What percentage of Americans agree with the science of climate change? It’s a trickier question than you might think.

As a topic of rigorous study for decades, you’d think we’d have a relatively straightforward answer. We know from a 2014 report, for example, that the US is the single largest haven for climate denial when put up against every other country surveyed, including Russia. We also know, thanks to painstaking work by a number of dedicated teams, what Americans think on this issue down to the county level. Upon closer inspection, however, several factors emerge to complicate the pursuit of a uniform tally.

What you’ll notice right off the bat when canvassing the available data is how discrepant the figures can be from group to group. This is due in part to differences in methodology of course, but especially to how the questions in a survey are phrased. As has long been understood, even slight variations in the wording of a question can materially affect the results of a given poll.

Consider the following five statements:

• The climate change we are currently seeing is largely the result of human activity. (Source)
• Climate change is caused entirely or mostly by human activities. (Source)
• Global warming is caused mostly by human activities. (Source)
• Almost all climate scientists agree that human behavior is mostly responsible for climate change. (Source)
• Human action has been at least partly causing global warming. (Source)

Would it surprise you to learn that outcomes differed, in some cases dramatically as we’ll see in a moment, for each of the above statements? When creating an opinion poll, word choice matters. Notice how some of the pollsters chose to use ‘climate change’ (less specific), while others opted for ‘global warming’ (more specific). These terms are not equivalent, and the decision to use one over the other most certainly will impact the results. I also count at least five adverbs above, each carrying its own set of connotations to a reader. Variation in terminology and phrasing is perhaps the single biggest reason for the discernible spread across different polling groups and why direct comparisons should be avoided.

Before we dive into some of the more recent polling data, we first need to identify which question we actually want the answer to. Do we wish to know how many people concur with the science, or how many dispute it? It’s not a simple matter of finding one of these percentages and then substracting it from 100 to get to the other, either, since most polls carve out a space for the undecideds by including selections like “I don’t know” or “Not sure.” Some respondents may also leave some questions blank.

Let’s assume we want to know the portion of the public that concurs with the science. Here an important distinction arises: by “the science,” do we mean (1) the climate is changing, or (2) the climate is changing due to human activity. Many surveys break these out separately. As we might expect, more people have historically co-signed (1) than (2), clinging to the bunkum that any observed change is part of natural climate variability. It could be argued that (2) is the one that matters because it speaks to the question of scientific consensus. Sure, rejecting either statement makes one a climate ‘denialist‘, but only those who affirm both are in agreement with the plurality of scientists in the field. Getting (1) right and (2) wrong is akin to earning partial credit on an exam, in the same way as saying organisms change over time while rejecting the evolutionary mechanism of Darwinian selection.

Furthermore, those who fall into this camp are generally no more keen on altering their behaviors or advocating that others do the same, or championing effective climate policy, such as scaling back on fossil fuel burning — an irrefragably human endeavor — in favor of renewables than those who reject both statements. They’re just as likely to have swallowed and to pass on the same misinformation and suspect sources, and therefore just as motivated to brick popular discourse on the topic and hinder the path to a sustainable future. For these reasons, when people ask, ‘what percentage of Americans accept climate change,’ what we’re really — or should be — after is (2). Keep this distinction top of mind as we delve into the polling.

On to the Data

There are several groups doing this work, but at the top of the list is the Climate Change Communication team at Yale, whose mission is to tackle the gap between what scientists and the public know. You can always find their latest opinion maps here, where they break down US sentiment in terms of Beliefs, Risk Perceptions, Policy Support, and Behaviors all the way down to the county level. According to their most recent survey data from fall 2021 (just posted last week!), they found that 72% of US adults think “global warming is happening,” while 57% think “global warming is mostly caused by human activities.” Their data also show that only 14% of US adults outright answer “No” to the question of whether global warming is happening at all, while 30% think it is but that the change is natural.
 

 
To see how these numbers have changed, the Yale team conducted the same poll five years earlier. For 2016, the equivalent figures are 53% who agreed that global warming is caused mostly by human activities and 70% who agreed that global warming is happening without regard for cause. So we’ve seen some incremental progress in that time. To get a glimpse of just how dramatically the numbers can vary based on linguistic choices, a poll conducted by Pew that same year found that just 27% of US adults accept the scientific consensus, concurring with the statement that “almost all scientists agree that human behavior is mostly responsible for climate change.” That’s a remarkable discrepancy between Yale and Pew, but one that’s no doubt best explained by the discrepant language: “almost all” is more binding than “mostly,” and, absent other relevant information known by the participant, likely to net fewer endorsements. Again, wording matters.

Next let’s turn to two surveys given mere days apart in November 2018 that arrived at wildly different outcomes. Monmouth University published a poll that year which found that 78% of Americans agree “that the world’s climate is undergoing a change that is causing more extreme weather patterns and the rise of sea levels” (up from 70% in their Dec. 2015 poll), but that only 29% agree that the change is “caused more by human activity” than “by natural changes in the environment, or by both equally” (compared to 27% in their Dec. 2015 poll). This result is more in line with Pew’s data from two years earlier. A 2018 survey from the University of Chicago, however, found that 71% (7 in 10 Americans) “think climate change is happening” and 60% (6 in 10) “think climate change is caused entirely or mostly by human activities.” That’s more than double Monmouth’s number, illustrating the extent to which study design can touch the final result.

At the top end of the spectrum, a Resources for the Future survey from August 2020 found that 82% of Americans “believe human action has been at least partly causing global warming.” Compared to the rest of the polling data I have in front of me and even after accounting for sampling error, RFF’s results paint the rosiest picture of US public opinion to date, coming in 22 percentage points higher than University of Chicago’s 2018 poll and a full 25 points higher than Yale’s latest poll. Here again, we probably have RFF’s more relaxed phrasing to thank for that.

To sum up, there’s no clear-cut answer to how many Americans accept or deny climate change, as so much depends on how you word the question and the methodological decisions made at the outset. Based on survey and polling results dating back to the Paris accord, the portion of America that considers recent warming anthropogenic in origin — my barometer of choice for gauging climate literacy — ranges anywhere from 27% to 82%. That’s an absolutely massive gap, a reflection of the unique language and design choices used in each poll. As we’ve seen, mild alterations in syntax can completely rewrite the national map.

But since “it depends” is an unsatisfying answer, I recommend the following approach. Instead of fruitless attempts to homogenize results from different polls to come up with a ‘true’ figure, track the trendline of a single group that’s been gathering reliable data for a while, such as the climate comms team at Yale. Based on their data, public acceptance of human-caused climate change has ticked slowly upward over the last decade or so, with slightly fewer than 6 in 10 (57%) Americans currently answering the question correctly. Yale’s numbers are usually the ones I cite because I trust their methodology and because I see respected experts in the field regularly citing their work. Theirs is as solid a dataset as you’re likely to find, and offers regional granularity to boot.

Feature image credit: Getty Images

 
 
Where do things stand with the pandemic? It’s easy to lose track what with summer setting in and other events in our life taking precedence, to say nothing of reporting fatigue and the speed at which circumstances on the ground can shift. But things are not looking particularly rosy in the U.S. right now. Covid-19 isn’t roaring back exactly, but Delta is certainly making its presence felt across the country. After passing 35 million reported cases and 615,000 reported deaths and counting, you might be wondering: is the worst behind us or still to come? The answer, it turns out, could depend on where you live.

The Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, you may recall, was first identified in India last October. With some haste it managed to outcompete all rivals, including previous Big Bad Alpha, the variant discovered in the UK in December. After dominating the world in early 2021, Alpha ebbed away and the faster-spreading Delta variant swept across the globe. In the U.S., Delta first took the lead toward the end of June, and now makes up around 82 percent of all collected sequences. One month ago, it made up a third of all cases in the country, giving you a sense of how quickly Delta’s jumped ahead. It is now the motive force behind the pandemic, without which all relevant research and reporting is incomplete.
 

 
Of all the variants that have come before, Delta is also the most worrisome in essentially every category that matters. It’s at least 40% more transmissible than Alpha and twice as transmissible as the original coronavirus. Its incubation period is two days shorter on average, meaning people can begin shedding the virus that much earlier after exposure, and it’s capable of generating viral loads up to 1,260 times higher than the original strain. And perhaps most concerning, our vaccines appear to be less effective against Delta at blocking infection — though they remain exceedingly effective at keeping you out of the hospital. The jury is still out on whether Delta is inherently more deadly or likely to cause severe disease in unvaccinated individuals, but initial data from the UK isn’t reassuring.

None of this is surprising from an evolutionary point of view, as natural selection tends to favor transmission and vaccine escape. Any contender hoping to elbow out the defending champ must perform better in at least one of the above areas. Delta might hold the crown for now, but unless we do more to arrest its spread (read: more vaccines in more places), a more formidable challenger will inevitably emerge to take its place.

Low Vaccination Rates

States lagging behind in vaccinations are prime targets in Delta’s relentless pursuit of viable hosts. In Louisiana and Missouri and Arkansas and Mississippi and Tennessee, the virus is currently having a field day. We’re seeing the largest case spikes in rural counties that have been relatively untouched to this point. And because rural America has a considerable vaccine hesitancy problem, an avoidably high number of those infected will lose their life to Covid-19. In fact, virtually all hospitalizations and deaths at this point involve unvaccinated persons.

We saw similar surges last year, in which a single superspreader event could effect chains of transmission that overwhelmed small towns — same song, second verse. But due in part to the heightened transmissibility of the Delta variant, and the large number of holdouts refusing the vaccine, many states could actually experience more suffering at the local level in 2021 than in 2020.

Yes, that’s as scary as it sounds. Or at least it should be, especially for the unvaccinated, but also for health care workers anticipating overburdened facilities as Covid-19 gains a foothold in their community. Rural hospitals often have limited resources, such as beds and ventilators, both of which can dwindle quickly during a pandemic. In southwestern Missouri, it’s being reported that a hospital in Greene County is busier now than at any point since the pandemic began. In Florida, hospital admissions in Jacksonville and Brevard County are soaring past the peaks of last summer.

I suspect we’ll see a familiar story arc play out over the next few years. Delta — and Delta 2.0, along with other subsequent variants — will continue to burn through unvaccinated populations like wildfire until there are too few receptive hosts for the virus to self-perpetuate. As communities approach herd immunity, a phenomenon in which a sufficiently immunized population breaks the chain of transmission, daily case numbers will trend back down, with occasional flare-ups in more isolated communities that the virus hadn’t managed to breach in the past. Eventually, enough people will have either been vaccinated or infected that the virus struggles to carry on (unless of course immunity begins to wane; more on this possibility later).
 

 
Most experts seem to coalesce around a herd immunity figure of between 80 and 90 percent for SARS-2. At present the U.S. stands at just under 50 percent vaccinated, leaving plenty of pockets of susceptible ground for the virus to cover yet. No matter how you tilt the picture, there’s a great deal of Covid-related hardship still ahead of us.

Breakthrough Cases

Let’s talk about breakthrough cases for a moment, as they’re understandably a central concern for those of us who took the social contract seriously and opted for the vaccine as soon as it arrived. Since no vaccine is 100 percent effective, some number of vaccinated people will go on to test positive for the virus. These are called breakthrough infections: the virus breaks through our wall of immunity, despite the boosted defense from the vaccine, and starts churning out copies of itself.

While breakthrough cases aren’t unexpected, even with the best vaccines, we do seem to be seeing more of them in the Delta-dominated stage of the pandemic. Notably, just how many we’re dealing with on a national level is difficult to pin down now that the CDC only tracks “severe” breakthrough cases — i.e. those ending in hospitalization or death — a controversial decision in place since the start of May. Even so, based on the existing body of evidence showing that Delta is better at evading immunity compared to earlier variants, it stands to reason that we should expect to see more of these cases as Delta further cements itself on the national map.

It’s important to emphasize at the outset that breakthrough cases by themselves should not be interpreted as a failure of the vaccines. “The success of the vaccine,” as Dr. Fauci reminded us recently, “is based on the prevention of illness.” Epidemiologists will tell you that infection is the hardest to prevent, followed by transmission, followed by symptomatic disease, followed by hospitalization and death. Any vaccine worth its salt will protect you from the last two, but may not shield you from the virus completely. Thus, a vaccine that turns an otherwise symptomatic case into an asymptomatic one still did its job. What we really want to know, then, is the most likely course of a breakthrough infection. If you, as a fully vaccinated person, are exposed to the Delta variant, what are the most probable outcomes? How worried should you be?

Let’s take each in turn. In terms of preventing infection altogether, efficacy varies depending on which vaccine and population are being studied, but it’s clear that none of the leading vaccines guard quite as well against Delta compared to Alpha. The unique mutations that gave rise to Delta enable easier access to our cells, as we might expect in response to the vaccine threat. Next, while Delta’s higher viral load already suggested an elevated risk of forward transmission, until this week we weren’t sure whether this applied only to unvaccinated people. As Apoorva Mandavilli reports in the NYT, fully vaccinated individuals “may be just contagious as unvaccinated people, even if they have no symptoms.” (This appears to be the key piece of evidence behind the CDC’s recently updated mask guidance.) Regarding symptomatic disease, here, too, the evidence indicates the vaccines perform slightly less well against Delta than Alpha, though not enough to raise alarm.

One point all the research agrees on, however, is that the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines — the three shots authorized in the U.S. — are resoundingly effective at preventing serious illness and death, even with Delta around. We can be confident in this because as breakthrough cases have increased, we’ve not seen an associated increase in hospitalization or deaths. In Israel, for example, which has the highest density of vaccinated people anywhere in the world, serious Covid-related illness and deaths have continued to fall even as case numbers have risen. Israel’s Ministry of Health announced recently that Pfizer’s vaccine demonstrated 93 percent effectiveness at preventing serious illness and hospitalization. Similarly, national-level data from the UK shows that large spikes in cases have been met with only marginal increases in hospitalizations.

This is powerfully borne out by the CDC’s latest breakthrough data as well. Of the 161 million-plus vaccinations administered through July 19, 2021, 5,914 severe breakthrough cases have been reported, including 5,601 hospitalizations and 1,141 deaths. That’s already vanishingly low, but there are asterisks around all these numbers. First, three-quarters of the total cases involved people 65 or older, unsurprising given the fact that older adults are more susceptible to severe illness, irrespective of their vaccination status. Second, 1,821 of the cases involving hospitalization and death were asymptomatic or not related to Covid-19 at all. While these cases are included in the data sweep, they cannot necessarily be tied to Delta. Put differently, a positive test result does not mean cause of death. So what we’re really left with are 4,093 cases in which vaccinated people suffered a serious enough bout of Covid-19 that it landed them in the hospital or killed them. Such a low probability would be heralded as a triumph in the context of any other vaccine.
 

 
While it’s probable that breakthrough infections are undercounted at the moment, the available data speaks strongly to the success of the vaccines. The overwhelming majority of breakthrough cases have been mild or asymptomatic, and only in the rarest of rare cases has the infection progressed to something more serious.

[Update: As the CDC has restricted their breakthrough data in recent weeks to serious cases or those that create a burden on our health care system, other analysts have tasked themselves with casting a wider net. The first out of the gate is NBC News, and the results are encouraging. So encouraging, in fact, that it ought to change the way we talk about the topic entirely. Their analysis found a total of 125,682 breakthrough cases out of the 164.2 million people vaccinated since January. That translates to a rate of just under .08 percent, or less than eight-hundredths of a percent. The analysis compiled data from 38 states, with the remainder either not tracking breakthrough cases at all or disclosing only partial data. Even if we assume, though, that breakthroughs were undercounted by half, we’re still talking about fifteen-hundredths of a percent, or 1 in 650 people.1

To concentrate on a slightly raised concern of breakthrough cases is to place an unreasonable expectation on the vaccines and to take too dim a view of their unparalleled success. These are medical interventions designed in a matter of days in January 2020 that are effectively being deployed against a virus that has since evolved several times over. Mass coverage of what amounts to a tiny fragment of the overall population could further entrench vaccine hesitancy by focusing the spotlight on the wrong people. It’s not the vaccinated, who are three times less likely to be infected and 25 times less likely to die from Covid-19, but the unvaccinated who are chiefly responsible for transmitting the virus and prolonging the pandemic. We should continue to track breakthrough infections. But we should also be wary of straying too far off message at a time when trust in science and vaccines is at an all-time low.]

The throughline here, if you take nothing else away, is that getting vaccinated is the best way to protect yourself and others. That hasn’t changed. A vaccinated person is less likely to be infected in the first place, less likely to suffer from mild Covid, and even less likely to be admitted to the hospital or end up in a morgue. It’s the difference between having a gun-toting trespasser who means you harm on your mostly unprotected property versus a property laden with security alarms, concealed bear traps, land mines, and other active defenses. Sure, they might still make it through, but chances are the attacker will be turned away or disabled long before they can inflict real harm.

Waning Immunity?

The last item I want to cover is the possibility of waning immunity, a topic of much discussion in recent days. The length of protection afforded by the vaccines is still an open question — they simply haven’t been around long enough for us to draw any firm conclusions. It’s also a critically important one, because it could dictate our public health response, such as whether boosters are needed, or even entirely new vaccines.

Some answers are starting to trickle in from various countries, most notably a study released by Israel’s Health Ministry. Their latest data show a large and worrying drop in efficacy against both asymptomatic and symptomatic infections in recent weeks. As most of the country is vaccinated, about half of these cases were breakthrough infections. What’s most concerning are the time periods they looked at. From January to early April, when Alpha held a commanding lead, efficacy was estimated at 95 percent. From late June to early July, when Delta moved out in front, that figure plummeted to 39 percent. Protection against serious illness stayed at over 90 percent across both periods. Breakthrough cases, meanwhile, were more prominent among those vaccinated earlier in the year. The implication is that protection has tapered off since January, suggesting a shorter immunity period than we might have hoped.

There are many reasons to approach the Health Ministry’s latest study with some skepticism, however, reasons Israeli scientists raise themselves. It relies on a small sample, it measures only a tiny window of time, the age groups vary significantly across the two periods, and it’s highly inconsistent with data from other countries where Delta is also prevalent, including studies from the UK, Scotland, and Canada, which all derived efficacy ratings of 80 percent or higher.

Though the data is murky and will take time to sort out, it’s worth looking at the possibility the Israeli study is telling us something important about vaccine duration or potency. What might the future hold if their results amount to more than a statistical artifact? I see two plausible scenarios, one where new variants evolve to the point that they render our vaccines ineffective, and one where our immunity, whether vaccine- or infection-induced, wanes after a set period of time.

In the first scenario, Covid-19 would basically end up like the flu, requiring periodic shots to prevent infection from the active strain. These would need to be constantly updated to better match the genetic profile of newly circulating forms of the virus. How often we’d need them would depend on the rate of evolution of the virus, which could vary based on a number of factors, including the level of population immunity the virus encounters. Ideally, though, it would be less frequent than the flu vaccine, since coronaviruses generally mutate at a slower rate than the family of viruses behind influenza.

Under the second scenario, the vaccines themselves don’t change but their frequency does. Instead of offering indefinite protection, they may last up to six months, or two years, at which time you’d schedule a booster to top off your immunity. This would not be dissimilar to the vaccines for bacterial diseases like typhoid, tetanus, diphtheria, and meningitis, where immunity fades after a number of years. Given what we know about natural immunity from common cold coronaviruses, however, it’s unlikely that any Covid-19 vaccine will be able to match the ten-year duration conferred by tetanus and diphtheria shots, much less the lifelong immunity provided by measles and yellow fever inoculations. Nonetheless, the hope would be for vaccine-based immunity to extend longer than one year for most cohorts. Perhaps older age groups, and those with weaker immune systems, would need a booster once a year, while the rest of us could get by with a period of two years or more.

Finally, it should be noted that in the event of waning immunity, new cases would not constitute breakthrough infections. I think scientists and public health experts need to start underscoring now the important distinction between vaccine efficacy on the one hand and waning immunity on the other. If someone vaccinated back in May contracts Covid sometime next year, it doesn’t necessarily mean the vaccine didn’t take or that SARS-2 has outwitted their antibody arsenal. It may simply mean their immunity level has subsided, as happens with many vaccines, and it’s time to re-up.

Mask Up, Get Your Vaccine

All told, the risk calculus hasn’t materially changed from where we were in March of last year. Even if you aren’t personally at risk of serious illness from Covid-19, it’s more about those around you, who may be more vulnerable than you are. Asymptomatic transmission is now a universal concern, even if you’re vaccinated. It’s not just the vaccine hesitant folks you ought to be concerned about either, but the immunocompromised (at least 5 million), for whom vaccines may be less effective, children under 12 (50 million), who are not yet eligible to receive the shot, and the elderly, who may experience sharper drop-offs in vaccine protection due to their less resilient immune systems. Delta only raises the stakes for all of the above.
 

 
For these reasons, masking remains a favorable social safeguard whether you’re vaccinated or not, especially while in indoor, crowded spaces. That’s why it’s good to see the CDC recently changed its tune and now recommends masks for vaccinated people under certain conditions, particularly in areas with high case loads. This brings U.S. guidance more in line with the WHO’s in this regard, which has also called for the fully vaccinated to keep wearing masks in light of Delta.

And please, if you have yet to get your vaccine, do so. It’s the surest path out of this storm, and it can only happen once a critical mass of the country gets on board. No reasonable excuse exists for putting yourself and those around you at such inflated risk, especially once you consider how many people around the world lack access to a proven solution that you are — against all evidence — continuing to take for granted.

As we’ve come to expect from sifting through the science for the last year and a half, Delta’s impact is a developing story. The pandemic is still very much in flux, and evolution surely has more surprises in store for us yet. No public health guidance is set in stone, and we should be ready to adapt to whatever new conditions the variants and immunity thresholds throw at us.

Further reading:

• How the Delta variant achieves its ultrafast spread (preprint)
• How Worried Should Vaccinated People Be About the Delta Variant?
• What breakthrough infections mean for the Covid vaccines
• Rarely, Covid vaccine breakthrough infections can be severe. Who’s at risk?
• The Delta Variant Is Surging in Missouri
• Pfizer vaccine protection takes a hit as Delta variant spreads, Israeli government says
• Is Israel or the UK right when it comes to COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness?
• Nearly all COVID deaths in US are now among unvaccinated
• How Often Do the Vaccinated Spread Covid-19?
• American Dysfunction Is the Biggest Barrier to Fighting Covid
• Why You Should Still Wear a Mask—Even After Getting Vaccinated
• What Do We Know About the New Variant of Coronavirus?
• Why the Delta Covid Variant Is Making Herd Immunity Harder to Reach

1. In Massachusetts, where the shoddily reported Provincetown outbreak took place, the Department of Public Health just released more granular data that makes the case for vaccines even stronger. Of all the breakthrough cases observed in Massachusetts to date, hospitalizations represented 0.009 percent of the total, while deaths made up just 0.002 percent. Of those hospitalized, 57 percent had underlying conditions. Among those who died, the median age was 82.5 years old, with nearly three-quarters having underlying conditions. That these numbers keep getting tinier the more we drill into them is a testament both to how effective these vaccines are at preventing severe Covid-19 and the unprecedented global effort to understand this disease and the virus that causes it.

 
 
Today I want to bring attention to a trio of climate-focused stories that push against the notion that climate change is something with which future generations must contend as opposed to something that is ongoing and all around us. These are stories that might easily escape notice amid the noisy inundation of climate reporting. Each takes place in the U.S., and each presages the kinds of events we can expect to see more of so long as global temperatures continue on their current trajectory. Seemingly ripped straight from the world of apocalyptic science fiction, they’re illustrative of the fact that the climate our parents and grandparents grew up in is gone, and probably not coming back.

Death Valley Breaks All-Time Temperature Record

On Friday we set a new record for the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth. Readings hit 130°F (54.4°C) in Death Valley, California, ever so slightly eclipsing the previous record taken just last year on August 16, 2020. In case that didn’t hit you the way it should: this is the single highest air temperature we’ve ever witnessed anywhere on this planet. I’ve literally been telling everyone I can about this. I even told my cab driver yesterday (no joke). I think you should, too.

The milestone occurred in the wake of one of the hottest heat waves ever experienced in the Pacific Northwest, an event scientists say was made at least 150 times more likely thanks to human influence of the climate. What’s worse, not only has our influence tipped the scales in favor of similarly intense heat dome events across the U.S., such events, when and where they do occur, are now 3 to 5 degrees warmer on average than they would be without that influence — say, prior to the Industrial era. Caught in the “loaded dice” scenario in which we now find ourselves, what was once infrequent and rare has become ordinary and expected.

The North American continent as a whole, meanwhile, registered its hottest June on record as states all across the Southwest, Mountain West, and Northwest turned in a string of record-breaking events over the course of the month. Between June 25 and 30 alone, a total of around 175 record highs were recorded in Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, with some temperatures breaking the previous record by more than 5 degrees. Even Canada notched a new national temperature record three days in a row, topping out at 121 degrees on June 29.

It has been so searingly hot in fact that officials from Las Vegas to Phoenix cautioned that making contact with the pavement could result in third-degree burns. (Imagine how this changes the calculus of something as simple as walking your dog.) In Seattle, bridges were shut down twice a day for scheduled “cooling baths.” What? Yes.

It’s important to put these events in perspective, and in particular to refute the notion that these are one-off outliers disconnected from the climate crisis. Intuitively, if the average temperature of the planet is increasing, we should expect to see both an increase in the temperature values of daily minimums and maximums (i.e. the coolest and warmest readings over the course of a day at a particular location), as well as an uptick in the ratio of record hot to record cold days. In short, our days should get warmer over time, and we should set more hot records compared to cold records. These constitute important predictions of human-caused warming, and one of the clearest signals of climate change that we experience directly.
 

 
This is indeed what we’ve observed. Consistent with predictions based on climate physics, not only has the distribution of record hot days versus record cold days been shifting towards more and more hot records, but the values of both daily minimums and maximums are trending higher as well. In fact, for the United States we see that recent decades show twice as many hot records as cold records, whether we isolate the data to daytime or nighttime temperature. Regardless of where we live, our days are generally getting warmer, and we’re setting hot temperature records more often than cold temperature records. The trend is toward a planet that’s hotter, drier, and less hospitable to species adapted to environments with a more stable climate.1

Climate researcher and Skeptical Science alum Kevin Cowtan breaks it all down in the video below.
 

 
As Cowtan explains, global warming does not mean cold weather goes away or that record cold days will no longer occur, only that the relationship between hot and cold will change (climate is the average weather). Specifically, the prediction is that the ratio of record cold to record hot days will decrease. Better than simply looking at the absolute number of hot and cold daily records since temperature tracking began is to look at the proportion of hot to cold records over time. Again, when we do this we see a clear pattern of hot-record events outcompeting cold-record events. And climate change’s tendency to “rig” the meteorological dice makes the recent roasting of the Pacific Northwest more likely to occur.

Our Roads Are Crumbling From the Heat

One of the more alarming stories to come out of the Pacific Northwest episode this past month is the impact of the excess heat on our nation’s roads and highways. During the closing weeks of June, roads in Washington state and Oregon literally crumbled under the stress of the prolonged heat bout.

The problem: aging infrastructure built for a fundamentally different climate. Most of our roads were originally built several decades ago, and without climate change in mind. Engineers typically used historical weather records to inform the design of a city’s roads. Now, it’s clear we should be using climate models instead.
 

 
Fortunately, it sounds like we possess the technical know-how to design our roads to withstand the extreme heat currently laying siege to the Northwest. Concrete and asphalt roads in Phoenix, for example, haven’t suffered from these issues in recent years because they were designed to be more heat-resilient. Revamping the rest of the country’s existing infrastructure in order to make it compatible with our present and future climate will require huge public investment at the federal and state levels.

The buckling roads out west are a warning of what’s to come if we fail to prepare now for a tomorrow that’s hotter and drier. As with climate change more generally, this is not a matter of lacking the relevant information or technology, but of political will and resource priorities. Excerpts:
 

“When it gets really, really abnormally hot, like it hasn’t been that hot before in quite a long time, it expands so much that it runs into the adjacent slab. There’s no more room to expand, they just push up against each other and then they pop up” Muench says.

Asphalt is a different beast entirely. “Asphalt is a viscoelastic material, which is temperature-dependent. So, the hotter it is, the more fluid-like it is,” Muench says. If it gets hot enough, some asphalt roads can become soft or deform like Play-Doh, forming ruts when cars and trucks drive over them.

Both asphalt and concrete roads can be designed to withstand heat. “We already know how to adjust materials to behave in hotter places,” Muench says. “That’s why Phoenix isn’t falling apart — it’s not Armageddon there because it’s hotter.”

“The problem is that when some of these roads in Washington state were being designed, using those materials or design techniques would have been overkill — the area doesn’t normally get as hot as Phoenix, so there was no need to build with extreme heat in mind. Now, that calculus might be changing.”

Rising Seas and the Surfside Condo Collapse

Amid widespread coverage of the horrific condo collapse in South Florida, I’ve seen comparatively little discussion of the role that climate change undoubtedly played in the destruction. (The Wikipedia page, for example, hasn’t a single mention of the word ‘climate’ as of this writing.) And yet Florida is perhaps the most climate-vulnerable state in America, with the Miami area in particular a showcase for sea level rise. Since construction of Champlain Towers South was first completed in 1981, the local sea level has risen between 7 and 8 inches.
 

 
Along with Charleston, Norfolk, Savannah, and other major cities up and down the eastern seaboard, Miami has seen a marked uptick in flooding events from a gradually encroaching ocean. Today, high-tide flooding is more or less a part of life in low-lying Miami-Dade, even on perfectly sunny days, due to climate change. The abundance of saltwater such nuisance flooding introduces to coastal infrastructure carries clear implications for its structural integrity and overall longevity.

Salt, a mineral, is inherently corrosive and, if left untreated, will eat away at certain materials over time. The brine-like residue left behind from repeated flooding in the region rots both concrete and rebar, the primary materials used in building construction. Whether this corrosion actually caused the collapse or merely expedited it remains unclear. Early reports, however, have traced the critical failures to the lower levels of the structure, including the underground garage, where the maintenance manager of the building reported seeing one to two feet of standing water every time flooding occurred in the area. All of that saltwater intrusion appears to have deteriorated the concrete and raised a number of inspection concerns in the years leading up to the collapse.

For an earlier piece, I looked at some of the institutional strengthening projects currently underway in Miami Beach, where engineers are literally raising the pavement to put more dirt underneath, a massively costly effort to safeguard against sea level rise and storm surges. In Norfolk, VA, rulers situated along the sides of the road help drivers gauge whether intersections and low-lying streets are safe to navigate at speed. At the 540-foot tall Ross Dam in Washington, engineers are lifting up hydroelectric facilities and other at-risk equipment. To better fortify our buildings, perhaps we can make creative use of beryllium (Be), an element that’s highly resistant to corrosion but due to its high cost has typically been reserved for applications like missiles and rockets.

Functionally, these are stopgap remedies that seek to adapt to the emergency rather than mitigate the underlying causes. And it’s still far from clear whether city boards and state planners are attuned to the scale of the threat climate change poses to communities at the forefront of this crisis.

Excerpts:
 

“Officials are still very early in their investigation into what caused the collapse, and initial signs point to potential issues at the base of the building, perhaps in its foundation, columns or underground parking garage. But some engineers are considering whether increasing exposure to saltwater could have played a role in weakening the building’s foundation or internal support system.

At the very least, experts say even the possibility should be a wake-up call to vulnerable communities across the United States: Climate change isn’t a far-future threat; it’s happening now, and with potentially deadly consequences.

Higher sea level increases the amount of saltwater building foundations are exposed to, Moftakhari told CNN. “Infrastructure like roads and foundations are not designed to be inundated by saltwater a couple of hours a day.”

Ben Schafer, a structural engineer at Johns Hopkins University said sea-level rise and saltwater intrusion — where underground seawater moves farther inland — typically threatens older coastal buildings like Champlain Towers South.

“The life of the structure would be greatly shortened,” Schafer told CNN. “It’s a corrosive environment. It’s not favorable for concrete or steel, which are your primary building materials.”

Schafer says that although climate change is already upon us, we have yet to do very much about it.

“People are still imagining that it will move slow,” he said. “The problem is much, much larger, and we need to be thinking much more broadly about how we equitably evacuate ourselves from some areas that won’t be available to us here in not so many years.”

As more parts of the world feel the dire impacts of climate change, Schafer says civil engineers such as himself also need to rethink how buildings are designed and how older buildings need to be reassessed to adapt to these changes.

“I don’t think we’ve owned up even to the scale of the problem,” Schafer said. “If you look at the median sea-level rise predictions and project that onto city maps, the scale of what we need to do is so far beyond the scale of what we’re so far considering.”

 
So yeah, shit is dire. Reading the latest climate reports, it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re living in a Dune novel. Though the planet Arrakis also happens to be the third planet from its star, we’d like to think the in-universe similarities end there. And yet the wasteland-esque elements so popular in science fiction seem to keep making their presence felt outside our front door.

In addition to being predictable downstream effects of human-caused planetary warming, the foregoing are all highly visible manifestations of the new climate regime that’s now intruding in our daily life from coast to coast. These can’t simply be written off as outlier events when the fingerprints of climate change are all over them — when indeed, grounded as they are in basic physics, they’re direct predictions from the models themselves. Projections indicate that the frequency, duration, and intensity of extreme heat events and flooding from sea level rise will increase over the coming decades as average global temperature continues its ascent. How long until headlines like these are no longer noteworthy?
 

Further reading:

• Pacific Northwest heat wave was ‘virtually impossible’ without climate change, scientists find (analysis)
• Doctors Warn Of Burns From Asphalt As A Record-Breaking Heat Wave Envelops The West
• Global Warming Cauldron Boils Over in the Northwest in One of the Most Intense Heat Waves on Record Worldwide
• Northwest “heat dome” signals global warming’s march
• Why roads in the Pacific Northwest buckled under extreme heat
• Climate scientists say building collapse is a ‘wake-up call’ about the potential impact of rising seas
• When Mitigation Has Failed, Adapt
• Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun
• It’s time to say it: We are in a climate emergency
• Is climate change happening faster than expected? A climate scientist explains.
• Climate change to worsen heat waves in Northern Hemisphere, studies warn

Feature image credit: Desert Safari by adrianvdesign
 

1. Meehl et al. published an updated study on US daily temperature records in 2016, confirming the 2:1 average decadal ratio of record hot to record cold days. For this later study, they also used climate models to project the ratio out to 2100. Their analysis showed that under a 3 °C warming scenario for the US, the ratio could reach as high as ∼15:1 ± 8.

   Other good resources for tracking record high temperatures versus record low temperatures can be found at Climate Signals, NOAA, and USGCRP.

 
 
As evidence mounts for the extraordinary effectiveness of all three vaccines approved for use in the US, new talking points are starting to emerge among those hesitant to get the shot. One of the more popular in recent days is that if you’ve already had Covid you don’t need the vaccine. It doesn’t appear that there was ever any actual science to support this claim, and in fact it’s demonstrably wrong — all the evidence points in the opposite direction. In this post I’ll take a brief walk through the latest studies showing the pronounced benefits of vaccine-mediated immunity over ‘natural’ immunity from infection.

First, a bit of terminology. ‘Seropositive‘ is simply when a blood test detects that you were previously infected with a particular pathogen, while ‘seronegative’ is when a blood test fails to show that you were infected. So for example, if you go to the doctor for a blood test and the test doesn’t detect any SARS-2 antibodies, you would be ‘seronegative’ for this virus.

Based on the research to date, there are at least two main reasons why those who’ve previously tested positive for Covid-19 should opt for the vaccine.

(1) Vaccinated people have higher antibody levels than those who’ve recovered from a prior infection. One of the earliest studies on this was published back in December, before new variants had turned up. The study, which looked exclusively at the Moderna vaccine, found that the number of IgG antibodies (the important ones that bind to the notorious spike protein on the surface of the virus) in participants who received both doses “far exceeded” that of seropositive participants.

It’s also been shown that seropositive individuals who receive at least one dose of an mRNA vaccine (i.e., Pfizer, Moderna) have roughly equivalent levels of antibodies to seronegative individuals who receive both doses, per preprints here and here. Essentially, one dose for previously infected people provides about the same level of (humoral) immunity as the full regimen does for uninfected people. While the reasons for this aren’t fully understood, it may be that since the immune system of a previously infected person will have already been trained to fight SARS-2, perhaps that first vaccine dose functions as a ‘booster’. Or, as the authors put it, “prior infection primes the immune response to the first dose of mRNA-based vaccine.”

What this suggests is that if you’ve had Covid, you might only need one dose of an mRNA vaccine to achieve the same level of antibody immunity as an uninfected person who gets both doses. What this also means, though, is that simply having had Covid in the past may not protect you from reinfection as much as getting even one vaccine dose. The vaccine tops up your antibody levels, which may have waned in the months following infection, and which could come in handy in the event of a future assault by the virus (or novel variants, which I cover below).

In short, a previously infected person who foregoes the vaccine altogether is at higher risk of coronavirus compared to a previously infected person who opts for a single mRNA dose, and to both infected and uninfected people who receive both mRNA doses.

(2) Seropositive individuals are less protected against emerging variants relative to fully vaccinated seronegative individuals. As Apoorva Mandavilli, writing for the Times, explains:
 

“In both new studies, neutralizing antibodies from vaccinated people were better at thwarting the virus than those from people who developed antibodies from being sick with Covid-19. Direct comparison of the two sets of antibodies offered a possible explanation [now published here]: Antibodies from vaccinated people are distributed across a broader range of parts of the virus, so no single mutation has a big impact on their effectiveness — making vaccines a better bet against variants than immunity from natural infection.

Dr. Bloom led the analysis comparing vaccine-induced antibodies with those produced by natural infection. He found that the most powerful antibodies bind to multiple sites in a key part of the virus. Even if a mutation affects the binding in one site in this region, antibodies that target the remaining sites would still be protective.

Antibodies induced by the vaccine cover many more sites across this region than those from natural infection — and so are less likely to be affected by a mutation in any one site.”

 
This finding is corroborated by an earlier study based on Pfizer’s vaccine that looked at two variants, the UK variant (Alpha) and the South African variant (Beta): Vaccine-induced immunity provides more robust heterotypic immunity than natural infection to emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern. Key excerpt:
 

“The reduction in antibody neutralization was less marked in post-boost vaccine-induced than in naturally-induced immune responses and could be largely explained by the potency of the homotypic antibody response. However, after a single vaccination, which induced only modestly neutralizing homotypic antibody titres, neutralization against the VOCs was completely abrogated in the majority of vaccinees. These data indicate that VOCs may evade protective neutralising responses induced by prior infection, and to a lesser extent by immunization, particularly after a single vaccine, but the impact of the VOCs on T cell responses appears less marked. The results emphasize the need to generate high potency immune responses through vaccination in order to provide protection against these and other emergent variants.”

 
Some rather convoluted diction there but it’s saying that vaccine-derived immunity is better at producing neutralizing ABs compared to natural immunity from infection. And that people who only receive the initial dose are granted a markedly lower level of protection from extant variants compared to those who receive both doses as recommended. Up against the latest variants, the best offense is a good defense, which the vaccine provides in spades.
 

 
The takeaway is that the vaccines supply you with higher antibody counts in addition to a much broader antibody arsenal compared to natural immunity alone. One caveat is that all of the above studies comparing antibody response among the infected versus uninfected were based on the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer & Moderna). I’ve not seen similar studies on Johnson & Johnson’s, a single-dose, viral vector vaccine. But all the evidence we do have indicates that people who have had Covid are better off getting any of the available vaccines rather than none at all. Period.

While not an exhaustive list, hopefully this is helpful for those of you encountering this excuse out in the wild. Whether you’re up against genuine misunderstanding or entrenched anti-vaxx sentiment, it never hurts to have the facts in your back pocket.

Update: A new CDC study shows that seropositives who decline the vaccine are over twice as likely to be reinfected as seropositives who are fully vaccinated. This builds on numbers 1 and 2 above, further stacking the deck against the questionable line of reasoning addressed in this post. Excerpt:
 

“In today’s MMWR, a study of COVID-19 infections in Kentucky among people who were previously infected with SAR-CoV-2 shows that unvaccinated individuals are more than twice as likely to be reinfected with COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated after initially contracting the virus. These data further indicate that COVID-19 vaccines offer better protection than natural immunity alone and that vaccines, even after prior infection, help prevent reinfections.

The study of hundreds of Kentucky residents with previous infections through June 2021 found that those who were unvaccinated had 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with those who were fully vaccinated. The findings suggest that among people who have had COVID-19 previously, getting fully vaccinated provides additional protection against reinfection.”

 
The previous advice holds strong: get the vaccine — whether you were already infected, whether you’re not sure if you’ve been infected, or whether you know you haven’t been infected. It’s your best bet at mounting a superior defense against all circulating forms of the virus.

Further reading:

• Why you should get a COVID-19 vaccine – even if you’ve already had the coronavirus
• CORONAVIRUS MAY 2021—PART 13 HOW EFFECTIVE ARE THE VACCINES IN THE REAL WORLD?
• Vaccines Are Effective Against the New York Variant, Studies Find
• The Science of mRNA Vaccines
• New CDC Study: Vaccination Offers Higher Protection than Previous COVID-19 Infection

Feature image credit: James Estrin/The New York Times

 
 
As more of us get the vaccine, particularly friends and family who work in health care — thank you for all that you do! — it’s worth reflecting on the genius, passion, and raft of hard-won scientific insight on which these vaccines rest. This post from evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne dives into the technology and engineering behind BioNTech/Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine, the one that most people seem to have received so far (though Moderna’s works much the same way). Learning more about what went into this unprecedented endeavor can help crystallize the significance of this moment. It’s a lot more than a jab in the arm.

The New York Times, courtesy of one of my favorite science journalists Carl Zimmer, has already put out individualized breakdowns of each of these vaccines here and here (as well as several others approved for emergency use). But Coyne’s post goes into more detail, including how the genetic code used in the vaccine was initially entered into DNA printers (those exist) which then converted the bytes on disk to actual DNA molecules. You don’t need to understand the niceties of nucleotides to marvel at what our best and brightest managed to achieve this year. And taking a few minutes out of our day as an expert walks us through it helps us better appreciate how we arrived at this moment and the sheer complexity of the science involved.

Over at Science Magazine, Derek Lowe brings us up to speed on the spate of development research on mRNA vaccines in the years leading up to the pandemic. The immune system is obnoxiously intricate, so much so that a vaccine which triggers too strong of a response can be rendered ineffective as the body’s innate immunity quashes the viral proteins before they have a chance to make it into your cells. It’s a balancing act between the innate and adaptive immune systems, and we didn’t stumble upon the right formula by accident. These techniques, as Derek points out, have been carefully honed over decades of empirical study, and they essentially paid “off just in time for the current pandemic.”

This preparatory work in large part explains how scientists were able to churn out the initial batch of vaccines so quickly. Zooming out for a moment, many of us still haven’t quite fathomed the dizzying pace at which science operated over the last year. The typical lead time for a vaccine product is in the ballpark of ten to fifteen years. For SARS-CoV-2, we went from having the genome sequenced and uploaded to the internet on January 10th of last year to robust Phase 3 clinical trial data in 300 days. Moderna reportedly took just two days to finalize the design of their mRNA vaccine after the sequence data was posted online. Thanks to years of groundwork and the collective efforts of scientists around the world, we decoded a deadly virus, organized clinical trials, and began distribution of two promising vaccines — all inside of a year.
 

 
This stunning series of events was helped along by hard work, and a few lucky breaks, to be sure, but we were able to accomplish this feat because the science behind these vaccines is well established. Their formulation builds on previous depth of knowledge about genetic instructions, protein structure, DNA & RNA sequencing, and viral evolution, while their rapid rollout stems from advances in scalable technology and large-scale trial design. We also owe an enormous debt to Professor Zhang in China, who set a precedent for open data sharing when he bravely ignored threats from above by releasing the initial sequence of the coronavirus on that seminal day last January.

The Covid-19 pandemic has inflicted an incalculable toll on human life, but we’d be remiss not to acknowledge the reality of our scientific successes. We’ve faced down pandemics in the past, but never have we mobilized our scientific and technological arsenal the way we did in 2020. The quiet, steady toil of research that’s played out across generations, and the selfless actions of Chinese whistleblowers, represent “the perfect example of why we can see further by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Further reading:

• The mRNA coronavirus vaccine: a testament to human ingenuity and the power of science
• The tangled history of mRNA vaccines
• Eric Topol on Twitter: mRNA Vaccine Milestones
• Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
• What are mRNA vaccines and how do they work?
• mRNA Vaccines: What Happens
• Moderna’s groundbreaking coronavirus vaccine was designed in just 2 days
• Ten reasons we got Covid-19 vaccines so quickly without ‘cutting corners’
• The Pandemic Heroes Who Gave us the Gift of Time and Gift of Information
• Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker
• Every Covid-19 Vaccine Question You’ll Ever Have, Answered

Feature image credit: Illustration by Andy Potts

 
 
The talk on everyone’s lips this week is the new Covid variant identified in the the UK. Concern surrounding the new strain has sapped some of the elation brought on by the first rollout of vaccines. While there’s no evidence so far that the UK variant — or any of the other known variants — has any impact on the efficacy of vaccines, early reports suggest the new kid on the block is well worth paying attention to, as its more contagious nature threatens to test our resolve over the next few months and push our already overburdened health care systems to their limit.

Here’s the original paper on the SARS-2 variant known as B.1.1.7 that emerged in the UK at least as early as September. One question that’s on a lot of people’s minds is: how did this happen? The received wisdom was that SARS-2, like its coronavirus kin, is relatively genetically stable in both humans and animals, certainly when compared to influenza and other RNA-based viruses. (It’s why we develop a new flu vax every year, but we don’t for measles.) For example, Carl Zimmer wrote the following on the 30th of April (emphasis mine):
 

“In fact, researchers have found that the coronavirus is mutating relatively slowly compared to some other RNA viruses, in part because virus proteins acting as proofreaders are able to fix some mistakes. Each month, a lineage of coronaviruses might acquire only two single-letter mutations.

In the future, the coronavirus may pick up some mutations that help it evade our immune systems. But the slow mutation rate of the coronavirus means that these changes will emerge over the course of years.”

 
Of course, this never meant that the novel SARS-CoV-2 wouldn’t defy our expectations (as it has in several other respects), or that science doesn’t change. More people getting sick means more replicating viruses. More replication means more mutations. And more mutations mean more opportunities for the coronavirus to change in significant, even dangerous ways. The longevity of the pandemic, and the fact that SARS-2 has managed to worm its way into nearly every corner of the globe, raised the prospect of new strains emerging, and here they are — if a bit sooner than expected.

What appears to have happened, according to the running hypothesis in the above paper, is that the UK strain originated from a prolonged infection in an immunocompromised host. Coronaviruses isolated from patients with prolonged or persistent bouts of Covid show an unusually high amount of genetic variation. These patients tend to be immunodeficient in some way or another, which biases them toward chronic infection as the virus is allowed to linger in the body for a much longer period of time compared to people with healthy immune systems.

And it’s precisely this combination that produced the unique evolutionary pressures that gave rise to the UK strain:

Weak selective pressure from the patient’s natural immune response

Unusually large and genetically diverse virus population that builds up over the course of the infection

Strong selective pressure after convalescent plasma or other forms of antibody therapy are introduced several weeks later

In short, hosts with a weakened immune system foster a higher degree of viral evolution compared to immunocompetent individuals due to some unique factors at play in such hosts.

The authors note that patients with this particular type of infection are a rarity, and that onward transmission from said patients should be rarer still. Patients who develop chronic infections are usually hospitalized and under the care and supervision of trained health care workers equipped with proper PPE. Thus forward transmission is unlikely, or at least far less likely compared to asymptomatic “silent spreaders” walking around with no clue they’re even carrying the virus. In this case, however, transmission did occur. It sounds like we may have just gotten unlucky. It may be that the new strain’s more contagious properties managed to crash through the normal impediments.

The researchers identified a total of 23 mutations present in the new variant, including 6 synonymous mutations, 14 non-synonymous mutations, and 3 deletions.
 

By Jonathan Corum | Source: Andrew Rambaut et al., Covid-19 Genomics Consortium U.K.

 
According to a preprint released by British scientists this past Wednesday, the cumulative effect of these various mutations is more rapid spread. While the variant is not currently linked to more severe illness or higher risk of hospitalization or death, initial estimates indicate B.1.1.7 is between 56 and 70 percent more infectious compared to others that have been circulating in most parts of the world. That’s alarming news for nations already seeing record high case counts and deaths as we settle in for the winter and outdoor activity wanes.

From the moment the new variant was announced, many experts suggested it was essentially a foregone conclusion that it wouldn’t stay confined to the UK for long, and likely had already escaped. Given the shamefully low rates of testing across the US in particular, the lack of a national program for genetic sequencing, and the reality of international travel, one could easily presume the mutant strain had been circulating here for weeks, if not months, without detection.

Sure enough, news came this morning that the first case of B.1.1.7 in the US has been confirmed in Colorado. More than a dozen other countries have also reported finding the new variant in samples isolated from patients. That the variant had been on hand but not accounted for was bolstered by the fact that the patient in Colorado had no travel history. Presumably, it was spreading among the community for quite some time.

One silver lining in all this is that most scientists doubt the new strains will undermine the vaccine effort. The CDC is currently tracking a number of SARS-2 variants or strains1 identified over the last few months, one from the UK (B.1.1.7) and one in South Africa (B.1.351). Under both, the agency emphasizes that there is no evidence either variant “has any impact on disease severity or vaccine efficacy.” Dr. Fauci appears optimistic as well. That said, we cannot yet rule out the possibility, and a number of countries and vaccine makers are hustling to secure more concrete answers to this very question.

The scientists behind the B.1.1.7 paper do close out on a hopeful note by reflecting on a strain that emerged in Singapore. That strain was discovered earlier this year and produced a milder form of Covid in patients. However, it died out shortly afterward thanks to the swift control measures enacted by the government. Singapore’s encounter with its own unique variant can serve as a hopeful lesson for Western nations by demonstrating that similar successes can be achieved if we act quickly and decisively.

The revelation of a new, faster-spreading variant comes at a most inopportune time. Just as the world begins to celebrate the influx of vaccines, a more formidable foe has arrived that threatens to complicate our ability to control the virus. But there is also an opportunity here. The emergence of new strains sharpens the urgency of vaccination programs around the world. We — from global health agencies to ordinary citizens — can respond to these new perils in the months ahead by stepping up surveillance and testing, and by redoubling our efforts to distribute the vaccines as quickly, as widely, and as safely as possible. First and foremost, these efforts must entail educating people about vaccine safety and the role we all play in minimizing transmission and bringing the virus to heel.

As it’s often said, vaccines don’t save lives, vaccination campaigns do.

Further reading:

• What we know about the new British variant.
• U.K. variant puts spotlight on immunocompromised patients’ role in the COVID-19 pandemic
• Coronavirus Variant Is Indeed More Transmissible, New Study Suggests
• First U.S. Case of Highly Contagious Coronavirus Variant Is Found in Colorado
• CEPI creates new collaborative taskforce to assess impact of emerging viral strains on effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines
• Vaccine makers in Asia rush to test jabs against fast-spreading COVID variant
• The new U.K. coronavirus variant is concerning. But don’t freak out
• Could too much time between doses drive the coronavirus to outwit vaccines?
• Inside the B.1.1.7 Coronavirus Variant
• COVID Variants May Arise in People with Compromised Immune Systems (study)

Image credit: Shutterstock

1. Virology can be a notoriously confusing field both because the terminology used in the literature is often inconsistent, and because popular concepts within the field are still fiercely debated. (Welcome to academia.) As an example, terms like ‘isolate,’ ‘strain,’ ‘variant,’ ‘species,’ and ‘serotype’ are not always used the same way by different infectious disease researchers; while some associate these terms with different concepts, others may use them more or less interchangeably, or worse, inconsistently.

   The CDC weighed in on this matter in their interim report on B.1.1.7: “The press often uses the terms “variant,” “strain,” “lineage,” and “mutant” interchangeably. For the time being in the context of this variant, the first three of these terms are generally being used interchangeably by the scientific community as well.”

   Typically, the terms mentioned by the CDC above are reserved for versions with special changes that confer a new property to the virus. Since lineage B.1.1.7 appears to be up to 70% more transmissible thanks to a few key mutations, it’s acceptable to refer to it as a new ‘strain’ or ‘variant.’ Other viral genomes isolated from patients, which number in the hundreds of thousands at this point, have no new or discerning features or properties to write home about, and are merely considered ‘isolates.’

   To be sure, virologists will not necessarily agree on this, just as many did not agree with referring to the Singapore virus as a ‘new strain.’ The conversation will go on.

 
 
A few Covid-centric items to share today that I trust many will find useful. The first is a top-notch summary by Stat of the current state of knowledge about the coronavirus a year into the pandemic. Given the unprecedented global effort to understand this virus, I expect it’ll be outdated in six month’s time as science marches on, but it serves well enough for now.
 

“The single advantage that’s propelled SARS-2 on its around-the-world quest: People can pass it to others before they start feeling sick or even if they never show symptoms. Together, this accounts for more than 50% of new cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This is not the case with the two other coronaviruses, MERS and the original SARS, that in recent decades have spilled from animals into people and raised global alarms. Those infections are much deadlier than the one caused by SARS-2 — MERS in particular — but people are only contagious once they show symptoms. It’s much easier to stop a virus when you have a clear sign of who is infected.

Covid-19 is not just heterogeneous in presentation, but in severity. One in five people who get it never feel sick at all, while another one in five will get severely or critically ill. Experts say the fact that the vast majority of people will recover just fine has made it harder to get everyone to take it seriously — and in turn to take precautions to protect themselves, their communities, and health system capacities. Experts wonder if people might act differently if SARS-2 had a mortality rate like SARS of nearly 10%, as opposed to 1% or less.

“People are like, my cousin got it and he was fine,” said virologist Juliet Morrison of the University of California, Riverside. “Well, you might have a genetic propensity to develop more serious disease, or you might have an underlying risk factor you don’t know about. Seeing how it’s presented in one individual or even the majority of the population does not mean you’ll have the same disease presentation.”

 
It’s those one in five silent spreaders which brings us to the second item: a write-up in The New York Times on why continuing to wear a mask after getting a vaccine is a good idea. The main reason for this is because coronavirus transmission may still occur by a vaccinated person. This possibility arises from the fact that infection risk — and, by extension, transmission — isn’t something the clinical trials by Pfizer, Moderna, and other vaccine makers are designed to suss out. At least, it isn’t the primary goal behind such trials.

Clinical trials are designed to test the safety and efficacy of a particular treatment. And ‘efficacy‘ in the case of a vaccine typically means ‘ability to prevent illness’ (i.e. prevents an infection from establishing disease in the body). It does not necessarily mean that recipients can’t still be infected and spread the virus without developing symptoms. After all, our bodies are utterly teeming with viruses, most of which are benign, and we’re ‘infected’ by viruses all the time in the sense that they find their way into our cells and tissues. But the vast majority of these situations don’t result in our getting sick because the infection is subdued by our immune system before the pathogen’s replication process gets off the ground.

Like its predecessor, SARS-CoV-1, SARS-2 prefers to take up residence in the nose and throat, where it can pass to new hosts by hitching a ride on droplets ejected by coughs and sneezes. Ideally, a vaccine would produce antibodies that circulate to every area of the body in which the virus resides, and stop it from multiplying. But this often isn’t the case in practice; different types of vaccines with different methods of delivery tend to specialize at shutting down infection in certain parts of the body and can be somewhat less effective in other sectors. It’s why nasal vaccines and oral vaccines, for example, are considered the more optimal remedy for respiratory viruses like SARS-1 and -2.

In contrast, the first generation of vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer are, as with most vaccines throughout history, deep, intramuscular injections. The clinical trial data lend strong confidence they protect against illness, but how effective they are at muzzling the virus in the airways is unclear. It may be that these initial recipes are better suited for tamping down viral activity throughout the lungs and stomach, but prove moderately less effective at dispatching antibodies to the nose and throat area — the locus of transmission. If that turns out to be the case, then the virus could still take refuge in a vaccinated person’s nasal region or upper respiratory tract, ready and able to migrate to new hosts, despite not doing any material damage to its current host.

As The Times notes:
 

“The coronavirus vaccines have proved to be powerful shields against severe illness, but that is no guarantee of their efficacy in the nose. The lungs — the site of severe symptoms — are much more accessible to the circulating antibodies than the nose or throat, making them easier to safeguard.

“Preventing severe disease is easiest, preventing mild disease is harder, and preventing all infections is the hardest,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona. “If it’s 95 percent effective at preventing symptomatic disease, it’s going to be something less than that in preventing all infections, for sure.”

 
The scientists contacted for the story do instill a bit of hope, however, by expressing a middle-ground possibility in which the first round of vaccines don’t arrest the virus entirely but do reduce the viral load in the mucosal tissues (i.e., those lining the nose, mouth, lungs, and digestive tract). Reducing viral load reduces risk of transmission.
 

“Still, he and other experts said they were optimistic that the vaccines would suppress the virus enough even in the nose and throat to prevent immunized people from spreading it to others.

“My feeling is that once you develop some form of immunity with the vaccine, your ability to get infected will also go down,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. “Even if you’re infected, the level of virus that you replicate in your nose should be reduced.”

 
In short, a vaccine may not always block an infection entirely, but it can prevent you from getting sick from it. What this ultimately means is that people who receive an approved vaccine will be protected against Covid, but could still contract/be infected by the virus and transmit it to unvaccinated persons. And if so, they would still represent a risk to others, thus necessitating the continued use of masks. In effect, vaccinated people would need to think of themselves going forward as asymptomatic carriers until we know more. 

From a public health standpoint, vaccines that don’t stop transmission are less useful than those that do, but the fact is that we still don’t know enough about all the ways SARS-2 spreads or how the first batch of vaccines affect risk of infection and transmission. If it turns out that upper-arm injections ferry sufficient antibody counts to the nose and mouth, then those risks will be low. Alternatively, we may need to wait for mucosal vaccines to arrive that can generate the particularized immune response that blocks both illness and transmission. Or we may end up needing a combination of various delivery types to shore up comparable levels of immunity in the blood and mucosa alike.

These answers will come in time. Until then, wearing a mask and continuing to observe public safety guidelines even post-vaccination is the best way to protect others and end this pandemic as soon as possible.

Scientists also cannot yet say how long immunity (either natural or vaccine-induced) lasts, or SARS-2’s capacity to mutate around our medical arsenal. Based on these two facts alone, mask use is recommended well into the future.

Finally, for those wanting a deeper dive into the science behind this pandemic, this MIT lecture series a friend recently brought to my attention is super informative, albeit impossibly dense in spots (especially lectures 8 and 9, so caveat lector). Dr. Fauci is featured in lecture 4 and is a highlight.
 

Further reading and resources:

• A portrait of the coronavirus at 1: how it spreads, infects, and sickens
• Here’s Why Vaccinated People Still Need to Wear a Mask
• “COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 and the Pandemic” (7.00)
• Nasal Vaccines May Work Better Than Injected Ones
• Are Covid-19 Vaccines Really 95% Effective?
• Could a Blood Test Show if a Covid-19 Vaccine Works?
• COVID-19 Vaccines Might Never Get Us to Herd Immunity

Image credit: MIKE REDDY FOR STAT

 
 
Yesterday, I wrote a Facebook post debunking a Covid-19 conspiracy video that had been making the rounds all day in right-wing circles. All the leading platforms have since removed the video and its offshoots for the rampant misinformation it contained, but not before it garnered some 14 million views on Facebook alone. The video, a staged presser of sorts by a dozen doctors in lab coats, was apparently one of the most viral pieces of content in the entire history of the platform. According to NYT columnist Kevin Roose:
 

“The #2 most-engaged post on Facebook today is a Breitbart video of a group of doctors claiming that hydroxychloroquine is “a cure for Covid” and “you don’t need a mask.” 14 million views in 6 hours. (For scale, Plandemic got ~8 million in a few days.)”

 
In the following post, which appears to have gone semi-viral since I logged off last night, I go through a few of the red flags I picked up on while watching the video. It’s hardly worth tracking down and watching for yourself (one of the doctors blanked on what the ‘H’ in NIH stands for), but I’m sure you could find it if you really wanted to. I hope my teardown below will be useful for sharing with friends and family who may have been conned by the video, or with any others in your circles who’ve shared it with glee.

For more background, here’s a quick and dirty summary from Business Insider.

And for a cataloged list of peer reviewed studies debunking the ‘HCQ as prophylactic and cure’ narrative, see this thread.

No doubt people will, as is customary, treat the video’s removal as evidence its claims have merit. But it does seem significantly worse to allow misinfo like this to spread around unchecked versus people having to specifically seek it out in uncommon places.

So there’s a video1  that made the rounds today of a group of 12 or so doctors giving a press conference outside the Supreme Court arguing that hydroxychloroquine (hereafter, HCQ) is both a “prophylactic” and a “cure” for Covid-19 and that the truth about the efficacy of this drug is being hidden from the public.

This ragtag coterie was assembled by an organization known as America’s Frontline Doctors. If you haven’t heard of them before, it’s because they’re not a real organization. Their domain name was registered on July 16th of this year. As far as can be discerned, they’re a fringe far-right front group whose raison d’etre is to downplay the gravity of the pandemic and cast doubt on established science. At present, the video, originally posted by Breitbart, is primarily being circulated in right-wing bubbles, after signal boosts by a variety of alt-right, Tea Party-aligned pages and websites.

One thing I noticed right off the bat is there’s zero real press presence. It almost seems like a handful of people just stepped off a tour bus somewhere. The guy working the camera conspicuously avoids showing the crowd as much as possible. There are literally like six people there. If this feels odd, it’s because it is. Were this a legitimate press conference meant to convey sound science to the general public, you’d want as much press there as possible to disseminate the information as widely as possible.

But this isn’t what’s happening. What’s going on here is actually a hallmark tactic of the far-right in that they bring in a small number of handpicked press outlets and journos whom they know will be sympathetic to the views and info being espoused. This limits the pushback during the actual press conference: they know what they’re advocating can’t stand up to real scrutiny, and they don’t want any of that scrutiny or informed skepticism to be seen on camera.

As for the content, it’s all the standard Covid conspiracy fare you can probably already imagine. When one of the first doctors to speak couldn’t remember what the ‘H’ in NIH stands for (not a joke), I had to shut it off. I picked it back up later only so I could finish this post (not sure it was worth it but here we are). There’s also a woman (Stella Immanuel) shouting about and repeatedly disparaging double-blind studies as “fake science.” Apparently, Real Science is her single sample of patients from her single clinic in Texas. I googled her clinic and it currently has one review, and another one on Facebook. Alas, you would think at least a few of the people “cured” by HCQ would have left a review for her.

Several of the doctors here touting the pseudo-magical properties of HCQ have perhaps mixed up correlation with causation — and bias with rigorous research, more likely. How, for example, do they know that their patients who recovered from Covid-19 did so because of HCQ, as opposed to natural recovery as their immune system fought off the virus? Was there a control group to help isolate the effects of HCQ? How were they able to discount, measure, or compare the effects of other treatments that may have been administered alongside HCQ? This, it must be said, is the *whole point* of randomized controlled trials in the first place — to rule out faulty causal inferences. It’s very tiring indeed to have to go through this with people who should know better.

Which brings us to my next point, which is that physicians, generally speaking, are not scientists. In many cases, they’re not even all that well-trained in science apart from memorizing a highly specific set of facts. They don’t necessarily have a robust understanding of the scientific process or experimental design. This isn’t their fault, of course; it’s not a routine expectation in their profession. At any rate, placing greater emphasis on the rote observations of a doctor than the many tightly controlled trials conducted to date is a mistake.

It should go without saying that a staged press conference is not exactly how the frontier of science and empirical knowledge are advanced. Science advances from fierce debate resolved through the process of peer review. It’s not as glamorous as shiny white coats with megaphones standing outside Congress, admittedly, but it’s the best method we have for shoring up knowledge about the natural world. Many of the assertions made by today’s group of ‘America’s Frontline Doctors’ have been disproved in objective, controlled studies, no matter how many right-wing quacks you get to stand in front of a camera and protest to the contrary.

The last red flag I want to call attention to has to do with the language that so often accompanies these kinds of clickbaity videos. The directive to “watch quick before they take it down again” is a dead giveaway that you’re being fed an enormous dose of sh*t. Always and instinctively avoid videos that promise you “inside information” that’s being “hidden” from you. They’re designed to short-circuit your critical thinking faculties and emotionally manipulate you while doing so. Remember, this is the far-right’s calling card: conscripting fringe voices, however far outside mainstream academia, to release generic ‘reports’ masquerading as good science. They’ve been doing it for years, it’s just easier to spot in real time now.

Feel free to share this with people who need it. I did the homework so you don’t have to.

Addendum

One residual question many have been asking is how a thoroughly suspect video like this could receive such massive traffic. The honest answer, I think, is that it catered to a specific set of ideological axioms, namely that Covid-19 is essentially a hoax or otherwise overhyped, and that the truth — from the case numbers to the efficacy of masks to the available remedies — is being shielded from the public at large. Vast numbers on the right buy into this narrative hook, line, and sinker, so when seemingly credentialed folks sporting shiny coats were on their computer screen saying exactly this, they were keyed in. It’s confirmation bias on a national scale. The other reason is that we are in the midst of a pandemic and people are desperate to latch onto anything, no matter how flimsy the evidence.

Secondly, inquiring after the motivations or mental state of the individuals appearing at the press conference may keep some online quarters busy, but it’s irrelevant as regards the underlying science. We don’t need to label Dr. Stella Immanuel ‘crazy’, for example, in order to demonstrate that she has no actual data for her claims and that her work at her tiny clinic in Houston is not on a par with RCTs — the gold standard in medical science. I think it’s perfectly possible that some of the folks in the video are well-intentioned and believe they’re doing the right thing, but simply misunderstand the scientific process or the nuances of controlled trials. Alternatively, a few may indeed be bad faith actors out to make a buck. But what matters is the data, and it’s not on their side.

Lastly, it is not overly difficult to fact-check wild and grandiose claims like this or to vet science-centric information more generally. Granted, the task has certainly become more onerous in the era of misinformation and troll farms, but peer reviewed research is still the gold standard; that hasn’t changed. If a friend or loved one chooses to invest their trust in random YouTube videos and blogs over published research, yes, that’s a problem and they are liable to arrive at faulty conclusions. But sound science is still easy to find, access, and interpret provided you’re looking in the right places and investing trust in authorities with actual expertise.

Further reading and resources:

• Coronavirus Drug and Treatment Tracker
• Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter Remove False COVID-19 Video Shared by Trump
• In Viral Video, Doctor Falsely Touts Hydroxychloroquine as COVID-19 ‘Cure’
• PolitiFact: Don’t fall for this video. Hydroxychloroquine is not a COVID-19 cure.
• Who are the doctors in the viral hydroxychloroquine video?
• CORONAVIRUS MARCH 2020—PART 4 THE TRUTH ABOUT HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE
• Trump retweeted a video with false covid-19 claims. One doctor in it has said demons cause illnesses.
• Trump’s New COVID Doctor Says Sex With Demons Makes You Sick
• Facebook, Other Tech Platforms Join to Fight COVID-19 Misinformation
• Other related Facebook posts of mine here and here

Feature image credit: John Phillips / Getty Images

1. No, I won’t share it here, frankly because it’s not worth sharing and I won’t be responsible for giving it traffic it doesn’t deserve.

 
 
Tell me if the following situation sounds familiar. You share a post calling attention to the issue of climate change. A friend or acquaintance jumps in to tell you that actually the science isn’t settled and there’s still debate about this or that. You respond by linking to one or more sources which address those talking points. They respond by linking sources of their own that say just the opposite. The exchange ends in a stalemate, as neither side is able to convince the other of the legitimacy of their chosen sources.

This “dueling sources” business tends to short-circuit popular debates over science more often than we’d like, but they needn’t end there. In fact, it usually takes minimal effort to sort out which sources to trust and which we should deem unreliable. And while it may be grandiose to expect that each party to a discussion will be objective enough to accept feedback on their own sources, we should be prepared to provide it in the event that there are receptive minds within reach.

What I want to offer here are some simple, broadly applicable methods you can use to help make heads or tails of competing information, particularly when it comes to questions of science. They will be especially useful for laypersons who lack the necessary expertise to debunk the arguments and data directly, which, let’s be honest, includes most of us. We don’t always have a resident expert on hand we can tag in to correct the record. What we can do instead is look for a few basic characteristics that can serve to either validate or impugn the reliability of a given source. Though this post hews closely to the topic of climate change, it should be readily exportable to other scientific issues where overwhelming agreement among scientists exists.

We should first recognize that when it comes to an issue as politicized as climate change, there will always be competing or contradictory sources. Americans have been sharply divided over climate change for decades now, thanks largely to fossil fuel interests funneling billions into campaigns committed to sowing doubt, denial, and uncertainty. Oil corporations like Exxon and Shell, despite knowing the relevant dangers, bankrolled thinktanks and lobby groups that continue to churn out misleading information at seemingly self-replicating rates. Suffice to say, if one wishes to stake out a particular position on climate change, they will find it trivially easy to track down sympathetic sources.

But just because anyone can furnish sources in a debate that agree with their view doesn’t mean all sources rest on equal footing. What matters is which of those sources hold up against the peer reviewed literature. Indeed, what matters most in science is the durability of an idea measured by its success in the peer review process. A theory that sounds good on paper may not survive the scrutiny of experts. For a theory to stand the test of time — as has the theory that humans are behind this current iteration of climate change — it must withstand rigorous empirical investigation by generations of experts who publish their findings in peer reviewed journals.

This means that the credibility of a given source is, or rather should be, a matter of empirical support. You should easily be able to determine whether a source is trafficking in well-sourced science from relevant experts (and if not, I’ll explain how in the next section). You should be able to take someone else’s sources and validate them against experts who practice and publish in the field, and they should be able to do the same for yours. If one person’s sources consistently cite individuals who are not experts in climate science, or rely on unpublished or speculative ideas, then neither those sources nor the person posting them ought to be considered trustworthy on the topic in question.

What often happens is that you get people with little knowledge of the science circulating articles by people who also aren’t experts in the topic, which then get taken up by an intricate web of consumers acting on confirmation bias who accept the information without any further interrogation because it supports what they already believe. This isn’t how we get to the truth.

We get to the truth by listening to what the experts have to say, and by querying the consensus of those experts, just as we would in any other context. If you want to know why you have a heart murmur, you’re probably going to lend more credence to your primary physician’s diagnosis than that of the barista at your local coffee shop. If you’re wondering why the brakes on your SUV aren’t working properly, you’re better off listening to a licensed mechanic than your coworker who has no experience working with cars.

It should be likewise for questions about climate change. Apart from going back to school and acquiring the necessary degree to understand and interpret the studies ourselves (unrealistic), we should look to what the best minds have concluded on such questions — to the people who are in the best position to render a verdict. Rarely do we possess the technical know-how to assess competing scientific claims, but we always have the option, if not the willingness, to consult those who do.

We can distill the foregoing to a battery of basic questions: Is the source drawing on relevant expertise? That is, has the author of the piece or founder of the website completed academic training in subjects relevant to climate science or are they citing peer reviewed research by experts who have? Can the ideas expressed be traced back to peer reviewed literature? Does the article link to studies or provide a journal reference or citation number? Does the website or group have a history of peddling unsourced or unverified claims? These are all questions that can be easily resolved with just a few minutes of careful reading and desk research.

That’s assuming, of course, you know what to look for. Thus far, the advice here has been mostly general in nature. Below I’ll walk through a real world example to illustrate how this works in practice.

Case Study

Let’s suppose the friend from earlier decides to chime in on one of your posts and proceeds to dispute whether there is a settled consensus on the causes of climate change. And let’s further suppose (since I get this one a lot) that they post a PragerU video, titled “Do 97% of Climate Scientists Really Agree?,” to make their point. This video argues, in a rather roundabout way, against the legitimacy of the commonly cited 97% consensus figure. But let’s ignore the actual arguments for now and instead apply the approach outlined earlier to see how this source stacks up.

Where do you start? I like to start with DeSmogBlog’s Climate Disinformation Database, as it contains extensive entries “on the individuals and organizations that have helped to delay and distract the public and our elected leaders from taking needed action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and fight global warming.” Basically, if they’ve made contrarian noises about the science of climate change in a public forum, they’re in this database, receipts and all. In addition to their affiliations and publications, every single quote attributed to a person or organization is sourced and referenced in chronological order. When I see a name associated with a view that sounds fishy, this is my first pit stop.

For good measure, you might take a few minutes to cross-reference DSB with Wikipedia, SourceWatch, and RationalWiki. Usually there’s overlap, although DSB will typically have a much denser bio pertaining to climate change.

Let’s look at DSB’s entry for PragerU. It doesn’t take long to realize that this isn’t an academic institution as the ‘U’ in its name might suggest, but a right-wing organization with strong Judeo-Christian origins whose raison d’être is to rail against the American left. Its founder, Dennis Prager, is a conservative radio talk show host who denies climate change and sees environmentalism as a replacement for God. He has no educational background in STEM or any credentials related whatsoever to science.

After watching a handful of their videos, it’s probably not too difficult for one to conclude that PragerU is invested in pushing a conservative ideological agenda and is not a reliable resource on information about climate change, or any other science for that matter. This is not to say that conservative sources in general cannot be reliable on matters of science, only that we’d prefer to get our information from a more neutral or scientific source and not one so obviously invested in political outcomes.

But okay, you might say, PragerU is just the thinktank. It’s Alex Epstein who’s being held up as an expert in the video, so what about him? Well, turns out he’s no more of an expert than Dennis Prager. In fact, all Epstein has done in this space is write op-eds and books championing fossil fuels. What are his credentials? He didn’t study science in college, much less climate science. He has no STEM-related degree whatsoever, nothing but a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. He hasn’t published a single peer reviewed paper in a single journal relevant to climate science. It should go without saying that these are all red flags.

Sure, okay, so Epstein’s not an expert, but is he at least citing peer reviewed research? Does he name scientists who agree with the views he’s espousing? Are there study references or journal citations that appear under the video that allow the audience to follow up on Epstein’s claims? The answer to all of these is no. PragerU neglects to mention that Epstein is not a scientist, and all they include under the video are promotional links for their own products and other offerings.

But wait — when Epstein finally gets around to refuting the 97% consensus figure toward the end of the video, he does cite an “analysis” which showed that “less than 2% of papers” say that human beings are the main cause of recent warming. A citation is provided in tiny text at the bottom of the screen. It’s quite easy to miss as it appears for only a second, but it’s there nonetheless: “David Henderson — 1.6%, Not 97%, Agree that Humans are the Main Cause of Global Warming, Library of Economics and Liberty, March 1, 2014.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. The reference is not to a peer reviewed paper but a blog post on econlib.org by David Henderson. Who is he, one wonders? Yes, DSB has an entry on him, too. The late Henderson is an economist who, like Prager and Epstein, lacks any formal training in the subject of climate science. He served as chairman for the Global Warming Policy Foundation (SourceWatch link here), a lobby group that prides itself on combating climate-centric policy and contesting the underlying science, and whose average trustee age at the time of formation was 74. And the Library of Economics and Liberty, as far as I can tell, is merely a collection of libertarian blog posts. Birds of a feather, as they say.

Henderson’s blog post is so thin on the ground as to be comical. It’s not even his “analysis”; he says a commenter on one of his previous posts “sifted through” the data of one of the studies attesting to the 97% figure. He doesn’t link to the comment in question. He gives us no information whatsoever about this “Mark Bahner,” only that he came up with 64 studies, or 1.6%, that “claimed explicitly that humans are the main cause of global warming.” Henderson even admits to not checking the data for himself! He is simply passing along the conclusions of a lone commenter, who could be anyone from a paid coal lobbyist to a Russian troll. We’re given zero details about the methodologies said commenter used, or any data product that would allow others to replicate his results.

If I had to guess, this random netizen probably only counted the papers that explicitly say climate change is both real and human-caused in the summary abstract. But this is bound to be very few, since anthropogenic climate change is so broadly accepted that it’s unnecessary for the authors to state the obvious in such an overt fashion. One could make a similar “case” against any number of scientific theories, including the theory of evolution and gravitation. Biologists don’t begin each paper with an awkward declaration of their belief in common descent. Rather, most research extant seeks to iron out the details encompassed by major integrative ideas. Ironically, it’s the papers that reject or dispute the consensus that are easiest to spot, yet even there we only find an exceedingly small minority. (As it happens, Cook et al. 2013 raise these very same points.) At any rate, guessing is all we can do here because, again, Henderson offers no support for how these figures were reached. Of course, that didn’t stop him from putting said figures in a clickbait headline in the form of a bare assertion.

So that’s the “analysis” Epstein relies on in the PragerU video. Let’s briefly recap what we’re working with here. We have one non-expert (Henderson) circulating an unevidenced claim from an anonymous blog comment, which then gets picked up by an ideologically driven thinktank (PragerU) who hires a conservative ideologue lacking expertise in climate science (Epstein) to appear in a video casting doubt on the consensus of climate scientists. I doubt we could conceive of a more unreliable info-chain if we tried. Note that nowhere in this pipeline is relevant expertise present. What our few minutes of desk research should tell us, then, is that we shouldn’t trust this gaggle of usual suspects any more on questions about climate science than we would on questions concerning medicine and health.

What about the actual arguments raised in the PragerU video? Though the questionable nature of PragerU’s sourcing is reason alone to deem their content untrustworthy, I’ll go ahead and address them here strictly for purposes of completeness. Epstein’s main argument amounts to a gross non sequitur. He says that the upside of fossil fuels is that “they make modern life possible.” Undoubtedly true, but that has nothing to do with whether the 97 percent statistic regarding human-caused climate change is accurate or not. And it also singularly fails to address whether a civilizational transition to renewable and clean energy could also support modernized life. If “precision matters,” as he says, why so blatantly beg the question as he does here?

When Epstein does get around to addressing the question in the video’s title, he makes two embarrassing blunders. We’ve already covered the first one in which he cites, effectively, a blog comment rather than peer reviewed research. Second, he omits a crucial detail when discussing the Cook et al. 2013 study. The researchers broke their meta-analysis into two parts. In the first part, they used their own methodology to categorize the population of abstracts. In the second phase, they actually reached out to the authors of the papers themselves, asking them directly whether their paper endorsed the consensus on anthropogenic global warming. Both the third-party and self-rated methods returned a figure in excess of 97%.

That is, the second phase of the study served as a check on their own methodology, and ended up validating their result. Why Epstein and PragerU would omit this important detail is hardly a mystery, at least to those of us who understand how the denial machine works.

In response to the PragerU source, I would probably link to a Skeptical Science resource or my primer on climate change, which includes several links attesting to the overwhelming consensus of research pointing to human-caused climate change. Those links reference a number of peer reviewed meta-analyses, each relying on separate methodologies, that support the strong consensus, as well as published experts commenting on said consensus. It demonstrates that the consensus statistic was not derived from a single study (an inference the PragerU video leads you toward), but has been independently established by a range of different studies using a variety of different methodologies.

Oreskes 2004 was among the first; Doran and Zimmerman 2009 was another; Anderegg et al. 2010 another; previously mentioned Cook et al. 2013 another; Verheggen et al. 2014, Stenhouse et al. 2014, and Carlton et al. 2015 came after that. And finally, a kind of super meta-analysis was published in 2016 by a collaboration of several of the authors of the previous studies, which found that the consensus sits between 90 and 100 percent, depending on which scientific disciplines are queried.

Less robust studies include those by James Powell, former science advisor to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Powell conducts his own analyses periodically, examining all the papers accepted for publication in a given period and determining how many rejected anthropogenic climate change. His first analysis looked at the literature from 1991-2012 and found that there have been 13,950 peer-reviewed papers on global warming published in the last 21 years by 33,690 different authors from over 20 different countries. Out of that population, just 24 are papers of dissent. That’s 0.17%. (If you drill down further, you find that of those 24, even fewer flat-out reject global warming, with the balance accepting that the earth is warming but demurring that humans are the cause.)

A similar analysis examining the period from November 2012 through December 2013 was performed in 2014, in which Powell found that 9,135 out of 9,136 authors accepted anthropogenic global warming. (The lone dissenter rejected the consensus not because of contrary evidence but because of economic and monetary concerns surrounding Russian markets.) Powell makes all of his data publicly available, with full references for each study that include the paper’s title, document number, and Web of Science accession number.

In short, the oft-mentioned consensus is based on several independent analyses, each attesting to the uniquely anthropogenic causes of current climate change. For a more reliable and more comprehensive presentation of the climate consensus than the one released by PragerU, I recommend the following video hosted by the edX platform. Note the copious references provided in the subjacent text.
 

 
Let us revisit our questions from earlier. Which of these sources should we consider reliable? Is it PragerU that features people like Alex Epstein who write op-eds for a living and offers no credible or reproducible research? Or is it rather outlets like Skeptical Science and educational platforms like edX that feature scientists who actually study climate for a living? If this question sounds easy, that’s because it is. The follow up question that should be posed to anyone using PragerU-style material to defend their view is this: why are you listening to unpublished, inexpert hacks like Epstein as opposed to practicing scientists?

More knowledgeable patrons of the science can take this exercise a step further and elaborate on why a certain source’s claims cannot be reconciled to the published literature. With enough working knowledge, they can cite specific papers, quote excerpts, and adduce graphs that empirically contradict the asserted claims. But it doesn’t require formal training to evaluate sources and identify the odd man out. All it takes is a modicum of Google sleuthing and sufficient interest in offering good-faith defenses of settled science. As someone who wades into these debates on a regular basis, I am constantly surprised by how effortless it is to debunk the prevalent talking points due to the vacuous nature of the claims themselves, the degree to which those making them eschew qualified voices, and the deliberate, heavy-handed deception involved throughout.

In the era of fake news and troll farms, efficient vetting of sources has taken on a newfound urgency. Granted, not all of the folks who produce the kind of articles and videos that get disseminated around Deniersville are genuine hacks, paid and propped up by the fossil fuel industry. Some are simply misguided and confused laypersons who have succumbed to confirmation bias and antiscience propaganda. In the end, though, it shouldn’t matter. If one’s claims cannot withstand empirical scrutiny, they should be dismissed, and one’s level of trust in that source should evaporate. Expertise matters. Peer review matters. Look for these two things and it will help you immensely in discerning what’s legitimate and what isn’t.

Further reading and resources:

• Skeptical Science
• The Debunking Handbook by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky
• Climate Consensus – the 97%
• Climate Central
• RealClimate
• The Washington Post’s Energy and Environment
• DeSmogBlog’s Climate Disinformation Database
• Climate Feedback
• CarbonBrief
• Climate Desk
• NASA Climate
• NASA GISS
• NOAA ESRL
• IPCC
• National Geographic Environment & Climate Change

 
 
The impacts of climate change fall disproportionately on vulnerable communities. We hear this repeated like a mantra, but it is simply an unfortunate fact that undeveloped nations have the least amount of resources to cope with a rapidly changing environment. In contrast with the Netherlands, thirty percent of which is below sea level and which has completely redesigned their cities in response, less moneyed nations lack the necessary capital to implement such comprehensive infrastructural overhauls. Even in the States, places like Newtok, Alaska and Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana are hopeless without bursts of federal assistance for mitigation, restoration or resettlement.

One of the more calamitous places to live in terms of vulnerability to climate is Bangladesh. Its three main threats include flooding, drought, and salinity. With its 700 rivers and thousands of miles of inland waterways, Bangladesh is uniquely susceptible to flash flooding during the rainy season. According to their government’s 2009 Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan, on any given year “approximately one quarter of the country is inundated.” And every four to five years, “there is a severe flood that may cover over 60% of the country and cause loss of life and substantial damage to infrastructure, housing, agriculture and livelihoods.” Even in Bangladesh, the report goes on to note, “it is the poorest and most vulnerable who suffer most because their houses are often in more exposed locations.”
 

 
The widespread erosion and flooding created by overflowing rivers is bad enough, but pales in comparison to the longer-term and more permanent threat of rising seas. Bangladesh is situated within the deltaic region formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna Rivers, and more than half of the country lies fewer than 5 meters (16 ft) above sea level. The gradually encroaching seas are forcing many communities — some of which have existed in their current state for centuries — to migrate inland.

The number of these so-called environmental migrants is expected to swell in the coming decades. Just three feet of sea level rise would plunge about 20 percent of Bangladesh underwater and potentially displace 30 million people. If the region sees five or six feet of sea level rise by the end of this century, a real possibility per the latest IPCC report, we’re talking about upwards of 50 million migrants.

While it may seem counterintuitive in a country surrounded by so much water, Bangladeshis also have to contend with periodic drought. This is mostly a function of the region’s climate profile, in which it receives too much moisture in monsoon season and too little during the dry months. Those most affected tend to live in the northwestern districts, as these areas typically receive less annual rainfall relative to other parts of the country. A prolonged shortage in rainfall can devastate local agriculture and ecosystems in the form of reduced crop growth and yield and the loss of livestock.

A more esoteric cause of Bangladesh’s water shortage woes that bears mentioning stems from its water-sharing agreements with bordering nations. Over fifty of the rivers flowing through Bangladesh territory are considered what are called trans-boundary rivers, the resources from which are shared with India and Myanmar. Both of these countries withdraw water upstream with the help of large-scale water management facilities, disrupting the river’s natural flow. Not only does this result in lower yields for Bangladesh during the dry season, but it also impacts groundwater recharge leading to an overall moisture loss in the northwest part of the state. The details of these agreements are politically complex, but it seems clear that Bangladesh is getting the short end of the stick here due to the climatic knife-edge on which much of the country exists.

Perhaps the most serious threat posed by droughts, however, is access to fresh drinking water. Currently, about 1.7 billion people — or one-quarter of the world’s population — live in countries that are water-stressed. Drought conditions such as those plaguing northwestern Bangladesh make potable water scarce and facilitate the spread of disease like malaria due to the stagnant pools of water left behind from the rainy season.

The logic is inescapable that a monotonically warming planet intensifies the conditions for millions of people living in Bangladesh. Climate change causes sea levels to rise, reducing the area of habitable land available to vulnerable communities. Climate change increases the amount of moisture in the air, accelerating the hydrological cycle, thereby leading to more (and more intense) precipitation events. At the same time, rising temperatures decrease the amount of moisture stored in soils. These and other readily observed trends exacerbate conditions in places prone to nuisance flooding and persistent drought like Bangladesh.

As if all of the above weren’t cause enough for alarm, the salinity of freshwater streams used by sea-proximate communities is increasing, which is now reportedly contributing to the higher incidence of miscarriages in the region. As the BBC writes, “When sea levels rise, salty sea water flows into fresh water rivers and streams, and eventually into the soil. Most significantly, it also flows into underground water stores – called aquifers – where it mixes with, and contaminates, the fresh water. It is from this underground water that villages source their water, via tube wells.”
 

 
Families living in the coastal zones are consuming three times more salt each day than inland families, and scientists believe this is having a measurable effect on miscarriage rates throughout the country. Apart from complicating pregnancies, excess salt intake also increases the risk of strokes and heart attacks and can cause hypertension in adults. We can expect to see more people suffering from these infirmities as more and more salt makes its way into freshwater basins.

In light of these developing horrors, what will we tell our kids and our grandkids when they ask why more wasn’t done to respond to the manifold risks brought on by climate change? What will we say to them when they ask us why we didn’t listen to the scientists? We told ourselves it didn’t matter.

As Trent Reznor intones in his song Zero Sum, “May God have mercy on our dirty little hearts.”
 

Further reading:

• How climate change could be causing miscarriages in Bangladesh
• Climate Change Impacts in Bangladesh
• The Unfolding Tragedy of Climate Change in Bangladesh

Feature image credit: DfID/Rafiqur Rahman Raqu