Could Hurricane Season Lead to "Disaster Fatigue?"

Life is difficult enough these days due to covid-19. Now those who live in the Atlantic basin are facing a double whammy: a hurricane season that not only started early--for the sixth straight year--but one that is likely to be worse than normal. 

The combination could be called cruel and unusual punishment for the tens of millions of Americans who live near the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico.

The New York Times’ Henry Fountain summarized a recent study by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Wisconsin. “Hurricanes have become stronger worldwide during the past four decades, an analysis of observational data shows, supporting what theory and computer models have long suggested: climate change is making these storms more intense and destructive.

“The analysis... shows that warming has increased the likelihood of a hurricane developing into a major one of Category 3 or higher, with sustained winds greater than 110 miles an hour, by about 8 percent a decade, Fountain wrote.” The study was published May 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Physics suggests that as the world warms, hurricanes and other tropical cyclones should get stronger, because warmer water provides more of the energy that fuels these storms. Scientists point out, though, that there are other factors at play, as well.

“We’ve just increased our confidence of our understanding of the link between hurricane intensity and climate change,” said James Kossin, the lead author of the new study. “We have a significantly building body of evidence that these storms have already changed in very substantial ways, and all of them are dangerous,” he said.

Gabriel Vecchi, a hurricane expert at Princeton University who was not involved in the new research, told The Washington Post that the study shows an uptick from 30 percent of storms being major to about 40 percent of storms being major. He termed that “a pretty large increase.”

NOAA researchers are putting the odds of an above-normal hurricane season at 60 percent. They forecast that the Atlantic basin could see 13 to19 named storms, six to 10 hurricanes and three to six major hurricanes. The average hurricane season includes 12 named tropical storms, six hurricanes and three major hurricanes.

The Atlantic hurricane season officially begins June 1 and runs through November. This year the first named tropical storm, Hurricane Arthur, arrived in mid-May. It hit North Carolina’s Outer Banks before veering out to sea, having done relatively little damage.

After two months of a pandemic, Fox News reported, some emergency officials worry that people living in hurricane-prone areas could face “disaster fatigue.”

“We have disaster fatigue, they’re tired of seeing the numbers, they’re tired of seeing the news. … They’re tired,” Bill Wheeler, Houston’s deputy emergency management coordinator, told Accuweather.

This year’s hurricane season is all the more dangerous because of the pandemic, which makes some of the core practices of emergency management, like group shelters, far more difficult,” noted Carlos J. Castillo, acting deputy administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in a call to journalists May 21.

Meantime, some Americans who live hundreds of miles from the Atlantic have their own problems. Floodwaters from heavy rains caused the collapse of a dam upstream from Midland, Michigan, May 20, forcing the evacuation of about 40,000 people. The floodwaters mixed with containment ponds at a Dow Chemical Company plant and could displace sediment from a downstream Superfund site, though the company said there was no risk to people or the environment.

The changing climate has put more of the nation’s 91,500 dams at risk of failing, engineers and dam safety experts told The New York Times. “We should expect more of these down the road,” said Amir AghaKouchak, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California, Irvine. “It’s unfortunate but this is what the trend is going to be.” The American Society of Civil Engineers, in its latest report card on infrastructure in 2017, gave the nation’s dams a “D” grade.

In the West, there’s another problem worsened by climate change. “Expanding and intensifying drought in Northern California portends an early start to the wildfire season,” Paul Duginski wrote in The Los Angeles Times, “and the National Interagency Fire Center is predicting above-normal potential for large wildfires by midsummer.”

 All these challenges across our nation drive home, yet again, the need for national action to counter climate change. Congress should reduce the number-one cause of climate change--carbon dioxide emissions--by putting an honest price on carbon.

SOLAR & WIND NOW CHEAPEST NEW POWER SOURCES IN MOST OF WORLD

New wind, solar and battery projects are getting so inexpensive that they rival the cost of building new gas or coal power plants in most of the world, according to an April 28 report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).

A solar or wind farm is now the cheapest kind of new power plant for two-thirds of the world’s population, according to BNEF. Those areas represent up 71 percent of gross domestic product and 85 percent of energy generation.

The cost of electricity around the globe has dropped by 9 percent for onshore wind and by 4 percent for utility-scale solar since the second half of 2019 — “a startlingly fast change for power plants that don't rely on traditional fuels,” as David Ferris put it in his EnergyWire story on the report.

The projects’ costs are declining as they get larger, achieving a scale that makes every part less expensive. In the last four years, the average size of a wind farm has more than doubled, from 32 megawatts to 73 MW, while solar farms have become a third larger.

The drop in the cost of renewables is certain to continue. "There are plenty of innovations in the pipeline that will drive down costs further," said Tifenn Brandily, a lead author of the report.

BNEF’s analysis measured the all-in costs of creating power, which means "development, construction and equipment, financing, feedstock, operation and maintenance."

Experts point out, however, that the pandemic could help coal and natural gas survive a bit longer than they would otherwise, mainly because the decline in electricity demand has driven down the prices of those two fossil fuels. "If sustained, this could help shield fossil fuel generation for a while from the cost onslaught from renewables," said Seb Henbest, chief economist at BNEF.

The coronavirus crisis is partly to blame for slowdowns in major U.S. offshore wind projects, Newsday’s Mark Harrington reported. Denmark-based Ørsted, the largest developer of offshore wind for the United States, said in late April that it expects delays on five major East Coast projects, citing impacts from the coronavirus pandemic and "prolonged" federal permitting.

In addition, the far-better-established onshore wind sector has some 25 gigawatts of planned projects at risk, or $35 billion worth of investment, according to an analysis by the American Wind Energy Association.

The Financial Times reported that the wind industry’s supply chain woes are putting “as much as 30 gigawatts of new capacity at risk in the US, China and Europe this year alone."

The good news for the U.S. wind industry is that during the year’s first quarter a record amount of capacity, about 24,690 MW, was under construction, as EnergyWire’s David Iaconangelo reported. Corporations and utilities contracted for a record volume of wind power via power purchase agreements. And the first 4-MW turbines went into service, marking the rise of a new crop of machines with unprecedented capacity factors.

As the world’s economies are drawing up rescue packages to staunch the damage caused by the pandemic, the UN, the International Energy Agency (IEA), EU officials and others are calling for seizing the opportunity to boost clean energy, Ben Geman noted in his Axios newsletter “Generate.” IEA said the world needed a wave of investment to restart the economy with “cleaner and more resilient energy infrastructure.”

Reinforcing that notion, a report by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a climate finance think tank, found that developers risked wasting more than $600 billion if all mooted coal-fired plants were built. The Guardian’s Adam Morton quoted report co-author Matt Gray, who said that proposed coal investments risked becoming stranded assets that locked in increasingly expensive power for decades. “The market is driving the low-carbon energy transition but governments aren’t listening,” Gray said. “It makes economic sense for governments to cancel new coal projects immediately and progressively phase out existing plants.”

To accelerate the transition to renewable energy, Congress should put an honest price on carbon emissions. Models indicate that even a modest price of $25/metric ton of CO2 would trigger a significant shift toward renewable energy.

COVID-19 DEATH TOLL SHOWS NEED TO REDUCE EMISSIONS

The World Health Organization says dirty air, both indoors and out, cuts short seven million lives annually. That includes more than 100,000 Americans.

Now there’s a study from researchers at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health indicating that higher levels of the tiny, dangerous particles in air known as PM 2.5 are associated with higher death rates from Covid-19.

U.S. counties that averaged just one microgram per cubic meter more PM 2.5 in the air, the researchers found, had a covid-19 death rate that was 15 percent higher, based on data from 3,080 counties covering 98 percent of the nation’s population.

Specifically, the researchers found that if Manhattan had lowered its average PM 2.5 level by just a single unit, or one microgram per cubic meter, over the past 20 years, there would have been 248 fewer Covid-19 deaths in the period ending April 7. “The results of this paper suggest that long-term exposure to air pollution increases vulnerability to experiencing the most severe Covid-19 outcomes,” the authors wrote.

“If you’re getting COVID, and you have been breathing polluted air, it’s really putting gasoline on a fire,” said Francesca Dominici, a Harvard biostatistics professor and the study’s senior author.

Most fine particulate matter comes from fuel combustion in automobiles, refineries and power plants. Some is from indoor sources like tobacco smoke. The fine particles penetrate deep into the body, promoting hypertension, heart disease, breathing trouble, and diabetes, all of which increase complications in coronavirus patients. The particles also weaken the immune system and fuel inflammation in the lungs and respiratory tract, adding to the risk both of getting Covid-19 and of having severe symptoms.

 In 2003, Dr. Zuo-Feng Zhang, the associate dean for research at the University of California, Los Angeles, Fielding School of Public Health, found that SARS patients in the most polluted parts of China were twice as likely to die from the disease as those in places with low air pollution.

Beth Gardiner, a journalist and the author of Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution, said she was particularly worried about what the coronavirus outbreak would mean for countries with far worse pollution, such as India. “Most countries don’t take it seriously enough and aren’t doing enough given the scale of the harm that air pollution is doing to all of our health,” she said. 

Sadly, the United States is proposing to ignore scientists’ strong recommendations that clean air standards be raised. The decision by EPA to stand pat drew a critical letter from 18 U.S. senators that cited the Harvard study. “What should be painfully obvious to all of us right now is that the cost of protecting public health is far less than the cost of breathing polluted air,” said U.S. Senator Tom Carper (D-DE), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and one of the signers of the April 14 letter. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler defended the decision and noted that the Harvard study had yet to be peer reviewed.

The world’s experience with Covid-19 has illustrated the importance of fostering public acceptance of science and a willingness to listen to scientific expertise. We also need to pay heed to scientists warning us about climate change. "Every disaster movie starts with a scientist being ignored," Texas Tech University’s Katharine Hayhoe said during a recent webinar organized by Harvard University and the American Public Health Association. 

The fastest, most efficient way to reduce air pollution is to put an honest price on fossil fuel emissions--a price that takes into account the significant costs imposed on all of us when breathing those emissions causes poor health and death. It’s time for Congress to start moving on a carbon fee.

Can Miami Beach and other coastal cities hold off rising seas?

Last October Miami Beach declared a climate emergency. Citizens who had urged the city to take that action see it as a first step toward convincing the city to do more to slow carbon emissions and climate change, The Miami Herald’s Alex Harris reported.

Over the next two decades climate change will increasingly threaten Florida’s 8,500-mile coastline and its $1 trillion economy. E&E’s Daniel Cusick, in an article picked up by Scientific American, wrote: “New modeling by Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan economic think tank, reveals that ‘100-year floods’ could occur every few years rather than once a century in many locations, endangering an additional 300,000 homes, 2,500 miles of roadways, 30 schools and four hospitals.

RFF contends that Miami will become “the most vulnerable major coastal city in the world,” with hundreds of billions of dollars in assets under assault from winds, storm surges, coastal flooding, and sea-level rise.

What will Miami Beach do to combat its emergency? We should get a glimpse of the possibilities within the next few weeks after Jacobs Engineering Group Inc., an engineering firm hired by Miami Beach to review its climate-adaptation strategy, releases its final recommendations. 

The audience will include a number of American cities that confront similar challenges, among them New York, Norfolk, Va., and Charleston, S.C., Arian Campo-Flores reported in The Wall Street Journal. Because Miami Beach is farther along than many of them in feeling the effects of climate change and trying to respond, its experience could provide lessons.

In recent years, Miami residents have become familiar with a phenomenon called a “king tide,” a higher-than-normal tide caused by specific alignments of the sun and moon. “Under a full or new moon, the tide becomes so elevated that combined with sea-level rise the water filters through the drains flooding the streets of downtown Miami,” Irene Sans, a meteorologist at WFTV, said in a Twitter message. The worst flooding occurs in September, October and November, Washington Post reporter Matthew Cappucci wrote. And it can happen even on a sunny day.

Miami Beach started addressing the threat in 2014. Lying an average of four feet above sea level on porous limestone, the city is especially vulnerable. The grim reality: Sea levels are projected to increase as much as 21 inches by 2040, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Climate experts praise Miami Beach—a diverse, international city with wealthy sections—for devoting $1 billion to tackle the problem, Campo-Flores reported. The city installed bigger storm-water pipes and new pump stations to push rainwater out to sea. It also began elevating sea walls and raising roads in the lowest-lying areas to address sea-level rise. The roughly $1 billion program is funded by a combination of sources, including bonds and residential and business utility fees.

The Sunset Harbour neighborhood, which overlooks Biscayne Bay and often flooded during the highest tides, was the first commercial and condo area where these measures were implemented. Since January 2017, after the project was completed, the area has avoided 85 flooding incidents that would have occurred without the changes, said Roy Coley, the city’s public works director.

A January 2020 study commissioned by the city and led by consulting firm ICF International Inc. estimated that raising roads in the neighborhood increased condo values 11.9 percent.

But Campo-Flores reported that residents are split on what the city should do. Some say that proposals to raise roads as much as about five feet above sea level and add storm-water pumps with generators the size of vans would create unsightly intrusions and a potential drag on property values.

So the mayor and city commissioners face a dilemma: How far can they go in accommodating those homeowners’ concerns without undercutting the city’s long-term viability? “We will have to have the political will to make unpopular decisions,” City Commissioner Ricky Arriola told Campo-Flores. 

Our nation desperately needs elected officials willing to vote for policies that will pay off down the road. We have not seen much of that wisdom in Washington. By now it should be clear to almost all members of Congress that we need national policies that combat climate change--and that the longer these politicians sit on the sidelines, the more our health and prosperity will suffer. The time has come to put an honest price on carbon emissions.

MEDICAL PROS SOUND CLIMATE ALARM

Medical professionals are seeing the effects of climate change in their own practices more often and are increasingly concerned. Recently 150 of them gathered in Boston to start planning a response.

Sponsored by the New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and all of Boston’s teaching hospitals, the Climate Crisis and Clinical Practice Symposium aimed “to bring the issue of climate change directly to the bedside,” Dr. Aaron Bernstein told The Boston Globe’s Felice J. Freyer. He is a pediatrician and the interim chief of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He was one of the event’s organizers.

The gathering was the first of eight to galvanize health care systems to face the reality of climate change. Six additional symposiums are scheduled over the next year and a half in the United States. Australia will host another. 

“The climate crisis has created an unprecedented future that looks nothing like what we have experienced,” said Dr. Renee N. Salas, an emergency medicine doctor at Mass. General. “We are the ones that are experiencing this first and need to work collectively with the rest of the country.”

On January 2 the Medical Society Consortium wrote an open letter to President Trump urging him not to remove the United States from the Paris Agreement. “Our organizations represent hundreds of thousands of our country’s doctors, nurses and other health care providers,” wrote Dr. Mona Sarfaty, the organization’s executive director. “We are seeing, right now, the harms to our health that global warming is creating. We foresee much greater health harms to all Americans, especially our children and grandchildren, if we do not join with the rest of the world to respond to the climate crisis—because climate change is a public health emergency.”

“Climate change exacerbates chronic and contagious disease, worsens food and water shortages, increases the risk of pandemics, and aggravates mass displacement” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote in an article titled “Climate Change is Already Killing Us” in Foreign Affairs. “The broad environmental effects of climate change have long been discussed as long-term risks; what’s clear now is that the health effects are worse than anticipated—and that they’re already being felt.” He is director-general of the World Health Organization.

Heat stress is one of the health problems that is on the rise. It can lead to heart attacks, kidney stones, and preterm birth, The Globe’s Freyer reported. “Cholera, dengue, Lyme disease and valley fever are all increasing in incidence and also expanding their range. With warmer springs and later winters, the pollen season is getting longer and also more severe, because carbon dioxide prompts plants to release more pollen. That increases asthma attacks, as does air pollution.

“The heat also affects the way medications work. Drugs for depression, heart disease, and kidney failure can be less safe in hot weather. People taking beta blockers for high blood pressure are more likely to faint in hot weather. EpiPens and albuterol can be rendered ineffective by extreme heat if left inside cars.”

Dr. Gaurab Basu, a primary care physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance who attended the Boston symposium, expressed concern about the many people doing physical labor outside, especially in urban “heat islands,” where asphalt and concrete can make the temperature 10 or 15 degrees higher than elsewhere. They could be injuring their kidneys day after day without knowing it. Basu told the group about a 27-year-old patient who developed end-stage kidney disease caused by chronic exposure to heat. The man, an immigrant, had worked on sugar farms in El Salvador. Doctors, she said, need to “add a climate lens” to their diagnostics.

Mental health also can suffer from climate change. Extreme heat "makes all mental illnesses worse,” said Dr. Gary Belkin, a psychiatrist and visiting scientist at the Harvard climate group. Emergency room visits for mental crises and psychiatric hospitalizations go up during heat waves.

Climate change can even affect the availability of medical supplies, Freyer reported. Bernstein had ordered intravenous fluids for an infant who had become dehydrated. He was shocked to receive an alert that IV fluids — a common, life-saving treatment — were being rationed. The reason: Hurricane Maria, which scientists believe was more intense due to climate change, had shut down the Puerto Rican plant that makes them.

Politicians reluctant to act on climate change say that doing so would threaten our prosperity. They obviously are not considering the cost of health problems. It is time for Congress to put a price on carbon that reflects ALL the costs that emissions impose on us.