默默新聞08

2019年9月4日星期三

Your Wednesday Evening Briefing

SEPTEMBER 4, 2019

Your Wednesday Evening Briefing

By remy tumin and marcus payadue

Good evening. Here's the latest.

Johnny Milano for The New York Times

1. Hurricane Dorian is threatening to swamp hundreds of miles of the Southeast coast.

It's barreling toward the Eastern Seaboard as a Category 2 storm, and the National Hurricane Center warned of "life-threatening" storm surge from Florida to Virginia — even before the high winds arrive. We'll continue to have live updates here. Above, Vilano Beach near St. Augustine, Fla.

The vast scale of the storm's devastation is beginning to emerge in the Bahamas, where residents have been stripped of their most basic needs: fresh water, food, shelter and medical care. We collected before and after images and ways to help survivors.

Meanwhile, meteorologists are up in arms after President Trump held up what appeared to be a modified map that incorrectly extended the storm's possible path into Alabama.

Charles Krupa/Associated Press

2. Next up on the environmental chopping block: energy-saving light bulbs.

The Trump administration is rolling back rules requiring them that had gotten a bipartisan embrace by Congress during the George W. Bush administration. It's a big deal, as the bulbs have made a real dent in household energy use.

Expect a court challenge.

Sholten Singer/The Herald-Dispatch, via Associated Press

3. The Trump administration's approach to the environment has left a huge opening for Democratic presidential candidates.

Their plans vary in costs and priorities, but most aim to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. They're discussing their ideas in a CNN town-hall-style event on global warming right now that goes until midnight (yes, you read that right). Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders all appear between 8 and 10 p.m. Eastern. We have live analysis here.

Nearly all the candidates have claimed that cutting greenhouse gases will lead to job creation. Maybe — but "green growth" is a little complicated.

How is the Green New Deal playing across the political spectrum? The first edition of our new Opinion series rounds up a 360-degree view.

Seth Wenig/Associated Press

4. The Pentagon is diverting $3.6 billion from 127 construction projects for President Trump's border wall.

So far, we know that about half of the money will be taken from planned military projects overseas, and the remainder from projects in the U.S.

Senator Chuck Schumer identified one as the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, above. He said the diversions were a "slap in the face" to the armed services.

Officials have begun notifying congressional representatives of the areas that will see cuts, so expect some uproar.

Andrew Testa for The New York Times

5. British lawmakers just blocked a no-deal Brexit.

The House of Commons passed a bill that rules out Prime Minister Boris Johnson's plan to pull out of the E.U. next month without a blueprint. The bill now goes to the House of Lords, which must give its assent.

Mr. Johnson, bruised by his second setback in two days, then got a third. Lawmakers rejected his formal request for a snap general election on Oct. 15 — at least until their no-deal block becomes law.

Dr. Zhe Chen at Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology

6. And now an ancient death trail.

A 500-million-year-old fossil found in China offered what scientists consider a rare treasure: the imprint of a worm that literally died in its tracks. Above, an artist's rendering.

The worm appeared more than twice as long ago as the appearance of the first dinosaurs.

Our Science desk is also reporting on the opening of a new center for psychedelic research. The center at Johns Hopkins University, the first of its kind in the country, aims to give "psychedelic medicine" a long-sought foothold in the scientific establishment.

Yan Cong for The New York Times

7. In today's animal news:

Garlic, above, is China's first cloned cat. The feat, by a Beijing-based commercial pet-cloning company called Sinogene, represents the country's emergence as a global power in genetics and in the lucrative and unregulated pet-cloning market.

And scientists have discovered that squirrels pay attention not only to alarm calls but also to the background chatter of birds. When the birds sound relaxed, it causes the squirrels to relax a bit, too.

Micaiah Carter for The New York Times

8. "I've got to be experiencing something that's real to me for it to read real to you."

Brad Pitt is giving hard thought to the person he's become. With two major films out this year, the 55-year-old actor and producer talked to The Times about his changing career, masculinity and getting sober.

In other news from Hollywood: Lizzo, the singer, rapper, dancer and flutist with one of the biggest hits of the summer, dishes on her skin rehab, impossible standards and what she does first thing in the morning (water, and more water).

Liam Sharp

9. Praise be! "The Testaments," the sequel to "The Handmaid's Tale," is here, and so is our review. Above, the author, Margaret Atwood.

"The Testaments" picks up 15 years after readers last saw Offred, who has since been declared an enemy of the state in Gilead. Ms. Atwood's "sheer assurance as a storyteller makes for a fast, immersive narrative that's as propulsive as it is melodramatic," Michiko Kakutani writes.

The committee that awards the Booker Prize took special precautions to make sure no details of "The Testaments" leaked out. Really special.

Axel Koester for The New York Times

10. And finally, does any one person really own Taco Tuesday? LeBron James would like to think so.

A company affiliated with the N.B.A. star filed to copyright the phrase, which he uses to relay his family's dinner plans to his social media followers.

At issue for taco lovers far and wide: Should anyone hold a trademark for a phrase in liberal use at Mexican restaurants across the country? We sent our reporter to taquerias around Los Angeles, and one diner told him: "Give me a break."

Have a wacky Wednesday night.

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Climate Fwd: Light bulb usage can add up

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SEPTEMBER 4, 2019

Welcome to the Climate Fwd: newsletter. The New York Times climate team emails readers once a week with stories and insights about climate change. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. (And find the website version of this week's letter here.)

Tyler Varsell

By Jillian Mock

The Trump administration said Wednesday it planned to scrap requirements for energy-efficient light bulbs, but that doesn't mean you can't phase out the old-style bulbs in your home. It's simple and it would very likely lower your power bill. And, it would be good for the environment.

How good? There's been a quiet light bulb revolution in the United States over the last decade or so, with many homes moving to more energy-efficient lighting. That general shift has already decreased electricity demand in the country.

Completing that revolution would bring carbon savings equivalent to taking several million cars off the roads.

LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, are the most efficient light bulbs on the market. They use up to 85 percent less energy than traditional incandescent bulbs, the ones with a thin wire filament inside, and can last up to 25 years. LEDs are also much more efficient than halogen bulbs and slightly more efficient than compact fluorescents, the other common options on the market, according to the Energy Saver office at the Department of Energy. (The office declined to comment for this article.)

There are about six billion screw-in sockets in homes across the United States. Two billion to three billion of those still have an inefficient incandescent or halogen bulb in them, said Noah Horowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. If every home in the country switched those sockets over to LEDs at once, he said, we'd save an estimated 38 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year. He based his estimate on a report by the Appliance Standards Awareness Project that used Department of Energy data.

That's equal to the emissions from about seven million cars. And, it would save money because it means the United States would spend about $14 billion less on lighting annually. On average, every household would save roughly $100 a year on its electrical bill. Precise cost savings would depend on a few variables, like electricity rates where you live, said Eric Hittinger, an energy expert at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

The upfront cost of LEDs tends to be higher than traditional bulbs, but that is rapidly changing as technology improves. And, over their lifetime, LEDs are almost certainly a better value because of the energy savings and because they don't have to be replaced as often.

"In energy, we don't get a lot of free lunches," Dr. Hittinger said. "But LED lighting, switching to LED lighting, is basically a free lunch."

Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric AdministrationMatthew Bloch and Denise Lu/The New York Times

By Henry Fountain

As Dorian has shown over the past 10 days, predicting the path of a hurricane is an inexact science. Forecasters take data about ocean temperatures, air pressure, wind speeds — the more data the better — and feed it into computer models, which, after a few hours of number-crunching, can produce a dizzying number of possible tracks. They are spaghetti strands of uncertainty.

The uncertainty diminishes over time, especially as a hurricane grows. "Big hurricanes are easier to forecast," said Joel Cline, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The path of a small storm is harder to predict.

Dorian is a good example of this — as a small storm in the tropics off Africa, its initial track forecasts were literally all over the map. But as the storm developed into a large hurricane and approached the Bahamas, the track forecasts became more certain (unfortunately so for Grand Bahama and Abaco Islands, which were devastated when Dorian, then a Category 5 storm, slowed to a crawl over them).

We know that climate change affects hurricanes in some ways. Warmer oceans provide more of the energy that the storms need to grow, for example, which is why climate scientists say that, while there may not be more hurricanes in the future, there may be more severe ones.

But does climate change affect the track that these storms take?

So far, there is not a lot of evidence either way. A study published in June found that hurricanes are more likely to stall near the North American coast than in the past. But the authors said the trend could be linked to natural variability rather than a warming atmosphere.

Some scientists say that, as climate change makes run-of-the-mill weather patterns more intense, this may have an impact on storms, since these external patterns — high-pressure ridges, low-pressure troughs and other phenomena — are what steer hurricanes.

But that is just a suggestion at this point. Mr. Cline said that what steered Dorian toward the Bahamas and the United States was what steers most hurricanes in the tropical Atlantic: the prevailing winds that blow from east to west.

What caused it to stall over the Bahamas, he said, was a weakening of those winds as a zone of high-pressure air receded to the south.

Now that Dorian has moved past the Bahamas, a low-pressure trough over the Southeastern United States is steering it to the north-northwest, a very typical pattern, Mr. Cline said. And as it travels farther north, it will be affected by the west-to-east winds that prevail over much of the country, pushing the storm to the northeast and eventually into the North Atlantic.

MORE GLOBAL WARMING COVERAGE

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