This is the final digest of 2021 and an open thread. Everyone is encouraged to share articles, stories, and tweets in your comments.
The Washington Post
Prosecutors break down charges, convictions for 725 arrested so far in Jan. 6 attack on U.S. Capitol
Federal prosecutors in the District have charged more than 725 individuals with various crimes in connection with the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection, when hundreds of rioters forced their way into the U.S. Capitol, the U.S. attorney’s office said Friday.
As the country nears the first anniversary of the storming of the Capitol, the U.S. attorney’s office in the District, the largest office of federal prosecutors in the nation, released a breakdown of the arrests and convictions associated with the attack.
Of those arrested, 225 people were charged with assault or resisting arrest. More than 75 of those were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon against police officers. The office said 140 police officers, including Capitol officers and members of the D.C. police department, were victimized during the attack.
‘A monumental task’: Schools grapple with how to stay open amid omicron surge
[…] Nearly two years into the pandemic, districts large and small that had achieved some semblance of normalcy with the wide-scale return to in-person teaching this fall are now contemplating the start of a new semester with case numbers higher than ever before. Some are making painful decisions to revert, at least temporarily, to remote learning. But increasingly, there is consensus that even in the midst of a massive surge, schools should stay open. […]
But staying open could prove to be a challenge. The latest coronavirus wave comes at a time when districts have already been grappling with shortages of teachers, bus drivers and cafeteria workers. Scores of children eligible for a coronavirus vaccine still have not gotten their shots and pediatric hospitalizations are climbing. Although testing every student might help contain cases, many districts don’t have that capacity, and new research shows widely used rapid tests may be less effective at identifying cases of the fast-spreading omicron variant. […]
As of Thursday, more than 900 public schools were preparing to close for at least one day during the first week of January, according to numbers from Burbio, a data company that tracks school closures in some 5,000 districts across the nation. But those schools appear to be the exception rather than the norm. Early pandemic days of mass closures have now been replaced with a growing consensus that school must go on.
The Denver Post
Becky Bolinger and the team at the Colorado Climate Center have kept watch over the dry and warm conditions that have blanketed the Front Range since the summer, knowing that they provided the perfect recipe for a wildfire.
For them, it was a matter of when and where a fire would spark – not if one would happen, said Bolinger, the assistant state climatologist at the center at the Colorado State University.
Still, Bolinger and other scientists who spoke to The Denver Post, were surprised by the location of the wind-swept Marshall fire that rapidly spread through Boulder County on Thursday. Instead of mountain forests, the flames spread through suburban neighborhoods and forced tens of thousands of Coloradans from their homes as the state’s burgeoning population collided with climate change.
“I have thought it won’t be long before we start experiencing fires like California where flames chase people out of their neighborhoods,” Bolinger said. “I didn’t expect that would happen in December.”
Marshall fire may have destroyed 1,000 homes in Boulder County, officials say
The Marshall fire that tore through parts of Superior and Louisville may have destroyed as many as 1,000 homes as it decimated entire neighborhoods, Gov. Jared Polis and Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle said Friday.
But, in a development officials pointed to as miraculous, there have been no reported deaths connected to the 6,000-acre fire. […]
Officials said there were 1,778 homes within the burn area with a total value of $825 million — but not all of them were destroyed or even damaged, and it may be another day or so before a final tally is complete.
Los Angeles Times
Is wildfire arson getting worse in California? Climate change doesn’t help
[…] A confounding collection of Californians have been accused of contributing to one of the worst wildfire seasons in state history — a season that saw three killed, thousands of homes leveled and more than 2.5 million acres burned.
While fires ignited by downed power lines and lightning have caused widespread destruction in recent years, this last wildfire season was unusual for the number of large fires that were linked to arson. Wildfire arson arrests have been climbing over the last few years: In 2021, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection reported 140 arrests by its law enforcement division — 20 more than last year and double the number of 2019… [but,] arson represents only a fraction of California’s fire starts each year.
What has changed, they say, is that bone-dry drought conditions and overgrown forests have enabled even the smallest of sparks to explode into an inferno.
The Fresno Bee
Did Fresno’s rainy December break records or help the drought? Here are the numbers
Fresno saw a “pretty good” month for rain in December, according to the National Weather Service…
“We had a fantastic week for precipitation,” said Modesto Vasquez, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Hanford.
“That’s 220% above the normal,” said Vasquez. “We’re doing pretty good for the month of December.”
In fact, California saw so much rain in December that much of the state saw a change in its drought categorization.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Drought Monitor released new data on California’s drought conditions, and much of the state, including much of the central San Joaquin Valley, saw a change from category D4 “Exceptional Drought,” to category D3, “Extreme Drought.”
San Francisco Chronicle
California snowpack jumps to 160% of average, nourishing hopes for drought recovery
After a year of historic drought and wildfire, California will go into 2022 cold and wet, with more snow on the ground than it has had at year’s end in a decade.
State water officials, who conducted the first snow survey of the winter on Thursday, found the snowpack across California’s mountains measuring 160% of average for the date.
This bounty of powder follows a series of big storms this month that have pounded the state and turned California’s dry and often fire-singed hills into a watery and sometimes white spectacle.
The rapid change of fortunes for the state, which has seen increasing weather extremes due to climate change, is only a first step toward shaking off a grueling drought that’s entering a third year.
Oregon Public Broadcasting
2021 delivered ‘warning signs of things to come’ for Pacific Northwest summers
The Pacific Northwest endured some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded last June, with some areas in Oregon reaching as high as 118 degrees Fahrenheit. […]
For more than two centuries the global burning of fossil fuels like coal and petroleum has released carbon into the atmosphere, trapping heat and warming the planet. Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, storms are becoming more extreme. And the types of “once in a lifetime” extreme heat events that occurred in the Northwest last summer are expected to become more common.
That’s according to Oregon State University professor and climatologist Chris Daly, among others. He called the heat dome frightening and unexpected — not just because of the extreme temperatures, but also because it hit the region just as summer was arriving. Residents had no time to get acclimated to the warmer summer months. Overnight temperatures were also the highest lows ever recorded during this time, leaving little to no relief from the excessive heat during the day.
The Seattle Times
From record high temperatures to bitter cold days, Western Washington’s year of extreme weather
Heat waves, rivers of rain from the tropics and now a record-breaking snap of bitter cold. Western Washington’s weather has been full of extremes this past year, and much of it unfolded the way climate scientists have been predicting for decades. For three local meteorologists asked to weigh in on the year’s most significant weather, the record-setting year was not unexpected.
“I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to see where this is going,” said Justin Shaw, who writes the Seattle Weather Blog.
Joe Boomgard-Zagrodnik, a former Washington State University meteorologist who now works in the private sector, said the year epitomized the predictions of climate scientists. […]
Looking back, it seems that 2017 was “the year when the switch got flipped,” said Shaw. Out of the last five years, all but 2019 brought record-breaking heat, unprecedented wildfires in the northwest and smoke in Seattle, he said.
Missoulian
State racks up at least $119K in legal costs defending law from 2021 session
The state of Montana has spent at least $119,000 in the past nine months defending against legal challenges to laws passed during the 2021 legislative session, according to state government reports.
But that's likely an undercount of the actual amount of public funds used to defend against lawsuits seeking to overturn new laws — ranging from abortion restrictions to limits on how and where college students can engage in political activities.
All of the laws under legal challenge were brought by Republicans in the state’s Republican-dominated Legislature, and their final passage fell largely along party lines. For the past 16 years, similar proposals that advanced from the two chambers met the veto pens of Democratic governors. But with the 2020 election of Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte, many of those long-awaited GOP priorities were signed into law this spring.
The Arizona Republic
Feds OK work to close border wall 'gaps' in Arizona as environmentalists raise concerns
The U.S. government has authorized work to complete unfinished construction, fill border wall "gaps" in Arizona and address "environmental requirements" along the international boundary.
Work is expected to begin more than 11 months since operations were paused by the Biden administration. It is unclear whether this effort will effectively complete all previously planned fencing throughout Arizona. […]
The announcement, made by the Department of Homeland Security on Dec. 20, authorized U.S. Customs and Border Protection to continue construction activities and "remediation requirements" in unfinished sections of the new border wall in Arizona, California and Texas.
Houston Chronicle
Houston-area hospitals say within two weeks they could run out of sotrovimab, the monoclonal antibody treatment that has proven most effective against the coronavirus’ dominant omicron variant, if they don’t receive another shipment from the state amid a nationwide supply shortage.
Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday publicly called on the federal government, which took over distribution of the treatment in September, to send another shipment of sotrovimab and other therapies that are effective against previous variants. The Texas Department of State Health Services earlier this week said regional infusion centers in Austin, El Paso, Fort Worth, San Antonio and The Woodlands had already exhausted their supply of sotrovimab.
Intended for symptomatic or high-risk patients, monoclonal antibodies block the virus’ ability to enter the cells, giving the body’s natural immune system time to mount its own response. The IV-administered treatment is not a substitute for vaccination but prevents COVID symptoms from worsening, and has become a critical tool for preventing long-term care in overwhelmed hospitals.
The Daily Progress
The statues are down but the work isn’t done: Councilors discuss Charlottesville’s path forward
Charlottesville’s years-long efforts to remove its Confederate statues finally came to fruition in 2021 after a court ruled the city could take the statues down, and cranes took them away in July. And in December, City Council voted to give its statue of Robert E. Lee to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center to be melted and turned into a new work of public art, and gave the statue of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson to a museum in Los Angeles for an exhibit on Lost Cause propaganda.
But community members and city councilors said here is more work for the city to do when it comes to racial equity in the city. The way they see it, the statues were a symbol of a bigger crisis.
“Yes, you have to remove Confederate statues, but we also need to remove statutes that are continuing wealth inequality, racial inequality and I think that’s the most important thing,” said councilor Michael Payne.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Inside the campaign to undermine Georgia’s election
[…] Georgia was a swing state in the highest-profile presidential election in recent memory. The race between Republican … Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden was expected to be close, and election officials were under intense pressure to get it right. The June primary election had been a fiasco, with long lines and problems operating Georgia’s new voting system.
At a hearing the day of the Buckhead rally, Chatham election officials said the ballots in question had been flagged for further review, but they were found to be valid and then counted. There was nothing improper about them.
Judge James F. Bass Jr. dismissed the lawsuit. He found there was no evidence that election workers counted illegal votes or broke the law.
But the lawsuit established a pattern: Trump and his supporters made alarming accusations that created an impression of lawlessness. On closer inspection, the allegations amounted to nothing.
That didn’t stop Republicans from repeating the Chatham County allegations at the Buckhead rally that night. In the months ahead, Trump and his supporters continued to repeat such allegations long after they had been investigated and refuted.
The repetition of false claims convinced many Georgians they were true…
The Philadelphia Inquier
Pa. nurses after 22 months of COVID-19 and a new surge: ‘It is so defeating’
It’s been 660 days, and few have experienced the collective trauma of the coronavirus pandemic as vividly as frontline health workers.
They have held the hands of people as they died alone. They showed up to work while others stayed home. They pushed personal heartache to the backs of their minds to get through the day.
As the United States enters a third calendar year of the pandemic, and braces to see whether thisomicron- and delta-fueled case surge will cause hospitalizations to spike further, we talked to four nurses, who described units full of COVID-19 patients, most of whom are unvaccinated and many of whom are now skewing younger.
They described the emotional toll — “defeating,” “disheartening,” “frustrating,” and “exhausting.”
The Boston Globe / The New York Times
Scientists predict Omicron will peak in the US in mid-January but still may overwhelm hospitals
[…] Over the past month, the omicron variant has spread around the world with astonishing speed, even among people who are vaccinated or who had recovered from previous infections. On Thursday, the United States surpassed 580,000 cases, beating the record set only a day before.
That is believed to be a vast undercount, because of testing shortages, the popularity of at-home tests and reporting delays over the holidays. What’s more, a significant number of people may have asymptomatic infections and never know it.
New estimates from researchers at Columbia University suggest that the United States could peak by Jan. 9 at around 2.5 million cases per week, although that number may go as high as 5.4 million. In New York City, the first U.S. metropolis to see a major surge, the researchers estimated that cases would peak by the first week of the new year.
Reuters
Biden, Manchin discussed social spending bill after U.S. senator's rejection -adviser
President Joe Biden and Senator Joe Manchin spoke about the "Build Back Better" bill a day after the conservative Democratic senator publicly rejected the president's social spending plans, a White House adviser said on Friday.
"He (Biden) has some confidence about that (bill), including discussions he has had with Senator Manchin," Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House council of economic advisers, said in an interview with CNN on Friday.
"The president and Senator Manchin - the day after that announcement where the senator said he couldn't vote for the bill as it was - they were talking again."
[…] Reuters has documented more than 850 threatening and hostile messages aimed at election officials and staff related to the 2020 election. Virtually all expressed support for … Donald Trump or echoed his debunked contention that the election was stolen. The messages spanned 30 jurisdictions in 16 states. They came via emails, voicemails, texts, letters and Internet posts.
Reuters obtained the messages through public records requests, interviews, and an examination of hundreds of online posts. Reporters focused on gathering examples from states that were among the most hotly contested in the 2020 presidential race. The case set isn’t a statistically representative sample, but it offers insights into the nature of this campaign of fear.
About 110 of the 850 messages Reuters collected appear to meet what law professors and attorneys say is the federal threshold for prosecution. That would make them so-called true threats, generally defined as those intended to put a person in fear of death or bodily harm or to inflict severe emotional distress. In many other messages, harassers call for violence without threatening to act themselves. Arrests for threatening election workers have been rare, even in cases of true threats.
Politico
Trump appointee at FDIC to resign after partisan brawl
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Jelena McWilliams on Friday unexpectedly submitted her resignation after the Trump appointee faced partisan strife at the bank regulator, in a move that will give Democrats control of the agency in the coming weeks.
Her departure, effective Feb. 4, means that FDIC board member Martin Gruenberg will become acting chair — his third stint atop the 88-year-old independent agency that insures trillions of dollars in deposits at the nation’s banks. It followed an attempt by Gruenberg and other Democrats on the agency’s board to wrest control from McWilliams, whose term was not scheduled to end until June 2023.
AP News
Chief justice: Judges must better avoid financial conflicts
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts says the federal judiciary needs to do more to ensure judges don’t participate in cases where they have financial conflicts of interest.
Roberts made the comments as part of his annual report on the federal judiciary released Friday evening.
Roberts pointed to a series of stories recently in The Wall Street Journal that found that “between 2010 and 2018, 131 federal judges participated in a total of 685 matters involving companies in which they or their families owned shares of stock.” Federal judges and Supreme Court justices are required by law to recuse themselves from cases where they have a personal financial interest.
US and Russia face deep differences ahead of Ukraine talks
After tough talk between Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin over the Russian troop buildup on the Ukraine border, both sides insist they are hopeful that a pathway to easing tensions could open during diplomatic talks set for January. […]
Biden on Friday told reporters that he advised Putin when they spoke by phone a day earlier that the upcoming talks could only work if the Russian leader “deescalated, not escalated, the situation” in the days ahead. The U.S. president said he also sought to make plain to Putin that the U.S. and allies stood ready to hit Russia with punishing sanctions if the Russians further invade Ukraine.
“I made it clear to President Putin that if he makes any more moves into Ukraine we will have severe sanctions,” Biden said. “We will increase our presence in Europe with NATO allies.”
Bloomberg
The Fight to Slow the Global Fish Crash Has a Big Problem
Biendi Maganga-Moussavou had a problem.
As Gabon’s minister of fisheries, agriculture and food security, he helps oversee the African country’s marine protected areas, some of the most extensive in Africa. Covering 27% of Gabon’s Exclusive Economic Zone, these waters are supervised using monitoring technology that tracks larger vessels, which are required to report their catch. But many of Gabon’s fishers run smaller operations that don’t have such systems, or even automated identification. […]
Gabon’s problem is the world’s problem. More than 30 million fishers worldwide—around 90% of the total, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)—are considered small-scale. Together, they bring in about half of the world’s catch. With human populations rising and developing nations getting wealthier, the demand for seafood is escalating. An accurate assessment of the shrinking global fish supply is thus crucial to planetary food security. Right now though, that’s impossible.
The Guardian
Prosecutors drop charges against officers on duty when Epstein killed himself
US prosecutors have dropped charges against the two correctional officers on duty the night Jeffrey Epstein killed himself on their watch in August 2019 while he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The officers, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, had allegedly falsified government records, indicating that they had made their rounds every 30 minutes to check on inmates when they had not, and instead had fallen asleep on the job, according to an indictment.
Earlier this year, the two officers entered into a deferred prosecution agreement – contingent on completing community service and good behavior.
New year Brexit changes ‘permanently damage’ EU trade, says food body
Britain’s small businesses should expect trade with the EU to be “permanently damaged” from 1 January, the refrigerated supply chain trade body has said, after new customs checks take effect that it says will make imports from the bloc “more expensive, less flexible and much slower”.
Amid growing public dismay at the negative impact of Brexit, the Cold Chain Federation said speciality food imports could face the same 70% decline that affected exports of food by small businesses this year after Britain quit the EU single market and customs union.
Extra costs that amount to £300 to £400 for each consignment will mean sales of food to EU countries in small batches could become uneconomic, said the CCF, which lobbies on behalf of firms that transport frozen and chilled goods.
EuroNews
Germany begins nuclear phase-out, shuts down three of six nuclear power plants
Germany's nuclear phase-out has entered its penultimate phase today, as the country shuts down half of its six nuclear plants still operating, marking the beginning of an 11-year plan.
Under Germany's energy transition policy, the Gundremmingen, Brokdorf, and Grohnde nuclear power plants will be decommissioned on December 31, 2021. […]
Renewables have seen a spectacular rise since 2011 and in 2020 made up more than 50% of Germany's energy mix for the first time, according to the Fraunhofer research institute — compared with less than 25% ten years ago.
The declining importance of nuclear power (12.5% in 2020) "has been compensated for by the expansion of renewable energies", added Claudia Kemfert, an energy expert at the DIW economic research institute.
Climate change is bringing polar bears dangerously close to humans
Seeing a polar bear on the outskirts of a village is almost commonplace for the residents of Chukotka Ryrkaipiy, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
In recent years, animals appear there every winter in search of food. Climate change is warming the region, leading to late formation of ice cover and early ice melt. Though polar bears normally hunt sea animals living on ice floes, now they are being forced to find food on the coast instead.
"Since 2000, in Chukotka, there has been an increase in the number of bears. They come into villages, sometimes up to a dozen, looking for food. This is due to climate change," says Yegor Vereshchagin, deputy head of the Department of Industrial and Agricultural Policy of the Chukotka AO.
This warming causes migration - and animals find themselves ever closer to human habitats.
Mongabay
Urban ecology that saved Argentina’s Rosario held up as a model for others
In the Argentine city of Rosario, an award-winning urban agriculture program is marking nearly two decades as a model for how to put local farming and agroecology at the heart of a system of equitable and sustainable development.
Throughout this period, the program has manifested many of the benefits of such a system: improved public health outcomes, job creation, efficient repurposing of underused real estate, and mitigation of greenhouse gases caused by food transport. But proponents say local farming and agroecology — agricultural systems crafted to enhance yields and benefit the natural environment — remain largely overlooked by policymakers, urban planners and activists seeking to build a better world.
In the case of Rosario, it took desperate times to spark this shift.
Deutsche Welle
RCEP: Asia readies world's largest trade deal
Trade barriers between most countries in the Asia Pacific will be lowered significantly from January 1 as the world's largest free trading bloc opens for business.
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a trade deal between the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
RCEP will cover about 30% of global gross domestic product (GDP), worth $26.2 trillion (€23.17 trillion), and nearly a third of the world's population, some 2.2 billion people. […]
In its analysis of RCEP, think tank the Atlantic Council warned that the lack of participation by the United States "allows Beijing to solidify its role as driver of economic growth in the region."
Washington had planned to try to contain China's economic influence by joining another proposed trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). However, […] Donald Trump pulled out of the agreement in 2017.
South China Morning Post
Covid-19 experts agree: 2021 was a failure for vaccine distribution
Rich countries, poor countries, pharmaceutical executives and advocates for equitable access to medicines have been on different sides of the debate over what is needed to vaccinate the world against Covid-19. But they all agree on one thing: 2021 was a failure.
While 2020 brought record-speed development of effective vaccines and 2021 saw what has been called the largest immunisation campaign in history, how those shots have been allocated throughout the global population has been starkly uneven.
Last month, two former national leaders, Helen Clark of New Zealand and Ellen Sirleaf Johnson of Liberia – who also co-chaired a previous panel established by the World Health Organization to evaluate pandemic response – put it this way:
“The profit-incentivised, inequitable system for distribution of pandemic tools has led to a place where one of us lives in a country on track to fully vaccinate 90 per cent of the eligible population by Christmas, and one of us lives in a country where less than 10 per cent of people are fully vaccinated,” they wrote.
Al Jazeera
UN food agency suspends North Darfur operation after attacks
The World Food Programme (WFP) has suspended its operations across Sudan’s North Darfur state following attacks this week on all three of its warehouses in the capital, El Fasher, including the theft of more than 5,000 metric tons (tonnes) of food.
The move is expected to affect close to two million people in the area in 2022, the United Nations’ food agency said in a statement on Thursday.
“We have been forced to suspend WFP operations in North Darfur, effective immediately,” said David Beasley, WFP executive director.
‘Free, I’m free!’: The day I was released from refugee detention
Ahmad Zahir Azizi sits at his kitchen table beaming at the camera, barely able to contain his laughter, as he speaks over a video call.
Just weeks earlier, he was released from immigration detention in Australia and granted a temporary bridging visa after more than eight years in state custody.
I had interviewed Azizi via video call countless times before, but never had I seen him smile like this, let alone laugh. Every time we saw one another, he seemed broken. I thought he had given up.
Now, I smile with him, and ask: “Can you tell me again about the day that you were released?”
Azizi gets up, closes his window, and yet again, he begins telling me his story.
Vox
Despite omicron, Covid-19 will become endemic. Here’s how.
[…] Here’s one big question you’d probably like the answer to: Does omicron push endemicity farther off into the future? Or could it actually speed up our path to endemicity by infecting so much of the population so swiftly that we more quickly develop a layer of natural immunity?
“That is really the million-dollar question,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, told me. “It’s really hard to say right now.”
That’s partly because endemicity isn’t just about getting the virus’s reproductive number down to one. That’s the bare minimum for earning the endemic classification, but there are other factors that come into play, too…
In general, a virus becomes endemic when we (health experts, governmental bodies, and the public) collectively decide that we’re okay with accepting the level of impact the virus has — that in other words, it no longer constitutes an active crisis.
The Atlantic
Our Highways Are an Ever-Expanding Museum of America’s Wars
South of downtown Columbus, Ohio, lost on the way to a tailgate, I saw the road sign bearing his name. The brown aluminum placard flashed between passing cars. I’d been holding my phone, listening to directions, and I dropped it. I could hardly make out the words on the sign, and then it disappeared behind semis, but I knew what they said: army specialist nicholaus e. zimmer memorial highway. Fifteen years earlier, when he’d been killed by a rocket-propelled grenade near Kufa, Iraq, I was on a base four hours north, staring at dark hills and crooked coils of concertina wire during a quiet 12–4 a.m. guard-duty shift.
I thought about merging into the right lane to pull over. A guy from our basic-training platoon, now a truck driver, had stopped on this freeway years back and taken a selfie with the sign. A bunch of us “liked” it on Facebook. Guys typed things like “RIP Nick” and “Miss you brother.” I always told myself I’d go see the sign. I never had.
As I moved with the hundreds of other vehicles, I was angry to be among the anonymous mass passing his name. No one here fucking knows Zimmer, I thought. I also sensed a self-deprecating awareness: Yes, how sad, I’d seen the name of a dead friend on a road sign and now felt a numb indifference to the rest of the day—to the first football game of the season for the nationally ranked Ohio State Buckeyes.
Ars Technica
Extreme weather could be as expensive as investing in cutting carbon ASAP
Recently, a network of climate modeling groups showed that it will cost more to overshoot the Paris Agreement temperature goals than it will to stay on a low-temperature trajectory. On the same day, that collaboration also published work showing that additional risks of overshooting come in part via ensuing increases in extreme weather. These studies are two of four published this year; together they provide the most comprehensive projections of the requirements and implications of the path we take to reach our end-of-century temperature targets.
The article focused on the economic aspects of meeting the Paris temperature targets—specifically how much mitigation actions will cost and the impact on the global GDP—wasn’t designed to project environmental impacts. In fact, most economic models don’t include this level of complexity and, as a result, they underestimate the overall costs. But this additional analysis projects not only how much extreme weather will increase, but also how that will effect crop yields around the world.