Dramatic satellite observations that show the true scale of Arctic change

Aishwarya Sukesh 2/25/2019 

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The Earth has been through some devastating environmental episodes in the first eight months of 2019 alone, including fires in Brazil, Hurricane Dorian devastating the Bahamas, and record-breaking temperatures in Paris. 

But nowhere does the rate of environmental change or its impacts occur more quickly or severely than in the Arctic. When something changes in the Arctic, things closer to home can change as well—sometimes in a more amplified way. Melted land ice in this region has been responsible for roughly 60% of the global sea-level rise since 1972, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). 

But because the Arctic is thousands of miles away and for some exists merely as a childhood trope for Santa's headquarters, that change can be hard to understand. Satellite images of the Arctic promote conversations about climate change and allow people to understand a relatively inaccessible place. 

To explain and contextualize the impacts of climate change in the northernmost part of our planet, Stacker used maps from the Satellite Observations of Arctic Change project. 

Resulting from a collaboration between the NSIDC and NASA, these maps use a specific metric to display how current conditions in the Arctic compare to those of the last four decades. Some examples of the parameters include surface air temperature, snow cover, and water vapor levels. The interactive images use data from 1979 to 2017. 

NSIDC Senior Research Scientist Walt Meier told Stacker in an email that images from October would be the most representative of change. That's because while the sun's northerly position has remained constant, smaller amounts of sea ice have caused uncharacteristic changes in air temperature and water vapor. 

Therefore, five of the eight images presented in this gallery use data from October 2015. The remaining three images include the most recently available data. 

Read on to see satellite observations that show the significant scale of Arctic change.

2/9 SLIDES © NSIDC // NASA

Near-surface air temperature

- Time period: October 2015

- "The map shows how air temperatures in the Arctic compared to averages from 1979 to 2015. On the map, areas with higher than average temperatures for the selected month and year are indicated in oranges and reds (positive anomalies), and areas with lower than average temperatures are shown in blues (negative anomalies). These are temperatures two meters above the surface, similar to the temperatures given in weather reports and forecasts."

- More air temperature info here

Air temperature is essential to facilitate many natural processes such as plant growth and even wind speeds. The October satellite map from 2015 shows a lot of orange and red areas, which indicate higher than average temperatures. Arctic amplification is a term used to describe this effect. When there is less ice covering the water, the ocean absorbs the sun's energy instead of ice reflecting it back. As the water absorbs the heat, the near-surface air temperature is amplified in months like October when it historically has been lower.

 

3/9 SLIDES © NSIDC // NASA

Water vapor

- Time period: October 2015

- "The map shows how the amount of water vapor in the Arctic atmosphere for different years and months compares to averages from 1979 to 2015. On the map, areas with greater than average water vapor for the selected month and year are indicated in purples (positive anomalies), and areas with less than average water vapor are shown in greens (negative anomalies). The values show the mass of water vapor in a column of the atmosphere that stretches from the surface to the top of the atmosphere."

- More water vapor info here

Water vapor regulates the Earth's climate and is what scientists call a greenhouse gas. These gases are capable of trapping and holding heat in the atmosphere instead of allowing the radiation to escape back to space. This process is called the greenhouse effect. This map shows higher than average water vapor temperatures in 2015, which is indicative of a warmer atmosphere.

4/9  © NSIDC // NASA

Sea ice

- Time period: October 2015

- "The map shows how the Arctic Ocean sea ice cover for different years and months compares to averages from 1979 to 2015. The map shows spatial patterns of the differences (anomalies) of sea ice concentration for each year and month. Sea ice concentration is the fraction of the ocean covered by sea ice and is expressed as a percentage. (Most red = 50% less sea ice cover than average)"

- More sea ice info here

Perhaps the most dramatic representation of change, the red on this map represents areas with less sea ice coverage. One of the essential roles of sea ice—beyond the habitat it provides for many organisms—is its ability to reflect solar radiation back to space. A lack of ice means the ocean absorbs the heat. Satellite images from September 2012 showed a record low level of sea ice. While the extent of sea ice in 2015 isn't as low as it was then, it's still below normal levels.

5/9 SLIDES  © NSIDC // NASA

Snow cover

- Time period: October 2015

- "The map shows how Northern Hemisphere snow cover for different years and months compares to averages for the period 1966 to 2015. The map shows snow cover, expressed as the number of days a grid cell is snow covered for each month for each year. On the map, areas with longer than average snow cover duration are indicated in blue (positive anomalies). Areas with shorter than average snow cover duration are indicated in red (negative anomalies). The maps of anomalies help show where changes in snow cover are strongest."

- More snow cover info here

Snow cover is the length of time an area is covered in snow, which acts as an insulator for the arctic soil. The process of melting and freezing releases and traps essential minerals that regulate local bodies of water. In later months such as October, snow cover remains relatively high because of the freezing temperatures. But in other regions below the Arctic, anomalies in snow cover are more prominent.

6/9 SLIDES © NSIDC // NASA

Soil non-frozen period

- Time period: 2015

- "The map shows how the number of days in each year the soil surface is unfrozen compares to the average for the period 1979 to 2012. On the map, areas where soil surfaces are unfrozen for more days than average are shown by reds (positive anomalies). Areas where soil surfaces are unfrozen for fewer days than average are shown by blues (negative anomalies). The map of anomalies helps to show where changes the number of days with unfrozen soil are the strongest."

- More information on soil non-frozen periods here

A soil non-frozen period is exactly how it sounds: a period when the soil is not frozen. According to the NSIDC, the soil's non-frozen period started to significantly increase in 2005, which means that the soil was not covered by ice for longer than normal. However, in 2015, the soil was not frozen for fewer days than average. While the changes are seasonal, the duration has been in flux for reasons other than the position of the sun. And just like it's detrimental to have less ice coverage; it's harmful to disrupt the natural, seasonal exposure of the soil as well.

 

7/9 SLIDES © NSIDC // NASA

Age of sea ice

- Time period: October 2015

- "The map shows the age of Arctic sea ice for each year of a chosen month. On the map, ice that has survived four years or more appears in the darkest shade of blue, while sea ice under a year old appears in the lightest shade of green."

- More info on age of sea ice here

An ice's age is determined by the amount of time it survives without melting. For example, ice that hasn't melted in four years would be considered older ice. The map shows blue ice as old and green as young. Younger ice is more vulnerable to solar radiation and therefore melts more quickly, which makes it harder to sustain sea ice. In October 2015, less than 15% of the sea ice was older than five years.

8/9 SLIDES © NSIDC // NASA

Arctic vegetation

- Time period: October 2010

- "Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is a measure of the concentration of green vegetation for a given area of the land surface. The map shows how NDVI in Arctic land areas for different years and months compares to the long-term average for the period 1982 to 2010. On the map, areas with higher NDVI than the average for the selected month are indicated in greens (positive anomalies), and areas with lower than average NDVI are shown in browns (negative anomalies)."

- More arctic vegetation info here

This map represents data from October 2010 and shows a significant green coloration, meaning that the concentration of plant life is higher than average. July is considered the growing season, and positive change is expected during this time. But the measure of concentration spiked significantly since 2000.

Minimum exposed snow and ice

- Time period: 2013

- "The map shows annual minimum exposed snow and ice cover for each of the years of the NASA Earth Observing System era (2000-2013). This product indicates those areas that never reveal complete soil or vegetation cover across a pixel during the particular year. The annual exposed ice is indicated by blue pixels."

- More minimum exposed snow and ice cover info here

Minimum exposed snow and ice cover translates to areas that rarely show ground, meaning these areas are constantly covered by snow. This map was created with an algorithm that uses daily snow and ice cover images. Change is best seen when zoomed in on the interactive map. This establishes the annual baseline minimum for exposed ice.

Trump nominee to federal court once called for abolishing Social Security, several government agencies

LIFETIME APPOINTMENT BUT IT CAN BE IMPEACHED

Robert O'Harrow

A Trump nominee to serve on a court that hears claims against the government once argued that several federal agencies should be eliminated and that Social Security should be abolished because economic disparity “is a natural aspect of the human condition.”

© The Yale Herald Stephen Schwartz, a judicial nominee to the US Court of Federal Claims as seen in a 2005 article in The Yale Herald.

Stephen Schwartz, nominated to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, spelled those ideas out 15 years ago in a student newspaper as an undergraduate at Yale. Schwartz wrote that the departments of Transportation, Agriculture and Education lack a “constitutional basis,” and that Social Security benefits were intended to prevent “outright starvation” but had become a “standard component of most retirement programs.”

In the years since, the view that federal government powers should be sharply curtailed has been central to his legal work. Schwartz, 36, has recently worked as a lawyer on controversial efforts that would have severely restricted the voting rights of African Americans in North Carolina and bathroom rights of transgender students in Virginia.

In 2015 and 2016, he sued the government multiple times while working at Cause of Action Institute, a tax-exempt group affiliated with the conservative Koch network and that seeks to curb the authority of federal agencies, according to legal and tax filings. “There are lots of circumstances today in America where agencies of the federal government exercise their discretion in ways that are terrible for personal liberty, for economic freedoms,” he said in a radio interview at the time.

Schwartz is among a growing cadre of conservative legal activists selected by President Trump to serve on the federal bench, part of the administration’s campaign to move the judiciary to the right. The Republican-controlled Senate has confirmed two Supreme Court justices, 51 Circuit Court judges and 137 United States District Court judges. In a news release last fall, the White House said it was “transforming our judiciary.”

Through a representative, Schwartz declined requests for an interview. In written statements to the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described his past legal work as judicious and fair.

“I believe that my own work has been characterized not only by integrity and careful legal reasoning, but by objectivity and fairness,” he wrote.

A White House spokesman referred questions about Schwartz to the Justice Department, which defended his nomination in a statement. “Stephen Schwartz has spent more than a decade litigating a wide range of constitutional and commercial claims in a sophisticated litigation practice,” the statement said. “Combined with his sterling academic credentials, this deep and varied experience makes him well-qualified for the Court of Federal Claims.”

In 2008, Schwartz received a law degree from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was a member of the law review. He became an associate at the Kirkland & Ellis, a law firm that has employed such notable conservatives as Attorney General William P. Barr, White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Schwartz was first nominated in June 2017. The nomination, to a 15-year-term, languished as Senate Democrats raised questions about his credentials and Republicans focused on higher priority seats on the federal district and appeals courts. He was renominated in November, and his nomination moved to the Judiciary Committee last month.

The Court of Federal Claims handles many financial claims against the government that draw on the Constitution, federal statutes or agency contracts. Cases include environmental regulations, contracting disputes and labor issues. The court is based in Washington but has jurisdiction over the entire country.

Daniel Epstein, who founded Cause of Action in 2011 and now advises Trump as a White House lawyer, has also been nominated for one of the court’s 16 seats. His nomination is pending.

Democrats and some left-leaning legal observers said Schwartz exemplifies the Trump administration’s strategy of naming young, conservatives to every level of the federal court system.

“Schwartz is another example of Trump’s ideal nominee for the bench: a conservative ideologue who is determined to undermine civil rights and federal agencies,” said Vanita Gupta, who headed the Obama Justice Department’s civil rights division and is now president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Hum­­­­an Rights.

Schwartz, a native of Rochester, Minn., was outspoken about his political views at Yale from the time of his arrival in September 2001.

While pursuing a degree in history, he became active in the university’s relatively small conservative community, according to documents he submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee and a review of his columns in the Yale Herald. He joined the Tory Party of the school’s political union and often sought out debates with his more liberal classmates.

In interviews, two former classmates recalled Schwartz as gracious, opinionated and dapper — in khakis and button-down shirts even at hours when others in his dining hall wore pajamas. “He was impeccably dressed and very comfortable in his own skin,” said Gwendolyn McDay, who lived in the same housing as Schwartz. “He had the courage to share his views, even though it was unpopular. His views were different.”

In early 2005, Schwartz began writing a biweekly column that sometimes carried the label “Always Right.”

“Being ideologically at odds with nearly everyone in your college isn’t a pleasant experience in itself, needless to say, but it can be a useful one, especially if one relishes notoriety,” he wrote in one column, adding that “I got used to being addressed as ‘enemy’ in the dining hall.”

In another, he wrote skeptically about Social Security and other government payments to Americans, chiding political leaders for trying to offset financial inequalities in the country. “Since differences in wealth correlate with normal human differences in capacity for work, collaboration, innovation, leadership, thought, and so on, economic inequality is a healthy byproduct of differences between people,” he wrote.

In still another, he blasted the George W. Bush administration for failing to cut spending sufficiently in its proposed budget. Schwartz wrote that the best approach “is a paring back of federal activity at all levels.”

“The federal government should devolve many of its current responsibilities to the states which are constitutionally empowered to fill them and may well do so better than Washington,” he wrote.

In an April column, with his college career drawing to a close, he expressed pride in his conservative advocacy.

“I very much hope that I’ve done credit to the conservative tradition during my Yale career,” he wrote. “I’ve argued that abortion is wrong, that racial preferences in college admissions are dangerous, that gay marriage should stay illegal, that immigration should be curtailed.”

In 2015, Schwartz joined Cause of Action. The group received about $30 million in donations through June 2018, according to the most recently available data. Most of that money came though Donors Trust, a clearinghouse of contributions to free-market and conservative advocacy organizations. The contributors who gave to Cause of Action through Donors Trust are not publicly disclosed.

Schwartz began filing lawsuits aimed at curtailing federal agencies and attempting to scale back government regulations. He sued the Department of Commerce on behalf of East Coast fisherman seeking to reverse a decision forcing them to pay for monitoring of their activities at sea. And he represented an Arkansas women, who ran a multistate consignment business, in an action brought by the Department of Labor.

In the 2015 radio interview, Schwartz said Cause of Action wanted to help individuals and companies while also combating government overreach. “And it’s really an immense problem, kind of a structural problem with American government that is hurtful to American society,” he told WBSM radio in New Bedford, Mass.

In 2016, Schwartz moved to a small law firm in Washington cofounded by Gene Schaerr, who has fought multiple legal battles against same-sex marriage. The firm’s co-founder was Stuart Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee to a federal appeals court who has denounced the Supreme Court’s landmark decision guaranteeing the right to marry for same-sex couples.

That year, Schwartz and the firm’s two founders argued on behalf of North Carolina in an unsuccessful bid to get the Supreme Court to uphold a controversial voter law. An appeals court had ruled that the law was intended to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision” and was “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow.”

In 2017, the three represented Gloucester County, Va., in an unsuccessful effort to adopt a policy requiring transgender students to use bathrooms that correspond to their birth gender, not their gender identity, court records show. The Supreme Court chose not to hear their appeal.

In written questions after he was first nominated, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked Schwartz about the political controversies related to his legal work.

“In short, you seem to have spent the vast majority of your time representing clients on hot-button social political issues,” she wrote in August 2017. “How can we be sure that you will approach your role as a judge on the Court of Federal Claims with the fairness and objectivity that all judges must exhibit?”

Schwartz responded that he has worked for and against the government and on a large amount of general commercial litigation.

“The diversity of interests I have represented, and the ways that I have represented those interests, should encourage confidence that I can fulfill the obligations of a judge,” he wrote, according to records maintained by the Judiciary Committee.

robert.oharrow@washpost.com

 

Oh No, They’ve Come Up With Another Generation Label


Joe Pinsker

The cutoff for being born into Generation X was about 1980, the cutoff for Generation Y (a.k.a. the Millennials) was about 1996, and the cutoff for Generation Z was about 2010. What should the next batch of babies be called—what comes after Z?

© Spencer Weiner / Getty

Alpha, apparently. That’s the (Greek) letter that the unofficial namers of generations—marketers, researchers, cultural commentators, and the like—have affixed to Gen Z’s successors, the oldest of whom are on the cusp of turning 10. The Generation Alpha label, if it lasts, follows the roughly 15-year cycle of generational delineations. Those delineations keep coming, even as, because of a variety of demographic factors, they seem to be getting less and less meaningful as a way of segmenting the population; in recent decades, there hasn’t been a clear-cut demographic development, like the postwar baby boom, to define a generation around, so the dividing lines are pretty arbitrary. How much do members of this new generation, or any generation, really have in common?


[Read: Generations are an invention—here’s how they came to be]

A picture of Generation Alpha, if a blurry one, is starting to emerge. In various articles about its members, analysts have stated that they are or will grow up to be the best-educated generation ever, the most technologically immersed, the wealthiest, and the generation more likely than any in the past century to spend some or all of their childhood in living arrangements without both of their biological parents. These are all notable features, but some of them are broad and fairly low-stakes observations, given that the global population has been getting richer, better educated, and more exposed to digital technology for a while now.

Some marketers and consultants who analyze generations have tried to get more specific. One suggested that Generation Alpha might be particularly impatient because they’ll be used to technology fulfilling their desires from an early age. And a branding agency recently polled a bunch of 7-to-9-year-olds on a wide range of mostly nondivisive issues (such as the importance of “making sure everyone has enough food to eat”) and arrived at the conclusion that Generation Alpha “cares more about all issues than their Millennial and Baby Boomer [predecessors] did when they were kids, or even than they do now.”

Many of these takeaways seem premature, or at least overeager. “They’re still kids,” says Dan Woodman, a sociology professor at the University of Melbourne who studies generational labels. “A lot of things we attach to a generation are around the way they start to think about politics, the way they engage with the culture, and [whether they] are a wellspring of new social movements.” The narrative of a generation, he told me, “starts to get filled in with some meaningful—maybe not correct, but at least substantial—content probably more when they start to enter their teens.”

Who Is Generation Alpha?

The term Generation Alpha is usually credited to Mark McCrindle, a generational researcher in Australia who runs a consulting agency. McCrindle told me that the name originated from an online survey he ran in 2008 that yielded a slew of now-discarded monikers, many of which focused on technology (the “Onliners,” “Generation Surf,” the “Technos”) or gave the next round of humans the burden of undoing the damage done by the last (the “Regeneration,” “Generation Hope,” the “Saviors,” “Generation Y-not”).

One popular option from the survey was “Generation A,” but, McCrindle told me in an email, he thought the name for a cohort that would shape the future shouldn’t “be labelled by going back to the beginning.” So once the Latin alphabet was exhausted, he hopped over to the Greek one—“the start of something new.”

A consensus has formed around Generation Alpha, but it may be a temporary one. The generic “Generation [Letter]” format began with Generation X. “It was meant to be a placeholder for something a bit uncertain or mysterious, almost like X in some algebraic equation,” Woodman told me. Generation Y followed, though it was usurped, at least in the U.S., by Millennials; nothing has overthrown Generation Z. Placeholder names, in a way, make generational generalizations easier. “They’re almost like empty labels that you can put anything in,” Woodman said. He thinks Generation Alpha will stick for at least a little while, but can also see how it might get replaced by something “a little more descriptive.”

The history of generational labeling is littered with names that gained some traction, but not enough. Gen X has been referred to as “Baby Busters,” the “slacker generation,” “latchkey kids,” and the “MTV Generation,” though the placeholder won out. The same, so far, has been the case for Gen Z, whose proposed alternate names include “iGeneration,” the “Homeland Generation,” “Multi-Gen,” “Post Gen,” and the “Pluralistic Generation.”

[Read: How generations get their names]

For researchers and consultants, picking a winning name and becoming an authority on a particular generation can be highly lucrative. “It’s worth a heap of money,” Woodman said. “One of the things we do with generational labels is make claims about how different this cohort is—they're so different, almost alien in their attitudes, that you need to pay some experts to come in and explain them to you.” For instance, Neil Howe, one of the coiners of Millennials some 30 years ago, has gone on to make a career out of consulting, speaking, and writing about generations.

Of course, the enthusiasm about naming generations isn’t just among marketers and consultants. People “do love generations talk,” Woodman said. They’re “drawn to using these labels to pin down something they intuitively feel about young or old people these days.” He thinks that this desire is strong when the world is perceived to be changing rapidly—people want to be able to identify their position amid the flux.

Unfortunately, though, “generations talk” can often devolve into stereotyping, as generational labels necessarily lump together people with a wide variety of experiences. “We'd probably bristle if we did with gender or race what we still seem to get away with with generations,” Woodman said.

Generalizing is additionally unwise because the process of delineating generations is hardly scientific. To be sure, today’s coexisting cohorts have had meaningfully different experiences—Baby Boomers and Millennials, for instance, came of age in eras with markedly different technologies and paradigms of education and work. But, Woodman noted, shifts involving “generational factors” like these are usually gradual, and don’t vary drastically from one year to the next.

“There’s a continuous stream of people emerging in a population. How do we draw the line between the end of one cohort and the beginning of another?” said Rick Settersten, a professor of human development and family sciences at Oregon State University. “At some point, it’s an arbitrary game.”

In some regards, the game is more arbitrary now than it used to be. Take the Baby Boomers, for example. “We can see them more easily in the population because there’s a fertility boom in 1946 right after World War II, which tails off by about 1964,” Settersten told me.

The moderately logical boundaries of the Boomer generation set a precedent that in some ways led to the less logical boundaries for the generations that followed. If the final birth year for Boomers is 1964, counting out 15 more years gets you to the Gen X–Millennial border, and another 15 or so gets you to the Millennial–Gen Z border. But even though this is an orderly way of doing things, big societal changes don’t always follow neat 15-year increments.

For instance, the youngest Millennials, born in 1996, might have more in common with the oldest Gen Zers, born in 1997, than the oldest Millennials, born in 1981; to name just one difference, many children of the late ‘90s grew up with the internet, while the 1981 babies spent most of their childhoods without it. (This sort of tension has birthed some niche generational labels for those born on the outer edge of their cohort, such as “Xennials.”) Even the Baby Boomer label—which is grounded in a measurable fertility trend—doesn’t entirely make sense, Settersten pointed out, as some of the oldest Boomers are the parents of some of the youngest ones.

Further, Millennials are often considered the children of Boomers, and Gen Zers are often considered Gen Xers’ children. But these sorts of one-to-one matchups of parents and children become less valid as the average age at which parents have their first child has gotten higher. The age range of first-time mothers—whether they are 21, or 31, or 41—“has widened dramatically,” Settersten wrote in an email. “They share a life event—they all had first births at the same time—but they potentially come from different ‘generations.’” (He put the term in scare quotes to note that generations are essentially social constructs.) Woodman raised this point about other life milestones, such as leaving one’s childhood home, starting a committed relationship, and purchasing a house. “The life course isn’t as synchronized as it once was, where everyone does stuff at the same time,” he said.

That means that, from here on out, even more diversity of human experience has to be crammed into broad generational labels. Woodman said that “attach[ing] attributes to an entire group, like optimistic or pessimistic or entitled, snowflakey, resilient, or whatever, has always been a stretch, but it’ll probably get even less helpful as time goes on.”

Settersten made a similar point: “It probably has gotten more difficult to distinguish one generation from another, especially if you can’t point to meaningful things that might define it, like a baby boom or bust; or a historical event like the Great Recession; or maybe the emergence of some new technology, if we had reason to believe that it would mark [people] as a distinct group.”

The march through the Greek alphabet may continue anyway. In 2024, by McCrindle’s definition, the last of Generation Alpha will be born, making way for Generation Beta, whose birth years will span from 2025 to 2039. “If the nomenclature sticks, then we will afterwards have Generation Gamma and Generation Delta,” McCrindle said. Those placeholder names stand a good chance of catching on—so long as nothing important and generation-defining happens in the next half century, of course.

Internet Shutdowns Become a Favorite Tool of Governments: 'It's Like We Suddenly Went Blind

PONNAGYUN, Myanmar—Last June, the Myanmar subsidiary of telecom Telenor Group received an urgent government order it was told it must not disclose. Turn off the internet in nine townships. 

© nyunt win/EPA/Shutterstock

Hans Martin, a senior executive at the Norwegian company, saw red flags. He said Myanmar’s justification—that people were using the internet to “coordinate illegal activities”—was vague, and no end-date was given. The telecom said it had little legal basis to refuse the order, and complied.


Nearly 250 days later, western Myanmar has become the site of one of the longest internet shutdowns documented anywhere in the world.

From autocratic Iran to democratic India, governments are cutting people off from the global web with growing frequency and little scrutiny. Parts or all of the internet were shut down at least 213 times in 33 countries last year, the most ever recorded, according to Access Now, a nonprofit that advocates for a free internet and has monitored the practice for a decade. The shutdowns were used to stop protests, censor speeches, control elections and silence people, human-rights advocates said.

Pakistan tailored shutdowns to isolate and control specific neighborhoods, while Iraq automated internet curfews at certain times of the day. Venezuela blocked social media apps, such as Facebook and Twitter. Bangladesh throttled mobile data speeds to 2G levels, making it impossible to share photographs, watch videos or even load most websites.

“What I’m seeing is a definite increase in the shutting down of the internet for political reasons,” said David Kaye, the United Nations’ special rapporteur for the protection of free expression, who monitors rights violations across the globe and reports to the U.N.’s Human Rights Council.

Dozens of interviews with telecom officials, diplomats, researchers and rights advocates revealed how very little stands in the way of governments that want to block the internet, even for long periods.

No global agreements explicitly cover internet freedoms, though the right to information is guaranteed under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a nonbinding set of principles adopted by the U.N. Telecom companies, which rely on government licenses and agree to follow a nation’s laws, rarely push back. Those that try to ask questions or negotiate find they don’t have much leverage.

Myanmar’s telecom ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Across the world, hundreds of companies offer access to the internet, including private-sector multinationals and state-owned firms. Their control over who can do what online makes them valuable to governments. The companies can pinpoint user locations, block apps and websites, and turn off access within minutes.

Companies emerging as prominent players in markets across Africa, Asia and the Middle East—including India’s Bharti Airtel Ltd., Malaysia’s Axiata Group Bhd. and Qatar’s Ooredoo QPSC—disclose little information about how they handle government orders or when and why they turn the internet off. The companies didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Only a few telecom firms publish data on the number of government requests they receive to intercept messages, shut down networks, restrict content and share user details. Even those reports leave out orders or actions that authorities want to keep secret.

“We’re often restricted by law to disclose the details or acknowledge any requests received,” said Laura Okkonen, the senior human-rights manager for U.K.-based Vodafone Group PLC. “We have, as a company, tried to be as transparent as legally possible.”

In the U.S., major telecommunications companies such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. publish reports disclosing the number and nature of demands they receive from government and law-enforcement bodies. These can include subpoenas for subscriber information, court orders for wiretaps, emergency requests for information and in some cases rough estimates of National Security Letters issued by the FBI.

To uncover or confirm shutdowns that aren’t disclosed, some internet monitoring groups rely on diagnostic tools that measure changes in network activity. Access Now and U.K.-based NetBlocks track dips in network data to call attention to disruptions, such as in Venezuela and Iran in recent months.

After Iran ordered a shutdown in November, a research lab in California, the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis, ran tests measuring connectivity. It produced a detailed sequence of the weeklong blackout, including how devices were severed from the global internet, though users could visit Iranian websites, which are largely government controlled.

The first time it’s known that a government ordered a nationwide internet blackout was Jan. 28, 2011. Internet trackers call it a turning point. The popular revolts of the Arab Spring were spreading to Egypt, and protests against then-President Hosni Mubarak were growing. Twitter, Facebook and messaging apps were being widely used to share information and coordinate protests. The government ordered all internet providers to disconnect, and almost immediately, 80 million people were offline.

After services were out, soldiers armed with machine guns barged into the office of Mobinil—majority owned by French telecom company Orange SA—and demanded that they blast out a text message praising the president’s glory, according to Yves Nissim, a corporate social responsibility officer at Orange. Staff sent out the message, at gunpoint, but insisted that it be attributed to the army.

“This was just unheard of before,” Mr. Nissim said. “We decided after that we couldn’t face this alone.”

Over the next two years, seven multinational telecom companies, including Orange, Telenor and Vodafone, formed a group to compare their experiences and align arguments used to negotiate with authorities. They said they established standards to disclose government requests, and that they have made some orders less severe through negotiations.

But the practice is more widespread than ever. On Nov. 16, Iran switched the entire nation offline as authorities carried out a deadly crackdown on antigovernment protesters. Iraq did the same in October, and again a few weeks later. Sudan did it in June. Zimbabwe in January 2019.

India’s government has faced criticism for blocking the internet in Kashmir after its decision in August to end the region’s partially autonomous status. Officials argue the move is required for public security, which they said trumps the right to internet access. Critics said the shutdown is aimed at blocking protesters.

India’s Supreme Court ruled in January that the blackout was unconstitutional. Authorities have restored limited fixed-line services while leaving mobile data and social media cut off.

“India is a swing state in the future of democratic governance of the internet,” said Adrian Shahbaz, research director for technology and democracy at Freedom House, a U.S.-based human rights group. “When a massive democracy like India resorts to such a blunt tool, it normalizes the approach of shutting down the internet.”

In Myanmar, the internet only became widespread over the past five years, after the country’s telecom sector opened up as part of a transition from military rule toward democracy. Mobile towers sprang up across the countryside, and the price of SIM cards—the chips that connect phones to a mobile network—dropped from about $250 to $1.50 almost overnight.

In rural Ponnagyun, in the western state of Rakhine, residents said the internet’s arrival had just started to transform their impoverished communities. E-commerce and digital services such as money transfers were trickling in, and travel operators and farmers had adopted new ways of working.

San Naing, a 40-year-old rice farmer, said he could communicate with buyers more efficiently, send them photographs and arrange large deliveries. Since the shutdown, he has returned to his old practice of bringing huge hauls of rice to the nearest town by boat, hoping to unload it at the market. “It’s like we suddenly went blind,” he said.

In this part of the country, Myanmar’s military, which has been widely criticized for its violent operations against the country’s many insurgent groups, is fighting a group of ethnic rebels called the Arakan Army. Clashes intensified in early 2019 and surged again in recent weeks.

The shutdown affects areas that are home to both Rakhine Buddhists and a few hundred thousand Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority. Myanmar is facing genocide allegations at the U.N.’s top court after military operations in 2017 forced more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh.

It was after hours on June 20 when the Myanmar subsidiary of Telenor, Norway’s state-owned telecom firm, received the government’s email. It had until 10 p.m. the next day to turn off the internet in nine townships, including Ponnagyun, according to Mr. Martin, Telenor’s chief corporate affairs officer in Myanmar.

The order, parts of which were read to the Journal, cites the country’s telecommunications law, which allows the government to suspend services “when an emergency situation arises.”

The company’s regulatory officer had already begun quiet preparations after a heads-up from a government source a few days earlier, according to the company’s head of technology operations, Abdur Raihan. Over two days, a small team of engineers identified the towers whose antennae transmit signals into the relevant townships. An engineer wrote a piece of code that would instantly disable the antennae, Mr. Raihan said.

Mr. Martin said his first thought on the morning after the order arrived was that obeying it could set a bad precedent, signaling to authorities that they would face little resistance if they tried to do the same elsewhere. The Arakan Army is only one of more than 20 armed groups in Myanmar, which is home to one of the world’s longest and most complex civil wars.

The company’s legal and sustainability officers weighed in with concerns that the order was too open-ended and might disproportionately affect civilians. Telenor representatives communicated with the telecom ministry several times throughout the day, pressing for details on why the shutdown was necessary and how long it would last. They were told the government had nothing to add.

Despite its concerns, Telenor decided to comply because the company’s lawyers found the order to be legal, Mr. Martin said. But it told a top bureaucrat in the telecom ministry, Soe Thein, that the company would alert customers with a text message and a public statement. Mr. Thein was clearly displeased, according to Telenor, but didn’t try to forbid it.

At 10 p.m., service went down. Telenor customers’ mobile phones in the blackout zone lit up with a message saying the government had ordered the disruption, and service would be restored “as soon as possible.”

The government order was also addressed to the country’s three other telecom providers—state-owned Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications, state-controlled MyTel and Qatar-based Ooredoo—who also complied. The companies didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In September, the government lifted restrictions in five townships, while four remained offline. In early February, the government reimposed the blackout in the five townships, citing “security requirements and public interest,” Telenor said.

Locals said that within days of the renewed blackout a major offensive against the rebels was under way in the region. On Feb. 18, the U.N. expressed grave concern over a surge in civilian casualties and urged the government to end the internet shutdown.

Write to Feliz Solomon at feliz.solomon@wsj.com

A heat wave melted 20% of an Antarctic island's snow in only 9 days

A heat wave this month in Antarctica sent temperatures soaring into the mid- to high-60s across northern portions of the normally frigid continent. 

Surprisingly, the warmth melted about 20% of an Antarctic island's snow in only nine days, according to newly released images from NASA, leaving behind ponds of melted water where the snow had been.

"I haven’t seen melt ponds develop this quickly in Antarctica," said Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College in Massachusetts, in a statement. “You see these kinds of melt events in Alaska and Greenland, but not usually in Antarctica.” 

Pelto said that during the heat wave, which peaked from Feb. 6 to 11, snowpack on Eagle Island melted 4 inches. This means that about 20% of seasonal snow in the region melted in this one event on Eagle Island, Pelto said.

Bye-bye iceberg: Iceberg twice the size of Washington, D.C., breaks off Pine Island glacier in Antarctica

He added that such rapid melting is caused by sustained high temperatures significantly above freezing. Such persistent warmth was not typical in Antarctica until this century, but it has become more common in recent years, NASA said.

The temperature peaked at 64.9 degrees Fahrenheit at Argentina’s Esperanza Base on Feb. 6, which was Antarctica's warmest temperature on record. A reading of 69.3 degrees was measured a few days later at a research station on Seymour Island, on Feb. 9, but that reading has not yet been officially verified.

This February heatwave was the third major melt event of the 2019-2020 summer, following warm spells in November 2019 and January 2020. "If you think about this one event in February, it isn’t that significant,” said Pelto. “It’s more significant that these events are coming more frequently." 

It's been a busy summer for climate news in the world's coldest continent. In addition to the record warmth, an iceberg twice the size of Washington, D.C., broke off a glacier there. Also, scientists reported that the continent's "Doomsday glacier" is melting from below because of unusually warm water.

Doomsday approaching? Warm water discovered beneath Antarctica's 'doomsday' glacier, scientists say

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A heat wave melted 20% of an Antarctic island's snow in only 9 days

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/02/antarcticas-thwaites-glacier-has-got.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/02/antarctica-shock-bizarre-heat-source.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/02/its-t-shirt-weather-in-antarctica-as.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-antarctica-factor-model.html

Koala Saved From Wildfires Won't Stop Snuggling His Rescuers

Caitlin Jill Anders

© Bill BlairBill Blair was capturing drone footage of the burnt terrain after wildfires raged through Australia when he suddenly spotted someone in need of help. Huddled at the base of a tree on Kangaroo Island was a little baby koala, all alone and so confused. Blair had been on his way back to his car when he noticed the little guy, and he immediately knew there was no way he could leave him behind.

© Bill Blair“I remembered I was told when I arrived if I come across a koala at the base of a tree, it means it's got nothing left in the tank and needs help, toss something over it like a blanket or a shirt as it will calm it down,” Blair told The Dodo. “So I took off my shirt and placed it over the koala, picked him up and carried him back to the car with the drone in the other hand.”

The koala wasn’t afraid as Blair approached him and scooped him up, and seemed to know that Blair was there to help him. All four of his tiny paws were burned, and it was a miracle he’d been able to survive on his own.

© Bill BlairAfter loading the koala into his car, still wrapped up in his shirt, Blair started driving toward the makeshift koala hospital that had been set up on the island. He hadn’t been driving for very long when suddenly the koala popped his head out of the shirt, watched Blair for a bit and then decided to have a look around.

© Bill Blair“Slowly he climbed out of my hat he was sitting in next to me and began exploring around the car, lots of looking out the window like a child,” Blair said. “Then when relaxed enough he came over and after climbing on the seat backs for a while, settled on my seat back just next to my shoulder and cuddled up.”

The little koala stayed that way for the rest of the car ride, all snuggled up next to Blair, so thankful to his rescuer for saving his life.

© Bill BlairWhen the pair finally arrived at the hospital, Blair passed the koala off to the team so they could give him the care he needed — but both Blair and the koala were definitely reluctant to say goodbye.

“I think he seemed relieved I found him and certainly showed affection towards me,” Blair said. “He didn't want to leave me when I passed him over to the military nurse.”

© Bill BlairLuckily the orphaned koala was able to get the care and attention he needed to eventually be released back into the wild where he belongs, but there’s no doubt he’ll never forget the kind man who noticed him and took the time to help, just like so many other people across Australia.

“They are doing an amazing job there, koalas and kangaroos were being brought in every day by locals,” Blair said. “To see all these people working together to help these animals was truly amazing. I'm so glad I could be involved in a small way.”

If you’d like to help the animals affected by the fires in Australia, you can donate to WIRES.

Konrad Lorenz - Imprinting | Simply Psychology
Lorenz (1935) investigated the mechanisms of imprinting, where some species of animals form an attachment to the first large moving object that they meet.

Konrad Lorenz | Austrian zoologist | Britannica
 Konrad Lorenz, (born Nov. ... 27, 1989, Altenburg), Austrian zoologist, founder of modern ethology, the study of animal behaviour by means of comparative zoological methods. ... He shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973 with the animal behaviourists Karl von Frisch and ...

Konrad Lorenz - Biographical - NobelPrize.orgKonrad Lorenz. Biographical. I consider early childhood events as most essential to a man's scientific and philosophical development. I grew up in the large ...

As Domestic Terrorists Outpace Jihadists, New U.S. Law Is Debated

When the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness issued its terrorism threat assessment for 2020 last week, it noted a marked shift. 

© Jim Wilson/The New York Times Mourners in August after a mass shooting in El Paso killed 22 people. Proponents of a domestic terrorism law argue that it would streamline and clarify the patchwork of charges now used against homegrown extremists.

The threat level from violent, homegrown extremists, and specifically white supremacists, was marked in red as the top category: “High.” The threat from the Islamic State, Al Qaeda and their ilk was demoted to third, in green: “Low.”

Terrorism experts believe that holds true for the entire United States.

“In the U.S., more people are killed by far-right extremists than by those who are adherents to Islamist extremism,” said Mary McCord, a Georgetown University law professor and a former senior Justice Department official for national security. Her comments came at a discussion last week at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, which commemorates victims of the most notorious attack by international terrorists on American soil.

© Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times The F.B.I. director Christopher Wray told a House committee that “racially motivated violent extremism” was equal to the threat from the Islamic State.

Even as the menace from homegrown extremists grows more explicit, however, law enforcement is wrestling with how to combat it. That challenge has spawned a fervent debate over whether the United States needs a new law to specifically criminalize domestic terrorism, or whether such a statute would threaten basic First Amendment rights.

Proponents argue that a domestic terrorism law would streamline and clarify the patchwork of charges now used against homegrown extremists, charges that often avoid even mentioning terrorism.

Opponents counter that a new law amounts to a worrisome expansion of government powers, and might face constitutional challenges on the grounds of impinging on free speech.

Yet the New Jersey report laid out what is at stake in stark terms. “Some white supremacist extremists argue that participating in mass attacks or creating other forms of chaos will accelerate the imminent and necessary collapse of society in order to build a racially pure nation,” it said.

After Latino shoppers were targeted in a shooting in El Paso last August, leaving 22 people dead, Congress proposed a new wave of laws. However, most of those have stalled.

But the recent arrests of eight members of a white supremacist group called the Base, some of whose members were accused of planning a mass attack in Richmond, Va., have renewed focus on the issue. Three members arrested in Maryland pleaded not guilty last week to various charges, including transporting a firearm and ammunition with the intent to commit a felony.

Senior law enforcement officials express frustration that cases like those cannot be called terrorism in court.

“The statutes that are typically deployed in connection with domestic terrorism cases are really kind of pedestrian in nature,” said Thomas E. Brzozowski, the Justice Department’s counsel for domestic terrorism. “This confuses people. It leads to this pervasive but false narrative that somehow the government is paying more attention to the Islamic extremist threat than to the domestic threat.”

With both Democrats and Republicans proposing legislation, the issue is one of the few that does not divide strictly along partisan lines.

There is no legal mechanism for designating domestic extremist groups as terrorists. Federal laws define terrorism as a criminal attack intended to intimidate and coerce civilians in order to influence government policy or to otherwise affect government conduct.

They also define 57 specific acts as federal crimes of terrorism. Among the conditions required for formally labeling a crime terrorism in court are targeting an international airport, using a weapon of mass destruction or attacking federal officials.

Such charges come into play periodically. Using a weapon of mass destruction was among the accusations faced by Glendon Scott Crawford, a member of the Ku Klux Klan from upstate New York who failed in his attempt to build a radiation death ray that would inflict cancer on Muslims hit from afar. In 2016, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

However, current terrorism statutes do not incorporate most attacks on civilians that involve guns or vehicles, or the stockpiling of assault weapons, which Ms. McCord, the Georgetown law professor, said was a gaping hole considering their frequency. A new law would also underscore that society considers white supremacist violence on par with jihadism, she said.

Several draft bills seek to define domestic terrorism as a crime and to prescribe court sentences, including the death penalty. A less sweeping bill would force the federal government to make public statistics about all violence attributed to white supremacy.

The F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, told the House Judiciary Committee this month that the agency had more than 1,000 violent extremist investigations in progress, covering all 50 states, but he resisted providing a more detailed breakdown.

He described “racially motivated violent extremism” as a “national threat priority” equal to the threat from the Islamic State. The F.B.I. has also created the Domestic Terrorism-Hate Crimes Fusion Cell to buttress its efforts, he said, stressing that the focus is “not about the ideology, it’s about the violence.”

Misgivings about a new law are also bipartisan.

African-American and Muslim organizations harbor deep concerns that a new law could actually be used against minority groups — organizations protesting police violence, for example — even though their communities are among the most frequently targeted. Current hate crimes laws are powerful enough to prosecute these acts, said Nadia Aziz, the policy counsel for the Stop Hate Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

“We need to know how domestic terrorism investigations are being carried out right now instead of a new statute,” said Ms. Aziz, echoing a common criticism.

A sweeping new law also makes some conservatives uneasy. The lack of such a law has not hindered the prosecution of anyone who carried out terrorist attacks domestically, said Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in technology, privacy and civil liberties.

He pointed out that one domestic terrorism law proposed by a Republican congressman specified various prison sentences, including up to 25 years for destroying or damaging “any structure, conveyance or other real property.”

That means a protester who engaged in vandalism to make a political point could face 25 years in jail. “Beyond being unnecessary, it seems quite thorny and dangerous,” Mr. Sanchez said.

After Mr. Trump’s inauguration, more than 200 demonstrators were arrested, some in connection with smashing storefronts and damaging vehicles. All charges were eventually dropped, but under such a law the defendants could be charged with terrorism, Mr. Sanchez noted.


Critics of federal counterterrorism measures, and even some senior law enforcement officials, believe that the intense focus on the jihadist threat since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks slowed efforts to counter white supremacists.

“There is a blind spot within law enforcement about the threat white supremacy poses,” said Michael German, a former undercover agent with the F.B.I. who researches national security law at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. “The F.B.I. and other intel agencies were not putting their resources toward the most serious threats.”

Under the Trump administration, the F.B.I. began dividing domestic extremism among four categories, down from 11: racially motivated violent extremism; anti-government/anti-authority violent extremism; animal rights/environmental extremism and abortion extremism.

Members of Congress have expressed skepticism about lumping white supremacists with other groups given the recent history of violent attacks directed against Latinos in El Paso, Jews in Pittsburgh and African-Americans in Charleston, S.C., among others.


There is no official source on the number of attacks carried out by white supremacists in the United States. Statistics kept by academic centers or NGOs rarely match because of different methods, including various definitions of right-wing extremism.

In addition, the tendency to include them with other hate crimes leaves the extent of the problem unclear.

“The F.B.I. is being evasive,” said Representative Karen Bass, Democrat of California and a member of the Judiciary Committee. “It raises the question as to whether or not they are seriously looking at white supremacy.”

In the short term, a far more likely scenario than a new law is the State Department designating a foreign white supremacist group as a terrorist organization, allowing for law enforcement agencies to pursue any U.S. adherents for providing material support for terrorism.

The debate over a domestic terrorism law underscores just how complex the terrorist threat has become in the nearly two decades since Sept. 11, said Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.

“You look at the landscape now — it is scattered,” he said, with white supremacists and antigovernment organizations rivaling jihadists in their aspiration to foment mayhem. “It is a diversification of the homegrown threat in a way that we have not seen before.”

South Carolina: Gobs of jobs, but not enough offer living wage

As the Democratic presidential candidates take to the stage for Tuesday night's debate in South Carolina, they'll be speaking in a state with the nation's lowest unemployment rate — 2.3%, tied with Utah and Vermont.

But that rosy number obscures a harsher reality for many South Carolina workers: While they are employed, their low wages make it hard to pay for housing and other basics. Indeed, the state's median household income — about $52,300 last year — ranks only 42nd among all U.S. states, according to the latest Census data.

The pressures on working families in South Carolina comes as President Donald Trump touts the nation's 50-year low in unemployment and robust hiring. Yet many low- and middle-wage families around the country continue to struggle with economic insecurity. Income for middle-class Americans is projected to grow at less than half the rate as for the richest 1%, a recent Congressional Budget Office found.

Indeed, South Carolina is typical for states across the U.S., where job growth looks strong on the surface but much of that work offers meager wages and few benefits like health insurance and retirement savings. It's an issue facing growing numbers of Americans, with about 55% of the 225,000 private-sector jobs U.S. employers added in January offering wages of $10 to $15 an hour, according to an index of job quality. That translates to about $400 to $600 in weekly wages — well below the $765 in average weekly earnings for most non-government workers.

At the same time, South Carolina's economic expansion, which has lifted wages for high-earning professionals, is pushing up housing costs and pricing many workers out of the local housing market, according to the state's Housing Finance and Development Authority.

The state not only has the highest eviction rate in the country, but two-bedroom apartments in 41 of its 46 counties aren't affordable for the typical renter in the state, the housing authority says.

"You are not likely to have a huge inventory of high-wage jobs" in a state like South Carolina, which has a relatively small workforce of about 2.3 million adult workers, and is a "right-to-work" state, said Daniel Alpert, a founder of Westwood Capital and one of the creators of the Job Quality Index. Right-to-work states are those where employees don't have to join a union if their workplace is unionized.

Among the state's largest employers are manufacturers such as BMW and Boeing, yet service-related jobs are growing fast and now outnumber manufacturing jobs, according to the state's Chamber of Commerce. Leisure and hospitality jobs pay about $16.83 an hour on average, compared with $27.91 an hour for manufacturing jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

Lowest jobless rate in the U.S.

On its face, South Carolina has an enviable economy. Its 2.3% jobless rate tied the state for the lowest in the nation in December, according to the latest BLS data. Holding a job, however, doesn't mean workers are earning a living wage.

Rates of worker pay in the state's two largest cities tell the tale. About 44% of workers in Charleston are employed in low-wage work, earning a median wage of $10.12 per hour, according to a recent study from the Brookings Institution. In Columbia, about 45% of workers earn median hourly wages of $9.84 per hour.

The state's minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, same as the federal wage floor. One state lawmaker told a local news outlet in December that raising the minimum wage in the state is a "non-starter" because the competitive job market means that most employers are already paying higher than the $7.25 hourly base rate.

Democratic candidates such as senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have pointed to widening income inequality as one of the nation's top problems, with both proposing taxes on the rich to raise revenue for social programs such as universal health care and education.

But for workers in South Carolina and nationally, a bigger issue may be whether the candidates have proposals to boost anemic wages.

A faulty CDC coronavirus test delays monitoring of disease’s spread

AMERICA UNPREPARED THANKS TO TRUMP

AND CANADA RELIES ON THE CDC FOR INFORMATION

Problems with a government-created coronavirus test have limited the United States’ capacity to rapidly increase testing, just as the outbreak has entered a worrisome new phase in countries worldwide. Experts are increasingly concerned that the small number of U.S. cases may be a reflection of limited testing, not of the virus’s spread.

While South Korea has run more than 35,000 coronavirus tests, the United States has tested only 426 people, not including people who returned on evacuation flights. Only about a dozen state and local laboratories can now run tests outside of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta because the CDC kits sent out nationwide earlier this month included a faulty component.

U.S. guidelines recommend testing for a very narrow group of people — those who display respiratory symptoms and have recently traveled to China or had close contact with an infected person.

But many public health experts think that in light of evidence that the disease has taken root and spread in Iran, Italy, Singapore and South Korea, it’s time to broaden testing in the United States. Infectious disease experts fear that aside from the 14 cases picked up by public health surveillance, there may be other undetected cases mixed in with those of colds and flu. What scares experts the most is that the virus is beginning to spread in countries outside China, but no one knows whether that’s the case in the United States, because they aren’t checking.

“Coronavirus testing kits have not been widely distributed to our hospitals and public health labs. Those without these kits must send samples all the way to Atlanta, rather than testing them on site, wasting precious time as the virus spreads,” said Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

In a congressional hearing Tuesday, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on whether the CDC test was faulty. He denied that the test did not work.

But in a news briefing that was going on about the same time, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said that she was “frustrated” about problems with the test kits and that the CDC hoped to send out a new version to state and local health departments soon.

“I think we are close,” she said. She said that the agency is working as fast as possible on the tests, but that the priority is making sure they are accurate.

Currently, she said, a dozen state and local health departments can do the testing, although positive results need to be confirmed by the CDC. She also said she hoped that tests from commercial labs would soon come online.

Messonnier said the agency was weighing widening its testing protocols to include people traveling to the United States from countries beyond mainland China, considering the rapid spread of the virus in other places in recent days.

The nation’s public health laboratories, exasperated by the malfunctioning tests in the face of a global public health emergency, have taken the unusual step of appealing to the Food and Drug Administration for permission to develop and use their own tests. In Hawaii, authorities are so alarmed about the lack of testing ability that they requested permission from the CDC to use tests from Japan. A medical director at a hospital laboratory in Boston is developing an in-house test, but is frustrated that his laboratory won’t be able to use it without going through an onerous and time-consuming review process, even if demand surges.

“This is an extraordinary request, but this is an extraordinary time,” said Scott Becker, the chief executive of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, which is asking the FDA for permission to allow the laboratories to create and implement their own laboratory-developed tests.

At one hospital in the Mid-Atlantic region, a patient who recently returned from Singapore, which has 90 cases, was admitted to the hospital with mild upper respiratory symptoms, according to a hospital official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the patient’s privacy. The patient tested negative for flu. Because of underlying medical conditions, the person was at higher risk for severe illness if this was a coronavirus infection.




Even though clinicians suspected coronavirus, and treated the person for it and placed the patient in isolation, the patient was not tested.

“If this person had returned from mainland China, they would have been tested for coronavirus,” the official said. The patient recovered and was discharged to their home.

Testing also affects other aspects of care.

People with confirmed cases can enroll in clinical trials for therapeutics. For patients who need more intense care in a facility with a biocontainment unit, that facility can receive reimbursement from the federal government for care, the official said.

The CDC announced a week and a half ago that it would add pilot coronavirus testing to its flu surveillance network in five cities, a step toward expanded testing of people with respiratory symptoms who didn’t have other obvious risk factors. Specimens that test negative for flu will be tested for coronavirus. But that expanded testing has been delayed because of an unspecified problem with one of the compounds used in the CDC test. About half of state labs got inconclusive results when using the compound, so the CDC said it would make a new version and redistribute it.

To public health experts, the delays — and lack of transparency about what, exactly, is wrong with the test — are extremely concerning.

“We have over 700 flights every month between Hawaii and Japan or South Korea,” where the virus is spreading in the community, said Hawaii Lt. Gov. Josh Green (D), who is also an emergency physician. It’s unlikely that the CDC would allow state labs to accept a test from another nation, he said, but “this is an exceptional circumstance.”

In a letter to the FDA, the Association of Public Health Laboratories, which represents state and local laboratories, asked the agency to use “enforcement discretion” to allow the laboratories to create and use their own laboratory-developed tests.

“While we appreciate the many efforts underway at CDC to provide a diagnostic assay to our member labs … this has proven challenging and we find ourselves in a situation that requires a quicker local response,” said the letter, which was co-signed by Becker. “We are now many weeks into the response with still no diagnostic or surveillance test available outside of CDC for the vast majority of our member laboratories.”

 © AP/AP This electron microscope image made available by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in February 2020 shows the Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, yellow, emerging from the surface of cells, blue/pink, cultured in the lab.Because a public health emergency has been declared, certified hospital laboratories that usually have the ability to internally develop and validate their own tests can’t use them without applying for an “emergency use authorization,” a major barrier to deploying the test.

“I think a lot of people, myself included, think it’s very likely this virus might be circulating at low levels in the United States right now. We can’t know for sure because we haven’t seen it,” said Michael Mina, associate medical director of clinical microbiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He said the optimal testing scenario for flu is a 30-minute turnaround on a test, but right now, shipping samples to Atlanta to test for coronavirus means a 48-hour wait.

“A lot of hospitals are trying to do something similar, which is get a test up and running on an instrument, get it validated in-house,” Mina said. “I think all of us are coming to the same realization that we can’t do anything as long as this remains under the control of CDC and state labs.”

Marion Koopmans, a virologist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, which has performed a few hundred tests on behalf of more than a dozen countries, said that developing a test for a new pathogen is complicated and involves refinement and a back-and-forth between researchers who are constantly learning from one another.

“That is typical for a new disease outbreak. No one actually knows how this works, so you really have to build these assays on the fly,” Koopmans said.

But as the United States struggled to ramp up its capacity, the coronavirus test was added to the sentinel flu surveillance system in the Netherlands two weeks ago. The test was recently rolled out to 12 high-performing molecular diagnostic laboratories in the Netherlands so that they can be ready to scale up if demand increases.

Part of the problem in the still-struggling United States is the tension between regulations intended to ensure a high-quality standard for tests and the need to roll out diagnostic capabilities very quickly. No test is perfect, and with high stakes for missing or misidentifying a case, public health officials want to make sure that tests are as accurate as possible and are validated by labs that run them. But the slowness may also reflect years of underinvestment in public health infrastructure — and a bias toward developing treatments that may seem more appealing to the public.

“The public health system is not sufficiently built to surge very rapidly,” said Luciana Borio, the former director of Medical and Biodefense Preparedness Policy at the National Security Council and now a vice president at In-Q-Tel, a strategic investor that supports the U.S. intelligence community. “Over the years, when given limited dollars, we applied it toward vaccines and therapeutics, more so than diagnostic tests. I think there’s this idea: The diagnostic test is not going to save my life. But the fact is they underpin so much of the response and deserve a lot more attention.”

Read More:

The biggest questions about the new coronavirus and what we know so far

Inside a lab where scientists are working urgently to fight the coronavirus outbreak

Most coronavirus cases are mild, complicating the response

Crews battle large fire at L.A.-area refinery after explosion

EDMONTON IS A REFINERY CITY AS WELL AND LIKE LA OUR REFINERIES WERE BUILT FIFTY YEARS AGO 

An explosion and a large fire erupted at a Los Angeles-area refinery late Tuesday.

Marathon Petroleum's Los Angeles refinery is the largest on the West Coast with a crude oil capacity of 363,000 barrels per day

© Scott Varley/The Orange County Register Image: A fire burns after an explosion at the Marathon Refinery in Carson

The blaze at a Marathon refinery in the city of Carson happened about 11 p.m. Tuesday.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department tweeted that an explosion preceded a fire in the cooling tower, and that Marathon fire crews were keeping the flames in check while the system was being depressurized. No injuries were reported by the county fire department, which was assisting.

Carson is a city in southern Los Angeles County, south of Compton.

Resident Pricilla Reyes told NBC Los Angeles in a phone interview that her niece came running over to ask whether she heard an explosion and that they saw the fire from their home, which is about four blocks from the refinery.

"I heard about four or five explosions, really loud," said Reyes. "You could see the flames and the smoke from our house," she said.

Reyes said she shut the windows of her home in case the smoke was harmful.

Michael Molina told NBC Los Angeles he saw sparks and then "a big fireball in the air."

"I heard a couple more thumps, and I could see like a big ball of smoke," Molina said.

Molina, a truck driver who works in the area, said the force of the blast shook his truck.

The city of Carson did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Tuesday.

The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Carson station tweeted crews had secured a perimeter around the facility but did not anticipate needing to evacuate residents. The fire department was monitoring air quality.

Marathon Petroleum's Los Angeles refinery is the largest on the West Coast with a crude oil capacity of 363,000 barrels per day, according to its website.