Tuesday, August 24, 2021

Trump's Border Wall Torn Apart by Arizona Monsoon Rains

Record monsoon rains have blown floodgates off their hinges as Trump's border wall breaks down.

By Brian Kahn

Flood gates on the border wall blown open by monsoon rains near San Bernardino Ranch in Arizona.Photo: Fernando Sobrazo

It turns out ignoring bedrock environmental laws may not have been the best choice for a multibillion-dollar construction project. Photos show former President Donald Trump’s border wall in deep disrepair after summer monsoon rains literally blew floodgates off their hinges.

The damage took place near San Bernardino Ranch, a historic site that sits between Douglas, Arizona, and the San Bernardino Wildlife Refuge. Much of the West is suffering through a deep megadrought, but the monsoon rains that have swept across parts of the Southwest this summer have doused the southern half of Arizona with record-setting rains. Douglas has seen nearly double its average monsoon season rainfall so far, including a blast that came through on Monday and unleashed flooding on the Arizona-Sonora border. The National Weather Service data shows 2.15 inches (5.5 centimeters) of rain fell, which in turn funneled into washes and drove flooding.

José Manuel Pérez Cantú, the director of the nonprofit Cuenca de Los Ojos, said in an email that six gates were washed out at this location alone. Other gates were also reportedly impacted by the heavy rainfall and flooding. The power and height of the waters can be seen in not just the heavy gates ripped open but the debris that wrapped around intact portions of the wall.

Who could have predicted this? Ah yes, just about everyone.

“I will build a great wall—and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me—and I’ll build them very inexpensively,” Trump said when he announced his run for president in 2015. “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”

Mexico did not, in fact, pay for the wall, which led former Trump to declare a national emergency so he could funnel money from other federal projects and programs to build the wall. Nor was the wall inexpensive, costing the public billions in overruns. It was, however, chintzily built.

In the rush to build the wall, Trump sidelined environmental and cultural protection laws. Those laws are meant to protect the natural world and historically significant artifacts and sites. But they also serve the purpose of ensuring multibillion-dollar construction projects don’t face catastrophic failures within a few years of being built.

Much of the work was outsourced to private companies that raked in billions, including Southwest Valley Constructors, which did most of the work in Arizona. The company pulled in $2.7 billion in federal contracts and has faced lawsuits from private landowners who claim explosions tied to construction sent “car-sized boulders” onto their land. (There are also multiple OSHA complaints against the company, which is a whole other issue.) The location near San Bernardino Wildlife Refuge is one of a growing number of chinks in the rushed wall. Another section in Texas where levees were destroyed has left hundreds of thousands exposed to catastrophic flooding.

“It’s clear that these were not companies that really were taking the long term integrity of the product into account,” said Myles Traphagen, the borderlands program coordinator of the Wildlands Network. “The sad thing is that it was overseen by the Army Corps of Engineers. The Army Corps has a long and illustrious history... Taking off the environmental hat, when you’re building dams, the snail darters die out and salmon are affected. However, the bottom line is that there is an economic net gain by society ... whereas the border wall is a complete suck of money. We don’t benefit by any of that.”

A family of javelinas.Photo: Myles Traphagen/Wildlands Network

It remains to be seen what the future holds for the wall. President Joe Biden has put a construction moratorium in place. Still, Trump managed to get 452 miles (727 kilometers) of wall built. That has created an environmental catastrophe for one of the most fragile ecosystems in North America, a place where the wildlife from the tropics, desert, and mountains mingle. Images captured during construction of iconic saguaros being razed as well as numerous environmental impact statements laid the risks bare, and Traphagen described camera trap photos his group has taken documenting everything from rare jaguars to common javelinas pacing along the wall in search of a way around.

The severe floods may have given them a passageway near San Bernardino. And the monsoons—which have become more intense due in part to the climate crisis—could rip further parts of the shoddily constructed wall asunder. But it’s clear that there’s a need for a much deeper reckoning and remediation.

“It’s not often that an ecologist can actually put a time stamp on the day that the evolutionary history of an area was sealed off,” Traphagen said. “Step number one [to reversing course] is to open up the gates where they exist and to remove sections of border wall in places where they’re having the greatest impact to species’ movement and migration.”

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Mob-like criminals are getting into organized retail crime. A crackdown is needed before the safety of everyday shoppers is put at risk.

insider@insider.com (Hector Balderas)

© Getty A police officer wears a mask while sitting on guard at a Best Buy in Kentucky. Getty

Professional thieves are scoring big on retailers, online and otherwise.

These criminals are often connected to other forms of crime, like human-trafficking and gang activity.

Without a crackdown from lawmakers, the security of shoppers could be in peril.

Hector Balderas is serving his second term as New Mexico's Attorney General.

This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

Businesses and law enforcement, both in New Mexico and across the nation, are now battling a new epidemic: organized retail crime.

Today, groups of professional thieves are stealing mass quantities of merchandise from retailers and selling the items to consumers, particularly on e-commerce platforms. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle - at the state and local levels - can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to it.

It's important to recognize that organized retail crime rings aren't made up of neighborhood shoplifters or teenage delinquents - these are violent, skilled thieves who seek profit and profit alone. It also shouldn't come as a shock that they can be tied back to other reprehensible schemes such as human trafficking, narcotics, and gang activity.

Organized retail crime has worsened over the years as online marketplaces became easy, anonymous platforms for criminals to fence mass quantities of stolen merchandise. Just as alarming, these thieves have become more brazen and violent in their schemes, putting retail employees and innocent customers at risk when they carry mace, knives, and guns into stores to assist in the commission of their crimes.

New Mexico has been plagued by violent retaliation when authorities attempt to detain these thieves. In 2018, an Albuquerque grocery store employee confronted a shoplifter and was stabbed in the chest, nearly dying. In June 2020, a Santa Fe man slashed at store personnel with a knife when they attempted to detain him following a theft.

In November 2020, a Dillard's loss-prevention officer at Cottonwood Mall was shot as he attempted to apprehend a shoplifter. And just last month, a State Police officer was threatened with a handgun by a felon who had just stolen from a Dollar General in Pecos.

Unfortunately, these examples are not uncommon.

There is an urgent need to address this growing problem - we need better resources and smarter laws on our books to protect communities and shut down these criminal networks plaguing local storefronts.
An organized solution to organized crime

Earlier this month, our office, along with the Albuquerque Police Department, announced plans to address the rise of organized retail crime. By coordinating efforts of law enforcement and working hand in hand with local businesses, we can stand up to these violent criminal operations and start to shut them down. However, addressing a widespread issue like this requires a two-pronged approach. While law enforcement officials will continue to do their job, we must also consider policy-based solutions at both the state and federal levels.

New Mexico currently lacks the appropriate laws required to address retail crime in the physical and online spaces. I have called on the New Mexico Legislature to pass the Organized Retail Crime Act, which would increase the penalties for serial shoplifters. As the law stands today, thefts under $500 only qualify as a misdemeanor, allowing savvy crime rings to shoplift from multiple stores without the risk of a more serious charge, harming others in the process.

Allow me to present two examples of how our present laws are deficient. First, offenders who use violence to retain stolen property immediately after a nonviolent taking - such as when a shoplifter threatens store security personnel when trying to exit the store with stolen merchandise - do not meet the requirements for "armed robbery" in New Mexico, and can thus only be prosecuted for less-serious crimes with lower penalties.

Secondly, no law presently allows prosecutors to punish serial shoplifters for their organized activities; rather, these offenders are now punished individually for each less-serious offense, not the brazen aggregation of their acts.

We must also counter organized retail crime within the online realm. Our federal laws, as they stand, don't do enough to ensure the legitimacy of third-party sellers or products. Estimates place the exact loss from organized retail crime to the retail industry to be between $15 to $37 billion annually. Unless we take appropriate action, we can only expect to see this number increase, and for attacks in community stores to escalate.

Without transparency regulations in place, shoplifters can capitalize on the lack of verification mechanisms on online marketplaces, selling stolen goods to unwary shoppers. Savvy criminal actors are easily able to create seller accounts and impersonate legitimate businesses.

Federal lawmakers have recognized the need for swift action. The INFORM Consumers Act, which sits in both the US House and the Senate, is the most comprehensive piece of federal legislation targeting the sale of stolen goods online. It requires e-commerce websites to verify basic information from third-party sellers, such as a government-issued ID and necessary business contact information.

The legislation will provide online shoppers the transparency they deserve before making an online purchase, while also helping legitimate businesses - a win for all except those looking to profit from stolen goods. A national measure such as the INFORM Consumers Act will support the efforts of law enforcement officials across our state, giving them an additional tool to better track and take down dangerous retail theft rings.

While our office will continue to do all that it can to protect New Mexico, we call on lawmakers to take the steps necessary to keep consumers and businesses safe. Viable legislative solutions - at both the state and federal levels - will significantly aid our efforts. I urge lawmakers in Santa Fe and Washington to make combating organized retail crime a top priority.

Remote workers holding 2 jobs shows a ton of jobs aren't really 40 hours per week

akiersz@businessinsider.com (Andy Kiersz)

The Wall Street Journal highlighted a trend of remote workers secretly taking on two full-time jobs.

Their ability to do so shows that maybe not every job needs to be 40 hours a week.

Many economists and experts have long advocated for a shorter work week, even four days long.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

Entrepreneurialism is a treasured American value, unless you work for a company.

After all, what's more entrepreneurial than working two jobs when you could work just one? Some remote workers have done just this, but because of American work culture, they've kept it a secret.

The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted several white-collar workers who shuffle two or more full-time jobs, carefully aligning their schedules to avoid meeting overlaps and doing their best to keep their multiple gigs secret from each other.

Many of the workers in the article noted that only a small share of their time at their first job was spent doing productive work, enabling the multiple-job bait and switch. According to the Journal, one software engineer said "he was logging three to 10 hours of actual work a week back when he held down one job," with the rest of the time spent on extraneous meetings and busywork.

While the six people interviewed by the Journal are naturally not a representative sample, the idea that there's so much dead time in many occupations that it's possible to do multiple "full-time" jobs at once suggests that it may be time to rethink the 40-hour work week.

Americans work more hours than most developed countries, but they probably don't need to

Workers in the US already log a lot of hours at their jobs. This chart, based on data from the OECD, shows the average number of hours worked in 2020 among workers in the G7 advanced countries:

But as the anecdotes highlighted by the Journal suggest, for many white-collar workers, much of that time at the office may be wasted. Non-essential activities like excessive meetings or a flood of emails and messages from colleagues can take up a larger part of the day than core productive tasks.

Think of work like watching an NFL game and how much "sport" it actually contains. Kirk Goldsberry and Katherine Rowe estimated in an article at FiveThirtyEight that the average football game lasts for over three hours, but only includes 18 minutes of actual football. The rest of the broadcast time is filled with clock stoppages, half-time reports, and so many commercials.

The fifth Zoom meeting of your day that may not be essential to your job, and could be more like the fifth time you see that beer commercial in the third quarter of the Buffalo Bills game.
One of the greatest 20th-century economists predicted we'd be working 15 hours a week by now

In a famous 1930 essay, "Economic possibilities for our grandchildren," the British economist John Maynard Keynes observed the enormous leaps in productivity over the previous couple centuries stemming from the rapid technological progress of the industrial revolution.

He concluded that work of the future would take less time.

Within 100 years, he predicted, output per worker would be so great that only a minimal effort would be needed to provide for the basic needs of the entire population. To distribute that work, Keynes predicted "we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter - to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while."

More recently, several companies and countries have started experimenting with a four-day work week, finding that workers stayed just as productive while improving well-being. Of course, as Keynes' prediction above underscores, broader adoption of shorter hours has remained elusive for decades.

As seen in the G7 chart above, that 15-hour work week, or even a more modest four-day week, has not yet come to pass, at least not officially. If someone can do two 40-hour jobs per week in something close to 40 hours, that means they are doing roughly 20 hours of work for each. It's not far off Keynes' prediction, except it's an absurd distortion of his hopes for his proverbial grandchildren (he left no children behind when he died in 1946).

Instead of a 40-hour job being replaced by a 15-hour one, it seems we've replaced it with two.

RIP

Don Everly, Who Set the Standard for Pop Harmony as Half of the Everly Brothers, Dies at 84

© AP

Don Everly, who with his late younger sibling Phil established the template for close harmony vocalizing in the chart-topping duo the Everly Brothers, died Saturday at age 84 in Nashville. NO cause of death was immediately disclosed.

The Los Angeles Times confirmed the death through a family spokesman, even as tributes were already accumulating on social media Saturday night as word circulated about his passing.

Everly (pictured above, right) – an inaugural inductee in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 who also joined the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001 – grew up singing the high, fluid harmonies that would make him famous in his family’s country act. Beginning in 1957, he and his brother cut a groundbreaking series of hit ballads and rockers for the Cadence and Warner Bros. labels.

The Everlys left a bold impression on the rock musicians who succeeded them. The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel – whose early pairing as Tom & Jerry essentially cloned the brothers’ sound – were only the best known acts to adapt their achingly beautiful harmony sound.

The brothers also made their mark on a later generation of country-rock musicians, with their impact felt in the work of the Byrds, Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris and the Eagles.

In his notes for the 1994 Rhino Records boxed set “Heartaches & Harmonies,” critic and historian Ken Barnes wrote, “Excepting only the urban doo-woppers, you’d be hard-pressed to find a voice-blending rock act from 1957 on whose conceptual blueprint wasn’t first sketched by Don and Phil.”

Isaac Donald Everly was born in Brownie, KY, on Feb. 1, 1937. His father Ike, originally a coal miner and a gifted guitarist, had pursued country music as a career in a duo with his wife Margaret. Don’s younger brother Phil was born in Chicago in 1939.

The boys grew up on Shenandoah, Iowa, where their parents hosted a country music show on local radio stations KMA and KFNF. The brothers began performing on the broadcasts from an early age, styling their vocal work along the lines of such country sibling duos as the Blue Sky Boys (Earl and Bill Bolick), the Monroe Brothers, the Delmore Brothers and the ‘50s stars the Louvin Brothers.

The family moved to Tennessee in the early ‘50s. After Don and Phil both graduated from high school, they tried to establish themselves as an act in Nashville. They were mentored in Music City by guitarist and producer Chet Atkins, a family friend. They secured a contract with Columbia Records, but they were dropped by the label after one unsuccessful 1955 single.

The Everlys kicked around Nashville for a year in which they were rejected by nearly every label in town. However, they were befriended by Wesley Rose, head of the powerful Acuff-Rose publishing combine, who encouraged Archie Bleyer of the New York-based independent Cadence Records to roll the dice on the brothers. When they entered the studio for the label, their country-based sound was cast in a pop matrix.

Their first session for the company had an immediate and huge payoff. “Bye Bye Love,” a mournful yet deceptively chipper number penned by the husband-and-wife Nashville writing team of Boudeleaux and Felice Bryant, topped the U.S. pop singles chart and also reached No. 2 on the country rolls, racking up a six-month run. The follow-up number “Wake Up Little Susie,” also penned by the Bryants, reached the apex of both the pop and country charts a few months later.

Capable of delivering the commercial goods with both heart-wrenching ballads and up-tempo rockers, the Everlys went on to a score No. 1 hit with 1958’s “All I Have to Do is Dream” and “Bird Dog.” Their top 10 singles for Cadence included “Problems,” “Devoted to You” and “(Till) I Kissed You.”

In ’58, the brothers also released a landmark early concept album: “Songs Our Daddy Taught Us,” a collection of traditional country material in the vein of the Louvins’ “Tragic Songs of Life.” Though it failed to chart, it would later have a pronounced impact on country-rock, alt-country and Americana performers of all stripes.

The Everlys began a decade-long tenure at Warner Bros. in 1960, becoming one of the label’s first rock ‘n’ roll acts. They kicked off their stint with their final No. 1 pop single, the forceful “Cathy’s Clown,” which was highlighted by a unique and dazzling cascading harmony vocal.

Before they faded from the singles charts following the advent of the British Invasion, the brothers logged several other indelible top-10 numbers, including “So Sad” (No. 7, 1960), “Walk Right Back” (No. 7, 1961), “Ebony Eyes” (No. 8, 1961), “Crying in the Rain” (No. 6, 1962) and “That’s Old Fashioned” (No. 9, 1962).

Though their albums were too often old-school affairs – collections of hit singles laden with filler, or collections of cover material – the Everlys recorded another landmark LP near the end of their Warner Bros. epoch. Produced by future label president Lenny Waronker, “Roots” (1968) was an impressionistic country-based collection that found the duo interpreting material by pioneer Jimmie Rodgers and contemporary star Merle Haggard. Some critics rank it with the Byrds’ “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” released the same year, as among the most important early country-rock albums.

Following their departure from Warner Bros., the Everlys made a pair of disappointing 1972 albums, “Stories We Could Tell” and “Pass the Chicken and Listen,” for RCA; neither set reached the charts.

By then, two decades of performing, recording and touring had created smoldering, insuperable tensions within rock’s most celebrated brother act. On July 14, 1973, Don showed up drunk for a show at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, CA, and Phil smashed his guitar and stormed off the stage, leaving his older brother to finish the show alone.

After the act’s public breakup, Don Everly worked solo with limited success. He cut an album for Lou Adler’s Ode Records, “Sunset Tower” (1974), and a collection for Hickory Records, “Brother Jukebox.” His singles for the latter label occupied the lower reaches of the country charts; the biggest of them, “Yesterday Just Passed My Way Again,” peaked at No. 50 in 1976.

However, one of the elder brother’s sidemen, English guitarist Albert Lee, was instrumental in reuniting the Everlys. In 1983, at Lee’s urging, the Everly Brothers reunited for an emotional concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall. While the subsequent album and video recorded at the event were not big hits, they sparked fresh interest in the brothers’ music among a new generation of listeners, and the Everlys were signed to Mercury Records.

Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney contributed the lead-off single, “On the Wings of a Nightingale” (No. 50) to the brothers’ first studio album in 12 years, “EB ’84,” which reached No. 36 in its titular year of release. The less successful “Born Yesterday” (1986) and “Some Hearts” (1988) followed.

The brothers reunited only sporadically thereafter. They recorded the song “Cold” for Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jim Steinman’s musical “Whistle Down the Wind” in 1998. When Paul Simon – who had used the Everlys on backup vocals for the title cut of his 1986 smash “Graceland” – reunited with Art Garfunkel for a 2003-4 tour, the brothers were enlisted as the supporting act, in recognition of their impact on the New York duo’s sound.

Phil Everly died of lung disease at 74 in Burbank on Jan. 3, 2014.

Speaking about his differences with his brother in a 1999 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Don said, “Everything is different about us, except when we sing together,. I’m a liberal Democrat, he’s pretty conservative. … We give each other a lot of space (on their then-occasional reunion tours)… We say hello, we sometimes have a meal together… Wherever I go, it’s ‘Are you still mad at each other?’ I say, ‘Do you have a family? Do you have a brother?’”

But he was not about to deny the musical chemistry of the relationship, and how it created enduring magic. “That’s one part where being brothers makes a difference. It’s just instinct,” Everly said. “That’s the charm of what the Everly Brothers are: two guys singing as one.”

Thrice divorced, Don Everly is survived by his wife of 24 years, Adela, his son Edan. and daughters Erin (who was briefly married to Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose), Venetia and Stacy.

The Middle East is running out of water

The ferries that once shuttled tourists to and from the little islets in Iran's Lake Urmia sit rusty, unable to move, on what is rapidly becoming a salt plain. Just two decades ago, Urmia was the Middle East's biggest lake, its local economy a thriving tourist center of hotels and restaurants.

© Claudia Otto/CNN The ferry boats many used to cross the lake lies stranded on the salty crust, slowing rusting away.

By Frederik Pleitgen, Claudia Otto, Angela Dewan and Mohammed Tawfeeq, CNN

"People would come here for swimming and would use the mud for therapeutic purposes. They would stay here at least for a few days," said Ahad Ahmed, a journalist in the former port town of Sharafkhaneh as he showed CNN photos of people enjoying the lake in 1995.

Lake Urmia's demise has been fast. It has more than halved in size -- from 5,400 square kilometers (2,085 square miles) in the 1990s to just 2,500 square kilometers (965 square miles) today -- according to the Department of Environmental Protection of West Azerbaijan, one of the Iranian provinces where the lake is located. There are now concerns it will disappear entirely.

Such problems are familiar in many parts of the Middle East -- where water is simply running out.

The region has witnessed persistent drought and temperatures so high that they are barely fit for human life. Add climate change to water mismanagement and overuse, and projections for the future of water here are grim.

Some Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, Iraq and Jordan, are pumping huge amounts of water from the ground for irrigation as they seek to improve their food self-sufficiency, Charles Iceland, the global director of water at the World Resources Institute (WRI), told CNN. That's happening as they experience a decrease in rainfall.

"They're using more water than is available routinely through rain. And so groundwater levels are consequently falling because you're taking water out faster than it's being replenished by the rainfall," he said.

That's what's happening in Iran, where a vast network of dams sustains an agricultural sector that drinks up about 90% of the water the country uses.

"Both declining rainfall and increasing demand in these countries are causing many rivers, lakes, and wetlands to dry up," Iceland said.

The consequences of water becoming even scarcer are dire: Areas could become uninhabitable; tensions over how to share and manage water resources like rivers and lakes could worsen; more political violence could erupt.

In Iran, Urmia has shrunk largely because so many people have exploited it, and some of the dams built in its basin mainly for irrigation have reduced the flow of water into the lake.

Iran's water woes are already a deadly issue. In one week in July, at least three protesters were killed in clashes with security officers in demonstrations against water shortages in the country's southwest.

The country is experiencing some of the driest conditions in five decades, according to the country's meteorological service.

The Middle East's winters are projected to get drier the more the world warms, and while the summers will be wetter, the heat is expected to offset its water gains, according to scientists' latest projections published earlier this month by the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change report.

"The problem is, with this whole temperature rise, whatever rainfall will come will evaporate because it is so hot," Mansour Almazroui, director at the Center of Excellence for Climate Change Research at Saudi Arabia's King Abdulaziz University, told CNN.

"The other thing is, "This rain is not necessarily going to be usual rain. There's going to be extreme rainfall, meaning that floods like those happening in China, in Germany, in Belgium, these floods will be a big problem for the Middle East. This is really a big climate change issue."

A study by the Iranian Energy Ministry found the demise of the lake was more than 30% attributable to climate change.

These changes are not only having an impact on the amount of water available, they are also affecting quality.

Lake Urmia is hypersaline, meaning it's very salty. As it has shrunk, the salt concentration has increased and gotten so extreme, using it for irrigation is damaging farmers' crops.

Kiomars Poujebeli, who farms tomatoes, sunflowers, sugar beet, eggplant and walnuts near the lake, told CNN that the salty water has been disastrous.

"The day the soil will become unfarmable is not far away," he said.

A vicious cycle

In Jordan, one of the most water stressed countries in the world, people have become used to living with very little water.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that Jordanians will have to halve their per capita use of water by the end of the century. Most Jordanians on lower incomes will live on 40 liters a day, for all their needs -- drinking, bathing and washing clothes and dishes, for example. The average American today uses around 10 times that amount.

In many Jordanian homes, water isn't necessarily available every day, said Daniel Rosenfeld, a professor with the Program of Atmospheric Sciences at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

"Jordan now has a critical shortage of water -- water reaches the houses in Jordan once or twice a week, even in the capital Amman," Daniel Rosenfeld, a professor with the Program of Atmospheric Sciences at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The capital actually has existential problems right now, already," Rosenfeld said.

Groundwater levels in parts of the country are dropping by well over one meter a year, studies show, and waves of refugees from many countries in the region have put extra pressure on the already stressed resource.

The secretary-general of Jordan's Water Authority, Bashar Batayneh, told CNN that the country needs more funding from the rest of the world to deal with this increased demand for water.

"Jordan bore the heavy load of the Syrian refugee crises on behalf of the international community and was deeply impacted regarding water. Refugees cost the water sector over $600 million per year while Jordan received a fraction of this amount from the international community," he said.

He added that Jordan had much less rain in 2020 than it did the previous year, putting more than a quarter of water resources at risk and halving drinking water sources.

But it's not only climate change. The country relies on the Jordan River system, which also runs through Israel, the West Bank, Syria and Lebanon, and dams building along the rivers have severely cut the flow of water flow to Jordan. Jordan, too, uses canals to redirect the river's waters for irrigation. Conflict has flared several times around the river system in the past.

It's a transboundary problem also seen in other parts of the region along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, as well as in northern Africa along the Nile.

Jordan, Israel and Syria have gotten better at coordinating management of the river system they rely on, but tensions often erupt. Experts have long warned that water scarcity worsened by climate change could lead to more conflict.

Jordan has little choice but to buy large amounts of water from Israel, which has an enormous desalination program, in which it removes salt from seawater to make it fit for human consumption. But desalination is energy-intensive -- using up huge amounts of energy; energy that is not yet green and renewable, and only adds to global warming, a major driver of water scarcity in the first place.

As the climate continues to warm and water runs scarce, part of the solution in the Middle East will have to involve reducing water use in agriculture. That can also mean changing the kind of food farmers grow and export, Rosenfeld said.

"In Israel, for example, we used to grow a lot of oranges, but at some point, we realized that we are exporting water that we don't have," he said, adding that crops could also be engineered to be more resilient to heat and dryness.

And Almazroui, from King Abdulaziz University, said that dams could be better organized to consider changing rain patterns. Coordination on managing rivers that flow across countries also has to improve.

But that's not going to help a farmer whose family has owned land for generations and can't necessarily move to wetter climes, or has little control over where a neighboring country might build a dam.

Raad al-Tamami, a 54-year-old father of five who lives in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, relies on the Diyal River, a tributary to the Tigris River, for water. The Diyal has been drying up for years and has forced al-Tamami to halve his fruit production across his three farms.

He and his fellow farmers are working on a water rationing schedule, and he sometimes waits up to a month for the water to come.

This dependence on more water to ensure food security could ironically put the availability of food at risk -- farmers are only going to keep farming under these difficult conditions for so long.

That's what plagues al-Tamami's mind all the time.

"Many farmers, including me, are seriously considering leaving this profession, which is inherited from father, from grandfather, and to start looking for more profitable jobs that guarantee a better future for our children."

Wildfires are burning up trees meant to fight climate change: 'It’s definitely not working'

Janet Wilson and Christal Hayes, USA TODAY NETWORK

© Action News Now The Monument Fire burns in northern California on August 2, 2021, near forests set aside to offset industrial carbon pollution. Healthy forests store carbon naturally, but when they burn, the carbon literally goes up in smoke, adding to global climate change instead of helping to slow it.

LOS ANGELES – Thousands of acres of forests have been set aside in the West to help curb climate change. But increasingly, wildfires are burning them up.

The bitter irony was highlighted Wednesday in comments by California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Chief Thom Porter, who said the blazes in the West were taking out years of work combating climate change.

Some of the blazes are raging in areas that are "a huge part of California's climate initiative," Porter said. "We are seeing generational destruction of forests because of what these fires are doing. This is going to take a long time to come back from."

Porter was talking about forests dedicated to carbon offset programs, which have been billed as a tool to fight climate change. The underlying goal of such programs is to ensure large swaths of trees continue growing. As they grow, the trees suck carbon out of the air and store it.

“When trees grow, as they get bigger, they pull carbon out of the atmosphere and they store it in their trunks, the branches, the leaves, every part of the tree, and that’s good,” said Danny Cullenward, policy director of Carbon Plan, a nonprofit that researches climate policy.

But there's an increasing problem: The plan works only “as long as the tree is alive and hasn’t burned to the ground.”

If the trees burn, they not only stop capturing carbon – they also release massive amounts of it into the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas that has been piled sky high into the atmosphere, and according to a landmark United Nations report this month, is causing increasingly catastrophic climate change, with fiercer lightning storms and hotter, drier conditions in forests across the planet.

'Code red for humanity': UN report gives stark warning on climate change, says wild weather events will worsen

'Catastrophically destroyed': Dixie Fire wipes out California gold rush town of Greenville

The monster Bootleg Fire in Oregon, which burned for about six weeks until it was contained in mid-August, wiped out an estimated 24% of a huge carbon offset project used by Microsoft and others, according to Carbon Plan, a nonprofit that has a live map updating the overlap of the fires and forest projects. In eastern Washington on tribal lands, five blazes have burned about 12% of the huge Colville forest project.

“This summer and the past few years have made it incredibly clear that forest offsets face substantial risks from climate change, including major wildfires,” said University of Utah ecologist William Anderegg. “A major forest offset project burned in 2020, and there are currently at least four offset projects burning in 2021.”

And in California and Montana, several fires now burning have overlapped with projects or are within a few miles of them.

'Get out now': Monstrous Dixie Fire moves closer to small California town; Caldor Fire threatens more communities

Opinion: Borders can't contain climate change: California’s crisis is a world management issue

Some trees involved in the projects were always expected to burn. A system called "buffer pools" was set up to ensure that trees that go up in smoke or otherwise are lost would be factored into the planning of carbon offset programs, much like an insurance policy. But researchers say the pool is not keeping up with the rate with which wildfires are destroying trees.

“We haven't set up a real insurance program, and all of these climate claims are going up in smoke,” Cullenward said. “If you’ve got a forest offset project on fire, it’s definitely not working.”

The programs are often used by major companies like Microsoft and BP and were built on a long-standing recognition of trees’ powerful ability to trap carbon dioxide, converting it into beneficial organic matter for a century or longer.

But a June 2020 review in the prestigious journal Science concluded that while forests could provide limited help, they should not be relied upon as a major tool to combat climate change.

“Using forests as natural climate solutions must not distract from rapid reductions in emissions," it said.

The problem playing out in the West is far from unique. Heat waves and historic droughts tied to climate change have contributed to more intense wildfires around the globe.

Timothy Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University's Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, said hotter climates may have different consequences across the globe. In some areas, climate-change-induced droughts will fuel wildfires. In other areas, more rainfall could increase tree growth, allowing some regions to absorb more carbon and help slow climate change.

But hope that trees alone will make a significant impact has been fading in recent years. Notably, a study published last month said parts of the Amazon rainforest are now emitting more carbon dioxide than they absorb.

Investigation: Hundreds of U.S. cities adopted climate plans. Few have met the goals, but it's not too late.

Increases in fires combined with persistent droughts in the West might signal an adjustment is needed in plans to use trees in the West to fight climate change, especially because forests going up in flames can be a huge source of carbon emissions.

Different trees and the climate they are grown in can alter how much carbon they hold. A massive redwood, for instance, can hold as much as 250 tons of carbon over its lifetime. Other trees can absorb about 50 pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere a year. But when they burn, those carbon gases are emitted into the atmosphere, compounding the problem.

California’s historic 2020 fire season, which included five of the largest blazes in state history, released about 107 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere – the equivalent of more than 23 million cars driven for one year.

“We really are in a pinch to do everything we can possibly do in the next 30 years or so to try to keep climate change from kind of spiraling out of control,” Searchinger said.

Monday, August 23, 2021

Interstellar comets like Borisov may not be all that rare

Peer-Reviewed Publication

HARVARD-SMITHSONIAN CENTER FOR ASTROPHYSICS

Interstellar Comets Like Borisov May Not be All That Rare — IMAGE: DETECTED IN 2019, THE BORISOV COMET WAS THE FIRST INTERSTELLAR COMET KNOWN TO HAVE PASSED THROUGH OUR SOLAR SYSTEM. view more
CREDIT: CREDIT: NASA, ESA AND D. JEWITT (UCLA)

Cambridge, MASS. – In 2019, astronomers spotted something incredible in our backyard: a rogue comet from another star system. Named Borisov, the icy snowball traveled 110,000 miles per hour and marked the first and only interstellar comet ever detected by humans.

But what if these interstellar visitors—comets, meteors, asteroids and other debris from beyond our solar system—are more common than we think?

In a new study published Monday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) present new calculations showing that in the Oort Cloud—a shell of debris in the farthest reaches of our solar system—interstellar objects outnumber objects belonging to our solar system.

“Before the detection of the first interstellar comet, we had no idea how many interstellar objects there were in our solar system, but theory on the formation of planetary systems suggests that there should be fewer visitors than permanent residents,” says Siraj, a concurrent undergraduate and graduate student in Harvard’s Department of Astronomy and lead author of the study. “Now we’re finding that there could be substantially more visitors.”

The calculations, made using conclusions drawn from Borisov, include significant uncertainties, Siraj points out. But even after taking these into consideration, interstellar visitors prevail over objects that are native to the solar system.

“Let’s say I watch a mile-long stretch of railroad for a day and observe one car cross it. I can say that, on that day, the observed rate of cars crossing the section of railroad was one per day per mile,” Siraj explains. “But if I have a reason to believe that the observation was not a one-off event—say, by noticing a pair of crossing gates built for cars—then I can take it a step further and begin to make statistical conclusions about the overall rate of cars crossing that stretch of railroad.”

But if there are so many interstellar visitors, why have we only ever seen one?

We just don’t have the technology to see them yet, Siraj says.

Consider, he says, that the Oort Cloud spans a region some 200 billion to 100 trillion miles away from our Sun—and unlike stars, objects in the Oort Cloud don’t produce their own light. Those two factors make debris in the outer solar system incredibly hard to see.

Senior astrophysicist Matthew Holman, who was not involved in the research, says the study results are exciting because they have implications for objects even closer than the Oort Cloud.

"These results suggest that the abundances of interstellar and Oort cloud objects are comparable closer to the Sun than Saturn. This can be tested with current and future solar system surveys," says Holman, who is the former director of the CfA’s Minor Planet Center, which tracks comets, asteroids and other debris in the solar system.

“When looking at the asteroid data in that region, the question is: are there asteroids that really are interstellar that we just didn’t recognize before?” he asks.

Holman explains that there are some asteroids that get detected but aren’t observed or followed up on year after year. “We think they are asteroids, then we lose them without doing a detailed look.”

Loeb, study co-author and Harvard astronomy professor, adds that “interstellar objects in the planetary region of the solar system would be rare, but our results clearly show they are more common than solar system material in the dark reaches of the Oort cloud."

Observations with next-generation technology may help confirm the team’s results.

The launch of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, slated for 2022, will “blow previous searches for interstellar objects out of the water,” Siraj says, and hopefully help detect many more visitors like Borisov.

The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II), which is specifically designed to detect comets in the far reaches of our solar system, may also be able to detect one of these passersby. TAOS II may come online as early as this year.

The abundance of interstellar objects in the Oort Cloud suggests that much more debris is left over from the formation of planetary systems than previously thought, Siraj says.

"Our findings show that interstellar objects can place interesting constraints on planetary system formation processes, since their implied abundance requires a significant mass of material to be ejected in the form of planetesimals,” Siraj says. “Together with observational studies of protoplanetary disks and computational approaches to planet formation, the study of interstellar objects could help us unlock the secrets of how our planetary system — and others — formed."

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About the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian is a collaboration between Harvard and the Smithsonian designed to ask—and ultimately answer—humanity’s greatest unresolved questions about the nature of the universe. The Center for Astrophysics is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, with research facilities across the U.S. and around the world.

JOURNAL

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters

DOI

10.1093/mnrasl/slab084

ARTICLE TITLE

Interstellar Objects Outnumber Solar System Objects in the Oort Cloud

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

23-Aug-2021

This technology could bring the fastest version of 5G to your home and workplace

UC San Diego engineers developed a system that enables millimeter wave signals to overcome blockages while providing high throughput

Reports and Proceedings

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SAN DIEGO

Making high band 5G reliable experimental setup — IMAGE: EXPERIMENTAL SETUP OF THE MULTI-BEAM MILLIMETER WAVE SYSTEM. view more
CREDIT: ISH JAIN

Consumers of today’s 5G cellphones may have experienced one of the following tradeoffs: impressive download speeds with extremely limited and spotty coverage, or widespread and reliable coverage with speeds that aren’t much faster than today’s 4G networks.

A new technology developed by electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego combines the best of both worlds and could enable 5G connectivity that is ultra-fast and reliable at the same time.

The team will present their work at the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 conference which will take place online Aug. 23 to 27.

The technology presents a solution to overcome a roadblock to making high band 5G practical for the everyday user: the speedy wireless signals, known as millimeter waves, cannot travel far and are easily blocked by walls, people, trees and other obstacles.

Today’s high band 5G systems communicate data by sending one laser-like millimeter wave beam between a base station and a receiver—for example, a user’s phone. The problem is if something or someone gets in the way of that beam’s path, then the connection gets blocked completely.

“Relying on a single beam creates a single point of failure,” said Dinesh Bharadia, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, who is the senior author on the ACM SIGCOMM paper.

Two beams are better than one

Bharadia and his team, who are part of the UC San Diego Center for Wireless Communications, came up with a clever solution: split the one laser-like millimeter wave beam into multiple laser-like beams, and have each beam take a different path from the base station to the receiver. The idea is to improve the chances that at least one beam reaches the receiver when an obstacle is in the way.

The researchers created a system capable of doing this and tested it inside an office and outside a building on campus. The system provided a high throughput connection (up to 800 Mbps) with 100% reliability, which means that the signal didn’t drop or lose strength as the user moved around obstacles like desks, walls and outdoor sculptures. In outdoor tests, the system provided connectivity up to 80 meters (262 feet) away.

To create their system, the researchers developed a set of new algorithms. One algorithm first instructs the base station to split the beam into multiple paths. Some of these paths take a direct shot from the base station and the receiver; and some paths take an indirect route, where the beams bounce off what are called reflectors—surfaces in the environment that reflect millimeter waves like glass, metal, concrete or drywall—to get to the receiver. The algorithm then learns which are the best paths in the given environment. It then optimizes the angle, phase and power of each beam so that when they arrive at the receiver, they combine constructively to create a strong, high quality and high throughput signal.

CAPTION

Hardware of the multi-beam millimeter wave system.

CREDIT

Ish Jain

With this approach, more beams result in a stronger signal.

“You would think that splitting the beam would reduce the throughput or quality of the signal,” Bharadia said. “But with the way that we’ve designed our algorithms, it turns out mathematically that our multi-beam system gives you a higher throughput while transmitting the same amount of power overall as a single-beam system.”

The other algorithm maintains the connection when a user moves around and when another user steps in the way. When these happen, the beams get misaligned. The algorithm overcomes this issue by continuously tracking the user’s movement and realigning all the beam parameters.

The researchers implemented their algorithms on cutting-edge hardware that they developed in the lab. “You don’t need any new hardware to do this,” said Ish Jain, an electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. student in Bharadia’s lab and the first author of the paper. “Our algorithms are all compliant with current 5G protocols.”

The hardware consists of a small base station and receiver. The base station is equipped with a phased array that was developed in the lab of UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering professor Gabriel Rebeiz, who is an expert in phased arrays for 5G and 6G communications and is also a member of the university’s Center for Wireless Communications.

The team is now working on scaling their system to accommodate multiple users.

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More information can be found on the project’s website: https://wcsng.ucsd.edu/mmreliable/

Paper: “Two beams are better than one: Towards Reliable and High Throughput mmWave Links.” Co-authors include Raghav Subbaraman, UC San Diego.

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation (grant 1925767).

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

ARTICLE TITLE

Two beams are better than one: Towards Reliable and High Throughput mmWave Links

Wildfire smoke exposure during pregnancy increases preterm birth risk

Wildfire smoke and early births

Peer-Reviewed Publication

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Average number of smoke days per year — IMAGE: AVERAGE NUMBER OF SMOKE DAYS PER YEAR. view more
CREDIT: HEFT-NEAL ET AL. 2021, ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH

Exposure to wildfire smoke during pregnancy increases the risk that a baby will be born too early, a new Stanford University study suggests.

The study, published Aug. 14 in Environmental Research, finds there may have been as many as 7,000 extra preterm births in California attributable to wildfire smoke exposure between 2007 and 2012. These births occurred before 37 weeks of pregnancy when incomplete development heightens risk of various neurodevelopmental, gastrointestinal and respiratory complications, and even death.

Wildfire smoke contains high levels of the smallest and deadliest type of particle pollution, known as PM 2.5. These specks of toxic soot, or particulate matter, are so fine they can embed deep in the lungs and pass into the bloodstream, just like the oxygen molecules we need to survive.

The research comes as massive wildfires are again blazing through parched landscapes in the western U.S. – just a year after a historic wildfire season torched more than 4 million acres of California and produced some of the worst daily air pollution ever recorded in the state. During the 2020 fire season, more than half of the state’s population experienced a month of wildfire smoke levels in the range of unhealthy to hazardous.

This year could be worse, said Stanford environmental economist Marshall Burke, a co-author of the new study. And yet much remains unknown about the health impacts of these noxious plumes, which contribute a growing portion of fine particle pollution nationwide and have a different chemical makeup from other ambient sources of PM 2.5, such as agriculture, tailpipe emissions and industry.

One possible explanation for the link between wildfire smoke exposure and preterm birth, the authors say, is that the pollution may trigger an inflammatory response, which then sets delivery in motion. The increase in risk is relatively small in the context of all the factors that contribute to the birth of a healthy, full-term baby. “However, against a backdrop where we know so little about why some women deliver too soon, prematurely, and why others do not, finding clues like the one here helps us start piecing the bigger puzzle together,” said co-author Gary Shaw, DrPH, a professor of pediatrics and co-primary investigator of Stanford’s March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center.

Extreme wildfires

The new results show wildfire smoke may have contributed to more than 6 percent of preterm births in California in the worst smoke year of the study period, 2008, when a severe lightning storm, powerful winds, high temperatures and a parched landscape combined for a deadly and destructive fire season – one that has now been dwarfed by the record-setting infernos of 2020 and ongoing blazes like the Dixie fire in Northern California.

“In the future, we expect to see more frequent and intense exposure to wildfire smoke throughout the West due to a confluence of factors, including climate change, a century of fire suppression and construction of more homes along the fire-prone fringes of forests, scrublands and grasslands. As a result, the health burden from smoke exposure – including preterm births – is likely to increase,” said lead author Sam Heft-Neal, a research scholar at Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment.

The research provides new evidence for the value of investing in prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, or other efforts to reduce the risk of extreme wildfires. Given that premature births cost the U.S. healthcare system an estimated $25 billion per year, even modest reductions in preterm birth risk could yield “enormous societal benefits,” said Burke, an associate professor of Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). “Our research highlights that reducing wildfire risk and the air pollution that accompanies it is one way of achieving these societal benefits.”

‘No safe level of exposure’

The researchers analyzed satellite data of smoke plumes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to identify smoke days for each of 2,610 zip codes. They paired these data with estimates of ground-level PM 2.5 pollution, which were developed using a machine learning algorithm that incorporates data from air quality sensors, satellite observations and computer models of how chemicals move through Earth’s atmosphere. They pulled additional data from California birth records, excluding twins, triplets and higher multiples, which commonly arrive early.

After accounting for other factors known to influence preterm birth risk, such as temperature, baseline pollution exposure and the mother’s age, income, race or ethnic background, they looked at how patterns of preterm birth within each zip code changed when the number and intensity of smoke days rose above normal for that location.

They found every additional day of smoke exposure during pregnancy raised the risk of preterm birth, regardless of race, ethnicity or income. And a full week of exposure translated to a 3.4 percent greater risk relative to a mother exposed to no wildfire smoke. Exposure to intense smoke during the second trimester – between 14 and 26 weeks of pregnancy – had the strongest impact, especially when smoke contributed more than 5 additional micrograms per cubic meter to daily PM 2.5 concentrations. “If one can avoid smoke exposure by staying indoors or wearing an appropriate mask while outdoors, that would be good health practice for all,” Shaw said.

The findings build on an established link between particle pollution and adverse birth outcomes, including preterm birth, low birth weight and infant deaths. But the study is among the first to isolate the effect of wildfire smoke on early births and to tease out the importance of exposure timing.

“Our work, together with a number of other recent papers, clearly shows that there’s no safe level of exposure to particulate matter. Any exposure above zero can worsen health impacts,” said Burke, who is also deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “While as a society it will be extremely difficult to fully eliminate all pollutants from the air, our research suggests that further reductions in key pollutants below current ‘acceptable’ levels could be massively beneficial for public health.”

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This work was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Shaw is NICU Nurses Professor and Professor (Research) by Courtesy, of Epidemiology and Population Health and of Obstetrics and Gynecology (Maternal Fetal Medicine). Burke is a Senior Fellow at Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.