01 August 21
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The Republican leadership’s decision to boycott the inquiry leaves the ex-president without defenders on the committee
he House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is readying the committee that will on Tuesday begin its investigation into the attack on the Capitol to press ahead with an aggressive inquiry into Donald Trump, as she seeks to exploit a Republican refusal to participate that could leave the former president unguarded.
Pelosi’s move last week to block Jim Banks and Jim Jordan – vociferous allies of Trump – from serving on the House select committee, prompted the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, to boycott the inquiry, pulling his three other Republican picks from the panel.
But Pelosi won strong support from Democrats and told lieutenants she may have emerged with the upper hand ahead of the select committee’s first hearing.
“We have the duty, to the constitution and the country, to find the truth of the 6 January insurrection and to ensure that such an assault on our Democracy cannot again happen,” Pelosi said of the investigation in a letter to Democrats.
The speaker has suggested to top Democrats in recent days that McCarthy’s move to boycott the panel leaves Trump without any defenders in the high-profile investigation into the 6 January insurrection, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Pelosi chose some of the former president’s most critical opponents when she made her appointments to the select committee, installing both lead impeachment managers from Trump’s two impeachments as well as the Republican dissident Liz Cheney, who was ousted from party leadership in May for repudiating Trump.
On Sunday she added a second Republican, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who has also vocally differed from his party about the Capitol attack.
Kinzinger said: “For months, lies and conspiracy theories have been spread, threatening our self-governance. For months, I have said that the American people deserve transparency and truth on how and why thousands showed up to attack our democracy.
“I will work diligently to ensure we get to the truth and hold those responsible for the attack fully accountable.”
The absence of any Republican picks on the committee means that when the investigation pivots from examining security failures to the role Trump played on 6 January, the inquiry will be conducted solely by his political foes, emboldening Pelosi to seek an aggressive inquiry, the source said.
Democrats have agitated for weeks for Pelosi to take a hard line against Republicans after the party in the Senate blocked a 9/11-style bipartisan commission into the Capitol attack.
Democrats close to Pelosi say she remains furious at how Republicans have sought to downplay the brutal violence of the insurrection, which informed her decision to not give Banks and Jordan a platform from which to twist or minimize the select committee’s findings.
But the speaker’s relationship with Republicans fell to a new low after McCarthy shouted down the phone at her when she informed him of her decision to veto Banks and Jordan, the source said.
Republicans have seized on Pelosi’s intervention against Banks and Jordan, as well as her close involvement with the panel, to portray the inquiry as a partisan exercise to gain political advantage ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
McCarthy lashed out anew a day after he was denied his two top picks for the committee, and pledged to carry out a Republican-only investigation that would focus on how Pelosi should have done more to protect the Capitol.
But Democrats said Pelosi was more than justified in upending congressional norms in refusing to appoint Banks and Jordan, both of whom amplified Trump’s lies about a stolen election and objected to certifying Joe Biden’s election win.
“We want people who are going to have allegiance to the oath of office that they took, not an allegiance to one person. And they’ve clearly pledged their allegiance to the former president,” said Democrat Pete Aguilar, a member of the committee.
Several Democrats said they were particularly disturbed by a CNN report that an alleged Capitol rioter, Anthony Aguero, accompanied Banks on a trip sponsored by the Republican Study Committee to the southern border and, at times, served as an interpreter.
They also said that Pelosi came to the conclusion Banks could not be trusted to serve as the top Republican on the panel after he issued a statement that he wanted to investigate the role of the Biden administration in the insurrection.
Democrats expressed deep reservations about Jordan, the top Republican on the House judiciary committee, after he disparaged the select committee and accused Pelosi of being responsible for a diminished security presence at the Capitol.
The speaker does not herself oversee security at the Capitol, which is the responsibility of the US Capitol police board and the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms. Both sergeants-at-arms at the time of the attack were hired by Republican leaders.
A bipartisan Senate report released last month detailed multiple security failings on the parts of the US Capitol police and the sergeants-at-arms. It did not blame Pelosi or her then opposite number in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.
It's easy for law enforcement to get your data. (photo: Christina Animashaun/Vox)
And you may never know they did it.
f you’ve ever read a privacy policy, you may have noticed a section that says something about how your data will be shared with law enforcement, which means if the police demand it and have the necessary paperwork, they’ll likely get it. But maybe, like most American adults, you don’t read privacy policies very carefully if at all. In that case, you might be surprised to learn how much of your data is in the hands of third parties, how much access law enforcement has to it, how it might be used against you, or what your rights are — if any — to prevent it.
Many of the Capitol insurrectionists might be discovering this now, as cases against them are built with evidence taken from internet services like Facebook and Google. While they left a trail of digital evidence for investigators (and internet detectives) to follow, not all of that data was publicly available. If you read through cases of people charged with crimes relating to the events in Washington on January 6, you’ll find the FBI also obtained internal records from various social media platforms and mobile phone carriers.
But you don’t have to be an alleged insurrectionist for law enforcement to get data about you from another company. In fact, you don’t have to be suspected of a crime at all. The police are increasingly using tactics like reverse search warrants to grab the data of many people in the hope of finding their suspect among them. You might get swept up in one just because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time or looked up the wrong search term. And you might never know that you got caught in the dragnet.
“Investigators are going to these providers without a suspect and asking for a broad set of information that is not targeted in order to basically identify suspects that they didn’t already have in mind,” Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel for the ACLU’s speech, privacy, and technology project, told Recode. “These more mass surveillance techniques are increasingly common.”
Basically, if a company collects and stores your data, then the police can probably get their hands on it. And when it comes to your digital life, there’s a lot of your data held by third parties out there to obtain. Here’s how they get it.
How law enforcement buys your data, no warrant needed
The good news is there are some privacy laws that govern if and how the government can get your data: The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), first enacted in 1986, established these rules.
But the law is several decades old. While it has been updated since 1986, many of its tenets don’t really reflect how we use the internet today, or how much of our data stays in the hands of the companies that provide those services to us.
That means there are gray areas and loopholes, and for some things, the government doesn’t have to go through any legal processes at all. Law enforcement can and does purchase location data from data brokers, for instance. And while location data companies claim that their data has been de-identified, experts say it’s often possible to re-identify individuals.
“The notion is that if it’s available for sale, then it’s okay,” said Kurt Opsahl, deputy executive director and general counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “Of course, one of the problems is that a lot of these data brokers are getting information without going through the consent process that you might want.”
And it’s not just location data. Facial recognition company Clearview AI’s entire business model is to sell law enforcement agencies access to its facial recognition database, much of which was culled from publicly available photos Clearview scraped from the internet. Unless you live in a city or state that has outlawed facial recognition, it’s currently legal for the police to pay for your face data, regardless of how flawed the technology behind it may be.
This could change if something like the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, which bans law enforcement from purchasing commercially available data, were to become law. But for now, the loophole is open.
“One of the challenges with any technology law is technology evolves faster than the law,” Opsahl said. “It is always a challenge to apply these laws to a modern setting, but [ECPA] still has, all these many decades later, provided a solid privacy protection. There definitely could be improvements, but it’s still doing good work today.”
What law enforcement can get through the courts
If you’re suspected of a crime and police are looking for evidence in your digital life, then ECPA says they must have a subpoena, court order, or warrant before a company is allowed to provide the data they’re requesting. That is to say, the company can’t just hand it over voluntarily. There are a few exceptions — for instance, if there’s reason to believe there’s imminent danger or a crime is in progress. But in the case of criminal investigations, those exceptions don’t apply.
Broadly, the legal process that investigators have to use depends on what data they’re looking for:
- Subpoena: This gives investigators what’s known as subscriber information, such as your name, address, length of service (how long you’ve had your Facebook profile, for example), log information (when you’ve made phone calls or logged into and out of your Facebook account), and credit card information.
- Court order, or “D” order: The D refers to 18 US Code § 2703(d), which says a court may order internet service providers to give law enforcement any records about the subscriber other than the content of their communications. So that could include who emailed you and when, but not the contents of the actual email.
- Search warrant: This gives law enforcement access to content itself, specifically stored content, which includes emails, photos, videos, posts, direct messages, and location information. While the ECPA says that emails stored for over 180 days can be obtained with just a subpoena, that rule dates back to before people routinely kept their emails on another company’s server (how far back does your Gmail inbox go?) or used it as a backup. At this point, several courts have ruled that a warrant is necessary for email content regardless of how old the emails are, and service providers generally demand a warrant before they’ll agree to hand them over.
If you want to get an idea of how often the government requests data from these companies, some of them do release transparency reports that give basic details about how many requests they get, what type, and how many of those requests they fulfill. They also show how much those requests have increased over the years. Here’s Facebook’s transparency report, here’s Google’s, and here’s Apple’s. The EFF also put out a guide in 2017 showing how several tech companies respond to government requests.
You don’t have to be a suspect or involved in a crime for law enforcement to get your data
So, let’s say you’ve decided that you will never commit a crime so law enforcement obtaining your data will never be an issue for you. You’re wrong.
As mentioned above, your data could be included in a purchase from a data broker. Or it may be scooped up in a digital dragnet, also known as a reverse search warrant, where police request data about a large group of people in the hope of finding their suspect within them.
“These are novel techniques to discover things that never could have been discovered in the past, and which have the capacity to rope in innocent people,” Granick, of the ACLU, said.
Two examples of this: where you went and what you searched for. In a geofence warrant, law enforcement gets information about all the devices that were in a certain area at a certain time — say, where a crime occurred — then narrows them down and gets account information for the device(s) they think belong to their suspect(s). For keyword warrants, police may ask a browser for all the IP addresses that searched for a certain term related to their case and then identify a possible suspect from that group.
These situations still represent a legal gray area. While some judges have called them a Fourth Amendment violation and refused the government’s requests for warrants, others have allowed them. And we’ve seen at least one instance where reverse search warrants have led to the arrest of an innocent person.
You may not be told for years that your data was obtained — if you’re told at all
Another troubling aspect to this is that, depending on what’s being requested and why, you may never know if police requested your data from a company or if that company gave it to them. If you’re charged with a crime and that data is used as evidence against you, then you’ll know. But if your data is obtained through purchase from a data broker or as part of a bulk request, you might not. If a company tells you that law enforcement wants your data and gives you advance notice, then you can try to fight their request yourself. But investigators can get gag orders that prevent companies from telling users anything, at which point you’re left to hope that the company fights for you.
According to their transparency reports, Google, Apple, and Facebook do appear to fight or push back sometimes — for example, if they think a request is overly broad or burdensome — so not every request is successful. But that’s them. It’s not necessarily true of everyone.
“Not every provider is a Google or a Facebook that has a deep-bench legal department with serious expertise in federal surveillance law,” Granick said “Some providers, we don’t know what they do. Maybe they don’t do anything. That’s a real issue.”
The majority of government requests even to the biggest companies in the world result in the disclosure of at least some user data, and we’ve seen cases where someone’s data was given to the government and that person didn’t know for years. For instance, the Department of Justice obtained Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff’s and Eric Swalwell’s subscriber records (and that of their family members) from Apple through a grand jury subpoena. This occurred in 2017 and 2018, but the Congress members only found out about it in June 2021, when the gag order expired.
If your information is swept up in something like a reverse search warrant but you’re never identified as a suspect or charged, you may never know about it at all if the company that provided it doesn’t tell you. Opsahl, of the EFF, said that most of the major tech companies post transparency reports and it’s considered an industry best practice to do so. That doesn’t mean they all follow it, nor do they have to.
How you can prevent this
When it comes to your data held by third parties, you don’t have much control or say over if and what they’ll disclose. You’re relying on laws written before the modern internet existed, a judge’s interpretation of them (assuming it goes before a judge, which subpoenas may not), and the companies that have your data to fight them. If you’re notified about a pending order, you might be able to fight it yourself. That’s no guarantee you’ll win.
The best way to protect your data is to use services that don’t get it in the first place. Privacy concerns, including the ability to communicate free from government surveillance, have made encrypted messaging apps like Signal and private browsers like DuckDuckGo popular in recent years. They minimize the data they collect from users, which means they don’t have much to give if investigators try to collect it. You can also ask services to delete your data from their servers or not upload it to them in the first place (assuming those are options). The FBI can’t get much from Apple’s iCloud if you haven’t uploaded anything to it.
At that point, investigators will have to try to get the data they want from your device ... which is a whole other can of legal worms.
Willie Nelson performing in Austin. (photo: Rolling Stone)
illie Nelson returned to the stage Saturday to take part in the Poor People’s Campaign march for voting rights outside the Texas Capitol in Austin.
Beto O’Rourke shared video of Nelson’s performance on social media; the gig marked Nelson’s first in-person and public concert outside of his Luck, Texas ranch since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. (“I’ve been double-shotted,” the mask-less Nelson quipped about being vaccinated prior to his performance.)
The Poor People’s Campaign’s 28-mile march toward Austin began four days ago in Georgetown, Texas and culminated in Saturday’s event outside the capitol building, with Luci Baines Johnson, the youngest daughter of former President Lyndon B. Johnson, and O’Rourke also speaking at the event, the Dallas Observer reported.
The march was in protest of the state’s controversial election reform bill, which O’Rourke said would make Texas “the hardest state in the nation in which to vote.”
Nelson, who previously campaigned on behalf of O’Rourke during the Democratic candidate’s 2018 senate race, said in a statement ahead of his Saturday concert, “It is important that we ensure the right for EVERY American to vote and vote safely. Laws making it more difficult for people to vote are Un-American & are intended to punish poor people, people of color, the elderly & disabled…why? If you can’t win by playing the rules, then it’s you & your platform – not everyone else’s ability to vote.”
Nelson will next return to the stage with his traveling Outlaw Music Festival, as well as the return of Farm Aid on September 25th alongside Neil Young, Sturgill Simpson, John Mellencamp and more.
Ayana Campbell, 14, received a Covid shot at Jackson State University in Mississippi on Tuesday. (photo: Rogelio V. Solis/AP)
ovid cases are going up. Mask sales are again on the rise. And yet, vaccine resistance grows. Does this make any sense?
The ongoing surge in all 50 states, plus DC and Puerto Rico -- one that's putting cases in some regions at the same levels they were one year ago, at the height of the pandemic and before there was a vaccine -- is largely due to the fact that about half of the US population remains unvaccinated, health officials across the country confirm. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says about 97% -- 97%! -- of those recently hospitalized by the virus were unvaccinated.
One would think that the mounting and incontrovertible evidence that the Delta variant is something to fear would convince all vaccine holdouts to get the shot. But the needle is not moving.
This situation has left many of us with stubbornly unvaccinated people in our lives to wonder: Can I do something about this?
You can -- and you should. It's not easy to talk to someone who is refusing to be vaccinated and even harder to convince them to change their mind. But not impossible. Here are a few suggestions.
Listen. Vaccine hesitancy is complex and rooted in a number of beliefs and emotions. Some are scared of the unknown effects of the vaccine. Or they're angry -- at the government, at China, at whomever else -- for "making" them do this in the first place. If you've been keeping yourself informed and updated with credible health and science reports, it's tempting to cite data or list off all the reasons one should get vaccinated. But for many who are resistant, facts and data and science don't seem to matter; pleas can actually turn them in the opposite direction. Trying to make your best case can make them feel attacked and blamed for the pandemic continuing.
Even if this is true, making them feel as much isn't the way to convince them. The first best way to persuade someone to change their mind is to first listen and understand where their resistance lies. Your assumptions for why they're resisting may be wrong.
Talk in way that will help them listen. Ever hear of "charm and disarm"? Those who are unvaccinated know you want something from them, and that wanting -- that "demand" -- may well make them dig in. Instead, appeal to their softer side, and their fondness for you, by making it personal. Explain why the vaccine is important to you -- not why they should get the vaccine. You might try offering your own concerns, and how you overcame them. Maybe you start to wear a mask again, and tell them why, how even as you, too, are tired of doing so you're doing it for your safety and the safety of everyone around you.
Some people also do better reading versus hearing. If the unvaccinated person in your life is easily distracted, or the sort who needs time to process -- or if, just as importantly, you're someone who tends to get fired up in the face of debate -- consider putting your thoughts in an email instead. Taking a moment to gather and process your argument in a kind and respectful way, away from the heat of a frustrating confrontation, can go a long way towards making a convincing case.
Stay detached. Your emotions are not helpful. Don't shame people who are unvaccinated, and don't show your own anger. Make them feel safe around you and enter any conversation knowing you can stay reasoned, no matter what. If you're not sure you can, table the talk for another time or format (see: put your thoughts in an email).
Make it their decision. Position getting the vaccine as a choice, rather than something the government is forcing them to do (it is not) -- a choice to take a chance on the vaccine rather than on Covid. It is true that President Joe Biden recently announced new steps to get people vaccinated, including requiring federal government employees and on-site contractors to attest to their vaccination status, wear a mask if they are not and submit to weekly or twice weekly screening. But there is no government mandate for others. Perhaps you might appeal to their patriotic senses. That uncle driving around with the flag on the back of his truck? Surely he cares about his country and keeping his fellow Americans healthy and in their jobs!
Bribe them. It's not as ridiculous as it may seem. An increasingly impatient Biden has suggested that states offer $100 vaccine incentives. There's a reason to believe this approach could work -- for him and for you. Some people aren't getting vaccinated because they're busy, misinformed and/or see it as not worth their time. Others are not because, simply put, they're lazy or complacent. Maybe this is your 70-year-old father, or your 20-year-old stepdaughter. Offering to drive or accompany them to their appointment -- and then rewarding them with something they'd appreciate, like lunch at their favorite restaurant or a book you think they'd enjoy -- may seem like pandering, but it's pandering with a purpose.
View it as a long game. Chances are good you're not going to convince anyone on your first attempt. But that doesn't mean you won't the second or third time. Don't give up. The best route to success is often slow and steady. Have patience, and keep the conversation open and ongoing. Over time, as they trust your motivations and take in what you're saying -- and have the chance to grow their own awareness of the news they're hearing around them, or the masks they're starting to see more and more of -- you might have a chance. You do have to try. We all do.
Roundup products on a shelf at a store in San Rafael, California, on July, 9, 2018. (photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)
ayer will no longer sell glyphosate-containing products to U.S. home gardeners, the company announced on Thursday.
The move comes as the company currently faces around 30,000 legal claims from customers who believe use of these products — including the flagship Roundup — caused them to develop cancer, as AgWeb reported.
"Bayer's decision to end U.S. residential sale of Roundup is a historic victory for public health and the environment," Center for Food Safety executive director Andrew Kimbrell said in a statement. "As agricultural, large-scale use of this toxic pesticide continues, our farmworkers remain at risk. It's time for EPA to act and ban glyphosate for all uses."
Glyphosate is a controversial ingredient because it has been linked to the development of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, as Cure noted. The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer declared that it was "probably carcinogenic to humans," in 2015. While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under former President Donald Trump ruled that the chemical did not pose any risk to human health, the Biden Administration later admitted that the review was flawed and needed to be redone, as Common Dreams reported. Still, it refused to take it off the market in the meantime.
Bayer's decision comes in response to the many lawsuits related to glyphosate that it inherited when it acquired Monsanto in 2018. Juries sided with the plaintiffs in three highly-watched trials before Bayer settled around 95,000 cases in 2020 to the tune of $10 billion. That settlement, which was one of the largest in U.S. history, allowed Bayer to continue to sell Roundup without any warnings. However, the company still faces further litigation, and said it decided to pull the product from residential use in order to prevent more. More than 90 percent of recent claims come from the residential home and garden market, AgWeb reported.
"This move is being made exclusively to manage litigation risk and not because of any safety concerns," the company said when it announced its decision.
The products will be replaced with different active ingredients beginning in 2023, following reviews by the EPA and state regulatory bodies. January 2023 was the earliest the change could reasonably be implemented, Bayer Crop Science Division president Liam Condon told AgWeb.
"This is from a regulatory and logistical point of view (of what's) possible," Condon said during a conference call with investors, as AgWeb reported.
The Head and The Heart keeping acoustic ballads alive for a new generation. (photo: THATH promo image)
Lyrics The Head and the Heart, Lost in My Mind. From the 2010 album, The Head and the Heart.The band credits multiple band members with writing the song: Charity Thielen, Chris Zasche, Jonathan Russell, Josiah Johnson, Kenny Hensley, Tyler Williams
Put your dreams away for now*
I won't see you for some time
I am lost in my mind
I get lost in my mind
Momma once told me
You're already home where you feel love
I am lost in my mind
I get lost in my mind
Oh my brother
Your wisdom is all that I need
Oh my brother
Don't you worry 'bout me
Don't you worry
Don't you worry
Don't worry about me
How's that bricklayin' coming
How's your engine running
Is that bridge getting built
Are your hands getting filled
Won't you tell me my brother
Cause there are stars up above
We can start moving forward
How?s that bricklayin? coming
How?s your engine running
Is that bridge getting built
Are your hands getting filled
Won?t you tell me my brother
Cause there are stars up above
We can start moving forward
Lost in my mind
Lost in my mind
Oh I get Lost in my mind
Lost, I get lost, I get lost in my mind
Lost in my mind
Yes I get lost in my mind
Lost, I get lost, I get lost
Oh I get lost
Oh I get
A sign warns of extreme heat danger at the salt flats in Death Valley national park. (photo: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)
More than a billion sea creatures across the Pacific north-west perished in this year’s heatwave. And it’s just a taste of what’s to come
hen forecasts foreshadowed the Pacific north-west’s devastating heatwave at the end of June, marine biologist Christopher Harley was alarmed and intrigued.
Then came the smell, and his feelings somberly shifted.
“It was this putrid smell of decay,” Harley said. Across hundreds of miles of coastline the extreme heat baked the barnacles, seaweed, and small sea creatures exposed to the elements along the shore. Starfish that failed to crawl to shadier spots were cooked alive. Mussels laid agape along the rocks, the tissue crisped between their shells.
Armed with special equipment, Harley and his team of researchers at the University of British Columbia descended to the beaches to measure the body temperatures of the mussels, but it was too late – by the third day of the record-breaking heatwave they all had died. “We were just walking across carpets of dead mussels on the shore in awe,” he said.
Initial estimates show that over a billion creatures that live in the shallow waters across the Pacific north-west perished in the heat that week. Scientists expect the impact will have a trickle-down effect on the ecosystem and the other animals that rely on those that died for food and habitat.
“I knew [the heat] would be ecologically impactful but I wasn’t ready for the magnitude of the destruction,” Harley said. “The more places I visited and the more death I saw the more sobering the whole event became.”
‘It is going to get hotter’
The unprecedented heat events that scorched the west this summer – smashing dozens of local temperature records across the region – had disastrous effects on people, plants and animals. Climate scientists say this is just a taste of what’s to come.
As the environment continues to warm due to human-caused global heating, spiking temperatures will become more frequent, more intense, and last longer. Because heat and drought are inextricably linked, the compounding catastrophes that have plagued the west this summer will persist into the future, continuing to wreak havoc on ecosystems, infrastructure, and agriculture.
Scientists are still working to document and understand the impact of the recent heatwaves. But the research has been clear that this anomalous event could become the norm over the next 30 years as the planet continues to warm.
“It is going to continue to get hotter,” said Andrew Hoell, a meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s physical sciences laboratory, noting that rising temperatures are unequivocally linked to human activities. “That means it is going to take much moisture supply in terms of precipitation to stave off drought,” he explained. “That is going to be a game changer in terms of how we live.”
Extreme heat could increase crop damage tenfold, according to a study led by researchers at the University of Colorado published earlier this year. The real-time effects are already being seen across the west, where farmers and ranchers have struggled to adapt to extremely dry conditions even before temperatures began to spike.
More than half of the cherry crop in western Canada was damaged in late June, according to the British Columbia Fruit Growers Association. “It seems like somebody took a blowtorch to it and just singed it,” said Pinder Dhaliwal, the association’s president, to CBC News. Even cherries that looked untouched from the outside were cooked, he added, appearing hot all the way through to the pit.
Growers and their respective associations also reported that raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries were baked across the northern west coast before they could be picked, and stone fruits and apples were damaged and burned from the high temperatures. Experts from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have expressed concern that shriveled wheat berries and diminished kernels will mean a drastic reduction in wheat production this season.
Temperatures above 95F (35C) have also been found to change parts of potatoes from starch to sugar and stunt their growth. Meanwhile, a drought-induced shortage of California’s thirsty tomatoes, used for processing, is expected to spike prices for the foods made from them, like pizza sauce and ketchup.
‘A frog in a slow-to-boil pot’
As of last month, close to half of the contiguous US was mired in drought according to NOAA scientists, and more than 15% of the nation experienced record heat for June – the largest number of spiking temperatures ever recorded. Extreme heat and drought, which are individually costly and devastating disasters, go hand-in-hand complicating efforts to adapt and recover. The combined conditions also set the stage for fast-burning fires that have already torched close to 3m acres (1.2m hectares) this year.
“You have the gradual shift of climate change working in the background,” said Steve Ostoja, director of the USDA California Climate Hub, “but the extreme events are the things that really throw you off.”
The historical record indicates between four and six extreme heatwaves a year, but climate models indicate that on current trajectories there could be between 25 and 30 of these events by mid-century, according to Ostoja. “That’s a huge difference,” he said. “That basically means it is going to be that hot all the time.”
Water and moisture that could help alleviate strain during the extreme heat, is currently in short supply because of the drought. Plants experience higher stress, animals can’t keep cool, and shallow waterways warm faster, making habitats inhospitable.
“It is looking like water scarcity is going to be the theme of the future and we know warming is in our future,” Ostoja said, noting that there will be a marked shift in how agriculture is approached in places such as California, which currently produces over a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of the country’s fruits and nuts.
“I don’t think it’s just like, one day you will see we won’t be able to do ag in California,” he added. “It’s just kind of like the analogy of the frog in the slow-to-boil pot of water.”
Animals are also struggling to adapt and for some, the prognosis is “grim”, said Jonathon Stillman, a professor of biology at San Francisco State University. His research shows that for animals that have already adjusted to higher heat it will be even harder to adapt when the temperatures spike further. “They don’t have the ability to cope when the temperature goes just a little bit above the maximum that they’ve adapted to,” he said. “They can’t tolerate just a little bit more.”
This includes small birds living on the edge of their water needs, desert dwellers who have nowhere else to go when the nights fail to cool down, and fish that aren’t able to reach the areas they spawn.
Spring-run Chinook salmon in California’s central valley were decimated by the heat, after making a significant recovery following the 2018 Camp fire that critically diminished the already-threatened fish. More than 83% of the roughly 15,000 adults in Butte Creek – the largest population of the federally protected fish, near Chico, California – died according to Howard Brown, a senior policy adviser with NOAA Fisheries, west coast region.
“It is devastating,” he said calling this an indicator of the severity of the drought and heatwave. “It is the largest loss of adult salmon we have ever seen in the central valley.” Salmon in the Columbia River farther north were also documented swimming slowly and lethargically through the over-heated waters, with large, red abrasions and burn marks.
As heatwaves become more frequent and more intense, they are also expected to impact physically larger areas at once, according to research from Bradfield Lyon, a professor at the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine.
“By mid-century, the spacial size of heatwaves in the US are expected to increase between about 50% to 80% from what they are in the current climate,” he said. “The frequency will increase, the duration will increase, as well as the intensity.”
It’s alarming, but Lyon, and each of the other researchers, hope this episode and the promise of more extreme heat serve as a call for change. The models used to predict the disasters to come are based on current levels of energy consumption and carbon emission. There are advances being made and the potential for progress abounds.
“The way I look at it is it is a very stark warning,” Lyon said, likening the situation to fire drills used to teach school children about how to respond during emergencies. “The teacher would say, ‘Now don’t panic, but head as quickly as possible for the exits’,” he said. “In this case, the exit is burning of fossil fuels. We don’t need to panic, but we certainly need to head as quickly as possible in that direction.”
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