United States – Page 22 – Desdemona Despair

Global excess and reported COVID-19 deaths and death rates per 100,000 population, January 2020-January 2022. (a) Cumulative global excess death estimates and the cumulative reported COVID-19 deaths by month from January 2020 to December 2021. (b) Global excess death rates per 100,000 population and the reported COVID-19 death rates per 100,000 population, also by month, from January 2020 to December 2021. On both plots, the central lines of the excess mortality series show the mean estimates, and the shaded regions indicate the 95 percent uncertainty intervals. Graphic: Msemburi, et al., 2022 / Nature

December 30, 2022

WHO study reports global Covid death toll likely three times higher than official records – Pandemic may have claimed nearly 15 million lives, more than 2.7 times official reports of 5.4 million – India mortality alone may be 6.45 million dead

By Robert Hart 14 December 2022 (Forbes) – The Covid-19 pandemic may have claimed nearly 15 million around the world in 2020 and 2021, according to World Health Organization estimates published in Nature on Wednesday, almost three times what was reported in official records and underscoring the devastating and far-reaching impact of the disease as countries strive to return […]

Age-adjusted rate of drug overdose deaths in the United States, by sex, 2001–2021. Graphic: Spencer, et al., 2022 / CDC / NCHS

December 30, 2022

Record 106,699 drug overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2021 – Overdose deaths have risen fivefold over the past 2 decades – Mortality rate now 32.4 per 100,000 people

By Merianne Rose Spencer, M.P.H., Arialdi M. Miniño, M.P.H., and Margaret Warner, Ph.D. 21 December 2022 (CDC) – Drug overdose deaths have been rising over the past 2 decades in the United States (1–4). This report uses the most recent data from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) to update statistics on deaths from drug […]

People walk between homes that are covered in ice on Wednesday, 28 December 2022 in the waterfront community of Crystal Beach in Fort Erie, Ontario. Photo: Cole Burston / AFP / Getty Images

December 29, 2022

Buffalo’s “blizzard of the century” and Southwest’s 2,900 canceled flights prompt closer look at climate change and severe storms – “Nobody ever said global warming would eliminate winter”

By Rachel Koning Beals 27 December 2022 (MarketWatch) – Snowed-in Buffalo, N.Y., braced Tuesday for more wintry accumulation just days after an epic blizzard that killed at least 34 people, stranded some motorists in cars for days over the Christmas holiday and brought the city’s airport to a standstill. About 4,000 domestic flights were canceled […]

A youth runs over what remains of the glacier that lost most of its volume during the last years, on top of the Zugspitze Mountain near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Saturday, 25 June 2022. Once the world had hope that when nations got together, they could stop climate change. Thirty years after leaders around the globe first got together to try, that hope has melted. Photo: Michael Probst / AP Photo

December 23, 2022

Climate negotiations: 30 years of melting hope and U.S. power – “Such innovative, exciting proposals were put forward in the early years, which if they had been implemented, we would be in a so much better situation”

By Seth Borenstein 4 November 2022 (AP) – Thirty years ago there was hope that a warming world could clean up its act. It didn’t. The United States helped forge two historic agreements to curb climate change then torpedoed both when new political administrations took over. Rich and poor nations squabbled about who should do what. During […]

Photo portrait of economist Nouriel Roubini. Photo: Charlie Bibby / Financial Times

December 20, 2022

Financial Times interview with economist Nouriel Roubini, aka “Dr. Doom” – “I think that really the world is on a slow-motion train wreck”

By Henry Mance 18 December 2022 (Financial Times) – Nouriel Roubini is gloomy, and it’s not just that he arrived in London on a red-eye flight and couldn’t get a table at Nobu. It’s not even conventional economic worries. It’s everything: a confluence of problems, old and new. “I think that really the world is […]

Rising sea surface temperatures in the Caribbean Sea since 1901. The waters around Puerto Rico have warmed by heat two degrees Fahrenheit. Data: EPA Climate Change Indicators in the United States. Graphic: EPA

December 20, 2022

Big oil is behind conspiracy to deceive public, first climate racketeering lawsuit says – “What’s different about this case is that we have their enterprise in writing: the decision by rival companies, their front groups, scientists, and associations to act together to change public opinion”

By Nina Lakhani 20 December 2022 (The Guardian) – The same racketeering legislation used to bring down mob bosses, motorcycle gangs, football executives and international fraudsters is to be tested against oil and coal companies who are accused of conspiring to deceive the public over the climate crisis. In an ambitious move, an attempt will […]

Map showing GFS 2m Temperature Anomaly for 20 December 2022. Much of the Arctic in December 2022 experienced a burst of freak warming. Graphic: Climate Reanalyzer

December 20, 2022

December 2022 serving up baked Alaska and warming most of Arctic – “Record-setting weather like we’re seeing plenty of examples of in recent years does tell a real story of climate heating”

By Seth Borenstein 5 December 2022 (AP) – Much of the Arctic is in a burst of freak December warming. In Utqiagvik, Alaska’s northernmost community formerly known as Barrow, it hit 40 degrees (4.4 degrees Celsius) Monday morning. That’s not only a record by six degrees (3.3 degrees Celsius) but it’s the warmest that region has seen […]

Arctic annual air surface temperatures from October 2021 to September 2022 were the sixth warmest dating back to 1900. The image on the left depicts the departure from the average near-surface temperature across the Arctic during this period, with redder colors showing areas of greater than average warmth. The graphic on the right shows how the rate of Arctic air temperature warming has outpaced the rate of global warming. Data: ERA5 and NASA. Graphic: NOAA / Climate.gov

December 17, 2022

NOAA: Human-caused climate change fuels warmer, wetter, stormier Arctic

13 December 2022 (NOAA) – A typhoon, smoke from wildfires, and increasing rain are not what most imagine when thinking of the Arctic. Yet these are some of the climate-driven events included in NOAA’s 2022 Arctic Report Card, which provides a detailed picture of how warming is reshaping the once reliably frozen, snow-covered region which […]

Maternal Deaths per 100,000 Births, by State Abortion Policy, 2018-2020. Maternal death rates were 62 percent higher in 2020 in abortion-restriction states than in abortion-access states (28.8 vs. 17.8 per 100,000 births). Notably, across the three years presented in this graph, the maternal mortality rate was increasing nearly twice as fast in states with abortion restrictions. Graphic: Commonwealth Fund

December 17, 2022

The U.S. maternal health divide: The limited maternal health services and worse outcomes of states proposing new abortion restrictions

By Eugene Declercq, Ruby Barnard-Mayers, Laurie Zephyrin, and Kay Johnson 14 December 2022 (Commonwealth Fund) – In anticipation of a U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a number of states passed “trigger laws” that would ban all, or nearly all, abortions once national abortion protections ended. In the months since the Court’s ruling in Dobbs […]

Police monitor a protest opposing COP15, the UN Biodiversity Conference, in Montreal, on Wednesday, 7 December 2022. Photo: Graham Hughes / The Canadian Press

December 10, 2022

Monbiot: The US is a rogue state leading the world toward ecological collapse – “It’s a cliff edge”

By George Monbiot 9 December 2022 (The Guardian) – There are two extraordinary facts about the convention on biological diversity, whose members are meeting in Montreal now to discuss the global ecological crisis. The first is that, of the world’s 198 states, 196 are party to it. The second is the identity of those that aren’t. Take a […]