Beaches Closing for July 4 Weekend Due to COVID-19 Surges

Independence Day weekend is a busy time for coastal communities as people flock to the beaches to soak up the sun during the summer holiday. This year is different. Some of the country's most popular beach destinations in Florida and California have decided to close their beaches to stop the surge in coronavirus cases.
In Florida, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez announced last week that all beaches and parks in the county will close from Friday, July 3, through Tuesday, July 7, as CNN reported. He added that the closed beaches might not reopen next week if coronavirus cases continue to rise and people are not adhering to social distancing and face mask guidelines.
"As we continue to see more COVID-19 positive test results among young adults and rising hospitalizations, I have decided that the only prudent thing to do to tamp down this recent uptick is to crack down on recreational activities that put our overall community at higher risk," Gimenez said in a news release last week.
Once Miami-Dade County made that decision, the ripple effect extended to surrounding areas as one county after another worried about an influx of visitors and started to close beaches as well. Broward County was quick to follow when it tweeted its closures. The domino effect continued with Monroe, Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties and the city of Vero Beach following Miami-Dade's lead, according to the Palm Beach Post.
"The reason why we're doing this is because we feel that we will not be able to provide the necessary safe environment that everyone is entitled to enjoy when they come to our beaches," said Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis, as CNN reported.
Across the country, in California, where there are nearly 250,000 coronavirus cases, beaches in Los Angeles will county will be closed for the holiday weekend, from Friday through Monday. That includes a complete ban on fireworks in an effort to "prevent dangerous crowding that results in the spread of deadly COVID-19," the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said in a statement earlier this week, according to Newsweek.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn tweeted on Monday: "We had almost 3,000 reported cases just today. We cannot risk having crowds at the beach this holiday weekend," in a post on her official Twitter account.
To the north of Los Angeles, Ventura county will also close all of its county beaches over the weekend. California State Parks will close beach parking lots in Orange, Santa Barbara, Marin, Monterey, San Diego, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Cruz and Sonoma counties, according to KTLA.
Following those orders, Governor Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday that state beaches in Southern California and the Bay Area will be closed this weekend, as the Sacramento Bee reported.
In New England, officials are worried about more than just the coronavirus. While officials in Cape Cod are expecting smaller than usual crowds due to COVID-19, they are warning beach visitors that a large number of great white sharks have been spotted in the area, according to The Guardian.
Leslie Reynolds, the chief ranger with Cape Cod National Seashore, warned the powerful predators were coming close enough to shore to be a concern for swimmers at a recent news conference.
"Yes, we're in the middle of a pandemic, but if you choose to recreate in the water off Cape Cod, it is home to white sharks and they're coming close to shore," said Reynolds, as The New York Times reported.
Great whites frequently visit the waters off Cape Cod to prey on the large seal colonies that live there.
"It's kind of like when a new restaurant opens and people realize it's a really good spot, and someone else discovers it and slowly the clientele builds," said Gregory B. Skomal, a senior fisheries scientist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, about the uptick in great whites recently, to The New York Times.
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
The period of the 45th presidency will go down as dark days for the United States — not just for the violent insurgency and impeachment that capped off Donald Trump's four years in office, but for every regressive action that came before.
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