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☆ Opinion | With Covid, Is It Really Possible to Say We Went Too Far?
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-15 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

In others, when you went into stores, the store asked you to wear a mask. Is there a way to lock down that we could have protected people in nursing homes? Is there a way to lock down that we could have protected people who live in multigenerational housing? If you’re a restaurant owner who lost their restaurant because of this, you might define it as lockdown. McLean: I think you’re asking an essentially unknowable question.

Persons: didn’t, McLean, it’s Locations: China, Peru, Sweden, U.S

☆ Opinion | The Godfather of Climate Science Turns Up the Heat
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-08 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Hansen’s 1988 appearance before a Senate committee conventionally marks the beginning of the era for climate alarm, when many Americans started worrying about global warming and why their leaders were doing so little about it. This process is already embedded in conventional modeling of our climate future. But the uncertainty range is much higher for aerosol cooling than for other, more widely measured climate inputs, and the high end of that estimated range is above a full degree of cooling. In the “Pipeline” paper, Hansen gives a higher estimate still: that aerosols are cooling the planet by perhaps 1.5 degrees Celsius. assumes and that a collapse of one of the ocean’s major circulation systems is possible this century, much sooner than most believe.

Persons: wonks, Hansen Organizations: NASA, United Nations

☆ Opinion | Acapulco Saw the Future of Hurricanes: More Sudden and Furious
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-01 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Although, conventionally, hurricanes are measured by their peak intensity, how quickly they reach that intensity and how rapidly they approach land matters enormously. A tropical storm isn’t an insignificant threat, and what became Otis surely would’ve damaged Acapulco even if it hadn’t ever intensified. But a Category 5 is a threat of a different order, requiring an entirely different scale of preparatory response. You simply can’t evacuate a city of one million in just a few hours — at least, it’s never been managed before. It was the surprise of the storm’s transformation, with few of the conventional forecasting models predicting any significant intensification at all.

Persons: Otis, hadn’t, it’s, “ Otis, ”, Kerry Emanuel, you’ve, “, Emanuel Organizations: Atlantic Locations: Acapulco

☆ ‘It’s Like Our Country Exploded’: Canada’s Year of Fire
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-24 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

Instead, he emphasizes what might be called the power law of wildfire spread. Most fires are not hard to put out if you want to extinguish them and don’t spread very fast if you don’t. Globally, the fire story is less exponential, with declines in burned area in sub-Saharan Africa mostly offsetting rapid fire growth in the major midlatitude hot spots, with the global trend in fire emissions, as a result, mostly flat. If we manage the forest around my little town, well, maybe we can stop my little town from burning down,” she says. And if we don’t, it’s all a game.” She goes on: “It doesn’t matter what we do in the forest, things are going to burn.

Persons: Pyne, We’re, ”, Mike Flannigan, “, Flannigan, Rachel Holt, ” Holt Locations: Canada, British Columbia, United States, American, Saharan Africa, Russian Siberia, Australia

☆ Opinion | Beyond ‘Deaths of Despair’
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-18 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

Those million extra deaths exceed even the nearly 700,000 who die each year from cardiovascular disease, the country’s biggest killer. In 2021, the researchers found, extra mortality accounted for nearly one in every three American deaths. “The United States is failing at a fundamental mission — keeping people alive,” The Washington Post recently concluded, in a remarkable series on the country’s mortality crisis. But by almost every other measure the United States is lagging its peers, often catastrophically. It’s not quite right to call all this simply “despair,” even if social anomie plays a role.

Persons: Matthews, “, Jimmy Carter, ”, Covid, It’s, Deaton, America ” Organizations: Washington Post, European Union, Organization for Economic Cooperation, Development Locations: Bor, United States, Virginia, Louisiana, Kansas, States, Netherlands, Sweden, America

☆ Opinion | Can We Put a Price on Climate Damages?
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-20 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

But whenever anyone tries to put an actual price on the damages from global warming — to calibrate a carbon tax, assess past responsibility or aid in litigation against fossil-fuel malefactors — the numbers are almost too much to process. One problem is that the damage accumulates over time, like a compound interest of climate degradation. Most carbon, once emitted, hangs in the air for centuries — and some of it lingers even longer. A lump of coal being burned in Shaanxi or Inner Mongolia today does climate damage equivalent to a lump that was burned in 19th-century Newcastle or 20th-century Pittsburgh, and an oil well decommissioned three decades ago may still be doing climate damage three centuries from now. I used an optimistically low future price for such technology and assumed no obstacles to scaling that tech, though many analysts see many such roadblocks.

Locations: United States, China, Shaanxi, Inner Mongolia, Newcastle, Pittsburgh

☆ Opinion | The Pandemic Was a Time Machine
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-13 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Across other nations in Europe, the rough pattern appears similar to the English one: an abrupt jump in 2020 mortality that nevertheless did not reach the age-standardized levels experienced around the year 2000. There are many ways of thinking about this fact, as is often the case with pandemic data. A second observation is that, adjusting for age, we experienced what seemed to be normal death rates in 2000 as essentially unthinkable in 2020. Between the end of World War II and the onset of the pandemic, American-adjusted mortality rates had fallen by about half. These were the gains that the pandemic undid.

Organizations: Centers for Disease Control Locations: Europe, United States

☆ Opinion | What Have We Learned From a Summer of Climate Reckoning?
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-05 | by ( The Ezra Klein Show | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

This summer has been a parade of broken climate records. June was the hottest June and July was not just the hottest July but the hottest month ever on record. What does it mean to hold the pessimism of climate disaster and the optimism of climate action together? [You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.] There are few individuals better suited to navigate these questions than Kate Marvel, a senior climate scientist at Project Drawdown.

Persons: “, Ezra Klein, Kate Marvel, David Wallace, Wells, Marvel Organizations: Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google

☆ Opinion | The Faustian Bargain of Reducing Air Pollution
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-30 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

This summer of extremes has been a summer of mystery, debate and even some confusion for climate scientists, who’ve been watching the news with the rest of us and asking, What, exactly, is going on? Is it just baseline global warming, trending upward, that explains the extreme temperatures on land and over sea? The arrival of a planet-warming El Niño in the Pacific? And when considering off-the-charts sea-surface temperatures, what role is being played by recent regulations designed to significantly reduce the sulfur emissions of ships, since less pollution in the air means more heat making its way to the water below? And almost certainly, the sulfur effect has been larger locally, along particular shipping routes in the world’s oceans, where some especially striking anomalies have been observed.

Persons: who’ve, what’s, alarmists, Robert Rohde Organizations: Berkeley Locations: Tonga, South, Phoenix

☆ Opinion | What Can Replace China as a Global Economic Engine?
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-23 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

To an extent that few Americans genuinely appreciate, global growth has been powered by the so-called Chinese miracle for almost half a century now. grew by 30 percent and China’s by 263 percent — China accounted for more than 40 percent of all global growth. If you excluded China from the data, global G.D.P. In 1992, China’s G.D.P. Quite likely not somewhere great, even if the world’s great powers manage to avoid direct conflict.

Persons: —, China’s, David Oks, Henry Williams, Ricardo Hausmann, Tim Sahay, Narendra Modi Organizations: World Bank, Harvard Kennedy School Locations: China, Asia, United States, India

☆ Opinion | Maui and the Age of the Urban Firestorm
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-16 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

It wasn’t even really a wildfire. In general, we’ve long believed the built environment offered formidable firebreaks, and worried over what might be lost when fires passed near homes as a form of tragic collateral damage. As of Tuesday, the official death toll in Maui was 99, but almost 1 percent of all residents remained unaccounted for, and many locals were suggesting the death toll could increase significantly in the days ahead. A climate lawsuit launched by the island against Big Oil in 2020 specifically cited additional wildfire risk. But still, when the fire broke out, almost no one seemed adequately prepared.

Persons: Daniel Swain, Tubbs, Marshall, Chuck, Swain Organizations: Costco, New York, Big Oil Locations: Lahaina, Hawaii, Santa Rosa, Calif, Paradise, Boulder County, Colo, New, Maui

☆ Opinion | Why Is America Such a Deadly Place?
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-09 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Death is excessive in America, and the more you look the more distressing the picture seems. And while the trend is clear, the change may seem small, because the impact is averaged over the country as a whole. American life expectancy dropped just 0.1 year between 2014 and 2019, before Covid. Before the pandemic, roughly a half million more people in America died each year than would have died, on average, in wealthy peer countries. In each of the first two years of the pandemic, the number surpassed one million.

Persons: You’ve, Jacob Bor Organizations: Boston University Locations: America, United States, Kosovo, Albania, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Panama, Turkey, Lebanon, Europe

The wildfires sweeping Canada have become the largest in its modern history. Across the country, 30 million acres of forest have burned — three times as much land as in the worst American fire in the past 50 years. The scale has forced an international response and a re-evaluation of how the world handles wildfires. Firefighters on the front lines discuss the challenges they face, and David Wallace-Wells, a climate columnist for The Times, explores how climate change has shifted thinking about wildfires.

Persons: David Wallace, Wells Organizations: Firefighters, The Times Locations: Canada

☆ Opinion | This Summer Is Pointing Us Toward Uncharted Territory
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-02 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

On the last day of July, Phoenix finally registered a temperature high below 110 degrees Fahrenheit — the first time that had happened in 31 days. The I.C.U.s are filling up, too, and the region’s iconic saguaro cactuses are crumpling and collapsing in the heat. “The era of global boiling has arrived.”It was, worldwide, the hottest month on record. June was the hottest June on record. Every single day for four straight weeks, as Canada burned and Sicily burned and Algeria burned, global temperatures surpassed the daily record set in 2016 and matched last summer, when 61,000 Europeans are estimated to have died as a result of the heat.

Persons: Biden, António Guterres, ”, “ Organizations: Phoenix, Florida Locations: Maricopa, Canada, Sicily, Algeria, Atlantic, Beijing, Chile, Argentina

☆ Opinion | A Grim Climate Lesson From the Canadian Wildfires
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-26 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

But whose responsibility is the carbon produced when forests burn? In the age of extreme weather and climate agreements, the world has learned to tabulate ecological guilt nation by nation — cutting responsibility for the current crisis into so many slices of pie. If the 20th century taught us the perversity of aggressive fire suppression, the 21st is already teaching us the limits of that lesson. But if the costs to human health of wildfire smoke are larger than from the fires themselves, should the goal be recalibrated? Canada has a gargantuan per capita carbon footprint, in fact, by some measures larger than that of the United States.

Persons: ” Henry Mance, “ Organizations: U.S ., Canadair, Financial Times Locations: North America, Eurasia, China, United States, India, California, Canada, Russia, Ontario, Quebec, Michigan, Maine, U.S, Los Angeles, Tampa

☆ Floods, Heat, Smoke: Climate Change is Accelerating - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-12 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Global warming is accelerating, with temperatures not just rising but rising faster than ever. But it is simultaneously proving harder to compartmentalize — even in places such as New York City that once looked to residents like concrete fortresses against nature. Last weekend, it was Hudson Valley streets turned into swimming pools by supercharged rain and ravines disgorging landslides that those in New York City watched with a mix of horror and false relief. The flooding was “upstate,” we told ourselves, though by “upstate,” of course, we meant not even 50 miles north of the city. The United States Military Academy at West Point was briefly flooded by a once-in-a-thousand-years climate event.

Persons: San Francisco, could’ve Organizations: New York City, United States Military Academy, West, New Locations: New York City, New York, American, Hudson, ”, Vermont, Montpelier

☆ Opinion | Rochelle Walensky on the Rocky Road to Normal
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-07 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

You have Anthony Fauci and Vivek Murthy saying that 99.2 or 99.5 percent of deaths were unvaccinated, when in those months the share of vaccinated deaths was about 10 times that high. They’re important deaths. But the character of the kind of person who was dying is different. And the backdrop of immunity was different, and the case fatality rate of different variants changed over time, as well. And I think about all of the messaging that we did over the last three years.

Persons: It’s, We’re, Anthony Fauci, Vivek Murthy Organizations: CNN Locations: Covid

☆ Pandemic Divisiveness in the U.S. Wasn’t What It Seemed - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-28 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

I’d like to tell you a story about the pandemic, one that may sound so gauzily hopeful, it would qualify today as a public health fairy tale. Instead, political leaders could have moved forward more or less in unison, navigating epidemiological uncertainties unencumbered by the weight of the culture war. But at the state and local levels, for many months, red and blue authorities moved in quite close parallel. For the most part, red and blue people did, too. Over the next few weeks, inspired by this book and a few other efforts at pandemic autopsy, I’ll examine the experience of 2020 and how it is already distorted in our memory.

Persons: Covid Organizations: PublicAffairs Locations: United States

☆ Suddenly, It Looks Like We’re in a Golden Age for Medicine
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-23 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Hype springs eternal in medicine, but lately the horizon of new possibility seems almost blindingly bright. “I’ve been running my research lab for almost 30 years,” says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. And yet these brutal years — which brought more than a million American deaths and probably 20 million deaths worldwide, and seemed to return even the hypermodern citadels of the wealthy West to something like the experience of premodern plague — might also represent an unprecedented watershed of medical innovation. “It’s stunning,” says the immunologist Barney Graham, the former deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center and a central figure in the development of mRNA vaccines, who has lately been writing about a “new era for vaccinology.” “You cannot imagine what you’re going to see over the next 30 years. The pace of advancement is in an exponential phase right now.”

Persons: I’ve, ”, Jennifer Doudna, Doudna, Barney Graham Organizations: University of California, Army, Vaccine Research Center Locations: Berkeley, West

☆ Opinion | Even in Texas, You Can’t Stop the Green Revolution
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-14 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

It is no longer clean energy that requires political interventions for survival. And when American investors are drawn to opportunities, they find themselves overwhelmingly in red states like Texas. Nearly a hundred new clean energy manufacturing facilities or factory expansions have been announced since the bill, marking more than $70 billion in new investment, according to Canary Media. This is the rundown offered by the former director of President Biden’s National Economic Council, Brian Deese, last month:Companies have announced at least 31 new battery manufacturing projects in the United States. In energy production, companies have announced 96 gigawatts of new clean power over the past eight months, which is more than the total investment in clean power plants from 2017 to 2021.

Persons: Brian Deese, decarbonization Organizations: Bloomberg, Republicans, Democrat, Canary Media, Economic Council, Companies Locations: Texas, There’s, United States

Smoke from wildfires in Canada has created a crisis in the American Northeast and beyond, with air pollution in New York reaching its worst level in modern history. David Wallace-Wells, a climate columnist for The Times, explains why this happened, and why there is so little we can do to keep it from happening again.

Persons: David Wallace, Wells Organizations: The Times Locations: Canada, American, New York

☆ As Canadian Smoke Darkens the New York Sky, The Future is Clear - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-07 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

My father, who died of lung cancer, used to say that as soon as people inhaled their first cigarette, they immediately knew, if they weren’t in denial, that they were harming themselves. I felt the same way on Tuesday in New York, my eyes itching and my nose burning and the taste in my throat like I’d swallowed a charcoal bonbon. Until now, if people in the green and leafy Northeast looked at arid Western cities covered in smoke from wildfires, they could say, that can’t happen here, thank God. On Tuesday, it did: For a moment, New York’s air quality was worse than it was in Delhi, the infamous pollution capital where average life spans are reduced more than nine years by particulates in the air. By evening, New York had registered the worst air quality in the world among major cities.

Locations: New York, Delhi

☆ Opinion | The Ocean Is Looking More Menacing
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-01 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

What do you call the arrival of events that have been predicted but, when predicted, were described as distressing or even terrifying? But some news from ocean science may prove more surprising still — perhaps genuinely paradigm-shifting. This key part of the circulation of the Southern Ocean “looks headed towards collapse this century,” study coordinator Matthew England told Yale Environment 360. “And once collapsed, it would most likely stay collapsed until Antarctic melting stopped. At current projections that could be centuries away.”Then, last week, some of the same researchers confirmed that the process was already unfolding — in fact, that the Southern Ocean overturning circulation had already slowed by as much as 30 percent since the 1990s.

Persons: Matthew England, ”, Steve Rintoul, who’d Organizations: Yale Environment Locations: Pacific Northwest, Canada, El

☆ Opinion | There’s No Escape From Wildfire Smoke
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

This season so far, the total is already more than 1.5 million — which would make it the province’s third-worst annual result, just a few weeks into May, with months more of wildfire season still to burn. In the United States, by contrast, those who live in fear of wildfire are probably breathing a bit easier. Last year was a relatively light one, with fewer than eight million acres burning across the country — close to the two-decade average and well below the damage of several especially scarring recent seasons. But a new lesson from the evolving science of wildfire is about how far its toxic smoke spreads and how widely its noxious impacts are distributed. In fact, according to one not-yet-published study led by Stanford researchers exploring the distribution of wildfire smoke, an estimated 60 percent of the smoke impact of American wildfire is experienced by those living outside the states where the trees are in flames.

☆ Opinion | We Could Easily Make Risky Virological Research Safer
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-10 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The 2007 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain was traced to a faulty drainage pipe at a research facility. In 2015 the Department of Defense discovered that a germ-warfare program in Utah had mistakenly mailed almost 200 samples of live anthrax over 12 years. Lab accidents happen, and they aren’t especially rare. In January the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity issued a series of draft recommendations for tightening regulation and oversight. And many of those who see the Covid pandemic as merely the sort of pathogenic disaster that lab accidents might cause agree that greater safety is needed.

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