Guess who is Manitoba’s Bad Boy of Covid?

Epidemics/Pandemics, The Sleep of Reason

 

This will surprise no one, but it is clear that Manitoba’s Southern Health district that includes Steinbach, Winkler and the Rural Municipalities of Stanley and Hanover that surround those two small cities, are the hot bed of Covid-19 in our province. It should be obvious because they are also the places in the province that have the lowest uptake of Covid-19 vaccines. The people here, where I live, have decided that a perverted sense of freedom is more important than public safety.

 

Yesterday, for the first time, the province released information about the test positivity rates in various districts and this exposed our region’s malfeasance. As Tom Brodbeck of the Winnipeg Free Press said, after looking at the stats of Covid-19 prevalence,

“Not surprisingly, the rate is highest in Southern Health where vaccination uptake is the lowest in the province. The five-day test positivity rate has climbed to 14.5 per cent in Southern Health, up from 9.7 per cent two weeks ago. It’s by far the highest in the province.”

The test positivity rate is 3 times as high as Winnipeg! None of this should surprise anyone. After all the southern Health district is the land of the credulous.

The consequences are also clear. As Brodbeck said,

“More than half of COVID-19 patients in intensive care units (14 out of 24) are from Southern Health and 50 of the 118 hospitalizations come from that region, which makes up about 15 per cent of the Manitoba population. By contrast, only four ICU patients are from Winnipeg.”

Those of us from the Southern Health District should think about that (after getting over our shame) Even though Southern Health has less than 15% of the entire population of Manitoba we account for more than 50% of Covid patients in our ICUs and nearly half of all hospitalizations. As Brodbeck concluded: “The connection between high infection rates and low vaccination uptake in Southern Health is indisputable.”

Frankly, any thinking person must realize by now that it is smart to get vaccinated. In fact not doing so is getting to look more and more like superstition.  As Brodbeck noted: “95 per cent of active cases in ICU have not been immunized.”

 This figure is even more astounding when you take into consideration that only about 15% of Manitoba’s population are not vaccinated. And from that small population come 95% of all CUU patients!

The conclusion is obvious: If you are not getting vaccinated you are taking bad advice.

The Simple Mathematics of Vaccines

Epidemics/Pandemics

 

Recently, I thought it was time for some mathematics. My brilliant cousin and nuclear physicist, Erich Vogt, who unfortunately passed away a few years ago, once said that everything in the world can be explained by numbers/mathematics.  I am much too stupid to understand that, but I think it might be true. Apparently, that’s what you learned in his first year Physics class at the University of British Columbia. I think he learned that from Albert Einstein under whom he studied post graduate physics at Princeton University.

I thought of that recently when I considered some simple numbers. According to a recent study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States (‘CDC’) in the United States, probably the world authority on Covid-19 and many other infectious diseases: Unvaccinated people are 11 times more likely to die from Covid-19 than vaccinated people. Compared to unvaccinated people, vaccinated people are nearly 5 times less likely to get infected, and 10 times less likely to get so sick from Covid-19 that they must be hospitalized.

The numbers are clear: Vaccines are effective protection against Covid-19. And very few people get sick from the vaccine. As the director of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky said, “As we have shown, in study after study, vaccination works.”

Is there really anyone needs to know anymore about why it is smart to get vaccinated? Aren’t numbers simple? Let’s keep it simple. Maybe they don’t tell us everything, like my cousin thought, but they sure do tell us a lot.

Code Red  for Humanity

Climate change, Environmental Apocalypse

 

The reports of the International Panel on Climate Change (‘IPCC’) are written in pretty turgid prose. After all, they must be agreed to by a large panel of scientists who are accustomed to talking in very dry scientific language that each member must agree to.  Then all the member countries must also approve. Some countries like the United States and Saudi Arabia and others are always alert to how they might be criticized so are careful about approving.  Inflammatory language is unlikely to ever get approved.  As Elizabeth Kolbert said in the New Yorker, “The process seemed guaranteed to produce gridlock, and, by many accounts, that was the point of it.” After all, entrenched interests want to remain entrenched. That is why they send delegates to the meetings to ensure that stays that way.

Every 5 or 6 years or so the IPCC updates its reports. The latest report prepared this year just before the meeting of the parties in Glasgow Scotland is not just turgid, but according to Kolbert, “pretty much impenetrable. Still it manages to terrify.” The U.N. Secretary-General was more clear and blunt. He called it a “code red for humanity.” That does not pull any punches.

The report  says it is “unequivocal” that the climate change is caused by humans. It has removed its slight qualifications from early reports such as “highly likely” or words to that effect. Doubt has been removed. Global temperatures are already higher than at any time in the past 125,000 years.

 

A few days before the report came out the Dixie Fire in northern California became the largest single fire on record. The one last year was bigger but it was made up of several fires that joined up. The day it was issued “two hundred million Americans were under some kind of heat advisory.”

Of course, what did the political leaders do? As Kolbert reported, “As the world fried and boiled, Washington continued to do what it does best, which is argue.” Let me make clear Canada of course was no better,. Politicians have been arguing for decades as the world gets hotter. Kolbert put it this way:

“Every day matters. Three decades have passed since the I.P.C.C. released its first report.  During that time, annual global emissions have nearly doubled and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere put there by humans has more than doubled. As a result, the world is rapidly approaching thresholds that no sane person would want to cross.’

 

We all wonder what will happen when temperatures continue to rise.  Kolbert said this about that:

“In the carefully vetted formulations of the I.P.C.C. ‘many changes in the climate system become larger in direct relation to increasing global warming.’ In other words, we really don’t want to find out. But unfortunately we are going to.”

 

Somethings it might be better not to know. The effects of climate increasing by 2ºC are one of them.

The Climate Disaster is Here but the future is hellish

Climate change

 

For years now climate scientists have been warning us the climate crisis is around the corner. Well, we have now gone around the corner. The changes in temperature seem tiny. They are not. The numbers are tiny. The reality is big.

As one of the most respected scientists, Katherine Hayhoe from Texas Tech University of all places, and a born again Christian of all people, put it well, “We have built a civilization based on a world that doesn’t exist anymore.” The old world with the old climate that we liked, except for some outlier places like Manitoba and Siberia, is gone. It is not coming back.

As Oliver Milman, Andrew Witherspoon, Rita Liu, and Alvin Chang, reported recently in the Guardian,

“The world has already heated up by around 1.2C, on average, since the preindustrial era, pushing humanity beyond almost all historical boundaries. Cranking up the temperature of the entire globe this much within little more than a century is, in fact, extraordinary, with the oceans alone absorbing the heat equivalent of five Hiroshima atomic bombs dropping into the water every second.”

 

If you don’t think the world has changed already, read what the Guardian reporters  said about that:

Until now, human civilization has operated within a narrow, stable band of temperature. Through the burning of fossil fuels, we have now unmoored ourselves from our past, as if we have transplanted ourselves onto another planet. The last time it was hotter than now was at least 125,000 years ago, while the atmosphere has more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in it than any time in the past two million years, perhaps more.

 

This change happened since the start of the Industrial Revolution in or about 1750 or 270 years ago. I hope you agree that compared to 125,000 years ago, that  is a mere blink of an eye. That is rapid change in these terms. But they key, this has already happened. We don’t have to wait for it. As Hayhoe put it,

“We are conducting an unprecedented experiment with our planet. The temperature has only moved a few tenths of a degree for us until now, just small wiggles in the road. But now we are hitting a curve we’ve never seen before.”

 

No one knows where this will end, but at the 2015 Paris climate agreement most of the countries of the world agreed that if we could not hold the temperature increase to 2C we are in big trouble. They agreed we would limit the rise to 2C and try hard to keep it to 1.5C. For a number of countries anything above 1.5 would be catastrophic. And, of course, most of the countries for whom it will be catastrophic did not cause this problem, but they sure will feel it. I don’t think anyone calls that justice, but as so happens, ‘it sucks to be them.’ We are now on course to go over 2C if we don’t change soon. Some think we are already committed to 2C

 

Most scientists agree that we are now committed to an increase above 1.5C. Yet most countries, including of course Canada, are not on course to meet the targets they set for themselves in Paris in 2015. No one should be surprised. And we wonder why so many people don’t trust governments when we really need to trust them. They probably don’t deserve to be trusted.

 

The Secretary general of the UN António Guterres, summed it up in colorful language: “We are on a catastrophic path,” said António Guterres, secretary general of the UN. “We can either save our world or condemn humanity to a hellish future.”

I don’t know if he is exaggerating or not, but a hellish future sounds pretty bad to me.

 

Reverse Dust Bowl-Lake Mead’s Changing Climate

Environmental Apocalypse

 

This is what Oliver Milman said in the Guardian about recent weather that has already occurred:

“The heat has been otherworldly, with Phoenix recently enduring a record six straight days above 115F (46.1C). A “heat dome” that settled over usually mild Pacific north-west pushed temperatures to reach a record 108F (42.2C) in Seattle and caused power lines to melt and roads to buckle in Portland. A few hundred miles north, a fast-moving wildfire incinerated the town of Lytton in British Columbia the day after it set a Canadian temperature record of 121F (49.4C). Barely into summer, hundreds of people have already died from the heat along the west coast.”

 

We all know climate has changed before. The climate is constantly changing everywhere. After all, at one time Manitoba had alligators growing in the far north, but that was hundreds of millions of years ago. And now the climate is changing fast—incredibly fast.

You might not notice by looking at all the swimming pools in Arizona or California, or green golf courses, with brown rough around each fairway, or the many new lawns grown by Canadian snow birds who think a desert deserves a well-manicured and well-watered lawn, but the American southwest, that I love so much, has been in a megadrought for about 20 years! The lawns don’t show it, but Lake Mead sure does. Lakes don’t lie like lawns do.

Oliver Milman described it this way in his Guardian article:

“The west has gone through periods like this “megadrought” , with only occasional respite, for the past two decades. But scientists have made clear the current conditions would be virtually impossible without human-caused climate change, pointing to a longer-term “aridification” of the region. All of the water conservation efforts that have kept shortages at bay until now risk being surpassed by the rising heat.”

 

Water in the American southwest has always been scarce. Well at least for the last couple of hundred million years. Before that much of this area was under water in an inland sea. Milman interviewed someone who knows what is going on:

“The amount of water now available across the US west is well below that of any time in modern civilization,” said Park Williams, a hydro-climatologist at Columbia University. Research by Williams and colleagues last year analyzed tree rings to discover the current dry period is rivaled only by a spell in the late 1500s in a history of drought that reaches back to around 800, with the climate crisis doubling the severity of the modern-day drought.

“As the globe warms up, the west will dry out,” said Williams. “The past two years have been shocking to me, I never thought I would see downtown LA reach 111F as it’s so close to the ocean, but we have some of the driest conditions in 1,200 years so the dice are loaded for more heatwaves and fires. This could be the tip of the iceberg, we may well see much longer, tougher droughts.”

  

I want to emphasize that this has already occurred. The environmental apocalypse is already here. It is really just a question of how people will adapt to it now that it is here. Yet the future is far from rosy. As Milman reported,

“Even with these adaptions, however, the decline of Lake Mead has caused the amount of hydro power generated by the dam to drop by around 25%. The drought is expected to cause the hydro facility at Lake Oroville, California, to completely shut down, prompting a warning from the United States Energy Association that a “megadrought-induced electricity shortage could be catastrophic, affecting everything from food production to industrial manufacturing”. The association added that such a scenario could even force people to move east, in what it called a “reverse Dust Bowl exodus”

 

I have friends of mine that have already sold their properties in Arizona. Not because they fear drought. Some got spooked by Covid-19, others were tempted to cash in good prices when the Canadian dollar was high. That wasn’t that long ago. Perhaps some of them might be grateful they left before the start of the reverse dust bowl. Time will tell. It always does.

A Shrinking Lake Mead

Climate change, Environmental Apocalypse

The decline of Lake Mead is obvious at first glance. One only has to look at the white bath tub ring in the reservoir which clearly shows where water levels used to be. We saw it clear as day when we were there a couple of years ago.  I took a photograph in 2016 a mere 5 years ago which I showed in a previous post.( https://themeanderer.ca/nature-always-bats-last) When I saw a photo in the Guardian I was shocked how much farther the water level had dropped. It was stunning.

As Oliver Milman reported in the Guardian,

The decline of Lake Mead is apparent even at a cursory glance. The US’s largest reservoir is now barely a third full, the dark basalt rock of its canyon walls blanched by a distinctive white calcium ring where the water level once was. This level has plunged by about 130ft in the past 20 years and is currently receding by about a foot a week as farms hit their peak irrigation period.

A lot of people go to Lake Mead for recreation including boating, fishing and swimming. According to Milman,

“The pace of change has been jarring to the millions of people who regularly boat, fish and swim on the lake, with the National Park Service recently laying down new steel platforms to extend launch ramps that no longer reach the water. Some marinas have been wrenched from their moorings and moved because they have been left marooned in baking sediment.”

 

Meanwhile Las Vegas, which gets nearly all of its water from Lake Mead, was recently the fastest growing city in the United States. Last year it had a record of 240 days without rain, but it is still growing. Now it has to worry about where it will get its water.

The Colorado River is the source of the water for Lake Mead and it is fed mainly by snow melt from the mountains but that snowmelt has declined by 19% since the 1950s. Because of that, and because so much of the water from the river is siphoned off for lawns, golf courses, drinking water, and above all agriculture in California, the Colorado River rarely reaches the Pacific Ocean anymore. Kayaks have to be carried on shoulders to get there. According to Milman,

“Only 1.8% of the west is not in some level of drought, with California, Arizona, and New Mexico all experiencing their lowest rainfalls on record. Lakes in Arizona are so low they can’t be used to fight the fires spurred by drought.”

Do cities like Las Vegas really make sense in a desert? How about Phoenix? Or Los Angeles? I don’t know what the future will bring, but it is bound to be interesting.

Extremes We’ve not seen

Climate change, Environmental Apocalypse

 

According to Guardian reporter Oliver Milman, the situation at the Hoover dam near Las Vegas is “emblematic of a planet slowly, inexorably overheating. And the catastrophic consequences of the extreme weather this brings.”  Lake Mead that straddles the Arizona and Nevada borders and was created by water backing up from the Hoover Dam, supplies water to 7 western states including my beloved Arizona, is running dry.

 

Michael Bernardo the river operations manager at the US Bureau of Reclamation, whose job it is to ensure that the reservoir delivers a steady reliable supply of water to nearly 40 million people including tribes from whose lands the river runs and from water is diverted into the reservoir,  said this

“the scarcity of water is out of bounds with historical norms. While there is no “average” year on the Colorado River, Bernardo and his colleagues were always able to estimate its flow within a certain range.

But since 2000, scientists say the river’s flow has dwindled by 20% compared to the previous century’s average. This year is the second driest on record, with the flow into Lake Mead just a quarter of what would be considered normal.”

 

 

Bernardo also said this when he pointed out how scenarios they had created had never led them to believe the water in the reservoir would reach such low levels:

“These are scenarios that aren’t necessarily where we expect to be in our models We’re getting those years that are at the extreme ends of the bell curve. We’ve seen extremes we haven’t seen before, we now have scenarios that are very, very dry.”

 

In June this past year the level of Lake Mead (the name given to the artificial reservoir created by the dam), dropped below 1,075ft, the point that will trigger, for the first time, federally mandated cuts in water allocations next year.

As Oliver Milman reported in the Guardian,

 “The Bureau of Reclamation (the government agency originally tasked with “reclaiming” this arid place for a new utopia of farmland and a booming western population), expects this historic low to spiral further, dropping to about 1,048ft by the end of 2022, a shallowness unprecedented since Lake Mead started filling up in the 1930s following Hoover dam’s completion. This will provoke a second, harsher, round of cuts.”

 

Those 7 states and tribes will be facing some harsh realities next year, because of what has already happened this year.  Like many Americans, I had heard for years about the levels of water dropping in Lake Mead, but it never really hit home. Now it has hit home.  This has already happened.  The southwest is committed to this. It has already happened though the consequences won’t be felt until next year. Perhaps some people are still living in FantasyLand. Many of us like to live there.

Kathryn Sorensen, a water policy expert at Arizona State University, my second University I have enjoyed so much the last few years with Chris, made things plain:

“We’ve known this point will arrive because we’ve continued to use more water than the river provides for years,” said Kathryn Sorensen, a water policy expert at Arizona State University. “Things look pretty grim. Humans have always been good at moving water around but right now everyone will need to do what it takes to prevent the system from crashing.”

 

If the second round of cuts occurs as most now expect, Arizona will lose nearly 1/5th of the water it gets from the Colorado River, the greatest source of water in Arizona.  Nevada has a lower cut, based on an agreement made between the states and tribes more than a 100 years ago when few people were crazy enough to live there, only gets a small share to start out with. I think Las Vegas gets most of its water from there. It could be in big doo doo (that’s a technical engineering term).

Some people think that this situation is temporary because when people talk about a 20-year drought in the region that sounds like it won’t last for ever.  These people are not taking climate change into consideration. But this is change that has already occurred. As Colby Pellegrino, deputy general manager of resources for the Southern Nevada Water Authority said to the Guardian, “Everyone’s going to have to do more with less, and that’s really going to be challenging for people,” she said. “‘Drought’ suggests to a lot of people something temporary we have to respond to, but this could permanently be the type of flows we see.” Doing “more with less” is not something North Americans (other than indigenous people) are accustomed to.

Nature always bats last

Climate change, Environmental Apocalypse, New Attitude to Nature

 

 

It first dawned on me that climate change was here and now when I read an article bby Oliver MIlman  in the Guardian Weekly this summer about the Hoover Dam. I had visited the dam a couple of years ago when Chris and I drove to Las Vegas to pick up her sister who had flown in from Winnipeg. The dam was an awesome sight. But like many others I was struck by the white “bathtub ring” of the reservoir that showed graphically how the level in the reservoir had been dropping for decades.

 

The article in the Guardian had a very similar photo of the reservoir but the water level had dropped even more. That was hard to believe. It was also hard to swallow.  After living there for 3 months each year for about half a dozen years I have fallen in love with the American southwest. It is a place of awesome beauty and fascination. I consider it my second home.

 

The Guardian described the situation at Lake Mead this way: “The situation here is emblematic of a planet slowly, inexorably overheating. And the catastrophic consequences of the extreme weather this brings.”  The reservoir created by the dam is the largest reservoir in North America. It is an amazing sight. Yet the level of water in the reservoir has plummeted to historic lows. This could cause many places in the southwest including my beloved Arizona to face some steep cuts in their water supplies and they don’t have a lot of alternative sources of water. They have already used a lot of ingenuity to get at water and the supply is limited. Someone once said the wars of the 21st century will be founded on water issues like the wars of the 20th century had their basis in oil.

 

First, we must all admit that it really does not make sense that the American southwest being as dry as it, is home to such huge cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix. That was only possible because of the huge efforts made by Americans to tame the desert.  They wanted to control nature. Matin Heidegger, by way of Friedrich Nietzsche referred to this idea as the will to power, and there are few better examples of it than this region. Those imbued with will-to-power in this sense want to tame nature. As Oliver Milman said,

“Had the formidable white arc of the Hoover dam never held back the Colorado River, the US west would probably have no Los Angeles or Las Vegas as we know them today. No sprawling food bowl of wheat, alfalfa and corn. No dreams of relocating to live in a tamed desert. The river, and dam, made the west; now the climate crisis threatens to break it.”

 

The dam is a demonstration of engineering at its finest (or if you like its most brutal). As Milman said, “The engineering might of Hoover dam undoubtably reshaped America’s story, harnessing a raucous river to help carve huge cities and vast fields of crops into unforgiving terrain.”

 The Hoover dam is huge (though much smaller than the 3 Gorges Dam we saw in China). It is as high as a 60-story building and is 45ft thick at the top and 660ft at the bottom. It was built during the extremes of the Great Depression and was a source of national pride when it was done. It was an engineering marvel.

 But that was then; this is now. Now nature seems to be fighting back. And like they say, “Nature always bats last.”  Thanks in part to climate change, also man made, the region is in the midst of a historic drought. As a result, the dam may no longer make sense, even though it is so badly needed. As Milman said, “We bent nature to suit our own needs,” said Brad Udall, a climate and water expert at Colorado State University. “And now nature is going to bend us.”

We must learn to stop fighting nature and instead learn to work with nature. Climate change is proving that we need a new attitude to nature. And we need it quickly.