hacklink hack forum hacklink film izle hacklink marsbahis izmir escort sahabet porn Jojobet casibom padişahbet Bakırköy Escort casibom9018 betgit casino jojobet

Tag: warming

What does Big Tech hope to gain from warming up to Trump?

NEW YORK — In a string of visits, dinners, calls, monetary pledges and social media overtures, big tech chiefs — including Apple’s Tim Cook, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — have joined a parade of business and world leaders in trying to improve their standing with President-elect Donald Trump before he takes office in January.

“The first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump said in remarks at Mar-a-Lago. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

Tech companies and leaders have now poured millions into his inauguration fund, a sharp increase — in most cases — from past pledges to incoming presidents. But what does the tech industry expect to gain out of their renewed relationships with Trump?

A clue to what the industry is looking for came just days before the election when Microsoft executives — who’ve largely tried to show a neutral or bipartisan stance — joined with a close Trump ally, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, to publish a blog post outlining their approach to artificial intelligence policy.

“Regulation should be implemented only if its benefits outweigh its costs,” said the document signed by Andreessen, his business partner Ben Horowitz, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the company’s president, Brad Smith.

They also urged the government to back off on any attempt to strengthen copyright laws that would make it harder for companies to use publicly available data to train their AI systems. And they said, “the government should examine its procurement practices to enable more startups to sell technology to the government.”

Trump has pledged to rescind President Joe Biden’s sweeping AI executive order, which sought to protect people’s rights and safety without stifling innovation. He hasn’t specified what he would do in its place, but his campaign said AI development should be “rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.”

Trump’s choice to head the Interior Department, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, has spoken openly about the need to boost electricity production to meet increased demand from data centers and artificial intelligence.

“The AI battle affects everything from defense to healthcare to education to productivity as a country,″ Burgum said on Nov. 15, referring to artificial intelligence. “And the AI that’s coming in the next 18 months is going to be revolutionary. So there’s just a sense of urgency and a sense of understanding in the Trump administration″ to address it.

Demand for data centers ballooned in recent years due to the rapid growth of cloud computing and artificial intelligence, and local governments are competing for lucrative deals with big tech companies.

But as data centers begin to consume more resources, some residents are pushing back against the world’s most powerful corporations over concerns about the economic, social and environmental health of their communities.

“Maybe Big Tech should buy a copy of ‘The Art of The Deal’ to figure out how to best negotiate with this administration,” suggested Paul Swanson, an antitrust attorney for the law firm Holland & Hart. “I won’t be surprised if they find ways to reach some accommodations and we end up seeing more negotiated resolutions and consent decrees.”

Although federal regulators began cracking down on Google and Facebook during Trump’s first term as president — and flourished under Biden — most experts expect his second administration to ease up on antitrust enforcement and be more receptive to business mergers.

Google may benefit from Trump’s return after he made comments on the campaign trail suggesting a breakup of the company isn’t in the U.S. national interest, after a judge declared its search engine an illegal monopoly. But recent nominations put forward by his transition team have favored those who have been critical of Big Tech companies, suggesting Google won’t be entirely off the hook.

Cook’s notoriously rocky relationship with the EU can be traced back to a 2016 ruling from Brussels in a tax case targeting Apple. Cook slammed the bloc’s order for Apple to pay back up to 13 billion euros ($13.7 billion) in Irish back taxes as “total political crap.”

Trump, then in his first term as president, piled on, referring to the European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who was spearheading a campaign on special tax deals and a crackdown on Big Tech companies, as the “tax lady” who “really hates the U.S.”

Brussels was eventually vindicated after the bloc’s top court rejected Apple’s appeal this year, though it didn’t stop Cook from calling Trump to complain, Trump recounted in a podcast in October.

Trump hosted Cook for a Friday evening dinner at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly. Neither Apple nor the Trump transition team has commented on the nature of their discussions.

Altman, Amazon and Meta all pledged to donate $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural fund.

During his first term, Trump criticized Amazon and railed against the political coverage at The Washington Post, which billionaire Bezos owns. Meanwhile, Bezos had criticized some of Trump’s past rhetoric. In 2019, Amazon also argued in a court case that Trump’s bias against the company harmed its chances of winning a $10 billion Pentagon contract.

More recently, Bezos has struck a more conciliatory tone. He recently said at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit in New York that he was “optimistic” about Trump’s second term, while also endorsing president-elect’s plans to cut regulations.

The donation from Meta came just weeks after Zuckerberg met with Trump privately at Mar-a-Lago.

During the 2024 campaign, Zuckerberg did not endorse a candidate for president, but voiced a more positive stance toward Trump. Earlier this year, he praised Trump’s response to his first assassination attempt. Still, Trump in recent months had continued to attack Zuckerberg publicly.

And Altman, who is in a legal dispute with AI rival Elon Musk, has said he is “not that worried” about the Tesla CEO’s influence in the incoming administration. Musk, an early OpenAI investor and board member, sued the artificial intelligence company earlier this year alleging that the maker of ChatGPT betrayed its founding aims of benefiting the public good rather than pursuing profits.

Source link

December 17, 2024
Global warming fills New England’s rich waters with death traps for endangered sea turtles

QUINCY, Mass. — Global warming is filling the plankton-rich waters of New England with death traps for sea turtles and the number of stranded reptiles has multiplied over the last 20 years, turning some animal hospitals into specialized wards for endangered species with maladies ranging from pneumonia to sepsis.

More than 200 cold-stunned young turtles, unable to navigate the chilly winter waters, were being treated Tuesday partly because the warming of the Gulf of Maine has turned it into a natural snare for sea turtles, said Adam Kennedy, the director of rescue and rehabilitation at the New England Aquarium, which runs the Quincy, Massachusetts turtle hospital.

The animals enter areas of the gulf such as Cape Cod Bay when it is warm, and when temperatures inevitably drop, they can’t escape the hooked peninsula to head south, Kennedy said.

“Climate change certainly is allowing those numbers of turtles to get in where normally the numbers weren’t very high years ago,” Kennedy said.

Cold-stunned sea turtles, sometimes near death, wash up on Cape Cod every fall and winter. The aquarium expects the number of turtles it rescues to climb to at least 400, Kennedy said, up from about 40 a year a decade ago, Kennedy said.

The total five-year average of cold-stunned sea turtles in Massachusetts was around 200 in the early 2010s, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data, growing to more than 700 in recent years.

All the turtles at New England Aquarium’s hospital are juveniles, mostly critically endangered Kemp’s ridley turtles whose migratory patterns fuel their strandings here.

The Kemp’s — the world’s smallest sea turtle — lives largely in the Gulf of Mexico and ventures into the Atlantic Ocean when juvenile. Some recent science, including a 2019 study in the journal PLoS One, says the warming of the ocean increases the chance of cold-stunning events once the turtles reach the Northwest Atlantic. Warmer seas may have pushed the turtles north in a way that makes stranding more likely, the study said.

The turtle hospital allows the animals to rehabilitate so they can be safely returned to the wild, sometimes locally and sometimes in warmer southern waters, Kennedy said.

Upon arrival, the turtles are often critically ill.

“The majority of the turtles arrive with serious ailments such as pneumonia, dehydration, traumatic injuries, or sepsis,” said Melissa Joblon, director of animal health at the aquarium.

Around 80% survive. High wind speeds and dropping temperatures have played a role in recent strandings, he said.

Some of the turtles that arrive at the hospital are green turtles or loggerheads, which are not as endangered as the Kemp’s ridley, but still face numerous threats.

“At the end of the day getting these turtles back to the wild is what we are doing and what we want,” Kennedy said. “We want them back in the ocean.” ___

Whittle reported from Portland, Maine.

Source link

December 3, 2024
For 3rd straight year, no improvement in Earth’s projected warming

BAKU, Azerbaijan — For the third straight year, efforts to fight climate change haven’t lowered projections for how hot the world is likely to get — and recent developments in China and the United States are likely to slightly worsen the outlook, according to an analysis Thursday.

The analysis comes as countries come together for the 29th edition of the United Nations climate talks, hosted in Baku, Azerbaijan, where nations are trying to set new targets to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases and figure out how much rich nations will pay to help the world with that task.

But Earth remains on a path to be 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times, according to Climate Action Tracker, a group of scientists and analysts who study government policies and translate that into projections of warming.

If emissions are still rising and temperature projections are no longer dropping, people should wonder if the United Nations climate negotiations known as COP are doing any good, Hare said.

“There’s an awful lot going on that’s positive here, but on the big picture of actually getting stuff done to reduce emissions … to me it feels broken,” Hare said.

The world has already warmed 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. That’s near the 1.5-degree (2.7 F) limit that countries agreed to at 2015 climate talks in Paris. Climate scientists say the atmospheric warming, mainly from human burning of fossil fuels, is causing ever more extreme and damaging weather including droughts, flooding and dangerous heat.

Climate Action Tracker does projections under several different scenarios, and in some cases, those are going up slightly.

One projected track based on what countries promise to do by 2030 is up to 2.6 degrees Celsius, a tenth of a degree warmer than before. And even the analysts’ most optimistic scenario, which assumes that countries all deliver on their promises and targets, is at 1.9 Celsius, also up a tenth of a degree from last year, said study lead author Sofia Gonzales-Zuniga of Climate Analytics, one of the main groups behind the tracker.

“This is driven highly by China,” Gonzales-Zuniga said. Even though China’s fast-rising emissions are starting to plateau, they are peaking higher than anticipated, she said.

Another upcoming factor not yet in the calculations is the U.S. elections. A Trump administration that rolls back the climate policies in the Inflation Reduction Act, and carries out the conservative blueprint Project 2025, would add 0.04 degree Celsius (0.07 Fahrenheit) to warming projections, Gonzales-Zuniga said. That’s not much, but it could be more if other nations use it as an excuse to do less, she said. And a reduction in American financial aid could also reverberate even more in future temperature outlooks.

“For the U.S. it is going backwards,” said Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare. At least China has more of an optimistic future with a potential giant plunge in future emissions, he said.

“We should already be seeing (global) emissions going down” and they are not, Hare said. “In the face of all of the climate disasters we’ve observed, whether it’s the massive floods in Nepal that killed hundreds of people or whether it’s the floods in Valencia, Spain, that just killed hundreds of people. The political system, politicians are not reacting. And I think that’s something that people everywhere should be worried about.”

The major battle in Baku is over how much rich nations will help poor countries to decarbonize their energy systems, cope with future harms of climate change and pay for damage from warming’s extreme weather. The old goal of $100 billion a year in aid is expiring and Baku’s main focus is coming up with a new, bigger figure.

A special independent group of experts commissioned by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued its own estimate of costs and finances on Thursday, calling for a tripling of the old commitment.

“Advanced economies need to demonstrate a credible commitment” to helping poor nations, the report said.

A coalition of poor nations at the Baku talks are asking for $1.3 trillion in annual climate finance. The independent experts’ report said about $1 trillion a year is needed by developing nations from all outside sources, not just government grants.

The report detailed how expensive decarbonizing the world’s economy would be, how much it would cost and where the money could come from. Overall climate adaption spending for all countries is projected to reach $2.4 trillion a year.

“The transition to clean, low-carbon energy, building resilience to the impacts of climate change, coping with loss and damage, protecting nature and biodiversity, and ensuring a just transition, require a rapid step-up in investment in all countries,” said the report.

___

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Source link

November 14, 2024
World on pace for significantly more warming without immediate climate action, report warns

The world is on a path to get 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.2 Fahrenheit) warmer than it is now, but could trim half a degree of that projected future heating if countries do everything they promise to fight climate change, a United Nations report said Thursday.

But it still won’t be near enough to curb warming’s worst impacts such as nastier heat waves, wildfires, storms and droughts, the report said.

Under every scenario but the “most optimistic” with the biggest cuts in fossil fuels burning, the chance of curbing warming so it stays within the internationally agreed-upon limit “would be virtually zero,” the United Nations Environment Programme’s annual Emissions Gap Report said. The goal, set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, is to limit human-caused warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. The report said that since the mid-1800s, the world has already heated up by 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit), up from previous estimates of 1.1 or 1.2 degrees because it includes the record heat last year.

Instead the world is on pace to hit 3.1 degrees Celsius (5.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. But if nations somehow do all of what they promised in targets they submitted to the United Nations that warming could be limited to 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the report said.

In that super-stringent cuts scenario where nations have zero net carbon emissions after mid-century, there’s a 23% chance of keeping warming at or below the 1.5 degrees goal. It’s far more likely that even that optimistic scenario will keep warming to 1.9 degrees above pre-industrial times, the report said.

“The main message is that action right now and right here before 2030 is critical if we want to lower the temperature,” said report main editor Anne Olhoff, an economist and chief climate advisor to the UNEP Copenhagen Climate Centre. “It is now or never really if we want to keep 1.5 alive.”

Without swift and dramatic emission cuts “on a scale and pace never seen before,” UNEP Director Inger Andersen said “the 1.5 degree C goal will soon be dead and (the less stringent Paris goal of) well below 2 degrees C will take its place in the intensive care unit.”

Olhoff said Earth’s on a trajectory to slam the door on 1.5 sometime in 2029.

“Winning slowly is the same as losing when it comes to climate change,” said author Neil Grant of Climate Analytics. “And so I think we are at risk of a lost decade.”

One of the problems is that even though nations pledged climate action in their targets submitted as part of the Paris Agreement, there’s a big gap between what they said they will do and what they are doing based on their existing policies, report authors said.

The world’s 20 richest countries — which are responsible for 77% of the carbon pollution in the air — are falling short of their stated emission-cutting goals, with only 11 meeting their individual targets, the report said.

Emission cuts strong enough to limit warming to the 1.5 degree goal are more than technically and economically possible, the report found. They just aren’t being proposed or done.

The report ”shows that yet again governments are sleepwalking towards climate chaos,” said climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, who wasn’t part of the report.

Another outside scientist, Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said the report confirms his worst concerns: “We are not making progress and are now following a 3.1 degree path, which is, with next to zero uncertainty, a path to disaster.”

Both the 3.1 degree and 2.6 degree calculations are a tenth of a degree Celsius warmer than last year’s version of the UN report, which experts said is within the margin of uncertainty.

Mostly the problem is “there’s one year less time to cut emissions and avoid climate catastrophe,” said MIT’s John Sterman, who models different warming scenarios based on emissions and countries policies. “Catastrophe is a strong word and I don’t use it lightly,” he said, citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report saying 3 degrees of warming would trigger severe and irreversible damage.

The report focuses on what’s called an emissions gap. It calculates a budget of how many billions of tons of greenhouse gases — mostly carbon dioxide and methane — the world can spew and stay under 1.5 degrees, 1.8 degrees and 2 degrees of warming since pre-industrial times. It then figures how much annual emissions have to be slashed by 2030 to keep at those levels.

To keep at or below 1.5 degrees, the world must slash emissions by 42%, and to keep at or below 2 degrees, the cut has to be 28%, the report, named, “No more hot air… please !” said.

In 2023, the world spewed 57.1 billion metric tons (62.9 billion U.S. tons) of greenhouse gases, the report said. That’s 1,810 metric tons (1,995 U.S. tons) of heat-trapping gases a second.

“There is a direct link between increasing emissions and increasingly frequent and intense climate disasters,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a video messaged released with the report. “We’re playing with fire, but there can be no more playing for time. We’re out of time.”

__

Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

___

Follow Seth Borenstein on X at @borenbears

______

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Source link

October 24, 2024
Pollution of the potent warming gas methane soars and people are mostly to blame

The amount and proportion of the powerful heat-trapping gas methane that humans spew into the atmosphere is rising, helping to turbocharge climate change, a new study finds.

Tuesday’s study finds that in 2020, the last year complete data is available, the world put 670 million tons (608 million metric tons) of methane in the air, up nearly 12% from 2000. An even more significant finding in the study in Environmental Research Letters was the source of those emissions: those from humans jumped almost 18% in two decades, while natural emissions, mostly from wetlands, inched up just 2% in the same time.

Methane levels in the air are now 2.6 times higher than in pre-industrial times, the study said. Methane levels in the air had plateaued for a while in the early 2000s, but now are soaring. Humans cause methane emissions by burning fossil fuels, engaging in large-scale agriculture and filling up landfills.

“Methane is a climate menace that the world is ignoring,” study lead author Rob Jackson, head of the Global Carbon Project, which is a group of scientists who monitor greenhouse gas emissions yearly. “Methane has risen far more and much faster than carbon dioxide.”

Carbon dioxide is still the biggest threat, said Jackson, a Stanford University climate scientist. Humans, mostly through the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, put 60 times more carbon dioxide in the air than methane and it lasts thousands of years.

Because methane leave the atmosphere in about a decade, it’s a powerful “lever” that humans can use to fight climate change, Jackson said. That’s because cutting it could yield relatively quick benefits.

In 2000, 60% of the methane spewed into the air came from direct human activity. Now it’s 65%, the study found.

“It’s a very worrying paper, but actually not a big surprise unfortunately,” said climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, who wasn’t part of the research. He said for the world to keep warming to an agreed-upon limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, the world needs to cut carbon dioxide emissions nearly in half and methane by more than one-third.

But Jackson said the current trend with methane emissions has the world on target for warming of 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), twice the goal of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Jackson’s study mostly focused on where the methane is coming from, both by location and source.

Geographically, everywhere but Europe is increasing in human-caused methane emissions, with large jumps in Asia, especially China and India, Jackson said.

In the last 20 years, methane emissions from coal mining, oil and gas have jumped 33%, while landfill and waste increased 20% and agriculture emissions rose 14%, according to the study. The biggest single human-connected source of emissions are cows, Jackson said.

Cornell University climate scientist Robert Howarth faulted the study for not sufficiently emphasizing methane emissions from the boom in shale gas drilling, known as fracking. He said that boom began in 2005 and coincided with a sharp rise in methane emissions, including a spike of about 13 million tons (11.7 million metric tons) in the United States alone since then.

Jackson said the rise in natural methane from tropical wetlands was triggered by warmer temperatures that caused microbes to spew more gas. He called it disturbing because “we don’t have any way of reducing” those emissions.

In 2021, countries promised to do something about methane, but it’s not working yet, Jackson said.

Though Jackson’s data runs only through 2020, he said global monitoring of methane levels in the air show that “we know that concentrations in the last four or five years rose faster than at any time in the instrument record. So that alone tells us that the global methane pledge is not having a substantive effect on methane emissions and concentrations,” he said.

University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, who wasn’t part of the research, said, “we have a lot more work to do if we want to avoid the most dire consequences of global warming.”

___

Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

___

Follow Seth Borenstein on X at @borenbears

______

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Source link

September 10, 2024
Takeaways from AP report on perils of heatstroke for runners in a warming world

As climate change reshapes the way humans live outdoors, it’s affecting the way they play, too. That includes runners, who may find themselves in harm’s way on a warming planet.

They pursue a sport that esteems grit and suffering in pursuit of improvement. Experts told The Associated Press that can be a recipe for heatstroke as the frequency of dangerously hot days in the continental U.S. is expected to grow by roughly one-third by mid-century.

Here are some takeways from AP’s reporting on running, racing and the hazards of heat:

Exertional heatstroke happens during exercise when the body can’t properly cool, rising above 104 degrees (40 Celsius) and triggering a central nervous system problem such as fainting or blacking out.

Muscles can break down, releasing proteins that damage kidneys. The lining of the digestive system may weaken and leak bacteria. Brain cells may die. It can damage organs and ultimately kill a victim.

When runners suffer heatstroke, getting them into a tub of ice water is the best way to quickly cool them. And it needs to happen fast, with quick diagnoses to treat runners on the spot. Medical staff need rectal thermometers to gauge temperature when skin can be deceptively cool.

Douglas Casa is director of the University of Connecticut’s Korey Stringer Institute, named for the Minnesota Vikings lineman who died of heatstroke in training camp in 2001. He’s been researching athletes and exertional heatstroke for some three decades.

“I can’t guarantee everything that is going to happen in the future,” Casa said. “But based on over 3,000 cases we’ve tracked, if someone’s temp gets under 104 within 30 minutes of the presentation of heatstroke, no one has ever died.”

It’s a mixed bag that’s typically related to the size of a race and its resources. Casa says many races don’t have the resources or expertise to offer the right lifesaving care.

One that does is the Falmouth Road Race in Falmouth, Massachusetts, a popular, long-running and big race that’s run in August on the shore of Cape Cod. The summer setting and the 7-mile distance make Falmouth a magnet for heatstroke — it’s just long enough for runners to really heat up, and short enough that many of them are pushing hard.

But Falmouth has enough people, equipment and experience to handle lots of cases. The race’s medical director has documented so many of them — nearly 500 over more than two decades — that the race has attracted researchers.

That’s a big difference from small local races that Casa says might have an ambulance, or a nurse, but no significant medical tent ready for heat.

Carolyn Baker was about to turn 60 last summer when she ran Falmouth. She had done it several times before and was cruising as she neared the final mile, looking around for friends.

Then she collapsed — a moment she doesn’t remember. Her family members rushed to the medical tent where volunteers had taken Baker and plunged her into an ice bath, with her internal temperature nearly 107 degrees (41.6 Celsius).

Baker regained consciousness in the ice bath, which lowered her temperature to safe levels. She was eventually able to go home, though she felt weak and took a while to fully recover.

Baker was determined to finish the race, so she went back a week later to run the final mile with her husband there to record it. This year, she was back at Falmouth again — and finished safely.

Racing may slightly increase the chances a runner will suffer from a rare event like heatstroke or cardiac arrest, but doctors say it’s almost certainly healthier to show up anyway.

“Runners and athletes are at reduced risk of having not only cardiac arrest, but all forms of heart disease compared to non-runners,” said Dr. Aaron Baggish, a professor at the Université de Lausanne and former medical director of the Boston Marathon.

___

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

Source link

August 31, 2024
Runners are used to toughing it out. A warming climate can make that deadly

Carolyn Baker, clad in a neon pink top and matching sunglasses, smiled as she ran the Falmouth Road Race on the shore of Cape Cod, looking around for friends as she neared the end of a race she’d completed more than a dozen times before.

Suddenly, Baker collapsed, as her exertion on a sunny August day sent her internal temperature soaring. As medical volunteers rushed to her aid by plunging her into a tub filled with ice water, they measured it at nearly 107 degrees (41.6 Celsius).

For family members, the first sign of trouble was when their tracking app showed Baker moving backward on the course — as she was taken to the medical tent. Her husband, catching up with friends after finishing earlier, blurted “Oh my god,” after his daughter called to alert him, then rushed to the tent.

The heatstroke that felled Baker last year is a deadly illness associated with extreme heat, and climate change is worsening the risk. In the continental U.S., the frequency of dangerously hot days is expected to grow by roughly one-third by mid-century.

Exertional heatstroke happens during exercise when the body can’t properly cool, rising above 104 degrees (40 Celsius) and triggering a central nervous system problem such as fainting or blacking out. It can be effectively treated by rapidly cooling a victim, but lots of races lack the resources or expertise to do it. And many runners, in a culture that esteems grit and suffering, may ignore conditions that put them at risk.

Muscles can break down, releasing proteins that damage kidneys. The lining of the digestive system may weaken and leak bacteria. Brain cells may die. It can damage organs and, ultimately, kill.

The Falmouth race is a magnet for heatstroke. At 7 miles, it’s long enough to give the body time to heat up dangerously and short enough that many runners are pushing hard. And with more than 11,000 runners, odds are good that some haven’t trained to acclimate to hot weather, or show up dehydrated. And some runners are simply more vulnerable.

But if you are going to have heatstroke, you could do it in a worse place than Falmouth. They have enough people, equipment and experience to handle lots of cases. And medical director John Jardine has documented nearly 500 cases of heatstroke in more than two decades — so many the race has attracted researchers.

The problem is lots of races don’t have the equipment or expertise to offer the right lifesaving care, said Douglas Casa, director of the University of Connecticut’s Korey Stringer Institute, named for the Minnesota Vikings lineman who died of heatstroke in training camp in 2001.

“Think of the local 5K races,” Casa said. “They might have an ambulance there or they might have a nurse or medic or somebody there, but they don’t have a whole medical tent set up to be able to deal with heatstroke.”

Getting victims into a tub of ice water is the best way to quickly cool them. And it needs to happen fast, with quick diagnoses to treat runners on the spot. Medical staff need rectal thermometers to gauge temperature when skin can be deceptively cool.

“I can’t guarantee everything that is going to happen in the future,” Casa said. “But based on over 3,000 cases we’ve tracked, if someone’s temp gets under 104 within 30 minutes of the presentation of heatstroke, no one has ever died.”

He said there isn’t good data on how many races do it right. From his decades of experience, very few do, although generally he said care is better now than when he started. Casa suggested governing bodies for racing should publish heat-related recommendations for safety.

Race directors must organize complex events for runners of all ability. Some are big races with lots of resources; others are small local affairs with a shoestring budget. Security, organizing workers and volunteers, tracking runners and medical care all must be assembled and paid for, said Dave McGillivray, who helps direct the Boston Marathon and also advises other race directors.

Runners bear responsibility, too. He recalls grabbing a mic at the 2012 Boston Marathon when it was apparent the day was going to be hot, telling runners they needed to take it easy. It’s a hard message for runners who have trained months to meet goals.

“We cannot fit all of you in our medical tents,” he remembered saying. More than 2,000 people needed treatment that day; roughly 200 went to the hospital.

“It was a lot of carnage out there,” McGillivray said. “But, you know, no one passed, people went home, and we dodged the proverbial bullet. Not every race can say that. If you don’t have the resources, then you shouldn’t be firing the gun.”

Evan Hauptmann, a multi-sport athlete in high school, decided to run Falmouth at 17. He wanted to finish in under an hour and felt fine until a big hill late in the race made him light-headed. By then he could see the finish line and his competitive nature kicked in.

Soon after finishing, he lost consciousness. His temperature was the highest Jardine has seen at Falmouth – 112.8 degrees (44.9 Celsius).

“That’s crazy,” said Dr. Sameed Khatana, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “That is not compatible with life.”

But Hauptmann got immediate care, with a half-hour in the ice bath bringing his temperature down quickly, and he went home that day. Doctors worried about organ damage. Blood tests showed high protein levels from muscle breakdown, but they came down and he avoided lasting injury.

Two weeks later he started playing football again. But he’s more aware of heat’s danger, and makes sure to stay hydrated and aware of how he is feeling.

“As an athlete I can’t really let it stop me from competing,” he said. “I kind of just have to learn from it, realize what I did wrong and realize what I can do better in the future to listen to my body.”

In contrast, there’s Zoë Wallis, recruited to play college basketball in South Carolina. The summer before her freshman year in 2014, her team was told their mental strength would be tested with a 5-mile run they had to finish within an hour. It was about twice as far as she had ever run.

By the second half, she started feeling hazy, then panicky. Eventually, a teammate on each side held her up. She recalled saying she wanted to stop but being pushed forward.

“What I remember happening was getting a jolt of energy near the end and feeling like I was hitting this runner’s high and was going to finish the run strong,” she said. “In reality, what happened is that I completely collapsed, skinned my entire arms, elbows, knees.”

She was taken to the hospital in a car, laid across the warm laps of teammates. She awoke in the emergency room, disoriented. Her kidneys and liver had failed, she said. She eventually sued the school and receive a settlement.

Wallis said it took about three months to resume practice. But the sport never felt the same. Eventually, she left the team, lost her scholarship and transferred.

“The mental aspect of the heatstroke consumed me. I felt so fragile, not only when I was practicing and actually playing my sport, but also just existing. I was just afraid in so many ways,” she said. Ten years later, she’s in a good place, but it took therapy and time.

Racing may slightly increase the chances a runner will suffer a rare event like heatstroke or cardiac arrest, but doctors say it’s almost certainly healthier to show up anyway.

“Runners and athletes are at reduced risk of having not only cardiac arrest, but all forms of heart disease compared to non-runners,” said Dr. Aaron Baggish, a professor at the Université de Lausanne and former medical director of the Boston Marathon.

Baker, now 61, had a happy ending.

She regained consciousness in an ice bath that brought her temperature down to a safe level. Her head hurt and she felt weak, but family members eventually helped her stand and she was able to go home. She had no memory of her collapse, and called it “eerie” afterward when she came upon a gallery of race pictures online and saw photos that showed her falling to the ground.

One week later, Baker dressed in the same pink top, sunglasses and racing bib to run Falmouth’s last mile, striding past the spot where she collapsed. Her husband’s photos show her smiling and flexing at the finish.

“We have a big running group of friends and family,” Baker said. “Everybody in our group had finished the race except for me. And I was like nah, I need to do it. And I need to know I’m going to be OK mentally.”

This year, she was back at Falmouth again — and finished safely.

___

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

Source link

August 31, 2024