Wait And Sea
February 16, 2022
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“The sea is emotion incarnate. It loves, hates, and weeps. It defies all attempts to capture it with words and rejects all shackles. No matter what you say about it, there is always that which you can’t.” – Christopher Paolini
Wait And Sea
By the time the E-Trade baby is in his early 30s, the planet’s oceans will be on average a foot higher than they are today. The latest National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report, released Tuesday, predicted 10 to 12 inches of additional sea level rise by midcentury. The scientists who do this work are constantly reassessing and adjusting their predictions as the data change. The pattern that remains constant is that change is happening sooner than predicted. In other words, sea level rise is accelerating more rapidly than imagined.
Global warming, driven by the use of fossil fuels, is, of course, the primary cause of sea level rise. Scientists have been observing the trend for decades, as water expands due to higher temperatures, melting glaciers, and diminished ice sheets. Previous reports provided broad ranges of how much the seas will rise, but the science is now more specific and can provide a more assertive view of how the world’s coasts will look in a few decades, regardless of future emissions. A NOAA oceanographer said: “2050 is in our headlights, and we can speak with confidence and clarity about what will occur.” NOAA administrator Rick Spinrad is definitive: “The United States is expected to experience as much sea level rise in 30 years as we saw over the span of the entire last century. Current and future emissions matter, but this will happen no matter what we do about emissions.”
Regions of the Northeast Atlantic (Virginia coast and northward) and the western Gulf of Mexico coasts are particularly vulnerable due to low elevations and sinking shorelines. Coastal communities in these regions face increased risks from high-tide flooding, hurricanes, sea level rise, and erosion. Experts say a single flooding event that now happens every four to five years in the southeast U.S. will instead happen four to five times a year by midcentury. On the West Coast, millions of Californians live in low-lying areas where land subsidence is exacerbating the risks of sea level rise in the Pacific. Areas around San Francisco Bay, Monterey Bay, and San Diego Bay have relatively high rates of subsidence. If the worst projections of sea-level rise wind up being correct, all or most of some major U.S. cities could disappear by the end of the century, including New Orleans, Miami, Virginia Beach, most of Houston, Charleston, South Carolina, Atlantic City, and parts of New York City and Boston. (NOAA, NBC News, NASA, Business Insider)
Prince Andrew Settles Lawsuit
- Prince Andrew avoided airing more dirty laundry Tuesday by settling the lawsuit filed in New York in 2021 by Virginia Giuffre, who accused him of sexual abuse on three separate occasions. Giuffre said Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted sex offender, had trafficked her to Andrew when she was 17.
- The Prince is the third child and second son of Queen Elizabeth II. He was stripped of his royal patronages and military affiliations in January and won’t be allowed to use the title “His Royal Highness” in any official capacity. He retains the title “Duke of York” and his place in the line of succession.
- Rumors abound that Andrew was pressured to settle ahead of his mother’s Platinum Jubilee later this year, and that The Queen is also reportedly helping to pay Andrew’s £12 million settlement to Giuffre and her charity. One royal source said: “Regardless of the outcome, [Andrew] has ruled himself out of any public role by virtue of his appalling lack of judgment and poor choice of friends and associates.” (CBS News)
The Elephant In The Room
- African elephants have drastically dwindled as targets of the illegal ivory trade, but researchers used genetic testing on ivory shipments seized by law enforcement to establish a familial relationship. That enabled law enforcement to trace the location of the international crime ring shipping the ivory from Africa.
- The findings were published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. The researchers tested more than 4,000 elephant tusks from 49 different seizures, made between 2002 and 2019, across 12 different African countries. The study established genetic connections between elephants that are being poached for their ivory tusks and reveals the poaching and shipping practices and interconnectedness of the traffickers.
- This study built on previous work published in 2018, which showed tusks from the same elephant were often separated and smuggled in different shipments before being seized. These identifications linked the trafficking networks that smuggled ivory from three African port cities in Kenya, Uganda, and Togo. (CNN, Nature, Science Advances)
Additional World News
- Canada Live Updates: Trudeau Declares National Emergency, Expanding Measures to End Protests (NYT, $)
- Pakistan: Man lynched by villagers over blasphemy allegation, say police (CNN)
- Tunisian women’s posts glamorize risky migrant crossings (AP)
- Israeli Leader to Make Historic Visit to Bahrain, Deepening New Ties (NYT, $)
- Erdogan visits UAE to bolster political, economic ties (Al Jazeera)
- China’s Censors Have a New Target: ‘Friends’ (NYT, $)
A Run Of Bad Luck
- President Biden won Colorado in 2020 with 55% of the vote, and this year Colorado is one of 27 states whose top elections official – the secretary of state – will be on the ballot. The current officeholder is Democrat Jena Griswold. She will face whichever Republican wins the state’s primary on June 28.
- Three GOP contenders already battling for that spot have just been joined by a fourth: Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk who spread the big lie about a stolen election, then breached the security of voting machines and tampered with crucial election information. Griswold removed Peters from her position in 2021. On Monday, Peters announced on a podcast hosted by Steve Bannon that she was entering the GOP primary race for secretary of state.
- Griswold said Peters was “unfit to be secretary of state and a danger to Colorado elections,” citing Peters’ attempts to discredit the 2020 election results. Bannon said Peters was being targeted because of her fight against “this globalist apparatus.” (NYT)
Missing Girl Found Alive Two Years Later
- In 2019, a family court judge in Cayuga Heights, NY, determined the biological parents of 4-year-old Paislee Shultis and her older sister were “unfit.” Another relative was awarded custody. Then, Paislee disappeared. For over two years authorities in Saugerties, NY, three hours west of Cayuga Heights, tracked down tips that the missing girl was living in town with her parents.
- Police visited the Shultis several times but never found the girl. On Monday, police got enough information for a search warrant; they returned to the Shultis’ home but didn’t find the girl. Right before leaving an officer noticed something odd about a staircase to the basement. He shined a flashlight through the floorboards and saw what looked like a blanket.
- After ripping up the stairs, officers found Paislee, now 6, hidden in a small, clammy space under the staircase. She appeared healthy, but was unable to read or write. Paislee was reunited with her sister and legal guardians, and her parents were charged with custodial interference and endangering the welfare of a child. (NBC News)
Additional USA News
- Kentucky mayoral candidate survives being targeted by a gunman (BBC)
- John Eastman, lawyer for then-President Donald Trump, turns over thousands of emails to January 6 committee while withholding others (CNN)
- Megadrought: Western US dry spell is worst in 1,200 years, study says (USA Today)
- DC, Maryland join others in easing COVID restrictions (Reuters)
- How a Small Alabama Company Fueled Private Equity’s Push Into Hospitals (WSJ)
- ATF urges people to give exes a ‘Valentine’s Day surprise’ by turning them in (The Hill)
Holy Moly
- For thousands of faithful folk, learning their children’s baptisms were invalid may have been crushing. But that’s what Bishop Thomas Olmsted of the Diocese of Phoenix said in a letter last month. “It is with sincere pastoral concern that I inform the faithful that baptisms performed by Reverend Andres Arango, a priest of the Diocese of Phoenix, are invalid.” Arango had been performing baptisms since 1995. But during each baptismal ceremony he’d say: “We baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” instead of “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
- One can imagine that Reverend Arango just wanted to be inclusive. After all, parents, guardians, godparents, are all expected to share in a covenant with God to raise the child in the faith until the child is old enough to make his own personal confession of Christ. And Arango may not have been alone in changing the wording. In June 2020, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith wrote: “Recently there have been celebrations of the Sacrament of Baptism administered…to emphasize the community value of Baptism, to express the participation of the family and those present and to avoid the idea of concentrating sacred power in the priest at the expense of parents and community, which the formula present in the Roman Ritual would convey.”
- Maybe it seemed like a good idea at the time. But as Olmsted explained: “The issue with using ‘We’ is that it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Him alone, who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes. This determination was made after careful study by diocesan officials and through consultation with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome.” So, with that official pronouncement, there wasn’t much left for Arango to do but resign, saying he will “dedicate [his] energy and full time ministry to help remedy this and heal those affected.” (NBC News)
Additional Reads
- The Science of Heartbreak (Wired)
- The beating heart of a swimming robot (Ars Technica)
- A billionaire CEO is on track to go further into space than any human in 50 years (CNN)
- Why did birds fall from sky in Mexico? Probably a predator, experts say (Guardian)
- Australia: Newly discovered crocodile species ate a young dinosaur for its last meal, scientists say (CNN)
- Flourishing plants show warming Antarctica undergoing ‘major change’ (Guardian)