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Global warming can aggravate multiple sclerosis symptoms. Here’s what you can do
Climate change will make people with MS more uncomfortable more often, but experts say the good news is that the symptoms will not further damage the nervous system.
Climate change linked with worsening neurologic diseases
Climate change may be making the symptoms of headaches, dementia, multiple sclerosis (MS) and Parkinson’s disease worse, according to results of a new review. It’s estimated around 100 million Americans suffer from at least one neurologic disease and their prevalence is growing.
Mississippi Power: Kemper plant was, will remain asset to state.
As Mississippi Power Co., Public Utilities Staff and others struggle to come to an equitable agreement, the utility's CEO maintains that the power plant was and will continue to be an asset to the area.
Mississippi Power: Kemper plant was, will remain asset to state
By Jim Brock  jbrock@themeridianstar.com Sep 13, 2017
Kemper Power Plant
As Mississippi Power Co., Public Utilities Staff and others struggle to come to an equitable agreement, the utility’s CEO maintains that the power plant was and will continue to be an asset to the area.
“This is the biggest project in the history of Mississippi,†said Mississippi Power Chairman, President and CEO Anthony L. Wilson, who visited The Meridian Star on Monday. “Can you imagine what the recession of 2009 would have been had we not invested $7 billion in Mississippi?â€
Wilson said the lignite coal gasification operation was far from a failure. One of the problems, he said, was the decrease in the price of natural gas, mainly due to fracking. If money was “unlimited, I think we would have gotten there,†he said.
“The plant worked — it did exactly what we wanted it to do,†Wilson said. “The problem was we could never make the process work consistently.â€
Mississippi Power spokesman Jeff Shepard said more than 560 companies provided services and equipment to the project.
In late June, Mississippi Power announced it was suspending its lignite coal gasification operation at the Kemper plant.
Per an order from the Mississippi Public Service Commission, the plant will be relicensed as a natural gas facility — which means hundreds of jobs lost.
+1
Anthony Wilson
Mississippi Power, Chairman, President and CEO
Wilson said since the utility issued Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, there are about 125 employees “actively working at the site,†down from 285. About 60 employees have since been “absorbed†by the companies and sent to other locations, while 100 have “released†since the WARN was issued. Once the plant is fully converted to a natural gas facility, there will be 40-45 employees left at the plant.
Meanwhile, the commission on Tuesday said it would decide by the beginning of next year how much Mississippi Power customers should pay for the $7.5 billion power plant in Kemper County.
Since Mississippi Power Co., the Public Utilities Staff and others have been unable to reach a settlement, commissioners have set a Dec. 4 hearing to decide how much customers should pay for the natural gas part of the plant unless settlement talks resume.
In response, Mississippi Power said its most recent filing was equitable enough.
“We will continue discussing reasonable outcomes to the Kemper settlement docket, but we do believe the agreement we filed in August is a fair resolution for all parties concerned,†according to a statement from Mississippi Power. Items in said agreement include removal of risk to customers for the gasifier and related assets, no rate increase and operation of the Kemper plant as a 700-megawatt natural gas facility.
According to a Mississippi Power statement, “We believe the facts contained in the company’s filing demonstrate that Mississippi Power is operating in the best interest of customers and what is required to ensure the company’s financial stability.â€
The commission in July ordered the utility and other parties to reach a settlement concerning the plant within 45 days. The order included relicensing the plant as a natural gas facility and ensuring that rates do not increase. The commission also suggested that customers see a decrease in rates.
Mississippi Power and Public Utilities Staff were unable to reach a settlement by Aug. 21, so the commission extended the deadline to Sept. 5, which has since passed.
According to a recent Associated Press report, Mississippi Power says it wants customers to pay for $277 million more in assets than the Public Utilities Staff believes is necessary.
Atlanta-based Southern Co., the parent company of Mississippi Power, announced recently that it would absorb an additional $2.8 billion in losses from the Kemper County power plant’s lignite coal operation — bringing the total to nearly $6 billion in losses.
Charges recorded through May 2017 were $3.07 billion, according to a statement from Mississippi Power.
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How much should major polluters pay? A case against DuPont provides a model.
A biologist traced mercury from a company spill to contamination in songbirds, and devised a new way to hold polluters financially accountable.
Science
How Much Should Major Polluters Pay? A Case Against DuPont Provides a Model
A biologist traced mercury from a company spill to contamination in songbirds, and devised a new way to hold polluters financially accountable.
By Paul Greenberg
August 16, 2017
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It was just another sweltering summer afternoon gathering blood samples from Shenandoah Valley birds when the news came in. The ornithologist Dan Cristol had been conducting a preliminary assessment funded by DuPont to determine to what degree the company’s pollution of the watershed might have affected the avian community. DuPont was facing potential legal action and had cautiously agreed to one summer of funding for a small team to gauge just how expensive fixing the damages might be. True to his nature, Cristol hadn’t been tentative in his research. He and his students had skulked into stream-bank kingfisher nests, cornered screech owls near bridges, and mist-netted dozens of species of songbirds. Using tiny needles, they’d extracted drops of bird blood before gently releasing their subjects back into the wild. Then they’d shipped their samples to a toxicology lab at Texas A&M;, and watched as their funding dribbled away at a rate of $55 per analyzed sample.
Now as the sun blazed over the South River, a major tributary of the mighty Shenandoah, and waves of heat rose up from the newly mown hayfields, Cristol opened an email from the lab and read the first test results.
“Holy fucking shit,” one of the students cried out.
“I rechecked the numbers about five times to make sure,” Cristol recalls. “We were being funded by the responsible party, so I figured DuPont would look at what we’d found and say, ‘OK, thanks but no thanks, we’ve seen enough.’ I was worried that after this tantalizing glimpse we would not get to learn what was really going on. But to their credit, everyone just kept moving forward and letting us propose to answer each new question that arose.”
Cristol and his students had discovered that the DuPont mercury spill had penetrated much further into the avian food web than anyone had previously expected. Not only was mercury found in fish-eating raptors like osprey and eagles, but it was present in bluebirds that flitted far away from the contaminated South River; it was in surprisingly high levels in the feathers of the distinctly non-riverine Red-eyed Vireo whose song tells you to look-up way-up tree-top to find it; it was in scrappy Carolina Wrens, whirling Tree Swallows, and reclusive thrushes. Even in the diminutive Blue-gray Gnatcatcher that weighs in at a miniscule third of an ounce.
More importantly, the work had laid the foundation for a novel way to restore North American songbird populations that are declining throughout the country. For Cristol’s research has ultimately perfected a way of holding major polluters accountable for something as profound as it has long been intangible: a means to calculate and seek reparations for bird years lost.
Mercury in Cristol's lab. Photo: Greg Kahn
“You couldn’t have a better site to test the effects of methylmercury,” Cristol told me as we stood on a bridge over the South River in the City of Waynesboro and stared southeast at a 177-acre chemical plant. For roughly 50 years this gray smudge of a facility, built into the green hillsides by DuPont in 1928, manufactured something called acetate fibers—which used mercury as a catalyst for the first 20 years of its operation.
DuPont to its credit has never strongly contested that it put significant amounts of mercury into the South River. Ever since mercury was detected in river sediment and floodplain soil around the plant in the 1970s, the corporation has been trying to figure out a way to put its pollution legacy behind it. For years DuPont funded a vaguely missioned “South River Science Team” where state officials and academics monitored mercury levels in fish, with the hope that concentrations would eventually go down. No such decrease was observed. Sampling continued to show levels in some fish higher than 4 parts per million—nearly four times that found in swordfish, which the FDA urges consumers to avoid because of high mercury levels. Nevertheless, officials representing the State of Virginia (technically the key plaintiff in these early proceedings) seemed at a loss as to what to do next.
“They had been completely bamboozled,” says Nancy Marks, a senior attorney for the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council’s litigation team. Under Marks’s direction NRDC filed an intention to sue DuPont in the early 2000s to move the issue forward from monitoring to mitigation. “[DuPont’s] remedy was to have a hundred year monitoring program. But we knew the mercury in the river was sky high. And DuPont was the only obvious source.” Unlike other American watersheds that have been host to numerous polluters, the Waynesboro DuPont plant is all the mercury-discharging industry the South River basin ever had. The bulk of the mercury in the ecosystem and any harm it may have caused birds is undeniably DuPont’s fault.
A single drop of blood collected from a Tree Swallow in Shenandoah Valley. Such samples helped make the case that mercury in the water was making its way into songbird species. Photo: Greg Kahn
“For us it was a no-brainer,” Marks recalls. “It was a very strong case.” The case was made even stronger by the fact that NRDC had just won a big legal victory in a suit in Maine under the same legal theory. The Maine suit had gone to trial, and the mercury polluter, a company called Mallinckrodt, Inc., if ordered by the court to pay for remediation, will likely owe hundreds of millions of dollars (this in addition to many millions of dollars spent on legal fees). While DuPont declined to comment about this aspect of the case, it seems likely that the prospect of a Maine-sized case going to trial gave corporate officers pause. Soon after the NRDC action, the company entered into a consent decree with the river’s trustees, the State of Virginia, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
But by trying to reach a settlement over the South River, DuPont started unraveling another knot when it agreed to finance the research that would determine the value of its liability. That’s where Dan Cristol entered the picture. If the company was really ready to pay to restore the birds of the South River drainage, how would that cost be calculated? It was obvious that immediate and quantifiable harm had been done to, say, sport fish and the people who had lost the opportunity to catch and eat them. But when the bird blood results revealed methylmercury present throughout the avian community, even in songbirds that lived far away from the river, Cristol realized they had a chance to build a much more expansive case.
First they had to figure out how birds that had nothing to do with the river were getting so much mercury into their systems.
“There’s nothing like getting paid to get up early and catch birds on a beautiful spring morning,” Cristol told me as we cruised down Route 340 to check in at 10 of the 50 sampling sites he established during the seven years of his mercury field study. “But by eleven o’clock at night when you’re going out to catch screech owls with your students, hoping local drug dealers aren’t hanging out under the bridge, you’re saying, ‘This is beyond tedious. This is horrible.’” The Salvadoran street gang MS-13 is active in the Shenandoah Valley and several murders have occurred in the area, including at least one along the river’s banks.
Nevertheless Cristol set about designing and implementing a largely undergraduate-staffed research regimen up and down the length of the South River. “We knew the mercury must be coming through what the birds ate. And the only way we could figure out exactly what they were eating was to catch them in the act.” Realizing it was more or less impossible to reliably catch adult birds eating, Cristol found he could measure diet through the next best thing: what adults fed their babies.
Using a method perfected by ecologists in the early 1990s, Cristol and his students sneaked into nest boxes while adult birds were hunting and put tiny plastic zip ties or “ligatures” around the nestlings’ necks. “We had to be really careful,” Cristol recalls. “Too tight and the babies would suffocate. Too loose and the food goes down and you lose your sample. Just right and you get the perfect bug to measure.” It’s a testament to Cristol’s care and sensitivity that not a single bird was harmed by ligature during the years of field sampling. This task was performed hundreds of times in multiple locations. There were all sorts of things in those bird craws. Grasshoppers and grubs. Gnats and houseflies. But there was one unexpected prey item that was causing most of the problems.
Dan Cristol, a biology professor at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, spearheaded the research that led to the discovery of how mercury pollution affected songbirds in the Shenandoah Valley. Photo: Greg Kahn
“Thirty percent of their diet was big spiders,” Cristol says. “And those spiders were bringing in 70 percent of their mercury.” Spiders are alpha predators of the insect world. They eat big bugs that have in turn eaten smaller bugs, which had rooted in the mercury-laden river sediment. Just as swordfish and sharks end up as storehouses for all the mercury their prey contains, as well as all the mercury all the prey of their prey contained, so too do spiders end up “biomagnifying” mercury in the environment and concentrating it in their flesh. And they were then dumping this immense toxic load onto songbirds.
It was a revolutionary discovery. “It was just a one pager in Science, but it was a game changer. [Dan] moved the needle on [understanding] how mercury behaves in the environment,” Fish and Wildlife’s John Schmerfeld told me. Henceforth, when mercury contamination cases are considered (and there are dozens pending) litigators will be more likely to look beyond the immediate contamination site and consider the wildlife populations in the wider surrounding environment. It’s a difference that could change the nature of mercury settlements in many cases around the country.
Now that they knew how waterborne mercury was making its way into terrestrial bird blood, the next step was to establish just how many birds mercury had harmed and how badly. This number—the dollar amount needed to restore bird numbers to their pre-DuPont levels—would inform the price tag of the settlement. Again, a disciplined, time-consuming regime was part of the solution, as was some pretty heated negotiation for access to private land. “People we asked for access came in two flavors,” Cristol remembers. “One worried we might be jackbooted government thugs coming to take away their property rights. The other thought we were working for DuPont and trying to poison them.” They needed permission to put up row after row of birdhouses along the polluted river, as well as in nearby uncontaminated tributaries, in order to establish reference populations of Tree Swallows.
By comparing swallows in mercury-contaminated stretches and unaffected areas, Cristol and his students were able to show that reproduction was indeed being affected. Overall they found a 20-percent decline in offspring in high mercury areas. In other more sensitive species, like Carolina Wrens, they observed that as mercury levels increased to three parts per million the birds were more likely to abandon their nests altogether.
The research team was also able to understand how wide a swath methylmercury had cut through the South River drainage. “With river contamination, length is easy,” Cristol would tell me. “Width is more difficult.” That mercury was in the river sediment was obvious. But because they had proof of terrestrial insects with high mercury levels they could begin to fan out into the floodplain to look for effect. Mercury becomes methylated (and thus can permeate cell membranes) by interaction with anaerobic bacteria in areas that are frequently moistened. The flat fields that flooded regularly on either side of the South River turned out to be methylation factories. In many cases mercury concentrations in the birds and bugs were found to be worse many miles downstream than right next door to the polluting facility. In the end with his nest boxes and insect collections Cristol was able to determine that mercury had affected more than 11,000 acres, a much wider swath than had previously been thought. Two more years and 900 bird surveys later, he knew the densities of every species of songbird in the Shenandoah Valley.
With that kind of data in hand, parties to the DuPont settlement could then plug numbers—including bird density and range, contamination levels, and reproductive success—into a model developed in the early 2000s. The original model evaluated the damage a barge company had inflicted on a coral reef in Florida. But the model’s basic math can be applied to a range of different damaging agents and ecosystems. “Once you have an idea of what the injury is you can put that into the model and then on the back end, eventually the theoretical equivalent in money is coughed out,” says Schmerfeld.
But there was one more piece of the puzzle that had to be solved in order for the data to stand up in court. Correlation is not causation as is so frequently said in scientific circles. To establish causation, a different kind of experiment had to be initiated. An experiment that, for a passionate bird lover like Cristol, would prove to be the most painful of all.
The epidemiology around methylmercury is still evolving, but the pollutant, at the concentrations found in the contaminated stretches of the South River, has the diabolical tendency to profoundly interfere with life’s processes rather than kill outright. It is formed when anaerobic bacteria bind a “methyl group” of carbon and hydrogen atoms to a mercury atom. The methylation process transforms relatively inert inorganic mercury into something that is more easily assimilated and can even pass the “blood barrier” to the brain. Methylmercury’s tendency to bind to sulfur-containing proteins that are central to the nervous and metabolic systems can cause multiple malfunctions. Birds can lose efficiency in capturing prey as well as something behavioral scientists called “nesting tenacity.” It can alter immune response, spur autoimmune disorder, change expression of reproductive hormones, and limit an animal’s ability to respond to stress.
But while the health effects of mercury poisoning on vertebrates are clear it is extremely difficult to pin the loss of birds on a single mercury pollution event. Mercury was probably causing nesting failures in Dan Cristol’s field research subjects but other confounding factors such as an uptick in invasive predators or some other unknown pollutant could also have played a role. To strengthen the case for actual causation Cristol had to conduct a laboratory-based phase where captive animals were intentionally subjected to the isolated and punishing effects of a high mercury diet. It was clear that Cristol had found this aspect of his research the most troubling. “I could not ethically justify it,” he told me as he opened the door to a repurposed cattle barn on the campus of William and Mary, “if I didn’t think that their imprisonment in cages was going to save a lot of birds in the wild.”
A juvenile wolf spider. These arachnids accounted for 70 percent of the mercury found in birds in the Shenandoah Valley. Photo: Greg Kahn
Inside the lab hundreds of Zebra Finches peeped and fluttered and pecked away at piles of rainbow-colored birdseed that the lab techs have taken to calling “fruity pebbles.” A black or orange mark on a birdcage label indicated whether the subjects inside were controls eating clean fruity pebbles, or experimentals given food dosed with methylmercury to the same concentration as a swordfish steak. Cristol and his students pursued this line of research for six years with an equal amount of rigor as their field studies. They repeated the nesting trials they’d done along the South River. They tested the birds’ memories by hiding food in one of 10 feeders and then examining the birds’ efficiency at re-finding the food an hour later. They probed the finches’ stress-regulation abilities as indicated by the levels of the hormone corticosterone. They even examined their songs and compared them with the lower-pitched song distortions they’d observed in the field. In truth they tested so many different vectors, including heredity and song learning across multiple generations, that it’s beyond the scope of this article to list them all.
The meticulous approach comes back to Cristol’s central passion: to preserve the lives of birds. “This is the weight of evidence,” he told me, closing the door to the chirping and peeping in the lab. “After all the tearing apart the lawyers will do, a judge will say it’s clear there has been a strong effect. Birds were lost year after year.”
The lab experiments bore out what Cristol was witnessing in the wild. Methylmercury was seriously messing with the minds of birds, particularly their spatial memory. Birds that in the wild needed all their faculties to navigate thousands of miles from Virginia to South America.
The lab and field studies were eventually assembled into a compelling dossier and delivered to the parties of the consent agreement. DuPont, having paid for all of this research and having watched as increasingly damning evidence accumulated, has come rather peacefully to the table.
In late July a federal judge approved the settlement for DuPont’s mercury-related damages. “DuPont will move forward with its commitment to provide $42.3 million in support of restoration projects in the South River and South Fork Shenandoah watersheds,” says Mike Liberati, South River project director for the DuPont Corporate Remediation Group. “We are committed to working with all Waynesboro-area stakeholders on these projects.”
Some $2.5 million will go toward avian conservation, and a further $19.5 million will be designated for “land protection, property acquisition, and recreational and wildlife enhancements”—enhancements that could directly benefit songbirds.
Those close to the case emphasize that it was the rigor of Cristol’s research that proved critical in the final judgment. “We really use birds to represent the whole terrestrial injury,” says Anne Condon, a former student of Cristol’s who oversaw the natural resource damage case for the FWS. “I don’t know what we would have done if we hadn’t had Dan’s data.”
It seems fitting that the South River DuPont settlement concluded just as Dan Cristol began a sabbatical year. While he is deeply involved with the lives of his students and incorporated undergraduates into nearly every phase of the mercury research, it is birds he loves most. His teenage daughters Indigo and Lazuli are named for two species of bunting and the first trip of his sabbatical year was to North Dakota to help his equally bird-obsessed father bag a Baird’s Sparrow or a Sprague’s Pipit to add to the pater familias’s life list. Cristol seemed practically skipping with the joy of impending freedom as we did some casual birding around a forested swath of campus a week after graduation. “This is the only week of the year,” he told me smiling as he peered through his binoculars, “that there are more Blackpoll Warblers on campus than students.”
But while Cristol is heading off on sabbatical a much more difficult phase is ramping up. “Now the work begins,” FWS’s Schmerfeld says. “We worked how many years to reach a settlement? Now people need to put the money on the ground in smart ways. That’s always tough. When there’s a big check written, public interest is heightened.”
Indeed how money will be spent on the ground will probably be the most contentious phase of restoring lost bird years—in large part because it’s not really possible to remove mercury from all 11,000 acres affected by the Waynesboro plant. True, mercury-laden riverbanks can be stabilized. But to get rid of the mercury altogether, vast amounts of soil would have to be removed and stored in a toxic waste facility. Numerous side settlements would have to be reached with scores of different landowners along more than 100 miles of river. All parties to the settlement realize that new bird years will have to be created outside of the contaminated portion of the South River to make up for the bird years lost.
How those bird years can be recovered can be widely interpreted. Because the federal government manages migratory birds, which includes almost all songbirds, $2.5 million of the settlement could be spent to protect habitat anywhere along the birds’ migratory pathways. Buying land outside of the United States could end up being the most cost effective way to make that remediation. “We started finding out early on that you can restore habitat in the Shenandoah all you want,” says Schmerfeld, “but it might not move the needle as much as protecting overwintering habitat.” Cristol agrees. “For the same dollars you could get 10 times the number of bird years in Belize than here. It’s the same birds you’re protecting, just in their winter habitat.”
Dosing captive Zebra Finches, like this male, with mercury showed how the toxin would affect birds in the wild. Photo: Greg Kahn
That habitat acquisition and all other restoration will begin just as Cristol starts to contemplate bigger sabbatical-sized questions. Most troubling of all the questions he will consider is whether he did indeed correctly calculate the totality of the harm done to birds. In the background lurks the possibility that what he measured was just a faint echo of the actual damage. Many other birds may have been so severely poisoned that they didn’t have the wherewithal to pick up a twig, let alone compete with others to build a nest in one of the test birdhouses. Those lost birds would never have been picked up by the study. “How many birds died that we never saw?” Cristol now wonders. “Twenty percent is the number we’re saying were lost each time they nested. But then I’m like, ‘This whole thing is playing into the hands of industry.’ We’re not even considering all those many other birds that weren’t around anymore to be studied.”
To anyone outside of academic science the South River mercury work would appear to be exactly the kind of patient evidence-building the world needs in this era of fake news and alternative facts—not to mention an approach that may be even more important moving forward, if efforts by the Trump administration to roll back mercury air pollution standards are successful. Nature, it would seem, has no better defense than good research. But for Dan Cristol, a man who has organized his life around wild birds, the pace of science now feels painfully slow. Not a year goes by when he doesn’t note the disappearance of a warbler from his home woods or the waning of swallows on the wing crossing his local meadows.
“When I first started out I thought I should add to the body of knowledge. I thought I should be a scientist.” Today he shakes his head and considers all the bird years lost around the world while he diligently hoed his narrow row. “Now that way of thinking seems like a luxury. Now it seems selfish to just be a scientist. In the end,” he tells me as we bid goodbye, “I should have been an activist.”
***
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Climate change is killing us right now.
The most obvious effect of global warming is not a doomsday scenario. Extreme heat is happening today, and wreaking havoc on vulnerable bodies.
The most obvious effect of global warming is not a doomsday scenario. Extreme heat is happening today, and wreaking havoc on vulnerable bodies.
BY EMILY ATKIN
July 20, 2017
A young, fit U.S. soldier is marching in a Middle Eastern desert, under a blazing summer sun. He’s wearing insulated clothing and lugging more than 100 pounds of gear, and thus sweating profusely as his body attempts to regulate the heat. But it’s 108 degrees out and humid, too much for him bear. The brain is one of the first organs affected by heat, so his judgment becomes impaired; he does not recognize the severity of his situation. Just as his organs begin to fail, he passes out. His internal temperature is in excess of 106 degrees when he dies.
An elderly woman with cardiovascular disease is sitting alone in her Chicago apartment on the second day of a massive heatwave. She has an air conditioner, but she’s on a fixed income and can’t afford to turn it on again—or maybe it broke and she can’t afford to fix it. Either way, she attempts to sleep through the heat again, and her core temperature rises. To cool off, her body’s response is to work the heart harder, pumping more blood to her skin. But the strain on her heart is too much; it triggers cardiac arrest, and she dies.
Such scenarios could surely happen today, if they haven’t already. But as the world warms due to climate change, they’ll become all too common in just a few decades—and that’s according to modest projections.
This is not meant to scare you quite like this month’s cover story in New York magazine, “The Uninhabitable Earth.” That story was both a sensation and quite literally sensational, attracting more than two million readers with its depiction of “where the planet is heading absent aggressive action.” In this future world, humans in many places won’t be able to adapt to rising temperatures. “In the jungles of Costa Rica, where humidity routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when it’s over 105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal. And the effect would be fast: Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out,” David Wallace-Wells writes. “[H]eat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain ‘would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.’”
These scenarios are supported by the science. “For heat waves, our options are now between bad or terrible,” Camilo Mora, a geography professor at University of Hawaii at Manoa, told CNN last month. Mora was the lead author of a recent study, published in the journal Nature, showing that deadly heat days are expected to increase across the world. Around 30 percent of the world’s population today is exposed to so-called “lethal heat” conditions for at least 20 days a year. If we don’t reduce fossil-fuel emissions, the percentage will skyrocket to 74 percent by the year 2100. Put another way, by the end of the century nearly three-quarters of the Earth’s population will face a high risk of dying from heat exposure for more than three years weeks every year.
Even the best-case scenario shows that nearly half of humanity will be exposed regularly to deadly heat by the year 2100.
This is the worst-case scenario. Even the study’s best-case scenario—a drastic reduction in greenhouse gases across the world—shows that 48 percent of humanity will be exposed regularly to deadly heat by the year 2100. That’s because even small increases in temperature can have a devastating impact. A study published in Science Advances in June, for instance, found that an increase of less than one degree Fahrenheit in India between 1960 and 2009 increased the probability of mass heat-related deaths by nearly 150 percent.
And make no mistake: Temperatures are rising, in multiple ways. “We’ve got a new normal,” said Howard Frumkin, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Washington. “I think all of the studies of trends to date show that we’re having more extreme heat, and we’ve having higher average temperatures. Superimposed on that, we’re seeing more short-term periods of extreme heat. Those are two different trends, and they’re both moving in the wrong direction.” Based on those trends, the U.S. Global Change Research Program predicts “an increase of thousands to tens of thousands of premature heat-related deaths in the summer ... each year as a result of climate change by the end of the century.” And that’s along with the deaths we’ve already seen: In 2015, Scientific American noted that nine out of the ten deadliest heat waves ever have occurred since 2000; together, they’ve killed 128,885 people.
In other words, to understand how global warming wreaks havoc on the human body, we don’t need to be transported to some imagined dystopia. Extreme heat isn’t a doomsday scenario but an existing, deadly phenomenon—and it’s getting worse by the day. The question is whether we’ll act and adapt, thereby saving countless lives.
There are two ways a human body can fail from heat. One is a direct heat stroke. “Your ability to cool yourself down through sweating isn’t infinite,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “At some point, your body begins to heat up just like any other object. You go through a variety of problems. You become dehydrated. Your skin dries out. Your various organs begin to shut down. Your kidneys, your liver, your brain. As gross as this may sound, you in effect, cook.” (So maybe Wallace-Wells wasn’t being hyperbolic after all.)
Heat death can also be happen due to a pre-existing condition, the fatal effects of which were triggered by high temperature. “Heat stress provokes huge amounts of cardiovascular strain,” said Matthew Cramer of the Institute of Exercise and Environmental Medicine. “For these people, it’s not necessarily that they’ve cooked, but the strain on their cardiovascular system has led to death.” This is much more common than death by heat stroke, but is harder to quantify since death certificates cite the explicit cause of death—“cardiac arrest,” for instance, rather than “heat-related cardiac arrest.”
In both scenarios, the body’s natural ability to cool itself off through sweating has either reached its capacity or has been compromised through illness, injury, or medication. There are many people who have reduced capacity for sweating, such as those who have suffered severe burns over large parts of their bodies. Cramer, who studies heat impacts on burned people, says 50,000 people suffer severe burn injuries per year in America, and the World Health Organization considers burns “a global public health problem,” with the majority of severe burn cases occurring in low- and middle-income countries.
Bodies that are battling illness or on medication may also struggle with heat regulation. Diuretics tend to dehydrate people; anticholinergics and antipsychotics reduce sweating and inhibit heat dissipation. An analysis of the 2003 heat wave in France that killed 15,000 people suggested that many of these deaths could have been avoided had people been made aware of the side effects of their drugs. As for illnesses, “Anything that impairs the respiratory or circulatory system will increase risk,” said Mike McGheehin, who spent 33 years as an environmental epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Obesity, diabetes, COPD, heart disease, and renal disease.” Kidney disease, mental illness, and multiple sclerosis. The list goes on and on.
This summer has presented many opportunities for bodies to break down from heat. Temperature records, some more than a century old, have been broken across California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Arizona. (Speaking of Arizona, it’s been so hot there that planes can’t fly.) And it’s not just America. Last month, Iran nearly set the world record for highest temperature ever recorded. The May heatwave that hit India and Pakistan set new world records as well, including what the New York Times called “potentially the hottest temperature ever recorded in Asia”: 129.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Worldwide, 2017 is widely expected to be the second-hottest year, after 2016, since we began keeping global average temperature records in 1880.
A Pakistani resident helps a heatstroke victim at a market area during a heatwave in Karachi on June 23, 2015.RIZWAN TABASSUM / Getty Images
These trends have public health professionals concerned about how people are going to deal with the heat when it comes their way. “Clearly this is one of the most important problems we’re going to see from a public health perspective,” Benjamin said. “This is not a tomorrow problem. It’s a significant public health problem that we need to address today.”
It’s a public health problem especially in cities, says Brian Stone, a professor at Georgia Tech’s City and Regional Planning Program. “Our fundamental work shows that larger cities are warming at twice the rate of the planet,” he said, describing a phenomenon known as urban heat islands, where built-up areas tend to be hotter than surrounding rural areas, mainly because plants have been replaced by heat-absorbing concrete. Global warming is making that phenomenon worse. “We’re really worried about the rate of how quickly we’re starting to see cities heat up,” Stone said.
Due to their density, darkness, and bustling activity, cities have always experienced warming more intensely than rural areas.urbanclimate.gatech.edu
According to Stone’s analysis, the most rapidly warming city is Louisville, Kentucky, followed by Phoenix, Arizona, and Atlanta, Georgia. But he’s less concerned about cities like Phoenix, which already have infrastructure to deal with brutally high temperatures, than he is about Chicago, Buffalo, and other cities in the northern United States that have really never had to deal with extreme heat. That is precisely why the Chicago heat wave of 1995 that killed 759 people was so deadly. According to the Chicago Tribune, the city was “caught off guard,” and had “a power grid that couldn’t meet demand and a lack of awareness on the perils of brutal heat.”
In other words, Stone and others say, excessive death rates are not always due to just extreme temperatures, but unusual temperatures. People are more likely to die when they are confronted with temperatures they don’t expect and thus aren’t prepared for. That’s why officials in cities not experiencing heat-related extremes need to improve emergency response systems, now. “Those people have got to start thinking in term of, ‘two years ago we had four hot days, the year after we had eight hot days,” Benjamin said. “Public health systems should be put in place to respond to prolonged heat waves. Emergency cooling centers where people can go should be built. Identify where the people who are most socially isolated live.” Absent preventative action, heat-related deaths in New York City could quintuple by the year 2080, according to recent research.
Some cities have already started to prepare. Stone recently completed a heat adaptation study for Louisville that includes not only emergency management planning but also ways the city can prevent itself from getting so hot (by improving energy efficiency and installing green roofs, for instance). But as for now, he said, it’s rare to see a city actually adopt policies supportive of heat management. “We do see flooding adaptation plans—New York City has one, and New Orleans has one—but heat adaptation planning is a very new idea, in the U.S. and really around the world,” he said. “It takes a lot to convince a mayor that a city can actually cool itself down. It’s not intuitive.”
The good news is that humans adapt to heat, both physiologically (through acclimatization) and socially (with air conditioning, for instance). That will continue, according to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which states with very high confidence that adaptation efforts in humans “will reduce the projected increase in deaths from heat.”
“It’s a quintessential public health problem in that it impacts the most disenfranchised of our society.”
But there’s a limit to this. “There’s no way to adapt to heat that’s more than a certain amount,” Frumkin said. “And socially, there’s always going to be people we miss, who don’t have access to air conditioning.” McGeehin noted those people will likely be poor, elderly, and minority populations. “It’s a quintessential public health problem in that it impacts the most disenfranchised of our society. Young, healthy, middle-class people will largely be left alone,” he said.
Air conditioners also have limits, especially in cities where blackouts can occur. “It is inevitable,” Stone said, that large cities will see blackouts during future heat waves. “The number of blackouts we see year over year is increasing dramatically,” he said. “Whether that’s caused by the heatwave or just happens during the heatwave doesn’t really matter.... The likelihood of an extensive blackout during a heatwave is high, and getting higher as we add more devices and stressors to the grid.”
It’s a “cruel irony,” Frumkin said, that as world gets hotter, we need more air conditioning, and thus consume more electricity. And if that electricity comes from fossil fuel sources, it will create more global warming, which in turn will increase the demand for air conditioning. The answer, he said, is to “decarbonize the electric grid.” But that’s easier said that done, especially when the Trump administration is devoted to increasing the use of fossil fuels to support the country’s electrical grid.
As with many other efforts to fight climate change, though, cities don’t need Washington’s help to take action on heat adaptation. “Cities can manage their own heat islands on their own, and that’s where we most need to be focused,” Stone said. But that will require convincing elected leaders that extreme heat is big a threat as, say, rising seas—and one that can’t be addressed with something as obvious as a sea wall. That’s the challenge, says McGeehin: “Heat as a major natural disaster is mostly overlooked in this country.” It’s a quiet killer, and perhaps more lethal because of it.
Emily Atkin is a staff writer at the New Republic
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Shipping companies urged to stop using dirty fuels in the Arctic.
Shipping companies are under pressure to phase out use of heavy fuels ahead of a potential ban on their use in the Arctic in the coming years.
Shipping companies are under pressure to phase out use of heavy fuels ahead of a potential ban on their use in the Arctic in the coming years.
The International Maritime Organisation has approved an environmental review of the use of heavy fuel oil (HFO) by ships in the Arctic. Already banned in Antarctica, HFO is a dense and viscous byproduct of other fuel refining processes.
Oil spills or leaks would be severely toxic, and devastating to flora, fauna and indigenous communities because of the long time the sludge takes to break down in cold water. The risks to fragile Arctic ecosystems could soar as more polar sea lanes become accessible because of climate change.
A Canadian proposal unanimously adopted at the IMO’s marine environmental protection committee last Friday mandates a review of mitigating measures for HFO use, to begin in April 2018. No calls for a ban on HFOs have been formally put on the agenda but “at this early stage, nothing can be ruled in or out,” an IMO spokesperson said.
“I’m fairly sure a ban will happen one day,” said Peter Hinchliffe, the secretary-general of the International Chamber of Shipping told the Guardian. “We won’t be opposing it but our role [in the IMO] is to make sure we are not causing a disproportionate disadvantage to ships that use HFOs in the Arctic today.”
More than 850 ships operating in the Arctic today are thought to use HFOs, said Dr Sian Prior, lead advisor to the Clean Arctic Alliance, and these represent around three-quarters of total Arctic ship fuel use. The majority are flagged to non-Arctic nations such as Panama, Liberia, Singapore and the Marshall Islands.
But as global warming melts new shipping lanes, even larger ships from outside the Arctic are expected to steer through the Polar north in search of shorter journey times, increasing the risk of accidents. In March, Arctic sea ice extent fell to its lowest recorded level since records began 38 years ago.
The shipping industry has already agreed to cut the sulphur content of marine fuels to 0.5% by 2020. “It will be extremely difficult to get HFOs with sulphur content as low as 0.5%. Most ships will turn to lighter fuels – diesel essentially – and that means that imposing an Arctic ban on HFOs may have a very limited life as few ships are likely to go there burning HFOs,” said Hinchliffe.
Rune Thomas Ege, a spokesman for the Norwegian expedition tour operator, Hurtigruten, said that the new Arctic waterways opening up were pulling in inexperienced crews in unsuitable ships, and stoking concerns.
“HFOs should already have been banned in the Arctic – as they has been in Antarctica,” he said.
Hybrid cruise ships
Next year, Hurtigruten says it will launch the world’s first hybrid battery-powered cruise ship, the MS Roald Amundsen, to be followed by the MS Fridtjof Nansen in 2019.
Hinchliffe said while the idea of battery-powered fleets was “not pie in the sky”, it would be inappropriate for tankers needing to travel thousands of miles. Other alternatives were in the works, he suggested.
“We don’t yet have a hydrogen-powered ship but I expect experimentation to take place,” he said. “Our holy grail is to find a carbon-free fuel but there isn’t one at the moment. I would hope that by 2030 we will have a very clear indication of what the fuel is likely to be.”
Aslak Ross, the head of marine standards at Maersk Line, told the Guardian that fuels which were both low-sulphur and low-carbon could enter the world market “sooner than many expect”. “This is one of the reasons we have decided not to invest in ‘scrubbers’, not least due to their negative impact on the vessel’s energy efficiency,” he said.
Scrubbing technology allows ships to chemically filter and cleanse their existing HFO blends and avoid the trouble and expense of switching to lighter distillate fuels such as diesel, liquefied natural gas or, potentially, ethanol.
But scrubbers are seen as impractical by industry analysts because they cost $3-5m to fit per vessel, and a lack of shipyards would prevent a retrofit taking place among the world’s fleet by 2020, when the new sulphur standard takes effect.
Many environmentalists and shipowners alike see scrubbers as a way of ensuring the survival of highly polluting fuels at a time when rapid transition is needed. More than 200 LNG-fuelled ships are in service around the world.
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Rajahmundry: New canal-top solar power project in West Godavari.
A canal-top solar power project of one mw capacity at a cost of Rs 8 crore will be coming up on Losari Main Canal at Gollavanitippa village of Bhimavaram rural mandal in West Godavari.
e-Paper | Sunday Chronicle
Saturday, Jul 08, 2017 | Last Update : 04:13 PM IST
NATION, IN OTHER NEWS
Andhra Pradesh to have its own film industry soon
DECCAN CHRONICLE. | SAMPAT G SAMARITAN
Published Jul 8, 2017, 6:38 am ISTUpdated Jul 8, 2017, 6:38 am IST
No need to shift Telugu film industry from Hyderabad, says Murali Mohan.
Experts say that the development of facilities such as a dubbing studio, a recording studio and a graphics studio will attract producers, directors, artists and actors.
Rajahmundry: AP will soon have its own film industry. Initially, low-budget films may be shot in Visakhapatnam, which has a better environment and infrastructure than Amaravati at present.
There was speculation that the Telugu film industry, popularly known as Tollywood, would shift to AP after bifurcation. However, sources from the Telugu film industry say that there is no need for such a shift as the people of both states speak Telugu.
Hyderabad in Telangana is attractive to the Telugu film industry as well as Bollywood because of Ramoji Film City, which offers them all the necessary infrastructure. AP will have to start from scratch to develop a film industry of its own.
Film actor and MP M. Murali Mohan says, “There is no need for the Telugu film industry to be shifted from Hyderabad in Telangana to AP, as both states have Telugu-speaking people and the TS Government is encouraging and promoting the film industry. The AP Government is planning to develop the requisite facilities in a phased manner, at a suitable place such as Visakhapatnam, Amara-vati, or any other place suggested by the CM.”
Sources from the film industry say that AP has the potential to have films shot there, especially in Visakhapatnam which has a picturesque seashore, hilly areas, shipyards, quarries, and ancient structures. The neighbouring Araku Valley almost matches up to Ooty. The Konaseema area, which is just 180 km away from Visakhapatnam, has beautiful coconut plantations, lush green paddy fields, and small streams.
Directors usually prefer to shoot in places that are located close to each other because moving the shoot equipment and crew from place to place is a time-consuming and expensive task. The ambience in and around Visakhapatnam is suitable for romantic scenes, action scenes, as well as songs.
Eight years ago, film producer Late D. Ramanaidu set up a film studio in Visakhapatnam, but no film was shot there until recently. Satirical drama film Gopala Gopala starring Pawan Kalyan and Venkatesh was shot there under the banner of Suresh Productions, a film production and distribution company was set up by Ramanaidu, and North Star Entertainment.
Experts say that the development of facilities such as a dubbing studio, a recording studio and a graphics studio will attract producers, directors, artists and actors.
Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu has been briefed about the necessity of the establishment of a film industry in the state, and he has reportedly said that he will look into the matter soon.
Tags: film industry, amaravati, cm n. chandrababu naidu
Location: India, Andhra Pradesh, Rajahmundry
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