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The smoke’s gone, but hearts and lungs still may be in danger months after wildfires

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This story was originally published by Reveal and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Three days after the Camp Fire erupted, incinerating the Northern California town of Paradise and killing 85 people, Katrina Sawa found herself struggling to breathe.

But Sawa wasn’t anywhere near Paradise. She lives almost 100 miles away in Roseville, a suburb northeast of Sacramento. Sawa puffed on her emergency asthma inhaler over and over again.

“Usually, I use it once a month,” said Sawa, a 48-year-old business coach who has had asthma since she was 13. “After using it four times in one day, I knew it was time to go to urgent care.” There, doctors had her inhale a powerful steroid medication to soothe her inflamed airways.

For two weeks after the fire ignited, the air in Northern California, stretching as far as 200 miles from the flames, was so full of smoke that it was deemed unhealthy to breathe, especially for people with heart and respiratory ailments.

But the health problems Sawa and others experienced while the blaze raged are just the beginning of effects that could plague people from Sacramento to the San Francisco Bay Area long after the smoke clears.

An analysis of hospital data by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that emergency room visits surged several months after a previous large wildfire was extinguished.

Three to five months after the 37,000-acre Tubbs Fire in Napa and Sonoma Valleys in October 2017, the region’s emergency rooms treated about 20 percent more patients for respiratory and cardiac ailments compared with previous years, according to the analysis, which used state data. At the time, the Tubbs Fire was the most destructive in California history, killing 22 people and destroying nearly 6,000 structures.

Seven of nine hospitals in Napa and Sonoma counties reported either significantly or slightly more cardiovascular and respiratory cases from January through March 2018 compared with the same period in 2016 and 2017. For instance, at Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Medical Center in Sonoma County’s largest city, emergency room visits for respiratory problems jumped by 570, or 37 percent, from January through March 2018 compared with the same period in 2017. Twenty miles down Highway 101 at Petaluma Valley Hospital, heart cases increased by 61 patients, or 50 percent.

Medical experts say these findings raise troubling questions about the long-term health effects of wildfires, which, worsened by drought and global warming, are raging across the West.

The life-threatening effects of smoke disproportionately harm the elderly, children, and low-income people of color. More than 2.3 million adults and 644,000 children in California have asthma and another 1.7 million suffer from heart disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and California Department of Public Health. Adult asthma rates are highest for multiracial people and African Americans, while heart ailments tend to afflict the state’s poorest and least educated residents across all racial groups.

Reveal’s analysis does not take into account other factors that might have driven up the emergency room visits, such as other pollutants or the weather. But the conclusion is in line with a growing body of research that has found more people suffer respiratory problems and heart attacks within days of being exposed to wildfire smoke.

“The uptick in ER visits is very consistent” with scientific research about smoke, said Kari Nadeau, director of Stanford University’s Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research.

John Balmes, a pulmonologist and professor at the University of California San Francisco who studies air pollution, is not surprised that emergency room visits increased three months after the wine country fire.

“People with asthma, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and other lung diseases could have persistent exacerbations,” he said, adding that inhaling ash could have longer-term consequences, too. The effects of smoke months or years after a fire are not well understood.

There was only a slight increase in immediate emergency room visits during the days when last year’s Tubbs Fire burned. That’s because two of the largest hospitals were evacuated and a third was destroyed. As a result, the analysis was based on the period three to five months later, using data from California’s Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development.

Busier ERs in Bay Area, Sacramento

This month’s Camp Fire — the deadliest and largest in California history — was more than four times bigger than the Tubbs Fire. Throughout much of the Bay Area and Sacramento area, the smoke was so intense and widespread that many people wore masks, stayed indoors and bought air purifiers. At least two Northern California hospitals have reported busier ERs due to smoke from the fire, which burned 153,000 acres in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

Robin Scott, director of the emergency department at Adventist Health Clear Lake, reported a 43 percent increase in respiratory diagnoses when the smoke hung over the region compared with the two previous weeks.

In Berkeley, 160 miles from the fire, Sutter Health’s Alta Bates Summit Medical Center treated “increasing numbers of patients with chief complaints that appear to be connected to the poor air quality,” including “asthma, eczema, respiratory illness — as well as worsening heart conditions like congestive heart failure and chest pain,” said Ronn Berrol, medical director of the emergency department.

Other hospitals in the region, however, reported small increases, while some, including Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, reported no increases.

“There has been a slight uptick in terms of patients coming through our ER with respiratory issues. Most have been quickly treated and discharged,” said William Hodges, director of communications at Dignity Health in Sacramento. “I would say the impact has been minimal at most.”

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Francesca Dominici, a biostatistics professor at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said understanding the health effects is critical because climate change is making fires more frequent, ferocious, erratic, and long lasting.

Dominici was on a team of researchers that published a study last year that collected data from wildfires across the West between 2004 and 2009 and compared it with hospitalizations of elderly residents. About 22 percent more African Americans 65 and older were hospitalized for respiratory problems on smoky days than on non-smoky days. For elderly women of all races, respiratory hospitalizations increased more than 10 percent on smoky days, and for elderly men, 4 percent.

Five of the 10 largest wildfires in California history have occurred in the last two years, and many of the state’s largest population centers have been exposed to smoke repeatedly.

Dominici said the impacts are likely cumulative.

“More people are becoming susceptible to air pollution because they have been breathing bad air from previous wildfires,” she said. “For these people, the risk of adverse health effects is going to be even larger than the rest of the population.”

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency researchers, in a study published in April, examined more than a million emergency room visits during California’s 2015 fire season and found a 42 percent increase in heart attacks among adults over 65 on days with dense wildfire smoke. They also found increases in strokes and other cardiovascular effects.

The EPA researchers expressed a willingness to speak about their research, but the agency would not grant permission.

Tiny particles harm hearts, lungs

A major health concern is the makeup of the smoke. Fires emit clouds of fine particles known as PM2.5. For decades, researchers have shown that whenever these tiny particles — which largely come from vehicles and other sources of fuel combustion — increase in the air, deaths and hospitalizations from heart attacks and respiratory problems rise. The particles can irritate airways, travel deep into the lungs and disrupt the heart.

In addition, fires can emit toxic gases from a variety of sources, including oil, metals, and pesticides.

Among the estimated 19,000 buildings destroyed in the Camp Fire were gas stations, two grocery stores, eight schools, and a hotel.

“When you’re breathing smoke from that wildfire,” said Stanford’s Nadeau, “you’re breathing paint thinner, Drano, plastics, heavy metals, and burned leaves, which are very similar to tobacco.”

The long-term effects of breathing this cocktail are unknown.

In Palo Alto, 200 miles from the Camp Fire, pediatrician Kellen Glinder said he has seen a marked increase in number of children with breathing problems during each of California’s recent wildfires.

On Friday, after rain cleared much of the wildfire smoke, the waiting room at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, a clinic where Glinder works, wasn’t as busy as it was in previous days. Several children sat or crawled around as a television played Toy Story overhead. But Glinder said he still was treating kids affected by the smoke.

About one third of the 20 children he treated each day during the fires — six to eight kids per day — had conditions the smoke exacerbated, Glinder said.

“We (saw) a lot of things hidden under the guise of a cold that wouldn’t have gotten worse unless the air quality was so bad,” he said.

In August, when the Mendocino Complex Fire blazed through the state, Glinder treated more patients with asthma and other conditions. And last year, the Santa Rosa fires brought similar health concerns.

“Each forest fire is going to have its own particular combination of chemicals, depending on what’s getting incinerated and blowing our way,” he said. “With this particular fire, I saw a lot more … skin irritation, headaches, and nausea than I had seen in prior forest fires.”

The waiting room had a box of miniature paper masks for the kids, decorated with Mickey Mouse heads. Glinder, however, said such flimsy masks are ineffective at protecting people from smoke’s particles and gases; they are designed to contain germs from colds and flu.

Like the elderly, children are particularly sensitive to soot and smoke.

“Children’s lungs are still growing, their nervous systems are still growing,” Glinder said. “That makes them more susceptible to these pollutants.”

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The smoke’s gone, but hearts and lungs still may be in danger months after wildfires

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California wildfire smoke spreads to New York, 3,000 miles away

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This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The U.S. East Coast has been provided a firsthand reminder of the deadly California wildfires after smoke swept across the country and caused a haze to envelop the eastern seaboard, including Washington, D.C. and New York City.

Hazy skies were reported in several places on the East Coast from smoke wafting from 3,000 miles farther west, where wildfires in California have killed more than 80 people and razed more than 15,000 homes and other structures.

An unusually dense fog shrouded the top of New York City skyscrapers and the sunset was particularly intense due to the smoke particles in the air. “Wow. I knew tonight’s sunset over New York City seemed different, and I should’ve realized,” tweeted Kathryn Prociv, a meteorologist on the Today Show. “Wildfire smoke is in the air, all the way from California.”

Donald Trump visited the areas affected last weekend and created controversy by refusing to acknowledge climate change as a major factor, getting the name of the incinerated town of Paradise wrong, once again blaming forest management, and arguing for leaf-raking as a key factor in prevention.

Early on Wednesday morning, the former California governor and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger made a surprise visit to firefighters, who have been working exhaustingly long shifts in extremely dangerous, unpredictable conditions.

He served breakfast to officers who have been battling the Camp Fire in Northern California, and criticized Trump for jumping to blame the fires on forest management.

Schwarzenegger, who was California governor from 2003 to 2011, said he was in Hungary when he heard Paradise had been destroyed, and wanted to visit firefighters to show his appreciation for their efforts while they risked their lives.

Satellite imagery released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed a band of smoke curling up from Southern California to Massachusetts. While the diffused smoke can be hard to distinguish from other pollution, it makes a telltale appearance at sunrise and sunset.

The smoke is moving fairly high in the atmosphere but can exacerbate health problems if it settles – D.C.’s air quality was classed as only “moderate” on Tuesday.

This smoky pall is still nothing compared with the situation on the West Coast, where there have been shortages of protective masks in some places. Schools and sporting events have been shut down due to the dire air quality, although San Francisco’s famed tram network has now reopened. The air is expected to improve this week, with rain forecast for Wednesday.

The Camp Fire in Northern California is the deadliest blaze in the state’s history, with 81 confirmed deaths and nearly 700 people still unaccounted for since it broke out earlier this month, with the cause yet to be determined. The fire obliterated almost all of Paradise, a small town close to the Sierra Nevada, and displaced more than 50,000 people. A smaller blaze near Los Angeles has caused three deaths and is now largely contained, but still prompted some dramatic rescues of those stranded by the flames and smoke.

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California wildfire smoke spreads to New York, 3,000 miles away

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Here’s how California could avoid wildfires (hint: It’s not raking)

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Nine months ago, when California wasn’t in flames, government investigators warned Governor Jerry Brown that an inferno loomed.

“California’s forests are reaching a breaking point,” the report said.

The report got about little media attention at the time, but it’s still worth taking seriously even now. It came from an independent oversight commission set up by the California government to sniff out ways the state was going bad, then make recommendations to Brown and the legislature. The commission spent a year interviewing experts and holding hearings.

If California doesn’t want a future wreathed in wildfire smoke, the report suggests, it will need to permit more tree thinning, more prescribed fires, and more burning of wood for electricity.

Wait a sec, you say. Does that mean President Donald Trump is right to blame the fires on California’s forest management? Hardly. Trump’s suggestion that California needed to spend more time “raking” the forest is comically wrong. The Paradise Camp Fire started on National Forest Land, which is managed by Trump’s own Department of Agriculture, not by California. The severity of the recent fires, burning areas surrounded by brushy chaparral rather than forest, can be blamed more accurately on climate change and also the sprawling development that puts houses in the wilderness.

That said, it’s also true that California — and the rest of the West — needs to change how it manages forests. Ever since the United States took control of the West, people have been putting out fires. Before 1800, California was a pretty smoky place — an estimated 7,000 square miles burned every year (1,000 have burned so far this year. This history of fire suppression has left us with a massive backlog of fuels that we will have to deal with … somehow.

California’s fire report, recommended big changes. For starters, the state should flip its traditional mode of suppressing fires and shift to using fire as a tool, it said. That would mean burning in a controlled manner, lighting prescribed fires and firing up biomass electricity generation plants. All that would let the government control the air pollution from blazes, allowing someone to plan and space out fires, instead of having raging wildfires bathe the state in smoke all at once.

The commission also suggested that California supply a greater percentage of the wood it uses for everything from paper to houses. The state has strict sustainability rules for logging but ends up importing 80 to 90 percent of its wood from other places that may have “weaker or nonexistent regulations,” the report said.

In short, California has a lot of hard, dirty work to do in its forests to avoid choking Californians with smoke every year. But here’s the rub: The federal government owns nearly 60 percent of the forest in California. And that, as the authors of the report delicately put it, “complicates a state response.” California has already instituted a suite of programs to restore forests, but Trump has yet to take a rake to the land under federal authority.

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Here’s how California could avoid wildfires (hint: It’s not raking)

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The bizarre and frightening conditions that sparked the Camp Fire

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The Camp Fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise, is now the most destructive to ever hit California and the deadliest wildfire in modern American history. As of Wednesday night, 56 people are known to have died, and 130 are still missing. The last fire this deadly was back in 1918 in Minnesota — before professional firefighting or meteorological science.

“This is the kind of urban conflagration Americans thought they had banished in the early 20th century,” wrote fire historian Stephen Pyne for Slate. “It’s like watching measles or polio return.”

Our unnaturally warming climate set the stage for the return of this type of devastating fire. The Camp Fire, and the escalating onslaught of weather emergencies like it, crystalizes the urgency of the climate challenge: Without radical changes, there will be more fire catastrophes like Paradise.

According to local meteorologist Rob Elvington, the Camp Fire began under atmospheric conditions with “no analog/comparison” in history for the date. Northern California’s vegetation dryness was off the charts — exceeding the 99th percentile for any single day as far back as local records go. “Worse than no rain is negative rain,” wrote Elvington. The land was so dry, it was sucking water out of the air.

That warranted an “extremely critical” fire weather alert by the National Weather Service, which was really an understatement for the direness of the situation. According to the U.S. Forest Service, fighting a fire in such conditions is almost by definition a losing battle: “Direct attack is rarely possible, and may be dangerous, except immediately after ignition. Fires that develop headway in heavy slash or in conifer stands may be unmanageable while the extreme burning condition lasts.”

The Camp Fire burned so hot that it cremated people in their homes and cars. Lizzie Johnson, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter embedded with one of the area’s cadaver search-and-rescue teams, has been candid about her experience. “There are some things you can’t unsee while reporting,” she wrote on Twitter.

Fire disasters on a scale recently considered inconceivable now appear to be the inevitable. Six of the 10 most destructive wildfires in California history have ignited in the past three years. In little more than a year, two other California towns (Redding and Santa Rosa) have been similarly devastated by fires. As long as we continue on a business-as-usual path, it’s a matter of where, not when, another California town will be erased from the map.

Like the Camp Fire, future fires catastrophes are inescapable — on our current path. It may take generations for California’s forests to adapt to the warming and drying climate. Nearly every square mile of the state’s forests may need to burn for that to happen — for new life to emerge and for new tree species to migrate northward toward new water sources and cooler air.

We can’t continue on as if the fate of Paradise was just a fluke. By failing to take appropriate action on climate change, we are actively choosing to create the ideal conditions for future, unfightable fires. The fact that millions of people around the world are being subjected to increasingly extreme weather is a choice we make every day.

We know the kinds of bold, radical plans that scientists say are now necessary to steer the world toward a safer future — including remaking the American economy to rapidly reduce emissions immediately. We have the money, the time, and the knowledge to implement them. Future fires are a given, but we can avoid future tragedies at the level of Paradise. It’s our choice whether last week’s fires become a cautionary tale, or the new normal. It doesn’t have to be this way.

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The bizarre and frightening conditions that sparked the Camp Fire

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Entire cities evacuate as hellish wildfires whip through California

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A trio of rapidly expanding wildfires are burning in California, marking the latest in a string of harrowing climate-related disasters in America.

The Camp Fire has killed at least five people and destroyed 2,000 buildings in the Northern California city of Paradise. The fire is already the fourth most destructive wildfire in state history, but those numbers are almost certain to increase once officials survey the area more completely.

In Southern California, low humidity combined with strong offshore Santa Ana winds prompted the National Weather Service to issue an “extremely critical” fire weather alert, its highest warning for wildfire risk. Two fires there are rapidly expanding towards the coast causing the city of Malibu to evacuate.

These are firestorms — towering, fast-moving walls of flames hundreds of feet high — the kind of fires that are not only uncontrolled by firefighters, but uncontrollable. In Southern California, fire burning through wind-whipped palm trees on Thursday resembled a hurricane.

“This is the new normal,” Los Angeles County Fire Captain Erik Scott told a local television station. “When we have conditions like this, when it’s such incredible wind, that brings us into a different caliber.” Acting California Governor Gavin Newsom has requested an emergency presidential disaster declaration from Trump to speed the flow of federal aid to victims.

Meteorologists marvelled at the “gut-wrenching” rate of spread Thursday’s fires exhibited. At one point, the Camp Fire was consuming 80 football fields worth of land per minute, fueled by winds of up to 50 mph. That fire grew more than 20-fold in about six hours just before it overtook the town of Paradise, home to about 27,000 people. By nightfall, the fire had expanded in size to 70,000 acres, and was just 5 percent contained. A reporter’s video caught a fire tornado on camera, an exclamation mark on a truly hellish scene:

By all accounts, the scrambled evacuation of Paradise was harrowing. There were reports of people abandoning their vehicles trapped in heavy traffic, clutching children and running for safety under blackened skies. At least one cluster of about 70 people were airlifted from a Walgreens. Video from the exodus is nightmare-inducing, and is difficult to watch. During the height of the blaze, firefighters completely surrendered firefighting duties in order to focus on rescuing people.

On Friday morning, gruesomely burned cars littered the side of the road. “The whole town is gone,” Gianna Wallace, a survivor, told Sacramento Bee reporter Ryan Sabalow. That assessment was echoed by Scott McLean, a spokesperson for CALFIRE, who told the Los Angeles Times that the Camp Fire “has destroyed the town.”

Smoke from the fire drifted in a huge plume and set off smoke alarms as far away as San Francisco, nearly 150 miles away.

In Southern California, two fires burned near the town of Thousand Oaks with towering smoke clouds visible at the site of a mass shooting where a gunman killed more than a dozen people just hours earlier. The Hill Fire caused an evacuation of Cal State University-Channel Islands and about 1,000 homes. More worrying is the Woolsey Fire, which threatens about 75,000 homes in both Ventura and Los Angeles Counties — including the entire city of Malibu. At least one family was grieving both tragedies, losing a loved one in the shooting and being forced to evacuate because of the fire all within 24 hours, according to the Los Angeles Times.

This week’s fires come just months after July’s Carr Fire destroyed large parts of Redding, California, and a little over a year after the Tubbs Fire devastated Napa and Sonoma Counties — the most damaging wildfire on record in California. Six of California’s 10 worst fires on record have come in just the past three years.

After an exceptionally hot and dry summer, the vegetation in Northern California near one of the fires is the driest ever measured so late in the year.

Rapidly expanding wildfires in California are part of a worrying trend across the West and around the world that is attributable to climate change. Two human-related trends are most responsible: More people are moving to areas prone to fire while hotter, drier weather is making fires blossom and spread more quickly. Wildfire seasons are lengthening as temperatures rise and droughts become more frequent. Over the past 40 years, the area burned by wildfire across the West has doubled. Globally, the surge in burning forests is making warming worse, too, expelling nearly half as much as all industrial sources worldwide in the worst years.

This week’s fires, along with the countless other recent record-breaking weather disasters, send a clear message: The era of climate consequences is here. We should treat this as the emergency it is.

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Entire cities evacuate as hellish wildfires whip through California

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Illinois voters saw through this Republican’s climate facade

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On Tuesday night, a Democratic climate advocate ran against a Republican “climate advocate” in Illinois’ 6th district. The results of that race make one thing clear: If conservative politicians want to incorporate the environment into their platforms, they have to mean it. Let’s back up for a second.

In 2016, a bipartisan effort to address rising temperatures formed. The Climate Solutions Caucus said it would “explore policy options that address the impacts, causes, and challenges of our changing climate.” But after the group failed to accomplish, well, anything, the Climate Solutions Caucus appeared to chiefly be exploring one thing: how to shield conservatives running in states where environmental issues matter to voters.

The question leading into the midterms was whether belonging to the caucus would have any impact for Republicans running for reelection. That brings us back to Illinois’ 6th district, where Sean Casten — a Democrat with a background in renewable energy (and a background as a contributing writer to Grist) — beat out six-term incumbent Peter Roskam.

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Roskam became a member of the Climate Solutions Caucus in May, two months after Casten won the Democratic primary on a platform that featured climate action front and center. After joining the group, Roskam, alongside a lion’s share of the Republicans in the caucus, voted for a resolution condemning the very notion of a carbon tax. (Putting a price on carbon is a Republican-friendly, market-based approach to fighting climate change, but never mind that.)

Roskam’s lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters — an organization that keeps tabs on how members of Congress vote on green issues — wasn’t anything to write home about. He earned a 7 percent lifetime score from the group, and scored just 3 percent last year. He’s also on record calling global warming “junk science.”

“The Climate Solutions Caucus — I truly don’t know what its purpose is,” Casten tells Grist. “It’s a great way to provide cover for Republicans who want to appear to care, but it’s not lost on anybody in this district that Roskam called climate change junk science and joined the Climate Solutions Caucus right after I won the primary to try to give himself some cover.”

Casten, on the other hand, was unequivocal about his stance on green issues. He called global warming “the single biggest existential threat we face as a species,” and has a plan for what he wants to do about it once he gets to Congress.

As a former CEO of renewable energy companies, Casten says he’s equipped to frame the debate in a way that appeals to both businesses and consumers. “There’s no fundamental conflict between the economy and the environment, provided you focus on efficiency and conservation,” Casten says. He wants to streamline parts of the Clean Air Act to encourage innovation and efficiency. “The Clean Air Act is awesome,” he says. “But it’s got these flaws because it was written in a way that never contemplated regulating CO2.” That’s one of the things he plans to push for in 2019.

One thing he doesn’t plan on doing when he gets to Capitol Hill? Joining the Climate Solutions Caucus. “It’s not high on my list of things to do, because it’s really important for me to do something about climate,” he says. “I don’t need any resume bonafides.”

By the time results had rolled in from purple districts across the country on Tuesday night, it became evident that Roskam wasn’t the only climate caucus Republican whose diluted environmental message failed to resonate with voters. In all, 12 other conservative members of the caucus lost their seats to folks with better climate bonafides.

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Illinois voters saw through this Republican’s climate facade

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One year after Maria, the Puerto Rican diaspora charts a new path forward

One year ago Friday, Yamil Anglada recalls fear setting in as she lost contact with family members who were riding out Hurricane Maria. The office manager at a women’s cooperative in Brooklyn had moved from Puerto Rico to the mainland U.S. more than twenty years ago. And as the storm passed through her native island, she struggled to concentrate at work between making unsuccessful calls and scanning social media for updates that never came.

Today, her family is safe. But on the anniversary of the storm, she said, “I didn’t want to be alone.”

Like hundreds of other New Yorkers, Anglada made her way Thursday night to one of several gatherings planned to remember the lives lost and continue a call for a just recovery on the island. Although she said it was important for the community to be together for the occasion, she added, “I feel like this is just a date because the crisis is still ongoing.”

Anglada headed to Manhattan’s Union Square for an event organized by a community-led initiative called #OurPowerPRnyc, which was createdr to call out injustices in the U.S. government’s response to Maria. Among other demands, it argues for full relief for the territory’s “catastrophic” debt burden and rejecting the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA). The campaign says PROMESA, which established a federal oversight board for the territory, has hampered recovery efforts and is just one example of U.S. colonial control over Puerto Rico.

At rally in Union Square to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria, speakers and attendants called for Puerto Rico to become an independent nation.Justine Calma

Again and again, speakers at the event called for for the island’s people to be able to chart their own future — and escape the federal government’s grip.

Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of the Latino community-based organization in Brooklyn, UPROSE, paid respect to a resistance she says is building within the island. She called its members “the people who are making sure that Puerto Rico is there 50 years from now, 100 years from now, and that we are an independent, sovereign nation.”

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New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to the mic later in the program, calling for a transition to renewable energy that leaves no resident behind, a Marshall Plan-type effort to help Puerto Rico recover economically, and for “self-determination of the island.” In response, a voice in the audience called out, “We need independence! Say it!”

The demands for sovereignty resonated with Anglada, as well. “It’s independence for Puerto Rico,” she said. “It’s the only answer at this point.”


Roughly 30 blocks north, a few hundred people assembled at St. Bartholomew’s Church on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to commemorate the solemn day for Puerto Ricans everywhere.

Hurricane Maria evacuees who found refuge in New York City and families of some of the storm’s victims gathered with interfaith clergy, community organizers, and local politicians for a bilingual memorial service — organized by the Power 4 Puerto Rico coalition. They came to bare witness to stories of shared grief and hope as part of a national week of action aimed at a just and transparent rebuilding effort that the coalition called “Boricuas Remember.

Among the attendees was Bethzaida Toro, a 49-year-old licensed nurse from Cabo Rojo in southwestern Puerto Rico. She left the island for New York City last November with her three-year-old grandson. “I wanted to raise him in the paradise I was raised in,” she told Grist. “Unfortunately, that did not happen for him.”

Hurricane Maria’s siege on the island shook Toro’s faith. “When you survive a hurricane and then you realize that thousands of others didn’t — I doubted God.” she opined, adding that she lost her 72-year-old uncle to the storm. “But ultimately I kept praying. I kept walking on Faith Street.”

Nearly 3,000 flickering electric candles crowded St. Bartholomew’s ornate altar, each one representing a life lost to the tropical tyrant. Speakers pointed to these deaths as the result of gross negligence by the U.S. government, as well as the consequences of discriminatory treatment and policies.

People attend a service at St. Bartholomew’s Church for the anniversary of Hurricane Maria which cut through Puerto Rico exactly one year ago Thursday.Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Several evacuees spoke at the ceremony. “Life for the past year has simply been one fight after another,” said Carlos Matos, who is now a physics student at the City University of New York. “Today, I can begin the process of healing.”

Speakers urged those gathered to remember the lives cut short as they mobilized to act and support Puerto Rico. “Today we mourn, but tomorrow we vote.” said former New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who is now campaign director of the Power 4 Puerto Rico coalition.

After taking time to honor Maria’s victims, attendees made sure those in power wouldn’t forget what the Puerto Rican people went through. And so, sign-wielding churchgoers took to the streets for a march to Trump Tower, holding hundreds of votive candles. They called for members of the U.S. Congress to meet the needs of Hurricane Maria survivors and their families. They also beseeched President Trump to apologize for his blatant neglect of the island and his continued refusal to acknowledge the extraordinary death toll, for which, they said, he is partly, responsible.

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One year after Maria, the Puerto Rican diaspora charts a new path forward

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Terrified by ‘hothouse Earth’? Don’t despair — do something.

A team of international researchers released what looks like a blueprint for catastrophe this week. On our current path, they warned, humanity might push the planet into an entirely new, hellish equilibrium, unseen since before the emergence of our species millions of years ago.

This doomsday scenario, which they dubbed “hothouse Earth,” could render large swaths of our planet uninhabitable. Their conclusion: “Humanity is now facing the need for critical decisions and actions that could influence our future for centuries, if not millennia.”

But that message got lost in the breathless media coverage over “hothouse Earth” — even though it’s the most important thing each one of us needs to hear at perhaps the most important turning point in our species’ history.

Yes, the prospect of runaway climate change is terrifying. But this dead world is not our destiny. It’s entirely avoidable. As the authors of the paper have argued in response to the coverage, implying otherwise is the same as giving up just as the fight gets tough.

Take a look at the leading sentences from some of the most widely-shared reports (and note the use of “will”):

CNN:

Scientists are warning that a domino effect will kick in if global temperatures rise more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, leading to “hothouse” conditions and higher sea levels, making some areas on Earth uninhabitable.

The Guardian:

A domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas, shifting currents and dying forests could tilt the Earth into a “hothouse” state beyond which human efforts to reduce emissions will be increasingly futile.

This kind of framing is almost perfectly engineered to foster hopelessness. When coverage hinted at optimism, failure seemed built-in.

BBC:

Others are concerned that the authors’ faith in humanity to grasp the serious nature of the problem is misplaced. “Given the evidence of human history, this would seem a naive hope,” said Professor Chris Rapley, from University College London.

The paper paints a terrifying picture. It does a masterful job of compiling the evidence (some of which we’ve known for a long time) that our worst climate fears could come true and persist for millennia if Earth is just slightly more sensitive to greenhouse gases than we think. But that doesn’t change what we already know: We need a world that’s carbon neutral as quickly as possible.

With every year we wait — and our emissions continue to climb — this challenge becomes more and more difficult.

Seeing this, and seeing the still massive headwinds of state-sanctioned climate denial and the corrupting influence of fossil fuel money, a cynic might say: It’s too hard. Let’s just learn to adapt.

Well, the authors say, it will be existentially difficult to adapt to a world with runaway permafrost melt, global forest die-offs, rapid sea level rise, and supercharged extreme weather. These aren’t just tipping points. The authors call them tipping cascades. That kind of world will make the current version of Earth look like paradise.

But the bottom line is, we have no choice but to press on through this fear. This is our actual planet we’re talking about, the only place in the entire universe capable of supporting life as we know it.

The next decade will almost surely decide our fate. That should empower us. It means every act has meaning; we have the chance to save the world as we know it every single day. In this scenario we now find ourselves in, radical, disruptive climate action is the only course of action that makes sense.

To their credit, climate scientists of all stripes, including the paper’s authors, have been pushing back hard on the media’s framing of this research.

In a tweet, Diana Liverman, a climate scientist and co-author of the paper called out the media directly:

“Clearly people aren’t reading the paper we wrote where our point is exactly that Hothouse Earth is not our destiny and that social system feedbacks are starting to move us to the Stable Earth. But media goes for worst case and makes it sound certain.”

Liverman and the other authors anticipated a defeatist response and published a multi-page document of possible solutions which, when combined with other research on the most important actions people can take, gives a blueprint for hope, not despair.

In the paper, the authors sum this up into a single battle cry. To prevent a hothouse Earth, they say, we need “a coordinated, deliberate effort by human societies to manage our relationship with the rest of the Earth System.”

That sounds a lot like the message of a burgeoning global movement targeting the root causes of climate change. That scientists are increasingly comfortable with using language like this — not mincing words anymore — is nothing if not hopeful.

Building a world that works for everyone is exactly what we should refocus our efforts on doing when we read scientific studies that scare the hell out of us. As the researchers point out, there’s still time that we have to take advantage of. That’s why it’s so damn important to act boldly. Now.

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Terrified by ‘hothouse Earth’? Don’t despair — do something.

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How to Defeat Your Own Clone – Kyle Kurpinski & Terry D. Johnson

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

How to Defeat Your Own Clone

And Other Tips for Surviving the Biotech Revolution

Kyle Kurpinski & Terry D. Johnson

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: February 23, 2010

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


Send in the clones! On second thought, maybe not.   CAN IT READ MY MIND? WILL IT BE EVIL? HOW DO I STOP IT?   Find out the answers to these and other burning questions in this funny, informative, and ingenious book from two bioengineering experts who show you how to survive—and thrive—in a new age of truly weird science. For decades, science fiction has been alerting us to the wonders and perils of our biotech future—from the prospects of gene therapy to the pitfalls of biological warfare. Now that future looms before us. Don’t panic! This book is all you need to prepare for the new world that awaits us, providing indispensable cautionary advice on topics such as   • bioenhancements: They’re not just for cyborgs anymore. • DNA sequencing and fingerprinting: What’s scarier than the government having your DNA on file? Try having it posted on the Internet. • human cloning: Just like you, only stronger, smarter, and more attractive. In other words: more dangerous. Our future may be populated by designer babies, genetically enhanced supersoldiers, and one (or more!) of your genetic duplicates, but all is not lost. How to Defeat Your Own Clone is the ultimate survival guide to what lies ahead. Just remember the first rule of engagement: Don’t ever let your clone read this book! From the Trade Paperback edition.

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How to Defeat Your Own Clone – Kyle Kurpinski & Terry D. Johnson

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Wind energy over the oceans could power the world, geophysicists say.

Sorry to ruin the party, but a report from the Food Climate Research Network casts doubt on recent suggestions that pasture-raised cattle could sequester massive amounts of carbon in the soil.

By nibbling plants and stimulating new root growth, the old argument goes, cows can encourage deeper root networks, which suck up more carbon. Proponents of grass-fed meat have embraced these findings, saying that pasture-raised livestock could mitigate the impact of meat consumption on the environment.

The new report — cleverly titled “Grazed and Confused?” — acknowledges that pastured cattle can be carbon negative, but this depends on the right soil and weather conditions. In most places, according to the report, grazers produce much more greenhouse gas than they add to the ground. It is an “inconvenient truth,” the authors write, that most studies show grass-fed beef has a bigger carbon footprint than feedlot meat. “Increasing grass-fed ruminant numbers is, therefore, a self-defeating climate strategy,” the report concludes.

Fortunately, grass-fed beef is not the only solution being bandied about: Research shows that a small dose of seaweed in livestock feed could drastically reduce methane emissions. And if you really want to reduce your impact on the climate you could, you know, stop eating meat.

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Wind energy over the oceans could power the world, geophysicists say.

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