Spotlight on green news & views: The Anthropocene's 'new normal'; Trump promotes dirtier air
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This is the 569th edition of the Spotlight on Green News & Views (previously known as the Green Diary Rescue). Here is the August 11 edition. Inclusion of a story in the Spotlight does not necessarily indicate my agreement with or endorsement of it.Spotlight on green news & views: The Anthropocene's 'new normal'; Trump promotes dirtier air
This is the 569th edition of the Spotlight on Green News & Views (previously known as the Green Diary Rescue). Here is the August 11 edition. Inclusion of a story in the Spotlight does not necessarily indicate my agreement with or endorsement of it. OUTSTANDING GREEN STORIES xaxnar writes—The West may have Fires, But the East has Floods - This is the New Normal in the Anthropocene: “The news has not gotten better since then. Here’s a sampling from a quick web search August 13, 2018. Flash Flood Watch in Eastern New York • Emergencies Declared as Storms Persist in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York • Flash flooding threat continues for East Coast after wet weekend • Pennsylvania flooding prompts water rescues around state • Drenching rain, flooding wreaks havoc in Pennsylvania • Heavy rain prompts flash flood emergencies in Pennsylvania and New Jersey • This one got a lot of attention: Bride, groom rescued from floodwaters by New Jersey police. I posted about this on August 12 — to recap some of the highlights: The precipitation graphic shows what’s going on. What does this mean? It shows where thousands of miles of roads have increasingly inadequate drainage systems. They can be rapidly overwhelmed, leading to flash flooding and washouts. It shows where there are cities with large areas of pavement can turn into lakes in a matter of minutes because the water can’t soak into the ground and it can’t drain away fast enough. It shows where people are finding their homes are now in flood zones. Home insurance costs skyrocket, and resale values plummet.” StateOfMind writes—TAHLEQUAH’S MESSAGE FROM MOTHER EARTH: “People watched with a mixture of horror, fascination and grief as an orca whale mother took her dead child to its burial spot. For 17 days and for over 1000 miles, Tahlequah carried her dead calf, which breathed and swam for only a short time after its birth, as she grieved her loss. Her pod swam along with her but her attention was tuned only to her burden. Tahlequah has been giving everyone on Mother Earth a message without speaking a word. Her tears were invisible to us as they fell into the vast ocean waters. Her message is clear. The number of orcas from her region are growing smaller year by year. The foods they depend on have diminished to such an extent that there has not been a recent live birth for several years -- until Tahlequah gave birth to a calf that was alive and swimming beside her. As an intelligent mammal, there is no doubt that Tahlequah felt the joy of motherhood. Perhaps she also realized how momentous a live birth was to her pod. After all, whales are a matriarchal society and she was the protector and leader of her shrinking family group. But the joy and hope were short lived. Mother Earth has been devastated by the greed of man. We all play a part in the greed that harms her and all of nature.” sninkypoo writes—It's HEEE-re! “Worldwide record-breaking heatwaves, which produced this stunner: Quriyat, Oman, posted the world’s hottest low temperature ever recorded on June 28: 108.68 degrees. Rampant, terrifying wildfires. Millions (not thousands – MILLIONS) of people evacuated from flood waters in Japan. That’s climate change. That’s now. That’s everywhere. We have reached the proverbial no place to run, no place to hide moment. If Seattle is sizzling and the Arctic is catching fire, what next? More of the same, and worse, and more and worse and soon we’ll reach that point where, quite suddenly, there’s a seismic shift, and we jump to a higher orbital. Of course, with global warming, there’s no analogous jump back down, and no quick, discontinuous way back to ‘normal,’ where we came from. Things fall apart. The edges fray. The space of time between events will get narrower. There will be less time to regroup, regrow, rebuild. Resources will become scarcer. We’ll run out of time, money, materials, and hands to do the work. It won’t be too long now before we are overtaken by the scale of what we have to mitigate. We’ll be battered and bruised, scrounging for assistance, for federal funding, for volunteers, for sandbags, for water trucks, for firefighting equipment, for the energy to go on.” Read more