18/03/2020

(AU) ‘If You’re Not Sweating’ In This Town, ‘There’s Something Wrong’

New York Times - Livia Albeck-Ripka | Photographs Matthew Abbott

 In Marble Bar, which claims to be Australia's hottest town, the temperature hit at least 113 degrees on 32 days this summer. Some residents worry that "there's got to be a point where you actually start to cook".
Cameron Whalebone, left, and Nathaniel Corbett swimming in Marble Bar last month.
New York Times
MARBLE BAR, Australia — As the sun started to rise in Marble Bar, the temperature was already nudging 90 degrees: cool, by local standards.
The remote desert outpost, where the temperature soars above 95 degrees Fahrenheit for an average of 200 days a year, calls itself the “hottest town in Australia,” as it swelters through heat waves hotter and longer than anywhere else on the searing continent.
Local residents, or at least the most acclimatized ones, embrace the title. It draws offbeat tourists to the town of fewer than 200 people, a dusty strip where the burning earth can melt the soles of shoes and the water running from the “cold” tap comes out hot.
While other Australian towns have hit higher peak temperatures, it’s the ceaseless, stifling heat that has made Marble Bar notorious. By the end of the Southern Hemisphere summer, the town had broken its own record, with the thermometer hitting at least 113 degrees on 32 days.
A view of Marble Bar from the town’s water tank.
Ann Coppin reading a newspaper in her bush hut, where she goes to escape the heat.
On the most scorching mornings, heading outside can feel “like standing in front of a roaring wood stove,” said Brian Higgins, the local nurse. As the days’ hours tick on and the heat increases, he added, it begins to feel as if you have walked into the oven itself.
Being able to bear such heat is a point of local pride.
Mr. Higgins was sipping a beer in the town’s only pub, a corrugated iron shack built in the late 1800s, which has no air-conditioning.
“We have fan-conditioning,” said Cheryl Manurung, the pub’s manager, as she retrieved a cool beer from the fridge.
In Melbourne or Sydney, students might be released early from school, and people might be permitted to work from home, in extreme weather conditions.
“If we did that, we’d work three days a year,” joked Amy Pfitzner, a coordinator at the Marble Bar Community Resource Center.
But with Australia’s temperatures rising even higher as a result of climate change — and, by some accounts, warming even faster than the rest of the world — it is possible that not even Marble Bar’s hardiest residents will be able to withstand what may be coming.
By the end of the century, Marble Bar, about a thousand miles northeast of Perth in Western Australia, could be an average of 3 to 4.5 degrees Celsius warmer, according to figures from the Bureau of Meteorology and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.
Cattle station workers from nearby Yarrie Station come to Marble Bar on their day off for a swim.
A popular swimming hole on the Coongan River about three miles west of Marble Bar.
“People don’t talk about it because they really don’t want to know if they’re going to fry or not,” Louise Mawson, a local government worker, said of climate change.
It’s a divisive issue in Marble Bar, whose population is largely made up of civil servants, teachers, retirees and prospectors drawn to town by the promise of gold, not all of whom accept the science that the earth, and their town, are warming.
It “could be ugly,” Ms. Mawson added of what the future holds. “There’s got to be a point where you actually start to cook.”
Across Australia, people are beginning to grapple with their identity as citizens of a country where climate change is unleashing its wrath in the form of unpredictable and ferocious disasters, from flood to drought to the catastrophic bush fires in the country’s east this summer, which razed thousands of homes and destroyed more than a billion animals.
While Marble Bar’s brutal conditions represent the current global extreme, the town may offer a glimpse of a new normal for a lot more places as the world grows hotter and not even the cover of night any longer offers a reprieve.
Much of the world may need to learn the rules that come with surviving sizzling conditions, rules the people of Marble Bar already know by heart. Always stay hydrated, keep out of the sun in the hottest hours and never, ever, travel more than 10 minutes by car without water to last days in case of a breakdown.
A school in the Warralong community. The police officer is visiting to help build community relationships.


The Iron Clad Hotel, the only pub in town, is a popular resting place for long-distance truckers. There is no air-conditioning.
On a February morning, Alex Dorrington, a parks and gardens worker, was among the few brave enough (and prepared enough) to be outside on the town’s main street in the blazing heat.
He was taking a break in the shade of a tree from his 10-hour shift mowing the town’s grass. His body was covered head-to-toe with a straw hat, a bandanna swaddling his neck, long pants and heavy work boots. He tries to take a gulp of water every 15 minutes.
But even with these precautions, he has still suffered heat stroke before and knew well one of its symptoms. “If you’re not sweating,” Mr. Dorrington said, “there’s something wrong.”
Less prepared to withstand the furnace are the tourists, who come to experience the awesome heat and the boundless red earth desert stretching beyond the town.
“They come here in stiletto heels with a 500-milliliter bottle of water, and I think: You’re going to die,” Ms. Mawson said.
And they have died, if not in town, then not far away by the standards of this part of Australia. In 2003, a British tourist perished 230 miles from Marble Bar after his vehicle became bogged down and he left it to look for help. In a period of just two months in 2018, four others died in the Western Australian Outback’s fiery conditions.
Trucks transporting iron ore from a large mine west of Marble Bar waiting for a flooded road to clear ahead of them.
Murray Millwood at his goldmine in Marble Bar.
While the tourists come only to briefly satisfy their curiosity, some people move to Marble Bar intending to stay, but find they can’t handle the heat.
“I’ve seen a lot of people in the five years I’ve been here come and go,” Pat Clarke, the groundskeeper at the local trailer park, said as he turned on the sprinklers one morning.
“No one really stays that long,” he added. “I’m surprised I’m still here.”
But for some longtime residents, Marble Bar is an isolated Eden, where cyclones bring fresh water to the desert’s swimming holes and gold remains abundant underground.
“It’s paradise,” said Daniele Specogna, a 72-year-old former photographer and goldsmith from Italy who was lured to the Australian desert two decades ago.
“Nature here is untouched,” he added, though he conceded he would find it difficult to survive in Marble Bar without air-conditioning.
Desmond Gardner cooking a goanna, a native Australian lizard that he hunted earlier, in a bush oven, which is made from hot coals, sand, bark and leaves.
Jeannice Walker, center, visiting with her friends in Goodabinya. She said life in the region can be hard, but she has no intention of leaving.
In the nearby Indigenous communities of Goodabinya and Warralong, air-conditioning is considered a luxury that residents often limit to using at night.
During the day, people stay in the shade, or cool off under the sprinklers, said Jeannice Walker, sitting on her porch in Goodabinya, where friends played cards with children in their laps. When the heat isn’t too unbearable, they go hunting for local bush foods, like goannas and kangaroos.
“Sometimes it’s very hard for people,” Ms. Walker said, adding that her family could not always afford the power needed to run their air-conditioning and that they had to wet their clothing to stay cool.
But no matter how unrelenting the desert heat might become in the future, Ms. Walker said her family and community would never leave. “This is our home,” she said, “our mother’s country.”
Some find the best way to cope with the extreme heat is by working underground.
Some 165 feet below the surface of Marble Bar, the temperature was a cool 80 degrees. Here, Murray Millwood has built and runs his own gold mine. Unlike his wife, Elaine, who operates the winch from above, he said he had never experienced the full wrath of Marble Bar’s summer when working in these depths.
Underground, “time goes quick,” said Mr. Millwood, 77, placing his palm on the limestone, where cool water trickled down from the aquifer. “There’s no sun to torment you.”
Sunset in Goodabinya.



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With Coronavirus And Climate Change, It’s About Time

Axios - Amy Harder

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Time is what keeps everything from happening at once, someone wisely said.

Yes, but: In once-in-a-lifetime moments when everything does seem to be happening at once, like what’s unfolding with the cascading coronavirus crisis, time is a ruthless prioritizer. Acting on the decades-long problem of climate change falls to the bottom.

The intrigue: Peter Atwater, a behavioral economist and an adjunct lecturer at William & Mary, has a framework, called the “Horizon Preference,” for how we perceive the world based on our level of confidence. When confidence is high, we have a “us-everywhere-forever” mindset. When it’s low, it’s “me-here-now.”
  • The former is where much of the world was as recent as a month ago. The economy was doing great, consumer confidence was high and the stock market was (still) going up.
  • This mindset fosters an eagerness to take on big global challenges. Although President Trump shuns acting on climate change, most other world leaders have been underscoring the urgency of the problem.
  • The latter complex — “me-here-now” — is where we all suddenly find ourselves now: grappling with an imminent crisis touching nearly all of us in a myriad of personal and direct ways.
“Our fixation on climate change, our eagerness to attack it, was a reflection of extraordinary confidence. I think our attention on climate change is going to move immediately from strategically preventing it to how we deal with its adverse consequences.”— Peter Atwater, behavioral economist
Where it stands: Climate change and pandemics are both long-term systemic risks society often ignores, but they have vastly different time frames.
  • “Our time horizons are minutes and hours,” Atwater says. “Eventually, they’re going to restore to weeks and months.”
  • Climate change unfolds over decades, increasing the risk of more extreme weather and inflicting mostly gradual, yet profound and negative, consequences on most of the world.
  • In roughly a week’s time, the coronavirus compelled the cancellation of virtually every major sports and cultural event in America, closed schools, and tanked oil markets and stocks to historic low levels. Much of Europe is shutting down too.
  • COVID-19, the illness stemming from the virus, has killed more than 6,500 people and sickened thousands more around the world.
My thought bubble: How does one prioritize a collection of events like that? The safety and health of family usually trumps everything. Like most other humans, my personal life is being thrown into uncertain territory.
  • Last week my family was finishing up a multiweek trip to Southeast Asia and were missing rumored quarantines by mere miles and hours. Thankfully, they arrived safely back in Washington state, where we’re from.
  • But anxiety, much like the coronavirus, doesn’t know borders. Washington state has been dubbed the “U.S.’s Wuhan” — meaning it's being hit hard in a way that's similar to the epicenter of the outbreak in China.
“In a crisis, we immediately eliminate anything that is in any way psychologically distant from us because that requires too much thinking. The priorities become all around ‘me-here-now.’ How does it affect me? Is it immediate? Is it geographically proximate? Is it simple? Can I understand it?”— Peter Atwater
What’s next: After a dozen years living in Washington, D.C., I put in motion in January plans to move to Seattle next month. I’m looking to expand my Axios beat by scrutinizing the ever-growing aggressive state and company climate plans and, also, to be closer to my family.
What deeply inauspicious timing I’m facing.
  • Because I start paying rent April 1 on a Seattle apartment, I am weighing the prospects of doubling my housing costs if I don't move soon, the deep level of uncertainty around potential travel restrictions in the region and, of course, the heightened risk of getting or spreading COVID-19 while moving.
  • This is just my story. We’re now all dealing with uncertainty that we don’t know when will end.
  • I’m aware and grateful for the flexibilities I have that many others don’t. I can easily work remotely. I don’t have children suddenly out of school. I’m not a health care worker on the front lines. Luckily, and as of now, I don't have any family or friends diagnosed with COVID-19 (that I know of anyway).
  • No matter the gravity of anyone’s situation, the same psychological laws apply, which is that we inevitably must focus on us, our family, the next hour, next day, versus anything longer term.
This column is unique: in that it's less about energy and climate change, specifically, and more about where they fit in the collective package we call life. We don’t live life in silos — it comes as a package deal. And lately and for the foreseeable future, our life packages are being turned upside down.

The bottom line: “The kind of broad strategic, generational, really forward, futuristic thinking only occurs at extreme peaks in confidence,” Atwater said. “It could be 20, 30, 50 years before we’re back to that sort of intensity on things like climate change.”

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COVID-19 And Climate Change: A Healthy Dose Of Reality

GreenBiz - Joel Makower
Shutterstock
It’s too early to tell whether COVID-19 is linked in any way to the climate crisis. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t; we’ll likely never know for certain. Still, consider the global health crisis currently upon us as a warm-up act for a climate-changing world.

In the immortal words of the ‘70s rock band Bachman-Turner Overdrive, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

For nearly two decades, health officials around the world have warned about the rise of infectious disease from a warming climate. The Pentagon, for example, started raising concern back in 2003 in an independent study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense. It warned that “As famine, disease and weather-related disasters strike due to the abrupt climate change, many countries’ needs will exceed their carrying capacity.”
In the immortal words of the ‘70s rock band Bachman-Turner Overdrive, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
In its 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon officially recognized climate change as a factor worthy of consideration in national security planning. “Warmer temperatures can also exacerbate the introduction and proliferation of heat-related illnesses and disease vectors, such as mosquitoes, into vulnerable regions,” it noted. In 2014, in a Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, it warned of “the emergence of new strains of disease.” That report called the effects of climate change “threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad.”

Note that even America’s defense establishment didn’t see these impacts striking at home so much as “abroad,” leading to global security threats. It concluded:
Countries that have the infrastructure and capability to report and track the spread of an outbreak of disease are able to save more lives. Detecting, diagnosing and determining the origin of a pathogen will enable U.S. authorities to better respond to future disease outbreaks and identify whether they are natural or man-made.
Good old days?
Such warnings seem both prescient and obvious today, given the global scramble to corral COVID-19. But it also provides an opportunity to plan for the next infectious outbreak, and the ones after that.

Indeed, climate change could make the coronavirus seem like the good old days.

“Infectious disease transmission is sensitive to local, small-scale differences in weather, human modification of the landscape, the diversity of animal hosts, and human behavior that affects vector-human contact, among other factors,” write the authors of the Third National Climate Assessment, produced by more than 300 experts guided by a 60-member Federal Advisory Committee and reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences. It warned:
The public health system is not fully prepared to monitor or respond to these growing disease risks. The introduction of new diseases into non-immune populations has been and continues to be a major challenge in public health. There are concerns that climate change may provide opportunities for pathogens to expand or shift their geographic ranges.
Clearly, this is not a “someday” situation. According to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization since 2017, “As man-made climate change has taken hold over the last four decades, dozens of new infectious diseases have emerged or begun to threaten new regions, including Zika and Ebola.” Moreover, he writes, “Bubonic plague, spread by rats and fleas, is predicted to increase with warmer springs and wetter summers. Anthrax, whose spores are released by thawing permafrost, could spread farther as a result of stronger winds.”

Bubonic plague. Anthrax. Suddenly, coronavirus feels rather tame.

So, how are companies faring? It’s early days, but the outlook isn’t exactly encouraging.

A survey released last week by the Institute for Supply Management looked into how companies are dealing with coronavirus. It found nearly three-fourths of U.S. firms reporting supply-chain disruptions due to virus-related travel and transportation restrictions, and more than eight in 10 believe that their organization will experience some impact because of COVID-19 disruptions. Of that 80 percent, ISM found that one in six are adjusting revenue targets downward an average of 5.6 percent due to coronavirus, with some companies saying revenue could drop as much as 15 percent.

Writes Jeff Berman in Supply Chain Management Review: “The findings are staggering on multiple levels and, while unintentional to be sure, they ought to put supply chains on high alert, in the very unlikely circumstance they are not already, at this point.”

It’s not just supply chains, of course. McKinsey & Co. last week laid out three scenarios for business as a result of the pandemic: a “quick recovery,” a “global slowdown” and a “global pandemic and recession.”

For now, let’s be optimistic and assume the middle path — that the world is facing merely a global slowdown, not a recession. Among the impacts, according to McKinsey:
  • Small and midsize companies would be more acutely impacted.
  • Less-developed economies would suffer more than advanced economies.
  • Service sectors, including aviation, travel and tourism, would likely be hardest hit, accelerating the wave of consolidation, especially among airlines.
  • A steep drop in consumer demand would impact suppliers that operate on thin working-capital margins.
The current outbreak is providing an object lesson about what it means for business to be resilient — as individuals and organizations, as well as in infrastructure and supply chains.
Clearly, much remains unknown, notably the impacts on individuals, especially in the service sector — the Walmart cashier, the Starbucks barista, the Uber driver and countless more gig-economy and low-wage workers.

And we don’t yet know the silver linings: the potential rise of telecommuting and virtual events; positive changes in social norms, from hygiene to handshakes; paid sick leave, especially for minimum-wage and contingent workers; more centralized emergency response, as the United States once had in its Civil Defense System during the Cold War; and the strengthening of the social fabric, especially at the neighborhood and community levels. Indeed, good things can come from dreadful times.

All of this is to say that the current outbreak is providing an object lesson about what it means for business to be resilient — as individuals and organizations, as well as in infrastructure and supply chains. And it is showing, quite vividly, what it’s like when we aren’t.

There is no roadmap for this. We are in uncharted territory. We are hurtling into the unknown.

Will the lessons of coronavirus extend beyond the crisis itself, or will we revert to what had been standard operating procedure in both the public and private sectors? Can there be some good that comes from this — for workers, companies and their value chains? How can we improve our response and resilience so that we're ready for the next one?

We’d better get started figuring this out. We have a window — a painfully clear window — on what’s coming next, and a window of opportunity to align our organizations, value chains and systems of commerce with this strange new normal. As I said, COVID-19 could be but a taste of our collective future.

No one can say we didn’t see it coming.

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