13 apocalyptic images of 2017
At 2017's worst, it didn't just feel like everything was on fire. Parts of the world literally were - and still are - burning.
There were fires, floods, storms, earthquakes, droughts, and volcanic eruptions.
Some of the photos of those events gave the past year a very "end of the world" sort of feel.
These are some of the most apocalyptic images we spotted.
Slide show:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/13 ... ailsignout
NATURAL DISASTERS
Lava flowing from Philippine volcano, thousands evacuated
LEGAZPI, Philippines - More than 9,000 people have evacuated the area around the Philippines' most active volcano as lava flowed down its crater Monday in a gentle eruption that scientists warned could turn explosive.
The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology increased the alert level for Mount Mayon late Sunday to three on a scale of five, indicating an increased tendency toward a hazardous eruption.
Lava flowed at least half a kilometre (less than half a mile) down a gulley from the crater and on Monday morning, ash clouds appeared mid-slope, said Renato Solidum, head of the volcano institute.
Molten rocks and lava at Mayon's crater lit the night sky Sunday in an reddish-orange glow despite a shroud of thick clouds that covered the volcano, leaving spectators awed but sending thousands of residents into evacuation shelters.
Albay province emergency response official Cedric Daep said at least 9,000 people have been moved from high-risk areas in an ongoing evacuation. People in the danger area have put up huge white crosses in their neighbourhoods, hoping to protect their lives and homes
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/la ... ailsignout
LEGAZPI, Philippines - More than 9,000 people have evacuated the area around the Philippines' most active volcano as lava flowed down its crater Monday in a gentle eruption that scientists warned could turn explosive.
The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology increased the alert level for Mount Mayon late Sunday to three on a scale of five, indicating an increased tendency toward a hazardous eruption.
Lava flowed at least half a kilometre (less than half a mile) down a gulley from the crater and on Monday morning, ash clouds appeared mid-slope, said Renato Solidum, head of the volcano institute.
Molten rocks and lava at Mayon's crater lit the night sky Sunday in an reddish-orange glow despite a shroud of thick clouds that covered the volcano, leaving spectators awed but sending thousands of residents into evacuation shelters.
Albay province emergency response official Cedric Daep said at least 9,000 people have been moved from high-risk areas in an ongoing evacuation. People in the danger area have put up huge white crosses in their neighbourhoods, hoping to protect their lives and homes
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/la ... ailsignout
Debunking the Myth That Earthquakes and Full Moons Are Linked
On Dec. 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake ruptured the ocean floor off the west coast of Sumatra. The resulting tsunami killed nearly 230,000 people in 14 countries, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in history. And it occurred during a full moon.
The Sumatra earthquake isn’t the only large earthquake to have occurred beneath the moon’s bright glare. Both the earthquake that devastated Chile in 2010 and the Great Alaskan Earthquake in 1964 also happened on a conspicuous lunar date — making it tempting to argue that more large earthquakes occur during the full moon.
But a new study published in Seismological Research Letters finds that the connection is nothing but folklore.
To analyze the supposed link, Susan Hough, a seismologist at the United States Geological Survey, scrutinized 204 earthquakes of magnitude 8 or greater over the past four centuries. She then matched those earthquakes to the lunar calendar and found that no more occurred during a full or new moon than on any other day of the lunar cycle.
“The lore that the big earthquakes happen during the full moon — there’s no support for that in the catalog,” Dr. Hough said.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/scie ... dline&te=1
On Dec. 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake ruptured the ocean floor off the west coast of Sumatra. The resulting tsunami killed nearly 230,000 people in 14 countries, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in history. And it occurred during a full moon.
The Sumatra earthquake isn’t the only large earthquake to have occurred beneath the moon’s bright glare. Both the earthquake that devastated Chile in 2010 and the Great Alaskan Earthquake in 1964 also happened on a conspicuous lunar date — making it tempting to argue that more large earthquakes occur during the full moon.
But a new study published in Seismological Research Letters finds that the connection is nothing but folklore.
To analyze the supposed link, Susan Hough, a seismologist at the United States Geological Survey, scrutinized 204 earthquakes of magnitude 8 or greater over the past four centuries. She then matched those earthquakes to the lunar calendar and found that no more occurred during a full or new moon than on any other day of the lunar cycle.
“The lore that the big earthquakes happen during the full moon — there’s no support for that in the catalog,” Dr. Hough said.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/scie ... dline&te=1
Growing glaciers prove cold comfort for Pakistan’s Shimshal valley
ISLAMABAD (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Climate change is causing glaciers around the world to melt, raising the risk of flooding and other problems. But residents of a remote area of Pakistan face floods for the opposite reason – their glaciers are growing.
Experts say that more than 120 glaciers in Pakistan’s north are stable, or even growing rapidly, in a phenomenon called the “Karakoram Anomaly”.
A team of researchers from Britain’s Newcastle University last year attributed the anomaly to a summer “vortex” of cold air over the Karakoram mountain range.
They say this is causing the glaciers in the region to grow, in spite of a global increase in average temperatures.
More...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-paki ... SKCN1GS0BR
ISLAMABAD (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Climate change is causing glaciers around the world to melt, raising the risk of flooding and other problems. But residents of a remote area of Pakistan face floods for the opposite reason – their glaciers are growing.
Experts say that more than 120 glaciers in Pakistan’s north are stable, or even growing rapidly, in a phenomenon called the “Karakoram Anomaly”.
A team of researchers from Britain’s Newcastle University last year attributed the anomaly to a summer “vortex” of cold air over the Karakoram mountain range.
They say this is causing the glaciers in the region to grow, in spite of a global increase in average temperatures.
More...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-paki ... SKCN1GS0BR
Hawaii: Lava engulfs a Ford Mustang live on-camera
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/weather/video/ ... ailsignout
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/weather/video/ ... ailsignout
Fly through Hawaii's active volcano with this up-close drone footage
This footage from The Drone Racing League's (DRL) Podium Pilot is closest you'll get to active lava flow
Video
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/fl ... ailsignout
This footage from The Drone Racing League's (DRL) Podium Pilot is closest you'll get to active lava flow
Video
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/fl ... ailsignout
Lava vs. metal fence in Hawaii: Watch what happens
Video:
Footage captures lava from Hawaii's Kilauea volcano oozing through a metal fence on the Leilani Estates neighbourhood on May 6.
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/la ... ailsignout
Video:
Footage captures lava from Hawaii's Kilauea volcano oozing through a metal fence on the Leilani Estates neighbourhood on May 6.
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/la ... ailsignout
Photo Updates From Kilauea: The Lava Meets the Sea
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/ph ... ut#image=1
Video:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/viral/to ... id=AAxJvxS
Toxic steam cloud as lava enters ocean
White plumes of acid and extremely fine shards of glass billowed into the sky over Hawaii on Sunday as molten rock from Kilauea volcano poured into the ocean
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/ph ... ut#image=1
Video:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/viral/to ... id=AAxJvxS
Toxic steam cloud as lava enters ocean
White plumes of acid and extremely fine shards of glass billowed into the sky over Hawaii on Sunday as molten rock from Kilauea volcano poured into the ocean
Villagers 'living between life and death' as Pakistan's glaciers melt
BADSWAT: When a glacial lake burst in Pakistan’s northern Gilgit-Baltistan province in July, Sher Baz watched helplessly as the waters swept away his family home.
Residents of Badswat village, which lies in Ishkoman valley at the foot of the Hindu Kush mountain range’s snow-capped peaks, were at the mercy of the flash flood that carried off homes, roads and bridges, as well as crops and forest.
“Thank God we are alive, but everything we owned was washed away by the floods when the glacial lake burst,” said Baz, a 30-year old father of four.
Although there are several glaciers near Badswat village, residents said this was the first glacial outburst in living memory. The authorities said the timely evacuation of villagers meant nobody had died.
Baz said the event had left him feeling stranded.
“Surrounded by mountains and muddy water, it seems we are living between life and death,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
More....
https://www.geo.tv/latest/206339-villag ... ciers-melt
BADSWAT: When a glacial lake burst in Pakistan’s northern Gilgit-Baltistan province in July, Sher Baz watched helplessly as the waters swept away his family home.
Residents of Badswat village, which lies in Ishkoman valley at the foot of the Hindu Kush mountain range’s snow-capped peaks, were at the mercy of the flash flood that carried off homes, roads and bridges, as well as crops and forest.
“Thank God we are alive, but everything we owned was washed away by the floods when the glacial lake burst,” said Baz, a 30-year old father of four.
Although there are several glaciers near Badswat village, residents said this was the first glacial outburst in living memory. The authorities said the timely evacuation of villagers meant nobody had died.
Baz said the event had left him feeling stranded.
“Surrounded by mountains and muddy water, it seems we are living between life and death,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
More....
https://www.geo.tv/latest/206339-villag ... ciers-melt
Kerala Flooding: Hundreds Killed in Indian State’s Worst Rains Since 1920s
NEW DELHI — The idyllic tourist destination of Kerala, India, is experiencing some of its worst floods in nearly a century, with torrential rains in recent days killing at least 324 people, state officials said, and shuttering the state’s major infrastructure.
Scores of the state’s residents were injured in landslides and the authorities said nearly 220,000 more have been displaced since heavy rains began battering the southern Indian state last week.
Video and more at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/worl ... 3053090818
NEW DELHI — The idyllic tourist destination of Kerala, India, is experiencing some of its worst floods in nearly a century, with torrential rains in recent days killing at least 324 people, state officials said, and shuttering the state’s major infrastructure.
Scores of the state’s residents were injured in landslides and the authorities said nearly 220,000 more have been displaced since heavy rains began battering the southern Indian state last week.
Video and more at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/worl ... 3053090818
Afshi Charania Merchant, Aga Khan Council for Southwestern United States: Faith During and After Harvey: One Year Later
BY ISMAILIMAIL POSTED ON AUGUST 24, 2018
Afshi Charania Merchant, Aga Khan Council for Southwestern United States: Faith During and After Harvey: One Year Later
RICE Events: August 30, 2018 – 7:00pm – 8:30pm – Herring Hall, Room 100
Religious organizations have often been tapped for support after natural disasters; and following Hurricane Harvey, they are increasingly in the public eye and judged for their ability to respond quickly. Expert panelists at this event will address how faith communities have assisted with continued Harvey recovery efforts as well as how they are preparing for future disasters. Framed by relevant social science research on disasters and religion, this will be a conversation on preparing for and executing disaster relief through the lens of faith.
Panelists: Alexander Johnson, Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church; Afshi Charania Merchant, Aga Khan Council for Southwestern United States; Paula Pipes, Pipes Research and Consulting; and Jason Plotkin, Congregation Emanu El.
Moderator: Elaine Howard Ecklund, Rice University.
BY ISMAILIMAIL POSTED ON AUGUST 24, 2018
Afshi Charania Merchant, Aga Khan Council for Southwestern United States: Faith During and After Harvey: One Year Later
RICE Events: August 30, 2018 – 7:00pm – 8:30pm – Herring Hall, Room 100
Religious organizations have often been tapped for support after natural disasters; and following Hurricane Harvey, they are increasingly in the public eye and judged for their ability to respond quickly. Expert panelists at this event will address how faith communities have assisted with continued Harvey recovery efforts as well as how they are preparing for future disasters. Framed by relevant social science research on disasters and religion, this will be a conversation on preparing for and executing disaster relief through the lens of faith.
Panelists: Alexander Johnson, Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church; Afshi Charania Merchant, Aga Khan Council for Southwestern United States; Paula Pipes, Pipes Research and Consulting; and Jason Plotkin, Congregation Emanu El.
Moderator: Elaine Howard Ecklund, Rice University.
THIS DAM COULD CAUSE THE WORLD'S WORST NATURAL DISASTER AND IMPACT 5 MILLION
Why You Should Care
Tajikistan’s Lake Sarez is stunning. But some experts say it’s a ticking time bomb.
In its very first moments of existence, the Usoi dam claimed the lives of an entire village. It was formed during a 1911 earthquake that saw the Usoi settlement buried by a massive landslide that blocked the Murghab River and formed Tajikistan’s Lake Sarez. At roughly 1,860 feet, the Usoi dam is the world’s highest natural dam.
Lake Sarez is isolated now, but in 1911 it was even more so: It took six weeks for news of the disaster to reach civilization. Today there are at least 30 villages in the Bartang Valley, and more scattered across surrounding areas. And they’re all in mortal danger.
And that’s a conservative estimate.
So how and why will this dam collapse? Take your pick. The most probable and obvious trigger is an earthquake — not unlike the massive temblor that created the dam and the lake in the first place. Were the dam to break, it could trigger another deadly landslide, but that wouldn’t be the worst of it. The lake’s water could cannon out in a 100-foot-high wave, coursing down established waterways and affecting as many as 5 million people, not only in Tajikistan but also in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The deadliest floods in recorded history occurred in China in 1931, when as many as 4 million people died. But estimates that a Lake Sarez flood would affect 5 million were made two decades ago, and while surveys of the river valley’s population are scarce, records from 2010 indicate that it has increased several times since 1998.
More...
https://www.ozy.com/acumen/this-dam-cou ... lion/88749
Why You Should Care
Tajikistan’s Lake Sarez is stunning. But some experts say it’s a ticking time bomb.
In its very first moments of existence, the Usoi dam claimed the lives of an entire village. It was formed during a 1911 earthquake that saw the Usoi settlement buried by a massive landslide that blocked the Murghab River and formed Tajikistan’s Lake Sarez. At roughly 1,860 feet, the Usoi dam is the world’s highest natural dam.
Lake Sarez is isolated now, but in 1911 it was even more so: It took six weeks for news of the disaster to reach civilization. Today there are at least 30 villages in the Bartang Valley, and more scattered across surrounding areas. And they’re all in mortal danger.
And that’s a conservative estimate.
So how and why will this dam collapse? Take your pick. The most probable and obvious trigger is an earthquake — not unlike the massive temblor that created the dam and the lake in the first place. Were the dam to break, it could trigger another deadly landslide, but that wouldn’t be the worst of it. The lake’s water could cannon out in a 100-foot-high wave, coursing down established waterways and affecting as many as 5 million people, not only in Tajikistan but also in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The deadliest floods in recorded history occurred in China in 1931, when as many as 4 million people died. But estimates that a Lake Sarez flood would affect 5 million were made two decades ago, and while surveys of the river valley’s population are scarce, records from 2010 indicate that it has increased several times since 1998.
More...
https://www.ozy.com/acumen/this-dam-cou ... lion/88749
How Do You Save a Million People From a Cyclone? Ask a Poor State in India
BHUBANESWAR, India — Flights were canceled.
Train service was out.
And one of the biggest storms in years was bearing down on Odisha, one of India’s poorest states, where millions of people live cheek by jowl in a low-lying coastal area in mud-and-stick shacks.
But government authorities in Odisha, along India’s eastern flank, hardly stood still. To warn people of what was coming, they deployed everything they had: 2.6 million text messages, 43,000 volunteers, nearly 1,000 emergency workers, television commercials, coastal sirens, buses, police officers, and public address systems blaring the same message on a loop, in local language, in very clear terms: “A cyclone is coming. Get to the shelters.”
It seems to have largely worked. Cyclone Fani slammed into Odisha on Friday morning with the force of a major hurricane, packing 120 mile per hour winds. Trees were ripped from the ground and many coastal shacks smashed. It could have been catastrophic.
But as of early Saturday, mass casualties seemed to have been averted. While the full extent of the destruction remained unclear, only a few deaths had been reported, in what appeared to be an early-warning success story.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/worl ... 3053090504
BHUBANESWAR, India — Flights were canceled.
Train service was out.
And one of the biggest storms in years was bearing down on Odisha, one of India’s poorest states, where millions of people live cheek by jowl in a low-lying coastal area in mud-and-stick shacks.
But government authorities in Odisha, along India’s eastern flank, hardly stood still. To warn people of what was coming, they deployed everything they had: 2.6 million text messages, 43,000 volunteers, nearly 1,000 emergency workers, television commercials, coastal sirens, buses, police officers, and public address systems blaring the same message on a loop, in local language, in very clear terms: “A cyclone is coming. Get to the shelters.”
It seems to have largely worked. Cyclone Fani slammed into Odisha on Friday morning with the force of a major hurricane, packing 120 mile per hour winds. Trees were ripped from the ground and many coastal shacks smashed. It could have been catastrophic.
But as of early Saturday, mass casualties seemed to have been averted. While the full extent of the destruction remained unclear, only a few deaths had been reported, in what appeared to be an early-warning success story.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/worl ... 3053090504
We Thought We Lived on Solid Ground. California’s Earthquakes Changed That.
Dry land is a kind of ocean in waiting.
LOS ANGELES — On the morning of July 4, my wife and I were sitting at the breakfast table when the effects of a 6.4-magnitude earthquake outside Ridgecrest, Calif., hit our home. A sensation of dizziness, then nausea, rolled over me as the back wall of our dining room appeared to lean away, our tabletop somehow pushing closer toward me. They then reversed course over a span of several seconds, as if the space around us had begun to bulge and pulsate. Only when I noticed the lights mounted above our table swaying back and forth did I realize what was happening.
The experience of an earthquake can be destabilizing, not just physically but also philosophically. The idea that the ground is solid, dependable — that we can build on it, that we can trust it to support us — undergirds nearly all human terrestrial activity, not the least of which is designing and constructing architecture. That morning, however, it was as if our home had been lifted up by an invisible sea; in an instant, what had been a house had become a raft, bobbing at anchor. Inside, we rocked and rolled, as if hit by a passing wake.
Earthquakes mock the very idea of solid ground, of trustworthy geology. The writer David Ulin has called this “the myth of solid ground,” and it is fundamental to how we have come to define and police civilization. Those who live at sea are considered nomads, migrants, even pirates; they build ships, not cities; they roam rather than inhabit.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/opin ... y_20190709
Dry land is a kind of ocean in waiting.
LOS ANGELES — On the morning of July 4, my wife and I were sitting at the breakfast table when the effects of a 6.4-magnitude earthquake outside Ridgecrest, Calif., hit our home. A sensation of dizziness, then nausea, rolled over me as the back wall of our dining room appeared to lean away, our tabletop somehow pushing closer toward me. They then reversed course over a span of several seconds, as if the space around us had begun to bulge and pulsate. Only when I noticed the lights mounted above our table swaying back and forth did I realize what was happening.
The experience of an earthquake can be destabilizing, not just physically but also philosophically. The idea that the ground is solid, dependable — that we can build on it, that we can trust it to support us — undergirds nearly all human terrestrial activity, not the least of which is designing and constructing architecture. That morning, however, it was as if our home had been lifted up by an invisible sea; in an instant, what had been a house had become a raft, bobbing at anchor. Inside, we rocked and rolled, as if hit by a passing wake.
Earthquakes mock the very idea of solid ground, of trustworthy geology. The writer David Ulin has called this “the myth of solid ground,” and it is fundamental to how we have come to define and police civilization. Those who live at sea are considered nomads, migrants, even pirates; they build ships, not cities; they roam rather than inhabit.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/opin ... y_20190709
A Giant Volcano Could End Human Life on Earth as We Know It
Why isn’t anyone taking this problem more seriously? Unlikely isn’t the same thing as impossible, even though it’s human nature to conflate the two.
If you’re planning to visit Yellowstone National Park this Labor Day weekend, I have good news: It is very, very, very unlikely that the supervolcano beneath it will erupt while you’re there.
The Yellowstone supervolcano — an 8 out of 8 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index — has erupted three times over the past 2.1 million years, most recently 640,000 years ago. A Yellowstone eruption would be like nothing humanity has ever experienced.
First would come increasingly intense earthquakes, a sign that magma beneath Yellowstone was rushing toward the surface. Then magma would burst through the ground in a titanic eruption, discharging the toxic innards of the earth to the air. It would continue for days, burying Yellowstone in lava within a 40-mile radius.
A bad day at the park. But the devastation around Yellowstone would be just the beginning. Volcanologists believe a Yellowstone supereruption would bury large swaths of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah in up to three feet of toxic volcanic ash. Depending on the weather patterns, much of the Midwest would receive a few inches, too, plunging the region into darkness. Even the coasts — where a majority of Americans live — would most likely see a dusting as the ash cloud spread. Crops would be destroyed; pastureland would be contaminated. Power lines and electrical transformers would be ruined, potentially knocking out much of the grid.
That’s just the United States. Modeling by meteorologists has found that the aerosols released could spread globally if the eruption occurred during the summer. Over the short term, as the toxic cloud blocked sunlight, global average temperatures could plunge significantly — and not return to normal for several years. Rainfall would decline sharply. That might be enough to trigger a die-off of tropical rain forests. Farming could collapse, beginning with the Midwest. It would be, as a group of researchers wrote in a 2015 report on extreme geohazards for the European Science Foundation, “the greatest catastrophe since the dawn of civilization.”
Supervolcanoes like Yellowstone represent what are known as existential risks — ultra-catastrophes that could lead to global devastation, even human extinction. They can be natural, like supereruptions or a major asteroid impact of the scale that helped kill off the dinosaurs, or they can be human-made, like nuclear war or an engineered virus. They are, by definition, worse than the worst things humanity has ever experienced. What they are not, however, is common — and that presents a major psychological and political challenge.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/opin ... 3053090822
Why isn’t anyone taking this problem more seriously? Unlikely isn’t the same thing as impossible, even though it’s human nature to conflate the two.
If you’re planning to visit Yellowstone National Park this Labor Day weekend, I have good news: It is very, very, very unlikely that the supervolcano beneath it will erupt while you’re there.
The Yellowstone supervolcano — an 8 out of 8 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index — has erupted three times over the past 2.1 million years, most recently 640,000 years ago. A Yellowstone eruption would be like nothing humanity has ever experienced.
First would come increasingly intense earthquakes, a sign that magma beneath Yellowstone was rushing toward the surface. Then magma would burst through the ground in a titanic eruption, discharging the toxic innards of the earth to the air. It would continue for days, burying Yellowstone in lava within a 40-mile radius.
A bad day at the park. But the devastation around Yellowstone would be just the beginning. Volcanologists believe a Yellowstone supereruption would bury large swaths of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah in up to three feet of toxic volcanic ash. Depending on the weather patterns, much of the Midwest would receive a few inches, too, plunging the region into darkness. Even the coasts — where a majority of Americans live — would most likely see a dusting as the ash cloud spread. Crops would be destroyed; pastureland would be contaminated. Power lines and electrical transformers would be ruined, potentially knocking out much of the grid.
That’s just the United States. Modeling by meteorologists has found that the aerosols released could spread globally if the eruption occurred during the summer. Over the short term, as the toxic cloud blocked sunlight, global average temperatures could plunge significantly — and not return to normal for several years. Rainfall would decline sharply. That might be enough to trigger a die-off of tropical rain forests. Farming could collapse, beginning with the Midwest. It would be, as a group of researchers wrote in a 2015 report on extreme geohazards for the European Science Foundation, “the greatest catastrophe since the dawn of civilization.”
Supervolcanoes like Yellowstone represent what are known as existential risks — ultra-catastrophes that could lead to global devastation, even human extinction. They can be natural, like supereruptions or a major asteroid impact of the scale that helped kill off the dinosaurs, or they can be human-made, like nuclear war or an engineered virus. They are, by definition, worse than the worst things humanity has ever experienced. What they are not, however, is common — and that presents a major psychological and political challenge.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/opin ... 3053090822
Typhoon Hagibis Slams Into Japan After Landslides, Floods and a Quake
The storm made landfall Saturday evening. Record rainfall flooded rivers and tested dams as almost four million people were urged to evacuate.
TOKYO — Typhoon Hagibis, Japan’s largest storm in decades, lashed the country’s northeast early Sunday morning, just hours after hitting the Tokyo region with heavy rain and high winds that forced many residents to move to evacuation centers.
THE LATEST Dozens killed in Typhoon
Record rains flooded rivers, pushed dams to their limits and caused several landslides. An earthquake measuring 5.7 magnitude also shook Chiba, east of Tokyo, early Saturday evening.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/worl ... 3053091013
The storm made landfall Saturday evening. Record rainfall flooded rivers and tested dams as almost four million people were urged to evacuate.
TOKYO — Typhoon Hagibis, Japan’s largest storm in decades, lashed the country’s northeast early Sunday morning, just hours after hitting the Tokyo region with heavy rain and high winds that forced many residents to move to evacuation centers.
THE LATEST Dozens killed in Typhoon
Record rains flooded rivers, pushed dams to their limits and caused several landslides. An earthquake measuring 5.7 magnitude also shook Chiba, east of Tokyo, early Saturday evening.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/worl ... 3053091013
Japan Spent Mightily to Soften Nature’s Wrath, but Can It Ever Be Enough?
After a typhoon’s record-breaking rains breached dozens of levees, the country is wondering whether even the costliest systems can be future-proofed for the age of climate change.
NAGANUMA, Japan — The time was 1:30 a.m., and Hiroshi Ogawa was trying to decide whether he should run from the biggest typhoon to hit Japan in decades.
His home stood near the Chikuma River in Nagano Prefecture, separated from the rising waters by a levee. “I had confidence in the levee,” Mr. Ogawa, 68, said. “I had faith that it was built to withstand a hundred-year flood, so it should be O.K.”
It was not. A little over an hour later, the levee burst, submerging his home and sweeping away everything in it. He barely escaped: Minutes before, he had driven to higher ground after being warned by volunteer firefighters to flee.
The levee, in an area northwest of Tokyo, was one of at least 55 breached as Typhoon Hagibis dumped record-breaking rains on Japan last weekend, with more than 70 people dying in the storm and floodwaters hitting more than 10,000 homes.
Japan, a nation grimly accustomed to natural disasters, has invested many billions of dollars in a world-class infrastructure meant to soften nature’s wrath. But with the flooding in areas across central and northern Japan in recent days, the country has been forced to examine more deeply the assumptions that undergird its flood control system.
That is raising a difficult question, for Japan and for the world: Can even the costliest systems be future-proofed in an age of storms made more powerful by climate change?
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/worl ... 3053091017
After a typhoon’s record-breaking rains breached dozens of levees, the country is wondering whether even the costliest systems can be future-proofed for the age of climate change.
NAGANUMA, Japan — The time was 1:30 a.m., and Hiroshi Ogawa was trying to decide whether he should run from the biggest typhoon to hit Japan in decades.
His home stood near the Chikuma River in Nagano Prefecture, separated from the rising waters by a levee. “I had confidence in the levee,” Mr. Ogawa, 68, said. “I had faith that it was built to withstand a hundred-year flood, so it should be O.K.”
It was not. A little over an hour later, the levee burst, submerging his home and sweeping away everything in it. He barely escaped: Minutes before, he had driven to higher ground after being warned by volunteer firefighters to flee.
The levee, in an area northwest of Tokyo, was one of at least 55 breached as Typhoon Hagibis dumped record-breaking rains on Japan last weekend, with more than 70 people dying in the storm and floodwaters hitting more than 10,000 homes.
Japan, a nation grimly accustomed to natural disasters, has invested many billions of dollars in a world-class infrastructure meant to soften nature’s wrath. But with the flooding in areas across central and northern Japan in recent days, the country has been forced to examine more deeply the assumptions that undergird its flood control system.
That is raising a difficult question, for Japan and for the world: Can even the costliest systems be future-proofed in an age of storms made more powerful by climate change?
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/worl ... 3053091017
Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows
Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new research, threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal cities.
The authors of a paper published Tuesday developed a more accurate way of calculating land elevation based on satellite readings, a standard way of estimating the effects of sea level rise over large areas, and found that the previous numbers were far too optimistic. The new research shows that some 150 million people are now living on land that will be below the high-tide line by midcentury.
Southern Vietnam could all but disappear.
The first map shows earlier expectations of submerged land by 2050. But the new outlook, the second map, indicates that the bottom part of the country will be underwater at high tide.
More than 20 million people in Vietnam, almost one-quarter of the population, live on land that will be inundated.
Much of Ho Chi Minh City, the nation’s economic center, would disappear with it, according to the research, which was produced by Climate Central, a science organization based in New Jersey, and published in the journal Nature Communications. The projections don’t account for future population growth or land lost to coastal erosion.
Standard elevation measurements using satellites struggle to differentiate the true ground level from the tops of trees or buildings, said Scott A. Kulp, a researcher at Climate Central and one of the paper’s authors. So he and Benjamin Strauss, Climate Central’s chief executive, used artificial intelligence to determine the error rate and correct for it.
In Thailand, more than 10 percent of citizens now live on land that is likely to be inundated by 2050, compared with just 1 percent according to the earlier technique. The political and commercial capital, Bangkok, is particularly imperiled.
Climate change will put pressure on cities in multiple ways, said Loretta Hieber Girardet, a Bangkok resident and United Nations disaster risk-reduction official. Even as global warming floods more places, it will also push poor farmers off the land to seek work in cities.
“It is a dire formula,” she said.
In Shanghai, one of Asia’s most important economic engines, water threatens to consume the heart of the city and many other cities around it.
The findings don’t have to spell the end of those areas. The new data shows that 110 million people already live in places that are below the high tide line, which Mr. Strauss attributes to protective measures like seawalls and other barriers. Cities must invest vastly greater sums in such defenses, Mr. Strauss said, and they must do it quickly.
But even if that investment happens, defensive measures can go only so far. Mr. Strauss offered the example of New Orleans, a city below sea level that was devastated in 2005 when its extensive levees and other protections failed during Hurricane Katrina. “How deep a bowl do we want to live in”? he asked.
The new projections suggest that much of Mumbai, India’s financial capital and one of the largest cities in the world, is at risk of being wiped out. Built on what was once a series of islands, the city’s historic downtown core is particularly vulnerable.
Over all, the research shows that countries should start preparing now for more citizens to relocate internally, according to Dina Ionesco of the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental group that coordinates action on migrants and development.
“We’ve been trying to ring the alarm bells,” Ms. Ionesco said. “We know that it’s coming.” There is little modern precedent for this scale of population movement, she added.
The disappearance of cultural heritage could bring its own kind of devastation. Alexandria, Egypt, founded by Alexander the Great around 330 B.C., could be lost to rising waters.
In other places, the migration caused by rising seas could trigger or exacerbate regional conflicts.
Basra, the second-largest city in Iraq, could be mostly underwater by 2050. If that happens, the effects could be felt well beyond Iraq’s borders, according to John Castellaw, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general who was chief of staff for United States Central Command during the Iraq War.
Further loss of land to rising waters there “threatens to drive further social and political instability in the region, which could reignite armed conflict and increase the likelihood of terrorism,” said General Castellaw, who is now on the advisory board of the Center for Climate and Security, a research and advocacy group in Washington.
“So this is far more than an environmental problem,” he said. “It’s a humanitarian, security and possibly military problem too.”
Map illustrations at:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... 3053091030
Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new research, threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal cities.
The authors of a paper published Tuesday developed a more accurate way of calculating land elevation based on satellite readings, a standard way of estimating the effects of sea level rise over large areas, and found that the previous numbers were far too optimistic. The new research shows that some 150 million people are now living on land that will be below the high-tide line by midcentury.
Southern Vietnam could all but disappear.
The first map shows earlier expectations of submerged land by 2050. But the new outlook, the second map, indicates that the bottom part of the country will be underwater at high tide.
More than 20 million people in Vietnam, almost one-quarter of the population, live on land that will be inundated.
Much of Ho Chi Minh City, the nation’s economic center, would disappear with it, according to the research, which was produced by Climate Central, a science organization based in New Jersey, and published in the journal Nature Communications. The projections don’t account for future population growth or land lost to coastal erosion.
Standard elevation measurements using satellites struggle to differentiate the true ground level from the tops of trees or buildings, said Scott A. Kulp, a researcher at Climate Central and one of the paper’s authors. So he and Benjamin Strauss, Climate Central’s chief executive, used artificial intelligence to determine the error rate and correct for it.
In Thailand, more than 10 percent of citizens now live on land that is likely to be inundated by 2050, compared with just 1 percent according to the earlier technique. The political and commercial capital, Bangkok, is particularly imperiled.
Climate change will put pressure on cities in multiple ways, said Loretta Hieber Girardet, a Bangkok resident and United Nations disaster risk-reduction official. Even as global warming floods more places, it will also push poor farmers off the land to seek work in cities.
“It is a dire formula,” she said.
In Shanghai, one of Asia’s most important economic engines, water threatens to consume the heart of the city and many other cities around it.
The findings don’t have to spell the end of those areas. The new data shows that 110 million people already live in places that are below the high tide line, which Mr. Strauss attributes to protective measures like seawalls and other barriers. Cities must invest vastly greater sums in such defenses, Mr. Strauss said, and they must do it quickly.
But even if that investment happens, defensive measures can go only so far. Mr. Strauss offered the example of New Orleans, a city below sea level that was devastated in 2005 when its extensive levees and other protections failed during Hurricane Katrina. “How deep a bowl do we want to live in”? he asked.
The new projections suggest that much of Mumbai, India’s financial capital and one of the largest cities in the world, is at risk of being wiped out. Built on what was once a series of islands, the city’s historic downtown core is particularly vulnerable.
Over all, the research shows that countries should start preparing now for more citizens to relocate internally, according to Dina Ionesco of the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental group that coordinates action on migrants and development.
“We’ve been trying to ring the alarm bells,” Ms. Ionesco said. “We know that it’s coming.” There is little modern precedent for this scale of population movement, she added.
The disappearance of cultural heritage could bring its own kind of devastation. Alexandria, Egypt, founded by Alexander the Great around 330 B.C., could be lost to rising waters.
In other places, the migration caused by rising seas could trigger or exacerbate regional conflicts.
Basra, the second-largest city in Iraq, could be mostly underwater by 2050. If that happens, the effects could be felt well beyond Iraq’s borders, according to John Castellaw, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general who was chief of staff for United States Central Command during the Iraq War.
Further loss of land to rising waters there “threatens to drive further social and political instability in the region, which could reignite armed conflict and increase the likelihood of terrorism,” said General Castellaw, who is now on the advisory board of the Center for Climate and Security, a research and advocacy group in Washington.
“So this is far more than an environmental problem,” he said. “It’s a humanitarian, security and possibly military problem too.”
Map illustrations at:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... 3053091030
Australia fires kill half a billion animals as crisis mounts
-Wildfires have turned southeast Australia into a charred, apocalyptic nightmare, and threaten to wipe out entire species of animals.
-An estimated half billion million mammals, birds and reptiles have been killed since the bushfires started in September, according to ecologists from the University of Sydney. The actual number is likely much higher.
-Pictures and images on social media show charred koalas receiving medical attention, bodies of dead animals lying on the ground and kangaroos desperately running from blazes.
Nearly half a billion animals in Australia's New South Wales state have been killed by raging wildfires in the last couple months, and the devastating death toll is expected to rise.
Roughly 480 million mammals, birds and reptiles have been affected since bushfires started in September, according to ecologists from the University of Sydney, who add that the actual number is likely much higher.
Wildfires have turned southeast Australia into a charred, apocalyptic nightmare as the country copes with a devastating fire season that is expected to grow worse as the summer months continue. Record high temperatures and drought exacerbated by climate change have ignited blazes that have destroyed more than 1,000 homes and nine million acres and killed 18 people.
The blazes, expected to be the worst yet this weekend, threaten to erase entire species in Australia, which already has the highest rate of extinction in the world.
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/weather/topst ... ailsignout
-Wildfires have turned southeast Australia into a charred, apocalyptic nightmare, and threaten to wipe out entire species of animals.
-An estimated half billion million mammals, birds and reptiles have been killed since the bushfires started in September, according to ecologists from the University of Sydney. The actual number is likely much higher.
-Pictures and images on social media show charred koalas receiving medical attention, bodies of dead animals lying on the ground and kangaroos desperately running from blazes.
Nearly half a billion animals in Australia's New South Wales state have been killed by raging wildfires in the last couple months, and the devastating death toll is expected to rise.
Roughly 480 million mammals, birds and reptiles have been affected since bushfires started in September, according to ecologists from the University of Sydney, who add that the actual number is likely much higher.
Wildfires have turned southeast Australia into a charred, apocalyptic nightmare as the country copes with a devastating fire season that is expected to grow worse as the summer months continue. Record high temperatures and drought exacerbated by climate change have ignited blazes that have destroyed more than 1,000 homes and nine million acres and killed 18 people.
The blazes, expected to be the worst yet this weekend, threaten to erase entire species in Australia, which already has the highest rate of extinction in the world.
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/weather/topst ... ailsignout
Reducing Fire, and Cutting Carbon Emissions, the Aboriginal Way
As blazes rage in southern Australia, Indigenous fire-prevention techniques that have sharply cut destructive bushfires in the north are drawing new attention.
COOINDA, Australia — At a time when vast tracts of Australia are burning, Violet Lawson is never far from a match.
In the woodlands surrounding her home in the far north of the country, she lights hundreds of small fires a year — literally fighting fire with fire. These traditional Aboriginal practices, which reduce the undergrowth that can fuel bigger blazes, are attracting new attention as Australia endures disaster and confronts a fiery future.
Over the past decade, fire-prevention programs, mainly on Aboriginal lands in northern Australia, have cut destructive wildfires in half. While the efforts draw on ancient ways, they also have a thoroughly modern benefit: Organizations that practice defensive burning have earned $80 million under the country’s cap-and-trade system as they have reduced greenhouse-gas emissions from wildfires in the north by 40 percent.
These programs, which are generating important scientific data, are being held up as a model that could be adapted to save lives and homes in other regions of Australia, as well as fire-prone parts of the world as different as California and Botswana.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/worl ... 3053090117
As blazes rage in southern Australia, Indigenous fire-prevention techniques that have sharply cut destructive bushfires in the north are drawing new attention.
COOINDA, Australia — At a time when vast tracts of Australia are burning, Violet Lawson is never far from a match.
In the woodlands surrounding her home in the far north of the country, she lights hundreds of small fires a year — literally fighting fire with fire. These traditional Aboriginal practices, which reduce the undergrowth that can fuel bigger blazes, are attracting new attention as Australia endures disaster and confronts a fiery future.
Over the past decade, fire-prevention programs, mainly on Aboriginal lands in northern Australia, have cut destructive wildfires in half. While the efforts draw on ancient ways, they also have a thoroughly modern benefit: Organizations that practice defensive burning have earned $80 million under the country’s cap-and-trade system as they have reduced greenhouse-gas emissions from wildfires in the north by 40 percent.
These programs, which are generating important scientific data, are being held up as a model that could be adapted to save lives and homes in other regions of Australia, as well as fire-prone parts of the world as different as California and Botswana.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/worl ... 3053090117
The $119 Billion Sea Wall That Could Defend New York … or Not
A six-mile-long barrier would help protect the city from floodwaters during fierce storms like Sandy, but critics say rising seas make the option inadequate.
Excerpt:
The conundrum on how to best protect New York reflects the challenges other major cities face in deciding how to respond to climate change. Coastal areas not only power much of the world’s economy, they also house 40 percent of its population.
New York City, New York State and New Jersey would all have to approve any barrier and foot 35 percent of the bill. The city and two states, which are consulting with the Army Corps, have yet to take official positions on a solution. Congress must agree to fund the remaining 65 percent of the cost.
The barrier debate comes as New York City is still struggling to respond to Sandy, and the larger need to carefully reshape an entire region’s infrastructure to adapt to climate change. In the more than seven years since the storm killed 72 people and caused $62 billion in damage, agencies have spent just 54 percent of the $14.7 billion allocated by the federal government to help the city recover and prepare for new storms.
Still, no one is sure if the most ambitious and costly engineering solutions will work in the long run, and what their impacts could be. A five-mile-long, swinging-gate structure in the Netherlands, built after a deadly storm in the 1950s, has both curbed flooding and caused environmental damage, changing the ecology of estuaries and marshlands, as has the Thames Barrier in London.
In the New Orleans area, levees that the Corps recently spent $14 billion to upgrade are sinking and are projected to be inadequate within four years.
Boston recently studied a sea barrier, but rejected it in favor of a mix of onshore measures like retractable flood walls and wetland terraces. Russia, however, has credited a nearly 15-mile barrier, completed in 2010, with protecting St. Petersburg from a catastrophic storm a year later.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/nyre ... 778d3e6de3
A six-mile-long barrier would help protect the city from floodwaters during fierce storms like Sandy, but critics say rising seas make the option inadequate.
Excerpt:
The conundrum on how to best protect New York reflects the challenges other major cities face in deciding how to respond to climate change. Coastal areas not only power much of the world’s economy, they also house 40 percent of its population.
New York City, New York State and New Jersey would all have to approve any barrier and foot 35 percent of the bill. The city and two states, which are consulting with the Army Corps, have yet to take official positions on a solution. Congress must agree to fund the remaining 65 percent of the cost.
The barrier debate comes as New York City is still struggling to respond to Sandy, and the larger need to carefully reshape an entire region’s infrastructure to adapt to climate change. In the more than seven years since the storm killed 72 people and caused $62 billion in damage, agencies have spent just 54 percent of the $14.7 billion allocated by the federal government to help the city recover and prepare for new storms.
Still, no one is sure if the most ambitious and costly engineering solutions will work in the long run, and what their impacts could be. A five-mile-long, swinging-gate structure in the Netherlands, built after a deadly storm in the 1950s, has both curbed flooding and caused environmental damage, changing the ecology of estuaries and marshlands, as has the Thames Barrier in London.
In the New Orleans area, levees that the Corps recently spent $14 billion to upgrade are sinking and are projected to be inadequate within four years.
Boston recently studied a sea barrier, but rejected it in favor of a mix of onshore measures like retractable flood walls and wetland terraces. Russia, however, has credited a nearly 15-mile barrier, completed in 2010, with protecting St. Petersburg from a catastrophic storm a year later.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/nyre ... 778d3e6de3
A Crisis Right Now: San Francisco and Manila Face Rising Seas
The two sprawling metro areas — one rich, one poor — offer a vision of what could be a watery future for 600 million coastal residents worldwide.
What do you do when the sea comes for your home, your school, your church?
You could try to hold back the water. Or you could raise your house. Or you could just leave.
An estimated 600 million people live directly on the world’s coastlines, among the most hazardous places to be in the era of climate change. According to scientific projections, the oceans stand to rise by one to four feet by the end of the century, with projections of more ferocious storms and higher tides that could upend the lives of entire communities.
Many people face the risks right now. Two sprawling metropolitan areas offer a glimpse of the future. One rich, one poor, they sit on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean: the San Francisco Bay Area (population 7 million) and metropolitan Manila (almost 14 million).
Their history, their wealth, and the political and personal choices they make today will shape how they fare as the water inevitably comes to their doorsteps.
In both places, it turns out, how you face the rising sea depends mostly on the accident of your birth: Whether you were born rich or poor, in a wealthy country or a struggling one, whether you have insurance or not, whether your property is worth millions or is little more than a tin roof.
And, in both places, climate change has magnified years of short-sighted decisions. Manila allowed groundwater to be pumped out so fast that the land sagged and turned into a bowl just as the sea was rising. The Bay Area allowed people to build right at the water’s edge, putting homes, highways, even airports at risk of catastrophic flooding.
But people tend to hold on, often ingeniously, as the water rises around them. In some cases that’s because their properties are worth a lot, for now, at least, or because they have so little that they have nowhere else to go.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... ogin-email
The two sprawling metro areas — one rich, one poor — offer a vision of what could be a watery future for 600 million coastal residents worldwide.
What do you do when the sea comes for your home, your school, your church?
You could try to hold back the water. Or you could raise your house. Or you could just leave.
An estimated 600 million people live directly on the world’s coastlines, among the most hazardous places to be in the era of climate change. According to scientific projections, the oceans stand to rise by one to four feet by the end of the century, with projections of more ferocious storms and higher tides that could upend the lives of entire communities.
Many people face the risks right now. Two sprawling metropolitan areas offer a glimpse of the future. One rich, one poor, they sit on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean: the San Francisco Bay Area (population 7 million) and metropolitan Manila (almost 14 million).
Their history, their wealth, and the political and personal choices they make today will shape how they fare as the water inevitably comes to their doorsteps.
In both places, it turns out, how you face the rising sea depends mostly on the accident of your birth: Whether you were born rich or poor, in a wealthy country or a struggling one, whether you have insurance or not, whether your property is worth millions or is little more than a tin roof.
And, in both places, climate change has magnified years of short-sighted decisions. Manila allowed groundwater to be pumped out so fast that the land sagged and turned into a bowl just as the sea was rising. The Bay Area allowed people to build right at the water’s edge, putting homes, highways, even airports at risk of catastrophic flooding.
But people tend to hold on, often ingeniously, as the water rises around them. In some cases that’s because their properties are worth a lot, for now, at least, or because they have so little that they have nowhere else to go.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... ogin-email
To Survive Disaster, Plan for the Worst
Getting ready for a disaster is still a tiny part of the world’s response to the likelihood of one. But some governments and officials are starting to plan well in advance.
Disaster relief works like this: There is a flood, a drought, an earthquake, a famine, an exodus of refugees. Reporters swarm in, broadcasting images of suffering. Humanitarian workers on the ground analyze who needs what relief and draw up plans. The government asks for help. The United Nations coordinates international pledges. Relief comes in — money, bags of grain, medical supplies.
But by that point, weeks or months have gone by.
Rarely is there preplanning, pre-fundraising, or pre-agreement on a plan. “This is medieval,” said Stefan Dercon, a professor of economic policy at Oxford and a former chief economist of Britain’s bilateral aid agency, the Department for International Development. He and Daniel Clarke, head of the London-based Center for Disaster Protection, wrote the book “Dull Disasters? How Planning Ahead Will Make a Difference.”
“It is as if financial instruments such as insurance do not exist,” they wrote. “This is begging-bowl financing at its worst.”
But here’s what can happen instead — what, in fact, did happen in the Kurigram district of northwest Bangladesh in July. With colossal rains predicted, the United Nations World Food Program and the Bangladesh government identified about 5,000 particularly vulnerable families. Three days before the flood hit, they used mobile phone banking to send each family the equivalent of $53. With that money, the families secured their houses and belongings — for example, buying materials to lift their furniture off the ground. And they could pay the costs of taking their livestock and fleeing.
Instead of getting relief after they were wiped out by the flood, the residents were able to avoid much of the loss — for $10 per person.
The accomplishment in Bangladesh is one of a handful of examples worldwide of anticipating disaster.
But it doesn’t have to be the rare exception. If disasters take us by surprise, it’s because we weren’t looking. With satellite data and mathematical modeling, we can now know about a flood or drought days or even weeks in advance. “We’ve improved so much in getting the precise likelihood of this particular area being flooded, and the number of people affected,” Dr. Dercon said of the Bangladesh case. “We probably couldn’t have done this 10 years ago.”
We can’t predict the first case of a new outbreak of Ebola, but we can know where that deadly disease recurs and use that first case to predict later ones. Using satellite data, scientists can anticipate cholera outbreaks days, even weeks, in advance. When violent conflict breaks out or terrible drought sets in, we can plot the mass movement of refugees.
An early response can prevent suffering. With famine expected in Somalia in 2017, for example, U.N. and other aid agencies sent 600,000 families vouchers by text message redeemable in local markets. (All hail mobile phone banking!) The vouchers fed families and the local economy, and famine was averted.
Anticipating disasters can also help when they continue. In Kenya, rural herders can buy subsidized insurance that pays them automatically by mobile phone when satellites determine that the available forage in their area is too scarce to support livestock. A payout in time to buy food for a cow is vastly preferable to a payout after the cow dies. It’s health insurance, not life insurance.
We can even prepare for unexpected disasters. Mexico can’t predict a specific earthquake. But it knows that the country is an enormous earthquake zone. So in the late 1990s, the government established the Fund for Natural Disasters, or Fonden. It allows Mexico to make action plans and money available in advance of any quake, as well as to start relief and reconstruction immediately when one occurs. In 2006, Mexico issued the world’s first government catastrophe bond, a form of insurance that pays out when an earthquake strikes.
Caribbean countries can buy policies from the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility to insure against cyclones, earthquakes and very heavy rains. In Africa, the African Risk Capacity pays countries when rain is scarce.
Mark Lowcock, under-secretary-general of the United Nations for humanitarian affairs — the U.N.’s emergency relief coordinator — is trying to push the relief system toward anticipating disasters. He said that one sign of progress is the growth of the U.N.’s Central Emergency Response Fund, which he administers. Its funding has been roughly steady since 2006 at about $500 million a year, but in 2019 donors contributed $828 million.
Other groups are also trying anticipatory action. Red Cross and Red Crescent societies in several countries have piloted forecast-based financing, providing aid in advance of floods, mostly, but also heat and cold waves.
But getting ready for a disaster is still a tiny part of the world’s response to the likelihood of one. “We’ve got quite a lot of very persuasive examples,” Mr. Lowcock said. “It’s nice to have 25,000 people in Bangladesh, but most situations have caseloads in the millions. There is much more scope to do this than is happening at the moment.”
In general, we don’t plan enough for disasters largely because we’ve assumed our political processes demand those visible victims. Political systems are notoriously bad at long-term thinking. It’s hard to raise money in the abstract. Politicians know you don’t get credit for prevention.
“We’ve learned in other areas of development to be more sophisticated in our use of financial instruments,” Dr. Dercon said. “Somehow in the humanitarian space we just never embraced this. The humanitarian sector has lots of really good people, but it’s built around the emotion of helping people in need.”
How we react to disasters matters more than ever. This year, 168 million people will need disaster assistance, a record high. Mr. Lowcock said that in two years, that could rise to 200 million people. He said the main reasons for the increase are droughts and floods related to climate change, large outbreaks of infectious disease (often related to climate as well) and protracted violent conflicts — which are increasingly killing children, he said.
New research shows that how we respond — or not — to a disaster can follow people for the rest of their lives. A 2017 World Bank report found that prosperous countries are the ones lucky enough to avoid crises that set them back. Just as a fall can permanently damage the health of an older person, conflict, drought or epidemic can permanently make a country poorer.
Drought, particularly, is crippling, because it creates lasting malnutrition, leading to permanent cognitive and physical damage. Researchers found that without relief, a drought causes a 4 percent drop in the income of affected people — for the long term. And a speedy response is crucial. “A response time that is one month quicker has a benefit of 0.8 percent of income per capita in the long run,” the study says.
There is wide agreement on the value of having money set aside, a plan for what to do and agreement on what triggers action. But what’s needed to get that done isn’t always present. Mr. Lowcock gave the example of drought in Somalia: It’s not enough to predict hunger and famine. “We need to know at the village level who are the most vulnerable,” he said. “We’re trying to build models to answer that question for us.”
U.N. agencies are getting creative with the challenge of knowing when to help. Rebeca Moreno Jiménez, the U.N. refugee agency’s first data scientist, recently traveled to Ethiopia to interview Somali refugees, hoping to identify something measurable that can signal relief is needed. What she found was the price of goats. Refugees told her that before people flee, they sell their goats, which are too fragile to make the trip. So the crash in goat prices that would accompany a mass sell-off means people are getting ready to move. We know they will end up in Ethiopia several days later.
This work is still experimental. “We are bothering our colleagues in the Food and Agriculture Organization,” she said. “Every month, we’re asking for goat prices in Somalia.” Her program has now established an interagency dashboard where everyone can track the prices F.A.O. posts.
“Cynical people think politicians are prompted to action only when they see the starving kid in the street,” Mr. Lowcock said. “But when I talk to politicians and confront them with the fact that we can anticipate problems better than that, they get it. That’s why my fund is bigger this year than last and we are able to fund more experiments. No one wants to see a starving kid on the street and think, ‘If we’d done something earlier, we might have been able to stop that.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/opin ... ogin-email
Getting ready for a disaster is still a tiny part of the world’s response to the likelihood of one. But some governments and officials are starting to plan well in advance.
Disaster relief works like this: There is a flood, a drought, an earthquake, a famine, an exodus of refugees. Reporters swarm in, broadcasting images of suffering. Humanitarian workers on the ground analyze who needs what relief and draw up plans. The government asks for help. The United Nations coordinates international pledges. Relief comes in — money, bags of grain, medical supplies.
But by that point, weeks or months have gone by.
Rarely is there preplanning, pre-fundraising, or pre-agreement on a plan. “This is medieval,” said Stefan Dercon, a professor of economic policy at Oxford and a former chief economist of Britain’s bilateral aid agency, the Department for International Development. He and Daniel Clarke, head of the London-based Center for Disaster Protection, wrote the book “Dull Disasters? How Planning Ahead Will Make a Difference.”
“It is as if financial instruments such as insurance do not exist,” they wrote. “This is begging-bowl financing at its worst.”
But here’s what can happen instead — what, in fact, did happen in the Kurigram district of northwest Bangladesh in July. With colossal rains predicted, the United Nations World Food Program and the Bangladesh government identified about 5,000 particularly vulnerable families. Three days before the flood hit, they used mobile phone banking to send each family the equivalent of $53. With that money, the families secured their houses and belongings — for example, buying materials to lift their furniture off the ground. And they could pay the costs of taking their livestock and fleeing.
Instead of getting relief after they were wiped out by the flood, the residents were able to avoid much of the loss — for $10 per person.
The accomplishment in Bangladesh is one of a handful of examples worldwide of anticipating disaster.
But it doesn’t have to be the rare exception. If disasters take us by surprise, it’s because we weren’t looking. With satellite data and mathematical modeling, we can now know about a flood or drought days or even weeks in advance. “We’ve improved so much in getting the precise likelihood of this particular area being flooded, and the number of people affected,” Dr. Dercon said of the Bangladesh case. “We probably couldn’t have done this 10 years ago.”
We can’t predict the first case of a new outbreak of Ebola, but we can know where that deadly disease recurs and use that first case to predict later ones. Using satellite data, scientists can anticipate cholera outbreaks days, even weeks, in advance. When violent conflict breaks out or terrible drought sets in, we can plot the mass movement of refugees.
An early response can prevent suffering. With famine expected in Somalia in 2017, for example, U.N. and other aid agencies sent 600,000 families vouchers by text message redeemable in local markets. (All hail mobile phone banking!) The vouchers fed families and the local economy, and famine was averted.
Anticipating disasters can also help when they continue. In Kenya, rural herders can buy subsidized insurance that pays them automatically by mobile phone when satellites determine that the available forage in their area is too scarce to support livestock. A payout in time to buy food for a cow is vastly preferable to a payout after the cow dies. It’s health insurance, not life insurance.
We can even prepare for unexpected disasters. Mexico can’t predict a specific earthquake. But it knows that the country is an enormous earthquake zone. So in the late 1990s, the government established the Fund for Natural Disasters, or Fonden. It allows Mexico to make action plans and money available in advance of any quake, as well as to start relief and reconstruction immediately when one occurs. In 2006, Mexico issued the world’s first government catastrophe bond, a form of insurance that pays out when an earthquake strikes.
Caribbean countries can buy policies from the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility to insure against cyclones, earthquakes and very heavy rains. In Africa, the African Risk Capacity pays countries when rain is scarce.
Mark Lowcock, under-secretary-general of the United Nations for humanitarian affairs — the U.N.’s emergency relief coordinator — is trying to push the relief system toward anticipating disasters. He said that one sign of progress is the growth of the U.N.’s Central Emergency Response Fund, which he administers. Its funding has been roughly steady since 2006 at about $500 million a year, but in 2019 donors contributed $828 million.
Other groups are also trying anticipatory action. Red Cross and Red Crescent societies in several countries have piloted forecast-based financing, providing aid in advance of floods, mostly, but also heat and cold waves.
But getting ready for a disaster is still a tiny part of the world’s response to the likelihood of one. “We’ve got quite a lot of very persuasive examples,” Mr. Lowcock said. “It’s nice to have 25,000 people in Bangladesh, but most situations have caseloads in the millions. There is much more scope to do this than is happening at the moment.”
In general, we don’t plan enough for disasters largely because we’ve assumed our political processes demand those visible victims. Political systems are notoriously bad at long-term thinking. It’s hard to raise money in the abstract. Politicians know you don’t get credit for prevention.
“We’ve learned in other areas of development to be more sophisticated in our use of financial instruments,” Dr. Dercon said. “Somehow in the humanitarian space we just never embraced this. The humanitarian sector has lots of really good people, but it’s built around the emotion of helping people in need.”
How we react to disasters matters more than ever. This year, 168 million people will need disaster assistance, a record high. Mr. Lowcock said that in two years, that could rise to 200 million people. He said the main reasons for the increase are droughts and floods related to climate change, large outbreaks of infectious disease (often related to climate as well) and protracted violent conflicts — which are increasingly killing children, he said.
New research shows that how we respond — or not — to a disaster can follow people for the rest of their lives. A 2017 World Bank report found that prosperous countries are the ones lucky enough to avoid crises that set them back. Just as a fall can permanently damage the health of an older person, conflict, drought or epidemic can permanently make a country poorer.
Drought, particularly, is crippling, because it creates lasting malnutrition, leading to permanent cognitive and physical damage. Researchers found that without relief, a drought causes a 4 percent drop in the income of affected people — for the long term. And a speedy response is crucial. “A response time that is one month quicker has a benefit of 0.8 percent of income per capita in the long run,” the study says.
There is wide agreement on the value of having money set aside, a plan for what to do and agreement on what triggers action. But what’s needed to get that done isn’t always present. Mr. Lowcock gave the example of drought in Somalia: It’s not enough to predict hunger and famine. “We need to know at the village level who are the most vulnerable,” he said. “We’re trying to build models to answer that question for us.”
U.N. agencies are getting creative with the challenge of knowing when to help. Rebeca Moreno Jiménez, the U.N. refugee agency’s first data scientist, recently traveled to Ethiopia to interview Somali refugees, hoping to identify something measurable that can signal relief is needed. What she found was the price of goats. Refugees told her that before people flee, they sell their goats, which are too fragile to make the trip. So the crash in goat prices that would accompany a mass sell-off means people are getting ready to move. We know they will end up in Ethiopia several days later.
This work is still experimental. “We are bothering our colleagues in the Food and Agriculture Organization,” she said. “Every month, we’re asking for goat prices in Somalia.” Her program has now established an interagency dashboard where everyone can track the prices F.A.O. posts.
“Cynical people think politicians are prompted to action only when they see the starving kid in the street,” Mr. Lowcock said. “But when I talk to politicians and confront them with the fact that we can anticipate problems better than that, they get it. That’s why my fund is bigger this year than last and we are able to fund more experiments. No one wants to see a starving kid on the street and think, ‘If we’d done something earlier, we might have been able to stop that.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/opin ... ogin-email
Adapting to Rising Seas, Schools Move to the Rafters and Cats Swim
On an island in the Philippines, waterlogged for one-third of every year, residents adjust to their sodden existence instead of fleeing.
BATASAN, Philippines — When the floods invade her home at night — and they always do, a little higher each year — Pelagia Villarmia curls up on her bed and waits.
Someday soon, she knows, the water will creep past the bamboo slats of her bed. It will keep rising, salty and dark and surprisingly cold.
The seawater has covered the walls of Ms. Villarmia’s home with murals of mildew. It has gnawed at the legs of furniture and frozen a DVD player with its tray ajar. A corroded picture of Ms. Villarmia and her husband, now dead, hangs on the wall, from back when they were young, hopeful and unaware of the sea’s hunger.
What is happening to Ms. Villarmia and her neighbors on Batasan, an island in the Philippines, is a harbinger of what residents of low-lying islands and coastal regions around the world will face as the seas rise higher.
In 2013, Batasan was convulsed by a 7.2-magnitude earthquake. Thousands of aftershocks followed, and the local topography was thrown off-kilter. Batasan and three neighboring islands collapsed downward, making them more vulnerable to the surrounding water.
Now climate change, with its rising sea levels, appears to be dooming a place that has no elevation to spare. The highest point on the islands is less than 6.5 feet above sea level.
Photos of flooded homes and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/22/worl ... ogin-email
On an island in the Philippines, waterlogged for one-third of every year, residents adjust to their sodden existence instead of fleeing.
BATASAN, Philippines — When the floods invade her home at night — and they always do, a little higher each year — Pelagia Villarmia curls up on her bed and waits.
Someday soon, she knows, the water will creep past the bamboo slats of her bed. It will keep rising, salty and dark and surprisingly cold.
The seawater has covered the walls of Ms. Villarmia’s home with murals of mildew. It has gnawed at the legs of furniture and frozen a DVD player with its tray ajar. A corroded picture of Ms. Villarmia and her husband, now dead, hangs on the wall, from back when they were young, hopeful and unaware of the sea’s hunger.
What is happening to Ms. Villarmia and her neighbors on Batasan, an island in the Philippines, is a harbinger of what residents of low-lying islands and coastal regions around the world will face as the seas rise higher.
In 2013, Batasan was convulsed by a 7.2-magnitude earthquake. Thousands of aftershocks followed, and the local topography was thrown off-kilter. Batasan and three neighboring islands collapsed downward, making them more vulnerable to the surrounding water.
Now climate change, with its rising sea levels, appears to be dooming a place that has no elevation to spare. The highest point on the islands is less than 6.5 feet above sea level.
Photos of flooded homes and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/22/worl ... ogin-email
Pandemics Kill Compassion, Too
You may not like who you’re about to become.
Some disasters, like hurricanes and earthquakes, can bring people together, but if history is any judge, pandemics generally drive them apart. These are crises in which social distancing is a virtue. Dread overwhelms the normal bonds of human affection.
In “The Decameron,” Giovanni Boccaccio writes about what happened during the plague that hit Florence in 1348: “Tedious were it to recount how citizen avoided citizen, how among neighbors was scarce found any that shewed fellow-feeling for another, how kinfolk held aloof, and never met … nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children, untended, unvisited, to their fate.”
In his book on the 1665 London epidemic, “A Journal of the Plague Year,” Daniel Defoe reports, “This was a time when every one’s private safety lay so near them they had no room to pity the distresses of others. … The danger of immediate death to ourselves, took away all bonds of love, all concern for one another.”
Fear drives people in these moments, but so does shame, caused by the brutal things that have to be done to slow the spread of the disease. In all pandemics people are forced to make the decisions that doctors in Italy are now forced to make — withholding care from some of those who are suffering and leaving them to their fate.
In 17th-century Venice, health workers searched the city, identified plague victims and shipped them off to isolated “hospitals,” where two-thirds of them died. In many cities over the centuries, municipal authorities locked whole families in their homes, sealed the premises and blocked any delivery of provisions or medical care.
Frank Snowden, the Yale historian who wrote “Epidemics and Society,” argues that pandemics hold up a mirror to society and force us to ask basic questions: What is possible imminent death trying to tell us? Where is God in all this? What’s our responsibility to one another?
Pandemics induce a feeling of enervating fatalism. People realize how little they control their lives. Anton Chekhov was a victim during a TB epidemic that traveled across Russia in the late 19th century. Snowden points out that the plays he wrote during his recovery are about people who feel trapped, waiting for events outside their control, unable to act, unable to decide.
Pandemics also hit the poor hardest and inflame class divisions.
Cholera struck Naples in 1884, especially the Lower City, where the poor lived. Rumors swept the neighborhood that city officials were deliberately spreading the disease. When highhanded public health workers poured into Lower City, the locals revolted, throwing furniture at them, hurling them down stairs.
The city thought the disease was passed on by people eating unripe or overripe fruit. The peasants responded by bringing baskets of fruit to City Hall and gorging on it in public — a way to hold up a defiant middle finger against the elites who were so useless in the face of the disease.
The Spanish flu pandemic that battered America in 1918 produced similar reactions. John M. Barry, author of “The Great Influenza,” reports that as conditions worsened, health workers in city after city pleaded for volunteers to care for the sick. Few stepped forward.
In Philadelphia, the head of emergency aid pleaded for help in taking care of sick children. Nobody answered. The organization’s director turned scornful: “Hundreds of women … had delightful dreams of themselves in the roles of angels of mercy. … Nothing seems to rouse them now. … There are families in which every member is ill, in which the children are actually starving because there is no one to give them food. The death rate is so high, and they still hold back.”
This explains one of the puzzling features of the 1918 pandemic. When it was over, people didn’t talk about it. There were very few books or plays written about it. Roughly 675,000 Americans lost their lives to the flu, compared with 53,000 in battle in World War I, and yet it left almost no conscious cultural mark.
Perhaps it’s because people didn’t like who they had become. It was a shameful memory and therefore suppressed. In her 1976 dissertation, “A Cruel Wind,” Dorothy Ann Pettit argues that the 1918 flu pandemic contributed to a kind of spiritual torpor afterward. People emerged from it physically and spiritually fatigued. The flu, Pettit writes, had a sobering and disillusioning effect on the national spirit.
There is one exception to this sad litany: health care workers. In every pandemic there are doctors and nurses who respond with unbelievable heroism and compassion. That’s happening today.
Mike Baker recently had a report in The Times about the EvergreenHealth hospital in Kirkland, Wash., where the staff showing the kind of effective compassion that has been evident in all pandemics down the centuries. “We have not had issues with staff not wanting to come in,” an Evergreen executive said. “We’ve had staff calling and say, ‘If you need me, I’m available.”
Maybe this time we’ll learn from their example. It also wouldn’t be a bad idea to take steps to fight the moral disease that accompanies the physical one.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/opin ... 0920200313
You may not like who you’re about to become.
Some disasters, like hurricanes and earthquakes, can bring people together, but if history is any judge, pandemics generally drive them apart. These are crises in which social distancing is a virtue. Dread overwhelms the normal bonds of human affection.
In “The Decameron,” Giovanni Boccaccio writes about what happened during the plague that hit Florence in 1348: “Tedious were it to recount how citizen avoided citizen, how among neighbors was scarce found any that shewed fellow-feeling for another, how kinfolk held aloof, and never met … nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children, untended, unvisited, to their fate.”
In his book on the 1665 London epidemic, “A Journal of the Plague Year,” Daniel Defoe reports, “This was a time when every one’s private safety lay so near them they had no room to pity the distresses of others. … The danger of immediate death to ourselves, took away all bonds of love, all concern for one another.”
Fear drives people in these moments, but so does shame, caused by the brutal things that have to be done to slow the spread of the disease. In all pandemics people are forced to make the decisions that doctors in Italy are now forced to make — withholding care from some of those who are suffering and leaving them to their fate.
In 17th-century Venice, health workers searched the city, identified plague victims and shipped them off to isolated “hospitals,” where two-thirds of them died. In many cities over the centuries, municipal authorities locked whole families in their homes, sealed the premises and blocked any delivery of provisions or medical care.
Frank Snowden, the Yale historian who wrote “Epidemics and Society,” argues that pandemics hold up a mirror to society and force us to ask basic questions: What is possible imminent death trying to tell us? Where is God in all this? What’s our responsibility to one another?
Pandemics induce a feeling of enervating fatalism. People realize how little they control their lives. Anton Chekhov was a victim during a TB epidemic that traveled across Russia in the late 19th century. Snowden points out that the plays he wrote during his recovery are about people who feel trapped, waiting for events outside their control, unable to act, unable to decide.
Pandemics also hit the poor hardest and inflame class divisions.
Cholera struck Naples in 1884, especially the Lower City, where the poor lived. Rumors swept the neighborhood that city officials were deliberately spreading the disease. When highhanded public health workers poured into Lower City, the locals revolted, throwing furniture at them, hurling them down stairs.
The city thought the disease was passed on by people eating unripe or overripe fruit. The peasants responded by bringing baskets of fruit to City Hall and gorging on it in public — a way to hold up a defiant middle finger against the elites who were so useless in the face of the disease.
The Spanish flu pandemic that battered America in 1918 produced similar reactions. John M. Barry, author of “The Great Influenza,” reports that as conditions worsened, health workers in city after city pleaded for volunteers to care for the sick. Few stepped forward.
In Philadelphia, the head of emergency aid pleaded for help in taking care of sick children. Nobody answered. The organization’s director turned scornful: “Hundreds of women … had delightful dreams of themselves in the roles of angels of mercy. … Nothing seems to rouse them now. … There are families in which every member is ill, in which the children are actually starving because there is no one to give them food. The death rate is so high, and they still hold back.”
This explains one of the puzzling features of the 1918 pandemic. When it was over, people didn’t talk about it. There were very few books or plays written about it. Roughly 675,000 Americans lost their lives to the flu, compared with 53,000 in battle in World War I, and yet it left almost no conscious cultural mark.
Perhaps it’s because people didn’t like who they had become. It was a shameful memory and therefore suppressed. In her 1976 dissertation, “A Cruel Wind,” Dorothy Ann Pettit argues that the 1918 flu pandemic contributed to a kind of spiritual torpor afterward. People emerged from it physically and spiritually fatigued. The flu, Pettit writes, had a sobering and disillusioning effect on the national spirit.
There is one exception to this sad litany: health care workers. In every pandemic there are doctors and nurses who respond with unbelievable heroism and compassion. That’s happening today.
Mike Baker recently had a report in The Times about the EvergreenHealth hospital in Kirkland, Wash., where the staff showing the kind of effective compassion that has been evident in all pandemics down the centuries. “We have not had issues with staff not wanting to come in,” an Evergreen executive said. “We’ve had staff calling and say, ‘If you need me, I’m available.”
Maybe this time we’ll learn from their example. It also wouldn’t be a bad idea to take steps to fight the moral disease that accompanies the physical one.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/opin ... 0920200313
Is Sweden Doing It Right?
The Swedes aren’t battling the coronavirus with broad lockdowns.
President Trump has often described this pandemic as our “war” with an “invisible enemy” — the coronavirus. That war metaphor is wrong and misleading.
Wars are fought and won by humans. So, we could out-mobilize the Nazis and Japanese to win World War II. We could out-spend and out-innovate the Soviet Union to win the Cold War. But when you’re in a struggle with one of Mother Nature’s challenges — like a virus or a climate change — the goal is not to defeat her. No one can. She’s just chemistry, biology and physics. The goal is to adapt.
Mother Nature does not reward the strongest or the smartest. She rewards the species that are the most adaptive in evolving the chemistry, biology and physics that she has endowed them with to thrive — no matter what she throws at them.
And that’s why I believe one of the most important questions we need to answer, as these lockdowns end, is this: Are we going to adapt to the coronavirus — by design — the way Sweden is attempting to do — or are we going to go the same direction as Sweden — by messy default — or are we just going to say “the hell with lockdowns” and go 50 different ways?
In case you’ve missed it, Sweden has taken a radically different approach in dealing with the coronavirus. It has essentially opted for a strategy of “herd immunity” through exposure.
This strategy posits that most people under age 65 who get the coronavirus — if they do not have major pre-existing medical conditions — will either experience it as a typical or tough flu, or completely asymptomatically, and the number who will get so sick that they require hospitalization or emergency care will reliably be less than the number of beds needed to care for them.
So, if you do your best to shelter and sequester all of those over 65 and those with serious pre-existing conditions — notably heart and lung disease and diabetes — and let much of the rest of the population circulate and get exposed and become naturally immune, once about 60 percent of your population has gone through this you’ll have herd immunity and the viral transmission will be blocked. (This assumes that immunity for some period of time results from exposure, as most experts think it will.)
After all, herd immunity is our goal — either from vaccination or from enough people building natural immunity. Those are the only ways to achieve it.
The upside of Sweden’s strategy — if it works — is that your economy does not take such a deep hit from lockdowns. It is unlike the strategy of suppression pursued in cities across America right now — as well as around the globe — where, when the lockdown is over, your population largely has not developed immunity and so most everyone remains vulnerable to the virus, and to a second wave in the fall.
Think of the challenge of New York City. Its hospitals would have been overwhelmed by the sudden crush of patients, so the months of lockdown of millions will surely, and vitally, have saved lives. But it has come at huge cost to jobs and businesses and with little progress to herd immunity — and with the prospect that the virus can come roaring back as soon as the lockdown is lifted, unless there is Chinese-level testing, tracking, tracing and quarantining those carrying the infection. And even that might not work.
Now think of Stockholm. Anders Tegnell, chief epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency — the nation’s top infectious disease official and architect of Sweden’s coronavirus response, said in an interview published in USA Today on Tuesday: “We think that up to 25 percent people in Stockholm have been exposed to coronavirus and are possibly immune. A recent survey from one of our hospitals in Stockholm found that 27 percent of staff there are immune. We think that most of those are immune from transmission in society, not the workplace. We could reach herd immunity in Stockholm within a matter of weeks.”
Tegnell explains that Sweden is not just blithely letting all Swedes get the disease to achieve herd immunity, but rather is pursuing a designed strategy for the most sustainable way to navigate through this pandemic. So colleges and high schools are closed, but kindergarten through grade nine are open, as are many restaurants, stores and businesses.
But the government has also issued social-distancing guidelines, which many people are abiding by, encouraged working from home and discouraged nonessential travel. Most important, it has encouraged everyone over 70 to stay at home and banned gatherings of more than 50 people and visits to nursing homes.
The result, so far, Tegnell noted, has been a gradual building of herd immunity among those least vulnerable while the country has avoided mass unemployment and an overwhelming of the hospital system.
It has come with a high cost, though. As USA Today noted: “Sweden has a population of 10 million people, about twice as large as its nearest Scandinavian neighbors. As of April 28, the country’s Covid-19 death toll reached 2,274, about five times higher than in Denmark and 11 times higher than in Norway.” Nursing home residents account for more than a third of all deaths.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The Swedes aren’t battling the coronavirus with broad lockdowns.
President Trump has often described this pandemic as our “war” with an “invisible enemy” — the coronavirus. That war metaphor is wrong and misleading.
Wars are fought and won by humans. So, we could out-mobilize the Nazis and Japanese to win World War II. We could out-spend and out-innovate the Soviet Union to win the Cold War. But when you’re in a struggle with one of Mother Nature’s challenges — like a virus or a climate change — the goal is not to defeat her. No one can. She’s just chemistry, biology and physics. The goal is to adapt.
Mother Nature does not reward the strongest or the smartest. She rewards the species that are the most adaptive in evolving the chemistry, biology and physics that she has endowed them with to thrive — no matter what she throws at them.
And that’s why I believe one of the most important questions we need to answer, as these lockdowns end, is this: Are we going to adapt to the coronavirus — by design — the way Sweden is attempting to do — or are we going to go the same direction as Sweden — by messy default — or are we just going to say “the hell with lockdowns” and go 50 different ways?
In case you’ve missed it, Sweden has taken a radically different approach in dealing with the coronavirus. It has essentially opted for a strategy of “herd immunity” through exposure.
This strategy posits that most people under age 65 who get the coronavirus — if they do not have major pre-existing medical conditions — will either experience it as a typical or tough flu, or completely asymptomatically, and the number who will get so sick that they require hospitalization or emergency care will reliably be less than the number of beds needed to care for them.
So, if you do your best to shelter and sequester all of those over 65 and those with serious pre-existing conditions — notably heart and lung disease and diabetes — and let much of the rest of the population circulate and get exposed and become naturally immune, once about 60 percent of your population has gone through this you’ll have herd immunity and the viral transmission will be blocked. (This assumes that immunity for some period of time results from exposure, as most experts think it will.)
After all, herd immunity is our goal — either from vaccination or from enough people building natural immunity. Those are the only ways to achieve it.
The upside of Sweden’s strategy — if it works — is that your economy does not take such a deep hit from lockdowns. It is unlike the strategy of suppression pursued in cities across America right now — as well as around the globe — where, when the lockdown is over, your population largely has not developed immunity and so most everyone remains vulnerable to the virus, and to a second wave in the fall.
Think of the challenge of New York City. Its hospitals would have been overwhelmed by the sudden crush of patients, so the months of lockdown of millions will surely, and vitally, have saved lives. But it has come at huge cost to jobs and businesses and with little progress to herd immunity — and with the prospect that the virus can come roaring back as soon as the lockdown is lifted, unless there is Chinese-level testing, tracking, tracing and quarantining those carrying the infection. And even that might not work.
Now think of Stockholm. Anders Tegnell, chief epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency — the nation’s top infectious disease official and architect of Sweden’s coronavirus response, said in an interview published in USA Today on Tuesday: “We think that up to 25 percent people in Stockholm have been exposed to coronavirus and are possibly immune. A recent survey from one of our hospitals in Stockholm found that 27 percent of staff there are immune. We think that most of those are immune from transmission in society, not the workplace. We could reach herd immunity in Stockholm within a matter of weeks.”
Tegnell explains that Sweden is not just blithely letting all Swedes get the disease to achieve herd immunity, but rather is pursuing a designed strategy for the most sustainable way to navigate through this pandemic. So colleges and high schools are closed, but kindergarten through grade nine are open, as are many restaurants, stores and businesses.
But the government has also issued social-distancing guidelines, which many people are abiding by, encouraged working from home and discouraged nonessential travel. Most important, it has encouraged everyone over 70 to stay at home and banned gatherings of more than 50 people and visits to nursing homes.
The result, so far, Tegnell noted, has been a gradual building of herd immunity among those least vulnerable while the country has avoided mass unemployment and an overwhelming of the hospital system.
It has come with a high cost, though. As USA Today noted: “Sweden has a population of 10 million people, about twice as large as its nearest Scandinavian neighbors. As of April 28, the country’s Covid-19 death toll reached 2,274, about five times higher than in Denmark and 11 times higher than in Norway.” Nursing home residents account for more than a third of all deaths.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Where Are the Photos of People Dying of Covid?
In times of crisis, stark images of sacrifice or consequence have often moved masses to act.
Excerpt:
Medical privacy laws in the United States can present obstacles to this kind of viewing. Instead of images, we have daily briefings of statistics presented in pie charts and bar graphs. During news conferences, officials such as Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany have illustrated how social distancing can flatten the curve through clear numerical analysis.
Statistics alone, however clear, are not historically how we have communicated calamity on this scale. There is an inverse relationship between high numbers and comprehension: It is much harder to picture tragedy of the kind we are now witnessing than it is to visualize one person in pain, or an image that connects with a familiar aspect of the human condition, what psychologists have termed the “identifiable victim effect.”
For at least a brief moment, daunting imagery (along with increasingly alarming data) seemed to force President Trump to backtrack on his push to relax national social distancing guidelines. “I have been watching them bring in trailer trucks, freezer trucks,” he said in March. “They are freezer trucks because they can’t handle the bodies, there are so many of them. This is essentially in my community in Queens — Queens, New York. I have seen things I’ve never seen before. I mean, I’ve seen them, but I’ve seen them on television in faraway lands.”
He amended his insistence on opening the country back up by Easter, telling “Fox & Friends” that “the worst that can happen is you do it too early and all of a sudden it comes back.” (Mr. Trump has wavered on this issue since then, encouraging the vocal minority of protesters who are against the lockdown while deeming it “too soon” for states like Georgia to reopen.)
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/opin ... 778d3e6de3
In times of crisis, stark images of sacrifice or consequence have often moved masses to act.
Excerpt:
Medical privacy laws in the United States can present obstacles to this kind of viewing. Instead of images, we have daily briefings of statistics presented in pie charts and bar graphs. During news conferences, officials such as Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany have illustrated how social distancing can flatten the curve through clear numerical analysis.
Statistics alone, however clear, are not historically how we have communicated calamity on this scale. There is an inverse relationship between high numbers and comprehension: It is much harder to picture tragedy of the kind we are now witnessing than it is to visualize one person in pain, or an image that connects with a familiar aspect of the human condition, what psychologists have termed the “identifiable victim effect.”
For at least a brief moment, daunting imagery (along with increasingly alarming data) seemed to force President Trump to backtrack on his push to relax national social distancing guidelines. “I have been watching them bring in trailer trucks, freezer trucks,” he said in March. “They are freezer trucks because they can’t handle the bodies, there are so many of them. This is essentially in my community in Queens — Queens, New York. I have seen things I’ve never seen before. I mean, I’ve seen them, but I’ve seen them on television in faraway lands.”
He amended his insistence on opening the country back up by Easter, telling “Fox & Friends” that “the worst that can happen is you do it too early and all of a sudden it comes back.” (Mr. Trump has wavered on this issue since then, encouraging the vocal minority of protesters who are against the lockdown while deeming it “too soon” for states like Georgia to reopen.)
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/opin ... 778d3e6de3
We’re nowhere near herd immunity. Why would we trust governments to get us there?
There is a cluster of arguments making the rounds, especially on the right, and it goes like this. The models were wrong. They’ve underestimated the infection rate, and overestimated the death rate. Many more people than is believed have been infected; the vast majority will recover, and be immune. Lift the lockdown, then, and leave the disease to spread further, until we reach “herd immunity.” Like they’re doing in Sweden.
The argument depends heavily on the bedrock populist belief that “no one knows anything.” Experts are just as clueless as the rest of us, if not more so. In the present case, admittedly, this is largely true. There is indeed much we do not know about COVID-19, or the novel coronavirus that causes it, not because the experts are clueless but because the virus, as the name implies, is so new.
We do not really know where it started, or how it spreads, or why it affects some people worse than others. Because so many of those infected show no obvious symptoms of it, it is especially difficult to know how many people have the disease, or which ones. By the time we have identified them, they might have already passed it on to others who are more vulnerable to it.
So we don’t know as much as we would like about the disease. That is not to say we know nothing. Experts can draw inferences from the data, to make rough estimates of how fast the disease is likely to spread, and how far, and how many of those who catch it will die.
It is true that the models’ projections have tended to overstate the number of future deaths from the disease. But that is not enough in itself to invalidate them. Models depend heavily on the assumptions that go into them – particularly, in this case, assumptions about human behaviour.
We are six weeks into the most extraordinary experiment in behavioural modification ever attempted. How much people would limit their contact with others, in order to limit the disease’s spread, could only be guessed at. That they appear to have done so to a decisive degree is more cause for celebration than criticism.
Moreover, while the models’ predictions may have been off, that doesn’t mean their estimates of current numbers are. Given how few tests have been conducted, it’s probable the actual number of cases is much larger than the reported number – about 50,000, or roughly 133 for every 100,000 of the population. But how much larger is still the work of experts. There is no particular reason to prefer another estimate over theirs just because it accords with our prior beliefs.
It is a curious irony that an argument rooted in appeals to radical uncertainty should be so certain on other points, with even less grounds. We do not, in fact, know whether those who have contracted the disease are in every case immune, or what proportion will be, or for how long. Neither do we yet have reliable tests to determine whether they are or are not.
Suppose we knew all these things. Herd immunity is achieved when enough of the population is immune that the virus cannot find new people to infect. The more infectious the disease, the smaller the pool of potential victims it needs to keep spreading, and the greater the proportion of the population that must already be infected to stop it. How large a proportion? Most experts put it at between 50 and 80 per cent of the population. How much of the population do they think are now infected? Between 1 and 3 per cent.
To get to herd immunity, then, governments would have to engineer a “controlled ascent” in the numbers of those infected, all the way from 1 to 3 per cent of the population to 50 to 80 per cent, allowing only the right sorts of people to contract the disease (those young and fit enough to survive it) at just the right pace – slow enough to avoid overwhelming the hospitals, but fast enough to make it worth the risk.
Even if the experts are wrong, and the number of those currently infected is 10 times current estimates, that still leaves us well short of herd immunity. Do we really trust governments to accomplish a task of that degree of difficulty – the same ones who can’t even count? And the evidence that they can is … Sweden?
Sweden’s death rate from COVID-19 currently stands at 23.3 for every 100,000 of the population. In the neighbouring countries of Denmark, Norway and Finland, it is 7.5, 3.8 and 3.5, respectively. Perhaps the Swedes have had a better time of it the past six weeks. But at the price of three to seven times the number of deaths, proportionately? No thanks.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
There is a cluster of arguments making the rounds, especially on the right, and it goes like this. The models were wrong. They’ve underestimated the infection rate, and overestimated the death rate. Many more people than is believed have been infected; the vast majority will recover, and be immune. Lift the lockdown, then, and leave the disease to spread further, until we reach “herd immunity.” Like they’re doing in Sweden.
The argument depends heavily on the bedrock populist belief that “no one knows anything.” Experts are just as clueless as the rest of us, if not more so. In the present case, admittedly, this is largely true. There is indeed much we do not know about COVID-19, or the novel coronavirus that causes it, not because the experts are clueless but because the virus, as the name implies, is so new.
We do not really know where it started, or how it spreads, or why it affects some people worse than others. Because so many of those infected show no obvious symptoms of it, it is especially difficult to know how many people have the disease, or which ones. By the time we have identified them, they might have already passed it on to others who are more vulnerable to it.
So we don’t know as much as we would like about the disease. That is not to say we know nothing. Experts can draw inferences from the data, to make rough estimates of how fast the disease is likely to spread, and how far, and how many of those who catch it will die.
It is true that the models’ projections have tended to overstate the number of future deaths from the disease. But that is not enough in itself to invalidate them. Models depend heavily on the assumptions that go into them – particularly, in this case, assumptions about human behaviour.
We are six weeks into the most extraordinary experiment in behavioural modification ever attempted. How much people would limit their contact with others, in order to limit the disease’s spread, could only be guessed at. That they appear to have done so to a decisive degree is more cause for celebration than criticism.
Moreover, while the models’ predictions may have been off, that doesn’t mean their estimates of current numbers are. Given how few tests have been conducted, it’s probable the actual number of cases is much larger than the reported number – about 50,000, or roughly 133 for every 100,000 of the population. But how much larger is still the work of experts. There is no particular reason to prefer another estimate over theirs just because it accords with our prior beliefs.
It is a curious irony that an argument rooted in appeals to radical uncertainty should be so certain on other points, with even less grounds. We do not, in fact, know whether those who have contracted the disease are in every case immune, or what proportion will be, or for how long. Neither do we yet have reliable tests to determine whether they are or are not.
Suppose we knew all these things. Herd immunity is achieved when enough of the population is immune that the virus cannot find new people to infect. The more infectious the disease, the smaller the pool of potential victims it needs to keep spreading, and the greater the proportion of the population that must already be infected to stop it. How large a proportion? Most experts put it at between 50 and 80 per cent of the population. How much of the population do they think are now infected? Between 1 and 3 per cent.
To get to herd immunity, then, governments would have to engineer a “controlled ascent” in the numbers of those infected, all the way from 1 to 3 per cent of the population to 50 to 80 per cent, allowing only the right sorts of people to contract the disease (those young and fit enough to survive it) at just the right pace – slow enough to avoid overwhelming the hospitals, but fast enough to make it worth the risk.
Even if the experts are wrong, and the number of those currently infected is 10 times current estimates, that still leaves us well short of herd immunity. Do we really trust governments to accomplish a task of that degree of difficulty – the same ones who can’t even count? And the evidence that they can is … Sweden?
Sweden’s death rate from COVID-19 currently stands at 23.3 for every 100,000 of the population. In the neighbouring countries of Denmark, Norway and Finland, it is 7.5, 3.8 and 3.5, respectively. Perhaps the Swedes have had a better time of it the past six weeks. But at the price of three to seven times the number of deaths, proportionately? No thanks.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
How Pandemics End
An infectious outbreak can conclude in more ways than one, historians say. But for whom does it end, and who gets to decide?
When will the Covid-19 pandemic end? And how?
According to historians, pandemics typically have two types of endings: the medical, which occurs when the incidence and death rates plummet, and the social, when the epidemic of fear about the disease wanes.
“When people ask, ‘When will this end?,’ they are asking about the social ending,” said Dr. Jeremy Greene, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins.
In other words, an end can occur not because a disease has been vanquished but because people grow tired of panic mode and learn to live with a disease. Allan Brandt, a Harvard historian, said something similar was happening with Covid-19: “As we have seen in the debate about opening the economy, many questions about the so-called end are determined not by medical and public health data but by sociopolitical processes.”
Endings “are very, very messy,” said Dora Vargha, a historian at the University of Exeter. “Looking back, we have a weak narrative. For whom does the epidemic end, and who gets to say?”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/heal ... 778d3e6de3
An infectious outbreak can conclude in more ways than one, historians say. But for whom does it end, and who gets to decide?
When will the Covid-19 pandemic end? And how?
According to historians, pandemics typically have two types of endings: the medical, which occurs when the incidence and death rates plummet, and the social, when the epidemic of fear about the disease wanes.
“When people ask, ‘When will this end?,’ they are asking about the social ending,” said Dr. Jeremy Greene, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins.
In other words, an end can occur not because a disease has been vanquished but because people grow tired of panic mode and learn to live with a disease. Allan Brandt, a Harvard historian, said something similar was happening with Covid-19: “As we have seen in the debate about opening the economy, many questions about the so-called end are determined not by medical and public health data but by sociopolitical processes.”
Endings “are very, very messy,” said Dora Vargha, a historian at the University of Exeter. “Looking back, we have a weak narrative. For whom does the epidemic end, and who gets to say?”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/heal ... 778d3e6de3
What to Expect When a Coronavirus Vaccine Finally Arrives
Sobering lessons from the history of the polio vaccine.
On a spring morning in 1955, a pair of press officers greeted a mob of reporters in a stately hall on the University of Michigan campus. The officers had hot news: A clinical trial of the long-awaited polio vaccine had proved it to be safe and effective. The reporters nearly rioted in their scramble to spread the word. Once they did, church bells rang, and people ran into the streets to cheer.
In the midst of our current pandemic, collective hope for a vaccine is just as palpable and regularly reinforced — as it was with this week’s news of promising results from a small coronavirus vaccine test. The federal government’s top infectious-disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said that “the ultimate game changer in this will be a vaccine.” President Trump assured us that a vaccine is not far off. Television hosts and pundits claim that this goal is within reach because we’ve beaten infectious killers, such as polio, with vaccines in the past.
But America’s experience with polio should give us pause, not hope. The first effective polio vaccine followed decades of research and testing. Once fully tested, it was approved with record speed. Then there were life-threatening manufacturing problems. Distribution problems followed. Political fights broke out. After several years, enough Americans were vaccinated that cases plummeted — but they persisted in poor communities for over a decade. Polio’s full story should make us wary of promises that we will soon have the coronavirus under control with a vaccine.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Sobering lessons from the history of the polio vaccine.
On a spring morning in 1955, a pair of press officers greeted a mob of reporters in a stately hall on the University of Michigan campus. The officers had hot news: A clinical trial of the long-awaited polio vaccine had proved it to be safe and effective. The reporters nearly rioted in their scramble to spread the word. Once they did, church bells rang, and people ran into the streets to cheer.
In the midst of our current pandemic, collective hope for a vaccine is just as palpable and regularly reinforced — as it was with this week’s news of promising results from a small coronavirus vaccine test. The federal government’s top infectious-disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said that “the ultimate game changer in this will be a vaccine.” President Trump assured us that a vaccine is not far off. Television hosts and pundits claim that this goal is within reach because we’ve beaten infectious killers, such as polio, with vaccines in the past.
But America’s experience with polio should give us pause, not hope. The first effective polio vaccine followed decades of research and testing. Once fully tested, it was approved with record speed. Then there were life-threatening manufacturing problems. Distribution problems followed. Political fights broke out. After several years, enough Americans were vaccinated that cases plummeted — but they persisted in poor communities for over a decade. Polio’s full story should make us wary of promises that we will soon have the coronavirus under control with a vaccine.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/opin ... 778d3e6de3