Residents in Saudi Arabia and Yemen have been faced with the bewildering sight of a truly gargantuan swarm of roughly 360 billion locusts, which can block out the sun at times. But an even bigger swarm is coming soon.
The massive locust swarm measures roughly the size of Manhattan and has caused tens of millions of dollars worth of damage, devastating East Africa in one of the worst outbreaks in decades.
https://www.rt.com/news/479938-horde-lo ... di-arabia/
NATURAL DISASTERS
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INDIA Updated: May 22, 2020
Zia Haq
Hindustan Times, New Delhi
Locusts can fly up to 150 km daily and a one square km swarm can eat as much food as 35,000 people in terms of weight in a single day, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s Desert Locust Information Service bulletin.
India is on the alert for crop-munching desert locusts, which according to a UN warning, pose a “severe” risk to the country’s agriculture this year, as a top pest-monitoring agency flagged signs of an early-than-usual summer invasion of the species of grasshoppers from across Pakistan.
This has prompted the Union agriculture ministry to consider importing equipment from the UK, apart from deploying drones, satellite-derived tools, special fire-tenders and sprayers at pre-identified border locations.
Protocols are in place for India to hold videoconferencing meetings with authorities in Pakistan for joint strategies, an agriculture ministry official said requesting anonymity because he is not authorised to speak to the media.
Locusts can fly up to 150 km daily and a one square km swarm can eat as much food as 35,000 people in terms of weight in a single day, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s Desert Locust Information Service bulletin.
A surge in locust attacks since last year is being attributed to favourable breeding weather caused by a large number of cyclones in East Africa. India, China and Pakistan face the most risk in Asia, according to the UN. Pakistan has already declared an agricultural emergency, according to the official cited above.
Locust attacks are known to cause a considerable drop in agricultural output. A moderate infestation chomped through winter crops in an estimated 300,000 hectares in Rajasthan and Gujarat in January. The crucial summer sowing season begins next month.
The alert on Wednesday came after a month of monitoring by the locust warning office, a wing under the agriculture ministry’s directorate of plant protection. Their field agents spotted clouds of the insects in mid-April in Rajasthan’s Sri Ganganagar and Jaisalmer districts.
Agriculture minister Narendra Singh Tomar consulted representatives of the pesticide industry on May 13, a second plant quarantine department official said. Tomar reviewed broad measures to fight off infestations. The ministry now plans to import some equipment from the UK.
In December last year, India held preparatory meetings with Pakistani teams on the India-Pakistan border in Munabao and Khokhapar in Rajasthan’s Barmer district, an official said.
India is constantly monitoring the pests and scheduling more talks with Pakistani representatives during the entire June to September kharif (summer-sown) season, said KL Gurjar, deputy director at India’s directorate of plant protection.
Gurjar was one of the participants at the border talks in December. A report of a senior locust forecasting officer of FAO to the government noted that “swarms would be present in Haryana and Punjab, moving east towards Bangladesh similar to 1950 when there were devastating plagues that lasted up to 14 consecutive years.”
“Despite the Covid-19 lockdown, the locust control offices are working since April 11, 2020, with 50 spray equipment and vehicles, in coordination with officials of district administration and state agriculture department,” a statement from the farm ministry said.
Normally, with the arrival of the monsoon, locust swarms enter the Scheduled Desert Areas of India via Pakistan for breeding in June and July, but this year, their presence was first reported on April 11.
“The situation remains extremely alarming in the Horn of Africa, specifically Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, where widespread breeding is in progress and new swarms are expected to form in the coming weeks,” an FAO alert issued this month said.
Heavy cyclones made for favourable breeding conditions also in the southern Arabian Peninsula for at least nine months (June 2018 to March 2019), allowing “three generations of breeding that was undetected and not controlled”, FAO said.
Pest specialists are drawing on standard strategies, such as maintaining sufficient reserves of melathion, the principal insecticide. “Overnight, they can devour field after field. One large swarm can cover several districts,” said JN Thakur, a former chief of locust monitoring at the agriculture ministry.
According to Thakur, India has an experience of fighting the pest from two previous outbreaks, in 1950 and 1993, but the country lacks large insecticide-spraying aircraft, which are the most effective way of dealing with a large-scale crisis.
Until May 11, the pests have been “controlled in an area of ​​14,299 hectares of Jaisalmer, Sri Ganganagar, Jodhpur, Barmer, and Nagaur districts in Rajasthan and Fazilka districts of Punjab”, the official said. Swarms are active in Barmer, Phalodi (Jodhpur), Nagaur, Sriganganagar, and Ajmer districts of Rajasthan.
The Union government has decided to conduct awareness campaigns and training for farmers and officials from these states.
Zia Haq
Hindustan Times, New Delhi
Locusts can fly up to 150 km daily and a one square km swarm can eat as much food as 35,000 people in terms of weight in a single day, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s Desert Locust Information Service bulletin.
India is on the alert for crop-munching desert locusts, which according to a UN warning, pose a “severe” risk to the country’s agriculture this year, as a top pest-monitoring agency flagged signs of an early-than-usual summer invasion of the species of grasshoppers from across Pakistan.
This has prompted the Union agriculture ministry to consider importing equipment from the UK, apart from deploying drones, satellite-derived tools, special fire-tenders and sprayers at pre-identified border locations.
Protocols are in place for India to hold videoconferencing meetings with authorities in Pakistan for joint strategies, an agriculture ministry official said requesting anonymity because he is not authorised to speak to the media.
Locusts can fly up to 150 km daily and a one square km swarm can eat as much food as 35,000 people in terms of weight in a single day, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s Desert Locust Information Service bulletin.
A surge in locust attacks since last year is being attributed to favourable breeding weather caused by a large number of cyclones in East Africa. India, China and Pakistan face the most risk in Asia, according to the UN. Pakistan has already declared an agricultural emergency, according to the official cited above.
Locust attacks are known to cause a considerable drop in agricultural output. A moderate infestation chomped through winter crops in an estimated 300,000 hectares in Rajasthan and Gujarat in January. The crucial summer sowing season begins next month.
The alert on Wednesday came after a month of monitoring by the locust warning office, a wing under the agriculture ministry’s directorate of plant protection. Their field agents spotted clouds of the insects in mid-April in Rajasthan’s Sri Ganganagar and Jaisalmer districts.
Agriculture minister Narendra Singh Tomar consulted representatives of the pesticide industry on May 13, a second plant quarantine department official said. Tomar reviewed broad measures to fight off infestations. The ministry now plans to import some equipment from the UK.
In December last year, India held preparatory meetings with Pakistani teams on the India-Pakistan border in Munabao and Khokhapar in Rajasthan’s Barmer district, an official said.
India is constantly monitoring the pests and scheduling more talks with Pakistani representatives during the entire June to September kharif (summer-sown) season, said KL Gurjar, deputy director at India’s directorate of plant protection.
Gurjar was one of the participants at the border talks in December. A report of a senior locust forecasting officer of FAO to the government noted that “swarms would be present in Haryana and Punjab, moving east towards Bangladesh similar to 1950 when there were devastating plagues that lasted up to 14 consecutive years.”
“Despite the Covid-19 lockdown, the locust control offices are working since April 11, 2020, with 50 spray equipment and vehicles, in coordination with officials of district administration and state agriculture department,” a statement from the farm ministry said.
Normally, with the arrival of the monsoon, locust swarms enter the Scheduled Desert Areas of India via Pakistan for breeding in June and July, but this year, their presence was first reported on April 11.
“The situation remains extremely alarming in the Horn of Africa, specifically Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, where widespread breeding is in progress and new swarms are expected to form in the coming weeks,” an FAO alert issued this month said.
Heavy cyclones made for favourable breeding conditions also in the southern Arabian Peninsula for at least nine months (June 2018 to March 2019), allowing “three generations of breeding that was undetected and not controlled”, FAO said.
Pest specialists are drawing on standard strategies, such as maintaining sufficient reserves of melathion, the principal insecticide. “Overnight, they can devour field after field. One large swarm can cover several districts,” said JN Thakur, a former chief of locust monitoring at the agriculture ministry.
According to Thakur, India has an experience of fighting the pest from two previous outbreaks, in 1950 and 1993, but the country lacks large insecticide-spraying aircraft, which are the most effective way of dealing with a large-scale crisis.
Until May 11, the pests have been “controlled in an area of ​​14,299 hectares of Jaisalmer, Sri Ganganagar, Jodhpur, Barmer, and Nagaur districts in Rajasthan and Fazilka districts of Punjab”, the official said. Swarms are active in Barmer, Phalodi (Jodhpur), Nagaur, Sriganganagar, and Ajmer districts of Rajasthan.
The Union government has decided to conduct awareness campaigns and training for farmers and officials from these states.
This Country Fought Ebola. It May Beat Another Disease.
How to combat Covid-19 in a developing economy.
The coronavirus has struck the world’s most powerful economies first, leading countries in Europe, North America and East Asia to carry out an array of strategies to help control its spread. But as the virus picks up speed across the global south, those policies may not be applicable there. Low- and middle-income countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia and Nigeria should not blindly follow strategies that are sensible for richer nations.
Europe, the United States and Canada can offset the economic losses caused by social-distancing policies with stimulus payments to businesses and individuals. China can mobilize the power of its state apparatus to enforce compliance with lockdown orders. South Korea and Taiwan can deploy technologically sophisticated tracking methods to test and isolate cases.
But the developing world simply can’t replicate these measures. In addition, universal social distancing and work closures may do more harm than good in places where a disproportionate number of people depend on a day’s or week’s labor to feed their families. In many countries in the global south it is also not unusual to have 15 people or more living in a small structure, making social distancing virtually impossible.
Fortunately, there are simple measures that poorer countries can take that will slow the spread of the virus. It is urgent that such countries begin to take them.
Sierra Leone, drawing on its experience fighting an Ebola outbreak in 2014, offers a possible model for how to combat the coronavirus in a developing economy. The country is extremely poor, but it is deploying low-cost strategies to fight the pandemic that other low- and middle-income countries can adopt at large scale. (One of us, Mr. Meriggi, has advised the country’s Ministry of Health and Sanitation during the post-Ebola recovery.)
As of June 15, Sierra Leone had 1,176 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 51 deaths related to Covid-19. On April 11, the country started imposing a “soft” lockdown that limited inter-district travel and constrained working hours in an effort to protect the livelihood of most laborers. Sierra Leone was early to establish airport screening measures and traveler quarantines.
The government and its development partners have been distributing and encouraging the use of face masks and Veronica buckets, a Ghanaian invention popularized during the Ebola crisis. The buckets are simple wash stations with (sometimes bleached) water, along with soap and a plastic basin for washing hands. Since they do not require running water, they can be placed at police checkpoints on the way to and inside remote villages, as well as in upscale and urban areas.
Such frugal innovations make it easier to impose a policy of compulsory hand-washing or mask-wearing before entering villages or buildings. Low labor costs in Sierra Leone — as in other poor countries — also allow it to deploy people to monitor and encourage healthy behaviors, and to take people’s temperature with infrared thermometers as a condition of entry.
During the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, government officials in military vehicles blasted public health messages at people, who typically ran away instead of listening — a reasonable response, given the country’s history of civil war. Now the country is adopting a community-centered focus in tailoring those messages to specific populations and collaborating with local leaders to spread information. While the urban population is easier to reach with print, web and social media, people living in rural areas have less access to the internet and mobile technology. Village elders and chiefs, key female leaders, religious figures and local councils are being asked to provide Covid-19 information. Local “town criers” with boomboxes broadcast health messages on foot.
Sierra Leone also established high standards during the Ebola crisis for local care in field units known as community care centers — temporary facilities in repurposed buildings or in makeshift structures with water pumps, electric generators and toilets. These centers were used mostly to isolate, test and treat Ebola patients. They were staffed with locals, which helped build trust among patients. Sierra Leone has adopted a similar model for isolating Covid-19 patients.
This is not to say that Sierra Leone is certain to win the fight against the coronavirus. The government has acknowledged serious challenges, including limited testing capacity, difficulties enforcing quarantine regimens and obstacles to supplying care centers. The health system remains comparatively weak, and if the virus spreads more widely, as with Ebola, millions could be left unable to get care.
But this harsh reality only underscores the importance of simple, inexpensive policies and solutions that can prevent widespread infection and enable poor people to work and feed their families. Though each country will have to find out what works best in its own context, governments and emergency medical workers across the global south deserve more information about coronavirus strategies that are viable for them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/opin ... 778d3e6de3
How to combat Covid-19 in a developing economy.
The coronavirus has struck the world’s most powerful economies first, leading countries in Europe, North America and East Asia to carry out an array of strategies to help control its spread. But as the virus picks up speed across the global south, those policies may not be applicable there. Low- and middle-income countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia and Nigeria should not blindly follow strategies that are sensible for richer nations.
Europe, the United States and Canada can offset the economic losses caused by social-distancing policies with stimulus payments to businesses and individuals. China can mobilize the power of its state apparatus to enforce compliance with lockdown orders. South Korea and Taiwan can deploy technologically sophisticated tracking methods to test and isolate cases.
But the developing world simply can’t replicate these measures. In addition, universal social distancing and work closures may do more harm than good in places where a disproportionate number of people depend on a day’s or week’s labor to feed their families. In many countries in the global south it is also not unusual to have 15 people or more living in a small structure, making social distancing virtually impossible.
Fortunately, there are simple measures that poorer countries can take that will slow the spread of the virus. It is urgent that such countries begin to take them.
Sierra Leone, drawing on its experience fighting an Ebola outbreak in 2014, offers a possible model for how to combat the coronavirus in a developing economy. The country is extremely poor, but it is deploying low-cost strategies to fight the pandemic that other low- and middle-income countries can adopt at large scale. (One of us, Mr. Meriggi, has advised the country’s Ministry of Health and Sanitation during the post-Ebola recovery.)
As of June 15, Sierra Leone had 1,176 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 51 deaths related to Covid-19. On April 11, the country started imposing a “soft” lockdown that limited inter-district travel and constrained working hours in an effort to protect the livelihood of most laborers. Sierra Leone was early to establish airport screening measures and traveler quarantines.
The government and its development partners have been distributing and encouraging the use of face masks and Veronica buckets, a Ghanaian invention popularized during the Ebola crisis. The buckets are simple wash stations with (sometimes bleached) water, along with soap and a plastic basin for washing hands. Since they do not require running water, they can be placed at police checkpoints on the way to and inside remote villages, as well as in upscale and urban areas.
Such frugal innovations make it easier to impose a policy of compulsory hand-washing or mask-wearing before entering villages or buildings. Low labor costs in Sierra Leone — as in other poor countries — also allow it to deploy people to monitor and encourage healthy behaviors, and to take people’s temperature with infrared thermometers as a condition of entry.
During the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, government officials in military vehicles blasted public health messages at people, who typically ran away instead of listening — a reasonable response, given the country’s history of civil war. Now the country is adopting a community-centered focus in tailoring those messages to specific populations and collaborating with local leaders to spread information. While the urban population is easier to reach with print, web and social media, people living in rural areas have less access to the internet and mobile technology. Village elders and chiefs, key female leaders, religious figures and local councils are being asked to provide Covid-19 information. Local “town criers” with boomboxes broadcast health messages on foot.
Sierra Leone also established high standards during the Ebola crisis for local care in field units known as community care centers — temporary facilities in repurposed buildings or in makeshift structures with water pumps, electric generators and toilets. These centers were used mostly to isolate, test and treat Ebola patients. They were staffed with locals, which helped build trust among patients. Sierra Leone has adopted a similar model for isolating Covid-19 patients.
This is not to say that Sierra Leone is certain to win the fight against the coronavirus. The government has acknowledged serious challenges, including limited testing capacity, difficulties enforcing quarantine regimens and obstacles to supplying care centers. The health system remains comparatively weak, and if the virus spreads more widely, as with Ebola, millions could be left unable to get care.
But this harsh reality only underscores the importance of simple, inexpensive policies and solutions that can prevent widespread infection and enable poor people to work and feed their families. Though each country will have to find out what works best in its own context, governments and emergency medical workers across the global south deserve more information about coronavirus strategies that are viable for them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale
Its decision to carry on in the face of the pandemic has yielded a surge of deaths without sparing its economy from damage — a red flag as the United States and Britain move to lift lockdowns.
LONDON — Ever since the coronavirus emerged in Europe, Sweden has captured international attention by conducting an unorthodox, open-air experiment. It has allowed the world to examine what happens in a pandemic when a government allows life to carry on largely unhindered.
This is what has happened: Not only have thousands more people died than in neighboring countries that imposed lockdowns, but Sweden’s economy has fared little better.
“They literally gained nothing,” said Jacob F. Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “It’s a self-inflicted wound, and they have no economic gains.”
The results of Sweden’s experience are relevant well beyond Scandinavian shores. In the United States, where the virus is spreading with alarming speed, many states have — at President Trump’s urging — avoided lockdowns or lifted them prematurely on the assumption that this would foster economic revival, allowing people to return to workplaces, shops and restaurants.
In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson — previously hospitalized with Covid-19 — reopened pubs and restaurants last weekend in a bid to restore normal economic life.
Implicit in these approaches is the assumption that governments must balance saving lives against the imperative to spare jobs, with the extra health risks of rolling back social distancing potentially justified by a resulting boost to prosperity. But Sweden’s grim result — more death, and nearly equal economic damage — suggests that the supposed choice between lives and paychecks is a false one: A failure to impose social distancing can cost lives and jobs at the same time.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/busi ... 778d3e6de3
Its decision to carry on in the face of the pandemic has yielded a surge of deaths without sparing its economy from damage — a red flag as the United States and Britain move to lift lockdowns.
LONDON — Ever since the coronavirus emerged in Europe, Sweden has captured international attention by conducting an unorthodox, open-air experiment. It has allowed the world to examine what happens in a pandemic when a government allows life to carry on largely unhindered.
This is what has happened: Not only have thousands more people died than in neighboring countries that imposed lockdowns, but Sweden’s economy has fared little better.
“They literally gained nothing,” said Jacob F. Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “It’s a self-inflicted wound, and they have no economic gains.”
The results of Sweden’s experience are relevant well beyond Scandinavian shores. In the United States, where the virus is spreading with alarming speed, many states have — at President Trump’s urging — avoided lockdowns or lifted them prematurely on the assumption that this would foster economic revival, allowing people to return to workplaces, shops and restaurants.
In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson — previously hospitalized with Covid-19 — reopened pubs and restaurants last weekend in a bid to restore normal economic life.
Implicit in these approaches is the assumption that governments must balance saving lives against the imperative to spare jobs, with the extra health risks of rolling back social distancing potentially justified by a resulting boost to prosperity. But Sweden’s grim result — more death, and nearly equal economic damage — suggests that the supposed choice between lives and paychecks is a false one: A failure to impose social distancing can cost lives and jobs at the same time.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/busi ... 778d3e6de3
A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything.
The country’s latest calamity illustrates a striking inequity of our time: The people least responsible for climate change are among those most hurt by its consequences.
Torrential rains have submerged at least a quarter of Bangladesh, washing away the few things that count as assets for some of the world’s poorest people — their goats and chickens, houses of mud and tin, sacks of rice stored for the lean season.
It is the latest calamity to strike the delta nation of 165 million people. Only two months ago, a cyclone pummeled the country’s southwest. Along the coast, a rising sea has swallowed entire villages. And while it’s too soon to ascertain what role climate change has played in these latest floods, Bangladesh is already witnessing a pattern of more severe and more frequent river flooding than in the past along the mighty Brahmaputra River, scientists say, and that is projected to worsen in the years ahead as climate change intensifies the rains.
“The suffering will go up,” said Sajedul Hasan, the humanitarian director of BRAC, an international development organization based in Bangladesh that is distributing food, cash and liquid soap to displaced people.
This is one of the most striking inequities of the modern era. Those who are least responsible for polluting Earth’s atmosphere are among those most hurt by its consequences. The average American is responsible for 33 times more planet-warming carbon dioxide than the average Bangladeshi.
This chasm has bedeviled diplomacy for a generation, and it is once again in stark relief as the coronavirus pandemic upends the global economy and threatens to push the world’s most vulnerable people deeper into ruin.
An estimated 24 to 37 percent of the country’s landmass is submerged, according to government estimates and satellite data By Tuesday, according to the most recent figures available, nearly a million homes were inundated and 4.7 million people were affected. At least 54 have died, most of them children.
Photos, maps and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/clim ... 778d3e6de3
The country’s latest calamity illustrates a striking inequity of our time: The people least responsible for climate change are among those most hurt by its consequences.
Torrential rains have submerged at least a quarter of Bangladesh, washing away the few things that count as assets for some of the world’s poorest people — their goats and chickens, houses of mud and tin, sacks of rice stored for the lean season.
It is the latest calamity to strike the delta nation of 165 million people. Only two months ago, a cyclone pummeled the country’s southwest. Along the coast, a rising sea has swallowed entire villages. And while it’s too soon to ascertain what role climate change has played in these latest floods, Bangladesh is already witnessing a pattern of more severe and more frequent river flooding than in the past along the mighty Brahmaputra River, scientists say, and that is projected to worsen in the years ahead as climate change intensifies the rains.
“The suffering will go up,” said Sajedul Hasan, the humanitarian director of BRAC, an international development organization based in Bangladesh that is distributing food, cash and liquid soap to displaced people.
This is one of the most striking inequities of the modern era. Those who are least responsible for polluting Earth’s atmosphere are among those most hurt by its consequences. The average American is responsible for 33 times more planet-warming carbon dioxide than the average Bangladeshi.
This chasm has bedeviled diplomacy for a generation, and it is once again in stark relief as the coronavirus pandemic upends the global economy and threatens to push the world’s most vulnerable people deeper into ruin.
An estimated 24 to 37 percent of the country’s landmass is submerged, according to government estimates and satellite data By Tuesday, according to the most recent figures available, nearly a million homes were inundated and 4.7 million people were affected. At least 54 have died, most of them children.
Photos, maps and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/clim ... 778d3e6de3
Sweden's Success is Kryptonite for Lockdown and Mask Advocates
Their long term strategy is working.
Here in the United States, we have become inundated with tales of COVID-19 doom and gloom. In America, the mainstream narrative is rife with hopelessness. We are told that there is simply no way to stop this virus without repetitive lockdowns, healthy quarantine, even of asymptomatic individuals, and universal mask mandates. And even with all of those extreme policy measures put in place, the politicians and public health officials tell us that we will have to wait for a vaccine for the country to even think about our “new normal” following the COVID-19 pandemic.
There’s one country that they don’t seem to want to talk about - Sweden. And for good reason. Sweden debunks the hysteria. Sweden shows how unnecessary all of the interventions to “fight” the virus are. Sweden shows us that a rational, evidence-based approach to the pandemic is now thriving.
In Sweden, there’s no masks, no lockdown, no vaccine, and most importantly, no problem.
Life has largely returned to normal in Sweden, and it all happened without the economy-destroying non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) demanded by the “public health expert” class, who guaranteed that chaos would come to every country that disobeyed their commands to hit the self-destruct button for their nations.
The Swedish government has provided its advanced metrics on the COVID-19 pandemic to the public, and the data includes the ever-important statistics on actual day of death, and other useful information. I ran the numbers month by month so you can get a very clear picture of Sweden’s downward trend.
Data, charts and more..
https://jordanschachtel.substack.com/p/ ... tonite-for
*******
New Study Finds Sweden’s Refusal To Lock Down Saved The Economy Without Sacrificing Lives
Sweden has an intact economy, a citizenry with greater immunity to COVID-19, and a death rate per million lower than Italy's — all with no lockdown.
To prove a study isn’t suffering from selection bias, one of the best methods is to find cases or studies with similar precepts that show different results. When conclusions and expertise are constantly challenged by counter-conclusions and counter-expertise, the better the investigative process becomes, and everyone benefits with a better-refined outcome. In studying different results of similar assumptions, we have a better chance of isolating and understanding causal variables.
After five months of a total collapse of social life under forced quarantines, if we are indeed facing a second wave with no vaccines yet, it’s time to declare that Sweden’s approach was correct all along. While the majority of political leaders around the globe panicked, lost their nerve, and — at least temporarily — wrecked our countries, that wasn’t the case everywhere.
In refusing to lock down citizens over coronavirus, Sweden appears to have both managed to avoid an economic crash as well as a devastating death toll. As Americans and most of the rest of the world ponder how to handle second or even third waves of the coronavirus and the prospect of further lockdown, Sweden is now likely on her way to immunity.
As the pandemic struck, the Swedes normalized as much as they could, while maintaining a measure of social distancing. What Sweden didn’t do, unlike most of the globe, is reflexively dive into a full-lockdown scenario. Instead, they allowed life to go continue as ordinarily as possible. Stores remained open. Restaurants remained open. Most importantly, schools remained open as well. The state banned public gatherings of more than 50 people, but any further social distancing measures were largely unenforced and voluntary.
More...
https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/10/ne ... ing-lives/
Their long term strategy is working.
Here in the United States, we have become inundated with tales of COVID-19 doom and gloom. In America, the mainstream narrative is rife with hopelessness. We are told that there is simply no way to stop this virus without repetitive lockdowns, healthy quarantine, even of asymptomatic individuals, and universal mask mandates. And even with all of those extreme policy measures put in place, the politicians and public health officials tell us that we will have to wait for a vaccine for the country to even think about our “new normal” following the COVID-19 pandemic.
There’s one country that they don’t seem to want to talk about - Sweden. And for good reason. Sweden debunks the hysteria. Sweden shows how unnecessary all of the interventions to “fight” the virus are. Sweden shows us that a rational, evidence-based approach to the pandemic is now thriving.
In Sweden, there’s no masks, no lockdown, no vaccine, and most importantly, no problem.
Life has largely returned to normal in Sweden, and it all happened without the economy-destroying non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) demanded by the “public health expert” class, who guaranteed that chaos would come to every country that disobeyed their commands to hit the self-destruct button for their nations.
The Swedish government has provided its advanced metrics on the COVID-19 pandemic to the public, and the data includes the ever-important statistics on actual day of death, and other useful information. I ran the numbers month by month so you can get a very clear picture of Sweden’s downward trend.
Data, charts and more..
https://jordanschachtel.substack.com/p/ ... tonite-for
*******
New Study Finds Sweden’s Refusal To Lock Down Saved The Economy Without Sacrificing Lives
Sweden has an intact economy, a citizenry with greater immunity to COVID-19, and a death rate per million lower than Italy's — all with no lockdown.
To prove a study isn’t suffering from selection bias, one of the best methods is to find cases or studies with similar precepts that show different results. When conclusions and expertise are constantly challenged by counter-conclusions and counter-expertise, the better the investigative process becomes, and everyone benefits with a better-refined outcome. In studying different results of similar assumptions, we have a better chance of isolating and understanding causal variables.
After five months of a total collapse of social life under forced quarantines, if we are indeed facing a second wave with no vaccines yet, it’s time to declare that Sweden’s approach was correct all along. While the majority of political leaders around the globe panicked, lost their nerve, and — at least temporarily — wrecked our countries, that wasn’t the case everywhere.
In refusing to lock down citizens over coronavirus, Sweden appears to have both managed to avoid an economic crash as well as a devastating death toll. As Americans and most of the rest of the world ponder how to handle second or even third waves of the coronavirus and the prospect of further lockdown, Sweden is now likely on her way to immunity.
As the pandemic struck, the Swedes normalized as much as they could, while maintaining a measure of social distancing. What Sweden didn’t do, unlike most of the globe, is reflexively dive into a full-lockdown scenario. Instead, they allowed life to go continue as ordinarily as possible. Stores remained open. Restaurants remained open. Most importantly, schools remained open as well. The state banned public gatherings of more than 50 people, but any further social distancing measures were largely unenforced and voluntary.
More...
https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/10/ne ... ing-lives/
What if ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Closer Than Scientists Thought?
In what may be the world’s most important math puzzle, researchers are trying to figure out how many people in a community must be immune before the coronavirus fades.
We’ve known from the beginning how the end will arrive. Eventually, the coronavirus will be unable to find enough susceptible hosts to survive, fading out wherever it briefly emerges.
To achieve so-called herd immunity — the point at which the virus can no longer spread widely because there are not enough vulnerable humans — scientists have suggested that perhaps 70 percent of a given population must be immune, through vaccination or because they survived the infection.
Now some researchers are wrestling with a hopeful possibility. In interviews with The New York Times, more than a dozen scientists said that the threshold is likely to be much lower: just 50 percent, perhaps even less. If that’s true, then it may be possible to turn back the coronavirus more quickly than once thought.
The new estimates result from complicated statistical modeling of the pandemic, and the models have all taken divergent approaches, yielding inconsistent estimates. It is not certain that any community in the world has enough residents now immune to the virus to resist a second wave.
But in parts of New York, London and Mumbai, for example, it is not inconceivable that there is already substantial immunity to the coronavirus, scientists said.
“I’m quite prepared to believe that there are pockets in New York City and London which have substantial immunity,” said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “What happens this winter will reflect that.”
“The question of what it means for the population as a whole, however, is much more fraught,” he added.
Herd immunity is calculated from the epidemic’s so-called reproductive number, R0, an indicator of how many people each infected person spreads the virus to.
The initial calculations for the herd immunity threshold assumed that each community member had the same susceptibility to the virus and mixed randomly with everyone else in the community.
“That doesn’t happen in real life,” said Dr. Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health. “Herd immunity could vary from group to group, and subpopulation to subpopulation,” and even by postal codes, he said.
For example, a neighborhood of older people may have little contact with others but succumb to the virus quickly when they encounter it, whereas teenagers may bequeath the virus to dozens of contacts and yet stay healthy themselves. The virus moves slowly in suburban and rural areas, where people live far apart, but zips through cities and households thick with people.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/17/heal ... 778d3e6de3
In what may be the world’s most important math puzzle, researchers are trying to figure out how many people in a community must be immune before the coronavirus fades.
We’ve known from the beginning how the end will arrive. Eventually, the coronavirus will be unable to find enough susceptible hosts to survive, fading out wherever it briefly emerges.
To achieve so-called herd immunity — the point at which the virus can no longer spread widely because there are not enough vulnerable humans — scientists have suggested that perhaps 70 percent of a given population must be immune, through vaccination or because they survived the infection.
Now some researchers are wrestling with a hopeful possibility. In interviews with The New York Times, more than a dozen scientists said that the threshold is likely to be much lower: just 50 percent, perhaps even less. If that’s true, then it may be possible to turn back the coronavirus more quickly than once thought.
The new estimates result from complicated statistical modeling of the pandemic, and the models have all taken divergent approaches, yielding inconsistent estimates. It is not certain that any community in the world has enough residents now immune to the virus to resist a second wave.
But in parts of New York, London and Mumbai, for example, it is not inconceivable that there is already substantial immunity to the coronavirus, scientists said.
“I’m quite prepared to believe that there are pockets in New York City and London which have substantial immunity,” said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “What happens this winter will reflect that.”
“The question of what it means for the population as a whole, however, is much more fraught,” he added.
Herd immunity is calculated from the epidemic’s so-called reproductive number, R0, an indicator of how many people each infected person spreads the virus to.
The initial calculations for the herd immunity threshold assumed that each community member had the same susceptibility to the virus and mixed randomly with everyone else in the community.
“That doesn’t happen in real life,” said Dr. Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health. “Herd immunity could vary from group to group, and subpopulation to subpopulation,” and even by postal codes, he said.
For example, a neighborhood of older people may have little contact with others but succumb to the virus quickly when they encounter it, whereas teenagers may bequeath the virus to dozens of contacts and yet stay healthy themselves. The virus moves slowly in suburban and rural areas, where people live far apart, but zips through cities and households thick with people.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/17/heal ... 778d3e6de3
Saliva tests could be the key to crushing this pandemic
Eric Brown is a professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University in Hamilton.
COVID-19 is an invisible enemy. While we weren’t prepared for this pandemic and researchers around the world are racing to develop a vaccine for it, we have learned an important lesson: testing is critical if we are to defeat this virus and prepare for any future pandemic.
New forms of rapid, non-invasive, saliva-based tests, ones that can be administered with speed and ease by anyone, could test COVID-19 into oblivion with widespread use. This is not science fiction. There are many such tests in the making.
Research has shown that about 40 per cent of patients infected are asymptomatic, which is in large part responsible for the astonishing spread of the virus. Testing saliva samples from every Canadian on a routine basis would reduce the reproductive number of the virus – the number of people one might, on average, infect – as we quickly identify, isolate and care for the infected. The result would be a dramatic decline in infections, sickness and death.
While there is growing optimism a COVID-19 vaccine will be effective, there are no guarantees. We could be expecting a miracle that may never come. We need only consider the AIDS epidemic, which first emerged nearly 40 years ago. It took more than a decade to get effective therapies for HIV patients, and there is still no vaccine today.
The United States has set a target for a COVID-19 vaccine by year-end, and 10,000,000 doses of a Canadian-made vaccine are projected to be available for March, 2021. This is a long time to wait, but it is also very ambitious, indeed unprecedented, in terms of the time required for vaccine development. There may be delays, setbacks and outright failures in clinical trials.
At the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University, we are researching new therapies, diagnostics and vaccines. We recognize what a game-changer daily COVID-19 testing could be to the workplace, to education and to the wider community. With this in mind, we are embarking on new research to study saliva-based testing. We want to understand the logistics of such an effort, how it might facilitate a return to normalcy and how we might scale this quickly for our entire university and even larger communities.
Consider what we are seeing in professional sports. COVID-19 testing conducted every day on asymptomatic players and staff has made it possible to watch the the NHL playoffs and to follow the Toronto Raptors as they attempt to defend their NBA title.
Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted emergency approval of a saliva diagnostic test developed by the Yale School of Public Health in partnership with the NBA and first trialed within the NBA bubble. This is a lab-based test designed for widespread public screening using saliva instead of the dreaded deep nasal swab.
Analyzing saliva samples can solve many lingering issues related to nasal swab testing, which is expensive, unpleasant and requires trained medical professionals who are at risk from a procedure that often induces coughing and sneezing.
It can eliminate problems within the supply chain too, including costly, hard-to-source swabs, sample storage and testing liquids. Certainly one of the most promising aspects is that saliva sampling can be self-administered at a fraction of the cost of conventional swab testing.
A saliva-based lab test is the first hurdle. The next step is to develop a test that doesn’t require a lab, and this, too, is within reach.
Daily at-home testing would be a game-changer. Imagine spitting into a tube or onto a piece of treated paper, and monitoring to see if it turns colour: green means go to school or work, red means isolate and engage with the health-care system.
Students could go to school, employees could return to the workplace and health-care workers could do their jobs with security and without worry, bringing normalcy to health care, education and the economy.
But critics argue that at-home tests are risky. Health Canada has been wary, initially ruling them out due to accuracy concerns, but later reversing its stance and agreeing to review applications for home tests. New COVID-19 testing technology could be a breakthrough for this pandemic, so it’s important that Health Canada is open to it.
No question, new testing technology is also a wise investment for the future. COVID-19 may be a dress rehearsal for another even more deadly pandemic, and we will be better prepared to respond quickly, averting the madness of 2020.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
Eric Brown is a professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University in Hamilton.
COVID-19 is an invisible enemy. While we weren’t prepared for this pandemic and researchers around the world are racing to develop a vaccine for it, we have learned an important lesson: testing is critical if we are to defeat this virus and prepare for any future pandemic.
New forms of rapid, non-invasive, saliva-based tests, ones that can be administered with speed and ease by anyone, could test COVID-19 into oblivion with widespread use. This is not science fiction. There are many such tests in the making.
Research has shown that about 40 per cent of patients infected are asymptomatic, which is in large part responsible for the astonishing spread of the virus. Testing saliva samples from every Canadian on a routine basis would reduce the reproductive number of the virus – the number of people one might, on average, infect – as we quickly identify, isolate and care for the infected. The result would be a dramatic decline in infections, sickness and death.
While there is growing optimism a COVID-19 vaccine will be effective, there are no guarantees. We could be expecting a miracle that may never come. We need only consider the AIDS epidemic, which first emerged nearly 40 years ago. It took more than a decade to get effective therapies for HIV patients, and there is still no vaccine today.
The United States has set a target for a COVID-19 vaccine by year-end, and 10,000,000 doses of a Canadian-made vaccine are projected to be available for March, 2021. This is a long time to wait, but it is also very ambitious, indeed unprecedented, in terms of the time required for vaccine development. There may be delays, setbacks and outright failures in clinical trials.
At the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University, we are researching new therapies, diagnostics and vaccines. We recognize what a game-changer daily COVID-19 testing could be to the workplace, to education and to the wider community. With this in mind, we are embarking on new research to study saliva-based testing. We want to understand the logistics of such an effort, how it might facilitate a return to normalcy and how we might scale this quickly for our entire university and even larger communities.
Consider what we are seeing in professional sports. COVID-19 testing conducted every day on asymptomatic players and staff has made it possible to watch the the NHL playoffs and to follow the Toronto Raptors as they attempt to defend their NBA title.
Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted emergency approval of a saliva diagnostic test developed by the Yale School of Public Health in partnership with the NBA and first trialed within the NBA bubble. This is a lab-based test designed for widespread public screening using saliva instead of the dreaded deep nasal swab.
Analyzing saliva samples can solve many lingering issues related to nasal swab testing, which is expensive, unpleasant and requires trained medical professionals who are at risk from a procedure that often induces coughing and sneezing.
It can eliminate problems within the supply chain too, including costly, hard-to-source swabs, sample storage and testing liquids. Certainly one of the most promising aspects is that saliva sampling can be self-administered at a fraction of the cost of conventional swab testing.
A saliva-based lab test is the first hurdle. The next step is to develop a test that doesn’t require a lab, and this, too, is within reach.
Daily at-home testing would be a game-changer. Imagine spitting into a tube or onto a piece of treated paper, and monitoring to see if it turns colour: green means go to school or work, red means isolate and engage with the health-care system.
Students could go to school, employees could return to the workplace and health-care workers could do their jobs with security and without worry, bringing normalcy to health care, education and the economy.
But critics argue that at-home tests are risky. Health Canada has been wary, initially ruling them out due to accuracy concerns, but later reversing its stance and agreeing to review applications for home tests. New COVID-19 testing technology could be a breakthrough for this pandemic, so it’s important that Health Canada is open to it.
No question, new testing technology is also a wise investment for the future. COVID-19 may be a dress rehearsal for another even more deadly pandemic, and we will be better prepared to respond quickly, averting the madness of 2020.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
'Doomsday Glacier' melting quickly from the inside, British Antarctic Survey shows
Telegraph reporters
The Telegraph September 9, 2020, 7:54 AM CDT
A five-year research project, involving 100 scientists, is the biggest US-UK joint scientific project in Antarctica since the 1940s
A team of British and American scientists have for the first time mapped the area around Antarctica’s ‘doomsday glacier’ in a bid to understand why it is melting so rapidly.
Thwaites glacier, which is roughly the size of Great Britain, accounts for 4 per cent of world sea level rise each year, and is melting at an accelerating rate.
Scientists have now mapped the channels surrounding the glacier which they believe are providing access for warm water that is causing it to melt.
They have discovered they are much deeper than previously believed, up to 600m deep.
“Think of six football pitches back to back," Dr Kelly Hogan from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), told the BBC.
The scale of the channels means they are allowing vast amounts of water in that attack the underside of the glacier’s ice.
A team of UK and US scientists travelled to West Antarctica in 2019 on a five-year £20m mission to find out why the Thwaites Glacier is melting so rapidly, losing around 8 times as much ice annually as it did in the 1990s.
Their work was interrupted by the Covid-19 crisis, as the remoteness of the glacier, some 1,000 miles from the nearest research base, meant scientists could not be helped if they fell ill.
Described as the most vulnerable place in Antarctica, the glacier would add 65cm to global sea levels should it collapse, and could cause a domino effect on other parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Sea level rise is predicted to be particularly devastating for East Asia and the Pacific, with more than a quarter of the population of Vietnam facing inundation if the entire West Antarctic ice sheet were to collapse.
Scientists on the project hope they will ultimately be able to predict the trajectory of the melting ice, and what the knock-on effects might be.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/do ... 18324.html
Telegraph reporters
The Telegraph September 9, 2020, 7:54 AM CDT
A five-year research project, involving 100 scientists, is the biggest US-UK joint scientific project in Antarctica since the 1940s
A team of British and American scientists have for the first time mapped the area around Antarctica’s ‘doomsday glacier’ in a bid to understand why it is melting so rapidly.
Thwaites glacier, which is roughly the size of Great Britain, accounts for 4 per cent of world sea level rise each year, and is melting at an accelerating rate.
Scientists have now mapped the channels surrounding the glacier which they believe are providing access for warm water that is causing it to melt.
They have discovered they are much deeper than previously believed, up to 600m deep.
“Think of six football pitches back to back," Dr Kelly Hogan from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), told the BBC.
The scale of the channels means they are allowing vast amounts of water in that attack the underside of the glacier’s ice.
A team of UK and US scientists travelled to West Antarctica in 2019 on a five-year £20m mission to find out why the Thwaites Glacier is melting so rapidly, losing around 8 times as much ice annually as it did in the 1990s.
Their work was interrupted by the Covid-19 crisis, as the remoteness of the glacier, some 1,000 miles from the nearest research base, meant scientists could not be helped if they fell ill.
Described as the most vulnerable place in Antarctica, the glacier would add 65cm to global sea levels should it collapse, and could cause a domino effect on other parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Sea level rise is predicted to be particularly devastating for East Asia and the Pacific, with more than a quarter of the population of Vietnam facing inundation if the entire West Antarctic ice sheet were to collapse.
Scientists on the project hope they will ultimately be able to predict the trajectory of the melting ice, and what the knock-on effects might be.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/do ... 18324.html
How China Brought Nearly 200 Million Students Back to School
China says the reopening of classrooms proves that its top-down system is superior. To overwhelmed teachers and students stuck on campuses, its restrictions can feel like overkill.
Under bright blue skies, nearly 2,000 students gathered this month for the start of school at Hanyang No. 1 High School in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus first emerged.
Medical staff stood guard at school entrances, taking temperatures. Administrative officials reviewed the students’ travel histories and coronavirus test results. Local Communist Party cadres kept watch, making sure teachers followed detailed instructions on hygiene and showed an “anti-epidemic spirit.”
“I’m not worried,” a music teacher at the school, Yang Meng, said in an interview. “Wuhan is now the safest place.”
As countries around the world struggle to safely reopen schools this fall, China is harnessing the power of its authoritarian system to offer in-person learning for about 195 million students in kindergarten through 12th grade at public schools.
While the Communist Party has adopted many of the same sanitation and distancing procedures used elsewhere, it has rolled them out with a characteristic all-out, command-and-control approach that brooks no dissent. It has mobilized battalions of local officials and party cadres to inspect classrooms, deployed apps and other technology to monitor students and staff, and restricted their movements. It has even told parents to stay away for fear of spreading germs.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said in a speech on Tuesday that the country’s progress in fighting the virus, including the opening of schools, had “fully demonstrated the clear superiority of Communist Party leadership and our socialist system.”
China’s top-down, state-led political system allows the party to drive its vast bureaucracy in pursuit of a single target — an approach that would be nearly impossible anywhere else in the world.
In the United States, where the pandemic is still raging, discussions about how and when to resume in-person classes have been fraught. An absence of a national strategy has left school districts to craft their own approach. Coronavirus tests can be hard to come by. Parents have expressed misgivings about sending their children back to classrooms. Teachers’ unions have threatened to strike, while college students have flouted rules against gatherings.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/12/worl ... 778d3e6de3
China says the reopening of classrooms proves that its top-down system is superior. To overwhelmed teachers and students stuck on campuses, its restrictions can feel like overkill.
Under bright blue skies, nearly 2,000 students gathered this month for the start of school at Hanyang No. 1 High School in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus first emerged.
Medical staff stood guard at school entrances, taking temperatures. Administrative officials reviewed the students’ travel histories and coronavirus test results. Local Communist Party cadres kept watch, making sure teachers followed detailed instructions on hygiene and showed an “anti-epidemic spirit.”
“I’m not worried,” a music teacher at the school, Yang Meng, said in an interview. “Wuhan is now the safest place.”
As countries around the world struggle to safely reopen schools this fall, China is harnessing the power of its authoritarian system to offer in-person learning for about 195 million students in kindergarten through 12th grade at public schools.
While the Communist Party has adopted many of the same sanitation and distancing procedures used elsewhere, it has rolled them out with a characteristic all-out, command-and-control approach that brooks no dissent. It has mobilized battalions of local officials and party cadres to inspect classrooms, deployed apps and other technology to monitor students and staff, and restricted their movements. It has even told parents to stay away for fear of spreading germs.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said in a speech on Tuesday that the country’s progress in fighting the virus, including the opening of schools, had “fully demonstrated the clear superiority of Communist Party leadership and our socialist system.”
China’s top-down, state-led political system allows the party to drive its vast bureaucracy in pursuit of a single target — an approach that would be nearly impossible anywhere else in the world.
In the United States, where the pandemic is still raging, discussions about how and when to resume in-person classes have been fraught. An absence of a national strategy has left school districts to craft their own approach. Coronavirus tests can be hard to come by. Parents have expressed misgivings about sending their children back to classrooms. Teachers’ unions have threatened to strike, while college students have flouted rules against gatherings.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/12/worl ... 778d3e6de3
California, the Most Calamitous Place on Earth
Drought, flood, wildfire, mudslide, earthquake — it’s a hell of a way to run through the seasons.
FRESNO, Calif. — I’ve lived in the middle of California for more than 50 years, which is another way of declaring my share of natural disasters. I’ve seen the land around me dragged through four long droughts, five big floods, a half-dozen earthquakes 7.0 or higher on the Richter scale and three of the 10 deadliest wildfires in U.S. history.
I’m now sitting in my home in Fresno on the edge of another historic blaze, the Creek Fire, counting the days for it to peter out, waiting for our collective amnesia to set down again like ash, so that Californians can go on with the madness of building in the same path of wildfire.
Figuring out this state isn’t easy. I’ve written more than a million words of history, memoir, essay, biography and journalism trying to get close. I’ve come to understand that the question of disaster and rebirth exists at the heart of our experiment. We’ve spent the past 170 years erecting a most intricate system — dams, aqueduct, canals, turbine pumps, power grids, roads, codes — to dull, if not defeat, nature.
Yet California remains one of the most calamitous places on earth. Drought, flood, wildfire, mudslide, earthquake — it’s a hell of a way to run through the seasons. When we’re caught in the clutches of one disaster, we forget all about the possibility of another. We consider this failure of memory to be our resilience. It’s a powerful force to behold.
William Brewer, who studied at Yale before coming west to survey California’s natural resources during the Gold Rush, watched the great deluge of 1862 erase the land. “Nearly every house and farm over this immense region is gone,” he reported. “America has never before seen such desolation by a flood as this has been.”
Yet Brewer had come to recognize the Californian’s peculiar fortitude to outlast everything. “No people can so stand calamity as this people,” he wrote. “They are used to it. Everyone is familiar with the history of fortunes quickly made and as quickly lost. It seems here, more than elsewhere, the natural order of things.”
My 22-year-old son, Jake, has outlasted the virus, the heat wave, the blackouts, the smoke and six months of lockdown by reading Dostoyevsky and Saroyan. He wonders if the wildfires herald the arrival of climate change. We talk existentialism over the hum of four machines that change our household air from “very unhealthy” to “good.” I remind him that California doesn’t need climate change to suffer disasters. We produce them quite fine on our own. Now that climate change has hitched aboard, we’ll see hazards we’ve never seen before.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Drought, flood, wildfire, mudslide, earthquake — it’s a hell of a way to run through the seasons.
FRESNO, Calif. — I’ve lived in the middle of California for more than 50 years, which is another way of declaring my share of natural disasters. I’ve seen the land around me dragged through four long droughts, five big floods, a half-dozen earthquakes 7.0 or higher on the Richter scale and three of the 10 deadliest wildfires in U.S. history.
I’m now sitting in my home in Fresno on the edge of another historic blaze, the Creek Fire, counting the days for it to peter out, waiting for our collective amnesia to set down again like ash, so that Californians can go on with the madness of building in the same path of wildfire.
Figuring out this state isn’t easy. I’ve written more than a million words of history, memoir, essay, biography and journalism trying to get close. I’ve come to understand that the question of disaster and rebirth exists at the heart of our experiment. We’ve spent the past 170 years erecting a most intricate system — dams, aqueduct, canals, turbine pumps, power grids, roads, codes — to dull, if not defeat, nature.
Yet California remains one of the most calamitous places on earth. Drought, flood, wildfire, mudslide, earthquake — it’s a hell of a way to run through the seasons. When we’re caught in the clutches of one disaster, we forget all about the possibility of another. We consider this failure of memory to be our resilience. It’s a powerful force to behold.
William Brewer, who studied at Yale before coming west to survey California’s natural resources during the Gold Rush, watched the great deluge of 1862 erase the land. “Nearly every house and farm over this immense region is gone,” he reported. “America has never before seen such desolation by a flood as this has been.”
Yet Brewer had come to recognize the Californian’s peculiar fortitude to outlast everything. “No people can so stand calamity as this people,” he wrote. “They are used to it. Everyone is familiar with the history of fortunes quickly made and as quickly lost. It seems here, more than elsewhere, the natural order of things.”
My 22-year-old son, Jake, has outlasted the virus, the heat wave, the blackouts, the smoke and six months of lockdown by reading Dostoyevsky and Saroyan. He wonders if the wildfires herald the arrival of climate change. We talk existentialism over the hum of four machines that change our household air from “very unhealthy” to “good.” I remind him that California doesn’t need climate change to suffer disasters. We produce them quite fine on our own. Now that climate change has hitched aboard, we’ll see hazards we’ve never seen before.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Pakistan’s Most Terrifying Adversary Is Climate Change
The country debates women’s honor inexhaustibly but pays little attention to the ferocious and imminent dangers of climate disasters.
Karachi, the commercial capital of Pakistan, was flooded in August after the heaviest rains in decades.
Karachi is home. My bustling, chaotic city of about 20 million people on the Arabian Sea is an ethnically and religiously diverse metropolis and the commercial capital of Pakistan, generating more than half of the country’s revenue.
Over the decades, Karachi has survived violent sectarian strife, political violence between warring groups claiming the city and terrorism. Karachi has survived its gangsters sparring with rocket launchers; its police force, more feared than common criminals; its rulers and bureaucrats committed to rapacious, bottomless corruption. Now Karachi faces its most terrifying adversary: climate change.
In August, Karachi’s stifling summer heat was heavy and pregnant. The sapodilla trees and frangipani leaves were lush and green; the Arabian Sea, quiet and distant, had grown muddy. When the palm fronds started to sway, slowly, the city knew the winds had picked up and rain would follow. Every year the monsoons come — angrier and wilder — lashing the unprepared city. Studies show that climate change is causing monsoons to be more intense and less predictable, and cover larger areas of land for longer periods of time.
On Aug. 27, Karachi received nearly nine inches of monsoon rain, the highest amount of rainfall ever in a single day. Nineteen inches of rain fell in August, according to the meteorological officials. It is enough to drown a city that has no functioning drainage, no emergency systems and no reliable health care (except for those who can pay). Thousands of homes and settlements of the poor were subsumed and destroyed, and more than 100 people were killed.
A traders association estimated that the submerging of markets and warehouses damaged goods worth 25 billion Pakistani rupees, or about $150 million. Local papers estimated that with Karachi at a standstill for a week, in some congested areas for longer, Pakistan’s gross domestic product suffered daily losses of $449 million — a number that didn’t include the enormous informal economy. The World Bank estimates that 15 percent of gross domestic product of the Sindh province (Karachi is its capital) is lost every year to environmental damage and climate change.
Pakistan is the fifth most climate vulnerable nation in the world. Between 1998 and 2018, according to the Global Climate Risk Index, the country is estimated to have lost nearly 10,000 lives to climate-related disasters and suffered losses amounting to about $4 billion from 152 extreme weather events in that period. Analysts have estimated Pakistan’s climate migrants over the past decade at around 30 million people.
More.....
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/27/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The country debates women’s honor inexhaustibly but pays little attention to the ferocious and imminent dangers of climate disasters.
Karachi, the commercial capital of Pakistan, was flooded in August after the heaviest rains in decades.
Karachi is home. My bustling, chaotic city of about 20 million people on the Arabian Sea is an ethnically and religiously diverse metropolis and the commercial capital of Pakistan, generating more than half of the country’s revenue.
Over the decades, Karachi has survived violent sectarian strife, political violence between warring groups claiming the city and terrorism. Karachi has survived its gangsters sparring with rocket launchers; its police force, more feared than common criminals; its rulers and bureaucrats committed to rapacious, bottomless corruption. Now Karachi faces its most terrifying adversary: climate change.
In August, Karachi’s stifling summer heat was heavy and pregnant. The sapodilla trees and frangipani leaves were lush and green; the Arabian Sea, quiet and distant, had grown muddy. When the palm fronds started to sway, slowly, the city knew the winds had picked up and rain would follow. Every year the monsoons come — angrier and wilder — lashing the unprepared city. Studies show that climate change is causing monsoons to be more intense and less predictable, and cover larger areas of land for longer periods of time.
On Aug. 27, Karachi received nearly nine inches of monsoon rain, the highest amount of rainfall ever in a single day. Nineteen inches of rain fell in August, according to the meteorological officials. It is enough to drown a city that has no functioning drainage, no emergency systems and no reliable health care (except for those who can pay). Thousands of homes and settlements of the poor were subsumed and destroyed, and more than 100 people were killed.
A traders association estimated that the submerging of markets and warehouses damaged goods worth 25 billion Pakistani rupees, or about $150 million. Local papers estimated that with Karachi at a standstill for a week, in some congested areas for longer, Pakistan’s gross domestic product suffered daily losses of $449 million — a number that didn’t include the enormous informal economy. The World Bank estimates that 15 percent of gross domestic product of the Sindh province (Karachi is its capital) is lost every year to environmental damage and climate change.
Pakistan is the fifth most climate vulnerable nation in the world. Between 1998 and 2018, according to the Global Climate Risk Index, the country is estimated to have lost nearly 10,000 lives to climate-related disasters and suffered losses amounting to about $4 billion from 152 extreme weather events in that period. Analysts have estimated Pakistan’s climate migrants over the past decade at around 30 million people.
More.....
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/27/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Testing Was Not Enough to Protect the White House
The key to slowing down the spread of coronavirus infections is to have few, if any, close contacts. There’s just no getting around it.
The president has been infected with coronavirus. Schadenfreude is inappropriate. This is, however, a good opportunity for leaders to rethink their current policies and rhetoric on prevention — because what the president’s case highlights are the limitations of even the best testing regimes.
The president is tested for coronavirus every day. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report the incubation period can be two to 14 days, it usually appears to be somewhere between three and five days after exposure. Given that President Trump tested positive on Thursday, he was most likely infected sometime between Saturday and Monday. We are usually concerned about a sick person being able to spread infections to others for up to two days before symptoms began or a test was positive. Therefore, the president might have been infectious to others as early as Tuesday. He probably interacted with many, many people in this time frame; likewise for Melania Trump and Hope Hicks.
The three of them will now need to isolate for at least 10 days. All of the people who were in close contact with them — and by close contact, I mean spent 15 minutes within six feet of them — will have to quarantine for two weeks, because they are at significantly increased risk of being infected themselves and infecting others. If any of them later test positive or show symptoms, they need to isolate for 10 days from that time.
This, in other words, is going to be a contact tracing fiasco — one that could easily shut down the White House.
Many, including me, have called for more testing for all. But what happened with Ms. Hicks and the president illustrates that testing doesn’t matter unless you close the infection loop with other interventions.
The president and the White House benefit from what is arguably the most rigorous coronavirus testing in the country. In the past, the White House has claimed that Mr. Trump is tested multiple times a day, and is the most tested man in the country.
Screening people without symptoms finds those who are infectious and gets them into quarantine and isolation earlier. But this doesn’t serve any purpose unless you’re also pairing this screening with careful behavior. Even if the infections of the president and others were discovered during regular screening, they still had a huge number of contacts; it’s still a disaster. If you’re going to lead a life where you could theoretically infect hundreds of people or more a day, slightly earlier knowledge doesn’t matter that much.
The most testing, the most advanced technology, and the best health care are simply not sufficient when it comes to this disease. What’s necessary are simple public health measures, like distancing, masking, washing hands and spending as little time as possible close together indoors in the same room. The key to slowing down the spread of coronavirus infections is to have few, if any, close contacts. There’s just no getting around it.
Unfortunately, this has not been the message coming out of the White House for some time. At the debate this week, the president ridiculed Joe Biden for wearing a mask too often. In remarks delivered Thursday night, Mr. Trump said that “the end of the pandemic is in sight.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The key to slowing down the spread of coronavirus infections is to have few, if any, close contacts. There’s just no getting around it.
The president has been infected with coronavirus. Schadenfreude is inappropriate. This is, however, a good opportunity for leaders to rethink their current policies and rhetoric on prevention — because what the president’s case highlights are the limitations of even the best testing regimes.
The president is tested for coronavirus every day. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report the incubation period can be two to 14 days, it usually appears to be somewhere between three and five days after exposure. Given that President Trump tested positive on Thursday, he was most likely infected sometime between Saturday and Monday. We are usually concerned about a sick person being able to spread infections to others for up to two days before symptoms began or a test was positive. Therefore, the president might have been infectious to others as early as Tuesday. He probably interacted with many, many people in this time frame; likewise for Melania Trump and Hope Hicks.
The three of them will now need to isolate for at least 10 days. All of the people who were in close contact with them — and by close contact, I mean spent 15 minutes within six feet of them — will have to quarantine for two weeks, because they are at significantly increased risk of being infected themselves and infecting others. If any of them later test positive or show symptoms, they need to isolate for 10 days from that time.
This, in other words, is going to be a contact tracing fiasco — one that could easily shut down the White House.
Many, including me, have called for more testing for all. But what happened with Ms. Hicks and the president illustrates that testing doesn’t matter unless you close the infection loop with other interventions.
The president and the White House benefit from what is arguably the most rigorous coronavirus testing in the country. In the past, the White House has claimed that Mr. Trump is tested multiple times a day, and is the most tested man in the country.
Screening people without symptoms finds those who are infectious and gets them into quarantine and isolation earlier. But this doesn’t serve any purpose unless you’re also pairing this screening with careful behavior. Even if the infections of the president and others were discovered during regular screening, they still had a huge number of contacts; it’s still a disaster. If you’re going to lead a life where you could theoretically infect hundreds of people or more a day, slightly earlier knowledge doesn’t matter that much.
The most testing, the most advanced technology, and the best health care are simply not sufficient when it comes to this disease. What’s necessary are simple public health measures, like distancing, masking, washing hands and spending as little time as possible close together indoors in the same room. The key to slowing down the spread of coronavirus infections is to have few, if any, close contacts. There’s just no getting around it.
Unfortunately, this has not been the message coming out of the White House for some time. At the debate this week, the president ridiculed Joe Biden for wearing a mask too often. In remarks delivered Thursday night, Mr. Trump said that “the end of the pandemic is in sight.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/opin ... 778d3e6de3
ShakeOut 2020 Goes Virtual: Learn how to protect yourself during an earthquake
Earthquakes continue to be a danger to life and property. Each year, we remind people of this hidden threat and how to take precautions and remain safe.
FOCUS USAThe global coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we live, work, and go to school. Every day, we are confronting old and new challenges. But earthquakes are still happening all around us.
Did you know that more than 4,000 earthquakes have struck the continental United States since Jan. 1, 2020? Most of these earthquakes have occurred in the West, but also in other parts of the country as well.
One thing is for certain: ShakeOut is also still happening on Oct.15, and we are all in this together!
If you’re not familiar, the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) ShakeOut is an annual global earthquake drill targeting more than 20 countries, and it is aimed at preparing individuals to protect themselves in the event of an earthquake.
The 2019 AKDN ShakeOut campaign reached over 1.5 million people with live “Drop, Cover and Hold On” drills, preparedness messages on earthquake hazards, and guidelines to secure the property against damage. Participating AKDN countries include Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, Portugal, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Uganda, and the United States.
This year, Focus Humanitarian Assistance USA is encouraging the community to participate in the largest global earthquake drill by registering at www.shakeout.org and joining over 28.1 million people across the world as we “Drop, Cover and Hold On!”
Remember, earthquakes can happen at any time—even during a pandemic. It is vital to be prepared!
Here are some basic guidelines to keep in mind:
- Hazard Hunt: Do a “hazard hunt” around your home or workspace for items that might fall during earthquakes and secure them. Identify and correct any issues in your home’s structure.
- Make a Plan: Complete or update your family emergency plan’s evacuation routes. If an earthquake occurs, you may need to evacuate your home or building.
- Build a Kit: Organize or refresh your family emergency kits and a go-bag in case you need to evacuate.
- Stay Informed: Sign up for local and national emergency alerts including: FEMA & RedCross
- Practice, practice, practice: “Drop, Cover and Hold On”
- More information on preparedness actions are at www.focus-usa.org/shakeout
This year, whether you will be conducting the ShakeOut drill at home, work, or school, ensure you are following COVID-19 health and safety guidelines. Maintain physical distancing, wear a mask, and implement any other necessary protective measures.
The AKDN has been participating in the ShakeOut Drill since 2011. This initiative was conceived as part of AKDN's collaboration with California's Office of Emergency Services under the Agreement of Cooperation between the Ismaili Imamat and the State of California. It is coordinated through FOCUS.
Let’s ShakeOut together online at www.shakeout.org and www.focus-usa.org/shakeout.
https://the.ismaili/usa/our-community/s ... earthquake
Earthquakes continue to be a danger to life and property. Each year, we remind people of this hidden threat and how to take precautions and remain safe.
FOCUS USAThe global coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we live, work, and go to school. Every day, we are confronting old and new challenges. But earthquakes are still happening all around us.
Did you know that more than 4,000 earthquakes have struck the continental United States since Jan. 1, 2020? Most of these earthquakes have occurred in the West, but also in other parts of the country as well.
One thing is for certain: ShakeOut is also still happening on Oct.15, and we are all in this together!
If you’re not familiar, the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) ShakeOut is an annual global earthquake drill targeting more than 20 countries, and it is aimed at preparing individuals to protect themselves in the event of an earthquake.
The 2019 AKDN ShakeOut campaign reached over 1.5 million people with live “Drop, Cover and Hold On” drills, preparedness messages on earthquake hazards, and guidelines to secure the property against damage. Participating AKDN countries include Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, Portugal, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Uganda, and the United States.
This year, Focus Humanitarian Assistance USA is encouraging the community to participate in the largest global earthquake drill by registering at www.shakeout.org and joining over 28.1 million people across the world as we “Drop, Cover and Hold On!”
Remember, earthquakes can happen at any time—even during a pandemic. It is vital to be prepared!
Here are some basic guidelines to keep in mind:
- Hazard Hunt: Do a “hazard hunt” around your home or workspace for items that might fall during earthquakes and secure them. Identify and correct any issues in your home’s structure.
- Make a Plan: Complete or update your family emergency plan’s evacuation routes. If an earthquake occurs, you may need to evacuate your home or building.
- Build a Kit: Organize or refresh your family emergency kits and a go-bag in case you need to evacuate.
- Stay Informed: Sign up for local and national emergency alerts including: FEMA & RedCross
- Practice, practice, practice: “Drop, Cover and Hold On”
- More information on preparedness actions are at www.focus-usa.org/shakeout
This year, whether you will be conducting the ShakeOut drill at home, work, or school, ensure you are following COVID-19 health and safety guidelines. Maintain physical distancing, wear a mask, and implement any other necessary protective measures.
The AKDN has been participating in the ShakeOut Drill since 2011. This initiative was conceived as part of AKDN's collaboration with California's Office of Emergency Services under the Agreement of Cooperation between the Ismaili Imamat and the State of California. It is coordinated through FOCUS.
Let’s ShakeOut together online at www.shakeout.org and www.focus-usa.org/shakeout.
https://the.ismaili/usa/our-community/s ... earthquake
Danger in the Pamirs
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xDzzTmr3rE
The International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction celebrates how people and communities around the world are reducing their exposure to disasters and raising awareness about the importance of reigning in the risks that they face. The Aga Khan Agency for Habitat (AKAH) works closely with communities living in hazard-prone areas, particularly in remote mountain areas in the Roof of the World, to help them understand and protect themselves against the risks they face. These communities in South and Central Asia live at the frontline of climate change and AKAH’s mandate is to empower them with the skills and infrastructure to help them thrive despite growing risks. AKAH works with communities in nearly 2,500 settlements to conduct hazard, vulnerability and risk assessments, which leverage science, technology and local indigenous knowledge to map hazards and risks. Based on these assessments, AKAH has guided communities in over 1,600 villages to develop Village Disaster Management Plans. AKAH also trains and supports a network of nearly 30,000 active community emergency response volunteers who help develop and implement these disaster management plans and act as first responders in the event of a crisis.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xDzzTmr3rE
The International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction celebrates how people and communities around the world are reducing their exposure to disasters and raising awareness about the importance of reigning in the risks that they face. The Aga Khan Agency for Habitat (AKAH) works closely with communities living in hazard-prone areas, particularly in remote mountain areas in the Roof of the World, to help them understand and protect themselves against the risks they face. These communities in South and Central Asia live at the frontline of climate change and AKAH’s mandate is to empower them with the skills and infrastructure to help them thrive despite growing risks. AKAH works with communities in nearly 2,500 settlements to conduct hazard, vulnerability and risk assessments, which leverage science, technology and local indigenous knowledge to map hazards and risks. Based on these assessments, AKAH has guided communities in over 1,600 villages to develop Village Disaster Management Plans. AKAH also trains and supports a network of nearly 30,000 active community emergency response volunteers who help develop and implement these disaster management plans and act as first responders in the event of a crisis.
Himalayan glacier breaks in India, around 125 missing in floods
Devjyot Ghoshal and Manoj Kumar
Reuters Sun, February 7, 2021, 1:42 AM
People walk past a destroyed dam after a Himalayan glacier broke and crashed into the dam at Raini Chak Lata
A view shows damage after a Himalayan glacier broke and crashed into a dam at Raini Chak Lata
Himalayan glacier bursts in India
Himalayan glacier breaks in India, around 125 missing in floods
People walk past a destroyed dam after a Himalayan glacier broke and crashed into the dam at Raini Chak Lata
By Devjyot Ghoshal and Manoj Kumar
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Around 125 people were missing in northern India after a Himalayan glacier broke and swept away a small hydroelectric dam on Sunday, with floods forcing the evacuation of villages downstream.
A wall of dust, rock and water hit as an avalanche roared down the Rishiganga valley deep in the mountains of Uttarakhand, a witness said.
"It came very fast, there was no time to alert anyone," Sanjay Singh Rana, who lives on the upper reaches of the river in Raini village, told Reuters by phone. "I felt that even we would be swept away."
Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat said 125 people were missing but the number could rise. So far, the bodies of seven people had been recovered.
The disaster took place around 500 km (310 miles) north of New Delhi.
Uttarakhand is prone to flash floods and landslides and the disaster prompted calls by environment groups for a review of power projects in the ecologically sensitive mountains.
Earlier state chief secretary Om Prakash said 100 to 150 people were feared dead. A large number of the missing were workers at the 13.2 MW Rishiganga Hydroelectric Project which was destroyed by the bursting of the glacier.
Footage shared by locals showed the water washing away parts of the Rishiganga dam and everything else in its path. At least 180 sheep were washed away.
Videos on social media, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed water surging through a small dam site, washing away construction equipment.
Twelve people who had been trapped in a tunnel had been rescued and efforts were under way to save others caught in another tunnel, the federal home ministry said after a meeting of the National Crisis Committee, comprising top officials.
"India stands with Uttarakhand and the nation prays for everyone’s safety there," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Twitter.
State utility NTPC said the avalanche had damaged a part of its Tapovan Vishnugad hydropower plant that was under construction further down the river. It gave no details but said the situation is being monitored continuously.
Indian military helicopters were flying over the area and soldiers deployed for help with relief and rescue.
The neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous, put its riverside areas on high alert.
'HIMALAYAN TSUNAMI'
It was not immediately clear what had set off the avalanche at a time when it is not the flood season. In June 2013, record monsoon rains in Uttarakhand caused devastating floods that claimed close to 6,000 lives.
That disaster was dubbed the "Himalayan tsunami" because of the torrents of water unleashed in the mountainous area, which sent mud and rocks crashing down, burying homes, sweeping away buildings, roads and bridges.
Uma Bharti, India's former water resources minister and a senior leader of Modi's party, criticised the construction of a power project in the area.
"When I was a minister I had requested that Himalaya is a very sensitive place, so power projects should not be built on Ganga and its main tributaries," she said on Twitter, referring to the main river that flows from the mountains.
Environmental experts called for a halt to big hydroelectric projects in the state.
"This disaster again calls for a serious scrutiny of the hydropower dams building spree in this eco-sensitive region," said Ranjan Panda, a volunteer for the Combat Climate Change Network that works on water, environment and climate change issues.
"The government should no longer ignore warnings from experts and stop building hydropower projects and extensive highway networks in this fragile ecosystem."
(Additional reporting by Saurabh Sharma, Krishna N. Das and Jatin Das; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani, William Mallard and Frances Kerry)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/hi ... 29074.html
Devjyot Ghoshal and Manoj Kumar
Reuters Sun, February 7, 2021, 1:42 AM
People walk past a destroyed dam after a Himalayan glacier broke and crashed into the dam at Raini Chak Lata
A view shows damage after a Himalayan glacier broke and crashed into a dam at Raini Chak Lata
Himalayan glacier bursts in India
Himalayan glacier breaks in India, around 125 missing in floods
People walk past a destroyed dam after a Himalayan glacier broke and crashed into the dam at Raini Chak Lata
By Devjyot Ghoshal and Manoj Kumar
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Around 125 people were missing in northern India after a Himalayan glacier broke and swept away a small hydroelectric dam on Sunday, with floods forcing the evacuation of villages downstream.
A wall of dust, rock and water hit as an avalanche roared down the Rishiganga valley deep in the mountains of Uttarakhand, a witness said.
"It came very fast, there was no time to alert anyone," Sanjay Singh Rana, who lives on the upper reaches of the river in Raini village, told Reuters by phone. "I felt that even we would be swept away."
Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat said 125 people were missing but the number could rise. So far, the bodies of seven people had been recovered.
The disaster took place around 500 km (310 miles) north of New Delhi.
Uttarakhand is prone to flash floods and landslides and the disaster prompted calls by environment groups for a review of power projects in the ecologically sensitive mountains.
Earlier state chief secretary Om Prakash said 100 to 150 people were feared dead. A large number of the missing were workers at the 13.2 MW Rishiganga Hydroelectric Project which was destroyed by the bursting of the glacier.
Footage shared by locals showed the water washing away parts of the Rishiganga dam and everything else in its path. At least 180 sheep were washed away.
Videos on social media, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed water surging through a small dam site, washing away construction equipment.
Twelve people who had been trapped in a tunnel had been rescued and efforts were under way to save others caught in another tunnel, the federal home ministry said after a meeting of the National Crisis Committee, comprising top officials.
"India stands with Uttarakhand and the nation prays for everyone’s safety there," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Twitter.
State utility NTPC said the avalanche had damaged a part of its Tapovan Vishnugad hydropower plant that was under construction further down the river. It gave no details but said the situation is being monitored continuously.
Indian military helicopters were flying over the area and soldiers deployed for help with relief and rescue.
The neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous, put its riverside areas on high alert.
'HIMALAYAN TSUNAMI'
It was not immediately clear what had set off the avalanche at a time when it is not the flood season. In June 2013, record monsoon rains in Uttarakhand caused devastating floods that claimed close to 6,000 lives.
That disaster was dubbed the "Himalayan tsunami" because of the torrents of water unleashed in the mountainous area, which sent mud and rocks crashing down, burying homes, sweeping away buildings, roads and bridges.
Uma Bharti, India's former water resources minister and a senior leader of Modi's party, criticised the construction of a power project in the area.
"When I was a minister I had requested that Himalaya is a very sensitive place, so power projects should not be built on Ganga and its main tributaries," she said on Twitter, referring to the main river that flows from the mountains.
Environmental experts called for a halt to big hydroelectric projects in the state.
"This disaster again calls for a serious scrutiny of the hydropower dams building spree in this eco-sensitive region," said Ranjan Panda, a volunteer for the Combat Climate Change Network that works on water, environment and climate change issues.
"The government should no longer ignore warnings from experts and stop building hydropower projects and extensive highway networks in this fragile ecosystem."
(Additional reporting by Saurabh Sharma, Krishna N. Das and Jatin Das; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani, William Mallard and Frances Kerry)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/hi ... 29074.html
Glacier Bursts in India, Leaving More Than 100 Missing in Floods
Rescue efforts were underway in the northern state of Uttarakhand, where officials said a hydroelectric dam project had been largely swept away.
Watch video at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
NEW DELHI — A Himalayan glacier broke and caused sudden, massive flooding in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand on Sunday, smashing two dam projects and forcing the authorities to scramble to evacuate villages and try to save more than 100 lives.
Trivendra Singh Rawat, the chief minister of Uttarakhand, said that seven bodies had been recovered and that about 125 people, many of them workers at the two hydroelectric dam projects that were largely swept away, were unaccounted for.
“An avalanche came and completely broke the Rishiganga power project, and almost all the workers there are missing,” said Ashok Kumar, the chief of police in Uttarakhand. “By the time the water came downstream, we had alerted people.”
The scenes were reminiscent of floods in Uttarakhand in 2013, when heavy rain over several days led to landslides that killed thousands of people and washed away entire villages.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Rescue efforts were underway in the northern state of Uttarakhand, where officials said a hydroelectric dam project had been largely swept away.
Watch video at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
NEW DELHI — A Himalayan glacier broke and caused sudden, massive flooding in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand on Sunday, smashing two dam projects and forcing the authorities to scramble to evacuate villages and try to save more than 100 lives.
Trivendra Singh Rawat, the chief minister of Uttarakhand, said that seven bodies had been recovered and that about 125 people, many of them workers at the two hydroelectric dam projects that were largely swept away, were unaccounted for.
“An avalanche came and completely broke the Rishiganga power project, and almost all the workers there are missing,” said Ashok Kumar, the chief of police in Uttarakhand. “By the time the water came downstream, we had alerted people.”
The scenes were reminiscent of floods in Uttarakhand in 2013, when heavy rain over several days led to landslides that killed thousands of people and washed away entire villages.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
How We Can Better Predict Weather Catastrophes
We need to develop an early warning system to forecast climate-induced extreme weather events.
We are playing Russian roulette with extreme climate events.
Look no further than Texas, where extreme cold from the warming Arctic descended and blanketed the state and much of the rest of the nation last week in freezing temperatures.
But frigid weather in that unlikely locale isn’t all we should worry about. What’s happening to the climate presents unpredictable weather risks that, as we’ve seen time and again, can be extremely dangerous and strike almost anywhere.
In fact, the United States had an average of around six heat waves a year in the past decade, at times breaking local temperature records. Last year a town in northeastern Siberia reportedly reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The western United States found itself engulfed by smoke-filled skies and raging wildfires. The summer of 2019 saw sprawling heat waves in Europe, and temperatures hit 123 degrees Fahrenheit in part of the Indian subcontinent.
Because of climate change, extreme hot and cold weather events and ramped-up storms are becoming more frequent, more intense and often longer lasting. The recent glacier collapse in India is a stark reminder of how warming temperatures can contribute to catastrophic outcomes.
It is not a question of if but when an extreme event will reach your neighborhood. That’s very hard to predict. To safeguard our communities, scientists need to be able to see a couple of months or more ahead. With a deeper understanding of the science and better technology, that may be possible. But we don’t have all of that in place now.
That’s not to say scientists haven’t significantly improved weather forecasting. They have, thanks to government and private investments in satellite and ground-based measurements and the development of advanced computer models. It’s now possible to predict weather events like cold snaps and storms up to about two weeks in advance. But things become much less clear beyond that.
Climate scientists, on the other hand, can estimate environmental conditions decades into the future. This creates a gap in the time scales between forecasting weather and climate. Nature has no such artificial demarcation. Recent observations suggest worrisome trends that underscore the interplay between weather and climate.
Among the two dozen or so satellites that NASA operates to monitor Earth’s environment, two of them — the Orbiting Carbon Observatories 2 and 3 — track sources of carbon dioxide and natural absorbers of that greenhouse gas, called sinks. The decades-old technology in these two satellites samples less than 1 percent of Earth’s surface each month. But even these sparse measurements are revealing some staggering changes in Earth’s carbon cycle.
We think, for instance, of the Amazon forests as giant sinks that suck in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That was once true. However, after decades of increased warming, sporadic rainfall, escalating fires and deforestation, research suggests that the Amazon is gradually turning into a source of carbon dioxide. Sub-Saharan Africa is becoming a source as well, as higher temperatures enhance plant respiration and reduce the efficiency of photosynthesis.
At the same time, across the Arctic, permafrost is thawing, raising alarms that the warming ground could release an enormous cocktail of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The well-founded fear is that this will create a positive feedback loop, fueling and accelerating global warming.
What’s clear is that Earth’s carbon cycle is changing. It’s worrisome that we don’t fully understand how these changes are shaping Earth’s future in the short term. Our current capability for sporadic observations could easily miss small changes in the climate system — the so-called tipping points — that could cascade into catastrophes.
We urgently need an international partnership to develop a high-resolution and high-fidelity Earth observation system. This would involve new satellites and ground-based monitoring stations that feed their data to high-performance computers to predict events.
Recent efforts are attempting to fill the predictive gap with a combination of physics-based and artificial-intelligence-based models. But near-real-time measurements are needed to increase forecasting accuracy. Today’s capabilities are woefully inadequate to provide that data because the majority of Earth-observing satellites are operating well beyond their design lifetimes and most of those have no replacements planned.
With its intense focus on climate change, the Biden administration should convene climate scientists in federal and state agencies, national laboratories, academia, the private sector and nonprofits to draft a plan for an advanced Earth observation system. The idea would be to sharpen our ability to monitor the environment, make the data available to the scientific community and expand our predictive capability well beyond what it is today to forecast extreme weather events generated by the warming climate.
As a bonus, this new system could also verify whether countries that signed the Paris climate agreement are meeting their goals to limit their greenhouse gas emissions.
Russian roulette is a dangerous game. The chances of tragedy are high. So are the perils in the short term with climate-influenced weather events. That’s why we need an early warning system that can identify the locations and magnitude of these threats. The return on these investments will be in lives and economies saved. It ought to be a top priority for global cooperation.
Abhishek Chatterjee is an earth scientist with the Universities Space Research Association and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; William Collins is a professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley; David Crisp is an atmospheric physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology; and Arun Majumdar is a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford and was a top official in the Energy Department during the Obama administration. (The views expressed here do not represent the position of NASA or the federal government.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/opin ... 778d3e6de3
We need to develop an early warning system to forecast climate-induced extreme weather events.
We are playing Russian roulette with extreme climate events.
Look no further than Texas, where extreme cold from the warming Arctic descended and blanketed the state and much of the rest of the nation last week in freezing temperatures.
But frigid weather in that unlikely locale isn’t all we should worry about. What’s happening to the climate presents unpredictable weather risks that, as we’ve seen time and again, can be extremely dangerous and strike almost anywhere.
In fact, the United States had an average of around six heat waves a year in the past decade, at times breaking local temperature records. Last year a town in northeastern Siberia reportedly reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The western United States found itself engulfed by smoke-filled skies and raging wildfires. The summer of 2019 saw sprawling heat waves in Europe, and temperatures hit 123 degrees Fahrenheit in part of the Indian subcontinent.
Because of climate change, extreme hot and cold weather events and ramped-up storms are becoming more frequent, more intense and often longer lasting. The recent glacier collapse in India is a stark reminder of how warming temperatures can contribute to catastrophic outcomes.
It is not a question of if but when an extreme event will reach your neighborhood. That’s very hard to predict. To safeguard our communities, scientists need to be able to see a couple of months or more ahead. With a deeper understanding of the science and better technology, that may be possible. But we don’t have all of that in place now.
That’s not to say scientists haven’t significantly improved weather forecasting. They have, thanks to government and private investments in satellite and ground-based measurements and the development of advanced computer models. It’s now possible to predict weather events like cold snaps and storms up to about two weeks in advance. But things become much less clear beyond that.
Climate scientists, on the other hand, can estimate environmental conditions decades into the future. This creates a gap in the time scales between forecasting weather and climate. Nature has no such artificial demarcation. Recent observations suggest worrisome trends that underscore the interplay between weather and climate.
Among the two dozen or so satellites that NASA operates to monitor Earth’s environment, two of them — the Orbiting Carbon Observatories 2 and 3 — track sources of carbon dioxide and natural absorbers of that greenhouse gas, called sinks. The decades-old technology in these two satellites samples less than 1 percent of Earth’s surface each month. But even these sparse measurements are revealing some staggering changes in Earth’s carbon cycle.
We think, for instance, of the Amazon forests as giant sinks that suck in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That was once true. However, after decades of increased warming, sporadic rainfall, escalating fires and deforestation, research suggests that the Amazon is gradually turning into a source of carbon dioxide. Sub-Saharan Africa is becoming a source as well, as higher temperatures enhance plant respiration and reduce the efficiency of photosynthesis.
At the same time, across the Arctic, permafrost is thawing, raising alarms that the warming ground could release an enormous cocktail of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The well-founded fear is that this will create a positive feedback loop, fueling and accelerating global warming.
What’s clear is that Earth’s carbon cycle is changing. It’s worrisome that we don’t fully understand how these changes are shaping Earth’s future in the short term. Our current capability for sporadic observations could easily miss small changes in the climate system — the so-called tipping points — that could cascade into catastrophes.
We urgently need an international partnership to develop a high-resolution and high-fidelity Earth observation system. This would involve new satellites and ground-based monitoring stations that feed their data to high-performance computers to predict events.
Recent efforts are attempting to fill the predictive gap with a combination of physics-based and artificial-intelligence-based models. But near-real-time measurements are needed to increase forecasting accuracy. Today’s capabilities are woefully inadequate to provide that data because the majority of Earth-observing satellites are operating well beyond their design lifetimes and most of those have no replacements planned.
With its intense focus on climate change, the Biden administration should convene climate scientists in federal and state agencies, national laboratories, academia, the private sector and nonprofits to draft a plan for an advanced Earth observation system. The idea would be to sharpen our ability to monitor the environment, make the data available to the scientific community and expand our predictive capability well beyond what it is today to forecast extreme weather events generated by the warming climate.
As a bonus, this new system could also verify whether countries that signed the Paris climate agreement are meeting their goals to limit their greenhouse gas emissions.
Russian roulette is a dangerous game. The chances of tragedy are high. So are the perils in the short term with climate-influenced weather events. That’s why we need an early warning system that can identify the locations and magnitude of these threats. The return on these investments will be in lives and economies saved. It ought to be a top priority for global cooperation.
Abhishek Chatterjee is an earth scientist with the Universities Space Research Association and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; William Collins is a professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley; David Crisp is an atmospheric physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology; and Arun Majumdar is a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford and was a top official in the Energy Department during the Obama administration. (The views expressed here do not represent the position of NASA or the federal government.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Italy landslide drags 200 coffins into the sea near popular tourist resort
Giada Zampano
The Telegraph Tue, February 23, 2021, 11:54 AM
Landslide in the cemetery of Camogli village sent 200 coffins into the sea - Vigili del fuoco-DAPRESS / SplashNews.com
Hundreds of coffins were carried away and plunged into the seas after a landslide on Tuesday hit a graveyard in a village near Genoa.
Firemen and rescuers in Camogli, a cliff-side village near the northern city of Genoa, scrambled to rescue the coffins, many of which were damaged or destroyed after falling on the rocks about 50 metres below the cemetery.
Only a dozen coffins out of the more than 200 swept away had been recovered as of Tuesday afternoon.
Images of open and partially destroyed coffins floating in Camogli’s green waters were published by most Italian media and were shared widely on social media.
The landslide appears to have been caused by coastal erosion, aggravated by severe storms that hit the northern Liguria region in recent years. It also destroyed two chapels at the Camogli cemetery.
Genoa prosecutors have opened an investigation into the disaster, examining recent building works in the area, which they say could have played a role in the landslide.
Local news reports suggested that the slope at Camogli had started to suffer from instability problems after a major storm in 2018. Works to mitigate the instability on parts of the cliff are ongoing.
Families who lost their relatives' remains at sea will be offered support, Camogli's mayor said.
“We’ll do our best to identify the bodies also using DNA tests,” said Francesco Olivari. “We are also planning to create a team that would provide psychological support to those people, who are understandably under shock.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/it ... 37533.html
Giada Zampano
The Telegraph Tue, February 23, 2021, 11:54 AM
Landslide in the cemetery of Camogli village sent 200 coffins into the sea - Vigili del fuoco-DAPRESS / SplashNews.com
Hundreds of coffins were carried away and plunged into the seas after a landslide on Tuesday hit a graveyard in a village near Genoa.
Firemen and rescuers in Camogli, a cliff-side village near the northern city of Genoa, scrambled to rescue the coffins, many of which were damaged or destroyed after falling on the rocks about 50 metres below the cemetery.
Only a dozen coffins out of the more than 200 swept away had been recovered as of Tuesday afternoon.
Images of open and partially destroyed coffins floating in Camogli’s green waters were published by most Italian media and were shared widely on social media.
The landslide appears to have been caused by coastal erosion, aggravated by severe storms that hit the northern Liguria region in recent years. It also destroyed two chapels at the Camogli cemetery.
Genoa prosecutors have opened an investigation into the disaster, examining recent building works in the area, which they say could have played a role in the landslide.
Local news reports suggested that the slope at Camogli had started to suffer from instability problems after a major storm in 2018. Works to mitigate the instability on parts of the cliff are ongoing.
Families who lost their relatives' remains at sea will be offered support, Camogli's mayor said.
“We’ll do our best to identify the bodies also using DNA tests,” said Francesco Olivari. “We are also planning to create a team that would provide psychological support to those people, who are understandably under shock.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/it ... 37533.html
The mystery of India’s ‘lake of skeletons’
Soutik Biswas - India correspondent
BBCSun, February 28, 2021, 7:49 AM
High in the Indian Himalayas, a remote lake nestled in a snowy valley is strewn with hundreds of human skeletons.
Roopkund Lake is located 5,029 metres (16,500ft) above sea level at the bottom of a steep slope on Trisul, one of India's highest mountains, in the state of Uttarakhand.
The remains are strewn around and beneath the ice at the "lake of skeletons", discovered by a patrolling British forest ranger in 1942.
Depending on the season and weather, the lake, which remains frozen for most of the year, expands and shrinks. Only when the snow melts are the skeletons visible, sometimes with flesh attached and well preserved. To date, the skeletal remains of an estimated 600-800 people have been found here. In tourism promotions, the local government describes it as a "mystery lake".
For more than half-a-century anthropologists and scientists have studied the remains and puzzled over a host of questions.
Who were these people? When did they die? How did they die? Where did they come from?
One old theory associates the remains to an Indian king, his wife and their attendants, all of whom perished in a blizzard some 870 years ago.
skeleton lake
The remains of an estimated 600-800 people have been found at the site
Another suggests that some of the remains are of Indian soldiers who tried to invade Tibet in 1841, and were beaten back. More than 70 of them were then forced to find their way home over the Himalayas and died on the way.
Yet another assumes that this could have been a "cemetery" where victims of an epidemic were buried. In villages in the area, there's a popular folk song that talks about how Goddess Nanda Devi created a hail storm "as hard as iron" which killed people winding their way past the lake. India's second-highest mountain, Nanda Devi, is revered as a goddess.
Earlier studies of skeletons have found that most of the people who died were tall - "more than average stature". Most of them were middle-aged adults, aged between 35 and 40. There were no babies or children. Some of them were elderly women. All were of reasonably good health.
Also, it was generally assumed that the skeletons were of a single group of people who died all at once in a single catastrophic incident during the 9th Century.
The latest five-year-long study, involving 28 co-authors from 16 institutions based in India, US and Germany, found all these assumptions may not be true.
Scientists genetically analysed and carbon-dated the remains of 38 bodies, including 15 women, found at the lake - some of them date back to around 1,200 years.
Naturally preserved ancient human skeletons under snow found beside high altitude alpine Roopkund lake in Indian Himalayas.
Only when the snow melts, do the skeletons become visible at the lake site
They found that the dead were both genetically diverse and their deaths were separated in time by as much as 1,000 years.
"It upends any explanations that involved a single catastrophic event that lead to their deaths," Eadaoin Harney, the lead author of the study, and a doctoral student at Harvard University, told me. "It is still not clear what happened at Roopkund Lake, but we can now be certain that the deaths of these individuals cannot be explained by a single event."
But more interestingly, the genetics study found the dead comprised a diverse people: one group of people had genetics similar to present-day people who live in South Asia, while the other "closely related" to people living in present-day Europe, particularly those living in the Greek island of Crete.
Also, the people who came from South Asia "do not appear to come from the same population".
"Some of them have ancestry that would be more common in groups from the north of the subcontinent, while others have ancestry that would be more common from more southern groups," says Ms Harney.
So did these diverse groups of people travel to the lake in smaller batches over a period of a few hundred years? Did some of them die during a single event?
No arms or weapons or trade goods were found at the site - the lake is not located on a trade route. Genetic studies found no evidence of the presence of any ancient bacterial pathogen that could provide disease as an explanation for the cause of deaths.
View of Ropkund lake also known as skelton lake or mysterious lake in uttarakhand
Tourism promotions describe Roopkund as a 'mystery lake'
A pilgrimage that passes by the lake might explain why people were travelling in the area. Studies reveal that credible accounts of pilgrimage in the area do not appear until the late 19th Century, but inscriptions in local temples date between 8th and 10th Centuries, "suggesting potential earlier origins".
So scientists believe that some of the bodies found at the site happened because of a "mass death during a pilgrimage event".
But how did people from the eastern Mediterranean land up at a remote lake in India's highest mountains?
It seems unlikely that people from Europe would have travelled all the way from Roopkund to participate in a Hindu pilgrimage.
Or was it a genetically isolated population of people from distant eastern Mediterranean ancestry that had been living in the region for many generations?
"We are still searching for answers," says Ms Harney.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/my ... 36821.html
Soutik Biswas - India correspondent
BBCSun, February 28, 2021, 7:49 AM
High in the Indian Himalayas, a remote lake nestled in a snowy valley is strewn with hundreds of human skeletons.
Roopkund Lake is located 5,029 metres (16,500ft) above sea level at the bottom of a steep slope on Trisul, one of India's highest mountains, in the state of Uttarakhand.
The remains are strewn around and beneath the ice at the "lake of skeletons", discovered by a patrolling British forest ranger in 1942.
Depending on the season and weather, the lake, which remains frozen for most of the year, expands and shrinks. Only when the snow melts are the skeletons visible, sometimes with flesh attached and well preserved. To date, the skeletal remains of an estimated 600-800 people have been found here. In tourism promotions, the local government describes it as a "mystery lake".
For more than half-a-century anthropologists and scientists have studied the remains and puzzled over a host of questions.
Who were these people? When did they die? How did they die? Where did they come from?
One old theory associates the remains to an Indian king, his wife and their attendants, all of whom perished in a blizzard some 870 years ago.
skeleton lake
The remains of an estimated 600-800 people have been found at the site
Another suggests that some of the remains are of Indian soldiers who tried to invade Tibet in 1841, and were beaten back. More than 70 of them were then forced to find their way home over the Himalayas and died on the way.
Yet another assumes that this could have been a "cemetery" where victims of an epidemic were buried. In villages in the area, there's a popular folk song that talks about how Goddess Nanda Devi created a hail storm "as hard as iron" which killed people winding their way past the lake. India's second-highest mountain, Nanda Devi, is revered as a goddess.
Earlier studies of skeletons have found that most of the people who died were tall - "more than average stature". Most of them were middle-aged adults, aged between 35 and 40. There were no babies or children. Some of them were elderly women. All were of reasonably good health.
Also, it was generally assumed that the skeletons were of a single group of people who died all at once in a single catastrophic incident during the 9th Century.
The latest five-year-long study, involving 28 co-authors from 16 institutions based in India, US and Germany, found all these assumptions may not be true.
Scientists genetically analysed and carbon-dated the remains of 38 bodies, including 15 women, found at the lake - some of them date back to around 1,200 years.
Naturally preserved ancient human skeletons under snow found beside high altitude alpine Roopkund lake in Indian Himalayas.
Only when the snow melts, do the skeletons become visible at the lake site
They found that the dead were both genetically diverse and their deaths were separated in time by as much as 1,000 years.
"It upends any explanations that involved a single catastrophic event that lead to their deaths," Eadaoin Harney, the lead author of the study, and a doctoral student at Harvard University, told me. "It is still not clear what happened at Roopkund Lake, but we can now be certain that the deaths of these individuals cannot be explained by a single event."
But more interestingly, the genetics study found the dead comprised a diverse people: one group of people had genetics similar to present-day people who live in South Asia, while the other "closely related" to people living in present-day Europe, particularly those living in the Greek island of Crete.
Also, the people who came from South Asia "do not appear to come from the same population".
"Some of them have ancestry that would be more common in groups from the north of the subcontinent, while others have ancestry that would be more common from more southern groups," says Ms Harney.
So did these diverse groups of people travel to the lake in smaller batches over a period of a few hundred years? Did some of them die during a single event?
No arms or weapons or trade goods were found at the site - the lake is not located on a trade route. Genetic studies found no evidence of the presence of any ancient bacterial pathogen that could provide disease as an explanation for the cause of deaths.
View of Ropkund lake also known as skelton lake or mysterious lake in uttarakhand
Tourism promotions describe Roopkund as a 'mystery lake'
A pilgrimage that passes by the lake might explain why people were travelling in the area. Studies reveal that credible accounts of pilgrimage in the area do not appear until the late 19th Century, but inscriptions in local temples date between 8th and 10th Centuries, "suggesting potential earlier origins".
So scientists believe that some of the bodies found at the site happened because of a "mass death during a pilgrimage event".
But how did people from the eastern Mediterranean land up at a remote lake in India's highest mountains?
It seems unlikely that people from Europe would have travelled all the way from Roopkund to participate in a Hindu pilgrimage.
Or was it a genetically isolated population of people from distant eastern Mediterranean ancestry that had been living in the region for many generations?
"We are still searching for answers," says Ms Harney.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/my ... 36821.html
Mount Sinabung: Time-lapse shows Indonesia volcano's 5km-high ash cloud
Watch video here..
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-56253470
Mount Sinabung: Time-lapse shows Indonesia volcano's 5km-high ash cloud
Close
An Indonesian volcano erupted on Tuesday, sending clouds of ash up to 5km (3.1 miles) into the sky.
Located in North Sumatra, Mount Sinabung first erupted in 2010 after being inactive for centuries, and has seen an increase in its activity over the last year.
There are no reported injuries but locals have been advised to stay 3km (1.9 miles) away from the crater.
Watch video here..
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-56253470
Mount Sinabung: Time-lapse shows Indonesia volcano's 5km-high ash cloud
Close
An Indonesian volcano erupted on Tuesday, sending clouds of ash up to 5km (3.1 miles) into the sky.
Located in North Sumatra, Mount Sinabung first erupted in 2010 after being inactive for centuries, and has seen an increase in its activity over the last year.
There are no reported injuries but locals have been advised to stay 3km (1.9 miles) away from the crater.
The Worst Dust Storm in a Decade Shrouds Beijing and Northern China
The Communist Party has made great strides in reducing China’s pollution, but a perfect storm of northern winds and an industrial rebound has created dangerously high levels of pollution countrywide.
When China’s leader, Xi Jinping, met with Communist Party delegates from Inner Mongolia last week, he urged them not to relent in the fight to improve the environment.
“We must adhere to the concept that clear waters and green mountains are as good as mountains of gold and silver,” he said.
On Monday, large parts of China experienced just how bad the environment can still be.
The largest and strongest dust storm in a decade swept across northern China, grounding hundreds of flights, closing schools in some cities and casting a ghastly shroud over tens of millions of people — from Xinjiang in the far west across to the Bohai Sea, according to China’s meteorological service
The storm, coming after weeks of smog, recalled the “airpocalypses” that the country routinely experienced a few years ago, forcing crash government efforts to address what had become a political and public health crisis.
Those efforts improved the air quality significantly, especially around the capital. But this week, three forces — the post-Covid industrial rebound, the continued impact of climate change on the deserts of northern China, and a late winter storm — combined to create a dangerous, suffocating pall.
“Beijing is what an ecological crisis looks like,” Li Shuo, the policy director for Greenpeace China, wrote on Twitter.
Video, photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/worl ... iversified
The Communist Party has made great strides in reducing China’s pollution, but a perfect storm of northern winds and an industrial rebound has created dangerously high levels of pollution countrywide.
When China’s leader, Xi Jinping, met with Communist Party delegates from Inner Mongolia last week, he urged them not to relent in the fight to improve the environment.
“We must adhere to the concept that clear waters and green mountains are as good as mountains of gold and silver,” he said.
On Monday, large parts of China experienced just how bad the environment can still be.
The largest and strongest dust storm in a decade swept across northern China, grounding hundreds of flights, closing schools in some cities and casting a ghastly shroud over tens of millions of people — from Xinjiang in the far west across to the Bohai Sea, according to China’s meteorological service
The storm, coming after weeks of smog, recalled the “airpocalypses” that the country routinely experienced a few years ago, forcing crash government efforts to address what had become a political and public health crisis.
Those efforts improved the air quality significantly, especially around the capital. But this week, three forces — the post-Covid industrial rebound, the continued impact of climate change on the deserts of northern China, and a late winter storm — combined to create a dangerous, suffocating pall.
“Beijing is what an ecological crisis looks like,” Li Shuo, the policy director for Greenpeace China, wrote on Twitter.
Video, photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/worl ... iversified
As Locusts Swarmed East Africa, This Tech Helped Squash Them
A hastily formed crowdsourcing operation to contain the insects in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia could help manage climate-related disasters everywhere.
Melodine Jeptoo will never forget the first time she saw a locust swarm. Moving like a dark cloud, the insects blotted out the sky and pelted her like hail.
“When they’re flying, they really hit you hard,” said Ms. Jeptoo, who lives in Kenya and works with PlantVillage, a nonprofit group that uses technology to help farmers adapt to climate change.
In 2020, billions of the insects descended on East African countries that had not seen locusts in decades, fueled by unusual weather connected to climate change. Kenya had last dealt with a plague of this scale more than 70 years ago; Ethiopia and Somalia, more than 30 years ago. Nineteen million farmers and herders across these three countries, which bore the brunt of the damage, saw their livelihoods severely affected.
“People were operating in the dark, running around with their heads cut off in a panic,” said Keith Cressman, a senior locust forecasting officer at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. “They hadn’t faced something of this magnitude since the early 1950s.”
But as bad as 2020’s swarms were, they and their offspring could have caused much worse damage. While the weather has helped slow the insects’ reproduction, the success, Mr. Cressman said, has primarily resulted from a technology-driven anti-locust operation that hastily formed in the chaotic months following the insects’ arrival to East Africa. This groundbreaking approach proved so effective at clamping down on the winged invaders in some places that some experts say it could transform management of other natural disasters around the world.
“We’d better not let this crisis go to waste,” said David Hughes, an entomologist at Penn State University. “We should use this lesson as a way not just to be adapted to the next locust crisis, but to climate change, generally.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/scie ... 778d3e6de3
A hastily formed crowdsourcing operation to contain the insects in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia could help manage climate-related disasters everywhere.
Melodine Jeptoo will never forget the first time she saw a locust swarm. Moving like a dark cloud, the insects blotted out the sky and pelted her like hail.
“When they’re flying, they really hit you hard,” said Ms. Jeptoo, who lives in Kenya and works with PlantVillage, a nonprofit group that uses technology to help farmers adapt to climate change.
In 2020, billions of the insects descended on East African countries that had not seen locusts in decades, fueled by unusual weather connected to climate change. Kenya had last dealt with a plague of this scale more than 70 years ago; Ethiopia and Somalia, more than 30 years ago. Nineteen million farmers and herders across these three countries, which bore the brunt of the damage, saw their livelihoods severely affected.
“People were operating in the dark, running around with their heads cut off in a panic,” said Keith Cressman, a senior locust forecasting officer at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. “They hadn’t faced something of this magnitude since the early 1950s.”
But as bad as 2020’s swarms were, they and their offspring could have caused much worse damage. While the weather has helped slow the insects’ reproduction, the success, Mr. Cressman said, has primarily resulted from a technology-driven anti-locust operation that hastily formed in the chaotic months following the insects’ arrival to East Africa. This groundbreaking approach proved so effective at clamping down on the winged invaders in some places that some experts say it could transform management of other natural disasters around the world.
“We’d better not let this crisis go to waste,” said David Hughes, an entomologist at Penn State University. “We should use this lesson as a way not just to be adapted to the next locust crisis, but to climate change, generally.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/scie ... 778d3e6de3
We’re Not Ready for the Next Big Climate Disasters
The infrastructure bills taking shape in Congress will be the first test of the Biden administration’s ability to legislate on climate change. Most eyes are on how greener infrastructure can cut emissions of warming gases.
But it will take decades to achieve the enormous reductions required globally; in the meantime emissions will continue and so will the warming. That’s why the nation has much at stake in bolstering communities, highways, rail lines, water systems and the like now against the devastating consequences of climate change, including worsening hurricanes, flooding, rising seas, drought and wildfires. We must also get better at managing climate disasters as they become more numerous.
Over decades, our spending on infrastructure and disaster relief has become fine-tuned to political expedience rather than the geophysical realities of the climate. We build roads and protect houses in vulnerable places; we subsidize insurance for homes prone to flooding and for years avoided updating insurance maps that would let the federal government set rates that reflect real danger. When communities are flattened by nature, the nation helps pay for rebuilding — often rebuilding the same infrastructure in the same place, a target for the next disaster. Flatten, flood, scorch — rebuild and repeat.
The fact that politics, not geophysics, sets the tune in Washington is hardly surprising. What’s needed now is a politically smart strategy for giving voice to geophysics to help our communities prepare for the future.
Studies going back decades have shown, for example, that farmers and city managers who prepare for a changing climate can absorb the shocks, at least to a point. By contrast, policies such as disaster assistance and subsidized flood insurance can have the opposite effect: They invite people to invest in harm’s way and make us less prepared when disaster strikes, as will become more common in a warming world.
We have combed through data from experts and the government and have tabulated what the federal government spends on climate-related disasters, including on infrastructure and insurance. We measured the balance of spending between “building back the same,” the usual response to disasters, and investing in making our infrastructure more resilient.
Our study found that the federal government is spending about $46 billion per year on recovery from disasters, which is seven times the level of investment in resilience. (Depending on the accounting method, that ratio could be as high as 40 to 1.) That nobody really knows these numbers shows why the nation must take stock of its infrastructure and disaster spending with an eye to resilience. At the same time, the National Climate Assessment, mandated by Congress and prepared by climate scientists every four years to evaluate the nation’s climate vulnerabilities, needs to look beyond what the scary science says to assess how government policies and private investment are amplifying or dampening the potential consequences of global warming.
Resilience matters because it is impossible to wall off the country from the effects of climate change. Tens of trillions of dollars are invested in infrastructure and personal property, with a lot more investment to come. Federal money accounts for only one-quarter of the nation’s investment in public infrastructure, but how that money is spent has a big influence on how the rest of the country invests and behaves.
Redirecting federal money toward resilience rather than simply rebuilding after disasters will be hard. But the longer we wait, the harder it will become as the costs of climate change mount.
More and more people are living in places that are highly exposed to weather that will get nastier with climate change — places that are already hot, communities along the coasts vulnerable to storms and sites in or near increasingly flammable forests. For example, the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 would today incur insured losses of $128 billion — dwarfing all big storms of recent memory.
Last year all 94 major natural catastrophes — severe storms, droughts, wildfires and floods, along with earthquakes — caused insured losses of $74 billion in the United States. Over the next three decades, climate change could raise the annual losses in the country from hurricanes alone by one-fifth, according to a new analysis by AIR Worldwide, a catastrophe modeling firm. (Disclosure: AIR hired Mr. Gesick for an unrelated matter after the analysis was published.)
Everyone deeply involved with infrastructure and disaster assistance knows that changes are needed. When municipalities on the front lines borrow for infrastructure, nobody much pays attention to their exposure to climate change in part because everyone involved, including the investors, expect to be bailed out if disaster strikes. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is brimming with good ideas such as smarter mapping and earmarking funds for grants that can make communities more resilient. We also found emerging bipartisan support for many of these reforms, including in the most recent big disaster recovery reform bill that Congress passed in 2018.
But when good ideas meet politics, they seem destined to die at the hands of powerful opponents, such as updating flood insurance policies (unpopular in the Northeast, as we have seen recently) or stopping the most egregious rebuilding after hurricanes (unpopular in much of the coastal Southeast). One fix would be for Congress to follow the playbook it used to close military bases, where piecemeal shutdowns faced political death. As it did with base closures, Congress should create a commission to do the work. It would draw up a package deal to build climate resilience that can spread the pain while making the nation better able to withstand the calamities that are sure to come.
We must get ready, politically, for the next big disaster — not just because the nation will need recovery but also because that’s the political window for reform. For example, after Hurricane Sandy blew through Northeastern and other states in 2012, inflicting about $75 billion in damages, Congress paid $58 billion of those costs, and the 7:1 ratio on spending to rebuild versus resilience dropped to about 2:1. So, too, the 2017 hurricanes that ravaged Houston and Puerto Rico were followed by the 2018 Disaster Recovery Reform Act, which set up the innovative Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, focused largely on resilience, with funding to help move some communities out of harm’s way.
Geophysics will never set the agenda in Washington, but a smart political strategy can give it a stronger voice — and not a moment too soon as the planet warms. More spending on infrastructure is long overdue, but these new investments must come with the right incentives so that we don’t inadvertently exacerbate the dangers of warming.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The infrastructure bills taking shape in Congress will be the first test of the Biden administration’s ability to legislate on climate change. Most eyes are on how greener infrastructure can cut emissions of warming gases.
But it will take decades to achieve the enormous reductions required globally; in the meantime emissions will continue and so will the warming. That’s why the nation has much at stake in bolstering communities, highways, rail lines, water systems and the like now against the devastating consequences of climate change, including worsening hurricanes, flooding, rising seas, drought and wildfires. We must also get better at managing climate disasters as they become more numerous.
Over decades, our spending on infrastructure and disaster relief has become fine-tuned to political expedience rather than the geophysical realities of the climate. We build roads and protect houses in vulnerable places; we subsidize insurance for homes prone to flooding and for years avoided updating insurance maps that would let the federal government set rates that reflect real danger. When communities are flattened by nature, the nation helps pay for rebuilding — often rebuilding the same infrastructure in the same place, a target for the next disaster. Flatten, flood, scorch — rebuild and repeat.
The fact that politics, not geophysics, sets the tune in Washington is hardly surprising. What’s needed now is a politically smart strategy for giving voice to geophysics to help our communities prepare for the future.
Studies going back decades have shown, for example, that farmers and city managers who prepare for a changing climate can absorb the shocks, at least to a point. By contrast, policies such as disaster assistance and subsidized flood insurance can have the opposite effect: They invite people to invest in harm’s way and make us less prepared when disaster strikes, as will become more common in a warming world.
We have combed through data from experts and the government and have tabulated what the federal government spends on climate-related disasters, including on infrastructure and insurance. We measured the balance of spending between “building back the same,” the usual response to disasters, and investing in making our infrastructure more resilient.
Our study found that the federal government is spending about $46 billion per year on recovery from disasters, which is seven times the level of investment in resilience. (Depending on the accounting method, that ratio could be as high as 40 to 1.) That nobody really knows these numbers shows why the nation must take stock of its infrastructure and disaster spending with an eye to resilience. At the same time, the National Climate Assessment, mandated by Congress and prepared by climate scientists every four years to evaluate the nation’s climate vulnerabilities, needs to look beyond what the scary science says to assess how government policies and private investment are amplifying or dampening the potential consequences of global warming.
Resilience matters because it is impossible to wall off the country from the effects of climate change. Tens of trillions of dollars are invested in infrastructure and personal property, with a lot more investment to come. Federal money accounts for only one-quarter of the nation’s investment in public infrastructure, but how that money is spent has a big influence on how the rest of the country invests and behaves.
Redirecting federal money toward resilience rather than simply rebuilding after disasters will be hard. But the longer we wait, the harder it will become as the costs of climate change mount.
More and more people are living in places that are highly exposed to weather that will get nastier with climate change — places that are already hot, communities along the coasts vulnerable to storms and sites in or near increasingly flammable forests. For example, the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 would today incur insured losses of $128 billion — dwarfing all big storms of recent memory.
Last year all 94 major natural catastrophes — severe storms, droughts, wildfires and floods, along with earthquakes — caused insured losses of $74 billion in the United States. Over the next three decades, climate change could raise the annual losses in the country from hurricanes alone by one-fifth, according to a new analysis by AIR Worldwide, a catastrophe modeling firm. (Disclosure: AIR hired Mr. Gesick for an unrelated matter after the analysis was published.)
Everyone deeply involved with infrastructure and disaster assistance knows that changes are needed. When municipalities on the front lines borrow for infrastructure, nobody much pays attention to their exposure to climate change in part because everyone involved, including the investors, expect to be bailed out if disaster strikes. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is brimming with good ideas such as smarter mapping and earmarking funds for grants that can make communities more resilient. We also found emerging bipartisan support for many of these reforms, including in the most recent big disaster recovery reform bill that Congress passed in 2018.
But when good ideas meet politics, they seem destined to die at the hands of powerful opponents, such as updating flood insurance policies (unpopular in the Northeast, as we have seen recently) or stopping the most egregious rebuilding after hurricanes (unpopular in much of the coastal Southeast). One fix would be for Congress to follow the playbook it used to close military bases, where piecemeal shutdowns faced political death. As it did with base closures, Congress should create a commission to do the work. It would draw up a package deal to build climate resilience that can spread the pain while making the nation better able to withstand the calamities that are sure to come.
We must get ready, politically, for the next big disaster — not just because the nation will need recovery but also because that’s the political window for reform. For example, after Hurricane Sandy blew through Northeastern and other states in 2012, inflicting about $75 billion in damages, Congress paid $58 billion of those costs, and the 7:1 ratio on spending to rebuild versus resilience dropped to about 2:1. So, too, the 2017 hurricanes that ravaged Houston and Puerto Rico were followed by the 2018 Disaster Recovery Reform Act, which set up the innovative Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, focused largely on resilience, with funding to help move some communities out of harm’s way.
Geophysics will never set the agenda in Washington, but a smart political strategy can give it a stronger voice — and not a moment too soon as the planet warms. More spending on infrastructure is long overdue, but these new investments must come with the right incentives so that we don’t inadvertently exacerbate the dangers of warming.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Volcano Eruption Forces Thousands to Evacuate in Eastern Congo
Thousands fled the eastern Congolese city of Goma overnight as lava from the nearby Nyiragongo volcano blocked a major highway and spewed into the outskirts of this hub for humanitarian agencies operating in the restive region, officials said Sunday.
More than 3,500 people, many carrying mattresses, crossed the border into Rwanda, said a spokesman for Rwanda’s ministry of emergency management. Lava from the eruptions turned the sky above the city of some two million people red and volcanic rocks dropped into some neighborhoods.
The active volcano, which is about 6 miles from Goma, entered increased seismic activity two weeks ago, increasing chances of an eruption, according to the Goma Volcano Observatory, a research institute that monitors Mount Nyiragongo. Flights to Goma airport were halted and the government ordered gas stations to make arrangements to empty tanks to prevent explosions across the city.
By Sunday morning, the intensity of the lava flow had subsided, allowing some residents who had fled to start returning, officials said.
More...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/volcano-er ... 1621766797
Thousands fled the eastern Congolese city of Goma overnight as lava from the nearby Nyiragongo volcano blocked a major highway and spewed into the outskirts of this hub for humanitarian agencies operating in the restive region, officials said Sunday.
More than 3,500 people, many carrying mattresses, crossed the border into Rwanda, said a spokesman for Rwanda’s ministry of emergency management. Lava from the eruptions turned the sky above the city of some two million people red and volcanic rocks dropped into some neighborhoods.
The active volcano, which is about 6 miles from Goma, entered increased seismic activity two weeks ago, increasing chances of an eruption, according to the Goma Volcano Observatory, a research institute that monitors Mount Nyiragongo. Flights to Goma airport were halted and the government ordered gas stations to make arrangements to empty tanks to prevent explosions across the city.
By Sunday morning, the intensity of the lava flow had subsided, allowing some residents who had fled to start returning, officials said.
More...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/volcano-er ... 1621766797
Even Amid a Pandemic, More Than 40 Million People Fled Their Homes
Storms, floods, wildfires and to a lesser degree, conflict, uprooted millions globally in 2020 — the largest human displacement in more than a decade.
Storms, floods, wildfires — and to a lesser degree, conflict — uprooted 40.5 million people around the world in 2020. It was the largest number in more than a decade, according to figures published Thursday by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, a nonprofit group based in Geneva that tracks displacement data annually.
It was all the more notable as it came during the worst global pandemic in a century.
Extreme weather events, mainly storms and floods, accounted for the vast majority of the displacement. While not all of those disasters could be linked to human-induced climate change, the Center’s report made clear that global temperature rise, fueled by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, “are increasing the intensity and frequency of weather-related hazards.”
Last May, Cyclone Amphan alone displaced five million people in Bangladesh and India, as it whipped across the Bay of Bengal, downed trees and power lines, and destroyed thousands of buildings. In Bangladesh, weeks later, torrential rains upstream swelled rivers, submerging a quarter of the country and taking away the assets of its people — their homes built of mud and tin, their chickens and livestock, their sacks of rice stored for the lean times.
In November, two ferocious hurricanes, Eta and Iota, pummeled Central America in quick succession, washing away bridges, uprooting trees and causing widespread flooding and deadly mudslides. The 2020 hurricane season was the most active Atlantic hurricane season on record, with 30 named storms, 13 of them hurricanes.
In the United States, rising temperatures and sea level rise have made flooding more frequent, particularly along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, and the rate of that flooding is quickening, according to United States government researchers. At many locations, “floods are now at least five times more common than they were in the 1950s,” according to figures published recently by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Last year’s displacement numbers come as this year’s Atlantic hurricane season approaches. Scientists have projected the season will see above-normal storm activity.
Climate change has led to wetter storms because warmer air holds more moisture. And while the links between climate change and hurricanes are complex, recent research suggests that warming has made stalled Atlantic storms more common. That can be more destructive because they linger in one place for a longer period of time.
The largest numbers of displaced people, mostly weather-related, were in Asia, with five million in China, roughly 4.4 million each in Bangladesh and the Philippines, and 3.9 million in India. The United States recorded 1.7 million displacements. Conflict-related displacement was highest in the Democratic Republic of Congo at 2.2 million and Syria at 1.8 million.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/clim ... 778d3e6de3
Storms, floods, wildfires and to a lesser degree, conflict, uprooted millions globally in 2020 — the largest human displacement in more than a decade.
Storms, floods, wildfires — and to a lesser degree, conflict — uprooted 40.5 million people around the world in 2020. It was the largest number in more than a decade, according to figures published Thursday by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, a nonprofit group based in Geneva that tracks displacement data annually.
It was all the more notable as it came during the worst global pandemic in a century.
Extreme weather events, mainly storms and floods, accounted for the vast majority of the displacement. While not all of those disasters could be linked to human-induced climate change, the Center’s report made clear that global temperature rise, fueled by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, “are increasing the intensity and frequency of weather-related hazards.”
Last May, Cyclone Amphan alone displaced five million people in Bangladesh and India, as it whipped across the Bay of Bengal, downed trees and power lines, and destroyed thousands of buildings. In Bangladesh, weeks later, torrential rains upstream swelled rivers, submerging a quarter of the country and taking away the assets of its people — their homes built of mud and tin, their chickens and livestock, their sacks of rice stored for the lean times.
In November, two ferocious hurricanes, Eta and Iota, pummeled Central America in quick succession, washing away bridges, uprooting trees and causing widespread flooding and deadly mudslides. The 2020 hurricane season was the most active Atlantic hurricane season on record, with 30 named storms, 13 of them hurricanes.
In the United States, rising temperatures and sea level rise have made flooding more frequent, particularly along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, and the rate of that flooding is quickening, according to United States government researchers. At many locations, “floods are now at least five times more common than they were in the 1950s,” according to figures published recently by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Last year’s displacement numbers come as this year’s Atlantic hurricane season approaches. Scientists have projected the season will see above-normal storm activity.
Climate change has led to wetter storms because warmer air holds more moisture. And while the links between climate change and hurricanes are complex, recent research suggests that warming has made stalled Atlantic storms more common. That can be more destructive because they linger in one place for a longer period of time.
The largest numbers of displaced people, mostly weather-related, were in Asia, with five million in China, roughly 4.4 million each in Bangladesh and the Philippines, and 3.9 million in India. The United States recorded 1.7 million displacements. Conflict-related displacement was highest in the Democratic Republic of Congo at 2.2 million and Syria at 1.8 million.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/clim ... 778d3e6de3
China braces for summer floods as 71 rivers exceed warning levels
FILE PHOTO: Buildings and farmlands are seen partially submerged in floodwaters following heavy rainfall in Poyang county of Jiangxi
Tue, May 25, 2021, 11:34 PM
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China is bracing for a heavy flood season with 71 rivers already exceeding warning levels, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday, as meteorological authorities warned that global warming is fuelling more extreme weather.
Rain in some parts of central and southern China has hit record highs in recent weeks even though overall precipitation is about 10% lower this year compared with last year, according to the Ministry of Water Resources.
Water levels on the Yangtze and its tributaries were expected to rise further over the next week, the ministry said, and it warned of major floods throughout the country from June to August.
Some monitoring stations are issuing alerts, with the Wuhan city section of the Yangtze river in central China more than two metres higher than the normal at this time of the year as a result of heavy rain upstream.
Last summer, rainfall reached its second highest level since 1961, triggering flood alerts on major rivers and lakes and bringing water levels at the giant Three Gorges Dam close to their maximum.
For the whole of last year, nationwide precipitation levels stood at nearly 700 millimetres, 10.3% higher than average and up 7.6% from a year earlier, with rainfall doubling in some parts of central and northeast China.
Jia Xiaolong, deputy director of the National Meteorological Centre, told reporters at the end of April that global warming had made China increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather, including heatwaves as well as floods.
On Sunday, an unexpected onslaught of hail, freezing rain and gales killed 21 runners during an ultramarathon race in the northwestern province of Gansu.
This month, a tornado hit Wuhan and another hit the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu, killing 12 people and injuring hundreds.
(Reporting by David Stanway; Additional reporting by Muyu Xu in Beijing; editing by Robert birsel)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ch ... 13537.html
FILE PHOTO: Buildings and farmlands are seen partially submerged in floodwaters following heavy rainfall in Poyang county of Jiangxi
Tue, May 25, 2021, 11:34 PM
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China is bracing for a heavy flood season with 71 rivers already exceeding warning levels, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday, as meteorological authorities warned that global warming is fuelling more extreme weather.
Rain in some parts of central and southern China has hit record highs in recent weeks even though overall precipitation is about 10% lower this year compared with last year, according to the Ministry of Water Resources.
Water levels on the Yangtze and its tributaries were expected to rise further over the next week, the ministry said, and it warned of major floods throughout the country from June to August.
Some monitoring stations are issuing alerts, with the Wuhan city section of the Yangtze river in central China more than two metres higher than the normal at this time of the year as a result of heavy rain upstream.
Last summer, rainfall reached its second highest level since 1961, triggering flood alerts on major rivers and lakes and bringing water levels at the giant Three Gorges Dam close to their maximum.
For the whole of last year, nationwide precipitation levels stood at nearly 700 millimetres, 10.3% higher than average and up 7.6% from a year earlier, with rainfall doubling in some parts of central and northeast China.
Jia Xiaolong, deputy director of the National Meteorological Centre, told reporters at the end of April that global warming had made China increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather, including heatwaves as well as floods.
On Sunday, an unexpected onslaught of hail, freezing rain and gales killed 21 runners during an ultramarathon race in the northwestern province of Gansu.
This month, a tornado hit Wuhan and another hit the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu, killing 12 people and injuring hundreds.
(Reporting by David Stanway; Additional reporting by Muyu Xu in Beijing; editing by Robert birsel)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ch ... 13537.html
VIDEO: Surveying Goma’s Volcanoes
Scientists are working to assess the risk of a volcanic eruption after lava from Mount Nyiragongo forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people in the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Video:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/afr ... 778d3e6de3
Scientists are working to assess the risk of a volcanic eruption after lava from Mount Nyiragongo forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people in the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Video:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/afr ... 778d3e6de3
Can California Start Taking Droughts Seriously, Please?
Drought may be the sneakiest of natural disasters. Although human history teems with people engulfed by abrupt aridity — the Akkadians of four millenniums ago, the Maya in the ninth and 10th centuries A.D., the Great Plains farmers of the 1930s — even today drought is a poorly appreciated phenomenon. Unlike mighty storms or thundering eruptions, droughts slink into our lives invisibly, unannounced. It can be hard to know you’re in a drought until it’s too late to do much about it; then, when the rains come back, it can be just as difficult to believe the water will ever run out again, so why worry about the next dry spell? Donald Wilhite, a pioneering scholar of drought, calls it the Rodney Dangerfield of natural disasters. Drought has felled entire civilizations, but still it gets no respect.
The American West is once again facing drought, one of the worst on record. Across a vast region encompassing nine states and home to nearly 60 million people, the earth is being wrung dry. About 98 percent of this region is currently weathering some level of drought, and more than half the land area is under extreme or exceptional drought, the most severe categories.
This drought began just last year, but it is already causing severe disruptions. Farmers are being forced to rip out almond trees and send dairy cows to early slaughter. Lake Mead, a reservoir formed by the Hoover Dam, has fallen so low that the dam’s hydroelectric generation capacity is down by 25 percent from its peak. But the worst is likely to come — drought-intensified wildfires, blackouts, more extensive crop destruction and perhaps even more Americans who lack safe drinking water.
Droughts in the West are nothing new, and on a warming planet they are likely to become more numerous, more intense and longer lasting. And yet drought almost always seems to catch us flat-footed. This time, let’s finally meet drought in the United States with the fear and awe it deserves — with a recognition of our humility before its wrath and a consequent seriousness about mitigating its desiccating fury.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Drought may be the sneakiest of natural disasters. Although human history teems with people engulfed by abrupt aridity — the Akkadians of four millenniums ago, the Maya in the ninth and 10th centuries A.D., the Great Plains farmers of the 1930s — even today drought is a poorly appreciated phenomenon. Unlike mighty storms or thundering eruptions, droughts slink into our lives invisibly, unannounced. It can be hard to know you’re in a drought until it’s too late to do much about it; then, when the rains come back, it can be just as difficult to believe the water will ever run out again, so why worry about the next dry spell? Donald Wilhite, a pioneering scholar of drought, calls it the Rodney Dangerfield of natural disasters. Drought has felled entire civilizations, but still it gets no respect.
The American West is once again facing drought, one of the worst on record. Across a vast region encompassing nine states and home to nearly 60 million people, the earth is being wrung dry. About 98 percent of this region is currently weathering some level of drought, and more than half the land area is under extreme or exceptional drought, the most severe categories.
This drought began just last year, but it is already causing severe disruptions. Farmers are being forced to rip out almond trees and send dairy cows to early slaughter. Lake Mead, a reservoir formed by the Hoover Dam, has fallen so low that the dam’s hydroelectric generation capacity is down by 25 percent from its peak. But the worst is likely to come — drought-intensified wildfires, blackouts, more extensive crop destruction and perhaps even more Americans who lack safe drinking water.
Droughts in the West are nothing new, and on a warming planet they are likely to become more numerous, more intense and longer lasting. And yet drought almost always seems to catch us flat-footed. This time, let’s finally meet drought in the United States with the fear and awe it deserves — with a recognition of our humility before its wrath and a consequent seriousness about mitigating its desiccating fury.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/opin ... 778d3e6de3
European Floods Are Latest Sign of a Global Warming Crisis
Floods like these, which have left more than 100 dead, had not been seen in perhaps 1,000 years. For many, the warnings came too late, raising questions about lapses in Germany’s flood alert system.
BERLIN — Days before roiling waters tore through western Germany, a European weather agency issued an “extreme” flood warning after detailed models showed storms that threatened to send rivers surging to levels that a German meteorologist said on Friday had not been seen in 500 or even 1,000 years.
By Friday those predictions proved devastatingly accurate, with more than 100 people dead and 1,300 unaccounted for, as helicopter rescue crews plucked marooned residents from villages inundated sometimes within minutes, raising questions about lapses in Germany’s elaborate flood warning system.
Numerous areas, victims and officials said, were caught unprepared when normally placid brooks and streams turned into torrents that swept away cars, houses and bridges and everything else in their paths.
“It went so fast. You tried to do something, and it was already too late,” a resident of Schuld told Germany’s ARD public television, after the Ahr River swelled its banks, ripping apart tidy wood-framed houses and sending vehicles bobbing like bath toys.
Extreme downpours like the ones that occurred in Germany are one of the most visible signs that the climate is changing as a result of warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Studies have found that they are now happening more frequently for a simple reason: A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, generating more, and more powerful, rainfall.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Floods like these, which have left more than 100 dead, had not been seen in perhaps 1,000 years. For many, the warnings came too late, raising questions about lapses in Germany’s flood alert system.
BERLIN — Days before roiling waters tore through western Germany, a European weather agency issued an “extreme” flood warning after detailed models showed storms that threatened to send rivers surging to levels that a German meteorologist said on Friday had not been seen in 500 or even 1,000 years.
By Friday those predictions proved devastatingly accurate, with more than 100 people dead and 1,300 unaccounted for, as helicopter rescue crews plucked marooned residents from villages inundated sometimes within minutes, raising questions about lapses in Germany’s elaborate flood warning system.
Numerous areas, victims and officials said, were caught unprepared when normally placid brooks and streams turned into torrents that swept away cars, houses and bridges and everything else in their paths.
“It went so fast. You tried to do something, and it was already too late,” a resident of Schuld told Germany’s ARD public television, after the Ahr River swelled its banks, ripping apart tidy wood-framed houses and sending vehicles bobbing like bath toys.
Extreme downpours like the ones that occurred in Germany are one of the most visible signs that the climate is changing as a result of warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Studies have found that they are now happening more frequently for a simple reason: A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, generating more, and more powerful, rainfall.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/worl ... 778d3e6de3