A new COVID-19 variant called Mu that might be able to evade immunity from vaccines has been detected

in almost every US state

Joshua Zitser

Sat., September 4, 2021,

The Mu variant has not been detected in Nebraska, South Dakota, and Vermont. Data from: Outbreak.info

• A new COVID-19 variant called Mu might be able to evade the immunity people get from vaccines, Insider reported.

• The Mu variant has been detected in 47 US states and the District of Columbia, according to data from Outbreak.info.

• Only Nebraska, Vermont, and South Dakota are yet to detect a case, the data says.

• See more stories on Insider's business page.

A new variant of COVID-19, which the World Health Organization (WHO) says could have the ability to evade the immunity people get from vaccines and previous infections, has been detected in almost every US state, according to data from epidemiology and genomic database Outbreak.info.

Called Mu, the B.1.621 variant was first detected in Colombia in January this year. As of September 4, cases of the strain have been reported in 47 US states and the District of Columbia, Newsweek was first to report.

The only states without reported cases are Nebraska, Vermont, and South Dakota, according to Outbreak.info's data.

The strain is currently most prevalent in Alaska, where data suggests that 139 reported cases account for 4 percent of the total 3,837 sequenced samples.

California has the highest number in terms of raw numbers, the data show, with 232 reported cases of the B.1.621 variant out of 139,930 sequenced. This accounts for less than one percent of those sampled.

The Mu variant accounts for fewer than one percent of total COVID-19 cases, with the Delta variant dominant in the US.

Earlier this week, Mu was added to the WHO's "of interest" list of variants.

Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden's chief medical officer, said Thursday that the Mu variant did not represent an "immediate threat" to the US.

"This variant has a constellation of mutations that suggests that it would evade certain antibodies, not only monoclonal antibodies but vaccine- and convalescent serum-induced antibodies," Fauci said during a COVID-19 press briefing on Thursday. "But there isn't a lot of clinical data to suggest that. It is mostly laboratory in-vitro data," he added.

Fauci said that health officials are "keeping a very close eye" on the situation.

The WHO noted in its weekly bulletin that further studies would need to be done on the mutated variant to see if it can evade immune defenses to COVID-19, Insider's Cheryl Teh reported.

James Churchward - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Churchward

James Churchward (27 February 1851 – 4 January 1936) was a British occult writer, inventor, engineer, and fisherman. Churchward is most notable for proposing the existence of a lost continent, called "Mu," in the Pacific Ocean. His writings on Mu are considered to be pseudoscience.

• Life
• Claims and hypothesis
• Scientific rebuttal
• Popular culture
• Works
• External links

Churchward was born in Bridestow, Okehampton, Devon at Stone House to Henry and Matilda (née Gould) Churchward. James had four brothers and four sisters. In November 1854, Henry died and the family moved in with Matilda's parents in the hamlet of Kigbear, near Okehampton. Census records indicate the family next moved to London when James was 18 after his grandfather George Gould died. 

Wikipedia · Text under CC-BY-SA license

THE SACRED SYMBOLS OF MU - James Churchward

www.bahaistudies.net/.../Col-James-Churchward-The-Sacred-Symbol… · PDF file

COLONEL JAMES CHURCHWARD AUTHOR OF "THE LOST CONTINENT OF MU" "THE CHILDREN OF MU" ILLUSTRATED IVES WASHBURN; NEW YORK Scanned at sacred-texts.com, December, 2003.

3 Beards Podcast: Is the Lost Continent of Mu Real?

Posted on June 19, 2021 | Comments Offon 3 Beards Podcast: Is the Lost Continent of Mu Real?

Author Jack Churchward joins the show to talk about his books that cover The Lost Continent of Mu, a subject brought to life by the works of his great grandfather Col. James Churchward.

Lifting the Veil on the Lost Continent of Mu: The Motherland of Men
The Stone Tablets of Mu
Crossing the Sands of Time
are books Jack Churchward has penned to cover the works of his great grandfather and bring into focus on what is fact and what is fiction.

The mythical idea of the “Land of Mu” first appeared in the works of the British-American antiquarian Augustus Le Plongeon (1825–1908), after his investigations of the Maya ruins in Yucatán. He claimed that he had translated the first copies of the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the K’iche’ from the ancient Mayan using Spanish. He claimed the civilization of Yucatán was older than those of Greece and Egypt, and told the story of an even older continent.

Col. James Churchward claimed that the landmass of Mu was located in the Pacific Ocean, and stretched east–west from the Marianas to Easter Island, and north–south from Hawaii to Mangaia. According to Churchward the continent was supposedly 5,000 miles from east to west and over 3,000 miles from north to south, which is larger than South America. The continent was believed to be flat with massive plains, vast rivers, rolling hills, large bays, and estuaries. He claimed that according to the creation myth he read in the Indian tablets, Mu had been lifted above sea level by the expansion of underground volcanic gases. Eventually Mu “was completely obliterated in almost a single night” after a series of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, “the broken land fell into that great abyss of fire” and was covered by “fifty millions of square miles of water.” Churchward claimed the reasoning for the continent’s destruction in one night was because the main mineral on the island was granite and was honeycombed to create huge shallow chambers and cavities filled with highly explosive gases. Once the chambers were empty after the explosion, they collapsed on themselves, causing the island to crumble and

COST OF CLEANING UP PLASTIC POLLUTION AROUND THE WORLD IN 2019 AMOUNTED TO $3.7 TRILLION: WWF REPORT



WWF said societies were "unknowingly subsiding" plastic, with their estimates for the lifetime costs of 2019 production equivalent to more than India's GDP.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

SEP 06, 2021 11:33:39 IST

The pollution, emissions and clean-up costs of plastic produced in 2019 alone could be $3.7 trillion, according to a report released Monday by wildlife charity WWF, warning of the environmental and economic burden of this "seemingly cheap" material.

There is increasing international alarm over the sheer volumes of fossil-fuel based plastics entering the environment, as microplastics have infiltrated even the most remote and otherwise pristine regions of the planet.

In its report, WWF said societies were "unknowingly subsiding" plastic, with their estimates for the lifetime costs of 2019 production equivalent to more than the gross domestic product of India.

In India, 60 percent of plastic waste (15,384 tonnes) is collected and recycled, while the rest is uncollected and littered in the environment. Image credit: India Water Portal/Flickr

"Plastic appears to be a relatively cheap material when looking at the market price primary plastic producers pay for virgin plastic," said the report Plastics: The cost to society, environment and the economy, produced for WWF by the consultancy Dalberg.

"However, this price fails to account for the full cost imposed across the plastic life cycle."

It estimated that unless there was concerted international action, a projected doubling of plastic production could see costs rocket by 2040 to $7.1 trillion.

The analysis looked at factors including the greenhouse gas emissions in the production process, health impacts, waste management and estimates of the reduction in the economic "services" of ecosystems on land and in water.

Since the 1950s, roughly 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been produced with around 60 percent of that tossed into landfills or into the natural environment.

Tiny fragments have been discovered inside fish in the deepest recesses of the ocean and peppering Arctic sea ice.

The debris is estimated to cause the deaths of more than a million seabirds and over 100,000 marine mammals each year.

"Tragically, the plastic pollution crisis is showing no signs of slowing down, but the commitment to tackle it has reached an unprecedented level," said Marco Lambertini, Director General of WWF International, in a statement.
More plastic than fish

The report comes as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) meets in the French port city of Marseille, with one motion under consideration calling for an end to plastic pollution by 2030.

Earlier in September the European Union threw its weight behind calls for a legally-binding international agreement to reduce plastic pollution, during UN-hosted talks in Geneva.

The UN Environment Programme has said the planet is "drowning in plastic pollution", with about 300 million tonnes of plastic waste produced every year.

The proposed resolution is due to be discussed during the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi next year.

France's minister in charge of biodiversity, Berangere Abba, said if the world failed to act there would be "more plastic in the oceans than fish" by 2050.

World's largest Martian meteorite goes on display


By Harry Baker 

3 days ago

The chunk of rock fell to Earth after being ejected from the Red Planet.

The world's largest Martian meteorite, Taoudenni 002.

 (Image credit: Maine Mineral and Gem Museum)

The largest piece of Mars ever to fall to Earth is being displayed for the first time.

The hefty chunk of Mars weighs 32 pounds (14.5 kilograms) and measures 10 inches (25 centimeters) across at its widest point. It was unveiled Wednesday (Sept. 1) at the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum in Bethel, which also houses approximately 6,000 extraterrestrial rocks, including the largest piece of moon rock and the oldest igneous rock, formed from volcanic activity, in the solar system.

The lump of rock wound up on Earth after a large asteroid or comet blasted it off the Martian surface.

"Martian rocks can fall to Earth as meteorites," Carl Agee, director of the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico, told Live Science. "They are ejected off Mars by large, energetic impact events."

The Martian rock, named Taoudenni 002, is "by far the largest complete uncut Martian meteorite on Earth," said Agee, who was involved in confirming the rock did indeed originate from the Red Planet.

There are around 300 pieces of Martian rock on Earth, totaling around 500 pounds (227 kg). However, collectors often break them apart to sell them separately, so the actual number of known Martian meteorites on Earth is between 100 and 150, Agee said.

After powerful impacts eject the rocks from Mars, they drift through space and eventually end up on an Earth-crossing orbit around the Sun.

A local meteor hunter discovered Taoudenni 002 near a desert salt mine in Mali before world-leading meteorite dealer Darryl Pitt acquired it for the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum in April 2021. "The meteorite fall was not witnessed, but it was likely recent," Agee said. "In the last few 100 years perhaps," due to its well preserved condition, he added.

After acquiring the meteorite in Mali, Pitt sent a small sample of the rock to Agee to confirm its origin.

Martian meteorites have specific chemical signatures, and the minerals and elements in Taoudenni 002 perfectly matched the known Martian minerals, Agee said.

"It is a shergottite, which is the main type of Martian meteorite," Agee said. "It contains the minerals olivine, pyroxene and shock-transformed feldspar," which formed from the Mars impact that ejected it.

The meteorites' composition also hinted at how the rock was created. "It most likely was formed in a volcanic episode on Mars more than 100 million years ago," Agee said.

Even larger Martian rocks may be hidden on Earth, Agee said, potentially "buried under a sand dune in the Sahara, or deep in the ice in Antarctica, or perhaps at the bottom of the ocean."

Originally published on Live Science.

The world must cooperate to avoid a catastrophic space collision

Governments and companies urgently need to share data on the mounting volume of satellites and debris orbiting Earth.




Space junk such as broken spacecraft and inactive satellites (illustration) adds to mounting congestion in Earth’s orbit.Credit: European Space Agency/SPL

There’s an awful lot of stuff orbiting Earth, with more arriving all the time. More than 29,000 satellites, pieces of rockets and other bits of debris large enough to track from the ground are circling the planet. Smaller items number in the millions. The Californian company SpaceX alone has launched some 1,700 satellites over the past 2 years as part of its Starlink network, which provides broadband Internet, with thousands more planned. Other companies are also planning such megaconstellations, and more and more nations are launching or plan to launch satellites.

This growing congestion is drastically increasing the risk of collisions in space. At the European Space Agency’s operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany, which controls key research spacecraft, hundreds of e-mail alerts arrive each day warning of potential space smash-ups. And, in May, NASA engineers spotted a 5-millimetre-wide hole in one of the International Space Station’s robotic arms, created by a collision with an unknown piece of space junk.

These close calls highlight not only the need to be more thoughtful about what we put into space, but also that it’s well past time the global space community developed a sustainable framework for managing space traffic. Such a move would benefit both the scientists who rely on observations from orbit and humanity as a whole, because satellites are crucial for modern communication and navigation.

Astronomers push for global debate on giant satellite swarms

History offers some lessons about how to operate safely in newly crowded domains. During the early twentieth century, aviation boomed and pilots ran into congestion in the skies. Air-traffic controllers ultimately developed a system of coordinating between cities and across borders, sharing information about aeroplanes’ locations so that pilots could avoid crashing into one another.

But there are no traffic cops in space, nor international borders with clearly delineated areas of responsibility. To avoid further damage, it’s crucial that satellite operators have an accurate and up-to-date list of where objects are in space. At present, the main global catalogue of space objects is published at Space-Track.org by the US Space Command, a branch of the military. The catalogue is the most widely used public listing available, but it lacks some satellites that countries — including the United States, China and Russia — have not acknowledged publicly. In part because of this lack of transparency, other nations also track space objects, and some private companies maintain commercially available catalogues.

Rather than this patchwork of incomplete sources, what the world needs is a unified system of space traffic management. Through this, spacefaring nations and companies could agree to share more of their tracking data and cooperate to make space safer. This might require the creation of a new global regime, such as an international convention, through which rules and technical standards could be organized. One analogy is the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations agency that coordinates global telecommunications issues such as who can transmit in which parts of the radio spectrum.

It won’t be easy to create such a system for space traffic. For it to succeed, questions of safety (such as avoiding smashing up a satellite) will need to be disentangled from questions of security (such as whether that satellite is spying on another nation) so that countries can be assured that participating in such an effort would not compromise national security. Countries could, for instance, share information about the location of a satellite without sharing details of its capabilities or purpose for being in space.

How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images

One near-term move that would help would be for the United States to complete a planned shift of responsibility for the Space-Track.org catalogue from the military to the civilian Department of Commerce. Because this catalogue has historically been the most widely used around the world, shifting it to a civilian agency could start to defuse geopolitical tensions and so improve global efforts to manage space debris. It might one day feed into a global space-traffic agreement between nations; even the nascent space superpower China would have a big incentive to participate, despite rivalries with the United States. The transition was called for in a 2018 US presidential directive that recognizes that companies are taking over from national governments as the dominant players in space, but it has yet to occur, in part because Congress has not allocated the necessary funds.

On 25 August, the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space will meet to discuss a range of topics related to international cooperation in space. The UN is the right forum through which spacefaring nations can work together to establish norms for responsible space behaviour, and that should include how the world can track objects to make space safer. It should continue recent work it has been doing emphasizing space as a secure and sustainable environment, which at least brings countries such as the United States and China into the same conversation.

Basic research has a role, too: innovations such as techniques to track and display the locations of orbiting objects in real time, and artificial intelligence to help automate debris-avoidance manoeuvres, could bolster any global effort to monitor and regulate space.

If governments and companies around the world do not take urgent action to work together to make space safer, they will one day face a catastrophic collision that knocks out one or more satellites key to their safety, economic well-being or both. Space is a global commons and a global resource. A global organization responsible for — and capable of — managing the flow of space traffic is long overdue.

Nature 596, 163 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02167-5

Hidden Bacterial Hairs Power Nature’s “Electric Grid” – A Global Web of Bacteria-Generated Nanowires

By YALE UNIVERSITY SEPTEMBER 2, 2021

Two proteins within buried bacteria, lacking oxygen, pump out nanowires, which essentially “exhale” electrons. Scientists are seeking to use this natural electrical grid to generate electricity, new biofuels and even self-healing electronic components. Credit: Nikhil Malvankar/Yale University

A hair-like protein hidden inside bacteria serves as a sort of on-off switch for nature’s “electric grid,” a global web of bacteria-generated nanowires that permeates all oxygen-less soil and deep ocean beds, Yale researchers report in the journal Nature. “The ground beneath our feet, the entire globe, is electrically wired,” said Nikhil Malvankar, assistant professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at the Microbial Sciences Institute at Yale’s West Campus and senior author of the paper. “These previously hidden bacterial hairs are the molecular switch controlling the release of nanowires that make up nature’s electrical grid.”

Almost all living things breathe oxygen to get rid of excess electrons when converting nutrients into energy. Without access to oxygen, however, soil bacteria living deep under oceans or buried underground over billions of years have developed a way to respire by “breathing minerals,” like snorkeling, through tiny protein filaments called nanowires.

Two proteins within buried bacteria, lacking oxygen, pump out nanowires, which essentially “exhale” electrons. Scientists are seeking to use this natural electrical grid to generate electricity, new biofuels and even self-healing electronic components.

Two proteins within buried bacteria, lacking oxygen, pump out nanowires, which essentially “exhale” electrons. Scientists are seeking to use this natural electrical grid to generate electricity, new biofuels and even self-healing electronic components.

Just how these soil bacteria use nanowires to exhale electricity, however, has remained a mystery. Since 2005, scientists had thought that the nanowires are made up of a protein called “pili” (“hair” in Latin) that many bacteria show on their surface. However, in research published 2019 and 2020, a team led by Malvankar showed that nanowires are made of entirely different proteins. “This was a surprise to everyone in the field, calling into question thousands of publications about pili,” Malvankar said.

For the new study, graduate students Yangqi Gu and Vishok Srikanth used cryo-electron microscopy to reveal that this pili structure is made up of two proteins And instead of serving as nanowires themselves, pili remain hidden inside the bacteria and act like pistons, thrusting the nanowires into the environment. Previously nobody had suspected such a structure.

Understanding how bacteria create nanowires will allow scientists to tailor bacteria to perform a host of functions — from combatting pathogenic infections or biohazard waste to creating living electrical circuits, the authors say. It will also assist scientists seeking to use bacteria to generate electricity, create biofuels, and even develop self-repairing electronics.

Reference: “Structure of Geobacter pili reveals secretory rather than nanowire behaviour” by Yangqi Gu, Vishok Srikanth, Aldo I. Salazar-Morales, Ruchi Jain, J. Patrick O’Brien, Sophia M. Yi, Rajesh Kumar Soni, Fadel A. Samatey, Sibel Ebru Yalcin and Nikhil S. Malvankar, 1 September 2021, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03857-w

Other authors are Aldo Salazar-Morales, Ruchi Jain, Patrick O’Brien, Sophia Yi, Fadel A. Samatey, and Sibel Ebru Yalcin, all from Yale, as well as Rajesh Soni from Columbia University.

AFGHANISTAN
HOW TURF WARS MUCKED UP AMERICA’S EXIT FROM AFGHANISTAN

In July, at Antony Blinken’s State Department, bureaucratic decisions affecting the Afghan withdrawal, one insider said, were “slightly more organized than a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.”

LONG READ
BY ADAM CIRALSKY

AUGUST 30, 2021

U.S. soldiers board an Army Chinook transport helicopter in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan in 2008. BY JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES.


On the afternoon of July 9, 2021, William Walters rode an elevator to the seventh floor of the State Department’s Harry S. Truman Building. Passing a praetorian guard of aides, assistants, and diplomatic security agents, he entered the wood-paneled sanctum of his boss, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. The visit was professional, personal, and pressing.

A physician and a veteran of the Army’s most elite special operations unit, “Doc” Walters headed up Operational Medicine, or OpMed—the State Department’s little-known expeditionary force that has helped organize and carry out daring rescues of U.S. officials, American citizens, and foreign nationals imperiled overseas. Created in 2013, after the deadly siege of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Walters’s directorate had been a turnkey solution for overseas operations at times when the proverbial shit hit the fan. Indeed, only a few months before, Blinken had thrown his public support behind OpMed, telling Vanity Fair—in a May story on Walters’s team—that the unit was a “lifeline for the Department of State and the American people. Though perhaps lesser known outside of the Department, it’s vital to our operations. That’s because OpMed provides the platform and personnel to save American lives around the world, especially in times of crisis.”

But with a potential Afghan crisis on the horizon, OpMed was in limbo. There had been plans in the offing to elevate its status at Foggy Bottom with an expansive new title, befitting its robust mission: the Bureau of Contingency and Crisis Response (CCR). Then in July, everything changed. Blinken approved a recommendation against upgrading OpMed into a bureau. A unit distinguished by its ability to blow through bureaucratic wickets would instead be forced to play “Mother May I,” answering to a series of administrators: a director, an acting undersecretary, and on up to the deputy secretary for management and resources (DMR). To outsiders, this might seem like a low-stakes game of Jenga in reverse. But the move, which blindsided many, appeared to have profound consequences.


WATCH NOW:

Presidential Historian Reviews Presidents in Film & TV, from 'Lincoln' to 'The Comey Rule'


Walters, who in his role also served as an official physician to the secretary of state, was alone with Blinken. Temperamentally adverse to small talk, Walters got right to the point. “I am resigning,” he said, according to three State Department sources with knowledge of the encounter. He explained that, in his view, Blinken’s decision not to move forward with the establishment of the CCR bureau, which Walters had been slated to lead, was a mistake. Given simmering tensions in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Walters said, he believed that throwing out plans for the new unit and thereby marginalizing OpMed would impact State’s ability to respond to threats to U.S. diplomats and citizens abroad. “Sir, you deserve to have leaders who can get behind the decisions you make. I can’t do that. So I’m leaving.”


Blinken, these sources say, was exceedingly polite. He inquired about Walters’s future plans. But he did not defend his CCR decision so much as explain it away, purportedly telling Walters he had delegated the matter down to his deputy, Brian McKeon. (A higher-up at State characterized the meeting as extremely cordial and said that Walters did not make any appeals.) The doctor and patient parted ways, and Walters left the building—an exit that in hindsight might have hampered the State Department’s ability to properly prepare for what both men feared might be coming in Afghanistan.

America’s chaotic departure from Afghanistan was not unforeseeable. Nor was it an intelligence failure—that old chestnut often used to absolve leaders of culpability. Instead, the Biden administration’s tumultuous exit from the war-torn country seems to have been the result of incremental and baffling bureaucratic decisions.

Throughout the summer, I had been fielding Cassandra-like calls from U.S. officials. They warned of impending doom in Afghanistan. They spoke of scenarios in which the Taliban, on the eve of President Joseph Biden’s mandated pullout, might crater the runway at Hamid Karzai International Airport and create humanitarian and security disasters. It sounded far-fetched. Then again, maybe I was biased. After working in the intelligence community as a young attorney and reporting on national security issues for 20 years, I still believed the U.S. government had the wits and wherewithal to ensure that its decades-long Afghan misadventure would end with a whimper, not a bang. So while I discussed the conversations with my editors, I did not write about them, not wanting to sound alarmist.

Yet what was most striking to me about these summer exchanges was where the blame seemed to land: at the foot of State Department leaders, whom the callers insisted were undermining contingency planning and shirking their legal responsibility—as enumerated by statute and executive order—to protect, and evacuate as necessary, U.S. posts and personnel as well as American citizens abroad. Instead, said one senior official, State was “pressing the DOD easy button”—shorthand for shoveling State’s problems onto the plate of the Department of Defense. This individual described the decision-making process at Foggy Bottom as being plagued by “pathologic optimism.” But as the days and weeks wore on, several other State Department sources would explain that the problem came down to hubris. Eliminating CCR and degrading OpMed, without clearly defined alternatives, was evidence, they said, of meta-ignorance (known in psychology circles as the Dunning-Kruger effect); America’s diplomats, in the view of these insiders, were ignorant of their own ignorance.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives to the Capitol Visitor Center to brief members of Congress on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan on Tuesday, August 24, 2021.

 BY TOM WILLIAMS/CQ ROLL CALL/GETTY IMAGES.

And so it would come to pass. “We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit,” President Biden had said when he stepped up to the podium in the White House Treaty Room on April 14, 2021, to announce he was bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan by late summer. “We’ll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely.” True, the American government, in recent days, has arranged for the emergency evacuation of some 120,000 people, an impressive feat. Moreover, even as ISIS terror attacks claimed the lives of 13 members of the U.S. military and more than 110 Afghan civilians last week, the Biden administration has said it is determined to honor its pledge to extract American forces from an unpopular and devastating conflict. But what happened at the State Department in the months leading up to the fall of Kabul seems to have undermined Biden’s promise back in April. It appears to have involved self-sabotage, bureaucratic infighting, and disjointed planning with, at times, an apparent lack of urgency. This account is based on a review of sensitive memos, emails, texts, calendar entries, audio recordings, situation reports, and intelligence threat summaries—as well as interviews with 16 current and former officials who had a ringside seat to the internecine battles that marred the end of America’s longest war.

This past spring, I got to know Doc Walters and the OpMed team, who were at the forefront of the State Department’s efforts to help protect and repatriate Americans across the globe on very short notice and under the most trying of circumstances. I traveled with their dynamic and diverse squad of doctors, scientists, logisticians, and veteran Special Forces medics in the final phase of Operation Icebox, a Herculean undertaking that involved flying 574,000 miles on 26 separate aircraft to 212 airports to supply more than 190,000 COVID vaccine doses to 257 U.S. diplomatic posts.

The unit had just come off a pandemic year in which, as Blinken put it, “OpMed was integral to our evacuation and repatriation of 100,000 Americans to the United States as countries began locking down their borders.” And yet, for OpMed, COVID was almost a side mission. Its stock and trade had been dispatching “medics with guns” to posts at risk of being attacked; embedding with rapid-reaction forces in response to life-threatening incidents worldwide; and supplying mass-casualty triage gear and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) countermeasures to far-flung locations.

Inside the Secretive Government Unit Saving American Lives Around the World

So with a deadline looming to leave Afghanistan, the State Department certainly had a well-seasoned response force—with unique aviation and logistics capabilities—at the ready.

The events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, which rocked the national security establishment, made the creation of a group like OpMed an imperative. Out of the investigations that followed, some key findings emerged. First, Pentagon officials had warned their counterparts at State about the “tyranny of distance” in Libya and other parts of North Africa. Second, CIA medics on the scene in Benghazi had played an indispensable role in saving the lives of severely wounded diplomatic security personnel. Finally, an interagency panel of experts concluded that, in light of the “grossly inadequate” response time to evacuate the injured, “State must ensure it has the capability to rapidly deploy crisis responders and evacuate […] personnel in harm’s way.” It didn’t come as a surprise, then, that the Obama administration, in 2013, authorized this new State Department directorate.

Threats to America’s posts and people abroad are hardly an aberration. “Since the 1960s, terrorists have increasingly targeted diplomats as a high-profile means of advancing their ideology,” concluded an independent panel that in 2018 examined best practices for protective medicine in high-risk, high-threat diplomatic engagements. “The ‘symbolic identity’ and ‘representative character’ of U.S diplomats means that they are ‘not only at the frontline of the political battle but also directly in the firing line of terrorists seeking to undermine or derail the counter-terrorism process itself.’” Historians still recount the tragedies that befell U.S. diplomats, spies, and support staff in Saigon (1975), Tehran (1979), Beirut (1983), Nairobi and Dar es Salaam (1998), Benghazi, and elsewhere. In truth, from 1998 to 2016 there were more than 370 “significant attacks”—128 of which resulted in casualties.

In the past two years alone, according to several internal State Department documents, OpMed helped evacuate U.S. embassies in Caracas, Venezuela (March 2019) and La Paz, Bolivia (November 2019) and pre-positioned assets and personnel in anticipation of revenge attacks on our embassy in Beirut following the Trump-ordered assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in 2020. In each of those cases, State convened a task force—its traditional mechanism for responding to a crisis.

OpMed’s former managing director William Walters boarding a flight to oversee vaccine distribution in March 2021.

BY ADAM CIRALSKY.

Though it was founded during Obama’s second term, OpMed found its footing during the pandemic, much of which coincided with Trump’s frenzied final year in office. Walters and his teams accepted missions that others did not want or were ill-equipped to handle. The unit’s relentless tempo throughout 2020, however, exposed systemic weaknesses within the State Department, where foreign service officers could be less than diplomatic when they sensed someone might be infringing on their territory or pushing them outside of their comfort zone. Then secretary of state Mike Pompeo—a West Point grad and former CIA director—championed OpMed’s work even though the office was established on Hillary Clinton’s watch, drew Trump’s ire (both before and after he became president), and had no political appointees in its ranks, which exposed OpMed to allegations that it was staffed by Deep Staters.

In September of that year, Pompeo approved the elevation of OpMed from a directorate to a bureau. As detailed in official documents, Pompeo’s aim in creating the new CCR was to “synchronize Department capabilities including aviation, logistics, and medical support to disasters abroad, both natural and man-made, including the outbreak of infectious disease.” According to sources close to the matter, Pompeo (who declined to comment for this article) was also apparently hoping to end bureaucratic skirmishes and foot-dragging among those at State who believed that crisis planning can create self-fulfilling prophecies. This sentiment was certainly on display this summer with Afghanistan. “The second you stand up a task force and imply that we’re starting to plan for evacuation is the second you’re eroding the confidence of the government in Kabul that we were trying to support,” a senior State Department official told me this week in trying to explain, in part, why he and his colleagues waited until mid-August to create a task force fully focused on evacuating embassy personnel and other American citizens. “We were constantly having to balance our policy imperatives with the other policy objectives.”

CCR was a product of the times, literally growing out of the State Department’s response to the pandemic, according to Pompeo deputy Stephen Biegun. He recalled that in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, State had to “beg, borrow and practically steal” to repatriate Americans from every corner of the globe. “We used every asset, every aircraft, every mode of transportation available to us. We built a system that started with the evacuation of our diplomats and U.S. citizens in Hubei province of China, but ultimately culminated in the returning of more than 100,000 Americans.” The system, to his mind, worked and its codification and expansion seemed a logical next step.

The move to make OpMed a bureau continued right up until Trump left office. An Executive Resources Board met and approved establishing the position of CCR coordinator as well as Doc Walters’s promotion to the civil service’s senior executive ranks. An action memo, which Pompeo approved on January 15, describes Walters’s new role as follows, “The CCR coordinator is an assistant secretary-equivalent position responsible for the development, resourcing, deployment, maintenance, and oversight of the Department’s medical, aviation, and logistics support capabilities to address contingency planning and crisis preparedness and response in accordance with applicable laws and Presidential policy in those instances where traditional mechanisms are not available or cannot address the need.”

Another source close to Pompeo put it this way, “We needed to have a world-class organization that was ‘fit for purpose.’ What we had been doing previously was playing pickup games. What the secretary recognized is [that] if we’re going to be agile and have the ability to proactively respond...we've got to have a unit that could do operational planning and contingency scenarios and have the right capabilities and skill set, all in one, so that we can go to them when the decision is made and they can execute the hell out of it and we we can do it well.” Pompeo, said the source, wanted to eliminate silos and create an outfit with “a clear chain of command on who’s got the operational execution.”

On January 26, Blinken was confirmed by the Senate as the new secretary of state. And one of his early acts was to order a reassessment of the CCR edict, pending what one inside source described as a “holistic look back.” Diplo-speak aside, the job fell to Brian McKeon, Blinken’s deputy for management and resources (DMR), to conduct a 30-day review that began on April 14 but wound up dragging into July.

The writing was on the wall, according to State and congressional sources: OpMed, though an Obama brainchild, had somehow been tainted by its promotion under Team Trump, whose secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, had not exactly been welcomed with open arms by either Team Biden or the State Department’s rank and file. What’s more, to some in the foreign service, Doc Walters and his team were loose cannons who almost revelled in defying the buttoned-up veneer that diplomats tend to project.


The decision surprised some of those on Pompeo’s former team, who did not feel that centralizing State’s crisis planning and response capabilities had been controversial or partisan. Once McKeon took office, he reached out to Brian Bulatao, an undersecretary for management under Pompeo. Bulatao appealed to him, saying that of all the things McKeon might prioritize in his new role, two units were vital to protect. One was the Center for Analytics, which leverages data to help with diplomacy. The other was CCR. “CCR needs to endure,” Bulatao pleaded, according to a source familiar with the conversation. “There are those in the building that are going to tell you that it’s not necessary, that it’s redundant because they’re envious of [OpMed’s] capabilities and they want to protect their turf. But they don’t know how to do it [themselves].”

Blinken’s endorsement of McKeon’s CCR recommendation not only scuttled OpMed’s elevation to a bureau, but soon would parcel out its capabilities to other stakeholders at State. The new plan was for OpMed—which had been run with a fair amount of autonomy—to report up to Dr. Larry Padget, director of the Bureau of Medical Services (MED). Blinken was well within his rights to make the move and to run the department as he saw fit. But the optics of returning State to an earlier incarnation—and putting the Pentagon in the position of having to potentially risk soldiers’ lives to rescue American diplomats, citizens, and others—has since become a magnet for controversy. As one senior participant in the CCR process lamented, “If State had put half as much energy into evacuation planning for Afghanistan as it put into cratering OpMed and abolishing a bureau devoted to contingency planning and crisis response, maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

Some at the top echelons of the State Department don’t see it this way at all. Ned Price, Blinken’s spokesperson, stressed to Vanity Fair that the CCR bureau was never really greenlit in the first place. What’s more, he said, “The new bureau was not proposed to introduce any new capabilities, and questions were raised at the time”—meaning at the end of Trump’s and Pompeo’s time in office—“both internally as well as by Republican and Democratic Members of Congress about whether a new bureau was the right approach.” Despite these concerns, Price explained, “then-Secretary Pompeo decided to proceed with [CCR’s] establishment.”

Once Biden and his team took office, however, “Secretary Blinken,” according to Price, elected to conduct a review of “whether it was in the Department’s interest to proceed with that course of action.” The verdict? “A new bureau was not the right approach. Consistent with that finding, the Secretary decided to discontinue the proposed bureau.”

A senior source within State added that there was a judgment from leadership at Foggy Bottom and on the Hill that the establishment of what he termed a redundant bureau would potentially sap manpower and resources from State’s existing global emergency medical response structure and its medical care systems for its diplomats. This same source went on to say, in a more personal vein, that while Doc Walters may have fancied himself as having a broader mission, he and his office were primarily focused on medevac capabilities, not on full-on evacuations. The notion that the unit would have been overseeing the Kabul evacuation, the source claimed, was absurd on its face.

Some in Congress hold a distinctly different view about these matters. Texas representative Michael McCaul, the lead Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Vanity Fair this week, “It is appalling that Secretary Blinken dissolved the bureau at the very time it was most needed. After the president made his decision to withdraw troops, it should have been all hands on deck from Day One. The [State] Department’s contingency planners and crises managers should have been consulted from the get-go and utilized at every juncture.

By Adam Ciralsky.AN OPMED TEAM PREPARING ULTRA-LOW TEMPERATURE (ULT) FREEZERS FOR OPERATION ICEBOX. DR. TROY GLASSMAN, JIMMY ALGARIN, DR. WILLIAM WALTERS, SAMUEL BUNCH, MATTHEW FERREIRA, KATRINA MAYES, AND TAYLOR BUNCH.

“Call it OpMed, or CCR, or whatever you want,” McCaul continued, “the point is the Department had these people, and their experience was a huge asset. We chose not to draw upon them until it was almost too late—after the Taliban had overrun the country, and tens of thousands of people had to be evacuated in a matter of days. We should have started sooner, and we should have used our A-team. The tragedy we’ve seen unfold—people stranded, American lives lost—reflects…disorganization, mismanagement, and, worst of all, utter neglect.”

Stephen Biegun, deputy secretary of state under Pompeo, wondered why Blinken and the State Department insisted on starting from scratch. “I would have thought that the wisdom of this initiative might have been attractive to the Biden team. And the Biden team is very good.” Of Brian McKeon, he noted, “He and I worked together for many years on Capitol Hill and I have a huge respect for him. But I think this is kind of what happens in an administration. They get overwhelmed first with the initial wave of responsibility staffing up and then something like Afghanistan falls on them—or this one was actually by choice to make a policy decision like Afghanistan and [they] end up being caught flat-footed.”

OpMed, in Biegun’s view, had had a track record of arranging “incredibly successful” COVID-related airlifts. “A year ago, we had built the same thing” required in Afghanistan, essentially. But the incoming Blinken team, he said, seemed like it “forgot” it had this capability in-house already and wanted to begin afresh: “It was like the U.S. government had never done this before.” Biegun argued for a wholesale reassessment, “not from a political perspective but from a managerial perspective…. I sure hope they take a long, hard look at whether or not we have to keep reinventing the wheel. It’s time for the State Department to have a permanent crisis and contingency response capacity. This is not going to be the last time we have a crisis…. It would save us all a lot of grief and be [of] service to American foreign policy and especially to the American people.”

To CCR or not to CCR? The question was front-of-mind on August 20—five days after the fall of Kabul—when all 23 Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) signed a letter to Secretary Blinken, as they put it, “to condemn in the strongest terms the Department’s senior leadership team in its dereliction of duty regarding Afghanistan,” including the decision “to dissolve the Bureau of Contingency and Crisis Response, which could have provided logistical support with Afghanistan.”

In their letter, the HFAC members asked Blinken whether State would “reconsider its upcoming Congressional Notification dissolving [CCR],” inquiring about who was “currently responsible for aviation, logistics, and medical support to crisis response operations,” and singling out the respective roles and responsibilities of McKeon and Undersecretary for Management Carol Perez.

To some, the letter read like a partisan pile-on. And had the Taliban not taken over city after city, had Afghan government forces not disintegrated, and had the withdrawal been pulled off without a hitch, the CCR decision would have likely been a non-issue. But that didn’t happen. It became evident to many that the eleventh-hour scramble to airlift people, the mayhem at the airports, and the stranding of hundreds of Afghan allies, might have been avoided had there been solid plans in place in the spring and summer.

Brian McKeon broke the news to Walters at a meeting on July 8: There would be no new bureau after all. According to three sources who received a readout of the exchange, upon hearing of CCR’s demise and OpMed’s new management structure, Walters is said to have warned McKeon, “You’re going to get your boss fired.” (Another source with knowledge of the meeting refuted the contention that Walters made such a statement.)

The damage from this byzantine imbroglio might have been contained were it not for the fact that the world was still turning. Haiti and Lebanon were in turmoil and the United States had less than two months to remove its forces from Afghanistan. The following week, on July 14, Dr. Larry Padget, the director of the Bureau of Medical Services who by then had OpMed under his direct command, convened a town hall, in part to address the elephant in the room: how OpMed’s missions—including its life-saving aviation, expeditionary medicine, and logistics sub-programs—would be managed moving forward. The day before, diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, en masse, sent a warning to Blinken—via the department’s dissent channel—that the Taliban’s advance was imminent and Afghan forces might collapse.

State, however, was already on notice about the emerging threat. In fact, at a June 30 meeting of the Afghanistan Non-Combatant Evacuation (NEO) Working Group—according to sources familiar with its operations and a review of contemporaneous notes—conversation turned to how the department might evacuate an estimated 25,000 Americans and Afghans eligible for U.S. visas. When someone from OpMed weighed in and presented a back-of-the-napkin plan to charter 100 flights over 25 days, the response, according to two sources at State, was tepid—there needed to be further discussion and additional working groups. “Whenever OpMed offered options for evacuating AmCits and SIVs, they were told to sit in the corner and color,” said a source whose descriptions of meetings in June, July, and August was confirmed by three others, “It was, ‘We’ll let you know when we need you. In the meantime, be quiet.’”

But OpMed did not stay quiet. In May, Walters, according to two knowledgeable insiders, began using his biweekly briefings with Undersecretary Perez to highlight the need to ramp up contingency planning for Afghanistan. (A senior State Department official claimed that those meetings were more focused on medevac options for Afghanistan as opposed to large-scale evacuations.)

Meanwhile, the Department of Defense had been honing its own contingency plans, starting last winter. Throughout the spring and summer, officials hosted so-called tabletop exercises—with representatives from State and other departments—to war-game out myriad responses, including a non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO). The Pentagon’s priorities, however, were different from State’s: Before they could safely evacuate diplomats and people associated with the embassy, for instance, the military, under President Biden’s timetable, first had to evacuate its troops.

A senior national security figure outside the State Department witnessed the interagency process play out over the summer. In his view, there was an odd resistance or reluctance on the part of State to fully engage in prepping for worst-case scenarios should things turn ugly in Afghanistan: “There was a clear lack of urgency by the Department of State. DOD got pushback from State. I can confirm that DOD told State that they needed more contingency planning and needed to do so earlier.”

A top Pentagon planner I spoke to went even further, spreading the blame across the board: “It didn't take high-fidelity intelligence to know that the Afghan national security forces were deteriorating as the Taliban were quickly overwhelming both the forces and the civilian population throughout Afghanistan. The State Department very much wanted to run this and control it, and then at some point it kind of became clear that it was very much over their head.” The source said that throughout the process of planning for the U.S. withdrawal, political considerations trumped operational imperatives. “There was a ‘sunk cost’ fallacy—there was [so] much invested in the Afghan people, the Afghan security forces, and the blood and treasure and munitions and capabilities that it was kind of a ‘too big to fail’ mindset. So I think that’s why the contingency planning wasn’t quite there, because it was a little bit antithetical to suggest that the national security forces would not be able to withhold the coming onslaught of the Taliban.”

This official insisted that a sort of willful “blindness” entered the equation and had ramifications beyond the evacuations from Kabul airport. In particular, he cited the decision to abandon Bagram air field (vital for staging U.S. military maneuvers, possible evacuations, and reprisals in case things went south) and the failure to mitigate the loss of high-end military munitions and hardware (now in Taliban hands) as “fundamental errors of strategy that any general officer in the military knows not to make that were made [anyway] and had to be political decisions and not military ones.”

A senior State Department official, in contrast, expressed no second thoughts about how things played out. He told Vanity Fair about Operation Allies Refuge, whose focus had been on Afghans eligible for exit visas: “During the course of the spring and summer, we were looking every day—as we watched the pace of this retrograde by the U.S. military and the military campaign of the Taliban—[at] what policy and decisions we needed to make...including bringing out special immigrant visa (SIV) holders. And as the Taliban campaign continued to march forward [we had] to look very closely all the time at the size and scope of our footprint at the United States embassy in Kabul…. The State Department [had been] warning Americans for 20 years that they shouldn’t be traveling to Afghanistan because of the danger. We effectuated these warnings that people should get out of the country over the course of the last seven months on a biweekly basis.”
From the Archive: Into the Valley of Death

But by the summer, the Taliban accelerated its advance and Afghan government forces began retreating at an alarming rate. As a result, U.S. personnel were left extremely vulnerable. “On August 14,” he said, describing the Pentagon-led operation, “when the decision was made to bug out of the American embassy in Kabul, we got out of the embassy and out to the airport in 48 hours, and the U.S. forces came in over that weekend and buttoned down the airport in about 72 hours. All of that because we had good advance plans. We had forces postured in the [Persian] Gulf that enabled us to get those forces there quickly.”

Moreover, the official noted, “Even if the CCR bureau existed, we would have had this task force and CCR would not have been leading the department’s response right now …. Even though this proposed bureau has the word[s] ‘crisis response’ in its title, the crisis response functions in the State Department are managed by a unit under the State Department operations center and often leads to, indeed in this case, the establishment of a cross-department and interagency task force, in which we have currently hundreds of people working 24/7 on this task force with different units focusing on different elements.”

When asked why the department waited until Kabul was on the verge of falling, on August 14, to establish that very task force, the official answered, “Task forces are to manage immediate crisis situations.” He then elaborated, “The assessments from the part of our government that does these assessments was that there would certainly be a civil war, it was likely that the Taliban would come out on top at the end of it, but it was going to be a year or 18 months was the initial expectation.”

But back at that July 14, 2021 town hall session—about seven weeks ago—those purportedly “good advance plans” were not on display.

On that day, the State Department’s Larry Padget addressed how contingency planning would be handled in the absence of a Bureau of Contingency and Crisis Response and in the wake of Walters’s resignation. There were no blinking lights. Nor was there an apparent sense of urgency and imminent threat. Attendees submitted questions and the meeting was recorded via Microsoft Teams. According to two sources who were present and familiar with the aftermath, when some who could not attend later asked to see the video, they were informed that it had been deleted. (Padget, approached through official State Department channels, did not respond to questions.)

Still, nerves were frayed, and some people used their phones to capture bootleg audio. I listened to one such recording. And as I did, I had to wonder if State leadership—Blinken, McKeon, Perez, and Padget—had thoroughly considered the downstream effects their decision-making might have on morale, on personnel, and most importantly, on their own ability to respond to the brewing crisis in Afghanistan.

Twenty-seven questions were posed in advance. Padget, however, addressed few of them directly. Considering their tenor and substance, it is not hard to see why:
What are MED’s current and planned actions that are being taken to prepare for the next international crisis or pandemic? A good example would be contingency planning for Kabul.

On April 22, 2021, in accordance with Presidential Policy Directive 40, thirty Mission Essential Functions [MEFs] were identified for the State Department. [One of them is] to “Protect, provide assistance to, evacuate U.S. Citizens abroad.” How does MED justify that OpMed is better able to support this MEF when OpMed provided justification that they are better able to support as CCR?

Why does MED believe some [OpMed] functions are best serviced through [the Bureau of Administration]? For example, having an internal aviation asset has been crucial throughout the pandemic. We were able to conduct countless biocontainment medevac’s, deliver testing capabilities and supplies directly to our posts, repatriate several thousand Americans and residents, deliver vaccines to all posts without incident, loss or issue. When you “own” the contract you have visibility on all aspects of an aviation operation—cradle to grave.

To be fair, Padget did take questions in the room. But, given the pandemonium and deaths on the ground in Kabul a month later, some of his answers do not age well. In fact, two sources present at the town hall that day say it confirmed their worst fears: that the State Department, for whatever reason, was severing the “lifeline” as Blinken had called it, that could “save American lives around the world, especially in times of crisis.” After praising OpMed for its hard work in carrying out difficult missions, Padget conceded, “I’ll confess to you that over the last few years, and especially since I have been Chief Medical Officer, I’ve not had a lot to do with [OpMed].... The first thing I want to say to you is a lot of your programs and sub-programs, I have a cursory, superficial understanding of it, but I don’t have an in-depth understanding.”

A few minutes later, he asked Tiffany Reeser to say a few words. Padget described her as “high up” in the department and someone who had been detailed to his office after stints with the brass on the seventh floor. She was nothing if not candid. “I think there was an impression, given [Blinken’s] decision, with [McKeon’s] recommendation,” she asserted, “that there was going to be a 25-point plan dropped on all of us for how this decision was going to be implemented. That’s not the case. This is, I would say, slightly more organized than a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.”

Embedding With Pentagon Leadership in Trump’s Chaotic Last Week

Manmeet Thind, an attorney who works with OpMed, spoke up too. She attributed OpMed’s success to its ability to house logistics, crisis response, aviation, and medical support under one roof. Distributing those responsibilities to different bureaus in the department, she warned, would have consequences: “Now, suddenly, you have more layers of bureaucracy, and as we all know, that’s going to slow response. And at the end of the day, that’s going to affect lives.”

Padget’s response at the July meeting suggests that the decision not to greenlight CCR may not have been exactly methodical. “I ask for some grace and forgiveness for not having a full program of how I see these [aviation and logistics] sub-programs and how things are going to work with the reintegration. Frankly, besides the [CCR] decision and a pretty rapid white paper going out to [McKeon], the focus of the front office and other things have been putting out other fires…so the attention that we pay for future planning and how things fit was a pretty rapid response on a pretty rapid turnaround on this. I don’t know how well thought-out it was, and it needs to be reconsidered.”

He may be onto something. The September 18, 2020 memo establishing CCR was drafted by Doc Walters, approved by McKeon’s predecessor, Bulatao, signed three days later by Pompeo, and cleared by 32 people in more than 12 different bureaus and offices—a number of them career civil servants and foreign service officers. One of those offering approval, according to the document, was none other than Larry Padget.

As late as Thursday, August 12, 2021 (the day the Taliban seized Kandahar and other provincial capitals), Blinken’s lieutenants still had not informed Congress, as required by law, of the secretary’s decision not to proceed with CCR. In fact, the State Department team was still noodling with a draft congressional notification entitled “Abolishment of the Bureau of Contingency and Crisis Response.” A week later, on August 19, State’s Ned Price would tell reporters, in a sort of semantic jujitsu, that CCR was never actually created, which begs the question: Why have Price’s colleagues at State been preparing to notify Congress of a decision to “abolish” something that never existed?

The academic debate over CCR’s existence, however, obscures a far more elemental issue, which, at this date, remains unresolved: Why did Antony Blinken and his lieutenants rejigger and possibly degrade State’s in-house crisis planning and response capabilities on the eve of ending the longest war in American history?

When asked if the department’s Afghan planning could have been better conceived and executed—and organized earlier—a senior source within state was unapologetic, “I think whenever the United States government and military decided to withdraw from Afghanistan, it was going to be messy. There’s no clean way for a civil war to end in the circumstance that we’re seeing now.”

Climate Change Is Pushing Fires to Higher Ground

By NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY SEPTEMBER 4, 2021

January 1, 1984 – December 31, 2017

Wildfires in the western United States have been spreading to higher elevations due to warmer and drier conditions.

Scientists have known for decades that climate change makes wildfires more common, larger, and more intense. Now an international team of scientists has demonstrated a new connection between fires and global warming. Using data from Landsat satellites, they discovered that wildfires in the western United States have been spreading to higher elevations due to warmer and drier conditions that are clearly linked to climate change.

Historically, forest fires have been rare in high-elevation areas—at least 8,200 feet (2,500 meters) above sea level. But when McGill University scientist Mohammad Reza Alizadeh and colleagues studied fires that occurred in the West between 1984 and 2017, they found blazes moving to higher ground at a rate of 25 feet (7.6 meters) per year.

Fires are now burning higher up on hillsides and mountainsides because areas that used to be too wet to burn are now drier due to warmer temperatures and earlier snowmelt. The study also showed that drier air—which makes vegetation dry out and burn more easily—is moving upward at a rate of about 29 feet (8.9 meters) each year. The researchers estimated that an additional 31,500 square miles (81,500 square kilometers) of the mountainous U.S. West are now more vulnerable to fires compared to 1984.

The map above illustrates where and how much fires have moved upslope in the western United States since 1984, according to the study by Alizadeh and colleagues. Shades of yellow, orange, and red show the intensity of the elevation gain by mountain range.

“Our research would not have been possible if it were not for decades of reliable Landsat data to help us look back in time,” said Alizadeh. “We hope these findings will encourage people to not only mitigate the effects of increased wildfire activity, but also to limit emissions and curb global warming.”

To evaluate fire characteristics in high-elevation regions, the researchers combined two Landsat-derived data sets—one that showed the locations of moderate to severe fires and one that displayed forest cover—with a digital elevation model. By overlaying these datasets, the team was able to analyze trends in forest fire elevation for different regions with similar ecological traits. They also compared their findings with measurements of vapor pressure (a measure of moisture in the air) and found a strong link between aridity and the elevation and size of forest fires.

The impacts of such high-elevation fires are numerous. Many mountain ranges serve as “water towers” for the western U.S.: snow accumulates on mountaintops each winter and then melts and runs down to river valleys as a summer water source. Fires can change how snow accumulates and melts, shifting when it is available in downstream reservoirs and rivers. That’s a problem for more than 60 million people in the western US who rely on this water source. Fire debris, ash, and chemical retardants also can pollute the water, reducing its quality for drinking.

High-elevation fires are also bad news for species native to those areas because the much of the plant life is not fire-adapted and may grow back differently, as a 2020 paper suggested. Streams near high-elevation fires can also become much warmer than those in similar areas without fires. Both conditions threaten native animals and plants that depend on cooler water and air.

Finally, many towns and cities located at high elevations are not necessarily accustomed to the threat of wildfires. “Areas in Canada and the western U.S. are experiencing droughts and heat waves, which increase the risk of fires,” said Mojtaba Sadegh, an assistant professor at Boise State University and a co-author of the paper. “This should raise the alarm for people to think more about what the future will look like if global warming continues at the same rate.”

“Moving forward, we can implement adapted forest management practices, create more fire-resilient communities, and use tactics like controlled burns,” Sadegh said. ”But because the root cause is climate change, the most important path forward is to prevent further degradation and warming, which requires both individual and collective action.”

NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using data from Alizadeh et al. (2021). Story by Ashley Balzer, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, with Mike Carlowicz.

Fossil fuels’ price boom isn’t the victory it might seem

A liquefied natural gas (LNG) tanker is tugged towards a thermal power station. 

(REUTERS)

Updated: 06 Sep 2021

Bloomberg

Commodity prices don’t rise and fall based on the level of demand itself, but rather as a result of the mismatch between demand and supply

From the price action, you’d think that fossil fuels are back in business.

Since breaking above $100 a metric ton in May, the price of coal at Australia’s Newcastle port — a benchmark for Asia, which consumes about three-quarters of the world’s soot — has gone almost vertical, hitting a record $173.10 a ton Thursday. The key regional contract for liquefied natural gas, the Japan-Korea Marker, is in similar territory, hitting $18.02 per million British thermal units the same day. That’s not a record, but it’s still the third-highest spike LNG has ever seen, during what’s typically the low season for a commodity that tends to surge amid winter’s heating demands.

If you think of futures prices simply as a vote on the path ahead for the commodity in question, that should worry a world that needs to decarbonize. This view is simplistic, though. Commodity prices don’t rise and fall based on the level of demand itself, but rather as a result of the mismatch between demand and supply. A world in which fossil fuel consumption is on a long-term downtrend can still see handsome prices for fossil fuels in any period when supply falls faster than demand.


The current price spike has multiple sources. One is the diversion of Russian gas from Europe to Asia, while another is China’s coal-to-gas switch. Then there’s the relatively warm, dry summer that’s reduced hydro generation and increased pressure on air conditioners. Most important, though, has been the bounce back from 2020’s bout of economic sickness, which has sent electricity consumption surging — and with it, the dirtiest forms of generation.

One of the biggest drivers for growth in renewable power’s energy share over the past decade has been flat or declining electricity demand. Adding wind and solar capable of supplying 5% of a country’s grid power can drive a sharp reduction in emissions if output remains constant or falls. If, however, grid use climbs 5%, then all that new renewable capacity won’t make a shred of difference to emissions. If it climbs 14% year-on-year — as China’s did in July — then it’s likely to be fossil fuels that make up the shortfall.

That situation can turn even the economic disadvantages of coal and gas in their favor. For years now, the growth of renewable power with zero fuel costs has been pushing thermal generators out of use, dealing a severe blow to their economics. Fossil power plants need to be in operation for 60% to 80% of the time to turn a profit, but the last time China’s fleet hit that level was all the way back in 2011. For most of 2019 and 2020, the figure was well below 50%.

That very underutilization, however, means that there’s substantial ability to turn up the gas when demand starts surging. Delivering an extra megawatt-hour from a thermal generator operating at half capacity only requires finding some fuel on the global markets for coal and LNG. If you want to increase wind and solar generation beyond current levels, you’ll need to build a whole new power plant.


That sounds like bad news for decarbonization — and in the short term, it is. Still, the current price spikes also provide a reminder to generators of why the days of thermal power are numbered. At current prices for Newcastle coal, even the most efficient power plant will be paying upwards of $60 per megawatt hour just for its fuel. In the largest markets of China and India, the cost of brand-new wind or solar generation is half as much, or less. Even renewable power plants backed up with batteries to provide on-demand electricity are competitive with fossil fuels at current prices.