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Agent Orange, exposed: How U.S. chemical warfare in Vietnam unleashed a slow-moving disaster.
Some 45 million liters of the poisoned spray was Agent Orange, which contains the toxic compound dioxin. It has unleashed in Vietnam a slow-onset disaster whose devastating economic, health and ecological impacts that are still being felt today.
In the end, the military campaign was called Operation Ranch Hand, but it originally went by a more appropriately hellish appellation: Operation Hades. As part of this Vietnam War effort, from 1961 to 1971, the United States sprayed over 73 million liters of chemical agents on the country to strip away the vegetation that provided cover for Vietcong troops in “enemy territory.”
Using a variety of defoliants, the U.S. military also intentionally targeted cultivated land, destroying crops and disrupting rice production and distribution by the largely communist National Liberation Front, a party devoted to reunification of North and South Vietnam.
Some 45 million liters of the poisoned spray was Agent Orange, which contains the toxic compound dioxin. It has unleashed in Vietnam a slow-onset disaster whose devastating economic, health and ecological impacts that are still being felt today.
This is one of the greatest legacies of the country’s 20-year war, but is yet to be honestly confronted. Even Ken Burns and Lynn Novick seem to gloss over this contentious issue, both in their supposedly exhaustive “Vietnam War” documentary series and in subsequent interviews about the horrors of Vietnam.
Vietnam’s half-century of disaster
More than 10 years of U.S. chemical warfare in Vietnam exposed an estimated 2.1 to 4.8 million Vietnamese people to Agent Orange. More than 40 years on, the impact on their health has been staggering.
This dispersion of Agent Orange over a vast area of central and south Vietnam poisoned the soil, river systems, lakes and rice paddies of Vietnam, enabling toxic chemicals to enter the food chain.
Today crops are grown and livestock graze at former U.S. bases where toxic dioxin continues to pollute the soil. HOANG DINH NAM / AFP
Vietnamese people weren’t the only ones poisoned by Agent Orange. U.S. soldiers, unaware of the dangers, sometimes showered in the empty 55-gallon drums, used them to store food and repurposed them as barbecue pits.
Unlike the effects of another chemical weapon used in Vietnam – namely napalm, which caused painful death by burns or asphyxiation – Agent Orange exposure did not affect its victims immediately.
In the first generation, the impacts were mostly visible in high rates of various forms of cancer among both U.S. soldiers and Vietnam residents.
But then the children were born. It is estimated that, in total, tens of thousands of people have suffered serious birth defects – spina bifida, cerebral palsy, physical and intellectual disabilities and missing or deformed limbs. Because the effects of the chemical are passed from one generation to the next, Agent Orange is now debilitating its third and fourth generation.
Aerial spraying in central and southern Vietnam. Wikimedia
A legacy of environmental devastation
During the 10-year campaign, U.S. aircraft targeted 4.5 million acres across 30 different provinces in the area below the 17th parallel and in the Mekong Delta, destroying inland hardwood forests and coastal mangrove swamps as they sprayed.
The most heavily exposed locations – among them Dong Nai, Binh Phuoc, Thua Thien Hue and Kontum – were sprayed multiple times. Toxic hotspots also remain at several former U.S. air force bases.
And while research in those areas is limited – an extensive 2003 study was canceled in 2005 due to a reported “lack of mutual understanding” between the U.S. and the Vietnamese governments – evidence suggests that the heavily polluted soil and water in these locations have yet to recover.
The dangerous quantity of residual dioxin in the earth thwarts the normal growth of crops and trees, while continuing to poison the food chain.
Vietnam’s natural defenses were also debilitated. Nearly 50 percent of the country’s mangroves, which protect shorelines from typhoons and tsunamis, were destroyed.
On a positive note, the Vietnamese government and both local and international organizations are making strides toward restoring this critical landscape. The U.S. and Vietnam are also undertaking a joint remediation program to deal with dioxin-contaminated soil and water.
Mangrove forests before and after spraying. Wikimedia
The destruction of Vietnamese forests, however, has proven irreversible. The natural habitat of such rare species as tigers, elephants, bears and leopards were distorted, in many cases beyond repair.
In parts of central and southern Vietnam that were already exposed to environmental hazards such as frequent typhoons and flooding in low-lying areas and droughts and water scarcity in the highlands and Mekong Delta, herbicide spraying led to nutrient loss in the soil.
This, in turn, has caused erosion, compromising forests in 28 river basins. As a result, flooding has gotten worse in numerous watershed areas.
Some of these vulnerable areas also happen to be very poor and, these days, home to a large number of Agent Orange victims.
War propaganda and delayed justice
During Operation Ranch Hand, the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments spent considerable time and effort making the claim that tactical herbicides were safe for humans and the environment.
U.S. propaganda about Agent Orange was so effective, it fooled American troops into thinking it was safe, too.
It launched a public relations campaign included educational programs showing civilians happily applying herbicides to their skin and passing through defoliated areas without concern.
One prominent comic strip featured a character named Brother Nam who explained that “The only effect of defoliant is to kill trees and force leaves to whither, and normally does not cause harm to people, livestock, land, or the drinking water of our compatriots.”
Brother Nam assured readers that herbicides were safe. Wikimedia
It’s abundantly clear now that this is false. Allegedly, chemical manufacturers had informed the U.S. military that Agent Orange was toxic, but spraying went forward anyway.
Today, Agent Orange has become a contentious legal and political issue, both within Vietnam and internationally. From 2005 to 2015, more than 200,000 Vietnamese victims suffering from 17 diseases linked to cancers, diabetes and birth defects were eligible for limited compensation, via a government program.
U.S. companies, including Monsanto and Dow Chemical, have taken the position that the governments involved in the war are solely responsible for paying out damages to Agent Orange victims. In 2004, a Vietnamese group unsuccessfully attempted to sue some 30 companies, alleging that the use of chemical weapons constituted a war crime. The class action case was dismissed in 2005 by a district court in Brooklyn, New York.
Many American victims have had better luck, though, seeing successful multi-million-dollar class action settlements with manufacturers of the chemical, including Dow, in 1984 and 2012.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government recently allocated more than US$13 billion to fund expanded Agent Orange-related health services in America. No such plan is in store in Vietnam.
It is unlikely that the U.S. will admit liability for the horrors Agent Orange unleashed in Vietnam. To do so would set an unwelcome precedent: Despite official denials, the U.S. and its allies, including Israel, have been accused of using chemical weapons in conflicts in Gaza, Iraq and Syria.
As a result, nobody is officially accountable for the suffering of Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange. The Burns and Novick documentary could have finally raised this uncomfortable truth, but, alas, the directors missed their chance.
This story was co-authored by Hang Thai T.M., a research assistant at the Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology, in Hanoi.
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We could probably predict Zika outbreaks if humans weren’t so unpredictable.
Climate-based models do a pretty good job, but they can’t account for people.
Early last year, President Trump was just the punchline to jokes about the motley ensemble of Republican presidential candidates and the Zika virus was the national story of the moment. The mosquito-borne pathogen dominated headlines: “Senate Democrats Urge Obama to Form a Response Plan to Zika Virus,” “How Scared Should You Be About Zika?”
At the height of the panic, Andy Monaghan, a meteorologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, got an email from his boss. He asked if NCAR was doing anything to address Zika. “No,” Monaghan replied. The center is an atmospheric science organization, he thought, what would we do? But that night after he got home, he reconsidered. He knew the Zika-carrying mosquitoes could only survive in a relatively narrow temperature range. How hard would it be to throw together a climate model to figure out whether conditions were right for a national outbreak if local transmission of Zika began in the U.S.? Eight weeks later, he published a paper with several other climate scientists, entomologists and public health officials from across the country, in which they used historical weather data and travel patterns to project that the Zika virus would enter the U.S. but that low temperatures in most of the country would keep it confined to isolated outbreaks in southern Florida and Texas, at least during the winter months.
The paper was a smash hit, making it all the way to a White House press briefing, where then-press secretary Josh Earnest used the findings to urge Congress to approve Obama’s request for funding to fight Zika. “We knew going in that there would be public appetite for this kind of information,” Monaghan said. “But we were pretty surprised at how much attention it got.”
The public has shown a growing appetite to have scientists use the weather to forecast the risk of disease outbreaks the way they’d forecast the chance of rain. As global temperatures change, the distribution of infectious diseases spread by insects, such as Zika, malaria and Lyme disease, appears to be changing as well. Seasonal and geographic distributions of diseases are less predictable. Avian malaria, a close cousin of the human disease, has been found infecting birds as far north as Alaska. At the same time, advances in global climate modeling, combined with our pre-existing understanding of how weather affects mosquito life cycles, are enabling some scientists to peek into the near-term future, looking to get ahead of the next epidemic. It has long been predicted that climate change will cause vector-borne diseases to spread into new areas. Now, that general trend is upon us, so the next frontier is predicting specific epidemics on a useful time scale. But how realistic is that goal, and how useful can these predictions actually be?
In December, months after Monaghan published his findings and one month after the World Health Organization declared the Zika public health emergency ended, scientists from the University of Liverpool published the results of a new global risk model, showing that weather was a key factor in Brazil’s Zika outbreak. The virus is believed to have arrived in the country in 2013, but their data suggested that the warm weather brought by 2015-16’s “Godzilla” El Niño — when added to the warming baseline temperatures caused by climate change — was responsible for unleashing the outbreak two years later. Their model, which combined climate data with mosquito virus transmission patterns, found that warm, wet weather made conditions especially conducive to a Zika outbreak in Brazil in 2015. Even if Zika had been present in South America for decades, weather conditions during El Niño raised the risk of an outbreak to a level higher than it would have been at any point in more than 50 years. This information was published after the disease had already been linked to at least 1,326 cases of microcephaly in infants in Brazil. But “I think we’re moving towards forecasting systems, slowly but surely,” lead author Cyril Caminade said in an interview, and he’s working on a prototype to make the model available to public health agencies.
The patterns revealed by Caminade’s model were groundbreaking and made headlines around the world. But he readily acknowledges the model’s limitations: According to his results, conditions were also ripe for a Zika outbreak in Angola, where no cases were reported in 2015, even though the virus was known to be present in the mosquito population. This might be because Zika has been present in Africa for longer and Angolans have developed some immunity, or it might be that a lack of public health services and surveillance made it difficult to detect the disease — no one knows for sure.
People, diseases, bugs and weather interact in complex ways. Some things are certain: Temperature plays a crucial role in every stage of a mosquito’s life cycle. Too cold, they die. Too hot, they die. But in the sweet spot, around 77 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit, mosquitoes are hungry and full of energy. Mosquitoes bite more as it gets hotter, and the amount of time it takes them to become infectious after biting a virus-infected animal is shorter at higher temperatures. And rainfall plays an important role in providing a habitat for larvae and pupae.
Other factors are much less predictable: human travel, human immune response and the likelihood of an extreme weather event such as a hurricane, which could interfere with insect-control efforts and leave standing water behind for mosquito breeding. Even things that seem well-established in the scientific literature, like the temperature range in which mosquitoes can survive, are up for re-evaluation. Sara Paull, a colleague of Monaghan’s at the NCAR, is studying the insect’s potential to thermoregulate (i.e., go fly around in the shade when it’s too hot).
Despite these uncertainties, models like Caminade’s and Monagahan’s could be valuable to public health officials. “Our model can be useful to look at temporal changes, for example to use seasonal climate forecasts to issue a ‘good or bad mosquito season’ forecast,” Caminade said in an email. But there are nontechnical obstacles to creating even these basic forecasts. First, who should be in charge, and who should pay? Access to climate data and computing power is expensive. Plus, scientists and research groups face a risk when they put their models to use in real life. “We’re dealing with highly nonlinear, uncertain systems. Nobody wants to be that person or group who’s wrong in these things, particularly when you’re dealing with human health outcomes,” Monaghan said. And someone is inevitably going to get it wrong. But “I think we need to get over that and at least get some tools out there, as rudimentary as they are,” he said.
Other research and economic sectors have long relied on predictive modeling to forecast weather-dependent changes that could affect their interests. Farmers have been using drought and seasonal climate predictions for years. Businesses try to anticipate diseases and the potential aftereffects of epidemics in order to plan supply chains and minimize disruption. Animal disease forecasting is a sort of testing ground for potential human outbreak tools. Scientists successfully used a weather-based model to predict an outbreak of Rift Valley fever among livestock around the Horn of Africa in 2006-07. But as much as these fields suggest promise, they also supply plenty of cautionary tales. An early-warning model developed by respected scientists to project crop yields and food security in West Africa failed twice in three years “People stopped trusting them,” Caminade said.
Caminade, Monaghan and their colleagues don’t want to turn people off of predictive, climate-based modeling — but they don’t want to get anyone too excited either. Because the truth is, climate modeling can only predict how the climate will affect the problem under consideration, whether that’s drought, crop yields, or the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like Zika or malaria. But the most important factor in determining how much damage a disease can do isn’t always the weather.
“The big unknowns, in my view, really lie with the human factors,” Monaghan said. “Fifty years from now, what will be changes in medical technology? What type of vaccination technology will there be, and how widespread will its use be? What will human exposure be in a different climate? What will public health capacity be?” The spread of disease largely depends on human population growth and socioeconomic factors, such as whether households have protections like window screens and whether communities have public health and insect-control services. England or California could start to see mosquitoes bearing tropical diseases, but because the people there can relatively easily control their exposure by buying repellent or by staying inside and using window screens, and because both locations’ governments have public health resources, a disastrous outbreak is less likely in these places. Public health workers in Brazil reported that Zika hit the poorest regions the hardest, places where most homes don’t have air conditioning and are otherwise more open to mosquitoes, or where there’s no running water, forcing people to store standing water near their homes, creating areas where mosquitoes can breed.
“Climate change is going to have an important impact on the potential suitability for future virus transmission and vectors that transmit them,” Monaghan said. But “human factors could swamp some of the climate-change things that we see.”
Developing early-warning systems for disease is an important part of what humans can do to prepare for a warmer, wetter world. Caminade is working on a prototype he’ll make available online to give people information on their risk of exposure to specific diseases. Monaghan is working on seasonal risk forecasts. But Caminade and Monaghan agree that their work is a small part of the most urgently needed disease-fighting technique: sharing resources and building public health capacity around the world to be ready for any disease, even if we can’t see it coming ahead of time. “These are the types of steps that need to be taken,” Monaghan said, “building near-term capacity to deal with long-term problems.”
Mallory Pickett is a Los Angeles-based journalist who covers science, technology and the environment.
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Climate change impacts: American's health hurt by global warming, doctors say.
Climate change is already harming Americans’ health, a report released Wednesday by the Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health, which represents more than half of the country’s doctors, found.
Climate change is already harming Americans’ health, a report released Wednesday by the Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health, which represents more than half of the country’s doctors, found.
“Climate change is already causing problems in communities in every region of our nation, and from a doctor’s perspective, it’s harming our health,” said the consortium.
The report pointed out that Americans may not be aware of health harms attributed to climate change, which is backed up by a 2014 study by Yale University and George Mason University. Few Americans are aware that some groups, such as children, the elderly or the poor, are more susceptible to harm associated to climate change. The 2014 study also found only one in four Americans can name one way climate change can harm a person’s health.
“Most Americans understand that climate change is real and are concerned about it,” the doctors said in the report. “But most still see climate change as a faraway threat, in both time and place, and as something that threatens the future of polar bears but not necessarily people.”
How Climate Change Harms Americans
Harms caused by climate change include heat-related sickness, worsening chronic illnesses, injuries and deaths from weather events, air pollution, infectious diseases spread by mosquitoes and ticks, illnesses from contaminated food and water and mental health problems, the consortium said.
“Public health professionals know this too, because they’re seeing increasing rates of health problems associated with climate change in their communities,” the report said.
Climate change can harm the health of any American, especially children, pregnant women, the elderly, the poor, student athletes and those with chronic illnesses and allergies.
For example, heat illnesses are a leading cause of death and disability for young athletes, with about 9,000 high school athletes treated for heat-related illnesses annually. Climate change can also cause droughts and wildfires, which can lead to heart attacks, respiratory infections and asthma.
The report comes after 2016 was officially declared the hottest year on record by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA ) and the World Meteorological Organization ( WMO ). Last year’s record surpassed 2015 and 2014 numbers, making it the third consecutive year of record-breaking numbers.
Global warming also heightens the risk of diseases via mosquitoes and ticks.
“Across the country, doctors are seeing more patients struck ill by serious diseases like Lyme disease and West Nile fever,” Dr. Nitin Damle, President of the American College of Physicians (ACP) said in the report. “Because of the changing climate and the spread of vectors, we expect that Americans will continue to face new diseases and familiar diseases in new places.”
Last December, researchers from the University of Liverpool said the weather phenomenon El Niño and climate change fueled the spread of the Zika virus in South America, which has been linked to birth defects and neurological complications, like microcephaly. Thousands of Zika cases have been reported in the U.S. and U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The consortium mapped out how health is affected across regions in the country:
Taking Action On Climate Change
The doctors say the most important action to protect Americans’ health is to reduce heat-trapping pollution by decreasing energy waste and transitioning to clean renewable energy, which could help clean up our air and water.
“Unless we take concerted action, these harms to our health are going to get much worse,” the consortium said. “The sooner we take action, the more harm we can prevent, and the more we can protect the health of all Americans.”
President Donald Trump has denied climate change and previously said it was a “hoax” invented by the Chinese. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said last week he does not believe carbon dioxide emissions are a primary contributor to climate change, while scientific evidence suggests otherwise.
However, the majority of American people say environmental regulations are worth the cost, a December 2016 Pew Research Center survey found. Fifty-nine percent of Americans say stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth it, while 34 percent say laws would affect jobs and hurt the economy.
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Here is the worst anti-science BS of 2016.
Donald Trump wasn't the only politician who lied about science this year.
2016 was a year of remarkable scientific breakthroughs. A century after Albert Einstein proposed his general theory of relativity, researchers proved him right when, for the first time ever, they were able to observe gravitational waves produced by two black holes that collided 1.3 billion years ago. Astronomers discovered a potentially habitable planet just 4.3 light-years from Earth. And scientists even came up with a good reason to put a bunch of adorable dogs in an MRI machine.
Unfortunately, there was a lot of anti-science nonsense this year, too—much of it from our political leaders. On issues ranging from climate change to criminal justice, our president-elect was a notable offender. But some of his rivals joined in as well. So did his nominees. And Congress. And members of the media. Here, in no particular order, are some of the most appalling examples. You can let us know in the comments which one you think is the worst.
Hurricane Matthew Truthers
In early October, as Hurricane Matthew approached the southeastern United States and officials ordered mass evacuations, a group of right-wing commentators alleged that the Obama administration was conspiring to exaggerate hurricane forecasts in order to scare the public about climate change. On October 5, Rush Limbaugh said hurricane forecasting often involved "politics" because "the National Hurricane Center is part of the National Weather Service, which is part of the Commerce Department, which is part of the Obama administration, which by definition has been tainted." He added, however, that Matthew itself was "a serious bad storm" and hadn't been politicized.
The next day, Matt Drudge took the theory a step further, tweeting, "The deplorables are starting to wonder if govt has been lying to them about Hurricane Matthew intensity to make exaggerated point on climate." He added, "Hurricane center has monopoly on data. No way of verifying claims." Drudge's tweets were widely condemned as dangerous and irresponsible. They also caught the attention of conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones:
.@DRUDGE This is exactly why they want to eradicate free speech... so you can't question official #globalwarming narrative. #altright #Trump https://t.co/udznluuBQO
— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) October 6, 2016
A day later, Limbaugh also went full Matthew Truther, declaring it "inarguable" that the government is "hyping Hurricane Matthew to sell climate change." Matthew would ultimately kill more than 40 people in the United States and hundreds in Haiti. It caused billions of dollars' worth of damage.
Congress Won't Lift the Gun Research Ban
Gun violence is a public health crisis that kills 33,000 people in the United States each year, injures another 80,000, and, according to an award-winning Mother Jones investigation, costs $229 billion annually. But as the Annals of Internal Medicine explained in a 2015 editorial, Congress—under pressure from the National Rifle Association—has for years essentially banned federal dollars from being used to study the causes of, and possible solutions to, this epidemic:
Two years ago, we called on physicians to focus on the public health threat of guns. The profession's relative silence was disturbing but in part explicable by our inability to study the problem. Political forces had effectively banned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other scientific agencies from funding research on gun-related injury and death. The ban worked: A recent systematic review of studies evaluating access to guns and its association with suicide and homicide identified no relevant studies published since 2005.
Following the June 12 terrorist shootings that killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Democrats tried once again to lift the research ban. But as the Hill reported, "Republicans blocked two amendments that would have allowed the [CDC] to study gun-related deaths. Neither had a recorded vote."
Officials Face Charges in Flint Water Crisis
Perhaps the biggest scientific scandal in recent memory was the revelation that residents of Flint, Michigan—an impoverished, majority-black city—were exposed to dangerous levels of lead after government officials switched their drinking water source. Lead poisoning can cause learning disabilities and behavioral problems, along with a variety of other serious health issues. Officials ignored—and then publicly disputed—repeated warnings that Flint's water was unsafe to drink. According to one study, the percentage of Flint children with elevated lead levels doubled following the switchover. The water crisis may also be to blame for a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires' disease.
Since April 2016, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has filed charges against 13 current and former government officials for their alleged role in the crisis. On December 19, Schuette accused two former emergency managers—officials who had been appointed by the governor to oversee Flint's finances with minimal input from local elected officials—of moving forward with the switchover despite knowing the situation was unsafe. According to the charging document, Darnell Earley conspired with Gerald Ambrose and others to "enter into a contract based upon false pretenses [that required] Flint to utilize the Flint River as its drinking water source knowing that the Flint Water Treatment Plant…was unable to produce safe water." The document says that Earley and Ambrose were "advised to switch back to treated water" from Detroit's water department (which had previously supplied Flint's water) but that they failed to do so, "which caused the Flint citizens' prolonged exposure to lead and Legionella bacteria." The attorney general also alleged that Ambrose "breached his duties by obstructing and hindering" a health department investigation into the Legionnaires' outbreak. Earley and Ambrose have pleaded not guilty.
Trump's Budget Director Isn't Sure the Government Should Fund Zika Research
Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), Donald Trump's choice to head the White House Office of Management and Budget, isn't just a global warming denier. As Mother Jones reported, he recently questioned whether the government should even fund scientific research. In September, Mulvaney took to Facebook to discuss the congressional showdown over urgently needed funding for the Zika epidemic—money that would pay for mosquito control, vaccine studies, and research into the effects of the virus. (Among other disputes, Republicans sought to prevent Planned Parenthood from receiving Zika funds.)
"[D]o we need government-funded research at all[?]" wrote Mulvaney in his since-deleted post. Even more remarkably, he went on to raise doubts about whether Zika really causes microcephaly in babies. As Slate's Phil Plait noted, "There is wide scientific consensus that zika and microcephaly are linked, and had been for some time before Mulvaney wrote that."
The House "Science" Committee
The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology is quickly becoming one of the most inaccurately named entities in Washington. For the past several years, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) has used his position as chairman of the committee to harass scientists through congressional investigations. He's even accused researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of having "altered historic climate data to get politically correct results" about global warming. As we explained in February, "Smith is determined to get to the bottom of what he sees as an insidious plot by NOAA to falsify research. His original subpoena for internal communications, issued last October, has been followed by a series of letters to Obama administration officials in NOAA and other agencies demanding information and expressing frustration that NOAA has not been sufficiently forthcoming."
Fast-forward to December 2016, when someone working for Smith decided to use the committee Twitter account to promote an article from Breitbart News titled "Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists." (Breitbart is the far-right website that was formerly run by chief Trump strategist Steve Bannon. In addition to climate denial, Bannon has said the site is "the platform for the alt-right," a movement that is closely tied to white nationalism.)
.@BreitbartNews: Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists https://t.co/uLUPW4o93V
— Sci,Space,&Tech; Cmte (@HouseScience) December 1, 2016
Unsurprisingly, actual scientists weren't pleased.
GOP Platform Declares Coal Is "Clean"
Republicans' devotion to coal was one of the defining environmental issues of the 2016 campaign. Trump promised to revive the struggling industry and put miners back to work by repealing "all the job-destroying Obama executive actions." Those commitments were reflected in an early version of the GOP platform, which listed coal's many wonderful qualities and said that Republicans would dismantle Obama's Clean Power Plan, which limits emissions from coal-fired power plants. That didn't go far enough for GOP activist David Barton, who convinced delegates at the party's convention to add one additional word to the text. "I would insert the adjective 'clean,'" said Barton. "So: 'The Democratic Party does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource.'" Barton's wording change was approved unanimously. As Grist noted at the time, "For years the coal industry—and at one point, even President Obama—promoted the idea of 'clean coal,' that expensive and imperfect carbon-capture-and-storage technology could someday make coal less terrible. But there's no way it is clean."
Global Warming Deniers in the GOP Primaries
As 2016 kicked off, there were still 12 candidates competing for the Republican presidential nomination. Nearly all of them rejected the overwhelming scientific consensus that humans are the main cause of global warming. (The GOP contenders who spoke most forcefully in favor of the science—Lindsey Graham and George Pataki—both dropped out of the race in late 2015.)
As recently as December 2015, Trump declared that "a lot of" the global warming issue is "a hoax." His chief rival, Ted Cruz, said in February that climate change is "the perfect pseudoscientific theory" to justify liberal politicians' efforts to expand "government power over the American citizenry." In a debate in March, Marco Rubio drew loud applause when he said, "Well, sure, the climate is changing, and one of the reasons why the climate is changing is the climate has always been changing...But as far as a law that we can pass in Washington to change the weather: There's no such thing." Moments later, John Kasich said, "I do believe we contribute to climate change." But he added, "We don't know how much humans actually contribute."
In 2015, Ben Carson told the San Francisco Chronicle, "There is no overwhelming science that the things that are going on are man-caused and not naturally caused." A few months earlier, Jeb Bush said, "The climate is changing. I don't think the science is clear of what percentage is man-made and what percentage is natural…For the people to say the science is decided on this is just really arrogant." In one 2014 interview, Rand Paul seemed to accept that carbon pollution is warming the planet; in a different interview, he said he's "not sure anybody exactly knows why" the climate changes. Mike Huckabee claimed in 2015 that "a volcano in one blast will contribute more [to climate change] than a hundred years of human activity." (That's completely wrong.) In 2011, Rick Santorum called climate change "junk science." In 2008, Jim Gilmore said, "We know the climate is changing, but we do not know for sure how much is caused by man and how much is part of a natural cycle change."
Two other GOP candidates, Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina, seemed to largely accept the science behind climate change, but neither of them had much of a plan to deal with the problem.
Trump's (Other) Wars on Science
Trump's rejection of science goes well beyond basic climate research. Here are some of his more outlandish claims from the past year:
Despite DNA evidence, Trump still thinks the Central Park Five are guilty. In 1989, five black and Hispanic teenagers were charged with the brutal rape of a white woman in New York's Central Park. Trump proceeded to pay for inflammatory ads in the city's newspapers decrying the "permissive atmosphere which allows criminals of every age to beat and rape a helpless woman." He called on lawmakers to "bring back the death penalty and bring back our police!" The defendants, most of whom had confessed to involvement in the rape, were convicted. They were eventually exonerated by DNA evidence and a confession from the actual rapist. But Trump still isn't persuaded by the scientific evidence. "They admitted they were guilty," he told CNN in October. "The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous." As Sarah Burns, who made a documentary about the case, noted in the New York Times, "False confessions are surprisingly common in criminal cases. In the hundreds of post-conviction DNA exonerations that the Innocence Project has studied, at least one in four of the wrongly convicted had given a confession."
Trump mocks football players for worrying about brain damage from concussions. In October, Trump praised a woman who returned to his Florida rally shortly after she had fainted from the heat. "That woman was out cold, and now she's coming back," he said. Trump, who once owned a USFL football team, added, "See, we don't go by these new, and very much softer, NFL rules. Concussions—'Uh oh, got a little ding on the head? No, no, you can't play for the rest of the season'—our people are tough." As the Washington Post pointed out, "Recent MRI scans of 40 NFL players found that 30 percent had signs of nerve cell damage. Florida State University College of Medicine's Francis X. Conidi, a physician and author of the study, said in a statement that the rates of brain trauma were 'significantly higher in the players' than in the general population. In the spring, the NFL acknowledged a link between football and degenerative brain diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is associated with symptoms such as depression and memory loss."
Trump meets with anti-vaxxers. Trump has long been a proponent of the discredited—and dangerous—theory that vaccines cause autism. "I'm not against vaccinations for your children, I'm against them in 1 massive dose," Trump tweeted in 2014. "Spread them out over a period of time & autism will drop!" He made the same argument at a 2015 GOP debate, causing a spike in Google searches for information about the supposed vaccine-autism connection. Since then, Trump hasn't said much more about the issue in public. But according to Science magazine, he met privately with a group of leading anti-vaccine activists at a fundraiser in August. The group reportedly included Andrew Wakefield, the lead researcher behind the seminal study (since retracted) of the vaccine-autism connection. Science reported that "Trump chatted with a group of donors that included four antivaccine activists for 45 minutes, according to accounts of the meeting, and promised to watch Vaxxed, an antivaccine documentary produced by Wakefield…Trump also expressed an interest in holding future meetings with the activists, according to participants."
Trump says there is no drought. During a May campaign stop in Fresno, California, Trump offered a bizarre take on the state's "insane" water problems, implying that there wasn't actually a drought. (There was and still is.) He suggested that the state had "plenty of water" but that "they're taking the water and shoving it out to sea" in order to "protect a certain kind of three-inch fish." As FactCheck.org explained, "California is in its fifth year of a severe 'hot' drought," and "officials release fresh water from reservoirs primarily to prevent salt water from contaminating agricultural and urban water supplies." (A much smaller proportion of water is released from reservoirs to preserve habitat for Chinook salmon, the "three-inch" delta smelt, and other fish.)
Trump wants to use hairspray. Trump has repeatedly complained that efforts to protect the ozone layer are interfering with his hair routine. "You're not allowed to use hairspray anymore because it affects the ozone," he said in May, arguing that more environmentally friendly hair products are only "good for 12 minutes." He added, "So if I take hairspray and I spray it in my apartment, which is all sealed, you're telling me that affects the ozone layer?…I say no way, folks. No way. No way." FactCheck.org actually went through the trouble of asking scientists whether Trump's strategy of using hairspray indoors would help contain the ozone-destroying chemicals. "It makes absolutely no difference!" said Steve Montzka, a NOAA chemist. "It will eventually make it outside."
Jill Stein (Yep, She Deserves Her Very Own Category)
Vaccines. Of course, science denial isn't confined to the political right. During the 2008 presidential campaign, both Obama and Hillary Clinton flirted with the notion that vaccines could be causing autism and that more research was needed on the issue—long after that theory had been discredited. Obama and Clinton have abandoned these misguided views, but Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is apparently still concerned. In July, she told the Washington Post that vaccines are "invaluable" medications but that the pharmaceutical industry has too much influence over safety determinations from the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC. "As a medical doctor, there was a time when I looked very closely at those issues, and not all those issues were completely resolved," she said. "There were concerns among physicians about what the vaccination schedule meant, the toxic substances like mercury which used to be rampant in vaccines. There were real questions that needed to be addressed. I think some of them at least have been addressed. I don't know if all of them have been addressed."
GMOs. There are plenty of reasonable debates surrounding the use of genetically modified crops. But when it comes to their impact on human health, scientists are pretty much in agreement: GMOs are safe to eat. Once again, Stein isn't convinced. During the 2016 campaign, Stein called for a moratorium on the introduction of new genetically modified organisms and a "phaseout" of current genetically modified crops "unless independent research shows decisively that GMOs are not harmful to human health or ecosystems." Stein's website promised that her administration would "mandate GMO food labeling so you can be sure that what you're choosing at the store is healthy and GMO-free! YOU CAN FINALLY FEEL SECURE THAT YOUR FAMILY IS EATING SAFELY WITH NO GMO FOODS ON YOUR TABLE!" That page also featured a 2013 video of Stein saying, "This is about what we are eating. This is about whether we are going to have a food system at all. This is about whether our food system is built out of poison and frankenfood."
The Climate-Denying Cabinet
Trump has loaded up his incoming administration with officials who, to varying extents, share his views on climate change. Vice President-elect Mike Pence once called global warming a "myth," though he now acknowledges that humans have "some impact on climate." Scott Pruitt, Trump's pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency, wrote in May that "scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind." Energy secretary nominee Rick Perry once alleged that "a substantial number" of climate scientists had "manipulated data." Trump's interior secretary nominee, Ryan Zinke, believes that climate change is "not a hoax, but it's not proven science either." Ben Carson (see above) is slated to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development, an agency facing serious challenges from global warming. Mulvaney, the incoming White House budget director, has said we shouldn't abandon domestic fossil fuels "because of baseless claims regarding global warming." Attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions claimed in 2015 that predictions of warming "aren't coming true."
Interfering with government scientists?
Trump hasn't even been sworn in yet, but already there are troubling signs that his administration may attempt to interfere with the work of government scientists and experts.
Energy Department questionnaire. The president-elect's transition team submitted a questionnaire to the Department of Energy asking for a list of employees and contractors who had worked on the Obama administration's efforts to calculate the "social cost of carbon"—that is, the dollar value of the health and environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels. The transition team also asked for a list of staffers who attended UN climate negotiations. As the Washington Post explained, the questionnaire "has raised concern that the Trump transition team is trying to figure out how to target the people, including civil servants, who have helped implement policies under Obama." (The department didn't comply with the request, and the Trump team ultimately disavowed the questionnaire after facing criticism.)
Earth science at NASA. One of Trump's space advisers, Bob Walker, has repeatedly floated the idea that the administration should begin to remove Earth science from NASA's portfolio. NASA's Earth science program is well known for producing some of the world's most important climate change research, and Walker's proposal has sparked an outcry among many in the scientific community. (Walker has suggested shifting the work to NOAA, but the incoming administration hasn't proposed giving NOAA additional funding, and Walker's critics have called the plan unworkable.) Trump hasn't actually adopted Walker's idea, and scientists such as David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist who receives NASA funding, are optimistic that he won't. But if Trump does attempt to gut NASA's research efforts, the backlash could be intense. "We're not going to stand for that," said Grinspoon on our Inquiring Minds podcast. "We're going to keep doing Earth science and make the case for it. We'll get scientists to march on Washington if we have to. There's going to be a lot of resistance."
Abortion and Breast Cancer
For years, abortion rights opponents have insisted that abortion can cause breast cancer. That claim was based on a handful of flawed studies and has since been repeatedly debunked by the scientific community. According to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, "More rigorous recent studies demonstrate no causal relationship between induced abortion and a subsequent increase in breast cancer risk." Influential anti-abortion groups have frequently emphasized a more nuanced but still misleading version of the breast cancer claim: that having an abortion deprives women of the health benefits they would otherwise receive by giving birth. That argument has found its way into an official booklet that the state of Texas provides to women seeking abortions. According to the latest version of the booklet, released in early December:
Your pregnancy history affects your chances of getting breast cancer. If you give birth to your baby, you are less likely to develop breast cancer in the future. Research indicates that having an abortion will not provide you this increased protection against breast cancer.
"The wording in [the Texas booklet] gets very cute," said Otis Brawley, the American Cancer Society's chief medical officer, in an interview with the Washington Post. "It's technically correct, but it is deceiving." Here's the problem, as explained by the Post:
Women who deliver their first baby to full-term at 30 years or younger face a decreased long-term risk of breast cancer than women who have their first baby at older than 30 or 35, or who never deliver a baby at all…Having a baby does provide increased protection against breast cancer, but it doesn't mean that having an abortion affects your risk one way or another. For example, women who deliver a child before 30, but then have an abortion after their first child, still have a decreased risk of breast cancer, said Brawley, who described himself as "pro-life and pro-truth."
Pence Denies the Existence of Implicit Bias in Police Shootings
During her first debate with Trump, Clinton supported efforts to retrain police officers to counter so-called "implicit bias." She noted that people in general—not just police officers—tend to engage in subconscious racism. But she added that in the case of law enforcement, these biases "can have literally fatal consequences." During the vice presidential debate a few days later, Pence blasted Clinton and other advocates of police reform for "bad-mouthing" cops. He criticized people who "seize upon tragedy in the wake of police action shootings… to use a broad brush to accuse law enforcement of implicit bias or institutional racism." That, he said, "really has got to stop."
Pence's comments were a gross misrepresentation of a key scientific issue in the national debate over police killings of African Americans. Implicit bias does not, as he implied, refer to intentional, overt bigotry or to systematic efforts by law enforcement to target minorities (though there are plenty of examples of those, too). Rather, implicit bias refers to subconscious prejudices that affect people's split-second decisions—for example, whether or not a cop shoots an unarmed civilian. As Chris Mooney explained in a 2014 Mother Jones story:
This phenomenon has been directly studied in the lab, particularly through first-person shooter tests, where subjects must rapidly decide whether to shoot individuals holding either guns or harmless objects like wallets and soda cans. Research suggests that police officers (those studied were mostly white) are much more accurate at the general task (not shooting unarmed people) than civilians, thanks to their training. But like civilians, police are considerably slower to press the "don't shoot" button for an unarmed black man than they are for an unarmed white man—and faster to shoot an armed black man than an armed white man.
And as Mooney noted, acknowledging that implicit biases are common—something Pence refused to do—allows scientists and law enforcement to devise trainings that seek to counter the problem.
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The 12 key science moments of 2016.
Our panel of leading scientists pick the most significant discoveries and developments of the year – from the Zika virus to the planet Proxima B – and a surprising secret of marriage.
The 12 key science moments of 2016
Our panel of leading scientists pick the most significant discoveries and developments of the year – from the Zika virus to the planet Proxima B – and a surprising secret of marriage
Andrea Sella, Sophie Scott, Helen Czerski, Mark Miodownik, Adam Rutherford, Martin Rees, Kevin Fong, Sue Hartley, Georgina Mace, Vaughan Bell, Peter Piot
Sunday 18 December 2016 03.30 EST
1 World Health Organisation declares a public emergency of international concern over Zika
1 February
In global health, 2016 will be remembered as the year a little known virus made a major impact. It felt strangely familiar, but this time it wasn’t Ebola making headlines around the world, it was Zika – a mosquito-borne virus being linked to a huge spike in the number of babies in Brazil born with brain defects. When the World Health Organisation declared that the cluster of microcephaly cases and other neurological disorders were a public health emergency of international concern, it was a rallying cry for the international community to respond. The announcement triggered investment in mosquito control efforts and vital funding for research into the virus and its devastating health consequences. This allowed for the scale-up of initial efforts already under way by institutions including the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
For me, this response also showed that the international community had learned important lessons from the Ebola crisis, and was determined to act more rapidly before the situation spiralled out of control. As 2016 draws to a close, our knowledge of the virus has increased and potential vaccines are in the pipeline.
But Zika transmission by mosquitoes has now been reported in 75 countries and we are still a long way from fully understanding and controlling this virus.
Professor Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully lands on ocean platform
2 SpaceX demonstrates a big step towards fully reusable space craft
8 April
It was an incredible achievement for SpaceX. The first stage rocket of one of its Falcon 9 launchers, having successfully lofted cargo to the International Space Station, managed to turn itself around, bleed off the enormous kinetic energy it had acquired while its main engines were burning, fly back down to Earth and land vertically – with balletic precision – on a rather tiny looking robotic barge floating somewhere in the Atlantic.
There are many reasons to love this moment. For the sheer audacity of it; for the uncontrollable roar of celebration that erupted in the control room at the moment of touchdown; for the promise that it might prove a game changer in the world of space exploration; for the fact that they named the drone ship on which the landing happened Of Course I Still Love You after a sentient AI spacecraft that featured in one of the late great Iain M Banks’s sci-fi novels. But most of all because Arthur C Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic and on 8 April the successful touchdown of Flight 23’s first stage looked a lot to me like magic.
Kevin Fong, clinical lead at the Centre for Altitude Space and Extreme Environment Medicine
The solar power plant at Moura, Portugal, produces 45 MW of electricity each year, powering 30,000 homes. Photograph: Universal Images Group/Getty Images
3 Portugal is entirely powered by renewable energy for four days
7-11 May
The high point for me this year from an engineering perspective was the announcement by Portugal that the entire country’s electric usage had been provided by renewables for four consecutive days in early May. Moving away from fossil fuels to renewable energy is surely the most important engineering and scientific challenge of our age. The shift to coal in the 19th century and then to oil in the 20th century gave us the modern world of cheap energy, plentiful food, consumer goods and sunny holidays. If we want to prevent climate change while allowing our children to have these things too, then we must wean ourselves off fossil fuels. It seems unthinkable, it seems impossible, but impossible is what engineering does best. Portugal’s achievement gives governments and energy companies a tangible example of how it can and does work, and why they should be investing in solar, wind, wave and other renewable technologies now.
Mark Miodownik, professor of materials and society, UCL
Helium-filled balloons stuck against a ceiling. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
4 New reserves of helium discovered
28 June
It might seem odd to get excited by a new supply of the second most abundant element in the universe. But in June this year, a collaboration between universities and industry announced that it had discovered a huge reserve of helium gas in Tanzania, using a new exploration technique. Helium is a very small unreactive atom, which makes it spectacularly useful for cooling magnets (in MRI scanners, for example) and as an inert atmosphere for manufacturing semiconductor chips. It’s an essential tool for our modern world. But that tiny size means that it’s easily lost from the atmosphere, and we are reliant on finding trapped pockets of it buried deep underground. The known reserves are limited, and this discovery is huge news. It means that as amazing new ideas come along and our society pushes to make use of them, we won’t be limited by lack of this tiny workhorse.
Helen Czerski, research fellow in the department of mechanical engineering at UCL
Discovery of Earth-like exoplanet Proxima b close to our solar system – video report
5 Confirmation of the discovery of a nearby habitable planet
24 August
We’ve discovered in recent years that many stars – perhaps even most of them – are orbited by retinues of planets, like the sun is. The night sky has become hugely more interesting.
We’re specially interested in possible “twins” of our Earth – planets the same size as ours, on orbits with temperatures such that water neither boils nor stays frozen – the so-called “habitable zone” . It’s estimated that our Milky Way galaxy contains billions of such planets.
This year there’s been further excitement. It’s been realised that even more planets may be orbiting very small faint stars. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, has a planet orbiting it not much bigger than Earth. Its “year” is only 11 days. But it’s in the habitable zone because Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf star about 100 times fainter than the sun. And there’s hot news that a similar star, 40 light years away, may have three planets in its habitable zone.
These planets are “habitable” – but that of course doesn’t mean they are inhabited. We eagerly await telescopes that can analyse the faint light from these planets, seeking evidence for a biosphere. And these discoveries are stimulating searches for advanced (even intelligent) life – though this remains a long shot.
Martin Rees, astronomer royal
A hydrothermal vent on the East Pacific Rise, seen as the root of life. Photograph: Dr Ken McDonald/Getty Images/Science Photo Library RM
6 Our last universal common ancestor gets a makeover
25 July
The Tree of Life was redefined in April, now looking like a jagged explosion, its central node representing a thing we call Luca – the last universal common ancestor. Our presence in this grand view of life is not significant enough to warrant a label, as almost every bough of this tree is a type of bacteria. Amazingly, many of these cells are yet undiscovered, but known only by our finding their DNA, and it being different from all others.
Luca is not the origin of life, but the thing from which all life is derived. Luca also got a makeover in July with a dazzling new portrait by Düsseldorf-based biochemist Bill Martin. By tracking back DNA in branches of other single-celled creatures, he drew up a list of 355 genes that tell us how Luca made its living – deep in the metal-rich gassy hydrothermal vents of an ancient ocean floor, the root of life on Earth.
Adam Rutherford, geneticist and presenter of Radio 4’s Inside Science
Henry G Molaison, aka HM, was the subject of decades of research by Suzanne Corkin. Photograph: NYT
7 The legacy of a celebrated neuroscientist is contested
9 August
In 1953, Patient HM had experimental brain surgery that left him with striking amnesia. Decades of subsequent research with HM by neuropsychologist Suzanne Corkin made a major contribution to our understanding of memory.
Corkin died this year but shortly after, journalist Luke Dittrich published a book claiming Corkin buried inconvenient findings, shredded files, and acted unethically in gaining HM’s consent. Subsequently, 200 neuroscientists wrote to the New York Times to protest at a “biased and unfair attack”. Corkin’s institution, MIT, stated nothing was shredded, and claims of “burying findings” turned out to be indistinguishable from a typical scientific spat.
But Dittrich then released audio of Corkin saying she had shredded files and the ethical issues remain unresolved. In many ways, this has been a standard debate about a scientist’s legacy but, so soon after Corkin’s death, passions have run too high for a cool consideration. Undoubtedly, it will come in time.
Vaughan Bell, clinical senior lecturer, Faculty of Brain Sciences, UCL
A Greenland shark in Lancaster Sound, Nunavut, Northwest Territories, Canada.
Photograph: Paul Nicklen/National Geographic Creative/Getty Images
8 Greenland sharks live for a very long time
11 August
On our increasingly human-dominated planet we can still learn much from the lives of other species. The discovery this year that the Greenland shark lives for 400 years, making it the longest-living vertebrate, puts our hectic lives into perspective. Perhaps we could pick up some tricks from the frigate birds that were found to sleep for only about 40 minutes a day while on their 10-day nonstop flights across oceans. But all this is put into a stark perspective by the latest readout from the WWF Living Planet Report. This records that over just the past 40 years, a timescale that represents the kindergarten years of a Greenland shark, the number of wild vertebrates on Earth has been reduced by 58%, surely putting the future of many of these species into question.
Georgina Mace, professor of biodiversity and ecosystems, UCL
The sun sets behind a smoking chimney in Wismar, Germany. Photograph: Daniel Reinhardt/EPA
9 CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere passes 400 parts per million
28 September
In climate science, we work in 30-year averages, so 30 years is one data point. Four data points ago, in 1896, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were 295 parts per million (ppm). Svante Arrhenius made the first global warming predictions, looking forward to a gentle heating of his chilly homeland Sweden. Two data points ago, in 1957, Charles Keeling began measuring CO2 concentrations and discovered a rapid rise, by 20ppm. In 2016, CO2 levels had risen a further 85ppm over the same time period and were officially announced as 400ppm: the highest in 3m years. Back then, in the Pliocene era, the world was warmer and sea levels were much higher. We don’t know how fast the planet changed, but we know we don’t want to risk seeing it again in future. One data point from now, in 2046, we’re on track to have burned more than a trillion tonnes of carbon and to have reached last year’s Paris agreement target: 1.5C-2C warming. What future do we want to see after that?
Tamsin Edwards, lecturer in environmental sciences, Open University
Negative emotions in marriage can have surprising effects on health Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
10 A bad marriage can lead to an early death
1 October
Next time you’re on the verge of picking a fight with your partner, pause and consider the findings of a study published in October. This research involves a large longitudinal study of emotion in interactions within married couples. They get couples into the lab and looking at their stress levels while they have “difficult” conversations, finding that couples that deal with stress with positive emotions like laughter become less stressed, and tend to stay together for longer. This year they looked at the use of negative strategies such as anger or stonewalling responses to conflict, and found that these predicted health-related changes over time in specific ways. The use of anger predicted cardiovascular problems, and “stonewalling” musculoskeletal problems such as bad backs. These relationships were found even after lifestyle factors were controlled for, and were more pronounced in men. Most strikingly, these physical effects were not there at the start of the study, but developed over 20 years. This is an extraordinary demonstration of the health effects of negative emotions.
Sophie Scott, professor of cognitive neuroscience, UCL
Ice floats near the coast of West Antarctica viewed from a Nasa plane on October 27, 2016. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
11 Arctic and Antarctic sea ice volumes both fall to an all-time low
17 November
This year saw the arrival of the long-awaited El Niño, the periodic shift in warm water across the Pacific that brings torrential rain to Central and Latin America and drought to parts of Asia and Africa. Planetary temperatures spiked, putting an end to talk of a “pause”. Yet summer melting of Arctic ice broke no records. But in October, unprecedented weather patterns drove icy winds across Siberia, pushing Arctic temperatures up to 20C above normal and parts of the Arctic Ocean failed to refreeze; in the Antarctic, sea ice thawed faster than usual. For me the bombshell came from a Dutch blogger in late November: a plot of the Arctic plus Antarctic showed sea ice this autumn to be tracking 4m km2 (the size of western Europe) below the normal average. This is a 7-sigma event – with a chance of about one in a hundred billion of being random. The ice doesn’t lie. If we don’t take this seriously now, our children will ask us why.
Andrea Sella, professor of materials and inorganic chemistry, UCL
Increasing the speed at which leaves adapt to shade could raise crop yields by 15% Photograph: Pat Canova/Alamy Stock Photo
12 Scientists modify photosynthesis to boost crop yield
18 November
Producing enough food for a growing population in the face of extreme weather associated with climate change without using environmentally damaging methods is a trickier balancing act than the Brexit negotiations! But last month scientists at Illinois University made a breakthrough that could herald a second green revolution for world agriculture – they improved the efficiency of photosynthesis, the process by which plants turn sunlight into the biomass that is the source of all our food. The team used mathematical models to show that increasing the speed at which leaves adapt to shade could potentially raise crop yields. They turned this theory into reality by boosting the expression of the genes responsible and crucially showed this worked in agricultural fields, with a 15% increase in productivity.
The work, published in Science, is the culmination of decades of effort to understand the 140 processes underpinning photosynthesis. It demonstrates the value of long-term interdisciplinary collaboration and offers proof of concept for a new approach to environmentally sustainable increases in crop productivity, something that could improve the lives of millions. So it’s my pick for science moment of the year, if not the decade.
Prof Sue Hartley, director, York Environmental Sustainability Institute, University of York
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Zika is no longer global emergency, W.H.O. says.
The World Health Organization declared an end to its global health emergency over the spread of the Zika virus on Friday, prompting dismay from some public health experts still wrestling with the epidemic.
Zika Is No Longer Global Emergency, W.H.O. Says
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.NOV. 18, 2016
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Nine photos taken in September 2016 of infants who were born with microcephaly in Pernambuco state, Brazil. W.H.O. declared an end to the global health emergency for the virus on Friday. Credit Felipe Dana/Associated Press
The World Health Organization declared an end to its global health emergency over the spread of the Zika virus on Friday, prompting dismay from some public health experts still wrestling with the epidemic.
An agency advisory committee said it ended the emergency — formally known as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern — because Zika is now shown to be another dangerous mosquito-borne disease like malaria or yellow fever, and should be treated, like them, as an ongoing problem, not an exceptional situation.
The experts who recommended ending the emergency were at pains to explain that they did not consider the current Zika crisis over.
“We are not downgrading the importance of Zika,†said Dr. Peter Salama, executive director of the W.H.O.’s emergencies program. “We are sending the message that Zika is here to stay and the W.H.O. response is here to stay.â€
Like other mosquito-borne diseases, Zika is seasonal and can be expected to return, Dr. Salama added, and countries now need to consider it an endemic disease and respond accordingly, with help from the W.H.O.
Short Answers to Hard Questions About Zika Virus
Why scientists are worried about the growing epidemic and its effects on pregnant women, and how to avoid the infection.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is funding many efforts to find a vaccine against Zika, suggested that it was premature for the W.H.O. to lift the state of emergency, since summer is just beginning in the southern hemisphere.
“Are we going to see a resurgence in Brazil, Colombia and elsewhere?†he asked. “If they pull back on the emergency, they’d better be able to reinstate it. Why not wait a couple of months to see what happens?â€
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His agency will not slow down its efforts, he said. “The decisions we make about developing a vaccine or not are unrelated to what the W.H.O. says,†he said.
Since the W.H.O. first declared a state of emergency on Feb. 1, the Zika virus has spread to almost every country in the Western Hemisphere except Canada. Thousands of babies have suffered deformities as a result of the infection.
Recent outbreaks and related birth defects have also been detected in Southeast Asia, although scientists believe the virus has circulated there for decades.
The most severe deformity is microcephaly, a tiny head with a severely underdeveloped brain; but fetuses have been killed by the virus, and others have been born blind, deaf, with severely clubbed feet and with permanent limb rigidity.
Scientists also fear that many babies who seem normal but whose mothers were infected may suffer intellectual deficits throughout their lives.
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CDC tells men at risk of Zika to put off procreation for 6 months.
Men who may have been exposed to the Zika virus should wait at least six months before trying to conceive a child with a partner, regardless of whether they ever had any symptoms, federal health officials are recommending.
CDC Tells Men At Risk Of Zika To Put Off Procreation For 6 Months
September 30, 20161:40 PM ET
ROB STEIN
The Zika virus has been largely spread by mosquitoes, but it can also be spread by sexual intercourse.
NIAD/Flickr
Men who may have been exposed to the Zika virus should wait at least six months before trying to conceive a child with a partner, regardless of whether they ever had any symptoms, federal health officials are recommending.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had previously recommended that only men with Zika symptoms had to wait that long. Those who may have been exposed to Zika but never developed any symptoms were told to hold off on trying to conceive for just eight weeks.
But on Friday the agency published revised recommendations based on new evidence indicating the Zika virus can remain in semen longer than had been thought and can be spread by men even if they don't have symptoms.
"The updated recommendations incorporate what's been learned since the previous guidance was released," the CDC said in a statement announcing the change.
"The new time period for couples to wait to attempt conception when the man has possible Zika exposure but no symptoms [is] expected to minimize the risk of sexual transmission around the time of conception and prevent possible early fetal exposure to the Zika virus," the CDC said.
The Zika virus can cause a variety of birth defects when women get infected while pregnant. The most serious birth defect that has been linked to Zika is microcephaly, which causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads and badly damaged brains.
For couples planning to conceive who do not live in a place where the virus is actively spreading, the CDC recommends men who may have been exposed to the virus by traveling where the virus is being transmitted wait at least six months before trying to conceive.
The virus has spread through Latin America, especially Brazil, and the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico. It has also been spread by mosquitoes in Pacific islands such as Fiji.
For couples who live in a place where the virus is spreading, the CDC recommends women and men should be tested if they develop any symptoms. Men who test positive should wait at least six months to try to conceive. Women who test positive should wait at least eight weeks. Those who test negative should talk to their doctor about what to do.
The guidelines are less specific for couples who live in a place experiencing an outbreak, such as Miami, but who don't have any reason to believe they may have been infected.
The guidelines recommend that those couples talk their doctors about what they should do, weighing factors that "might influence pregnancy timing," such as their age, whether they had problems getting pregnant and their fertility.
SHOTS - HEALTH NEWS
Congress Ends Spat, Agrees To Fund $1.1 Billion To Combat Zika
The agency stressed that its guidelines could continue to change as new information about Zika becomes available.
The virus has repeatedly surprised health authorities. At first they thought the virus was only transmitted by mosquitoes. Then researchers discovered men could spread Zika to women through sexual contact. The CDC was surprised again when doctors determined women could also spread the virus to men.
The Food and Drug Administration also recently recommended that all blood donations be screened for the virus to minimize the chances pregnant women could get infected from a transfusion, or sex with someone who had a transfusion.
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