(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
As California Burns, America Breathes Toxic Smoke. I was amazed that the air quality over the Plains and Upper Midwest has been so bad in recent years. Here's a clip from KCRW Features: "Western wildfires pose a much broader threat to human health than to just those forced to evacuate the path of the blazes. Smoke from these fires, which have burned millions of acres in California alone, is choking vast swaths of the country, an analysis of federal satellite imagery by NPR's California Newsroom and Stanford University's Environmental Change and Human Outcomes Lab found. The months-long analysis, based on more than 10 years of data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and analyzed down to the ZIP code level, reveals a startling increase in the number of days residents are breathing smoke across California and the Pacific Northwest, to Denver and Salt Lake City in the Rocky Mountains and rural Kentucky and West Virginia in Appalachia..."
(Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
US Says Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, 22 Other Species Extinct. Associated Press has details: "Death's come knocking a last time for the splendid ivory-billed woodpecker and 22 more birds, fish and other species: The U.S. government is declaring them extinct. It's a rare move for wildlife officials to give up hope on a plant or animal, but government scientists say they've exhausted efforts to find these 23. And they warn climate change, on top of other pressures, could make such disappearances more common as a warming planet adds to the dangers facing imperiled plants and wildlife. The ivory-billed woodpecker was perhaps the best known species the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday will announce is extinct. It went out stubbornly and with fanfare, making unconfirmed appearances in recent decades that ignited a frenzy of ultimately fruitless searches in the swamps of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida..."
(Paul Douglas/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
Electric Cars Have Hit an Inflection Point. The Atlantic summarizes where we are today, and where we may be heading; here's the intro: "Take electric cars, for instance. An electric car is an expensive, highly specialized piece of technology, but building one takes even more expensive, specialized technology—tools that tend to be custom-made, large and heavy, and spread across a factory or the world. And if you want those tools to produce a car in a few years, you have to start planning now. That's exactly what Ford is doing: Last night, the automaker and SK Innovation, a South Korean battery manufacturer, announced that they were spending $11.4 billion to build two new multi-factory centers in Tennessee and Kentucky that are scheduled to begin production in 2025. The facilities, which will hire a combined 11,000 employees, will manufacture lithium-ion vehicle batteries and assemble electric F-series pickup trucks. While Ford already has several factories in Kentucky, this will be its first plant in Tennessee in six decades..."
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
The Everyday Foods That Could Become Luxuries. Please, not the coffee (or chocolate). CNN.com explains the trends and what food items may become pricier and harder to find: "...Today, chocolate and coffee are, once again, at risk of becoming expensive and inaccessible. "Chocolate and coffee could both become scarce, luxury foods again because of climate change," says Monika Zurek, a senior researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. Vast swathes of land in Ghana and Ivory Coast could become unsuitable for cocoa production if global temperature rises reach 2C, according to a 2013 study. "Cocoa used to be for kings and nobody else. Climate change is hitting production areas hard...it could become more luxurious again," says Zurek. Climate change could wipe out half of the land used to grow coffee worldwide by 2050, according to a 2015 study. Another study suggests that areas suitable for growing coffee in Latin America could decrease by 88% by 2050 due to rising temperatures..."
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
America's Car Crash Epidemic. Vox has an eye-opening report (that makes me want to work from home indefinitely). Here's the intro: "Driving is the most dangerous thing most Americans do every day. Virtually every American knows someone who's been injured in a car crash, and each year cars kill about as many people as guns and severely injure millions. It's a public health crisis in any year, and somehow, the pandemic has only made it more acute. Even as Americans have been driving less in the past year or so, car crash deaths (including both occupants of vehicles and pedestrians) have surged. Cars killed 42,060 people in 2020, up from 39,107 in 2019, according to a preliminary estimate from the National Safety Council (NSC), a nonprofit that focuses on eliminating preventable deaths..."
(Paul Douglas/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
Can An Average Passenger Actually Be Talked Into Landing a Plane During an Emergency? The short answer appears to be no, unless they have private pilot skills. Mental Floss has the post; here's a clip: "...Thanks to the redundancy and rules in place, a pilotless cockpit is "extremely unlikely to ever happen," Binstead tells Mental Floss. "But in the unlikely event it did, you'd want someone with flying experience if possible, even in small planes." There have been a few notable events in which a passenger with flight experience has been called on to help. In 2014, the pilot of a United Airlines flight suffered a heart attack, and the co-pilot landed the plane with help from a passenger who, as luck would have it, was an off-duty USAF pilot. But not all planes are lucky enough to have a passenger who just so happens to be a pilot sitting in business class. And if that's the case—which, again, would likely never happen—then you might have something to worry about..."