Environmental Protection Agency - Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association

Saharan Dust Cloud Arrives At The U.S. Gulf Coast, Bringing Haze

Bill Chappell - NPR — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 20:26:14 +0000

A massive cloud of dust from the Sahara Desert is arriving along the U.S. Gulf Coast this week after traveling across the Atlantic Ocean. The phenomenon happens every year – but the 2020 version is especially large and imposing, experts said.

The dust cloud is “quite large” this year, said Marshall Shepherd, director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia, in an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered. “I think that’s why it’s garnering so much attention.”

That attention has included some experts who are calling it the “Godzilla dust cloud” due to its unusual size.

There are signs that the cloud is living up to the hype. Michael Lowry, an atmospheric scientist at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the cloud shattered the previous record for dust across the tropical Atlantic, as measured by the MODIS satellite.

As of Thursday morning, the cloud was stretching from the western Caribbean, over Belize and the Yucatán Peninsula, and through most of the central and western Gulf of Mexico, blanketing a huge area with its haze.

After reaching the U.S. shore in Texas and other states on the Gulf of Mexico, the dust cloud is expected to shift toward the northeast, moving across the Southeastern U.S.

“I think we’ll get it mainly over the weekend,” Shepherd said, discussing the dust cloud’s likely arrival in Georgia.

The dust sharply reduced visibility when it hit Puerto Rico this week, with its haze completely masking mountains in El Yunque National Forest in northeastern Puerto Rico.

The technical name for the phenomenon is the “Saharan Air Layer,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“This layer can travel and impact locations thousands of miles away from its African origins,” the agency says, “which is one reason why NOAA uses the lofty perspective of its satellites to track it.”

As the dust crosses the Atlantic, “it usually occupies a 2- to 2.5-mile-thick layer of the atmosphere with its base starting about 1 mile above the surface,” NOAA hurricane researcher Jason Dunion said.

As the dust moved across Louisiana on Thursday, images from the ground showed it had turned the sky a milky color with not a trace of blue.

“Typically, you lose the blue sky for more hazy, milky sky,” Shepherd said. “You tend to see more vivid sunsets and sunrises because of the scattering properties of the dust interacting with the sunlight.

“So those are sort of the optical effects. But I think people that suffer from allergies or perhaps have some kind of allergy to dust or particulate matter, they actually might not find it so amusing. They may have some health issues.”

Experts also noted that the dust could add to challenges faced by people infected with the coronavirus, complicating the respiratory ailments they face.

The dust is already affecting air quality on the U.S. mainland, with the Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow monitoring map showing the southern rim of Gulf states draped in warning colors of yellow and orange.

A massive cloud of dust from the Sahara Desert is arriving along the U.S. Gulf Coast this week after traveling across the Atlantic Ocean. The dust will move over the Southeastern United States after reaching the U.S. shore.

NOAA/NESDIS/STAR/GOES-East

By Thursday morning, Lake Charles, La., was reporting “the highest air quality index value in the country,” at 114, as NPR member station WWNO reported.

In addition to causing dramatic sunsets, the Saharan dust cloud also serves at least two positive purposes: It tends to hamper the development of hurricanes, due to its warm, dry air, according to NOAA.

The dust also “plays an important ecological role, such as fertilizing soils in the Amazon and building beaches in the Caribbean,” NASA’s Earth Observatory said.

Each year, the NASA unit said, winds in North Africa loft about 800 million metric tons of desert dust into the air, often scattering the dust thousands of miles away.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/25/883555736/saharan-dust-cloud-arrives-at-the-u-s-gulf-coast-bringing-the-haze

[Disclaimer]

The post Saharan Dust Cloud Arrives At The U.S. Gulf Coast, Bringing Haze first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

China’s Trade War Retaliation Against Trump’s Rural Base Boomerangs

Chriss Street — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 21:20:20 +0000

A farmer plows his fields in the small northeastern agricultural town of Eaton, Colorado, on Feb. 10, 2017. With a population of just over 5,000 residents, 71% of the town’s registered voters cast their ballots in support of President Donald Trump during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. (Jason Connolly/AFP via Getty Images)

China’s tariffs targeting President Donald Trump’s rural base have boomeranged with farm income hitting a 5-year high of $88 billion and in the top 30 percent after inflation.

China was very aware the key to Trump’s 2016 presidential victory was the 11 percent collapse of Democrat voting in rural districts that fell from 45 percent in 2008 to 34 percent in 2016. The only demographic Hillary Clinton won was metropolitan cities with over a million population that she won by 55.4 percent to Trump’s 40.1 percent.

As documented by a recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, China used targeted trade war tariffs to specifically interfere with the political outcomes of the U.S. House of Representatives 2018 midterm elections. The NBER demonstrated that tariffs focused on U.S. election competitive “battleground” counties and caused “3.8 percentage point decline in consumption growth” in 2017 and 2018.

The U.S. media has relentlessly highlighted U.S. Courts Chapter 12 data for the 12-month period ending September 2019 that reported farm bankruptcies totaled 580 filings, up 24 percent from the prior year and the highest level since 676 filings in 2011.

The American Farm Bureau Federation did report that U.S. agricultural exports declined by about 5 percent to $78.5 billion in the twelve months through July 2019. But the Trump administration’s $117 billion in U.S. tariffs is funding $33 billion of trade tariff assistance, disaster assistance, farm bill and insurance indemnities that will flow to farmers and ranchers by year-end. As a result, Chapter 12 bankruptcies decreased by 2 percent in the third quarter of 2019.

The Trump administration has been aggressively unwinding the Obama administration’s 3,900 Environmental Protection Agency rules that the ‘Americans for Tax Reform’ estimated would cost mostly rural interests about $50 billion in annual compliance costs.

In spite of the Sino-U.S. trade war, agricultural prices are generally higher since President Trump took office in January 2017, with soybeans down 7 percent; corn up 2 percent and wheat up 24 percent. But with African swine fever expected to kill off over half of China’s 425 million hogs, pork prices are up by 34 percent.

The trade war also helped the Trump administration push through the 2018 Farm Bill as a path forward in the multi-billion revival of industrial hemp suspended since 1950. The USDA on Oct. 29 issued its regulatory final rule to launch the market.

Although China made promises in mid-October that it will buy $50 billion in farm products in a “Phase 1” trade truce, the Colorado Springs Gazette found most farmers still expecting the Chinese to continue using non-tariff barriers to discriminate against U.S. exports. But Montana farmer Michelle Jones commented that if a deal is signed for $40 to $50 billion: “That far exceeds what they’ve ever bought from us before and having a dollar amount like that in a trade deal, for me, it’s managing trade.”

With booming cash flow, rising prices and the potential for a mega-export deal with China, agricultural optimism kicked into high gear in September with total U.S. monthly farm tractor sales up 18.7 percent and self-propelled combines sales up 12.3 percent, according to the latest data from the Association of Equipment Manufacturers.

The U.S. economic boom has largely been ignored by ABC, CBS, and NBC television with 92 percent negative Trump reporting. But this probably reflects the 15 point Democrat advantage in large urban settings. The Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll reports Trump running mostly ahead of Obama since March 2018.

The depth of the Chinese failure in targeting Trump’s rural agricultural base was revealed in a recent “Change Research” survey sponsored by The American Federation of Teachers and “One Country,” a group with close ties to former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), who was successfully targeted in the 2018 Trump mid-term campaigning. The progressives’ survey found that 60 percent of voters from non-metropolitan counties in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and West Virginia approve of the job Trump is doing.

Chriss Street is an expert in macroeconomics, technology, and national security. He has served as CEO of several companies and is an active writer with more than 1,500 publications. He also regularly provides strategy lectures to graduate students at top Southern California universities.

Source: https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinas-trade-war-retaliation-against-trumps-rural-base-boomerangs_3136626.html

[Disclaimer]

The post China’s Trade War Retaliation Against Trump’s Rural Base Boomerangs first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.