![]() Hundreds of people died last week when the heat wave parked over the Pacific Northwest. Such extreme weather conditions will become more frequent and intense, scientists say, as climate change, driven by humans burning fossil fuels, wreaks havoc on animals and humans alike. In California’s Inland Empire, the anger has turned to widespread action. Warehouse Moratorium : As warehouse construction balloons nationwide, residents in communities both rural and urban have pushed back.A Piece of Black History Destroyed: Lincoln Heights - a historically Black community in a predominantly white, rural county in Northern California - endured for decades.Bullet Train to Nowhere : Construction of the California high-speed rail system, America’s most ambitious infrastructure project, has become a multi-billion-dollar nightmare.Factoring in the other creatures that live in the mussel beds and on the shore - barnacles, hermit crabs and other crustaceans, various worms, tiny sea cucumbers - puts the deaths at easily over a billion, he said. He estimated losses for the mussels alone in the hundreds of millions. Harley first looked at how many blue mussels live on a particular shoreline, how much of the area is good habitat for mussels and what fraction of the mussels he observed died. “It just feels like one of those postapocalyptic movies,” said Christopher Harley, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia who studies the effects of climate change on coastal marine ecosystems. The combination of extraordinary heat and drought that hit the Western United States and Canada over the past two weeks has killed hundreds of millions of marine animals and continues to threaten untold species in freshwater, according to a preliminary estimate and interviews with scientists. Sockeye salmon swam sluggishly in an overheated Washington river, prompting wildlife officials to truck them to cooler areas. Dead mussels and clams coated rocks in the Pacific Northwest, their shells gaping open as if they’d been boiled. ![]()
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