Southern Bookman

Amazon fires a threat to humanity

The Amazon burning looks like the apocalypse.

Fires bringing afternoon darkness to Sao Paulo, 1,500 miles away, were deliberately set, an activist seeking to save the rainforest said on the Chris Hayes show Thursday night.

She said the arsonists were encouraged by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing loon who wants agricultural development of the home of countless species and generator of 20 percent of the world's oxygen.

Hayes pointed out that the Amazon, which absorbs carbon as the world's main barrier against climate change, is now spewing tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

Rather than taking any effective action to stop the fires, Bolsonaro launched a twitter feud with French President Emmanuel Macron, who wants G7 leaders meeting this weekend to discuss action on the Amazon emergency. Bolsarno accused Macron of meddling in Brazilian affairs, while displaying total befuddlement about stopping the conflagration. To him, short-term economic gains take precedence over the world's survival.

While Donald Trump's plan to buy Greenland is fatuous, perhaps the world can purchase whatever's left of the Amazon from Brazil and other countries and make the rainforest a global preserve. Of course, Trump would object, seeing the Amazon as a great place for a hotel and golf course.

In April, Macon vowed to rebuild Notre Dame after the world watched in horror as the ancient cathedral burned. The Amazon can't be rebuilt. Once it's gone, it's gone forever

 

Trump lays waste to Endangered Species Act

The Endangered Species Act is another American institution trashed by Trump.

Passed during the Richard Nixon administration, the act showed that the country cared as much about its natural heritage as it did about economic exploitation. The act protected animals like the bald eagle and Florida alligator that are part of our national identity.

Trump doesn't care. George W. Bush sought to weaken the act, but it survived. The Reagan administration and its anti-governmental philosophy didn't overturn the law. Now the Trump administration will let developers have their way in destroying natural habitat.

As CNN reported, Trump had already tossed aside EPA scientists in allowing an oil and copper mine at Bristol Bay in Alaska. Environmentalists fear the Pebble Mine will destroy the bay's salmon. Trump apparently personally approved the mine after a meeting with Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who cares nothing about his state's natural resources.

The EPA is another Nixon administration legacy that Trump is gutting. The GOP once listed conservation as one of its cornerstones. Beginning with Reagan, the party of Theodore Roosevelt has boosted mining, oil, natural gas and construction over the environment.

But the GOP never fully realized its anti-environmental agenda. It still when politically necessary followed voters' desire to preserve natural areas.

Now, with Trump, the GOP is fulfilling its dream to drill in every natural area, drain every wetland, concrete over every forest and meadow.

The new Endangered Species Act regulations will let developers for the first time present alleged "economic benefits" of a project. To Trump and his cronies, natural habitats have no economic benefits. The economic benefits will be what a developer says they are. That means whatever profits can be squeezed  from a place where wildlife once thrived.

Can Atlanta keep wasting water?

A neighbor watered his lush green lawn Thursday night, just after a new report on the earth's vanishing resources.

Four nozzles sent sent streams from every corner of the yard. Down the street, another neighbor watered his front yard with an old-fashioned back and forth device attached to a hose.

The watering in North Atlanta has tenuous connection to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report that deforestation and poor land use will cause a global food crisis. The New Yorker's Carolyn Kormann produced a full summary, connecting land degradation in Africa to Amazon deforestation.

Poor areas in Africa, Asia and South America will be the most hurt by water scarcity, soil degradation, and once fertile areas turning into desert. Rich countries like the United States will be less affected, although migration from countries like Guatemala, El Salvadore and Honduras will burgeon.

While I understand my neighbors' desire to keep their lawns green, the watering struck me as wasteful. Atlanta had received a heavy rainfall only a few days before. Was the excessive watering necessary?

For years, experts have warned that Atlanta's torrid population growth would threaten its water supply. Georgia, Alabama and Florida have battled for years over Atlanta taking more and more water from the Chattahoochee River. Over the years, Atlanta has undergone severe droughts.

When I covered the Georgia Legislature several years ago, I never heard any mention of climate change or global warming. The Republican-controlled General Assembly and then Gov. Nathan Deal believed economic growth would last forever, and that the state will be immune from global climate changes.

Savannah might sink under rising Atlantic waters, but at least it will have remnants of the port. Jekyll and Cumberland islands will lose beaches. The Chattahoochee will be reduced to a trickle.

As temperatures grow hotter and emissions rise, Atlantans build bigger homes, drive larger cars, and keep watering heir lawns. Some day, the bill will come due.

 

 

A morning walk, as the planet burns

I've been walking in the morning, enjoying cooler temperatures and low humidity in Atlanta.

Those I meet along the way comment how nice it is, compared with the 90-plus days of a week or so ago.

Morning brings hope: The newly risen sun shining through the trees. People walking their dogs. Folks driving off to work.

Meanwhile, in Paris, temperatures rise above 100 degrees. Paris!

In London, insufferable heat has replaced the mild summers of Shakespeare's plays.

A new report in the British journal Nature found that warming is now uniform across the globe. For most of the last 2000 years, warming and cooling have occurred at different places at different times, even events like the Little Ice Age. But now, temperatures keep rising at the same time over most of the globe.

It's a beautiful morning. They used to not seem so rare.

New Orleans, environs threatened by environmental catastrophe

New Orleans again stands on the edge of environmental apocalypse.

The city hammered by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is now threatened by a new storm gathering strength in the Gulf of Mexico. Thunderstorms Wednesday brought massive flooding to the low-lying city, including the French Quarter, which escaped Katrina's flooding.

The tropical storm that will be called Barry is expected to develop into a weak hurricane by the weekend. Hurricane warnings have been issued for the entire Gulf Coast. Barry's threat comes early in the hurricane season. There have only been three July hurricanes historically, all in the last 40 years, according to media reports.

The arrival of Barry comes as the Mississippi River stands at unusually high levels for this time of year. Heavy spring rainfall has raised the river's level to 16 feet at the Carrollton Avenue gauge, according to media reports.

Barry, if hits Louisiana, could bring up to 18 inches of rainfall, swelling the New Orleans river level to 20 feet or more, according to reports. That will put severe pressure on the levees that protect the city, as reported in a New Republic article.

A Corps of Engineers official expressed confidcnce that New Orleans' levees would hold, according to a wire story. But The Times-Picayune Advocate reported that water might overlap levees in the city's lower Ninth Ward, Algiers and St. Bernard Parish.

The threat from Barry comes after an environmentally ominous spring in which Mississippi River towns farther north suffered catastrophic flooding. The turgid Mississippi brought an increase of pollution washing downriver, threatening Louisiana's fisheries, as detailed in a Huffiington Post article.

The opening of the Bonnet Carre Spillway an unprecedented two times caused a heavy infusion of fresh water pouring into Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico.

The nutrient-rich chemical, hazardous and human waste carried by the heavy volume of river water led to a profusion of algae in the gulf, forcing the closure of Mississippi beaches. Scientists are also reporting an ominous rise in dolphin deaths, and an expected widening of the dead zone that develops each summer in the gulf.

With Barry gaining strength in the gulf, officials in Plaquemines Parish south of New Orleans have ordered a mandatory evacuation, while New Orleans officials are waiting to see what happens.

The evacuation of Plaquemines brought to mind a notorious historical catastrophe. As the momentous 1927 Mississippi River flood rushed toward the gulf, the levees were dynamited south of New Orleans to ease pressure on the city, as memorably recounted in John M. Barry's definitive book on the flood.

While New Orleans was spared, Plaquemines suffered devastating flooding. The memory of that event, evoked in Randy Newman's anthem "Louisiana 1927," persisted in rumors during Hurricane Katrina that the federal government intentionally blew up the levees around New Orleans so that poor people's neighborhoods would be destroyed to save rich white homes.But affluent Lakeshore neighborhoods also were inundated.

Plaquemines, one of the south Louisiana parishes losing land to the Gulf of Mexico at alarming rates, now hopes to avoid an echo of the 1927 debacle. And New Orleans prays it won't suffer a catastrophe like Katrina.

But even if New Orleans avoids devastation, the long-term threats of climate change and human pollution remain. Extreme weather will become a normal event.

 

Harper's Kevin Baker finds Green New Deal the best hope for American future

The Green New Deal offers the best chance for surviving climate change, Kevin Baker argues in a persuasive article in the May Harper's magazine.

Rather than the impractical, quixotic, absurd chimera painted by critics on the left and right, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's plan for a non-carbon economy outlines the most realistic course for the country's future, Baker says. While critics believe that half-measures can be taken, the Green New Deal expresses the truth that a total economic makeover is required. 

Baker turns to the Roosevelt New Deal for models of the full-scale action needed. Along with Depression-era Soil Conservation Service programs to restore dust bowl land ravaged by disastrous agricultural practices, Baker gives an extensive history of the Tennessee Valley Authority's transformation of poverty-stricken rural areas of Alabama and Tennessee.

Acknowledging that the TVA's damming of the Tennessee River looks environmentally destructive now, Baker makes a convincing case for a full-scale mobilization to end carbon emissions. Whether the TVA's massive electrification projects give the best model is debatable. Perhaps a proliferation of smaller projects would prove more effective.

While Baker ignores that World War II brought the biggest changes to the U.S. economy, his look back at Roosevelt's new deal illustrates that the United States once had the political will and social commitment to make major changes. While flawed, the Green New Deal offers a workable blueprint for that same level of unified action.

 

 

 

Widespread species extinctions threaten human existence, report warns

The dinosaurs were killed off by a meteor. Now, we are the meteor rapidly destroying life on Earth.

Human activity at its present rate will bring the extinction of a million plant and animal species, according to a U.N. report.

The extinctions are the largest in human history, the report found. Human life depends on the threatened ecosystems, the report warned.

While climate change exacerbates the loss of life, the primary causes come from human activity like deforestation, poaching, and overfishing.

Natural habitat is being lost at accelerating rates. In Thailand, rain forests are being turned into palm-oil plantations, devastating wildlife habitats. The death of coral reefs threatens marine diversity.

The report had a ray of hope. "Through transformative change, nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably," concluded Sir Robert Wilson, who led the research for the Intergovernmental Seience-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

Such a transformative change will also be required to reduce carbon emissions and lessen the devastation of global warming.

Those sounding the alarm about climate change and widespread species extinctions keep saying that humanity has time to take action. Instead, the world accelerates faster and faster toward disaster.

 

Good Friday, 2019, Heading Westward

On a stormy good Friday morning in Atlanta, I read John Donne's "Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward," as has been my custom for many years.

Wonderful to reopen the Norton Anthology of English Literature and rediscover Britain's literary treasures.

We're headed westward ourselves for a mini-family reunion and history-steeped weekend in Montgomery, Ala.

Other family members are on their way to Fort Worth to cheer the LSU gymnastics team on as they seek a national championship.

As we depart, here is an Easter message from George Hebert's "Easter Wings."

O let me rise

            As larks, harmoniously,

Black hole mission a model for effort required to fight climate change

That black hole image was great.

Now, scientists need to get busy to find a solution to global warming.

As the Event Horizon mission revealed the dark orb's photo from 55 million light years away,  the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that Alaska's March temperatures averaged 20 degrees higher than normal.

A high of 42 degees Farenheit, 30 degrees above the usual, was recorded on March 30 in Kotzebue, according to The New York Times.

Alaska's spring heat wave was the result of the Bering Sea losing its ice and the jet stream shifting to the south, the Times said, adding that the Arctic is experiencing more extreme temperature increases than any other region. That will bring more melting, and an escalating chain of climate change reactions.

If urgent action is not taken soon, climate change will reach its own event horizon, or point of no return.

The black hole image from the Messier 87 galaxy in the Virgo constellation emerged from a global network of telescopes, according to media reports. A young graduate student, Katie Bouman,  played a leading role in a team developing an algorithm to link the telescope data.

Such a concentrated global effort will be required to prevent the worst devastation from climate change.

But the Trump administration's climate change denial, support of fossil fuel industries and budget cuts to agencies like NOAA threaten humanity's future.

A sustained political, economic and scientific mobilization against climate change is needed or else our world will turn as desolate as a black hole swirling in space.

 

 

Elizabeth Kolbert investigates disappearance of Louisiana's coast

Louisiana loses a staggering amount of land to the Gulf of Mexico each hour. The disappearance of the state's coast is one of the world's most alarming environmental disasters.

Elizabeth Kolbert in a pessimistic article in the current New Yorker finds that control of the Mississippi River is the main cause of the state's rapid land loss.

Flood control and the need to keep the Mississippi from abandoning New Orleans and Baton Rouge mean that the river no longer spreads sediment to build up the state's delta, as it did for thousands of years. The oil industry's cutting of canals through swamps and marshland worsened the crisis.

Kolbert reports on likely futile attempts to counter the land loss through engineering efforts to artificially boost sediment in places like Plaquemines Parish, where seawater now covers large areas where homes and businesses once stood.

Along with Kolbert's reporting, two maps shock with the realization that much of southern Louisiana is gone forever, and that New Orleans, already sinking, will be threatened by the gulf in not too many years. One map shows the old familiar boot-shaped Louisiana. The other shows the state today, with shredded slivers of land remaining in places like Plaquemines and Terrebonne Parish.

Kolbert's Louisiana reporting updates that done by legendary New Yorker writer John McPhee, who in a 1987 article examined control of the Mississippi. In homage to McPhee, Kolbert visits a central focus of his writing, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Old River Control Structure 80 miles north of Baton Rouge.

The corps keeps 70 percent of the Mississippi's water flowing toward New Orleans and Baton Rouge. As Kolbert details, following McPhee, the Mississippi, seeking a shorter distance to the gulf, wants to shift west into the Atchafalya River's channel. If the Mississippi made its break, Louisiana's two major ports would be left dry.

While two engineering projects are under way to restore land in Plaquemines, the states' relentless loss of land won't stop unless river control is ended. New Orleans' economy would be devastated, but the city already seems doomed to sink into the sea.

Kolbert stands among the most pessimistic environmental writers, seeing human's alteration of nature as irreversible. She takes a broad view, citing the term "global change," rather than just changes in the climate.

With overpopulation, humans now outstrip the body weight of other vertebrates combined, she says. Along with rising species extinctions, she cites threats from humans' dominance of the globe: atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication (the spread of chemicals to waterways, causing algae blooms, etc.). "These are just some of the byproducts of our species' success," she says.

So much for the joys of baseball's opening day.

While GOP loons like Sen. Mike Lee mock the Green New Deal with claims such as that it would remove airplanes, that's the kind of decisive action needed if humans are to escape the worst of "global change." We might not be able to afford air transportation any longer.

Alas, Kolbert takes a dark view of humanity's prospects.

"At this point, it might be prudent to scale back our commitments and reduce our impacts. But there are so many of us - nearly eight billion - and we are stepped in so far, return seems impracticable."

Impracticable or nor, it's time for massive action.