Science
A Climate Warrior’s Journey From Summit Talks to Street Protests
“I felt that the entire multilateral world, the worldwide framework for human rights, was simply collapsing round me,” Ms. Yamin mentioned.
When, from a gathering room at a United Nations local weather convention in Marrakesh, Morocco, Ms. Yamin watched Mr. Trump win the election, she was despondent. She felt that her 30-year profession as a authorities lawyer and local weather negotiator had amounted to nothing.
“All of it was going up in smoke,” she mentioned. “I couldn’t inform my shoppers, I couldn’t mislead the Marshall Islands, that we’d repair this.” Ms. Yamin took a 12 months off, spending most of her time in nature remedy lessons and tenting within the wilderness for weeks at a time.
Throughout her day without work, Ms. Yamin started studying about different social actions, just like the anti-apartheid marketing campaign and the suffragist motion, that used social mobilization and nonviolent resistance to advance their causes. “I felt that the local weather motion was nearly distinctive and fragile, relying totally on insider techniques and never on motion constructing,” she mentioned. “It wasn’t counting on the total units of instruments.”
It was this concept that reignited Ms. Yamin’s ardour for local weather and helped her get again to work. As an alternative of returning to local weather diplomacy, Ms. Yamin joined the nascent Extinction Rise up motion, a decentralized group that makes use of nonviolent motion and civil disobedience, in 2018.
Initially, Ms. Yamin grew to become the chief of Extinction Rise up’s political crew, utilizing her data of the diplomatic terrain to assist the motion be extra strategic in its activism and get extra funding. Even in her new activist function, although, Ms. Yamin felt she was relying too closely on her mental abilities as an alternative of placing her physique on the road. When an Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change report was issued in October 2018, Ms. Yamin was studying the report as activists crammed Parliament Sq. in London. As she noticed footage of younger individuals refusing to maneuver and ready to be arrested, she thought, “I need to be with them.”
Ice shelf collapses. For the primary time since satellites started observing Antarctica almost half a century in the past, an ice shelf has collapsed on the japanese a part of the continent. The 450-square-mile ice shelf was positioned in an space often known as Wilkes Land; the loss occurred in mid-March.
Perceive the Newest Information on Local weather Change
Ms. Yamin spent the next two years working with Extinction Rise up, organizing and protesting alongside different activists. She stepped down from her function with the group in 2020 due to disagreements with different leaders. Ms. Yamin mentioned she believed the motion was not targeted sufficient on local weather justice.
Science
Sex, radiation and mummies: How farms are fighting a pesky almond moth without pesticides
In a windowless shack on the far outskirts of Fresno, an ominious red glow illuminates a lab filled with X-ray machines, shelves of glowing boxes, a quietly humming incubator and a miniature wind tunnel.
While the scene looks like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, its actually part of an experimental program to prevent a damaging almond pest from successfully mating.
With California almond growers reeling from dropping nut prices and rising costs, the pests have only added to their woes.
Every year, the navel orangeworm eats through roughly 2% of California’s almonds before they can make it to grocery store shelves. Last year, it was almost double that.
While that might seem small, if you do the math “it’s going to be a lot of millions of dollars lost to this pest,” said David Haviland, a Kern County farm advisor with University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. “And that’s despite the control methods that people use,” he said.
California produces 80% of the world’s almonds, yet in 2022 the production value of the nut fell 34% compared with the previous year.
Scientists say climate change could make the navel orangeworm problem even worse, with hotter temperatures allowing the moths to reproduce even faster. (Despite its name, the insect has largely left citrus farms unbothered and is in fact a moth.)
Traditionally, nut farmers have tackled the insect with chemical pesticides, or by destroying “mummies” — almonds left over after harvest. Mummies are a favorite winter shelter for the bugs.
However, research is increasingly showing that chemical pesticides are not only harmful to the environment but to people as well. One new study found that the impact of nearby pesticide use on cancer incidence “may rival that of smoking.”
“When you have to don a spacesuit, basically, to apply something, you’re definitely thinking, ‘This is not good,’” said Houston Wilson, an entomologist with UC ANR’s Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center and the mastermind behind the sci-fi shack.
“Across the board, folks want to get away from chemical controls,” he said.
So farmers and researchers have been searching for other non-pesticide alternatives.
Removing almost every last mummy from every tree in an orchard can be effective, but since it must be done manually, it can become too expensive and complex for some growers.
Another tactic that’s been used since around 2010 is to cover orchards with disorienting levels of sex pheromones to confuse horny moths — a technique known as “mating disruption.”
But with limited budgets and climate change threatening to make the pest situation worse, researchers are studying another yet-to-be-proven approach: sterilizing almost a million moths a day with radiation and dropping them out of planes.
The idea behind the technique is that by flooding orchards with sterilized insects, they will mate with fertile insects and produce no offspring, reducing the overall population.
The simplest way to sterilize the bugs is to use radiation. Since their reproductive genes tend to mutate faster, the right dose can leave them relatively unfazed but unable to reproduce.
At the request of almond and pistachio farmers, the California Department of Food and Agriculture has been working with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture since 2018 to source sterilized moths from a Phoenix lab.
The lab sterilizes about 750,000 bugs per day, then chills the moths to put them to sleep and ships them off to California. The bugs are dropped from an airplane hundreds of feet in the air. Often too sleepy to fly, the insects crash into the hard ground or almond trees.
From there, the survivors have only one job: have sex.
Through this test program, the USDA hopes to perfect the best ways to get moths to reproduce in the lab and give them the right dose of radiation that will sterilize them but not severely injure or disorient them.
The program has yet to put a significant dent in the moth population, though, because they can’t produce enough sterile bugs.
Right now, researchers are only finding a couple of sterile insects in traps for every hundred wild fertile moths. For the technique to be effective, they’ll need to deploy dozens of sterile bugs for every wild one.
Matthew Aubuchon, national policy manager at the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, estimated that the Phoenix facility could produce up to 8 million moths per day with enough staff working around the clock.
While opening more facilities in California would help, the program uses cobalt to produce high-energy radiation to sterilize the bugs — which is expensive and requires the lab to take extensive safety and security measures.
Wilson’s sci-fi shack at Kearney might hold a solution that is cheaper and easier to scale.
Instead of using cobalt or other radioactive materials, Wilson’s team uses an X-ray machine to irradiate the pests. (Unlike a radioactive substance, an X-ray machine will not emit radiation when it is turned off.)
Then, the team puts their X-rayed bugs and the sterilized insects from Phoenix through a series of tests to determine which methods produce the healthiest, sterile moths.
The tests include gluing moths to the end of a stick suspended in the air. The stick rotates like a carousel as the moths flutter around and researchers record how well they can fly.
The researchers also place moths in a wind tunnel and release sex pheromones to see if the excited bugs are able to locate the smell. (Unfortunately for the insects, there are no potential mates at the end of the tunnel.)
While the team doesn’t yet produce enough X-rayed moths to test them in a full-blown almond orchard, they do send the Phoenix moths into their final test: releasing them into their seven-acre almond farm on the Kearney campus to see how good they are at actually finding fertile moths to mate with.
The researchers at Kearney may be in a race against time, however.
Scientists say it’s possible that climate change will continue to tip the weather in the moths’ favor. The metabolism of navel orangeworms — like many agricultural pests — is tied to temperature. The hotter it is, the faster they grow and reproduce.
A 2021 study found that the moths, which can have life cycles as short as just one month, may be able to squeeze in another generation each summer before holing up in nuts for the winter.
“For each additional generation, their population is increasing at an exponential rate,” said Tapan Pathak, an author on the study and a professor at UC Merced.
“If this additional generation is coinciding with … harvest,” Pathak said, “then they become unmarketable. That’s a huge economic loss.”
However, the food web is complicated, and just because the warmer weather benefits the moths on paper doesn’t mean the moths will end up on top.
“Navel orangeworm could be a nightmare … but it could also become less of a problem because all the things that eat it benefit more from the heat than the navel orangeworm,” said Haviland. “The crystal ball is certainly not clear enough to know what will happen.”
Researchers stress that successful pest control will require multiple measures.
“What we’ve learned through integrated pest management is that the timing of one or staggering of different approaches together yields results for the growers,” said Aubuchon.
The tried-and-true non-pesticide method growers have been using since the moths’ unannounced arrival in the 1940s is to simply ensure all the almonds are either harvested or destroyed by the time winter arrives.
But for this method to be effective, there must be no more than two almonds left on every tree in an orchard. This can be hard to achieve in wet weather.
Rain makes almond branches soggy and flexible, which makes it hard to snap nuts off using an industrial shaker. Damp earth can also make it difficult for machines to get close to the trees.
Instead, workers must use poles to knock almonds off manually. As effective as this is, increasing labor costs mean some farms just can’t afford it.
While researchers say the sterile insect technique still has a lot of hurdles to clear before it will be widely effective, they say it holds great promise.
“You’re literally managing a pest by preventing it from being born in the first place,” said Haviland of both sterile insect technique and pheromone mating disruption. “To think that something like that was possible 10 or 15 years ago — nobody could imagine that growers would be using such innovative techniques as those.”
Science
The Tijuana River smells so bad, the CDC is coming to investigate
San Diego County residents will have an opportunity to share their pollution concerns about the Tijuana River when officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention arrive later this month to conduct a health survey.
This is the first time that a federal agency is investigating the potential harm caused by millions of gallons of raw sewage pouring through the Tijuana River that have caused beach closures of more than 1,000 days. Residents living near the river say they have been suffering unexplained illnesses, including gastrointestinal issues and chronic breathing problems, because of the stench of hydrogen sulfide.
“We’re continuing to lean in and listen in on what our community residents are feeling,” said Dr. Seema Shah, the interim deputy public health officer with San Diego County. Supervisor Nora Vargas first wrote to the CDC back in May, formally asking the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to look into the health complaints.
This week, the county began reaching out to thousands of residents to inform them that the CDC is coming in the hope that they will be more receptive to answering questions. “This is our chance to be able to communicate [pollution concerns] on a national level,” Shah added.
As part of what the CDC calls a Community Assessment for Public Health Emergency Response, 210 households will be surveyed about their mental and physical health, as well as the pollution’s effects on property values. The families will be randomly selected from 30 clusters of neighborhoods where San Diego County has identified air pollution complaints in the Tijuana River Valley.
Around 30 officials from the CDC and 50 graduate student volunteers from San Diego State University’s School of Public Health will be going door to door to conduct interviews with local residents over a three-day period. Here are the times when the survey will be conducted:
- Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024, from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.
- Friday, Oct. 18, 2024, from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.
- Saturday, Oct. 19, 2024, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
The goal is to accommodate people’s schedules and, officials hope, catch them after work, Shah said. The volunteers are helping to bridge the language barriers with Spanish-speaking families.
“A lot of students, many of whom are bilingual, are from the community themselves,” said Paula Granados, an associate professor at San Diego State University’s School of Public Health, who’s been testing the Tijuana River for contaminants over the past month. “Our students are super excited. They want to help.”
The CDC could take weeks to months to release even the preliminary results from the survey, but for longtime residents like Bethany Case, this renewed attention already feels like a breath of hope.
“I just really want [this survey] to inform policy so that we don’t have to worry about our kids being sick,” said Case, the mother of two who’s lived in Imperial Beach for 16 years. For seven years she’s been an activist fighting to clean up the river as a volunteer with Surfrider, a nonprofit that works to preserve ocean access and cleanliness.
“I’m hoping that their survey shows that oftentimes it doesn’t just smell like sewage,” Case added. She doesn’t want the focus on the sewage to distract from the industrial waste that is dumped into the river that could be making people ill. “Oftentimes it smells like a chemical, it smells like a bite in the air, it burns your sinuses.”
Granados said the CDC’s survey is only a snapshot of what was going on when the data were collected, and conditions could worsen for residents when rainy seasons flood the river once more. Granados wants residents to know that even if they aren’t picked to respond to this survey, SDSU will be conducting its own yearlong survey that they can answer multiple times at tjriver.sdsu.edu.
“There’s research that’s still ongoing,” Granados said, and all that data will help policy decisions in the future. “We’re just committed to the long haul, whatever it takes to support the community.”
The county and other federal and state representatives have been working to raise awareness around the pollution to a national level.
Next week, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors will consider a proposal by Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer to petition the Environmental Protection Agency to label the Tijuana River a Superfund site in need of remediation.
Science
'More serious than we had hoped': Bird flu deaths mount among California dairy cows
As California struggles to contain an increasing number of H5N1 bird flu outbreaks at Central Valley dairy farms, veterinary experts and industry observers are voicing concern that the number of cattle deaths is far higher than anticipated.
Although dairy operators had been told to expect a mortality rate of less than 2%, preliminary reports suggest that between 10% and 15% of infected cattle are dying, according to veterinarians and dairy farmers.
“I was shocked the first time I encountered it in one of my herds,” said Maxwell Beal, a Central Valley-based veterinarian who has been treating infected herds in California since late August. “It was just like, wow. Production-wise, this is a lot more serious than than we had hoped. And health-wise, it’s a lot more serious than we had been led to believe.”
A total of 56 California dairy farms have reported bird flu outbreaks. At the same time, state health officials have reported two suspected cases of H5N1 infections among dairy workers in Tulare County, the largest dairy-producing county in the nation. With more than 600,000 dairy cows, the county accounts for roughly 30% of the state’s milk production.
Beal’s observations were confirmed by others during a Sept. 26 webinar for dairy farmers that was hosted by the California Dairy Quality Assurance Program — an arm of the industry-funded California Dairy Research Foundation. A summary of the findings and observations was reported in a newsletter published earlier this week by the program.
Beal, along with Murray Minnema, another Central Valley veterinarian, and Jason Lombard, a Colorado State University veterinarian, described their observations and data to dairy farmers to help them anticipate the signs of, and treatments for, the virus.
The webcast was not made available to The Times.
“The animals really don’t do well,” Beal told The Times.
He said the infected cows he has seen are not dissimilar to people who are suffering from a typical flu: “They don’t look so hot.”
He and others think the recent heat may be a factor.
Since the end of August, the Central Valley has suffered multiple heat waves, with daytime temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.
“Heat stress is always a problem in dairy cattle here in California,” he said. “So you take that, you add in this virus, which does have some affinity for the respiratory tract … we always see a little bit of snotty noses and heavy breathing in animals that are affected … and for some of them, just the stress takes them.”
Indeed, most of the deaths are not directly the result of the virus, he said, but are “virus adjacent.” For instance, he has seen a lot of bacterial pneumonia, which is likely the result of the cow’s depressed immune system, as well as bloat.
He said that when the cows aren’t feeling well, they often don’t eat.
“The digestive tract, or rumen, basically requires movement. There has to be things moving out of that rumen constantly in order for the pH balance and microbiome to stay where it should be,” he said. So, when they’re not eating, things in the digestive tract stagnate.
That, in turn, causes them to “asphyxiate because their diaphragm has too much pressure on it.”
In addition, he and others are seeing a lot of variation in the duration of illness.
While early reports had suggested the virus seemed mild and lasted only about a week or two, others are seeing it last several weeks. According to the industry newsletter, at one dairy, cows were shedding virus 14 days before they showed clinical signs of illness. It then took another three weeks for the cows to get rid of the virus.
They’re also noticing the virus is affecting larger percentages of herds — in some cases 50%-60% of the animals. This is much more than the 10% that had been previously reported.
Some say the actual rate may be even higher.
“I would speculate infection is even higher; 50-60% are showing clinical signs due to heat stress or better herd monitoring earlier in infection. Unfortunately, few or no herds have been assessed retrospectively through serology testing to determine actual infection rates,” said John Korslund, a retired U.S. Department of Agriculture veterinarian epidemiologist.
Cows are also not returning to 100% production after they’ve cleared the virus, said Beal. Instead, he and others say it’s closer to 60%-70%.
“There’s going to be some animals that are removed from the herd, because they never seem to come back,” he said.
Beal said his firsthand observations have really challenged his notions about the disease, which has so often been described as mild and insignificant.
“Once I saw it myself, I said, this is something I need to communicate with my clients about … this is not something that is just a joke at the dinner table,” he said. “I didn’t want people to not take it seriously, because I see what it is doing to the animals, and it is rough to see — as an animal caretaker, as a veterinarian like myself — it’s just not something that’s enjoyable. It’s more serious than we had been led to believe.”
He said he is working hard with Central Valley farmers to treat the animals — largely by making sure the cattle are adequately hydrated. He also treats sick cows with a medication similar to aspirin, to reduce fever, pain and discomfort.
He said the treatment is pretty effective, and seems to be helping.
Others are not surprised H5N1 is becoming more severe in cows.
“As I’ve said since we first learned of the outbreak in dairy cows, nothing we’ve learned about this virus is new or unexpected,” said Rick Bright, a virologist and former head of the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. “It’s behaving exactly as we’ve come to know of this virus over the past 25 years. It’s spreading very efficiently now among mammals, and it’s mutating and adapting to mammals as it does.”
He credited state health officials and veterinarian for “being more forthcoming and transparent with their data” than other states, and said this may be the reason the virus seems to be hitting California cows so hard.
“This virus is out of control. It is time for urgent and serious leadership and action to halt further transmission and mutation,” Bright said. “The concept of letting it burn out through food animals, with unmonitored voluntary testing, has failed. There are pandemic playbooks that we need to dust off and begin to implement.”
In the meantime, officials continue to reassure the public about the safety of the nation’s dairy supply. They say pasteurization inactivates the virus. They also warn people to stay away from raw milk.
Beal noted one of the sentinel signs that a farm has been infected is dead barn cats that have drunk the infected, raw milk.
“It’s weird, actually, how consistently that seems to be happening everywhere,” he said. “It’s pretty sad and shocking. But that’s one of the first things that people see sometimes.”
There is also some suggestion that some cows that have recovered from the virus have been reinfected, although this has not been confirmed.
“We don’t have any data to support this yet, but there have been anecdotal reports of reinfections in herds,” said Kay Russo, a dairy-poultry vet with RSM Consulting, an international consulting firm.
She said it could just be a persistent infection that is being observed, but also speculated that the virus could be mutating rapidly — and evolving “enough to reinfect an animal.”
And Jason Lombard, one of the speakers at the dairy webinar, said in an email that he had been told by veterinarians that they are observing clinical signs of disease in animals that had been infected, “but I don’t believe any of them have been confirmed via testing.”
As of Oct. 4, California officials have reported 56 infected herds. Although state officials will not disclose the location of these herds, the Valley Veterinarians Inc. website — a veterinary clinic run by large-animal vets in the Central Valley — said the infections are in Tulare and Fresno counties.
Steve Lyle, a California Department of Food and Agriculture spokesman, would not confirm the counties.
There are more than 200 herds in Tulare County and more than 100 in Fresno County. The state’s largest raw milk dairy is also in Fresno County.
Requests by The Times to observe infected farms or speak with the owners of infected dairies went unanswered by the state and declined by industry insiders.
“We are not recommending farmers engage on this due to farm security issues we’ve had,” said Anja Raudabaugh, chief executive officer of Western United Dairies, an industry trade group for California dairy farmers. “It is very unwise to consider viewing a dairy under quarantine … this is just not the time.”
She said her organization doesn’t want anyone “doxing” farmers or increasing traffic at or near a farm, “both of which have happened.”
In the last week, the H5N1 virus has been detected in wastewater samples collected in Turlock, San Francisco, Sunnyvale and Palo Alto.
State epidemiologist Erica Pan said it was hard to know where the virus is coming from. While Turlock is a dairy center, the hits in the Bay Area cities could potentially be from wild birds, she said, but the source is not known.
-
Technology5 days ago
Charter will offer Peacock for free with some cable subscriptions next year
-
World4 days ago
Ukrainian stronghold Vuhledar falls to Russian offensive after two years of bombardment
-
World4 days ago
WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange says he pleaded ‘guilty to journalism’ in order to be freed
-
Technology4 days ago
Beware of fraudsters posing as government officials trying to steal your cash
-
Health2 days ago
Health, happiness and helping others are vital parts of free and responsible society, Founding Fathers taught
-
Virginia6 days ago
Status for Daniels and Green still uncertain for this week against Virginia Tech; Reuben done for season
-
Sports3 days ago
Freddie Freeman says his ankle sprain is worst injury he's ever tried to play through
-
News2 days ago
Lebanon says 50 medics killed in past three days as Israel extends its bombardment