Covid-19 Is Accelerating Human Transformation—Let’s Not Waste It

The Neobiological Revolution is here. Now's the time to put lessons from the Digital Revolution to use.

FOUCAULT'S BIOPOLITICS

JANE METCALFE
IDEAS 07.05.2020
Sequencing the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the patients that have had adverse reactions to it is providing valuable learnings that can expedite research already underway.PHOTOGRAPH: NIAID/NIH/SCIENCE SOURCE











BACK WHEN WE started WIRED magazine, it was all digital, all the time. In Silicon Valley, bodies were treated like the somewhat inconvenient and sometimes embarrassing things that needed to be fueled and occasionally rested so that they could support big heads that housed big ideas about the future. Human biology wasn’t exactly on our radar, except in science fiction, where pandemics always seemed du jour.
WIRED OPINION
ABOUT

Jane Metcalfe is the founder, with Louis Rossetto, of WIRED. After a stint as the president of TCHO Chocolate, she created NEO.LIFE to track the ways we are changing as we bring an engineering mindset to our own biology. For more on this topic, read Neo.Life: 25 Visions for the Future of Our Species. To share your thoughts, please send email to visions@neo.life.

Then, in 1995, we published Scenarios, our first special issue, which imagined the future in 25 years, i.e. 2020. One article from that issue, “The Plague Years,” almost reads like a report from the current pandemic.


In it, a virus from China, of course named Mao flu, afflicts the elderly and the immunocompromised. A bio conference becomes a significant vector for infection. Singapore is initially able to contain the virus using draconian measures. The whole world goes into lockdown and cities empty as those who can afford it escape to the countryside. There’s an extensive loss of lives among medical personnel. Mao flu research becomes the only medical research taking place. The transgenic source of the virus is eventually traced back to a lab in China. There is even a cruise ship involved in our version. Ultimately, the cure is open sourced.

Our imagined solutions were based on a lot of computational and bioengineering virtuosity. In Scenarios, genomics, big data, sophisticated modeling, and immunotherapy end up solving the problem and saving our future selves. And that’s pretty close to what’s happening now. But what we didn’t predict back in 1995 is the unprecedented amount of collaboration, cooperation, and data sharing that’s going on now worldwide. And we certainly didn’t anticipate the general disregard for who owns the intellectual property or who gets academic credit.

In Scenarios, it took 20 years to find the solution. Today we envision a vaccine within two years, and for frontline health care workers, probably much sooner. It’s remarkable how fast science can happen when everyone is focused on the same problem. This devastating pandemic, with all its worldwide chaos and horror, has at the same time created a perfect alignment of technology, science, need, and opportunity. The global impact of Covid-19 could change science forever.


In the mid-20th century, World War II and the space race ignited the fields of computer science and communications. In the 1990s, the digital revolution came along and transformed, well, pretty much everything, from the way we communicate with each other to the way we do business, education, entertainment, and politics. Now, the next phase of technological innovation—we call it the Neobiological Revolution—is literally transforming our species. From gene editing to brain computer interfaces, our ability to engineer biological systems will redefine our species and its relation to all other species and the planet.

And Covid-19 is accelerating this transformation.

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PHOTOGRAPH: STEPHEN JAFFE/GETTY IMAGES

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the day the White House announced the first draft of the human genome. In Bill Clinton’s words, it was “the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.” Since then, we have gone on to sequence over 12,000 other eukaryotes (which include humans, animals, plants, and fungi), along with even larger numbers of prokaryotes, viruses, plasmids, and organelles. We rapidly sequenced the SARS-CoV-2 virus and are watching it mutate in almost real time. We are sequencing individual patients who have had particularly adverse reactions to it, and using our big data technologies to help us understand why.




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The pandemic is also accelerating the development of new vaccine platforms, including RNA- and DNA-based vaccines, as well as platforms that use attenuated virus or bacteria to introduce microbial DNA into cells.

This worldwide laser focus on Covid-19 is providing hugely valuable learnings that can expedite research already underway pairing omics data sets (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc.) with machine learning to identify why people get sick, why we age, which pathways to target, and which drugs to use. In addition to the known risk factors for Covid-19, there may be a genetic reason why some people experience a life-threatening reaction. That would help pinpoint the people who critically need a vaccine, sparing us the gargantuan task of trying to inoculate most people on the planet in the next two years.

Some people don’t want to know about their genetic predisposition for disease. But from a public health point of view, this is invaluable information. Sequencing everyone—with proper safeguards to insure privacy and nondiscrimination, of course—would advance clinical practice as well as scientific knowledge, and accelerate our progress toward true precision medicine.

Our ability to manipulate RNA and DNA, bacteria, viruses, algae, and fungi gives us the power to engineer life. Advanced imaging technologies allow us unprecedented views inside the body while big data sets, machine learning, and AI are helping us read those images and giving us correlations and predictions ... and ultimately root causes. The only problem is, as Edward O. Wilson so succinctly put it, “we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” So how do we overcome our Paleolithic emotions (like fear, jealousy, and greed) and our medieval institutions (US health care, anyone?) to deploy our godlike technologies?


The WIRED Guide to Crispr
Everything you need to know about how scientists can repurpose a bacterial immune system to alter DNA, making everything from cheap insulin to extra starchy corn.

In 2018, a Chinese scientist claimed to be the first person to have created human babies with Crispr-edited DNA . But some couples using IVF had already been selectively editing their families for years. As more couples elect to freeze embryos, they will turn to preimplantation genetic screening to determine which embryo is the most viable. You can imagine a parent-to-be not selecting one that was genetically predisposed to mental illness, for instance. But what would our future civilization be like if it didn’t include people such as Isaac Newton, Beethoven, Van Gogh, Ada Lovelace, Winston Churchill, and Norbert Wiener? These are the difficult questions this next phase will force us to reckon with.


Of course, we are curious by nature, and it is in our nature to make tools. So we will pursue these lines of research and we will develop these tools. Through technology, we have already extended our locomotion, senses, cognition, and even asserted control over the very creation of life with birth control, advanced reproductive technologies, and now gene editing. This is possibly the ultimate definition of progress, like it or not.

If we move too fast, we increase the risk of unintended consequences, and a backlash from patients, consumers, regulators, religious groups, and more. But what if we move too slowly, or choose not to pursue these possibilities at all? Eliminating genetically inherited diseases is our obligation, isn’t it? To not do so seems like a crime against humanity. Imagine the day when your great grandchild sues her parents for not genetically engineering her to protect her from cystic fibrosis, or thalassemia, or sickle cell anemia. Or maybe she could sue because they failed to enhance her in order to compete effectively.
PHOTOGRAPH: MISHA FRIEDMAN/GETTY IMAGES



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Let’s suppose the answer to the novel coronavirus lies in our genome. Would you edit it out of all embryos to prevent a future lockdown? How far is too far? Our opinions about all this are likely to change rapidly.

Some people thought IVF was outrageous and unnatural 40 years ago, but today, many would consider it a basic human right. What are we shocked by today that will be considered a basic human right in another 40 years? Or maybe it will only take 10.

The digital revolution fulfilled so many of our hopes and dreams, but it also brought us some very complex new problems—some foreseeable, others unimaginable. The web evolved without centralized control or regulation and we fervently believed that whatever was good for the internet was good for humanity.

What if we actively imagined this next phase, and consciously designed it for particular outcomes, including a focus on equity? Perhaps we’re wiser this time. The stakes are certainly higher—literally life and death. We need to manage this next revolution more closely and oversee it more openly. I’m not suggesting we draft a master plan for humanity. After all, random mutations would probably foil our plans. But culture, including the scenarios we imagine, the stories we tell, and our decisions about which technologies to fund or buy, will determine our future. Now is the time to make sure the culture we create includes all voices.

We have survived and evolved because we are alert to the dangers lurking everywhere. But Homo sapiens are unique among species in that we can also visualize a future and then make it happen. Without that ability, we wouldn’t dare leave our caves. People at the forefront of life sciences are showing us enormous potential technological, public health, environmental, financial, and social benefits.

What we imagine becomes what we build. It’s time to outline possible futures people can rally for rather than fear.


Let’s not let the coronavirus crisis go to waste.

Astronomers Are Uncovering the Magnetic Soul of the Universe

Researchers are discovering that magnetic fields permeate much of the cosmos. If these fields date back to the Big Bang, they could solve a cosmological mystery.

VELIKOVSKY WAS RIGHT 
IT'S AN ELECTROMAGNETIC UNIVERSE

Hidden magnetic field lines stretch millions of light years across the universe.
ILLUSTRATION: PAULINE VOSS/QUANTA MAGAZINE

ANYTIME ASTRONOMERS FIGURE out a new way of looking for magnetic fields in ever more remote regions of the cosmos, inexplicably, they find them.

These force fields—the same entities that emanate from fridge magnets—surround Earth, the sun, and all galaxies. Twenty years ago, astronomers started to detect magnetism permeating entire galaxy clusters, including the space between one galaxy and the next. Invisible field lines swoop through intergalactic space like the grooves of a fingerprint.

Last year, astronomers finally managed to examine a far sparser region of space—the expanse between galaxy clusters. There, they discovered the largest magnetic field yet: 10 million light-years of magnetized space spanning the entire length of this “filament” of the cosmic web. A second magnetized filament has already been spotted elsewhere in the cosmos by means of the same techniques. “We are just looking at the tip of the iceberg, probably,” said Federica Govoni of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Cagliari, Italy, who led the first detection.

The question is: Where did these enormous magnetic fields come from?

“It clearly cannot be related to the activity of single galaxies or single explosions or, I don’t know, winds from supernovae,” said Franco Vazza, an astrophysicist at the University of Bologna who makes state-of-the-art computer simulations of cosmic magnetic fields. “This goes much beyond that.”


One possibility is that cosmic magnetism is primordial, tracing all the way back to the birth of the universe. In that case, weak magnetism should exist everywhere, even in the “voids” of the cosmic web—the very darkest, emptiest regions of the universe. The omnipresent magnetism would have seeded the stronger fields that blossomed in galaxies and clusters.

The cosmic web, shown here in a computer simulation, is the large-scale structure of the universe. Dense regions are filled with galaxies and galaxy clusters. Thin filaments connect these clumps. Voids are nearly empty regions of space.ILLUSTRATION: SPRINGEL & OTHERS/VIRGO CONSORTIUM

Primordial magnetism might also help resolve another cosmological conundrum known as the Hubble tension

The problem at the heart of the Hubble tension is that the universe seems to be expanding significantly faster than expected based on its known ingredients. In a paper posted online in April and under review with Physical Review Letters, the cosmologists Karsten Jedamzik and Levon Pogosian argue that weak magnetic fields in the early universe would lead to the faster cosmic expansion rate seen today.

Primordial magnetism relieves the Hubble tension so simply that Jedamzik and Pogosian’s paper has drawn swift attention. “This is an excellent paper and idea,” said Marc Kamionkowski, a theoretical cosmologist at Johns Hopkins University who has proposed other solutions to the Hubble tension.

Kamionko

Meanwhile, astrophysicists kept collecting data. The weight of evidence has led most of them to suspect that magnetism is indeed everywhere.
The Magnetic Soul of the Universe

In the year 1600, the English scientist William Gilbert’s studies of lodestones—naturally magnetized rocks that people had been fashioning into compasses for thousands of years—led him to opine that their magnetic force “imitates a soul.” He correctly surmised that Earth itself is a “great magnet,” and that lodestones “look toward the poles of the Earth.”

Magnetic fields arise anytime electric charge flows. Earth’s field, for instance, emanates from its inner “dynamo,” the current of liquid iron churning in its core. The fields of fridge magnets and lodestones come from electrons spinning around their constituent atoms.

Cosmological simulations illustrate two possible explanations for how magnetic fields came to permeate galaxy clusters. At left, the fields grow from uniform “seed” fields that filled the cosmos in the moments after the Big Bang. At right, astrophysical processes such as star formation and the flow of matter into supermassive black holes create magnetized winds that spill out from galaxies.

However, once a “seed” magnetic field arises from charged particles in motion, it can become bigger and stronger by aligning weaker fields with it. Magnetism “is a little bit like a living organism,” said Torsten Enßlin, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, “because magnetic fields tap into every free energy source they can hold onto and grow. They can spread and affect other areas with their presence, where they grow as well.”

Ruth Durrer, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of Geneva, explained that magnetism is the only force apart from gravity that can shape the large-scale structure of the cosmos, because only magnetism and gravity can “reach out to you” across vast distances. Electricity, by contrast, is local and short-lived, since the positive and negative charge in any region will neutralize overall. But you can’t cancel out magnetic fields; they tend to add up and survive.

Yet for all their power, these force fields keep low profiles. They are immaterial, perceptible only when acting upon other things. “You can’t just take a picture of a magnetic field; it doesn’t work like that,” said Reinout van Weeren, an astronomer at Leiden University who was involved in the recent detections of magnetized filaments.

In their paper last year, van Weeren and 28 coauthors inferred the presence of a magnetic field in the filament between galaxy clusters Abell 399 and Abell 401 from the way the field redirects high-speed electrons and other charged particles passing through it. As their paths twist in the field, these charged particles release faint “synchrotron radiation.”

The synchrotron signal is strongest at low radio frequencies, making it ripe for detection by LOFAR, an array of 20,000 low-frequency radio antennas spread across Europe.

The team actually gathered data from the filament back in 2014 during a single eight-hour stretch, but the data sat waiting as the radio astronomy community spent years figuring out how to improve the calibration of LOFAR’s measurements. Earth’s atmosphere refracts radio waves that pass through it, so LOFAR views the cosmos as if from the bottom of a swimming pool. The researchers solved the problem by tracking the wobble of “beacons” in the sky—radio emitters with precisely known locations—and correcting for this wobble to deblur all the data. When they applied the deblurring algorithm to data from the filament, they saw the glow of synchrotron emissions right away.
 
LOFAR consists of 20,000 individual radio antennas spread across Europe.
PHOTOGRAPH: ASTRON

The filament looks magnetized throughout, not just near the galaxy clusters that are moving toward each other from either end. The researchers hope that a 50-hour data set they’re analyzing now will reveal more detail. Additional observations have recently uncovered magnetic fields extending throughout a second filament. Researchers plan to publish this work soon.

The presence of enormous magnetic fields in at least these two filaments provides important new information. “It has spurred quite some activity,” van Weeren said, “because now we know that magnetic fields are relatively strong.”
A Light Through the Voids

If these magnetic fields arose in the infant universe, the question becomes: how? “People have been thinking about this problem for a long time,” said Tanmay Vachaspati of Arizona State University.

In 1991, Vachaspati proposed that magnetic fields might have arisen during the electroweak phase transition—the moment, a split second after the Big Bang, when the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces became distinct. Others have suggested that magnetism materialized microseconds later, when protons formed. Or soon after that: The late astrophysicist Ted Harrison argued in the earliest primordial magnetogenesis theory in 1973 that the turbulent plasma of protons and electrons might have spun up the first magnetic fields. Still others have proposed that space became magnetized before all this, during cosmic inflation—the explosive expansion of space that purportedly jump-started the Big Bang itself. It’s also possible that it didn’t happen until the growth of structures a billion years later.

The way to test theories of magnetogenesis is to study the pattern of magnetic fields in the most pristine patches of intergalactic space, such as the quiet parts of filaments and the even emptier voids. Certain details—such as whether the field lines are smooth, helical, or “curved every which way, like a ball of yarn or something” (per Vachaspati), and how the pattern changes in different places and on different scales—carry rich information that can be compared to theory and simulations. For example, if the magnetic fields arose during the electroweak phase transition, as Vachaspati proposed, then the resulting field lines should be helical, “like a corkscrew,” he said.

The hitch is that it’s difficult to detect force fields that have nothing to push on.

One method, pioneered by the English scientist Michael Faraday back in 1845, detects a magnetic field from the way it rotates the polarization direction of light passing through it. The amount of “Faraday rotation” depends on the strength of the magnetic field and the frequency of the light. So by measuring the polarization at different frequencies, you can infer the strength of magnetism along the line of sight. “If you do it from different places, you can make a 3D map,” said Enßlin.

ILLUSTRATION: SAMUEL VELASCO/QUANTA MAGAZINE

Researchers have started to make rough Faraday rotation measurements using LOFAR, but the telescope has trouble picking out the extremely faint signal. Valentina Vacca, an astronomer and a colleague of Govoni’s at the National Institute for Astrophysics, devised an algorithm a few years ago for teasing out subtle Faraday rotation signals statistically, by stacking together many measurements of empty places. “In principle, this can be used for voids,” Vacca said.

But the Faraday technique will really take off when the next-generation radio telescope, a gargantuan international project called the Square Kilometer Array, starts up in 2027. “SKA should produce a fantastic Faraday grid,” Enßlin said.

For now, the only evidence of magnetism in the voids is what observers don’t see when they look at objects called blazars located behind voids.

Blazars are bright beams of gamma rays and other energetic light and matter powered by supermassive black holes. As the gamma rays travel through space, they sometimes collide with other passing photons, morphing into an electron and a positron as a result. These particles then collide with other photons, turning them into low-energy gamma rays.

But if the blazar’s light passes through a magnetized void, the lower-energy gamma rays will appear to be missing, reasoned Andrii Neronov and Ievgen Vovk of the Geneva Observatory in 2010. The magnetic field will deflect the electrons and positrons out of the line of sight. When they create lower-energy gamma rays, those gamma rays won’t be pointed at us.

ILLUSTRATION: SAMUEL VELASCO/QUANTA MAGAZINE

Indeed, when Neronov and Vovk analyzed data from a suitably located blazar, they saw its high-energy gamma rays, but not the low-energy gamma-ray signal. “It’s the absence of a signal that is a signal,” Vachaspati said.

A nonsignal is hardly a smoking gun, and alternative explanations for the missing gamma rays have been suggested. However, follow-up observations have increasingly pointed to Neronov and Vovk’s hypothesis that voids are magnetized. “It’s the majority view,” Durrer said. Most convincingly, in 2015, one team overlaid many measurements of blazars behind voids and managed to tease out a faint halo of low-energy gamma rays around the blazars. The effect is exactly what would be expected if the particles were being scattered by faint magnetic fields—measuring only about a millionth of a trillionth as strong as a fridge magnet’s.

Cosmology’s Biggest Mystery

Strikingly, this exact amount of primordial magnetism may be just what’s needed to resolve the Hubble tension—the problem of the universe’s curiously fast expansion.

That’s what Pogosian realized when he saw recent computer simulations by Karsten Jedamzik of the University of Montpellier in France and a collaborator. The researchers added weak magnetic fields to a simulated, plasma-filled young universe and found that protons and electrons in the plasma flew along the magnetic field lines and accumulated in the regions of weakest field strength. This clumping effect made the protons and electrons combine into hydrogen—an early phase change known as recombination—earlier than they would have otherwise.

Pogosian, reading Jedamzik’s paper, saw that this could address the Hubble tension. Cosmologists calculate how fast space should be expanding today by observing ancient light emitted during recombination. The light shows a young universe studded with blobs that formed from sound waves sloshing around in the primordial plasma. If recombination happened earlier than supposed due to the clumping effect of magnetic fields, then sound waves couldn’t have propagated as far beforehand, and the resulting blobs would be smaller. That means the blobs we see in the sky from the time of recombination must be closer to us than researchers supposed. The light coming from the blobs must have traveled a shorter distance to reach us, meaning the light must have been traversing faster-expanding space. “It’s like trying to run on an expanding surface; you cover less distance,” Pogosian said.

The upshot is that smaller blobs mean a higher inferred cosmic expansion rate—bringing the inferred rate much closer to measurements of how fast supernovas and other astronomical objects actually seem to be flying apart.

“I thought, wow,” Pogosian said, “this could be pointing us to [magnetic fields’] actual presence. So I wrote Karsten immediately.” The two got together in Montpellier in February, just before the lockdown. Their calculations indicated that, indeed, the amount of primordial magnetism needed to address the Hubble tension also agrees with the blazar observations and the estimated size of initial fields needed to grow the enormous magnetic fields spanning galaxy clusters and filaments. “So it all sort of comes together,” Pogosian said, “if this turns out to be right.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

Correction: 7-6-2020 6:15 PM EST: An earlier version of this article stated that gamma rays from blazars can turn into electrons and positrons after striking microwaves. In fact, the change can happen when gamma rays strike many different kinds of photons. The text and the accompanying graphic have been changed.

https://www.wired.com/story/astronomers-are-uncovering-the-magnetic-soul-of-the-universe/#intcid=recommendations_wired-right-rail_7e137b89-15db-4e0b-b89f-5c34ac0fb506_virality-uplift-1

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KILLER WEATHER
How a ‘Heat Dome’ Forms—and Why This One Is So Perilous
A massive, intense heat wave is settling over the continental US. The ravages of the Covid pandemic are going to make it all the more deadly.

PHOTOGRAPH: NIVEK NESLO/GETTY IMAGES

A PERFECT STORM of crises is forming across the United States. Above our heads, a “heat dome” of high pressure could blast 80 percent of the continental US with temperatures over 90 degrees for the next few weeks. This coming in a summer when the Covid-19 lockdown has trapped people indoors, many without air-conditioning—and mass unemployment may mean that residents with AC units can’t afford to run them. Deeper still, the heat and the pandemic are exacerbating long-standing and deadly inequities that will only get deadlier this summer.

A heat dome “is really just sort of a colloquial term for a persistent and/or strong high-pressure system that occurs during the warm season, with the end result being a lot of heat,” says climate scientist Daniel Swain of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

That high-pressure air descends from above and gets compressed as it nears the ground. Think about how much more pressure you experience at sea level than at the top of a mountain—what you’re feeling is the weight of the atmosphere on your shoulders. As the air descends and gets compressed, it heats up. “So the same air that's maybe 80 degrees a few thousand feet up, you bring that same air—without adding any extra energy to it—down to the surface in a high-pressure system and it could be 90, 95, 100 degrees,” says Swain.

At the same time, a high-pressure system keeps clouds from forming by inhibiting upward vertical motion in the atmosphere. Oddly enough, it’s this same phenomenon that produces extremely cold temperatures in the winter. “If you don't have that upward vertical motion, you don't get clouds or storms,” Swain says. “So when it's already cold and dark, that means the temperatures can get really cold because of clear skies, as things radiate out at night. In the warm season, that lack of clouds and lack of upward motion in the atmosphere means it can get really hot because you have a lot of sunlight.”

That heat can accumulate over days or weeks, turning the heat dome into a kind of self-perpetuating atmospheric cap over the landscape. On a normal day, some of the sun’s energy evaporates water from the soil, meaning that solar energy isn’t put toward further warming the air. But as the heat dome persists, it blasts away the soil’s moisture, and that solar energy now goes full-tilt into heating the air.

“So after a certain point, once it's been hot enough for long enough, it becomes even easier to get even hotter,” says Swain. “And so that's why these things can often be really persistent, because once they've been around for a little while, they start to feed off of themselves.”

Unfortunately for the southwestern US, this is likely to unfold in the next week or two. Normally at this time of year, monsoons would be drenching the landscape, but no such storms are on the horizon. “And so those super dry land surfaces are going to amplify the heat and the persistence of this heat dome,” says Swain. The central US and mountain states will also be sweltering particularly badly over the next few weeks—heat domes tend to perpetuate inland, where they more easily dry out the surface than in wetter regions—though over three-quarters of the Lower 48 will be under the dome’s influence.

This won’t be the last heat dome, or the most severe one. On a warming planet, the conditions are ripe for these systems to perpetuate themselves. Harsher droughts mean ever-drier soils, so when future heat domes settle over the US, they’ll start from the beginning with more solar energy heating the air instead of the wet ground. And thanks to climate change, those air temperatures will be hotter even before a heat dome arrives.

For many vulnerable Americans, that climactic hellscape isn’t approaching—it’s already here, and it’s colliding with the Covid-19 pandemic. Cooling centers, where folks without air-conditioning can go to chill, are shuttered. Public pools, too. And wandering malls is certainly out of the question. Skyrocketing evictions could mean more people are forced onto the street, completely exposed to the heat. Even among those who do have an air conditioner at home, people may have lost their jobs thanks to the Covid-19 economic slump and now can’t afford to pay their utility bills.

“Already, we knew before Covid that one in three American households was struggling to pay their energy bills,” says Chandra Farley, director of the Just Energy program at the Partnership for Southern Equity, which promotes policies and institutional actions that advance racial equity. “We knew folks were already keeping their homes at uncomfortable temperatures for fear of running up their bills.”

The heat assault on lower-income households is twofold. For one, these residents spend a much bigger fraction of their income on energy bills than the rich do, a phenomenon known as the energy burden. And two, low-income neighborhoods are actually hotter than high-income ones all across the US, according to a 2019 joint analysis by National Public Radio and the University of Maryland's Howard Center for Investigative Journalism. That's because the suburbs are dotted with single-family homes separated by lots of greenery, which provides shade and cools the air via the evaporation of water from leaves. Urban neighborhoods tend to turn into “heat islands,” absorbing the sun’s energy during the day and slowly releasing it at night.

“Low-income groups and communities of color are more likely to be located in urban heat islands,” says Linda Rudolph, senior adviser at the Public Health Institute, a nonprofit that promotes health equity. “These are areas that have fewer trees, less green space, more buildings, and more asphalt and concrete. Nighttime temperatures can be as much as 22 degrees higher than the surrounding area.”

Residents of low-income communities have also historically had less access to health insurance and health care, even before the pandemic hit. “These are also communities that have a higher underlying baseline prevalence of the illnesses that make people more susceptible to severe heat illness,” says Rudolph. “And those are the same illnesses that make people more susceptible to severe Covid outcomes—so obesity, diabetes, respiratory illness, cardiovascular disease.”


Extreme heat also worsens air pollution, which already disproportionately affects people of color, Farley notes. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, Black children are four times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma than white children, and 10 times more likely to die from it. And Covid is at least primarily a respiratory disease. “From a respiratory pandemic perspective, when we think about the existing morbidities and existing medical vulnerabilities of certain communities, we really can begin to get our hands around the disproportionate and expansive impacts of this health pandemic and the pandemic of structural racism,” Farley says.

This heat dome is also setting up the perfect conditions for wildfires, which could pour smoke into cities in the western US in particular—dry, hot air means super dry brush. Wildfire smoke deposits particulate matter in the lungs, leading to inflammation, even in healthy people. In one study done on mice, wildfire smoke decreased the antimicrobial activity of the cells that clear the lungs of harmful microbes. And the novel coronavirus is one seriously harmful microbe.

Put it all together and you’ve got a compounding threat to human health now unfolding across the US, particularly for low-income Americans: Covid-19 is wreaking economic devastation and trapping people indoors just as a weeks-long heat dome parks itself over the country. But this also might be an opportunity to better prepare these communities for life on an ever-hotter planet. The stimulus package following the 2008 economic collapse injected $5 billion into the Weatherization Assistance Program, started in 1976, which compensates homeowners to hire contractors to make improvements like better windows and insulation. By 2012, the revitalized program had weatherized a million houses.

To juice our now even more crippled economy, stimulus packages might do the same. This might take the form of infusing the Weatherization Assistance Program with cash at the federal level, or states might add weatherization to their own Covid-19 stimulus efforts. It can even happen more locally: Vermont’s Burlington Electric Department, a municipally owned electric utility, has included weatherization in its Green Stimulus in response to the pandemic.

“So it's a way to target both jobs for the construction industry and that problem of the energy burden,” says Elizabeth Sawin, codirector of Climate Interactive, a nonprofit that focuses on the intersection of climate change and inequity. Weatherization efforts in the 2008 stimulus package “also improved the quality of the housing stock enough that they saw things like improvements in hospitalizations or emergency room visits for asthma,” she says. “So to me, it's a no-brainer. It gets at the direct source of climate change because it's going to improve efficiency—so less greenhouse gas emissions from the building sector—while providing these essential, positive, life-saving improvements in the community.”

More From WIRED on Covid-19
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Read all of our coronavirus coverage here



Matt Simon is a science journalist at WIRED, where he covers biology, robotics, cannabis, and the environment. He’s also the author of Plight of the Living Dead: What Real-Life Zombies Reveal About Our World—And Ourselves, and The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar, which won an Alex Award.

UK
Meat factory staff 'going into work sick' as they fear being hurled into poverty

EXCLUSIVE: Union reps have claimed some meat packing workers do not want to be tested for coronavirus - because they fear falling back onto £95-a-week sick pay

CLOSE ALL MEATPACKERS GLOBALLY

PAY ALL WORKERS A LIVING WAGE WITH UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME WHILE THE PLANT IS CLOSED FOR A MONTH!

Chickens before being slaughtered for food (stock photo)

Meat packing workers are going in sick and even failing to get coronavirus tests because they fear isolation will hurl them into poverty, union reps claim.

Officials raised the alarm after a string of food processing plants were hit by outbreaks of deadly Covid-19.

By June 25, four food factories had reported more than 450 workers between them testing positive with the virus.

But unions fear the full total across England and Wales could be far higher.

In a meeting between unions and Labour, attended by the Mirror, reps said some low-wage food workers cannot afford to isolate on £95.85-a-week Statutory Sick Pay.

People "simply cannot afford to have the time off" (stock photo) (Image: Getty Images)

Unite regional officer Brian Troake said “people simply cannot afford to have the time off”.

He claimed some workers do not want to be tested “because when they’re tested, they can’t earn any money.”

He added: “We’ve got thermal CCTV cameras now on the entrance to the sites.

“And even when the alarms are going off, you’ve got a manager stood there saying ‘don’t worry about that, keep on going.’ They need you in the factory. Because they need to make the numbers.”

Asked if he had heard of similar cases, Eamon O'Hearn, National Officer at GMB, said a survey of the union’s food and drink members found 70% could not afford to stay away from work.
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He added the “response rate fell through the floor” when the same people were then asked if they’d keep going to work, even if they had symptoms.

The British Meat Processors Association has disputed Unite’s claims that workers are exploited or on precarious contracts.

The industry body insisted its members pay a “fair wage” and branded Unite’s claims ”false and misleading”, adding there have been 10 outbreaks in food plants so far.

It comes after the government's own scientific advisors called for extra financial support for people forced to go into 14 days' coronavirus isolation.

People who develop symptoms, or have contact with a confirmed case, are told to isolate for 14 days. They can receive Statutory Sick Pay - but any further payments are up to their employer.

Chief Scientific Advisor Patrick Vallance has highlighted the cold, noisy environment factories as a risk for food factory workers. Environment Secretary George Eustice suggested canteens or car-sharing could be to blame.

But Unite accused ministers of ignoring the financial element.

The union said they were alerted to one possible factory outbreak by bus drivers, who rang the union worried about the state of people they were taking to factory gates.

Unite national officer Bev Clarkson said many workers who live in crowded shared houses due to low wages could not afford to fall back onto Statutory Sick Pay.

She said: "It’s appalling. These workers are living a nightmare at the moment. They don’t know what’s the right thing to do.

"Stay at home and starve, or go to work and risk contracting the disease, then passing it on to their family?

“They’ve no choice whatsoever. I think in this day and age it’s absolutely disgusting we’ve got workers living and working in these conditions.”

The unions raised their fears in a meeting with Shadow Environment Secretary Luke Pollard.

One union, UNISON, wrote to the Health and Safety Executive on Friday to demand the Food Standards Agency carry out “thorough” individual visits to meat factories.

The union called for the HSE to launch an urgent investigation into the FSA, claiming it has used a “generic” risk assessment that “covers hundreds of workplaces”.

National Officer Paul Bell told the meeting some meat plants were a “Wild West situation”, adding: “Everyone’s on top of each other.

“When you enter and leave these plants, everybody goes through the same entrance or exit. They are very secure places… and everyone is grouped together.”

In his formal complaint to the HSE, he wrote: “UNISON expects the FSA to protect its workforce and contractors.

“We believe the duty of care has not [been] met nor satisfied under the Health & Safety at Work Regulations Act 1974.

“The generic risk assessment written by the FSA does not adequately cover the risk and the FSA has so far refused to provide the risk assessments from local FSA managers.

“UNISON would faithfully request that the Health & Safety Executive urgently investigate the FSA for potential breaches to The Act in order that our members are protected as the key workers necessary for the food supplies of the country.”

The Food Standards Agency hit back, saying the HSE had decided to take no action.

An FSA spokeswoman said: ”It is incorrect to say that the FSA applied a generic risk assessment to hundreds of food business operator sites where its inspectors and veterinarians work.

"The FSA developed a generic methodology which was then applied on a site-by-site basis."

"We welcomed the opportunity to explain this approach to the HSE and we will continue to keep each work location under review."

During the meeting, reps agreed low temperatures and loud volume make meat packers more at risk of catching Covid-19.

But Ms Clarkson accused the government of “burying their heads in the sand” for blaming car-sharing and canteens.

“A lot of the meat companies have dealt with the canteens”, she said. “They’ve put in booths for people to sit and have their lunch - but they only spend 5% of their working day in a canteen.”

She added some workers are agency staff who work in multiple plants, risking cross-contamination.

Mr Troake said workers are “literally shoulder-to-shoulder” in some plants despite social distancing improvements.

Mr O’Hearn added: “What we’ve seen is basically business as usual, some modifications - sometimes curtains or screens - but nothing that is particularly suitable.

“Because a lot of the infrastructure is very old and the ability to expand and move is very limited.”

The British Meat Processors Association said claims workers face "widespread exploitation" were "false and misleading".

BMPA Chief Executive Nick Allen said: “Far from offering insecure or zero-hours contracts... our members seek to hold on to their staff by offering them stable, permanent employment and a fair wage.

"Indeed, most overseas workers typically stay for two years or more”.

A BMPA spokeswoman said one Unite survey covered only 150 people, who all worked at one plant with an outbreak.

The BMPA said last week that "only 10 out of 1079 UK meat plants (less than 1%) have experienced instances of Covid-19 over what’s already prevalent in the wider community."

DRILLING IN THE WEST ANTARCTICA ICE SHEET FOR EVIDENCE OF COLLAPSE
125,000 YEARS AGO 




By Paul Voosen Jul. 10, 2020 , 3:50 PM

Scientists have long suspected that 125,000 years ago, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed, drowning a world not much warmer than today in 3 meters of rising tides. But hard evidence of whether such a collapse occurred—and if it did, how fast the melt went—has remained scarce.

Next week, the National Science Foundation will fund a 5-year project, costing more than $3 million, that will seek evidence of this collapse from gases trapped in tiny bubbles encased in a 2.5 kilometer-long tube of ice. The core drilling, likely to start in 2023, will target Hercules Dome, an expanse of ice 400 kilometers from the South Pole. Hercules sits at the saddle between the continent’s western and eastern ice sheets; if the western one collapsed, “Hercules Dome would be sitting on the waterfront, so to speak,” says Eric Steig, the project’s principal investigator and a glaciologist at the University of Washington, Seattle.

The Eemian, the last warm period between the ice ages, lasting from 129,000 to 116,00 years ago, is one of the best analogs for modern Earth. Temperatures were about 1° warmer than now, yet sea levels were 6 meters to 9 meters higher. And recent work, some still unpublished, has suggested much of this melt must have come from Antarctica.

If the ice collapsed, then the gases trapped at Hercules Dome would capture such a shift. It would be as if a set of protective mountains suddenly dropped away, exposing the Hercules ice to the warm storms that regularly strike Antarctica’s edge before petering out inland. Sodium would spike, and variations in oxygen isotopes would capture the warmer, wetter weather. And not only could the ice core capture whether the melt happened—it might also say how fast it occurred, Steig says, a hugely important variable for projections of future sea-level rise.

Much of the land in western Antarctica sits below sea level, leaving the ice on top at risk of melt from intruding warm ocean waters, and glaciers fringing it are retreating fast. Some scientists fear such a collapse is already unstoppable, which has prompted climate scientists to attack the question from all angles: NSF and U.K. government are supporting an expansive study of the western glacier most at risk of collapse, Thwaites, while marine drilling has targeted past evidence of collapse in the sediments off of the continent’s shore.

One reason the Hercules project was funded now, even though drilling remains years away, is that it will include community workshops to develop scientific proposals for other ways the core might be used. Deep ice drilling is a tight-knit, homogenous group; Steig and NSF hope these workshops will help bring in scientists “beyond the usual suspects,” he says.

doi:10.1126/science.abd7704


Paul Voosen is a staff writer who covers Earth and planetary science.

Erdogan’s Big Gamble on the Hagia Sophia

Turkey’s president, desperate to boost his popularity at home, further damages his country’s international standing.

By Soner Cagaptay, July 11, 2020 ANALYSIS THE GLOBALIST

Credit: Brookings Institution (www.flickr.com)

Takeaways

The decision on the Hagia Sophia is unlikely to give Erdogan more than a temporary popularity boost. But it will surely undermine Turkey’s international brand.
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Maintaining Hagia Sophia as a museum has been potent evidence of Turkey’s openness, including a willingness to embrace its Christian past.
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As the nation’s most-visited building by foreign tourists, the Hagia Sophia is Turkey’s strongest global symbol.
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Converting Hagia Sophia back to an Islamic edifice will complete Erdogan’s trilogy of massive, legacy-defining mosques in his hometown of Istanbul.
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On July 9, Turkey’s Court of Cassation decided to void a 1934 cabinet decision designating Hagia Sophia as a museum.

Erdogan, the lobbyist
The high court’s decision followed an intense campaign by the office of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to convert the nearly 1,500-year-old Istanbul landmark back into a mosque.

A 2010 constitutional amendment allowed Erdogan to appoint a majority of the court’s current judges, so the decision was not a surprise.

Among other reasons, Erdogan apparently wants to move forward with the conversion in order to reverse the ongoing erosion of his popular base.
Hurting Turkey’s international brand

Yet, the decision on the Hagia Sophia is unlikely to give Erdogan more than a temporary boost in popularity. What it will surely do is undermine Turkey’s international brand as an open, Muslim-majority society at peace with its Christian heritage.

Byzantine emperor Justinian I built Hagia Sophia as a Christian cathedral in 537. In 1453, Ottoman sultan Mehmet II converted it into a mosque shortly after taking the city from the Byzantines.

Always fighting Ataturk

In 1934, following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the government of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk converted the building into a museum.

As the founder of modern Turkey, Ataturk believed that opening the building to all people would underline his secularist revolution and help push Islam out of government and public spaces.
Un-mosquing and re-mosquing

Yet just as Ataturk “un-mosqued” Hagia Sophia nearly a hundred years ago, Erdogan seemingly wants to convert it back.

His goal is to bolster his religious revolution — one that has steadily flooded Turkey’s government and public spaces with his conservative brand of Islam.

Making such a move in Istanbul is particularly important to Erdogan given the city’s deep symbolism in his life and career.

Born there in 1954, he emerged on the national political scene after becoming the city’s mayor in 1994, using the position as a springboard to his ongoing run as the most powerful elected leader in Turkey’s history.
Building mosques, while tearing Turkey apart

For years now, Erdogan has been patronizing major mosque construction in Istanbul as a way of leaving his indelible political and religious imprint there.

In March 2019, he oversaw the inauguration of Camlica Mosque, informally known as “Erdogan Mosque,” a massive structure that was erected on a tall hill in order to permanently alter the city’s dramatic skyline.

Another major Erdogan-backed mosque is also nearing completion, this one poignantly placed on Istanbul’s central Taksim Square, which has historically lacked a mosque.


Converting Hagia Sophia back to an Islamic edifice will complete Erdogan’s trilogy of massive, legacy-defining mosques in his hometown of Istanbul.
But will this boost his popularity?

Erdogan’s mosque push has more nakedly political drivers as well. A nativist, populist leader, he no doubt aims to use the controversy generated by the conversion process to support the narrative of victimization that he often peddles to his base.

In this case, his message would be: “How dare these secularists deny us pious Muslims the ‘liberty’ to pray at Hagia Sophia?”

This strategy is unlikely to work, however. Since 2002, Erdogan has won more than a dozen nationwide elections primarily on a platform of strong economic growth.
No way to counter the recession pain

Yet, once a recession hit in 2018, Erdogan’s popularity began to slip. His hand-picked candidates lost mayoral elections for Istanbul and other key cities in 2019.

The Turkish economy is now suffering another recession due to the coronavirus pandemic. No wonder that polls show that Erdogan’s popularity is slipping further.

Thus, even if the Hagia Sophia conversion increases Erdogan’s approval rating by a few percentage points, the boost is unlikely to last. Nothing short of strong economic growth in Turkey will bring back the wider popularity he once enjoyed.
Implications abroad

If implemented in full, the building’s conversion would cause significant, potentially irreversible harm to Turkey’s international brand.

Maintaining Hagia Sophia as a museum has long served as potent evidence of Turkey’s openness. It vividly underscored its willingness to embrace its Christian past, Christian citizens, and Christian-majority neighboring countries.

As the nation’s most-visited building by foreign tourists, Hagia Sophia in many ways is Turkey’s global brand.
Chances to change his mind?

For officials in Washington and other allied governments considering how best to sway Erdogan from his damaging course, such conversations are likely best conducted in private given the issue’s domestic sensitivities.

But if the Trump administration does decide to comment publicly, its statement should highlight Turkey’s long, proud history of religious tolerance — and encourage Ankara to shy away from further steps that undermine this tradition.
Conclusion

Turkey should also be urged to maintain Hagia Sophia’s multicultural heritage and allow public access to its religious iconography, taking into account that such access was unhindered during most of the Ottoman era.

More on this topic
Erdogan and the Hagia Sophia: Will He – Or Won’t He?
“Army of Islam”: Erdogan’s Plot Against Israel
Albania Must Choose Between the EU and Turkey

About Soner Cagaptay
Soner Cagaptay is director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute.

TRUMPISM GOES GLOBAL

French bus driver dies after being attacked by passengers ‘who refused to wear face masks’

Philippe Monguillot, 59, was left brain dead by alleged assault in southwestern town of Bayonne
Chiara Giordano JULY 10, 2020

Wife of French bus driver Philippe Monguillot, Veronique Monguillot holds a portrait of her husband during a march in Bayonne, southwestern France, 8 July 2020. ( EPA )

A French bus driver has died after being attacked by passengers during an alleged row over masks.

Philippe Monguillot, 59, died in hospital on Friday, five days after he was left brain dead by the assault in Bayonne, in southwest France.

His daughter, Marie, said his family and doctors had made the decision to “let him go”, Agence France-Presse reported

Mr Monguillot was attacked after he reportedly asked three passengers to wear face coverings – mandatory on public transport in France during the coronavirus pandemic – and to see their tickets.

Two men in their 20s have been charged with attempted murder.

Two other men have been charged with not assisting a person in danger, while a fifth man faces a charge of attempting to hide a suspect.

Thousands of people dressed in white to took part in a march honouring Mr Monguillot in Bayonne on Wednesday.

The city’s mayor Jean-Rene Etchegaray, condemned the “barbaric” attack.

He tweeted: “Philippe Monguillot has left us. He succumbs to barbaric aggression in the exercise of his profession.

“A faithful servant of the public service, he leaves the image of a generous man. Support for colleagues in grief. Our affection for his grieving wife and family.”

French prime minister Jean Castex said Mr Monguillot’s death following the “cowardly assault” while he was trying to do his job “touches us in the heart”.

Thousands of people participate in a march as a tribute to French bus driver Philippe Monguillot in Bayonne, southwestern France, 8 July 2020. (Caroline Blumberg/EPA)
He tweeted: “The Republic recognises in him an exemplary citizen and will not forget him. Justice will punish the perpetrators of this abject crime.”

Interior minister Gerard Darmanin sent his condolences to Mr Monguillot’s family, saying those involved in the incident must be punished.

He tweeted: “I extend my sincere condolences to the family, relatives and colleagues of Philippe Monguillot, bus driver who was violently attacked last Sunday in Bayonne.

“This heinous and cowardly act must not go unpunished.”

He added: “I will go tomorrow to #Bayonne to take stock of safety in the city with the heads of state services and meet the drivers and unions of public transport.”

The European Transport Workers’ Federation said it was “shocked and saddened to learn of the senseless and heinous assault”.

The union called for greater protection for workers in the industry, saying in a statement: “For us, it is essential that management quickly implement measures to ensure the safety of drivers.

“Companies must value lives over profits.”

It added on Twitter: “We express our support and solidarity with Philippe Monguillot’s family, friends and colleagues.

“We condemn this barbaric and senseless act, and once again, we demand the swift implementation measures to protect workers from such attacks!”

These 7 details from the damning Sharpiegate report show it was a dark omen of Trump’s destructive potential

Published  July 10, 2020 By Cody Fenwick, AlterNet - Commentary


While it was dismissed by some as an overhyped media obsession, the presidential scandal that has come to be known as “Sharpiegate” was, in fact, an early warning sign of the truly catastrophic potential of Donald Trump.

The story arose out of Hurricane Dorian, which began its deliberate march up toward the East Coast of the United States in late August and early September of 2019. It ravaged the Bahamas, and officials feared the damage it could inflict stateside. But then came a Trump tweet on Sept. 1, and later comments to reporters, in which he warned that Alabama was in the storm’s path. He said it was among the states “most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.”

This wasn’t true, and his false claim set off a series of troubling events. Most infamously, he later showed a weather forecast map that appeared to have been altered with a Sharpie to falsely extend the storm’s path into Alabama — a truly absurd and ridiculous spectacle that earned the president widespread derision. But his tweet also led to the NOAA’s National Weather Service office in Birmingham to tweet out contradictory information, telling readers: “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.” That tweet sparked fury within the administration, and the Commerce Department later rebuked the office in a contentious statement.

Because of Trump’s particular personal style, the episode had an element of farce that led some to dismiss its importance. Others — including me — argued that having reliable communication about severe weather events is actually a vital government function, and Trump’s actions showed in disturbing fashion how he can undermine this role. And a new report from the Commerce Department inspector general, examining the lead-up to the statement, affirmed this view and strengthened the case that the administration’s actions were deeply objectionable. In light of the administration’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the Hurricane Dorian episode reads as an ominous preview of the catastrophic habits of the president and the people he surrounds himself with.

Here are seven key details from the report:

1. Mick Mulvaney was at the center of it all.
The president’s then-chief of staff sparked a process that led to a statement rebuking the Birmingham office for contradicting the president, according to an email included in the report. We can probably assume Mulvaney was carrying out Trump’s orders, but even without this assumption, this fact shows that the highest levels of the administration were involved in actions that ended up undermining scientific integrity in favor of what was perceived to be good public relations.

This habit continued into the coronavirus crisis to disastrous effect. Trump has repeatedly downplayed the severity of the pandemic because he clearly believes acknowledging the scale of the crisis will hurt the economy and thus his re-election chances.

2. The inspector general concluded the statement rebuking the Birmingham office undermined public safety.

The report explains:

[The] very issuance of the Statement had public safety implications. An immediate, but briefly lived, consequence was that leaders at some NWS offices lost or had diminished connections with their emergency management contacts after having to turn off their mobile phones due to the number of calls about the Statement. However, the broader, longer-term consequence is that NOAA’s rebuke of the NWS Birmingham office could have a chilling effect on NWS forecasters’ future public safety messages, as well as undercut public trust in NWS forecasts. [emphasis added]

These long-term threats to NWS are important, but thankfully, there’s been no indication yet that Trump’s conduct toward the agency has led to tangible harm. But in the case of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s doubtlessly true that Trump had consistently thwarted the public health messaging of his own administration and even intentionally undermined the scientific advice of his own experts. The pandemic is now resurgent after he rushed to reopen against the experts’ advice, and many people are sick and dying as a result.

3. Evidence undermined the White House’s apparent fears of the “deep state.”

The report found:

Mr. Mulvaney’s request appears to have been based on the perception that NWS Birmingham “intentionally contradicted” President Trump, who tweeted on September 1, in reference to Hurricane Dorian, that “[i]n addition to Florida – South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.” However, evidence demonstrates that NWS Birmingham was responding to questions from the public, and we found no evidence that NWS Birmingham was aware that President Trump had tweeted that Alabama would most likely be hit harder than anticipated by Hurricane Dorian.

So it seems the White House thought the NWS Birmingham office was trying to undermine the president, and it wanted to knock the office down a peg. This shows the fundamentally paranoid and self-obsessed nature of Trump’s presidency, and this disturbing trait has clearly impacted the president’s handling of the coronavirus. He has even suggested people wear masks, which experts believe are one of the best ways to prevent spread of the virus, to “signal disapproval of him.” This childish way of thinking has almost certainly encouraged his followers to eschew masks as a way of showing support for him.

4. The relatively minor even had an impact on employee morale

Because of the dust-up caused by the Birmingham office’s tweet, the subsequent statement, and then the public criticism of the statement, employees of the agency were understandably upset:

At the conclusion of our fieldwork, NOAA employees said that they did not think that NOAA will be permanently damaged by the issuance of the Statement. Although NOAA’s credibility and employees’ morale took a serious hit, NOAA employees expressed their readiness to move forward.

Despite employees’ readiness to move forward, we pursued this work because the Department’s and NOAA’s actions, in the words of one senior NOAA official, “hit at the core” of NOAA. The Statement undercut the NWS’s forecasts and potentially undercut public trust in NOAA’s and the NWS’s science and the apolitical nature of that science.

This level of political involvement in scientific and public safety matters is disheartening for staff. At least in the NOAA case, the episode was short-lived. But it’s hard to imagine the ongoing health crisis, and Trump’s disastrous and partisan leadership of the response, isn’t severely compromising morale for public health officials in government. Many may decide to pack up and leave as a result, which could cause lasting damage to vital institutions. Their ability to warn the public about the dangers has certainly been chilled because of the president’s actions.

5. The controversy undermined the good work of NOAA.

The report also noted that because of all the attention that the statement controversy attracted, the agency was unable to draw attention to its genuine success:

The attention generated by the Statement cost NOAA and NWS the opportunity to highlight what Dr. Jacobs suggested should have been an important success story that week: that NOAA’s weather forecasting model correctly predicted the path of Hurricane Dorian and proved more accurate than the European model. As stated in an email that Dr. Jacobs sent on September 6, 2019, preliminary statistics showed a “[v]ery good forecast for a tricky storm that stalled.” (See appendix I.) In the end, this apparent success story of the important science-based accomplishment was overshadowed by actions the Department set in motion in response to an external demand.

Failing to get the public to understand when the government is working right is a significant opportunity cost, but under Trump, we’re paying it every day.

6. Internal concerns about the political agenda were overridden.

Much this fallout was preventable. People within NOAA warned against releasing the statement:

[Even] before the Statement was publicly issued, the internal reactions were negative. When Dr. Jacobs contacted key people at NOAA, including NOAA’s then Chief of Staff and senior career employees, to notify them of the forthcoming Statement, the immediate reactions included shock, disappointment, and attempts to talk Dr. Jacobs out of letting the Statement go forward, particularly with the line rebuking the NWS Birmingham office.

As the coronavirus has devastated the United States, this pattern has happened again and again. Dr. Anthony Fauci, for example, has repeatedly and even publicly warned against Trump’s actions, only to have his warnings ignored for no good reason.

7. Political considerations trumped everything else.

Fundamentally, the report makes clear that the leadership in the administration wasn’t concerned with doing what was best for the agency or for the public understanding of science. They were doing what they thought was best for Trump:

Mr. Walsh assembled the team of NOAA and Departmental officials to work on the task for Secretary Ross and the White House. Of the team he assembled, the most involved participants were Mr. Walsh, Dr. Jacobs, and Mr. Dewhirst. While Dr. Jacobs had the relevant substantive, scientific knowledge, senior officials on NOAA’s political team suggested that they should have been involved to advise him on how to navigate this situation. To our knowledge, Mr. Walsh and Mr. Dewhirst do not have formal training or work experience in meteorology or emergency communications. Nonetheless, they both said that they concluded that the NWS Birmingham tweet needed to be corrected. Mr. Dewhirst, who was described as someone who “tends to not be afraid to just blow things up,” took a leading role in drafting the Statement and, according to Ms. Roberts and one NOAA Communications employee, overruled an objection to the line that rebuked NWS Birmingham. [emphais added]

But the report also noted that this kind of conduct isn’t even good for Trump:

Ultimately, NOAA issued a Statement that, from the perspective of one senior NOAA official, “hurt the Department and it hurt NOAA, it hurt the White House, it hurt the public, it hurt the science community.” And, specifically with respect to NWS, the line in the Statement that rebuked NWS Birmingham undercut NWS forecasters and created the possibility that forecasters would second-guess or delay their public safety tweets or warnings—an issue with life-and-death consequences, given the public safety role of NWS.

This, too, is a key aspect of the coronavirus response. Trump’s narrow focus on his re-election always makes him aim for the short-term win or the message that will succeed for the next news cycle. But his re-election chances would actually be much better if he took a longer view and decided that grappling with the science and figuring out how to crush the virus was most important.

As Sharpiegate showed, though, Trump is simply repeating his own self-destructive habits, and the cost is falling on all of us.