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☆ Are Smartphones and Social Media Driving a Teen Mental Heath Crisis? - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-01 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

First, that American teenagers are experiencing a mental health crisis; second, that it is the fault of phones. “Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health,” the Financial Times declared last spring. What do we really know about the state of mental health among teenagers today? But the American suicide epidemic is not confined to teenagers. Is there a stronger distress signal in the data for young women?

Persons: Haidt’s, Jean Twenge, —, Z, ”, It’s, Max Roser Organizations: Big Tech, Financial Times, New York Times, Guardian, Yorker Locations: France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, Greece, Poland, Norway, Belgium, Sweden

☆ Ozempic and Wegovy Have Health Benefits Beyond Weight Loss - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-24 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Last year was called the year of Ozempic, though it was also a year of Ozempic backlash and Ozempic shortages, which could persist for years. Even so, we appear very far from a peak for GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic and Wegovy, which are powered by a molecule called semaglutide, and Mounjaro, which uses its cousin tirzepatide. It seems possible to imagine a future in which almost everyone is taking some variety of GLP-1 drug, and with a pretty good reason to do so. Patients on Ozempic and Wegovy can lose 15 to 20 percent or more of their weight in a little over a year, and if they stay on the drugs, the weight tends to stay off. Semaglutide has been shown to eliminate or reduce the need for insulin among those with recent-onset Type 1 diabetes.

Persons: tirzepatide, Wegovy, we’ve, Semaglutide Locations: Alzheimer’s

☆ Lumina’s Cavity Vaccine and a New Era of D.I.Y. Medicine - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-17 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

“Cavities are a communicable disease, and if you’re among the 90 percent of Americans who’s ever had one, you probably got them from your mother.”So begins “The Rise and Impending Fall of the Dental Cavity,” a remarkably engrossing and, for me, genuinely eye-opening survey of the history and science of tooth decay, published last week by the pseudonymous Cremieux Recueil on his Substack. The bacterium Streptococcus mutans might not seem like the likeliest subject for a 7,600-word general-interest deep-dive, but Cremieux takes detours into the immaculate teeth of dinosaurs, the practice of Neolithic dentistry, the agricultural and industrial revolutions and their effect on our diets, and the dental agony of America’s founding fathers. Probably, you remember admonitions from childhood that eating candy will rot your teeth, but that story turns out to be a bit simplistic — the problem isn’t that your teeth hate sugar but that Streptococcus mutans loves it. And when it consumes sugar, the byproduct is lactic acid, which is what really starts to eat away at your dental enamel. Not everyone has an oral microbiome dominated by Streptococcus mutans, but chances are if you do, it was passed to you by your parents, very early on — and if you eat any sugar, you’re very likely to suffer tooth decay.

Persons: who’s, ”, Recueil, Cremieux, Streptococcus mutans

☆ Opinion | What War by A.I. Actually Looks Like
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-10 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

apocalypse — visions that sometimes featured autonomous weapons systems going rogue — you might have expected an enormous and alarmed response. Instead, the report that a war was being conducted partly by A.I. Perhaps that was partly because — to an unnerving degree — experts accept that forms of A.I. are already in widespread use among the world’s leading militaries, including in the United States, where the Pentagon has been developing A.I. Many of us still regard artificial intelligence wars as visions from a science-fiction future, but A.I.

Persons: Yuval Abraham, A.I, Obama, It’s, ” Elliot Ackerman, James Stavridis Organizations: Israel Defense Forces, Pentagon, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Associated Press Locations: Gaza, United States, Ukraine, Yemeni, Red

☆ Which countries has the best and worst Covid response? - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-03 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The number was just a ballpark estimate, drawn from modeling by the epidemiologist Trevor Bedford. But the burden of Covid is also obviously subsiding, and the shadow of the first-year emergency is retreating even further. As the fourth anniversary of the pandemic’s start brings a new flurry of retrospectives, I find myself marveling not just about the many narratives we’re still getting wrong but also about how many seemingly contradictory stories can be justified by the facts. In 2020, we often assessed that toll pretty crudely, using raw death counts, which invariably made the United States look like the world’s biggest pandemic failure. This produced one of the dominant morality tales of the pandemic’s first years: that the countries that should have expected to do best were, in fact, faring worst and that the United States under Donald Trump was the world’s most conspicuous example of pandemic mismanagement.

Persons: Trevor Bedford, marveling, we’re, Donald Trump Locations: United States

☆ Opinion: I’m a climate scientist. If you knew what I know, you’d be terrified too
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-07 | by ( Opinion Bill Mcguire | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

CNN —Are you frightened by climate change? While those of us working in the climate science field know the true picture, and understand the implications for our world, most others do not. As a climate scientist, it is my duty to tell you about what is happening to our world, whether it engenders fear or not. Critically, the authors of the study observed that the reality of climate change has to be communicated without inducing a feeling of hopelessness — and this is the key. Climate change is no different.

Persons: Bill McGuire, Read, David Wallace, Wells, Sean Gallup, ” Organizations: University College London, CNN, University of Bath, American Psychological Association Locations: —, Disko, Greenland

☆ Opinion | John Kerry: ‘I Feel Deeply Frustrated’
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-06 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Kerry, now 80, is stepping down this week but will continue to work on climate change. It is the test of our own times, a test as acute and as existential as any previous one. When Biden came in, the credibility of the United States was in the crapper, and we were viewed with suspicion if not derision. Our job was to go out and create credibility for our nation and for the president. At the time, the U.S. didn’t really have a global strategy, and so we laid out “keep 1.5 alive.”

Persons: John Kerry, Biden, didn’t, ” Organizations: Munich Security Conference Locations: United States, Kerry, Paris, U.S

☆ Coups and Climate Change in the African Sahel - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-28 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

On the time scale of human civilization, this might still be true, particularly when it comes to interpersonal violence. But on the time scale of human memory, it isn’t true any longer, particularly when it comes to warfare. By some measures, it’s more conflict ridden than at any point since the end of World War II. Nonstate violence — conflict between nongovernmental armed groups, such as gangs — has more than tripled, according to Sweden’s Uppsala Conflict Data Program, since a low point in 2007. In 2011, when Pinker published “Better Angels,” there were nearly 40,000 deaths from warfare worldwide, Uppsala estimates.

Persons: Steven Pinker’s, ”, —, Pinker Organizations: International Institute for Strategic Studies, Survey Locations: London, Sahel, Uppsala

☆ Opinion | Just How Many People Will Die From Climate Change?
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-22 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

How deadly could climate change be? Last fall, in an idiosyncratic corner of the internet where I happen to spend a lot of time, an argument broke out about how to quantify and characterize the mortality impact of global warming. The claim was quickly picked apart by experts: “An oft-quoted adage within the climate-modeler community is that garbage in equals garbage out,” the climate advocate Mark Lynas wrote. But it did make me wonder: How big would the number have to be to strike you as really big? If you include premature deaths from the air pollution produced by the burning of fossil fuels, you may well get estimates stretching into the hundreds of millions.

Persons: Roger Hallam —, ” Hallam, Mark Lynas, “ Organizations: BBC

☆ Fires Are the Sum of Our Choices
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-14 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

In early February, the deadliest South American wildfires in a century swept through Valparaiso, Chile, killing more than a hundred people. In the United States, mercifully little land burned — only 2.6 million acres, which was less than half the recent average. But in Canada, fires ate through more than twice as much forest as the country’s previous modern record, the total burn scar large enough that more than half the world’s countries could fit inside. In Greece, one fire forced the country’s largest-ever evacuation, and another became the largest fire in the history of the European Union. And in the United States, especially, you increasingly hear a somewhat contrarian explanation that emphasizes fire suppression rather than warming.

Persons: “, Stephen Pyne, Daniel Swain Organizations: European Union, Sydney Locations: Valparaiso, Chile, Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii’s, United States, Canada, Greece, Australia, McMurray , Alberta, Hawaii, Boulder County, Colo

☆ The Measles Outbreak in Europe is a Warning to America - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-01 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In 2022, there were 941 reported cases of measles in the World Health Organization’s European region. And it appears even more significant compared to recent years, when efforts to limit Covid also resulted in almost entirely eliminating measles in Europe in 2021. But as the year drew to a close, the European measles outbreak kept growing. Almost certainly, the virologist Rik de Swart of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam tells me, these official case totals are significant underestimates. The epidemiologist Bill Hanage, also at Harvard, lamented it to me as a “chronicle of an outbreak foretold.”

Persons: Rik de Swart, Michael Mina, Bill Hanage, ” Organizations: Health, Erasmus University Medical Center, Harvard Locations: Europe, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Britain, West Midlands, Rotterdam, Harvard

☆ Opinion | How Hot Was It Last Year?
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-17 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

That threshold describes a long-term average rather than a single-year anomaly. But because it describes a multidecade average, the measure will always be backward-looking, with the precise moment the world crossed the 1.5 mark clear only in retrospect. This year a handful of prominent scientists have suggested that when we do look back to mark that time, we may well circle 2023. Not that long ago, it would have been pretty contentious to suggest that the world’s most ambitious climate goal was already lost. Perhaps 2024 is the year we may finally be ready to retire it publicly, too.

Persons: — Organizations: Berkeley Earth, Global Locations: Paris

☆ Opinion | Has the Age of Mass Protest Actually Achieved Anything?
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-22 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

In some cases, it simply dissipates — mass protest as release valve. In others, it is repurposed by more strategic actors with clearer objectives, often political agents friendlier to the establishment and working to enclose the protest energy in a big centrist tent. In still others, the initial protests present the provocation around which outraged others can mobilize a reactionary backlash. The pattern holds not just across the poorer parts of the world, where Bevins concentrates, but in more affluent and outwardly “stable” parts of Europe and North America as well. Here, recent protests have been characterized by the same two distinctive features: their enormous scale and their mercurial shapelessness.

Persons: Bevins, “, Lula Organizations: Occupy Wall, Tea Party Locations: Gezi Park, Turkey, Brazil, Chile, Ukraine, Hong Kong, Jair, Europe, North America

☆ Opinion | With Covid, Is It Really Possible to Say We Went Too Far?
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-15 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

In others, when you went into stores, the store asked you to wear a mask. Is there a way to lock down that we could have protected people in nursing homes? Is there a way to lock down that we could have protected people who live in multigenerational housing? If you’re a restaurant owner who lost their restaurant because of this, you might define it as lockdown. McLean: I think you’re asking an essentially unknowable question.

Persons: didn’t, McLean, it’s Locations: China, Peru, Sweden, U.S

☆ Opinion | The Godfather of Climate Science Turns Up the Heat
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-08 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Hansen’s 1988 appearance before a Senate committee conventionally marks the beginning of the era for climate alarm, when many Americans started worrying about global warming and why their leaders were doing so little about it. This process is already embedded in conventional modeling of our climate future. But the uncertainty range is much higher for aerosol cooling than for other, more widely measured climate inputs, and the high end of that estimated range is above a full degree of cooling. In the “Pipeline” paper, Hansen gives a higher estimate still: that aerosols are cooling the planet by perhaps 1.5 degrees Celsius. assumes and that a collapse of one of the ocean’s major circulation systems is possible this century, much sooner than most believe.

Persons: wonks, Hansen Organizations: NASA, United Nations

☆ Opinion | Acapulco Saw the Future of Hurricanes: More Sudden and Furious
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-01 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Although, conventionally, hurricanes are measured by their peak intensity, how quickly they reach that intensity and how rapidly they approach land matters enormously. A tropical storm isn’t an insignificant threat, and what became Otis surely would’ve damaged Acapulco even if it hadn’t ever intensified. But a Category 5 is a threat of a different order, requiring an entirely different scale of preparatory response. You simply can’t evacuate a city of one million in just a few hours — at least, it’s never been managed before. It was the surprise of the storm’s transformation, with few of the conventional forecasting models predicting any significant intensification at all.

Persons: Otis, hadn’t, it’s, “ Otis, ”, Kerry Emanuel, you’ve, “, Emanuel Organizations: Atlantic Locations: Acapulco

☆ ‘It’s Like Our Country Exploded’: Canada’s Year of Fire
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-24 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

Instead, he emphasizes what might be called the power law of wildfire spread. Most fires are not hard to put out if you want to extinguish them and don’t spread very fast if you don’t. Globally, the fire story is less exponential, with declines in burned area in sub-Saharan Africa mostly offsetting rapid fire growth in the major midlatitude hot spots, with the global trend in fire emissions, as a result, mostly flat. If we manage the forest around my little town, well, maybe we can stop my little town from burning down,” she says. And if we don’t, it’s all a game.” She goes on: “It doesn’t matter what we do in the forest, things are going to burn.

Persons: Pyne, We’re, ”, Mike Flannigan, “, Flannigan, Rachel Holt, ” Holt Locations: Canada, British Columbia, United States, American, Saharan Africa, Russian Siberia, Australia

☆ Opinion | Beyond ‘Deaths of Despair’
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-18 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

Those million extra deaths exceed even the nearly 700,000 who die each year from cardiovascular disease, the country’s biggest killer. In 2021, the researchers found, extra mortality accounted for nearly one in every three American deaths. “The United States is failing at a fundamental mission — keeping people alive,” The Washington Post recently concluded, in a remarkable series on the country’s mortality crisis. But by almost every other measure the United States is lagging its peers, often catastrophically. It’s not quite right to call all this simply “despair,” even if social anomie plays a role.

Persons: Matthews, “, Jimmy Carter, ”, Covid, It’s, Deaton, America ” Organizations: Washington Post, European Union, Organization for Economic Cooperation, Development Locations: Bor, United States, Virginia, Louisiana, Kansas, States, Netherlands, Sweden, America

☆ Opinion | Can We Put a Price on Climate Damages?
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-20 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

But whenever anyone tries to put an actual price on the damages from global warming — to calibrate a carbon tax, assess past responsibility or aid in litigation against fossil-fuel malefactors — the numbers are almost too much to process. One problem is that the damage accumulates over time, like a compound interest of climate degradation. Most carbon, once emitted, hangs in the air for centuries — and some of it lingers even longer. A lump of coal being burned in Shaanxi or Inner Mongolia today does climate damage equivalent to a lump that was burned in 19th-century Newcastle or 20th-century Pittsburgh, and an oil well decommissioned three decades ago may still be doing climate damage three centuries from now. I used an optimistically low future price for such technology and assumed no obstacles to scaling that tech, though many analysts see many such roadblocks.

Locations: United States, China, Shaanxi, Inner Mongolia, Newcastle, Pittsburgh

☆ Opinion | The Pandemic Was a Time Machine
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-13 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Across other nations in Europe, the rough pattern appears similar to the English one: an abrupt jump in 2020 mortality that nevertheless did not reach the age-standardized levels experienced around the year 2000. There are many ways of thinking about this fact, as is often the case with pandemic data. A second observation is that, adjusting for age, we experienced what seemed to be normal death rates in 2000 as essentially unthinkable in 2020. Between the end of World War II and the onset of the pandemic, American-adjusted mortality rates had fallen by about half. These were the gains that the pandemic undid.

Organizations: Centers for Disease Control Locations: Europe, United States

☆ Opinion | What Have We Learned From a Summer of Climate Reckoning?
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-05 | by ( The Ezra Klein Show | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

This summer has been a parade of broken climate records. June was the hottest June and July was not just the hottest July but the hottest month ever on record. What does it mean to hold the pessimism of climate disaster and the optimism of climate action together? [You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.] There are few individuals better suited to navigate these questions than Kate Marvel, a senior climate scientist at Project Drawdown.

Persons: “, Ezra Klein, Kate Marvel, David Wallace, Wells, Marvel Organizations: Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google

☆ Opinion | The Faustian Bargain of Reducing Air Pollution
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-30 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

This summer of extremes has been a summer of mystery, debate and even some confusion for climate scientists, who’ve been watching the news with the rest of us and asking, What, exactly, is going on? Is it just baseline global warming, trending upward, that explains the extreme temperatures on land and over sea? The arrival of a planet-warming El Niño in the Pacific? And when considering off-the-charts sea-surface temperatures, what role is being played by recent regulations designed to significantly reduce the sulfur emissions of ships, since less pollution in the air means more heat making its way to the water below? And almost certainly, the sulfur effect has been larger locally, along particular shipping routes in the world’s oceans, where some especially striking anomalies have been observed.

Persons: who’ve, what’s, alarmists, Robert Rohde Organizations: Berkeley Locations: Tonga, South, Phoenix

☆ Opinion | What Can Replace China as a Global Economic Engine?
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-23 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

To an extent that few Americans genuinely appreciate, global growth has been powered by the so-called Chinese miracle for almost half a century now. grew by 30 percent and China’s by 263 percent — China accounted for more than 40 percent of all global growth. If you excluded China from the data, global G.D.P. In 1992, China’s G.D.P. Quite likely not somewhere great, even if the world’s great powers manage to avoid direct conflict.

Persons: —, China’s, David Oks, Henry Williams, Ricardo Hausmann, Tim Sahay, Narendra Modi Organizations: World Bank, Harvard Kennedy School Locations: China, Asia, United States, India

☆ Opinion | Maui and the Age of the Urban Firestorm
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-16 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

It wasn’t even really a wildfire. In general, we’ve long believed the built environment offered formidable firebreaks, and worried over what might be lost when fires passed near homes as a form of tragic collateral damage. As of Tuesday, the official death toll in Maui was 99, but almost 1 percent of all residents remained unaccounted for, and many locals were suggesting the death toll could increase significantly in the days ahead. A climate lawsuit launched by the island against Big Oil in 2020 specifically cited additional wildfire risk. But still, when the fire broke out, almost no one seemed adequately prepared.

Persons: Daniel Swain, Tubbs, Marshall, Chuck, Swain Organizations: Costco, New York, Big Oil Locations: Lahaina, Hawaii, Santa Rosa, Calif, Paradise, Boulder County, Colo, New, Maui

☆ Opinion | Why Is America Such a Deadly Place?
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-09 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Death is excessive in America, and the more you look the more distressing the picture seems. And while the trend is clear, the change may seem small, because the impact is averaged over the country as a whole. American life expectancy dropped just 0.1 year between 2014 and 2019, before Covid. Before the pandemic, roughly a half million more people in America died each year than would have died, on average, in wealthy peer countries. In each of the first two years of the pandemic, the number surpassed one million.

Persons: You’ve, Jacob Bor Organizations: Boston University Locations: America, United States, Kosovo, Albania, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Panama, Turkey, Lebanon, Europe

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