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☆ 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

The wildfires sweeping Canada have become the largest in its modern history. Across the country, 30 million acres of forest have burned — three times as much land as in the worst American fire in the past 50 years. The scale has forced an international response and a re-evaluation of how the world handles wildfires. Firefighters on the front lines discuss the challenges they face, and David Wallace-Wells, a climate columnist for The Times, explores how climate change has shifted thinking about wildfires.

Persons: David Wallace, Wells Organizations: Firefighters, The Times Locations: Canada

☆ Opinion | This Summer Is Pointing Us Toward Uncharted Territory
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-02 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

On the last day of July, Phoenix finally registered a temperature high below 110 degrees Fahrenheit — the first time that had happened in 31 days. The I.C.U.s are filling up, too, and the region’s iconic saguaro cactuses are crumpling and collapsing in the heat. “The era of global boiling has arrived.”It was, worldwide, the hottest month on record. June was the hottest June on record. Every single day for four straight weeks, as Canada burned and Sicily burned and Algeria burned, global temperatures surpassed the daily record set in 2016 and matched last summer, when 61,000 Europeans are estimated to have died as a result of the heat.

Persons: Biden, António Guterres, ”, “ Organizations: Phoenix, Florida Locations: Maricopa, Canada, Sicily, Algeria, Atlantic, Beijing, Chile, Argentina

☆ Opinion | A Grim Climate Lesson From the Canadian Wildfires
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-26 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

But whose responsibility is the carbon produced when forests burn? In the age of extreme weather and climate agreements, the world has learned to tabulate ecological guilt nation by nation — cutting responsibility for the current crisis into so many slices of pie. If the 20th century taught us the perversity of aggressive fire suppression, the 21st is already teaching us the limits of that lesson. But if the costs to human health of wildfire smoke are larger than from the fires themselves, should the goal be recalibrated? Canada has a gargantuan per capita carbon footprint, in fact, by some measures larger than that of the United States.

Persons: ” Henry Mance, “ Organizations: U.S ., Canadair, Financial Times Locations: North America, Eurasia, China, United States, India, California, Canada, Russia, Ontario, Quebec, Michigan, Maine, U.S, Los Angeles, Tampa

☆ Floods, Heat, Smoke: Climate Change is Accelerating - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-12 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Global warming is accelerating, with temperatures not just rising but rising faster than ever. But it is simultaneously proving harder to compartmentalize — even in places such as New York City that once looked to residents like concrete fortresses against nature. Last weekend, it was Hudson Valley streets turned into swimming pools by supercharged rain and ravines disgorging landslides that those in New York City watched with a mix of horror and false relief. The flooding was “upstate,” we told ourselves, though by “upstate,” of course, we meant not even 50 miles north of the city. The United States Military Academy at West Point was briefly flooded by a once-in-a-thousand-years climate event.

Persons: San Francisco, could’ve Organizations: New York City, United States Military Academy, West, New Locations: New York City, New York, American, Hudson, ”, Vermont, Montpelier

☆ Opinion | Rochelle Walensky on the Rocky Road to Normal
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-07 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

You have Anthony Fauci and Vivek Murthy saying that 99.2 or 99.5 percent of deaths were unvaccinated, when in those months the share of vaccinated deaths was about 10 times that high. They’re important deaths. But the character of the kind of person who was dying is different. And the backdrop of immunity was different, and the case fatality rate of different variants changed over time, as well. And I think about all of the messaging that we did over the last three years.

Persons: It’s, We’re, Anthony Fauci, Vivek Murthy Organizations: CNN Locations: Covid

☆ Pandemic Divisiveness in the U.S. Wasn’t What It Seemed - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-28 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

I’d like to tell you a story about the pandemic, one that may sound so gauzily hopeful, it would qualify today as a public health fairy tale. Instead, political leaders could have moved forward more or less in unison, navigating epidemiological uncertainties unencumbered by the weight of the culture war. But at the state and local levels, for many months, red and blue authorities moved in quite close parallel. For the most part, red and blue people did, too. Over the next few weeks, inspired by this book and a few other efforts at pandemic autopsy, I’ll examine the experience of 2020 and how it is already distorted in our memory.

Persons: Covid Organizations: PublicAffairs Locations: United States

☆ Suddenly, It Looks Like We’re in a Golden Age for Medicine
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-23 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Hype springs eternal in medicine, but lately the horizon of new possibility seems almost blindingly bright. “I’ve been running my research lab for almost 30 years,” says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. And yet these brutal years — which brought more than a million American deaths and probably 20 million deaths worldwide, and seemed to return even the hypermodern citadels of the wealthy West to something like the experience of premodern plague — might also represent an unprecedented watershed of medical innovation. “It’s stunning,” says the immunologist Barney Graham, the former deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center and a central figure in the development of mRNA vaccines, who has lately been writing about a “new era for vaccinology.” “You cannot imagine what you’re going to see over the next 30 years. The pace of advancement is in an exponential phase right now.”

Persons: I’ve, ”, Jennifer Doudna, Doudna, Barney Graham Organizations: University of California, Army, Vaccine Research Center Locations: Berkeley, West

☆ Opinion | Even in Texas, You Can’t Stop the Green Revolution
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-14 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

It is no longer clean energy that requires political interventions for survival. And when American investors are drawn to opportunities, they find themselves overwhelmingly in red states like Texas. Nearly a hundred new clean energy manufacturing facilities or factory expansions have been announced since the bill, marking more than $70 billion in new investment, according to Canary Media. This is the rundown offered by the former director of President Biden’s National Economic Council, Brian Deese, last month:Companies have announced at least 31 new battery manufacturing projects in the United States. In energy production, companies have announced 96 gigawatts of new clean power over the past eight months, which is more than the total investment in clean power plants from 2017 to 2021.

Persons: Brian Deese, decarbonization Organizations: Bloomberg, Republicans, Democrat, Canary Media, Economic Council, Companies Locations: Texas, There’s, United States

Smoke from wildfires in Canada has created a crisis in the American Northeast and beyond, with air pollution in New York reaching its worst level in modern history. David Wallace-Wells, a climate columnist for The Times, explains why this happened, and why there is so little we can do to keep it from happening again.

Persons: David Wallace, Wells Organizations: The Times Locations: Canada, American, New York

☆ As Canadian Smoke Darkens the New York Sky, The Future is Clear - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-07 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

My father, who died of lung cancer, used to say that as soon as people inhaled their first cigarette, they immediately knew, if they weren’t in denial, that they were harming themselves. I felt the same way on Tuesday in New York, my eyes itching and my nose burning and the taste in my throat like I’d swallowed a charcoal bonbon. Until now, if people in the green and leafy Northeast looked at arid Western cities covered in smoke from wildfires, they could say, that can’t happen here, thank God. On Tuesday, it did: For a moment, New York’s air quality was worse than it was in Delhi, the infamous pollution capital where average life spans are reduced more than nine years by particulates in the air. By evening, New York had registered the worst air quality in the world among major cities.

Locations: New York, Delhi

☆ Opinion | The Ocean Is Looking More Menacing
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-01 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

What do you call the arrival of events that have been predicted but, when predicted, were described as distressing or even terrifying? But some news from ocean science may prove more surprising still — perhaps genuinely paradigm-shifting. This key part of the circulation of the Southern Ocean “looks headed towards collapse this century,” study coordinator Matthew England told Yale Environment 360. “And once collapsed, it would most likely stay collapsed until Antarctic melting stopped. At current projections that could be centuries away.”Then, last week, some of the same researchers confirmed that the process was already unfolding — in fact, that the Southern Ocean overturning circulation had already slowed by as much as 30 percent since the 1990s.

Persons: Matthew England, ”, Steve Rintoul, who’d Organizations: Yale Environment Locations: Pacific Northwest, Canada, El

☆ Opinion | There’s No Escape From Wildfire Smoke
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

This season so far, the total is already more than 1.5 million — which would make it the province’s third-worst annual result, just a few weeks into May, with months more of wildfire season still to burn. In the United States, by contrast, those who live in fear of wildfire are probably breathing a bit easier. Last year was a relatively light one, with fewer than eight million acres burning across the country — close to the two-decade average and well below the damage of several especially scarring recent seasons. But a new lesson from the evolving science of wildfire is about how far its toxic smoke spreads and how widely its noxious impacts are distributed. In fact, according to one not-yet-published study led by Stanford researchers exploring the distribution of wildfire smoke, an estimated 60 percent of the smoke impact of American wildfire is experienced by those living outside the states where the trees are in flames.

☆ Opinion | We Could Easily Make Risky Virological Research Safer
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-10 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The 2007 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain was traced to a faulty drainage pipe at a research facility. In 2015 the Department of Defense discovered that a germ-warfare program in Utah had mistakenly mailed almost 200 samples of live anthrax over 12 years. Lab accidents happen, and they aren’t especially rare. In January the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity issued a series of draft recommendations for tightening regulation and oversight. And many of those who see the Covid pandemic as merely the sort of pathogenic disaster that lab accidents might cause agree that greater safety is needed.

☆ The Covid Pandemic Emergency is Apparently Over - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

This is a pace of about four million excess deaths per year. Excess mortality tells a somewhat different story. With a couple of brief exceptions, excess deaths have held steady for about a year now in a range between about 8,000 and 15,000 per day. At some point we may simply stop referring to these as excess deaths and incorporate them instead into higher mortality baselines. Excess mortality, too.

☆ Opinion | Why Does Bad Science on Covid’s Origin Get Hyped?
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

This pattern does not apply only to research purporting to show evidence of a natural origin. Perhaps, if you staked a lot on that initial raccoon-dog report, it does make sense to turn your dial a bit in the opposite direction. Across a pandemic in which the public was desperate for new information, we have probably gotten too used to treating hurriedly prepared reports as definitive science. “It is really important to try to understand the origin of Covid-19,” Bloom says. I think part of science, and part of critical thinking in general, is supposed to be a high level of comfort with uncertainty and unknowns.

☆ Opinion | Who’s to Blame for a Million Deaths?
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

“Something clearly went wrong,” Anthony Fauci told me, reflecting on the long pandemic, in an interview for The New York Times Magazine. It was those who forced essential workers to stay on the job and those who kept ordering delivery from them. It was those who cut the line to get vaccinated, then those who didn’t get vaccinated, then those who stopped wearing masks once they did. It was the unvaccinated and it was Joe Biden saying “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” It was the C.D.C. And it was those people who kept annoyingly insisting that the pandemic wasn’t over, when, in truth, well, it both was and wasn’t.

☆ Dr. Fauci Looks Back: ‘Something Clearly Went Wrong’
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-24 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +55 min

Dr. Fauci Looks Back: ‘Something Clearly Went Wrong’ In his most extensive interview yet, Anthony Fauci wrestles with the hard lessons of the pandemic — and the decisions that will define his legacy. But when people say, “Fauci shut down the economy” — it wasn’t Fauci. But somehow or other, the general public didn’t get that feeling that the vulnerable are really, really heavily weighted toward the elderly. We also had a public-health system that we thought was really, really good. But it was really, really antiquated.

☆ Good Climate-Change News Is Fit to Print
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-01 | by ( Holman W. Jenkins | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Call it the calamity of climate journalism. After 40 years, writers are still serving up a binary issue, with idiotic back-and-forths over who is a denier in ways that work, sometimes deliberately, to undermine clear thinking and any concession to the changing science. Better can be done and last weekend a newish New York Times writer, David Wallace-Wells , in his customary excess of words, reprised his own concession since writing a 2017 New York Magazine article titled “The Uninhabitable Earth.” He now says: “Just a few years ago climate projections for this century looked quite apocalyptic.” He acknowledges a new consensus that has reduced expected warming to “between two and three degrees” Celsius, or less than half the forecast of, say, the 2018 U.S. National Climate Assessment.

☆ Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-26 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | Photographs Devin Oktar Yalkin | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +53 min

Beyond Catastrophe A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View By David Wallace-WellsYou can never really see the future, only imagine it, then try to make sense of the new world when it arrives. (A United Nations report released this week ahead of the COP27 climate conference in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, confirmed that range.) A little lower is possible, with much more concerted action; a little higher, too, with slower action and bad climate luck. There were climate-change skeptics in some very conspicuous positions of global power. New emissions peaks are expected both this year and next, which means that more damage is being done to the future climate of the planet right now than at any previous point in history.

☆ The New World: Envisioning Life After Climate Change
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-26 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Climate change has led to roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius of warming so far, making the earth hotter now than it has ever been in the long history of civilization. Not very long ago, scientists warned that this could cause four or five degrees Celsius of warming, giving rise to existential fears about apocalyptic futures. But, while ambitious and difficult, it now seems possible — a very different sort of future, neither a best-case nor a worst-case scenario. What follows is a partial, hopscotching geography of the jagged new world that climate change is making. As much as our planet has already been transformed by climate change, it will be transformed far more in the decades to come.

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