Florida economy is impacted by global warming: Government must respond to save lives

At first, you sweat.

Killer heat claims too many lives, and it’s going to get worse 

Editorial echo published in the Orlando Sentinel: 
It’s the body’s first line of defense: Sweat, as it evaporates, can keep your body a critical degree or two cooler than the air around you. But a number of factors, including dehydration or tight-fitting , non-breathable clothing that traps sweat instead of letting it evaporate or intense physical activity that raises your core temperature faster than you can cool down, will defeat that defense. Another self-regulating system kicks in, and your breathing and pulse grow more rapid as your organs fight to lower your core temperature.

This is how the first signs of heat exhaustion feel — physical reactions that an increasing number of people experience every day. They are warnings that many don’t take seriously, and we’re not just talking about individuals. As global temperatures inch upward, Florida is obviously on the vanguard of a rising threat to life and health.

Yet local, state and national officials haven’t done nearly enough to combat the threat heat poses, and many Floridians will pay for that with their lives. That should change.

When your internal temperature crosses a critical threshold of 104 degrees, you’re in trouble. Your chances of recovery without medical intervention — by getting someplace cooler, by drinking water — start to dwindle.

The ranks of people at risk of heat-related health problems are wide and variable. Prolonged exposure to high temperatures can be particularly dangerous for young children and the elderly, as well as people who are pregnant, people with chronic diseases such as diabetes, people whose jobs keep them outdoors without ready access to shade or water, and athletes whose intense activity can push their temperature into the danger zone far more quickly. Risks also vary by location, with residents in densely populated urban areas suffering more than those in the suburbs and low-income people endangered because they can’t afford high electric bills.

But anyone can succumb to heat-related illness. As global temperatures inch upwards, more people will. That demands serious attention at the local, state and federal level.

Your skin is dry now, and flushed. You probably have a piercing headache and you may be feeling weak, dizzy, possibly nauseated. Your speech grows confused, your muscles are cramping and you may start to have convulsions or seizures. Inside, your body is at war with itself. Instead of slowing down, your metabolism will often speed up, pushing your temperature even higher.

The obvious place to start: Better education and warning. The National Weather Service already issues advisories in advance of anticipated spikes, as it did last week for South Florida, where it predicted “feels like” temperatures in the range of 105-111 degrees — clearly in the danger zone for most humans.

But those warnings might not reach those who need to hear them. Extreme heat advisories should follow the model set up for big, dangerous weather events such as hurricanes, including easy-to-decode levels of threat assessment, advisories on how and when people should protect themselves against dangerously high temperatures and other in-the-moment information that people need to make smart decisions.

Your liver, kidneys and brain start to shut down, then your blood vessels shred. You begin to hemorrhage, purple bruises blossoming across your skin. You are within minutes of becoming one of approximately 1,300 Americans who die each year of heat-related illness. 

Perhaps, you may survive with rapid medical attention — but the chances of permanent brain damage or other long-term effects are significant.

For Floridians at the highest level of risk, warnings won’t be enough. There must be a level of infrastructure needed to deal with high heat. The CDC has suggested several ideas worthy of public investment, including the establishment of community cooling stations for those who don’t have access to air conditioning and urban forestry programs that can lower temperatures in intensely developed areas.

These are the easy solutions. Then it gets tough, because many of the needed changes fall into one of two areas.

How Floridians must respond: First: Economic support for those who cannot afford the energy required to stay cool. State and federal governments should consider subsidizing power costs for low-income households that kick in during hot months. But they should also investigate the potential of lower-cost solutions such as evaporative air conditioning units (also known as swamp coolers). These predate refrigerant-based air conditioning systems and require so little energy that many can be operated through USB connections.

The other required step: Restrictions on employers who might otherwise keep their workers in high-heat conditions with inadequate access to shade or water. This will cause Florida’s two biggest industries — agriculture and tourism — to scream bloody murder. Those protests should be viewed in this light: Would anyone dare to argue that companies had the right to force workers to cut ferns or sell theme-park balloons in the middle of a hurricane?

Some might still debate the causes of global warming. ❓❗ 

But the impact of global warming is undeniable. Most years, extreme heat already claims more lives than hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, flooding and mudslides combined, and it’s only getting worse. Our leaders must come to grips with the need to take heat seriously, as the major health threat that it is, or more will die. And Florida will be among the first to bear the grim toll of that failure.

The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board 

Donald Trump is obviously "fact" challenged

Echo opinion published in the St. Louis Post Dispatch by Editorial Board

Last summer, Trump mistakenly warned that Hurricane Dorian threatened the Alabama coast. Days later, rather than admit error, he displayed a government weather map clumsily altered with a Sharpie marker, as if to confirm his erroneous claim. 

In a postscript, a federal watchdog last week chided the administration for threatening government scientists who had the audacity to contradict Trump with facts.

“Sharpiegate” today looks like an early harbinger of what would later go so wrong with America’s pandemic response: Now, as then, this Trump ignores science and puts his personal interests above the good of the nation. Worse, people around him — people who clearly know better — (ugh!) enable this dangerous behavior.

On Sept. 1, Trump tweeted a warning that Dorian would hit Alabama “harder than anticipated.” In fact, the storm wasn’t on track to hit Alabama at all (!); Trump’s warning was based on outdated information. Honest mistake. About 10 minutes later, the National Weather Service office in Birmingham, fielding panicked calls from the public, tweeted that “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.”

That’s where it should have ended. But according to a new government watchdog report, top federal officials had to divert their attention from the approaching hurricane to focus instead on soothing a bruised presidential ego — to the point of threatening the weather officials.

It “appears as if the National Weather Service intentionally contradicted the president,” then-White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said in an email to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the watchdog report states. “And we need to know why. [Trump] wants either a correction or an explanation or both.”

The obvious response should have been, Well, the president was mistaken. But Trump, bizarrely, cannot admit making even the smallest error, ever. So weather officials were warned that “there are jobs on the line,” according to the report.

Ultimately, the administration issued a statement that the weather office shouldn’t have said Alabama was safe. Even though it was.
The report, by Commerce Department Inspector General Peggy Gustafson, concluded the administration “unnecessarily rebuked NWS forecasters for issuing a public safety message about Hurricane Dorian in response to public inquiries — that is, for doing their jobs.” She warned it could undercut public confidence in weather experts during future storms, potentially endangering the public.

As Trump has demonstrated repeatedly during the pandemic, he couldn’t care less about endangering the public. Just as he’d rather undermine trust in weather experts than admit a small error, he’d rather let the coronavirus engulf America than admit his response to the crisis has failed and needs to change.

This isn’t just a matter of outsized ego. As indicated by Sharpiegate — and as confirmed by Trump’s pandemic misinformation, his dangerous reopening demands and his maskless rallies — there is something psychologically wrong with this president. But what is the excuse of the Mulvaneys and Rosses of this administration?

BUT! As if #sharpiegate were not "bad enough"!....now this: North Carolina stupidity

Echo! Published in The Denver Post, I read this opinion after the stupid #Sharpiegate incident was plastered all over the world's media. Donald Trump violated the tenets for supporting the National Weather Service (NWS) forecast that predicted hurricane Dorian's path, while the devastating storm skipped up the US east coast. 

He warned people living in Alabama about the storm, but (!) it was never predicted to affect that state. So, the #sharpiegate fiasco happened after this opinion essay was published, and before Trump's deliberately stupid and illegal weather blunder.

Blake echo: Donald Trump’s transparent and petty pre-hurricane politicking

He said whaaaa?  "Thank you, Mr. President"?  Senator Thom Tillis, R-NC #SIASD (Thank you for what? For being stupid!)

DENVER POST- On the list of Donald Trump’s political sins, wrongly crediting a GOP ally for getting him to declare a pre-hurricane Dorian federal emergency in North Carolina doesn’t rank particularly high.

But!

This is a remarkably transparent political gambit even for Trump, to whom so little is holy, coming as it does on the eve of a natural disaster that has threatened the southeastern United States and devastated the Bahamas.

On Tuesday night September 3, Trump credited Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., for his decision to declare a federal emergency in the state ahead of Hurricane Dorian’s arrival. “At the request of Senator Thom Tillis, I am getting the North Carolina Emergency Declaration completed and signed tonight,” Trump tweeted. “Hope you won’t need it!”

The first problem with that is that senators don’t formally request states of emergency. Under federal law, that’s left to governors.

In North Carolina’s case, that governor is Roy Cooper, a Democrat. Cooper declared a state emergency Friday and formally requested the federal one Monday. Trump didn’t mention him in the tweet.

The second problem is that it’s clear that this was political payback, and there’s virtually nothing subtle about it. Tillis, as Wagner notes, is up for reelection in 2020, and he faces a difficult general-election contest and a well-funded primary foe, businessman Garland Tucker. He appears to have earned plenty of goodwill from Trump after his flip-flop on Trump’s border-wall national emergency, which he eventually supported after writing a Washington Post commentary against it.

And Tillis was clearly angling for some credit here, repeatedly tweeting about his talks with Trump about the federal emergency.

“Just got off the phone with President @realDonaldTrump,” Tillis tweeted Monday evening, saying Trump would be issuing the federal emergency. “Just spoke with President @realDonaldTrump again & he said an emergency declaration for NC would be made later tonight,” he tweeted Tuesday. When Trump tweeted his credit to Tillis, the senator retweeted it without correcting Trump or mentioning Cooper’s role.

“Thank you, Mr. President!” he said.

Fine. Tillis can certainly play a role in that process, too — even if he doesn’t formally make the request. 

And there’s nothing wrong with letting people you work for know you’re engaged and talking to the president.

But !

Even if we set aside all of that: Was Trump really not going to declare a federal emergency in one of two states that are most directly in Dorian’s path, along with South Carolina? 

That state had already gotten one, as had Florida, Georgia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, which appear to have escaped the worst effects of the hurricane. As you can see from this long list of hurricane-related federal emergency declarations, this is a matter of course. Many recent declarations were for storms whose names you’ve probably already forgotten.

Whether someone is politicizing a natural disaster is difficult to pin down; one person’s politicization is another’s raising of an important issue. Republicans accuse Democrats of politicizing hurricanes by citing climate change, for example, when Democrats and climate scientists think that’s pretty important.

Orange man Trumpzi stupidity!

But! Even accounting for that subjectivity, Trump’s pre-hurricane gambits have been pretty obvious.

There was the time he pardoned Joe Arpaio, a former sheriff in Arizona, as Hurricane Harvey was hitting Texas — and acknowledged that he did so with the hurricane in mind. “A lot of people think it was the right thing to do,” Trump said. “Actually, in the middle of a hurricane, even though it was a Friday evening, I assumed the ratings would be far higher than they were normally.”There was the time he lodged a conspiracy theory that Democrats had inflated the Hurricane Maria death toll in Puerto Rico . . . less than 24 hours before Hurricane Florence was set to hit the Carolinas. (Even Florida Republicans disowned that Trump theory.)

Just last week, Trump called Puerto Rico corrupt and wrongly inflated the amount of Maria-related aid the U.S. territory received, even as it faced another blow from Dorian.

And before he was president, Trump previewed Hurricane Sandy in 2012 by arguing that President Barack Obama would use it to his advantage for his reelection bid.

“Hurricane is good luck for Obama again- he will buy the election by handing out billions of dollars,” Trump tweeted.

Trump even used the occasion to extend the deadline for his offer of $5 million for Obama’s birth certificate.

“Because of the hurricane, I am extending my 5 million dollar offer for President Obama’s favorite charity until 12PM on Thursday,” Trump said.  (Cruel, OMG!)

It has become pretty clear what’s on Trump’s mind when a hurricane is about to hit.

Aaron Blake is senior political reporter, writing for The Fix. A Minnesota native, he has also written about politics for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and The Hill newspaper.