tingilinde

the coming american climate migration

It will certainly happen and further separate rich from poor.

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Then what? One influential 2018 study, published in The Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, suggests that one in 12 Americans in the Southern half of the country will move toward California, the Mountain West or the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences alone. Such a shift in population is likely to increase poverty and widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. It will accelerate rapid, perhaps chaotic, urbanization of cities ill-equipped for the burden, testing their capacity to provide basic services and amplifying existing inequities. It will eat away at prosperity, dealing repeated economic blows to coastal, rural and Southern regions, which could in turn push entire communities to the brink of collapse. This process has already begun in rural Louisiana and coastal Georgia, where low-income and Black and Indigenous communities face environmental change on top of poor health and extreme poverty. Mobility itself, global-migration experts point out, is often a reflection of relative wealth, and as some move, many others will be left behind. Those who stay risk becoming trapped as the land and the society around them ceases to offer any more support.

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vanity fair on jared kushner

Incredibly damning  Kushner even more evil than he is dimwitted.

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The same attendee explained that although he believed in open markets, he feared that the system was breaking. As evidence, he pointed to a CNN report about New York governor Andrew Cuomo and his desperate call for supplies.

“That’s the CNN bullshit,” Kushner snapped. “They lie.”

According to another attendee, Kushner then began to rail against the governor: “Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state…. His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem.”

“That’s when I was like, We’re screwed,” the shocked attendee told Vanity Fair.

The group argued for invoking the Defense Production Act. “We were all saying, ‘Mr. Kushner, if you want to fix this problem for PPE and ventilators, there’s a path to do it, but you have to make a policy change,’” one person who attended the meeting recounted.

In response Kushner got “very aggressive,” the attendee recalled. “He kept invoking the markets” and told the group they “only understood how entrepreneurship works, but didn’t understand how government worked.”

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putting the pandemic in its place

This short  thread by Andy Slavitt is worth reading.

 

the 2020 ig nobles

Held virtually on the 17^th.  Note the lectures were not given, but will be posted some time in November. Here's the site link.

first make people laugh, then make them think

surviving the virus this winter

James Hamblin on what you and society can do. (via The Atlantic)

A tip of the hat to Sukie

another reason to vote for biden

 

 

the age of megafires

Is the world entering a phase of awful new normals?

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“Unprecedented and devastating bushfires in Australia this past fire season burned over 45 million acres,” said Flannigan, director of the newly created Canadian Wildfire Strategic Network. “Arctic fires are releasing record amounts of greenhouse gases and the [Arctic] area burned has exceeded 3 million acres for the first time in the modern record — and much of the fire season still lays ahead. We expected these increases in fire activity, but they are happening faster than anticipated.”

Indeed, just as global warming has propelled the Arctic Ocean past a tipping point that is expected to lead to a largely ice-free Arctic in summer in the coming decades, wildfire scientists say that rising global temperatures and worsening droughts mean that the world has entered a new era of megafires. Scientists say that wildfires are behaving in unprecedented ways and that the traditional methods of fighting them are proving inadequate to this new reality.

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an insider on trump's covid-19 failure

Susan Glasser of the New Yorker on Olivia Troye's revelations.

Trump and his gang really don't care about people dying.

 

 

a detailed look at stellar winds

Their structure may offer an explanation for the shapes of planetary nebulae.

 

 

disease denialism

An opinion piece in the British Medical Journal on disease denialism in the US.

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In the early 2000s, I worked, and for part of that time lived, in South Africa. Those were the years of AIDS denialism, when the President of the Republic, Thabo Mbeki, rejected mainstream views about HIV/AIDS, denying that the human immunodeficiency virus caused the disease and that antiretroviral therapy, saving lives around the rest of the world, was akin to poison. The entire state apparatus was overhauled to ensure that the President’s views became national policy, with his health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, following Mbeki’s lead on HIV and suggesting that beetroot, garlic, lemons, and African potatoes were better than AIDS drugs for the disease, while quack cures like Virodene got championed by President Mbeki and his Deputy President Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. Most of the provincial leaders followed suit, except in the Western Cape where activists from the Treatment Action Campaign, doctors and nurses from Médecins Sans Frontières, and the provincial health department started a programme to get antiretroviral drugs to the people who needed them. After Thabo Mbeki resigned in 2008 after almost ten years in office, a Harvard University study estimated that over 350,000 deaths were attributable to the refusal of his government to provide AIDS treatment to his citizens. South Africa rebooted its AIDS response quickly after his departure and now has the largest AIDS treatment programme in the world.

If Thabo Mbeki had his Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, Donald Trump has found something of an equivalent in the shape of Scott Atlas, from Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Atlas was the subject of a scathing piece in the Washington Post in late August, which reported that he has championed the idea of sequestering the elderly and letting the coronavirus rip through the rest of the nation, akin to the Swedish “herd immunity” model which was tried unsuccessfully earlier this year, and in which deaths mounted and the economy suffered, even though this laissez-faire approach was supposed to ameliorate both. After the Washington Post story, Atlas claimed he was being misrepresented and that there was no White House policy to achieve herd immunity. But, there seems to be no question that he has pushed for decreasing testing of asymptomatic people even if they have been exposed to someone with covid-19, and has repeatedly pushed for schools and colleges to reopen and for lockdown orders to be lifted. If Sweden’s approach to “herd immunity” was a failure, trying anything like it in the US, with its patchwork of a healthcare system, and with millions of people without healthcare insurance and living with underlying conditions which predisposes them to serious complications from covid-19, is likely just to pile disaster upon disaster.

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