April 22, 2020 Night

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Good evening! Mostly clear and 34 degrees in Delmar, NY. There is a west breeze at 10 mph. 🍃. When the wind picks up its pretty darn cold but that’s been the story of the weather all day. With enough layers it’s not bad especially in the sun. ☀ Definitely not warm enough though with the wind to sit out back.

Today in the afternoon I went to Five Rivers Environmental Education Center 🐸 for a while to upload some new content to the blog and do some work tasks. The Wi-Fi is so much faster plus it saves bandwidth and allows me to visit personal sites using my personal laptop and get podcasts. 🎧 Walked the maintenence road twice like I do every day I’m out there. After Five Rivers I came home, had hot dogs and beans 🍣and went for my evening walk 🚶. I got milk at the store 🐮 making sure to have my bandana on before I went in. I swear the banada over the face requirement is just more of an excuse to be uncomfortable and make people stay home rather than a real health improvement. 😷 I don’t have one of those fancy masks 🎭, just a banada and it works fine as long as it clean and mold free unlike the one I used the other day.

Tonight will be clear 🌃, with a low of 26 degrees at 4am. 14 degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical night around March 18th. West wind 7 to 10 mph. In 2019, we had cloudy skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 50 degrees. The record low of 26 occurred back in 1975.

Tonight will have a New 🌚 Moon with 0% illuminated. The Flower 🌷 Moon is on Thursday, May 7. The darkest hour is at 12:54 am, followed by dawn at 5:33 am, and sun starting to rise at 6:03 am in the east-northeast (72°) and last for 3 minutes and 2 seconds. Sunrise is one minute and 31 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌄 The golden hour ends at 6:41 am with sun in the east (79°). Tonight will have 10 hours and 14 minutes of darkness, a decrease of 2 minutes and 39 seconds over last night.

Tomorrow will have a slight chance of showers after 2pm. Increasing clouds 🌞, with a high of 53 degrees at 3pm. Nine degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical day around April 4th. West wind 5 to 7 mph becoming south in the afternoon. A bit warmer than today. Chance of precipitation is 20%. A year ago, we had partly cloudy skies in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 75 degrees. The record high of 87 was set in 2007. 2.4 inches of snow fell back in 1956.❄

I still haven’t gone grocery shopping for the week 🍏 or done my wash 👚 but none is pressing right away now that I got milk. I’m leaning towards Wally World this week for one stop shopping plus I can wash my truck at the same time. I think I need to get socks 👢as a lot of them I have now are falling apart. I don’t think it will be that nice come tomorrow evening but at least it won’t be windy for washing my truck. Always trying to avoid shopping as I don’t want to get Coronavirus if I can avoid it. I do carry that bottle of isopropyl alcohol with me but it sure makes my hands crack and bleed. I need some glycerin to mix in with it.

In four weeks on May 20 the sun will be setting in the west-northwest (299°) at 8:16 pm,🌄 which is 30 minutes and 29 seconds later then tonight. In 2019 on that day, we had partly cloudy, rain showers and temperatures between 83 and 56 degrees. Kind of hot last year. Typically, you have temperatures between 71 and 48 degrees. The record high of 91 degrees was set back in 1962.

Looking ahead, Average High is 80 🏖 is in 2 months, Latest Sunset 🌆 is in 9 weeks and Inauguration Day 2021 👴🏻 is in 39 weeks.

🇺🇸🦅Only 30 days remain until the start of Memorial Day Weekend!🦅🇺🇸

Hudson River on this beautiful afternoon

Earth Day Fifty 🌎

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Earth Day Fifty 🌎

Today was Earth Day’s fiftieth anniversary, coming a half century after the first Earth Day. We’ve both made amazing progress and also stumbled upon other issues as mankind’s needs and desires sometimes vary in relationship to the planet’s own well being.

Many of the worse fears and predictions of a half century ago did not come true, while others seem just pushed further off to the day of reckoning. Humans are generally bad at understanding their impacts at a macro-level, what often seems bad isn’t so bad while what seems minor can add up to being quite bad in reality.

I often think too much emphasis is made on the April 22, 1970 date when much of the environmental improvements we saw over the past six decades were a series of inter-related technological, economic, education and political changes. Environmental laws grew in strength throughout the sixties, thanks to countless community advocates, their elected officials and general public awareness.

Act local, think global isn’t a bad slogan. Fight for what you know and understand best – the land you know and care about, the species that mean the most to you. People should be asking questions and not be surprised when you are lectured by people in the know claim what you are asking is impossible.

I am not convinced that protecting the earth is a liberal or conservative thing, or that it’s greedy people undermining our future. The problem isn’t greed, it’s not asking the right questions or advocating the right policies for our communities. Protecting the environment doesn’t necessarily mean more big government – but it might mean more regulations requiring better controls and better mitigations on the biggest polluters.

Earth Day Fifty kind of is playing second string during the Coronavirus PAUSE but it’s still moving forward. But few environmental problems were solved from the top down, so instead we should stop thinking so big and look how can we make the things we care about so deeply a little better.

Trump’s OSHA could mandate essential worker protections, but it hasn’t. Why not?

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Trump’s OSHA could mandate essential worker protections, but it hasn’t. Why not?

4/21/2020 by Marketplace / Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood

Web player: https://podplayer.net/?id=102819841
Episode: https://play.podtrac.com/APM-MakeMeSmart/play.publicradio.org/wp-feed/d/podcast/marketplace/make_me_smart/2020/04/21/mms_20200421_128.mp3

In the U.S., there are no specific regulations for protecting workers from a disease like COVID-19. President Donald Trump could use the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to mandate essential worker protections, but he hasn’t. Why not? To help talk us through it, we’re joined by Dr. David Michaels, who ran OSHA under President Barack Obama.

Why We Didn’t Prepare For The Pandemic

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Why We Didn’t Prepare For The Pandemic

4/22/2020 by NPR

Episode: https://play.podtrac.com/npr-510325/edge1.pod.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/npr/indicator/2020/04/20200422_indicator_200422_tim_harford_bad_brains_final-f2ba14a8-87c3-4aae-9ae6-98adc41fe281.mp3?awCollectionId=510325&awEpisodeId=841988400&aw_0_1st.cv=yes&orgId=1&topicId=1006&d=599&p=510325&story=841988400&t=podcast&e=841988400&size=9578696&ft=pod&f=510325

We’ve had plenty of warnings over the years that we weren’t ready for a pandemic. Today on the show: the psychology and economics of why.

The problem is that there are so many potentially alarming things on the horizon that are low probability but high risk. You have to pick and choose but usually immediate concerns get all the attention for good reason. Sometimes you can’t be prepared.

NPR

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Why The World Is Still Pumping So Much Oil Even As Demand Drops Away : NPR

With the global economy in a pandemic-induced coma, the world just doesn't need a lot of oil.

But oil is still flowing out of wells, and with nowhere else to go, it's filling up the world's storage tanks. The oversupply is so intense that this week U.S. oil prices briefly went negative.

But why is that oil still flowing, anyway? Why don't producers turn off the spigot when demand falls?

The short answer is that production is decreasing — just not fast enough.

No, the Pandemic Isn’t an Excuse to Go Back to Single-Use Plastics | Opinion

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No, the Pandemic Isn’t an Excuse to Go Back to Single-Use Plastics | Opinion

ecause of coronavirus, events planned for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day were cancelled, or moved online. At least while lockdown orders last, the pandemic is transforming behavior and environmental impacts—but not across the board. Some industries are cynically exploiting it to push for rollbacks and greater license to pollute.

The plastics industry is a case in point. It's intertwined with the fossil fuel industry, since petrochemical byproducts of fossil fuel production are the feedstocks for plastics. As demand for fracked gas declines, the two industries have been working to channel overproduction into producing more plastic, and they're playing the angles to stoke demand.