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Johan Rockström: Presenting a framework for preserving Earth's resilience | MIT News - 0 views

news.mit.edu/...eserving-earth-resilience-0926

resilience earth boundaries

shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 19 - No Cached

Sixty-seven percent of vertebrate wildlife species is projected to be extinct by 2020
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if we avoid transgressing planetary boundaries we can maintain a semblance of the biosphere balance we enjoyed during the Holocene epoch of Earth history.
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“The Holocene is the only equilibrium of the planet that we know for certain can support humanity as we know it,” he said. “We have no evidence to suggest that we could morally and ethically support 9.5 billion co-citizens with a minimum standard of good lives [outside of Holocene conditions].”
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The use of renewable energy sources is doubling every 5.4 years; continuing that rate of growth is a key strategy to phase out the use of fossil fuels and achieve full decarbonization of the economy by 2050, according to Rockström.
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Why it's healthy to be afraid in a crisis | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...althy-to-be-afraid-in-a-crisis

crisis us

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached

As a mental health professional, I disagree with the message in Paul Daley’s article (We face a pandemic of mental health disorders, 24 March). We’re not facing “a pandemic of severe mental health disorders”. We’re all facing entirely normal fear, anxiety, despair and confusion about a truly terrifying situation that challenges our whole way of life. Never has it been clearer that so-called “mental disorders” make sense in context. In fact, many professionals would argue that this applies to the whole range of experiences that are labelled as clinical depression, personality disorder, psychosis, and so on.
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We can come out of this crisis in a better state than before by staying connected with our feelings and the urgent threats that have led to them, and taking collective action to deal with the root causes. These include climate change, environmental degradation, wildlife trafficking, insecure employment, the structure and funding of public services, and the neoliberal values that have driven us for far too long.
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Unlike many news organisations, all of our reporting is free and available for everyone – during this time of crisis and beyond. This is made possible thanks to the support we receive from readers like you across America in all 50 states.
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Our journalism relies on our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.
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Trump Is Inciting a Coronavirus Culture War to Save Himself - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...608638

trump culture war pandemic response morality racism analysis politics

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached

Donald Trump had a message for the Chinese government at the beginning of the year: Great job!
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“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency,” Trump tweeted on January 24. “It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
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Over the next month, the president repeatedly praised the Chinese government for its handling of the coronavirus, which appears to have first emerged from a wildlife market in the transportation hub of Wuhan, China, late last year. Trump lauded Chinese President Xi Jinping as “strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus,” and emphasized that the U.S. government was “working closely” with China to contain the disease.
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For months, Trump himself referred to the illness as “the coronavirus.” In early March, though, several conservative media figures began using Wuhan virus or Chinese virus instead. On March 16, Trump himself began to refer to it as the “Chinese Virus,” prompting commentators to charge that he was racializing the epidemic
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Even before Trump’s adoption of Chinese virus, Asian Americans had been facing a wave of discrimination, harassment, and violence in response to the epidemic. The president’s rhetoric did not start this backlash, but the decision to embrace the term Chinese virus reinforced the association between a worldwide pandemic and people of a particular national origin.
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Legitimizing that link with all the authority of the office of the president of the United States is not just morally abhorrent, but dangerous.
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The president’s now-constant use of Chinese virus is the latest example of a conservative phenomenon
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Trump and his acolytes are never more comfortable than when they are defending expressions of bigotry as plain common sense, and accusing their liberal critics of being oversensitive snowflakes who care more about protecting “those people” than they do about you. They seek to reduce any political dispute to this simple equation whenever possible.
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“I want them to talk about racism every day,” the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told The American Prospect in 2017. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
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n this instance, though, the gambit served two additional purposes: distracting the public from Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, and disguising the fact that Trump’s failures stemmed from his selfishness and fondness for authoritarian leaders, which in turn made him an easy mark for the Chinese government’s disinformation
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Trump understands that overt expressions of prejudice draw condemnation from liberals, which in turn rallies his own base around him. Calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” not only informs Trump’s base that foreigners are the culprits, it also offers his supporters the emotional satisfaction of venting fury at liberals for unfairly accusing conservatives of racism.
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The point is to turn a pandemic that threatens both mass death and the collapse of the American economy into a culture-war argument in which the electorate can be polarized along partisan lines.
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Since that report, Chinese officials have engaged in a propaganda offensive, expelling American journalists, minimizing their early missteps, and putting forth a conspiracy theory that the virus was engineered by the U.S. military. Compared with all this, the president’s defenders argue, Trump referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” seems trivial.
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Lost in that comparison, however, is the fact that the most effective target of CCP disinformation has been Trump himself.
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According to The Washington Post, at the same time that Trump was stating that Beijing had the disease under control, U.S. intelligence agencies were already warning him that “Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak.”
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Administration officials directly warned Trump of the danger posed by the virus, but “Trump’s insistence on the contrary seemed to rest in his relationship with China’s President Xi Jingping, whom Trump believed was providing him with reliable information about how the virus was spreading in China,” The Washington Post reported, “despite reports from intelligence agencies that Chinese officials were not being candid about the true scale of the crisis.”
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The right’s rhetorical shift then, is not just another racism rope-a-dop
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It is also an attempt to cover up the fact that the Chinese government’s propaganda campaign was effective in that it helped persuade the president of the United States not to take adequate precautionary measures to stem a tide of pestilence that U.S. government officials saw coming.
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Now faced with the profound consequences of that decision, the right has settled on a strategy that does little to hold Beijing accountable for its mishandling of the coronavirus, but instead plays into Beijing’s attempt to cast any criticism of the Chinese government’s response as racism
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The term makes no distinction between China’s authoritarian government and people who happen to be of Chinese origin, and undermines the unified front the Trump administration would want if it were actually concerned with countering Chinese-government propaganda.
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Instead, the Trump administration has chosen a political tactic that strengthens the president’s political prospects by polarizing the electorate, and covers up his own role as Xi’s patsy, while making its own pushback against CCP propaganda less effective
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This approach reflects the most glaring flaws of Trumpist governance, which have become only more acute during the coronavirus crisis: It exacerbates rather than solves the underlying problem, placing the president’s political objectives above all other concerns, even the ones both the president and his supporters claim to value.
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How Climate Change Is Contributing to Skyrocketing Rates of Infectious Disease | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...ng-rates-of-infectious-disease

climate change pandemic origins effects change disease

shared by Javier E on 07 May 20 - No Cached

The scientists who study how diseases emerge in a changing environment knew this moment was coming. Climate change is making outbreaks of disease more common and more dangerous.
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Over the past few decades, the number of emerging infectious diseases that spread to people — especially coronaviruses and other respiratory illnesses believed to have come from bats and birds — has skyrocketed.
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A new emerging disease surfaces five times a year. One study estimates that more than 3,200 strains of coronaviruses already exist among bats, awaiting an opportunity to jump to people.
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until now, the planet’s natural defense systems were better at fighting them off.
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Today, climate warming is demolishing those defense systems, driving a catastrophic loss in biodiversity that, when coupled with reckless deforestation and aggressive conversion of wildland for economic development, pushes farms and people closer to the wild and opens the gates for the spread of disease.
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ignoring how climate and rapid land development were putting disease-carrying animals in a squeeze was akin to playing Russian roulette.
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the virus is believed to have originated with the horseshoe bat, part of a genus that’s been roaming the forests of the planet for 40 million years and thrives in the remote jungles of south China, even that remains uncertain.
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China for years and warning that swift climate and environmental change there — in both loss of biodiversity and encroachment by civilization — was going to help new viruses jump to people.
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. Roughly 60% of new pathogens come from animals — including those pressured by diversity loss — and roughly one-third of those can be directly attributed to changes in human land use, meaning deforestation, the introduction of farming, development or resource extraction in otherwise natural settings
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Vector-borne diseases — those carried by insects like mosquitoes and ticks and transferred in the blood of infected people — are also on the rise as warming weather and erratic precipitation vastly expand the geographic regions vulnerable to contagion.
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Climate is even bringing old viruses back from the dead, thawing zombie contagions like the anthrax released from a frozen reindeer in 2016, which can come down from the arctic and haunt us from the past.
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It is demonstrating in real time the enormous and undeniable power that nature has over civilization and even over its politics.
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it also makes clear that climate policy today is indivisible from efforts to prevent new infectious outbreaks, or, as Bernstein put it, the notion that climate and health and environmental policy might not be related is “a dangerous delusion.”
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The warming of the climate is one of the principal drivers of the greatest — and fastest — loss of species diversity in the history of the planet, as shifting climate patterns force species to change habitats, push them into new regions or threaten their food and water supplies
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What’s known as biodiversity is critical because the natural variety of plants and animals lends each species greater resiliency against threat and together offers a delicately balanced safety net for natural systems
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As diversity wanes, the balance is upset, and remaining species are both more vulnerable to human influences and, according to a landmark 2010 study in the journal Nature, more likely to pass along powerful pathogens.
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even incremental and seemingly manageable injuries to local environments — say, the construction of a livestock farm adjacent to stressed natural forest — can add up to outsized consequences.
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Coronaviruses like COVID-19 aren’t likely to be carried by insects — they don’t leave enough infected virus cells in the blood. But one in five other viruses transmitted from animals to people are vector-borne
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the number of species on the planet has already dropped by 20% and that more than a million animal and plant species now face extinction.
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Americans have been experiencing this phenomenon directly in recent years as migratory birds have become less diverse and the threat posed by West Nile encephalitis has spread. It turns out that the birds that host the disease happen to also be the tough ones that prevail amid a thinned population
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as larger mammals suffer declines at the hands of hunters or loggers or shifting climate patterns, smaller species, including bats, rats and other rodents, are thriving, either because they are more resilient to the degraded environment or they are able to live better among people.
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It is these small animals, the ones that manage to find food in garbage cans or build nests in the eaves of buildings, that are proving most adaptable to human interference and also happen to spread disease.
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Warmer temperatures and higher rainfall associated with climate change — coupled with the loss of predators — are bound to make the rodent problem worse, with calamitous implications.
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As much as weather changes can drive changes in species, so does altering the landscape for new farms and new cities. In fact, researchers attribute a full 30% of emerging contagion to what they call “land use change.”
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As the global population surges to 10 billion over the next 35 years, and the capacity to farm food is stressed further again by the warming climate, the demand for land will only get more intense.
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Already, more than one-third of the planet’s land surface, and three-quarters of all of its fresh water, go toward the cultivation of crops and raising of livestock. These are the places where infectious diseases spread most often.
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that fully three-quarters of all new viruses have emerged from animals
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Almost every major epidemic we know of over the past couple of decades — SARS, COVID-19, Ebola and Nipah virus — jumped to people from wildlife enduring extreme climate and habitat strain, and still, “we’re naive to them,” she said. “That puts us in a dangerous place.”
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A 2008 study in the journal Nature found nearly one-third of emerging infectious diseases over the past 10 years were vector-borne, and that the jumps matched unusual changes in the climate
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Ticks and mosquitoes now thrive in places they’d never ventured before. As tropical species move northward, they are bringing dangerous pathogens with them.
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by 2050, disease-carrying mosquitoes will ultimately reach 500 million more people than they do today, including some 55 million more Americans.
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In 2013, dengue fever — an affliction affecting nearly 400 million people a year, but normally associated with the poorest regions of Africa — was transmitted locally in New York for the first time.
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“The long-term risk from dengue may be much higher than COVID,
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only 15% of the planet’s forests remain intact. The rest have been cut down, degraded or fragmented to the point that they disrupt the natural ecosystems that depend on them.
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it’s only a matter of time before other exotic animal-driven pathogens are driven from the forests of the global tropics to the United States or Canada or Europe because of the warming climate.
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it will also shape how easily we get sick. According to a 2013 study in the journal PLOS Currents Influenza, warm winters were predictors of the most severe flu seasons in the following year
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Even harsh swings from hot to cold, or sudden storms — exactly the kinds of climate-induced patterns we’re already seeing — make people more likely to get sick.
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The chance of a flu epidemic in America’s most populated cities will increase by as much as 50% this century, and flu-related deaths in Europe could also jump by 50%.
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Slow action on climate has made dramatic warming and large-scale environmental changes inevitable, he said, “and I think that increases in disease are going to come along with it.”
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By late 2018, epidemiologists there were bracing for what they call “spillover,” or the failure to keep a virus locally contained as it jumped from the bats and villages of Yunnan into the wider world.
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In late 2018, the Trump administration, as part of a sweeping effort to bring U.S. programs in China to a halt, abruptly shut down the research — and its efforts to intercept the spread of a new novel coronavirus along with it. “We got a cease and desist,” said Dennis Carroll, who founded the PREDICT program and has been instrumental in global work to address the risks from emerging viruses. By late 2019, USAID had cut the program’s global funding.
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The loss is immense. The researchers believed they were on the cusp of a breakthrough, racing to sequence the genes of the coronaviruses they’d extracted from the horseshoe bat and to begin work on vaccines.
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They’d campaigned for years for policymakers to fully consider what they’d learned about how land development and climate changes were driving the spread of disease, and they thought their research could literally provide governments a map to the hot spots most likely to spawn the next pandemic.
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They also hoped the genetic material they’d collected could lead to a vaccine not just for one lethal variation of COVID, but perhaps — like a missile defense shield for the biosphere — to address a whole family of viruses at once
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Carroll said knowledge of the virus genomes had the potential “to totally transform how we think about future biomedical interventions before there’s an emergence.
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PREDICT’s staff and advisers have pushed the U.S. government to consider how welding public health policy with environmental and climate science could help stem the spread of contagions.
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Since Donald Trump was elected, the group hasn’t been invited back.
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What Daszak really wants — in addition to restored funding to continue his work — is the public and leaders to understand that it’s human behavior driving the rise in disease, just as it drives the climate crisis
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“We turn a blind eye to the fact that our behavior is driving this,” he said. “We get cheap goods through Walmart, and then we pay for it forever through the rise in pandemics. It’s upside down.”
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Senate Approves Budget Plan That Smooths Path Toward Tax Cut - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...budget-vote-senate.html

Us history senate budget plan republicans democrats politics Trump

shared by millerco on 20 Oct 17 - No Cached

The Senate took a significant step toward rewriting the tax code on Thursday night with the passage of a budget blueprint that would protect a $1.5 trillion tax cut from a Democratic filibuster.
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The budget resolution could also pave the way for opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil exploration by ensuring that drilling legislation can pass with only Republican votes.
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Despite having full control of the government, Republicans have so far been unable to produce a marquee legislative achievement in the first year of President Trump’s tenure, putting even more pressure on lawmakers to succeed in passing a tax bill.
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The budget’s passage could keep Republicans on track to approve a tax package late this year or early in 2018.
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As early as next week, the House plans to take up the budget blueprint that the Senate approved on Thursday by a 51 to 49 vote. Doing so would allow for the tax overhaul to move ahead quickly.
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Speaker Paul D. Ryan will need most House Republicans to back the blueprint without changes; in the Senate, Rand Paul of Kentucky was the lone Republican to vote against the measure on Thursday, in protest of what he deemed excessive spending.
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If House Republicans were to insist on negotiating a compromise that melds the Senate and House budget plans, tax legislation could be delayed.
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“This is the last, best chance we will have to cut taxes,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a member of the Budget Committee, who warned that the consequences would be ruinous if the party failed.
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“That will be the end of us as a party,” he said, “because if you’re a Republican and you don’t want to simplify the tax code and cut taxes, what good are you to anybody?”
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San Diego Zoo Apes Get an Experimental Covid Vaccine - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...san-diego-zoo-covid.html

world pandemic apes vaccine

shared by ethanshilling on 05 Mar 21 - No Cached

The San Diego Zoo has given nine apes an experimental coronavirus vaccine developed by Zoetis, a major veterinary pharmaceuticals company.
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In January, a troop of gorillas at the zoo’s Safari Park tested positive for the virus. All are recovering, but even so, the zoo requested help from Zoetis in vaccinating other apes.
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Dr. Lamberski said one gorilla at the zoo was also scheduled to be vaccinated, but the gorillas at the wildlife park were a lower priority because they had already tested positive for infection and had recovered.
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Infection of apes is a major concern for zoos and conservationists. They easily fall prey to human respiratory infections, and common cold viruses have caused deadly outbreaks in chimpanzees in Africa.
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Genome research has suggested that chimpanzees, gorillas and other apes will be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the pandemic.
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Scientists are worrying not just about the danger the virus poses to great apes and other animals, but also about the potential for the virus to gain a foothold in a wild animal population that could become a permanent reservoir and emerge at a later date to reinfect humans.
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Denmark ended up killing as many as 17 million mink — effectively wiping out its mink farming industry. In the United States, thousands of mink have died, and one wild mink has tested positive for the virus.
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Although many animals, including dogs, domestic cats, and big cats in zoos, have become infected by the virus through natural spread, and others have been infected in laboratory experiments, scientists say that widespread testing has yet to find the virus in any animal in the wild other than the one mink.
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Monarch Migration Threatened By Climate Change, Deforestation : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...en-monarch-butterfly-migration

climate change deforestation migration

shared by mimiterranova on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached

2020 was a bad year for butterflies, too. The population of monarch butterflies that migrated to Mexico to ride out the cold winter months in the north fell 26% from a year earlier, according to a new report from the Mexican government and the Word Wildlife Fund.
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A combination of logging, falling trees, and drought in the areas where the butterflies roost, as well as a reduction of milkweed in their breeding places, pose threats to the monarch's migration. But the damage wrought by climate change is the biggest factor.
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During the spring and summer of 2020, wild weather in the southern United States killed milkweed blossoms--which female monarch butterflies lay their eggs upon. In turn, the development of butterfly eggs and larvae was also impacted, the report said.
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However, the monarch's migratory process is at risk, he said, and the governments, the scientific community, and civil society of Mexico, the U.S. and Canada must work together to ensure the survival of the butterfly going forward.
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The monarch is the only butterfly known to make a two-way migration like birds do, according to U.S. Forest Service. Monarchs can't survive the cold winters of northern climates, unlike other butterflies.
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US cities are losing 36 million trees a year. Here's why it matters and how you can stop it - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by tsainten on 15 Jan 20 - No Cached

Trees can lower summer daytime temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a recent study.
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If we continue on this path, "cities will become warmer, more polluted and generally more unhealthy for inhabitants,"
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The study placed a value on tree loss based on trees' role in air pollution removal and energy conservation. The lost value amounted to $96 million a year.
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Energy emissions reduction:
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Water quality improvement
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Flooding reduction
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Noise reduction
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Improved human health
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Wildlife habitat
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“cities will become warmer, more polluted and generally more unhealthy for inhabitants,” said David Nowak, a senior US Forest Service scientist and co-author of the study.
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that we lost 36 million trees annually from urban and rural communities over a five-year period. That’s a 1% drop from 2009 to 2014.
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More than 80% of the US population lives in urban areas, and most Americans live in forested regions along the East and West coasts, Nowak says.
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Biden's Fossil Fuel Moves Clash With Pledges on Climate Change - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ssil-fules-climate-Willow.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached

On Wednesday, the Biden administration defended in federal court the Willow project, a huge oil drilling operation proposed on Alaska’s North Slope that was approved by the Trump administration and is being fought by environmentalists. Weeks earlier, it backed former President Donald J. Trump’s decision to grant oil and gas leases on federal land in Wyoming. Also this month, it declined to act when it had an opportunity to stop crude oil from continuing to flow through the bitterly contested, 2,700-mile Dakota Access pipeline, which lacks a federal permit.
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The three decisions suggest the jagged road that Mr. Biden is following as he tries to balance his climate agenda against practical and political pressures.
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As important, Mr. Biden is trying to avoid alienating a handful of moderate Republicans and Democrats from oil, gas and coal states who will decide the fate of his legislative agenda in Congress. Among them is Lisa Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska for whom the Willow project is a top priority and who grilled Deb Haaland about it during Ms. Haaland’s confirmation hearing for interior secretary in February.Editors’ PicksSummertime … and the Sloganeering Is a Little AwkwardThe Murky World of Private Spies and the Damage They May Be DoingThey’ve Given $6 Million to the Arts. No One Knew Them, Until Now.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story
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The multibillion-dollar plan from ConocoPhillips to drill in part of the National Petroleum Reserve would produce more than 100,000 barrels of oil a day until 2050. It is being challenged by environmental groups who said the Trump administration failed to consider the impact that drilling would have on fragile wildlife and that burning the oil would have on global warming.
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Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska, said in an interview that he, Ms. Murkowski and Representative Don Young of Alaska had all met with Ms. Haaland “ad nauseam” about Alaska issues, including the Willow project. Mr. Sullivan said he had repeatedly made the case that Willow’s projected 2,000 jobs and $1.2 billion in revenues should be seen as part of the Biden administration’s focus on environmental equity, as it would directly benefit local and Alaska Native communities in the North Slope.
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The decision on the Willow project was made as the Biden administration is trying to win Republican support for its infrastructure package and other policies, said Gerald Torres, a professor of law and environmental justice at Yale University. “He is going to need Murkowski’s vote for some things,” he said. “These are political calculations.”
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Earlier this month, lawyers for the Biden administration also opposed in court shutting down the Dakota Access pipeline, which is carrying about 550,000 barrels of oil daily from North Dakota to Illinois. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe and other activists have fought it for more than five years, contending the pipeline threatens water supplies and sacred sites.
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A few days later, the Biden administration defended 440 oil and gas leases issued by the Trump administration on federal land in Wyoming that is also the critical habitat of the sage grouse, mule deer and pronghorn. Environmentalists successfully sued the government to stop the leases, arguing that they violated a 2015 agreement that protected that land. But in federal appeals court, the Biden administration defended the decision to allow oil and gas drilling.
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Environmental activists, who campaigned to elect Mr. Biden, said this week that they were “baffled” and “disappointed” by the decisions but avoided criticizing the president.
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Still, some said they were running out of patience with the distance between Mr. Biden’s climate policies and his actions at a time when scientists say countries need to quickly and sharply cut fossil fuel emissions or risk irreversible damage to the planet.
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Still, some said they were running out of patience with the distance between Mr. Biden’s climate policies and his actions at a time when scientists say countries need to quickly and sharply cut fossil fuel emissions or risk irreversible damage to the planet.
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This month the world’s leading energy agency warned that governments around the globe must stop approving fossil fuel projects now if they want to keep the increase in average global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the Earth will experience irreversible damage.
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Biden administration puts Arctic refuge leases on ice as it asks for new environmental reviews - Alaska Public Media - 0 views

www.alaskapublic.org/...-for-new-environmental-reviews

US Politics Biden Trump Arctic Oil

shared by yehbru on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached

The Biden administration Tuesday took its first steps toward reversing the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain to oil drilling, by suspending leases issued in the final days of the Trump administration.
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And on his first day in office, on Jan. 20, he directed the Interior Department to put a “temporary mortarium” on all oil and gas leasing activities in the refuge, and to review the environmental impacts of the Trump administration’s oil and gas program for the area. 
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All activities related to the program — including the current leases — are suspended until the review is complete. The department will then decide whether the leases should be “reaffirmed, voided, or subject to additional mitigation measures,”
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Critics said it was rushed, sloppy and a threat to animals and the environment. But supporters said drilling in the refuge is good for jobs and the country’s energy independence.
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The sale ended up drawing little interest: No major oil companies bid on the leases. Instead, two smaller ones each picked up a single lease, and the state-owned Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority picked up seven
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A Single Fire Killed At Least 10% Of The World's Giant Sequoias, Study Says : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...rlds-giant-sequoias-study-says

shared by anonymous on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached

At least a tenth of the world's mature giant sequoia trees were destroyed by a single California wildfire that tore through the southern Sierra Nevada last year, according to a draft report prepared by scientists with the National Park Service.
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Castle Fire, which charred 273 square miles (707 square km) of timber in Sequoia National Park.
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Researchers used satellite imagery and modeling from previous fires to determine that between 7,500 and 10,000 of the towering species perished in the fire. That equates to 10% to 14% of the world's mature giant sequoia population, the newspaper said.
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The consequences of losing large numbers of giant sequoias could be felt for decades, forest managers said. Redwood and sequoia forests are among the world's most efficient at removing and storing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The groves also provide critical habitat for native wildlife and help protect the watershed that supplies farms and communities on the San Joaquin Valley floor.
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Brigham, the study's lead author, cautioned that the numbers are preliminary and the research paper has yet to be peer reviewed.
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"I have a vain hope that once we get out on the ground the situation won't be as bad, but that's hope — that's not science," she said.
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The newspaper said the extent of the damage to one of the world's most treasured trees is noteworthy because the sequoias themselves are incredibly well adapted to fire. The old-growth trees — some of which are more than 2,000 years old and 250 feet (76 meters) tall — require fire to burst their pine cones and reproduce.
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"One-hundred years of fire suppression, combined with climate change-driven hotter droughts, have changed how fires burn in the southern Sierra and that change has been very bad for sequoia," Brigham said.
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Sequoia and Kings Canyon have conducted controlled burns since the 1960s, about a thousand acres a year on average. Brigham estimates that the park will need to burn around 30 times that number to get the forest back to a healthy state.
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Pink Dolphins in Hong Kong Find Respite Thanks to the Coronavirus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hong-kongs-pink-dolphins.html

hong kong dolphins

shared by ethanshilling on 06 Apr 21 - No Cached

The most popular reward for hiking to the top of Fu Shan, a hill near Hong Kong’s westernmost point, is a selfie backed by the setting sun, the gleaming new bridge across the Pearl River or a flight landing at the nearby airport.But for those who look more closely, there is the chance of a rarer prize: a glimpse of Chinese white dolphins swimming among fishing boats and cargo ships in the milky jade water.
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The species, also known as the pink dolphin for the flush coloration it gets while swimming actively in warm waters, is found through much of coastal south China and Southeast Asia.
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The marine mammals have maintained a precarious existence in the Pearl River Delta, which has the world’s second-highest volume of freight shipments, several cities with populations in the millions and an unrelenting pace of development in and along its waters.
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But the number of dolphins in Hong Kong have declined as much as 80 percent over the past 15 years, according to a report by 15 conservation groups and regional universities, as pollution, marine traffic and large-scale land reclamation projects have made the environment increasingly hostile.
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The construction of a new runway for Hong Kong’s international airport and a bridge that links the city with the western side of the Pearl River has also disrupted areas that were once prime dolphin habitat but now rarely see the animals.
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“If we identify individuals, we can follow their life history — where they like to hang around, whether they have calves,” he said. “This is important, because one of the worries is reproductive rate of dolphins is quite low. To keep the population healthy, we want to see calves. But that’s not happening in Hong Kong.”
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“What we have documented fairly clearly is that dolphins are moving back out into the ferry zone,” Mr. McCook said. “That actually is their most prime habitat under current circumstances.”
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“People want to hear this news about the benefit of the pandemic for wildlife, but it’s not true for dolphins,” said Vincent Ho, the vice chairman of the Hong Kong Dolphin Conservation Society.
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“Every time we have a project like the bridge,” Mr. Ho said, “they set up a marine park as some kind of compensation. But we think it’s too late.”
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“All vessel traffic is an issue, but high-speed ferries are a particular issue,” said Laurence McCook, the head of oceans conservation for the WWF-Hong Kong. “They move so fast there’s a risk of vessel strike, but they also just physically disturb the dolphins because the dolphins run away from them.”
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Conservation groups say they hope the benefits of the ferry suspension will encourage regional governments and ferry companies to reconsider routes across the Pearl River. By traveling somewhat farther south, they could bypass key areas of dolphin habitat along Lantau, Hong Kong’s largest island.
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“Rerouting the ferries is not a magic cure-all,” Mr. McCook said. “But we think that can help us catalyze other actions and demonstrate it’s not a fait accompli that we lose the dolphins.”
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Darwin's Arch, a Famed Rock Formation in the Galápagos, Collapses - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...darwins-arch-collapse.html

shared by ethanshilling on 18 May 21 - No Cached

Darwin’s Arch, a famous, photo-friendly rock formation in the remote Galápagos Islands, collapsed on Monday because of natural erosion, Ecuadorean officials said.
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The collapse of the natural archway in the Pacific Ocean, about 600 miles west of continental Ecuador, left a pile of rubble between two pillars.
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The waters around the arch are known as a destination for divers, with tours from the main islands offering the opportunity to spot sharks, turtles, manta rays and dolphins. The arch was less than a mile from the uninhabited Darwin Island; both are named after Charles Darwin, the scientist whose study of species on the islands in 1835 influenced his theory of evolution and natural selection.
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The Galápagos, once a destination for only well-off travelers unfazed by the islands’ remote location, had seen an increase in tourism before the coronavirus pandemic, with visitor numbers jumping 90 percent between 2007 and 2016.
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In 2018, a group of tour operators expressed concern about the influx of tourists, saying they could harm not just the wildlife but the islands’ landscapes and beaches.
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Florida manatee with 'Trump' etched on back prompts investigation - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-55631498

shared by anonymous on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached

US wildlife authorities have launched an investigation after a manatee was discovered with the word 'Trump' scraped on its back.
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The marine mammal was spotted on Sunday in Florida's Homosassa River, with the US president's surname on its body.
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Officials told AP news agency that the animal does not appear to be seriously injured, and the word was scraped onto algae growing on its skin.
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Manatees, nicknamed "sea cows," are protected under US law, and anyone found guilty of harassing them faces up to a year in prison and a $50,000 (£37,000) fine.Images of the animal was first shared by the Citrus County Chronical, a local newspaper, and have been widely shared on social media.
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The Centre for Biological Diversity, a conservation charity, is also offering a $5,000 for information leading to the conviction of those responsible.
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"It's clear that whoever harmed this defenceless, gentle giant is capable of doing grave violence and needs to be apprehended immediately," she added.The manatee is a large, slow-moving mammal which has become an unofficial mascot for Florida. There are around 6,300 currently in the state, according to the USFWS.
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their numbers have fallen in recent years due to habitat loss, algae blooms and strikes by fast-moving boats.They are also vulnerable to attacks by humans while they congregate in the shallow water of local rivers and canals.
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637 manatees died in 2020, 90 of which were victims of boat collisions. Another 15 were killed by other interactions with humans.
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U.S. Executes Dustin Higgs In 13th And Final Execution Under Trump Administration : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ion-under-trump-administration

shared by anonymous on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached

The U.S. government has executed Dustin Higgs, the last prisoner executed during the Trump administration, and the 13th in the space of six months.
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The Supreme Court declined to stop the execution, although some justices dissented, noting that before the first of the 13, it had been 17 years since a federal execution had been carried out.
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Higgs, along with two other men, killed three women in 1996, with one of the men, Willis Haynes, actually pulling the trigger. Haynes pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. Higgs was found guilty in 2000 of multiple federal offenses including first-degree premeditated murder, three counts of first-degree felony murder, and three counts of kidnapping resulting in death.
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"after waiting almost two decades to resume federal executions, the Government should have proceeded with some measure of restraint to ensure it did so lawfully."
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The crimes were carried out in Maryland which has since dropped the death penalty. Higgs was executed at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., and was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m., according to the Associated Press. In a statement following the execution, Shawn Nolan, an attorney for Higgs, called him "a fine man, a terrific father, brother, and nephew" who "spent decades on death row in solitary confinement helping others around him, while working tirelessly to fight his unjust convictions."
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"There was no reason to kill him, particularly during the pandemic and when he, himself, was sick with Covid that he contracted because of these irresponsible, super-spreader executions,"
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Corey Johnson, 52, was executed Thursday night. He had also contracted COVID-19 while in prison, and his attorney argued that executing him following the infection would have been "cruel and unusual punishment." Lisa Montgomery was executed early Wednesday. She was the only woman on federal death row and the first female prisoner to be put to death by the U.S. government since 1953.
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The executions come days before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, who has opposed the federal death penalty. On Monday, Senate Democrats unveiled legislation that would abolish it.
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Caligula's Garden of Delights, Unearthed and Restored - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eology-rome-horti-lamiani.html

rome history Culture

shared by zoegainer on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached

During the four years that Caligula occupied the Roman throne, his favorite hideaway was an imperial pleasure garden called Horti Lamiani, the Mar-a-Lago of its day. The vast residential compound spread out on the Esquiline Hill, one of the seven hills on which the city was originally built, in the area around the current Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II.
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There, just on the edge of the city, villas, shrines and banquet halls were set in carefully constructed “natural” landscapes. An early version of a wildlife park, the Horti Lamiani featured orchards, fountains, terraces, a bath house adorned with precious colored marble from all over the Mediterranean, and exotic animals, some of which were used, as in the Colosseum, for private circus games.
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Historians have long believed that the remains of the lavish houses and parkland would never be recovered. But this spring, Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Cultural Activities and Tourism will open the Nymphaeum Museum of Piazza Vittorio, a subterranean gallery that will showcase a section of the imperial garden that was unearthed during an excavation from 2006 to 2015. The dig, carried out beneath the rubble of a condemned 19th-century apartment complex, yielded gems, coins, ceramics, jewelry, pottery, cameo glass, a theater mask, seeds of plants such as citron, apricot and acacia that had been imported from Asia, and bones of peacocks, deer, lions, bears and ostriches.
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The objects and structural remnants on display in the museum paint a vivid picture of wealth, power and opulence. Among the stunning examples of ancient Roman artistry are elaborate mosaics and frescoes, a marble staircase, capitals of colored marble and limestone, and an imperial guard’s bronze brooch inset with gold and mother-of-pearl. “All the most refined objects and art produced in the Imperial Age turned up,” Dr. Serlorenzi said.
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“The frescoes are incredibly ornate and of a very high decorative standard,”
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“Given the descriptions of Caligula’s licentious lifestyle and appetite for luxury, we might have expected the designs to be quite gauche.”
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Evidence suggests that after Caligula’s violent death — he was hacked to bits by his bodyguards — the house and garden survived at least until the Severan dynasty, which ruled from A.D. 193 to 235. By the fourth century, the gardens had apparently fallen into desuetude, and statuary in the abandoned pavilions was broken into pieces to build the foundations of a series of spas. The statues were not discovered until 1874, three years after Rome was made the capital of the newly unified Kingdom of Italy.
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The latest excavation of the horti unfolded under the detritus of the residences, which had been evacuated in the 1970s in the wake of a building collapse.
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I doubt these new discoveries will do much to rehabilitate his character. But they should open up new vistas onto his world, and reveal it to be every bit as paradisiacal as he desired it to be.”
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Trump's Pardons: The List - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...who-did-trump-pardon.html

Trump Pardons Clemency

shared by lmunch on 20 Jan 21 - No Cached

With hours to go before President Trump left office, the White House released a list early Wednesday of 73 people he had pardoned and 70 others whose sentences he had commuted.
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On the list were at least two people who had worked for Mr. Trump: Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist, and Elliott Broidy, a former top fund-raiser. Both received full pardons.
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The rapper Lil Wayne, born Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., received a full pardon after pleading guilty to possession of a firearm and ammunition by a felon in December. Mr. Trump also granted a commutation to another rapper, Kodak Black, whose legal name is Bill Kapri (though he was born Dieuson Octave). In 2019, he was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for lying on background paperwork while attempting to buy guns.
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The Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution gives presidents unlimited authority to grant pardons, which excuse or forgive a federal crime. A commutation, by contrast, makes a punishment milder without wiping out the underlying conviction.
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Mr. Manafort, 71, had been sentenced in 2019 to seven and a half years in prison for his role in a decade-long, multimillion-dollar financial fraud scheme for his work in the former Soviet Union. He was released early from prison in May as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and given home confinement. Mr. Trump had repeatedly expressed sympathy for Mr. Manafort, describing him as a brave man who had been mistreated by the special counsel’s office.
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Mr. Stone, a longtime friend and adviser of Mr. Trump, was sentenced in February 2020 to more than three years in prison in a politically fraught case that put the president at odds with his attorney general. Mr. Stone was convicted of seven felony charges, including lying under oath to a congressional committee and threatening a witness whose testimony would have exposed those lies.
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Mr. Kushner, 66, the father-in-law of the president’s older daughter, Ivanka Trump, pleaded guilty in 2004 to 16 counts of tax evasion, a single count of retaliating against a federal witness and one of lying to the Federal Election Commission. He served two years in prison before being released in 2006.
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Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with a Russian diplomat, and whose prosecution Attorney General William P. Barr tried to shut down, was the only White House official to be convicted as part of the Trump-Russia investigation.
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Mr. Trump issued full pardons to Nicholas Slatton and three other former U.S. service members who were convicted on charges related to the killing of Iraqi civilians while they were working as security contractors for Blackwater, a private company, in 2007.
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Joe Arpaio, an anti-immigration crusader who enjoyed calling himself “America’s toughest sheriff,” was the first pardon of Mr. Trump’s presidency.
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Conrad M. Black, a former press baron and friend of Mr. Trump’s, was granted a full pardon 12 years after his sentencing for fraud and obstruction of justice.
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Former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois was sentenced in 2011 to 14 years in prison for trying to sell or trade to the highest bidder the Senate seat that Mr. Obama vacated after he was elected president.
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Dinesh D’Souza received a presidential pardon after pleading guilty to making illegal campaign contributions in 2014. Mr. D’Souza, a filmmaker and author whose subjects often dabble in conspiracy theories, had long blamed his conviction on his political opposition to Mr. Obama.
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Edward J. DeBartolo Jr., a former owner of the San Francisco 49ers, pleaded guilty in 1998 to concealing an extortion plot. Mr. DeBartolo was prosecuted after he gave Edwin W. Edwards, the influential former governor of Louisiana, $400,000 to secure a riverboat gambling license for his gambling consortium.
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Alice Marie Johnson was serving life in a federal prison for a nonviolent drug conviction before her case was brought to Mr. Trump’s attention by the reality television star Kim Kardashian West.
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Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion, was tarnished by a racially tainted criminal conviction in 1913 — for transporting a white woman across state lines — that haunted him well after his death in 1946. Mr. Trump pardoned him on May 24, 2018.
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Susan B. Anthony, the women’s suffragist, was arrested in Rochester, N.Y., in 1872 for voting illegally and was fined $100. Mr. Trump pardoned her on Aug. 18, the 100th anniversary of the ratification of 19th Amendment, which extended voting rights to women.
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Zay Jeffries, a metal scientist whose contributions to the Manhattan Project and whose development of armor-piercing artillery shells helped the Allies win World War II, was granted a posthumous pardon on Oct. 10, 2019. Jeffries was found guilty in 1948 of an antitrust violation related to his work and was fined $2,500.
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Ten years ago, Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner, was sentenced to four years in prison after pleading guilty to eight felony charges, including tax fraud and lying to White House officials.
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I. Lewis Libby Jr., known as Scooter, was Vice President Dick Cheney’s top adviser before Mr. Libby was convicted in 2007 of four felony counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice, in connection with the disclosure of the identity of a C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame.
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Mr. Trump’s decision to clear three members of the armed services who had been accused or convicted of war crimes signaled that the president intended to use his power as the ultimate arbiter of military justice.
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Michael R. Milken was the billionaire “junk bond king” and a well-known financier on Wall Street in the 1980s. In 1990, he pleaded guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy charges and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, though his sentence was later reduced to two. He also agreed to pay $600 million in fines and penalties.
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Dwight Hammond and his son, Steven Hammond, were Oregon cattle ranchers who had been serving five-year sentences for arson on federal land. Their cases inspired an antigovernment group’s weekslong standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 and brought widespread attention to anger over federal land management in the Western United States.
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David H. Safavian, the top federal procurement official under President George W. Bush, was sentenced in 2009 to a year in prison for covering up his ties to Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist whose corruption became a symbol of the excesses of Washington influence peddling. Mr. Safavian was convicted of obstruction of justice and making false statements.
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Angela Stanton — an author, television personality and motivational speaker — served six months of home confinement in 2007 for her role in a stolen-vehicle ring. Her book “Life of a Real Housewife” explores her difficult upbringing and her encounters with reality TV stars.
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Water and Air Pollution - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...water-and-air-pollution

history crisis

shared by brookegoodman on 16 Jan 20 - No Cached

Along with amazing technological advances, the Industrial Revolution of the mid-19th century introduced new sources of air and water pollution.
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Out of this movement came events like Earth Day, and legislative victories like the Clean Air Act (1970) and the Clean Water Act (1972).
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The resulting smog and soot had serious health impacts on the residents of growing urban centers.
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the Great Smog of 1952, pollutants from factories and home fireplaces mixed with air condensation killed at least 4,000 people in London over the course of several days.
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However, in 2007, almost half (46 percent) of all Americans resided in counties with unhealthy levels of either ozone or particle pollution, according to the American Lung Association (ALA).
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It irritates the respiratory tract and can lead to a number of health problems, including asthma attacks, chest pain and even death.
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It causes many other health effects, premature births to serious respiratory disorders, even when the particle levels are very low. It makes asthma worse and causes wheezing, coughing and respiratory irritation in anyone with sensitive airways. It also triggers heart attacks, strokes, irregular heartbeat, and premature death.”
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For centuries, humans unknowingly contaminated sources of drinking water with raw sewage, which led to diseases such as cholera and typhoid.
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Water pollution intensified with the advent of the Industrial Revolution,
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Over half the American population (including the majority of those living in rural areas) relies on groundwater for drinking water, according to The Groundwater Foundation
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The disaster, which created a 3,000-square-mile oil slick, instantly killed hundreds of thousands of birds, fish and other wildlife and devastated the area for years afterward.
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Rain may help battle Australia fires - but could cause other problems - 0 views

nypost.com/...but-could-cause-other-problems

crisis