WHO – Air Pollution Responsible for 7 Million Deaths in 2012

Regardless of creed, ethnicity, or tax bracket, everyone must breathe the same air. This week, the World Health Organization announced that air pollution was responsible for seven million deaths globally in 2012. It is also the single largest preventable health risk worldwide. Both indoor and outdoor particulate matter is to blame for illnesses such as stroke, heart disease, respiratory infections, lung cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Not just harmful to human bodies directly, much of the pollution also contributes to the acceleration of climate change and its catastrophic affect on agriculture, the economy, and biosphere.

According to the WHO, air pollution is responsible for one death in eight every year. Overall, 4.3 million deaths worldwide were linked in 2012 to indoor pollution primarily due to cooking with coal, dung, or wood stoves. Outdoor pollution from diesel engines and fires were linked to 3.7 million deaths. Many populations are exposed to poor air quality in both settings, causing a degree of overlap within the aggregate figure of seven million deaths. Further chronic health risks such as birth defects and impaired cognitive abilities in children add to the already sobering statistics.

While the entire planet is vulnerable to air pollution, low and middle income countries such as those in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific are particularly hard-hit. In addition to particulate matter expelled from fossil fuel reliant power plants, industrial operations, and auto fumes, burning black carbon for domestic cook stoves can cause diseases that lead to early mortality. By switching to cleaner forms of energy and investing in public transportation, regions most reliant on fossil fuels would see immediate improvements.

“Reducing air pollution, including black carbon soot pollution, can save millions of lives a year, reduce crop losses significantly, and cut the rate of global warming in half and the rate of warming in the Arctic by two-thirds over the next few decades,” according to the WHO. “With this combination of benefits—healthier citizens, higher crop yields, and half the rate of climate change—reducing air pollutants should be a top priority for sustainable development and climate protection.”

To help clear the air, many governments and NGOs are beginning to support the switch to clean cooking stoves, reduce the number of vehicles on the road, and put moratoriums on the construction of new coal fire power plants. As the climate changes and developing nations seek to industrialize, energy production and consumption practices on both local and commercial scales must be adjusted to ensure the health of one of humanity’s most vital shared resources.

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NEW NASA Satellite Image Shows California Drought

A newly released NASA satellite image taken from space shows the extent of California’s worst drought since record-keeping started in 1885 and potentially the region’s driest period in 500 years. The data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites vividly displays green areas that are supposed to be white with winter snow cover and brown areas that are supposed to be green with plant growth this time of year.

The evergreen vegetation near the Sierra Nevada mountain range is usually covered with snow in a normal year. Most of the rest of the state — from the San Joaquin Valley to San Francisco to Los Angeles and beyond shows areas suffering from drought stress or left fallow because of lack of water to grow crop seeds.

“If you showed me this image without the date, I would say, ‘This is California in early fall after a long, hot summer, before the fall and winter rains and snows arrived,’” said Bill Patzert, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This is no California winter postcard.”

While recent rainfall and snowfall have brought temporary relief to parts of the state, it is not enough to mitigate the worst effects of the drought that is now in its third year. David Miskus of the NOAA Climate Prediction Center wrote that “even though this storm was welcome, the central Sierra still needs 3 to 4 more copious storms to bring this wet season close to average. Unfortunately, little to no precipitation fell on southern California and the Southwest.”

On a recent visit to California to tour the damage, President Obama pledged $183 million in federal aid and blamed the drought on climate change, saying “we’re going to have to stop looking at these disasters as something to wait for. We’re going to have to start looking at these disasters as something to prepare for.” The president added that “we have to be clear. A changing climate means that weather-related disasters like droughts, wildfires, storms, floods, are potentially going to be costlier and they’re going to be harsher.”

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California Drought Threatens 50% Farm Town Unemployment

Joe Del Bosque’s workers are tending irrigation lines and priming pumps for the cantaloupe season on 1,000 acres north of Mendota, California, an area bigger than Central Park. The drought gripping the most productive U.S. agricultural region may claim more than half that land.

Mendota, in Fresno County near the middle of the state, calls itself the Cantaloupe Center of the World. In the last big drought five years ago, unemployment in the town soared to almost 50 percent and the line of farm workers at the local food bank stretched for blocks. Del Bosque had to cut his payroll 30 percent, and it will probably be worse this year, he said.

“Those are wages lost,” said the 64-year-old farmer. “It’s wages lost to real people. It’s a loss of revenue into the community. That money supports families, it supports businesses. It’s a terrible effect. And I’m just one farmer, a medium-sized farmer. So if all farmers suffer the same thing, you can imagine the ripple effect throughout the community.” 

Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for the world’s 10th largest economy after 2013 turned into the driest year on record. President Barack Obama will visit the county today as more farmers prepare to idle thousands of acres, boosting food prices across the U.S. and leaving thousands of farm workers jobless.

Mendota is in a 200-mile zone on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley that grows about 70 percent of California’s cantaloupes. The state provides three-quarters of the cantaloupes sold in the U.S. Planting begins as early as April, with the harvest between June and October, according to the California Cantaloupe Advisory Board.

Poor, Hispanic

The city of 11,000 rises from a flat state highway that pierces farmland 230 miles north of Los Angeles. The community depends mostly on agriculture and is 97 percent Hispanic. Just one in three people graduated from high school and per-person income is about $9,000 a year, according to U.S. Census data.

Mendota already suffers from 34 percent unemployment, five times the national rate. The numbers vary seasonally, with farm workers migrating to Mendota every year from as far away as El Salvador and Oaxaca, Mexico.

“These people live week to week and if their paycheck is short by $5, they go hungry,” said Chuck Herrin who runs an employment agency that provides contract laborers to local farms. “A lot of these people, frankly, they don’t have legal status so they can’t go on unemployment.”

$122,000 Houses

A federal medium-security prison on the southwest edge of town provides some jobs outside of farming. There’s a new subdivision of modest one-story houses and apartments on the north side, and a rundown mobile home park on the west. In 2012, the median home value was $122,000, one-third of the average price in California, according to Census data. Many buildings in the seven-block downtown are older, showing their wear in broken shutters and weathered paint.

In 2009, farmers in the area got 10 percent of the federally-controlled water they requested during a milder drought. At the time, unemployment soared to almost 50 percent.

This year, no one expects any federal water.

“Without water we can’t produce,” said Bill Diedrich, a fourth-generation California farmer who grows almonds along the west side of Firebaugh, eight miles up the road from Mendota. “Without water, we don’t have jobs for folks. It’s going to be devastating.”

Small-Town Life

Sam Rubio, a 30-year-old former science teacher, is the president of the local chamber of commerce and owns a small coffee shop anchoring a one-story downtown commercial building. He sells some pastries and a place to plug in laptop computers. He offers chess boards for kids and a room where local non-profit groups can meet.

People live in the area because they are dedicated to farming and enjoy the quiet, small-town life, Rubio said. Yet more and more of them are talking about moving, he said, in search of a place where the crops are more certain.

“My worst fear is that we would have to close up shop,” Rubio said. “We’re a luxury. That’s just the truth. We are the last thing that parents are thinking about when they are thinking of providing for their children. They think the grocery store first, then gas and clothing and shoes.”

Top Producer

Fresno County supplied $6.6 billion of agricultural products in 2012, the top-producing county in the U.S. by gross value. With the drought, its farmers and ranchers are expected to fallow 250,000 acres this year, a quarter of its irrigated land and an area bigger than Manhattan, according to Ryan Jacobsen, chief executive of the Fresno County Farm Bureau. 

It’s not only the lack of rain that’s crippling farms. For years, the federal government and the state have reduced water allocation to a fraction of what is needed because of environmental laws protecting endangered fish and wildlife. As the state’s population grew to more than 38 million, few new dams and reservoirs were built to guard against dry years.

“Our farmers have been imaginative enough to maintain a good business until now,” said Steve Malanca, general manager of a John Deere (DE) farming equipment dealership in Firebaugh. “We’re going to be in some uncharted territory. With the zero allocation, I can tell you that my customers’ priority is not farm equipment. It’s water.

‘‘That translates into less sales, and not only farm equipment,” he said. “It’s farm fertilizer, farm seeds, it’s the local parts house in town, the local restaurants and the local barber. It affects us all.”

Price Spike

Ranchers and farmers who can buy water on the open market are paying as much as 10 times what it would cost in a typical wet year. Sheridan Nicholas, the water resources manager at the Wheeler Ridge-Maricopa Water Storage District near Bakersfield, bid on water that a neighboring district had put up for sale, only to find that local cattle ranchers were offering about 35 percent more, as much as $1,350 per acre-foot.

An acre-foot is the volume needed to cover an acre of land one foot deep with water and is used as a measure of large volume.

“If a state water contractor got 100 percent of their allocation, that water would typically go for about $100 an acre-foot,” Nicholas said. “It is so dry that there just isn’t enough water to buy, and that’s what made that water so valuable.”

The state saw relief last weekend as the most powerful storm to hit California in more than a year dropped several inches of rain in some spots and several feet of snow in the mountains. One reservoir rose as much as 15 feet in four days.

Northern California, where rainfall and snowmelt is collected and then fed down to cities and farms, has received just 8 inches of rain since July 1, according to the National Weather Service. That’s 14 inches below normal for Feb. 12, with more than half of the rainy season already over.

“I pray to God that we continue to get some rain,” said Mendota’s Mayor Pro Tem Joseph Amador, a retired detective who runs a local hotel. “There are some hard working people out here that want to work. They don’t need to be home stressing about what food is going to come to their table for their family tomorrow.”

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California Drought a National Concern

President Barack Obama called the California drought a national concern and promised millions of dollars worth of assistance to the state that provides almost half of the fruits and vegetables for the U.S.

“What happens here matters to every working American, right down to the cost of food you put on your table,” Obama said in in the state’s fertile Central Valley, where farmers are being forced to idle thousands of acres of fields and rural towns are running short of drinking water.

Obama also linked the drought, one of the worst in California history, to climate change and said local, state and federal governments must start preparing for the impact of more extreme weather events.

“There has to be a sense of urgency about this,” he said. “This cannot be a partisan endeavor.”

The administration plans to accelerate distribution of as much as $100 million in aid to ranchers to help feed livestock and offer compensation for losses. The Agriculture Department is also making available $15 million in conservation aid for the worst drought regions in California and in five other states to reduce wind erosion on damaged fields and to improve livestock access to water.

The White House said $60 million has been made available to California food banks for families affected by the drought, and plans are under way to establish 600 summer meal sites in hard-hit regions this summer.

Climate Change

Another $5 million is being set aside to protect vulnerable soil, along with $3 million in grants to communities facing water shortages and $3 million in grants for towns facing a decline in water quality or quantity.

As part of his policy on climate change, Obama plans to ask Congress to approve a $1 billion Climate Resilience Fund in the budget plan he’ll send to lawmakers March 4 for the fiscal 2015 spending year, which begins Oct. 1.

If approved, the money would be devoted to researching the projected effect of climate change on agriculture, communities and the nation’s infrastructure, according to a White House fact sheet. If would also finance research leading to “breakthrough technologies” to help cope with climate change.

Republicans in Congress, some of whom have questioned whether the climate is warming because of human activity, have rejected many of the new spending proposals Obama has presented in past budgets.

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Roofs Painted White Have Greater Economic and Environmental Benefits

Green roofs offer a lot of environmental benefits – they provide additional insulation, reduce rainwater runoff, and can lower your electricity bill. However a new study suggests that roofs painted white might actually be more effective at fighting climate change. A study published in the Energy and Buildings Journal compared three types of roofs – green, black and white – and came to the conclusion that white roofs have great economic benefits, and they are also three times more effective than the other two at fighting climate change.

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory conducted an economic analysis of the costs and benefits of white, black and green roofs and found that white roofs are far superior in fighting climate change than the other two. While roofs painted black absorb heat and contribute to the urban heat island effect, white roofs reflect the sunlight back into the atmosphere and help cool down its lower parts. The study advises those concerned with global climate change to choose white roofs, adding to a host of other studies in the past decade that have allowed the “white roof movement” to gain momentum across the United States. However, things are not as simple as they seem.

A series of climate simulations carried out by Mark Z. Jacobson and Ten Hoeve of Stanford University showed some unexpected results. Despite their beneficial effects on the lower parts of the atmosphere, white roofs decrease the temperature difference half a mile above ground-a difference which drives cloud formation and less clouds means more sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface. This, among other issues like the impact on fossil fuel consumption and summer cooling vs. winter heating gains, is still subject of scientific debates. Meanwhile, it should also be noted that vegetated roofs offer built-in storm water management mechanisms in addition to some cooling benefits.

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