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The grandfather of alt-science.
Art Robinson has seeded scientific skepticism within the GOP for decades. Now he wants to use urine to save lives.
Arthur B. Robinson, renegade chemist, failed politician, grandpa of the climate skeptics — and maybe, just maybe, our nation’s next scientist-in-chief — padded across the carpet of his homemade lab in a pair of white athletic socks. “This room, everything you see here, was built by my own sons with their own hands, including the concrete,” he said. Robinson raised and home-schooled six children in this tawny valley scratched into the hills near the town of Cave Junction, Oregon. Now his wife is dead and one of his daughters has moved away, but the rest of his kids — two veterinarians, a biochemist and a pair of nuclear engineers — remain nearby. They’ve got a lot to do: Feed the animals; maintain the lab; ward off cougars; publish their popular home-school curriculums; manage Robinson’s repeated, unsuccessful congressional campaigns; and, of course, perform high-stakes research into medicine and biochemistry.
A stuffed antelope with curly horns stares across the lab at a bank of instruments with flashing lights. “That’s a rectifier, and this machine measures the rotation of light,” said Robinson, a spritely 75-year-old in pleated khakis and a button shirt, with white hair parted neatly on his small, round head. Then he pointed at a massive cylinder, about the size of a hippopotamus and groaning like a locomotive. “And this,” he said, beaming — “this is our miracle in a box.”
Lo, the Robinson family spectrometer — a $2 million, 7-tesla magnet super-cooled by liquid helium and used for analyzing chemicals. It’s not the sort of thing one would expect to find in private hands, let alone in a DIY laboratory on a modest sheep ranch in a rural corner of the Pacific Northwest. But Robinson and his scientific colleagues — that is to say, his children — have big plans for the hulking, gray device with strands of a cobweb tethered to its back. They believe it will provide a novel way to diagnose disease and then, perhaps, to extend the human lifespan.
Here at what Robinson calls the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, the family has been assembling an archive of human urine. Eventually they hope to gather 50,000 samples, drawn from 5,000 volunteers across a five-year span. The pee is kept in cryogenic vials and stored in dozens of military-grade, minus-80 freezers on the property. Robinson and his kids have already started placing tiny urine samples, each not much bigger than a raindrop, into the family spectrometer, so they can record its chemical fingerprint — the set of peaks and valleys corresponding to its thousands of component parts. Once their catalog of prints has gotten big enough, they’ll start sifting through for hidden patterns in the data, anything that might provide a hint about our health. According to Robinson, these records could contain the telltale marks of, say, early-stage breast cancer or an approaching heart attack, or they might allow him to track the effects of treating those conditions in real time. Once the details have been worked out, he said, this cheap and noninvasive test — a tiny dab of urine fed into the hippopotamus — could spit out a dossier of diagnostic information.
Whatever you think of this endeavor, let alone its chances of success, the mere fact of its existence is remarkable. At a time when almost all biomedical research flows from either major public grants or industrial R&D;, Robinson has made the choice to strike out on his own. Instead of taking money from bureaucrats in Washington, he’s been raising millions for his big-data research from a set of ultra-wealthy donors who share his conservative values and wariness of government intrusion.
That is to say, Arthur B. Robinson is not some lonesome crank tinkering in his garage. He’s something more unusual: an extremely well-connected crank, with ample funding and an influential perch at the wild outskirts of both politics and science. If he once seemed destined for a respectable career in academia — 45 years ago, he was a young professor on the tenure track at the University of California, San Diego, working side-by-side with the legendary double-Nobelist Linus Pauling — he’s long since cut all ties to conventional research institutions and remade himself as a cowboy chemist, if not an oracle frontiersman for what might be termed America’s “alt-science” movement.
One could view his setup with idle curiosity: the science maverick on his ranch, with a seven-figure budget for his indie urinalysis. But the movement in which Robinson belongs (as a member, if not a shepherd) has nudged a few steps closer, in recent months, to the center of our national politics. Alternative theories of climate change — that is to say, those at odds with mainstream science — are now ascendant at the highest level of government, along with deep suspicion of environmental regulations. And other alt-science points of view — on vaccination, nuclear power, intelligent design — have been showing signs of purchase in the Trump administration. Even Robinson himself may soon be making tracks for Pennsylvania Avenue. Chief among his financial backers are the Mercers — hedge-fund billionaire Robert and his daughter Rebekah — who are better known these days for their avid right-wing activism and sponsorship of Steve Bannon. In March, reports emerged that Rebekah Mercer had made the case for Robinson to be the nation’s new national science adviser. “It would be an honor to do it,” he told me.
“He’s one of the founders of this whole movement,” says Joseph Bast, CEO of the Heartland Institute, which has served for 20 years as the leading think tank of the push to challenge climate science. Last year, when Robinson joined Heartland’s board of directors, Bast called him “as bold and brave a person as I have ever met.” Now Bast says that courage has been vindicated. “Time will tell,” he promised, “but it certainly seems like Robinson’s views are winning the day.”
“I’m ordinarily smart,” Robinson likes to say, as if that means he were no more clever than the average man. In fact, he has an extraordinary gift for selling average men on his ideas, and for making even subtle science seem like common sense. He’s been raising private money for his research since the 1970s, mostly on the basis of his grit-and-wit appeals to reason. Robinson is, if nothing else, a master simplifier. It’s a skill he learned from Linus Pauling: He’s the sort of guy who can flatten any topic, no matter how abstruse, into a pair of axes hand-drawn in the air. He mimes the X and Y dimensions with his fingers as he talks, explaining, for example, how samples of a person’s urine, taken over time, could yield a running readout of their health. “When you hear about a scientific subject that is said to be very, very complex, with lots of things to know, and only the expert can approach it,” he tells me, “you know they’re blowing smoke in your eyes.”
In the late-1990s, when Robinson first got into questioning the evidence for human-caused climate change, he spent six months reading through all the science he could find on atmospheric carbon dioxide. His final report, written with his son Zachary (the veterinarian) and two other scholars, cited about 150 academic papers and concluded — in a characteristic plain-spoken manner — that human activity “has not harmfully warmed the Earth.” In fact, Robinson and his colleagues went further still, claiming both in their review and an attached petition that higher levels of atmospheric CO2 would produce “a host of beneficial effects” for the planet. (His belief in the likely benefits of global warming makes Robinson somewhat unusual even among his cohort of contrarians.)
That review of climate science has been hugely influential among climate skeptics, says Bast, precisely on account of its simplicity. “It was a standard reference tool and an important publication,” he explains. “Art was one of the first to say, ‘This isn’t too hard for the layman to figure out.’ … You can go through it, even though you’re not a scientist, and say, ‘You’re right, that doesn’t make sense.’”
The same approach — simplify, clarify, persuade — has been on display for more than 20 years in Access to Energy, a libertarian newsletter that Robinson writes for 3,500 annual subscribers. (Robert Mercer is a reader.) The publication’s subject matter ranges far beyond the power grid: Robinson says it’s meant to serve as his corrective for all manner of irrational and unscientific thought; to counteract panics over pesticides and freak-outs over global warming; to teach its readers, as he puts it, “not to ‘trust and parrot’ the politically motivated statements of the press, politicians, and other self-interested parties” on scientific matters; to preach data directly to the people, so they can reach their own conclusions instead of being force-fed their ideas by science-policy elites in Washington. That is to say, Access to Energy has functioned as the house organ for Robinson’s peculiar brand of science populism — as if Breitbart had been crossed with Discover.
“Science is entirely a populist subject,” he tells me. If we don’t need some expert committee to tell us whether the atmosphere is warming, then we certainly shouldn’t let ourselves be bullied by whatever “custom and culture” happens to prevail in any other scientific circle. Custom and culture: these are dirty words for Robinson, representing the creaky machinery of public science, funded by the government through rusted peer-review committees and indifferent to nonconformists like himself. We can cast aside the custom and the culture, he says, and learn about the science for ourselves. That’s alt-science in a nutshell: It’s the freedom to draw one’s own conclusions from the facts.
Robinson has made ample use of that freedom. He currently serves as vice president of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness — an outré association of science-minded nonconformists, conspiracy theorists and dissenters (also funded by Robert Mercer). “Art is revered by those people,” says Bast, who has attended several of DDP’s annual meetings. At this year’s event, which took place in August on the theme of “Restoring Greatness in American Science and Health,” presenters spoke about the bullying of climate skeptics, the widespread use of phony global-warming models, scientific misconduct at the Environmental Protection Agency and the story of Chernobyl and other “radioactive fairytales.” Robinson himself gave a talk on the “vaccine controversy” — he believes they’re given too early in a child’s life, as a rule — and there was a banquet reception for the infamous anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield. Earlier meetings have attacked the science linking HIV and AIDS and questioned claims that we’re in the middle of a mass extinction.
Several of these radical positions were aired in a contentious interview between Robinson and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in 2010. Four years later, Maddow said Robinson “currently leads for The Rachel Maddow Show hall of fame balloting for weirdest interview on this show ever.”
“Science is entirely a populist thing,” Robinson says again. “It’s a way of using the individual human mind. That means one man can be right, and everybody else can be wrong.
“And if he’s right?” he continues. “Well, then, their ideas are going to fall.”
In a dusty and defunct building on the Oregon ranch, what used to be a mouse room now is home to a handful of flies. In the old days, Robinson would irradiate his lab animals, frying their backs with ultraviolet light until they developed squamous cell carcinoma. Then he’d check to see how their cancers might respond to changes in their diets. “We could vary the growth rate of cancer by tenfold, according to what we fed ’em,” he said, describing the results of some 40 experiments going back to his time on the faculty of the Salk Institute at UC-San Diego in La Jolla.1 “The poorer you feed ’em, the poorer the cancer grows.”
Robinson’s elfin face perks up whenever the subject turns to science, and he likes to punctuate his stories with a wheezy, blurted exclamation of delight. It wasn’t just that poor nutrition stopped the cancers’ growth, he said; according to his research, a wholesome diet seemed to make the mouse tumors more robust. “Take a gram of vitamin C per day, and it improves your health, but it’ll make your cancer grow faster, too. Heeeh!”
This alarming result — that eating well can feed the thing that kills you — all but wrecked Robinson’s career, he said: “I worked with Linus Pauling for 15 years, and then he and I got in a fight over those mice.” Pauling had been insisting that a daily mega-dose of vitamin C could prevent or cure three-quarters of all cancers; now Robinson had data that pointed in the opposite direction. “That experiment was the end of our collaboration. The 15 years were over.”
One can say the break with Pauling set the stage for much of what followed: Robinson’s decampment with his family to this secluded ranch; his turn toward radical conservatism; his reinvention of himself as a cowboy scientist; his pursuit of longer life in freezers full of urine; and now, finally, astoundingly, the prospect of his going to the White House.
It took only the slightest interrogatory nudge for Robinson to launch into a wistful account of his relationship with his former mentor, starting with the moment when they met, while Robinson was still an undergraduate at Caltech in the early 1960s.
It was right around the time that Pauling won his second Nobel Prize. The first had been for chemistry; the second, a Nobel Peace Prize, recognized Pauling’s anti-nuclear activism. In 1958, the world-famous chemist had submitted a petition, signed by 9,000 scientists (including 35 other Nobel Prize winners), to the United Nations, calling for a ban on nuclear-weapons testing.
But Pauling’s activism — and sympathy for left-wing politics — had repercussions for his career. Though he was still a member of the faculty, Pauling didn’t have access to a lab at Caltech. So instead he found a bunch of undergrads to run experiments for him while school was not in session. And in 1962, he hired Robinson — a young man from Texas with a natural gift for laboratory work — to supervise the summer research.
Back then, Robinson never read the newspaper and paid no mind to Pauling’s politics, nor in fact to politics of any kind. He’d been “raised a normal American,” he said — the only child of a homemaker and a senior engineer for Union Carbide: “My father was in love with petrochemical plants, and my mother was in love with him, and that was it.” When he got to California and started taking classes, he found himself ensorcelled by Professor Pauling’s brilliance and enthusiasm.
A few years later, their paths would cross again at UC-San Diego, where Robinson had been hired to the faculty as a biochemist. Pauling, who arrived there in 1968, was about to make a sharp left turn in his career, to pursue an alt-science theory of his own: Though his ample expertise had been in biophysics, he’d lately grown obsessed by the healing power of vitamins. One day he came into Robinson’s office with a paper that he’d written for Science magazine. Pauling already held a strong belief that large doses of vitamin C would yield enormous benefits for health; now he was proposing, in the nation’s most prestigious scientific journal, that nutritional supplements might also be a salve for mental illness.
Robinson’s idol, and one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, was asking him for help in pursuit of this unusual idea. Pauling would be the theoretician and Robinson the experimentalist. The two began by running simple tests to figure out what happens to your body when you mega-dose with vitamins. Robinson would analyze samples of his subjects’ urine so he could figure out how much of each nutrient would be excreted — and thus how much had been absorbed. What he and Pauling really wanted, though, was a global readout of well-being — a yardstick they could use to optimize their dosing. That’s when Robinson had the thought to measure all the metabolites in urine that he could and to try to use the pattern as a master-code for diagnosis, a “metabolic profile” that could serve as a holistic estimate for health.
The two would spend so much time together on this project, hashing out ideas at Pauling’s ranch in Big Sur, that Robinson — whose parents had passed away quite suddenly and tragically just a few years prior — began to think of Pauling as a second father. Eventually the two men hatched a plan to start a private institute where their out-there studies could be financed through direct appeals to donors. For Pauling, at the end of his career, the move off-campus was not so risky. For Robinson it would be a leap of faith. At just 31, he’d already been told by his department head in San Diego that he was close to getting tenure. Yet the promise of the work with Pauling, and of their search for gold in human urine, proved irresistible. So in March 1973, Robinson resigned from UCSD and kicked in $100,000 from his family inheritance to rent out a small, brick building on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. This would be the site of the duo’s new nutrition labs, at what they dubbed the Institute for Orthomolecular Medicine.
Robinson and Pauling had always been a mismatched pair: the older man, a brilliant theoretician from the Pacific Northwest, and his earnest protégé, a whiz-kid experimentalist from Houston. Pauling wore a beatnik’s black beret; Robinson favored jeans and button-shirts in situations where others might be wearing suits. Their differences went still deeper: Pauling leaned toward socialism; Robinson turned out to be a vocal libertarian. Pauling was an atheist, Robinson a faithful Christian.
The polar split extended even to each one’s fundamental sense of purpose. Pauling saw the world in pain and said it was his mission to diminish human suffering. Robinson arranged his goals around the sanctity of human life and any means that he might use to increase its quality, quantity and length. The bylaws of their institute tried to span this philosophical divide: The purpose of its research, they declared, was both to extend people’s lives and also to make those lives less miserable.
For a time, the rival forces of their personalities seemed to foster a productive tension, like the pulling of the cables on a suspension bridge. Then their partnership collapsed. Robinson claims the falling-out began with that mouse experiment — the one in which he showed that too much vitamin C could make a tumor grow instead of shrink. In contemporary press reports, Pauling called that work “amateurish.” Pauling’s wife, Ava Helen, had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, and Pauling was convinced that he could save her with 10-gram doses of ascorbic acid — more than 150 times the recommended daily amount. (She died of the disease in 1981, five years after her diagnosis.) Others say the rift between the men had nothing much to do with those experiments or with Ava Helen’s cancer; rather it arose from administrative disagreements. In any case, in late-summer 1978, Pauling had Robinson removed from his position as the president in Menlo Park.
The man who once felt like Pauling’s surrogate son now found himself orphaned for a second time. He responded to his firing with a $25 million lawsuit that would drag on for another half-decade, while his work on metabolic profiling — the reason he’d quit his job at UCSD and the centerpiece of his plan to save the world — came to a sudden halt. According to Robinson, a thousand cryogenic urine samples drawn from newborn infants, along with 200 magnetic tapes and 15 filing cabinets full of paper records, were summarily tossed out. “We lost everything,” he told me.
***
By the age of 36, Robinson had turned his back on academia and been evicted from the institute he’d helped create. Now he set off into the wilderness with a plan for starting over.
The more he tried to pull away from Pauling, though, the more it seemed their fates were drawn together. It was as if the falling-out had left Robinson with a driving need to be his former mentor’s mirror-opposite — a Pauling anti-particle, flung into a rival orbit. In 1980, Robinson took his family to Oregon — where Pauling had grown up — and built a lab so he could finish up their research on his own. He brought along the sign that had been out in front of his and Pauling’s place on Sand Hill Road: The same letters that once spelled out INSTITUTE OF ORTHOMOLECULAR MEDICINE were now scrambled and affixed (with a few new ones added) to the front wall of his homemade laboratory: OREGON INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND MEDICINE.
Robinson’s politics,2 like his science, also seemed to bloom in Pauling’s shadow. Pauling and Ava Helen had been terrified at the prospect of a nuclear war, and they’d spent a major portion of their later years organizing to abolish nuclear testing. Robinson and his wife (and research partner) Laurelee were also scared of nuclear devastation, but took a different tack: Starting in 1985, they became involved in “civil defense” and the disputed notion that a war with the Soviets would be survivable in shelters. From their ranch in Oregon, they started building these shelters in trailers and selling them to FEMA. They also worked on developing a nuclear-fallout diet and distributed a book on “Nuclear War Survival Skills,” which gave instructions for how to make a radiation meter from an old beer can, among many other patched-together doodads.
And where Pauling had been vocal on the health risks posed by radiation — in 1958, he participated in a famous televised debate on this topic with the theoretical physicist and Manhattan Project pioneer Edward Teller — Robinson spoke out in favor of nuclear energy. He forged his own, more cordial relationship with Teller and became an advocate for the unconventional theory of “radiation hormesis,” which holds that small doses of ionizing radiation are actually a boon for public health.3 It’s not coincidental that half of Robinson’s children have Ph.D.s in nuclear engineering: As the years went by, the Robinsons have been exactly as devoted to atomic power as the Paulings were against atomic weapons.
Then there was the Paulings’ influential 1958 petition, signed by 9,000 scientists, calling for an end to nuclear-weapons testing. (This would be the activism for which Pauling won his Nobel Peace Prize.) In 1997, Robinson organized his own petition, applying Pauling’s method to a different cause — that of climate-change skepticism. Robinson sent around his take on atmospheric science with the petition, with a cover letter from the well-known physicist, contrarian and tobacco-industry consultant Frederick Seitz. Eventually this mailing would yield 31,000 signatures, including that of Pauling’s adversary, Edward Teller, and many of the nation’s other leading skeptic scientists. Among these were a set of deregulatory pundits, the so-called “Merchants of Doubt,” who had spoken out for years on behalf of conservative think tanks and big business: Seitz, as well as Fred Singer, William Neirenberg and Robert Jastrow.
Robinson’s petition would be just as influential, in its way, as Pauling’s work on nuclear testing. Sen. James Inhofe, author of “The Greatest Hoax” and the Capitol’s leading climate-change skeptic, has described the document as “one of the first things [he] looked at” as his doubts developed, and he’s referenced it repeatedly on the floor of Congress, in claiming that the notion of “consensus” on the matter is a fraud.
“I think [the petition] was tremendously important,” another signer, the Princeton physicist and noted climate-change contrarian William Happer, told me recently. “It showed there are lots of highly credentialed scientists who really know a lot about the details of the science and don’t agree with the alarmists.” (In the past few months, Happer, like Robinson, has been short-listed for the job of science adviser to President Trump.)
Those climate skeptics are still in the minority: In a 2014 Pew Research Center survey of scientists connected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 87 percent said climate change was mostly due to human activity. But Robinson’s work has been instrumental to the others.
“Art Robinson is the reason many of us are in this room,” the Heartland Institute’s Bast told a conference of climate skeptics several years ago, in reference to the 1997 review paper and petition. “If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be here.”
***
The Robinsons served me lunch across the gravel road from their homemade lab and urine freezers, in the home where Robinson still lives with his two unmarried sons, Noah and Matthew. There’s an embroidered sign posted on the wall beside the kitchen: “The more laws, the less justice.” The living room feels somewhat wedged between a large wood stove that heats the house and a full-size church organ, about 15 feet wide with lanky pipes that loom into the rafters where dust bunnies dangle to their metal tips from a skylight.
“This was made in 1878,” Noah told me. He bought the instrument for several thousand dollars from a beautiful stone church in Vermont after he’d come across a listing on eBay. “It’s a little out of tune, but it plays.”
Matthew gave a demonstration, briefly banging out a spell of dirge-like music that reverberated throughout the house. “It’s a nice hobby,” Robinson said when his son had finished playing. The boys have been picking up colossal and unwanted instruments from churches all across the country; by now, they’ve accumulated six or seven, toting them back to Cave Junction in pieces, then assembling them on-site. “Laurelee loved the pipe organ,” he added. “She would have loved to have had a pipe organ.”
The loss of Laurelee was the next of Robinson’s misfortunes, following his falling-out with Pauling. In the fall of 1988, not so many years after Ava Helen succumbed to cancer of the gut, Laurelee started feeling ill. One night she felt a pain inside her abdomen before she went to bed. By sunrise her pancreas, diseased and inflamed, had secreted digestive enzymes onto a nearby artery, boring through its wall. Laurelee bled to death before anyone had any idea of what was happening.
The tragedy left Robinson a hypochondriac. With every minor ache, he worried that he might die and leave his kids as he had been, without a parent. Again, it seemed to him there ought to be a simple diagnostic tool — a quick and easy way for people to obtain a global readout of their health. “My wife was sitting here with a very bad stomachache, and any profiling tool could have immediately diagnosed her, and surgery would have saved her,” he said, referring to the technology that he’d been working on with Pauling and which he’s once again pursuing on the ranch. “I brought Laurelee up here and we built this place,” he said. “I don’t know where she got that disease, but my guess is that if we’d stayed in La Jolla, she’d still be alive. It would have been a different life. So I look at all this, and I know I’m lucky — I’ve got six wonderful young people working here, and they’re all brighter than me so I’m having fun. But she’s dead and the profiling was delayed for many, many years. So if I could do it over again …”
He paused. If he could do it over again, he might have kept his job at UCSD and tried to to do some work on profiling on the side. Or else he might have figured out a way to stave off Pauling’s “self-destruction” and continued with their work in Menlo Park.
That’s not what happened, though. The split from Pauling, and the death of Laurelee, sent Robinson hurtling further out into the fringe, where he found a small but ardent caucus of contrarians: scientists, like him, who had abandoned — or been ejected from — the normie, left-leaning research community and who made common cause in puncturing prevailing views on smoking, DDT, radiation, depletion of the ozone hole and changes to the climate. When his old life fell apart, Robinson had to find a new and different one, and a new and different way of doing science.
***
After lunch — a plate of watermelon slices, with cream of mushroom soup poured over white rice — Robinson told me more about his urine project. It sounded like the end point of his long, peculiar journey as a scientist and the knotty nexus of his life’s loose ends. While much of Robinson’s philosophy and many of his scientific views are informed by his politics, the work on profiling seems to float above all that, buoyed mainly by the goal that he put forth so many years ago when he started work with Pauling: to increase the quality and quantity of human life. But then it’s also anchored in the grief and grievance that cast him out into the wilderness, almost 40 years ago.
We headed back across the gravel road, past the schoolhouse building where Robinson used to sit and do his work, after Laurelee had died, while his kids did theirs with barely any supervision. When it got too cold in there, he put UV lights above the children’s heads to keep them warm. From there we strolled by a dilapidated chicken coop and a truck-sized billboard for one of his congressional campaigns, and then back into the lab with its hippopotamus spectrometer.
Other, more mainstream biochemists have been far too conservative in their attempts to do profiling, he told me, showing off some sample data on a poster, a broad array of spectrographic peaks. Instead of looking at all the different compounds in a sample, and a dataset with thousands of dimensions, they play it safe and study just a handful. “Their papers have one foot in what we’re doing, but they also have one foot in the past,” he said. “I’m sure the field will move, until 50 years from now, it will just be this” — he gestured at his poster — “but the move will be a slow one, because of custom and culture.”
Robinson’s “custom and culture” would seem to be a product of what he sees as the present, fallen age of science, if not of society at large. He likes to talk about the time before “the bureaucracy got control of science,” back when the nation’s “wild cards,” its humble and inventive folks, could still puzzle out their theories over many years of private work. They’d toil in a basement on their own, he said, solving problems for themselves, and then they would appear one day, blinking in the light, to share their big discoveries.
“Progress in science requires freedom to do what you want,” Robinson declared.
Standing there beside him in the hills of Oregon, I was tempted by the epic sweep of this idea. If the government won’t pay to build a giant urine archive, Robinson will build one on his own. Maybe sifting through those drops of pee really will extend our lives, or maybe it won’t. Why not celebrate the fact that someone has the guts to try?
Robinson’s plan isn’t even so far-fetched, at least in principle. Other, more mainstream scientists have pursued the same idea, skimming diagnoses from body fluids using giant reams of spectrographic data. This approach has at times been perilous: In one prominent case from 2002, a team of researchers claimed to have discovered a data pattern in patients’ blood showing whether they had ovarian cancer; that finding, published in The Lancet and cited several thousand times, turned out to be an artifact of statistical noise. Yet many still see promise in this grand approach to data-driven medicine: In April, the life-sciences division of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, began a major trial along the lines of Robinson’s. “Project Baseline,” which involves both Stanford and Duke universities and is likely to cost more than $100 million, will follow 10,000 people over four years to see what clues about their health might be gleaned from samples of their blood, saliva, tears and feces.
Indeed, several of the contrarian arguments that alt-science types have championed now seem pretty reasonable, and certain beliefs in Robinson’s portfolio have won out, in a sense, even among environmentalists. It’s no longer off the wall, for example, to suggest that DDT should be used in fighting malaria in Africa, or that we might benefit from greater use of nuclear power (which, after all, is carbon free).
But then, how are we to know which refutations of consensus science will end up seeming more or less correct, and which are nothing more than dangerous denialism? Which diversions from the mainstream path might lead us somewhere fruitful, and which are guaranteed dead ends? Can we really trust Art Robinson to help us make these weighty judgments, just because he’s plain-spoken and persuasive?
Or put another way: If science really is a populist phenomenon, then aren’t we at risk from science demagogues? Take Pauling, another master simplifier. In the 1950s, he convinced a lot of people that nuclear testing was a major risk to public health, based on data that Robinson now claims was “entirely incorrect.” And later on Pauling was nearly as persuasive, for a time, on his theory that vitamin C could eradicate all cancers. What if a great scientist’s skill as a communicator leads us into ruin?
“Linus was a very convincing individual,” Robinson admitted. “This is a failing of human nature that people can be driven by the most effective speaker, and that’s something we have to live with.” But if the wrong guy wins a debate or two, he said, that’s OK, because usually, the truth will come out in the end.
“Suppose I’m a charlatan, but a convincing charlatan,” he continued. “Then some people will voluntarily provide money for my work, and that’s perhaps a loss because they were fooled. But that’s not a big loss. When they earn money, it’s their privilege to spend it as they wish. … That’s a different thing than imposing something from above, something that diminishes the freedom of scientists.”
It occurred to me that the movement Robinson helped create often presents itself as free and independent — as embodying pure and populist resistance to a groupthink status quo, imposed by the elites. Yet I’ve also learned from past experience that scientific-skeptic views are often nurtured with specific ends in mind. Scientists who took tobacco money had a stake in saying cigarettes were not so bad. The Heartland Institute takes aim at mainstream climatology, while critics note its links to ExxonMobil and other companies that benefit from fighting regulation.4 All this to say: Alt-science often doubles as a beachhead for self-interest, if not a vehicle for greed.
Robinson’s ties to Heartland connect him to big business, at least indirectly, and it’s possible that the Mercers, or other wealthy donors, are in his ears on certain matters. (The Mercers did not respond to requests for comment on this story.) Still, I get the sense that he’s secured a different kind of independence. It’s hard to figure how his plans to study pee would carry water for his funders. Working only with his family, raising money as he does, Robinson seems to have walled off a space in which he can set his own alt-scientist’s agenda. On this sheep ranch in the hills, strewn with scrap metal and iron horseshoes, kitted out with electronics purchased second-hand, taxidermy animals and reconstituted pipe organs, his views do not appear to be controlled by any corporation. His way-out research is his own.
That doesn’t mean he’s free, exactly; only that his constraints come from within. His work is tied into a lifetime’s worth of trauma, and a long-held tendency to flout convention. I don’t mean to flatten out a complicated life into a pair of X-Y axes, but sometimes it does make sense to simplify: Robinson has tried to build a private fortress up in Oregon; he’s tried to break apart the shackles of consensus science; he’s tried to liberate his thinking from the so-called experts’ point of view. But in the end, he’s just as stifled and constrained as all the rest of us, wrapped up in the conflicts of his past.
Daniel Engber writes about science and culture. @danengber
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Puerto Rico’s slow-motion medical disaster.
Hurricane Maria left a ruined island and 16 Puerto Rico residents dead. But public health experts worry that figure could climb higher in the coming weeks, as many on the island fail to get medicines or treatment they need for chronic diseases.
Hurricane Maria left a ruined island and 16 Puerto Rico residents dead. But public health experts worry that figure could climb higher in the coming weeks, as many on the island fail to get medicines or treatment they need for chronic diseases. Roads are blocked, supplies are stuck at the ports, and only 11 of Puerto Rico’s 69 hospitals are open. Doctors at one children’s hospital were forced to discharge 40 patients this week when their generator ran out of diesel fuel.
But the immediate need for treatment is only the beginning of the island's public health challenges. With the island’s entire power grid knocked out, Puerto Rico’s massive pharmaceutical manufacturing industry—which provides 30 percent of the island’s gross domestic product and 90,000 jobs—has been shut down. FDA administrator Scott Gottlieb announced this week that his agency is trying to shift production to the mainland US to prevent shortages of cancer drugs, immunosuppressants for transplant patients, and medical devices for diabetes patients. Bringing Puerto Rico back online will make a big difference for people living both on—and off—the island.
In the short term, energy is essential to keeping patients alive. Medicines like insulin to treat diabetes or tetanus vaccines need to be kept cool. That means either in a refrigerator at 45 degrees Fahrenheit (for seasonal flu or tetanus vaccines) or at room temperature, which is about 72 degrees (for insulin). But without air conditioning, Puerto Rico’s tropical climate is hitting the upper 80s this week. “Refrigeration and cold storage are really big issues, and will be for the forseeable future,” says one former federal emergency response official who asked not to be identified.
The patients most affected by the failing cold chain will be those with chronic conditions. One-fifth of Puerto Rico's population has some kind of disability, including half of those above age 65. Its 3.5 million residents have the highest prevalence of diabetes in the United States—nearly 13 percent compared to 8.7 percent on the US mainland. That helps make Puerto Rico the most vulnerable US territory to a natural disaster like Hurricane Maria, according to a recent study by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers .
Federal health officials say they are already seeing patients come into emergency clinics with chronic disease related problems. “People with the most dire need are dialysis patients,” says Lt. Cmdr. Garrett Martin-Yeboah of the US Public Health Service and the national clinical pharmacist to the Department of Health and Human Service’s assistant secretary for emergency preparedness and response. “They are on a good number of prescription medications. Because of the volume of medications and tenuousness of their condition, those are some of the patients we are concerned about.”
The immediate refrigeration problem is solvable. Martin-Yeboah said a squad of federal emergency care doctors who were stationed on the island before Maria struck brought battery-powered mini-fridges that can run four days without power. They also brought their own diesel generators—though a week after the storm left, there is still not enough fuel to run them. “There are some challenges in Puerto Rico with fuel and things like that,” says Martin-Yeboah, who coordinates medicines and supplies for HHS doctors. “We’ve had to go to the airport to retrieve medical supplies,” she says. “Our suppliers can get them to Puerto Rico, but can’t get it to the site.”
The Navy hospital ship Comfort, which was finally dispatched this week, may also help in the short-term, especially for trauma patients. The converted supertanker will bring 1,000 beds, 12 operating rooms, a CAT-scan, and radiology capabilities to Puerto Rico. Meanwhie, emergency responders are using ham radios to reach some communities and even considering air-dropping medicines into villages, according to Nicolette Louissaint, executive director of Healthcare Ready, a group that coordinates post-disaster medical supply chain between public agencies and private suppliers such as pharmacies and drug manufacturers.
“The most important part is how we support the patients,” Louissant says. “These disaster responses are massive logistical operations. We have to do unusual things. Folks are looking at how you can get up to the mountains, and what solutions to move medicines to people but also people to medicines.”
Louissant noted that less than 10 percent of the island’s pharmacies were open as of Wednesday. Overall, there is no panic over medicines, according to health officials working in Puerto Rico. But they are prepared for the situation to worsen if conditions don’t improve quickly. Chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease and diabetes are often not counted in the final toll of natural disasters like Hurricane Maria. “These people end up dying from things that are preventable under ordinary circumstances,” said the former federal emergency official. “That’s what is going to start happening.”
But long-term, the effects of Puerto Rico's collapse may ripple far beyond the island. Twelve of the top 20 global pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have manufacturing facilities on the island, according to the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company. As a result, Puerto Rico manufactures seven of the top 10 drugs sold globally including AstraZeneca's cholesterol treatment Crestor, Abbvie arthritis drug Humira, and Johnson & Johnson-owned HIV drug Prezista, USA Today reported. Those three companies have said supplies of their drugs are in good shape and drugmakers are working to get production up and running. Still, Puerto Rico officials say it may be months before the island's power grid is fixed.
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Nick Kristof: ‘Enough already,’ said God.
I received the following transcript of a conversation between Jim Bakker and, er, God. It comes from a divine source.
˜Enough Already, Said God
Nicholas Kristof SEPT. 16, 2017
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Marc Chagall’s view of the burning bush. According to the transcript below, the bush recently reappeared. Credit RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY
The famous televangelist Jim Bakker, who is preaching again on television after a rape accusation and a prison term for financial fraud, recently warned that Christians would start an armed insurrection if President Trump were impeached. “If it happens, there will be civil war in the United States of America,†Bakker told his television audience. “The Christians will finally come out of the shadows, because we are going to be shut up permanently if we’re not careful.â€
Afterward, I received the following transcript of a conversation between Bakker and, er, God. It comes from a divine source.
Bakker: “Dear God, thank you for blessing me with wisdom, courage, virtue and rugged good looks. Plus humility. Please help me raise up an army to smite the infidels trying to impeach President Trump. …â€
God: “Oh, enough already!â€
Bakker, trying to dive under the bed: “Who’s there? And oh, no! Fire! Fire! There’s a fire on my bed!â€
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God: “It’s a burning bush.â€
Bakker: “Who said that? Fire! Fire! Help!â€
God: “Don’t be such a wimp: This is a smokeless burning bush. It won’t even singe your linens. So listen up. This is God.â€
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Bakker: “Wow, that really is a burning bush! That’s you, God? Are you anointing me to lead my people and smite our enemies? Will you give me a mighty, holy sword? I could crush all those infidels, just as if they were Amalekites.â€
God: “Whoa! Remember: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ I’m not into smiting these days. When you say deranged, violent things in my name, I want to sue you for defamation. Not that I go around feeling sorry for myself, but it’s tough being the Almighty when crazies keep running around fomenting hatred in my name.â€
Bakker: “Like those God-forsaken Muslims! They don’t value human life. We should destroy them!â€
God: “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.â€
Bakker: “You could be more respectful. And wait — are you not a Republican?â€
God: “I’m nonpartisan. I just don’t like being used. I was mortified when four out of five white evangelical Christians voted for a thrice-married liar who bragged about sexual assault — and then cited me as the reason for their votes. In polls, white evangelicals went from the group most likely to say that personal morality mattered in politics to the group least likely to say that — in just five years. These are values voters?â€
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Bakker: “I admit, Trump isn’t perfect. No man is perfect, except our Lord Jesus Christ. But Trump is pro-life.â€
God: “He’s pro-life for fetuses. That’s about it.â€
Bakker: “But God, you put Trump in power! So many evangelical leaders, like Robert Jeffress, have pointed out that Trump could have been elected only if that was your doing.â€
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God: “Don’t blame me! I endorse free will. And if Trump’s election had been my doing, I would have made sure he also won the popular vote.â€
Bakker: “Pastor Paula White said the other day on my television show that since Trump’s presidency is God’s will, opposition to Trump amounts to resisting ‘the hand of God.’ â€
God: “Hmm. Did she say that when Barack Obama was serving two terms?â€
Bakker: “But Trump is an instrument of Jesus. Fighting abortionists and refugees.â€
God: “I wish you’d read your Bible, and not just thump it. Jesus never said a peep about abortions or gays. And you know who was a refugee?â€
Bakker: “Hitler?â€
God: “How about Jesus? Jesus’s family fled King Herod’s slaughter of the innocents and found asylum in Egypt. Maybe ancient Egypt was more tolerant of refugees than Trump?â€
Bakker: “But God! We people of faith are just trying to do Jesus’s will!â€
God: “Jesus didn’t coddle the financiers of his day, the money-changers, but hounded them while comforting the needy. Follow him, and the focus would be on: ‘I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Nuns and missionaries make me proud when they fight AIDS or tutor in prisons. I love World Vision’s humanitarian programs. But I’m just insulted when people invoke my name and side with bigots or hurt the poor.â€
Bakker: “It’s more complicated than that. If today’s foreigners spoke English and were good white Christians like Joseph and Mary, I’d welcome them. But they speak strange languages. If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for everyone in America.â€
God: “Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani.â€
Bakker: “God, will you send your flesh and blood again on Earth so that we can exalt him?â€
God: “Her. You see, I did. She’s a 16-year-old Syrian Muslim girl in Arkansas. But ICE just arrested her and deported her to a refugee camp in Turkey.â€
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Bakker: “Uh-oh.â€
•
I’m holding a contest for poems about President Trump and this historical moment. For this, I’m partnering with the Poetry Society of America, which will pick finalists, and I hope to publish the winners in a future column.
I invite you to sign up for my free, twice-weekly email newsletter. Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter (@NickKristof).
A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 17, 2017, on Page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Enough Already,’ Said God. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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Covering climate change, with urgency and creativity.
A look at news outlets bringing innovation, urgency and new audiences to stories on climate change.
A look at news outlets bringing innovation, urgency and new audiences to stories on climate change
ARTICLE BY
MICHAEL BLANDING@michaelblanding
A rescue helicopter hovers in the background as a woman and her poodle use an air mattress to float above flood waters from Hurricane Harvey while waiting to be rescued from Scarsdale Boulevard in Houston Adrees Latif/Reuters
The assignment was simple: find out what energy companies knew about climate change, and when they knew it. InsideClimate News (ICN) reporter Neela Banerjee was initially skeptical they’d find any significant evidence that fossil fuel companies knew about the dangers of global warming. “At first, we thought, this was ridiculous,” she says. “We are not going to find anything.” As the nonprofit news organization’s team began to work through congressional testimony and talk to climate scientists, however, they found mention that oil giant Exxon has not only been involved with climate change research, but had actually published studies in peer-reviewed journals in the 1980s.
One Exxon scientist, Henry Shaw, had even published studies as far back as the late 1970s. When Banerjee and her colleagues tracked down his research, they discovered Exxon had fitted out one of its supertankers with sophisticated equipment to monitor carbon dioxide in the ocean and the atmosphere at a time when few scientists were studying global warming at all. Though Shaw had passed away, the reporters discovered document after document showing how Exxon’s scientists had agreed that emissions from fossil fuel companies were warming the planet, putting humans at risk. “It was astounding,” Banerjee says.
InsideClimate News published its findings in a nine-part series, “Exxon: The Road Not Taken,” in fall 2015, detailing the extent of Exxon’s scientific research, as well as how the company covered it up after it turned in the 1980s to suddenly denying climate change existed. The story earned ICN a nomination for a Pulitzer in Public Service and it was a winner or a finalist for practically every other environmental and investigative award last year.
Despite the urgency of climate change as an issue, in-depth stories like the one produced by ICN are a rarity. A veteran of The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Banerjee joined ICN out of frustration at not being able to pursue in-depth investigations on the topic. “Top management in the newsroom don’t give a hoot about climate change: ‘It’s depressing. It’s boring. It’s not sexy,’” she says. “They’ll tell you it’s the most important beat on the planet, but unless it’s wrapped up in politics and who’s up who’s down, they don’t care.”
Coverage of climate change overall is still just a small fraction of the overall news budget
Statistics bear her out, in part. Aside from PBS, network broadcast news has virtually stopped covering the topic. A study published by Media Matters for America in March found evening newscasts and Sunday shows on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox devoted only 50 minutes combined on climate change last year—despite such important climate-related stories as the signing of the Paris climate agreement, several extreme weather events, and the presidential campaign—during which there were no debate questions about climate change.
“Coverage is nowhere near where it should be for something that is so central to understanding how we can live, work, play, relax in a 21st-century society,” says Maxwell Boykoff, author of the 2011 book “Who Speaks for the Climate?” and a University of Colorado professor who has been tracking news coverage of climate change for 15 years. “Television has very much shirked its responsibility, and that is very worrisome.”
Major newspapers, while better, have been uneven over the past decade. According to research by Boykoff and others, coverage in the five largest U.S. newspapers decreased from an average of nearly 400 stories a month by 2007 to less than half that five years later. While coverage has rebounded to about 300 a month over the past two years, coverage of climate change overall is still just a small fraction of the overall news budget, says Boykoff, mostly spiking around political events such as President Trump’s recent decision to pull out of the Paris accord, rather than in-depth coverage of how countries around the world are adapting to changes in climate, or how it is affecting the world’s poorest citizens.
“The coverage since Trump has taken office is as high as it’s been, but it’s stunning how much of it is pegged to his activities, worries, and threats,” says Boykoff. “It hasn’t enhanced productive discussion on these issues. Instead, it’s been filled with fear and woe and worry.” Case in point: a 7,000-word cover story in New York magazine in July called “The Uninhabitable Earth,” which envisioned an apocalyptic worst-case scenario of what climate change could wreak in the next century, complete with mass extinctions, famine, disease, and war. The story was criticized as too alarmist even by climate scientists and those who work in climate politics, including one who fretfully called it “climate disaster porn.”
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It’s no wonder then that Americans are woefully undereducated on the topic. A 2016 study by the Yale Project on Climate Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, found only two-thirds of Americans even believe climate change is happening. Just over half believe it is caused by humans. And only 15 percent are aware that more than 9 out of 10 scientists agree on both points.
The dearth of coverage can be explained, at least in part, by the difficulty in covering an issue that defies most journalistic conventions, says Bud Ward, who has reported on the issue for more than 20 years and is editor of Yale Climate Connections, published by the Yale Project. Climate change is often perceived as an abstract concept, he says, lacking a timely news hook: “It affects only polar bears I’ll never see, or it will only take place in 2150 or beyond.” Just as crucially, since nearly all scientists are in agreement on the problem, the issue often lacks clearly defined sides. “The villain is us, or villains are everywhere.”
A Houston interstate is submerged in water after Hurricane Harvey brought widespread flooding to the area. The devastating impact strong and more frequent rainstorms are having on the city was detailed in The Texas Tribune/ProPublica's “Boomtown, Flood Town” months before Harvey hit Richard Carson/Reuters
The science behind the phenomenon, meanwhile, often lacks headline-grabbing revelations. “Science’s goal is to incrementally advance fundamental understanding on very basic questions,” says John Wihbey, an assistant professor of journalism and new media at Northeastern University who recently collaborated with Ward on a paper about climate change coverage for Oxford Research Encyclopedia. “If they [scientists] can collect data, test a hypothesis, and show something new … they’ve done their job.” By contrast, he says, journalists’ goal is to inform as many people as possible in as accessible a way as possible. “They are both dedicated to truth, but the importance of publicity and the scope of the audience is just very different.”
That discrepancy creates an inherent difficulty for science writers in making the topic feel fresh and newsworthy. “You can write that sea ice is at an all-time low, but a month later, it will still be at an all-time low,” says Seth Borenstein, a veteran beat reporter on climate change for the Associated Press. “The same goes for the monthly global temperature. At some point, you are reporting the same thing again and again.” Borenstein frequently looks for fresh angles in the data, going back to past studies to see if current reality matches predictions, or searching for significant anniversaries—such as the moment when more people alive have never felt a cooler than average month—to create news hooks.
When considering climate issues, Borenstein says, newer journalists will make the mistake of pitting scientists against political experts or think tanks. “That is like the doctor telling you you have cancer, so you go to the dentist for a second opinion,” Borenstein says.
The problem of false balance is one that has dogged climate change since global warming first started becoming an issue in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In part due to lack of data—and in part due to intentional obfuscation by fossil-fuel companies and right-wing think tanks—reporters have struggled to give fair representation to all perspectives. Says Wihbey, “How do we cover this as a political issue that seems to have two sides, but where there seems to be overwhelming scientific data accumulating on one side?” Oftentimes, they settled for a “he said, she said” story, giving equal weight to both.
That started to change in the mid-2000s, especially after an influential paper Boykoff co-authored with his brother, Jules, a political scientist, entitled “Balance as Bias,” published in the journal Global Environmental Change in 2004. The Boykoffs analyzed more than 600 stories selected at random from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Despite the International Panel on Climate Change’s release of a scientific consensus that humans contributed to global warming, they found that more than half of the articles gave equal weight to human-caused and natural-caused explanations for the issue. “In other words,” the Boykoffs wrote, “through adherence to the norm of balance, the U.S. press systematically proliferated an informational bias.”
The dearth of coverage can be explained, at least in part, by the difficulty in covering an issue that defies most journalistic conventions
When the study was repeated a few years later, the problem of false balance had largely gone away—both as the evidence supporting man-made climate change grew stronger and as journalists grew savvier in their reporting.
That has made it all the more surprising that the issue of false balance has once again reared its head in the last six months, as the presence of climate change deniers in high positions in the current presidential administration has once again put journalists in a quandary. Recent statements by Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and President Trump himself questioning the science have been echoed by far-right media sites such as Breitbart, Infowars, and Daily Wire, and put new pressure on journalists to include dissenting views.
That has made it more crucial than ever that journalists are able to separate fact from opinion, says Emmanuel Vincent, a project scientist at the University of California, Merced, who launched the website Climate Feedback three years ago as a forum for scientists to weigh in on the accuracy of media coverage. “Rick Perry said that climate change is due to the oceans, and a journalist may just let it go and say that’s his opinion, but it contradicts reality,” he says. “It should be the job of the journalist to say that.”
One commonly held misconception about climate change science is that it can only predict trends in weather patterns and can’t be tied to specific events. That’s no longer true, says Heidi Cullen, chief scientist at Climate Central, a nonprofit partnership of scientists and journalists and a Columbia Ph.D. who was formerly The Weather Channel’s first on-air climate expert. “The science has evolved and the models have gotten better,” Cullen says, “so we now have these peer-reviewed methodologies that can attribute individual extreme weather events to climate change.”
That development can help journalists in search of news hooks that bring the effects of climate change home to their readers. In 2012, Climate Central launched a program to train local meteorologists in how to accurately report on climate change and created Surging Seas Risk Finder, an interactive website at which users can enter their zip code to see the projected effects of rising sea levels in their area.
A more extensive recent multimedia project by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica brought the effects of climate change down to an even more local level. Published last December, “Boomtown, Flood Town” details the devastating impact that stronger and more frequent rainstorms are having on the city of Houston, months before the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey in August. The story used weather data and statistical analysis to show that in the past 28 years, the Houston area has been hit by eight storms. Five of those storms are thought to have a one in 100 chance to occur in a year, including spring storms in the past two years that together led to the deaths of 16 people and required thousands of high-water rescues.
“Work by scientists has shown that the frequency of these storms is clearly going to be worse because sea levels are rising,” says Texas Tribune and Reveal reporter Neena Satija, who wrote the story with fellow Tribune reporter Kiah Collier and ProPublica’s Al Shaw. As readers scroll through, a data visualization dynamically zooms in on a map of Houston, which gradually lights up with colored dots showing where flooding occurred in those two storms—more than a third of which are outside the city’s official flood zone, expected to be flooded only once every 100 years.
As the story continues, it weaves in personal stories of residents affected by the floods, showing readers where their homes are located on the map—such as the home of a woman whose two granddaughters were trapped atop tables as dark floodwaters swirled around them during the infamous “Tax Day” flood of 2016. At the same time, it demonstrates how policy decisions can exacerbate the effects of climate change. Runaway development in Harris County where Houston is located has replaced acres of prairie grass, formerly protected by switchgrass, which can have roots as deep as 15 feet, with impervious paved surfaces that impede drainage. By showing those areas of development on the map along with the areas affected by flooding, the visualization helps make apparent the political decisions behind the problem.
Despite those clear associations, the public officials the team interviewed are largely in denial about the effects. The former head of the flood-control district, according to the story, “flat-out disagrees with scientific evidence that shows development is making flooding worse,” and Houston still has no plans to take climate change into account. Since the story was published, residents of Memorial City, a neighborhood particularly hard hit by the flooding, have used it in their lobbying efforts to improve the city’s flood control infrastructure.
As Hurricane Harvey was bearing down on the Gulf Coast in late August, the reporters wrote a follow-up story, warning that the city wasn’t ready for the potential catastrophic consequences of the third superstorm in as many years. Unfortunately, meteorologists’ worst nightmares came true, as almost two feet of rain fell on the city overnight, stranding dozens of residents and causing at least five storm-related deaths in one of the worst natural disasters in Texas history.
A woman stands amidst the debris of her destroyed home in Agua Caliente, on the outskirts of Acapulco. In his story about climate change’s impact on Acapulco, Jason Margolis examined how tropical storm Manuel had little devastating impact on the city’s ritzy resorts, but destroyed entire communities just miles away TOP: David Butow/Corbis via Getty Images BOTTOM: Claudio Vargas/Reuters
Tying climate change to other issues, such as urban development, is one way to make the issue more accessible to a broader range of readers.
Stories by Indian journalist Stella Paul show just how far-reaching the impacts of climate change can be. While researching AIDS in India in 2012, she noticed two cities that had a significant jump in the number of women working in the sex trade in the southern city of Hyderabad. Investigating that rise, she discovered that many of the women had recently come to the city from agricultural areas decimated by drought, often after their husbands had committed suicide. Paul interviewed more than 50 women for the story she wrote about the issue for Reuters, shedding light on an unknown consequence of climate change that was hidden in plain sight. “The death of farmers from suicide had been covered very widely, but there was a story right next to it that wasn’t covered at all,” she says.
After that experience, Paul began searching for other stories at the intersection of climate change, gender, and human rights. Through an online network of women activists posting from Africa, South America, and other regions, she began to uncover more issues that had remained under the radar. One recent story details an increase in women being sexually assaulted in Guatemala because they are forced to walk farther to fetch water. Efforts by international NGOs to provide clean water to the villages took on an added urgency from the attacks. “It wasn’t just a health issue, it was a security issue,” she says.
By exploring such topics, Paul says, she is able to create new interest in both climate change and human rights issues. Finding stories like these sometimes just takes a shift of focus in applying a climate change lens to whatever beat a reporter is currently on. As one example, she remembers a journalist at a workshop in Bhutan, who was struggling to find a business journalism angle on the country. “But Bhutan is completely reliant on tourism, and if the glaciers melt, they won’t have enough hydroelectric power,” she says. “A lot times reporters aren’t even aware of the stories they have when they are sitting right on them.”
One organization that has recently put more effort into funding climate change stories is the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which has sponsored more than 50 projects looking in-depth at the effect of climate change on lives and livelihoods around the world. One project over the past year for publications including National Geographic looked at the way Bangladesh is adapting to rising sea levels—including “floating hospitals” in low-lying areas where permanent hospitals are no longer possible. In another story it funded this spring for The New York Times, reporter Kai Schultz looks at the island nation of the Maldives, where a green tax on resorts has fallen prey to government corruption, leaving guesthouse owners—and tourists—unprotected from rising seas. Despite the $3-a-night tax paid by tourists at guesthouses, residents on one island have been forced to construct their own makeshift seawall out of pieces of concrete and broken tiles to protect themselves from the surging waves.
In addition to funding articles, the Pulitzer Center’s efforts have focused on outreach to bring climate change stories to more diverse constituencies. To date, it has formed partnerships with 35 colleges and universities, ranging from liberal arts schools to large state colleges, as well as high schools and middle schools in St. Louis, Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and North Carolina to design curricula around climate change topics. “They are more or less neutral spaces where you can engage people who have maybe not made up their minds,” says Jon Sawyer, executive director of the Pulitzer Center.
For future grants, the center is working in a component that gives additional funding for efforts to reach new audiences with innovative techniques, such as data visualization or short videos for social media. “There is a lot of disinformation and distortion out there, with large segments of society being inundated with sources telling them climate change is not an issue,” Sawyer says. “Show us how a piece might end up on Fox or right-wing radio and have some credibility.”
Christopher Tin conducts the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road for his album "The Drop That Contained The Sea", which aims to bring attention to climate-induced water shortages Christopher Tin
Sawyer is not the only journalist working to find unconventional ways to tell climate change stories in order to reach a broader audience. After writing about climate change for 15 years, radio journalist Jason Margolis was feeling frustrated that he was only reaching those who were already convinced by the science. “I wanted to try and hit that sweet spot where people could still be persuaded to listen,” he says. Through a yearlong Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan, he developed new angles on the story, taking as his inspiration comedians like Jon Stewart and John Oliver, who are able to tell hard-hitting new stories in an entertaining way.
The stories he has produced in the past few years for Public Radio International address the topic of climate change with a breezy, even quirky sensibility. One features a climate activist and self-dubbed “eco-tainer” in Indianapolis, who emcees a monthly game show called “Ain’t Too Late Show” that has the audience in stitches at the same time it teaches them climate facts. Another follows the story of a composer who created a classical music concept album that follows a drop of water from snow pack to ocean to atmosphere as a way to draw attention to climate-induced water shortages. He’s clearly struck a nerve: The album, which includes lyrics from ancient texts in 10 different languages, debuted at number 1 on Billboard’s traditional classical album chart.
Several of Margolis’s recent stories are set in Mexico, where Margolis took an extended trip. Among his stops was the legendary, if faded, resort town of Acapulco, which was ravaged by tropical storm Manuel the previous fall. Many of the interviews he’d arranged with resort owners were lackluster—for them, the storm was a dramatic event from which they quickly recovered.
Walking down the beach with his fixer, however, he discovered a village where residents were still recovering from the damage. “When you go to one of these resort towns, you forget about the people who are washing your dishes and changing your sheets,” he says. “After the storm, this hotel was up and running five minutes later, and these people’s lives were destroyed. It’s a good reminder that if you have money, then even with the worst of climate change, you can pay your way out of it.” Despite the heaviness of the topic, Margolis still keeps the tone conversational as he talks to a community leader who has vowed to stick it out in his hometown, which dates back 400 years, despite the fact that many of its houses are now buried with silt that overflowed from the nearby river.
The problem of false balance is one that has dogged climate change since global warming first started becoming an issue
A similar balance between serious subject matter and engaging delivery has been the hallmark of “Years of Living Dangerously,” the television series on the National Geographic Channel (previously on Showtime). The show follows an unusual hybrid model, bringing in actors and other celebrities to investigate serious climate-related issues. In the inaugural episode, Harrison Ford travels to Indonesia to investigate deforestation from palm oil plantations. In later episodes, “Dawson’s Creek” alum Joshua Jackson explores coral bleaching, Jessica Alba talks with clean energy entrepreneurs, and—in one of his few appearances post-“Late Show”—David Letterman charmingly examines India’s transition to a solar-based economy.
“There is always a risk bringing in Hollywood actors that you will turn some people off,” says co-creator Joel Bach. But that’s outweighed, he says, by the huge amounts of additional attention they can draw. Still, Bach and co-creator David Gelber—both former producers of “60 Minutes”—are careful not to position the stars as experts on the subject matter. “They are really proxies for the viewer, and there to learn along with the audience,” Gelber says.
Bach and Gelber created the series after struggling to cover climate change at “60 Minutes.” “I had this sense that my God this really is the biggest story out there, and ‘60 Minutes’ wasn’t covering it the way we wanted to,” Gelber says. In addition to the star power, the producers focused on high production values, shooting episodes in a highly cinematic fashion. Despite the shiny surface, the show doesn’t sacrifice journalistic rigor, tackling complex scientific and economic concepts in naturalistic on-location interviews and trying to focus on solutions, rather than just fill the screen with doom and gloom. They hope their show can be an antidote to the almost total lack of coverage of the issue on network news. “I mean, God damn it,” Gelber says. “Twenty years from now, people will look back at NBC, CBS, and ABC and wonder what the bleep were they thinking.”
Whether the nightly news is covering it or the current presidential administration is supporting it, there are still plenty of stories out there on climate change for enterprising journalists to discover, says Yale’s Ward. In addition to exploring how individual communities are affected by and adapting to climate change, there are legitimate policy debates about the best solutions—whether to support technologies, such as natural gas and nuclear, and how to best support and incentivize a switch to renewable energy that can drive down the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
While climate change is perhaps the global issue, it is an intensely local one, with effects from climate change felt on agriculture and business from coastal cities to rural farms. The place to look for stories is close to home as well, says Northeastern’s Wihbey. “The more you bring scientists and journalists together it’s all to the good,” he says. “In any given city or region, there are going to be just a handful of climate scientists and just a handful of journalists who cover the environment. I would think any small organization can provide some event space and a lunch and just say, ‘Hey, we want to bring you guys together to talk on an informal basis.’”
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These infections are likely to get worse as the climate changes.
A European study recently took a broad look at what kind of microorganisms are most likely to be affected as climate change heats, cools, dries, and wets the world around us.
When the climate changes, so do all the things that rely on the climate, including people, plants, and pathogens. A European study recently took a broad look at what kind of microorganisms are most likely to be affected as climate change heats, cools, dries, and wets the world around us.
In a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, a research team from the University of Liverpool performed a broad assessment of how factors of climate change impact pathogens that make humans and animals sick. By understanding which microorganisms are more sensitive to environmental change, we have a better idea of how infection rates might change as the environment grows progressively less stable.
What Are Climate Drivers?
In the study, the authors note there is evidence that climate shifts are already causing changes in the incidence of disease — allowing some to appear at higher or lower altitudes and latitudes. The authors note modeling is frequently used to predict which pathogens could advance, but this study uses climate variables, along with data on selected pathogens, to get an idea of which pathogens we should worry about the most.
Climate variables that affect these pathogens are an important part of this study. The research team refers to these variables as "climate drivers" that include:
Primary drivers: Extreme weather events, climate change, climate oscillations, moisture, rainfall, temperature, and wind fluctuations.
Secondary drivers: Altitude, salinity, particulate matter, and vegetation.
The team chose to analyze 101 pathogens considered "high impact" to humans and animals in Europe and categorized them by how sensitive they are to these factors. These pathogens included bacteria, fungi, helminths, protozoa, and viruses. Overall, there are 157 pathogens categorized because some pathogens are affected by both primary and secondary variables.
Which Pathogens Are Set to Be Destabilized by Climate Change?
Humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms rely on climate variables that are always in some local flux. When climate drivers swing far enough beyond the expected spectrum, larger change is bound to happen.
When comparing pathogens to climate drivers, the study team found that 99, or 63% of the pathogens were likely to respond to at least one climate driver. Fifty-eight, or 37%, of the pathogens, like HIV, did not show sensitivity to climate variables. That narrows the field of pathogens likely to go askew because of environmental change.
More than 90% of that initial group of 99 pathogens were sensitive to between one and five climate drivers. Other statistical findings on the numbers of pathogens likely to be affected by climate change include:
81 of 99 pathogens were affected by primary climate drivers
56 of the 99 pathogens also had secondary climate drivers
18 of the 99 agents had sensitivity to secondary, but not primary climate drivers
Overall, pathogens were found to be most sensitive to climate drivers (primary and secondary) that include rainfall, temperature, moisture, and particulate matter.
The pathogen with the highest sensitivity to climate factors was Vibrio cholera, the microbe that causes the serious, and often deadly, diarrheal disease, cholera. Cholera had nine climate drivers, indicating high volatility in the face of climate change.
First runner up was the helminth, a parasite known as the "liver fluke" found throughout the world where sheep and cattle are present. A "helminth," is the term for any parasitic nematode, worm, or fluke.
Next up is anthrax, Bacillus anthracis, a naturally occurring bacteria that can prove fatal depending on infection type, and available treatment.
Rounding out the top four is Borrelia burgdorferi, the tick-borne bacteria that causes Lyme disease. (We're already seeing increased incidence of Lyme-bearing ticks in the Northeast US.)
Don't Miss: What to Do if You Think Your Child Has Lyme Disease
Fungi are more sensitive to the wind, moisture, and salinity, while protozoa and helminths are the most sensitive to altitude.
For all of the selected pathogens, the methods of transmission, in order of frequency, include:
Non-sexual, direct contact
Food
Fomite (fomites are non-living objects that carry pathogens, like hospital surfaces)
Water
Sexual, direct contact
Vectors (a vector is an animal like a tick or mosquito, which spreads disease)
Soil
Game birds for sale at an outdoor food market.
Image by Cory Doctorow/Flicrk
The study found zoonotic pathogens are likely more sensitive to climate than others. "Zoonotic" microorganisms are those spread between animals and can jump to humans, like some types of influenza, gastrointestinal infections, and other diseases. Food and waterborne pathogens were more likely to be zoonotic, while infections spread through direct, non-sexual, contact are less likely to be zoonotic.
The study authors note that while "having more drivers does not directly indicate that pathogens are more climate sensitive" this study assumes "that being sensitive to a broader range of climate variables means that climate change is more likely to affect a disease" in complicated ways.
Two-thirds of the pathogens identified as being vulnerable to climate change have more than one driver — and that makes the way climate affects the pathogen, and its resulting infection, hard to predict.
The study also touches on the possible emergence of new pathogens, or adaptations of existing microorganisms in the face of climate drivers and other factors — like civil wars that occur in drought stricken areas, or where public healthcare breaks down, leading to infectious diseases along the lines of cholera. Many human practices may change — for the better, or for the worse — and those changes can drive contamination and disease transmission between animals and humans, and among humans themselves.
Study authors write: "As an estimated 75% of emerging diseases are zoonotic, emerging diseases may, therefore, be disproportionately sensitive to climate."
A wildfire at Florida Panther NWR.
Image by Josh O'Connor-USFWS/Flickr
Study researcher Marie McIntyre said in a press release:
Climate sensitivity of pathogens is a key indicator that diseases might respond to climate change, so assessing which pathogens are most climate-sensitive, and their characteristics, is vital information if we are to prepare for the future.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported earlier this year that temperatures in 2016 marked three consecutive years of record warmth on the planet. Regarding "climate drivers" that could modify and promote the infections we face? The future is already here.
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