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Rising temperatures pose ‘extreme danger’ to Muslims on Hajj pilgrimage

by mtibkz48 Posted on August 26, 2019

It’s not always easy to have faith — especially when your faith might involve trekking through temperatures upwards of 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

For the world’s estimated 1.8 billion Muslims — roughly a quarter of the world’s population — making a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca is considered a religious duty. Hajj, as the ritual is called, brings millions of people to the Saudi Arabian holy city each year. But according to a new study, climate change could lead to an increase in temperatures and humidity along the heart of the route, putting many devotees in “extreme danger” of developing heat-related illnesses.

“When it comes in the summer in Saudi Arabia, conditions become harsh, and a significant fraction of these activities are outdoors,” Elfatih Eltahir, MIT engineering professor and lead author of the study, said in a press release.

When the Hajj falls in the summer — the timing of the annual migration changes every year due as it depends on the lunar calendar — it may not be safe for participants to remain outdoors during the trip. This year, the Hajj fell in August, and temperatures in Mecca averaged about 109 degrees F (43 degrees C). Saudi officials cautioned visitors that temperatures could reach as high as 122 degrees F (50 degrees C) on some days.

While rising temperatures along the traditional holy route are worrying, Saudi Arabia has some time to prepare for the increased danger. Each year the Hajj occurs about 11 days earlier, so there will only be the occasional stretch of five to seven years where the pilgrimage falls during the hottest summer months. According to the study, the Hajj won’t fall during the summer again until 2047. In the meantime, researchers are arguing for Saudi Arabia to introduce countermeasures or restrictions on participation in the pilgrimage, warning of an even more severe toll on human health. But even with mitigation measures in place, Eltahir says, “it will still be severe.”

“It is time for the Muslim community to become the leaders in the fight, with not just countries such as Bangladesh and Pakistan under threat now, but increasingly the holy site of Mecca.” Tufail Hussain, director of Islamic Relief U.K. told Sky News in response to the study.

“If we don’t act now, not only will people suffer the impact of more frequent and intense disasters, but our children born from today will no longer be able to perform the sacred duty of Hajj.”

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Rising temperatures pose ‘extreme danger’ to Muslims on Hajj pilgrimage

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Disaster! – John Withington

by Myrna Posted on June 19, 2018

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Disaster!

A History of Earthquakes, Floods, Plagues, and Other Catastrophes

John Withington

Genre: Nature

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: February 16, 2010

Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


A comprehensive catalog of the most devastating and deadly events—natural or man-made—in human history.   If you follow the news it can seem like injury, sickness, and death are now constant, inescapable occurrences that threaten us every second of every day. But such catastrophic events—as terrible and frightening as they are—have been happening for as long as mankind has walked the Earth . . . and even before.   From ancient volcanoes and floods to epidemics of cholera and smallpox to Hitler’s and Stalin’s mass killings in the twentieth century, humanity’s continued existence has always seemed perilous. This volume offers a unique perspective on our modern fears by revealing how dangerous our world has always been—with examples such as: • the Black Death that killed over seventy-five million people in the 1300s; • the 1883 volcanic eruption on Krakatoa; • the Irish Potato Famine; • the 1970 cyclone in Bangladesh; • and the long-ago volcano in Sumatra that may have wiped out as much as 99% of the world population. With this catalog of calamity, readers will be engrossed, enlightened, and relieved to realize that despite all the disasters that have befallen humanity, we are still here. John Withington is the author of The Disastrous History of London and produces television documentaries. He lives in London.  

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Disaster! – John Withington

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As Harvey devastates Texas, catastrophic floods unfold in South Asia.

by JuanW19aoss Posted on August 29, 2017

As floodwaters peak and recede over the coming weeks, there will be lots of standing water for disease-transmitting mosquitoes to breed and multiply, the Atlantic reports.

West Nile virus has plagued Texans since 2002, and there were 22 cases of Zika in the state in 2017. Those numbers could increase sharply if mosquito populations spike. In New Orleans, West Nile cases doubled the year after Hurricane Katrina flooded much of the city. (Oh, and mosquito populations are already on the rise thanks to climate change.)

There are other dire health effects from the storm. Floodwater often carries untreated sewage, gasoline, and debris, all of which can cause injury and illness when people come into contact with it. Even after water recedes, tainted carpet and drywall can harbor mold and mildew, another serious health threat.

And, in an unfortunate twist, unmonitored emissions and chemical leaks among the refineries and plants in Houston’s extensive industrial district on Monday caused officials to issue a shelter-in-place warning for residents downwind of a breached pipeline.

All of this will take a greater toll on Houston residents sidelined into vulnerable neighborhoods — mostly communities of color who were already suffering before Harvey made headlines. For them, the storm is far, far from over.

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As Harvey devastates Texas, catastrophic floods unfold in South Asia.

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Here’s Where Vaccine Skeptics Live Around the World

by MurrayWakefield Posted on September 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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More than 13 percent of Americans disagree with the statement that “vaccines are safe,” according to a new study by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. That puts America in the middle of the pack of 67 countries where researchers examined views towards immunizations in what they believe to be the largest survey on vaccine confidence to date.

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Published last week in Ebiomedicine and based on surveys of 66,000 people, the findings show stark variations among countries. France took the lead of vaccine skeptics, with a staggering 41 percent of respondents disagreeing with the statement that vaccines are safe. Authors attribute the country’s “extreme negative sentiment” to controversies over the past two decades around the unproven side effects of a range of vaccines, from hepatitis B to H1N1. (The hesitancy reflects what the French are hearing from their doctors: One in four general practitioners said that vaccines recommended by public health authorities aren’t useful, according to a study last year.)

Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, and Argentina, less than two percent of respondents were skeptical of vaccine safety.

Authors observed a counterintuitive finding: countries with higher education rates were generally more skeptical of vaccine safety, but within countries, more educated citizens were less skeptical. (Clusters of vocal vaccine skeptics in areas with a highly educated population—like California’s Marin County and Boulder, Colordo—appear to be exceptions to this rule.) “Our research thus stresses the emerging shift away from access to vaccines as the primary barrier to vaccination in many countries,” the authors write.

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Here’s Where Vaccine Skeptics Live Around the World

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Earth Doesn’t Have Be Doomed Like Atlantis — We Can Change Course

by Riley32J04 Posted on November 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When it comes to confronting global climate change, we don’t have much experience to draw on. As world leaders prepare to meet in Paris starting on November 30 to hash out a binding international agreement to limit greenhouse gases, it appears that we are in new and frightening territory, without the past as a reliable guide.

History, however, can offer some important lessons. Archaeologists in recent years have discovered that dramatic weather events helped lay the foundations for our very civilization. Climate calamities, in fact, may have sparked the urban revolution that continues to alter the planet.

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Earth Doesn’t Have Be Doomed Like Atlantis — We Can Change Course

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This Is What It’s Like to Live Without a Country

by Will7881iwjsf Posted on October 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Greg Constantine began working on what would become the Nowhere People project in 2005. A year-long project spurred by meeting North Korean defectors in China morphed into a decade-long investigation that took him around the world. Initially Constantine focused on Asia: documenting the lives of stateless people in Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Nepal. Part of that work lead to the Exiled to Nowhere book, which examined the plight of the Rohingya people in Burma.

As he got deeper into the subject, Constantine took an ambitious leap and expanded the work to Africa, working with the UN refugee agency in Kenya and Ivory Coast. He traveled to Sri Lanka to photograph the Hill Tamils, and to Ukraine, the Dominican Republic, and then the Middle East: Kuwait, Lebanon, and Iraq. Most recently, Constantine’s turned to Europe—the Netherlands, Italy, Serbia, Poland, and Malta—visiting 18 countries in all.

This woman from the Roma community in Serbia was unable to register her four children, is now pregnant, and will likely not be able to register her newborn. (2014)

A woman from the Nubian community in Kenya holds a photograph of her grandfather and other soldiers of the King’s African Rifles. The Nubian community have lived in Kenya for more than 100 years. (2008)

Constantine’s book Nowhere People brings you into the homes of the Rohingya, Roma, Crimean Tartars, Nubians, Hill Tamils, Haitians living in the Dominican Republic, Kurds, Dalits, Ahwazi, Bihari, Bukinabé in Ivory Coast, and Bidoons of Kuwait. It’s a bit of a blur. The similarity in how these people live and suffer helps bring a sense of scale to the problem.

The book is a deep dig into a rather unsexy story about people who have been exiled from their home countries or are not accepted by their birth countries simply because of their ethnicity or where their families may have come from. Often they can’t leave the country that doesn’t want them because they have no papers. They have no passport, no birth certificate, nothing to verify who they are or where they came from. They’re stuck.

Constantine explains:

Without citizenship, stateless people belong to no country and are refused most social, civil and economic rights. In most cases, they cannot work legally, receive basic state health care services, obtain an education, open a bank account or benefit from even the smallest development programs. They are often deprived the freedom to travel, the right to own land or possess essential documents like an ID card, birth certificate or passport. As non-persons, they are excluded from participating in the political process and are removed from the protection of laws, leaving them vulnerable to extortion, harassment and any number of human rights abuses. Statelessness paralyzes them in poverty and constructs challenges that plague every aspect of a person’s life.

The book, in its scope and depth, brings to mind a vast Sebastiao Salgado project (think Migrations) or Ed Kashi’s excellent Curse of the Black Gold book on the Nigerian oil industry.

Nowhere People is the kind of project that young documentary photographers often dream about pursuing without fully taking into account how much time it will take and, importantly, how much money it will cost. Constantine worked with a number of NGOs and got grants to continue the project from such notable organizations as the Open Society Institute, the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, the Oak Foundation, the European Network of Statelessness, and Blue Earth Alliance, among other supporters. The back end of a project like this, stringing together the amount of support Constantine did, is every bit as impressive as the photography.

Youth from the stateless Urdu-speaking community (or the Bihari community) demonstrate at a rally in Dhaka in 2006. In 2008, the community was granted Bangladesh citizenship after 35 years of being stateless.

A young stateless boy pushes a cart at a fish market in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia. Up to 50,000 children, mostly of Filipino and Indonesian descent, are stateless in Sabah. (2006)

Ibrahim, 24, was born in Mali and migrated to Ivory Coast when he was fourteen. He is stateless and now trapped in the area of Soubré because he has no documents and cannot travel through check posts. (2010)

Originally from Bosnia, this stateless man from the Roma community has lived in Italy for more than 30 years but is still without citizenship. Without documents, he was arrested and put in detention at a facility in central Rome. (2015)

Children from the Dom (gypsy) community play in a slum outside of Basra, Iraq. The Dom are some of the most vulnerable people in Iraq. Most of the children in the community have no documentation. (2014)

A quick note on the book itself: It’s a hefty, beautiful beast. From the textured, embossed cover to the excellent black & white reproductions and smart layout, including nice foldout pages allowing for big, gorgeous horizontal images, it’s a book that as an object itself stands out.

Nowhere People book

Nowhere People book

Nowhere People book

Nowhere People book spread

Nowhere People is available November 3, 2015 from nowherepeople.org and Amazon.

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This Is What It’s Like to Live Without a Country

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Two Charts That Show How the US Is Shortchanging the World

by Antony9244 Posted on November 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tim McDonnell

This morning, the New York Times reported that President Obama is poised to announce a pledge of $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, a United Nations-administered account to help poor countries deal with climate change. That’s the biggest single pledge of any country so far (see chart above); it doubles the total size of the fund and is a major step toward the UN’s target of raising $15 billion before next month’s climate talks in Lima, Peru. Other notable carbon emitters, such as the UK, are expected to announce contributions by the end of next week.

But viewed in a different context, the US contribution looks much less impressive. The idea behind the fund is to reconcile one of the cruel ironies of climate change: Many of the nations that will be hit hardest by global warming—countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands, for example—have done very little to cause the problem. Bangladesh was recently ranked as the country that is most vulnerable to climate change, but its per-capita carbon dioxide emissions are 44 times smaller than the US’s per-capita emissions, according to the World Bank. So the fund is meant to bridge the gap between the rich countries whose carbon pollution causing climate change and the poor countries that are suffering from it.

As the chart below shows, the US’s contribution to the Green Climate Fund looks a lot smaller when it’s adjusted to take into account America’s extremely high emissions:

Tim McDonnell

Cumulatively since 1980—the earliest year for which consistent data from the Energy Information Administration is available—the US has emitted more carbon than any other country, including China. (In 2008, China overtook the US as the leading annual carbon polluter). So it’s probably fair to say that the US is more to blame for global warming than any other single country. And yet Obama’s pledge to the Green Climate Fund only translates to about $17,100 per million metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted from 1980 to 2012—placing it ninth among the 13 countries that have announced pledges. That’s a bit like crashing a friend’s car and only offering to pay to fix the steering wheel. By contrast, Sweden’s pledge equates to $292,000 per million tons of CO2 emissions—17 times greater than the US pledge.

It’s great and necessary that Obama is willing to help poorer countries adapt to climate change. But I think it’s fair to say the US is getting away pretty cheap.

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Two Charts That Show How the US Is Shortchanging the World

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Climate change has found another way to screw the poor

by Volodyslav7uk Posted on May 16, 2014

mo’ warming, mo’ problems

Climate change has found another way to screw the poor

By

Shutterstock

Standard & Poor’s (S&P) Ratings Services has found yet another way that fossil fuel burning by rich countries is going to screw over poor ones — by making it harder for them to borrow money.

S&P analysts identified climate change as one of two “global mega-trends” that will shape countries’ economic risks in the years to come (aging populations is the other trend). In a new report, the analysts said climate change would hurt nations’ creditworthiness, with poor countries the worst affected.

The American financial services company considered how vulnerable 116 countries are to sea-level rise, assessed the role of agriculture in each of their economies, and factored in the results of a climate vulnerability index produced by Notre Dame University. The analysts found that the credit ratings of Vietnam, Bangladesh, Senegal, Mozambique, Fiji, the Philippines, Nigeria, Cameroon, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia were the most vulnerable to the worsening whims of the weather. Not exactly a group of G7 candidates. Bloomberg reports:

Global warming “will put downward pressure on sovereign ratings during the remainder of this century,” S&P analysts led by Moritz Kraemer in Frankfurt wrote. “The degree to which individual countries and societies are going to be affected by warming and changing weather patterns depends largely on actions undertaken by other, often far-away societies.” …

Changing rainfall patterns could affect agricultural yields, and altered weather could spread disease and pests, hitting productivity, they said. …

“Unlike in the case of aging, individual societies cannot by themselves meaningfully reduce the impact they will feel as the climate changes,” the analysts said. “A society may choose to reduce its carbon emissions unilaterally to reduce the risk of the potential consequences of global warming, but due to the global character most of the benefits of that society’s sacrifice will accrue to other nations.”

Affected countries might want to shake a tin can in the direction of Europe. The nations whose economies were deemed least vulnerable to climate change were Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Austria.


Source
Climate Change to Hit Sovereign Creditworthiness: S&P, Bloomberg

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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Climate change has found another way to screw the poor

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White House Unveils Plans to to Cut Methane Emissions

by Myrna Posted on March 28, 2014

The move is the latest in a series of administration actions aimed at addressing climate change without waiting for congressional action. Continue at source: White House Unveils Plans to to Cut Methane Emissions ; ;Related ArticlesFacing Rising Seas, Bangladesh Confronts the Consequences of Climate ChangeNew Mexico Is Reaping a Bounty in Pecans as Other States StruggleNew Mexico Reaps Pecan Bounty as Other States Struggle ;

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White House Unveils Plans to to Cut Methane Emissions

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Dot Earth Blog: Rising Seas + Dams + Aquifer Pumping = Delta Blues

by Myrna Posted on March 28, 2014

Dams, water pumping and global warming are combining to threaten crowded delta regions. Link: Dot Earth Blog: Rising Seas + Dams + Aquifer Pumping = Delta Blues ; ;Related ArticlesFacing Rising Seas, Bangladesh Confronts the Consequences of Climate ChangeRising Seas + Dams + Aquifer Pumping = Delta BluesMost Chinese Cities Fail Pollution Standard, China Says ;

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Dot Earth Blog: Rising Seas + Dams + Aquifer Pumping = Delta Blues

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