WHAT DIDN'T HE KNOW AND WHEN DIDN'T HE KNOW IT?

What didn't Trump know and when didn't he know it?

Concerning Trump in general and his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in particular, the simple answer is that he knows nothing, always. Despite being "a very stable genius," perennial ignorance is his stock in trade. It lets him avoid responsibility across the board. Unlike President Truman, the buck never stops at Trump's desk (or if it does, like Macavity, Trump wasn't there. He never got the memo.)

Harry Truman, 1959--the buck stops here

Credit: Levan Ramishvili/flickr

Unfortunately for America, sometimes ignorance, especially arrogantly willful ignorance, has costs, real-world impacts that can't be erased by shifting blame to someone else (right now WHO's on first), smearing someone with a smarmy nickname, or filing a lawsuit.

MACAVITY'S NOT THERE

Credit: Pixabay

As I write this, 565,835 Americans have been sickened by the coronovirus, and 22,850 have died. That's more cases than the next three worst-hit countries combined, and more deaths than any other country. So much for MAGA and "we're number one."

Tragically, neither those deaths nor those yet to come will make a difference to Trump's core supporters; his approval ratings have ranged from 41 to 49 percent as the pandemic has raged.  Still, for those of us who at least try to live in the real world, it might be interesting to figure out what Trump could have known, and ought to have known, and when he chose to ignore it and go with his--also brilliant--gut.

We now know that multiple agencies were trying to alert Trump to the approaching tsunami starting in January. These included the National Security Council, Health and Human Services, the CDC, Homeland Security, the VA and the Pentagon--at least 10 high-level warnings between January 18 and February 25. Clearly enough of these early warnings got through to him to stimulate him to do what comes naturally to him--closing borders. On January 31 he banned most travelers coming from China. 

Domestically, however, Trump presented a very different face to the U.S. public. From January 20th through mid-March, Trump blatantly downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic. His consistent message was "no worries," "under control," and "it will disappear." Finally, in mid-March, and some six weeks too late, he began to take the pandemic seriously in terms of what should be done within the U.S.

What he could have known if he were capable of and willing to listen to experts, was that viruses like SARS-CoV-2 have the capacity to go viral--duh--for the number of people sickened or killed to increase exponentially.  If he had digested that bit of information, his native genius could have led him to the conclusion that days count. In a country the size of the US, putting effective control measures into place a week or two sooner could mean the difference between a few thousand deaths and a few hundred thousand deaths .

We can see this clearly if we compare New York and California. New York dithered while California took quick and serious steps to slow the spread of the virus.  As of 4/13/20, New York has registered 195,031 cases and suffered 10,056 deaths. California has just one-eighth as many cases, 23,428 and one-fifteenth as many deaths, 675. The contrast becomes even starker when you consider that California has twice the population of New York. So, per population, California has just one-sixteenth the number of cases and one-thirtieth he number of deaths. If California had failed to act as quickly and decisively as it did, 20,000 more people might have died.

What the experts tried to get across to Trump starting in January is that when you're dealing with the potentially exponential explosion of a fatal disease, there isn't room for half measures nor time for delay. Trump only heard what he wanted to hear, and reality steamrolled over all his magical thinking, political positioning and base-soothing blather to remind us that ignorance can be fatal. That makes Trump even more dangerous than we thought just a few months ago.

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6/28/20:  Just to add one more data point to the ongoing drama of what Trump didn't know and when didn't he know it, we now have the scandal of Russian intelligence paying a bounty to the Taliban for the murder of US soldiers. As usual, Trump missed the briefing, and the next briefing, and the one after that . . .

ONE MILLION CASES AND GROWING FAST

The official count of coronavirus or COVID-19 cases passed one million worldwide early today (4/2/20).** But that number is already out of date, since the count is growing by at least 70,000 per day. As I write this in the late afternoon, 20,000 more people have been diagnosed, and 6,000 have died. That's just today.

Wall Street in lockdown

(along with Main Street)

Credit: Dan Nguyen/Flickr

Tragically, the US is number one among the nations on this statistic.  Despite having less than 5 percent of the world's population, we've incurred nearly 25 percent of the COVID-19 cases, and 11 percent of the deaths. (One day after this posting, the US sped past a grim milestone--1000 COVID-19 deaths in a day).

Many factors are contributing to our unfortunate leadership in this area. Our healthcare system is focused on providing top-quality care to people who are well off or well insured, but lacks a comparable commitment to public health, In response to a problem that requires a  quick, coordinated, disciplined response, and a response that requires personal sacrifice, our national love of individualism and our more recent Ayn Randian valuation of putting oneself first certainly contributed.

Still, if we're going to assign responsibility for where we are today, an awful lot needs to go to our tweeter-in-chief, Donald Trump. As anyone whose memory has not been wiped clean by the Ministry of Truth knows. Trump treated the looming pandemic as--take your choice--a hoax, a Democrat scheme to discredit him, just like impeachment; as a threat to his re-election; as something totally under control; as an ordinary, relatively trivial event, like the flu; as another reason to close borders; as something that could be cleared away by Easter, and, even if it risked thousands of deaths, should not be allowed to upset the economy. With his narcissistic, impulsive and erratic leadership, the US was ill prepared, slow to respond, and still extremely spotty in dealing with this grave crisis.

By the way, the fact that even as thousands of Americans die every day--deaths that could have been prevented by prompt and well-informed leadership, Trump's approval ratings are approaching 50 percent suggests that the Ministry of Truth* is doing a bang-up job.

The big question is how we proceed from here. The US is still at the beginning of the epidemic. Nothing that we've done so far in the US has "flattened the curve." Instead, COVID-19 cases in the US are on a steeply rising exponential trajectory.  Experts tell us that social distancing--staying at home and avoiding as many contacts with other people as possible-- is crucial. So is hand washing. If everyone, sick, possibly sick or well, wears a face mask in public, that may help.

A separate, perhaps more crucial factor is testing as many people as possible in order to isolate people who are shedding the virus, along with tracking and isolating their contacts. Where this has been done, for example in South Korea, it has controlled the spread of the virus without shutting down the country, businesses and the economy. Again, unfortunately, the US lags far, far behind on testing.

What lies ahead is in our hands. A swift, strong, coordinated, nationwide attack on the virus can still save thousands or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of live. The two key questions are:

Will enough Americans wake up and do what's needed, or will half of them remain in the dark and asleep even as the plague surges towards them?

Will government, starting with Trump, get its act together, and in time?

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* For another example of Trump's Ministry of Truth revising history as we speak, click here.

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** The number of cases worldwide passed two million on 4/15/20. In other words, the global doubling time for the virus is around 13 days. We'll see if the enormous sacrifices that nations and individuals are making are making a difference. When will we suffer 4,000,000 cases?

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WHAT IF WE HAD A SOCIOPATHIC NARCISSISTIC AS PRESIDENT IN A TIME OF CRISIS?

If, God forbid, we had a sociopathic narcissist as President of the United States in a time of grave crisis, we might get a tweet like this:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!

As usual with Trump's tweets, there's a huge amount of nastiness, divisiveness, us-vs-them-ism, and a whopper or two to unpack. However, let's just focus on ". . . in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success."

In other words, what we do about the coronavirus pandemic should be determined by how it might impact him. That is pure narcissism.

Epidemiologists--experts who devote their lives to studying, understanding and modeling epidemics and pandemics--tell us that stringent steps now can beat this virus down to a manageable level in a month or two--as the Chinese and a few other countries have managed to do. That would allow our health system to continue to function, and researchers to develop treatments or a vaccine. This difficult-but-necessary choice might mean thousands of deaths in the US.

They also tell us that getting everyone back to work or "back to church" prematurely will let the virus expand exponentially. This is a concept Trump doesn't and probably can't understand, but maybe some of his followers can. Exponential means that today's 75,000 cases and 1000 deaths in a few months could be multiplied not by 10 or 100 or 1000, but possibly by 10,000. That's right, unleashed to rage unchecked through the US population, this coronavirus could kill 10,000,000 people.

You don't have to believe me. You can research this for yourself in these two crystal-clear articles:

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56

Any normal person faced with the choice between his own needs and the potential death of millions of people would put all those lives first. But a sociopath wouldn't. Much less a sociopathic narcissist.

But we'd never elect someone like that as President. And even if we did, sensible people, the "adults in the room," would step in to protect us. After all, we have the Constitution, Congress and the  Courts--all those carefully crafted checks and balances--to save us. Right?

Right?

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ABSOLUTE MUST READ CONCERNING THE CORONAVIRUS AND OUR RESPONSE TO IT

For clarity about the explosive spread of the coronavirus and how individuals, businesses and governments need to respond to it, NOW, please read these two articles:

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca

and

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56

The urgent steps that COULD separate the US from the exponential curves followed by South Korea, Italy and Iran are detailed in these two articles

Credit: Thomas Pueyo

These are by the far the most incisive, coherent and meaningful analyses of the coronoavirus pandemic that I've found. They are crystal clear about the realistic steps that can and must be taken to stop it, and why all of us--from individuals and families on up to the federal government--have to act decisively NOW.

The alternative is tens of millions of avoidable deaths.

Please read these two articles and send them on.

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For an independent expert opinion coming to the same conclusion, click here.

HOW MANY WILL DIE FROM THE CORONAVIRUS IN THE US? TWO INTERACTIVE CALCULATORS TO SEE FOR YOURSELF

The math is simple. Plug in what percentage of US citizens will eventually catch the virus and what percent of those will die. The New York Times provides a convenient--and very sobering--calculator so you you can see for yourself. Just click here.

This is the enemy--Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2

Credit: NIAID//RML

If 40 percent get the disease and just 1 percent or them die, the coronavirus will kill more Americans this year than heart disease and cancer--the two leading causes of death--combined.

At least to some extent both variables are under our control. The number of people who contract the disease can be limited by our personal behavior and by mandated closures and quarantines. Having tests available to quickly identify carriers of the disease and their contacts is crucial. Unfortunately, the US lags far behind other countries on this critical factor. The percentage of infected people who die depends on the availability and quality of health care for them, and, in particular, keeping the number of cases at any given time within the capacity of the health care system.

We can only hope that we, as individuals and through our local, state and federal governments, will rise to this enormous challenge. If not, many of us will fall.

A sobering and urgent note: In the extremely important article here, you'll find a more detailed interactive calculator. You can see that in the United States, the difference between doing nothing to stop the pandemic and a strict and effective nationwide intervention NOW could mean the difference between 10,000,000 deaths and 4,000 deaths! Before you decide that that sounds crazy, read the article.

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Note 3/30/20:  In this comparison of coronavirus cases in New York vs California, you can see what difference even a few days lag in imposing strict stay-at-home orders makes. California--population 39.5 million, first state to impose strict controls: current # of cases 6358, deaths 132. New York--population 19.5 million, delayed a week before imposing controls: current # of cases 60,679, deaths 1063. The number of cases per population in NY is 19 times greater than in California, and the number of deaths per population 17 times greater. What a tragic difference a week's delay makes.

ANIMATED GRAPH OF ATMOSPHERIC CO2 OVER THE LAST 800000 YEARS AND INTO THE FUTURE

The animated graph linked to below is well worth watching--several times, slowing it down at the end:

https://mobile.twitter.com/OceansClimateCU/status/1237069561364545537?s=20&utm_source=NSDAY&utm_campaign=19fa2fe1ef-NSDAY_110320&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1254aaab7a-19fa2fe1ef-373908631

Credit for the above goes to Kris Karnauskas, who leads the Oceans and Climate Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

If we follow the steepest two curves, it really will be the end.

This graph credit: Wikimedia Commons

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HOW GOOD IS EXERCISE FOR SENIORS? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS!

A new review of reviews of the benefits of exercise tells us that exercise is as close as we're likely to get to a panacea.

Seniors exercising

Credit: Asahia/Wikimedia Commons

Writing in the Scandanavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, an international team of researchers reviewed all of the highest quality reviews and meta-analyses to date on the relationship between exercise and health in people in their sixties or older. The smallest group studied comprised 855 individuals, while the largest study tracked more than 400,000. The results are impressive:

If you're 60 or more and physically active, compared to your less-active peers, you're:

     22 percent less likely to die from any cause during a comparable time period

     25 to 40 percent less likely die from cardiovascular disease

     12 percent less likely to develop breast or prostate cancer

     29 to 39 percent less likely to fracture a bone

     50 percent less likely to become disabled (unable to perform basic activities              of daily living)

     26 to 38 percent less likely to experience cognitive decline or impairment

     32 to 42 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer's Disease

     14 to 21 percent less likely to develop some other kind of dementia

     17 to 21 percent less likely to suffer from depression

      and significantly more likely to experience healthy aging, a better
      quality of life and more years spent in good mental and physical health.

To some extent, the range of outcomes comes from different studies using different criteria. However, for most of these relationships, more exercise produced better outcomes. The researchers conclude that any amount of physical activity has some benefit, but recommend at least 75 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous physical activity.

"Physical activity plays a key role in the 'compression of morbidity,'" the authors write, "decreasing the time spent in ill-health as people age and ensuring that an increase in life expectancy is also an increase in life-time spent in good health."

Not a bad payoff for investing at 10 to 15 minutes a day exercising.

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TRUMP TO ATTACK SANCTUARY CITIES

The New York Times reported today that the Trump administration is planning to deploy heavily armed border patrol tactical units to hunt down and capture undocumented people in sanctuary cities.

In normal times, these highly trained, heavily armed units are used near the border to deal with equally heavily armed, highly dangerous individuals or groups, such as gangs of drug or arms smugglers.

Coming soon to a sanctuary city near you

Credit: James Tourtellotte

Now, cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles that have defied Trump by declaring themselves to be sanctuaries for undocumented people, will see these tactical units working side by side with ICE to enforce Trump and Stephen Miller's draconian immigration policies.

There's no doubt that this will play well with Trump's base. Images of uniformed, armored squads "taking down" immigrants whom Trump's true believers have been conditioned to fear and hate will provide visceral proof that tough guy Trump is making America great again.

For me, it brings to mind the aphorism, attributed to psychologist Abraham Maslow, that if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. These special tactical units are hammers, trained and primed to strike. When they are deployed against ordinary people in the heart of our cities, innocent people will die. It's just a matter of time.

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EARTH'S VITAL SIGNS: THREE VERY SCARY GRAPHS

For anyone who is not being paid or propagandized to deny global heating, these three graphs say everything that needs to be said:

 Atmospheric CO2 over the last 800,000 years

Credit: NASA

Atmospheric CO2 over the last 60 years

Note that the rate of increase is speeding up!

Credit: ESRL

 Credit: NASA GISS

By the way, today--2/12/20--the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory clocked the highest ever concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere--416.08 parts per million (ppm). Scientists tell us that the safe level is 350 ppm or less.

And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that Earth just experienced the hottest January on record.

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A SPOT OF GOOD ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS FROM THE UK

Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced this week that the UK will ban the sale of all gas- or diesel-burning cars by 2035--5 years earlier than previously planned, and just 15 years from now.

UK going green

Credit: NRMA

It's a bold goal, but, as critics point out, implementation will require major improvements in the UK's power generation and distribution system, as well as specific rules and regulations to encourage what remains a huge transition.

Still, supporters explain, every step towards this impressive target will provide significant environmental and health benefits.

We need all the good news we can find, environmental or otherwise, so kudos to Boris and the UK.

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BEWARE A WOUNDED NARCISSIST

Back in May, 2017, I posted an essay entitled "L'etat c'est moi--Trump's identity problem." In it I pointed out that, as a narcissist, Trump would be unable to distinguish between himself and the nation.

I wrote, "It's safe to assume that to a narcissistic ruler, there are no boundaries between himself and his realm. The poster child for this, at least until now, has been Louis XIV of France. He's famous for proclaiming, 'L'etat? L'etat c'est moi,'--The State? I am the State.'"

Beware a wounded narcissist

Credit: Flickr

Under the stress of impeachment, this enormous flaw in Trump's character could not have been clearer. Here's what he said at the National Prayer Breakfast just after the Senate found him not guilty: "As everybody knows, my family, our great country, and your president have been put through a terrible ordeal by some very dishonest and corrupt people. They have done everything possible to destroy us and by so doing, very badly hurt our nation."

In his mind, to criticize him is to criticize the nation. And of course, anyone who dares to criticize him is necessarily dishonest and corrupt. I suspect that it will not be long before he labels his critics as traitors. And, among his millions of devoted followers, there will be many who will take this not just as permission, but as a call to action.

As I wrote in that essay, the safest way to deal with a wounded and enraged narcissist is to walk away, get as far away as possible from their black-hole-like sphere of influence. Unfortunately, with Trump as president and with a Senate that has now told him that he can do no wrong, that's no longer an option for any of us.

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A SOBERING STATISTIC: ALCOHOL-RELATED DEATHS IN US HAVE DOUBLED SINCE 1999

By analyzing death certificates, researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) in Bethesda, Maryland, found that the rate of alcohol-related deaths in the US increased by 50 percent between 1999 and 2017 and the number of alcohol-related deaths per year doubled. This new research adds to the growing body of evidence that the mental, physical and social well-being of Americans is deteriorating.

 Alcohol-related deaths in US have doubled since 1999

Photo credit: Pixabay

Neuroscientist Aaron White and colleagues at the NIAAA analyzed data taken from all death certificates filed in the US between 1999 and 2017. Using listed causes of death and contributing factors they found that the rate of alcohol-related deaths of Americans 16 years old or older rose from 16.9 to 25.5 per 100,000 and the number of deaths per year doubled, from 35,914 to 72,558. Alcohol caused or contributed to the death of 944,880 Americans during that 18-year span. Their findings were published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

"Rates increased for all age-groups except 160 to 20 and 75+," the researchers write, "and for all racial and ethnic groups except for initial decreases among Hispanic males and [Non-Hispanic] Blacks followed by increases."

Almost every group was impacted. The sharpest increase was among Non-Hispanic White women. Rates of acute alcohol-related deaths rose most among people aged 55 to 64, while death rates from chronic alcohol use surged most in younger people, aged 25 to 34, and accounted for the majority of alcohol-related deaths.

As worrisome as these documented trends are, the authors point out that previous research has shown that death certificates understate what's really happening; the actual number of alcohol-related deaths is likely significantly higher than they were able to document.

The authors of this paper don't speculate about the causes of this trend. We know that they are part of the growing number of "deaths from despair" that have characterized the US for the past decades. Other researchers cite both economic and social disparities and declines  as at least part of the cause. Needless to say, it's a multifaceted problem and requires an equally multifaceted set of solutions. However, until the current political balance shifts in Washington, the dislocations and inequities that underline this tragic slide are not likely to be acknowledged or addressed.

CLIMATE CHANGE "FINGERPRINTS" NOW VISIBLE IN GLOBAL WEATHER EVERY DAY

Talk about thinking outside the box--

For decades now, climate scientists have worked to detect and measure the signal of human-caused climate change over time. They've revealed and warned us about changes in important variables such as atmospheric CO2, sea level and global average temperature; profound changes, but ones that take place over decades.

Climate change deniers, up to and including President Trump, have jumped on the fact that these incremental changes are swamped by much larger local daily and seasonal variability, making it difficult to link climate change to the weather people actually experience--with the fairly recent exception of super-storms or other extreme weather events that would have been extremely unlikely in the absence of global warming.

Now, a team of Swiss and Norweigian researchers has broken the mold. What would they see, they wondered, if they looked at variables such as temperature and humidity across space--the whole Earth--rather than over time. They were prompted to pursue this question by one of Trump's tweets using a major cold spell that hit much of the US to try to ridicule global warming.

"This lead to a lively debate about whether a single day could be informative at all about climate change," says climate scientist Reto Knutti, part of the Swiss-Norwegian research team. "Weather is not climate, yet we are seeing the imprint of climate change now in some single events, e.g. in the frequency of strong heatwaves. But what about the weather on an average day? Could we detect climate change in a single year, a month, a day?"

The answer they found is astonishing. Just by analyzing weather patterns across the globe they were able to detect the fingerprints of climate change on every day's weather since 2012.

Climate scientists can now detect signals of global warming in any day's weather

Image credit: NASA/MODIS

"Global weather is now in uncharted territory," says Knutti. "While locally of course we need a few decades for a signal to emerge from variability, the global information allows us to now detect climate change for any single day since early 2012."

The team used artificial intelligence (AI) to extract indicative patterns from the enormous mass of daily weather data around the globe. They could then test for the probability that the pattern for any given day could have appeared in the absence of climate change.

The daily weather patterns that most powerfully reveal the impact of climate change involve the global distribution of air temperature and humidity. Both variables were more pronounced over oceans than over land masses, and in the tropics compared to higher latitudes.

In retrospect, it may not be surprising that the cumulative heating effect of many decades of climate change is visible in the day-to-day distribution of temperatures across the globe. However, the researchers also found that they could still detect a strong climate change fingerprint in any given day's weather even without looking at temperature--simply from the pattern of atmospheric moisture around the world. "If we include humidity," says Knutti, "we can even detect climate change when we remove the global mean [temperature] signal for every single day, i.e. just by looking at the patterns."

If there was still any legitimate doubt that we humans have changed and are continuing to change the climate and the weather, this new way of charting the relationship between climate and weather should erase it.

Knutti writes, "In the last full IPCC report in 2013 we have shown that humans are the dominant cause of the long-term warming." We now demonstrate that since then we haven't had a single day of 'normal' weather globally. Yesterday was climate change, today is climate change, and tomorrow will be as well. We think this is a powerful message."

We couldn't agree more. The question is, is it powerful enough to get through to the deliberately deaf ears of our leaders?

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You can access the Nature Climate Change article describing this research here.

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NEW EVIDENCE: EXERCISE BOOSTS YOUR BRAIN

We all know that exercise is good for us, and if done right can build muscles, physical strength and cardiovascular fitness. Now new evidence is emerging that physical exercise is good for our brains as well.

Publishing in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, a group of physicians and epidemiologists at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases detail a large study measuring and comparing the cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) and brain volume of 2103 German women and men between the ages of 21 and 84. The researchers found that fitter participants had significantly greater brain volume than their less-fit peers.

Physical fitness may also boosts brain fitness
Photo credit: Michael (Mike) L. Baird

Interestingly, highly detailed magnetic resonance images (MRIs) of the participant's brains showed that the parts of the brain that benefitted most from increased fitness were not areas associated with movement or coordination, but instead areas involved in thinking and--seniors take note--memory. The effects on the hippocampus, crucial for memory, were especially strong in older participants.

"This is another piece of the puzzle showing physical activity and physical fitness is protective against aging-related cognitive decline," says Michael Joyner, a Mayo Clinic anesthesiologist. He and two Mayo Clinic colleagues wrote an editorial to accompany the research report. They note that while previous research has linked exercise, physical fitness, blood flow to the brain, and cognitive functioning, this is the first research to show beneficial changes to the grey matter of the brain.
". . . these data are encouraging," says Clifford Jack Jr., a neuroradiologist at Mayo Clinic. "The findings regarding cardiorespiratory fitness and certain brain structures are unique."

You can read an earlier zerospinzone post about research linking exercise and brain connectivity here.

The new study's authors point out that while their cross-sectional research clearly showed that CRF and brain volume and structure are correlated, it can't prove cause and effect-- ". . . reverse causation (i.e., individuals with greater brain volumes have higher CRF) cannot be excluded," they write.

Even with that caveat, the researchers and the Mayo Clinic commentators conclude that these findings justify large-scale studies that follow participants over time to see if exercise and improved physical fitness actually help preserve grey matter in aging brains, or possibly even stimulate growth in regions of the brain such as the frontal lobes or hippocampus.

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You can access the full research paper and editorial commentary at this link. 

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ONE MORE DEGREE COULD TRIGGER A COLLAPSE OF GREENLAND'S ICE SHEET

The latest and best reconstruction of temperatures near Greenland over that last 450,000 years shows that much of Greenland's vast ice sheet could melt from sustained warming of less than one degree. That means that the world risks triggering a devastating 7 meters (23 feet) of sea-level rise before the end of this century.

 Greenland Ice Sheet at Risk

Credit: cake@cake0

Writing in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers at the University of Bergen, Norway, and at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, analyze 450,000 years of sea surface temperatures off the coast of Greenland. They were able to track four interglacial (warm) periods, during one of which Greenland's southern ice sheet completely disappeared. During that 30,000-year-long warm period centered around 400,000 years ago, temperatures were only slightly higher than they are today--within one degree C--and well within the projections of climate models for the end of this century--if we continue on a business-as-usual trajectory.

Comparing the four warm periods it became clear that the amount of warming was not the only factor impacting how much of Greenland's ice melted. The other key was the duration of the warming. Even with temperatures just 0.8 degrees C warmer than today, the longer duration of the warm period centered around 400,000 years ago led to almost complete melting of Greenland's southern ice sheet.

According to the authors, their findings support climate models that find a tipping point somewhere between 0.8 and 3.2 degrees C warmer than today, beyond which melting of Greenland's ice sheet is inevitable even if temperatures go back down. Paleoclimatologist Nil Irvali, at the University of Bergen, explains that the tipping point occurs when melting reduces the altitude of the ice surface to the point where the even-warmer temperatures at the lower elevation guarantees runaway melting. "The elevation effect becomes dominant over time," she says, "melting accelerates, and may even continue even though the climate cools again."

The risk, she clarifies, is not that the Greenland Ice Sheet will melt before the end of the century, but that by the end of the century atmospheric warming caused by a continuation of current policies and emissions could easily trigger irreversible melting and an eventual, and devastating, 7-meter sea-level rise.

Actually, Irvali points out, it's even worse than that, since both atmospheric carbon dioxide and warmer ocean waters have extremely long lifetimes. "It is also important to note that CO2 we put into the atmosphere will have a long lifetime even if we cut emissions, and as more and more heat accumulates in the ocean it commits us to a longer timescale of warming," she says, "So our current activities will impact climate for millennia to come."

The authors conclude, "Notably, the critical temperature threshold for past [Greenland Ice Sheet] decay will likely be surpassed this century. The duration for which this threshold is exceeded will determine Greenland's fate."

To which we must add, and the fate of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of people worldwide.**

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**In case this paleo-historical study seems too theoretical, recent observations by a completely different set of researchers show that Greenland is losing ice 7 times faster than it was two decades ago, in line with the IPCC's worst-case scenario, putting some 400 million people at risk of coastal flooding by 2100.

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POLIO STRIKES BACK--ERADICATION ENDGAME SURPRISINGLY DIFFICULT

This has been a very mixed year for the global polio eradication campaign.

What the global polio eradication campaign

wants never to happen again

The good news is that two of the three strains of wild poliovirus have been conquered; they no longer exist except in laboratories.

The mixed news is that the remaining wild poliovirus only exists in two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, the number of cases in both countries, especially in Pakistan, has been higher than in 2018. The two countries suffered 125 cases of polio compared to just 33 last year, 101 of those in Pakistan. In both countries, strife, insecurity and anti-vacccination propaganda and rumors have enabled the virus to hold on.

The bad news is that the number of people--mostly children--sickened by poliovirus that has mutated back to a virulent form from the live-but-attenuated polio vaccine has more than doubled since 2018. This back-mutation only occurs in one person out of an estimated 2.8 million, but since 450 million children are getting the attenuated vaccine every year, a significant number of cases are inevitable as long as the oral vaccine remains in wide use--unless the surrounding population has a very high rate of "herd immunity." There were 241 such cases in 2019 vs. just 104 in 2018.

The solution is complex, but at hand. In part, it depends on the rapid release of an oral vaccine against the type 2 poliovirus, which is expected to be less likely to mutate to a virulent form. You can read about the global polio endgame strategy here. Plans and resources are in place to make this transition, and the intense, decades-long global campaign to wipe out this deadly disease once and for all will succeed, even if not quite as quickly as hoped.

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REA