tingilinde

rain patterns when it's really hot

There were times on ancient Earth when rainfall patterns were odd .. and it will happen again as the Sun heats in a hundred million years or so..

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"If you were to look at a large patch of the deep tropics today, it's always raining somewhere," said Jacob Seeley, a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Science and Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at Harvard and first author of the paper. "But we found that in extremely warm climates, there could be multiple days with no rain anywhere over a huge part of the ocean. Then, suddenly, a massive rainstorm would erupt over almost the entire domain, dumping a tremendous amount of rain. Then it would be quiet for a couple of days and repeat."

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global warning and chief dana tizya-tramm

Doing what you can locally against the odds.

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“Nature speaks to us,” he said. “Just not in English.” With Tizya-Tramm at the helm, the community is listening. In 2019, the Vuntut Gwitchin became among the first Indigenous peoples in Canada to declare a climate emergency — a move that catapulted them into the international limelight. That same year they set a target of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and as they strive toward the goal, the First Nation has been working to build among the largest solar projects in the Arctic.

These efforts have put Tizya-Tramm and his community at the forefront of not only saving their own way of life, but establishing models and mechanisms that others can follow.

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from several months ago, but it turns out to be roughly correct

 

whales and near-extinction

Ed Yong with a great piece on whales and whaling.

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In the 20th century, the largest animals that have ever existed almost stopped existing. Baleen whales—the group that includes blue, fin, and humpback whales—had long been hunted, but as whaling went industrial, hunts became massacres. With explosive-tipped harpoons that were fired from cannons and factory ships that could process carcasses at sea, whalers slaughtered the giants for their oil, which was used to light lamps, lubricate cars, and make margarine. In just six decades, roughly the life span of a blue whale, humans took the blue-whale population down from 360,000 to just 1,000. In one century, whalers killed at least 2 million baleen whales, which together weighed twice as much as all the wild mammals on Earth today.

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the iron cure strikes me as wrong though

 

 

heather cox richardson on what parties are trying to accomplish

She offers a historian's perspective.

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The role of the federal government in protecting the right to vote has been a mainstay of our Constitution since 1870.

But today’s Republicans are standing on the same ground former Confederates did in the post–Civil War years, insisting that only states can decide how the people within those states live, and who gets to vote on those conditions.

Today, once again, Senate Republicans have filibustered a motion to begin debate on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. That act would restore some of the provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights act the Supreme Court stripped away in their 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision. In 2006, when the Voting Rights Act came up for renewal, it passed the Senate unanimously. Today, the only Republican voting to advance the John Lewis bill was Alaska's Lisa Murkowski.

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puerto rico's success

Blowing away all US states and most countries in the world.  A lesson in a successful vaccination strategy.

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In August, as vaccination rates slumped and the Delta variant was driving an exponential increase in new cases, the government issued vaccine mandates for schools, public employees, and some parts of the private sector, including restaurants. That jolted Puerto Rico’s vaccination rates up past New England’s, said Irizarry, who has been tracking Covid-19 in Puerto Rico as part of a scientific coalition convened by Gov. Pedro Pierluisi.

Irizarry said he thinks the mandates had the biggest impact on vaccination rates, followed by the availability of shots (there are now 975 vaccine providers on the island, and soon to be 300 just for children). Broad cohesion among political leaders and their public health messaging also helped, he said.

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cancer risk by zip code

A sobering ProPublica report forced on EPA air pollution findings.

 

 

a possible covid endgame?

No eradication globally or locally, but just living with it at a lower level for decades.  

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Some scientists are starting to think that eventually COVID-19 could turn into a disease that looks more similar to those from these other coronaviruses — in other words, a mild flu-like illness.

"That's what our computer models predict," says Lavine, the computational biologist at Karius. For the past year and half, she and her colleagues have combined what's known about the four other seasonal coronaviruses to try to forecast what SARS-CoV-2 will do two, five and even 10 years from now. They published their findings in the journal Science this past February.

For the new virus to turn into a mild cold, she says, two conditions need to be met. First, immune protection against severe disease has to persist. "Being infected a few times or having a few doses of the vaccine needs to provide really long-lasting immunity against severe disease," she says. It doesn't have to prevent transmission or a mild disease. But it has to keep you from being hospitalized.

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Getting everyone vaccinated, particularly children, is important for keeping people from getting seriously ill.  Not to mention lowering the odds of a really horrendous variant turning up.

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

 

 

spain, franco and right-wing nationalism

Why an incorrect historiography  persists in Spain and why it's an identity issue with right-wing identity elsewhere.

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I managed to mutter something apparently amelioratory enough for him to agree to sign the papers. Still, his anger served as a reminder of how much of Spain’s national historiography remained unchallenged. At the time, although two decades had passed since the death of Francisco Franco, many Spaniards were still in denial about the horrors of the Civil War and the decades of Fascism that followed it. But the lawyer’s reaction revealed a deeper, enduring nationalistic pride in the era when Spain was a world power: before the United States took the last vestiges of its empire, after its humiliating defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898; before it lost its Latin American colonies in the national liberation revolts of the nineteenth century; and before its Armada was crushed by the British, in 1588.

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No wonder controlling their version of history is such a hot-button issue with the right.

 

religious exemptions and military vaccinations.

It turns out they're rare.

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The Defense Department has granted a smattering of exemptions, including to people who were already leaving the military or have medical issues. However, some of those exemptions, like for people who recently had the coronavirus, may soon be reversed. Officials declined to say how many service members had requested an exemption but said the number was not large.

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The leaders of most major religious organizations have recommended that their members get the vaccine. Officials say that no one is actively discouraging people in the military from seeking a religious exemption. But anyone seeking one from the Pentagon or Department of Veterans Affairs would be required to have an established history of adherence to a religion that prohibits vaccines, among other things.

“If members of the military want to apply for one, then they should be able to,” said John Kirby, a spokesman for the Pentagon. “And they should be able to make their case.”

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Aa it should be.  And I trust they don't count Trumpism as a valid religion.