[MCN] The world we're handing to Montana kids: A "sometimes-fatal fungal infection" is set to spread, thanks to fossil fuels

[Lance Olsen]

News Release 16-Sep-2019
Climate change expected to accelerate spread of sometimes-fatal fungal infection
AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION
Valley fever is endemic to hot and dry regions like the southwestern United States and California's San Joaquin Valley, but a new study predicts climate change will cause the fungal infection's range to more than double in size this century, reaching previously unaffected areas across the western U.S.

JOURNAL
GeoHealth
 <https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-09/agu-cce091619.php>Full release https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-09/agu-cce091619.php <https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-09/agu-cce091619.php>

Excerpt from release: " The states projected to host newly endemic counties are Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming, and the disease is expected to become more widespread in Colorado, Idaho and Oklahoma, according to the study.
"The range of valley fever is going to increase substantially," said Morgan Gorris, a former UCI PhD student in Earth system science and lead author of the new study. "We made projections out to the end of the 21st century, and our model predicts that valley fever will travel farther north throughout the western United States, especially in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains and throughout the Great Plains, and by that time, much of the western U.S. will be considered endemic."

Read-only(can be saved to your desktop) pdf of the article cited above: 
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2019GH000209 <https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2019GH000209>

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Australian Financial Review  March 29, 2019

Directors' climate liability exposure increasing 'exponentially'

Ben Potter <https://www.afr.com/ben-potter-j7gdk>  Senior Reporter

https://www.afr.com/news/directors-climate-liability-exposure-increasing-exponentially-20190327-h1cuja <https://www.afr.com/news/directors-climate-liability-exposure-increasing-exponentially-20190327-h1cuja>

Excerpts

The exposure of individual company directors to the risk of "climate change litigation" <https://www.afr.com/news/climate-litigation-could-become-like-tobacco-actions-martijn-wilder-20180405-h0yctd> is increasing, probably exponentially, a new legal opinion asserts.

Sydney SC Noel Hutley and barrister Sebastian Hartford Davis write <http://https//cpd.org.au/2019/03/directors-duties-2019/> that it is obvious that climate change is affecting the economy, "and it is increasingly difficult in our view for directors of companies of scale to pretend that climate change will not intersect with the interests of their firms".

They conclude that there are now "significant and well publicised risks associated with climate change and global warming that would be regarded by a court as foreseeable", and that "it is apparent that regulators now expect much more from companies than cursory acknowledgement and disclosure of climate change risks.

Sectors most exposed are banking, insurance, asset and building ownership and management, energy, transport, agriculture, food and forestry. The opinion is an update to their landmark October 2016 opinion <https://www.afr.com/business/legal/directors-ignore-climate-change-risks-at-their-own-peril-20161101-gsf6lv> which found that directors who ignored climate risk now could be liable for breaching their duty of care in future.

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