cognitive-neurological-behaviora
Why the 97% climate consensus is important.
Some have argued that consensus messaging is counter-productive. Here’s why they’re wrong.
Unfortunately, humans don’t have infinite brain capacity, so no one can become an expert on every subject. But people have found ways to overcome our individual limitations through social intelligence, for example by developing and paying special attention to the consensus of experts. Modern societies have developed entire institutions to distill and communicate expert consensus, ranging from national academies of science to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Assessments of scientific consensus help us tap the collective wisdom of a crowd of experts. In short, people value expert consensus as a guide to help them navigate an increasingly complex and risk-filled world.
More generally, consensus is an important process in society. Human cooperation, from small groups to entire nations, requires some degree of consensus, for example on shared goals and the best means to achieve those goals. Indeed, some biologists have argued that “human societies are unable to function without consensus.” Neurological evidence even suggests that when people learn that they are in agreement with experts, reward signals are produced in the brain. Importantly, establishing consensus in one domain (e.g. climate science) can serve as a stepping stone to establishing consensus in other domains (e.g. need for climate policy).
The value of consensus is well understood by the opponents of climate action, like the fossil fuel industry. In the early 1990s, despite the fact that an international scientific consensus was already forming, the fossil fuel industry invested in misinformation campaigns to confuse the public about the level of scientific agreement that human-caused global warming is happening. As has been well-documented, fossil fuel companies learned this strategy from the tobacco industry, which invested enormous sums in marketing and public relations campaigns to sow doubt in the public mind about the causal link between smoking and lung cancer.
However, some academics have recently argued that communicators and educators should not inform the public about the strong scientific consensus on climate change. UK sociologist Warren Pearce and his colleagues recently published a commentary (and corresponding Guardian op-ed) arguing that communicating the scientific consensus is actually counter-productive. John Cook published a reply, which we summarize here.
Playing into misinformers’ hands
By the late 1990s, political strategists recognized the importance of perceived scientific consensus. Market researcher Frank Luntz advised Republicans and then-president George W. Bush to cast doubt on expert agreement in order to reduce public support for climate policy. To stall climate policy, he argued, the Bush Administration should seek to convince the public that scientists were still arguing whether climate change is real or human-caused.
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Evidence Squared podcast on why denialists attack consensus.
Luntz was ahead of his time. It was over a decade before social scientists began studying this phenomenon and converged on the same result. A 2011 study found that support for climate policy was linked to perceptions about scientific agreement on climate change. This finding has since been independently replicated by other research, as well as randomized experiments conducted in Australia and the United States. Still other research confirmed these results using John Oliver’s viral TV segment illustrating the issue of “false balance” to the public.
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HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: A Statistically Representative Climate Change Debate.
Conversely, telling people that experts disagree was found to decrease their support for environmental policy and other actions, such as vaccinations.
Opponents of climate action may reject scientific evidence supporting the reality of human-caused climate change, but they have diligently applied the social scientific evidence indicating how to reduce public support for climate action. An analysis of conservative op-eds found their most common claim was “there is no consensus.” An analysis of a six-month period in 2016 found that the most-shared climate article on social media was about an online petition designed to cast doubt on the scientific consensus. It’s why the Trump administration wants to televise a Red Team/Blue Team climate debate.
To push back against the decades-long disinformation campaign, numerous scientists have made efforts to quantify and communicate the scientific consensus. Meanwhile, disinformers have doubled down on their efforts to confuse the public about the consensus. The commentary by Pearce and company plays into their hands by arguing the climate community should surrender this argument to the misinformers.
A misperception of reality
In the Guardian, Pearce argued:
the public have already heard enough about the scientific evidence to make up their mind, without being fed increasingly esoteric information about levels of scientific agreement … valuable media and political attention has been expended on boosting the 97% meme, crowding out deeper conversations about policy framing
However, in the United States, only 70% of Americans understand that global warming is happening, and only 58% understand it is human-caused. Further, only 13% of Americans realize the expert consensus on human-caused global warming exceeds 90%.
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Perceived expert climate consensus across the political spectrum from a nationally representative sample of 200 Americans. Even liberals significantly underestimate the expert consensus on human-caused global warming. Illustration: John Cook
And multiple empirical studies, conducted in different countries, have found that informing people of the scientific consensus has a small but significant influence on their own subsequent judgements about the reality of human-caused global warming. While discussion about climate policy is urgently needed, establishing and communicating the scientific consensus about human-caused climate change is not a competitor to policy discussion; it is a complement.
No one argues that the scientific consensus is the one and only message that needs to be communicated - public responses to climate change are often as complex as society itself. But informing the public about the scientific consensus that the problem actually exists can support the discussion on how to best solve the problem. The argument that we have to choose between debunking the climate policy opponent’s disinformation about the scientific consensus or engage in meaningful policy dialogue is a false choice.
Disinformation about the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is happening has been used to delay serious conversations about climate policy in the United States and a few other countries. Moreover, the argument that communicators should not talk about a scientific consensus when one exists is deeply troubling. In the history of science, it is relatively rare that such strong agreement emerges about basic scientific facts. When it comes to issues such as the future of our planet, recommending that we withhold this information from the public is unethical.
Consensus messaging isn’t responsible for climate policy failures
American policymakers have struggled to implement national climate policies, but not for lack of policy discussion “crowded out” by consensus messaging. Carbon tax and cap and trade bills have been introduced regularly, including by Republicans like Senator John McCain, and in the current session by Democratic Senators Whitehouse and Schatz. One climate bill even passed the House of Representatives in 2009 before failing in the Senate.
Those climate policy proposals failed in large part because they were opposed by most Republican members of Congress, many of whom continue to deny the very existence of human-caused climate change. Denial of the scientific consensus has long been one of the primary arguments used to justify their rejection of climate policy. Likewise, many members of the public don’t yet understand that climate scientists have reached near-unanimous agreement that climate change is real and human-caused, and thus are either uncertain or doubtful about whether this is a real and urgent problem. Consensus messaging is one tool (of many) to help people understand the reality and importance of the issue.
Moreover, what happens if we follow Pearce’s recommendations and stop communicating the fact of the scientific consensus, while opponents of climate policy continue to misinform? Two recent independent experimental studies (by the US and Australian authors of this article) found that when disinformation is not countered, people’s misunderstanding of the consensus increases, while decreasing their acceptance of the reality of human-caused climate change.
A growing body of empirical research across different fields has established that perceived scientific consensus is an important influence on action (or inaction). Opponents of climate action have understood this for decades.
It is unfortunate that Pearce ignores this body of empirical research, thus making recommendations that play into the hands of those who deny climate science and seek to maintain the status quo. To be sure, science includes doubt, healthy skepticism, and disagreement, but that does not mean that efforts to quantify and communicate scientific consensus should have no place in society or policy development. Advocating such a stance is not only counterproductive and would keep the public uninformed about this important consensus of experts.
John Cook is a research assistant professor at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, researching cognitive science.
Sander van der Linden is an Assistant Professor in Social Psychology, Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab and a Fellow of Churchill College.
Anthony Leiserowitz is a Research Scientist and Director of the Yale Project on Climate Change at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University.
Edward Maibach is a University Professor and Director of Mason’s Center for Climate Change Communication.
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Ticks are here to stay. But scientists are finding ways to outsmart them.
Researchers acknowledge that there’s no getting rid of ticks, so they are developing ways to make them less dangerous.
Here are the latest bulletins from the tick wars
BY SUSAN MILIUS 11:00AM, AUGUST 9, 2017
A CUNNING ADVERSARY You’d be wrong to call this black-legged tick an insect. Ticks have eight legs, like spiders and scorpions, not an insect’s six. Only a few of the world’s 900 or so tick species carry diseases, but those illnesses can be nasty.
DAVID M. PHILLIPS AND ERIC COHEN/SCIENCE SOURCE
Magazine issue: Vol. 192 No. 2, August 19, 2017, p. 16
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Thanks, Holly Gaff. Soon, anyone straining to tweeze off a mid-back tick can find answers to the obvious question: What if humankind just went after the little bloodsuckers with killer robots?
Gaff, who calls herself a mathematical ecoepidemiologist, at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., is one of the few people collecting real field data on the efficacy of tick-slaying robots. This summer, she’s been supervising a field test of a terminator named TickBot deployed to try making mowed grass safe for children. Researchers will start analyzing results in early fall.
Ticks make formidable enemies. “Almost every control measure that has been tried has failed, and has failed miserably,” Gaff says. “We are slowly coming to embrace the fact that you cannot eradicate ticks.” What human ingenuity might do, however, is manage the risks and — dream big! — make ticks irrelevant.
That’s an urgent hope. Data from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., have for two years suggested 2017 will be a high risk one for Lyme disease in the Northeastern United States. Of the various illnesses that North America’s ticks pass along, Lyme is the most common, caused by a squiggle of a parasite called Borrelia burgdorferi. The disease can bring on an eerie red bull’s-eye rash, flulike misery and risks of long-term neurological and joint troubles if not treated early. In 2015, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tallied about 30,000 confirmed cases. Considering gaps in case reporting, some estimates put the number closer to several hundred thousand.
So bring on the robots and other science revenge fantasies. It’s time to rethink humankind’s defenses against ticks. Pesticides and tick checks just aren’t doing the trick.
There may be ways to attack ticks without touching a single molecule of their die-hard little bodies. Ecologists have made progress in tracing what ticks need from the woods and lawns where they lurk. For instance, researchers believe that it was a bumper crop of acorns in 2015 that, through a Rube Goldberg series of consequences, created conditions for a perfect tick storm two years later. Breaking key ecological connections could knock back the tick menace in the future.
Molecular biologists are focusing on tick survival tricks. Researchers are looking for weak spots inside tick guts and trying to take advantage of ticks’ reckless abandon in mating. Biology is proving as important as electronics in the robot line of defense.
Though, Gaff warns, the top design is not the laser-blazing Armageddon that a recently tick-bitten human might crave.
Ticks attack
Long and varied life
The black-legged tick that spreads Lyme disease lives in the slow lane, taking more than a year to reach reproductive age, longer than some of the animals that it feeds on (shown). Eggs (center) hatch into tiny six-legged larvae but have inherited no Lyme pathogens from mom. Ticks pick up pathogens from later blood meals. A larva takes blood, often from something small like a mouse or bird, and transforms into a fully eight-legged nymph. Nymphs, roughly a year old but not sexually mature yet, seek more blood to reach adulthood.
First, a quick intro to ticks.
Unlike mosquitoes, ticks are pure vampires, consuming nothing but blood. Mosquitoes get colloquially called vampires, but blood is just their version of a pregnancy craving, a female-only nutrient gorge to aid reproduction in an adult life of sipping flower nectar.
For most of the troublesome tick species in North America, including the black-legged ticks that spread Lyme, blood is the elixir that lets them transition to the next life stage — from larva to nymph to adult. And after a single meal, an adult female can lay 1,000 or even 15,000 eggs without anything else to eat for the rest of her life. Hard ticks, the Ixodidae family, which includes the black-legged variety, typically have only two or three meals of any kind during the entire two or three years they live.
Soft ticks are gluttons, relatively speaking. Many move into mammal dens for a bedbug lifestyle. These ticks hide and, whenever they get hungry, just crawl over to the resident dinner.
For ticks without live-in prey, many “quest,” as the ambush is called. Ticks climb to some promising spot like the top of a grass blade, raise their front legs and just wait until something brushes by. But there are also ticks that hunt vigorously, even pursuing human prey.
A visit to Dennis Bente at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston is unforgettable, in part because of a video of a Hyalomma tick chasing down one of Bente’s collaborators. The tiny brown creature scurries like a frantic ant in an almost-straight line over bare dirt, onto a boot and finally into a hand reaching down to grab it. This hunter doesn’t live in North America.
Ticks can spread a wide variety of diseases. Despite its name, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which brings a higher risk of fatality than Lyme, is more common in the central United States and the South than in the Rockies. Other tickborne diseases are lately getting attention: A tick-bitten baby in Connecticut in April became the state’s first reported victim of the rare, but potentially fatal Powassan virus, thought to enter the bloodstream in just 15 minutes after a tick starts feeding. And medical journals are publishing discussions of whether a tick bite might lead to a sudden, deadly allergy to red meat. With a possible threat even to our beloved hamburger, new approaches to fending off ticks can’t come soon enough.
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On the rise
Between 1998 and 2015, the number of U.S. counties that have recorded black-legged ticks (Ixodes scapularis) and western black-legged ticks (Ixodes pacificus) increased almost 45 percent. Data include well-established populations of the disease-carrying creatures as well as places with fewer reports.
Move slider to compare 1998 and 2015 maps
Source: R.J. Eisen, L. Eisen and C.B. Beard/J. Med. Entomol. 2016
Super reactors
The most dramatic way of rendering a disease irrelevant is a vaccine. One company raised hopes for this approach in April in Washington, D.C., at the World Vaccine Congress by announcing the start of human safety tests of a new Lyme disease formulation. The only Lyme vaccine for humans in the United States was withdrawn voluntarily in 2002 when controversy stalled sales. (Dogs can still get a Lyme vaccination.)
The strategy for the new Lyme vaccine isn’t like the familiar flu or tetanus vaccines because the pathogens get killed outside the human body. The company, Valneva, based in Lyon, France, has redesigned a protein, OspA, used in previous Lyme vaccines. The vaccine trains the human immune system to fight OspA, found on the surface of B. burgdorferi. When a black-legged tick starts sucking human blood, human immune cells get slurped in too and kill the Lyme-causing pathogens before they leave the tick’s gut. “The idea of this vaccine ... is vaccinating the tick,” says CEO Thomas Lingelbach.
After a single meal, an adult female tick can lay 1,000 or even 15,000 eggs.
Even if the new vaccine proves to be safe and effective, its first shot in a doctor’s office, in the most optimistic view, is five to 10 years away.
There may be a bigger-picture way to imagine vaccines, however, than targeting each disease with its own shot. Ecologist Richard Ostfeld of the Cary Institute is one of the people hoping for a vaccine that stops the tick itself, and thus all the diseases it may pass along. By the luck of the great lottery of genetics, Ostfeld has a hyperactive immune response to tick saliva. Think of it as a natural version of what a tick vaccine might achieve.
Despite “many, many dozens of tick bites” over his career monitoring Lyme disease risk, Ostfeld has not gotten sick. He often wakes in the middle of the night with a “burning sensation” somewhere on his body. “I … put on my glasses and, sure enough, there’s a little dark spot surrounded by what’s already turned kind of red.” Warned by his vigilant immune system, he pulls off the dark bit of tick, which is usually dead or dying.
Maybe it’s a thing among tick scientists. Sam Telford of Tufts University’s veterinary school in North Grafton, Mass., who also studies the ecology of Lyme disease, has a similar reaction. Bites, he says, “itch like crazy.” A vaccine that makes people itch doesn’t sound very marketable, but blood that somehow poisons ticks sounds good.
A vaccine to protect cattle against debilitating blood loss from bites already targets the tick itself. Newer ways of targeting ticks are being developed for livestock, and for humans, though protecting our species poses extra challenges.
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Ticks east and west
Of the nine or so tick species that spread diseases in North America, the three highlighted below cause the most trouble. Maps show each tick's U.S. habitat.
Fix the landscape
“It would be lovely if we could get a vaccine,” says biochemist Kevin Esvelt of MIT. “But there’s a certain elegance to tackling the heart of the problem, which is ecological.” In several papers posted online at bioRxiv.org in 2016 and this year, Esvelt and colleagues laid out an approach that could slash Lyme risks by causing genetic changes in one of the mammals that ticks feed on, changes that could spread across whole landscapes.
The view of Lyme as an ecological disease blames much of the rise in cases on the suburbanization and fragmentation of once-wild countryside in North America. The shifts have fueled population booms in mammals such as white-footed mice that easily become great scurrying reservoirs of Lyme parasites. Ticks gorge on the mouse blood and a high percentage ingest the parasites.
Deer pick up a lot of the Lyme-spreading black-legged ticks. Yet deer aren’t biologically friendly to B. burgdorferi. The mice make a much better parasite paradise than deer do and are more likely to transmit those parasites.
The common name, “deer tick,” was a fluke of early misidentification, Ostfeld says. The tick was easy to collect on deer. But taxonomists realized the hard tick is just a northern form of the long-known black-legged tick, which dines on many mammals. In fact, just how deer abundance affects tick abundance was the No. 1 outstanding uncertainty about Lyme listed in a 12-person consensus published in the June 5 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
Fighting Lyme disease appeals to Esvelt, who, like his pediatrician wife, grew up in the low-tick landscapes of the West Coast where Lyme is rare. In Massachusetts now, he says, “to both of us, it’s just horrific that a) there are that many ticks out there, and b) that they give you horrific diseases.” He especially regrets that neither of his two kids, nor anyone else’s, can tromp around outdoors, like he used to, carefree.
Esvelt calls the work of his lab, which plans to engineer a Lyme-resistant mouse, “sculpting evolution.” He and colleagues aim to tackle big biological problems like Lyme spread by using the insights of evolutionary biology plus the powerful gene-editing tool known as CRISPR/Cas9 (SN: 9/3/16, p. 22). But Esvelt wants to use that power with a startling openness and extreme public oversight.
“Right now, people don’t trust scientists to ensure that technologies are well understood before throwing them out there,” he says. “We have to fix that somehow.”
Before he even started to create a Lyme-resistant mouse in the lab, he asked for public meetings on the two Massachusetts islands where he hopes to test mice: Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. He got the green light to begin from citizen steering committees on both islands. But they still have the power to shut down the tests at milestones in the project. If the citizens nix the idea, he will walk away.
Originally Esvelt planned to sculpt Lyme disease into insignificance by acting on the ticks directly, driving down their numbers or changing them to be less dangerous. “But I talked to a lot of tick biologists who said, ‘Look, it’s not gonna happen.’ ” The black-legged ticks take so long to reproduce that the plan would only succeed “if you’re willing to wait about 50 years,” he says.
It’s actually faster to work with a mammal, the white-footed mouse. For the first tests, on islands, he plans great caution. He won’t even use a gene drive, the powerful way of deploying CRISPR/Cas9 so it overrides chancy natural inheritance and passes the desired genes to all offspring (SN: 12/12/15, p. 16). Instead he’ll just release mice genetically tweaked to be bad transmitters of Lyme and let natural mouse powers spread the genes.
Those mice won’t even be transgenic: They won’t carry genes from any other species. He’ll vaccinate island-captured mice in the lab, with an anti-Lyme vaccine or one that should confer an active immune response to tick bites. Then he’ll identify genes that produce the most protective reaction and put a large selection of them into what should be a safer animal that’s still “100 percent mouse,” he says.
While he’s tailoring safer mice for the island, however, he’s imagining new gene drives for a larger, mainland campaign. The way forward may require making gene drives less powerful, so they sputter out after a certain number of generations — “daisy chains,” he calls them, with loosely linked elements that fall apart easily.
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Going for the gut
Ticks themselves probably have weaknesses that people haven’t yet exploited. The study of microbes in human guts has revolutionized ideas about human health and physiology. So Yale University’s Sukanya Narasimhan and Erol Fikrig are looking deep into the microbiome of the tick gut. Narasimhan describes the gut as a many-branched thing, “like a glove.” Ticks do have consistent bacterial residents, which could perhaps be exploited, but interactions look complex.
Along with Lyme, black-legged ticks can deliver other unpleasantries, such as human granulocytic anaplasmosis. When Anaplasma pathogens first tumble into a tick gut, invasion isn’t easy because some resident microbes form a biofilm along the gut lining that may be hard to breach. The pathogen, however, makes the tick secrete what’s essentially antifreeze, Fikrig, Narasimhan and colleagues reported in the Jan. 31 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The secretions can prevent biofilms from forming and ease the way for pathogen infection.
The sex lives of ticks could offer opportunities for completely different kinds of defenses, says longtime tick specialist Daniel Sonenshine of Old Dominion, author of Biology of Ticks.
He imagines, for instance, protecting livestock or dogs with decoys, “little bits of plastic” treated with a chemical cocktail that includes 2,6-dichlorophenol. That’s the come-hither substance female lone star and some other ticks release when they grab a mammal for a blood-feed. Like drinking venues for our species, mammals provide ticks with hot spots for finding mates. “These little plastic devices mimic a female tick,” Sonenshine says. And believe it or not, plastic fooled males long enough for a pesticide on the decoy to kill the ticks. (Tick sex on humans is possible but not likely, Gaff says. Humans rarely carry enough ticks at once to generate much of a scene.)
Robot vs. tick
Tick biology is also important in designing a robot army. The concept behind TickBot came out of a collision of two very different visions of pest-fighter robotics.
As Gaff tells the story, engineers at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, “were under this mistaken idea ... that ticks live in trees and they fall on your head.” The engineers’ solution: Use lasers to shoot ticks out of trees.
When they called to enlist Sonenshine in the project, he had to break the bad news: no blasting into shrubbery; ticks are on the ground. His advice: Don’t build a robot to attack ticks at all. Get the ticks to attack the robot.
Robots attack!
TickBot may not look scary. But the cloth strips dragged behind it carry a pesticide that deals death to ticks tricked into grabbing on.
Instead of a laser-shooting, macho terminator, the concept morphed into a panting raccoon-sized machine that kills with dragged strips of pesticide-carrying cloth. The engineers’ four-wheeled buggy chugs slowly along following a looped guideline set up along a trail or in an open area.
As the bot works its way along, its motion, in some cases the passing shadow, will trick a tick into jumping at the cloth as it would the fur of a mouse or the sock of a hiker. But the big pull is carbon dioxide. Pest ticks “act like very lazy teenagers who don’t move unless they’re prodded,” says James Squire, one of the Military Institute engineer designers. Adding CO2 gets ticks’ attention and strengthens the illusion of a breathing, warm-blooded something.
The engineers — Squire, David Livingston and Gerald Sullivan — “came up with this amazing system of tubing and carbon dioxide canisters” for releasing CO2 from the bot, Gaff says. However, a student last year put a bit of dry ice in a cup with holes to mimic mammal breath. It worked and made the bot far easier to lug around.
Gaff remembers when she was first pulled in to do the field testing. “I was a huge skeptic coming in,” she says. To test TickBot outdoors, she chose as the first site a path through a wooded park with what she calls “infinite ticks.” There weren’t many Lyme ticks there to test, but the creeping cart tricked so many of the abundant lone star ticks that — high praise from a tick scientist in summer — she sat on the ground and had lunch.
Within a day, however, more ticks moved onto the cleared path from the nearby woods, she and colleagues reported in 2015 in Ticks and Tick-borne Diseases. Still, the notion of robotic tick catchers may be catching on. Gregory Gray, who teaches at Duke University’s Global Health Institute, worked with students from the local robotics club to design their own creeping, cloth-dragging cart.
And the TickBot team is now planning a bigger and faster robot that might ease the uncomfortable business of monitoring for cattle ticks on grazing land. Usually, people “dress up in woolly pajamas” as Squire puts it, and move through brush with an eye out for rattlesnakes in the Texas summer heat. The ticks grab the suit and are later counted. There’s got to be a better way.
For the TickBot itself, summer 2017 brought testing on grass around a playground. Like a little Roomba vacuum cleaner (but with guide wires), it set out twice a week to carve a safe zone by whisking away ticks, Gaff says.
“I’m giving them their space, and I’m asking them to respect my space,” she says. It’s all part of the mind-set of surrendering to the notion that there will always be ticks. But someday maybe we won’t care as much.
Climate with a touch of lyme
Canada is a great place to look for teensy footprints of ticks moving into new areas opened up by climate change.
Parts of eastern Ontario in 2002 ranked, on average, as just too cold for Lyme-spreading ticks to survive. By 2012, satellite data indicated the area had warmed enough to become tick friendly, Angela Cheng of Queens University in Kingston and colleagues reported June 15 in the journal Remote Sensing. Earlier papers reached the same conclusion for other parts of southeastern Canada. Lyme is rising in Canada: Nationwide, 40 cases were reported in 2004. In 2016, Ontario alone had 343.
Where the disease moves depends on a lot more than climate, though. Landscape changes that trigger booms in mice and busts in coyotes, for example, can make a big difference. Yet the pattern of Lyme’s emigration into Canada looks as if it really could be climate based, says coauthor Nicholas H. Ogden of the Public Health Agency of Canada in Ottawa.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency referred to Ogden’s work in Canada when it included Lyme disease cases as an indicator of climate change in 2014 and 2016. He and other colleagues have been watching the pattern and pace of Lyme advance into Canada since the early 2000s.
Even the little park near his house has gone from a dud research site where he struggled to find any ticks to study to a danger zone where he demands full tick checks if his kids wander in. With climate change and ticks, he says, “we have gone from a hypothesis to a public health reality.” — Susan Milius
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Al Gore’s carbon footprint doesn’t matter.
Conservatives say environmentalists are hypocrites if they consume more energy than the average American. It's a deceitful, disingenuous argument.
Al Gore is back in the spotlight with his new documentary, An Inconvenient Sequel, making him a top target again of the right-wing counter-intel complex. On Thursday, the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research released a report, “Al Gore’s Inconvenient Reality,” that paints the former vice president as a hypocritical climate advocate. In near-creepy detail, NCPPR author Drew Johnson maps Gore’s home in Nashville, Tennessee, down to the number of windows, and concludes that “Gore’s own home electricity use has hypocritically increased to more than 21 times the national average this past year with no sign of slowing down.” Johnson also slams Gore’s numerous attempts to modernize his home through energy efficiency, solar panels, and geothermal heating, saying they have been inadequate in offsetting his energy use.
“No matter how the numbers are viewed, Al Gore uses vastly more electricity at his home than the average American—a particularly inconvenient truth given his hypocritical calls for all Americans to reduce their home energy use,” Johnson writes. “Al Gore has attained a near-mythical status for his frenzied efforts to propagandize global warming. At the same time, Gore has done little to prove his commitment to the cause in his own life.” The report was a smash hit on the right. In less than 24 hours of its publication, it was picked up by Fox News, The Daily Mail, The Washington Times, The Washington Free Beacon, and The Daily Caller—which, in case there was any doubt about NCPPR’s political motivations, allowed Johnson a guest column so he could declare that “Gore’s hypocritical home energy use and ‘do as I say not as I do’ lifestyle has plunged to embarrassing new depths.”
Gore’s team disputes NCPPR’s claims—just as they did in 2007, when Johnson put out a similar report attacking Gore’s personal energy use following the success of his first documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. “Climate deniers, funded by the fossil fuel industry, continue to wage misleading personal attacks on Al Gore as a way of trying to cast doubt on established climate science and distract attention from the most serious global threat we face,” Gore’s communications director, Betsy McManus, told me in an email. She didn’t dispute Johnson’s claims of Gore’s energy use, rather his assertion that Gore has been ineffective at getting as much of his energy consumption as possible from renewable sources. “Vice President Gore leads a carbon neutral life by purchasing green energy, reducing carbon impacts and offsetting any emissions that cannot be avoided, all within the constraints of an economy that still relies too heavily on dirty fossil fuels,” McManus said.
McManus did not respond to a request for evidence of Gore’s offsets. But let’s set aside the dispute over Gore’s carbon footprint, because the report raises a much bigger question: Should prominent climate advocates be expected to live a carbon-neutral lifestyle? Are they hypocrites if they don’t? Right-wing critics would have you believe so—that these moralizing elitists are making rules for the public that they themselves don’t have to follow. This has a powerful appeal, especially today. But ultimately the argument is deceitful faux-populism, and the real hypocrites here are the purveyors of it.
Gore is hardly the only climate advocate whose personal energy use has been attacked by the right. It’s a familiar, longstanding tactic among conservatives who don’t accept the truth about climate change. Republican pollster and consultant Frank Luntz told me he thinks Rush Limbaugh “started the argument that the Hollywood Left flew their private jets to global warming conferences.” The first reference I could find was in 2006, when the conservative Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Debra Saunders, then writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, bemoaned what she called “Learjet liberals who burn beaucoup fossil fuels in the sky as they soar around the planet fighting global warming.” Fox News host Sean Hannity picked up “Learjet liberals” soon after, using it in numerous segments in 2007 and 2008 and as recently as January.
“Learjet liberals” isn’t as prolific as it used to be, but the underlying argument is. Leonardo DiCaprio has been a frequent target for his use of private jets and yachts. Elon Musk was called out in June for flying in a private jet. Conservative outlets attacked former President Barack Obama in May for attending a climate change conference in a private jet and a 14-car convoy. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s segment on this, featuring Ann Coulter, was an orgy of incredulous outrage.
The hypocrisy argument has even traveled beyond conservative circles, and it’s perfectly suited for today’s populist climate. “These multimillionaires are asking us to sacrifice by paying more for energy or using less of it,” Luntz explained. “But while we’re asked to sacrifice, they’re riding and flying in style.” To the average American, Luntz says, this is hypocrisy at its finest, “asking people to give up something while their lifestyle goes unchanged.” Even Donald Trump made this case as a candidate, using it to attack Barack Obama. “You know, he talks about the carbon footprint, OK?” Trump said during a July 2016 campaign speech. “He wants to solve the carbon footprint, but he gets on an old 747 that’s spewing stuff into the air.” (It’s worth noting that Trump’s travel habits are much more ostentatious than Obama’s.)
The claim that Gore and his ilk are hypocrites is a classic conservative attack strategy of redirection (because it ignores the core issue of climate change) and of poisoning the well (because it attempts to discredit the message by discrediting the messenger). This is much easier, and perhaps more rhetorically effective, than debunking climate science itself. That’s why you only see groups like the National Center for Public Policy Research releasing “studies” on Gore’s energy use. NCPPR, which has been funded by oil interests, advocates against policies to fight global warming because it denies that global warming exists. “The world isn’t warming,” the group falsely claimed in a 2014 paper arguing against climate regulations. Thus, it’s in their interest to try to undermine one of the most effective advocates of aggressive climate action.
But the hypocrisy charge simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. An anti-abortion advocate who believes abortion is immoral and should be illegal, but gets one herself, is a hypocrite. But climate change advocates who don’t live a carbon-neutral lifestyle aren’t hypocrites because, for the most part, they’re not asking you to live a carbon-neutral lifestyle. They’re asking governments, utilities, energy companies, and large corporations to increase their use of renewable energy so that you can continue to live your life as you please, without contributing to global warming.
Advocates like Gore certainly have suggested ways individuals can do their part. In 2007, he stated, “The only way to solve this [climate] crisis is for individuals to make changes in their own lives.” But just a year later, he said, “In addition to changing the light bulbs, it is far more important to change the laws and to change the treaty obligations that nations have.” Last month, he said the three best ways are to talk about climate change (which he does), look for environmentally responsible choices when making large purchases (which he does), and support climate-friendly political candidates (which he does). Individual action has never been the focus of his message.
As David Roberts pointed out in Vox last year, the reason climate advocates don’t intensely advocate for personal behavioral changes is that they’re “insignificant to the big picture on climate.” That’s true even for huge energy users. DiCaprio’s emissions “are a fart in the wind when it comes to climate change,” Roberts wrote. “If he vanished tomorrow, and all his emissions with him, the effect on global temperature, even on US emissions, even on film-industry emissions, would be lost in the noise.” And it wouldn’t be hypocrisy, since DiCaprio isn’t asking you to stop flying.
This is not to say that celebrities and other wealthy people should be given carte blanche to consume as much dirty energy as they want. If Gore and DiCaprio and Obama and Musk want to be good advocates of emission reductions, they should do as much as they can to signal that they’re doing their part. But if we’re to take this hypocrisy argument seriously, then every rich person who wants to advocate for climate action must live in the smallest home possible and bike to work and not fly anywhere; they’d have to give all their speeches via Skype, I guess. And unlike Tucker Carlson or Ann Coulter, who almost certainly have above-average carbon footprints, people like Gore are using their wealth for good. “He’s devoted his life to making sure we act in time to avert a global climate crisis,” the climate scientist Michael Mann told me. “The lowering of carbon emissions resulting from his efforts dwarfs whatever his own personal carbon footprint (which I know he is mindful of) might be.”
But the most unfortunate aspect of this argument is how it misleads vulnerable populations. Rich people like Gore and DiCaprio and Obama won’t be affected by climate change. If rising seas threaten their vacation properties, they can just move. And they will always be able to afford air conditioning, no matter how high electricity rates climb. That’s also true of Carlson and Coulter, but the irony is that their working class and rural viewers are likely to be hardest hit by climate change. So as the seas, temperatures, and energy bills rise, and America’s crops begin to fail, the vulnerable will be left screaming “hypocrites!” into the hot air—their cries aimed, too late, at the right.
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Fuzzy pikas adapt to climate change at different rates.
An elusive mix of factors may influence whether a species can survive in changing landscapes.
An elusive mix of factors may influence whether a species can survive in changing landscapes
By Adam Aton, ClimateWire on August 3, 2017
Credit: Denali National Park and Preserve Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
A small, fuzzy creature might help researchers reimagine conservation in the age of rapidly changing environments.
Experts expect climate change to cause more endangered species to go extinct while bringing others to the brink. Most species slowly try to adapt — often by changing the timing of major life events, like reproduction. They can also alter migration and feeding habits.
Sometimes that works. But the same species can show great adaptive potential in some places while dying out elsewhere, according to a paper published this week in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
"For a while, folks were talking about species being climate change winners or climate change losers," said Erik Beever, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey and an author of the paper.
Instead, it seems like an elusive mix of factors influence whether a species can survive — or even thrive — in changing landscapes.
That makes it trickier to determine the resilience of a species spread across different areas, Beever said, because it's difficult to untangle the "menagerie" of conditions at play.
A case study in that is the pika.
Pikas resemble chubby hamsters — with round ears, no tail, and small, furry bodies — but they're more closely related to rabbits. They typically live in mountainous areas, isolated from most human contact.
But the researchers documented a population of pikas living at low elevations in Oregon's Columbia River Gorge. They adapted to their environment by using thick moss as insulation from the summer heat, or by using the nearby forest as shade so they could stay active during the day.
But pikas living elsewhere didn't show the same adaptivity.
In more than 23 years of observation, the pikas living in the Great Basin never showed such flexibility in habitat selection, the researchers wrote. That has led to sharp population declines.
The researchers also found differences in foraging habits and body posture as a way to regulate temperature.
There's no easy explanation for why some pikas adapt more than others.
"Is it the physical environment that's allowing this [behavioral] plasticity? Is it their genetic evolution to employ these behaviors?" Beever asked. "How do we disentangle those? I don't know."
It's an unsettling problem, he said, because it means conservationists need to work even harder to understand why some creatures are faring better than others.
But the results also offer hope, he said. Just because a species is struggling to adapt in one region doesn't mean it will fare as badly elsewhere. And paying closer attention to behavioral changes can help conservationists adapt their own management practices.
"The simplest way to put it is: Can a species either cope with or adapt to climate change? The answer is, it depends," he said.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E; News. E&E; provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.
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Energy industry legacy: Hundreds of abandoned wells leaking methane in Alberta communities.
Tyee obtains unreleased report that shows leaks pose threats to health, explosion risk.
About 10 per cent of Alberta’s 1,500 abandoned oil and gas wells in urban areas are leaking methane, in some cases at levels that create the risk of health damage and explosions, according to an unreleased 2016 report.
The unpublished study by the Alberta Energy Regulator, obtained by The Tyee, identified 335 urban wells that were “believed to be in close proximity to surface developments (houses, airports, business, etc.).”
The 33-page study found that 36 of the abandoned wells were leaking methane. Nine of those wells were leaking at a level that Alberta Health says poses a risk of neurological damage to nearby residents.
Six of them were leaking methane at more than 10,000 parts per million (ppm), a level deemed “life threatening” by Alberta Health.
According to a 2015 Alberta Health document titled “Methane from Leaking Abandoned Wells: Health and Safety Concerns” also obtained by The Tyee, leaks of 1,000 ppm could result in neurological effects. Leaks above 10,000 ppm pose explosion risks and should prompt “emergency evacuation,” the Alberta Health report said.
The Alberta government has not released the health and safety methane document. When The Tyee asked for a copy two months ago, ministry press secretary Laura Ehrkamp said officials couldn’t find it.
The methane leakage study was prompted by new regulations in 2014 that directed industry to locate and test abandoned wells that may pose a risk to communities.
It found that six wells that exceeded the emergency evacuation threshold of 10,000 ppm were outside buildings. Three other hazardous wells had “methane leakage inside buildings.”
In addition the report noted another 53 abandoned wells out of the 1,500 that had been identified as “higher risk” because of sour gas or acid content. “Licensees were directed to locate and test these wells,” the report says. There was no information on the results.
Although leaking methane from wells often travels with well-known public health hazards such as benzene, toluene, xylene and hydrogen sulfide (a potent neurotoxin), the AER study only measured methane.
The methane toxicity study, never released to the public, was completed in November 2016. Both the AER and Alberta Health said they were still reviewing the data.
Ryan Bartlett, a senior public relations advisor with the AER, said the agency “had conducted a screening level assessment for methane exposure thresholds on leaking abandoned wells in urban centres and is referring nine wells to Alberta Health to determine if there are potential human health impacts and to determine what actions are required to protect public safety.”
Many of the wells with the worst leaks were located in Medicine Hat, where Alberta’s natural gas boom began nearly 100 years ago. The city still owns and operates more than 4,000 gas wells.
One Medicine Hat well site was leaking 70,000 ppm of methane while another leak under an abandoned motel had forced the construction of a venting system.
In another case methane readings inside a church kitchen were 2,550 ppm, two-and-a-half times the level that could cause neurological effects.
Bradley Maynes, general manager of Natural Gas and Petroleum Resources for Medicine Hat, said he hadn’t seen the AER study but was well aware of the leaking wells.
“The city monitors methane anomalies including assessing levels in nearby buildings if necessary,” said Maynes.
The AER only requires a five-metre setback from old or abandoned wells in urban areas. That does not provide enough room for service crews to enter and fix leaking wells.
Alberta Health press secretary Timothy Wilson said the ministry was “reviewing the cases where these thresholds were exceeded to determine potential human health risk and what actions are required to protect public safety.”
Approximately 1,100 abandoned wells in cities like Edmonton, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Airdrie and Calgary “still need to be located and tested for leakage,” added the AER report.
Based on the testing of just 338 wells, the study estimated that 17,000 out of 170,000 abandoned wells in rural Alberta are leaking methane and that leaks at 3,400 wells could pose a risk to the public.
“These estimates are very approximate and only through ground truthing and methane testing will true risks become apparent,” warned the report.
Anthony Ingraffea, the Dwight C. Baum professor of Engineering and an expert on fracking and leaking wells at Cornell University, said the AER report added more ammunition to the argument that abandoned wells might be one of the key sources of rising methane atmospheric levels on the continent.
“Let’s suppose that that statistic of two per cent significant leakers translates to the rest of the country, and to the U.S for over a million abandoned wells,” Ingraffea said. “That means more than 20,000 leaking wells at 500 times natural background level, at least, some at 5,000 times natural background level of about 1.9 ppm.”
“When will the public be advised of the emergency conditions that exist near the urban center acute wells?” asked Ingraffea.
Alberta Health’s Wilson didn’t directly answer a question about whether the ministry had a protocol for dealing with leaking abandoned wells in urban neighborhoods.
“Alberta Health reviews information provided by the AER to determine if there are any human health risks, and routinely shares this information with Alberta Health Services and Health Canada if a First Nation is involved,” he said in an emailed response.
According to another 2016 report for Natural Resources Canada, methane leaks from active or abandoned oil and gas wells pose “a serious threat to the environment and public safety.”
The highly flammable gas can contaminate groundwater, accumulate in buildings and pose an explosion risk, and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.
Leaks from oil and gas wells have caused serious explosions throughout North America, including an April incident in Colorado that killed two people and demolished a home. In that case methane leaked from an abandoned pipeline still connected to a gas well and accumulated in the basement of a home.
The report sheds more light on the scale of the province’s largest unfunded environmental liability, the $30 billion to $300 billion cost of cleaning up old petroleum facilities, including 90,000 inactive wells, pipelines and thousands of orphaned wells or wells abandoned by their bankrupt owners.
According to Global News, more than 22 million metres of aging well infrastructure has been buried in the province over the last 100 years.
That’s enough pipe and wellbores to reach the height of Mount Everest 2,500 times. Most sites cost almost $200,000 to clean up; some can cost millions.
In addition little is known about methane leakage rates at 170,000 abandoned wells that were often sealed improperly or with concrete that degrades over time.
The hazard is real and toxic. Inactive and abandoned wells can leak pollutants, including methane and brine, as well as heavy metals and naturally occurring radioactive substances; these pollutants may contaminate groundwater, surface water, or, in the case of methane, be released into the atmosphere.
In one notable Alberta case a gas leak from an abandoned well in Calmar, a small town southwest of Edmonton, forced the demolition of five homes in 2010.
Imperial Oil, which owned the leaking well, asked residents to leave the area repeatedly in 2013 and 2015 while it spent millions trying to fix the leak. But the gas is still leaking.
Local residents in Calmar still argue that the province needs tougher legislation to ensure that more homes and buildings do not end up next to leaking abandoned wells, and that the province’s 170,000 abandoned wells be systematically checked for leaks every year especially if they are located near homes or livestock.
Studies show that 50 per cent of all well repair jobs often fail to control the source of leaking methane.
Methane leaks from abandoned and active oil and gas wells have caused a string of explosions across North America, including in Pennsylvania, Colorado and Wyoming, New Mexico and Alberta.
In 2006 accumulating gases including propane and ethane blew up a pump house at a farm in Central Alberta and hospitalized farmer Bruce Jack along with two workers.
A 2011 study by consultants Alberta Innovates, which was never made public, concluded that similarities in the “signatures of some of the gases in the Jack well with the gases in some of the energy wells in the area may indicate similar geological origins, but the results were not conclusive in identifying the source, pathway or method of introduction of the thermogenic gas to the Jack well.”
Four wells near the Jack farm tested positive for gas migration or leaks.
The Jacks sued an energy company and took a very small settlement “just to end it all” but did not sign a confidentially release agreement as is customary in Alberta.*
Researchers estimate that seven to 19 per cent of producing wells completed between 2005 and 2007 have been affected by gas migration along the casing annulus, while nine to 28 per cent showed gas leakage through the surface casing. The annulus is the space between the pipe and drilled rock.
A 2016 study completed for Natural Resources Canada explained that “abandoned oil and gas wells may develop wellbore leakage either over time or relatively soon after abandonment” due to poor cement jobs or poor regulation of the plugging process.
Alberta has among the most detailed and comprehensive reporting requirements for leaking wells out of seven major oil and gas jurisdictions in North America.
But a 2016 report for Natural Resources Canada noted flaws in the system.
“Even in Alberta, with the best reporting standards, there is no third party monitoring of well bore leakage required,” the report noted. “Being the industry is not financially or operationally motivated to report leakage, information... about the wellbore leakage is suspect.”
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Trump's climate retreat is about fear, not just greed.
"Conditional cooperation" like the Paris accord breaks down if some individuals feel weak and defensive.
Is it human nature to show restraint today, so that strangers might benefit tomorrow? Well, that depends on the human.
Researchers studied this question by telling subjects that they and four other players were allowed to take up to $20 from a shared pot of $100, and that if they collectively took less than $50, the next round of players would receive $100 as well.
It turns out that most people will restrain themselves and make a sacrifice for the benefit of others. But a small percentage of people will always take more than their fair share -- not simply because they want more than other players want, or because they cannot delay gratification as well as the average person, but because these few players assume that others will try to take advantage of them. It's a sort of defensive greed.
The researchers hoped to understand whether humans are prone to make sacrifices in order to share with hypothetical people of the future. They thought it might reflect important real-world situations, like limited fisheries that would collapse if people caught as much as they could sell. They also thought it applied to climate change, given that climate scientists agree that to keep global temperatures from wreaking havoc in the future, people must immediately begin to use much less fossil fuel than our planet provides.
The Paris agreement -- from which President Donald Trump recently announced the U.S. would withdraw -- was set up to curb the use of fossil fuels, with the goal of keeping global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Do people have the kind of restraint it would take to cut back for the sake of future generations? The experiment would suggest that individually, most of us do, but collectively, we do not -- because the few "defensively greedy" people take so much that they negate others' sacrifices. About two-thirds of players took only $10, which is a fair share of the $50 sustainable limit when there are five players. But about a third took the maximum allowed, $20. Even if four players restrained themselves and took only $10, that fifth person grabbing the full $20 would send their total over the $50 sustainable limit. (Details were published in a 2014 Nature paper, “Cooperating With the Future.”)
In April, the experiment came up in a conversation I had with the lead researcher, Harvard math and biology professor Martin Nowak. He said people who took the maximum amount assumed others wouldn’t bother to restrain themselves. It doesn't look like our old conception of greed as acquisitiveness. It's more a product of fear and a fragile ego; the people who took the full $20 were afraid to play the chump.
Compare to what Trump said last week in the speech announcing the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement: “This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States.” (The agreement was nonbinding, so it’s true others could do nothing while remaining part of the pact, but then, so could the U.S. -- not much of a "financial advantage.")
This kind of behavior is called conditional cooperation. Harvard behavioral scientist Oliver Hauser, who was one of the paper’s co-authors, said people are more likely to cooperate if they know everyone else is doing the same. That makes perfect sense. If you know that even one other player is taking the full $20, and you assume others will take at least $10, there's no reason for you to take less than $20. For you to show restraint wouldn't benefit anyone.
However, researchers found they could create a sustainable system when people got together and voted on the amount they should each take. When there was voting, volunteers almost universally agreed to take only $10, and the game then sustained itself indefinitely. In each round, players took only $50.
Oxford University evolutionary biologist Stuart West has done similar studies in humans and other animals, and cautions that people tend to want to find evidence that humans are more altruistic than other species. But it’s not the case, he said. Ants and slime molds are more prone to self-sacrifice for the good of the group.
Animals, including humans, can be good citizens or jerks. Some birds will fake a distress call in order to get everyone else out of the way and eat all the food. That behavior can pay off as long as only a few birds do it.
In a paper published this week, West and colleagues showed that humans will sometimes make short-term sacrifices to cooperate as a way to angle for alliances that might serve them in the future. So there can be a selfish side to what at first looks like selflessness. For many of us, there are social rewards to expressing support for the Paris agreement -- and, as a bonus, there is no apparent cost to doing so.
The question now is how steep the price will be for those humans who are too fearful and defensive to cooperate.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Faye Flam at fflam1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Philip Gray at philipgray@bloomberg.net
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This film explains why mosquitoes are so dangerous.
Climate change turns out to be great news for mosquitoes, particularly the fearsome Aedes aegypti variety, now free to move into formerly inhospitable areas.
Be sure to bring both popcorn and bug spray to “Mosquito,” a film about how something tiny can be such a big threat.
“Mosquito” is one of several health-oriented features being shown as part of the AFI DOCS Documentary Film Festival June 14-18 in Washington and Silver Spring. And it’s a reminder that although the Zika epidemic has officially just ended in Puerto Rico, that’s probably not the last we’ll hear of infants whose microcephaly was caused by the virus. Director Su Rynard lets viewers experience the heartbreak of that neurological condition through a Puerto Rican family that holds monthly birthday parties for their tiny, afflicted son because doctors say he probably won’t make it through his first year.
[Zika poses even greater risk for birth defects than previously known, CDC says]
There’s nothing new about mosquitoes spreading horrific diseases, explain a variety of international experts, including one with a cute model of the insect on his desk. (He uses it to teach a group of African children about a new technique for mosquito-proofing homes.) If you’ve got an exposed patch of skin, there’s a female mosquito out there that would love to make a hole, spit some infected saliva into it and then slurp your blood. In the process, she could pass on Zika, or perhaps dengue, chikungunya, West Nile, malaria or something else scientists have yet to discover.
She’s more likely to track you down than ever before. Climate change turns out to be great news for mosquitoes, particularly the fearsome Aedes aegypti variety, now free to move into formerly inhospitable areas. Washington’s claim to fame in the film: It’s home to the northernmost population of A. aegypti that stick around through the winter. Scientists say they rely on the city’s tunnels for protection. Thanks, Metro!
So why don’t we just kill the bugs off? If only it were that easy. Chemical spraying leads to resistance and also to serious ecosystem complications, including the death of bees, butterflies and other key pollinators. The documentary highlights the development of a new biotech strategy to create male A. aegypti mosquitoes with a special trait: They mate as usual, but their offspring die. Early results are promising.
But if you can manage to sleep after watching this, you’ll still want a net over your bed.
The international premiere of “Mosquito” will be Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at the Newseum.
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[Zika causes a unique syndrome of devastating birth defects]
The heart of the Zika outbreak
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