DL Open Thread: Mon., March 2, 2020

Coronavirus Outbreak In Washington State.  Scientists believe that the virus has been spreading unabated for six weeks, largely thanks to Federal strict testing requirements.

How Delaware Lawmakers Spend Their Community Transportation Funds.  I didn’t realize the extent to which legislators ‘lend’ money to other legislators with no areas in common.  Worth reading, and I definitely want to spend more time looking at this.

Texas Rethugs Close Polling Places With Latino And Black Voters.  They have to cheat to win, and they have no compunctions about cheating.

Trump Is Winning His War On American Institutions. A must-read from George Packer and The Atlantic. Warning: It’s profoundly depressing.

‘A Very Hot Year’.  Bill McKibben delivers the bad news straight:

The warmth we’ve added to the atmosphere—the heat equivalent, each day, of 400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs—is already producing truly dire effects, decades or even centuries ahead of schedule. We’ve lost more than half the summer sea ice in the Arctic; coral reefs have begun to collapse, convincing researchers that we’re likely to lose virtually all of them by mid-century; sea-level rise is accelerating; and the planet’s hydrologic cycle—the way water moves around the planet—has been seriously disrupted. Warmer air increases evaporation, thus drought in arid areas and as a side effect the fires raging in places like California and Australia. The air also holds more water vapor, which tends to drop back to earth in wet places, increasing the risk of flooding: America has recently experienced the rainiest twelve months in its recorded history.

In late November a European-led team analyzed what they described as nine major tipping points—involving the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the boreal forests and permafrost layer of the north, and the Amazon rainforest and corals of the tropical latitudes. What they found was that the risk of “abrupt and irreversible changes” was much higher than previous researchers had believed, and that exceeding critical points in one system increases the risk of speeding past others—for instance, melting of Arctic sea ice increases the chance of seriously slowing the ocean currents that transport heat north from the equator, which in turn disrupt monsoons. “What we’re talking about is a point of no return,” Will Steffen, one of the researchers, told reporters. Earth won’t be the same old world “with just a bit more heat or a bit more rainfall. It’s a cascading process that gets out of control.”

The sorta good news? There are solutions and there are even some politicians willing to carry them out. They’ve gotta get elected, though…

What do you want to talk about?