CNN’s Contribution to Climate Change Impact: Katherine Keel’s Journey to the Paramedic Dream: a View from a Former Division 1 Swimmer
This essay is part of a CNN series in which people share how they have been affected by the biggest issues facing the country and experts offer their proposed solutions. Katherine Keel is a former Division 1 swimmer who moved to Colorado shortly after graduating from the University of North Carolina with a journalism degree. She is going to become a paramedic. The views expressed in this commentary are hers. CNN has more opinion.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/19/opinions/climate-change-impact-colorado-keel/index.html
Rocky Mountain Meadows, Colorado: Impacts of COSMO on elm for PM2.5, and what they’ve been doing since 2016
The first time I was evacuated was the summer of 2018. I crammed the last of my stuff into the back of the truck and looked across the street. Flames crested the top of the hill, licking the sky and threatening to descend on the community below. Strong gusts of wind rattled my blinds, and cars pulled over on the side of the road to watch the nightmarish scene. It was the 4th of July, but that year no one was celebrating.
The smallest particulate matter, known as PM 2.5, is the most impacted by the impacts. The PM2.5 readings have been increasing since 2016 and have been in the northwest for many years. The EPA is considering tightening the US standard of 12 g m–3 which is just below the 2020 average. The average is much above the guidelines from the WHO, which stated in September that levels should not exceed 5 g m–3. That change, the organization says, is designed to save millions of lives.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife says that fly fishing shouldn’t be done when the river water temperature reaches 67 degrees because it puts high stress on the fish. It’s a problem for my rural community when the snow is low, as tourism is down and they don’t get as much income.
When climate change became a family, I realized how easy it was to stop and think about it. Today, almost every day is a journey in a wilderness
I remember my eyes were glued to the rearview mirror as I drove away from my house on July 4, 2018. There was orange flames growing taller and taller on the hillside behind me. The smoke hung heavy in the air the next morning, stinging my eyes and making it hard to breathe – even with a mask – as I walked into the grocery store. There was a somber tone in the valley and a fear that everyone was afraid of.
While my home was spared, there have been wildfires in the area nearly every summer since 2018 that remind me just how treacherous climate change can be.
We’ve all heard scientists and experts warn of the dangers of a warming world. I was told to recycle, pick up trash and conserve water as a child. From the Earth Day parades in elementary school, to the “reuse, reduce, recycle” trends of recent years, I’ve always been a big proponent of protecting the planet. But it didn’t really hit home until more recently.
I lived in a city for most of my life and, for many years, I felt largely immune to climate change. I was protected from the effects immediately after I heard about it. I’d turn on the TV and see climate disasters happening all over the world, and yet my daily life was largely uninterrupted.
Climate Change Impact on a Small Town in Colorado, a community that rallyed and held for the First Responders, Fire Fighters, Public Works and Public Works
Climate change and their own history are part of the battle against forest fires in western states. Government policy for most of the 150 years led to a build- up of dead wood and flammable vegetation in the forests, as well as suppressing all fires. During times of year when there is a lower chance of fires burning out of control, forest managers have tried to reduce that fuel load by conducting controlled burns.
As a community, we rallied. We supported the firefighters and first responders day in and day out, from making sandwiches to providing housing and everything in between. I had only lived in the valley for a year but I was still very connected to my community. Tragedy will create bonds, regardless of background, ethnicity or political affiliation. The question is how much more we can take before we speak up, take action and demand more from our elected officials.
And it’s not just me, or my small town in Colorado. Extreme weather events are becoming more commonplace in every corner of the globe. In Europe this summer, there were record high temperatures and fires in the UK, France, Spain, Italy and Greece. Ice shelves in Antarctica are crumbling faster than they can be replaced, and losses are double what was initially estimated by scientists in 1997.
Hurricane Fiona ravaged Puerto Rico before it made landfall in Canada as a severe tropical storm. Historic floods in Pakistan affected 33 million people and left a third of the country underwater. In terms of structures lost, the Marshall Fire in Boulder is the most destructive in Colorado history.
Moving to a small town has opened my eyes to the dramatic effects of a changing world. Four years ago the burn scar from the Lake Christine Fire is still visible on the landscape when I drive down Highway 82.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/19/opinions/climate-change-impact-colorado-keel/index.html
What has changed with the air pollution in the western United States over the last two weeks? An economy-driven map of the wildland-urban interface between 2010 and 2020
It is an economic impact of climate change. In the 2017-2018 season, snow totals were so low that our mountains couldn’t fully open all of the ski runs, and many employees who worked in hospitality were forced to take a two week “mandatory vacation.”
A zone called the wildland-urban interface surrounds the natural world and the built environment. Think the foothills of California, or the lush forests of the Eastern United States, where trees, grasses, and shrubs intermingle with homes, roads, and other infrastructure.
The map shows the general migration trends across the US from 2010 to 2020. More people left than arrived in the Midwest and the South. More people arrived in red areas than left. There are many of them in the Northwest, as well as Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, and Florida, all of which have problems with fires. Those seasons will get longer, the landscape will become more parched, dry vegetation will build up higher, and all of that can lead to wildfires so big that they create their own thunderclouds, which spark still more fires with their lightning. There is already an intense mega-drought going on in the American West.
In September 2020, the skies in Oregon turned crimson as dozens of wildfires scorched forests in the Cascade Mountains. In just three days, the blazes engulfed nearly 4,000 square kilometres — more than had burnt in Oregon during the previous 36 years combined.
For two weeks, residents were trapped in their homes. There was a 42% increase in respiratory related visits to the emergency departments during September 2020, compared with the previous month. It was “the worst two-week period I’ve ever experienced for air pollution anywhere — including India, China and Bangladesh”, says Perry Hystad at Oregon State University in Corvallis, who studies the health impacts of the worst air pollution worldwide.
The air-pollution levels in the western United States have changed quite a bit. The country has some of the strongest environmental regulations in the world, and has made significant progress cleaning its skies since the 1970s. Regulations such as the Clean Air Act drastically cut levels of air pollution — including lead, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone and fine particles — from vehicles, power plants, factories and other sources. The success of the air quality story has been swamped by environmental shifts due to a warming climate.
Hystad took matters into his own hands during the 2020 wildfire in Oregon. He closed all the windows in his home, ran the air conditioning with vents closed to recycle the air through filters, and used a single portable HEPA filter to clean the indoor air. The levels of PM 2.5 in the building were at a hazardous 200–300 g m–3. “The most I could reduce indoor concentrations was around 50% of what I was measuring outdoors,” he says.
In the western states and across the country, the changes are putting tens of millions of people at risk. “The Clean Air Act was not designed for today’s sources of pollution,” says Marshall Burke, an Earth-systems scientist at Stanford University in California. Researchers are struggling to find ways to tackle the West’s harmful air.
This is bad news for the region’s air quality. Ozone measurements at Carlsbad Caverns National Park, for example, exceeded the EPA’s ambient air-quality standards on 9 days in 2020 and 14 days last year. The EPA is now threatening to classify the Permian Basin as a non-attainment zone for ozone, meaning that it does not meet the NAAQS. This could hamper existing oil and gas operations and delay new development, even as the world clamours for more fossil fuels.
Climate change seems to be compounding the problems throughout the Southwest, including the Permian Basin. The region is experiencing a megadrOUGHT that has lasted for twenty-two years, and is drier than any other time in the past 1,200 years. California had the driest three months in a century, January, February and March.
The dry conditions are driving more air pollution. Higher temperatures and reduced precipitation are causing lakes such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake and California’s Salton Sea to evaporate, exposing sediments to wind erosion. Between the 1990s and 2000s, the number of large dust storms increased by 240% in the United States4.
Researchers say that laws intended to combat air pollution don’t address increasingly important sources, such as wildfires and dust. In fact, the EPA created an exemption for the increased air pollution that occurs during wildfires, dust storms and similar events considered to be ‘natural’. The rule adopted by the agency excludes days where events happen from consideration by regulators.
The data set is skewed by the fact that outliers are classified as natural exceptions, according to the author of a paper. “The problem is with how we are using the Clean Air Act,” she says. A human geographer at the University of Colorado Boulder stated that it’s built to respond to air quality issues and that removing data reduces regulatory oversight.
Researchers say that it’s unlikely that federal or state governments will use stronger regulations to curb some sources of industrial and agricultural pollution. But even if they did adopt regulations, the rules won’t help much against droughts, dust storms and wildfires.
Air pollution often hits hardest for vulnerable populations, such as older people, children, poorer individuals and those with underlying conditions. Burke and his colleagues estimate8 that an increase of 10 µg m–3 in local annual mean PM2.5 concentrations causes a 9% increase in infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, and that PM2.5 concentrations above minimum exposure levels resulted in 449,000 additional infant deaths there in 2015.
According to a report by the World Health Organization, more than 600,000 deaths of children in 2016 are the result of elevated PM 2.5 levels.
Dust and oil sources of PM 2.5 are usually closer to home since smoke can travel across the country. ozone values can rise in summer due to increases in sunlight and temperature, but peaks can be seen during spring and autumn when planting and harvesting are in full swing. And researchers are uncovering other health impacts from dust — for example, potential links to infectious diseases, such as Valley fever. Dust can be seen as harmless dirt, not as a delivery mechanism for a broad range of toxics, metals and faecal matter.
Researchers say an assessment of the cumulative health impacts from all air-pollutant sources is needed, for example, to set new policies, particularly for people who can’t avoid exposure, such as outdoor labourers. A January study of more than 15 million US Medicare recipients in major oil and gas fracking areas found that those who lived closest to wells had a 2.5% higher risk of mortality, a value that was statistically significant10. Another study11 estimated that, by 2025, the oil and gas sector alone will be responsible for 970 ozone-related premature deaths and 1,000 PM2.5-related deaths nationwide — as well as thousands of hospital visits and more than one million cases of exacerbated asthma and acute respiratory symptoms.
To get better data, Nadeau has begun a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health to study the long-term impacts of particulate matter on the heart, lungs and immune system across all ages, focusing on vulnerable communities.
Prescribed Burns in California: Challenges and Opportunities for the 2020 2020 Wildfire Clean-Scale Assessment and Controlling CO2 Emissions
It is getting harder as the climate changes. Colleen is an environmental health researcher in Boulder and she says that the windows of opportunity have shrunk considerably.
James Biggs says that there are thousands of prescribed burns safely conducted each year. These kinds of controlled burn can result in benefits such as reducing the spread of invaders.
How states calculate carbon emissions is one of the issues. Wildfire emissions will complicate California’s efforts to achieve its goal of carbon neutrality by 2045. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) estimates that the 2020 wildfire season generated 112 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. “CARB tracks carbon emissions from both prescribed fire and wildfires, and will continue to use that information while ascertaining the state’s progress towards the goal of net zero by 2045,” says Amy MacPherson, CARB’s public information officer in Sacramento.
A researcher at the University of Southern California says liability concerns, deficits in funding and training, and having to deal with a large number of small private land owners are all slowing progress.
Researchers are testing and developing ways to protect people when there is a fire because any forest-thinning or prescribed-fire efforts will take decades. Jaffe was one of the first to confirm that a low-cost, home air-purifying device — a filter attached to a box fan — was highly efficient. During the thick of the September 2020 fires, he promoted the method in numerous media interviews and subsequently published the design.