LA Times calls King Coal a liar

The Los Angeles Times has a heckuva team of environmental reporters, including several Pulitzer Prize winners, but as of late, some of the toughest reporting in the paper has come from Neela Banerjee, who in her latest story in politely calls the coal industry and its employees, the miners, liars.

It's fascinating to see how she does it. She introduces a coal miner, and lets him blame the Obama administration and the Environmental Protection Agency for the decline of the industry, and then, after several paragraphs of fairness, lowers the boom and reveals a simpler truth.

"Coal is the only industry we've got, all we've ever had," said Serafino Nolletti, Logan's mayor.

But coal's role in the state economy has been waning for 50 years.
Mechanization stripped away mining jobs, and the shuttering of the
domestic steel industry and much other manufacturing eroded coal
consumption.

Coal is the third-largest contributor to the state's gross domestic
product, but employs less than 5% of the state's workforce — far less
than other industries, according to Jeremy Richardson, a West
Virginia-raised physicist and fellow at the Union of Concerned
Scientists.

[snip]

"For the last 100 years, coal has been king in this state," said Jeff
Kessler, a Democrat who is president of West Virginia's Senate and a
sponsor of the so-called future fund. "But it's a king that hasn't
always been good to its subjects. Just because it's all we've known as a
state doesn't mean that's all there is."

As Joel Pett illustrates for the McClatchey chain:

Kingcoal2

Coal is losing power in this country — and popularity overseas too, as AP's BigStory of the day documents "the beginning of the end":

The U.S. will burn 943 million tons of coal this year, only about as much as it did in 1993. Now it's on the verge of adopting pollution rules that may all but prohibit the construction of new coal plants. And China, which burns 4 billion tons of coal a year — as much as the rest of the world combined — is taking steps to slow the staggering growth of its coal consumption and may even be approaching a peak.

Michael Parker, a commodities analyst at Bernstein Research, calls the shift in China "the beginning of the end of coal." While global coal use is almost certain to grow over the next few years — and remain an important fuel for decades after that — coal may soon begin a long slow decline.

 

Dengue fever hits the USA (as seen in “Fevered”)

A few days back I pointed out that Linda Marsa in her new global warming book Fevered dug up a central fact about the Dust Bowl that few others had noticed — that it only took one degree of warming to set that disaster in motion. This concern was echoed in a report on National Public Radio that focused on another reason to fear the reoccurence of a new dust bowl. 

Today let me mention another projection in Fevered, which is that dengue fever has landed again in the United States, thanks in part to mosquitoes empowered by climate change.

NPR echoed this concern in a report on All Things Considered too, on Friday. 

To wit:

Public health officials in Florida are once again scrambling to contain an outbreak of dengue fever, a disease spread by mosquitoes.

Until 2009, when it surfaced in Key West, the tropical disease hadn't been seen in Florida in more than 70 years.

Now there are concerns dengue may establish a foothold in the state.

Wrote Marsa, in chapter one of Fevered:

Over the last half-century, as the planet has experienced a warming trend, dengue has spread into more temperate areas. In that time its incidence has spiked 30-fold, according to the World Health Organization, and it now causes an estimated 100 million infections annually in more than 100 countries, especially in densely populated and developing megacities in the tropical belt, where a high percentage of the population lives in urban shantytowns. The Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits dengue is a sociable urbanite that feasts mainly on humans…because of the speed of its sprad and the overwhelming budens of illness and death it causes, the WHO considers dengue the world's most serious insect-transmitted viral disease. But many doctors are unfamiliar with the symptoms and fail to make an accurate diagnosis. As a consequence, the CDC believes many cases are never counted, making these figures estimates of its prevalence. 

In Florida this past summer, said the ATC story:

It's not unusual for travelers to the Caribbean, Africa or Latin America to return home with a case of dengue acquired overseas. But in Stuart, dengue spread to the local mosquito population, says Dr. Aileen Chang, an expert on dengue fever at the University of Miami Health System.

And those mosquitoes have infected others with the disease. It's an outbreak similar to one seen in Key West in 2009 and 2010.

Only about a quarter of those infected with dengue become sick enough to see a doctor. So far, health officials haven't been able to identify the person who brought dengue to the area.

In Stuart — and everywhere there's a dengue outbreak — officials find themselves in a race against the disease. They have to work to educate the public and control the mosquito population before it spreads more.

Dr. Chang has been advising health authorities in Stuart, and judging from the numbers of cases coming in, she believes this particular outbreak may have peaked. But it's not likely to be the last, she says.

"The temperature and weather patterns are changing. We're seeing more dengue throughout the entire world," she says. "So now, having it creep up to Florida, the most southern part of the U.S., is not that surprising."

Note that the National Public Radio report didn't breath a word of dengue's rare but deadly sibling, dengue hemorrhagic fever. Appropriate because no one, evidently, has contracted that strain in Florida. Marsa in Fevered points out that that the mortal disease has been documented in Brownsville, Texas, in 2005 and, she suggests, will show up soon enough wherever dengue fever is found. 

I wonder about California, given dengue fever's prevalence in Mexico…

Map_dengue_risk_areas

[map from Florida Bureau of Environmental Public Health Medicine]

Dust Bowl II? (Linda Marsa connects the dots)

Writing a good book about global warming is a little bit like trying to catch a whale in a butterfly net. Not only is the beast vast almost beyond human comprehension, but will it stay still? No it won't. Captain Ahab himself at least had a harpoon — a writer has nothing but a few facts in his or her arsenal. 

With that said, let me now pay my respects again to veteran science reporter Linda Marsa and her tightly focused Fevered (with its less-tightly-focused subhead: Why a Hotter Planet Will Hurt Our Health — And How We Can Save Ourselves). In her introduction, Marsa brings up a singular fact about the infamous Dust Bowl that I have never encountered before, despite years of reading about climate:

One degree. When I talked to meteorologist Siegfried Schubert, I was astonished to find that's all it took to cause the 1930's Dust Bowl. Just a 1 degree F change in the surface temperatures cut off the pipeline of moisture that normally travels north from the Gulf of Mexico and triggered the long dry spell, according to a study he did more than 60 years later, in 2004, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center….Granted [she qualifies] agricultural techniques, such as deep plowing that removed the top layer of fertile dirt and garsses that achored the soil, and a failure to rotate crops, which depleted vital nutrients, made the fields more vulnerable to wind erosion and created the conditions for the dust storms.)…[but] "The 1930's drought was a major climactic event on such a great, grand scale," Schubert told me […], "It's something that has to be explained, especially if we are to make progress in understanding future droughts in relation to global warming."

Here's a brief explanation of what happened from Schubert. For a primer on his research, try here:

The model showed cooler than normal tropical Pacific Ocean temperatures and warmer than normal tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures contributed to a weakened low-level jet stream and changed its course. The jet stream, a ribbon of fast moving air near the Earth's surface, normally flows westward over the Gulf of Mexico and then turns northward pulling up moisture and dumping rain onto the Great Plains. As the low level jet stream weakened, it traveled farther south than normal. The Great Plains dried up and dust storms formed.

The research shed light on how tropical sea surface temperatures can have a remote response and control over weather and climate. It also confirmed droughts can become localized based on soil moisture levels, especially during summer. When rain is scarce and soil dries, there is less evaporation, which leads to even less precipitation, creating a feedback process that reinforces lack of rainfall.

Given that estimates that temperatures will rise 1 degree Celsius (about 1.8F) by the 2030's, according to consensus IPCC projections from the last report, this means that Dust Bowl II is a real possibility.  WarmingbyIPCC

In fact, observers on the ground express fears about this possibility, for simpler reasons, according to an All Things Considered story aired this Thursday. 

In the 1930s, the Dust Bowl ravaged crops and helped plunge the U.S. into an environmental and economic depression. Farmland in parts of Texas, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas disappeared.

After the howling winds passed and the dust settled, federal foresters planted 100 million trees across the Great Plains, forming a giant windbreak — known as a shelterbelt — that stretched from Texas to Canada.

Now, those trees are dying from drought, leaving some to worry whether another Dust Bowl might swirl up again.

The report by Joe Wertz doesn't get too detailed, but will (one hopes) help spur more more research, by journalists and scientists alike, into this alarming possibility…or likelihood.

Here's a pic of what the Dust Bowl looked like to Stratford, Texas, back in the day. 

Dustbowlimage

The most famous artist to come out of the Dust Bowl was Woody Guthrie, and it's good to hear he's getting long-overdue attention, both from his home town of Okemah, which used to hate him, and with the publication of a long-lost novel about the Dust Bowl, House of Earth. 

The continuing (and confounding) story of “Into the Wild”

Mccandless-580

Two weeks ago a teenager, obsessed with the tragic story of Chris McCandless, who died of apparent starvation in the Alaskan wilderness, died in troublingly similar circumstances in Oregon.

Over the past six months, David Croom said, his son had shown a growing interest in the movie and possibly wanted to emulate McCandless' actions.

"He's been watching the movie a lot," Croom said before his son's body was found. "Maybe he said, 'I want to do it.' That's our theory, because he kept talking about the movie."

Johnathan's green Honda CRV was found on a lonely road in the quiet country town of Riddle, Oregon, on Wednesday, two days after he was supposed to start college at Mesa Community College.

"We still don't know what happened," Croom said, "but he was lost in the wild. He got in over his head, and things didn't go well."

In Alaska, meanwhile, several tourists have gotten in trouble trying to cross the river to visit the "Magic Bus" in which Chris McCandless lived in the wilderness. A Swiss tourist drowned trying to cross the Teklanika River. Alaskan Sean Dooley is sick of it:

I must admit up front that as an Alaskan,
raised in Fairbanks, I had long ago made up my mind about the 1946
International Harvester K-5 bus some 20 miles down the Stampede trail,
near Healy. The now (in)famous metallic husk was the site of the 1992
death of Christopher McCandless — the inspiration for a book, and
successful movie – were a siren’s call, it seemed to me, for people who,
like McCandless himself, were woefully ill-prepared to handle
everything the area had to throw at them. 

“Two cans of gas and a match would solve all our problems,” I used to say. The May 27th rescue of three German tourists from the area,
after they made a poorly-planned pilgrimage to the bus, only seemed to
reinforce my dark opinion of the bus and the people who visited it.

But what if McCandless died not of foolishness, but an understandable ignorance of an incredibly rare plant toxin? That's what Jon Krakauer, who wrote the book that set off this strange social phenomenon, now believes. He writes of the evolution of his opinion at length in The New Yorker: 

 In “Into the Wild,” the book I wrote about McCandless’s brief,
confounding life, I…speculated that he
had inadvertently poisoned himself by eating seeds from a plant
commonly called wild potato, known to botanists as Hedysarum alpinum.
According to my hypothesis, a toxic alkaloid in the seeds weakened
McCandless to such a degree that it became impossible for him to hike
out to the highway or hunt effectively, leading to starvation. Because Hedysarum alpinum
is described as a nontoxic species in both the scientific literature
and in popular books about edible plants, my conjecture was met with no
small amount of derision, especially in Alaska.

I’ve received thousands of letters from people who admire McCandless for
his rejection of conformity and materialism in order to discover what
was authentic and what was not, to test himself, to experience the raw
throb of life without a safety net. But I’ve also received plenty of
mail from people who think he was an idiot who came to grief because he
was arrogant, woefully unprepared, mentally unbalanced, and possibly
suicidal. Most of these detractors believe my book glorifies a senseless
death.

The full story is worth reading, but here's the toxicity punchline;

According to Dr. Fernand Lambein, a Belgian scientist who coördinates
the Cassava Cyanide Diseases and Neurolathyrism Network, occasional
consumption of foodstuffs containing ODAP “as one
component of an otherwise balanced diet, bears not any risk of
toxicity.” Lambein and other experts warn, however, that individuals
suffering from malnutrition, stress, and acute hunger are especially
sensitive to ODAP, and are thus highly susceptible to the incapacitating effects of lathyrism after ingesting the neurotoxin.

Considering that potentially crippling levels of ODAP are
found in wild-potato seeds, and given the symptoms McCandless described
and attributed to the wild-potato seeds he ate, there is ample reason
to believe that McCandless contracted lathyrism from eating those seeds.
As Ronald Hamilton observed, McCandless exactly matched the profile of
those most susceptible to ODAP poisoning:

"He was a young, thin man in his early 20s, experiencing
an extremely meager diet; who was hunting, hiking, climbing, leading
life at its physical extremes, and who had begun to eat massive amounts
of seeds containing a toxic [amino acid]. A toxin that targets persons
exhibiting and experiencing precisely those characteristics and
conditions ….

It might be said that Christopher McCandless did indeed starve to
death in the Alaskan wild, but this only because he’d been poisoned, and
the poison had rendered him too weak to move about, to hunt or forage,
and, toward the end, “extremely weak,” “too weak to walk out,” and,
having “much trouble just to stand up.” He wasn’t truly starving in the
most technical sense of that condition. He’d simply become slowly
paralyzed. And it wasn’t arrogance that had killed him, it was
ignorance. Also, it was ignorance which must be forgiven, for the facts
underlying his death were to remain unrecognized to all, scientists and
lay people alike, literally for decades."

Hamilton’s discovery that McCandless perished because he ate toxic seeds
is unlikely to persuade many Alaskans to regard McCandless in a more
sympathetic light, but it may prevent other backcountry foragers from
accidentally poisoning themselves. Had McCandless’s guidebook to edible
plants warned that Hedysarum alpinum seeds contain a neurotoxin
that can cause paralysis, he probably would have walked out of the wild
in late August with no more difficulty than when he walked into the
wild in April, and would still be alive today.

If that were the case,
Chris McCandless would now be forty-five years old. 

And, it's worth noting, a complete unknown, as somebody used to say. 

Back in Alaska, Sean Dooley has decided that the bus — despite its siren-like appeal to naive wilderness lovers — deserves to stay: 

Alaska is a beautiful and dangerous place.
While the “Magic Bus,” or “Sushana Bus,” may tempt travelers into
trouble, so do many other parts of the state. And tourists aren’t the
only ones that get caught in Mother Nature’s web. Most of the search and
rescues attempted in Alaska are for locals, not tourists. 

For
better, or worse, Fairbanks City Transit Bus #142, has become a part of
the landscape of the Interior. McCandless’ story is part of its lore.
Both are worth remembering.  

Leave the bus where it is. It
will fade away eventually — whether by nature, or packed out,
piece-by-piece, by McCandless enthusiasts themselves.

What's fascinating to yours truly is the fascination of this story itself. Why do we obsess over Chris McCandless, when every year countless good people find sanctuary and relief in the wilderness?  

Bus142onStampedeTrail

Beats me. 

Fevered: Global warming facts you probably don’t know

Am reviewing expert science reporter Linda Marsa's Fevered, about a hotter planet and what that means for human health. (Spoiler: It's not great news, although "heat adaptation" is possible in many cases.) 

Though I'm not yet finished, must say I'm impressed with this book. Perhaps the best climate change book I've read since Tim Flannery's "The Weathermakers." Short, direct, and uninterested in bickering wtih climate change deniers or minimizers, this book is all about consequences. Might say Fevered is a Sugar Ray Robinson of a climate change book: short, muscular, and punchy as hell. Pound for pound, as they say in sports, as good a book as you'll find on the subject.

It's also a book that includes a good number of interesting and useful facts usefui to know but not likely to show up in the sort of articles Marsa has written for newspapers (such as the Los Angeles Times) or magazines (such as Discover). And hence, worthy of blogging. 

For instance, from a stunning chapter about heat waves called "The Hot Zone":

"…when heat waves occur early in the summer, people are more likely to die because they're not yet acclimated to hotter weather. But as the summer goes on, our bodies gradually adapt by helping sweat glands produce more perspiration on the skin's surface, cooling the body. "By the end of the summer, bodies have become more resilient," said [Gary] Szatkowski, of the National Weather Service. "The exact same weather conditions that might prompt us to issue a warning in early June wouldn't be as dangerous in late August."

Brings to mind the Great Heat Wave of 2006 in California, which according to authorities killed a minimum of 147 people — making one of the worst natural disasters in recent history in California.

Point is, these heat waves are getting hotter, even in California — and especially at night.

Nighttimeheatwave
From California Heat Waves in the Present and Future  (Different colors indicate different regions, teal colored line indicates the coastal north — one reason why the Great Heat Wave of 2006 in California turned so deadly, because the northern coastal region was not accusted to real heat.)  

The Revenge of the Dinosaurs: Fossil Fuels

Columnist Thomas Friedman is a big picture columnist who drives enviros crazy with his broad strokes pronouncements, but every once in a while he stumbles across a genuine insight. In a column recently, he actually admitted to the stumbling, for which he deserves some credit:

I stumbled upon another powerful environmental insight here: the parallel between how fossil fuels are being used to power monoculture farms in the Middle West and how fossil fuels are being used to power wars to create monoculture societies in the Middle East.

Friedman introduces us to the brilliant and charismatic Wes Jackson, of The Land Institute, and briefly recaps his message:

Jackson’s philosophy is that the prairie was a diverse wilderness, with a complex ecosystem that supported all kinds of wildlife, not to mention American Indians — until the Europeans arrived, plowed it up and covered it with single-species crop farms, mostly wheat, corn, or soybeans. Jackson’s goal is to restore the function of the diverse polyculture prairie ecosystem and rescue it from the single-species, annual monoculture farming, which is exhausting the soil, the source of all prairie life. “We have to stop treating soil like dirt,” he says.

Friendman then points out the parallel between the destructive, fragile nature of plant monocultures (such as vast fields of corn powered, as it were, by petrochemical fertilizers) and human monocultures (such as the puritanical Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia, which fueled Al Qaeda). He writes:

Al Qaeda often says that if the Muslim world wants to restore its strength, it needs to go back to the “pure” days of Islam, when it was a monoculture unsullied by foreign influences. In fact, the “Golden Age” of the Arab/Muslim world was when it became a polyculture between the 8th and 13th centuries. Of that era, Wikipedia says, “During this period the Arab world became an intellectual center for science, philosophy, medicine and education. …” It was “a collection of cultures, which put together, synthesized and significantly advanced the knowledge gained from the ancient Roman, Chinese, Indian, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Byzantine and Phoenician civilizations.”

What is going on in the Arab world today is a relentless push, also funded by fossil fuels, for more monocultures. It’s Al Qaeda trying to “purify” the Arabian Peninsula. It’s Shiites and Sunnis, funded by oil money, trying to purge each other in Iraq and Syria. It’s Alexandria, Egypt, once a great melting pot of Greeks, Italians, Jews, Christians, Arabs and Muslims, now a city dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, with most non-Muslims gone. It makes these societies much less able to spark new ideas and much more susceptible to diseased conspiracy theories and extreme ideologies. To be blunt, this evolution of Arab/Muslim polycultures into monocultures is a disaster.

Pluralism, diversity and tolerance were once native plants in the Middle East — the way the polyculture prairie was in the Middle West. Neither ecosystem will be healthy without restoring its diversity.

Neither monoculture, nor climate change, could exist without fossil fuels. A painful irony there, given how much of an investment we have made in this unsustainability.

Corn_field_ohio

[a corn field in Ohio, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]  

The Republican response to climate change: Luckovich

It's been unbearably hot and dry this week, as is not unusually the case in this part of Southern California in early September…but could the extreme dryness of the state be contributing to our heat wave?

An attribution study — looking at the possible contribution from climate change to extreme weather events –from the American Meteorological Society, with a chapter on the extreme heat wave that hit the Midwest last year by Noah Diffenbaugh, a climatologist at Stanford, makes clear that yes, the dryness makes heat all the more likely. To wit:

…record rainfall deficits played a critical role in shaping the 2012 severe heat [in July the Midwest]. Given the considerably lower signal-to-noise ratio of the summer precipitation response to global warming over the central and eastern United States (relative to the summer temperature response; e.g., (Diffenbaugh et al. 2011), occurrence of the most severe heat events is likely to continue to be strongly regulated by rainfall variability. 

In other words, dry winters lead to parched plants, which transpire much less water vapor, making rain less likely. (True, this is more of a factor in the Midwest than in California, but forecasters repeatedly warned of flash floods in our mountains this week and last…but nada, unfortunately.)

The heat and lack of rain is not a problem for Congressional Republicans, however, who have a simple method for dealing with these questions, as seen in the work of Pulitzer Prize-winner Mike Luckovich:

Climatechangerepublicandenial

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Climate change behind the civil war in Syria: Polk

A half-mile from us, a good friend's well has gone almost dry, and we've heard of others on our street experiencing the same dryness. Our well water is increasingly turbid and sandy at times, even though we live near a creek bottom. The drought outlook for California is not good:

In contrast, [writes B. Pugh, a forecaster for the National Weather Service] drought "persistence is forecast for the intermountain West, Great Basin, and for ongoing drought areas along the West Coast where the wet season arrives late in this outlook period."

Droughtpersistant
In the Paso Robles area, a Los Angeles Times story focused on wells going dry against the backdrop of heavy water use by new wineries, creating a conflict between residents and vintners. 

But in California, at least, we may fight over water — but not with Ak-47s. In Syria, according to veteran foreign policy advisor William Polk, it's more serious. Both the drought and the conflict have turned deadly. In The Atlantic, a long letter Polk wrote made the following powerful argument:

Syria has been convulsed by civil war since climate change came to Syria with a vengeance. Drought devastated the country from 2006 to 2011.  Rainfall in most of the country fell below eight inches (20 cm) a year, the absolute minimum needed to sustain un-irrigated farming. Desperate for water, farmers began to tap aquifers with tens of thousands of new well.  But, as they did, the water table quickly dropped to a level below which their pumps could lift it. 

[USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, Commodity Intelligence Report, May 9, 2008]

In some areas, all agriculture ceased.  In others crop failures reached 75%.  And generally as much as 85% of livestock died of thirst or hunger.  Hundreds of thousands  of Syria’s farmers gave up, abandoned their farms and fled to the cities and towns in search of almost non-existent jobs and severely short food supplies.  Outside observers including UN experts estimated that between 2 and 3  million of Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to “extreme poverty.”

The domestic Syrian refugees immediately found that they had to compete not only with one another for scarce food, water and jobs, but also with the already existing foreign refugee population.  Syria already was a refuge for quarter of a million Palestinians and about a hundred thousand people who had fled the war and occupation of Iraq.  Formerly prosperous farmers were lucky to get jobs as hawkers or street sweepers.  And in the desperation of the times, hostilities erupted among groups that were competing just to survive.

The New York Times provided the background, in a story published three years ago: 

Now, after four consecutive years of drought, this heartland of the Fertile Crescent — including much of neighboringIraq — appears to be turning barren, climate scientists say. Ancient irrigation systems have collapsed, underground water sources have run dry and hundreds of villages have been abandoned as farmlands turn to cracked desert and grazing animals die off. Sandstorms have become far more common, and vast tent cities of dispossessed farmers and their families have risen up around the larger towns and cities of Syria and Iraq.

The collapse of farmlands here — which is as much a matter of human mismanagement as of drought — has become a dire economic challenge and a rising security concern for the Syrian and Iraqi governments, which are growing far more dependent on other countries for food and water. Syria, which once prided itself on its self-sufficiency and even exported wheat, is now quietly importing it in ever larger amounts. The country’s total water resources dropped by half between 2002 and 2008, partly through waste and overuse, scientists and water engineers say.

[snip]

Droughts have always taken place here, but “the regional climate is changing in ways that are clearly observable,” said Jeannie Sowers, a professor at the University of New Hampshire who has written on Middle East climate issues. “Whether you call it human-induced climate change or not, much of the region is getting hotter and dryer, combined with more intense, erratic rainfall and flooding in some areas. You will have people migrating as a result, and governments are ill prepared.”

Prophetic words, as now nearly two million Syrians have been forced to flee the country.