Earth Matters: Killer heat adds another notch; Biden designates American Indian boarding school as national monument

A dozen years ago, Americans who were paying attention to such things were shocked to learn that 2012 had been the hottest year in the United States since records had been kept. Planet-wide it was the 10th warmest year. Climatologists, activists, and a handful of pundits sounded the alarm, warning that further delay in taking serious climate action would ultimately be catastrophic. As it stands now, according to scientists at the Copernicus Climate Change Service in the UK, unless there’s a miraculous cold spell in the next two weeks, 2024 will be the hottest year on record not just in the United States but on Earth as a whole.

I can hear the sighs and murmurs as the scrolling to another article gets underway. Many readers no doubt read that last year was the hottest on record. And also 2020. Plus 2016, 2015, and 2014. As well as the aforementioned 2012. You may also have heard that 18 of the past 18 years have been the warmest on record. In this light, global warming is kind of boring, isn’t it?

You’re unlikely to find anyone who wishes more than I that their twilight years would not include any further repeats of this “hottest year on record” stuff. Or who wishes (pessimistically) that the 1.55° Celsius (2.79° Fahrenheit) temperature rise above the pre-industrial era we hit in the past year will just be temporary. The tinkering at COP29 in Baku and the loss of the election to Donald Trump—who manages to be both numbskull and shill on climate—have put the knife to those wishes.

How the green transition unfolds in the U.S. and globally cannot be predicted given all the unknowns such a gigantic disruption entails. What we do know is that there are already a lot more than mere hints about where things are going because of our fossil fuel addiction. And in the U.S. and several European countries, there is a retreat or threatened retreat on government policies designed to prevent, ameliorate, or adapt to climate impacts.

Sea surface temperatures, which soared last year, have remained exceedingly high in 2024. UNICEF found that 466 million children—that’s one of five children on Earth—experience at least twice as many extremely hot days compared to 60 years ago. The impacts hit widely but the Sahel in Africa just south of the Sahara is especially hard hit. As usual, the elderly and children are at heightened health risks including heat stress and vulnerability to disease.

In an interview with The Guardian in August, Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution and a senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute of Imperial College London, said: “Heatwaves are the deadliest type of extreme weather but they don’t leave a trail of destruction or striking images of devastation. They kill poor, lonely people in rich countries, and poor people working outdoors in developing countries. In the last 13 months, there will be thousands and thousands of stories of poor people dying in heat that will never be told.”

The Sahel is far afield for most Americans. But the heat is coming for the vulnerable everywhere, and the U.S. has no more federal rules about heat exposure than Sudan. It’s not just outdoor workers in developing countries who face getting cooked by their need to make a living. It happens in America too, though some states are better than others. You can be pretty sure that in the deregulatory mania than will soon be in charge of the federal executive and Republican-dominated Congress, a national heat rule ain’t going to happen.

But that’s the small picture. The big picture tells us that 2025, thanks to our fossil fuel addiction, could be the hottest year ever recorded. As could any of the next four years and the four after that. And on and on until we humans stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Which day the oil and gas giants are determined to delay as long as there is a molecule of hydrocarbons to be extracted. Every day of delay more and more people are affected by the rising heat. As are many animals and plants.

Back in 2012, science deniers cranked up their already roaring propaganda machine to shrug off the soaring temperatures. Plenty of people bought into their fossil fuel-funded deceit. And still do. Indeed, on the last count, there were 123 sitting members of Congress who fall into the category of climate science deniers. Numbskulls or shills, take your pick. Four more years of climate myopia won’t make those boring repeats of “hottest year ever” go away, only make them even more inevitable.

—Meteor Blades

WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO

(With all the recent rough news, I thought a palate cleanser would be nice.)

RESOURCES & ACTION

GREEN BRIEFS

Biden announces American Indian boarding school is latest national monument

On the left photo, taken in late October 1886, are Chiricahua Apache children who were captured with Geronimo. On the right are the same children four months later. — On the left photo, taken in late October 1886, are Chiricahua Apache children who were captured with Geronimo. On the right are the same children four months later at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

In Denver in 1892, Capt. Richard Henry Pratt gave a speech in which he notoriously argued that civilizing and Christianizing American Indians (while continuing to detach them from their lands) was a matter of "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man." This was theory and practice at the Carlisle Indian School that Pratt had established 15 years before in Pennsylvania.

Under the 1906 Antiquities Act, President Joe Biden on Monday designated Carlisle and the surrounding 24.5 acres as a national monument in acknowledgment that it and more than 400 other institutions in 37 states used Pratt’s school as a model that harmed thousands of Native children, their families, and tribes from the 1870s through the 1960s.

Even if they themselves did not attend such schools, many modern American Indians have suffered multigenerational trauma because of what happened to their parents or grandparents or other family members. In my own case, my Seminole grandmother Simmalikee and her sister Hitochi were forced into a boarding school before they were 10 years old. When she was 15, my grandmother returned to her family and vowed never again to speak English, and so far as I know she never did. She did teach me the Seminole dialect of Muscogee, but one reason so many Natives today don’t know their Indigenous language is because boarding school teachers told them not to teach their children to speak anything but English.

In the proclamation regarding the Carlisle designation, Biden said:

The Federal Government’s goal was to assimilate Native children by stripping them of their languages, religions, and cultures. To that end, the children taken to these institutions were often separated from their families for years, and many never returned to their homes. The schools often used physical abuse, compulsory labor, and corporal punishment to achieve their assimilative ends. Many Native children were subjected to sexual abuse at the schools. School staff cut their hair, made them give up their traditional clothes and names, provided them with inadequate medical services, and deprived them of essential nutrition. According to available records, nearly 1,000 Native youths died in schools across the system, but the actual number of lives lost is likely much higher.

Said Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo whose great-grandfather and grandparents were stolen from their families and taken to boarding schools:

“No single action by the federal government can adequately reconcile the trauma and ongoing harms from the federal Indian boarding school era. But, taken together, the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to acknowledge and redress the legacy of the assimilation policy have made an enduring difference for Indian Country. This trauma is not new to Indigenous people, but it is new for many people in our nation. One of the reasons I launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative was to ensure that this important story was told. Through the National Park Service — America's storyteller — people can now learn more about the intergenerational impacts of these policies as we, as a nation, continue to take steps to heal from them.”

—Meteor Blades

Scientists’ 2024 Arctic report CARD shows worrying trends in snow, ice, wildfires, and more

Scientists issued their first report card on the climate situation in the Arctic in 2006. Even on the limited data they then had access to they were deeply worried and continued to be in subsequent report cards, each of which you can access through these National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration archives. The latest edition doesn’t ease up on those worries, rather the contrary. From the Executive Summary:

The Arctic continues to warm at a faster rate than the global average. The 2024 Arctic Report Card highlights record-breaking and near-record-breaking observations that demonstrate dramatic change, including Arctic tundra transformation from carbon sink to carbon source, declines of previously large inland caribou herds, and increasing winter precipitation. Observations also reveal regional differences that make local and regional experiences of environmental change highly variable for people, plants and animals. Adaptation is increasingly necessary and Indigenous Knowledge and community-led research programs are essential to understand and respond to rapid Arctic changes.

Some of the details:

When including the impact of increased wildfire activity, the Arctic tundra region has shifted from storing carbon in the soil to becoming a carbon dioxide source. Circumpolar wildfire emissions have averaged 207 million tons of carbon per year since 2003.
The Arctic remains a consistent methane source.
Warmer temperatures impact caribou movements and survival. Arctic migratory tundra caribou populations have declined by 65% over the last 2-3 decades. .
Snow accumulation during the 2023/24 winter was above average across both the Eurasian and North American Arctic.
All 18 of the lowest September minimum ice extents have occurred in the last 18 years.
Despite above-average snow accumulation, the snow season was the shortest in 26 years over portions of central and eastern Arctic Canada. Arctic snow melt is occurring 1-2 weeks earlier than historical conditions throughout May and June..
Tundra greenness, a measure of expanding shrub cover due to warming temperatures, ranked second highest in the 25-year satellite record.

—Meteor Blades

HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)

Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant in San Diego, California

Can desalination quench agriculture’s thirst? by Lela Nargi at Knowable Magazine. Ensuring the survival of agriculture under an increasingly erratic climate is approaching a crisis in the sere and sweltering Western and Southwestern United States, an area that supplies much of our beef and dairy, alfalfa, tree nuts, and produce. Contending with too little water to support their plants and animals, farmers have tilled under crops, pulled out trees, fallowed fields, and sold off herds. They’ve also used drip irrigation to inject smaller doses of water closer to a plant’s roots and installed sensors in soil that tell more precisely when and how much to water. In the last five years, researchers have begun to puzzle out how brackish water, pulled from underground aquifers, might be de-salted cheaply enough to offer farmers another water resilience tool. Loya’s property, which draws its slightly salty water from the Hueco Bolson aquifer, is about to become a pilot site to test how efficiently desalinated groundwater can be used to grow crops in otherwise water-scarce places.

The slippery challenge of defining climate adaptation by Jake Bittle at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The 1.5-degree target was just one element of the Paris accord. The world also committed to throw its weight behind efforts to adapt to the global warming already baked in by centuries of fossil-fueled industrialization. Even if emissions fall, disasters over the next century will displace many millions of people and destroy billions of dollars in property, particularly in developing countries across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Those countries fought to ensure that adaptation to those hazards was a key pillar of the Paris agreement. But there’s no one way to measure the success of this commitment. Should the U.N. measure the number of deaths from disasters, or the value of property destroyed in floods, or the incidence of hunger, or the availability of clean water? How will the international community determine the efficacy of adaptation measures like sea walls and drought-resistant crops, given that the disasters they prevent remain so unpredictable? “There is no one single measure you can use that will apply to all adaptation globally,” said Emilie Beauchamp, an adaptation expert at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a think tank.

A Black-Led Agricultural Community Takes Shape in Maryland by Lisa Held at Civil Eats. Since 2012, Gail Taylor has built healthy soil, provided hundreds of local families with fresh tomatoes and turnips, and fostered community on less than an acre at Three Part Harmony Farm in northeast Washington, D.C. Along the way, she’s blazed a trail and spearheaded legislation to enable other urban farmers in D.C. to follow. And she’s done it all with a sense that—at any moment—it could all be over. Because with farm leases that only cover up to three years at a time, the threat of the landlord selling out to a pricey condo developer has hung over every kale and garlic harvest. Unfortunately, the scenario is a common one. Surveys of young farmers running operations like hers have consistently found that farmers rank access to stable, affordable land as a top challenge. For Black, Indigenous, and other farmers of color, it’s an even more formidable barrier. And access to capital is right up there alongside—and intimately tied to—land access. For more than a decade, those challenges have plagued the movement to energize and equip a new generation of farmers inspired to contribute to climate resilience and healthy, equitable communities. Adding urgency to it all is the fact that the average age of the American farmer keeps creeping up toward 60.

Trump’s OMB Pick Wants to Purge the Government of ‘Climate Fanaticism’ by Jeva Lange at Heatmap. In one of the most consequential moves yet for America’s standing in the fight to mitigate climate change — Trump also named Russ Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget. The decision comes as no surprise — Vought served as deputy director of the OMB under Trump in 2018 and took over the top job in 2019, serving until the end of Trump’s first presidency. [...] Vought is noteworthy for having thought long and hard about how to purge federal agencies of nonpartisan experts and replace them with partisan loyalists. He plans to do so mainly by reinstating Schedule F, a job classification that would designate at least 50,000 career civil servants as “at-will” political employees, including climate scientists National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and others who sit on committees like the Clean Air Scientific Advisory. In Vought’s words in his chapter of Project 2025, “the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.” (In a recent conversation with Tucker Carlson, the pair speculated about being able to “fire them all.”) Vought already tried this once, at the end of Trump’s first term, and Biden swiftly reversed it upon taking office.

Bird flu is racing through farms, but Northwest states are rarely testing workers by Rachel Spacek at Investigate West. Workers recently began their week on a large poultry farm in Franklin County, Washington, home to over 800,000 chickens. By the end of the day, avian flu had been discovered among some of those chickens. By the end of the week, four workers came down with the illness, which had infected only a handful of other people in the U.S. Two more days of testing found another 10 workers at the farm registering positive. The outbreak, initially detected Oct. 14, was the first human cases this year of the avian flu in the Pacific Northwest. The first human case in Oregon was confirmed Nov. 15, adding to mounting evidence that the flu is spreading. But efforts to test and monitor the disease among workers are spotty and inconsistent and leave the responsibility for getting tested on the laborers themselves, many of whom are undocumented and can’t afford to take time off if they test positive. Meanwhile, the virus is spreading rapidly among cows and chickens, raising concerns among epidemiologists that the avian flu could merge with the regular flu and cause a pandemic, making it even more urgent to try to limit the spread among people.

20th century lead exposure damaged American mental health by scientists at Duke University. Exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood altered the balance of mental health in the U.S. population, making generations of Americans more depressed, anxious and inattentive or hyperactive, according to researchers. They estimate that 151 million cases of psychiatric disorder over the past 75 years have resulted from American children's exposure to lead.

RESEARCH & STUDIES

Britain leads the world in cracking down on climate activism. Study shows UK police arrest environmental and climate protesters at three times the average global rate.
Arctic’s ice-free future could arrive sooner than expected, new study warns. According to researchers, since 1979, the Arctic has lost sea ice at an alarming rate of more than 12% per decade. IWhen sea ice in the Arctic drops below 1 million square kilometers, scientists consider it "ice-free."
New report reveals wind turbines and solar panels are changing the power landscape in a major way: “We are witnessing a historic shift.” For the first time, wind turbines and solar panels have produced 30% of the energy needed in the European Union, passing traditional dirty fuels. The improvement was centered in 13 of the EU member states, all of which produced more energy from wind and the sun than from dirty sources.
EV batteries can last 38% longer than expected. The study pinpointed strong correlations between dynamic discharge profiles from driving and battery ageing under non-accelerated conditions in the laboratory. Dynamic cycling enhances battery lifetime.
Cotton-and-squid-bone sponge can soak up 99.9% of microplastics, scientists say. A sponge made of cotton and squid bone that has absorbed about 99.9% of microplastics in water samples in China could provide an elusive answer to ubiquitous microplastic pollution in water across the globe, a new report from the the University of Wuhan suggests.

WEEKLY BLUESKY POST

_{(To see the original, click}_here.₎

ECOPINION

How Trump and Congress Could Reverse Biden-Era Regulations by Emma Janssen at The American Prospect. A law that gives Congress and the president the power to nullify federal regulations will almost certainly be part of Donald Trump’s strategy to overturn policies set by the Biden administration. The Congressional Review Act (CRA) is a Newt Gingrich–era law passed in 1996 to empower congressional oversight of federal rule making. Crucially, the law contains provisions that allow it to speed through Congress, eliminating barriers like the Senate filibuster. That makes it an attractive option for Republicans to make progress on a deregulatory agenda. “It gets Congress out of Congress’s own way,” said James Goodwin of the Center for Progressive Reform in a webinar discussing the CRA. Any regulation put forth by a federal agency in the final 60 legislative days is fair game for Congress to slash — whether it be an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule about methane emissions or a Consumer Product Safety Commission rule that sets standards for infant support cushions. Spoiler alert: Both of those rules could be on the chopping block in the early weeks of the Trump administration.

Kate Yoder: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — Kate Yoder

Does talking about climate ‘tipping points’ inspire action — or defeat? by Kate Yoder at Grist. A new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change makes the case that all these alarming events should be called something other than “tipping points.” The framing is intended to draw attention to the radical changes that global warming might bring. But a group of scientists from Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and cities around the United States argue that the concept is scientifically imprecise — and worse, it might be backfiring. Bob Kopp, a co-author of the paper who researches climate change and sea level rise at Rutgers University, said that talking about tipping points, as scary as they are, might not inspire people to do something about climate change. That’s because fear is an unreliable motivator. It might be key to generating attention online, but it can too often leave people feeling defeated and disengaged. “Tipping points are not, as a way of looking at the world, some inherent property of the world,” Kopp said. “It’s a choice to use that framing.”

The US Must Join the Global Fight Against Desertification to Prevent a Second Dust Bowl by William Ferwerda at Common Dreams. Desertification is no longer a distant issue; it’s an urgent threat that directly impacts food security, economic stability, and the resilience of communities in the U.S. and beyond. The Dust Bowl wasn’t just the result of drought; it was driven by unsustainable land-use practices, including the removal of native grasses and over-plowing for agriculture. What followed was environmental devastation, economic collapse, and the displacement of millions. This period remains a dark reminder of what happens when land is mismanaged, and its lessons are more relevant than ever as the world faces the growing crisis of desertification.

A stalled global plastic treaty threatens our future fertility by Susanne M. Brander and Shanna Swan at Environmental Health News. Plastic pollution is one of our most intractable environmental challenges, disproportionately impacting vulnerable communities in the Global South and contributing to climate change. As our thirst for single-use plastics drives up the demand for fossil fuels, most non-recyclable plastic products are being landfilled or incinerated, further contributing to carbon emissions. Most of the plastic ever produced is still with us, continually degrading into micro and nano-sized particles that are nearly impossible to remove from the environment, and as we now know, even persisting in our bodies. The global plastics treaty currently being negotiated by 175 countries via the United Nations Environment Programme is a pivotal and possibly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to address this crisis. Last week the fifth round of negotiations ended in a stalemate, with a sixth round planned for 2025. The lack of consensus to date is largely due to failure to agree on regulation of plastic chemicals and production caps

MSNBC Has Traded Climate Coverage for Trump Talk by Ashley Bishop and Spencer Snyder at Jacobin. You wouldn’t think Democrats were terribly interested in climate change if you were to watch liberal social media. On liberals’ home channel, MSNBC, all meaningful discussion of climate change is either edged out by or subsumed into the mother discussion: Donald Trump. The Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer found that from October 2023 to October 2024, there were 11 times as many segments mentioning Trump as there were mentioning climate change. During this yearlong period, the network went without mentioning climate change for 80 nonconsecutive days; zero days went by without mention of Trump. Furthermore, many of those mentions of climate change were incidental references made in passing, e.g., during breaking news coverage of an extreme weather event like a hurricane or heat wave. Often they were nested within a list of top issues, e.g., a graphic from November 2023 that reads, “Gen Z’s Top Issues: Mass Shootings, Climate Change, Racial Equality, Mental Health, Abortion.” By contrast, segments mentioning Trump were, for the most part, actually about Trump. In this year of coverage, MSNBC viewers spent roughly 5,300 minutes hearing the word “Trump” and about 17 minutes hearing “climate change.” That is a ratio of around 300 to 1.

I regret none of the climate policies we pushed in Ireland. But we underestimated the backlash by Eamon Ryan at The Guardian. Perhaps we underestimated the backlash we were to receive from the vested interests that want to maintain the status quo. Ryanair, Ireland’s biggest polluter, was in constant campaign mode to “weed out” the Greens, while a band of keyboard warriors swamped our every social media post with the most vile commentary imaginable. You brush it off at the time, but in truth, I think it did poison the well of public thinking on what we are about. It did not help either that the tide of public interest in climate breakdown receded as Covid and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza filled our screens. Most of all I worry that a younger generation may have become disillusioned and disheartened. The slogan of the school strikers, “We are unstoppable, another world is possible”, might be ringing slightly hollow six years on from the early days of their campaign. But I think there is one other lesson from Ireland, which might restore some hope. Just as there are dangerous climate breakdown tipping points that we risk crossing, there are also tipping points happening that can give us optimism. The renewable clean energy revolution has taken off in the past five years in Ireland as well as elsewhere, and I don’t think it will be stopped. (Eamon Ryan was Irish Green party leader from 2011 to 2024.)