Medics around the world face hostility over virus stigma


By SAMY MAGDY and EMILY SCHMALL, Associated Press


CAIRO (AP) — Dr. Dina Abdel-Salam watched in terror last month as scores of strangers gathered under the balcony of her aunt’s empty apartment in the Egyptian city of Ismailia, where she’d temporarily sheltered after leaving her elderly parents at home to protect them from exposure to the coronavirus

© Provided by Associated Press FILE - In this May 3, 2020, file photo, an Indian Air Force helicopter showers flower petals on the staff of INS Asvini hospital in Mumbai, India as part of Armed Forces' efforts to thank the workers, including doctors, nurses and police personnel, who have been at the forefront of the country's battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. Many cities across the world erupt at sundown with collective cheers thanking front-line workers for their selfless battle. But in Egypt, India, the Philippines, Mexico and elsewhere, doctors have been attacked, intimidated and treated as pariahs because of their work. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade, File)

The crowd called out her name, hurling threats until she dialed the police for help.


“You have moved here to make us sick,” someone shouted.

Abdel-Salam’s ordeal is just one of many in a wave of assaults on doctors, illustrating how public fear and rage can turn against the very people risking their lives to save patients in the pandemic.

While many cities across the world erupt at sundown with collective cheers to thank front-line workers treating COVID-19 patients, in Egypt, India, the Philippines, Mexico and elsewhere, some doctors and nurses have come under attack, intimidated and treated like pariahs because of their work.

The pandemic, especially in places with limited healthcare infrastructure, has already subjected doctors to hardships. But medical workers, seen as possible sources of contagion, face another staggering challenge in these countries: the stigma associated with the illness.

“Now more than ever, we need to recognize the importance of investing in our health workforce and take concrete actions that guarantee their well-being and safety,” Ahmed al-Mandhari, the World Health Organization's regional director for the Eastern Mediterranean, said in a virtual news conference earlier this week.

But in many places, that’s a difficult task as mistrust, fear and misinformation can have devastating effects. Decades of poor education and scant government services in some places have created deep misgivings about the medical profession.

In central India, a group of five health workers, dressed in full protective suits, entered a neighborhood to quarantine contacts of a confirmed COVID-19 patient when a mob descended, slinging stones and screaming insults.

“Some people felt that the doctors and nurses will come and take their blood,” said Laxmi Narayan Sharma, the health union president in Madhya Pradesh, in central India.

In the southern Indian city of Chennai, another stone-throwing mob broke up a funeral for Simon Hercules, a neurologist who died from COVID-19, pelting the ambulance carrying his remains and forcing his family and friends to run for their lives.

In Afghanistan, conspiracy theories undermine the credibility of medical professionals. Nearly 19 years after the U.S.-led coalition defeated the Taliban, many blame Western nations for the country’s deterioration. One commonly shared conspiracy theory is that the virus was allegedly manufactured by the U.S. and China to reduce the world population, said Sayed Massi Noori, a doctor at one of two Kabul hospitals testing for coronavirus.

Last week, several physicians at the emergency unit of the Afghan Japan Hospital, where Noori works, were mobbed by 15 family members of a patient who died of the virus. The doctors had their noses bloodied.

“The relatives believe it is the doctors who killed their family members,” Noori said.

The coronavirus hotline in Ouagadougou, the capital of war-torn Burkina Faso, fields calls about persistent coughs and headaches. But it has also gotten death threats.

“They call and say that after they’re finished killing the soldiers in the north, they’re going to come and kill everyone here,” said Red Cross volunteer Emmanual Drabo.

Health workers across the Philippines have been attacked and targeted more than 100 times since mid-March, resulting in 39 arrests, police Lt. Gen. Guillermo Eleazar told The Associated Press. In one attack, five men stopped a nurse heading to work in the Sultan Kudarat province in late March, throwing liquid bleach into his face and burning his eyes.

Tough-talking President Rodrigo Duterte, long censured for his violent approach to curbing crime, responded: “I told the police, maybe it’s illegal but I’ll answer for it. Pour it back on the attackers of doctors and nurses.”

In Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city, doctors and nurses say just venturing out in scrubs invites danger. One city hospital instructed its workers to shed their uniforms when they clock out, and the government has assigned National Guard troops to public hospitals.

Similar fears have sparked arrests in Sudan. In Omdurman, across the Nile River from the capital, Khartoum, a riot erupted at a hospital when rumor spread it would take COVID-19 patients. Police arrested several people who tried to attack the building, said hospital director Babaker Youssef.

In Egypt, even hospital administrators have faced public anger.

Ahmed Abbas, the vice president of a government hospital in Egypt’s Nile Delta city of Zagazig, was wearing scrubs when he was jostled and cursed while waiting in line at an ATM. The head of Egypt’s Doctors’ Union, Ihab el-Taher, says such incidents are “limited" but still disheartening.

On top of a global shortage of respirators, virus testing, and protective equipment, increased public hostility has deprived some medical professionals of basic needs — such as housing and transportation.

In India’s capital, New Delhi, doctors and first responders reported being evicted by their landlords. A nurse in Ethiopia said taxis refuse to pick up workers coming out of the nation's main hospital dedicated to coronavirus patients.

As the wave of attacks spurs government efforts to better support medical personnel and dispel rumors, many doctors draw optimism from growing public awareness.

After police dispersed the mob beneath her balcony in Ismailia, some people came back to apologize, Abdel-Salam said. In India, two of the doctors pelted with stones in Madhya Pradesh were cheered when they returned with gifts of saplings a day later, after health officials had explained the purpose of their visit.

Yet painful memories linger.

After the aborted burial of Dr. Hercules in southern India, one of his colleagues had to pick shards of glass off his shrouded body. Another colleague, Pradeep Kumar, gathered two hospital workers and returned under the cover of night to cover the dug-out grave with dirt.

“We had to literally use our hands,” Kumar said. “This man deserved something better than that.”

___

Schmall reported from New Delhi. Associated Press writers Chonchui Ngashangva in New Delhi; Jim Gomez in Manila, Philippines; Tameem Akhgar in Kabul, Afghanistan; Sam Mednick in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and Elias Meseret in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, contributed.

Drug promoted by Trump as coronavirus ‘game changer’ increasingly linked to deaths

Toluse Olorunnipa, Ariana Eunjung Cha, Laurie McGinley

For two months, President Trump repeatedly pitched hydroxychloroquine as a safe and effective treatment for coronavirus, asking would-be patients “What the hell do you have to lose?”

Growing evidence shows that, for many, the answer is their lives.

Clinical trials, academic research and scientific analysis indicate that the danger of the Trump-backed drug is a significantly increased risk of death for certain patients. Evidence showing the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating covid-19 has been scant. Those two developments pushed the Food and Drug Administration to warn against the use of hydroxychloroquine outside of a hospital setting last month, just weeks after it approved an emergency use authorization for the drug.

Alarmed by a growing cache of data linking the anti-malaria drug to serious cardiac problems, some drug safety experts are now calling for even more forceful action by the government to discourage its use. Several have called for the FDA to revoke its emergency use authorization, given hydroxychloroquine’s documented risks.

“They should say, ‘We know there are harms, and until we know the benefits, let’s hold off,’ ” said Joseph Ross, a professor of medicine and public health at Yale University, who added that the original authorization may have been warranted but new evidence has emerged about the drug’s risks.

“I’m surprised it hasn’t been revoked yet,” said Luciana Borio, who served as director for medical and biodefense preparedness of the National Security Council and was acting chief scientist at the FDA.

Testimony this week from a former top vaccine official removed from his post last month further highlighted allegations that Trump’s White House pressured government scientists to quickly sign off on the untested drug in March, at the same time the president was pitching it as a “game changer.”

Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, told Congress Thursday that political pressure forced “dozens of federal scientists” to spend a harried 48-hour stretch rushing to put together a protocol for approving hydroxychloroquine for widespread use in covid-19 patients. Ultimately, that approach wasn’t taken. The FDA issued an emergency authorization for hospitalized covid-19 patients who cannot participate in a clinical trial.

In his whistleblower complaint, Bright said he was removed from his position in part due to his reluctance to promote the use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, because they had not been tested and deemed safe for treating covid-19.

“It’s important to use available clinical data,” Bright told lawmakers. “And if we know there are potential risks, we need to make sure that we are cognizant of those risks and make sure those drugs are used in a very safe and controlled manner.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar attacked Bright on Thursday, saying “his allegations do not hold water.”

In a recent interview, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn denied that he was pressured to authorize hydroxycholoquine. “I can assure you 100 percent that the president has never pressured me to make a decision regarding any regulatory aspect of the FDA’s work.”

The FDA said in a statement Friday that it is continuing to evaluate its emergency use authorization for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, as it does with all such authorizations for drugs to ensure their continued safety.

“In general, the FDA may revise or revoke an EUA under certain circumstances, including information related to linked or suspected adverse events, newly emerging data that may contribute to revision of the FDA’s initial conclusion that a product may be effective against the particular threat or a material change in the risk/benefit assessment based on evolving understanding of the disease or condition,” the statement said.

Trump has continued to promote hydroxychloroquine without reservation while attacking those who question its effectiveness. He has described Bright as a “disgruntled employee” who is resisting the proposed treatment without cause.

“So we have had some great response, in terms of doctors writing letters and people calling on the hydroxychloroquine,” Trump told reporters Thursday. “And this guy is fighting it. There’s no reason to fight it. There’s no reason. But more importantly than that, we’ve had tremendous response to the hydroxy.”

But doctors, health experts and officials from Trump’s own administration say the evidence does not back up the president’s positive assertions. Those assertions, which Trump has claimed are partly based on “a feeling,” could be costing lives, they said.

Yogen Kanthi, assistant professor in the division of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Michigan, said that it has been clear that the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin — used to treat bacterial infections — could lead to cardiac arrhythmias, which cause the heart to beat irregularly or too fast or slow. Many patients hospitalized for covid had underlying cardiovascular disease that put them at higher risk for arrhythmias, “so it shouldn’t be surprising we saw an increase in death,” he said.

“The question has been answered that if you have the infection and it’s significant enough to be in the hospital, the drug doesn’t seem to do anything for you,” he said. “It may be the horse is out of the barn.”

Many hospitals have stopped using the drug outside of clinical trials.

“We no longer are keeping large quantities and have returned most of it,” said Nishaminy Kasbekar, director of pharmacy for the Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in Philadelphia. “I think they should revoke the EUA because clearly based on the data it is no longer considered a treatment for covid.”

Some doctors, including one in Texas who is also a Republican committeeman, have continued to give the drug to coronavirus patients — with mixed results.

A study of Veterans Affairs patients hospitalized with the coronavirus found no benefit and higher death rates among those taking hydroxychloroquine, researchers said last month.

More than 27 percent of patients treated with hydroxychloroquine died, and 22 percent of those treated with the combination therapy died, compared with an 11.4 percent death rate in those not treated with the drugs, the study said.

The National Institutes of Health announced Thursday that it had begun a clinical trial of 2,000 adults to determine if the combination of hydroxychloroquine an azithromycin — the cocktail touted by Trump — works as a therapeutic for those with coronavirus.

“Although there is anecdotal evidence that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin may benefit people with COVID-19, we need solid data from a large randomized, controlled clinical trial to determine whether this experimental treatment is safe and can improve clinical outcomes,” Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said in a statement.

While Fauci has cautioned against drawing broad conclusions from anecdotal evidence, Trump’s promotion of the drug has been almost exclusively based on personal stories he has heard — often on cable news. He has largely ignored scientific studies to pitch the drug without caveat.

In a tweet shared 102,800 times and liked 384,800 times on Mar. 21 Trump claimed that “HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.”

He invited several recovered coronavirus patients to the White House last month, including some who said hydroxychloroquine saved their lives.

From mid-March through early April, Trump touted the drug as a potential panacea while downplaying any potential risks.

“The nice part is it’s been around for a long time, so we know that if things don’t go as planned, it’s not going to kill anybody,” he told reporters on March 19.

The president’s associates, including Fox host Laura Ingraham and his personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, have also pushed the drug as a treatment for covid-19 in private Oval Office meetings and phone calls.

Some Republican lawmakers have continued to promote hydroxychloroquine while attempting to defend Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 86,000 Americans.

“When you’re the physician at the bedside, and there is a medication that has promise, and that has a safety profile that we understand — doctors will use this medication offline,” Rep. Larry Bucshon (R-Ind.) told Bright during Thursday’s hearing. “That’s what’s happening. Whether that’s right or wrong, it might take us years to prove, but in the meantime, people can die.”

The Trump administration deployed tens of millions of doses of the drug from the Strategic National Stockpile as the president promoted the FDA’s emergency use authorization. His repeated statements that the drug had been fully “approved” by the FDA in record time added to the false sense that hydroxychloroquine had been vetted and declared safe for use, experts said.

While the FDA didn’t intend for the authorization to signal an endorsement, many physicians and patients interpreted it that way, especially with “political figures saying the FDA had approved the drug,” said Jesse Goodman, former chief scientist at the FDA and now a Georgetown University professor.

“There’s a misperception out there that the EUA means that the FDA has approved the drug,” said Aaron S. Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “That’s wrong, of course, but it’s a widespread misconception driven by irresponsible statements from certain politicians and members of the media.”



Goodman and Kesselheim are among a growing number of medical experts calling for the FDA to revoke its emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine in light of new evidence about its risks.

While an emergency use authorization is not a full-fledged approval by the FDA, it allows unapproved drugs and devices to be used during a public health emergency. The standard for an emergency authorization is that the agency “determines that the known and potential benefits of the medical products for their intended uses outweigh their known and potential risks,” according to the agency.

Mark McClellan, who was FDA commissioner during President George W. Bush’s administration, said he disagreed with calls to revoke the authorization. He called for it to be strengthened with additional warnings about side effects for those with heart disease, adding that removing the emergency authorization could create access issues for people who need the drug for ailments other than covid-19. In weeks before the Veteran’s Administration study was released in late April, there was a steady stream of warnings from different physician groups about the potentially deadly side effects of hydroxychloroquine. On Apr. 8, the United States’ three cardiology medical groups urged “caution” in using the combination. On Apr. 21, a National Institutes of Health panel recommended against using hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin due to potential toxic effects.

While hydroxychloroquine is approved by the FDA to treat malaria, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, some medical groups have long voiced concern that using it for coronavirus patients was particularly risky.

Several studies have been published since then that support those initial findings. Doctors in Brazil stopped a trial of chloroquine, closely related to hydroxychloroquine, after 11 patients died. They reported in JAMA Open Network on April 24 that in 81 patients, those who took high doses of the drug had a 3.6-fold higher death rate as compared to a lower dose group.

Brazil’s top health official resigned Friday following reported disagreements with President Jair Bolsonaro over the efficacy of the anti-malarial drug in curbing the rapid rise of coronavirus in Latin America’s largest country.

The departure of the oncologist Nelson Teich, who resigned less than one month after becoming health minister, came as Bolsonaro has followed Trump’s lead in wagering heavily on the drug. He has ordered its mass production despite serious questions over its side effects and its effectiveness in a country that now has the worst outbreak in the Southern Hemisphere.

Many public health officials have called for Trump to defer to his medical experts, a push that intensified last month after the president pondered aloud whether light or disinfectant could be used internally to kill the coronavirus.

“Data free advocacy for projects rarely turns out well,” said Peter Lurie, a former top FDA official and president of Center for Science in the Public Interest who has criticized the promotion of hydroxychloroquine by politicians. “This was a product that never had a solid basis for believing it worked, and the data that has since emerged are not encouraging. The best thing to do is to leave drug review to the experts. That goes for hydroxychloroquine, it goes for bleach and it goes for ultraviolet light as well.”

Terrence McCoy contributed to this report.

Yet another study shows hydroxychloroquine doesn't work against Covid-19

By Elizabeth Cohen, CNN

A new study -- the largest of its kind -- shows that hydroxychloroquine, the drug touted by President Trump, does not work against Covid-19 and could cause heart problems.

© Buda Mendes/Getty Images RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL - APRIL 10: In this photo illustration, tablets on a blister pack of Plaquinol (Hydroxychloroquine) are displayed on April 10, 2020 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Controversial hydroxychloroquine is being suggested as a potential medication that could treat the Coronavirus pandemic in Brazil. According to the Ministry of health, as of today, Brazil has 19,638 confirmed cases infected with coronavirus (COVID-19) an at least 1057 recorded fatalities. (Photo illustration by Buda Mendes/Getty Images)

The study was published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It follows a study published last Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine that also showed the drug doesn't fight the virus.

Even before these reports were published, the US Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health issued warnings about using the drugs for coronavirus patients.

In the most recent study, researchers at the University at Albany looked at 1,438 patients with coronavirus who were admitted to 25 New York City area hospitals. After statistical adjustments, the death rate for patients taking hydroxychloroquine was similar to those who did not take the drug. The death rate for those taking hydroxychloroquine plus the antibiotic azithromycin, was also similar.

However, the patients who took the drug combination were more than twice as likely to suffer cardiac arrest during the course of the study. Heart issues are a known side effect of hydroxychloroquine.

"The big takeaway for me from this study is that it's very consistent with the FDA and NIH guidelines that came out in April," said one of the study's senior authors, David Holtgrave, dean of the School of Public Health at the University at Albany. "When deciding on public health interventions and treatments for Covid-19 or any other disease, it's really important to follow the data and follow the science and make sure decisions are being made on the highest quality data possible."

This study likely won't be the last word on the drugs. Researchers at the University of Washington, New York University and other centers are still testing the drug in patients.

In the clinical trials, coronavirus patients are randomly assigned to take the drugs or to take placebos, which have no effect, and then the death rates between the two groups will compared. These types of studies are considered the most reliable.

Trump's enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine

Starting in mid-March, President Trump became a frequent cheerleader for hydroxychloroquine, used to treat malaria, lupus and other diseases and the antibiotic azithromycin, often sold under the brand name Zithromax, or as a"Z-pack."

He promoted the drugs nearly 50 times, despite pleas from scientists to let studies decide if the treatment worked or not.

"HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine," Trump tweeted on March 21.

Fox News frequently echoed Trump, but both the network and the president quieted down about the drugs once studies started showing they didn't work and possibly could hurt.
No difference in death rates

Trump's enthusiasm for the drugs was based on a French study of 20 patients in March that showed the drugs might work against the virus. That study was criticized for poor methodology, with experts calling it "pathetic" and "a complete failure."

The medical society that published that study later said the study "does not meet the Society's expected standard."

But the study was enough to excite Trump, and enough to excite doctors, who were free to prescribe the drugs because they're both already on the market to treat patients with other illnesses.

The latest study in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at the medical records of 18% of all coronavirus patients hospitalized in the New York City area from March 15 to March 28.

In this group, doctors prescribed both drugs to 735 patients, just hydroxychloroquine to 271 patients, just azithromycin to 211 patients and neither drug to 221 patients.

They found that those taking hydroxychloroquine, either alone or with the antibiotic, were sicker than other patients to begin with and as time went on had a higher death rate. However, once the researchers statistically adjusted for the fact that the patients who took the drugs were sicker to start with, there was no statistical significance between the two death rates.

Overall, the patients had a 20% death rate.

The patients in the study were in the hospital, and other research teams are studying whether hydroxychloroquine can prevent coronavirus infection or slow it down in the beginning stages of the disease.

Fact check: The coronavirus pandemic isn’t slowing climate change

The claim: Drops in carbon emissions aren’t enough to significantly curb climate change

© Sam McNeil, AP FILE - In this Nov. 28, 2019 file photo, smoke and steam rise from a coal processing plant in Hejin in central China's Shanxi Province. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday at a two-day international meeting on climate change, that the coronavirus pandemic has exposed how fragile societies are, but that if governments work together on common challenges, including global warming, it can be an opportunity to 'rebuild our world for the better.' (AP Photo/Sam McNeil, File) ORG XMIT: DMSC307

With the coronavirus pandemic shutting down most global activity, a consequent crash in global carbon emissions has been widely reported.

While analysts agree the historic lockdowns will significantly lower emissions, some environmentalists argue the drop is nowhere near enough.

“Hey so it turns out that the people of earth accidentally did a global experiment to see if every individual could course correct climate change through mass personal change of habits, and it turns out, no! We can't!,” a Facebook post shared over 4,000 times reads.

The post shares a screenshot of another post that links to a Scientific American article, with the chatter, "Despite all the 'natural is healing' commentary global CO2 emissions have not considerably declined during the pandemic. This suggests emissions levels relate less to individual behavior than larger structural factors only addressable through regulation."
Projections for 2020 climate, carbon emissions

Analyses are nearly universal in finding that global carbon emissions will decline from the record peak in 2019. The declines, largely driven by a steep reduction in vehicle emissions, have been so large that photographs from space reflected the change.

The International Energy Agency, a policy advisory group to 30 member countries, projects that global carbon emissions are set to fall by 8%, or levels the world hasn't seen for a decade.

Estimates of the full drop in carbon emissions vary as analysts adjust their models around the coronavirus pandemic, but the lowest estimates still expect about a 5% drop in emissions.

“This may sound small at first, but it is the largest drop since World War II, as emissions have generally increased year-over-year, even during recessions,” Ankur Desai, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told USA TODAY.

Desai said the drop is attributable to commercial travel and business operations; a larger decline wasn’t recorded because “much of the economy is still going on,” including manufacturing, shipping and food production.

Despite the drop, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said 2020 is already the second-warmest year on record, and has a 75% chance of being the hottest ever.

“Our findings show that the annual average CO2 concentrations will still increase through this year, even though emissions are reducing,” a team from the United Kingdom’s National Weather Service said in a recent study, adding “This means that, although global emissions are smaller, they are still continuing — just at a slower rate. Additional CO2 is still accumulating in the atmosphere.”
Carbon accumulation, climate change

“The reported drops in carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases, while helpful, are insufficient to slow climate change,” Alex Hall, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UCLA, told USA TODAY.

Because current changes in the climate are the result of decades of accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, one year of slightly falling emissions will not counter long-term effects, Hall explained.

“Those emissions took place over of the past several decades,” he said. “To affect ongoing and future climate change, the recent emissions drop would have to be sustained over a much longer period than the likely duration of the coronavirus outbreak.”

The current drop in emissions is also not yet detectable in total carbon dioxide concentrations, according to Benjamin Houlton, a professor of environmental science at University of California, Davis. “The challenge is that carbon dioxide has an average lifespan of around 100 years in the atmosphere,” he told USA TODAY.

Emissions would need to drop by more than 25% to see a total drop in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and thus slow an annual global rise in temperatures, Houlton explained.

“There isn’t a scenario where global concentrations of CO2 do not increase this year,” Rob Jackson, a professor of earth systems at Stanford University, told USA TODAY.

“If we had a magic wand that would stop all emissions from today forward, it would still take decades for the atmospheric concentrations to return to normal,” he continued. “That is why we need to focus on carbon capture efforts as well.”

Kenneth Gillingham, a climate economist at Yale University, also cautioned that current emissions reductions were not sustainable, as they're the result of economic fallout rather a planned structural reduction in carbon emissions.

“The positive environmental impacts from COVID-19 are a silver lining but not something to be applauded,” he said. Gillingham was optimistic that some individuals and businesses would keep new habits like reduced commuting and increased telework after the coronavirus was contained.

“The only reason emissions dropped is that we’re all stuck at home,” Jackson said. “As soon as lockdowns lift, they are likely to rise again.”

While falling emissions may not have significantly impacted climate change, there have been some positive environmental outcomes from the pandemic. Air quality in cities around the world has improved over the last few months, according to preliminary studies.

“While this can’t be detected everywhere quite yet, there are signs in India and California, for example, that air quality improvements have been dramatic,” said Desai, the UW-Madison climate scientist.

Fact check: COVID-19 crisis has not created decreased long-term human environmental impact

The case study in falling carbon emissions may also hold significant lessons for climate scientists and policymakers going forward.

“Collective actions can have a real impact on emissions, rapidly,” Houlton said. “On the downside, the enormity of the challenge has been brought into greater focus: CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, which is what determines the magnitude of climate change, are very difficult to stabilize or reduce.”
Our ruling: True

While it is unclear how large carbon emission reductions will be for 2020, it is certain that the overall amount of carbon in the atmosphere will increase this year. Emissions have not fallen significantly enough to remedy any of the impacts on the climate, and current drops are unlikely to continue. We rate this claim TRUE because it is supported by our research.

Our fact-check sources:
USA TODAY, Will an 'unprecedented decline' in carbon emissions help limit climate change?

USA TODAY, Carbon dioxide reaches record high in Earth's atmosphere, scientists report

International Energy Agency, Global Energy Review 2020

Carbon Brief, Analysis: Coronavirus temporarily reduced China’s CO2 emissions by a quarter

USA TODAY, 2020 expected to be Earth's warmest year on record, scientists say

Carbon Brief, Analysis; What impact will COVID-19 have on atmospheric CO2?

Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: The coronavirus pandemic isn’t slowing climate change

9/11 saw much of our privacy swept aside. Coronavirus could end it altogether

Analysis by Nick Paton Walsh, International Security Editor, CNN

Spit into a cup when you land in an airport, and your DNA is stored. Every phone in every city talks to every other nearby device, their exchanges floating somewhere in the ether. Cross-border travel is enabled only by governments sharing data about millions of private movements.

© Vesa Moilanen/AFP/Getty Images A passenger, wearing a face mask, looks at her phone at the Helsinki International Airport in Vantaa, Finland, on May 13, 2020. - The Finnish airport operator Finavia requires the use of mouth-nose protectors of all airport employees who work in the customer interface. It also strongly recommends that passengers use a mask as they move about the airport. (Photo by Vesa Moilanen/AFP/Getty Images)
These are all possible visions of a future that the coronavirus pandemic has rushed on us -- decades of change effected, sometimes it feels, in just weeks. But a lurch into an even more intense era of mass data-collection -- the vast hoovering up of who went near whom and when, who is healthy to travel, and even scraps of personal DNA languishing in databases -- appears to be on the verge of becoming the new reality.


Will this grave new world intensify our desire for privacy, or extinguish what little left of it we had?

It took the attacks of September 11, 2001 to shove aside the previous decade's phobia of mass surveillance, and usher in an era where many of us imagined the state was probably skimming our emails, in exchange for keeping us safe from terror.

Over the next 15 years, billions of people agreed to a tacit deal where Facebook or Google were permitted to learn a staggering amount about them in exchange for free access to messaging apps, news, and shared pictures of a baby dancing, or a dog driving a car.

Eventually, that mutated into the heights exemplified by Cambridge Analytica -- private companies hoovering up the online lives of tens of millions in order to try to sway elections.


But the challenge presented by Covid-19 -- and the urgent need to trace contacts and movements -- is of another scale of intimacy. South Korea located over 10,000 cellphones near the latest outbreak and texted them to suggest a coronavirus test. The UK government has toyed with a centralized database of movements and health records, secured by government cyber-spies, able potentially to see who has been sick and who they have been near. Russia and many others have issued QR codes. China is putting surveillance cameras right outside people's doors.


Technology is again claiming the mantle of the savior we need to fill the gap between where we are now, and the new, knowledgeable, and capable place we need to be. Apple and Google are again offering solutions government cannot -- embedding into our phones anonymous methods of knowing who we may have infected and when. We are already seeing the extraordinary potential of these technologies in limiting the spread of the disease. But if they become ubiquitous, where does this new scrutiny end? When does it stop being helpful? Will we look back at 2020 as the moment privacy finally evaporated?
'Mission creep' feared

Few privacy advocates doubt the seismic nature of this moment. Some experts fear mission creep, while others see this as a chance to finally have our laws catch up with the digital age.

Privacy International called Covid-19's impact on privacy "unprecedented."

"9/11 ushered covert and overt surveillance regimes, many of which were unlawful," said Edin Omanovic, the campaign group's advocacy director. The surveillance industry "understands that this is an opportunity comparable to 9/11 in terms of legitimizing and normalizing surveillance. We've seen a huge willingness from people to help them as much as possible. However, helping health authorities fight the virus is different to helping security authorities use this moment as an opportunity for a data grab."

The way in which technology chooses to adapt to the moment may also define its success after it. The urgency of action after 9/11 -- and the things that were done "just for now" that became commonplace and permanent -- carry valuable lessons that governments may still choose to ignore. Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers exposed how huge amounts of phone or email data had been hoovered up by governments routinely, leaving some unsure if their democratic way of life was being eroded or protected by their security agencies.

Professor Jon Crowcroft, who pioneered one of the first influenza monitoring mobile apps at Cambridge University in 2011, said governments' introduction of apps, such as those in the UK, should be explicit about "sunsetting" -- the removal of data after a defined period.

"Just having a clear position on deleting that data after, say, 30 days, when it is clearly of no use for anyone -- because contacts will have recovered, epidemiologists will have improved their models -- would really help the public trust," he said.

Crowcroft fears two areas of "mission creep": the first being if the app or data is used to enforce isolation on people, and the second in imposing the need for an "immunity certificate" on a person who has the virus antibodies (though the science on this is far from settled).

But he added that, as we have seen in the past, practicalities may triumph over privacy: we will perhaps be less fascinated by how the apps technically gather and store data, "but will like the idea of being able to get out (to work & socialize) more safely and possibly sooner."

It's the same practical payoff that lured billions into social media; life was made better by platforms that did not appear to ask anything of you, yet created a trillion-dollar industry boosted by the commercial and predictive power of observing social media users. Despite growing privacy concerns, some 2.5 billion people use still use Facebook every month.
'Nothing here is inevitable'

The title of Shoshana Zuboff's book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" referred to the power and wealth accrued by tech companies who amassed huge amounts of data over the past two decades. She thinks Covid-19 could mark a moment not of the continued, inevitable dominance of these giants, but instead of people reasserting their rights in the way they should have done when these new online hyperpowers emerged.

"9/11 compromised our democracies in relationship to tech companies and their growing capabilities," she said. "We ended 2019 with people around the world in the process of waking up and appreciating the fact that surveillance capitalists have amassed these immense empires of unaccountable power. They have been given a free pass to do whatever they wanted: to steal our experience secretly, and combine that data to predict our behavior, then sell those predictions and become trillion-dollar companies."

This is a moment for better-informed societies to create the legal framework they've lacked to master the power of technology for their benefits, she said. Public health has always had an element of surveillance and tracking in it to monitor the spread of a disease, even before big-tech came along, she added.

"For people who are charged with tracking disease, surveillance systems are very important," she said, adding that we should permit some of our movements to be tracked for the good of common public health, a sacrifice of our privacy similar to how we choose to vaccinate children. But, she argued, new hi-tech surveillance has blighted that old, desperately needed health monitoring as being from the same intrusive fold.

"What's happened now is that we're so fearful of the other kind of surveillance that these things are conflated," she said. "We're hitting this wall of mistrust, because we have failed over the last 20 years to create the institutions, legislation, and regulatory paradigms that allow us to trust in this new invasive world."

Zuboff said the current vacuum in leadership in some Western countries meant tech giants could try to insert themselves into the problem as the only and obvious solution. "The dominant surveillance capitalists want us to believe and feel that in the vacuum that our leaders -- certainly in the UK -- have left in their wake, they are the ones to come and fill it."

But the pandemic could also present an opportunity to re-assert -- or finally assert -- regulation over the new digital age. "Nothing here is inevitable," she said. "We have a responsibility to society as well as to the privacy of individuals. And we can do both. The answer to that question is entirely up to us."

Yet, like 9/11, the moment is one of panic, coping, and rush for a return to normality, and less of a nuanced discussion about how the crisis can become an opportunity to fix the wrongs of the past. Without that discussion, our new normals may become a world in which a little bit more of our inner selves is out there in the ether, at risk of misuse.

There's a Surprising Connection Between Dangerous Algal Blooms And The Himalayas

A loss of snow and ice on Earth's highest mountain peaks could be driving dangerous changes in the food chains of distant coastal water, according to new research.

© Provided by ScienceAlert shrinkingsno

Like a gardener turning over soil, cold winter winds blowing down from the Himalayan mountains are known to fertilize the Arabian sea by chilling the surface and causing the dense waters to sink, only to be replaced with fresh currents rich in nutrients.

Due to climate change, however, winter monsoons are rapidly becoming warmer and moister, leaving marine habitats with less oxygen and nutrients, and allowing microbes that thrive in an oxygen-depleted wasteland to bloom instead.

Recently, it's gotten so bad, the thick green swirls of algal blooms can actually be seen from space.

What you're looking at is Noctiluca scintillans - also known as sea sparkle for its bio-luminescent effects. This is a millimetre-long marine dinoflagellate that can survive and thrive without oxygen or sunlight. Before the turn of the century, however, its presence along the coasts of Somalia, Yemen, and Oman was practically unheard of.

Today, it regularly causes massive blooms with widespread effects on ecosystems and industries. Something has clearly changed quite rapidly, far more than seems natural, and researchers now think the rise of Noctiluca in the Arabian Sea has to do with the climate crisis.

"This is probably one of the most dramatic changes that we have seen that's related to climate change," says Joaquim I. Goes from Columbia University, who has been studying the rapid rise of this organism for more than 18 years.

"We are seeing Noctiluca in Southeast Asia, off the coasts of Thailand and Vietnam, and as far south as the Seychelles, and everywhere it blooms it is becoming a problem. It also harms water quality and causes a lot of fish mortality."

Using field data and NASA satellite imagery, scientists have now connected the rise of these algae blooms to melting glaciers and a weakened winter monsoon.

Since 1980, the authors found mixing on the surface of the Arabian sea had decreased alongside warming winter monsoon winds that were less powerful but more humid.

"Collectively, these changes have resulted in an increase in net-heat flux from the atmosphere into [Arabian Sea] surface waters that indicates an increase in the upper [Arabian Sea] ocean heat content since 2000," the authors write.

For the tiny organisms that help make up a solid base to the ecosystem's food web, such as diatoms, this implies a problem. But for the less appetizing Noctiluca, the authors say this is a "tremendous competitive advantage".

In the lab, researchers have previously shown Noctiluca cells photosynthesize more efficiently under conditions with low oxygen or when nutrients are depleted.

Diatoms, on the other hand, need nutrient-rich conditions on the surface of the ocean where sunlight is ample. And if monsoon winds aren't stirring up that habitat on a yearly basis, there's a serious problem.

This means Noctiluca is a fierce competitor to many of the essential organisms holding up our marine environments. When winter monsoons are lacklustre and less nutrient mixing occurs on the surface of the sea or ocean, diatoms struggle to survive.

On the other hand, Noctiluca can survive in harsher environments, sometimes even by eating other microorganisms. Additionally, ammonia easily builds up in their own bodies, making the algae a particularly nasty, even poisonous morsel.

In today's rapidly changing Arabian Sea, this deadly and adaptive behaviour appears to be "short-circuiting the food chain", leaving fish poisoned, diatoms outcompeted and jellyfish numerous.

"Most studies related to climate change and ocean biology are focused on the polar and temperate waters, and changes in the tropics are going largely unnoticed," says Goes.

In light of their results, the authors suggest Noctiluca outbreaks are triggered each summer by the intrusion of hypoxic waters into the upper layers of the Arabian sea.

Here, the algae can rapidly photosynthesize, while other organisms are left "severely nutrient limited by a weaker convective mixing" due to a loss of snow cover in the Himalayas.

In countries like Somalia and Yemen, the authors fear this annual bloom, which is only getting bigger with the years, could harm local fisheries, leading to further unrest, poverty and deprivation as climate change strengthens its grip and the Himalayas continue to melt at an unprecedented rate.

"The inability of large zooplankton, except salps and jellyfish to feed on Noctiluca, is indicative of the capacity of Noctiluca blooms to short-circuit the trophic food chain," the authors write.

"Thus, their annual reoccurrence and growing dominance in winter each year will require a revision of our fundamental understanding of the [Arabian Sea] food web."

The study was published in Nature Scientific Reports.

Scientists Find The First Animal That Doesn't Need Oxygen to Survive

Some truths about the Universe and our experience in it seem immutable.

 The sky is up. THE SKY IS NOT UP OR DOWN IT IS OUT THERE 

 Gravity sucks. 

Nothing can travel faster than light. NOT TRUE CERN/LHC CREATED FASTER THAN LIGHT NEUTRINO'S

Multicellular life needs oxygen to live. Except we might need to rethink that last one.© Stephen Douglas Atkinson

Earlier this year, scientists discovered that a jellyfish-like parasite doesn't have a mitochondrial genome - the first multicellular organism known to have this absence. That means it doesn't breathe; in fact, it lives its life completely free of oxygen dependency.


This discovery isn't just changing our understanding of how life can work here on Earth - it could also have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life.

Life started to develop the ability to metabolise oxygen - that is, respirate - sometime over 1.45 billion years ago. A larger archaeon engulfed a smaller bacterium, and somehow the bacterium's new home was beneficial to both parties, and the two stayed together.

That symbiotic relationship resulted in the two organisms evolving together, and eventually those bacteria ensconced within became organelles called mitochondria. Every cell in your body except red blood cells has large numbers of mitochondria, and these are essential for the respiration process.

They break down oxygen to produce a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, which multicellular organisms use to power cellular processes.

We know there are adaptations that allow some organisms to thrive in low-oxygen, or hypoxic, conditions. Some single-celled organisms have evolved mitochondria-related organelles for anaerobic metabolism; but the possibility of exclusively anaerobic multicellular organisms has been the subject of some scientific debate.

That is, until a team of researchers led by Dayana Yahalomi of Tel Aviv University in Israel decided to take another look at a common salmon parasite called Henneguya salminicola.




h salminicola
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h salminicola(Stephen Douglas Atkinson)

It's a cnidarian, belonging to the same phylum as corals, jellyfish and anemones. Although the cysts it creates in the fish's flesh are unsightly, the parasites are not harmful, and will live with the salmon for its entire life cycle.

Tucked away inside its host, the tiny cnidarian can survive quite hypoxic conditions. But exactly how it does so is difficult to know without looking at the creature's DNA - so that's what the researchers did.

They used deep sequencing and fluorescence microscopy to conduct a close study of H. salminicola, and found that it has lost its mitochondrial genome. In addition, it's also lost the capacity for aerobic respiration, and almost all of the nuclear genes involved in transcribing and replicating mitochondria.

Like the single-celled organisms, it had evolved mitochondria-related organelles, but these are unusual too - they have folds in the inner membrane not usually seen.

The same sequencing and microscopic methods in a closely related cnidarian fish parasite, Myxobolus squamalis, was used as a control, and clearly showed a mitochondrial genome.

These results show that here, at last, is a multicellular organism that doesn't need oxygen to survive.

Exactly how it survives is still something of a mystery. It could be leeching adenosine triphosphate from its host, but that's yet to be determined.

But the loss is pretty consistent with an overall trend in these creatures - one of genetic simplification. Over many, many years, they have basically devolved from a free-living jellyfish ancestor into the much more simple parasite we see today.


h salminicola monochrome sm
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h salminicola monochrome sm(Stephen Douglas Atkinson)

They've lost most of the original jellyfish genome, but retaining - oddly - a complex structure resembling jellyfish stinging cells. They don't use these to sting, but to cling to their hosts: an evolutionary adaptation from the free-living jellyfish's needs to the parasite's. You can see them in the image above - they're the things that look like eyes.

The discovery could help fisheries adapt their strategies for dealing with the parasite; although it's harmless to humans, no one wants to buy salmon riddled with tiny weird jellyfish.

But it's also a heck of a discovery for helping us to understand how life works.

"Our discovery confirms that adaptation to an anaerobic environment is not unique to single-celled eukaryotes, but has also evolved in a multicellular, parasitic animal," the researchers wrote in their paper, published in February 2020.

"Hence, H. salminicola provides an opportunity for understanding the evolutionary transition from an aerobic to an exclusive anaerobic metabolism."

The research has been published in PNAS.

A version of this article was first published in February 2020.

Even If Climate Change Wasn't Happening, Phasing Out Coal Is A 'No-Regret' Solutio

The benefits of phasing out coal far outweigh the real-world costs, scientists say, and that's the case even when climate change is left out of the equation entirely.

© John W Banagan/Stone/Getty Images

Of all the fossil fuels in the world, coal is the biggest source of carbon dioxide, and its impacts on air pollution and public health are profound.

Since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, large-scale coal burning has cost lives, yet we've been struggling to kick it. Our global reliance on coal runs deep, so deep that even though we know it's bad for us, we continue to burn it at unprecedented levels.

Now, new computer simulations on the regional effects of phasing out coal suggest that continuing on this trajectory is a big mistake, with negative impacts not only on the environment and human health, but also the economy.

"We're well into the 21st century now and still heavily rely on burning coal, making it one of the biggest threats to our climate, our health and the environment," says Sebastian Rauner who researches climate impacts at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

"That's why we decided to comprehensively test the case for a global coal exit: Does it add up, economically speaking? The short answer is: Yes, by far."

The simulation the team has created incorporates information on the full extent of a 'coal exit' scenario, accounting for air pollution as well as the impact on the energy sector as a whole.

Using this thorough modelling, researchers have now examined the direct and indirect effects of three different scenarios: one, where we meet our current emission-cutting pledges by 2030; another, where we limit global temperature rise by the end of the century to 2 °C through carbon pricing; and a third, where we almost completely phase out coal by 2050.

This, of course, would be a substantial transformation of the energy system as we know it, but it may well be worth it.

Monetising the environmental and human health costs for the first time - including how much it would cost to re-wild areas and invest in transforming our energy systems - the authors have come to a stunning 'no-regret' decision.

Cutting off our reliance on coal will be hugely beneficial for most regions in the world, even when you don't take into account the global benefits of slowing down climate change.

In the simulations, the effects on air pollution in the coal exit scenario are at almost similar levels to the 2 °C scenario, improving global public health exponentially, especially in Asia.

In fact, in almost all regions of the world, the direct policy cost of exiting coal was nothing compared to the human health and environmental benefits that will be reaped come 2050.

Only sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Japan faced higher costs than benefits, and the authors think that might be because air pollution isn't as much of a problem in these parts.

Under the scenario where nations put a price on carbon to limit a temperature rise to 2 °C, a somewhat scattered picture emerges. Asia benefits from improved air quality, while Europe, Japan, and the US save on policy costs. The rest of the world, however, falls short of reaping the same direct societal benefits.

But keep in mind, that's only for regional effects. The minute we zoom out and consider climate change on a global level, everyone appears to win.

"We find that, based on all countries' current climate pledges under the Paris Agreement, humanity is so far not on track to keep global warming below 2 degrees," says Rauner.

"Yet, if all countries would introduce coal exit policies, this would reduce the gap to fulfilling the goal by 50 percent worldwide. For coal-heavy economies like China and India, quitting coal would even close the gap by 80-90 percent until 2030."

The authors argue exiting coal is a particularly valuable strategy going forward, because it reduces carbon dioxide emissions at a relatively low cost while also reaping huge local benefits, such as a reduction in air pollution.

Still, even then, coal is just a start, or, as the authors say, a "crucial early entry point." Phasing out our use of it is a way to buy us some time so we can create further climate policies that turn us away from other fossil fuels and towards more renewable forms of energy. Exiting coal is not a solution to the whole problem.

"[A] holistic response to the climate and environmental crisis will eventually have to achieve almost full-scale decarbonization of power supply," the authors conclude, "and thus also entail a deep reduction of not only coal but also oil and gas and address non-electric energy demands in transportation, buildings and industry sectors as well as resource efficiency."

The study was published in Nature Climate Change.

Wildlife habitat destruction and deforestation will cause more deadly pandemics like coronavirus, scientists warn

© Provided by CNBC The orangutans in Indonesia have been known to be on the verge of extinction as a result of deforestation and poaching.

As climate change contributes to a surge in disease outbreaks across the world, scientists warn that current rates of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss will lead to more deadly pandemics like the coronavirus.

The total number of disease outbreaks has more than tripled each decade since the 1980s. More than two thirds of the diseases originated in animals and most of those were directly transmitted from wildlife to people.

Habitat destruction like deforestation and agricultural development on wildland are increasingly forcing disease-carrying wild animals closer to humans, allowing new strains of infectious diseases to thrive.

"When you cut down trees and remove the forest, you eliminate the natural environment of some species. But those species don't just disappear," said Roger Frutos, an infectious diseases researcher at the University of Montpellier in France.

"We instead create a patchwork, a mosaic of their environment that's closer to ours, with houses that attract insects or sheds where bats can rest and find shelter," he said.

Scientists say the coronavirus pandemic is the most recent instance of how human degradation of wildlife habitats is linked to the spread of infectious diseases. Research has found that Covid-19 likely originated in a horseshoe bat and was then transmitted through another animal.

Bats are less likely to transmit viruses to humans when they are in wild habitats, but land conversion has increased their exposure to humans and upped the chances of virus transmission. There's now a higher density of bat-borne viruses and pathogens near human dwellings worldwide, according to Frutos.

Some researchers estimate that more than 3,000 strains of coronavirus could already exist in bats and could be transmitted to humans.

"When you're building human homes right up on forest edges, you're destroying wildlife habitats and squeezing animal habitats into smaller areas," leading to a more likely transmission of disease to humans, according to Tierra Smiley Evans, an epidemiologist at the One Health Institute at the University of California.

© Provided by CNBC Aerial view of deforestation in Nascentes da Serra do Cachimbo Biological Reserve in Altamira, Para state, Brazil, in the Amazon basin, on August 28, 2019.

Only about 15% of the world's forests, which are key to maintaining biodiversity, remain intact after degradation from logging, fires and agricultural expansion, according to the World Resources Institute. Millions of animal and plant species currently face extinction because of habitat destruction.

South America is a prime area of concern over infectious disease spread due to rapid deforestation of the Amazon rainforest from logging and mining, which researchers say will aggravate wildfires and Covid-19 spread in the region.

"Preserving habitats for wildlife and preserving our world is a human health issue, not just a wildlife or environmental issue," said Smiley, who studies deforestation and virus spread in Myanmar.

Scott Weaver, director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, said deforestation will increase the risk of many mosquito-borne viruses in areas like the tropics, Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Poorer countries will suffer the most from diseases made worse by climate change, since warmer temperatures will increase the spread of viruses like dengue fever in places where people can't afford air conditioning and general protections against disease exposure, Weaver said.

For instance, the West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne disease, replicates a lot faster in hotter climates. Researchers believe that global warming is allowing the virus to spread more efficiently in wild birds, who then infect people.

"We're in this predicament with the coronavirus because we've under invested in public health across the world and we haven't taken scientific information into account in political decisions," Weaver said.

There are more than 3.8 million confirmed Covid-19 cases across the world and at least 269,881 people have died from the disease, according to data by Johns Hopkins University.

"Hopefully the awakening from this Covid-19 pandemic will get people paying more attention to scientists telling us about these risks that could spill over into vector-borne diseases," Weaver added. 

Stone Tools Show How Humans Survived a Supervolcano Eruption 74,000 Years Ago


Of all the volcanic eruptions to shake our planet in the last 2 million years, the Toba super-eruption in India was one of the most colossal. But it may not have been the global catastrophe we once thought it was.

The massive eruption happened roughly 74,000 years ago, spewing roughly 1,000 times as much rock as the 1980 eruption of Mt St Helens. For a while there, some thought the fall-out was so extreme, it triggered a decade-long "volcanic winter" and a millenia-long glacial period.

This so-called Toba catastrophe theory left the global human population with just a few thousand survivors. Except, that's probably an exaggeration.

In recent times, archaeological evidence in Asia and Africa has suggested that while the eruption was indeed tremendous, the consequences were not so apocalyptic after all, and it certainly didn't leave humans on the brink of extinction.

Now, an ancient and "unchanging" stone tool industry, uncovered at Dhaba in northern India, suggests instead that humans have been present in the Middle Son Valley for roughly 80,000 years, both before and after the Toba eruption.

"Populations at Dhaba were using stone tools that were similar to the toolkits being used by Homo sapiens in Africa at the same time," explains archaeologist Chris Clarkson from the University of Queensland.

"The fact that these toolkits did not disappear at the time of the Toba super-eruption or change dramatically soon after indicates that human populations survived the so-called catastrophe and continued to create tools to modify their environments."

The Toba catastrophe theory centres around a correlation, and a controversial one at that. At about the same time as the Toba volcano was blowing, all those millennia ago, our species was also going through a genetic bottleneck; the eruption seemed like a plausible cause for this drop in diversity.

But over the years, the catastrophe theory has not held up to scientific scrutiny. In 2007, evidence of stone tools in southern India suggested the Toba eruption did not lead to extreme cooling, nor trigger a glacial period.

Some have pushed back and argued that these tools were not made by Homo sapiens, but whoever they were sculpted by appeared to survive this natural disaster.

In 2018, further fossil evidence from South Africa added even more support to the idea that global human populations not only made it through the Toba eruption, they might have even thrived in its wake.

Geneticists agree that 70,000 years ago, there was an unmistakable drop in human genetic diversity, but that shift may not have been the result of a super-eruption. Some think it might simply be a founder effect.

As humans spread across Eurasia and branched off into smaller and smaller groups, their genetic diversity may have also begun to dwindle. And that's probably why genetic diversity in Africa is so much higher than elsewhere.

The thousands of newly described stone tools found in Dhaba have helped fill in some of that timeline. The results suggest humans migrated out of Africa and expanded across Eurasia much earlier than expected, surviving a brutal natural disaster in the meantime.

The study authors say most of the tools found in Dhaba resemble African and Arabian techniques from the Stone Age, and some even look like early human artefacts from Australia.

The team claims these are unmistakably human-made, connecting the dots of early migration from Africa to southeast Asia and then on to the great south land.

"Modern human dispersal out of Africa, and more importantly east of Arabia, must therefore have taken place before [65,000 years ago]," the authors write.


"The Dhaba locality serves as an important bridge linking regions with similar archaeology to the east and west."

But without human fossils to back up the find, there are some who remain unconvinced these tools were made by Homo sapiens. This particular stone tool technique was also employed by Neanderthals; anthropologist Stanley Ambrose has told Science Magazine he thinks it's impossible to tell which species actually made the tools.

If the dates are right, however, it doesn't really matter who sculpted the tools. Whether created by Homo sapiens or other ancient hominins, whatever populations did reside in Dhaba were not nearly wiped out by the Toba eruption.

Although, something else probably ended them. The people who lived here have not contributed much to the modern gene pool, which means they probably faced other challenges to their ongoing survival.

"The archaeological record demonstrates that although humans sometimes show a remarkable level of resilience to challenges, it is also clear that people did not necessarily always prosper over the long term," says anthropologist Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute.

It just wasn't the volcano that got them.

The study was published in Nature Communications.

Climate change, pollution impacts hurricane formation in the Atlantic, NOAA study says
By Alex Harris, Miami Herald MAY 15, 2020


MIAMI — In the last 40 years, the East Coast, including Florida, has been hit by dozens of hurricanes.

© Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/TNS A Lowes customer loads plywood in his truck at the hardware store in Altamonte Springs, Fla., Friday, Aug. 30, 2019, as central Florida residents prepare for a possible strike by Hurricane Dorian.

New NOAA research suggests human pollution may have increased the likelihood of those Atlantic basin storms, but not in the way you might expect.


A decrease in aerosol pollution over the last 40 years, along with a couple of volcanic eruptions, played the largest role in the increase in hurricanes, said lead author Hiroyuki Murakami, a climate researcher at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

Climate change also played a role, although it was “outperformed” in the Atlantic basin specifically by aerosols and volcanoes, Murakami said.

This is the latest in a line of research that seeks to disentangle the complex relationship between climate change and natural variability in hurricane formation.

“At this point, there’s no event that is 100% naturally driven and there’s no event that’s 100% climate change. It’s all shades of gray,” said Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist at Colorado State University not involved with the study.

The study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration examined every storm from 1980 to 2018 and found that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, along with changes in other human pollution, has changed how often storms form in certain locations. Some spots, like the Atlantic basin, saw a “substantial increase” in storms, but other spots, like the southern Indian Ocean, saw far fewer.

Volcanic eruptions from El Chichón in Mexico in 1982 and Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 also cooled the atmosphere nearby and shifted storm activity. But NOAA scientists said the impacts of those eruptions dissolved by 2000 and didn’t impact the next 18 years of activity.

For the Atlantic basin, the birthplace of the storms that threaten Florida, Murakami’s team found that lower levels of aerosol pollution played a large role in the frequency of storms. Aerosols are small particles in the air and can be naturally occurring, like dust or sand, or human-caused like the thick smoke caused by burning diesel fuel. Clouds of air pollution shade ocean waters and keep temperatures down, making it harder for hurricanes to strengthen.

“When you have more aerosols and dust, especially in the Caribbean, you tend to have a quiet overall hurricane season,” Klotzbach said.

With fewer particles clogging up the air, the sun-warmed ocean was the perfect conduit for strong storms, especially when paired with increasing greenhouse gas pollution, which traps heat in the atmosphere.

But although the study found that climate change played a role in shifting storms toward and away from certain spots on the planet, it didn’t affect the overall number of storms that formed. However, the research showed that as the planet continues to heat up it could eventually lead to fewer hurricanes overall. But the ones that do form are more likely to be powerful Category 3, 4 and 5 hurricanes.

“In the future, we predict a decrease in tropical storms,” Murakami said. Yet “we still predict increasingly strong tropical cyclones.”

Climate change’s role in forming storms remains complicated and not well understood. Scientists are careful not to make absolute statements like “climate change caused X hurricane,” because that’s not what the research shows.

Attribution science, as the field is known, is about discovering if climate change makes something more or less common. Murakami said that’s simpler to do over a long period of time, like the 40 years analyzed in the study.

“Statistically speaking we can find some significant trends,” he said. “But when you look at a specific tropical cyclone it’s really difficult to figure out how climate change affected it.”

Some connections, like hotter oceans fueling more powerful storms, are simple enough. As sea levels rise, hurricanes have more water to shove ashore, making storm surge higher and deadlier.

But as the air above the oceans warms, it actually makes the atmosphere more stable and complicates storm formation. That’s why the NOAA study found that toward the end of the century the average annual number of tropical cyclones around the world could drop from 86 to 69.

And then there’s the question of whether climate change will impact the number of El Niños and La Niñas, weather systems that affect how and where hurricanes form around the globe.

“That’s a big question too. There’s no consensus there,” Klotzbach said. “There’s so many questions that need to be answered.”

Hurricane season starts June 1, although a disturbance passing through the Florida Straits could strengthen into the first named storm of the season — Arthur — over the weekend.

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©2020 Miami Herald