Everyday Erinyes #297

 Posted by at 12:56 pm  Politics
Dec 192021
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

We never used to, and mostly still don’t, think of winter as tornado season. (We also don’t think of earthquakes in the eastern United Sttes, ot hurricanes reaching New Yor, or sea level rise.) But it looks as though we are going to have to start thinking about all of these things.

Of course there is a lot science still doesn’t know. One limitation of science is that in order to actually study something – as opposed to making a model, which is what climate scientists have been doing – that something has to actually exist. And I guarantee there are many things we undoubtedly hope we will never have to know, if they don’t make it from model to reality. But winter tornadoes are not one of those things. They are here.
================================================================

Tornadoes and climate change: What a warming world means for deadly twisters and the type of storms that spawn them

Tornadoes are hard to capture in climate models.
Mike Coniglio/NOAA/NSSL

John Allen, Central Michigan University

The deadly tornado outbreak that tore through communities from Arkansas to Illinois on the night of Dec. 10-11, 2021, was so unusual in its duration and strength, particularly for December, that a lot of people including the U.S. president are asking what role climate change might have played – and whether tornadoes will become more common in a warming world.

Both questions are easier asked than answered, but research is offering new clues.

I’m an atmospheric scientist who studies severe convective storms like tornadoes and the influences of climate change. Here’s what scientific research shows so far.

Climate models can’t see tornadoes yet – but they can recognize tornado conditions

To understand how rising global temperatures will affect the climate in the future, scientists use complex computer models that characterize the whole Earth system, from the Sun’s energy streaming in to how the soil responds and everything in between, year to year and season to season. These models solve millions of equations on a global scale. Each calculation adds up, requiring far more computing power than a desktop computer can handle.

To project how Earth’s climate will change through the end of the century, we currently have to use a broad scale. Think of it like the zoom function on a camera looking at a distant mountain. You can see the forest, but individual trees are harder to make out, and a pine cone in one of those trees is too tiny to see even when you blow up the image. With climate models, the smaller the object, the harder it is to see.

Tornadoes and the severe storms that create them are far below the typical scale that climate models can predict.

What we can do instead is look at the large-scale ingredients that make conditions ripe for tornadoes to form.

A woman stands in the back of truck working on a LiDAR system
A researcher with NOAA and the Oklahoma Cooperative Institute prepares a light detection and ranging system to collect data at the edge of a storm.
Mike Coniglio/NOAA NSSL

Two key ingredients for severe storms are (1) energy driven by warm, moist air promoting strong updrafts, and (2) changing wind speed and direction, known as wind shear, which allows storms to become stronger and longer-lived. A third ingredient, which is harder to identify, is a trigger to get storms to form, such as a really hot day, or perhaps a cold front. Without this ingredient, not every favorable environment leads to severe storms or tornadoes, but the first two conditions still make severe storms more likely.

By using these ingredients to characterize the likelihood of severe storms and tornadoes forming, climate models can tell us something about the changing risk.

How storm conditions are likely to change

Climate model projections for the United States suggest that the overall likelihood of favorable ingredients for severe storms will increase by the end of the 21st century. The main reason is that warming temperatures accompanied by increasing moisture in the atmosphere increases the potential for strong updrafts.

Rising global temperatures are driving significant changes for seasons that we traditionally think of as rarely producing severe weather. Stronger increases in warm humid air in fall, winter and early spring mean there will be more days with favorable severe thunderstorm environments – and when these storms occur, they have the potential for greater intensity.

What studies show about frequency and intensity

Over smaller areas, we can simulate thunderstorms in these future climates, which gets us closer to answering whether severe storms will form. Several studies have modeled changes to the frequency of intense storms to better understand this change to the environment.

We are already seeing evidence in the past few decades of shifts toward conditions more favorable for severe storms in the cooler seasons, while the summertime likelihood of storms forming is decreasing.

Destruction of buildings for blocks after the tornado hit Mayfield.
The December tornadoes destroyed homes and buildings in communities from Arkansas to Illinois and claimed dozens of lives, including people in Mayfield, Ky.
Scott Olson/Getty Images

For tornadoes, things get trickier. Even in an otherwise spot-on forecast for the next day, there is no guarantee that a tornado will form. Only a small fraction of the storms produced in a favorable environment will produce a tornado at all.

Several simulations have explored what would happen if a tornado outbreak or a tornado-producing storm occurred at different levels of global warming. Projections suggest that stronger, tornado-producing storms may be more likely as global temperatures rise, though strengthened less than we might expect from the increase in available energy.

The impact of 1 degree of warming

Much of what we know about how a warming climate influences severe storms and tornadoes is regional, chiefly in the United States. Not all regions around the globe will see changes to severe storm environments at the same rate.

In a recent study, colleagues and I found that the rate of increase in severe storm environments will be greater in the Northern Hemisphere, and that it increases more at higher latitudes. In the United States, our research suggests that for each 1 degree Celsius (1.8 F) that the temperatures rises, a 14-25% increase in favorable environments is likely in spring, fall and winter, with the greatest increase in winter. This is driven predominantly by the increasing energy available due to higher temperatures. Keep in mind that this is about favorable environments, not necessarily tornadoes.

What does this say about December’s tornadoes?

To answer whether climate change influenced the likelihood or intensity of tornadoes in the December 2021 outbreak, it remains difficult to attribute any single event like this one to climate change. Shorter-term influences like the El Niño-Southern Oscillation may also complicate the picture.

There are certainly signals pointing in the direction of a stormier future, but how this manifests for tornadoes is an open area of research.

[Over 140,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletters to understand the world. Sign up today.]The Conversation

John Allen, Associate Professor of Meteorology, Central Michigan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

================================================================
Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, this is an article aimed at general audiences. In the comments, another scientist addresses another aspect, and Professor Allen replaies that that was omitted deliberately to keep the article clearer for the general reader. In actuality, there are many factors which affect, say, tornadoes. As a general reader myself, I would ask something mike, “Given other contributing factors such as El Niño-Southern Oscillation, if surface warming were not present, would this tornado have happened when it did,. the way it did?” And I suspect the answer to that is “No.” But even if it’s only “Maybe,” I don’t understand why we still continue to take such chances with our and other people’s lives.

The Furies and I will be back.

Share

Everyday Erinyes #296

 Posted by at 11:54 am  Politics
Dec 122021
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

In 1929, “Ellery Queen” began “his”* mystery-novel-writing career with “The Roman Hat Mystery,” just eight years after tetrsethyl lead started to be used in fuel for automobiles. The weapon his villain used to kill his victims in this book was tetraethyl lead. The deaths were quite gruesome. If “Queen” expected the novel to draw people’s attention to the dangers of using the stuff in gasoline and having it come out of the exhaust, it didn’t work. Ethanol existed then, but could not be patented, whereas tetraethyl lead could. It was not until the 1970’s that “Unleaded” gas appeared on the market, and “regular” was available alongside it for quite a while. I don’t currently have a source for this, but I remember reading that studies sone around this time and a bit later showed a direct correlation between the amount of ethyl gas used in an area and the amount of violent crime taking place in the same area. Big corporations making big money simply do not have the best interests of their customers in mind. But we are partly to blame for not forcing them to.
================================================================

A century of tragedy: How the car and gas industry knew about the health risks of leaded fuel but sold it for 100 years anyway

For decades, most gas sold in the U.S. contained a lead additive.
Per Magnus Persson via Getty Images

Bill Kovarik, Radford University

On the frosty morning of Dec. 9, 1921, in Dayton, Ohio, researchers at a General Motors lab poured a new fuel blend into one of their test engines. Immediately, the engine began running more quietly and putting out more power.

The new fuel was tetraethyl lead. With vast profits in sight – and very few public health regulations at the time – General Motors Co. rushed gasoline diluted with tetraethyl lead to market despite the known health risks of lead. They named it “Ethyl” gas.

It has been 100 years since that pivotal day in the development of leaded gasoline. As a historian of media and the environment, I see this anniversary as a time to reflect on the role of public health advocates and environmental journalists in preventing profit-driven tragedy.

A black and white photo of a man in an old laboratory.
Scientists working for General Motors discovered that tetraethyl lead could greatly improve the efficiency and longevity of engines in the 1920s.
Courtesy of General Motors Institute

Lead and death

By the early 1920s, the hazards of lead were well known – even Charles Dickens and Benjamin Franklin had written about the dangers of lead poisoning.

When GM began selling leaded gasoline, public health experts questioned its decision. One called lead a serious menace to public health, and another called concentrated tetraethyl lead a “malicious and creeping” poison.

General Motors and Standard Oil waved the warnings aside until disaster struck in October 1924. Two dozen workers at a refinery in Bayway, New Jersey, came down with severe lead poisoning from a poorly designed GM process. At first they became disoriented, then burst into insane fury and collapsed into hysterical laughter. Many had to be wrestled into straitjackets. Six died, and the rest were hospitalized. Around the same time, 11 more workers died and several dozen more were disabled at similar GM and DuPont plants across the U.S.

A cartoon showing a man going insane after lead exposure.
The news media began to criticize Standard Oil and raise concerns over Ethyl gas with articles and cartoons.
New York Evening Journal via The Library of Congress

Fighting the media

The auto and gas industries’ attitude toward the media was hostile from the beginning. At Standard Oil’s first press conference about the 1924 Ethyl disaster, a spokesman claimed he had no idea what had happened while advising the media that “Nothing ought to be said about this matter in the public interest.”

More facts emerged in the months after the event, and by the spring of 1925, in-depth newspaper coverage started to appear, framing the issue as public health versus industrial progress. A New York World article asked Yale University gas warfare expert Yandell Henderson and GM’s tetraethyl lead researcher Thomas Midgley whether leaded gasoline would poison people. Midgley joked about public health concerns and falsely insisted that leaded gasoline was the only way to raise fuel power. To demonstrate the negative impacts of leaded fuel, Henderson estimated that 30 tons of lead would fall in a dusty rain on New York’s Fifth Avenue every year.

Industry officials were outraged over the coverage. A GM public relations history from 1948 called the New York World’s coverage “a campaign of publicity against the public sale of gasoline containing the company’s antiknock compound.” GM also claimed that the media labeled leaded gas “loony gas” when, in fact, it was the workers themselves who named it as such.

An old advertisement for Ethyl brand gas.
Leaded gas was marketed as Ethyl, a joint brand of Standard Oil and General Motors.
John Margolies/Library of Congress

Attempts at regulation

In May 1925, the U.S. Public Health Service asked GM, Standard Oil and public health scientists to attend an open hearing on leaded gasoline in Washington. The issue, according to GM and Standard, involved refinery safety, not public health. Frank Howard of Standard Oil argued that tetraethyl lead was diluted at over 1,000 to 1 in gasoline and therefore posed no risk to the average person.

Public health scientists challenged the need for leaded gasoline. Alice Hamilton, a physician at Harvard, said, “There are thousands of things better than lead to put in gasoline.” And she was right. There were plenty of well-known alternatives at the time, and some were even patented by GM. But no one in the press knew how to find that information, and the Public Health Service, under pressure from the auto and oil industries, canceled a second day of public hearings that would have discussed safer gasoline additives like ethanol, iron carbonyl and catalytic reforming.

By 1926, the Public Health Service announced that they had “no good reason” to prohibit leaded gasoline, even though internal memos complained that their research was “half baked.”

A graph showing that blood lead levels closely follow lead emissions from cars.
As leaded gasoline fell out of use, lead levels in people’s blood fell as well.
U.S. EPA

The rise and fall of leaded gasoline

Leaded gasoline went on to dominate fuel markets worldwide. Researchers have estimated that decades of burning leaded gasoline caused millions of premature deaths, enormous declines in IQ levels and many other associated social problems.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the public health case against leaded gasoline reemerged. A California Institute of Technology geochemist, Clair Cameron Patterson, was finding it difficult to measure lead isotopes in his laboratory because lead from gasoline was everywhere and his samples were constantly being contaminated. Patterson created the first “clean room” to carry on his isotope work, but he also published a 1965 paper, “Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man,” and said that “the average resident of the U.S. is being subjected to severe chronic lead insult.”

In parallel, by the 1970s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency decided that leaded gasoline had to be phased out eventually because it clogged catalytic converters on cars and led to more air pollution. Leaded gasoline manufacturers objected, but the objections were overruled by an appeals court.

The public health concerns continued to build in the 1970s and 1980s when University of Pittsburgh pediatrician Herbert Needleman ran studies linking high levels of lead in children with low IQ and other developmental problems. Both Patterson and Needleman faced strong partisan attacks from the lead industry, which claimed that their research was fraudulent.

Both were eventually vindicated when, in 1996, the U.S. officially banned the sale of leaded gasoline for public health reasons. Europe was next in the 2000s, followed by developing nations after that. In August 2021, the last country in the world to sell leaded gas, Algeria, banned it.

A century of leaded gasoline has taken millions of lives and to this day leaves the soil in many cities from New Orleans to London toxic.

The leaded gasoline story provides a practical example of how industry’s profit-driven decisions – when unsuccessfully challenged and regulated – can cause serious and long-term harm. It takes individual public health leaders and strong media coverage of health and environmental issues to counter these risks.

[You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter.]The Conversation

Bill Kovarik, Professor of Communication, Radford University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

================================================================
Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, as a race, we humans are not terribly good at doing what is best for us. Up until the 1920’s, for instance, arsenic was still used in skin lotions. And before that it was white lead (lead carbonate), which still shows up in some paints and some ceramics. People did not want to give them up. Women did not want to give their cosmetics up. I’m not old enought o remember the pushback on arsenic or white lead, but I am definitely old enough to remember the pushback on unleaded gas. If people are so terrified of change that they become violently opposed to giving up poisons, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at the lengths they will go to in order not to take a vaccine. Well, give us long enough and we will make ourselves extinct – and maybe more sensible creatures will evolve to take our place.

The Furies and I will be back.

*”Ellery Queen” was actually two dudes, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee – hence the two cross strokes in the “Q” on the book titles, at least the early ones. There’s no unicode for it so I can’t use it here.)

Share

Everyday Erinyes #295

 Posted by at 12:10 pm  Politics
Dec 052021
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

I like to try to find articles which contain information that could help someone – help us change our behavior perhaps, or just help us to have a better attitude. But some times an article just jumps up, smacks me in the face, and says, “read me and barf,” For instance, the congenital syphilis one. And now this one. Don’t say you weren’t warned to get a barf bag.
================================================================

Victims of domestic abuse find no haven in family courts

Women’s reports of domestic violence are widely rejected by family courts.
The Image Bank/Getty Images

Joan Meier, George Washington University

The #MeToo movement may have shifted the balance of credibility on sexual abuse and harassment at work more toward victims and away from alleged perpetrators. But the same cannot be said regarding men’s violence and abuse at home: In fact, women’s reports of domestic violence are still widely rejected, especially in one critical setting: the family court.

When women, children or both report abuse by a father in a case concerning child custody or visitation, courts often refuse to believe them. Judges even sometimes “shoot the messenger” by removing custody from the mother and awarding it to the allegedly abusive father.

For instance, courts reject 81% of mothers’ allegations of child sexual abuse, 79% of their allegations of child physical abuse, and 57% of their allegations of partner abuse. Overall, 28% of mothers alleging a father is abusive lose custody to that father; this percentage rises to 50% when an allegedly abusive father accuses the mother of “parental alienation” (more on this below).

Family courts’ hostility – both in the U.S. and abroad – toward claims of paternal or spousal abuse has been widely reported by scholars and litigants. But it’s only recently that empirical data has been produced that validates the growing chorus of distress.

A child looks at building block toys.
Recent study shows abuse claims by mothers and children are often ignored by courts.
David Potter/Construction Photography/Avalon/Getty Images

‘Dynamic of resistance’

I am a scholar of domestic violence and the law. Working with four other researchers, I conducted a federally funded study that reviewed all electronically published family court cases between parents in the U.S. between 2005 and 2014 related to custody or visitation that involved abuse or alienation claims.

Among the results from this analysis of thousands of cases: Courts rejected women’s claims of partner violence and child abuse by men, on average, roughly two-thirds of the time. They rejected mothers’ claims of child abuse by fathers approximately 80% of the time. And they reversed custody from mothers alleging abuse to the allegedly abusive fathers at rates ranging from 22% – for partner violence claims – to 56% when mothers alleged both sexual and physical child abuse.

The same dynamic of resistance to mothers’ abuse claims against fathers in custody cases has been documented across the globe.

Courts’ skepticism in these cases is due to many factors, but a key driving force is the concept of “parental alienation” or “parental alienation syndrome,” which was invented in the 1980s by a psychiatrist named Richard Gardner.

Gardner claimed that the vast majority of child sexual abuse claims in custody court were false. In addition to attributing false allegations to mothers’ vengeance against their ex-husbands, he theorized that mentally unbalanced mothers also convince themselves (falsely) that their children are being abused by their fathers.

Gardner’s “parental alienation syndrome” (“PAS”) was eventually discredited by courts and scholars. But the notion of parental alienation as the toxic influence of a primary parent that turns children against the other parent continues to profoundly influence family courts’ responses to women’s claims of abuse, especially child sexual abuse.

Thus, our study found, consistent with Gardner and parental alienation theory, that when a father accused of sexual abuse responded by accusing the mother of parental alienation, 50 out of 51 courts sided with the father and refused to believe the sexual abuse claim.

Our study also found that when allegedly abusive fathers respond to any type of abuse allegations by accusing mothers of alienation, mothers are roughly twice as likely to be disbelieved, and their rate of custody losses doubles to roughly 50%.

While Gardner’s syndrome theory has been repudiated as unscientific, parental alienation writ large continues to be treated by many family court professionals and judges as quasi-scientific, even though there is no credible scientific research to support the theory.

More specifically, there is no empirical research supporting the idea that, when one parent bad-mouths the other or takes other steps to undermine the other’s relationship with a child, the child actually turns against the “targeted” parent. In fact, research has found the opposite: that bad-mouthing can actually backfire, by turning the child against the bad-mouthing parent.

Nor is there any objective way to distinguish a child’s legitimate and justified estrangement due to the avoided parent’s own behaviors from an estrangement unjustifiably fueled by the other parent.

In short, there is no scientific or objective means of applying the alienation label. Rather, it is applied whenever an evaluator or court subjectively chooses not to believe a mother and/or a child’s abuse claims and chooses to instead believe the mother is malicious or sick and the child is not in reality.

Who gets protected?

Most people presume that family courts are protective of children and responsive to abuse concerns. This assumption persists in part because society underestimates abusers’ manipulations of the legal system, courts’ inclination to prioritize fathers’ rights and access above most other concerns, and the backlash against women who are seen as not wanting to share the kids.

The belief that it is fathers, not mothers, who can’t get a fair shake in custody cases is further fueled by fathers’ rights groups’ claims that courts are biased against fathers.

This common assertion helps fathers whose parenting may be poor or destructive cast themselves as victims while casting mothers who raise such concerns as perpetrators. And it encourages courts to view their prioritization of fathers’ rights as progressive and egalitarian.

Indeed, the scholarly literature surrounding custody court decision-making routinely emphasizes the importance of fathers and shared parenting. These articles often reiterate that fathering is critically important to children, without much attention to the specifics of individual parents’ past behaviors and impacts on their children. This pro-father sentiment translates into treating mothers as personae non gratae when they seek to restrict paternal access or claim a father is dangerous or harmful.

In fact, while family courts’ special valuation of fathering is difficult to prove empirically, our study did find that protective fathers are not penalized for accusing the mother of abuse, as are mothers who accuse fathers of abuse. The study also found that parental alienation claims benefit fathers more than mothers.

Deadly consequences

The harm to both children and their protective mothers from these family court practices is significant.

One study of what are called “turned-around” cases involved allegations of child abuse that were at first viewed as false and later judged to be valid. This study found that a majority of children in these cases were forced to live with their abusive fathers, that the vast majority reported new incidents of abuse and that children’s mental and physical health significantly deteriorated before a second court finally sent them back to their safe mothers.

Worst of all, family courts’ refusals to take seriously one parent’s claims that the other parent is dangerous have enabled over 100 child homicides.

Perhaps it is time for #MeTooHome.The Conversation

Joan Meier, Professor of Law, George Washington University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

================================================================
Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, of all the places in the world where children’s well being should be the number one priority, family court ought to be at the top of the list. I don’t expect people who work in family court to be oerfect, but I do expect them to have learned more than Freud when he deccided that thh those women patiens claiming their fathers raped them must be making it up, because people – men – prominent persons in the community – don’t sdo such things. Well, surprise, surprise. And now Republicans want to take us backward instead of forward, and essentially declare open season on women and children 24/7/365*.

I couldn’t help thinking of Andrew Vachss as I read this. He has been pedophiles’ worst nightmare for decades. We could certainly use more like him – a lot more like him. Stuff like this goes far to explain why he now looks about a hundred and eighty (he’s actually 79. And, when we lose him, who will we have?)

The Furies and I will be back.

*366 in Leap Years.

Share

Everyday Erinyes #294

 Posted by at 11:39 am  Politics
Nov 282021
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Well. TFG, QAnon, and assorted Nazis just got a lot more to answer for. Not that it hasn’t been staring us in the face, but it’s only now that someone knowledgeable has put it into clear and simple language so we can see it.
================================================================

How the pandemic helped spread fentanyl across the US and drive opioid overdose deaths to a grim new high

Emblems of America’s epidemics.
David Gannon/AFP via Getty Images

Andrew Kolodny, Brandeis University

For the past 20 years, I have been engaged in efforts to end the opioid epidemic, as a public health official, researcher and clinician. And for every one of those years I have looked on as the number of deaths from drug overdoses has set a new record high.

Yet even knowing that trend I was surprised by the latest tally from the CDC showing that for the first time ever, the number of Americans who fatally overdosed over the course of a year surpassed 100,000. In a 12-month period ending at the end of April 2021, some 100,306 died in the U.S., up 28.5% over the same period a year earlier.

The soaring death toll has been fueled by a much more dangerous black market opioid supply. Illicitly synthesized fentanyl – a potent and inexpensive opioid that has driven the rise in overdoses since it emerged in 2014 – is increasingly replacing heroin. Fentanyl and fentanyl analogs were responsible for almost two-thirds of the overdose deaths recorded in the 12 months period ending in April 2021.

It is especially tragic that these deaths are mainly occurring in people with a disease – opioid addiction – that is both preventable and treatable. Most heroin users want to avoid fentanyl. But increasingly, the heroin they seek is mixed with fentanyl or what they purchase is just fentanyl without any heroin in the mix.

While the spread of fentanyl is the primary cause of the spike in overdose deaths, the coronavirus pandemic also made the crisis worse.

The geographical distribution of opioid deaths makes it clear that there has been a change during the pandemic months.

Before the COVID-19 health crisis, the skyrocketing increase in fentanyl-related overdose deaths in America was mainly affecting the eastern half of the U.S., and hit especially hard in urban areas like Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York City. A possible reason behind this was that in the eastern half of the U.S., heroin has mainly been available in powder form rather than the black tar heroin more common in the West. It is easier to mix fentanyl with powdered heroin.

COVID-19 resulted in less cross-national traffic, which made it harder to smuggle illegal drugs across borders. Border restrictions make it harder to move bulkier drugs, resulting in smugglers’ increased reliance on fentanyl – which is more potent and easier to transport in small quantities and as pills, making it easier to traffic by mail. This may have helped fentanyl spread to areas that escaped the earlier surge in fentanyl deaths.

Opioid-addicted individuals seeking prescription opioids instead of heroin have also been affected, because counterfeit pills made with fentanyl have become more common. This may explain why public health officials in Seattle and elsewhere are reporting many fatalities resulting from use of counterfeit pills.

Another factor that may have contributed to the soaring death toll is that the pandemic made it harder for those dependent on opioids to get in-person treatment.

More than anything else, what drives opioid-addicted individuals to continue using is that without opioids they will experience severe symptoms of withdrawal. Treatment, especially with buprenorphine and methadone, has to be easy to access or addicted individuals will continue using heroin, prescription opioids or illict fentanyl to stave off withdrawal. Some treatment centers innovated in the face of lockdowns, for example, by allowing more patients to take methadone unsupervised at home, but this may not have been enough to offset the disruption to treatment services.

And maintaining access to treatment is crucial to avoid relapse, especially during the pandemic. Research has shown that social isolation and stress – which became more common during the pandemic – increase the chances of a relapse in someone in recovery.

In the past, one slip might not be the end of the world for someone in recovery. But given the extraordinarily dangerous black market opioid supply, any slip can result in death.

[You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter.]The Conversation

Andrew Kolodny, Co-Director of Opioid Policy Research, Brandeis University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

================================================================
Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, pharma CEOs pricing addicts out of treatment (and failing to make it widely avaiable) are Republicans. The people standing in the way of our having a public health system which works for everyone are Reublicans. So are the voters who believe Democrats are a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles. It’s not like we haven’t seen this movie before – in real life – long before movies even existed. It has been Jews libeled, it has been Knights Templar libeled, and now it;s Democrats. And people are dying in large numbers. I wouldn’t call the number of overdoses last year alone and the number of people who subscribe to The Conversation’s newsletters (140,000) “close” exactly, but they are definitely in the same order of magnirude.

The Furies and I will be back.

Share

Everyday Erinyes #293

 Posted by at 12:31 pm  Politics
Nov 212021
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

So, this is what happens when people don’tpay attention toevery little detail. I was intrigued by the title (and certainly suspected something else.) It certainly never occurred to me that the answer would lie in obscure budget practices and requlations.

I’m not allowed to republish phpts from ProPublica, and the ones I could find on Google were too gruesome to even consider … so no pictures.j
================================================================

One Major Reason the U.S. Hasn’t Stopped Syphilis From Killing Babies

by Caroline Chen

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

 

Series:
A Closer Look

Examining the News

 

In public health, a “sentinel event” is a case of preventable harm so significant that it serves as a warning that the system is failing. The alarms are now blaring.

A growing number of babies are being born with syphilis after their mothers contract the sexually transmitted disease and the bacteria crosses the placenta. These cases are 100% preventable: When mothers who have syphilis are treated with penicillin while pregnant, babies are often born without a trace of the disease. But when mothers go untreated, there is a 40% chance their babies will be miscarried, be stillborn or die shortly after birth. Those who survive can be born with deformed bones or damaged brains, or can suffer from severe anemia, hearing loss or blindness.

I’ve spent the past few months trying to understand why countries including Belarus, Cuba, Malaysia and Sri Lanka have managed to wipe out congenital syphilis while the United States faces its highest incidence in nearly three decades: Last year, 2,022 cases were reported, including 139 deaths. That’s a shocking reversal from 1999, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared that the United States was on the verge of eliminating the centuries-old scourge for adults as well as babies.

What went wrong here?

My reporting led me to one major factor: the unusual and — according to various experts I spoke with, problematic — way that the CDC is funded, which has not only hampered the response to a rise in sexually transmitted diseases, but also has left us ill-prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic.

State and local health departments get much of their money from the federal agency, which has the best birds-eye view of all of the bugs, viruses and illnesses circulating in America. But CDC scientists don’t have the power to decide how much money to spend fighting each one.

Instead, Congress dictates to the CDC, in an uncommonly specific manner not seen with many other agencies, exactly how much money, by line item, it can spend to combat any single public health threat, from broad categories like emerging infectious diseases and Alzheimer’s disease, to more niche conditions like interstitial cystitis, neonatal abstinence syndrome and Tourette syndrome. Though prevention tactics for HIV and other STDs significantly overlap, HIV prevention has a separate line item and is allocated about six times as much money as the category for sexually transmitted infections.

The decisions can be politically driven and detached from bigger-picture health needs, as lobbyists and patient advocates descend on Washington to make the case to lawmakers that their specific disease of interest should get a bigger piece of the pie. Causes that don’t have large armies of compelling spokespeople can get ignored. Sexually transmitted diseases, which have an extra layer of stigma to contend with, have few dedicated advocacy groups. The small number of lobbyists focused on STDs sometimes can’t even get a meeting with lawmakers.

“The CDC needs to have more money and more flexible money,” former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden told me. The political nature of the agency’s funding is part of what led the country to neglect virus surveillance before the coronavirus pandemic. The 2014 Ebola epidemic was supposed to be a “global wakeup call,” yet in 2018, the CDC scaled back its epidemic prevention work as money ran out.

That means public health in the U.S. is constantly in what Frieden calls “a deadly cycle of panic and neglect” — scrambling to throw money at the latest emergency, then losing the attention and motivation to finish the task once fear ebbs. In May, President Joe Biden’s administration announced it would set aside $7.4 billion over the next five years to hire and train public health workers. But some officials worry about what will happen when those five years are up. “We’ve seen this movie before, right?” Frieden said. “Everyone gets concerned when there’s an outbreak, and when that outbreak stops, the headlines stop, and an economic downturn happens, the budget gets cut.”

Jo Valentine, former program coordinator for the CDC’s 1999 push to eliminate syphilis, says one of the reasons the campaign failed is because public health is usually working “in rescue mode, parachuting in and fixing things.” That’s effective in acute situations, like stopping a new outbreak from exploding, but it doesn’t address long-term structural issues like economic stability, safe housing and transportation, which are all key factors in chronic and preventive care. The last fraction of cases in any public health effort can be the hardest to solve because they often involve vulnerable populations experiencing these barriers to accessing care. They are also the easiest populations to ignore.

Local health departments don’t have nearly enough resources to investigate cases of syphilis with contact tracing, which involves tracking down patients, inquiring about sex partners and making sure everyone is treated. One disease intervention specialist I shadowed in Fresno, California, has made six trips to a rural town, driving an hour each way, trying to prevent a single case of congenital syphilis. The patient is unhoused and itinerant, and so far has been hesitant to visit the community clinic for treatment.

With interest in public health now at an all-time high, it is worth reexamining how much money public health gets to take on these unpopular but necessary challenges, and how much authority the CDC gets to set its priorities. I hope that, five or 10 years from now, I’m not still reporting about COVID-19 hot spots left behind after attention wanes, creating places where the disease still flares because testing or treatment is hard to come by. And I also hope I’m not still writing about babies dying from syphilis.

Read ProPublica and NPR’s story.

================================================================
AMT, It’s hard enough – next to impossible, I would say – to get people to pay attention even to the biggest of governmental trends. I really have no clue how to get people to pay attention to something like this. We really need any help whatsoever you can give us.  Particularly when safe and legalabortions are becoming harder and harder to obtain, we do not need a problem like this one.

The Furies and I will be back.

Share

Everyday Erinyes #292

 Posted by at 11:34 am  Politics
Nov 142021
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

I am not a professional historian, or even all that much of an amateir one, but I have, over the years, picked up bits and pieces. And I’m pretty sure there was a time in England – probably before the Civil War (theirs, not ours), when being “armigerous” was absolutely connected to a title or deed of nobility – that if you were a knight, or a baron (viscount,earl, marquis, or duke – or a royal), you had the right to “bear arms” in public – and if you weren’t, you didn’t. I actually hope the “originalists” on the bench never get hold of this. Because if they wanted to argue that the point of the Bill of Rights was to give everyone rights (including those rights only the nobility previously had), I for one could certainly not argue against that.
================================================================

Why are medieval weapons laws at the center of a US Supreme Court case?

A gun rights advocate walks through the rotunda of the Kentucky Capitol. Some lawyers argue that the 1689 English Bill of Rights created the legal basis for public carry of weapons in the U.S.
Bryan Woolston/Getty Images

Jennifer Tucker, Wesleyan University

In the opening scene of “The Last Duel,” the new film set in 14th-century France, a herald announces the rules for conduct at a tournament to the death. He declares that no members of the public – whatever their social background – are allowed to bring weapons to the event.

This scene might seem far removed from 21st-century America. But medieval weapons laws – including a 1328 English statute prohibiting the public carry of edged weapons without royal permission – are at the center of dueling legal opinions in a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen.

The plaintiffs are challenging New York’s “proper cause” gun law, which tightly restricts public carry of firearms. If they win, similar laws in several other states will be called into question. That means that concealed carry licensing laws could be broadly liberalized for millions of Americans currently living in those more restrictive jurisdictions.

Few people realize how big a role history has played in the battle over gun rights – the topic of a 2019 collection of essays, “A Right to Bear Arms? The Contested Role of History in Contemporary Debates on the Second Amendment,” that I co-edited with Smithsonian Museum of American History curators Barton Hacker and Margaret Vining.

The book explores how courts in the United States have turned to history for instruction in how guns should be treated – decrees, laws and interpretations of the past that are at the forefront of the case before the Supreme Court today.

Scalia points to the English Bill of Rights

The United States legal system grew out of the English legal tradition. This connection – which is often referenced by originalists – is crucial to making sense of the arguments around gun rights in America today.

Originalism is a legal philosophy that attempts to interpret legal texts, including the Constitution, based on what lawyers think is their original meaning.

An important victory for gun rights advocates took place in District of Columbia v. Heller. In that 2008 decision, the Supreme Court for the first time ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm for personal self-defense in the home.

Majestic white courthouse with columns.
New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen is the most significant gun rights case before the Supreme Court since 2008.
Ron Watts/The Image Bank via Getty Images

Justice Antonin Scalia, author of the 5-4 majority Heller opinion, claimed that there was a long tradition of the English state’s granting freedom to possess weapons dating back to the 1689 English Bill of Rights, which includes a clause that reads “the subjects which are Protestant may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.”

Scalia’s argument relied heavily on the work of historian Joyce Malcolm, the author of “To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right” and a Second Amendment scholar at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. Malcolm and lawyers who support the expansion of gun rights argue that this clause created the legal basis for having weapons for personal self-defense in Colonial America.

Having prevailed in Heller, gun rights activists are seeking the liberalization of restrictions on public carrying of guns outside the home. In the New York case, some lawyers and other parties are now arguing that medieval statutes restricted only public carry that “terrified” the public, and that such statutes were never actually enforced to prevent “normal” public carry.

Historians object

However, most scholars of English and American history vigorously dispute the accuracy of this claim. In fact, since the Heller decision, the history of firearms regulation in England and the U.S. has been the focus of what Fordham University law professor Saul Cornell has called an “explosion of empirical research.”

Many of these findings appear in an amicus brief presented to the Court in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Signed by 17 professors of law, English history and American history – including me – the brief demonstrates through a review of historical evidence that “neither English nor American history supports a broad Second Amendment right to carry firearms or other dangerous weapons in public based on a generic interest in self-defense.”

It highlights 700 years of trans-Atlantic weapons regulations, from the English tradition of restricting public carry through the American tradition of doing the same.

The brief makes clear that limitations on the public carry of dangerous weapons, including firearms, are a centuries-old legal and cultural norm.

Early royal proclamations dating as far back as the 13th century regularly prohibited going armed in public without special permission. In 1328, the Statute of Northampton banned the public carry of swords and daggers, open or concealed – this was before the invention of firearms – without express permission from the authorities.

As legal scholar and historian Geoffrey Robertson, an expert on the English Bill of Rights, put it: “There was never any absolute ‘right’ to carry guns. As the Bill of Rights (1689) made clear, this was only ‘as allowed by law.’”

Two pistols.
A pair of flintlock pistols that were common in 17th-century England.
Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images

An American tradition of limiting public carry

The English tradition of broad public carry restrictions continued across the Atlantic into the Colonies.

During periods of heightened risk of attack, some Colonies required certain individuals to carry guns to church or when working in fields away from fortified or populated areas. However, this obligation was not understood as establishing a right to carry firearms in public.

After the American Revolution, states continued to adopt regulations echoing the Statute of Northampton. Recent scholarship has uncovered that early-to-mid-19th-century firearms regulations varied considerably by jurisdiction and geography, but 19 states had restrictions for public carry on the books.

After the Civil War, as the lethality of firearms increased exponentially through technological advances, municipalities and states like Texas imposed even broader public carry prohibitions.

By 1900, there was a legal consensus that states and localities generally had the authority to limit public carry. While the American approach to public carry restriction was fluid – varying across time and jurisdiction based on social and political changes – there is a consistent history and tradition of many American Colonies, states, territories and municipalities imposing broad prohibitions on carrying dangerous weapons in public, particularly without a specific need for self-defense.

An invented tradition?

So how did a 1689 English Bill of Rights that never gave any absolute right to carry guns turn into a key justification for that very right in the U.S.?

Patrick Charles, the author of the 2019 book “Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry,” argues that pro-gun advocates have selectively interpreted the historical record to justify a personal right to possess and carry weapons in public.

Essentially, they invented a tradition.

[Over 115,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]

“Invented traditions,” a concept highlighted in the 1983 book “The Invention of Tradition,” which was edited by historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, are cultural practices that are thought to have emerged from long ago but actually are grounded in a much more recent past. A classic example is the Scottish tartan kilt, once believed to derive from the ancient garb of the Scottish Highlanders but actually invented in the 18th century by an Englishman.

The “individual right” to carry firearms in public seems to be another.The Conversation

Jennifer Tucker, Associate Professor of History and Science in Society, Wesleyan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

================================================================
Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, fortunately, the history is far more complicated than my picked-up bits and pieces would suggest. Even so, I personally would want to pay more attention to the beliefs of (now long retired) Justice Stevens, I believe it was, who recommended that the Second Amendment be abolished on account of the enormous increase in destructiveness of weapons developed since the Amendment was written. Of course, I don’t see that ever happening. But then, I don’t see universal love for each other ever happening either, and that doesn’t prevent me from supporting it.

The Furies and I will be back.

Share

Everyday Erinyes #291

 Posted by at 11:18 am  Politics
Nov 072021
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

I know everyone is wondering whether – not when – the current coronavirus, including the Delta variant, will ever go away. Well, the answer to that is no, it won’t. It wll likely become easier to deal with, but it’s unlikely to go away. The most likely outcome is that it will become like seasonal flu in that it will continue to change a little and new vaccines will be needed every year. And, as now happens with the flu, every year people will die from it – although not in the kind of numbers we are currently looking at.
================================================================

Is COVID-19 here to stay? A team of biologists explains what it means for a virus to become endemic

The best way to stop a contagious virus like COVID-19 is through a worldwide vaccination program.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

Sara Sawyer, University of Colorado Boulder; Arturo Barbachano-Guerrero, University of Colorado Boulder, and Cody Warren, University of Colorado Boulder

Now that kids ages 5 to 11 are eligible for COVID-19 vaccination and the number of fully vaccinated people in the U.S. is rising, many people may be wondering what the endgame is for COVID-19.

Early on in the pandemic, it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) might just go away, since historically some pandemic viruses have simply disappeared.

For instance, SARS-CoV, the coronavirus responsible for the first SARS pandemic in 2003, spread to 29 countries and regions, infecting more than 8,000 people from November 2002 to July 2003. But thanks to quick and effective public health interventions, SARS-CoV hasn’t been observed in humans in almost 20 years and is now considered extinct.

On the other hand, pandemic viruses may also gradually settle into a relatively stable rate of occurrence, maintaining a constant pool of infected hosts capable of spreading the virus to others. These viruses are said to be “endemic.”

Examples of endemic viruses in the United States include those that cause the common cold and the seasonal flu that appear year after year. Much like these, the virus that causes COVID-19 likely won’t die out, and most experts now expect it to become endemic.

We are a team of virologists and immunologists from the University of Colorado Boulder studying animal viruses that infect humans. An essential focus of our research is to identify and describe the key adaptations that animal viruses require to persist in the human population.

What determines which viruses become endemic?

So why did the first SARS virus from 2003 (SARS-CoV) go extinct while this one (SARS-CoV-2) may become endemic?

The ultimate fate of a virus depends on how well it maintains its transmission. Generally speaking, viruses that are highly contagious, meaning that they spread really well from one person to the next, may never die out on their own because they are so good at finding new people to infect.

When a virus first enters a population with no immunity, its contagiousness is defined by scientists using a simple mathematical term, called R0, which is pronounced “R-naught.” This is also referred to as the reproduction number. The reproduction number of a virus represents how many people, on average, are infected by each infected person. For example, the first SARS-CoV had an R0 of about 2, meaning that each infected person passes the virus to two people on average. For the delta variant strain of SARS-CoV-2, the R0 is between 6 and 7.

The goal for public health authorities is to slow the rate by which viruses spread. Universal masking, social distancing, contact tracing and quarantines are all effective tools to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses. Since SARS-CoV was poorly transmissible, it just took a little bit of public health intervention to drive the virus to extinction. Given the highly transmissible nature of the delta variant, the challenge for eliminating the virus will be much greater, meaning that the virus is more likely to become endemic.

Unmasked motorcyclists crowd together.
In August 2020, about 500,000 motorcyclists rode the streets of Sturgis, South Dakota, at the city’s annual motorcycle rally. Masks were encouraged but not required. COVID-19 cases throughout the state increased.
Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images

Is COVID-19 ever going away?

It’s clear that SARS-CoV-2 is very successful at finding new people to infect, and that people can get infected after vaccination. For these reasons, the transmission of this virus is not expected to end. It’s important that we consider why SARS-CoV-2 moves so easily from one person to the next, and how human behavior plays into that virus transmission.

SARS-CoV-2 is a respiratory virus that is spread through the air and is efficiently transmitted when people congregate. Critical public health interventions, like mask use and social distancing, have been key in slowing the spread of disease. However, any lapse in these public health measures can have dire consequences. For instance, a 2020 motorcycle rally brought together nearly 500,000 people in Sturgis, South Dakota, during the early phases of the pandemic. Most of the attendees were unmasked and not practicing social distancing. That event was directly responsible for an increase in COVID-19 cases in the state of South Dakota and nationwide. This shows how easily the virus can spread when people let their guard down.

The virus that causes COVID-19 is often associated with superspreading events, in which many people are infected all at once, typically by a single infected individual. In fact, our own work has shown that just 2% of the people infected with COVID-19 carry 90% of the virus that is circulating in a community. These important “supercarriers” have a disproportionately large impact on infecting others, and if they aren’t tracked down before they spread the virus to the next person, they will continue to sustain the epidemic. We currently don’t have a nationwide screening program geared toward identifying these individuals.

Finally, asymptomatically infected people account for roughly half of all infections of COVID-19. This, when coupled with a broad range of time in which people can be infectious – two days before and 10 days after symptoms appear – affords many opportunities for virus transmission, since people who don’t know they are sick generally take few measures to isolate from others.

The contagious nature of SARS-CoV-2 and our highly interconnected society constitute a perfect storm that will likely contribute to sustained virus spread.

An elderly woman wearing a mask receives a shot.
An elderly woman receives a Pfizer COVID-19 booster shot at a clinic in San Rafael, California.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News via Getty Images

What will our future with COVID-19 look like?

Given the considerations discussed above and what we know about COVID-19 so far, many scientists believe that the virus that causes COVID-19 will likely settle into endemic patterns of transmission. But our inability to eradicate the virus does not mean that all hope is lost.

Our post-pandemic future will heavily depend on how the virus evolves over the coming years. SARS-CoV-2 is a completely new human virus that is still adapting to its new host. Over time, we may see the virus become less pathogenic, similar to the four coronaviruses that cause the common cold, which represent little more than a seasonal nuisance.

Global vaccination programs will have the greatest impact on curbing new cases of the disease. However, the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine campaign so far has touched only a small percentage of people on the planet. In addition, breakthrough infections in vaccinated people still occur because no vaccine is 100% effective. This means that booster shots will likely be needed to maximize vaccine-induced protection against infection.

With global virus surveillance and the speed at which safe and effective vaccines have been developed, we are well poised to tackle the ever-evolving target that is SARS-CoV-2. Influenza is endemic and evolves quickly, but seasonal vaccination enables life to go on as normal. We can expect the same for SARS-CoV-2 – eventually.

How will we know if and when SARS-CoV-2 becomes endemic?

Four seasonal coronaviruses circulate in humans endemically already. They tend to recur annually, usually during the winter months, and affect children more than adults. The virus that causes COVID-19 has not yet settled down into these predictable patterns and instead is flaring up unpredictably around the globe in ways that are sometimes difficult to predict.

[Over 115,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]

Once rates of SARS-CoV-2 stabilize, we can call it endemic. But this transition may look different based on where you are in the world. For instance, countries with high vaccine coverage and plentiful boosters may soon settle into predictable spikes of COVID-19 during the winter months when the environmental conditions are more favorable to virus transmission. In contrast, unpredictable epidemics may persist in regions with lower vaccination rates.The Conversation

Sara Sawyer, Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, University of Colorado Boulder; Arturo Barbachano-Guerrero, Postdoctoral Researcher in Virology, University of Colorado Boulder, and Cody Warren, Postdoctoral Fellow in Virology and Immunology, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

================================================================
Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, could this virus have been prevented from becoming endemic? The authors are careful not to address that or even allude to it. But from what they do say about the handling of the 2002-2003 outbreak, my guess is yes, it could have. Our president at that time was George W Bush. I seriously doubt he knows or knew more than Trump** about science ot public health or viruses. But what he did know was how to shut up and let his people do their jobs, and to back them up, and to not make everything about himself. I am inclined to believe that, if we had had President H. Clinton in 2020, the handling of the pandemic would have been such that the virus could have been made extinct. Of course, that is not provable – hypotheticals seldom are.

The Furies and I will be back.

Share

Everyday Erinyes #290

 Posted by at 12:58 pm  Politics
Oct 312021
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Today, COP26 (“Conference of the Parties” number 26) begins in Glasgow, Scotland. I am guessing that people who read this blog know a lot more about climate science than the average bear – “average bears” like the Senator who brought a snowball to the Senate floor to “prove” climate change was a hoax, for instance.) But that doesn’t necessarily mean we know every detail of what is and isn’t being done in every nation, nor how those efforts are and are not succeeding. Well, we are about to find out.
================================================================

4 key issues to watch as world leaders prepare for the Glasgow climate summit

A mural near the site of COP26, the 26th Conference of Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Rachel Kyte, Tufts University

Glasgow sits proudly on the banks of the river Clyde, once the heart of Scotland’s industrial glory and now a launchpad for its green energy transition. It’s a fitting host for the United Nations’ climate conference, COP26, where world leaders will be discussing how their countries will reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change.

I’ve been involved in climate negotiations for several years as a former senior U.N. official and will be in Glasgow for the talks starting Oct. 31, 2021. As negotiations get underway, here’s what to watch for.

Ambition

At the Paris climate conference in 2015, countries agreed to work to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), aiming for 1.5 C (2.7 F). If COP21 in Paris was the agreement on a destination, COP26 is the review of itineraries and course adjustments.

The bad news is that countries aren’t on track. They were required this year to submit new action plans – known as national determined contributions, or NDCs. The U.N.’s latest tally of all the revised plans submitted in advance of the Glasgow summit puts the world on a trajectory to warm 2.7 C (4.86 F), well into dangerous levels of climate change, by the end of this century.

Chart showing emissions trajectories
The U.N. Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report, released Oct. 26, 2021, shows the national pledges so far fall well short of the Paris Agreement goals.
UNEP

All eyes are on the G-20, a group of leading world economies that together account for almost 80% of global emissions. Their annual summit takes place in Rome on Oct. 30-31, immediately before COP26 begins.

Some key G-20 countries have not submitted their updated plans yet, including India. Brazil, Mexico, Australia and Russia have filed plans that are not in line with the Paris Agreement.

Details of how China will achieve its climate goals are now emerging, and the world is poring over them to see how China will strengthen its 2030 emissions reduction target, which currently involves cutting emissions 65% per unit of gross domestic product, moving up the date when the country’s emissions growth will peak, and setting industrial production targets for other greenhouse gases, such as methane.

A delicate dance between the United States and China, and deft diplomacy by France, was critical to reaching the Paris climate agreement in 2015. Six years later, a growing rivalry threatens to spiral down what had been a race to the top.

Meanwhile the world’s eyes are on the United States. Opposition from two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, appears likely to force the Biden administration to scrap a plan that would have incentivized utilities to switch to cleaner power sources faster. If their planetary brinksmanship guts that key part of President Joe Biden’s Plan A for how the U.S. will reach its 2030 emissions targets, the world will want to see details of Plans B, C or D in Glasgow.

Carbon markets

One leftover task from the Paris conference is to set rules for carbon markets, particularly how countries can trade carbon credits with each other, or between a country and a private company.

Regulated carbon markets exist from the European Union to China, and voluntary markets are spurring both optimism and concern. Rules are needed to ensure that carbon markets actually drive down emissions and provide revenue for developing countries to protect their resources. Get it right and carbon markets can speed the transition to net zero. Done badly, greenwashing will undermine confidence in pledges made by governments and companies alike.

Another task is determining how countries measure and report their emissions reductions and how transparent they are with one another. This too is fundamental to beating back greenwashing.

Also, expect to see pressure for countries to come back in a year or two with better plans for reducing emissions and reports of concrete progress.

Climate finance

Underpinning progress on all issues is the question of finance.

Developing countries need help to grow green and adapt to climate change, and they are frustrated that that help has been on a slow drip feed. In 2009 and again in 2015, wealthy countries agreed to provide $100 billion a year in climate finance for developing nations by 2020, but they haven’t reached that goal yet.

With one week to go, the U.K. revealed a climate finance plan, brokered by Germany and Canada, that would establish a process for counting and agreeing on what counts in the $100 billion, but it will take until 2023 to reach that figure.

On the one hand it is progress, but it will feel begrudging to developing countries whose costs of adaptation now must be met as the global costs of climate impacts rise, including from heat waves, wildfires, floods and intensifying hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons. Just as with the global vaccine rollout, the developing world may wonder whether they are being slow-walked into a new economic divergence, where the rich will get richer and the poor poorer.

Beyond the costs of mitigation and adaptation is the question of loss and damage – the innocuous term for the harm experienced by countries that did little to contribute to climate change in the past and the responsibility of countries that brought on the climate emergency with their historic emissions. These difficult negotiations will move closer to center stage as the losses increase.

Public climate finance provided by countries can also play another role through its potential to leverage the trillions of dollars needed to invest in transitions to clean energy and greener growth. Expect big pledges from private sources of finance – pension funds, insurance companies, banks and philanthropies – with their own net zero plans, including ending finance and investments in fossil fuel projects, and financing critical efforts to speed progress.

It’s raining pledges

A cross section of the world will be in Glasgow for the conference, and they will be talking about pathways for reducing global carbon emissions to net zero and building greater resilience.

From emissions-free shipping to aviation, from ending coal financing to green steel and cement, from platforms to reduce methane, to nature-based solutions, the two-week conference and days leading up to it will see a steady stream of commitments and new groups of countries, nongovernmental organizations and businesses working together.

Keeping track and verifying achievements toward these pledges will be critical coming away from COP26. Without that, climate activist Greta Thunberg’s “blah blah blah” speech thrown at delegates to a pre-COP meeting in Milan a few weeks ago will continue to echo around the world.

[Over 110,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]

This article was updated Oct. 26 with the release of the UNEP Emissions Gap report and trajectories chart.The Conversation

Rachel Kyte, Dean of the Fletcher School, Tufts University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

================================================================
Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I couldn’t help but look at that map and wonder, “WTF is up with Mongolia?” I did see a different version of the map in which Mongolia was a much lighter shade, but I don’t know which is correct. However, that is probably the least of our worries at this point. I will be doing my best to cover COP26 at least lightly and still covering other things that may come up. Be sure to check the video threads for climate news as well.

The Furies and I will be back.

Share
 Older Entries  Newer Entries