Sunday, August 30, 2020
RSN: Robert Reich | The Soul of Our Country Is Being Fought for in the Streets and Cities Across America Right Now
30 August 20
Need to Pull a Rabbit From the Hat Today!
We are down to the last two days of the month and we are still far behind where we normally would be and more importantly where we need to be.
Really need a little movement here.
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It's Live on the HomePage Now: Robert Reich | The Soul of Our Country Is Being Fought for in the Streets and Cities Across America Right Now This time it happened in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rusten Sheskey of the Kenosha Police Department shot an unarmed Black man, Jacob Blake, seven times in the back as his three children watched. He is now paralyzed from the waist down, and doctors say it will take a miracle for him to ever walk again. I won’t pretend to understand what it’s like to be terrorized, brutalized, or murdered for the color of my skin, or to feel unsafe simply by existing. What I do understand is that there are serious, systemic disparities between how I am treated as a white man and how those in the Black community are treated. I am committed to using my privilege and platform to participate actively in upending systems of control, like police and prisons, that have perpetuated white supremacist violence and the oppression of Black people for centuries. That’s why I am asking you to use the below link to make a donation to the Movement for Black Lives — a collective of 150 organizations representing Black people from across the country — to help build a world free of police killings and systemic oppression, in which the full humanity and dignity of Black people is recognized. The Movement for Black Lives supports the local protests at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement, and is mobilizing to create a shared vision and policy agenda to win rights, recognition, and resources for Black people through grassroots organizing and legislative action. Tomorrow, they’re holding a Black National Convention to present the Democratic National Committee with a shared policy agenda, including restoration of the Voting Rights Act, immediate demilitarization of police and an end to private prisons, abolishing the Electoral College, breaking up Big Banks, and guaranteeing universal health care. You can tune in to the convention here: https://m4bl.org/events/the-black-national-convention/ The soul of our country is being fought for in the streets of Kenosha, Louisville, Oakland, and cities across America right now. The stakes could not be higher, and we must all come together to support the movement. So please, use the link below to stand with the Black Lives Matter movement and the protestors literally risking their lives in Kenosha by making a donation to the Movement for Black Lives Fund today. And, if you can, set up a recurring donation to sustain the work. In solidarity, Robert Reich
ALSO SEE: Google Greenlights Ads With Apple Makes a Privacy Change, Facebook and Advertising Companies Cry Foul Apple’s long-standing effort to improve its customers’ privacy is pitting it against an advertising industry that believes Apple has grown too powerful. But with Apple under the antitrust spotlight, its privacy move has also been called a power move by an advertising industry that is scrambling to adjust to the changes, expected to be included in iOS 14, the company’s latest mobile operating system expected to go live next month. On Wednesday, Facebook became the latest organization to speak openly about the changes, telling investors and users that Apple’s move will hurt the social network’s bottom line because it will limit the kind of personalized targeting that makes Facebook’s ads so valuable to advertisers. “This is not a change we want to make, but unfortunately Apple’s updates to iOS14 have forced this decision,” the company said in a blog post. Some in the advertising industry see the move as part privacy, part self-interest on the part of Apple. Apple also offers advertising, and by limiting the amount of data outside marketers collect, Apple’s access to the data becomes more valuable. “I think there’s probably 30 percent truth in that they’re doing it for privacy reasons, and it’s 70 percent that they’re doing it because it’s what’s good for Apple,” said Nick Jordan, founder of Narrative I/O, which helps companies gather data for advertising. “It’s a question for regulators and courts whether they should be able to wield the power they do over this ecosystem,” he said. “They created it, but can they rule it with an iron fist?” In an interview with The Washington Post, Apple Director of Privacy Engineering Erik Neuenschwander said the changes were part of Apple’s privacy road map. When asked whether Apple considers how regulators or competitors might view privacy changes, such as the new policies on advertiser tracking, he said the customer is always Apple’s main consideration. Facebook and Apple have sparred in the past over privacy, with Apple CEO Tim Cook making critical remarks aimed at the social network and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calling out Apple for the high prices it charges for its devices. Most recently, Facebook joined a chorus of app developers in criticizing the 30 percent fees Apple charges for money earned on its App Store. Apple and Facebook are both facing investigations by lawmakers and regulators into whether they have wielded their power in anticompetitive ways. Apple is facing a landmark lawsuit filed by Fortnite owner Epic Games that claims Apple is using its status as an alleged monopolist to overcharge app developers with 30 percent fees on App Store earnings. The latest altercation between Apple and Facebook concerns new pop-up messages expected in iOS 14. Apple says that when customers open apps, they’ll be asked whether they would like to give that specific app permission to track them with something called an “ID for Advertisers,” or IDFA. Apple created the IDFA in 2012 to help app developers earn money on iOS. The unique number, assigned to iPhone customers, allows advertisers to track their movements around websites and apps by following that unique identifier. For years, IDFA was turned on by default on iPhones. Only by going into the phone’s settings could users turn off that feature. The IDFA helped Facebook and other developers learn what apps users downloaded, how frequently they used those apps, their in-app purchases, and the websites they visit on desktop and mobile devices and Apple TV. With the new pop-up messages, customers will be forced to make a choice. It is likely that most consumers will opt out of being tracked. Facebook said in a blog post that it would render its off-platform ad network so ineffective that it may not make sense to offer it to developers at all. Facebook said that in testing it had seen a more than 50 percent drop in revenue as a result of the loss of data from Apple. Over time, Neuenschwander said, Apple has been handing users more and control over how IDFA is used, giving them the ability to turn it off completely when the company launched iOS 10 about four years ago by turning on the “limit ad tracking” switch in the phone’s settings. Neuenschwander wouldn’t say how many Apple customers turned that switch on in the settings. Like Facebook, Google and several other companies, Apple runs an advertising business that relies on personal data it gathers to show people “relevant” advertising. “We collect your personal information,” Apple’s App Store & Privacy guidelines say. “ … We also use information about your account, purchases, and downloads in the Stores to offer advertising to ensure that Search Ads in the App Store and ads in Apple News and Stocks, where available, are relevant to you.” But Apple doesn’t consider this data gathering “tracking,” according to Neuenschwander. That’s because Apple collects the data from its own users on its own apps and other services. Facebook and other advertisers, Apple says, gather data on users even when they’re not using Facebook. By reducing the amount of data Facebook and other advertising companies can gather from IDFA numbers, Apple is limiting their ability to gather data on users as they bounce from app to app, or website to website. “There’s been no discussion, no commercial transaction. They’re saying this is what we decided is right in the name of privacy and this is what we’re going to do,” said Stuart Ingis, a partner at the law firm Venable who represents the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, an association of advertisers. Ingis said Apple is harming the very economy that fueled innovation and growth in app development, which in turn helped Apple sell more phones.
Director of National Intelligence Cancels Verbal Election Security Briefings
Friends and Fans Mourn Black Panther Star Chadwick Boseman, Dead at 43
Leverage Is Everything: The Striking NBA Players Have Inherent Power, but So Do You Working people have the same kind of power. It’s leverage. Many of us walk around carrying it for our entire lives without ever using it. Seeing that power demonstrated is the best way to remind everyone that they can use it, too. We are in the midst of an unprecedented wave of wildcat strikes in major sports leagues. (Withholding labor is a strike; a wildcat strike is when workers strike on their own, without the formal approval of their union and often in violation of their contract. Don’t call it a “boycott.”) We can’t really call them sudden, because they’re a reaction to hundreds of years of racial oppression, but they are happening with stunning speed. Wednesday, the basketball players on the Milwaukee Bucks decided on their own to sit out of their NBA playoff game in protest of the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Players on other teams, inspired, followed their lead, causing the league to hastily “postpone” all of the day’s playoff games, to avoid being forced to cancel them one by one due to player walkouts. Within hours, players in the WNBA and in Major League Soccer and in Major League Baseball and even announcers were stopping work as well. History is being made, just that fast. Here I just want to make a simple point: these NBA players may be rich and famous, but in this case, they are not doing anything that you can’t do too. The power they are exercising here is not athletic power, but labor power. They are members of a union, the National Basketball Players Association, and that union has a contract with the NBA, and that contract prohibits them from striking. Yet they struck. And not only did they get away with it, but it was a spectacular public success. They pulled off a wildcat strike because they have leverage. Because they can. That is the only power that really matters in the workplace. Everything else is imaginary. Think about it: What would happen if the NBA started waving its contract, with the “no strike” clause, and criticizing the players for their work stoppage, and threatening harsh legal retaliation? The NBA would be crushed by a wave of bad PR, first of all. That would be bad for business. And what would be worse for business would be the fact that there would be no business — if the players don’t play, there is no NBA. Period. Being a professional basketball player is certainly a more elite and high-skill profession than what you or I do for a living, but these players are exercising leverage that we all have in common. If we don’t work, there is no business, and there is no money for the boss. The entire history of corporate labor relations in America has been one long effort by employers to obscure, hide, and stifle this fact. Yet it remains the case that we have the power, because we do the work. And bosses will go to great lengths, and make many concessions, to ensure that they’re never forced to do the work themselves. The rules that govern organized labor in America are not fair. The bulk of labor law has been written to favor business, which has the money and financial incentive to spend decades lobbying to make labor laws more and more hostile to workers. The law harshly restricts who is allowed to unionize, and what rights they have, and when they are legally allowed to strike. The Milwaukee Bucks have performed the valuable service of showing us that all of those laws don’t mean jack shit. Leverage is timeless and sits outside the law. It is rooted in the fabric of reality, like physics. Why did the NBA rush to release statements about how it “supports” these unauthorized strikes which very well may end their season? In what sense do the owners of these teams “support” these actions, which may cost them millions of dollars, that they would have warned against right up until the moment they happened? They “support” the players here in the sense that they have no choice but to do so. What would happen if the NBA responded to these unauthorized strikes by locking the players out next season, as would be their right under the contract? Would all of the world’s NBA fans sit calmly and continue tithing money to basketball team owners in order to preserve the sanctity of contracts? No. What would happen is there would be no NBA. And if all of the players got sick of the owners and their contracts and decided to pack up and start their own basketball league that they themselves ran, fans would watch that, because that is where the good basketball would be. The players make money for the owners, not vice versa. This is the key to their leverage. With an understanding of this fact, their options are limitless. The league can holler and yell and cajole and object, but ultimately it will come along. The workers have the power. What is happening in pro sports is inspiring. But I understand that some may also find it dispiriting, because they may think, “I am not a pro athlete. I am not rich or famous. I have a regular job with little power. I cannot exercise leverage in the same way.” Wrong. Though it is easier for the boss to replace you or me at work than it is to replace an NBA player, it is hard for any boss anywhere to replace everyone. To function, businesses require workers. Collective action, therefore, is the real source of your leverage. It is the ability of you and your coworkers to deprive the business of the labor it needs to function. Solidarity is power for everyone. I once went to a union rally for a group of janitors at an airport in Minneapolis. As they marched through the terminal waving signs, they chanted: “Let the bosses clean the toilets! Let the bosses clean the toilets!” They understood leverage. It’s true that NBA players have power because the bosses can’t dunk. But the bosses don’t want to clean the toilets either. You might be surprised what you can win by threatening to make the ownership class give up its most treasured privilege: to be paid without doing real work.
SUNDAY SONG: Johnny Cash | God's Gonna Cut You Down
Protecting African Wildlife: A Defense of Conservation Territories
Such transfers are often criticized as de facto privatization by critics of territorial conservation strategies but I have seen first hand the benefits that professional managers can bring and the damage caused by negligent or under-funded public agencies. The most important question remains: will wildlife be protected and will local people be able to pursue their livelihoods at the same time? W National Park, which spans Benin, Niger, and Burkina Faso, was once a “paper park” that had essentially been abandoned by the conservation community. Yet now it, along with the adjacent Pendjari National Park, represents one of the last hopes for wildlife in western Africa. Nearly 20 years ago, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in a community adjacent to W National Park and was fortunate enough to work closely with the ECOPAS Project, which played a major role in getting the protected area back on its feet from 2001 to 2008. One of its major initiatives was to establish a buffer zone for sustainable resource use by local communities along the boundary of the park. During my two years of service, I worked closely with the farmers and livestock herdsmen in the zone and felt a great deal of optimism that I was seeing a “win-win” for parks and people. But it was not to be, as the European Union-funded project ended and its buffer zone management dissipated or disappeared altogether. Fast forward 18 years and APN is essentially trying to pick up where ECOPAS left off. The park buffer zone has been all but forgotten in many places as agriculture – the most destructive form of land use for biodiversity – has expanded right up to the park boundary. Once hoped-for tourism has failed to materialize as my recent trip to a now dilapidated elephant viewing station revealed. Creating yet another buffer zone would likely lead to the same outcome given that local people and Benin’s economy remain dependent on agriculture and especially cotton, which contributes 40% to the country’s gross domestic product. To the chagrin of conservation critics, the only strategy that seems to have worked for W National Park is old-school enforcement of its boundaries. As someone who cares about and tries to work towards both conservation and rural development goals in Africa, I have been frustrated by critics who remain overly dismissive of the necessary role that protected areas play in the preservation of Africa’s imperiled species. Such territories require some level of security and, yes, surveillance in order to serve their purpose. One tragic example, the Boucle du Baoule National Park in Mali is a vast, intact stretch of woody savanna that is almost entirely devoid of wildlife due to the history of rampant poaching in the area; not by local people but well-armed and organized groups coming from afar. This is not a unique story. When I recently asked a former park director in the Central African Republic how many of his rangers had been killed by poachers, he grew visibly upset and angry that I wished to discuss the matter. The answer was 25 people. They were not killed by locals – who comprised the bulk of the anti-poaching brigade and retained the right to hunt – but heavily armed hunting parties supplying the ivory market in Khartoum, which has served world markets for over a century. The Central African Republic is another story of disappearing wildlife but the country also illustrates the problematic past and present of African conservation. Parks are the vestiges of a violent colonial era in the region and park rangers still behave badly. This does not, however, delegitimize protected areas, but instead reveals the need to remain vigilant about their management and accountability to local people. Conservationists struggle to provide social benefits across sub-Saharan Africa. Organizations such as African Parks Network and the Wildlife Conservation Society should therefore rethink conventional approaches to community engagement as they invest in moribund reserves in Central Africa as a well-justified means to protect biodiversity. In Chad, poaching caused the sizable elephant population in Zakouma National Park to drop by 90 percent during the 2000s but a concerted management effort by APN has led to an astonishing recovery. One gets a visceral sense of the price paid when looking at the portraits in the park’s field headquarters of rangers killed in the line of duty. On the other hand, cattle breeders and others living just outside of Zakouma struggle, as they do outside of W Park, to access the natural resources they need. This is the crux challenge for conservation across sub-Saharan Africa but especially in places like Chad, where the boundaries of once forgotten parks are being revived. Africa Parks’ announcement about W National Park describes the same “win-win” scenario that I had hoped to see in the early 2000s. It even discusses the same activities – notably, beekeeping – that were deployed to support local livelihoods back then. They need to succeed. If that means deploying “fences and fines” so be it, but it will clearly require some fresh thinking about the people living around the park. Why didn’t it work the first time? In 2019, I returned to a village on W Park’s boundary for the first time in 13 years, and people there told me they knew nothing about the buffer zone where, on paper, their homes and fields were located. Local authorities told me the buffer zone was part of the park, not territory they were responsible for. The forgotten W Park buffer zone, with all its legal, territorial, and even moral ambiguities, reflects how not to achieve buy-in from people – the locals – in whose hands “win-win” conservation scenarios ultimately lie. And therein lies the fatal problem that Africa Parks must address if it is to avoid the fate of ECOPAS. Read the origonal story at Mongabay |
RSN: Cops Have Long Encouraged Armed Right-Wing Counterprotesters Like the Teenage Shooter in Kenosha
29 August 20
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Cops Have Long Encouraged Armed Right-Wing Counterprotesters Like the Teenage Shooter in Kenosha
Branko Marcetic, Jacobin
Marcetic writes: "Since the latest uprising for racial justice began, police throughout the country have been very friendly with cop-worshipping, armed right-wingers who have shown up on the streets across America to oppose protesters. The teenage shooter in Kenosha who killed two protesters this week wasn't the first and probably won't be the last."
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'Trump is increasingly isolated in the fight against the mail, with many in his party moving past his position.' (photo: Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images)
Ignoring FBI and Fellow Republicans, Trump Continues Assault on Mail-In Voting
Miles Parks, NPR
Parks writes: "In the face of contradictory messages coming from members of his own party, members of the U.S. intelligence community and even a member of his own family, President Trump continues his months-long campaign against efforts to expand voting by mail amid the coronavirus pandemic."
"The fraud and abuse will be an embarrassment to our Country," Trump tweeted Wednesday.
On Monday, he claimed without evidence that mail ballots may purposely be manipulated to be sent to Democratic areas and not Republican areas. And on Sunday, he decried a system of ballot return that the federal government calls "secure and convenient" in official documents.
The president has questioned the legitimacy of U.S. elections for years, although the reasons for his skepticism shift almost weekly. After the 2016 election, when he lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College, Trump baselessly claimed "millions and millions" of people voted illegally in person.
Since the pandemic took hold in the U.S. this spring, states across the country have expanded voting by mail in an effort to limit the number of people who crowd into polling places on Election Day. A Washington Post analysis estimates that at least 83% of Americans are eligible to vote by mail this fall.
Trump quickly started criticizing those efforts, although his reasons for opposing it continue to change.
In April, Trump said any expansion of mail ballots would lead to widespread fraud. In June, Attorney General William Barr argued people should need an excuse to vote by mail. Earlier this month, Trump said no-excuse absentee voting is fine but claimed the Postal Service couldn't handle the increase in election mail. As of this week, Trump seems to have backtracked on that claim, too, saying that the USPS can handle the increase in mail ballots but that elections offices can't.
"It's not the post office," Trump said, in an interview this week with The Washington Examiner. "No, it's the elections office. The post office — look, this is a con job. It's like the Russian hoax. The post office has run the way it's been run forever."
Whatever the reason, it's clear Trump is increasingly isolated in the fight against the mail, with many in his party moving past his position.
Mail-in ballots will 'work out just fine'
Many Republicans fear that Trump's language on voting by mail could harm their chances this fall. Initial data shows Democratic voters far outpacing Republicans when it comes to requesting an absentee ballot, including in battleground states.
In Florida, Democrats lead Republicans by more than 660,000 requests, according to data compiled by University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald. In Pennsylvania, twice as many Democrats have requested ballots as Republicans. In North Carolina, triple the number of Democrats have asked for ballots.
Polling data tells a similar story: A Pew Research Center poll released this week found less than 20% of Trump supporters plan on voting by mail this fall, compared with almost 60% of voters who support former Vice President Joe Biden.
In Wisconsin, a recent Marquette Law School poll found that just 14% of voters planning to vote by absentee are Trump supporters.
All that puts local Republicans in a bind, considering in-person voting could be a dangerous proposition in some areas depending on the state of the pandemic, and mail-in voting has traditionally been a reliable turnout booster for Republicans in many states.
"We are hurting ourselves and putting ourselves at a disadvantage," said Rohn Bishop, a GOP county chairman in Fond du Lac, Wis. "Not a big disadvantage, but a disadvantage, and that's one of the reasons I push back against it because it is a legitimate way to vote."
Bishop called questions about ballot security when it comes to mail-in voting "conspiratorial hype."
"The system's pretty solid," Bishop said. "You have to sign the ballot, you need a witness, you can track your ballot."
Some of Trump's closest allies have recently endorsed voting by mail.
Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. urged voters to request an absentee or mail ballot in robocalls this week.
"Voting absentee is a safe and secure way to guarantee your voice is heard," Trump Jr. says in the call, which was first reported by Politico.
And Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., who delivered a keynote speech during the Republican convention, said in an interview with The Today Show that he was "very confident that we will have fair elections throughout this country."
"I'll tell you how I feel about it, and what I think most Americans believe, that this process of mail-in ballots will prove to work out just fine," Scott said. "I'm going to have confidence that all the moving pieces will actually fit together and we'll have a very strong, integrity-driven, character-driven election."
Law enforcement sees no fraud evidence
During an election security briefing Wednesday, FBI officials made what should have been an unremarkable statement: They've seen no evidence of any foreign plot to counterfeit or forge mail ballots.
Election officials scoffed at the concept when Attorney General William Barr mentioned it for the first time earlier this summer, but both the attorney general and Trump continued to repeat it as a potential reason not to expand mail voting over the past few months.
"MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS," tweeted Trump in June. "IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!"
The FBI, which is formally part of the Justice Department, said Wednesday that it has "no information about any nation state" engaging in any effort to undermine any aspect of mail voting and also noted how difficult any coordinated fraud scheme involving mail ballots would be to pull off because of the decentralized nature of U.S. elections and the numerous safeguards that are in place.
Regardless, election officials and experts worry that Trump's insistence on conspiracy theorizing about mail ballots and voting in general will affect the public's confidence in whatever result occurs in November.
"Any of these issues, when they get used for partisan political purposes, it's not good," said New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat. "The inherent side effect is that it fosters distrust and it fosters a perception of unfairness."
Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff during the Trump administration, told The Washington Post this week that Trump's language has effectively been an "open door" for foreign adversaries hoping to meddle in the race this fall.
In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, political scientist Rick Hasen argued that delegitimizing the results may actually be Trump's intention, with an eye toward contesting or casting doubt on a potential victory by his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.
"We cannot count on Mr. Trump to speak responsibly about the fairness of the 2020 vote count," Hasen wrote. "Indeed, he is one of the biggest threats to the integrity of the election."
Audrey DiMartinez, 57, and her granddaughter Eliysia Lever, 16, left, who came from Staten Island, listen to speakers at the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28. (photo: Evelyn Hockstein/WP)
At March on Washington, Black Americans Say Lines Are Blurred Between Now and 1963
Paul Duggan, Justin George, Michelle Boorstein and Sydney Trent, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Clifton Price Jr., a child of Jim Crow Mississippi, rested on the seat of his walker Friday beside the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial. He had decided to join the March on Washington, 57 years after he was unable to attend the first one because he couldn't leave his job as a janitor."
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DACA recipients and their supporters at a rally. (photo: Sandy Huffaker/AFP/Getty Images)
DACA Recipients Challenge Latest Trump Administration Attempt to Gut Program
Priscilla Alvarez, CNN
Alvarez writes: "Participants in the Obama-era program shielding undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation are challenging the Trump administration's latest effort to limit the program, the first targeted challenge against the full set of new rules."
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'The mantle of QAnon has been taken up by a huge number of mostly right-wing Americans.' (photo: The Nation)
Is QAnon the Future of the Republican Party?
William Sommer and Ryan Grim, The Intercept
Excerpt: "QAnon is a far-ranging conspiracy theory that alleges, among other things, that a patriotic Trump supporter (or supporters) embedded in the highest levels of the U.S. government has been using internet forums to send coded messages to the American public about a secret plan to arrest and/or execute a global cabal of child-torturing, blood-drinking, Satan-worshipping pedophiles."
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'The agreement lists nine alternative policy proposals for communities, local governments and public institutions to adopt to achieve social and environmental justice across the region and 'alter the balance of power.'' (photo: Apib Comunicação/Flickr)
Latin America Unites to Fight Global Inequalities With Regional Ecosocial Pact
Kimberley Brown, Mongabay
Brown writes: "COVID-19 has made it hard to ignore the gaping social and economic inequalities and environmental destruction worldwide, particularly in the global south. That's why researchers and social movements across Latin America have joined forces to push for, and collaborate on, creating real systemic changes in the new Ecosocial Pact of the South."
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A firefighter in Winters, California. (photo: Noah Berger/AP)
Hurricane Laura and the Wildfires: This Is Climate Change
Rebecca Hersher, Nathan Rott and Lauren Sommer, NPR
Excerpt: "The upshot of climate change is that everyone alive is destined to experience unprecedented disasters."
The most powerful hurricanes, the most intense wildfires, the most prolonged heat waves and the most frequent outbreaks of new diseases are all in our future. Records will be broken, again and again.
But the predicted destruction is still shocking when it unfolds at the same time.
This week, Americans are living through concurrent disasters. In California, more than 200,000 people were under evacuation orders because of wildfires, and millions are breathing smoky air. On the Gulf Coast, people weathered a tropical storm at the beginning of the week. Two days later, about half a million were ordered to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Laura. We're six months into a global pandemic, and the Earth is on track to have one of its hottest years on record.
Climate scientist Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii says if our collective future were a movie, this week would be the trailer.
"There is not a single ending that is good," he says. "There's not going to be a happy ending to this movie."
Mora was an author of a study examining all the effects of climate change. The researchers concluded that concurrent disasters will get more and more common as the Earth gets hotter. That means we will live through more weeks like this one — when fires, floods, heat waves and disease outbreaks layer on top of one another.
"Keep in mind that all these things are related," Mora explains. "CO2 is increasing the temperature. As a result, the temperature is accelerating the evaporation of water. The evaporation of water leads to drought that in turn leads to heat waves and wildfires. In places that are humid, that evaporation — the same evaporation — leads to massive precipitation that is then commonly followed by floods."
Disease outbreaks are also more likely. The most recent U.S. National Climate Assessment warns that changing weather patterns make it more likely that insect-borne illnesses will affect the U.S. Climate change is also causing people and animals to move and come in contact with one another in new and dangerous ways.
If humans dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions immediately, scientists say it will help avoid the most catastrophic global warming scenarios. Worldwide emissions are still rising, and the United States is the planet's second-largest emitter.
Mora says helping people connect the dots between the current disasters and greenhouse gas emissions should be every scientist's priority. "That's the million-dollar question," he says. "How do we speak to people in a way that we get them to appreciate the significance of these problems?"
Hurricanes and climate change
Climate change is making the air and water hotter, and that means more power for hurricanes.
"Whenever you get ocean temperatures that are much above average, you're asking for trouble," meteorologist Jeff Masters explains. "And we've seen some of the warmest ocean temperatures on record for the Atlantic basin this year."
Hot water is like a battery charger for hurricanes. As a storm moves over hot water, like Hurricane Laura did this week, it captures moisture and energy very quickly. In recent years, scientists have seen evidence that global warming is already making storms more likely to grow large and powerful and more likely to intensify quickly.
That's an alarming trend. "We're not very good at forecasting rapid intensification," Masters says. "That's critical because that gives you less time to prepare if there's a storm rapidly intensifying right before landfall."
Scientists have also found that hurricanes are dropping more rain, which means more flooding. Flooding is consistently the most deadly and damaging effect of a hurricane. Studies show many people underestimate the flood risks from hurricanes. Just a few inches of moving water can make it impossible to stay on your feet or control your car.
Add all that to the current pandemic, and you get a dangerous situation, especially for people living in the path of the storm. As NPR has reported, safe options for people who evacuate this year could be limited because group shelters might accept fewer people in order to maintain social distancing.
Concurrent disasters are hitting the country as more people struggle to keep their homes during the economic crash. Andreanecia Morris, the executive director of the nonprofit HousingNOLA, says this week's hurricanes are especially risky to the many people in Louisiana who don't have secure places to live because they were evicted.
"People are becoming more vulnerable as this COVID crisis goes on," Morris says, as more people get laid off or run out of savings. "We have frankly been failing to serve the most vulnerable, and the people who have been made vulnerable by these cascading catastrophes."
Wildfires and Climate Change
The fingerprints of climate change are all over the Western wildfires, too.
There are nearly 100 large uncontained fires burning across the U.S. More than a million acres have burned in California alone — almost all in the last few weeks. The smoke has blanketed cities and cast a haze from coast to coast.
Wildfires, like hurricanes, are a natural occurrence. They existed long before humans started rapidly changing the climate and are a necessary process for many Western landscapes. But a growing body of scientific evidence shows that a warming climate has changed the status quo.
Fires are burning more frequently and intensely in places where they've always occurred, and they're creeping into places where they were previously rare.
Wildfires thrive on high heat, low humidity, strong winds and dry vegetation, all of which are more likely to occur in a warming climate, says Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of earth system sciences at Stanford University.
Diffenbaugh was a co-author of a recent study that found climate change has doubled the number of days when conditions would support extreme fire in California. "And it's particularly increased the odds that those conditions occur broadly, simultaneously," Diffenbaugh says.
Take the fires currently burning across the West.
Two of the fire clusters in California are among the five largest wildfires in state history. The Pine Gulch Fire, chewing across the Western slope of the Colorado Rockies, is now largest fire in that state's history.
All occurred during a heat wave that broke temperature records from Texas to Washington state. Death Valley, Calif., reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature, if verified, that would rank as one of the hottest ever reliably recorded on the planet. At the same time, scientists are warning that Colorado and much of the Western U.S. may be in the early stages of a climate-fueled megadrought, the likes of which haven't been seen in the last 1,200 years.
"When you have warmer temperatures and you're lengthening the warm season, you're also lengthening the time when wildfires have a chance to start and grow," says Becky Bolinger, Colorado's assistant state climatologist.
The fire season is growing at a time when more people are in harm's way. Millions of houses in the Western U.S. have been built in fire-prone areas, many before building codes required fire-resistant roofs and siding. Many landscapes are also primed to burn because of overgrown brush and trees. For much of the last century, the U.S. Forest Service and other fire agencies extinguished wildfires, allowing vegetation to build up.
Experts say that living with both destructive wildfires and hurricanes will take more planning and preparation. Communities will have to strengthen existing homes and infrastructure, as well as improve evacuation and emergency plans. Some neighborhoods could prove too unsafe for residents at all.
How bad it eventually gets depends on how quickly the world can reduce carbon emissions. But the past weeks should make clear: "Climate change and its impacts are not the future," says Crystal Kolden, a fire scientist at the University of California, Merced. "They are now."
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