We were warned.

On June 23, 1988, a sultry day in Washington, James Hansen told Congress and the world that global warming wasn’t approaching — it had already arrived. The testimony of the top NASA scientist, said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, was “the opening salvo of the age of climate change.”

Thirty years later, it’s clear that Hansen and other doomsayers were right. But the change has been so sweeping that it is easy to lose sight of effects large and small — some obvious, others less conspicuous.

Earth is noticeably hotter, the weather stormier and more extreme. Polar regions have lost billions of tons of ice; sea levels have been raised by trillions of gallons of water. Far more wildfires rage.

Over 30 years — the time period climate scientists often use in their studies in order to minimize natural weather variations — the world’s annual temperature has warmed nearly 1 degree (0.54 degrees Celsius), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And the temperature in the United States has gone up even more — nearly 1.6 degrees.

“The biggest change over the last 30 years, which is most of my life, is that we’re no longer thinking just about the future,” said Kathie Dello, a climate scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “Climate change is here, it’s now and it’s hitting us hard from all sides.”

Warming hasn’t been just global, it’s been all too local. According to an Associated Press statistical analysis of 30 years of weather, ice, fire, ocean, biological and other data, every single one of the 344 climate divisions in the Lower 48 states — NOAA groupings of counties with similar weather — has warmed significantly, as has each of 188 cities examined.

The effects have been felt in cities from Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the yearly average temperature rose 2.9 degrees in the past 30 years, to Yakima, Washington, where the thermometer jumped a tad more. In the middle, Des Moines, Iowa, warmed by 3.3 degrees since 1988.

South central Colorado, the climate division just outside Salida, has warmed 2.3 degrees on average since 1988, among the warmest divisions in the contiguous United States.

When she was a little girl 30 years ago, winery marketing chief Jessica Shook used to cross country ski from her Salida doorstep in winter. It was that cold and there was that much snow. Now, she has to drive about 50 miles for snow that’s not on mountain tops, she said.

“T-shirt weather in January, that never used to happen when I was a child,” Shook said. When Buel Mattix bought his heating and cooling system company 15 years ago in Salida, he had maybe four air conditioning jobs a year. Now he’s got a waiting list of 10 to 15 air conditioning jobs long and may not get to all of them.

Wildfires

And then there’s the effect on wildfires. Veteran Salida firefighter Mike Sugaski used to think a fire of 10,000 acres was big. Now he fights fires 10 times as large.

“You kind of keep saying ‘How can they get much worse?’ But they do,” said Sugaski, who was riding his mountain bike on what usually are ski trails in January this year.

In fact, wildfires in the United States now consume more than twice the acreage they did 30 years ago.

The statistics tracking climate change since 1988 are almost numbing. North America and Europe have warmed 1.89 degrees — more than any other continent. The Northern Hemisphere has warmed more than the Southern, the land faster than the ocean. Across the United States, temperature increases were most evident at night and in summer and fall. Heat rose at a higher rate in the North than the South.

Heat records

Since 1988, daily heat records have been broken more than 2.3 million times at weather stations across the nation, half a million times more than cold records were broken.

Doreen Pollack fled Chicago cold for Phoenix more than two decades ago, but in the past 30 years nighttime summer heat has increased almost 3.3 degrees there. She said when the power goes out, it gets unbearable, adding: “Be careful what you ask for.”

The AP interviewed more than 50 scientists who confirmed the depth and spread of warming.

Clara Deser, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said that when dealing with 30-year time periods in smaller regions than continents or the globe as a whole, it would be unwise to say all the warming is man-made. Her studies show that in some places in North America — though not most — natural weather variability could account for as much as half of local warming.

But when you look at the globe as a whole, especially since 1970, nearly all the warming is man-made, said Zeke Hausfather of the independent science group Berkeley Earth. Without extra carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, he said, the Earth would be slightly cooling from a weakening sun. Numerous scientific studies and government reports calculate that greenhouse gases in the big picture account for more than 90 percent of post-industrial Earth’s warming.

“It would take centuries to a millennium to accomplish that kind of change with natural causes. This, in that context, is a dizzying pace,” said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

Since the 1800s, scientists have demonstrated that certain gases in Earth’s atmosphere trap heat from the sun like a blanket. Human activities such as burning of coal, oil and gasoline are releasing more of those gases into the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide. U.S. and international science reports say that more than 90 percent of the warming that has happened since 1950 is man-made.

Extremes

Others cautioned that what might seem to be small increases in temperature should not be taken lightly.  

“One or two degrees may not sound like much, but raising your thermostat by just that amount will make a noticeable effect on your comfort,” said Deke Arndt, NOAA’s climate monitoring chief in Asheville, North Carolina, which has warmed nearly 1.8 degrees in 30 years.

Arndt said average temperatures don’t tell the entire story: “It’s the extremes that these changes bring.”

The nation’s extreme weather — flood-inducing downpours, extended droughts, heat waves and bitter cold and snow — has doubled in 30 years, according to a federal index.

The Northeast’s extreme rainfall has more than doubled. Brockton, Massachusetts, had only one day with at least four inches of rain from 1957 to 1988, but a dozen of them in the 30 years since, according to NOAA records. Ellicott City, Maryland, just had its second thousand-year flood in little less than two years.

And the summer’s named Atlantic storms? On average, the first one now forms nearly a month earlier than it did in 1988, according to University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy.

The 14 costliest hurricanes in American history, adjusted for inflation, have hit since 1988, reflecting both growing coastal development and a span that included the most intense Atlantic storms on record.

“The collective damage done by Atlantic hurricanes in 2017 was well more than half of the entire budget of our Department of Defense,” said MIT’s Kerry Emanuel.

Arctic ice

Climate scientists point to the Arctic as the place where climate change is most noticeable with dramatic sea ice loss, a melting Greenland ice sheet, receding glaciers and thawing permafrost. The Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world.

Alaska’s annual average temperature has warmed 2.4 degrees since 1988 and 5.4 degrees in the winter.  Since 1988, Utqiagvik, Alaska, formerly known as Barrow, has warmed more than 6 degrees yearly and more than 9 degrees in winter.

“The temperature change is noticeable. Our ground is thawing,” said Mike Aamodt, 73, the city’s former acting mayor. He had to move his own cabins at least four times because of coastal erosion and thawing ground due to global warming. “We live the climate change.”

The amount of Arctic sea ice in September, when it shrinks the most, fell by nearly one third since 1988. It is disappearing 50 years faster than scientists predicted, said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University.

“There is a new Arctic now because the Arctic ocean is now navigable” at times in the summer, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The vast majority of glaciers around the world have shrunk. A NASA satellite that measures shifts in gravity calculated that Earth’s glaciers lost 279 billion tons of ice — nearly 67 trillion gallons of water — from 2002 to 2017. In 1986, the Begich Boggs visitor center at Alaska’s Chugach National Forest opened to highlight the Portage glacier. But the glacier keeps shrinking.

“You absolutely cannot see it from the visitor center and you haven’t in the last 15 or so years,” said climatologist Brian Brettschneider of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica have also shriveled, melting about 455 billion tons of ice into water, according to the NASA satellite. That’s enough to cover the state of Georgia in water nearly 9 feet deep.

Sea level

And it is enough — coupled with all the other melting ice — to raise the level of the seas. Overall, NASA satellites have shown three inches of sea level rise (75 millimeters) in just the past 25 years.

With more than 70 percent of the Earth covered by oceans, a 3-inch increase means about 6,500 cubic miles (27,150 cubic km) of extra water. That’s enough to cover the entire United States with water about 9 feet deep.

It’s a fitting metaphor for climate change, say scientists: We’re in deep, and getting deeper.

“Thirty years ago, we may have seen this coming as a train in the distance,” NOAA’s Arndt said. “The train is in our living room now.”
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Exhausted but relieved, Yariani Flores lay next to her healthy newborn son, along with four other Venezuelan women who just gave birth in a hospital in Colombia’s border city of Cucuta.

Thousands of Venezuelan women have done the same over the past few years, as the health system in their home country has crumbled. They crossed the border, driven by fear that they or their babies could die.

Early in her pregnancy, Flores sought a pre-natal checkup at a municipal hospital in Venezuela’s frontier state of Tachira only to be told that there was little point.

“The doctor said, ‘Don’t bother coming here, I can’t do much for you,'” said Flores, lying in the 12-bed maternity ward at Cucuta’s Erasmo Meoz University Hospital. “She recommended I come to Cucuta and have the birth here.”

Venezuela’s economic crisis has laid waste to its health system. The numbers of babies and women dying during or after childbirth have soared, while medicines and supplies have become increasingly scarce.

“You have to bring everything to the hospital in Venezuela,” said Flores, a 33-year-old mother of five. “There aren’t even any surgical gloves.”

A March survey of 137 hospitals, led by the opposition-dominated Congress, showed that they often lack basic equipment like catheters, as well as incubators and x-ray units.

Venezuelan hospitals are also plagued by water and electricity outages, and only 7 percent of emergency services are fully operative, the survey found.

Infant mortality in the oil-rich nation rose 30 percent last year, according to latest government data. Maternal mortality – dying during pregnancy or within 42 days of giving birth – shot up by 65 percent.

Healthcare Overwhelmed

Venezuela’s economic meltdown, including hyperinflation, is now putting a financial strain on the health system in Cucuta and other Colombian cities.

Nearly 820,000 Venezuelans have left their homeland to live in Colombia during the last 15 months, with arrivals expected to continue, according to Colombian authorities.

Cucuta, the largest city along the porous frontier and separated by a bridge that connects with Venezuela, has borne the brunt of the influx.

At the main hospital alone, Erasmo Meoz, about 14,000 Venezuelan patients have been treated in the past three years, most with no health insurance, said Juan Agustin Ramirez, director of the 500-bed facility.

The hospital has debts of about $6 million accumulated to care for Venezuelans, which the Colombian government has yet to reimburse as it promised last year, Ramirez said.

“This has created a financial crisis … and there comes a time when we collapse,” he said.

Until recently, the hospital treated only a few Venezuelans, mostly for road injuries, Ramirez said.

But now, on any given day, up to one in five patients at the hospital is Venezuelan, and its crowded emergency ward is overwhelmed.

Many are children suffering skin diseases, diarrhea and respiratory problems. Others are women who have high risk pregnancies and arrive malnourished, having had few or no pre-natal checkups.

“It’s a sign that something serious is happening with public health in Venezuela,” Ramirez told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Brother Nation

Ramirez said Colombia has a duty to help Venezuelans.

Colombians often refer to Venezuelans as their “brothers,” as they share close cultural and family ties.

In past decades, it was Venezuela that opened its doors to millions of Colombians fleeing civil war. Many found jobs and cutting-edge medical care in the once prosperous nation, Ramirez said.

“We can’t forget that during all these years of violence in Colombia, four to five million Colombians went to Venezuela where they were given services for free,” Ramirez said. “We have an immense debt with Venezuela.”

In the past year, about 54,500 Venezuelan migrants have received emergency care in public hospitals across Colombia, according to authorities, while nearly 200,000 have been vaccinated, many at border crossings.

But only patients needing emergency care, including pregnant women, get free treatment.

Those with chronic illnesses, like cancer, kidney failure, and HIV/AIDS are turned away because of a lack of resources.

“For those poor people, the situation is catastrophic,” Ramirez said.

Earlier this month, the Organization of American States reiterated its call on Venezuela to allow international aid into the country, to ease what it has described a “humanitarian crisis.”

Many expect the migration to continue following the re-election of Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolas Maduro last month, which the United States called “a sham” and many countries refused to recognize.

“We are not prepared, nor are we going to be prepared, if there’s a bigger exodus of citizens from Venezuela as conditions deteriorate even more,” Ramirez said.

Malnutrition

Another casualty of Venezuela’s crisis was laid bare at the hospital’s children’s ward.

A severely underweight four-month-old baby from Venezuela’s Yukpa tribe slept, hooked up to an intravenous tube to help him recover from malnutrition.

About 200 Yukpas have fled hunger in their ancestral lands.

They now live in ragged, makeshift tents just inside Colombia, near the border crossing.

Across town at a shelter run by the Scalabrini International Migration Network, a Catholic organization for migrant aid, pregnant women are given priority while other Venezuelans sleep on cardboard outside, waiting for a bed and a hot meal.

Keila Diaz, 23, who is heavily pregnant with her second child, came to the shelter with her husband in May. When the contractions start, she said, she will head to the hospital.

“I’m afraid to have my baby in Venezuela. Babies die, mothers die giving birth over there,” said Diaz, gently rubbing her bulging belly. “I have a better chance here.”
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Women must be at the heart of climate action if the world is to limit the deadly impact of disasters such as floods, former Irish president and U.N. rights commissioner Mary Robinson said on Monday.

Robinson, also a former U.N. climate envoy, said women were most adversely affected by disasters and yet are rarely “put front and center” of efforts to protect the most vulnerable.

“Climate change is a man-made problem and must have a feminist solution,” she said at a meeting of climate experts at London’s Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Entrepreneurship.

“Feminism doesn’t mean excluding men, it’s about being more inclusive of women and – in this case – acknowledging the role they can play in tackling climate change.”

Research has shown that women’s vulnerabilities are exposed during the chaos of cyclones, earthquakes and floods, according to the British think-tank Overseas Development Institute.

In many developing countries, for example, women are involved in food production, but are not allowed to manage the cash earned by selling their crops, said Robinson.

The lack of access to financial resources can hamper their ability to cope with extreme weather, she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on the sidelines of the event.

“Women all over the world are … on the front lines of the fall-out from climate change and therefore on the forefront of climate action,” said Natalie Samarasinghe, executive director of Britain’s United Nations Association.

“What we — the international community — need to do is talk to them, learn from them and support them in scaling up what they know works best in their communities,” she said at the meeting.

Robinson served as Irish president from 1990-1997 before taking over as the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and now leads a foundation devoted to climate justice.
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Astronomers and stargazers will get a chance to get up close and personal with Mars over the next six weeks, as the Earth passes between the Red Planet and the sun.

Mars will make its closest swing toward Earth, bringing it closer and appearing brighter, than it has in the past 15 years.

In 2003, Mars came within 56.1 million kilometers of Earth, the closest it had come in 60,000 years, according to the Weather Channel.

This year the two planets won’t get quite as cozy. The Weather Channel said Mars will appear the brightest to Earth stargazers on July 31, when the two planets are just 57.6 million kilometers apart.

How large Mars appears in the sky to people on Earth depends on where the two neighboring planets are in their elliptical journey. While it takes Earth 365 days to orbit the sun, it takes Mars almost twice as long, or 687 days.

In 2016, the planets were at the opposite ends of their orbits, with 75.6 million kilometers between them, making Mars appear very small.

The next time Mars comes this close to Earth will be in March 2035.

 
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For 25 years, Patrick Matondo has earned a living buying and selling monkeys, bats and other animals popularly known as bush meat along the Congo River. Standing on the riverbank in Mbandaka, a city affected by the deadly new outbreak of the Ebola virus, the father of five said that for the first time he’s worried he won’t be able to support his family.

“Since Ebola was declared, business has decreased by almost half. It’s really, really bad,” the 47-year-old said, hanging his head.

Congo’s latest Ebola outbreak declared in May has 38 confirmed cases, including 14 deaths. The discovery of a handful of Ebola cases among Mbandaka’s more than 1 million residents also has hurt the economy, especially among traders of meat from wild animals.

The virus, which spreads through bodily fluids of those infected, has been known to jump from animals such as monkeys and bats to humans. In the West Africa outbreak four years ago that killed more than 11,000 people, it was widely suspected that the epidemic began when a 2-year-old boy in Guinea was infected by a bat.

Usually the wild animals are highly sought-after as popular sources of protein along with beef and pork, and cargo ships carrying the smoked meat arrive daily in the city, the trade hub for Congo’s northwestern Equateur province. Meanwhile, bush meat markets still see locals bartering for the animals, both dead and alive. Prospective buyers pause at tables piled with monkey meat, picking up blackened chunks one by one for a closer look.

“Meat is very important for people here. It’s one of the biggest industries in Mbandaka,” said Matondo, a leader in the city’s bush meat association.

Dr. Pierre Rollin, an Ebola expert with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said if the meat is cooked, smoked or dried it kills the virus. The people at greatest risk are hunters and butchers who process the meat, he said.

The World Health Organization has advised against trade and travel restrictions because of the current outbreak, which is mostly in remote areas.

Boats with bush meat continue to depart for the capital, Kinshasa, 600 kilometers (323 miles) downstream and for villages tucked deep in the rainforest up and down the river. Disease experts warned, however, that precautions are still necessary as monkeys and bats are sold live throughout the region.

Traders said demand has dwindled because of Ebola, with sales for many dropping from about 100 animals a day to about 20.

“Kinshasa and Brazzaville told us to stop sending monkeys and bats,” said another trader in Mbandaka, Willy Taban, who said his business has been cut in half in recent weeks. He was referring to buyers in the capital of the nearby Republic of Congo, which is across the river from Kinshasa.

 

Congo’s health minister, Dr. Oly Ilunga Kalenga, said there are no plans to ban sales of bush meat in the province since bush meat is not the primary way the Ebola virus spreads. Instead, the government is focusing on good hygiene practices such as hand-washing, he said.

 

Health officials are also tracking down anyone who had close contact with anyone infected by the virus, offering an experimental vaccine and promoting safe burials and other practices. Such health efforts can be challenging in communities where many people consider Ebola to be witchcraft. Others are skeptical that the disease exists, even though this is the Central African country’s ninth outbreak.

One Mbandaka trader, Gamo Louambo, said he’s still shipping 100 wild animals to Kinshasa daily and said he won’t stop eating them as they’re his main source of food. “I don’t see Ebola. It isn’t here,” he said.

In West Africa, where there had never been an outbreak before 2014, getting people to accept that Ebola was a real disease was key, said WHO’s Jonathan Polonsky.

For those in Kinshasa, “Ebola is very far away,” said Defede Mbale, immigration chief at the capital’s port of Maluku.

Pointing to a poster of safe Ebola practices on his desk, he said the government has provided extra resources to patrol the river and take people’s temperatures as they arrive by boats, checking for fevers.

He doesn’t doubt the deadly virus exists, but Mbale said there’s only so much that he’s willing to change.

 

“We have our customs and they won’t change because of Ebola,” he said. “We’ll eat all foods.”
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California officials, having concluded coffee drinking is not a risky pastime, are proposing a regulation that will essentially tell consumers of America’s favorite beverage they can drink up without fear.

The unprecedented action Friday by the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment to propose a regulation to clear coffee of the stigma that it could pose a toxic risk followed a review of more than 1,000 studies published this week by the World Health Organization that found inadequate evidence that coffee causes cancer.

The state agency implements a law passed by voters in 1986 that requires warnings of chemicals known to cause cancer and birth defects. One of those chemicals is acrylamide, which is found in many things and is a byproduct of coffee roasting and brewing present in every cup of joe.

Win for coffee industry 

If the regulation is adopted, it would be a huge win for the coffee industry, which faces potentially massive civil penalties after recently losing an 8-year-old lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court that could require scary warnings on all coffee packaging sold in California.

Judge Elihu Berle found that Starbucks and other coffee roasters and retailers had failed to show that benefits from drinking coffee outweighed any cancer risks. He had previously ruled the companies hadn’t shown the threat from the chemical was insignificant.

The state’s action rejects that ruling.

“The proposed regulation would state that drinking coffee does not pose a significant cancer risk, despite the presence of chemicals created during the roasting and brewing process that are listed under Proposition 65 as known carcinogens,” the agency said in a statement. “The proposed regulation is based on extensive scientific evidence that drinking coffee has not been shown to increase the risk of cancer and may reduce the risk of some types of cancer.”

​Unprecedented move

Attorney Raphael Metzger, who won the court case on behalf of The Council for Education and Research on Toxics, said he was shocked the agency would move to nullify the court decision and undermine its own report more than a decade ago that drinking even small amounts of coffee resulted in a significant cancer risk.

“The takeaway is that the state is proposing a rule contrary to its own scientific conclusion. That’s unprecedented and bad,” Metzger said. “The whole thing stinks to high hell.”

The National Coffee Association had no comment on the proposed change. In the past, the organization has said coffee has health benefits and that the lawsuit made a mockery of the state law intended to protect people from toxics.

Scientific evidence on coffee has gone back and forth over many years, but concerns have eased recently about possible dangers, with some studies finding health benefits.

Big Coffee didn’t deny that acrylamide was found in the coffee, but argued it was only found at low levels and was outweighed by other benefits such as antioxidants that reduce cancer risk.

Congress

The state agency’s action comes about a week after bipartisan bills were introduced in both houses of Congress to require science-based criteria for labels on food and other products. One of the sponsors, Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Oregon, alluded to the California coffee lawsuit as an example of misleading warnings.

“When we have mandatory cancer warnings on a cup of coffee, something has gone seriously wrong with the process,” Schrader said in a news release. “We now have so many warnings unrelated to the actual health risk posed to consumers, that most people just ignore them.”

The lawsuit against Starbucks and 90 companies was brought by the tiny nonprofit under a law that allows private citizens, advocacy groups and attorneys to sue on behalf of the state and collect a portion of civil penalties for failure to provide warnings.

The Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, better known as Proposition 65, requires warning labels for about 900 chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects.

The law has been credited with reducing cancer-causing chemicals, but it has been criticized for leading to quick settlement shakedowns and vague warnings that are often ignored.
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