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

 
 
John Cooper is Big Mad. Concertgoers at this year’s Winter Jam captured the lead singer for Skillet mid-rant as he let loose some disordered thoughts aimed at those in the process of deconstructing their faith. Fed up with current and former believers with the audacity to think for themselves, Cooper urged his fellow Christians to “declare war against this deconstruction movement.” Over the course of some two minutes and change, he sputtered through a jumble of uninformed appraisals, betraying an acute misunderstanding of the object of his rage. “I don’t even like calling it deconstruction Christian,” he roared. “There is nothing Christian about it. It is a false religion. It is a whole nother religion.”

There’s a whole lot wrong with this take, which we’ll get to in a moment, but for now I’m imagining all his fundie fans suddenly googling ‘deconstruction’ for the first time. Dearly hope they find help leaving the cult. For those who may not know, Cooper has been a celebrity of sorts in the Christian rock scene since the late 90s. I probably saw his band Skillet in concert almost as many times as DC Talk. Feel free to judge, though in my defense I didn’t discover Smashing Pumpkins or Foo Fighters until college.

Zooming out, I can’t help but observe that this is such a common response by fundie Xians to any talk of deconstruction or skepticism directed at beliefs they see as sacred and unnegotiable. That is, they give in to anger, a natural human impulse that bubbles to the surface when confronted with threats to one’s identity or sense of self. And they allow that simmering rage to overpower any latent desire to hear out the other side or actually engage the relevant issues. Too afraid to ask questions and so cocksure they have a lock on truth, they unwittingly commit themselves to a lifetime of self-perpetuated delusion. It’s plain from Cooper’s quasi-coherent tirade here that he’s spent exactly zero minutes thoughtfully reviewing the reasons one might step out from the canopy of organized religion or, indeed, seeking to understand what ‘deconstruction’ even means.

He proclaims deconstruction a “false religion.” It’s…well, not that. Cooper is guilty of what we call a category error, or what a philosopher might label ‘not even wrong’ to indicate levels of wrongness that escape rational analysis. The term ‘deconstruction’ can mean lots of different things to different people. For me it refers to the concerted reconsideration of one’s (typically ‘inherited’) religious beliefs with the intent of reconciling them, to the extent possible, with one’s amassed knowledge and experience. In short, it’s looking at your faith-based worldview with fresh eyes and a questioning mind. For many of us, it entails a lifelong process of unwinding or dismantling a lot of the doctrinal, sectarian, and psychological baggage embedded in the associated subculture. Deconstruction serves as a necessary counter-discourse to the dominant and singularly toxic forms of organized religion whose power structures resist accountability.

Contra-Cooper, asking sincere and probing questions about the affirmations of your youth, skeptically interrogating your faith and beliefs you always took for granted, is not a religion. It’s a process that arises out of religion and the culture that sustains it, but it’s not a religion. It’s turning a critical eye on religion itself, in this case evangelical Christianity, casting a wide Socratic net that encompasses its dogmas, rituals, and sacraments to discern which are worth preserving and which you’re better off without. Deconstruction is simply a formalized way to refer to this process.

It’s precisely the elevation of skeptical inquiry and rational deliberation above tradition and dogma that incenses reactionaries like Cooper steeped in the evangelical ways of thinking. But beneath the surface anger is fear at having to cope with the cognitive dissonance that goes hand in hand with deconstruction — fear of the discomfort that inevitably comes with anatomizing a longtime belief system that has anchored you. Much easier is it to puff yourself up and double down than to roll up your sleeves and take an honest, more panoramic look at the various assertions that have been force-fed to you your whole life.

In accordance with the high-control environment that characterizes fundamentalist communities, most evangelicals are systematically taught to avoid entertaining their doubts, no matter how genuine, and told to keep the faith, whatever the cost to their intellectual integrity and psychological health. They’re counseled to push challenging questions aside and to simply accept that God ‘works in mysterious ways’. For all his demagoguery, Cooper should at least come to terms with the fact that such non-answers will prove unsatisfying to some people, many of whom go on to deconstruct.

Strange as it may seem to agitate against earnest seekers looking to live out a more authentic faith or worldview, the reality is that evangelical hardliners perceive deconstruction as a threat. What Cooper and other figures who espouse his variant of Christianity fail to realize is that it’s attitudes and behavior like this that validate the criticism of the culture they represent. A confused diatribe from someone who’s clearly never even bothered to ask anyone what deconstruction is simply furthers the narrative that evangelical Christians are unyielding and closed-minded. And failing to address the kinds of questions and concerns that prompt deconstruction only makes those wrestling with them more likely to find answers elsewhere. Unless and until the John Coopers of the world understand this, they will continue to be part of the problem.

 
Addendum, 2.15.2022: After posting similar thoughts to Facebook, an extended exchange ensued with a committed Skillet fan. Perhaps because I tagged John Cooper’s official page in my post, a small number of Skillet stans came to his rescue upon seeing the post in his page’s feed. Though the exchange was more respectful compared to many I’ve had in the past, I think it further illustrates how steeped in misconceptions the rhetoric around deconstruction really is among evangelicals as well as their penchant for using the pretext of theology to, among other things, distort and deny science that challenges their narrow view of the world, cover up personal prejudices, and further bigotry against marginalized groups. I’m reproducing it here for posterity. The comments from the Cooper stan are in italics, with my responses below each.
 

“I believe he is angered with the deconstruction movement because so many of the reasons for deconstructing often seem weak. It’s one thing to ask tough questions about the faith, pray to God for wisdom, and come out of it with a deeper understanding and appreciation, and quite another to reject the faith because of questions that have already been grappled with and sufficiently answered by countless theologians.”

 
Care to share which reasons in particular you find “weak”?
 

“Why does God allow evil, why did God order the destruction of the Canaanites, why will God send many to Hell, why is Jesus the only way, etc.”

 
Right so we might want to widen the circle to include the social ills prevalent in and perpetuated by Christian (particularly evangelical) culture. To reduce deconstruction simply to theological dilemmas would be a mistake. Both can contribute in their own way to the process of deconstruction. Any one issue can act as a catalyst for deeper inquiry, which can ultimately lead to any number of ‘destinations.’ It’s — and I can’t stress this enough — not a one size fits all phenomenon.

I think more concerning are the evangelicals who naively assume they’re in possession of tidy, impervious answers to each and every challenge to their faith and ignore good faith objections to the culture of which they’re a part. There’s a unique blend of piety and unfounded confidence that emerges in groupthink-laden fundamentalist movements that often manifests in a failure to self-reflect and confront the toxic and more problematic elements stitched into the culture (e.g. anti-intellectualism, dogmatism, sexism, racism, heteronormativity, gaslighting, hypocrisy, and so forth). In the present case, it tends to lead people away from genuine engagement with the core issues behind deconstruction and the like.

Lastly, it’s not clear what purpose enmity and resentment as responses to deconstruction are supposed to serve. It’s both odd and counterproductive. If someone comes to you with sincere hang-ups with respect to their faith-based worldview, lashing out and responding with indignation while altogether neglecting to address the issues raised gets no one anywhere, it seems to me. A lot of these occasions arise out of a felt insecurity on the part of rigidly anti-intellectual evangelical m-e-n who lack the necessary resources to meaningfully respond to the relevant arguments and engage with the other side. It’s much easier to puff themselves up and pander to their fellow clansmen than do the difficult work of engaging in a mutually respectful dialogue attentive to the concerns of those of us who walked away.
 

“As for the social ills you think are prevalent in and perpetuated by evangelicals, of course some individual churches and people are corrupt, have a dearth of intellectualism, etc., but I don’t see social ills endemic to the evangelical church. And we all know that there are wolves in sheep’s clothing who have infiltrated the church.

I’m not saying that every answer to every theological question is ironclad. Of course there still are questions I have as a Christian and things about God I don’t understand, but they aren’t faith-shaking questions. I think that many theologians and apologists have great answers to many of the tough questions, and for the answers that seem to elude Christian after Christian throughout the generations, I trust that it’s because those are the answers for which we’re not intended to have access. And I think the purpose of that is at least twofold: unlike God, we’re not omniscient, so we shouldn’t have all of the answers to any particular subject in life, and faith requires that we step out with slight uncertainty to some degree. I do think that the faith has to be grounded in solid reasons for believing and that the Holy Spirit convicts of the truth on a spiritual level, but faith is needed to be at rest not having every answer to every question. The Christian journey is a marathon.

Waging war on a movement that is harming people’s faith should not be conflated with enmity for them; rather his fervor is grounded in a genuine concern and love for people and desire for them to come to the truth. I think John is getting the sense that people’s hang-ups are more than just intellectual ones. I believe he thinks the growing deconstruction trend is a heart issue, not just a mind issue. I can’t speak for every person deconstructing and I truly am grieved for those who have been hurt by the church, but as for a number of the celebrities who have deconstructed, their reasons seem to start as intellectual but morph into a devotion issue because the concerns that shake their faith are relatively standard theological questions with sound answers. So it appears that they didn’t do the work of earnestly searching for answers to their questions and crying out to God for wisdom and truth. John is well-acquainted with the likes of Spurgeon and other intellectual giants, so I can assure you that intellectualism is not a stumbling block to him. I’ve listened to many of his Cooper Stuff episodes and can attest to the fact that he regularly addresses concerns of various detractors.”

 
“Waging war on a movement that is harming people’s faith should not be conflated with enmity for them…”

This framing is suspect, and for the reasons previously stated. It isn’t the “movement” that’s harming the faith, it’s the moral and intellectual failings of Christian culture, rhetoric, and dogma that give rise to deconstruction. The harm that stems from gaslighting women into believing their place is in the home and must be subservient to their husbands, regarding the LGBTQ community as having chosen a life of sin, or the cult-like predation by preceptors who push creationism and enjoin one’s children to oppose science — stunting the intellectual growth and curiosity of America’s youth in an often irrecoverable way — is where our locus of concern should be, not over people deconstructing. Conversations around deconstruction are healthy to the extent they prompt others to rethink beliefs and assumptions previously taken for granted and lead to a more ethically and intellectually robust worldview that takes into account a larger set of considerations, whether one still situated within the theistic paradigm or otherwise.

“I think John is getting the sense that people’s hang-ups are more than just intellectual ones. I believe he thinks the growing deconstruction trend is a heart issue, not just a mind issue.”

I don’t know what’s meant by “heart issue,” but this notion that deconstruction is a ‘hip’ celebrity trend that people cop to because it’s what’s ‘in’ right now is reductive at best and offensive at worst. It papers over the organic, yearslong process that occasions those raised in the evangelical mindset to rethink assumptions about their faith, about the Bible, about how humans ought to relate to one another, and so forth. And importantly it avoids contact with the issues fracturing and reshaping the Christian community writ large today. You’re not going to change the discourse by bitterly airing your resentments at people leaving or walking away or choosing a different life path, but by actually addressing the longstanding resentments and intellectual challenges behind deconstruction. That’s great that Cooper has responded to certain concerns on his podcast, but content-free rants like these solve nothing and only push people who’ve gradually dissociated further away.
 

“I’m not saying the movement is harming the Christian faith; I think it’s leading some astray under the pretense of faith-shattering questions. When I say that I think the root of deconstructionism is a heart issue, I mean that people who have completely renounced the faith have done so because they don’t want to follow the God of the Bible. Most of their questions could be satisfactorily answered, but it still wouldn’t help because they don’t want to submit to God’s authority.

Additionally, I’m not saying that deconstruction is merely a cool trend that people are latching onto; I do think that it starts with legitimate questions, but I think a lack of trust in God leads people to then not earnestly search for answers to those questions or to hastily dismiss them because they don’t comport with what they think should be true.

The Bible doesn’t say that women are subservient to their husbands. That word denotes that they are inferior to them, which is not so. Husbands and wives are equal in worth but have different roles. The verse you are referencing is the one in which women are called to SUBMIT to their husbands. Submission is yielding willingly; subservience is not. Submission doesn’t mean that the husband gets to make all of the decisions or that the wife has to accept his views, opinions, etc.–far from it. It means that the husband should be submitted to for decisions in which the two can’t agree so long as he is acting in accordance with the Bible. The rest of that verse calls on husbands to love their wives even as Christ loved the church, meaning that they need to be loving to the point of self-sacrifice, if need be.

I don’t think Christianity says that every or even most married women with children need to stay home with their kids, as we all know that’s not even a viable option for many, but I do think that it can be great for many families and that more women would stay home with their kids at least while they’re young if they could.

I think that the evangelical consensus on the LGBTQ community is that there are legitimate issues that such people struggle with but that such entrenched issues don’t give license to sin. When it comes to homosexuality, evangelicals don’t see gay people as any more broken than anyone else. We’re all broken, sinful people struggling with different things. Some struggle with anger, some with lust, some with homosexual proclivities, etc. and some with all of the above. Having homosexual proclivities isn’t a sin unless they’re leading to lust. Homosexual behavior is the sin. It’s a rejection of what God has ordained for sex. I think many recoil at that notion because they think it isn’t fair and that everyone should have romantic love and a sex life, but that’s an entirely human notion. What’s best for everyone isn’t the same. As for those who are transgender, I don’t think that altering one’s body will solve a psychological issue.

As for the false dichotomy of creationism versus science, that subject is too much for a FB post, but suffice it to say that God is the one who established the scientific laws and order of the universe, so science is one of God’s tools for discovery and a reflection of his nature.

“Conversations around deconstruction are healthy, to the extent they…lead to a more ethically and intellectually robust worldview that takes into account a larger set of considerations, whether one still situated within the theistic paradigm or otherwise.” This assumes that there can be multiple morally sound outcomes to the deconstruction process. Truth is truth. If one person deconstructs the Christian worldview and becomes an atheist and another does so and remains a Christian, both views on morality cannot be correct.”

 
This is where we’ll have to end the conversation. I’ve no interest in reenacting debates I’ve had countless times before, particularly on issues that carry tangible consequences for people I care about. It’s clear you’ve swallowed hook, line and sinker the fundagelical posture with respect to the topics I raised, and diving into each would occupy too much of my time and energy. Nor can I allow you to use my wall as a soapbox to spread the kind of toxic apologetics Skillet stans are selling. Feel free to defend complementarianism, heteronormativity, and creationism on your own page, but such unyieldingly narrow conceptions only serve as a reminder of the great harm that can be accomplished when insulated communities are inculcated to otherize minority groups and distort settled science under cover of theology. I draw a line at rhetoric I perceive as instrumental to the furtherance of bigotry and hate, whether under theological pretext or otherwise.

A few parting comments:

“When I say that I think the root of deconstructionism is a heart issue, I mean that people who have completely renounced the faith have done so because they don’t want to follow the God of the Bible. Most of their questions could be satisfactorily answered, but it still wouldn’t help because they don’t want to submit to God’s authority.”

I think those are clear straw men and suggest limited interaction with people in the camp with which you seem so preoccupied. These are the kinds of reductive takes you’re likely to hear on pop-Christian blogs and evangelical media that someone who defends John Cooper would frequent. I’d encourage you to branch out more and engage communities with stronger belief diversity than you have to this point.

“I’m not saying that deconstruction is merely a cool trend that people are latching onto; I do think that it starts with legitimate questions, but I think a lack of trust in God leads people to then not earnestly search for answers to those questions or to hastily dismiss them because they don’t comport with what they think should be true.”

It’s ironic you would level this charge at deconstructionists when it more accurately describes the behavior of fundamentalists like yourself who viscerally reject inconvenient facts and evidence that don’t comport with your pre-programmed view of the world. In fact, sometimes we earnestly search for answers and dismiss what we find not because it doesn’t comport with what we think should be true but because it conflicts with what is true. Key difference. And the mature response to the latter situation is to proportion your beliefs to the evidence, not sweep it under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist or twist and misrepresent the parts of it that cause distress.

The reality is there are tons of examples to date of people enmeshed in evangelical life for decades who went on to discard the very belief system you’re espousing in this thread. People like Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay. People like Kevin Max of DC Talk. People like Phanatik of The Cross Movement. To suggest that such preeminent voices of contemporary evangelicalism merely lacked “trust in God” or were somehow derelict in their pursuit of answers is risible if not borderline nonsensical and betrays an unfamiliarity with their stories. Your eagerness to make blanket assumptions (rooted in misconceptions) about a phenomenon you’ve spent little time exploring says more about the reflexive dogmatism central to the fundamentalist ethos than the people you’re critiquing.

“Truth is truth. If one person deconstructs the Christian worldview and becomes an atheist and another does so and remains a Christian, both views on morality cannot be correct.”

Atheism isn’t a “view on morality.” It refers merely to the proposition that no personal gods exist. The proposition makes no claims with respect to morality, so what we have here is a category error, or what a philosopher might label ‘not even wrong’. You’re once again reasoning from faulty premises and misconceptions. At this point, it’s hardly a coincidence that the Christians MOST vocal and opinionated about what other people believe are the MOST likely to have labored under gross misperceptions pertaining to the object(s) of discussion.

“Having homosexual proclivities isn’t a sin unless they’re leading to lust. Homosexual behavior is the sin. It’s a rejection of what God has ordained for sex. I think many recoil at that notion because they think it isn’t fair and that everyone should have romantic love and a sex life, but that’s an entirely human notion. What’s best for everyone isn’t the same. As for those who are transgender, I don’t think that altering one’s body will solve a psychological issue.”

Strange how it’s only a “proclivity” or “psychological issue” — despite protestations to the contrary by every refereed piece of science available — when it applies to the group you’re dehumanizing and persecuting but “natural” in the context of your own orientation. Maybe that’s what thinking people find unfair? Most Christians around the world reject the perverse conceptions of human nature and biology articulated above, while Christian scholars like Dale Martin and Matthew Vines have made profound, cogent cases for reconciling Christianity and same-sex relationships — pick up Vines’ 2014 book ‘God and the Gay Christian‘ if you’re interested. At any rate, these are precisely the toxic heteronormative attitudes I don’t allow on my wall.

While I appreciate the dialogue, any further comments will be removed.

 
 
Another day, another evangelical notable throwing in the towel on Christianity. This week we heard from Phanatik, aka Brady Goodwin, a founding member of the Philly-based hip hop outfit from the early 2000s known as The Cross Movement. Unlike some other folks in recent years who have publicly distanced themselves from the evangelical Republican approach to church and politics, Phanatik has gone further and explicitly renounced his faith in Christ. On Monday, he shared his extended thoughts in a 24-min video posted to Facebook titled “Unbecoming A Believer.”

Along with other acts from that era like Mars Ill, LA Symphony, and The Procussions, I listened to everything The Cross Movement put out as a teenager. I’m familiar with Phanatik’s work. What I was less aware of were his extracurriculars after the group disbanded circa 2008. Like many Bible-believing Christians looking to ‘upgrade’ their faith game, Goodwin shipped off to seminary, in his case Westminster Theological in Philadelphia. As he discusses in the video, at the time he saw it as a way to supplement and bolster his twenty-five years of experience in “urban apologetics” — defending Christ on the streets.

It was during his stint at seminary when cracks in his worldview began to form. Hearing his professors give unsatisfying answers to fundamental questions about Christian doctrine fed growing doubts that lingered long after he graduated. He doesn’t elaborate here on which questions troubled him or the particular answers he found lacking, but I have a pretty good guess. From there he went on to teach at a number of Christian colleges and even in secular academia, endeavoring to defend the gospel all the while. Tailoring his apologetics to a secular audience brought out a poignant realization: if the answers he had been trained to proffer weren’t good enough for someone with vastly different theological commitments, “why,” he recalls asking himself, “are they good enough for me?”

Eventually, reason, logic, and critical study of the Bible demanded more than the shaky rationalizations and theological acrobatics in which he was being forced to engage could muster. The seemingly ad hoc explanations employed to maintain sync with the ambitions of his faith became too much to stomach, while imparting those threadbare answers to his students left him with a crushing sense of guilt. If he was no longer personally persuaded by the arguments he was touting from a position of authority, how could he continue the charade in good conscience? In the end, Goodwin chose intellectual honesty over bearing false witness and blind faith in ancient texts.

Goodwin’s journey out of Christianity hums some familiar bars, wherein a skeptical approach to the Bible and certain doctrinal commitments, informed by contemporary scholarship and modern evidences, culminates in a lapse of faith preceded by a prolonged period of disillusionment. In order to maintain our faith, we have to jump through so many hurdles that we feel cut off from our own intellectual and moral instincts. The final hurdle — the only one left to us at that point — is adopting a new worldview altogether. Fundamentalists will attack him for leaving, but Goodwin simply followed his innate, some would say God-given, instincts to their logical conclusion. As Galileo famously said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended for us to forgo their use.”

Others will no doubt blame Goodwin’s volte face on seminary, as though the information gleaned there would suddenly cease to exist had he chosen not to attend. It’s like crooked cops who confiscate phones rather than change their behavior. It’s what was being filmed that matters, not those capturing it, just as it’s scholarly consensus with respect to the biblical texts that’s the central concern here, not the institutions who relay the information. Much of what evangelical hardliners deem a threat to their faith amounts to basic, commonly accepted knowledge for anyone engaged in academic study of the Bible. The evangelical community should spend more time directing their ire toward the pastoral class that knowingly withheld this knowledge from them than discouraging skepticism and shutting down free inquiry.

In hearing Goodwin tell his story, I notice the same hesitancy and reluctance I experienced ~ten years ago, despite knowing full well where I had landed. Just getting the words out can be difficult, even when you know what words to say.

For many of us, deconstruction is a grueling, often lifelong process of inward reflection and evaluation of our beliefs availed of manifold modes of study and inquiry. Markers along the way can vary in their impact to our personal outlook, from disagreements with our church’s position on matters of LGBT equality and racial justice, exposure to convincing arguments against such doctrinal imperatives as creationism or biblical inerrancy, to lucid conversations with members of other faiths. To précis this far-flung odyssey in a systematic way can prove daunting, particularly when those least receptive to it may never have ventured outside the confines of their theological bubble. The tendency for fundamentalists to diminish our stories, their eagerness to dismiss our journey as an overnight, flippant decision, gives us pause.

Indeed, renouncing one’s religion can be high stakes, secular democracy or no. In the context of conservative Christianity especially, making it ‘official’ sets things in motion. It alters relationships, closes off opportunities, can affect the contours of your marriage. No matter how ironclad you perceive the logic behind your deconversion, the hidebound nature of fundamentalism brooks little tolerance for dissent. No matter how heartfelt your perspective, disaffiliating is so often tantamount to self-exile. The mounting consequences, including loss of your community and the thought of having to forge an entirely new social identity, can at times outstrip the intellectual and moral clarity that comes from unburdening yourself of suspect convictions.

You can see the anguish Goodwin has had to plough through to reach these conclusions and affirm them openly. Here’s a guy who made two careers out of championing what he’s now denouncing. As a public figure, he knew the moment he posted this that he’d be subjecting himself to a torrent of bad faith insults and sectarian drivel. While this can’t have been easy, I’m glad he followed his conscience and spoke out. Given the hold organized religion has over people’s lives and the undeserved deference toward faith in this country, more skepticism is always and everywhere appreciated. I trust his story will be a comfort to many struggling through the same questions and obscurantism in their own churches and communities. I know it would have resonated with me back in 2011 when my faith began to crumble.

Goodwin’s far from alone — ex-vangelicalism is a genre unto itself — but it’s not every day that someone of his caliber and notoriety delivers a forthright postmortem on their exodus from Christianity. I look forward to hearing more from him in the future.

 
 
As a mega-fan of Dave Chappelle’s since college, his latest special was difficult to watch. I had held out hope (naively, it turns out) that he would use his Netflix farewell to make some sort of amends for using his vast platform at the regular expense of the LGBT community. What I saw instead was an all too familiar routine patterned after male celebrities unable to respond with maturity to valid criticism. For more than an hour, he doubled down on his past comments and waved his anti-trans flag around with more glee than ever, vanquishing any lingering doubts as to the status of his allyship. In truth, it felt less like a stand-up act than an hour-long apologia for his obsessive preoccupation with trans-antagonistic humor.

To say it fell totally flat is the most generous way of putting it, while ‘dreadfully predictable and cruel’ is more apt. Some might say he proved himself an accomplice to hate with his previous specials, but this one solidified it, with Chappelle even going so far as to close out his set by casually misgendering a dead trans woman — multiple times, just in case we chalked up the first one to a stray slip-up. This is no longer the Dave we grew to love with Killin’ Them Softly. His evolution from sharp social commentator to anti-PC curmudgeon has been terrible to witness in the way it’s always terrible when raw talent is wasted like this. As I say below, I will always believe in the possibility of redemption, but it’s looking increasingly unlikely after his latest salvo.

I’m reproducing here two more fleshed out reactions I shared on social media after watching Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix installment, The Closer.

(1) I’m curious how many others felt the same, but I just didn’t find it particularly funny? Even apart from the LGBT brickbats I’ll get into below. I laughed maybe twice during its 72-minute runtime. In terms of actual comedic content, it was overall pretty poor in both quality and quantity. And the few bits I did enjoy pale in comparison to most of his previous work. Which is to say, if you don’t consider a handful of laughs too much to ask for when watching a stand-up act, you might want to sit this one out. Those jonesing for some classic Dave are better off re-watching Killin’ Them Softly instead.

(2) Chappelle’s fixation with trans people, and trans women in particular, is genuinely a weird thing, notwithstanding the pain and damage his ignorance has inflicted on this community. He’s had this hang-up for virtually his whole career and I just don’t get how he’s made so little progress (if any). Much as he tries to conflate them throughout this special, his self-confessed transphobia and any perceived disparity in power between the movements for Black and LGBT justice are entirely separate issues. He needs to work on his transphobia, regardless of the latter. His “jealousy” of the brisk gains he sees in the LGBT domain doesn’t somehow negate his decadeslong history of transphobic commentary — not in the least. Nor is his ‘I had one trans friend who liked me’ in any way different from white people’s ‘I have a black friend’ defense. Same song, different verse. How could someone so seemingly intelligent commit this many unforced errors?

He was making these same jokes about AIDS and trans genitalia 16 years ago. They weren’t funny then and they still aren’t today. (At least in his early days, these amounted to side plots rather than the focal point.) The key difference now is that his targeted hate has wider reach and therefore hurts more people. And for the record, there is no conceivable universe in which threatening to kill a woman and throw them in the trunk of your car makes for a laughworthy bit in 2021 — unless, apparently, you’re comedy’s “G.O.A.T,” a title he claims for himself in this special.

“But it’s just jokes,” Chappelle stans retort, as if comedy is somehow immune to the same social pressures that guide behavior and conduct in every other societal domain. Except the way in which Chappelle speaks on these topics here is artless. In fact, much of his routine is neither comedic in tone nor laid out in the form of a traditional joke. “Gender is a fact,” he asserts, stone-faced, as if the case for this view makes itself. In case it isn’t obvious, that’s not a punch line, it’s straight hate speech — the kind that helps keep the lights on at NewsMax and Breitbart. If you’d take issue with a politician or talking head spouting this on Fox News, you should have a problem with Dave Chappelle doing the same in a Netflix special. And if you’d object to someone saying that being gay is a choice but not with Chappelle’s equally bigoted remarks that seek to erase any distinction between sex and gender, you might have a blind spot when it comes to trans people.

For his part, Chappelle seems positively mystified that the ubiquity of the internet could in turn mean more and stronger blowback from certain quarters, namely from LGBT activists and those whose generously salted wounds he insists on reopening. In what may have been the corniest joke of the night, Chappelle feebly attempts to shut down his most vocal critics dragging him online by declaring that “Twitter’s not a real place.” Only a deeply out of touch has-been could make a lousy one-liner like this while discounting the raw influence of the internet in today’s media landscape. As others have pointed out, Chappelle also completely contradicts himself later on when he suggests that it was Twitter attacks that led to his late friend, trans comedienne Daphne Dorman, to take her own life.

Honestly, what I saw last night was no different from the behavior we’ve observed from any number of other male figures who’ve come under fire for bigoted comments. It’s so boringly predictable — like a subroutine for contrarian celebrities. Whenever men of power are faced with backlash, they double down and, like a dog with a bone, refuse to let it go or thoughtfully reflect on the source of that backlash. Chappelle spent nearly the entire special on this singular topic, chasing his tail as he flitted from one ill-conceived argument to another, trying desperately to justify his bigotry and convince his detractors that he’s actually not the guy he continues to show us he is. What was painfully clear by the end is that he has no serious answer to the “punching down” critique that’s landed him in hot water over the years. If anything, his crude, relentless volley of lazy punchlines against the trans community here only served to validate his critics.

This is such a strange and sad saga because for whatever else you might say about Chappelle, he’s objectively a talented comic. Imagine getting twenty million dollars from Netflix to talk about anything in the world and you choose to do…this? Why? Does Dave have no other fun stories or insights from his globetrotting life? Any droll yet poignant commentary drawn from living through a pandemic? I’m certain he does. But instead he chose to dedicate the entirety of his Netflix finale to engaging in trans-exclusionary apologetics and bashing the easiest target since Donald Trump: “wokeness” and “cancel culture.” What a snooze. Not only is this unbefitting for a comic of his caliber, he’s far too smart to have misnavigated this debate in good faith, and without understanding the consequences. Dude knows full well what he’s doing and who he’s hurting, but when have powerful men ever let a little thing like that stand in the way of their ego?

As a friend cautioned on Facebook earlier this week, regardless of the position you take on the guy’s comedy, if you’re going to defend Chappelle, you HAVE to do it with scrutiny and attention to detail. You can’t do it blindly because it too easily invalidates the pain that he’s caused.

Given the new legacy Chappelle’s diligently created for himself and his unwillingness to make amends, this care should be top of mind wherever discussions of his work arise. I don’t much care whether he’s “canceled,” as I know that would never happen anyway. But any comic whose working definition of “edgy” is riffing on trans women and catering to anti-woke populism is as unimaginative as they are callous. While I remain firm in the belief that anyone is capable of redemption, Chappelle only makes the climb more treacherous each time he steps onto the stage. In the meantime, there are countless other stand-up acts perfectly capable of telling jokes without being an asshole.

P.S. Now is as good a time as any to donate to LGBT charities, like The Trevor Project and Human Dignity Trust.

Further reading:

• Response from Daphne Dorman’s roommate (mirrored here)
• Stevie Wonder Wasn’t the Weirdest Part
• Dave Chappelle’s Brittle Ego
• Dave Chappelle’s Betrayal
• Dave Chappelle’s ‘reckless’ #MeToo and trans jokes have real after-effects
• In Defense of Cancel Culture…and Dave Chappelle
• My Facebook post on Ricky Gervais dated May 25, 2022

 
 
Living in America, you encounter your fair share of bad faith argument. The internet is awash with bad actors who spend their time exploiting the anonymity afforded by social media and maliciously abusing the norms of civil discourse. In other words, trolls. With the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re seeing a variety of fallacious arguments reanimated by bad-faith agitators who pride themselves on lazily crafted objections that sound just compelling enough to the uninitiated or to those who already buy into the particular narrative they’re pressing.

So to start, I’ll share below a couple of pat responses to those objections that readers may find useful the next time you come up against similar talking points. The two I seem to come across most often are arguments from authority and argumentum ad populum (appeal to a majority). They’re deployed in some cases by right-wing partisans who feel the need to register token disagreement with anything they perceive as coming from “the left,” and in other cases by people who simply don’t like being contradicted or corrected after trying to pass off inaccurate information as fact.

This first example relates to those who attempt to dismiss your claims not by examining the claims themselves but by attacking the status of the person making them.
 

“But you’re not a scientist so why should we trust you?”

 
Response: You don’t have to trust me, but facts don’t suddenly cease to be facts when they’re conveyed by a non-scientist. If an astronomer says Mercury is the third planet from the sun, their having a PhD doesn’t make them right. And vice versa: If you say Mercury is the first planet from the sun, your not being an astronomer doesn’t make you wrong.

The second comes from people who attempt to parlay the groupthink quotient of their particular social bubble into validating their baseless assertions.
 

“But most people in this thread agree with me.”

 
Response: That doesn’t make you right, though. If you’re in a room with nothing but flat-earthers, espousing flat-earth views will earn you unanimous support. It doesn’t mean the earth is flat. Your belief can be shared by everyone with whom you regularly interact and still be contradicted by all observable data.

Both of the above arguments are red herrings as they fail to address the issue or question under debate. They’re meant to distract and derail rather than inform and clarify. It’s best to shut each down quickly before the discussion veers off course. Once focus shifts away from the evidence or claims presented, the troll has won. If you can beat them to the punch, you may have a chance at saving the thread from descending into a state that’s helpful to no one.

Radical Indifference

The above are archetypal bad faith comments, and in all honesty it may be best to block people who insist on engaging in this way. What I want to call attention to here is a different group of people who apparently mean well but who demonstrate a total lack of interest in what is true and factual. Not only do they not know ‘what the facts are’, they don’t care to find out. Worse still, there are in principle no wrong answers on their view — even when it comes to matters of scientific import. If an opinion seems to have been offered sincerely, it’s as valid as anyone else’s; both sides of an issue are equally trustworthy.

I’ve taken to labeling this phenomenon ‘radical indifference’, and I think in the long run it actually poses a greater danger than the obfuscationists who go out of their way to disrupt polite society and thwart substantive conversation. I encountered this mentality most recently as last week by way of a Facebook post from a friend I haven’t spoken to in years. Their post stressed that the decision over whether to get the Covid-19 vaccine is strictly a personal one and therefore worthy of respect on that basis. In my response, I chose not to address the merits of vaccination — both to the vaccinee and the people in their orbit — but rather the general theme of the post and its implications. Below is a screenshot of the post followed by the comment I left under it. I’ve blanked the name and picture as it was not Public.

 
I’d like to push back on some of the framing here a bit, if I could. I agree, at least in theory, that two people with the same information can reach different conclusions based on their personal values and goals. However, one of the big problems since this pandemic began (and with our national politics more generally, for that matter), is that people on opposing sides are often *not* working from the same information. At all, in fact. And to the extent that the information relevant to decisions such as whether to get vaccinated or whether to wear a mask is based on objectively gathered data, this opens up the possibility that one side is in fact ‘wrong’ — to the extent their conclusions are inconsistent with said data.

From personal experience in having conversations surrounding vaccines and masking, a lot of what passes for “medical freedom” and “personal choice” these days amounts to ignorance or preconceptions rooted in misinformation or partisan bias. These are phrases routinely used as cover for positions or decisions at stark odds with the underlying science/data. That is to say, the reasoning that often gets thrown out once you press someone on their decision to forego the vaccine or masks is largely fallacious and grounded in incorrect or inaccurate information. Not always, necessarily, but when it is, I don’t think we should give that person a pass by chalking it up to “personal choice” or pretending that their position is as valid as anyone else’s.

Because the truth is that not all perspectives/beliefs are equally valid, and I think we should be honest in admitting that. To take a rudimentary example, if someone says Mercury is the third planet from the sun, that person is wrong — objectively so. Likewise, if someone says the flu is more dangerous than Covid-19, or that the vaccines aren’t effective, or that HCQ is a cure for Covid-19, that person is plainly wrong from the perspective of all available evidence. Again, we’re not obligated to excuse them — even if they are our friends or family members — when the evidence is so clearly stacked against them.

Similarly, just because someone says they “researched” a particular issue does not automatically make their opinions valid. It’s not some miraculous word that makes a person worth listening to. It depends on whether that supposed research ever made contact with reliable and trustworthy sources and whether their resulting conclusions can actually be squared with the relevant scientific data. If someone tells you, for instance, that based on their research, Thomas Jefferson was actually the first POTUS and not the third, that doesn’t spontaneously invalidate all of the historical data we have to the contrary. It most likely means this person is mistaken or was led astray by misleading or otherwise inaccurate information.
 

 
Appeals to “balance,” “both sides,” “free speech,” “personal choice,” and the like are more often than not a calculated exercise in covering up inadequacy of evidence and the perceived right to muddy scientific debates with nonsense. If we truly believe that facts and evidence are important enough to guide our decisions as a society and as individuals (as opposed to fear, social pressure, and emotional reactivity as you rightly point out), then this should apply to our conversations about the pandemic as well. The notion that it’s all subjective and every opinion, no matter how intelligently arrived at, is equally valid and sound is, I would argue, the real “slippery slope” you should be worried about.

P.S. I want to emphasize that my comment should not be taken to mean that no sound reasons exist to refuse the vaccine or to decline to wear a mask. There are in fact medically legitimate reasons for why one might forego both, though these only apply to a small fraction of the human population. My comment should also not be interpreted as saying that anyone against vaccinating or masks is arguing in bad faith. Some of them are, while some are merely mistaken and misled. Hope that staves off any whataboutism that might follow.

 
 
I’m rather proud of this reply, though it stopped the thread cold. I don’t know if my words caused this person to rethink passing along what amounts to a remarkably casual disregard for truth, but either way, posts like this and the meaning behind them are deeply troubling to me. The attitude expressed here is almost anti-epistemological in the way it relativizes truth and evades the mere acknowledgment that there are right answers to be found. The notion that all research conducted on the internet rests on equal footing so long as one is “comfortable” with the decision they reach is similarly bonkers given how hazardous that task can be these days.

Similar sentiments scattered all across the internet — even on comment threads in the Times and the Post — are a tremendously dispiriting sign of decay. There’s such a widespread lack of interest or just lack of ability to actually read and consider what an article says, combined with a knee-jerk opinionism and leading with assertion over working through an argument. To say nothing of the defeatism and cynicism rampant among large swaths of our electorate. My hope is that this is all somewhat temporary, borne of the stress and anxiety that comes when a society’s guiding myths fall apart. My fear, though, is that with the ubiquity and unfettered environment of social media, we’ve lost our ability to think.

Worst case scenario is we’re effectively witnessing the endgame of authoritarian actors and other purveyors of disinformation. The denial of objective truth is an omen hastened along by antidemocratic forces whose goal is much more ambitious than merely reinforcing and popularizing anti-intellectual thought. It is to pull on the threads of democracy itself in an effort to bring down the whole ship. Putin and other autocratic leaders cut from similar cloth seek to disrupt through cyberwarfare the information-gathering process to such a degree that finding facts, and the sources capable of delivering them, seems a fool’s errand. When everyone is trapped in their own respective partisan bubbles, unable to critically think and parse evidence-based reality from abject nonsense, we as a society gradually lose the sense for what counts as reliable information in the first place, allowing fictions and delusions to flourish in its stead. We approach a point of no return where we no longer are guided by logic and reason and exude indifference toward the norms and institutions that keep democracy afloat.

As historian Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.” I worry that we’re now seeing the fruits of chronic disinformation and misdirection close in around us. I worry that the strange power of propaganda has managed to seep into the minds of everyday people who would otherwise not so readily have abandoned fact-based living. I fret over the possibility that our trust in media and other civic institutions has so frayed that we’ve entered a world in which what one believes and what is true are invariably one and the same. I worry that the war over the “information sphere,” to use the terminology of our own intelligence agencies, has already been lost.

I don’t know where we go from here as a nation, or how to restrain our worst impulses that seem to be speeding us toward a dark and uncertain future, but I dearly hope we can find a way to break free before it’s too late.

Further reading:

• Russian Disinformation Targets Vaccines and the Biden Administration
• State Dept. Traces Russian Disinformation Links
• The Problem Isn’t Disinformation, It’s Dismediation
• Review: On Tyranny
• The American Abyss
• What Russia’s Meddling Can Tell Us About Their Motives and Our Indifference
• What is Disinformation?
• Dialogue is Hard. This Blueprint May Help.
• The Problem With Self-Imposed Echo Chambers
• I Debunked a Covid-19 Conspiracy Video

Feature image via Renew America Together

 
 
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.

 
 
I think it’s important not to lose sight of what happened this past January. As time marches on, and the press moves on to the latest stories, I worry that many of us might misrecall the significance of that day, or forget about it altogether. Indeed, it’s quite easy to grow desensitized and reduce moments of import to a footnote of the Trump presidency after the daily affronts to our sense of decency that saturated our media diet the last four years. While those daily utterances of abject nonsense will surely fade from view, episodes like the border separations and the chaos that erupted in the halls of Congress six months ago should remain firmly rooted in living memory. I’ve saved the texts and emails my wife and I received from family and friends who reached out to check on us, as well as the various videos of those at the scene, because I believe that such things ought to be preserved.

I believe this not only because any act of domestic terrorism constitutes a bookmarkable chapter in our nation’s history, but because of the enduring relevance of what transpired. After all, the people responsible are still with us, and more importantly, so are the underlying motivations that saw hundreds of Americans storm the seat of U.S. democracy. Those motives don’t disappear the moment a new president is sworn in. The bulk of the rioters, almost exclusively white and male, acted in furtherance of a Lie premised ultimately, as we’ll see, on entrenched racism. Whether commitments to far-right conspiracies and causes will wane or accelerate in the years ahead, and how to combat them, are questions pertinent to social activists, our election security apparatus, and, perhaps especially, law enforcement and the U.S. military.
 

 
According to a recent study from the University of Chicago, and discussed at length above, the rioters were 93% white and 86% male. Hardly surprising, but then there’s this: the vast majority were middle-aged or older, gainfully employed, and married with kids (though for many of them that may have changed in the intervening months). This is inconsistent with what we have found when looking at the socioeconomic makeup of white nationalist and other far-right militia groups like Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, and the Three Percenters, whose members tend to skew younger and match the jobless loner profile.

It’s important to note that although the study found extremist groups were in relatively short supply at the Capitol, it’s possible that the demonstrators who showed up shared an overlapping ideology with these factions despite no formal affiliation. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2020 Year in Hate and Extremism report found that many extremists are not formal members of any organization. They are usually radicalized via online platforms and in the process may interact with organized antigovernment groups without joining them. Consequently, we need to look beyond connections to leading extremist organizations in discerning ideologues capable of engaging in hate violence.

Another interesting finding is that more than half of the rioters hailed not from deep-red counties and districts, as we might expect, but from counties that Biden won in 2020. A lot of them in fact were Trump supporters who traveled from the bluest parts of America to participate in the riot. One final takeaway from the study was that these largely white men were more likely to call home places where the white population had experienced marked declines compared to the Hispanic and Black populations, which naturally includes those blue-heavy urban locales Biden shored up.

The director of the project, Richard Pape, traces the driving ideology of those present at the riot to the “Great Replacement” theory, the notion that the rights of white people are being superseded by the rights of minority groups as the latter’s numbers eclipse the former’s in Western democracies. It’s a theory that picked up steam initially in Europe, and was adopted shortly thereafter by neo-Nazi and other white supremacist groups in the United States. The insurrectionists were also united in their belief the election was stolen, of course, but according to Pape and his colleagues, it was profound concerns over racial replacement that made the difference between the violent demonstrators who arrived in Washington and the passive observers who remained at home.

One plausible explanation for the participants’ counties of origin might be that in places where far-right voters are grossly outnumbered by their blue-leaning counterparts, the feeling of being hemmed in by the prevailing ideology better animates one to express their political frustrations in more raucous, even violent ways relative to their co-thinkers in deep-red localities. Thus while sympathy toward GR ideas exists in both red and blue enclaves, it’s the predominantly blue areas where the pro-Trump contingent is more likely to act on their core beliefs because the politics they so despise — and the minorities they resent — are more ubiquitous and harder to avoid. It was the sense of futility bred from the absence of solidarity in offline spaces, combined with the misinfo circulating in online spaces, that spurred them to action.

In order to assess the risk of further seditious efforts by the far-right that could materialize in ways both big and small, Dr. Pape shares a rather troubling poll his group conducted in tandem with the National Opinion Research Council. They asked 1,000 American adults whether they still believe the election was stolen and, additionally, whether they would be willing to personally participate in a violent protest. The results indicate that 4% of American adults, or 10 million people, respond ‘yes’ to both questions, with the strongest predictor being belief in the GR. Worse, we know that active or retired military, law enforcement, and government personnel make up a significant chunk of this figure, as more than 1 in 10 charged in the riot check at least one of those boxes.

In hindsight, the dramatic conflagration witnessed on January 6th of this year was possibly the only way for the Trump era to end: with deluded bands of costumed, antidemocratic, white nationalist radicals armed with bats and chemical spray laying waste to America’s foundational institutions, egged on by their beloved truth-trasher and Deluder-in-Chief. But there is a danger in dismissing what happened as just another disgraceful, mock-worthy day in an era chock full of them. Nothing about the last six months has abated interest in the conspiracist ideas that culminated in the antics back in January. The extremism harbored in the hearts and minds of everyday Americans will be with us for a long time to come, waiting for the right opportunity to strike out against the targets of that hatred.

And while it’s far from clear how best to deprogram those enamored with tenets of extremism, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the central role those beliefs played in the insurrection, and why they continue to pose a material threat to the preservation and strengthening of our democracy. If we focus only on the proximate convictions surrounding the 2020 election as opposed to the guiding force of racial resentment rampant in white society, we run the risk of thinking that the energy of far-right movements will dissipate as the events of January 6th recede further into the past. The election may be over, but the anarchy at the Capitol was always about much more than the fraudulent counting of ballots. It was fueled by an insidious strand of racial paranoia that’s festered among right-wing groups for decades. Those who would brush off the events of that day as mere ‘politics as usual’ underestimate both the scale of the threat before us and the degree to which nutty ideas can inspire mass violence.
 

Further reading:

• The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists
• These Are the Rioters Who Stormed the Nation’s Capitol
• Ronan Farrow: Who Were the Rioters on Jan. 6th?
• Off-Duty Police Officers Investigated, Charged With Participating In Capitol Riot
• Here Are The Police Officers And Other Public Employees Arrested In Connection To Capitol Riot
• Police Forces Dealing With Officers Involved in Capitol Riots
• ‘A nightmare scenario’: Extremists in police ranks spark growing concern after Capitol riot
• The warning signs before the Capitol riot
• FBI: U.S. Capitol Violence
• ‘I Alone Can Fix It’ book excerpt: The inside story of Trump’s defiance and inaction on Jan. 6

Image credits: Vox (feature); Jon Cherry/Getty Images

 
 
Having read this after The Invention of Wings, one can’t help but compare the two. In terms of the writing, plot structure, and character development, Monk Kidd’s later book, also set in South Carolina, prevails as the superior novel, if not quite the most memorable. Given the twelve years that separate them, I suppose this shouldn’t be too surprising, but Kidd’s talents as a writer have clearly flourished tremendously in that span of time. This is not to say that The Secret Life of Bees isn’t well written, because it is, but it did not grab me and refuse to let go like her 2014 masterpiece.

Beyond the noticeable backward drift in the caliber of her writing, I think what put me off was the overly saccharine tenor. Don’t get me wrong — I can do schmaltzy. In fact, I love schmaltzy, but I have to be on board with the general direction of the plot and it needs to feel organic in its delivery. In several spots, the ‘just-so’ sequence of events and the demeanor and personalities of the characters come across rather forced and unnatural. August Boatwright in particular has an elysian quality about her that lends the character an other-than-human aura. The perfected wisdom and virtue imbued in every word she utters robs her of authenticity and texture. This fits with the quasi-magical realism vibe Kidd was supposedly gunning for, but it didn’t help sell the character for me.

I did enjoy the element of beekeeping woven into the narrative and thought it offered some intriguing symbolism for the larger story. Kidd clearly did a lot of legwork exploring the science of hives and honeybees prior to charting a course for this novel, and their thematic presence throughout surely explains its lasting legacy since 2002. The vivid descriptions of Lily and August tending the hives left a strong impression, and I would have welcomed a few more of these moments.

The portrayal of Black characters by a white author is another potential sticking point. I think Kidd could have done a better job conveying that Lily’s pains and struggles are different both in kind and in degree from those shared by the nonwhite characters with whom she surrounds herself over the course of the novel. Part of this disconnect can be explained by the inherent limitations of telling the story through Lily’s eyes. As a young girl living a mostly sheltered, segregated life, she shouldn’t be expected to relate to, or have the vocabulary to describe, the contrasting lived experiences of those set apart in society. Still, I felt that more could have been done to manifest the starkly different realities inhabited by the central characters.

The friends of the Boatwright sisters also felt underdeveloped, more reminiscent of stereotypes than fully fleshed out characters. I wanted to hear about their personal struggles and racial tribulations, anything beyond what food they brought over and what type of hats they wore. If there’s any aspect of the book I felt unnecessarily watered down the racial friction of living in the deep south circa the early 1960s, it’s this one. The titular role of Black women as nurturing mother figures to a coming-of-age white girl seems passé and even insulting today, though I did appreciate those fleeting moments when Lily registers the scale of the racially charged landscape native to the era. I’ve yet to personally resolve the ethical status of white authors depicting Black voices, but I understand the perspective of critics who take a harsher stance against Kidd’s characterizations here.

Closing Thoughts

I don’t think the book necessarily deserves a lower score simply because it appeared earlier in Kidd’s career, or because direct comparisons with her 2014 standard-bearer leave much to be desired. As a work of literary fiction, it’s average — neither great nor terrible. The ambient backdrop of beekeeping elevates the narrative in original ways, but the goopy theatrics and unnatural characters weigh it back down. It’s possible this book just wasn’t for me and that others will derive greater value in accordance with their own personal experiences and the degree to which they connect with those of the characters. But if it’s a recommendation you’re after, my advice would be to skip this one and pick up The Invention of Wings for its better crafted story, its more historically grounded setting, its more enlivening characters, and its more eloquent prose, all of which combine to make it the irresistible page-turner I hoped this one would be.

Note: This review is mirrored over at Goodreads and at Amazon.

Feature image: Syrphid’s Feast by Niels Strating

 
 
In a post commemorating the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death, Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, affirms some of the unsung heroes that played pivotal roles in securing justice for Floyd and his family over the past year. There’s 17 year-old Darnella Frazier, whose righteous indignation in choosing to record rather than walk past allowed the world to bear witness to an evil that may otherwise have gone unnoticed and unpunished. And there’s Christopher Martin, the 18 year-old cashier who took Floyd’s $20 bill on that fateful day, whose recent interviews painfully demonstrate the long arc of our extraordinarily broken justice system. We may never know or understand the full toll this atrocity has taken on the people close to it, but we can seek to honor the remarkable courage of those who showed up when it mattered most.

Upon reflecting on the statistics Huang presents on police accountability, it seems clear that the outcome of Derek Chauvin’s trial was far from certain, and if anything represents an extreme outlier in the history of such cases. Indeed, were it not for two key elements — his fellow officers coming forward and testifying against him, and a more diverse jury — Chauvin would likely have joined the 99% who walked free following similar episodes of police brutality.

When police kill a civilian, a series of obstacles stand in the way of achieving justice for the victim, from the messy procedural nightmare that is police investigating themselves to the laws in place that grant considerable discretion to on-duty officers in the use of force. Accountability in modern policing is a fleeting and scarcely observed phenomenon precisely because the system is inherently designed to give special protections to law enforcement (see the doctrine of Qualified Immunity for more on this). Even with footage uploaded to YouTube, replete with matching autopsy evidence, holding police officers legally liable for their misconduct is nearly impossible in most cases.

The people of Minnesota know this all too well. Four years before Floyd’s death, an officer from a different police department in Minneapolis was charged in the shooting of Philando Castile. Same city, different ending. Castile, a 32 year-old Black man, was shot at point-blank range five times in his car during a routine traffic stop. Video of the encounter taken by Castile’s girlfriend, who was also in the car, later showed that Castile actually had the wherewithal to inform the officer he had a gun in the car before reaching for his license and registration — a decision that in hindsight proved to be fatal.

That officer, Jeronimo Yanez, walked after his trial in 2017. Unlike Chavin’s trial, the officers in Yanez’s department, including the police chief, all testified on his behalf. And the resulting verdict was decided by eight jurors, just two of whom were Black, compared to the twelve jurors, four of whom were Black and two of whom identified as multiracial, in Chauvin’s trial.

That the Chauvin verdict came as such a surprise despite the many courageous young women and men who captured the carnage on video and shared their stories both in and out of court is a testament to the massive reforms needed to hold those within the orbit of law enforcement more consistently accountable. We shouldn’t have to count on officers breaking ranks or judges to press for diverse juries, when history shows us this almost never happens. To turn the Chauvin outcome from a vanishingly rare exception to the rule requires a top-down rethink of not just policing but our entire justice system. Ultimately we must remove the discrepant veil of protection around those serving in a public capacity and make it more difficult for law enforcement and other state officials to escape legal consequences for clear, egregious abuses of power.

Instead of teaching generations of young Black men how to navigate a society that doesn’t respect Black life and a policing culture that seems hell-bent on killing them year in and year out, we should be addressing the systemic factors that feed the cycle of racial injustice in America.

Excerpts:
 

“The events of that day and the rise of Black Lives Matter protests across the globe have been seared into our minds and the history books for decades to come – and that’s because of the remarkable courage of many people and the conviction of one.

The courage was demonstrated by Darnella and other witnesses who stepped forward to counter the excuses of the legal defense team. In addition to Darnella, who testified in the trial of the killer, others who showed great courage were Jena Scurry, a 911 dispatcher who reported her concerns about the treatment of Floyd; Alisha Oyler, who was working nearby and took video recordings; Donald Williams II, a mixed martial arts fighter who warned the police that they were killing Floyd; Judeah Reynolds, Darnella’s 9-year-old cousin who also witnessed the murder; Alyssa Funari, another 17-year-old girl who recorded the killing; Kaylynn Gilbert, also 17, who witnessed the murder; Genevieve Hansen, a firefighter who offered to render aid to Floyd and was rebuffed by the police officers; Christopher Belfrey, who videotaped the murder; and Christopher Martin, a 19-year-old store clerk who had reported Floyd’s use of a counterfeit bill and later observed the murder.

It’s especially notable that so many of the witnesses who came forward were young people, people who had reason to fear the consequences of their bravery. Many of these young women and men were Black – and all were familiar with the frequent stories of police harassment and violence against their community. These witnesses took the stand seeking justice for Floyd, regretting their inability to stop the murder and anxiously calling for accountability. Their courage should serve as an inspiration to all of us. What if each of us were given the chance to stand up to police brutality? Would we be as brave? As Dr. Martin Luther King noted, “we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Our country was well-served by these brave young people who spoke out to demand justice.”

[…]

“This story is also unusual because it resulted in a conviction. According to Mapping Police Violence, 7,666 police officers killed someone in the U.S. between 2013 and 2019. Mapping Police Violence defines a police killing as “a case where a person dies as a result of being shot, beaten, restrained, intentionally hit by a police vehicle, pepper sprayed, tasered, or otherwise harmed by police officers, whether on-duty or off-duty.” Of the 7,666 cases, only 25 officers were convicted of a crime. In another 74 cases, the officers were charged with a crime but not convicted. In 99% of the cases, officers were not charged with any crime whatsoever.”

Further reading:

• One year after George Floyd’s death: Courage and conviction drive movement
• ‘I allowed myself to feel guilty for a very long time’: the teenage cashier who took George Floyd’s $20 bill
• Derek Chauvin Verdict Brings a Rare Rebuke of Police Misconduct
• Derek Chauvin’s trial shows cracks in blue wall of silence
• Derek Chauvin trial testimony by police brass is unprecedented
• Police shootings: Trials, convictions are rare for officers
• From Berlin to Syria, street artists are honouring George Floyd
• In Germany, George Floyd’s Death Sparks Protests — And Artwork That Honors His Life
• ‘My emotions were so raw’: The people creating art to remember George Floyd

Feature image credit: Flickr / Lorrie Shaull