21 October 20
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21 October 20
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Bill McKibben | The Most Important Global Forecast That You've Never Heard Of
Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "Every year at this time, the International Energy Agency publishes its annual World Energy Outlook, which is the equivalent of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue for oil executives."
That is, it incarnates their fantasies, especially the one about how this is an unchanging world, where attitudes and habits need not shift. Each year, the document forecasts a world in which fossil fuel continues to dominate for decades to come, and, because investors and governments often base their actions on those predictions, it’s almost literally the definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The problem, of course, is that the world it confidently imagines is an impossible one. If, as the I.E.A.’s current “sustainable development scenario” predicts, we don’t shut off the flow of fossil fuel until 2070, then the World Habitability Outlook, if there were such a thing, would be grim. (September, 2020, was the hottest September ever measured. That helped set the stage for, among many other novel forms of damage, the first Greek-letter hurricane ever to hit the United States and devastating wildfires in Paraguay, Argentina, and Bolivia.) The rational goal of the I.E.A. (a club of oil-consuming countries, first proposed by Henry Kissinger in the wake of the OPEC embargo of the nineteen-seventies) should be to model what science says we require to survive and then chart a path toward getting us there. And, this year, after intense pressure from activists, that began to happen. Along with the main report, the I.E.A. released a miniature scenario that tries to foresee a world in which we reach net zero by 2050. That’s still too slow to meet the climate targets set in Paris, in 2015, but at least it’s in the ballpark. Next year, the activists say, that nearer-term forecast needs to be the central event, not the kiddie table—taken seriously, such a scenario could be a crucial document as the world assembles in Glasgow a year from November for a critical round of talks about carbon cuts.
An I.E.A. report that took science as its starting point would not be revolutionary. In fact, there are signs that important parts of the world’s financial system are already beginning to get the message, thanks to unrelenting pressure. JPMorgan Chase, the world’s biggest fossil-fuel investor, this month committed to a “Paris alignment” of its lending practices. (Full disclosure: I was arrested in a Chase branch near the Capitol, in January, to help accelerate this campaign.) As activists point out, this vague target is barely a start. But the pressure won’t be going away: members of the Rockefeller family, whose forebears helped build Chase into the giant it is today, announced that they are rallying wealthy peers to prod the bank into more aggressive action, demanding that it “embrace innovation and move beyond the profits of fossil fuels to develop banking models that will excel in a zero-carbon world.” Some of the nations that constitute the I.E.A. are clearly ready for more: in the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson’s government noised around the idea that all of its home electricity could come from offshore wind by 2030. (A truly great idea, in part because, at the moment, too much of it is coming from burning wood pellets shipped over from the southeastern United States, which, as a new report makes clear, is a definitional example of environmental racism.)
As with so much else, the outcome of the I.E.A. saga likely rests on the results of the Presidential election. If a Biden Administration were trying to mobilize support for genuine climate action, a World Energy Outlook that showed a working future, instead of a nostalgic past, would be a real assist, and Washington doubtless has the clout to move the agency in a new direction. So vote as if the veracity of statistical forecasts depended on it!
Passing the Mic
With Bobby Berk, from “Queer Eye,” presiding, the National Design Awards last week conferred their inaugural prize for climate design on DLANDstudio, for Sponge Park, a plan to help staunch the flow of polluted stormwater runoff into Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. The lead designer, Susannah Drake, says that there may be lessons from the project for cities trying to deal with sea-level rise.
New Yorkers know the Gowanus Canal. What’s the problem, and what’s the right fix?
The Gowanus Canal is a former industrial canal that is very polluted. In fact, it was designated an E.P.A. Superfund site because of coal-gasification plants, paint factories, and other industrial uses located along its banks. New York City also has a combined sewer system: in some areas, even a light rain dumps a noxious combination of sewage and storm water into surrounding waterways.
Back when the Dutch settled the area, they turned what was a swamp into farmland. With sea-level rise, that wetland is now trying to reëmerge. The dynamics of historic contamination, ground water, tides, and surface-water runoff make for a hot mess.
The Sponge Park is a nature-based infrastructure solution for cleaning up the area and adding public open space. Using early grant-funded pilot projects, we developed a system that could be implemented in the public right of ways of street ends and waterfront setbacks to clean the water and soil and enhance habitat. Plants were selected for their ability to bioaccumulate and break down toxins, as well as for their resilience to periodic salt-water inundation. We also tried to use plants that were attractive to pollinators, including monarch butterflies.
If this system was deployed across the whole city, it would absorb and filter almost a billion gallons of excess runoff water per year, making our waterways cleaner and healthier.
Is this a template for other work? How should we be thinking about public works in an age of climate change?
The Sponge Park is a replicable system that is now being considered for widespread implementation as a component of the city’s long-term control plan for storm-water management. The systems can be deployed in concert with hard engineering solutions to manage the increased severity of storms brought about by climate change.
We did a plan for the St. Roch neighborhood, in New Orleans, that deployed similar methods to the Sponge Park. We designed streetscapes with new absorbent green spaces that could hold water during storm events, to keep pumping stations from getting overloaded. In coastal zones of Miami Beach, we proposed restoration and development of mangrove swamps to hold soil, protect aquifers, and buffer storm surges.
Adaptation of coastal zones can restore their elasticity. Wetlands and softer coastal zones can absorb impacts of severe storms better than a hard edge. They are like a crumple-zone on a car or an expansion joint in pavement or a building.
What are the limits here? Can these kinds of schemes keep working if we get sea-level rises of multiple metres, if rainfall totals keep rising?
Projects like the Sponge Park are an incremental step in the development of waterfronts that manage the creep of sea-level rise. The Sponge Park landscapes are designed to be flooded. Eventually, plantings can be transitioned to manage more frequent salt-water inundation, and additional modules can be added upland to absorb and filter storm water. But there is a limit to what they can do. With two metres of sea-level rise, roads and other transportation rights of way may be blocked, making access to many urban waterfronts impossible to sustain.
Ten years ago, when I designed MOMA’s “Rising Currents, a New Urban Ground” exhibition, I believed that adaptation in place was a viable long-term solution for many cities. In some places, economics may still warrant elevating ground, redevelopment of sub-grade infrastructure, and making streets porous. Creating a reciprocal relationship to water, where water can be allowed in and out, seemed manageable at the time.
In my most recent work, I have advocated for migration-oriented adaption. The strategy calls for denser development on existing high-ground transportation corridors. These areas would encourage use of public transport and make new walkable neighborhoods for people on land that had already been degraded.
Movement of people away from coastal zones enables the restoration of natural ecologies. Restoring the dynamism of the barrier islands, inland waterways, and coastlines enables the powerful protective forces of nature to protect people and the environment.
Climate School
In case you missed it last weekend, Jonathan Franzen, Carolyn Kormann, and Elizabeth Kolbert had a great conversation on climate at the New Yorker Festival. (I joined in, too.) On-demand viewing has been extended through this Sunday, so you can still stream the video here.
It turns out that leaving natural-gas and oil pipes out in fields unprotected for years while you try to win permits for your pipelines is a bad idea: they corrode and may no longer be safe for use.
Mario Molina, the Mexican chemist who shared the Nobel Prize, in 1995, for helping uncover the threat to the ozone layer, died last week. There are not many people of whom you can say, “He really saved the world.”
The situation in the Amazon grows steadily more dire, and a big reason is that indigenous leaders across the region are under assault from Brazil’s government.
After carbon dioxide and methane, nitrous oxide is the most prevalent greenhouse gas, and concentrations are spiking, caused by fertilizer use.
Here’s news of a fascinating new plan to reduce loan rates for farmers who are serious about making their soils soak up more carbon. The new fund, rePlant Capital, capitalized primarily by female investors, will put about two hundred and fifty million dollars in play—which is still fairly small set against the $426 billion in U.S. farm debt.
I can testify firsthand that “A Matter of Degrees,” a new podcast from Leah Stokes and Katharine Wilkinson, two of the most important and reliable voices in the climate debate, is going to be a don’t-miss show.
Scoreboard
Yet another new study finds that, if you take full account of methane emissions, replacing coal with natural gas is not much help at all.
Heat waves widen the achievement gap between students of color and white students, mostly because the latter are far more likely to be in buildings with air-conditioning.
During the pandemic, even when you control for urban-rural differences, drivers in Democratic-leaning states cut their mileage considerably more than their red-state peers.
Despite increasing demands from investors, ExxonMobil refuses to make public its projections for emissions. That may be because leaked documents show that the company planned to up its contribution to global warming by seventeen per cent in the years ahead.
Grist has identified a half-dozen congressional races in which they think climate fears may tip the balance to the Democrats on November 3rd.
A Biden ad aimed at Michiganders and featuring the state’s storied cherry growers is Biden’s first climate-change commercial. As Election Day looms, great environment-themed ads are popping up all over. Biden needs Wisconsin, and this ad, about the state’s beloved former senator (and Earth Day founder) Gaylord Nelson, should help. Meanwhile, the funniest climate spot features a moose puppet and backs the Alaska Senate hopeful Al Gross.
Not for the first time, Pope Francis called on everyone to divest from fossil-fuel companies, saying, “Science tells us, every day with more precision, that we need to act urgently . . . if we are to have any hope of avoiding radical and catastrophic climate change.”
Numbers don’t get much more basic than this: natural disasters have increased sharply in the past twenty years, as the world began to rapidly heat. Flooding in Asia stands out sharply in the new statistics. Debarati Guha-Sapir, of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, at the University of Louvain, in Belgium, which provided numbers for the report, said, “If this level of growth in extreme weather events continues over the next twenty years, the future of mankind looks very bleak indeed.”
Warming Up
Dana Lyons, a troubadour who has helped in dozens of environmental campaigns, has a new song, “Give Me an Easy Morning,” aimed at the health-care workers who are coping with the latest surge in coronavirus infections. “With my face shield on, I am ready,” he sings.
David Xol of Guatemala hugs his son Byron as they were reunited at Los Angeles International Airport in January. The father and son were separated 18 months earlier under the Trump administration's 'no tolerance' migration policy. (photo: Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP)
Parents of 545 Children Separated at US-Mexico Border Still Can't Be Found
Mark Katkov, NPR
Katkov writes: "The parents of 545 children still can't be found, according to a court document filed Tuesday by the U.S. Justice Dept. and the American Civil Liberties Union."
espite a federal judge's order that the government reunite families who had been separated at the U.S.-Mexico border under the Trump administration's "no tolerance" migration policy, the parents of 545 children still can't be found, according to a court document filed Tuesday by the U.S. Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Thousands of families were separated under the policy before the Trump administration ended the practice in 2018. The ACLU successfully sued the government, winning a court order to reunite families. Thousands of parents and children were reunited within weeks.
But about 1,000 families who had been separated in a pilot program in 2017 were not covered by the initial court order — reunification of this group was ordered only last year. The passage of time has made finding both parents and children more difficult.
"What has happened is horrific," says Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, who has been leading the litigation. "Some of these children were just babies when they were separated. Some of these children may now have been separated for more than half their lives. Almost their whole life, they have not been with their parents."
The update on reunification efforts was filed ahead of a status conference scheduled for Thursday before U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego.
The filing estimates that two-thirds of the separated parents are believed to have returned to their home countries. Nongovernmental groups appointed by the court have "engaged in time consuming and arduous on-the-ground searches for parents in their respective countries of origin," according to the filing, but those efforts were halted by the coronavirus pandemic and are only now resuming in limited fashion.
NPR's Joel Rose reports that the children initially went into a shelter system before being placed with sponsors across the country and that many will likely try to remain in the United States. The ACLU's Gelernt says about 360 of the children still have not been located.
The case is Ms. L. v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement et al., in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, 3:18-cv-428.
A NYPD ceremony in 2018. (photo: Damon Winter/NYT)
The Dystopian Police State the Trump Administration Wants
Phillip Atiba Goff, The New York Times
Excerpt: "Law enforcement's problems could get even worse."
ince this spring, when Americans watched George Floyd take his last breaths as a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck, we’ve borne witness to the worst that this country’s criminal justice system has to offer: continued extrajudicial killings, failure to hold officers accountable and state-sponsored violence against those standing up for justice.
It’s hard to imagine that things could get worse. But draft recommendations from a Trump-appointed policing commission prove that they could.
In October 2019, President Trump signed an executive order to establish a commission that Attorney General William P. Barr explained was intended to make the police “trusted and effective guardians of our communities.” From the beginning, its membership — made up entirely of law enforcement — spoke volumes about its intentions. A lawsuit brought by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund argued that the commission makeup violated federal law and this month, a federal judge agreed. He ordered the commission to halt its proceedings, including the release of the report, until it can meet the Federal Advisory Committee Act’s requirement that demands “fairly balanced” viewpoints aired in publicly noticed, open meetings.
Senator Dianne Feinstein. (photo: Politico)
Republicans Rally to Defend California Senator Diane Feinstein
John Bresnahan and Burgess Everett, Politico
Excerpt: "Liberal groups say Feinstein was far too accommodating to Republicans during last week's confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett."
huck Schumer refused to defend Sen. Dianne Feinstein over calls from progressive groups for her removal as top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, with the Senate minority leader divulging he had a “long and serious talk” recently with the California senator.
Senate Democrats are grappling with how to handle Feinstein’s future role on the panel. Liberal groups say Feinstein was far too accommodating to Republicans during last week’s confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. And while Democrats tread carefully in public on Tuesday, refusing to criticize the 87-year-old Feinstein — the first woman to serve as ranking member on Judiciary — her loudest supporters were actually Republicans.
Democrats mostly refused to comment on the controversy, with some praising Feinstein’s long record of service but few touting her performance last week. The Barrett proceedings ended with Feinstein praising Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and then hugging him. She called the Barrett hearings “one of the best sets of hearings that I’ve participated in,” a comment that drew waves of angry criticism from the left.
NARAL, Demand Justice and an array of liberal organizations dinged Feinstein for being far too deferential to Barrett, claiming she essentially helped Senate Republicans stack the Supreme Court with another ideologue who will solidify the conservative majority on the high court for years to come. NARAL Pro-Choice America president Ilyse Hogue said Feinstein “offered an appearance of credibility to the proceedings that is wildly out of step with the American people.”
In a brief interview, Feinstein said she had “no comment” about the groups calling for her to step down. Feinstein waved away a question about whether she would run again for the top Democratic slot on the Judiciary Committee during the next Congress.
The normally voluble Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who could be in line for the position if Feinstein stepped down, was uncharacteristically terse about calls for her to be demoted.
“You keep asking me that question. I’m not going to answer it,” he said on Tuesday.
The Democratic Party is highly unlikely to overtly force Feinstein to step down. Several Democratic sources said that if she did leave the top slot of the Judiciary Committee it would be of her own accord.
And in response to questions about whether Feinstein should be replaced atop the panel, Schumer was tight-lipped about Feinstein.
“I’ve had a long and serious talk with Sen. Feinstein,” Schumer said on Tuesday. “That’s all I’m going to say about it right now.
Many other Democrats also declined to comment on Feinstein, from progressive Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) to vice presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). Those that did speak out said the decision on Feinstein’s future isn’t up to them.
“She is the ranking member, and so far as I know standing here right now, she’ll continue to be ranking member,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the Judiciary Committee. “Sen. Schumer is the leader of our caucus and he’s the one who decides. She has contributed through her public service and I value her leadership and friendship.”
“Sen. Feinstein has a long record of fighting for gender equality and reproductive rights, and [she] has led the minority on the committee well,” added Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who also serves on the Judiciary Committee. When asked whether Feinstein should be replaced atop the panel, Coons demurred: “I don’t think that’s for me to say.”
Feinstein was the first Senate Democrat to endorse Joe Biden, even before he got in the race to be president. Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Biden, said: "Vice President Biden's appreciation for her support is only exceeded by his respect and admiration for her strong record of public service to the people of California and the nation.”
Feinstein still enjoys close relationships in the GOP and Republicans emerged this week as Feinstein’s most outspoken advocates. They claim the anger from the left at Feinstein is misguided and shows that Democrats’ attacks on Barrett’s conduct and qualifications during the hearing failed to land.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) lamented that it “would be a real shame if they run her off.”
“She’s such an outstanding legislator, it’s totally unjustified,” said fellow octogenarian Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a former Judiciary Committee chairman. “She’s only three months older than I am, and I haven’t announced I’m not running for reelection.”
“I’m not sure it would be terribly helpful to Dianne if I said something nice about her,” acknowledged Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who serves on the Judiciary Committee. “The left-wing attacks on Sen. Feinstein are a product of the frustration on the far left that their attacks [on Barrett] aren’t working and their arguments aren’t resonating.”
Feinstein would take over as chair of the Judiciary panel in the next Congress if Democrats win the majority on Election Day, which looks increasingly possible. Feinstein has not stated whether she will fight her critics and try to keep her spot or whether she will give up the role. After Durbin, who would be unlikely to lead the panel if he stays on as whip, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) is next in seniority.
“Sen. Feinstein is focused right now on the Barrett nomination and the upcoming election,” the California Democrat’s office said in a statement. “Decisions on the next Congress will be made after Nov. 3.”
There is precedent for replacing committee chairs who no longer are up to the job or become incapacitated due to health issues. The late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) was replaced as the chairman of the Armed Services Committee during the late 1990s. And in 2008, the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) voluntarily gave up his role as Appropriations Committee chairman. Most recently, Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) retired in 2018 after questions were raised about his fitness to wield the gavel at the Appropriations Committee.
The seniority system in Congress protects veteran members from being pushed aside by more junior rivals who may have a higher profile, and it also provides a powerful tool to small states or poor districts to get federal attention. Yet the other side of the coin is that it can take decades to climb the committee ladder, meaning lawmakers may not be as vital as they once were when they finally get to the cherished panel post.
But for Feinstein, this month's controversy centers on her throwback attitude of bipartisan comity and buddying up to Graham, an embattled incumbent who Democrats see as rushing the Supreme Court hearings and shifting the high court away from them for a generation.
“I hate the fact that saying something nice about me about the way I conducted the hearing has gotten to the point now that people would drive you out of office,” Graham lamented in an interview. “We’re losing our way here."
A ballot is cast on the first day of early voting for the 2020 elections in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Tuesday. (photo: Kamil Krzaczynski/Getty Images)
How the AP Will Decide When to Call States on Election Night - and When to Wait
Mike Pesca, Slate
Pesca writes: "On election night or soon thereafter, we have generally defaulted to letting the television networks 'make the call.'"
here is no formal mechanism for the United States to say, “We have a president.” Of course, there are 50 states that vote, and then there is the affirming of the Electoral College. But on election night or soon thereafter, we have generally defaulted to letting the television networks “make the call.” But in reality, the gold standard within the media is the AP, the Associated Press. Once the AP makes the call, well, then that’s it. The call is made. But as with all standards, this gold standard has changed, and it has had to change for this election.
As part of The Gist’s series “Calling It” about how the media is preparing for election night, I spoke with Julie Pace, who is the Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press. We discussed how the AP makes the call, and what it’s preparing for on Nov. 3 and the days—and possibly weeks—that follow. A portion of that interview is transcribed below. It has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Mike Pesca: What people are going to want to know is who won and when. You partnered with the University of Chicago to launch VoteCast in 2018, and you’ve been using it since then. That gives you a counting tool, but not enough to make the call. Could you take us through the portion of your task that is vote tabulation and research? How does that go down?
Julie Pace: VoteCast will be one tool, but it’s by far not the only tool that we’ll be using. We have a range of resources. We start with a group of analysts and race callers who are real experts in these states. Some people have been calling races in these states for several cycles. We draw on them pretty extensively here.
But essentially what they do is they are waiting to see if enough votes have come in, in the right places in those states to give us a margin [with which] we feel comfortable calling that race. That means that you could end up in a situation where we know that the margin [of victory] is 2 points right now, but we’ve got 5 percent of the votes still out, and it’s in those swingy areas of that state, a swingy county. It might mean though that if it’s a 2 percent margin and the Democrat is up, and all of the vote that is out still is from the most heavily Democratic county in the state, that might put us in position where we’re able to call that race. It’s just a series of data points that we’re looking at to make that determination. They don’t always cut one way or the other.
So it is the case that the AP will make a call even if it is mathematically possible for the candidate who you’re making the call against to win. The standard isn’t if Candidate A is leading by 20,000 votes, and if there are 21,000 votes out there, we simply will not make the call. No. You look at those 21,000 votes and say, “Oh my God, they’re from areas that should heavily favor Candidate A. Therefore, we can make the call.”
Yeah. There are certainly situations where yes, based on raw vote that is still out [there] technically—if the trailing candidate captured every single vote that is still out, they could win. But if we know that that vote is from an area that votes 80-20 for the candidate that’s ahead, that will probably give us confidence to call that race. There are always caveats here. One thing that is always a really big caveat for us is we pay very close attention to what recanvass and recount rules are in these states. If we have a margin that is within that window, we’re not going to call a race, because we don’t want to have the AP race call be part of that process. We don’t want to be used in legal challenges or in the ways that states are evaluating whether to start that process or not. If the margin is within that window, we’re going to let that process go forward before we call a race. Again, always caveats. But yeah, absolutely. We’d look not just at what the raw tally is, but where those votes would be coming [from].
I read in the AP’s materials that you have a rule that you do not call a race if the AP determines that the margin of vote is 0.5 percent. You’re not going to make the call if you think it’s so close that you could be wrong.
That is typically our standard. Yeah. I think one of the reasons why we do that is because we only want to call these races once. We don’t want to call a race and then, say, learn that there is some change in calculation. We have had situations where a county can come back and say, “Actually, we didn’t put this number of votes into the system that we had,” not because anything nefarious happened there, but [because] these are human processes. We have found that sometimes there are just things that change. When the margin is that close, we don’t want to have gone out and called a race and then have to take that race call back.
That’s, I think, really central in this election. We want people to feel really confident that when we call a race, that it is definitive, that you can trust us, that this is not going to change. You’re not going to learn something else that happened, and we’re going to have to reverse that call. But that means that we have to have some level of caution within our race call to allow us to be certain that when we’re doing it, that it’s right.
Would it surprise you if there is a situation where the networks have a bunch of check marks next to states they’ve called, but the AP doesn’t? Maybe four, five, six swing states where other big media organizations with lots of audience have weighed in, but the AP is holding back?
I would say, if you look historically, you’ll see a lot of examples where we’ve called races that other outlets haven’t called, or they’ve called races that we haven’t called yet. We all take a similar approach, but we all have tweaks around the edges on this stuff. It’s certainly possible that yeah, they could call some races before we’re ready. It’s also possible that we’ll call races before they’re ready. We were in a situation in ’16 where there were some states, individual states, where we hadn’t called the race yet when some other outlets had, but we ultimately called Wisconsin and then the presidency before others did.
Right.
Sometimes it kind of balances out at the end. We’re just going to kind of play our own game. That’s how we’ve always done it. We were very clear in our newsroom on election days: We care about the AP race count. That’s the one that we control. It’s the one that we believe is the gold standard. It’s the one we want to point people to and make people feel confident in.
So far, we’ve been talking about accuracy and numbers, a very important part of journalism, but an essential part is narrative. What will you, as an organization, maybe even you personally, be doing in your explanatory or storytelling capacity to explain to the voters, the audience, Americans, and maybe temper expectations about what election night really means?
We have been writing for some time, since the summer really, stories trying to lay out for people, this simple idea that you might not know the winner on election night, and that does not mean that something has gone wrong. That is just a function of the fact that we’re expecting more mail-in vote this year in some states, including a state like Pennsylvania, which is a really important state, isn’t going to be able to start counting those mail-in ballots until pretty darn late. That could really slow down that process. We’ve been trying to really just hammer home this idea that it’s OK if there’s no winner on election night. That’s not going to probably mean that there was some kind of widespread fraud here.
The other thing though that I think you’re going to see from us is I think we have to go above and beyond this cycle in explaining the race calls that we are making and explaining the race calls that we’re not making. I don’t think it’s going to be enough anymore in this environment—as much as I think that we’re the gold standard—I don’t think it’s enough in this environment to just say, “AP has called this race for this candidate,” or “AP is not able to call this race at this time,” and expect that people will just take us at our word.
Indigenous protesters gathered in Bogota, Colombia. (photo: AP)
Colombia: Four Indigenous Leaders Murdered in Last 24 Hours
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Four indigenous community organizations were murdered during the last 24 hours in Colombia due to three violent events in the departments of Huila, Cauca, and Córdoba."
While Colombia's indigenous peoples are being killed and demanding protection through the Social Minga, President Ivan Duque has shown no sign whatsoever of intending to attend to them.
hese new acts of violence against Colombia's indigenous peoples occurred while the Social Minga took place in Bogotá.
Community members Avelino Ipia and Hector David Marin were shot dead in the Guaico Alizal village, in the Caucan municipality of Caldono. They were attacked by armed men on Monday night, amid circumstances unknown to judicial bodies until now.
The mayor of Caldono, Jose Vicente Otero, denounced the incident. "We are in mourning for the vile murder of two community members, inhabitants of our municipality. They were passing through the place and were surprised by criminals who murdered them," explained the official.
"It cannot be possible that the families of Caldas continue to mourn their dead in these times of peace and territorial harmony. My solidarity with these families and total rejection of these acts of violence that our population mourns" added the mayor.
In response to what happened, a commission made up of indigenous and civil authorities went to the site to remove the bodies and begin an investigation to find the whereabouts of the perpetrators.
"Another Colombia Humana leader murdered. Eduardo Alarcon Córdoba, killed in Campoalegre, Huila."
On the other hand, Aurelio Jumi Domico, vice-governor of the Quebrada Cañaveral Emberá Katío Indigenous Reservation in San Jorge, was murdered this Tuesday morning in the village of Ibudó - Tres Playitas, in the municipality of Puerto Libertador, in the province of Córdoba.
Domico was a recognized leader of that community, a spokesman for the departmental Peace and Human Rights Council, and the Mesa de Garantías for leaders and defenders of Córdoba denounced the Cordoberxia Foundation.
Few details are known about this new attack on social and indigenous leaders in Córdoba, taking place while the Social Minga is in Bogotá.
In another crime that occurred in the village of Las Vueltas in Huila's rice capital, in southern Colombia, social and rural leader Eduardo Alarcón was murdered by a group of armed men who arrived at his farm on a motorcycle and shot at him.
Eduardo Alarcón was a recognized agrarian leader in Huila, who, together with other small farmers, managed to divide up several large estates in Llano Grande, in the municipality of Campo Alegre. He was a councilman in this municipality and a champion of agrarian and social struggles, belonging to the Alternative Pole.
The authorities went to the site to carry out the acts of investigation, but there has been no official statement on the matter.
A firefighter is silhouetted as the Cameron Peak Fire, the largest wildfire in Colorado's history, burns outside Drake, Colorado, on October 17, 2020. (photo: Reuters)
Colorado's Record-Breaking Wildfires Show "Climate Change Is Here and Now"
Jeff Berardelli, CBS News
Berardelli writes: "The Cameron Peak fire, a few miles west of Fort Collins, Colorado, has engulfed over 200,000 acres and it's still growing. It has now become the biggest wildlife in Colorado history."
What's more astounding is that the Cameron Peak fire is the second fire in 2020 to hold the title of largest wildfire in Colorado history. The Pine Gulch fire near Grand Junction briefly held that title, but for only 7 weeks, having burned 139,000 acres in late summer.
Looking at this in a vacuum, you might think of it as mere coincidence. But zooming out, you need only look two states away in California to find evidence of more unprecedented fires. Six of the 7 largest wildfires in California history have all burned in 2020, and the largest, the August Complex fire, became the state's first ever gigafire — meaning it burned over 1 million acres, scorching more acreage than the state of Rhode Island.
This year Mother Nature has supplied us with smoking-gun evidence to prove what climate scientists have been warning about for decades. The scorched-earth impacts of climate change have arrived.
In a letter the editor published in the journal Global Change Biology, two of the world's foremost experts on wildfires conclude that the "[r]ecord-setting climate enabled the extraordinary 2020 fire season in the western United States."
"Our 2020 wildfire season is showing us that climate change is here and now in Colorado. Warming is setting the stage for a lot of burning across an extended fire season," says Dr. Jennifer Balch, professor of fire ecology and director of Earth Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder.
According to Balch, Colorado in the 2010s saw a tripling of average burned area in the month of October, compared to the prior three decades of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. "We do see fall fire events in Colorado, related to fast, downslope winds. But to see multiple events start this late, in the middle of October, is very, very rare."
Perhaps it's rare, but as of Monday 10 notable fires are burning across the state. The Cameron Peak fire's eastern extent is just 5 miles from Fort Collins and Loveland.
Two of the most concerning new fires are burning in Boulder County and forcing evacuations. The CalWood fire — the largest fire ever in Boulder County — and the Lefthand fire have both exhibited extreme fire behavior, shocking even seasoned climate scientists.
"Even as a scientist studying extreme weather & wildfire in a warming climate, I was shocked by how fast #CalwoodFire roared down the Colorado Front Range foothills," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, wrote on Twitter, posting video of a swirling vortex of smoke.
Examining all the evidence, it's clear why conditions are extraordinarily flammable this fall. It's a compound issue of short-term natural climate variability layered on top of fundamental changes to the long-term climate from global warming.
"This year was shocking"
While you can't completely separate short-term variability from longer-term climate trends, as they are intertwined, a region's most recent weather conditions are a big factor in how extreme a fire season is.
According to the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University, for the first time since 2013 all of Colorado is experiencing drought. This is no run-of-the-mill dry spell — 97% of the state is in the "exceptional," "extreme," or "severe" drought categories. And it's not just Colorado; much of the Southwest is bone dry.
Brad Udall, the senior water and climate research scientist at the Colorado Water Institute at Colorado State University, said 2020 started out promising.
"This year was shocking because we had a decent winter and on April 1 we had 100% of snowpack," he said. But things quickly turned disappointing. "With 100% of snowpack, you'd expect a decent runoff year. Instead, we ended up with 52% of what is normal."
The amount of water that runs off from snow cover, and the pace at which it melts, is important because it determines water availability for soil and vegetation in summer.
Udall says much of the poor runoff is a result of increased evaporation due to a very warm and dry spring and summer. Over the past few months there have been a number of significant heat waves in the West, two of which were of historic proportions. The extra added heat energy vaporizes spring snow cover, and the lack of new moisture provides nothing to buffer the loss.
In the Southwestern states, June through August rainfall was the lowest since 1895 and temperatures were the highest since 1895, according to NOAA. In Colorado so far, this year is the eighth warmest and second driest on record. Denver has experienced more 90-degree days than any year in its history.
"We've had next to no moisture over the last 3 months which is highly unusual. The Arizona monsoon often carries moisture to Colorado but this year it was a complete bust," said Udall.
The below map illustrates just how "off the charts" the atmosphere's demand for evaporation is. The more the atmosphere pulls moisture from the land, the drier and more flammable the trees, grass and brush become.
Udall says that while most of the droughts of the 20th century were caused by lack of rainfall, today's droughts are mainly caused by increased evaporation due to warmer weather. But drought is usually referred to as a short-term issue, and what's happening in Colorado is not temporary. He prefers the term aridification, because climate change, due to the burning of fossil fuels and the buildup of a heat-trapping carbon pollution blanket overhead, is systematically drying out the landscape.
To be sure, climate is not the only factor driving the explosion in burned area. Excess fuel buildup due to increased fire suppression in recent decades as well as increasing ignitions due to more human activity in forested areas do play a role. But experts say the marked increase can not be explained without longer-term warming and drying.
Climate change and "the recipe for large forest fires"
If you look back over the past century, parts of Colorado have been warming faster than anywhere else in the nation. According to data from NOAA and an analysis by the Washington Post, western and northern Colorado are warming at twice the average rate of the globe, having warmed about 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895.
A study published in September found that the frequency of combined heat waves and droughts — which are more impactful when they occur in unison — has increased significantly, especially in the western U.S. For example, the type of hot-dry event that would have been expected once every 25 years in 1950, now occurs five to 10 times every 25 years.
"Episodes of extreme dryness and heat are the recipe for large forest fires," said Mojtaba Sadegh, the senior author of the study. "These extremes are intensifying and extending at unprecedented spatial scales, allowing current wildfires to burn across the entire U.S. West Coast."
Colorado's state climatologist Russ Schumacher agrees, telling Colorado Public Radio this is pretty well in line with climate predictions, "What we're seeing here is indicative of the fact that when the hot, dry years come around, they're hotter. ... I think the frequency of these kinds of summers where we get in these hot, dry conditions is probably going to increase."
Udall agrees, and warns we should get used to what he calls "the new abnormal." "The climate system has a really good memory and the cycle of heat and dryness is hard to break," he said.
Since 2000, the drought in the Western states has become so monumental that scientists are using the term "megadrought" to describe it. This spring climate scientists released a groundbreaking study saying that this is the beginning of the second worst drought in the past 1,200 years, with a "large contribution from human-caused climate change."
The graph below from drought.gov shows that over the past 20 years drought has become a regular and potentially permanent part of Colorado's climate. Darker shades mean drier conditions, with D2 representing "severe drought, D3 "extreme drought" and D4 "exceptional drought."
The effects on the Colorado environment are apparent. Since the 1930s the water available from Colorado snowpack has decreased by 30%. As a result streamflow in the Colorado River has decreased markedly. In a 2018 study, Udall and co-authors found that 50% of the river runoff decline was due to higher temperatures.
And this more arid climate has huge impacts, with larger wildfires and a longer fire season. In fact, wildfire season in the West is now two to three months longer than it was in the 1970s. And since 1984, human-caused climate change has led to a doubling of the area burned in the Western states, with about 50%of the increase being attributed to increases in the dryness of fuel.
A 2015 study on wildfires in the Colorado Front Range Corridor found that the expansion of the wildland-urban Interface — more people living on the edge of forests — and climate change were both to blame in explaining the changing fire trends, but that climate change had a "stronger influence."
Balch says that our inability to square the needs of our modern society with a rapidly changing climate is a dangerous proposition.
"Ignoring the link between warming and wildfires only puts lives and homes at risk," she said. "In the contiguous U.S. 1 million homes sat within the boundaries of wildfires in the last 24 years. Nearly 59 million more homes in the wildland-urban interface lay within a kilometer of fires."
The unprecedented wildfires of the past few years have certainly illuminated just how vulnerable we are to a climate which no longer plays by the rules our parents and grandparents took for granted. And considering the warming and drying projected in the coming decades, scientists say the rules will just keep on changing, making it "unlikely that the records from 2020 will stand for long."
