Costs of Climate Change - Denial

 It's a VERY common refrain from the Climate Change Denial camp

"The climate has changed before.  It's always changing."

"How could CO2 cause climate change when it makes up less than 0.04% of the atmosphere?"

Both statements are true, up to a point.  It's what comes after that point that's the problem.

Both statements are addressed and debunked in this one article:

Opinion: Yes, there was global warming in prehistoric times. But nothing in millions of years compares with what we see today 

It's like this, briefly.

First, CO2 concentrations are higher now than they've been in the past 4 million years.  That encompasses the whole of human history and definitely the history of modern civilization.

That said, it's not the concentration of CO2 specifically OR the precise temperature that is the problem.  It's the RATE at which both CO2 and temperature are changing.

Yes, there have been warm periods in the Earth's past.  Those changes happed over thousands of years and amounted to around 0.1 degree F per century.  That's 10 times slower than the rate of change we're experiencing now.

What we're seeing now looks like this:

That rapid rate of change is what's giving us conditions like those shown in this data.  Where the past 12 months are the warmest they've ever been, historically.  A rate of change that's more like a whole degree in a decade (remember - 10 times faster than anything the Earth has experienced before).

The infrastructure on which 8 billion people depend - our cities, our agriculture, and pretty much everything else - was built around a climate that was stable for thousands of years.  Infrastructure can be adapted to changing conditions IF those changes happen slowly.  

They're not.

Democracy Under Attack in the USA

The grand jury indictment referred to in the following article came out in 2018.  And yet, here we are, in July 2024, with the prospects of Trump becoming President once again.

By: Heather Cox Richardson

On Friday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, appointed to the Department of Justice by Donald Trump, announced that a grand jury had returned an indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officers for interfering in the 2016 US election. A grand jury is comprised of regular Americans, and it only indicts when a supermajority believes that the evidence proves a case. So Rosenstein was telling the nation, and the Republican Party, and the president, that the Department of Justice has evidence, admissible in court, that will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that, under Vladmir Putin, the Russian military hacked the 2016 election in favor of Trump. This is an attack on our sovereignty as real as any bombing campaign. Indeed, one of the aliases the Russians used was "Ward DeClaur," which sounds an awful lot like "War Declared."

Today, Trump stood in front of cameras and sided with Putin.

The American president sided with an enemy power over our own government. This has never happened before; indeed, our system was deliberately set up to make sure it could not happen. But it has.

Also today, a Russian national, Maria Butina, was charged in federal court with acting as a foreign agent, forging ties to the Republican Party through the NRA. Butina had testified voluntarily before the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into Russian interference in the election, which produced a bipartisan report unanimously agreeing that Russia interfered with the 2016 election, but GOP House investigators refused Democrats' requests to call Butina to testify. We know that the NRA gave $30 million to Trump's campaign, and that a great deal of that money was Russian. We also know that the NRA heavily supported GOP candidates, and that, apparently, some of them were talking with Russian agents. It is not a stretch to believe that Russian money influenced the election down the ticket as well as at the top. It seems we are approaching an explanation of why GOP leaders have been so defensive about the Russia investigation, and so weirdly quiet as Trump has run roughshod over the nation.

We are at the moment when we must face that the president and the leaders of the Republican Party are tools of a foreign power.

To what end are they acting?

They are deliberately destroying democracy in favor of oligarchy. This is why their interests align with those of the oligarchical Russia, rather than with us, and why Trump is trying to destroy our alliances with other democratic nations.

Since WWII, America has tried to curb the abuses of capitalism while still preserving that system. The government regulated businesses to keep them from brutalizing workers, cheating consumers, and polluting the air and water. It provided a basic social safety net for the elderly and the needy. And it provided infrastructure-- roads, bridges, schools and hospitals-- to make sure everyone had equal access to opportunity. Above all, it demanded equality before the law. Since 1933, this government represented what the American people wanted.

Trump and the GOP have deliberately worked to destroy this system (most recently by rewriting the numbers so they can declare that we have no need for a social safety net because there are so few Americans living in poverty). They believe that government interference in the accumulation of wealth hampers the ability of rich men to advance the economy, and therefore society. They must not be held to the laws; they must be permitted to do what they think is best. This was the same ideology as that held by the Robber Barons at the end of the nineteenth century and the leaders from the 1920s: to make the country great, you had to give businessmen free rein to act in their best interest. Now that ideology is international. If only Trump can smash our alliances with other democracies-- as he is working so hard to do-- he can help Russia launch an oligarchy that can rule the world.

If we permit this to happen, we will all be expendable, depending on whether or not we are useful to our rulers. You can bet your life on it. Literally.

In the 1890s and the 1920s, Americans took back their democracy. Today, we are at an even more dramatic crisis, with a president who is siding with a foreign enemy and a ruling political party that is compliant, at best. This is the moment when we must call out treason, and speak up to defend democracy, our birthright, from enemy oligarchs, both abroad and- heartbreakingly- at home.

Costs of Climate Change - Storms - Preparedness Part 1

 On Tuesday, July 16th, a major rain storm event flooded Toronto.

2nd major flooding in 11 years a sign Toronto is not adapting quickly enough, say climate experts

Tuesday's extreme rain is very reminiscent of 2013 flood with similar consequences

Eleven years and 8 days ago, another flood devastated the city, with 126 mm or rain falling in 90 minutes.  For those of you who haven't converted, that's about 5 inches of rain.  In an hour and a half.

This time, just under 100 mm of rain fell in just a few hours.  Clearly people weren't ready, despite heavy rain warnings in all the forecasts.  The question is whether the city itself was ready.  

Earlier wet weather had saturated the ground so it was unable to absorb much extra and drainage systems were overwhelmed.

Following the 2013 flood, talk abounded about how Toronto needed to better adapt, as climate change was likely to make these heavy rain events more frequent and more severe. And while it's too early to attribute Tuesday's rainfall to climate change, by all appearances, the city still seems unprepared for a major rainfall event.

"As temperatures continue to rise, you're going to have more moisture in the system. So with more moisture and energy, you're going to have bigger storms, larger precipitation events, with more water coming down over shorter periods of time," she said, "so storms are going to come down with even greater force.

So, not only are we not doing anything much about the root cause of climate change (fossil fuel emissions, we're not doing much about preparing our homes, roads and cities for the changes that are clearly coming. 

To prepare costs money and we don't seem to have the sense of urgency needed to put the drive and dollars behind preparation.

Interview with Toronto's Mayor.

Toronto's Mayor noted that the number of severe storms is expected to double in the next 15 year, but also noted that the city is $26 billion and 10 years behind in infrastructure work.

Costs of Climate Change - Diseases - Part 1 Ticks

 Anaplasmosis (caused by a bacterium), babesiosis (caused by a parasite), and the Powassan virus.  Ever heard of them?  Neither had I.  These diseases, however, are spreading (slowly) in Canada in recent years, carried by ticks who can also carry the better-known Lyme disease virus.

Most of these diseases are quite rare, but they are becoming more common in Canada, mainly because the ticks that carry the viruses are seeing their range increase further north as our climate warms.

Not much is known about how widespread these diseases are, partly because most provinces aren't keeping track, so data is hard to find.  However, back in 2009, Canada's first case of Anaplasmosis showed up in Alberta.  Last year, Ontario had 30 confirmed or suspected cases of this disease.  A research scientist with the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) was quoted as saying there are now "hundreds and hundreds" of Anaplasmosis cases in Canada each year.

Anaplasmosis isn't always a trivial disease, although initial symptoms often seem like a case of the flu (sound familiar??).  In June of 2024, an Ottawa woman died from an infection from the Powassan virus after spending 3 years in hospital, so it's not trivial either.

More of the story can be read here:  

Tick-spread illnesses are on the rise in Canada. Are surveillance, awareness efforts keeping up?

The BC Center for Disease Control (BCCDC) has a list that includes:

• Anaplasmosis
• Babesiosis
• Lyme disease
• Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever
• Tick-borne Relapsing Fever
• Tick Paralysis
• Tularemia

Changes in the climate are helping ticks spread into new territories and also helps the pathogens survive better.

This web page from the Climate Atlas of Canada shows the increasing spread of ticks and Lyme disease.

    Lime Disease under Climate change

Of course, they don't cover this information.  You'll have to get that elsewhere.

Costs of Climate Change - Storm Damage - Beryl

In what might become a series, I will post about articles highlighting damage that is becoming more common as the climate warms. 

In mid-July, Hurricane Beryl stormed its way through the Caribbean, into Mexico, through Texas, finally ending up hitting Nova Scotia around July 11th or 12th, 2024

As we saw during the COVID Pandemic, when some brushed off concerns about the virus with dismissive comments like "It's just the flu" (a "flu" that killed over 7 million people), Hurricane Beryl was dismissed by some as "Just a category 1 hurricane" by the time it made landfall in Texas.

As this article points out, focusing too much on the numerical category of any particular hurricane can cause one to ignore other factors that can make a hurricane more devastating than one might expect.

Despite being "just a Category 1 hurricane", Beryl knocked out power to 2.7 million customers and was blamed for 8 deaths in the US.  Many of those customers have been without power for a week or more.

By the time Beryl passed through Nova Scotia, it was a mere shadow of it's former self, but there were still hours of torrential rain; amounts of between 30-45 mm per hour in the Annapolis Valley.  One youth was swept away by a flash flood and drowned.  A year ago, 4 people died in a similar event.  Basements flooded to the level of electrical panels.  Clogged drains and damaged culverts from last year's flooding had not been resolved meaning waters from this flood had nowhere to go.

A video of flooding in Nova Scotia.

This article shows some of the flooding.  As one local mayor noted, "These storms are becoming very frequent....".  Which is exactly what climatologists have been warning us about for a number of years.  The climate is warming.  Warm air holds more moisture which leads to more precipitation during storms.  And the storms themselves are becoming more frequent because warmer ocean waters and warmer land masses tend to encourage the development of more and stronger storms.

Remember, the point of this is not that "this" hurricane was "caused" by climate change.  It's just that storms like this are happening more often, the damage is often more severe and we have to pay to clean up the mess.  

This article looks at insured damage and how it has increased, just in BC.

"...insurance companies are increasingly limiting or hiking rates for the kinds of damages they'll cover."

Just some of the costs of climate change.

[Edit:  July 17th, 2024 - more than week after Beryl passed through Texas, more than 60,000 people in the state still do not have power.  One more person was found dead in her apartment, the day the heat index reached +43C..  Eighteen other deaths have been attributed to the storm a storm that was "only" a Category 1 hurricane by the time it landed in Texas.  One family estimated that between staying in hotels and eating out every meal, they will have spent around $10,000 on living expenses.  Governor Abbott says that Texans have lost faith in the utility company.  Seems to me there a faith issue related to the Texas government as well.]

Russia. More War Crimes

 A Russian cruise missile targeted and struck a Children's Hospital in Ukraine today.

Anyone want to claim that Russia isn't guilty of war crimes?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cl4y1pjk2dzo

Secret Diaries of a Young Doctor

This is Going to Hurt

by Adam Kay

With diary entries that alternate between absolutely hilarious and tragically poignant, a young doctor records events from his time working in the NHS that most of us would never see or hear about.  Two entries will give you a small sample of the general tone of the book.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

"Today, as I was making a perineum look slightly more like a perineum after a forceps extraction, the midwife asks mom if we can give her baby a vitamin K injection.  The patient treats us to some tabloid-newspaper sensationalist scare-story quackery - except it appears that this woman may have been holding her paper upside down.

She declines the vitamin K because "vaccines give you arthritis."  The midwife patiently explains that vitamin K isn't a vaccine, it's a vitamin that's very important to help with baby's blood clotting.  And it doesn't cause arthritis - maybe she's thinking of autism, which also isn't caused by vaccines.  Which the injection isn't.

"Nah", the mom says, "I'm not taking any chances with my baby's health."

Friday, November 12, 2004

An inpatient's lab results show her clotting process is all over the map for no good reason.  Hugo eventually cracks it.  She has been taking St. John's wort capsules from a health-food store for anxiety.  Hugo points out to her (and, in fairness, me) that it interacts with the metabolism of her warfarin, and her clotting will probably settle down if she stops taking it.  She is astonished.  "I thought it was just herbal - how can it be that bad for you?"

As soon as she says the words just herbal, the temperature in the room seems to drop a few degrees and Hugo barely holds in a weary sigh.  It's clearly not his first time at this particular rodeo.

"Apricot stones contain cyanide", he replies dryly.  "The death cap mushroom has a fifty percent fatality rate.  Natural does not equal safe.  There's a plant in my garden that if you simply sat under it for ten minutes, you'd be dead."  Job done, she tosses the tablets.

I ask him about that plant over a colonoscopy later. "Water lily."

Dr Kay stopped practicing medicine, unless you count laughter as a form of medicine.  He developed a career as a comedian.