The invisible consequences of heat on the body and mind- Heat has a bigger impact on us than we may realize.In July, the world recorded the hottest day ever, breaking a record set just the day before. California’s Death Valley has measured some of the hottest temperatures ever documented on the planet, approaching 130 degrees Fahrenheit. And last month was the hottest June ever measured across the world. It’s the hottest summer of our lives, before summertime was even halfway over. These are the effects at about 1 degree Celsius of warming — just an early warning sign of a world that, on its current trajectory, is poised to warm three or more times that amount.Heat is a particular kind of killer. In the United States, it leads to more deaths than hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, and earthquakes combined. But heat is also called the silent killerbecause we simply don’t know all of its effects on our bodies. In fact, we only have data on a slice of the deadly consequences. Heat also puts an unequal burden on more vulnerable populations, harming older and lower-income people, outdoor workers, and prisoners while other parts of society try to look away from inside air-conditioned homes. There are just as many non-fatal health consequences in a heat wave. The toll grows the longer a heat wave lingers, which leads to the exact conditions a large part of the world finds itself in this summer. Even our best metric for understanding all of the consequences of heat is flawed. Most health research on heat focuses on deaths and to a lesser extent hospital admissions. Vivek Shandas, Portland State University professor of climate adaptation, calls the focus on mortality overly “blunt measures” that fail to capture how climate change is harming the world’s mental and physical health. While most of the studies discussed below track heat-related deaths, they are more likely missing a bigger picture: There’s an even broader population suffering from heat, but in ways that don’t lead to hospitalization or death. What’s the physical toll of extreme heat?   Cardiovascular.....The primary performer in helping cool the body down is the heart. It is under special strain when temperatures rise, and the vast number of deaths associated with a heat wave isn’t directly from heatstroke, when the organs can shut down from overheating, but because the heart can’t keep up. Respiratory.......Some of the excess mortality in a heat wave can also be blamed on more air pollution...... and there's more      https://www.vox.com/climate/2023/7/21/23799004/invisible-consequences-extreme-heat-physical-mental-health    

George Monbiot- With our food systems on the verge of collapse, it’s the plutocrats v life on Earth Climate breakdown and crop losses threaten our survival, but the ultra-rich find ever more creative ways to maintain the status quo. According to Google’s news search, the media has run more than 10,000 stories this year about Phillip Schofield, the British television presenter who resigned over an affair with a younger colleague. Google also records a global total of just five news stories about ascientific paper published last week, showing that the chances of simultaneous crop losses in the world’s major growing regions, caused by climate breakdown, appear to have been dangerously underestimated. In the mediaworld, a place that should never be confused with the real world, celebrity gossip is thousands of times more important than existential risk.       The new paper explores the impacts on crop production when meanders in the jet stream (Rossby waves) become stuck. Stuck patterns cause extreme weather. To put it crudely, if you live in the northern hemisphere and a kink in the jet stream (the band of strong winds a few miles above the Earth’s surface at mid-latitudes) is stuck to the south of you, your weather is likely to be cold and wet. If it’s stuck to the north of you, you’re likely to suffer escalating heat and drought. Already, regional climate shocks have helped cause a disastrous reversal in the trend of global chronic hunger. For many years, the number of hungry people fell. But in 2015 the trend turned and has been curving upwards since. This is not because of a lack of food. The most likely explanation is that the global food system has lost its resilience. When complex systems lose resilience, instead of damping the shocks that hit them, they tend to amplify them. The shocks amplified across the system so far have landed most heavily on poor nations that depend on imports, causing local price spikes even when global food prices were low.   The underlying problem isn’t hard to grasp: governments have failed to break what the economist Thomas Piketty calls the patrimonial spiral of wealth accumulation. As a result, the rich have become ever richer, a process that seems to be accelerating. The richer a fraction of society becomes, the greater its political power, and the more extreme the demands it makes. The problem is summarised in one sentence in the resignation letter of the UK environment minister Zac Goldsmith: instead of attending a crucial environment summit, Rishi Sunak went to Rupert Murdoch’s summer party. We cannot work together to solve our common problems when great power is in the hands of so few. It could scarcely be more screwed up. The effort to protect Earth systems and the human systems that depend on them is led by people working at the margins with tiny resources, while the richest and most powerful use every means at their disposal to stop them. Can you imagine, in decades to come, trying to explain this to your children?          https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/15/food-systems-collapse-plutocrats-life-on-earth-climate-breakdown  

 Report Shows French Oil Giant's East African Pipeline Project Has 'Devastated' Thousands. "They come here promising us everything," said one affected Ugandan. "We believed them. Now we are landless, the compensation money is gone, what fields we have left are flooded, and dust fills the air." BRETT WILKINS Jul 10, 2023 Construction of TotalEnergies' East African Crude Oil Pipeline has "devastated" the lives and livelihoods of tens of thousands of people in its path while exacerbating the climate emergency, according to a report published Monday by Human Rights Watch. HRW's 47-page report—entitledOur Trust Is Broken: Loss of Land and Livelihoods for Oil Development in Uganda—warns that "in total, over 100,000 people in Uganda and Tanzania will permanently lose land to make way for the pipeline and Tilenga oilfield development, according to calculations based on project documentation." In addition to massive displacement, the report says EACOP "has caused food insecurity and household debt, caused children to leave school, and is likely to have devastating environmental effects. EACOP is also a disaster for the planet and the project should not be completed." Local farmers told HRW they "felt pressured to sign compensation agreements in English, a language many of them cannot read," while many lamented how "unkept promises about grave relocation and an improvement in the quality of life" have eroded communities' trust in TotalEnergies. "They come here promising us everything," one Ugandan told HRW. "We believed them. Now we are landless, the compensation money is gone, what fields we have left are flooded, and dust fills the air." If completed, the $3.5 billion, nearly 900-mile EACOP will transport up to 230,000 barrels of crude oil per day from fields in the Lake Albert region of western Uganda through the world's longest electrically heated pipeline to the Tanzanian port city of Tanga on the Indian Ocean. In a letterto HRW last month, TotalEnergies said it continues to "pay close attention to respecting the rights of the communities concerned” and insisted the compensation it's offering people displaced by EACOP meets international standards. TotalEnergies—in partnership with China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and the Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC)—is also leading the Tilenga Development Project, which involves the drilling of 400 wells in dozens of locations, including inside therichly biodiverse Murchison Falls National Park. "EACOP has been a disaster for the tens of thousands who have lost the land that provided food for their families and an income to send their children to school, and who received too little compensation from TotalEnergies," HRW senior environment researcher Felix Horne said in a statement. "EACOP is also a disaster for the planet and the project should not be completed."    https://www.commondreams.org/news/eacop        

 Through the Smoky Haze, Can We See Clearly Now the Climate Emergency?. Today is our chance to understand what it really feels like every day on a fossil-fueled planet, for the billions of people unlucky enough to really bear the brunt. My eyes are stinging a bit from the smoke, but I’ve never seen more clearly. The air was worse in New York and in D.C.—indeed, across the east cities are breaking all-time pollution records.(I imagine it was smokier back in the early Industrial Revolution, but we weren’t measuring it).And we’re all lucky. Because this is what a huge percentage of the world’s people breathe every single day of their lives. In fact, we should probably—in our hearts if not our lungs—be grateful for a few days like this. They bring us much much closer to the lived experience of billions of our brothers and sisters.In the case of the eastern U.S. this week, the smoke—and the dangerous particulates it carries—comes from Canadian wildfires. They are a result of the hot dry weather that climate change has made more likely. It’s not just Canada, of course. A new analysis released last week by Climate Central analyzed the fifty-year shift towards more severe fire seasons. “Southern California, Texas, and New Mexico have experienced some of the greatest increases in fire weather days each year, with some areas now seeing around two more months of fire weather compared to a half-century ago,” the report noted. But here’s the thing. There’s nothing particularly special about wildfire smoke. Vermont on Wednesday felt like a hundred days I’ve spent in New Delhi, in Shanghai, in Beijing, in Ahmedabad and any of those were much worse.That smoke doesn’t come from forest fires. It comes mostly from burning fossil fuels. But it’s all combustion, and it all does the same thing to your lungs. There are four and a half million children in New Delhi, and the estimateis that half of them have irreversible lung damage from breathing the air. Around the world,nine million deathsa year—one death in five—comes from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. About a third of all deaths in Asia come from breathing fossil fuel pollution.If the climate crisis is the great existential crisis on our earth, then smoke is the great daily crisis.Happily, they’re both caused by the same thing: burning coal and gas and oil. And even more happily, we know how to end it. We just stop burning stuff, and rely instead on the fact that there’s a large ball of burning gas at a safe 93-million-mile distance. We get all the fire we could ever want, and none of the smoke. Call it “external combustion.”         https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/wildfires-smoke-climate-emergency