23 February 21
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Robert Reich | Texas Freeze Shows a Chilling Truth - How the Rich Use Climate Change to Divide Us
Robert Reich, Guardian UK
Reich writes:
The Lone Star State is aptly named. If you’re not part of the Republican oil elite with Cruz and Abbott, you’re on your own
exas has long represented a wild west individualism that elevates personal freedom – this week, the freedom to freeze – above all else.
The state’s prevailing social Darwinism was expressed most succinctly by the mayor of Colorado City, who accused his constituents – trapped in near sub-zero temperatures and complaining about lack of heat, electricity and drinkable water – of being the “lazy” products of a “socialist government”, adding “I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!” and predicting “only the strong will survive and the weak will perish”.
Texas has the third-highest number of billionaires in America, most of them oil tycoons. Last week, the laissez-faire state energy market delivered a bonanza to oil and gas producers that managed to keep production going during the freeze. It was “like hitting the jackpot”, boasted the president of Comstock Resources on an earnings call. Jerry Jones, billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys, holds a majority of Comstock’s shares.
But most other Texans were marooned. Some did perish.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the flow of electric power, exempted affluent downtowns from outages, leaving thriving parts of Austin, Dallas and Houston brightly lit while pushing less affluent precincts into the dark and cold.
Like the poor across America and much of the world, poor Texans are getting hammered by climate change. Many inhabit substandard homes, lacking proper insulation. The very poor occupy trailers or tents, or camp out in their cars. Lower-income communities are located close to refineries and other industrial sites that release added pollutants when they shut or restart.
In Texas, for-profit energy companies have no incentive to prepare for extreme weather or maintain spare capacity. Even if they’re able to handle surges in demand, prices go through the roof and poorer households are hit hard. If they can’t pay, they’re cut off.
Rich Texans take spikes in energy prices in their stride. If the electric grid goes down, private generators kick in. In a pinch – as last week – they check into hotels or leave town. On Wednesday night, as millions of his constituents remained without power and heat, Senator Ted Cruz flew to Cancún, Mexico for a family vacation. Their Houston home was “FREEZING” – as his wife put it.
Climate change, Covid-19 and jobs are together splitting Americans by class more profoundly than Americans are split by politics. The white working class is taking as much of a beating as most Black and Latino people.
Yet the white working class has been seduced by conservative Republicans and Trump cultists, of which Texas has an abundance, into believing that what’s good for Black and Latino people is bad for them, and that whites are, or should be, on the winning side of the social Darwinian contest.
White grievance helps keep Republicans in power, protecting their rich patrons from a majority that might otherwise join to demand what they need – such as heat, electricity, water and reliable sources of power.
Lower-income Texans, white as well as Black and Latino, are taking it on the chin in many other ways. Texas is one of the few states that hasn’t expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, leaving the share of Texans without health insurance twice the national average, the largest uninsured population of any state. Texas has double the national average of children in poverty and a higher rate of unemployment than the nation’s average.
And although Texans have suffered multiple natural disasters stemming from climate change, Texas Republicans are dead set against a Green New Deal that would help reduce the horrific impacts.
Last Wednesday, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, went on Fox News to proclaim, absurdly, that what happened to his state “shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States”. Abbott blamed the power failure on the fact that “wind and solar got shut down”.
Rubbish. The loss of power from frozen coal-fired and natural gas plants was six times larger than the dent caused by frozen wind turbines. Texans froze because deregulation and a profit-driven free market created an electric grid utterly unprepared for climate change.
In Texas, oil tycoons are the only winners from climate change. Everyone else is losing badly. Adapting to extreme weather is necessary but it’s no substitute for cutting emissions, which Texas is loath to do. Not even the Lone Star state should protect the freedom to freeze.
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Donald Trump. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Trump's Tax Returns Aren't the Only Crucial Records Prosecutors Will Get
Mike McIntire, The New York Times
McIntire writes:
For all that they reveal, tax returns have limitations. Other records from the former president’s accountants may help give a fuller picture of his finances.
hen New York prosecutors finally get to examine the federal tax returns of former President Donald J. Trump, they will discover a veritable how-to guide for getting rich while losing millions of dollars and paying little to no income taxes.
Whether they find evidence of crimes, however, will also depend on other information not found in the actual returns.
The United States Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., to obtain eight years of Mr. Trump’s federal income tax returns and other records from his accountants. The decision capped a long-running legal battle over prosecutors’ access to the information.
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A patient hospitalized with COVID-19. (photo: Belga)
Visualizing 500,000 Deaths From COVID-19 in the US
Eve Conant, Kelsey Nowakowski and Oscar A. Santamarina, National Geographic
Excerpt: "Research into our evolution shows that the human brain is not inherently wired to make sense of large numbers."
he United States has reached a grim milestone—the moment when half a million Americans have lost their lives to the coronavirus. It’s a staggering number that’s painful to think about, and even harder to picture. Research into our evolution shows that the human brain is not inherently wired to make sense of large numbers; other studies show that people also have become adept at suppressing trauma to cope with grief. In 2020, the U.S. saw a more than 15 percent increase in deaths over the prior year, the highest year-on-year rise in deaths across the U.S. since 1918, which experienced both a global flu epidemic and the First World War.
The colossal death toll forces us to confront a distressing number that has affected some groups more than others. Most of the dead have been Americans 65 and over. People of color are also dying at disproportionate rates: Deaths among Black Americans are 1.9 times higher than among non-Hispanic whites, Hispanics and Latinos 2.3 times higher, and Native Americans 2.4 times higher. The deadly sum of it all is hard to fathom.
What does the loss of so many lives look like? Here are some ways to envision what 500,000 really means.
There are 525,600 minutes in a year. That’s one COVID-19 death per minute, for almost an entire year.
A line of 500,000 caskets, laid end to end, would stretch for 645 miles. Those coffins would reach from New York City to Indianapolis.
It would take a wall almost nine times the length of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., to list the names of every American who died from COVID-19. The 58,318 names of those who perished in the Vietnam War are etched in the monument’s black granite.
It would equal nearly all the fast-food cooks in the country. In 2019, a year before the pandemic led to massive unemployment, there were 527,220 cooks in the industry.
Roughly the same number of Americans flocked to the Woodstock music festival in New York in 1969 as have died of COVID-19. Newspapers estimated that half a million came to celebrate “three days of peace and music.”
Losses to COVID-19 are about 25 percent greater than the U.S. military death toll in World War II. The official count of service members lost in that war is 405,399.
It would be like losing all the inhabitants of Atlanta, Georgia. In 2019 the city had a population of 488,800.
It might look like losing all the school bus drivers in the U.S. In 2018, there were 504,150 drivers transporting students and special clients, including the elderly and people with disabilities.
It would be as if we lost all U.S. Postal Service workers. The postal service had 496,934 career employees in 2019.
It would equal all the public-school teachers in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oregon. Those states combined had 499,196 teachers in 2017.
If each death were marked with the blink of an eye, it would take 14 hours of rapid blinking to count off all the victims.
If measured in the skies, 500,000 is a hundred times more than all the stars visible to the naked eye.
These figures do not include tens of thousands of deaths that may have been related to the virus but were not recorded as COVID-19 deaths, such as deaths before testing became more widely available.
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Immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. (photo: Eric Gay/AP)
First Migrant Facility for Children Opens Under Biden
Silvia Foster-Frau, The Washington Post
Foster-Frau writes:
ozens of migrant teens boarded vans Monday for the trip down a dusty road to a former man camp for oil field workers here, the first migrant child facility opened under the Biden administration.
The emergency facility — a vestige of the Trump administration that was open for only a month in summer 2019 — is being reactivated to hold up to 700 children ages 13 to 17.
Government officials say the camp is needed because facilities for migrant children have had to cut capacity by nearly half because of the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border has been inching up, with January reporting the highest total — more than 5,700 apprehensions — for that month in recent years.
But immigration lawyers and advocates question why the Biden administration would choose to reopen a Trump-era facility that was the source of protests and controversy. From the “tent city” in Tornillo, Tex., to a sprawling for-profit facility in Homestead, Fla., emergency shelters have been criticized by advocates for immigrants, lawyers and human rights activists over their conditions, cost and lack of transparency in their operations.
“It’s unnecessary, it’s costly, and it goes absolutely against everything [President] Biden promised he was going to do,” said Linda Brandmiller, a San Antonio-based immigration lawyer who represents unaccompanied minors. “It’s a step backward, is what it is. It’s a huge step backward.”
During the campaign, Biden pledged to undo former president Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies. In his first month in office, Biden signed several executive orders reversing many of those policies. Last week, he and House Democrats introduced a plan that would provide a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. The administration also reversed some of Trump’s expulsion practices by accepting unaccompanied children into the country, a change that also is contributing to an increase of minors in government facilities, officials said.
Mark Weber — a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that oversees services for migrant children — said the Biden administration is moving away from the “law-enforcement focused” approach of the Trump administration to one in which child welfare is more centric.
At the 66-acre site, groups of beige trailers encircle a giant white dining tent, a soccer field and a basketball court. There is a bright blue hospital tent with white bunk beds inside. A legal services trailer has the Spanish word “Bienvenidos,” or welcome, on a banner on its roof. There are trailers for classrooms, a barber shop, a hair salon. The facility has its own ambulances and firetrucks, as well as its own water supply.
The operation is based on a federal emergency management system, Weber said. The trailers are labeled with names such as Alpha, Charlie and Echo. Staff members wear matching black-and-white T-shirts displaying their roles: disaster case manager, incident support, emergency management.
The most colorful trailer is at the entryway, where flowers, butterflies and handmade posters still hang on its walls from Carrizo’s first opening in 2019.
HHS has 13,200 beds for children, having exploded in growth in the past four years — adding more than 80 facilities for a total of about 200. Weber said putting children in permanent shelters is preferable to the influx shelters like Carrizo, but nearly half of those beds are unusable during the pandemic.
As of Sunday, there were about 7,000 children in HHS custody, over 90 percent capacity under pandemic-era requirements, Weber said. Carrizo is expected to close when the pandemic ends, he said.
“Every kid that comes into this program is a symptom of a broken immigration system,” said Weber, who has worked at HHS since 2012. “So today, we’ve got over 7,000 symptoms of a broken immigration system.”
Weber said the facilities received a bad rap under the Trump administration because many people associated them with the detention centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But the children always received good care and that never wavered between administrations, he said.
The majority of child migrant facilities are subject to state licensing requirements; temporary influx centers like Carrizo are not. However, Weber said Carrizo would “meet or exceed” Texas licensing standards if applicable. The influx facilities also cost more: about $775 a day per child compared with $290 a day for permanent centers.
Weber said the influx shelters keep children from ending up in Border Patrol stations, which have holding cells that were not designed for children. During the 2019 immigration surge, many migrants were stuck in overcrowded cells for prolonged periods that exceeded legal limits.
The detention centers overseen by ICE are reserved for adults or families and often are run by private prison companies. Carrizo Springs is run by the nonprofit BCFS Health and Human Services, a government contractor for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency within HHS that focuses on unaccompanied children.
Most of these children arrive to the United States planning to reunite with sponsors — usually relatives or friends of the family. Office of Refugee Resettlement case managers work with the children to identify and conduct background checks on the sponsors. If cleared, children are released to live with them while they go through the immigration court process.
“When I read they were opening again, I cried,” said Rosey Abuabara, a San Antonio community activist who was arrested for protesting outside the Carrizo camp in 2019. “I consoled myself with the fact that it was considered the Cadillac of [migrant child] centers, but I don’t have any hope that Biden is going to make it better.”
She said despite what she’s heard about the camp’s amenities, the immense cost and scale of the Office of Refugee Resettlement operations points to a government program that profits from holding migrant children, who are shepherded in unmarked vans to remote areas with what she describes as little oversight.
Brandmiller, the lawyer, said people should take note of how these emergency shelters are often located in far-flung locations away from public view.
“This is done deliberately to shelve these children in places that are not only not readily accessible, but not accessible at all to anyone who cares about the quality of life of these kids, and whether or not they comply with the federal law,” she said, referring to the Flores Settlement Agreement, which recommends children not stay in unlicensed facilities for longer than 20 days.
HHS said its goal is that children will remain at Carrizo for about 30 days, though they are coming from at least two weeks of quarantine at other Office of Refugee Resettlement facilities in the region. The average stay for children in custody across its facilities is 42 days. In the 2020 fiscal year, migrant children spent an average of 102 days in federal government custody, according to HHS.
So far, no children in HHS care have been hospitalized for covid-19, Weber said.
“If we could find another way, that’d be great,” Weber said. “On the flip side, these kids just come in and they’re turned loose on the street, they end up being homeless kids.”
But Brandmiller is worried this is the latest government tactic to deter immigrants from seeking refuge in the United States. She said the Biden administration should not be reviving old systems but looking for new solutions.
“If they were actually addressing the issues that are endemic in a system that has been established for many years and is flawed, if they were addressing the inadequacies instead of creating a parallel jail for kids, I would have more hope,” she said.
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President Joe Biden. (photo: Saul Loeb/Getty)
Biden Boosts Pandemic Lending to Smallest Businesses
Zeke Miller, Associated Press
Miller writes:
resident Joe Biden announced changes Monday to target more federal pandemic assistance to the nation’s smallest businesses and ventures owned by women and people of color.
Biden says a lot of these mom and pop businesses “got muscled out of the way” by larger businesses seeking federal money in the early days of the pandemic. He said changes taking effect Wednesday will provide long overdue aid to these smaller enterprises that he says are being “crushed” by the pandemic-driven economic downturn.
“America’s small businesses are hurting, hurting badly and they need help now,” Biden said.
Under the pandemic-era Paycheck Protection Program, the administration is establishing a two-week window, starting Wednesday, in which only businesses with fewer than 20 employees — the overwhelming majority of small businesses — can apply for the forgivable loans.
Biden’s team is also carving out $1 billion to direct toward sole proprietors, such as home contractors and beauticians, the majority of which are owned by women and people of color.
Other efforts will remove a prohibition on lending to a company with at least 20% ownership by a person arrested or convicted for a nonfraud felony in the prior year, as well as allowing those behind on their federal student loans to seek relief through the program. The administration is also clarifying that noncitizen legal residents can apply to the program.
First rolled out in the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic and renewed in December, the program was meant to help keep Americans employed during the economic downturn. It allows small and mid-size businesses suffering loss of revenue to access federal loans, which are forgivable if 60% of the loan is spent on payroll and the balance on other qualified expenses.
The Biden effort is aimed at correcting disparities in how the program was administered by the Trump administration.
Data from the Paycheck Protection Program released Dec. 1 and analyzed by The Associated Press show that many minority owners desperate for a relief loan didn’t receive one until the PPP’s last few weeks while many more white business owners were able to get loans earlier in the program.
The program, which began April 3 and ended Aug. 8 and handed out 5.2 million loans worth $525 billion, helped many businesses stay afloat when government measures to control the coronavirus forced many to shut down or operate at a diminished capacity.
The latest PPP, which began Jan. 11 and runs through the end of March, has already paid out $133.5 billion in loans — about half of the $284 billion allocated by Congress — with an average loan under $74,000.
A further renewal of the program is not included in Biden’s $1.9 trillion “ American Rescue Plan,” which he hopes Congress will pass in the coming weeks.
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The deportations have put Malaysia's immigration and refugee policies in the spotlight. (photo: Amnesty International)
Malaysia Deports 1,086 Myanmar Nationals Despite Court Order
Al Jazeera
Immigration chief says the group was sent back on three Myanmar navy ships and do not include Rohingya or asylum seekers.
alaysia has deported 1,086 Myanmar nationals, despite a court order temporarily halting the repatriation amid concerns the group could be at risk if they are returned to military-ruled Myanmar.
Kairul Dzaimee Daud, director-general of Malaysia’s immigration department, said on Tuesday the group had agreed to return voluntarily and were sent back on three ships belonging to Myanmar’s navy.
The move came hours after the Kuala Lumpur High Court granted an interim stay barring the removal of some 1,200 people until 10am (02:00 GMT) on Wednesday.
The order was issued in response to a request for a judicial review from Amnesty International and Asylum Access, who said the lives of the people in the group would be at risk and that more than a dozen of the detainees were children with at least one parent in Malaysia.
Daud said those sent back were all Myanmar nationals who were detained last year and did not include asylum-seekers or any refugees from the persecuted Rohingya minority.
“All of those who have been deported agreed to return of their own free will, without being forced,” the immigration chief said in his statement.
The statement did not mention the court order or explain why only 1,086 were deported instead of 1,200.
Amnesty International Malaysia’s Executive Director Katrina Jorene Maliamauv said earlier that the court would hear its appeal on Wednesday and urged Malaysia to grant the UNHCR access to the group to verify any asylum claims.
“The government must respect the court order and ensure not one of the 1,200 individuals is deported today,” she said in a statement following the court ruling.
The two organisations said earlier that sending the group to Myanmar, where the military seized power on February 1 was “a cruel act that violates the international principle of non-refoulement”.
Tham Hui Ying, executive director of Asylum Access, said returning the children would breach Malaysia’s commitments under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and its own Child Act that “clearly states the government’s responsibility to protect children”.
Myanmar has been rocked by mass protests calling for the restoration of democracy since the military seized control of the country and detained elected leaders including State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint. Malaysia was among a handful of countries in the region to express concern about the military’s move.
“As the world condemns the political violence in Myanmar, we are appalled to note that the Malaysian government has instead chosen to send 1,200 individuals to a rapidly deteriorating situation,” Amnesty and Asylum Access said.
‘Extend protection’
Amnesty International also sent a letter of appeal to Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin on Tuesday, stressing the scale of “public opposition” to the planned deportation. It said it had received more than 1,000 letters calling on Malaysia to stop the removal.
Malaysia is home to millions of migrants from around the region – documented and undocumented – who often work in the kind of poorly paid jobs Malaysians do not want to do.
There are also nearly 180,000 refugees and asylum-seekers, according to the UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency.
The vast majority are from Myanmar, including 102,250 Rohingya, as well as tens of thousands from other ethnic minority groups who have fled conflict in their homeland.
They are also at risk of being detained as “undocumented” migrants because Malaysia is not a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees. The UN refugee agency has not been able to visit immigration detention centres in the country since August 2019.
“This is a time to extend protection to people fleeing Myanmar and grant the UN access, not put them into the hands of a military junta with a long track record of serious human rights violations,” Amy Smith, executive director of Fortify Rights, said in a statement calling on Malaysia to stop the deportation.
“This plan puts lives at risk and gives undeserving legitimacy to the abusive military coup in Myanmar.”
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Waipoua Forest in Northland, New Zealand. (photo: Experience Oz)
Ancient Trees Show When the Earth's Magnetic Field Last Flipped Out
Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR
Greenfieldboyce: "An ancient, well-preserved tree that was alive the last time the Earth's magnetic poles flipped has helped scientists pin down more precise timing of that event, which occurred about 42,000 years ago."
This new information has led them to link the flipping of the poles to key moments in the prehistoric record, like the sudden appearance of cave art and the mysterious extinction of large mammals and the Neanderthals. They argue that the weakening of the Earth's magnetic field would have briefly transformed the world by altering its climate and allowing far more ultraviolet light to pour in.
Their provocative analysis, in the journal Science, is sure to get researchers talking. Until now, scientists have mostly assumed that magnetic field reversals didn't matter much for life on Earth — although some geologists have noted that die-offs of large mammals seemed to occur in periods when the Earth's magnetic field was weak.
The Earth is a giant magnet because its core is solid iron, and swirling around it is an ocean of molten metal. This churning creates a huge magnetic field, one that wraps around the planet and protects it from charged cosmic rays coming in from outer space.
Sometimes, for reasons scientists do not fully understand, the magnetic field becomes unstable and its north and south poles can flip. The last major reversal, though it was short-lived, happened around 42,000 years ago.
This reversal is called the Laschamp excursion, after lava flows in France that contain bits of iron that are basically pointed the wrong way. Volcanic activity back then, during the flip, produced this distinctive iron signature as the molten lava cooled and locked the iron into place. Iron molecules embedded in sediments around the world also captured a record of this magnetic wobble, which unfolded over about a thousand years.
"Even though it was short, the North Pole did wander across North America, right out towards New York, actually, and then back again across to Oregon," says Alan Cooper, an evolutionary biologist with Blue Sky Genetics and the South Australian Museum. He explains that it "then zoomed down through the Pacific really fast to Antarctica and hung out there for about 400 years and then shot back up through the Indian Ocean to the North Pole again."
These changes were accompanied by a weakening in the magnetic field, he says, to as low as about 6% of its strength today.
He and colleague Chris Turney, an earth scientist at the University of New South Wales, found a new way to study the exact timing of all this, using unusual trees in New Zealand.
Giant kauri trees can live for thousands of years and can end up well preserved in bogs. "The trees themselves are quite unique," says Cooper. "They're a time capsule in a way that you don't really get anywhere else in the world."
Inside trees that lived during the last magnetic flip, the researchers and their colleagues looked for a form of carbon created when cosmic rays hit the upper atmosphere. More of these rays come in when the magnetic field is weak, so levels of this carbon go up.
The trees, with their calendar-like set of rings, took in this kind of carbon and laid it down as wood. That let the researchers see exactly when levels rose and peaked and then fell again. One tree in particular had a 1,700-year record that spanned the period of the greatest changes.
By creating a precise timeline, the research team was able to compare the magnetic field's weakening to other well-established timelines in the archaeological and climate records.
"We really think actually there's quite considerable impacts going on here," says Cooper.
They also turned to advanced climate modeling to try to understand how the magnetic changes would have affected conditions on the planet. The ozone layer, in particular, would have taken a beating.
"If you damage the ozone layer, as we've found out, you change the way in which the sun's heat actually impacts the Earth," says Cooper. "And as soon as you start doing that, you change weather patterns because wind directions and heating goes AWOL, goes all over the place."
If the sun went through one of its periodic conniptions when the strength of the Earth's magnetic field was turned way down, he says, a solar flare or storm would have sent a burst of radiation that could have had massive consequences for people living back then.
"This is what we think actually drove them into caves," says Cooper. "You would not want to be outside during daylight hours."
He admits that it's difficult to draw clear links among all these various events "at this stage. But I think that's always true when you're putting forward such a radical new theory." He notes that the idea of an asteroid killing off the dinosaurs once seemed far-fetched as well.
Other researchers say they're really struck by the fact that the scientists were able to construct such a detailed record of the timing of magnetic changes by looking at these trees.
"That high-resolution temporal record is, I think, pretty impressive," says Brad Singer, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the history of the Earth's magnetic field but was not part of the research team. "This is only a small number of specimens that they measured, but the results look fairly reproducible in the different trees, and I think that's a pretty impressive set of data."
He thinks this report will steer people's attention to do work that could test this proposal that reversals of the Earth's magnetic field could disturb its life.
James Channell, a geologist at the University of Florida, questioned whether other kinds of historical records, like ice cores, support the idea of a global climate crisis around 42,000 years ago. He works mostly on the North Atlantic, he says, and isn't aware of anything very dramatic going on there at that time.
Still, he has previously written about the possibility that magnetic field weakening was linked to die-offs of large mammals, so he was "thrilled" to see someone else connecting those two things. Large mammals, he notes, are long-lived and susceptible to damage from prolonged exposure to the ultraviolet radiation that would increase during periods when the magnetic field was weak.
"From what we know about field strength through time, over the last hundred thousand years," says Channell, "there does appear to be a linkage between extinctions and low geomagnetic field strength."
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