Citizen Cartwright

Fish are ‘refugees’ as the oceans warm

Reuters is running a multipart series on ocean warming after a year-long investigation.

 

The series seems to me to be unusual for Reuters in its glitzy graphics — and especially in its overheated language.

 

But I respect Reuters’ fact checking, so:

 

In the last few decades, the oceans have undergone unprecedented warming, says Reuters. "These changes are for the most part invisible from land, but this hidden climate change has had a disturbing impact on marine life – in effect, creating an epic underwater refugee crisis.”

 

Reuters says it's discovered that from the waters off the East Coast of the United States to the coast of West Africa, "marine creatures are fleeing for their lives, and the communities that depend on them are facing disruption as a result."

As waters warm, fish and other marine life are migrating poleward, seeking to maintain the even temperatures they need to thrive and breed. 

 

"The number of creatures involved in this massive diaspora may well dwarf any climate impacts yet seen on land,” Reuters says.

In the U.S. North Atlantic, for example, fisheries data show that in recent years, at least 85 percent of the nearly 70 federally tracked species have shifted north or to deeper depths, or both, when compared to the norm over the past half-century. And the most dramatic of those shifts have occurred in the last 10 to 15 years.

Fish always have followed changing conditions, sometimes with devastating effects for people. But what's happening today is different: The accelerating rise in sea temperatures, which scientists attribute mainly to the burning of fossil fuels, is causing a lasting shift in fisheries, Reuters says.

Fishing worldwide is a $140 billion to $150 billion business annually, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. In some parts of the world, seafood accounts for half of the average person’s diet. 

Fishermen’s livelihoods are at stake, says Reuters. For the sardine-eating Portuguese and seafood-loving Japanese, cultural heritages are at risk. And the burgeoning aquaculture industry, boosted in part by the effects of climate change, is decimating traditional fishing in West Africa and destroying coastal mangrove swamps in Southeast Asia. 

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Pentagon sending 5,200 troops to help ‘harden the southern border’

The troops will join the more than 2,000 National Guardsmen that President Trump already has deployed to the border, says The Associated Press.

 

Trump has stepped up his warnings about migrant caravans heading toward the United States, tweeting, “This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!”

 

The number of people in the first migrant caravan headed toward the United States has dwindled to about 4,000 from about 7,000 last week, although a second one is gaining steam and marked by violence, says AP.

 

About 600 migrants in the second group tried to cross a bridge from Guatemala to Mexico on Monday. The riverbank standoff with Mexican police followed a more violent confrontation Sunday when the migrants used sticks and rocks against officers. One migrant was killed on Sunday night by a head wound, but the cause is unclear.

 

The escalating rhetoric over the migrants and expected deployments come as Trump has been trying to turn the caravans into a key election issue days before elections that will determine whether Republicans maintain control of Congress, says AP.

“This will be the election of the caravans, the Kavanaughs, law and order, tax cuts, and you know what else? It’s going to be the election of common sense,” Trump said at a rally in Illinois on Saturday night.

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Brazil: 'Trump of the tropics’ Jair Bolsonaro is elected president of world’s fourth-largest democracy

The former army captain, who cast himself as a political outsider despite a 27-year career in Congress, has become the latest world leader to rise to power by mixing tough, often violent rhetoric with hard-right positions, says The Associated Press. 

 

Bolsonaro's win adds Brazil to a growing list of countries — from the United States to Hungary to the Philippines — where right-wing nationalists have scored victories at the ballot box, says The Washington Post.

 

His rise follows conservative electoral victories in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay and Peru that are pushing the continent to the right, says Reuters.

Bolsonaro’s victory reflects widespread anger at the political class after years of corruption, an economy that's struggled to recover after a recession, and a surge in violence.

 

Part of the reason for Bolsonaro’s win was the collapse of the left, says The New York Times. Many people cried foul after former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the longtime front-runner in the race, was ruled ineligible to run after being imprisoned in April to start serving a 12-year sentence for corruption and money laundering.

 

For the past two years, the country has been led by a conservative, Michel Temer, after the impeachment of leftist President Dilma Rousseff. 

 

But Temer has been deeply unpopular. With his approval rating at a record low of 2 percent, voters clamored for change but were deeply divided on which way that change should go.

 

Bolsonaro will be the first president with a background in the armed forces since the end of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship, which he has publicly praised. He's chosen retired generals to serve as his vice president and to run key ministries.

 

“The way he’s run his campaign is very clever,” says Matias Spektor, a professor of international relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas University. “He has managed to align himself with the institutions that Brazilians still believe in: religion, family and armed forces.”

Bolsonaro has alarmed many with vows to sweep political opponents off the map and with comments denigrating women, gays and racial minorities.

 

A year ago, Bolsonaro’s bid was widely seen by political veterans in Brasília as fanciful in a nation renowned for the cordiality and warmth of its people, says the Times. Some of Bolsonaro's remarks were so offensive that the country’s attorney general earlier this year charged him with inciting hatred toward black, gay and indigenous people. In a country where most of the population isn't white, this alone might have seemed to disqualify him, the Times says.

 

“This is a really radical shift,” says Scott Mainwaring, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government who specializes in Brazil. “I can’t think of a more extremist leader in the history of democratic elections in Latin America who has been elected.”

Here is an AP explainer on the ways Bolsonaro used Trump tactics in his campaign.

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Report on family separations at the border: Agencies were blindsided by Trump order

With the White House considering tougher immigration measures as a caravan of migrants slowly heads north from Central America, a report released Wednesday by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office is a “cautionary tale,” says The Associated Press.

 

On April 6, President Trump issued an executive order directing an end to “catch and release” at the border, a practice that had enabled migrants to be admitted into the country temporarily while their immigration claims were pending. That day, Attorney General Sessions ordered federal prosecutors to adopt a “zero tolerance policy” for border crossers. Parents placed in criminal custody couldn’t keep their children with them, so families were split up.

 

But the agencies responsible for handling the separations of thousands of children from their families were unprepared to do so.

 

“Officials told us that the agencies did not take specific planning steps because they did not have advance notice,” GAO says. “Officials we interviewed stated that they became aware of the April 2018 (‘zero-tolerance’) memo when it was announced publicly.”

 

Under pressure, Trump ultimately rescinded the family separations. A federal court ordered the government to reunite the families and provide regular progress reports.

 

But agency computer systems often didn’t flag when a child was separated from their parents. 

 

GAO says that as of Sept. 10, officials had identified 2,654 children who were covered by the court order reuniting families. But that number doesn’t include all the children affected because not all families were covered by the court order.

 

About 250 children still are separated from their parents, according to a report from the American Civil Liberties Union.

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We need to increase our efforts to suck carbon out of the air, report says

And the technology to do so has gotten better, says the report released Wednesday by the National Academy of Sciences.

 

The reports put out by NAS — the work of committees of top experts — are among the most respected out there.

 

The 370-page report calls for the country to invest in technologies and methods to remove the heat-trapping gasses like carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that are generated from human activities like burning coal and natural gas for electricity, or burning gasoline and diesel for transportation. Among these “negative emission" technologies:

— Plant more trees, manage forests better and limit the amount of land used by people. Plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air and use it to grow.

— Improve soil conservation so the soil can store more carbon dioxide and produce more food.

— Conserve and restore coastal plants such as marshlands and sea grass beds.

— Use direct air capture of carbon dioxide. Pilot projects have started using giant fans that pull in air, use a chemical reaction to suck carbon out and inject it underground.

— A still-to-be-worked out technology that uses certain types of rock that can absorb carbon dioxide.

— Burning more biofuel — such as wood — and capturing the carbon dioxide after combustion. The carbon could be buried underground or made into solids to be spread on soil.

 

“These technologies will clearly help since we have screwed up a lot,” says Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Mario Molina of the University of California San Diego, who wasn’t part of the committee that prepared the report.

 

A common misconception is the technologies would primarily be deployed to reduce atmospheric carbon levels only after emissions had been reduced to near zero, the report says. But because emissions reductions become increasingly expensive as emissions drop, it will be less expensive to deploy mitigation and these technologies at the same time. 

 

"The central question," says the report, “is which is least expensive and least disruptive in terms of land and other impacts, an emission reduction or an equivalent amount of negative emission?"

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