mutations.
“People are pretty burned out 18 months into this thing,” Emanuel said. “And the exhaustion has been made worse by the rapid seesaw we’re having — take your masks off, put them back on. It’s all very confusing, but we have to be honest: We don’t know when, we don’t know how. We don’t know.”
In Search Of Normal
I think we should try to get used to thinking there's really no such thing as "normal" anymore - or maybe that "All Fucked Up" is what the new normal is going to look like for at least a good long while.
Nearly 1 in 3 Americans experienced a weather disaster this summer
Climate change has turbocharged severe storms, fires, hurricanes, coastal storms and floods — threatening millions
Nearly 1 in 3 Americans live in a county hit by a weather disaster in the past three months, according to a new Washington Post analysis of federal disaster declarations. On top of that, 64 percent live in places that experienced a multiday heat wave — phenomena that are not officially deemed disasters but are considered the most dangerous form of extreme weather.
The expanding reach of climate-fueled disasters, a trend that has been increasing at least since 2018, shows the extent to which a warming planet has already transformed Americans’ lives. At least 388 people in the United States have died due to hurricanes, floods, heat waves and wildfires since June, according to media reports and government records.
Record-shattering temperatures in the Pacific Northwest cooked hundreds of people to death in their own homes. Flash floods turned basement apartments into death traps and in one instance ripped twin babies from their father’s arms. Wildfires raged through 5 million acres of tinder-dry forest. Chronic drought pushed federal officials to impose mandatory cuts to Colorado River water for the first time.
Americans’ growing sense of vulnerability is palpable. Craig Fugate, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Florida’s Emergency Management Division, has never known a summer as packed with crises as this one.
The question, he wonders, is whether this calamitous season will mark a turning point in public opinion that finally forces political leaders to act. “If not,” Fugate asked, “what will it take?”
Even seasoned survivors say that recent disasters are the worst they’ve ever experienced. People who never considered themselves at risk from climate change are suddenly waking up to floodwaters outside their windows and smoke in their skies, wondering if anywhere is safe.
The true test of this summer’s significance will be in whether the United States can meaningfully curb its planet-warming emissions — and fast.
The nation’s most ambitious plan to address climate change and adapt to its impacts — Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget bill — is now in jeopardy after Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) called for a “strategic pause” on the legislation Thursday, citing concern over the price tag. The proposal to institute renewable energy requirements for power companies, impose import fees on polluters and provide generous support for electric vehicles cannot pass without Manchin’s vote.
Yet time is one thing the world lacks. The planet has already warmed more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the start of the industrial era. The United States has contributed more to that warming than any other country in history; a quarter of all carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere since 1850 has come from Americans burning fossil fuels.
Humanity must roughly halve emissions by the end of the decade to have a chance of avoiding the worst effects of warming, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The climate will not stabilize unless greenhouse gas emissions cease.
Until then, the scientists warn, we commit ourselves to an even hotter and more disastrous future with each ton of carbon we unleash.
‘Something’s amiss’
Extreme weather has always been a “game of chance,” said earth scientist Claudia Tebaldi. People have long weighed the risk of storm surge against a view of the ocean, bet against the threat of fire by building homes nestled in the trees.
But climate change has loaded the dice for disaster. Studies show the chance of a given tropical storm becoming a hurricane that is Category 3 or greater has grown 8 percent every decade since 1979. The area of the West burned by wildfire is twice what it would be without human influence. For every degree Celsius of warming, the atmosphere is able to hold 7 percent more moisture, leading to exponential increases in rainfall. Scientists say the Pacific Northwest heat wave, which killed more than 200 people in June, was “virtually impossible” in a world without climate change.
“What we are doing with global warming is making ourselves play a game that is rigged more and more against us because of our own actions,” said Tebaldi, a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and a lead author of the IPCC’s latest climate report.
As extreme weather events become more frequent and intense, that report cautioned, they are more likely to coincide — creating “compound catastrophes” that are still more dangerous than each disaster would be on its own.
Experts pointed to the deadly deluges in the Northeast this week. The region had already experienced a historically wet August, which left waterways close to overtopping and the ground so saturated it couldn’t absorb any more rain. By the time Hurricane Ida’s remnants plowed through, dropping record amounts of rain in a matter of hours, flash flooding was inevitable. Seven rivers saw record-breaking floods, according to Dartmouth hydrologist Evan Dethier, at a time when waterways usually record their lowest flows of the year.
Similarly, the intense heat Louisiana has experienced in Ida’s wake has compounded the storm’s damage. Nearly a week after the storm made landfall, New Orleans has begun evacuating residents to save them from the sweltering conditions. The 100-degree heat index would be easier to withstand if so many people hadn’t lost power during the storm, experts said. And the toll of the hurricane would be less catastrophic if it wasn’t followed by temperatures that could kill.
Using advanced computer models, scientists can calculate the degree to which climate change made a given disaster more likely. This type of research, known as “attribution science,” has revealed how warming boosted Hurricane Harvey’s rainfall by at least 15 percent in 2017 and how a 2020 heat wave that blasted Siberia was almost impossible in a world not altered by humans.
For its analysis of exposure to disasters, The Post considered FEMA-declared severe storms, fires, hurricanes, coastal storms and floods — events that scientists have found are made more frequent or severe by climate change. Though most of those events were not subject to an attribution analysis, experts increasingly say the fact that these extremes are unfolding in a hotter world makes them, inevitably, climate disasters.
As Texas Tech researcher and Nature Conservancy chief scientist Katharine Hayhoe put it on Twitter: “The question today is not … how could climate change affect this event — but rather how could it NOT, as it is occurring over the massively altered background conditions of our 1.1C warmer planet.”
Things certainly felt worse to Margie Smith as she waited in line for water outside a city-run food assistance center in New Orleans’s West Bank. The lifelong Southerner is used to hurricanes, used to people measuring their lives in the number of storms they’ve witnessed, used to people saying nothing could ever be as bad as Katrina.
But now, on her fifth day without electricity, surrounded by broken telephone poles and splintered trees, she’s not so sure.
The storms seem stronger. The summer heat lasts longer. The normally mild winters have been shattered by ice storms and wild temperature swings.
Smith is no expert, she insisted. “But it feels like something’s amiss.”
Surveys show that concern about climate change has been steadily rising among Americans for the past decade. In a 2019 poll from The Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation, 63 percent of people who said their area had been affected by severe storms, droughts or extremely hot days identified climate change as a “major factor.” A slightly smaller fraction, 54 percent, viewed climate change as a major contributor to wildfires in their area.
Mariana Arcaya, a social epidemiologist and urban planner at MIT, has noticed an uptick in confessions of outrage, grief and fear from people in her life. Friends have reached out to ask where they should move to “escape” climate risks.
And in her research on the health effects of natural disasters, Arcaya is hearing more and more people worry about higher temperatures creating higher utility bills and basement flooding damaging rental homes.
“People have rightly been talking about climate change as the emergency that it is for years,” Arcaya said. “And it feels like that sense of urgency is finally spreading to those who, until now, have felt pretty safe.”
Yet views of the issue are sharply polarized. This year, a Gallup poll found a record high 82 percent of Democrats said the effects of global warming had already begun, compared with 29 percent of Republicans. In the Post-Kaiser poll, Democrats in the Southeast were more than twice as likely as Republicans to blame climate change for recent severe storms.
And even among those who worry about warming, the issue lacks political urgency. When the Pew Research Center asked Americans about President Biden’s policy agenda in January, just 38 percent said climate change should be a top priority. Fourteen other issues, from strengthening the economy to dealing with immigration, ranked higher.
Bracing for impact
The record-breaking nature of recent disasters has strained infrastructure that wasn’t built to withstand them. Storms have overwhelmed the pumps that remove water from New York City’s subway stations, nearly drowning people who were trapped underground. Temperatures high enough to melt streetcar cables forced Portland’s transit agency to suspend service during the heat wave, making it harder for vulnerable residents to reach cooling centers.
Preparations for Hurricane Ida were hampered by its rapid intensification, a trademark of climate change-driven storms. Officials had just 76 hours between when a tropical depression was identified in the Caribbean and the minute Ida made landfall — not enough time to change the flow of traffic on highways to enable a full evacuation.
And the breathless pace of emergencies has pushed the nation’s first responders to the breaking point.
A U.S. Forest Service firefighter said he’s been working for five straight months, struggling to contain blazes that move faster than any he’s ever seen. His crew is so tired he’s had to ask members to stay home from assignments. As much as they are needed to help battle the 84 large fires currently burning across the country, their fatigue makes them a hazard.
But there is no one to replace them. Since mid-July, the National Interagency Fire Center has set the nation’s preparedness level at 5 — the highest possible rating, which indicates the country is at risk of exhausting its firefighting resources.
The firefighter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of losing his job, said hundreds of requests for help from incident commanders have gone unfilled.
“We’re so on our heels, we’re so burnt out, we’re so understaffed,” he said.
Trevor Riggen, the head of the American Red Cross’s domestic disaster program, said the agency is “testing the limits” of its network. This week alone, more than 2,000 staff and volunteers have deployed across 10 states. Many of them are on their second or third crisis of the summer.
“It’s no longer, ‘We have a big event and then there’s time to recover,’” Riggen said. “Disaster has become a chronic condition.”
But the extent of damage wrought by climate change will be determined by how the nation plans for it, and how the communities rebuild.
Almost half of public roadways are currently in poor or mediocre condition, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers — making events like the deadly collapse of a Mississippi highway during Hurricane Ida more likely. The location and condition of some 10,000 miles of levees in the United States are unknown. Chronically underfunded storm water systems are unable to cope with record rainfall. Many electric utilities have not taken steps to ensure the grid keeps functioning amid worsening hurricanes and wildfires.
Communities need to start preparing for the unprecedented, Fugate said. Coastal cities should develop alternative evacuation plans to avoid getting caught off-guard by rapidly intensifying storms — for example, building comfortable, well-equipped shelters for people who don’t have time to flee. Levees and storm-water systems must be built to withstand floods that would have been impossible in a cooler world. Amid unstoppable wildfires, homes at the edge of forests can be made safer with flameproof building materials.
Social systems are also in need of repair, said Arcaya. During heat waves, early warning systems and check-ins from neighbors have been proved to save hundreds of lives. After hurricanes, research shows, people with strong connections to their neighbors experience less trauma and are better able to get back on their feet.
The country will need a robust support system to help thousands of displaced people navigate the bureaucracy required to obtain federal assistance, Arcaya said. And since disasters often destroy affordable housing, the nation will need to invest in building more places for people to live.
These changes will be expensive, Fugate acknowledged. But the cost of responding to disasters already totals more than $81 billion per year. “It’s a choice between spending now or spending more in the future.”
Beyond adaptation
However no amount of investment in infrastructure will be enough, experts say, if people don’t stop the world from warming.
Under the worst-case scenarios for climate change, average temperatures in much of the country are projected to be between 6 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit higher by the end of the century. More than 60,000 additional people may be killed per year by extreme heat by 2050. Hurricanes that gain 70 miles per hour of wind speed in half a day could happen every few years by the end of the century.
Most people will not be able to keep up with such a rapid pace of change, Tebaldi said. And the most vulnerable citizens will inevitably suffer the most. Low-income people won’t be able to afford insurance or home repairs. On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency released findings that people of color are disproportionately likely to live in communities hit by flooding, extreme heat and other climate impacts in a warming world.
“If we want to limit these probabilities, if we want to limit the damages, then we should start to do something for real about mitigating,” Tebaldi said. “And we need to start now.”
 |
WaPo: (pay wall)
Nearly 1 in 3 Americans experienced a weather disaster this summer
Climate change has turbocharged severe storms, fires, hurricanes, coastal storms and floods — threatening millions
Nearly 1 in 3 Americans live in a county hit by a weather disaster in the past three months, according to a new Washington Post analysis of federal disaster declarations. On top of that, 64 percent live in places that experienced a multiday heat wave — phenomena that are not officially deemed disasters but are considered the most dangerous form of extreme weather.
The expanding reach of climate-fueled disasters, a trend that has been increasing at least since 2018, shows the extent to which a warming planet has already transformed Americans’ lives. At least 388 people in the United States have died due to hurricanes, floods, heat waves and wildfires since June, according to media reports and government records.
Record-shattering temperatures in the Pacific Northwest cooked hundreds of people to death in their own homes. Flash floods turned basement apartments into death traps and in one instance ripped twin babies from their father’s arms. Wildfires raged through 5 million acres of tinder-dry forest. Chronic drought pushed federal officials to impose mandatory cuts to Colorado River water for the first time.
Americans’ growing sense of vulnerability is palpable. Craig Fugate, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Florida’s Emergency Management Division, has never known a summer as packed with crises as this one.
The question, he wonders, is whether this calamitous season will mark a turning point in public opinion that finally forces political leaders to act. “If not,” Fugate asked, “what will it take?”
Even seasoned survivors say that recent disasters are the worst they’ve ever experienced. People who never considered themselves at risk from climate change are suddenly waking up to floodwaters outside their windows and smoke in their skies, wondering if anywhere is safe.
The true test of this summer’s significance will be in whether the United States can meaningfully curb its planet-warming emissions — and fast.
The nation’s most ambitious plan to address climate change and adapt to its impacts — Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget bill — is now in jeopardy after Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) called for a “strategic pause” on the legislation Thursday, citing concern over the price tag. The proposal to institute renewable energy requirements for power companies, impose import fees on polluters and provide generous support for electric vehicles cannot pass without Manchin’s vote.
Yet time is one thing the world lacks. The planet has already warmed more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the start of the industrial era. The United States has contributed more to that warming than any other country in history; a quarter of all carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere since 1850 has come from Americans burning fossil fuels.
Humanity must roughly halve emissions by the end of the decade to have a chance of avoiding the worst effects of warming, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The climate will not stabilize unless greenhouse gas emissions cease.
Until then, the scientists warn, we commit ourselves to an even hotter and more disastrous future with each ton of carbon we unleash.
‘Something’s amiss’
Extreme weather has always been a “game of chance,” said earth scientist Claudia Tebaldi. People have long weighed the risk of storm surge against a view of the ocean, bet against the threat of fire by building homes nestled in the trees.
But climate change has loaded the dice for disaster. Studies show the chance of a given tropical storm becoming a hurricane that is Category 3 or greater has grown 8 percent every decade since 1979. The area of the West burned by wildfire is twice what it would be without human influence. For every degree Celsius of warming, the atmosphere is able to hold 7 percent more moisture, leading to exponential increases in rainfall. Scientists say the Pacific Northwest heat wave, which killed more than 200 people in June, was “virtually impossible” in a world without climate change.
“What we are doing with global warming is making ourselves play a game that is rigged more and more against us because of our own actions,” said Tebaldi, a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and a lead author of the IPCC’s latest climate report.
As extreme weather events become more frequent and intense, that report cautioned, they are more likely to coincide — creating “compound catastrophes” that are still more dangerous than each disaster would be on its own.
Experts pointed to the deadly deluges in the Northeast this week. The region had already experienced a historically wet August, which left waterways close to overtopping and the ground so saturated it couldn’t absorb any more rain. By the time Hurricane Ida’s remnants plowed through, dropping record amounts of rain in a matter of hours, flash flooding was inevitable. Seven rivers saw record-breaking floods, according to Dartmouth hydrologist Evan Dethier, at a time when waterways usually record their lowest flows of the year.
Similarly, the intense heat Louisiana has experienced in Ida’s wake has compounded the storm’s damage. Nearly a week after the storm made landfall, New Orleans has begun evacuating residents to save them from the sweltering conditions. The 100-degree heat index would be easier to withstand if so many people hadn’t lost power during the storm, experts said. And the toll of the hurricane would be less catastrophic if it wasn’t followed by temperatures that could kill.
Using advanced computer models, scientists can calculate the degree to which climate change made a given disaster more likely. This type of research, known as “attribution science,” has revealed how warming boosted Hurricane Harvey’s rainfall by at least 15 percent in 2017 and how a 2020 heat wave that blasted Siberia was almost impossible in a world not altered by humans.
For its analysis of exposure to disasters, The Post considered FEMA-declared severe storms, fires, hurricanes, coastal storms and floods — events that scientists have found are made more frequent or severe by climate change. Though most of those events were not subject to an attribution analysis, experts increasingly say the fact that these extremes are unfolding in a hotter world makes them, inevitably, climate disasters.
As Texas Tech researcher and Nature Conservancy chief scientist Katharine Hayhoe put it on Twitter: “The question today is not … how could climate change affect this event — but rather how could it NOT, as it is occurring over the massively altered background conditions of our 1.1C warmer planet.”
Things certainly felt worse to Margie Smith as she waited in line for water outside a city-run food assistance center in New Orleans’s West Bank. The lifelong Southerner is used to hurricanes, used to people measuring their lives in the number of storms they’ve witnessed, used to people saying nothing could ever be as bad as Katrina.
But now, on her fifth day without electricity, surrounded by broken telephone poles and splintered trees, she’s not so sure.
The storms seem stronger. The summer heat lasts longer. The normally mild winters have been shattered by ice storms and wild temperature swings.
Smith is no expert, she insisted. “But it feels like something’s amiss.”
Surveys show that concern about climate change has been steadily rising among Americans for the past decade. In a 2019 poll from The Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation, 63 percent of people who said their area had been affected by severe storms, droughts or extremely hot days identified climate change as a “major factor.” A slightly smaller fraction, 54 percent, viewed climate change as a major contributor to wildfires in their area.
Mariana Arcaya, a social epidemiologist and urban planner at MIT, has noticed an uptick in confessions of outrage, grief and fear from people in her life. Friends have reached out to ask where they should move to “escape” climate risks.
And in her research on the health effects of natural disasters, Arcaya is hearing more and more people worry about higher temperatures creating higher utility bills and basement flooding damaging rental homes.
“People have rightly been talking about climate change as the emergency that it is for years,” Arcaya said. “And it feels like that sense of urgency is finally spreading to those who, until now, have felt pretty safe.”
Yet views of the issue are sharply polarized. This year, a Gallup poll found a record high 82 percent of Democrats said the effects of global warming had already begun, compared with 29 percent of Republicans. In the Post-Kaiser poll, Democrats in the Southeast were more than twice as likely as Republicans to blame climate change for recent severe storms.
And even among those who worry about warming, the issue lacks political urgency. When the Pew Research Center asked Americans about President Biden’s policy agenda in January, just 38 percent said climate change should be a top priority. Fourteen other issues, from strengthening the economy to dealing with immigration, ranked higher.
Bracing for impact
The record-breaking nature of recent disasters has strained infrastructure that wasn’t built to withstand them. Storms have overwhelmed the pumps that remove water from New York City’s subway stations, nearly drowning people who were trapped underground. Temperatures high enough to melt streetcar cables forced Portland’s transit agency to suspend service during the heat wave, making it harder for vulnerable residents to reach cooling centers.
Preparations for Hurricane Ida were hampered by its rapid intensification, a trademark of climate change-driven storms. Officials had just 76 hours between when a tropical depression was identified in the Caribbean and the minute Ida made landfall — not enough time to change the flow of traffic on highways to enable a full evacuation.
And the breathless pace of emergencies has pushed the nation’s first responders to the breaking point.
A U.S. Forest Service firefighter said he’s been working for five straight months, struggling to contain blazes that move faster than any he’s ever seen. His crew is so tired he’s had to ask members to stay home from assignments. As much as they are needed to help battle the 84 large fires currently burning across the country, their fatigue makes them a hazard.
But there is no one to replace them. Since mid-July, the National Interagency Fire Center has set the nation’s preparedness level at 5 — the highest possible rating, which indicates the country is at risk of exhausting its firefighting resources.
The firefighter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of losing his job, said hundreds of requests for help from incident commanders have gone unfilled.
“We’re so on our heels, we’re so burnt out, we’re so understaffed,” he said.
Trevor Riggen, the head of the American Red Cross’s domestic disaster program, said the agency is “testing the limits” of its network. This week alone, more than 2,000 staff and volunteers have deployed across 10 states. Many of them are on their second or third crisis of the summer.
“It’s no longer, ‘We have a big event and then there’s time to recover,’” Riggen said. “Disaster has become a chronic condition.”
But the extent of damage wrought by climate change will be determined by how the nation plans for it, and how the communities rebuild.
Almost half of public roadways are currently in poor or mediocre condition, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers — making events like the deadly collapse of a Mississippi highway during Hurricane Ida more likely. The location and condition of some 10,000 miles of levees in the United States are unknown. Chronically underfunded storm water systems are unable to cope with record rainfall. Many electric utilities have not taken steps to ensure the grid keeps functioning amid worsening hurricanes and wildfires.
Communities need to start preparing for the unprecedented, Fugate said. Coastal cities should develop alternative evacuation plans to avoid getting caught off-guard by rapidly intensifying storms — for example, building comfortable, well-equipped shelters for people who don’t have time to flee. Levees and storm-water systems must be built to withstand floods that would have been impossible in a cooler world. Amid unstoppable wildfires, homes at the edge of forests can be made safer with flameproof building materials.
Social systems are also in need of repair, said Arcaya. During heat waves, early warning systems and check-ins from neighbors have been proved to save hundreds of lives. After hurricanes, research shows, people with strong connections to their neighbors experience less trauma and are better able to get back on their feet.
The country will need a robust support system to help thousands of displaced people navigate the bureaucracy required to obtain federal assistance, Arcaya said. And since disasters often destroy affordable housing, the nation will need to invest in building more places for people to live.
These changes will be expensive, Fugate acknowledged. But the cost of responding to disasters already totals more than $81 billion per year. “It’s a choice between spending now or spending more in the future.”
Beyond adaptation
However no amount of investment in infrastructure will be enough, experts say, if people don’t stop the world from warming.
Under the worst-case scenarios for climate change, average temperatures in much of the country are projected to be between 6 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit higher by the end of the century. More than 60,000 additional people may be killed per year by extreme heat by 2050. Hurricanes that gain 70 miles per hour of wind speed in half a day could happen every few years by the end of the century.
Most people will not be able to keep up with such a rapid pace of change, Tebaldi said. And the most vulnerable citizens will inevitably suffer the most. Low-income people won’t be able to afford insurance or home repairs. On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency released findings that people of color are disproportionately likely to live in communities hit by flooding, extreme heat and other climate impacts in a warming world.
“If we want to limit these probabilities, if we want to limit the damages, then we should start to do something for real about mitigating,” Tebaldi said. “And we need to start now.”
Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema need to be told to get off their asses and start doing something real for the majority of us, instead of always working for their big-dollar 1% donors.
Call now - answering machines are standing by
Today's Hero
Charles Jackson French, USN, CPO 1st Class (25 September 1919 - 7 November 1956)
Charlie French was an American war hero from Foreman, Arkansas. He had first enlisted in the United States Navy in 1937 and had completed his enlistment, moving to Omaha, Nebraska where he had family.
With the attack on Pearl Harbor, French went to the closest recruitment office, and on December 19, 1941, re-enlisted in the United States Navy.
During World War II, Petty Officer First Class French swam 6–8 hours in shark-infested waters near Guadalcanal while towing a life raft with 15 USS Gregory survivors of an attack by the Japanese Imperial Navy. For this action, French received a letter of commendation from Adm. William F. Halsey, Jr. in May 1943. Adm. Halsey was then commander of the Southern Pacific Fleet. The commendation stated:
For meritorious conduct in action while serving on board of a destroyer transport which was badly damaged during the engagement with Japanese forces in the British Solomon Islands on September 5, 1942. After the engagement, a group of about fifteen men were adrift on a raft, which was being deliberately shelled by Japanese naval forces. French tied a line to himself and swam for more than two hours without rest, thus attempting to tow the raft. His conduct was in keeping with the highest traditions of the Naval Service.
French was memorialized on War gum trading cards and in a comic strip. The Chicago Defender named him Hero of the Year.
Sep 4, 2021
How Weird Is It Getting?
The short answer is: Pretty fuckin' weird.
The state of Texas, with approval from the U.S. Supreme Court, instituted the most draconian set of anti-abortion laws in the last 50 years this Tuesday. While pro-choice advocates scramble to save what’s left of Roe v. Wade, their salvation may come from an unexpected place: The Satanic Temple.
The nontheistic religious group, based out of Salem, Massachusetts, has filed a letter with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration arguing that their members should be allowed to access abortion pills without regulatory action. The temple is attempting to use its status as a religious organization to claim its right to abortion as a faith-based right.
The group argues that they should have access to the abortion pills Misoprostol and Mifepristone for religious use through the The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) which was created to allow Native Americans access to peyote for religious rituals. Under these rules, the Temple is arguing that they should be granted those same rights to use abortifacients for their own religious purposes.
“I am sure Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton—who famously spends a good deal of his time composing press releases about Religious Liberty issues in other states—will be proud to see that Texas’s robust Religious Liberty laws, which he so vociferously champions, will prevent future Abortion Rituals from being interrupted by superfluous government restrictions meant only to shame and harass those seeking an abortion," wrote Satanic Temple spokesperson, Lucien Greaves in a statement.
Satanists hold bodily autonomy and science sacrosanct, he said, and abortion “rituals” are an important part of those beliefs. “The battle for abortion rights is largely a battle of competing religious viewpoints, and our viewpoint that the nonviable fetus is part of the impregnated host is fortunately protected under Religous Liberty laws,” he added.
Last year the Supreme Court refused to hear a case from Satanists to overturn Missouri’s abortion laws, but the group is hoping that an appeal to the federal government could make a difference.
In the past few years, the Temple of Satan, which has about 300,000 followers, protested a Ten Commandments monument erected outside of the Arkansas Capitol by erecting their own statue, a bronze satanic goat monster Baphomet next to it. In the Illinois Capitol rotunda, they were able to install a statue of an arm holding an apple with a snake coiled around it next to a Christmas nativity scene and a Hanukkah menorah.
"The State of Illinois is required by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution to allow temporary, public displays in the state capitol so long as these displays are not paid for by taxpayer dollars,” said a sign next to the statue. “Because the first floor of the Capitol Rotunda is a public place, state officials cannot legally censor the content of speech or displays. The United States Supreme Court has held that public officials may legally impose reasonable time, place and manner restrictions regarding displays and speeches, but no regulation can be based on the content of the speech."
In spite of its name, the Temple of Satan largely stands as an activist institution, with the intent to fight the proliferation of religion in U.S. policy and law.
To wit - via Fortune Magazine:
The nontheistic religious group, based out of Salem, Massachusetts, has filed a letter with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration arguing that their members should be allowed to access abortion pills without regulatory action. The temple is attempting to use its status as a religious organization to claim its right to abortion as a faith-based right.
The group argues that they should have access to the abortion pills Misoprostol and Mifepristone for religious use through the The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) which was created to allow Native Americans access to peyote for religious rituals. Under these rules, the Temple is arguing that they should be granted those same rights to use abortifacients for their own religious purposes.
“I am sure Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton—who famously spends a good deal of his time composing press releases about Religious Liberty issues in other states—will be proud to see that Texas’s robust Religious Liberty laws, which he so vociferously champions, will prevent future Abortion Rituals from being interrupted by superfluous government restrictions meant only to shame and harass those seeking an abortion," wrote Satanic Temple spokesperson, Lucien Greaves in a statement.
Satanists hold bodily autonomy and science sacrosanct, he said, and abortion “rituals” are an important part of those beliefs. “The battle for abortion rights is largely a battle of competing religious viewpoints, and our viewpoint that the nonviable fetus is part of the impregnated host is fortunately protected under Religous Liberty laws,” he added.
Last year the Supreme Court refused to hear a case from Satanists to overturn Missouri’s abortion laws, but the group is hoping that an appeal to the federal government could make a difference.
In the past few years, the Temple of Satan, which has about 300,000 followers, protested a Ten Commandments monument erected outside of the Arkansas Capitol by erecting their own statue, a bronze satanic goat monster Baphomet next to it. In the Illinois Capitol rotunda, they were able to install a statue of an arm holding an apple with a snake coiled around it next to a Christmas nativity scene and a Hanukkah menorah.
"The State of Illinois is required by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution to allow temporary, public displays in the state capitol so long as these displays are not paid for by taxpayer dollars,” said a sign next to the statue. “Because the first floor of the Capitol Rotunda is a public place, state officials cannot legally censor the content of speech or displays. The United States Supreme Court has held that public officials may legally impose reasonable time, place and manner restrictions regarding displays and speeches, but no regulation can be based on the content of the speech."
In spite of its name, the Temple of Satan largely stands as an activist institution, with the intent to fight the proliferation of religion in U.S. policy and law.
Deep Thought
Imagine a guy scarfing 3 slices of pizza at a party because he's afraid they'll run out of it, and a guy who takes just one slice for the same reason. That's basically an illustration of The Tragedy Of The Commons, but damned if it doesn't perfectly describe how fucked up America is right now.
We Should Try It
And I guess more accurately, we're a little too good at identifying - and sometimes creating - choke points, and then battling for control of those choke points.
Anyway, building pipelines to carry water from the oceans to people inland seems like something we should be studying. Not that it's automatically a good idea to fuck with the nature of things, but if we're going to have a chance at sustaining ourselves in the long term, we'd best be gettin' with the program - even if it turns out not to be a good thing (there's always the problem of "waste & by-product"), at least we'll have a decent shot at making an informed decision.
Reporting on proof of concept, and field testing the real gizmo at Wired:
What’s inside this giant ‘solar dome’ coming to Saudi Arabia
Middle East water plants pose a threat to sea life. But this desalination plant hopes to harness some serious brine power to deliver H20 more sustainably.
Malcolm Aw’s quest to create fresh water using the power of the sun started out with two salad bowls.
It was the early 1980s, and the entrepreneur was sitting on his balcony on a bright, sunny London day. Pondering the power of the rays beaming down from our star 150 million kilometers above his head, Aw conducted an experiment that wouldn’t be out of place in a high-school science class.
He placed some saltwater in a salad dish, with another, larger bowl on top. After a while, somewhat unsurprisingly, some of the salt water evaporated and condensed, gathering in a tray below.
It wasn’t exactly a eureka moment. But it did set Aw’s mind racing as to how such a basic principle could be used on a grand scale. And, almost 40 years after that improvised experiment, he is trying to make this a reality in the Middle East.
It’s no secret that the world’s looming water crisis affects this region more than most. According to the World Resources Institute, 12 of the 17 countries facing “extremely high” water stress are in the Middle East and North Africa.
The lack of natural water resources in the Arabian Gulf, especially, has led to some expensive, and highly polluting measures. The Gulf has the dubious honor of being the world’s “leader” in desalinated water, producing 40 percent of the world’s total supply, according to a study in early 2020. Saudi Arabia—home to the world’s largest water desalination facility at Al-Jubail, and which is expected to invest $80 billion in similar projects over the next 10 years—is responsible for about a fifth of the world’s total output.
Desalination plants spew out a combined 76 million tons of CO2 per year, with emissions expected to grow to around 218 million tons by 2040 if no action is taken, according to Abu Dhabi sustainability initiative Masdar. Yet they also pose a specific danger to marine life, thanks to the salty water that gets pumped back into the sea, warns Leticia Reis de Carvalho, coordinator of the UN Environment Programme’s Water Management Branch.
Waste brine from desalination can limit the growth of marine organisms, increase seawater temperature, and lower the levels of dissolved oxygen, causing further harm to aquatic life, Carvalho says.
“Hot and highly saline brine associated with desalination facilities, a range of pollutants, high energy use, and associated repercussions including carbon emissions, represent… increasing environmental threats,” she adds.
It is a problem Malcolm Aw thinks he can solve. After his balcony experiment, Aw became consumed in other projects. But the entrepreneur returned to the idea in 2000, forming a company called Water L’eau—a pun on the English and French words for “water”—and which later became the somewhat less playfully named Solar Water, a UK-based company looking to deliver “carbon neutral” desalination.
Developing the salad-bowl desalination concept was “not rocket science,” says Aw—but still took many years. It was accelerated by an association with the UK’s Cranfield University, where a proof of concept was developed over the course of six months in collaboration with researchers and students.
The bowl will be much bigger this time. Imagine a sphere formed by a dome extending 25 meters into the air, which covers a cauldron extending a further 25 meters into the ground. Solar Water envisages seawater being transported inland via aqueducts topped with glass that, under sunlight, would warm the water. This would then feed into the cauldron, where it would be superheated thanks to energy feeding down from the “solar dome.” The glass-and steel dome would itself be heated using concentrating solar power (CSP), with more than 100 solar reflectors around the structure directing the sun’s energy onto the frame. After the salt water evaporates, it condenses as freshwater as it is piped to reservoirs.
Although similar technology has been used to generate electricity—typically by generating heat to create steam, driving a turbine—this is one of the first to use it directly for desalination. Yet Aw downplays the sophistication of the tech involved. “Basically what we have is a huge kettle,” he says. “You can’t get more simple than that: We have a big kettle boiling water, and producing 30,000 cubic meters per hour.” There is a little more to it than that. The mirrors surrounding the dome have to be adjusted to maximize efficiency. “It’s like a sunflower—it’s got to follow the sun,” says Aw. “Even though it’s a very simple thing, there has to be precision.”
The problem of leftover salt remains. Aw says Solar Water’s system allows for the byproduct to be drained away to tanks, which can then be sold on to, for example, battery producers.
Some have expressed reservations about the feasibility of the design, as well as some of the projected production costs. One estimate was 34 US cents per cubic meter of water produced—significantly lower than desalination plants using reverse osmosis methods. The solar dome is yet to be tested on an industrial scale.
But that is going to change. Neom, Saudi Arabia’s ambitious $500 billion country-within-a-country currently under development, said in January it had signed an agreement with Solar Water to pilot the first ever solar dome. The initial plan is for a 25-meter desalination sphere, followed by three more of between 50 and 80 meters, says Aw. Work on the first plant was expected to be completed by the end of this year, although the announcement was made before the full extent of the coronavirus pandemic was known.
Solar Water also says it has signed a contract with a Jordanian mining company, and hopes to have several plants under construction by the end of the year.
The water produced could be used as drinking water—although further treatment would be required—but Aw sees a major use as being in desert farming and irrigation.
“We can build miles of canals into the middle of the desert, and turn the desert green,” he says. “We can reverse climate change. The only thing we need is water… We can make the desert blossom.”
Aw believes solar technology could replace traditional desalination plants—but that would not, of course, happen overnight.
“We got out of the Stone Age, but not because we ran out of stones. So we can get out of fossil fuel age by going straight on to solar power,” he says. “There are 18,000 desalination plants across the world. If we can replace all of them in due course, can you imagine how healthy the ocean would become? Because at the moment, what they are doing is horrible.”
Supplemental Reading - at Britannica: What's in sea water?
COVID-19 Update
Reported September 3, 2021
U.S. covid death toll hits 1,500 a day amid delta scourge
‘A perfect storm of viral changes and behavioral changes’ is driving pandemic’s fourth wave
Brian Pierce, the coroner in Baldwin County, Ala., thought he had seen the last of the coronavirus months ago as the area’s death count held steady at 318 for most of the spring and summer. But then in July and August, the fatalities began mounting and last week, things got so bad, the state rolled a trailer into his parking lot as a temporary morgue.
“I think most people were thinking, ‘We’re good,’ ” he said. “Life was almost back to normal. Now, I’m telling my kids again to please stay home.”
Nationally, covid-19 deaths have climbed steadily in recent weeks, hitting a seven-day average of about 1,500 a day Thursday, after falling to the low 200s in early July — the latest handiwork of a contagious variant that has exploited the return to everyday activities by tens of millions of Americans, many of them unvaccinated. The dead include two Texas teachers at a junior high, who died last week within days of each other; a 13-year-old middle schoolboy from Georgia; and a nurse, 37, in Southern California who left behind five children, including a newborn.
What is different about this fourth pandemic wave in the United States is that the growing rates of vaccination and natural immunity have broken the relationship between infections and deaths in many areas.
Do you have a child under the age of 12? Tell us what it's like to be a parent during the delta surge.
The daily count of new infections is rising in almost every part of the country, according to data tracked by The Washington Post. But only some places — mostly Southern states with lower vaccination rates — are seeing a parallel surge in deaths. The seven-day average of daily deaths is about a third of what it was in January, the pandemic’s most deadly month, but it is forecast to continue rising as high numbers of patients are hospitalized.
While most regions with increasing deaths have lower vaccination rates, that isn’t the case for all of them.
Florida, for example, where more than 53 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, is the worst-hit state in terms of daily deaths, which have averaged 325 over the past week, alongside almost 20,000 new daily infections on average. Despite resistance from local school boards, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has fought to enforce his ban on mask mandates and made good on a threat to withhold salaries from some of them this week even after a judge ruled the ban unconstitutional.
David Wesley Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the situation underscores the unanswered questions about the virus 18 months out — and the limitations of mathematical forecasting to predict the daily choices of 330 million Americans.
“The driving factor in the current wave is human behavior — how people interact and how people respond to risk — and that is really very unpredictable,” he said.
“We are in a perfect storm of viral changes and behavioral changes,” agreed Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium.
Virtually every time that humans have underestimated the virus and let down their guard, deaths surged.
Deborah Birx, then the coordinator of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force, suggested in March 2020, that mitigation measures might keep deaths at 100,000 to 240,000 under the most optimistic scenario. But by the end of 2020, when vaccines were first authorized for emergency use, the nation had long surpassed those numbers, and forecasters predicted U.S. covid-19 deaths would top out at around 550,000.
As of Thursday, the country has logged more than 640,000 deaths — and many experts believe we are not yet at the peak.
Difficult to predict
When looking at coronavirus deaths, the United States looks like two very different countries with a mostly north-south divide.
Alabama’s top health official has warned “there is no room to put these bodies,” while a central Florida medical coalition has purchased 14 portable morgues to help manage the “unprecedented” deaths.
Florida and Louisiana are experiencing their highest pandemic deaths per capita to date, surpassing their January toll. Mississippi’s death rate is higher than those other states, although far lower than at its January peak.
Of the 14 states experiencing the worst death rates this week, only Nevada, Oregon and Wyoming are outside the South.
At the other end, many Northern and Midwestern states still have low death rates despite rising case counts, although covid-19 deaths typically lag infection reports by several weeks. The seven states averaging two or fewer daily deaths were Vermont, Alaska, Rhode Island, the Dakotas, Maine and New Hampshire, along with the District. Most have high vaccination rates, or high rates of natural immunity from earlier pandemic waves, or both.
Ali Mokdad, a researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington whose model is considered among the more optimistic, said that at least nine states may have reached, or passed, their peak for the delta variant — Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida in the South, along with Nevada and Hawaii — but that has little to do with policy changes or other major events.
Likely it’s more about “individual caution and [delta] running out of susceptible individuals,” he and his team wrote in a recent report.
Mokdad expects that states that have done better at curbing infections will experience a longer, albeit smaller wave, while those with rampant infections might start to see case declines shortly. In total, the group projects between 116,000 to 210,000 new U.S. deaths before Dec. 1, based on delta’s continued spread, a slow but steady increase in vaccinations, and no other threatening variants emerging.
That model also assumes that 56 percent of the population is immune to delta as a result of vaccinations and infections, and that 67 percent will be immune by Dec. 1. The next three months will be rough, however, with 44 states experiencing high stress on intensive care beds, he predicted.
“It’s counterintuitive,” Mokdad said. “In order for a state to peak and come down, you need fewer people susceptible to the virus. So states like Florida that have allowed the virus to circulate may be reaching that level through vaccines, plus people being infected.”
That model forecasts that deaths may rise to a peak by mid-September and slowly decline until Dec. 1. Several other models, including one from Los Alamos National Laboratory, forecast daily deaths rising into October.
Nicholas G. Reich, a biostatistician at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, whose group puts together an ensemble forecast based on 40 models used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, predicts that weekly deaths in each of the next four weeks will be between 9,900 and 11,900.
Reich cautioned that those numbers are based on the idea that infections may be slowing in some areas. But with schools opening up, mask mandates in flux, vaccinations still underway and the impact of waning immunity still unclear, he said it’s almost impossible to forecast what will happen between now and the end of the year.
“Knowing what the decline is going to look like is a basically an impossible question at this point,” he said.
Mysteries continue
Epidemiological post-mortems are often useful at pinpointing why outbreaks played out the way they did, but experts say with the coronavirus, it’s been difficult to explain case and death curves, even in retrospect. And that’s especially so with the delta variant.
Among the first countries the new variant tore through was the United Kingdom. Cases went up sharply but the expected deaths never materialized. Scientists speculated the country’s high rate of infection and immunity due to vaccination and previous infection — estimated to be between 90 and 94 percent — were factors.
Two regions being closely watched by U.S. experts are Scotland and Israel. In Scotland, the delta variant appeared to peak in early July and then begin waning, but over the past two weeks, cases spiked again not long after schools opened. The region is one of the most highly vaccinated in the world, with 91 percent of adults having had at least one vaccine shot. Death rates remain lower than before vaccines — a sign that authorities says reconfirms the effectiveness of vaccines. Nonetheless, the country has drawn attention for the surprising number of breakthrough infections.
Israel, dubbed “the world’s real-life COVID-19 lab” by Science magazine, has seen new cases at close to peak levels, and as of mid-August, 59 percent of those hospitalized were fully vaccinated. Deaths are rising too. The government reported that more than 550 people died of covid-19 in August, versus seven in June. The country, one of the most highly vaccinated in the world with 66 percent of the population having at least one shot, in July became the first in the world to approve third jabs due to concerns about waning immunity.
Another mystery is India, where delta led to widespread chaos and death in March, but then appeared to have been contained despite few vaccinations in the country of nearly 1.4 billion. As of this week, 11 percent of the population was fully vaccinated and 38 percent had received at least one shot. On Sept. 1, the seven-day average of daily deaths was around 450, versus over 4,000 in May, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Meyers, the University of Texas professor, said that while delta’s spread may be playing out differently in different parts of the world, a lot of the U.S. experience reflects vaccination levels and compliance with strategies such as masking and social distancing.
That means that “today, we as individuals and communities have a lot of control in how the pandemic is playing out,” she said. “If we take precautions, we can start to curb and prevent deaths.”
Epidemiological post-mortems are often useful at pinpointing why outbreaks played out the way they did, but experts say with the coronavirus, it’s been difficult to explain case and death curves, even in retrospect. And that’s especially so with the delta variant.
Among the first countries the new variant tore through was the United Kingdom. Cases went up sharply but the expected deaths never materialized. Scientists speculated the country’s high rate of infection and immunity due to vaccination and previous infection — estimated to be between 90 and 94 percent — were factors.
Two regions being closely watched by U.S. experts are Scotland and Israel. In Scotland, the delta variant appeared to peak in early July and then begin waning, but over the past two weeks, cases spiked again not long after schools opened. The region is one of the most highly vaccinated in the world, with 91 percent of adults having had at least one vaccine shot. Death rates remain lower than before vaccines — a sign that authorities says reconfirms the effectiveness of vaccines. Nonetheless, the country has drawn attention for the surprising number of breakthrough infections.
Israel, dubbed “the world’s real-life COVID-19 lab” by Science magazine, has seen new cases at close to peak levels, and as of mid-August, 59 percent of those hospitalized were fully vaccinated. Deaths are rising too. The government reported that more than 550 people died of covid-19 in August, versus seven in June. The country, one of the most highly vaccinated in the world with 66 percent of the population having at least one shot, in July became the first in the world to approve third jabs due to concerns about waning immunity.
Another mystery is India, where delta led to widespread chaos and death in March, but then appeared to have been contained despite few vaccinations in the country of nearly 1.4 billion. As of this week, 11 percent of the population was fully vaccinated and 38 percent had received at least one shot. On Sept. 1, the seven-day average of daily deaths was around 450, versus over 4,000 in May, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Meyers, the University of Texas professor, said that while delta’s spread may be playing out differently in different parts of the world, a lot of the U.S. experience reflects vaccination levels and compliance with strategies such as masking and social distancing.
That means that “today, we as individuals and communities have a lot of control in how the pandemic is playing out,” she said. “If we take precautions, we can start to curb and prevent deaths.”
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