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'Katrina brain': The invisible long-term toll of megastorms.
Long after a big hurricane blows through, its effects hammer the mental-health system.
Bryan Tamowski for POLITICO
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'Katrina brain': The invisible long-term toll of megastorms
Long after a big hurricane blows through, its effects hammer the mental-health system.
By CHRISTINE VESTAL 10/12/2017 05:10 AM EDT
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NEW ORLEANS — Brandi Wagner thought she had survived Hurricane Katrina. She hung tough while the storm’s 170-mph winds pummeled her home, and powered through two months of sleeping in a sweltering camper outside the city with her boyfriend’s mother. It was later, after the storm waters had receded and Wagner went back to New Orleans to rebuild her home and her life that she fell apart.
“I didn’t think it was the storm at first. I didn’t really know what was happening to me,” Wagner, now 48, recalls. “We could see the waterline on houses, and rooftop signs with ‘please help us,’ and that big X where dead bodies were found. I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. I was crying all the time, just really losing it.”
Twelve years later, Wagner is disabled and unable to work because of the depression and anxiety she developed in the wake of the 2005 storm. She’s also in treatment for an opioid addiction that developed after she started popping prescription painkillers and drinking heavily to blunt the day-to-day reality of recovering from Katrina.
More than 1,800 people died in Katrina from drowning and other immediate injuries. But public health officials say that, in the aftermath of an extreme weather event like a hurricane, the toll of long-term psychological injuries builds in the months and years that follow, outpacing more immediate injuries and swamping the health care system long after emergency workers go home and shelters shut down.
That’s the rough reality that will soon confront regions affected by this year’s string of destructive hurricanes. As flood waters recede from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria and Nate, and survivors work to rebuild communities in Texas, Florida and the Caribbean, mental health experts warn that the hidden psychological toll will mount over time, expressed in heightened rates of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, domestic violence, divorce, murder and suicide.
Brandi Wagner's home in Lafitte, La., left, and the nearby bayou, Bayou Barataria, right. Below, sandbags line the street across from Wagner's home as Hurricane Nate approached earlier this month. | Bryan Tamowski for POLITICO
Renée Funk, who manages hurricane response teams for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says it has become clear since Katrina that mental illness and substance abuse aren’t just secondary problems—they are the primary long-term effect of natural disasters.
“People have trouble coping with the new normal after a storm,” Funk said. “Many have lost everything, including their jobs. Some may have lost loved ones, and now they have to rebuild their lives. They’re faced with a lot of barriers, including mental illness itself,” she said.
In New Orleans, doctors are still treating the psychological devastation of Katrina. More than 7,000 patients receive care for mental and behavioral health conditions just from the Jefferson Parish Human Services Authority, a state-run mental health clinic in Marrero, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. At least 90 percent of the patients lived through Katrina and many still suffer from storm-related disorders, according to medical director and chief psychiatrist Thomas Hauth, who adds that he and most of his fellow clinicians also suffer from some level of long-term anxiety from the storm.
“Every year about this time, I start checking the National Weather Service at least three times a day,” he said.
These long-term mental health effects of extreme weather are a hidden public health epidemic, one that is expected to strain the U.S. health care system as the intensity and frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, earthquakes and other natural disasters increase in coming decades because of global warming and other planetary shifts.
With climatologists promising more extreme weather across the country, mental and behavioral health systems need to start preparing and expanding dramatically or demand for treatment of the long-term psychological effects of future natural disasters will vastly outstrip the supply of practitioners, said Georges Benjamin, director of the American Public Health Association.
Dr. Thomas Hauth, a psychiatrist, in his office at the Jefferson Parish Human Services Authority in Marrero, La., where he treats residents still suffering from anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental disorders caused or exacerbated by Hurricane Katrina. Hauth and his colleagues also report post-storm anxiety and other conditions. | Bryan Tamowski for POLITICO
“On a blue sky day, our mental health resources are stretched,” said Carol North, researcher and professor of psychiatry at University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. “There’s a lot we don’t know yet, but common sense tells us that more disasters and worse disasters will lead to worse psychological effects.”
”Katrina brain”
For climate change believers, this year’s string of record-breaking Atlantic hurricanes was just a warm-up for what scientists predict will be more frequent extreme weather events in the future.
When an entire city experiences a significant trauma at the same time, as New Orleans did during Katrina and Houston did during Harvey, it can push a lot of people over the edge, said Eric Kramer, another doctor who worked in the Jefferson Parish clinic: “Some people can rely on their inner strength and resilience to get through it, but others can’t.”
In the aftermath of Katrina, many survivors struggled with short-term memory loss and cognitive impairment, a syndrome dubbed “Katrina brain,” according to a report by Ken Sakauye, a University of Tennessee professor of psychiatry who was at Louisiana State University at the time.
Even though more than half the population of New Orleans had evacuated, psychiatric helpline calls increased 61 percent in the months after Katrina, compared with the same period before the storm, death notices increased 25 percent, and the city’s murder rate rose 37 percent, Sakauye wrote.
A year after Katrina, psychiatrist James Barbee reported that many of his patients in New Orleans had deteriorated from post-Katrina anxiety to more serious cases of depression and anxiety. "People are just wearing down," Barbee said. "There was an initial spirit about bouncing back and recovering, but it's diminished over time, as weeks have become months.”
In a longitudinal study comparing the mental health of low-income single moms in New Orleans before and after Katrina, one in five participants reported elevated anxiety and depression that had not returned to pre-storm levels four years later, said Jean Rhodes, study co-author and professor of psychiatry at University of Massachusetts Boston.
Hurricane Katrina killed 1,800 people in 2005, and left behind massive property damage. But publiGetty Imagesc health officials are learning that the longest-lasting damage of several storms is psychological. | Getty Images
For a smaller percentage of people in the study, particularly people with no access to treatment, symptoms of anxiety developed into more serious, chronic conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, the researchers found.
These aren’t cheap conditions to treat. One study cited by the CDC estimated the cost of treating even the short-term effects of anxiety disorders at more than $42 billion annually; double-digit regional leaps in rates of anxiety could cause serious financial strain to patients, employers, insurers and the government.
Vicarious reactions
Some damage can take place outside the storm-hit region. Even for people who have never experienced the raging winds, floods and prolonged power outages of a hurricane, this season’s repeated images of people struggling against the storms on television and other news and social media created unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression nationwide, said Washington, D.C., psychiatrist and environmental activist Lise Van Susteren.
“There is a vicarious reaction. When we see people flooded out of their homes, pets lost, belongings rotting in the streets, and people scared out of their wits, we experience an empathic identification with the victims,” she said.
Brandi Wagner pulls out the medications she must take on a daily basis to control a range of storm-related disorders including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and an addiction to opioids. | Bryan Tamowski for POLITICO
“People come in saying they can’t sleep, they’re drinking too much, they’re having trouble with their kids, their jobs or their marriages are falling apart. They may not know where the anxiety is coming from, but everyone is affected by the stress of climate change.”
The same kind of vicarious reactions were documented after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington and after Hurricane Katrina, particularly in children, said Columbia University pediatrician and disaster preparedness expert Irwin Redlener.
“The mental health effects of natural disasters are really important and vastly overlooked, not only acutely but over the long term,” he said.
Everyone who lives through a major storm experiences some level of anxiety and depression. But for low-income people and those without strong social supports, the symptoms are much worse, said Ronald Kessler, an epidemiologist and disaster policy expert at Harvard Medical School. The same is true for people who already suffered from mental illness or drug or alcohol addiction before the disaster occurred.
Repeated exposure to weather disasters is another risk factor for mental and behavioral disorders. Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, followed by Hurricane Rita less than a month later. Three years after that, Hurricane Gustav hit the Louisiana coast, followed by Hurricane Ike two weeks later.
In September, many who had fled Hurricane Katrina and resettled in Houston had to relive the same horrors all over again, putting them at higher risk for long-term mental health problems.
TOP LEFT: Wagner in her backyard. TOP RIGHT: Wagner's medications. BOTTOM LEFT: Wagner shows off a photo of her son, Sgt. Aaron Briggs, receiving his sergeant badge in a photo on her phone. BOTTOM RIGHT: Wagner's daughter, Jessica Briggs, her grandson, Jeremy Goudeau Jr., and her daughter, Kristina Briggs, at her home in Lafitte, La.. | Bryan Tamowski for POLITICO
But perhaps the greatest risk of adverse mental health reactions to storms occurs when an entire community like New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward is so completely destroyed that people can’t return to normal for months or years, if ever. For those who left and went to live in Houston, Atlanta and other far-flung cities, the dislocation and loss of community was equally harmful, researchers say.
“People are only physically and mentally resilient to a point and then they are either irretrievably injured or they die,” Kessler said. If storms intensify in the future, the kind of devastation parts of New Orleans experienced could become more common, he said.
Psychiatric First Aid
In the past decade, first responders and public health workers began training in a type of mental health first aid that research has shown to be effective in lowering anxiety and reducing the risk that the traumas experienced during a storm will lead to serious mental illness.
Using evidence-based techniques, rescue workers reassure storm survivors that feelings of sadness, anger and fear are normal and that they are likely to go away quickly. But when survivors complain that they’ve been crying nonstop, haven’t slept for days or are having suicidal thoughts, rescue workers are trained to make sure they get more intensive mental health care immediately.
In Houston, for example, teams of doctors, nurses, mental health counselors and other health care professionals offered both physical and mental health services at clinics set up in every storm shelter. The city’s emergency medical director, Davie Persse, said the clinics were so successful that local hospital emergency departments reported no surges in patients with psychiatric distress or minor injuries.
Forced evacuation, whether temporary or permanent, can also trigger psychological problems for people confronted by natural disasters. | Wikimedia Commons
Another important factor in reducing the psychological impacts of a storm is avoiding secondary traumas like being stranded for weeks in the convention center in New Orleans, said Sarah Lowe, a co-author of the Katrina study who teaches psychology at Montclair University in New Jersey. “Repeated traumas can pile up almost the way concussions do.”
“What I’m seeing in Harvey and Irma is there’s more mitigation of secondary trauma,” Lowe said. People were allowed to take their pets to the shelters with them, for example. In Katrina, survivors either had to leave their pets behind or stay in their homes and be more exposed to physical and mental dangers.
Evacuation and relocation
Some public health experts say that we need to start thinking of longer-term solutions to the longer-term problem of severe weather; instead of trying to treat post-storm psychological damage, we should avoid it in the first place by persuading residents to move out of storm-prone areas.
“We do a great job with preparedness and response to hurricanes in this country. It’s an amazing accomplishment,” said Mark Keim, an Atlanta-based consultant who works with the CDC and the National Center for Disaster Medicine and Health. “But as climate change progresses over the next one hundred years, what are we going to do—respond, respond, respond? We can’t afford that anymore.”
According to Keim, much of the rest of the world is already taking that approach:
“Hurricanes can’t be prevented, but by refusing to rebuild in flood plains and developing the infrastructure needed to reduce inland flooding and coastal surges, we can avoid much of the human exposure to the coming storms. That’s where the world is right now in disaster management. Preparedness and response are older approaches.”
Climate change experts agree. To avoid increasing loss of lives from the mega storms expected in the decades ahead, large coastal populations should relocate, researchers say. Mathew Hauer, a demographer at the University of Georgia, recently found that a predicted 6-foot rise in sea levels by 2100 would put 13 million people in more than 300 U.S. coastal counties at risk of major flooding.
But relocating large populations has its own risks. For the hundreds of thousands of New Orleans residents who rebuilt their lives far from home after Katrina, the loss of social ties and the stress of adapting to new surroundings also took a heavy psychological toll, according to recent research at the University of California.
There’s another problem with relocating people from coastal regions. It’s not just hurricanes that are expected to plague the planet as the climate shifts. Wildfires, droughts, inland flooding, tornadoes, earthquakes and other natural disasters are also expected to increase in frequency and intensity, making it hard to find a safe place to put down new roots.
“Whether people decide to stay or decide to move, which means giving up a way of life, the long-term psychological costs of climate change appear to be inevitable,” Harvard’s Kessler said. “We can expect a growing number of people to have to face that dilemma. They’ll be affected by extreme weather one way or another, and they will need psychological help that already is in short supply.”
Christine Vestal is a reporter for Stateline, a nonprofit journalism project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
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AUDIO: 'A threat to the forces of denial and delay': Dr. Michael Mann on science facts after Irma.
We're joined by Penn State University climate scientist and author Dr. Michael E. Mann, to discuss what made Hurricanes Harvey and Irma so historically extraordinary (and deadly) and why now is absolutely the right time, despite claims to the contrary by top officials in the Trump Administration.
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'A Threat to the Forces of Denial and Delay': Dr. Michael Mann on Science Facts After Irma: 'BradCast' 9/13/2017
Guest: Penn State's award-winning climate scientist, author; Also: Dems rack up more special election wins, GOP 'fraud' fraudster face-plants...
By BRAD FRIEDMAN on 9/13/2017, 6:38pm PT
On today's BradCast: Big wins for Democrats, a public face-plant for a renowned GOP "voter fraud" fraudster, more on Irma's historic devastation, and the scientific facts behind what helped to make it so devastating, from someone who actually knows. [Audio link to full show is posted below.]
Before we get to the increasingly disturbing situation on the ground following Hurricane Irma in Florida and elsewhere --- and why that storm and Harvey before it were so terrible in the first place --- a few news items of note today. First up: Democrats took over two different state legislative seats in special elections wins on Tuesday, one in Oklahoma and one in New Hampshire. Both races were in districts that Trump won by very large margins last November. The victories for Dems --- including huge reported vote swings from R to D --- are of a piece with a series of other special elections held so far this year, including four in Oklahoma alone.
In, yes, related news, former President Jimmy Carter offered some noteworthy statements on North Korea that President Donald Trump may wish to notice, and also some words about worldwide democracy and the need for public oversight of ballot counting.
In the meantime, following some wildly misleading claims about stolen elections and "voter fraud" in New Hampshire from Kris Kobach, the vice-chair of Trump's so-called "Election Integrity" Commission and Sec. of State of Kansas, panelists and members of his own commission, including NH's own Sec. of State, blasted the GOP "voter fraud" fraudster, to his face, during the Commission's second public meeting, held on Tuesday in...NH!
While Republicans are very quick to use even the most sketchy threads of "evidence" they can possibly discover to claim that our democracy has fallen victim to a massive Democratic "voter fraud" conspiracy --- and that we must take radical steps to prevent it, even if it means millions of our fellow citizens lose their RIGHT to vote --- there is, apparently, a very different standard for "evidence" when it comes to climate change. On that, decades of peer-reviewed evidence and tens of thousands of studies don't seem to do the trick, for some reason. That evidence, is simply dismissed by the GOP's fossil fuel-funded cronies. Now it's costing the U.S. --- and the planet --- bigly.
After an update on the death toll and deteriorating conditions in some parts of Florida following Hurricane Irma, we're joined by Penn State University climate scientist and author DR. MICHAEL E. MANN, to discuss what made Hurricanes Harvey and Irma so historically extraordinary (and deadly) and why now is absolutely the right time, despite claims to the contrary by top officials in the Trump Administration and their fellow wingnut denialist community, to discuss the growing impact of our climate crisis and the relationship between that and hurricanes, flooding, wild fires, drought and more across the globe.
"In a word, warmth," Mann tells me when I ask him why Harvey and Irma, from a meteorological perspective, were so uniquely devastating. "Warm oceans mean more moisture in the atmosphere, moisture that's available for record rainfall like we saw in Harvey. It also means greater intensification of these storms --- and indeed, we saw the most intense hurricane ever in the open Atlantic, Irma, at a 185 miles per hour."
He notes that "over the last three years, when global ocean temperatures have been at their warmest, we've seen the strongest hurricane ever, globally, which was Patricia in the Pacific a couple of years ago, we have seen, obviously, the strongest storm in the Northern Hemisphere [Irma]. We've also seen the strongest storm in the Southern Hemisphere [Winston]."
"We've warmed the global oceans more than one degree Fahrenheit. That amounts to about a 7% increase in wind speeds. That 7% increase in wind speed means roughly 20% increase in destructive potential. It's not coincidental that we're noticing that. That is not a subtle climate signal. That is a very tangible impact that warming is having on the destructive potential of these storms."
Mann goes on to explain how the U.S. is "falling behind" Europe when it comes to investment, and accurate results, in climate and weather forecasts; responds to critics who use "straw men" and denial to "muddy the waters" and "poison the well"; draws an interesting parallel between Superstorm Sandy and the Sandy Hook mass murder, in response to those who say "now is not the time to discuss climate"; explains why he believes, as a professor of meteorology, there are still so many broadcast meteorologists in the dwindling denier community (and casts some of the blame for that on his own Penn State); and why he feels that recent comments about climate change from Sen. John McCain may offer reason for optimism.
"Ironically, the era of Trump, as adverse as it might feel when it comes to climate action, may ironically be creating a divide within the Republican Party that could end up leading to a governing coalition for action on climate," says the ever optimistic Mann near the end of today's conversation...
Download MP3 or listen to complete show online below...
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"'A Threat to the Forces of Denial and Delay': Dr. Michael Mann on Science Facts After Irma: 'BradCast' 9/13/2017"
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... Ernest A. Canning said on 9/14/2017 @ 4:09 pm PT...
Dr. Mann's analysis was extraordinary and compelling. I only wish it were possible to see it broadcast over a major television network, like MSNBC, during a prime time hour.
Well done, gentlemen!
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... Brad Friedman said on 9/14/2017 @ 6:41 pm PT...
Thank you, Mr. Canning!
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Is Scott Pruitt on the campaign trail?
President Donald Trump's EPA chief is getting a lot of airtime as he travels across the country, causing some strategists to suspect he has higher political aspirations.
President Donald Trump's EPA chief is getting a lot of airtime as he travels across the country, causing some strategists to suspect he has higher political aspirations.
By EMILY HOLDEN
08/21/2017 05:14 AM EDT
Updated 08/18/2017 06:59 PM EDT
Scott Pruitt is pictured. | Getty Images
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt holds up an agency baseball hat as he employees at the agency's headquarters in Washington on Feb. 21. | Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images
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Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt has logged thousands of miles this summer touting his plans to rewrite the Obama administration's environmental regulations — and fueling speculation that he's laying the groundwork for a future political campaign.
The former Oklahoma attorney general — who made a name for himself by launching more than a dozen lawsuits against the Obama administration — has visited 10 states in a few short weeks, hitting local media outlets along the way. His strategy, Beltway operatives say, more resembles a candidate seeking political support than an EPA administrator pressing for regulatory changes.
One conservative talk radio host in Iowa even joked about Pruitt's August trip to the state. "If you're writing a book, you come to Iowa, or you must be running for the presidency," WHO-AM's Simon Conway told Pruitt.
The trips, which have taken Pruitt to 25 mostly Republican-led states, are ostensibly to highlight his efforts to loosen Obama-era water regulations. But he's also spending time with GOP leaders and influential industries and packing in as many media hits as possible, laying out well-rehearsed talking points to bash former President Barack Obama's EPA.
Pruitt has declined to comment on long-running speculation among both Democrats and Republicans that he intends to run for the Senate seat held by Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe, an 82-year-old lawmaker whose fifth term ends in 2020. But the EPA chief’s current travels could help him build the support he needs for such a race, said Drew Edmondson, the former Democratic Oklahoma attorney general whom Pruitt defeated in 2010.
"A Senate race would fundraise in a lot of places besides Oklahoma," said Edmondson, who is running for governor in 2018. "He's doing what he needs to do to keep the oil companies and gas companies liking him, so he has a source of funding should he decide to run."
Pruitt, 49, has done an effective job of publicly elevating his "thankless" Cabinet post, "which would lend itself to assume he has higher political aspirations," said one GOP strategist.
"Whatever he may claim to be, he is a politician with campaign experience," the source said, noting that Pruitt could jump to governor or senator since he's relatively young and EPA probably won't be "his career culmination goal."
Edmondson said political observers in Oklahoma had expected Pruitt to run in 2018 for the House seat that could be vacated by Republican Rep. Jim Bridenstine, "as a holding place until a Senate seat came open." But insiders say he opted against that possibility before becoming EPA chief.
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EPA declined to comment on Pruitt's future but defended his trips, adding that he’s received more than two dozen invitations from elected officials and has plans to visit Montana, Kentucky and other states.
"Unlike the previous administration, which imposed its regulatory regime from Washington, Administrator Pruitt is taking the conversations directly to the states," said EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox. He noted that Pruitt's stop in Iowa included a discussion about water regulations, while in Indiana he highlighted a Superfund site, and in Minnesota he had been invited by Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton.
Pruitt served in the Oklahoma Senate for eight years before becoming the state's attorney general, where he helped build a political network through the Republican Attorneys General Association. During his time chairing the group, it raised at least $2.2 million from energy companies, according to a POLITICO analysis, including from Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Murray Energy, Cloud Peak Energy, Xcel Energy, DTE Energy, Southern Co., SolarCity and trade groups representing the coal, utility and nuclear industries.
If Pruitt does seek elected office, he could be the first EPA chief to make that jump. But former Republican-appointed agency chiefs say that if he is focusing on a future campaign, environmental protection and public health will suffer.
"If you think about this as a steppingstone to some other job ... you can't do it," said Bill Ruckelshaus, who served as EPA's first administrator under President Richard Nixon and later headed the agency under Ronald Reagan.
Running the agency well means asking businesses to spend money on things that reduce their profits but that are important, Ruckelshaus said, which is "not a way to make friends."
"He clearly has not bought into the mission of EPA. It's fairly simple: Protect public health and reduce pollution that impacts the environment," he said. "He is more interested in reducing the regulatory impact."
Previous EPA leaders have frequently made trips to meet state regulators or visit the agency's regional offices, but Pruitt's visits so far skipped those or conducted them at arm's length, with staff sometimes unaware he was in the area.
EPA noted that Pruitt was joined by some regional staff members while visiting Indiana, Missouri, Texas and Colorado. While he didn't go to regional offices when traveling, he "has met with every acting regional administrator, and has attended senior staff meetings where individuals from every regional office are represented," the agency official said, adding that Pruitt has also met with top health and environmental groups.
Pruitt's travel seems to have a different emphasis than that of former administrators, said former George W. Bush EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman, since he's spending more time on television and away from headquarters.
“You’ve got plenty on your plate. You really don’t have a lot of time to go and do the kinds of stuff he’s doing,” said Whitman, a former New Jersey governor. Her most prominent media appearances as EPA administrator came after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, during a series of anthrax attacks and when the Columbia space shuttle disintegrated, she said.
Steve Bannon is pictured. | Getty
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Pruitt has been in local news more than two dozen times as he traveled to eight states carried by President Donald Trump and only two — Colorado and Minnesota — led by Democrats. In Colorado, he toured the site of the Gold King Mine spill, where EPA employees and contractors accidentally released toxic wastewater into a river in 2015. In Minnesota, he met with Dayton, the Democratic governor, who told reporters he didn’t want to be “micromanaged” by a regional EPA office in Chicago.
None of Pruitt's predecessors went on to hold elected office after running EPA. Most have gone to academia, environmental think tanks and lobbying firms, company boards or other federal government roles. And most arrived at EPA with either state environmental agency experience or science backgrounds. A few came from state legislatures, and only Whitman and Mike Leavitt, of Utah, had served as governors.
Washington observers widely expect Pruitt to pursue a Senate seat, although there's no sign that Inhofe, a legend in Oklahoma politics, will depart. Inhofe's office pointed to a 2016 interview in which the senator said he had no plans to retire in 2020.
The Oklahoma governor’s race in 2018 is already a crowded field. Pruitt could be looking to another federal post, like attorney general, or even a run on a presidential ticket, according to some. All eyes in Oklahoma are on the 2018 elections, where Republicans are vying for multiple statewide seats. Some Oklahoma political experts say Pruitt may be biding his time.
“I can tell you that I have not heard anybody in Oklahoma talk about a Senate run for Scott Pruitt,” said Oklahoma GOP political strategist Pat McFerron. He said he’s in touch with Pruitt’s former chief of staff and campaign manager — who haven’t divulged any impending political plans.
“I think it is just his style,” McFerron said. “Maybe he wants to keep doors open.”
Still, McFerron added that if Inhofe decides not to run for reelection, “there’s no doubt Scott Pruitt’s name would be near the top of that list.”
Pruitt has stacked EPA with people connected to Inhofe, who has praised the EPA chief. Chief of staff Ryan Jackson, deputy chief of staff Byron Brown and policy advisers Mandy Gunasekara and Brittany Bolen all worked under Inhofe, as did Susan Bodine, Trump's nominee for EPA enforcement chief, who is awaiting Senate confirmation.
Pruitt has also maintained key personnel with links back to Oklahoma, including three staffers from his AG office and a former campaign aide. He hired law school friend and colleague Ken Wagner as a senior adviser and former SpiritBank executive Albert “Kell” Kelly, who had no prior experience in environmental issues, to lead his Superfund task force.
Geoff Andersen is pictured. | David Butow
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Hiring staff with campaign experience is not uncommon, but Pruitt’s inner circle is dominated by them. Career employees say he is not consulting them on major decisions, relying on his Oklahoma-rooted squad instead.
Still, Andrew Miller, a former Virginia attorney general and energy lobbyist who encouraged Pruitt to be the Republican voice against Obama's environmental regulations, said he would be “astounded” if Pruitt did run for elected office anytime soon.
“This is just inside-the-Beltway gossip,” Miller said. "I see him continuing at EPA as long as he wants to and certainly for the next four years.”
On top of the dozens of local media appearances during his tour, Pruitt is frequently on cable news networks, especially Fox News, and his aggressive political style stands out among Trump’s other Cabinet secretaries who are working to unravel Obama policies.
He said in his Iowa radio interview that his state tour is meant to send the message that “EPA is not intended to be an adversary” and that he wants to empower the states to regulate themselves. But Ruckelshaus said EPA was created because states needed backup.
“Industries would threaten to leave the state if you pushed them too hard on an environmental regulation,” he said.
Pruitt often uses the media exposure to criticize his own agency for its work under the previous administration.
“The last administration said: 'We’re going to use regulatory power to say that certain sectors of our economy were wrong. War on coal. War on natural gas. War on fossil fuels.' Where is that in the statute?” he told Conway. “Where is it that the EPA has authority to declare war in that regard?”
He mentions Obama by name in almost every interview, often blasting the ex-president's climate policies and saying EPA has overstepped its jurisdiction and the Constitution.
Contrary to most scientists, Pruitt says climate change is not an “existential threat” that will “impact our existence as a nation and as humankind."
“An existential threat is Iran. An existential threat is North Korea,” he said in the same interview.
In the run-up to Trump’s decision to leave the Paris climate agreement, Pruitt appeared often on TV to lobby for the U.S. to exit the deal. He’s planning an official program to debate mainstream climate science, which he has suggested could be televised. That would launch him even further into the national spotlight.
Pruitt has also come under fire for spending lots of time at home in Oklahoma, which he defended as necessary for EPA business.
Alex Guillén contributed to this report.
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How Trump is enabling famine.
The president’s love for the despotic regimes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates is perpetuating the crisis.
Last month, eight large private U.S. relief organizations formed an unprecedented alliance to call Americans’ attention to the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II: 20 million people at imminent risk of famine in four countries, including millions of children the United Nations says are “acutely malnourished.” Thinking of the popular anti-famine movements of the 1980s and ’90s, the groups enlisted support from big corporations and rock stars; the hope was to get through to the 85 percent of Americans whom polling showed were unaware of the crisis, and make a dent in the more than $2 billion deficit in funding needed to head off mass starvation.
For the most part, the two-week campaign didn’t work. Officials from the groups say they raised about $3.7 million and got more coverage than they would have working separately. But there was no eruption of public interest; news stories about the famine remain few and far between. The reason is fairly obvious: The continuing Trump circus sucks up so much media oxygen that issues that otherwise would be urgent — such as millions of people starving — are asphyxiated.
The U.N. tried to call attention to the looming hunger crisis in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria in March. Nearly six months later, the grim facts are these: Just 54 percent of the $4.9 billion the U.N. said was needed to head off a catastrophe has been raised. Though aid deliveries have pulled a state in South Sudan formally out of famine, more than half the population there and in Somalia need emergency food assistance, along with 5.2 million people in northeastern Nigeria.
In Yemen, the situation is even more dire: Nearly 7 million people are in danger of starvation, half a million children already are malnourished, and a cholera epidemic is ravishing the country, with half a million cases and nearly 2,000 deaths reported in fewer than four months.
Last month, the U.N. World Food Program fed a record 6 million people in Yemen — but only half got the full ration they needed. “The conditions on the ground are not getting better,” says David Beasley, the program’s executive director. “They are compounding and getting worse.” Meanwhile, he says, “we can’t break through all the noise in the media.”
The worst thing about this situation is not the lack of attention, or even the absence of adequate relief funding. (On the latter, the United States has stepped up reasonably well, thanks to an emergency appropriation by Congress this year of $990 million to fight famine .) The real tragedy is that, notwithstanding an exacerbating drought in the Horn of Africa, all of the hunger is man-made. The terrorist insurgency of Nigeria’s Boko Haram and the civil wars of South Sudan, Somalia and, above all, Yemen explain why millions may yet die of hunger in the coming months.
That’s where the real responsibility of President Trump lies, too. His pathological need to focus attention on himself has created the vortex into which public discourse on vital issues such as this disappears. But his larger offense has been his love affair with the despotic regimes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which are largely responsible for creating — and perpetuating — the food and cholera crises in Yemen.
The problem is this: About 90 percent of food and medicine for Yemenis is imported through a seaport, Hodeida, which is controlled by Yemeni rebels against whom the Saudis and their allies have unsuccessfully waged war for the past 2½ years. In the name of enforcing an arms embargo, the Saudis have blockaded Hodeida from the sea and also forced the closure of the international airport in the capital, Sanaa. Ships carrying food and approved by the U.N. are supposed to be allowed to dock, but in practice are often held up by the Saudis.
The result, says Joel Charny of the Norwegian Refugee Council USA, is that the Yemen crisis “is not about aid or aid dollars.” It’s about the blockade — and the Trump administration is complicit. It is backing the Saudi war effort with intelligence and military supplies and, says Charny, “failing to pressure the Saudis to do basic things that would remediate the situation.”
Two weeks ago, the U.N. Security Council finally took action on this problem, unanimously adopting a statement calling on “all parties” to “facilitate access for essential imports of food.” U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley issued her own broadside, saying that “we must hold governments and armed groups blocking access accountable.” Unfortunately, as Charny puts it, “that is not actually U.S. policy, if you look objectively at what is going on.” In fact, Trump is, in more ways than one, enabling famine.
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Michael Held
Bigger, hotter, faster.
The wildfires of tomorrow will be like nothing we’ve ever seen. But the debates they’ll spark have already been raging for more than a century.
This is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame. It has been edited and condensed.
It was in an almost invisible hole in the Bitterroot Mountains that America’s war with wildfire was born. There, on August 20, 1910, “Big Ed” Pulaski, a ranger with the U.S. Forest Service, led 45 scruffy, untrained firefighters to shelter in the Nicholson mine above the West Fork of Placer Creek when the “Big Blowup,” a fire the size of Connecticut, threatened to incinerate them.
“The forests staggered, rocked, exploded and then shriveled under the holocaust,” Betty Goodwin Spencer, an Idaho historian, recalled of the blaze. “Great red balls of fire rolled up the mountainsides. Crown fires, from 1 to 10 miles wide, streaked with yellow and purple and scarlet, raced through treetops 150 feet from the ground. Bloated bubbles of gas burst murderously into forked and greedy flames. You can’t outrun wind and fire that are traveling 70 miles an hour.”
With Armageddon hot on his heals, Pulaski led his crew and two horses into the mine shaft to escape the inferno he described as having “the roar of a thousand freight trains.” He kept the fire out of the prospector’s hole with water he scooped from the shaft floor with his hat. When some of his panicked firefighters tried to bolt, he pulled his pistol. “The next man who tries to leave the tunnel I will shoot,” he told them.
They all eventually fell unconscious as the inferno sucked the oxygen from the cave. Five never woke up. One survivor, finding Pulaski lying limp at the front of the shaft, announced that he was dead. “Like hell he is” was his now-legendary response.
Today the ranger’s name rings out at every wildfire. The pulaski, a combination axe and hoe that he invented after the ordeal, is the most common tool in the battle against forest fires, so even firefighters who don’t know his story shout out his name on the fire line. The ranger’s legacy looms larger in the philosophy of firefighting that followed the blowup in the Bitterroots. Firefighters on the ground saw their efforts against the Big Blowup as a “complete failure.” The fire killed at least 78 of the men fighting it, reduced much of Wallace, Idaho to ash, and torched parts of half a dozen other towns. Mining camps, farms, and more than 3 million acres of timber burned.
But the fledgling Forest Service, just five years old and already hated in much of the West, chose to focus on the firefighters’ heroic stand, rather than the futility of the battle. The American philosopher William James wrote of extinguishing wildfires as “the moral equivalent of war,” suggesting that American youth be conscripted into an “army enlisted against nature.” One of humanity’s greatest allies was suddenly one of America’s most reviled enemies.
Too many trees
A century after the Big Blowup, America’s fight against wildfire seemed like a victim of its own success. As a nation, Americans have proved to be very capable forest firefighters. We still put out more than 98 percent of the country’s wildfires during our initial attacks on them, but the ones we can’t snuff are bigger, hotter, faster, and more frequent than those we confronted before.
By the time I was on the fire line in 2003, many foresters and firefighters believed that the blazes we couldn’t stop had grown out of the ones that we did. Their message, in fact, became almost as codified into the western mythology of the twenty-first century as those of Pulaski and Smokey Bear during the twentieth: Putting out all those fires but leaving behind the wood, grass, and scrub that otherwise would have burned overloaded our forests with fuel that was driving increasingly explosive fires.
Historically, frequent fires creeping slow and low along the ground devoured scrub, deadfall, small trees, and low branches. Ponderosa pines developed a thick, corklike bark that insulates them from flames, and many large, old ones have “cat face” fire scars and blackened trunks. The flames that marked them didn’t hinder their growth into tall, majestic columns, but removed other vegetation that might have.
Forests in Colorado’s Front Range have missed three, four, or five fire cycles that would have thinned them during the past century, Mike Battaglia, a young, slender researcher with the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station, told me as we headed into the woods above Fort Collins. “A forest, it’s like a lawn,” he said. “You have to cut your lawn every week.” In the ponderosas, fires were effectively the forests’ lawn mowers, hedge clippers, and branch loppers. During the decades when the nation’s firefighters put out every wildfire, the government had effectively fired nature’s gardening crew.
After 100 years of the Forest Service extinguishing the ground fires, some forests in Arizona have 40 times their natural load of trees: An acre that historically had 20 ponderosa pines is now crowded with 800 to 1,200. Ponderosa forests above Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, and Boulder that historically had fewer than 100 trees per acre now have upwards of 500. But just 16 percent of Colorado's forests below about 9,000 feet, where ponderosas are the dominant species, had increased fire severity due to fires extinguished in the past leading to overly thick growth. Most of the higher-elevation forests usually only burn every 100 to 300 years, so the nation’s century of fire suppression could only have interrupted their natural fire cycle once, if at all.
Unfortunately, the areas showing an increase in wildfires over the past century are precisely where the most mountain homes have been built. The canyons on Colorado’s Front Range provide scenic and secluded homesites, but now some are more like slums of trees—overcrowded with evergreens struggling to survive. And it isn’t just firefighting that has left them that way.
When ranchers filled the West with cattle and sheep, the animals grazed down the grasses that carried the mellow ground fires that had thinned many ponderosa forests. Miners tramped the land around their claims to bare soil, with much the same effect. With nothing left to carry fire on the forest floor, trees that would have burned when they were small instead survived and crowded in. As the forests grew denser and darker, they provided a more hospitable environment for Douglas firs, which normally prefer north-facing slopes that are cooler and moister, but in this case followed the shade provided by the thickening stands. Mountain mahogany, Gambel oak, and juniper, which ignite easily and burn fast, pushed in beneath the pines and firs.
Eventually a forest that once had trunks spaced hundreds of feet apart was filled with trees standing shoulder to shoulder, all of them fighting to get enough sun, food, and water. Undergrowth, fallen needles and leaves, and dead wood gathered around their feet. Diseases and pests such as the mountain pine beetle spread through crowded forests like the plague. Dwarf mistletoe infested many boughs, causing witches’ brooms of dry bristles that burned like haystacks.
Playing with fire
In 1963 A. Starker Leopold oversaw a report on wildlife management for the National Park Service that called for reintroducing wildfire to federal woodlands. The son of naturalist Aldo Leopold, he grew up with conservation and wildfire. Starker’s report urged the Park Service to allow natural fires that didn’t threaten development to run their course, and to set fires—prescribed burns—to thin the most overgrown forests. To many at the time, his ideas were the ravings of a madman.
A quarter century later, when lightning-caused fires that the Forest Service allowed to burn charred nearly a third of Yellowstone National Park, politicians and the public responded with outrage. But by time I was fighting fires, their benefit was clear. The forest ecosystems of Yellowstone were healthier a decade after the fires than they were a decade before them.
In 1995, the “Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy and Program Review” noted the need to put fire back on the land to correct what had become known as the “fire deficit” in the nation’s woodlands. “The task before us—reintroducing fire—is both urgent and enormous,” the report said. “Conditions on millions of acres of wildlands increase the probability of large, intense fires beyond any scale yet witnessed. These severe fires will in turn increase the risk to humans, to property, and to the land [with] which our social and economic well-being is so intimately intertwined.”
But the reintroduction of fire hasn’t gone quite as planned. The excess timber and the warming and drying climate have made even carefully planned burns difficult to manage. And during the century in which the nation attempted to exclude fire from forests, they filled with homes. The woodlands that were most overgrown were often those closest to communities, where past fires were most aggressively snuffed. But those are also, of course, where the greatest resistance to prescribed burns and thinning projects lie.
A 2013 study by the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station noted that nearly a third of all U.S. homes were in the wildland-urban interface. So it should come as no surprise that four times more homes burned in U.S. wildfires in the 2010s than in the 1990s. As frightening as those numbers are, they’re likely just the beginning.
After the Big Blowup of 1910 inspired America to try to extinguish every wildfire in the country, foresters in the 2010s were finding that many of the nation’s efforts to put fire back into every forest were just as misguided. Colorado’s Front Range, for example, includes not just fire-starved ponderosa pine forests, but a much larger proportion of high country forests dominated by lodgepole pine, subalpine fir, and spruce forests, arid mesas of piñons and junipers, and even ponderosas mixed with other conifers higher in the mountains. Many of them always had big, intense wildfires. So the lesson isn’t to stop thinning and burning the woods, but to focus those treatments where they will do the most good — overgrown ponderosa forests adjacent to homes and other development.
Heated debate
There are two camps battling in the ash of the past decade’s epic fire seasons. On one side, fire ecologists see flames as being as much a part of the forests as the trees, and believe that allowing natural fires to burn will heal those forests and keep them healthy. Firefighting, they say, should focus on protecting homes, watersheds, and infrastructure, while blazes in more remote woodlands should be allowed to run their course.
Humans don’t want intense blazes near their homes, but other plants and animals depend on them. Even the biggest and hottest fires leave pockets of slightly burnt or unburnt vegetation. Foresters refer to that pattern of lower- and higher-intensity burns as a “mosaic.” The right mix leads to a healthier forest with a variety of habitats for animals, more diverse vegetation, and a cleaner and more efficient watershed. In moderately burnt areas, seedlings can grow faster than they would have if the fire had not come through at all, while areas cooked by high-intensity fires may not show green for years.
“Snag forests”—remnants of severe fires in which only a few burnt trunks still stand—are a critical habitat for many species. Black-backed woodpeckers, for instance, are dependent on the charred trees in intensely burnt forests for their nests and the insects they eat. In the Northwest, reductions in the number of severely burnt forests over the past century led to declines in the woodpecker’s population.
On the other side of the debate, an alliance often called the “fire-industrial complex” believes that timber harvests and grazing animals can thin the woods, while investments in more aggressive firefighting and bigger and better technologies can protect the valuable resources that related industries depend on, as well as the communities spreading fast into the forests.
While judicious logging and grazing can reduce the amount of fuel available to burn in the forests, they can also increase fire activity. Timber interests prefer to harvest large trees, which are more profitable, but these are the very trees that make forests resilient to wildfire. Small trees and brush, the removal of which improves the health and lowers the flammability of the forests, hold little value. Debris from logging activities, known as slash, can fuel fires if it isn’t cleaned up properly. New logging roads allow more people into the woods, which leads to more campfires, more sparks from vehicles, and more flashes from firearms to ignite blazes.
Interestingly, although the nation’s investment in fighting wildfires has exploded, so have the frequency and intensity of those fires. “I’ve had firefighters tell me, ‘It’s like dumping dollars on the fire,’ ” said George Wuerthner, an ecologist who edited the book Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy. Private companies supply everything from firefighters and bulldozers to caterers and mobile shower facilities for the fire camps. Most don’t get paid if they’re not actively fighting a fire, so they lobby to fight as many fires as they can.
“There will be an increasing polarization of this debate,” Crystal Kolden, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Idaho who focuses on wildfire, told me. “Science suggests that we should let more of these fires burn.” But the terror that large wildfires inspire, she said, allows profit to trump science.
A warmer, drier west
The journal Ecosphere added fuel to a different fire when it published a study showing that changing precipitation patterns and increasing temperatures brought on by global warming would result in an increase in wildfires across more than 60 percent of the Earth’s land by the end of the century. June 2012, the warmest June on record in Colorado, had temperatures 6.4 degrees above average. “The conditions we saw in 2012 will be an average year in 2030,” Nolan Doesken, Colorado’s state climatologist, told me. “And a hotter Colorado is a more-vulnerable-to-wildfire Colorado.”
Similarly, in 2015, Alaska had its hottest May in 91 years. The next month 1.8 million acres burned there in just 12 days, nearly twice the previous record for acres burned over an entire June. Some 320 fires burned across the state, charring nearly half a million acres in a single day.
While the increasing acreage in flames was scary, what was actually burning was just as frightening, if less dramatic. In addition to vast evergreen forests, the fires burned deep into tundra and permafrost, which hold about twice the amount of carbon as is already in the atmosphere, as well as huge stores of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas. One study showed that 60 percent of the climate-warming gases released in a large Alaska fire came not from burning trees and vegetation, but from the combustion of organic material in the soil.
With the wildfires themselves adding huge amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and thus warming the climate, they’ll likely drive even more fires.
Fighting tomorrow's fires
The seed of mythology planted a century ago in the wreckage of the Big Blowup fire grew into a deeply rooted tree with myriad legends branching off of it. One was that we could eradicate natural fire from forests and fields as if it were an unwanted pest. Another, written in the sky over the flames, convinced the public and politicians that planes and retardant could contain every forest fire. Yet another was that new technologies—better fire shelters, more powerful computers—could allow men and women to stand up to conflagrations that were growing larger, faster, and hotter. Then there was the dogma that loggers and grazing animals could take the place of flames in maintaining the forest. And finally there was the delusion that we could build our homes ever deeper into the nation’s most flammable landscapes without facing any consequences.
While the recent deaths of firefighters in wildland fires—like the 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots in 2013 or the 53 who have succumbed since then—trimmed a few branches from that tangled tree of legends, it could save lives and homes in the future. Cutting down that towering tree altogether, however, will require America to see past the fantasies inspired by the dancing flames.
Excerpted from MEGAFIRE: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame by Michael Kodas. Copyright © 2017 by Michael Kodas. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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This technology could stop the world’s deadliest animal.
The capabilities of “gene drive” are thrilling—and also terrifying.
Not long ago, Bill Gates, whose family foundation has spent billions of dollars battling diseases around the globe, noted in his blog that the deadliest animals on the planet are not sharks or snakes or even humans, but mosquitoes. Technically, the bloodsuckers merely host our most dangerous creatures. Anopheles mosquitoes can incubate the protozoae responsible for malaria—a stubborn plague that inspired the DDT treatment of millions of US homes and the literal draining of American swamps during the 1940s to shrink the insects’ breeding grounds. Malaria is now rare in the United States, but it infected an estimated 212 million people around the world in 2015, killing 429,000—mostly kids under five.
Dengue, which infects up to 100 million people worldwide each year, is spread largely by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which thrive along our Gulf Coast and also are capable of transmitting the related viruses Zika, chikungunya, and yellow fever. Of the millions infected, roughly 500,000 dengue victims develop an excruciatingly painful “break-bone fever”—according to Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague, “dengue” derives from the Swahili phrase ki denga pepo, “it is a sudden overtaking by a spirit”—and tens of thousands die.
West Nile virus, spread by Culex mosquitoes, has killed more than 2,000 Americans since 1999, primarily in California, Colorado, and Texas. Our latest headache, Zika, produces ghastly brain defects in the infants of infected mothers and neurological symptoms in some adults. Puerto Rico has been ravaged by more than 35,000 mosquito-borne Zika cases since 2015, not to mention periodic dengue outbreaks that afflict tens of thousands of people.
What if we could make all of this go away?
We do, in fact, have a weapon that could end the mosquito’s reign of terror. It’s called “gene drive,” and its implications are thrilling—and also kind of terrifying.
Evolution is a numbers game. Say you were to engineer a lab-modified gene into an animal embryo. By the rules of inheritance, that anomaly would be passed along to roughly half the creature’s offspring. Assuming the new gene didn’t offer any survival advantage (or disadvantage), it would be inherited by about a quarter of the subsequent generation and then an eighth and a sixteenth, and so on—until it became the genetic equivalent of radio static.
Gene drive upends that calculus. Lab-tested so far in yeast, fruit flies, and mosquitoes, this powerful new technique guarantees that a modified genetic trait is inherited by virtually all a creature’s offspring and all their offspring. After a while, every individual in the population carries the modification.
This wouldn’t work in people, thankfully—a short reproductive cycle and plenty of offspring are required for gene drives to spread effectively. But one could build, for instance, a drive targeting Aedes mosquitoes that leaves their offspring unable to reproduce, or one that makes Anopheles mosquitoes unable to transmit malaria. You could design a drive to control a stubborn crop pest or to render white-footed mice incapable of acting as a vessel by which ticks pick up and spread Lyme disease.
If used with care, gene drive could save millions of lives and billions of dollars. It could reduce pesticide use, help weed out nasty invasive species, and prevent tremendous human suffering. Then again, it could have unintended social and ecological consequences—or be hijacked for malevolent purposes.
The concept of a gene drive has been around for decades. In a 2003 paper, the British geneticist Austin Burt—inspired by naturally occurring “selfish” genes that copy themselves around the genome with the aid of enzymes that cut the DNA at precise locations—suggested that harnessing this ability and improving upon it would allow scientists to engineer natural populations, with an eye, for instance, toward preventing the spread of malaria.
Burt’s insight wasn’t practical, though, prior to the fairly recent invention of a breakthrough technique called CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. With this innovation, a scientist uses customized ribonucleic acid (RNA) guide sequences to deliver a molecular scissors (an enzyme called Cas9) to a precise spot on a chromosome. The enzyme snips the double helix, prompting the cell’s DNA-repair machinery to kick in and patch things up—and in the process replacing the wild-type gene at that location with a lab-engineered DNA sequence. (Here’s one simple diagram.)
One spring day in 2013, about a decade after Burt’s paper appeared, a 30-year-old researcher named Kevin Esvelt was out walking in the Boston-area greenbelt known as the Emerald Necklace, pondering his next move. Esvelt, a post-doctoral fellow working with the renowned Harvard geneticist George Church, had ruled out working on the development of new CRISPR techniques. “The field had become so crowded,” he recalls via email, “it seemed likely almost anything I tried would be pursued by at least three other labs.”
As he walked along, Esvelt idly wondered whether any of the greenbelt’s wild creatures would end up being gene-edited in the decades to come. You could do it, of course, by introducing the CRISPR elements into wild-animal embryos. But why bother? The modified genes would become less and less prevalent with each generation of offspring. Natural selection would eventually weed them out of the population entirely.
And that’s when it hit him: Scientists had been putting the CRISPR tools into their target cells as separate pieces. What if you introduced them into the embryos as a single, heritable element? Those creatures and their descendants—all of them—would retain the gene-editing ability in their DNA. The system would be self-propagating. In short, you could rig nature’s game so your gene would win every time!
Esvelt was practically giddy with the possibilities. “The first day was total elation,” he told me. He found Burt’s paper and began fantasizing about all the lives gene drive might save. But the elation didn’t last long. A mistake—or a deliberate act—he soon realized, would alter an entire species. An experimental drive could escape into the wild before society agreed that it was okay. Perhaps gene drive could even be used as a weapon of sorts—a means for sowing havoc. “Once it hit me,” he recalls, “well, there was a flash of pure terror, followed by an obsessive evaluation of potential misuses.” Like Enrico Fermi, the scientist who demonstrated the first nuclear chain reaction back in 1942—Esvelt would be letting a very big cat out of the bag.
He took his ideas and concerns to his mentor, George Church. A scientist’s usual first instinct is to test an exciting hypothesis right away to see whether it’s viable, and then be the first to press with a blockbuster paper. This felt different. “We decided not to immediately test it in the lab—not because we couldn’t do it safely, but because we felt that no technology like this should be developed behind closed doors,” Esvelt says. “The question was whether it was safe to tell the world.” At Church’s urging, they brought on Jeantine Lunshof, an ethicist, and Ken Oye, a social scientist and policy expert: “Ken’s first words after I described the probable capabilities were not publishable.”
The researchers determined that their best course was to go public before doing any experiments. They solicited feedback from fellow molecular biologists, ecologists, risk analysts, public policy and national security experts, and representatives of environmental nonprofits. Only then, in July 2014, did they publish a pair of papers on gene drive’s uses and policy implications.
This summer, a group of researchers that consults for the federal government was tasked with analyzing the technique’s potential risks—including the possibility that it could be used for biowarfare. “The range of nefarious possibilities based on genetically engineered microorganisms is already vast,” Steven Block, an expert in bioterror defense at Stanford University, told me in an email. “The right question to ask is whether a hypothetical gene-drive-based bioweapon, which is based on multicellular organisms, would afford any specific advantages over something based on microorganisms. Would it be more powerful? Cheaper? Easier to construct? Would it be more accessible to an adversary? Would it afford any special ‘desirable’ properties as a weapon, from either a strategic or tactical perspective? I’d argue that, at least for the time being, gene drive seems to have done little to change the lay of the land.”
Accidents, mistakes, and unsanctioned releases are a separate concern. But Esvelt and his peers realized, to their great relief, that gene drives can be overwritten; they spread slowly enough through a population and are easy enough to detect, Esvelt says, that researchers should be able to stop a rogue drive using something called an “immunizing reversal drive” that can cut up the engineered sequence and restore the original genes. (He and Church have demonstrated the reversal process in yeast.) In any case, he says, it would be “difficult to imagine any possible combination of side-effects worse than a disease like malaria.”
Over the past couple of years, several labs have proved that gene drives work as hypothesized. The next step is to convince society they can be tested safely. Each drive is different, so potential risks and benefits have to be weighed on a case-by-case basis. But one big-picture problem is that wild creatures don’t respect human boundaries. A drive could easily scamper or fly or tunnel across borders and into areas where it hasn’t been sanctioned by local authorities. And that, Esvelt says, could trigger “international disputes or even wars.”
In his new position as head of the Sculpting Evolution group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, Esvelt is working on gene-drive variations that can limit the spread of the engineered genes to a given number of generations. But diplomacy will be needed regardless. “For malaria, the case for an international agreement is obvious,” Esvelt says. Ditto the New World screwworm, whose “existence in the wild is an atrocity from an animal welfare perspective—it literally exists by eating higher mammals alive, causing excruciating agony.”
In 2015, Austin Burt and his collaborators unveiled a gene drive designed to decimate populations of the African malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae by rendering all female offspring sterile, although for statistical reasons, it is “quite implausible” for a gene drive system to completely wipe out a problematic species, Esvelt says. “Suppress a population, sure. Locally eliminate, possibly. But extinction? Not by itself.”
Anthony James, a geneticist at the University of California-Irvine, opted to target the disease directly. In 2015, he and his colleagues lab-tested a drive that enlists a pair of synthetic antibodies to disable malaria in the gut of the South Asian mosquito Anopheles stephensi. The dual attack—which targets two distinct phases of the parasite’s life cycle—should be all but impossible for the organism to overcome. In the highly unlikely event that these antibodies were to get into another insect species, they shouldn’t cause any problems. And because the mosquito population remains intact, their predators won’t lack for food.
James says his malaria drive will be ready for field tests within two years—either in huge outdoor cages or within a naturally confined environment such as an island. But is humanity ready to allow it? “It’s all new stuff. This is the problem. There’s no pathway,” he says. Securing permission to move forward with testing will depend entirely on the local mood and regulatory situation. As for deploying gene drive on a species-wide scale? Esvelt is skeptical that nations would accept wild releases without constraints in place that would limit their scope.
One way or the other, something has to change on the mosquito front. Conventional control methods—monitoring and education, poisons, door-to-door efforts to eliminate standing water—aren’t working. Poor countries in particular lack the resources to keep the bugs at bay, and because insects and microorganisms evolve so rapidly, our chemical weapons are rapidly losing their effectiveness. According to Bill Reisen, a retired UC-Davis mosquito expert, California mosquitoes can now tolerate compounds from three major families of insecticides that were once used to kill them: “The opportunities for control are becoming progressively limited.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that Plasmodium falciparum, the world’s deadliest malaria parasite, has developed resistance to “nearly all” antimalarial drugs.
A Zika vaccine seems to be on the horizon, but dengue remains a frustratingly elusive target for vaccine developers. UC-Davis geneticist Greg Lanzaro told me last year that, were it solely up to him, he would deploy gene drive as soon as scientifically feasible to beat back the Aedes mosquitoes that spread these diseases. Esvelt has heard similar sentiments from peers in several fields. “As a scientist, it’s hard to accept nontechnical limitations, especially when we could seemingly save so many lives if those constraints somehow magically vanished,” he says. “But they won’t.”
One thing is for sure: “The first effort has to be an unqualified success,” James says. “If there’s a trial and it’s a disaster—meaning it doesn’t prevent an epidemic—the technology is going to be set back.” Esvelt points to Jesse Gelsinger, an 18-year-old whose death during a 1999 gene therapy trial stifled progress in that field for a decade or more. “An accident involving a CRISPR gene drive—which would be viewed as reckless scientists accidentally turning an entire species into GMOs—would almost certainly have similar effects,” he says. And in the case of malaria, the delay “would likely result in the otherwise preventable deaths of millions of children.”
So he’s willing to wait to get it right. Indeed, in Esvelt’s view, gene drive is so existentially powerful that it demands a new era of scientific transparency. If researchers don’t rethink their longtime custom of competing behind closed doors, “we are likely to open extremely dangerous technological boxes without even realizing it.” A deeply collaborative approach with preregistered experiments, he says, would help scientists identify unforeseen dangers and ensure that those “boxes remain closed until we can develop countermeasures.” Such a radical departure from the current culture of secrecy would require nothing short of a sea change in the scientific community. But it might be worth the effort. As Esvelt puts it, “The greatest potential application of gene drive is to engineer the scientific ecosystem.”
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The uninhabitable Earth.
It is, I promise, worse than you think.
I. ‘Doomsday’
Peering beyond scientific reticence.
It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.
The Doomsday vault is fine, for now: The structure has been secured and the seeds are safe. But treating the episode as a parable of impending flooding missed the more important news. Until recently, permafrost was not a major concern of climate scientists, because, as the name suggests, it was soil that stayed permanently frozen. But Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful. In other words, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over.
Maybe you know that already — there are alarming stories every day, like last month’s satellite data showing the globe warming, since 1998, more than twice as fast as scientists had thought. Or the news from Antarctica this past May, when a crack in an ice shelf grew 11 miles in six days, then kept going; the break now has just three miles to go — by the time you read this, it may already have met the open water, where it will drop into the sea one of the biggest icebergs ever, a process known poetically as “calving.”
But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings; the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past; our uncertainty about uncertainty, which the climate writer Naomi Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing as though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible; the way we assume climate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere; the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers; the discomfort of considering a problem that is very difficult, if not impossible, to solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear. But aversion arising from fear is a form of denial, too.
In between scientific reticence and science fiction is science itself. This article is the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule.
The present tense of climate change — the destruction we’ve already baked into our future — is horrifying enough. Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade. Two degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold of catastrophe: tens of millions of climate refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues serial reports, often called the “gold standard” of climate research; the most recent one projects us to hit four degrees of warming by the beginning of the next century, should we stay the present course. But that’s just a median projection. The upper end of the probability curve runs as high as eight degrees — and the authors still haven’t figured out how to deal with that permafrost melt. The IPCC reports also don’t fully account for the albedo effect (less ice means less reflected and more absorbed sunlight, hence more warming); more cloud cover (which traps heat); or the dieback of forests and other flora (which extract carbon from the atmosphere). Each of these promises to accelerate warming, and the geological record shows that temperature can shift as much as ten degrees or more in a single decade. The last time the planet was even four degrees warmer, Peter Brannen points out in The Ends of the World, his new history of the planet’s major extinction events, the oceans were hundreds of feet higher.*
The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating. This is what Stephen Hawking had in mind when he said, this spring, that the species needs to colonize other planets in the next century to survive, and what drove Elon Musk, last month, to unveil his plans to build a Mars habitat in 40 to 100 years. These are nonspecialists, of course, and probably as inclined to irrational panic as you or I. But the many sober-minded scientists I interviewed over the past several months — the most credentialed and tenured in the field, few of them inclined to alarmism and many advisers to the IPCC who nevertheless criticize its conservatism — have quietly reached an apocalyptic conclusion, too: No plausible program of emissions reductions alone can prevent climate disaster.
Over the past few decades, the term “Anthropocene” has climbed out of academic discourse and into the popular imagination — a name given to the geologic era we live in now, and a way to signal that it is a new era, defined on the wall chart of deep history by human intervention. One problem with the term is that it implies a conquest of nature (and even echoes the biblical “dominion”). And however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have already ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. That is what Wallace Smith Broecker, the avuncular oceanographer who coined the term “global warming,” means when he calls the planet an “angry beast.” You could also go with “war machine.” Each day we arm it more.
II. Heat Death
The bahraining of New York.
Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having to continually cool off, like panting dogs. For that, the temperature needs to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing heat off the skin so the engine can keep pumping. At seven degrees of warming, that would become impossible for large portions of the planet’s equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem; in the jungles of Costa Rica, for instance, where humidity routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when it’s over 105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal. And the effect would be fast: Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out.
Climate-change skeptics point out that the planet has warmed and cooled many times before, but the climate window that has allowed for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history. At 11 or 12 degrees of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat. Things almost certainly won’t get that hot this century, though models of unabated emissions do bring us that far eventually. This century, and especially in the tropics, the pain points will pinch much more quickly even than an increase of seven degrees. The key factor is something called wet-bulb temperature, which is a term of measurement as home-laboratory-kit as it sounds: the heat registered on a thermometer wrapped in a damp sock as it’s swung around in the air (since the moisture evaporates from a sock more quickly in dry air, this single number reflects both heat and humidity). At present, most regions reach a wet-bulb maximum of 26 or 27 degrees Celsius; the true red line for habitability is 35 degrees. What is called heat stress comes much sooner.
Actually, we’re about there already. Since 1980, the planet has experienced a 50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or extreme heat; a bigger increase is to come. The five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002, and soon, the IPCC warns, simply being outdoors that time of year will be unhealthy for much of the globe. Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today. As Joseph Romm has put it in his authoritative primer Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain “would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.” The high-end IPCC estimate, remember, is two degrees warmer still. By the end of the century, the World Bank has estimated, the coolest months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century. Air-conditioning can help but will ultimately only add to the carbon problem; plus, the climate-controlled malls of the Arab emirates aside, it is not remotely plausible to wholesale air-condition all the hottest parts of the world, many of them also the poorest. And indeed, the crisis will be most dramatic across the Middle East and Persian Gulf, where in 2015 the heat index registered temperatures as high as 163 degrees Fahrenheit. As soon as several decades from now, the hajj will become physically impossible for the 2 million Muslims who make the pilgrimage each year.
It is not just the hajj, and it is not just Mecca; heat is already killing us. In the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population has chronic kidney disease, including over a quarter of the men, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago. With dialysis, which is expensive, those with kidney failure can expect to live five years; without it, life expectancy is in the weeks. Of course, heat stress promises to pummel us in places other than our kidneys, too. As I type that sentence, in the California desert in mid-June, it is 121 degrees outside my door. It is not a record high.
III. The End of Food
Praying for cornfields in the tundra.
Climates differ and plants vary, but the basic rule for staple cereal crops grown at optimal temperature is that for every degree of warming, yields decline by 10 percent. Some estimates run as high as 15 or even 17 percent. Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, we may have as many as 50 percent more people to feed and 50 percent less grain to give them. And proteins are worse: It takes 16 calories of grain to produce just a single calorie of hamburger meat, butchered from a cow that spent its life polluting the climate with methane farts.
Pollyannaish plant physiologists will point out that the cereal-crop math applies only to those regions already at peak growing temperature, and they are right — theoretically, a warmer climate will make it easier to grow corn in Greenland. But as the pathbreaking work by Rosamond Naylor and David Battisti has shown, the tropics are already too hot to efficiently grow grain, and those places where grain is produced today are already at optimal growing temperature — which means even a small warming will push them down the slope of declining productivity. And you can’t easily move croplands north a few hundred miles, because yields in places like remote Canada and Russia are limited by the quality of soil there; it takes many centuries for the planet to produce optimally fertile dirt.
Drought might be an even bigger problem than heat, with some of the world’s most arable land turning quickly to desert. Precipitation is notoriously hard to model, yet predictions for later this century are basically unanimous: unprecedented droughts nearly everywhere food is today produced. By 2080, without dramatic reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought, much worse than the American dust bowl ever was. The same will be true in Iraq and Syria and much of the rest of the Middle East; some of the most densely populated parts of Australia, Africa, and South America; and the breadbasket regions of China. None of these places, which today supply much of the world’s food, will be reliable sources of any. As for the original dust bowl: The droughts in the American plains and Southwest would not just be worse than in the 1930s, a 2015 NASA study predicted, but worse than any droughts in a thousand years — and that includes those that struck between 1100 and 1300, which “dried up all the rivers East of the Sierra Nevada mountains” and may have been responsible for the death of the Anasazi civilization.
Remember, we do not live in a world without hunger as it is. Far from it: Most estimates put the number of undernourished at 800 million globally. In case you haven’t heard, this spring has already brought an unprecedented quadruple famine to Africa and the Middle East; the U.N. has warned that separate starvation events in Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Yemen could kill 20 million this year alone.
IV. Climate Plagues
What happens when the bubonic ice melts?
Rock, in the right spot, is a record of planetary history, eras as long as millions of years flattened by the forces of geological time into strata with amplitudes of just inches, or just an inch, or even less. Ice works that way, too, as a climate ledger, but it is also frozen history, some of which can be reanimated when unfrozen. There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years — in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice.
The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million — about 5 percent of the world’s population and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.
Experts caution that many of these organisms won’t actually survive the thaw and point to the fastidious lab conditions under which they have already reanimated several of them — the 32,000-year-old “extremophile” bacteria revived in 2005, an 8 million-year-old bug brought back to life in 2007, the 3.5 million–year–old one a Russian scientist self-injected just out of curiosity — to suggest that those are necessary conditions for the return of such ancient plagues. But already last year, a boy was killed and 20 others infected by anthrax released when retreating permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the bacteria at least 75 years earlier; 2,000 present-day reindeer were infected, too, carrying and spreading the disease beyond the tundra.
What concerns epidemiologists more than ancient diseases are existing scourges relocated, rewired, or even re-evolved by warming. The first effect is geographical. Before the early-modern period, when adventuring sailboats accelerated the mixing of peoples and their bugs, human provinciality was a guard against pandemic. Today, even with globalization and the enormous intermingling of human populations, our ecosystems are mostly stable, and this functions as another limit, but global warming will scramble those ecosystems and help disease trespass those limits as surely as Cortés did. You don’t worry much about dengue or malaria if you are living in Maine or France. But as the tropics creep northward and mosquitoes migrate with them, you will. You didn’t much worry about Zika a couple of years ago, either.
As it happens, Zika may also be a good model of the second worrying effect — disease mutation. One reason you hadn’t heard about Zika until recently is that it had been trapped in Uganda; another is that it did not, until recently, appear to cause birth defects. Scientists still don’t entirely understand what happened, or what they missed. But there are things we do know for sure about how climate affects some diseases: Malaria, for instance, thrives in hotter regions not just because the mosquitoes that carry it do, too, but because for every degree increase in temperature, the parasite reproduces ten times faster. Which is one reason that the World Bank estimates that by 2050, 5.2 billion people will be reckoning with it.
V. Unbreathable Air
A rolling death smog that suffocates millions.
Our lungs need oxygen, but that is only a fraction of what we breathe. The fraction of carbon dioxide is growing: It just crossed 400 parts per million, and high-end estimates extrapolating from current trends suggest it will hit 1,000 ppm by 2100. At that concentration, compared to the air we breathe now, human cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.
Other stuff in the hotter air is even scarier, with small increases in pollution capable of shortening life spans by ten years. The warmer the planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by mid-century, Americans will likely suffer a 70 percent increase in unhealthy ozone smog, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has projected. By 2090, as many as 2 billion people globally will be breathing air above the WHO “safe” level; one paper last month showed that, among other effects, a pregnant mother’s exposure to ozone raises the child’s risk of autism (as much as tenfold, combined with other environmental factors). Which does make you think again about the autism epidemic in West Hollywood.
Already, more than 10,000 people die each day from the small particles emitted from fossil-fuel burning; each year, 339,000 people die from wildfire smoke, in part because climate change has extended forest-fire season (in the U.S., it’s increased by 78 days since 1970). By 2050, according to the U.S. Forest Service, wildfires will be twice as destructive as they are today; in some places, the area burned could grow fivefold. What worries people even more is the effect that would have on emissions, especially when the fires ravage forests arising out of peat. Peatland fires in Indonesia in 1997, for instance, added to the global CO2 release by up to 40 percent, and more burning only means more warming only means more burning. There is also the terrifying possibility that rain forests like the Amazon, which in 2010 suffered its second “hundred-year drought” in the space of five years, could dry out enough to become vulnerable to these kinds of devastating, rolling forest fires — which would not only expel enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere but also shrink the size of the forest. That is especially bad because the Amazon alone provides 20 percent of our oxygen.
Then there are the more familiar forms of pollution. In 2013, melting Arctic ice remodeled Asian weather patterns, depriving industrial China of the natural ventilation systems it had come to depend on, which blanketed much of the country’s north in an unbreathable smog. Literally unbreathable. A metric called the Air Quality Index categorizes the risks and tops out at the 301-to-500 range, warning of “serious aggravation of heart or lung disease and premature mortality in persons with cardiopulmonary disease and the elderly” and, for all others, “serious risk of respiratory effects”; at that level, “everyone should avoid all outdoor exertion.” The Chinese “airpocalypse” of 2013 peaked at what would have been an Air Quality Index of over 800. That year, smog was responsible for a third of all deaths in the country.
VI. Perpetual War
The violence baked into heat.
Climatologists are very careful when talking about Syria. They want you to know that while climate change did produce a drought that contributed to civil war, it is not exactly fair to saythat the conflict is the result of warming; next door, for instance, Lebanon suffered the same crop failures. But researchers like Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang have managed to quantify some of the non-obvious relationships between temperature and violence: For every half-degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. In climate science, nothing is simple, but the arithmetic is harrowing: A planet five degrees warmer would have at least half again as many wars as we do today. Overall, social conflict could more than double this century.
This is one reason that, as nearly every climate scientist I spoke to pointed out, the U.S. military is obsessed with climate change: The drowning of all American Navy bases by sea-level rise is trouble enough, but being the world’s policeman is quite a bit harder when the crime rate doubles. Of course, it’s not just Syria where climate has contributed to conflict. Some speculate that the elevated level of strife across the Middle East over the past generation reflects the pressures of global warming — a hypothesis all the more cruel considering that warming began accelerating when the industrialized world extracted and then burned the region’s oil.
What accounts for the relationship between climate and conflict? Some of it comes down to agriculture and economics; a lot has to do with forced migration, already at a record high, with at least 65 million displaced people wandering the planet right now. But there is also the simple fact of individual irritability. Heat increases municipal crime rates, and swearing on social media, and the likelihood that a major-league pitcher, coming to the mound after his teammate has been hit by a pitch, will hit an opposing batter in retaliation. And the arrival of air-conditioning in the developed world, in the middle of the past century, did little to solve the problem of the summer crime wave.
VII. Permanent Economic Collapse
Dismal capitalism in a half-poorer world.
The murmuring mantra of global neoliberalism, which prevailed between the end of the Cold War and the onset of the Great Recession, is that economic growth would save us from anything and everything.
But in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, a growing number of historians studying what they call “fossil capitalism” have begun to suggest that the entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly in the 18th century, is not the result of innovation or trade or the dynamics of global capitalism but simply our discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power — a onetime injection of new “value” into a system that had previously been characterized by global subsistence living. Before fossil fuels, nobody lived better than their parents or grandparents or ancestors from 500 years before, except in the immediate aftermath of a great plague like the Black Death, which allowed the lucky survivors to gobble up the resources liberated by mass graves. After we’ve burned all the fossil fuels, these scholars suggest, perhaps we will return to a “steady state” global economy. Of course, that onetime injection has a devastating long-term cost: climate change.
The most exciting research on the economics of warming has also come from Hsiang and his colleagues, who are not historians of fossil capitalism but who offer some very bleak analysis of their own: Every degree Celsius of warming costs, on average, 1.2 percent of GDP (an enormous number, considering we count growth in the low single digits as “strong”). This is the sterling work in the field, and their median projection is for a 23 percent loss in per capita earning globally by the end of this century (resulting from changes in agriculture, crime, storms, energy, mortality, and labor).
Tracing the shape of the probability curve is even scarier: There is a 12 percent chance that climate change will reduce global output by more than 50 percent by 2100, they say, and a 51 percent chance that it lowers per capita GDP by 20 percent or more by then, unless emissions decline. By comparison, the Great Recession lowered global GDP by about 6 percent, in a onetime shock; Hsiang and his colleagues estimate a one-in-eight chance of an ongoing and irreversible effect by the end of the century that is eight times worse.
The scale of that economic devastation is hard to comprehend, but you can start by imagining what the world would look like today with an economy half as big, which would produce only half as much value, generating only half as much to offer the workers of the world. It makes the grounding of flights out of heat-stricken Phoenix last month seem like pathetically small economic potatoes. And, among other things, it makes the idea of postponing government action on reducing emissions and relying solely on growth and technology to solve the problem an absurd business calculation.
Every round-trip ticket on flights from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.
VIII. Poisoned Oceans
Sulfide burps off the skeleton coast.
That the sea will become a killer is a given. Barring a radical reduction of emissions, we will see at least four feet of sea-level rise and possibly ten by the end of the century. A third of the world’s major cities are on the coast, not to mention its power plants, ports, navy bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshlands, and rice-paddy empires, and even those above ten feet will flood much more easily, and much more regularly, if the water gets that high. At least 600 million people live within ten meters of sea level today.
But the drowning of those homelands is just the start. At present, more than a third of the world’s carbon is sucked up by the oceans — thank God, or else we’d have that much more warming already. But the result is what’s called “ocean acidification,” which, on its own, may add a half a degree to warming this century. It is also already burning through the planet’s water basins — you may remember these as the place where life arose in the first place. You have probably heard of “coral bleaching” — that is, coral dying — which is very bad news, because reefs support as much as a quarter of all marine life and supply food for half a billion people. Ocean acidification will fry fish populations directly, too, though scientists aren’t yet sure how to predict the effects on the stuff we haul out of the ocean to eat; they do know that in acid waters, oysters and mussels will struggle to grow their shells, and that when the pH of human blood drops as much as the oceans’ pH has over the past generation, it induces seizures, comas, and sudden death.
That isn’t all that ocean acidification can do. Carbon absorption can initiate a feedback loop in which underoxygenated waters breed different kinds of microbes that turn the water still more “anoxic,” first in deep ocean “dead zones,” then gradually up toward the surface. There, the small fish die out, unable to breathe, which means oxygen-eating bacteria thrive, and the feedback loop doubles back. This process, in which dead zones grow like cancers, choking off marine life and wiping out fisheries, is already quite advanced in parts of the Gulf of Mexico and just off Namibia, where hydrogen sulfide is bubbling out of the sea along a thousand-mile stretch of land known as the “Skeleton Coast.” The name originally referred to the detritus of the whaling industry, but today it’s more apt than ever. Hydrogen sulfide is so toxic that evolution has trained us to recognize the tiniest, safest traces of it, which is why our noses are so exquisitely skilled at registering flatulence. Hydrogen sulfide is also the thing that finally did us in that time 97 percent of all life on Earth died, once all the feedback loops had been triggered and the circulating jet streams of a warmed ocean ground to a halt — it’s the planet’s preferred gas for a natural holocaust. Gradually, the ocean’s dead zones spread, killing off marine species that had dominated the oceans for hundreds of millions of years, and the gas the inert waters gave off into the atmosphere poisoned everything on land. Plants, too. It was millions of years before the oceans recovered.
IX. The Great Filter
Our present eeriness cannot last.
So why can’t we see it? In his recent book-length essay The Great Derangement, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh wonders why global warming and natural disaster haven’t become major subjects of contemporary fiction — why we don’t seem able to imagine climate catastrophe, and why we haven’t yet had a spate of novels in the genre he basically imagines into half-existence and names “the environmental uncanny.” “Consider, for example, the stories that congeal around questions like, ‘Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?’ or ‘Where were you on 9/11?’ ” he writes. “Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, ‘Where were you at 400 ppm?’ or ‘Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?’ ” His answer: Probably not, because the dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, especially in novels, which tend to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the poisonous miasma of social fate.
Surely this blindness will not last — the world we are about to inhabit will not permit it. In a six-degree-warmer world, the Earth’s ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters that we will just start calling them “weather”: a constant swarm of out-of-control typhoons and tornadoes and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly with climate events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations. The strongest hurricanes will come more often, and we’ll have to invent new categories with which to describe them; tornadoes will grow longer and wider and strike much more frequently, and hail rocks will quadruple in size. Humans used to watch the weather to prophesy the future; going forward, we will see in its wrath the vengeance of the past. Early naturalists talked often about “deep time” — the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. What lies in store for us is more like what the Victorian anthropologists identified as “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience, described by Aboriginal Australians, of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea — a feeling of history happening all at once.
It is. Many people perceive climate change as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries — a helpful perspective, in a way, since it is the carbon-burning processes that began in 18th-century England that lit the fuse of everything that followed. But more than half of the carbon humanity has exhaled into the atmosphere in its entire history has been emitted in just the past three decades; since the end of World War II, the figure is 85 percent. Which means that, in the length of a single generation, global warming has brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe, and that the story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is also the story of a single lifetime. My father’s, for instance: born in 1938, among his first memories the news of Pearl Harbor and the mythic Air Force of the propaganda films that followed, films that doubled as advertisements for imperial-American industrial might; and among his last memories the coverage of the desperate signing of the Paris climate accords on cable news, ten weeks before he died of lung cancer last July. Or my mother’s: born in 1945, to German Jews fleeing the smokestacks through which their relatives were incinerated, now enjoying her 72nd year in an American commodity paradise, a paradise supported by the supply chains of an industrialized developing world. She has been smoking for 57 of those years, unfiltered.
Or the scientists’. Some of the men who first identified a changing climate (and given the generation, those who became famous were men) are still alive; a few are even still working. Wally Broecker is 84 years old and drives to work at the Lamont-Doherty observatory across the Hudson every day from the Upper West Side. Like most of those who first raised the alarm, he believes that no amount of emissions reduction alone can meaningfully help avoid disaster. Instead, he puts his faith in carbon capture — untested technology to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which Broecker estimates will cost at least several trillion dollars — and various forms of “geoengineering,” the catchall name for a variety of moon-shot technologies far-fetched enough that many climate scientists prefer to regard them as dreams, or nightmares, from science fiction. He is especially focused on what’s called the aerosol approach — dispersing so much sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere that when it converts to sulfuric acid, it will cloud a fifth of the horizon and reflect back 2 percent of the sun’s rays, buying the planet at least a little wiggle room, heat-wise. “Of course, that would make our sunsets very red, would bleach the sky, would make more acid rain,” he says. “But you have to look at the magnitude of the problem. You got to watch that you don’t say the giant problem shouldn’t be solved because the solution causes some smaller problems.” He won’t be around to see that, he told me. “But in your lifetime …”
Jim Hansen is another member of this godfather generation. Born in 1941, he became a climatologist at the University of Iowa, developed the groundbreaking “Zero Model” for projecting climate change, and later became the head of climate research at NASA, only to leave under pressure when, while still a federal employee, he filed a lawsuit against the federal government charging inaction on warming (along the way he got arrested a few times for protesting, too). The lawsuit, which is brought by a collective called Our Children’s Trust and is often described as “kids versus climate change,” is built on an appeal to the equal-protection clause, namely, that in failing to take action on warming, the government is violating it by imposing massive costs on future generations; it is scheduled to be heard this winter in Oregon district court. Hansen has recently given up on solving the climate problem with a carbon tax, which had been his preferred approach, and has set about calculating the total cost of extracting carbon from the atmosphere instead.
Hansen began his career studying Venus, which was once a very Earth-like planet with plenty of life-supporting water before runaway climate change rapidly transformed it into an arid and uninhabitable sphere enveloped in an unbreathable gas; he switched to studying our planet by 30, wondering why he should be squinting across the solar system to explore rapid environmental change when he could see it all around him on the planet he was standing on. “When we wrote our first paper on this, in 1981,” he told me, “I remember saying to one of my co-authors, ‘This is going to be very interesting. Sometime during our careers, we’re going to see these things beginning to happen.’ ”
Several of the scientists I spoke with proposed global warming as the solution to Fermi’s famous paradox, which asks, If the universe is so big, then why haven’t we encountered any other intelligent life in it? The answer, they suggested, is that the natural life span of a civilization may be only several thousand years, and the life span of an industrial civilization perhaps only several hundred. In a universe that is many billions of years old, with star systems separated as much by time as by space, civilizations might emerge and develop and burn themselves up simply too fast to ever find one another. Peter Ward, a charismatic paleontologist among those responsible for discovering that the planet’s mass extinctions were caused by greenhouse gas, calls this the “Great Filter”: “Civilizations rise, but there’s an environmental filter that causes them to die off again and disappear fairly quickly,” he told me. “If you look at planet Earth, the filtering we’ve had in the past has been in these mass extinctions.” The mass extinction we are now living through has only just begun; so much more dying is coming.
And yet, improbably, Ward is an optimist. So are Broecker and Hansen and many of the other scientists I spoke to. We have not developed much of a religion of meaning around climate change that might comfort us, or give us purpose, in the face of possible annihilation. But climate scientists have a strange kind of faith: We will find a way to forestall radical warming, they say, because we must.
It is not easy to know how much to be reassured by that bleak certainty, and how much to wonder whether it is another form of delusion; for global warming to work as parable, of course, someone needs to survive to tell the story. The scientists know that to even meet the Paris goals, by 2050, carbon emissions from energy and industry, which are still rising, will have to fall by half each decade; emissions from land use (deforestation, cow farts, etc.) will have to zero out; and we will need to have invented technologies to extract, annually, twice as much carbon from the atmosphere as the entire planet’s plants now do. Nevertheless, by and large, the scientists have an enormous confidence in the ingenuity of humans — a confidence perhaps bolstered by their appreciation for climate change, which is, after all, a human invention, too. They point to the Apollo project, the hole in the ozone we patched in the 1980s, the passing of the fear of mutually assured destruction. Now we’ve found a way to engineer our own doomsday, and surely we will find a way to engineer our way out of it, one way or another. The planet is not used to being provoked like this, and climate systems designed to give feedback over centuries or millennia prevent us — even those who may be watching closely — from fully imagining the damage done already to the planet. But when we do truly see the world we’ve made, they say, we will also find a way to make it livable. For them, the alternative is simply unimaginable.
*This article appears in the July 10, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.
*This article has been updated to clarify a reference to Peter Brannen’s The Ends of the World.
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