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Hurricane Maria was so much worse than we thought

People in Puerto Rico have endured the devastation left behind by Hurricane Maria since the storm hit 8 months ago, with many still struggling to get clean water and medical care. Now there’s evidence that the death toll from Maria and its aftermath has been far worse than previously thought

An independent analysis from public health experts at Harvard University estimates that 5,740 people likely died as a result of Hurricane Maria — 90 times higher than the official government estimate of 64 dead. The new estimate, published on Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, would make Maria the deadliest U.S. natural disaster in more than a century — more than twice as deadly as Hurricane Katrina.

The enormous distance between the new estimate and the government’s official count can be blamed on the persistence of horrific living conditions and government neglect following the hurricane. The new study was based on a household survey conducted in the weeks and months following the storm. The storm’s winds and floods account for just 10 percent of Maria’s total deaths, according to the study — most of the dead perished from lack of medical care long after the water receded.

As a storm, Maria achieved a lot of “worsts”. It was one of the strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States. It caused the largest blackout in U.S. history and the second largest in world history. The loss of power meant many Puerto Ricans had to struggle for basic necessities — the storm shuttered hospitals and restricted access to fresh food and clean water for millions of people. In some cases, people resorted to drinking water from streams contaminated with toxic waste and raw sewage — simply because there was no other option. The result was one of the worst humanitarian crises in U.S. history.

“Interruption of medical care was the primary cause of sustained high mortality rates in the months after the hurricane,” wrote the study’s authors. Hundreds of thousands of people have left the island since the storm, one of the largest mass migrations in recent U.S. history — a possible preview of the kinds of shocks that might occur more frequently as climate change supercharges storms.

These conditions have been widely reported for months, but the federal government’s response has yet to match the scale of the challenge — leading to preventable deaths. The results of the new study “underscore the inattention of the U.S. government to the frail infrastructure of Puerto Rico,” according to its authors.

On his only visit to post-storm Puerto Rico back in October, President Donald Trump praised his administration’s response, saying that Puerto Ricans should be “proud” that the death toll wasn’t as large as “a real catastrophe like Katrina.”

The new study means that Maria is now the deadliest hurricane since 1900 in the United States, when a hurricane killed 8,000 people in Galveston, Texas. Hurricane Katrina’s official death toll was 1,833 people, though follow-up surveys conducted in the years following the 2005 storm showed that hundreds more likely died. There have been previous efforts at estimating the true scale of Maria’s death toll, but the Harvard survey is the most comprehensive so far. The truth is, we’ll probably never know exactly how many people died because of Hurricane Maria.

In a series of tweets in Spanish and English, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, responded to the study’s findings. “It took too long to understand the need for an appropriate response was NOT about politics but about saving lives,” she wrote. “Now will the government believe it?”

Cruz has repeatedly called for more assistance for hurricane victims, but has been criticized directly by Trump for “poor leadership.”

The Harvard survey may still be an underestimate, in part because “mortality rates stayed high” through December, when its data collection process ended. Tens of thousands of people are still without clean water and electricity, according to the government’s latest numbers. By all accounts, the humanitarian crisis started by Hurricane Maria continues. It’s going on right now. And, more storms are on the way: a new hurricane season starts on Friday.

It’s a safe assumption that people are still dying because of a storm that hit in late September, last year.

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Hurricane Maria was so much worse than we thought

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Brits may ban new onshore wind power

That blows

Brits may ban new onshore wind power

Shutterstock

Britain’s conservative government is preparing to make an unusual pledge — a crackdown on clean energy.

Prime Minster David Cameron, leader of the bluntly named Conservative Party (aka the Tories), is overseeing the drafting of a “manifesto” ahead of next year’s national election. That manifesto might come dressed up in a stifling windbreaker. The Guardian explains:

The Guardian understands that Cameron has brokered a compromise between warring Tories by agreeing to include measures in the manifesto for next year’s general election that will in effect rule out the building of onshore windfarms from 2020. …

The Tories will be working out the details of the pledge, which could involve an absolute cap on the output from onshore turbines. Lesser measures, which would all come into force in 2020, would involve lower subsidies or introducing tighter planning restrictions.

The senior Conservative said it was important to act because onshore windfarms had become so unpopular.

But Cameron’s party understands that renewable energy in general is popular in the country, so the manifesto might offset the anti-onshore wind pledge with strong commitments to solar power and offshore wind farms.

“We are not going to allow the [opposition] to characterize us as anti-clean-energy just because we want to control the number of onshore windfarms,” one party source told the newspaper. “We are mindful that uncontrolled expansion of onshore wind is alienating people from the whole clean energy debate.”


Source
Conservatives to promise ban on new onshore windfarms, The Guardian

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Brits may ban new onshore wind power

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Hot Hand? Well, Maybe a Lukewarm Hand….

Mother Jones

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Decades ago, the “hot hand” theory of sports was debunked. Massive statistical analysis showed that players in most sports went on streaks about as often as you’d expect by random chance, and when they were on a streak, their odds of making the next shot/goal/hit/etc. were no higher than at any other time. You might feel hot when you sink three buckets in a row, but that’s just the endorphin rush of doing well. It doesn’t mean you’ll make your next basket.

But now, there are all-new mountains of data to crunch, and two teams of researchers have concluded that hot hands really do exist in at least two sports:

Baseball: Brett Green, at the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley, and Jeffrey Zwiebel, at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business…controlled for variables, like the abilities of the batter and the pitcher, the stadium in which the at-bats took place, and even matchups like lefty versus lefty. And their findings, laid out in a working paper, show that a baseball player on a hot streak is batting 15 to 20 points higher than a teammate who is cold.

Basketball: Ezekowitz and his coauthors…with the help of cameras that NBA teams had installed at 15 arenas…could see that players with recent success in shooting were more likely to be taking shots from further away, facing tighter defenses, and throwing up more difficult shots….So the researchers controlled for these variables—and found what players and fans have long believed: The hot hand does exist. At least a little. According to the new research, players enjoying the hot hand are 1.2 to 2.4 percentage points more likely to make the next shot.

Hmmm. So that’s about 1-2 percentage points in both cases. And even that tiny effect is visible only after introducing a whole bunch of statistical controls that strike me as being a wee bit subjective. I suspect that if you varied your assessment of how tight the defense was or how difficult the shot was, the effect might go away entirely.

But even if it’s all legit, I have to say that 1-2 percentage points is pretty damn close to zero. And frankly, that’s still surprising. The truth is that it’s always seemed pretty logical to me that players would have hot hands now and again. But they don’t. At best, they occasionally have lukewarm hands. All the rest is just chance.

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Hot Hand? Well, Maybe a Lukewarm Hand….

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