29 December 21
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I like to think that is still a role I can play. And I am deeply appreciative of this venue and all of you in joining me on our walk into the future.
All this being said, the end of a year does provide a moment to take stock of where we have been, and where we may be going - as individuals, communities, nations, and as a planet. We will have plenty of opportunity in the weeks and months ahead to delve into the details of our challenges. But for the sake of our discussion today, let us focus on one particular lens through which to measure our times: health.
It is commonplace to wish each other a healthy and happy new year. And for good reason.
Without health, so many aspects of life can quickly transform from joys to struggles, or even sorrows. Our ability to spend time with friends and family, to be independent, to work, move about, and take the future for granted is all undermined without health. As we age, these realities become increasingly difficult to ignore. My wife Jean and I speak often of the TR we have - the “time remaining.” But in truth one rarely knows which year will be one’s last.
The purpose here is not to be morbid, but rather to reflect on the fickleness of life, and health, and the need to protect it jealously whenever possible.
With this pandemic, we have seen health shattered at a societal level that is almost impossible to comprehend, let alone accept - over 800,000 dead in the United States and well over 5 million worldwide. Both numbers are mind boggling. Both numbers are likely undercounts. Both numbers are guaranteed to spike further. And this doesn’t measure all the other suffering that has come in the wake, those still struggling with long Covid, with lost loved ones, lost jobs, lost schooling, lost gatherings, lost hope. And a pandemic doesn’t erase all the other health challenges people face, from heart disease, to cancer, to mental health, and the myriad other ways in which our bodies and minds succumb to the ravages of illness and trauma.
When we speak of health, we should be as expansive as possible. The perils of our personal, communal, and public health are matched by fragility in the health of our democratic institutions. Dangerous assaults on the rule of law, our global environment, and our social cohesion have worsened the well-being of our body politic.
We can find specific threats to our health from school shootings and other gun violence almost daily. But we can also find threats to the health of our nation in the ugly clashes over what we teach in our classrooms. Our health is hampered by inequality in medical care, and also by our lack of a suitable response to disparities of income. The two of course are related. When our personal strength fails, we become more vulnerable, and that is also true when we do not replenish the strength and resilience of our national infrastructure.
In our political calendar, the nation gets a check-up of sorts on all these health metrics when the president addresses Congress in January for the State of the Union. Depending on the times, and depending on the president, these speeches can vary considerably. A natural tendency for happy talk prevails, as it serves a president’s personal political interest to exude optimism. But such moments of choral applause cannot escape the intrusive pull of the times, the day-to-day endurance of what is going on out here in America. One wonders what President Biden will say later next month. Omicron likely will still be surging. What seems less clear is the state of his legislative agenda.
President Biden, who lost a son to cancer and a wife and daughter to a car accident, knows personally how mercurial health can be. One of the powers he has had to connect with others relates to how he can sincerely share the agonies of grief. He will be speaking to a nation that feels it is losing something central to its soul, on top of all the other loss that is taking place. I hope he speaks candidly about the pain and anxieties so many are feeling. I hope he names the varied social, political, and physical illnesses we face, and how he plans to address them.
At the same time, as I have mentioned in this forum, I think it is incumbent upon those with privilege to recognize our own responsibilities to help heal the ailing conditions we see around us. When we survey the world in which we live, one must recognize how many people are struggling with disease, fear, economic need, hunger, homelessness, and any of the long list of other ordeals that afflict humanity. The health of a society means responding to the struggles of others as part of our shared responsibility. We who can help should echo President Kennedy’s 1961 Inaugural call to action, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”
This is a time of year when I try to embrace a sense of gratitude, humility, and modesty. I understand, as I like to say, that these are not qualities one usually associates with current or former television news anchors. But I am truly touched by all that I see around me. For despite the challenges we face, I see many taking up the call for action, refusing to let injustices persist. I see personal sacrifice. I see resilience. I see healing. I see hope.
My final request for all of you is please attend to what you need to do to preserve your own health as much as possible in the year ahead. There will be times that will likely challenge your faith in the future. There will be outrages, and possibly outright fear. Sadness and struggle seem almost inevitable, despite the efforts of many to help.
But to be human must also mean nurturing the joys of life, a talk with a friend, holding hands with a partner, a great book, a funny movie, a sunset, a hike, rooting for your favorite sports team, a smile from a grandchild, and so many more. Seek out these moments. Hold on to them, dearly. Embrace them - for your own health, and for the health of our world
Happy New Year. May the year head be one of health for you and all who are close to you. And may it be a year of better health for our nation and our planet.
Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) at the Capitol. (photo: Francis Chung/E&E News)
There has been news of possible coordination between Jan. 6th rioters and members of Congress reported by Rolling Stone. Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri has an idea to nip this in the bud once and for all. In a tweet, Bush calls on Congress to pass her House Resolution on the anniversary to expel any members of Congress who were involved.
We should commemorate the 1-year-anniversary of January 6th by passing my H.Res 25 to investigate and expel the members of Congress who helped incite the violent insurrection at our Capitol.
— Congresswoman Cori Bush (@RepCori) December 27, 2021
So what is H.Res [House Resolution] 25, you ask? It was co-authored with other prominent House Democrats, including New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar.
According to Newsweek:
The text of H.Res 25 outlines a procedure for “directing the Committee on Ethics to investigate, and issue a report on, whether any and all actions taken by Members of the 117th Congress who sought to overturn the 2020 Presidential election violated their oath of office...and should face sanction, including removal from the House of Representatives.”
The text also notes a number of efforts by Republicans in Congress to try invalidating President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. This includes “the decision...to join efforts to invalidate votes in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin suppresses the votes of millions of people,” as well as “refusing to concede the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election and raising baseless allegations of fraud in States in which Black, Brown, and Indigenous people have been instrumental to the election outcome,” according to the bill.
Bush introduced the house resolution on Jan. 11th of last year. What Bush said in a statement echoes the same tone she has today:
“We must hold these Republicans accountable for their role in this Insurrection at our nation’s Capitol as part of a racist attempt to overturn the election results,” the statement continued. “There is no place in the People’s House for these heinous actions.”
The House committee’s investigation is still ongoing, digging through the underbelly of that day and the weeks and months leading up to it. While many arrests, jail sentences, and subpoenas are being issued, there’s still the elephant in the room and that is Congress. There’s no way you can have a functioning government if people who cheered as rioters put their feet up on congressional desks and issued threats are still present.
The fear is as this drags out and there are no consequences given, it’s just going to embolden people to try it again. And we’ll have people on the inside who will open the door for them. It’s not a tomorrow problem; it’s a yesterday emergency.
People wait in line at a testing site to receive a free COVID-19 PCR test in Washington, D.C. On Monday, the CDC announced that people can isolate for five days, instead of 10, after they've tested positive for the coronavirus and have no symptoms. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty)
The change in guidance released Monday was "motivated by science demonstrating that the majority of SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs early in the course of illness," according to the CDC.
CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky says the change was also motivated by economic and societal concerns. "With a really large anticipated number of cases [from omicron], we also want to make sure we can keep the critical functions of society open and operating," she told NPR on Tuesday. "We can't take science in a vacuum. We have to put science in the context of how it can be implemented in a functional society."
Public health experts say a shorter isolation period may be reasonable at this point in the pandemic, but they say the agency's new guidance is problematic because it relies on people's self-judgment to assess their transmission risk — and could lead to more spread and more COVID-19 cases if people aren't careful.
"The CDC is right. The vast majority of the transmissions happen in the first couple of days after the onset of symptoms ... but the data shows that about 20 to 40% of people are still going to be able to transmit COVID after five days," says Dr. Emily Landon, an infectious disease specialist at UChicago Medicine. "Is that person [leaving isolation after five days] really safe to carpool with or have close contact with or have them take care of your unvaccinated kids?"
Mask adherence is essential to this policy being effective, Landon says. The guidance assumes that people will wear a mask for five days after coming out of isolation if infected, and for 10 days if they were exposed to a positive case. But mask compliance in the U.S. is generally low.
"Many people will wear their masks on their chins or below their noses, which is useless for preventing transmission," says Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at the NYU School of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital, who previously served as a COVID-19 adviser to President Biden.
Gounder and Landon are among a chorus of public health experts who think the guidance relies too heavily on the honor system.
"We should really be using objective concrete measures to decide whether somebody needs to continue being in isolation, such as rapid antigen testing," Gounder says. Testing would help indicate whether a person still has a significant amount of spreadable virus in their upper airways.
Others were more blunt: "CDC's new guidance to drop isolation of positives to 5 days without a negative test is reckless," tweeted Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist and chief scientific officer at eMed. "I absolutely don't want to sit next to someone who turned [positive] five days ago and hasn't tested [negative]."
The guidance doesn't require a negative test to leave isolation or quarantine – it says to test "if possible" after five days if you were exposed. However, this comes at a time when COVID-19 tests are in short supply. People are queueing up at malls and around city blocks, sometimes for hours, to get tested. Rapid tests are out of stock on pharmacy shelves and online.
Gounder sees the absence of a testing requirement in these updated CDC guidelines as an "example of scarcity determining policy." The tests could work, she says — but there are just not enough tests readily available.
The CDC's Walensky defended the new COVID-19 recommendations in an interview with NPR on Tuesday. "We're trusting [people] to get the test to begin with, we're trusting them to stay home and to isolate for those first five days, we're trusting them to protect one another and wear a mask in those last five days, and we're trusting them to include their symptoms as part of that calculus," she said. "I think we, as a society, need to trust people to follow all of the components of this guidance."
Despite the administration's emphasis on COVID-19 vaccines and boosters, the guidelines make little distinction between the vaccinated and unvaccinated, "who are clearly facing very different pandemics at the moment," says Dr. Aaron Caroll, a pediatrician at Indiana University.
"Vaccinated people are much less likely to get infected and less likely to be infectious for a long period of time," he says. With that in mind, he thinks the CDC should have tailored the guidelines to distinguish between those who are protected by vaccines and those who are not.
Still, some experts say the new recommendations are a useful step forward. "I think they're prudent," says Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. " I think they're based on data from the omicron variant from South Africa, and they make sense." The guidance follows a similar policy update in the U.K., which shortened its isolation requirements during the omicron surge, though the U.K.'s policy has a testing requirement for ending self-isolation.
The CDC's guidance updates come at the end of a long first month with the omicron variant. State and industry leaders have pushed for a reduced isolation period, blaming the lengthy at-home stay for worker shortages that have led to thousands of canceled flights, postponed sports games and events and restaurant closures.
The change in guidance to the public expands on reduced isolation and quarantine periods for health care workers introduced last week. Where there are staffing shortages, the CDC recommends that infected workers isolate for five days before returning. In crisis times, they say workers should go to work even if they're sick with COVID-19.
"I don't know a lot of people that feel super comfortable with this decision," says Saskia Popescu, a hospital epidemiologist and assistant professor at George Mason University. On the one hand, health care staff wear high-quality masks at work, making them unlikely to transmit infections to patients. On the other hand, they can't wear masks all the time.
"They still need to eat. They still need to drink. They need to take breaks." Hospitals will need to think through the risks of the policy when deciding whether to implement it, she says.
While the new guidance may have room for improvement, ultimately the bigger problem is people who aren't paying attention to public health guidance at all, Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, chief medical executive for the state of Michigan, told NPR on Tuesday.
"What I'm more concerned about in places like Michigan are people who are continuing on with their lives as though there is no pandemic," she said. It's the people who are unvaccinated, not testing and not masking that are driving the current surge, she said.
Workers who quit or are fired for cause are not eligible for unemployment, but these Republican governors like Florida's Ron DeSantis have carved out exceptions for those who refuse the vaccine. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
In other words, Republicans are rewarding people for refusing the vaccine.
This is insanity. In the midst of an uptick in a deadly pandemic, it is absolutely ludicrous to give people an incentive to refuse to the vaccine. And if you tell me that benefits do not incentivize behavior, allow me to direct your attention to the many Republicans who have spent their careers arguing that unemployment incentivizes laziness.
Indeed, it is not only insanity for Republicans to be expanding these benefits; it is hypocritical insanity. After all, not so long ago Republican states cut unemployment benefits because, they thought, they encouraged people not to find jobs. "Transitioning away from this benefit will help meet the demands of small and large businesses who are ready to hire and expand their workforce," said a Florida government official in June, 2021.
In other words, first they tried to take benefits away to incentivize people going out and finding a job, and now they are offering benefits to people who have chosen to walk away from a job over a life saving vaccine. And here I thought Republicans were all about letting Americans run their business without government interference!
Republicans claim that they want to make the COVID vaccine a matter of choice. Kansas State Legislature President, Ty Masterson, for example, tweeted that the "pathway out of this pandemic is paved in freedom, which means trusting individual Kansans to make decisions for themselves and their families." But if the pathway to safety is indeed "paved in freedom," why stop with COVID vaccines? There are many other government mandates that stand in the way of freedom.
Seatbelts, for example: Most states have mandatory seatbelt laws (New Hampshire is the exception) for adults. All states mandate that children must be buckled in. But if you say, as one Washington, DC, parent did about schools mandating a COVID vaccine, "it should be my husband's and my choice—not theirs," why not make seatbelts subject to parental choice as well? Shouldn't we trust parents to know and do what's best for their children?
Each state also requires that children receive various vaccines (polio, chicken pox, measles, mumps and rubella) before entering kindergarten. But Republican logic says that should parents have the right to not immunize their kids. Maybe another polio epidemic results, but that's the price of freedom, it seems!
Moreover, by their logic, if getting a vaccine is a matter of choice, shouldn't hospitals and health insurance companies have the choice to refuse treatment to people who get sick because they refused the vaccine? Shouldn't they have the freedom to prioritize breakthrough cases and other, non-COVID related illnesses and diseases?
Republicans, after all, are supposed to favor holding people accountable for their behavior. Should an increasingly rare ICU bed go to someone who acted responsibly? Or irresponsibly?
These choices are going to be made one way or another. The situation is getting desperate. Recently, six Cleveland area hospitals placed a full-page ad in the Plain Dealer begging for help because they are overwhelmed with COVID patients—and the overwhelming majority were unvaccinated. By federal law, all emergency rooms must treat all patients, regardless of their status. Perhaps this mandate, too, should go and it should be up to the individual doctor's, or the individual hospital's choice to treat or not treat.
There is no doubt that COVID vaccines prevent hospitalization and death, which makes the Republican move to incentivize vaccine refusal especially perverse. The sad fact is that COVID outcomes tracks the political map. Republican states that voted for Donald Trump like Arkansas, Florida, and Iowa have far higher COVID death rates than blue states which voted for Biden.
Refuse the vaccine, as the Republican legislatures seem to incentivize their constituents to do, and your chances of a very bad ending if you get COVID skyrocket.
The pathway out of the pandemic is not "paved in freedom" for these states; it's paved in gravestones.
Which is the most perverse result of all. In their drive to oppose any and all Democratic policies, Republicans are leading their followers to an early grave. Truly, the Republican Party has turned into a death cult.
17-year-old Cedric Lofton died in police custody. (photo: unknown)
The cause of death was “complications of cardiopulmonary arrest sustained after physical struggle while restrained in the prone position.”
The findings contradict a preliminary autopsy report which suggested that 17-year-old Cedric Lofton didn't suffer life-threatening injuries prior to his September death while being held at the youth facility.
The autopsy released this week from the Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Center cites a law enforcement timeline and unreleased video of the incident, and paints a disturbing portrait of the final moments of Lofton’s life.
Authorities arrested Lofton in Wichita on Sept. 24 after he began “exhibiting erratic and aggressive behavior toward his foster family,” according to the report. Police then brought the teenager to the Sedgwick County Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center. After Lofton reportedly began fighting with staff at the juvenile center in the early morning hours, the teen's ankles were shackled, he was rolled onto his abdomen, and his wrists were handcuffed behind his back at 5:08 a.m.
The autopsy said that Lofton “calmed down” and made “occasional snoring sounds,” but four minutes later, staff members couldn't find a pulse, began chest compressions, and called for emergency medical assistance. Lofton remained unconscious and died two days later in a local hospital. The autopsy also said that Lofton tested positive for coronavirus at the time of his death.
Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Timothy S. Gorrill declared in the autopsy that the cause of death was “complications of cardiopulmonary arrest sustained after physical struggle while restrained in the prone position.”
The prone position—laying someone facedown on their stomach while restrained—has been linked to several deaths of individuals in police custody, including the murder of George Floyd. Former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murder in Floyd’s death.
After the autopsy report became public on Monday, the lawyers for Lofton's family released a statement urging the county district attorney's office to “pursue criminal charges against the law enforcement personnel responsible for Cedric’s death.”
“These individuals unjustifiably and with excessive and unreasonable force pinned Cedric to the ground, ultimately killing the unarmed, 135-pound, 17-year-old African American teenager,” wrote attorneys Steven Hart and Andrew M. Stroth. “This is a tragedy of epic proportions! These senseless killings by authorities must stop! Cedric and his family deserved better. Cedric’s family will not rest until they have secured justice for him.”
State and local authorities have said there is an active investigation into the death of Cedric Lofton and that they are reviewing the autopsy results. The corrections employees allegedly involved in the incident have been placed on paid administrative leave this week until local authorities finish their investigation.
The release of the autopsy Monday has led to renewed calls for the release of video that reportedly show what happened inside the juvenile center.
Wichita Vice Mayor Brandon Johnson has seen some of the police body camera footage before Lofton entered the juvenile center, but was left with additional questions related to the teens death and called for more transparency in the case on Tuesday.
“How did those injuries get sustained? How did he get to a point where he wasn’t breathing,” asked Johnson, in an interview with local media. “I think oftentimes, we fear releasing videos because, you know, of what that might do in the community for some, but I think for everybody else, it’s, you know, if a mistake was made, own up to it, show us, and then do something about it.”
Abubakar Yangulbaev, a lawyer with the Committee for the Prevention of Torture was detained by authorities this week. (photo: Facebook)
Human rights lawyer who was tortured by the Chechen regime told The Daily Beast his extended family was kidnapped to try and shut him up. Then he was taken too.
The latest spate of raids against critics and bloggers began last week. Men and women were snatched and disappeared without trace. In many instances, the only “crime” committed by those taken away and detained illegally was being related to human rights defenders or critics of the regime.
Abubakar Yangulbaev, a lawyer with the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, told The Daily Beast that he had been “worried sick” by Christmas Eve as he struggled to get in touch with more than 30 members of his own family.
“I constantly checked Telegram channels, saw terrible news that all Yanbungalayevs had been abducted, as well as many Musayevs from my mother’s side of the family,” he said.
By Christmas Day, the scale of the horror had been confirmed. “My dear aunts, my uncles, my cousins disappeared; I learned from Telegram channels, that the abductors took cellphones from them, so I published a post with a photograph of my family members on Saturday and officially appealed to the Investigative Committee,” Yangulbaev, 29, told The Daily Beast in an interview on Monday.
The following morning, he was taken too.
Oleg Khabibrakhmanov, a public investigator of human rights violations at the committee where Yangulbaev works, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday: “This morning officials from the Chechen Center to Prevent Extremism or simply political police came to search Abubakar Yangulbaev’s home in the city of Kislovodsk; they detained Yangulbaev and took him to a police station in Pyatigorsk. So far our lawyer, who is right outside the door of the police station, has not been allowed to see his client. Our biggest fear is that they will move Yangulbaev to Chechnya, where we constantly see police violating authority.”
Russia’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture NGO says the current list of “disappeared” people includes more than 50 names, including Yangulbaev’s family. “Our lawyers and observers searched homes and police stations in Grozny and Urus-Martan region with the names of the abducted,” Magomed Alamov, a human rights defender at the committee told The Daily Beast. “Only one police station said that they had none of these people among their arrested, others sent our lawyer away without any answer.”
Yangulbaev said he left Chechnya after being tortured with electric shocks along with his younger brother. He has his own personal memories of what “abduction” means.
“I was abducted by six men in civilian clothes along with my younger brother, a student of the Chechen State University, and my father, a judge of the Supreme court, in 2015,” he said. “They wanted me to say that my father was corrupt and my brother was with ISIS; they let me and my father go after 10 hours but kept my brother for several weeks in a police basement.”
Yangulbaev says he had managed to move six family members away from Chechnya but there are still many more relatives within the republic’s territory who live in fear of becoming hostages. “I suspect that Chechen authorities punish my relatives for my work as a human rights defender and they might also suspect I have anything to do with the Telegram channel criticizing Kadyrov,” he says. “That is not true, I don’t work for the opposition, I am a lawyer at the Committee for the Prevention of Torture.”
Kadyrov, who is known as “Putin’s soldier,” gave a press conference over the weekend denying that this latest round of abductions had even taken place. According to the TASS state news agency, he claimed those reports were fake news spread by “European bloggers, who openly support terrorism.”
“If there is anything, we’ll look with pleasure. But there is a fact: a Chechen never forgives, when somebody abuses his family’s dignity, his family members, especially women. They should understand that if they abuse the dignity of my family, mother, sisters, wife,—I swear, I will go to any court, to the tribunal but I am never going to leave this alone. They should understand that.”
In other words, while he was denying the abductions on the face of it, the Chechen leader was also confirming that the traditional blood feud was still in play in modern Russia—and not only that, vengeance against family members could even be committed by public officials.
“Russian law does not allow collective responsibility but Kadyrov does, so anybody who criticizes Kadyrov cannot be safe in the republic,” Alamov told The Daily Beast. “Kadyrov’s men go after not only the father’s side of Yangulbaev’s relatives but also after the mother’s side, which is even by Chechen traditional rules is absolutely insane.”
At his annual press conference last week, President Putin slammed this kind of state overreach even though it has been allowed to flourish under his rule. “I think that this score-settling is not just unacceptable, it does nothing but harm our country,” he said. “They must understand that the state will fight this kind of crime. We will continue doing everything within our power.”
After being targeted in attacks for years, Sergei Shunin of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture said he hoped Kadyrov had finally gone too far, even in the eyes of Moscow.
“Our offices were set on fire, our colleagues got attacked and now we hear about the biggest number of relatives abducted from just one family,” said Sergei Shunin. “If the governor of Chechnya denies the fact of abductions, we’ll appeal to President Putin.”
The Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. (photo: Jeff Goodell)
New data suggests a massive collapse of the ice shelf in as little as five years. “We are dealing with an event that no human has ever witnessed,” says one scientist. “We have no analog for this”
As we later learned from satellite images, in a matter of 48 hours or so, a mélange of ice about 21 miles wide and 15 miles deep had cracked up and scattered into the sea.
It was a spooky moment. Thwaites Glacier is the size of Florida. It is the cork in the bottle of the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains enough ice to raise sea levels by 10 feet. The mélange that disintegrated was not part of the glacier itself, but a mix of icebergs and sea ice that had cozied up next to it. Still, the idea that it could just fall apart overnight was mind-blowing.
As it turns out, the ice breakup I witnessed was not a freak event. A few weeks ago, scientists participating in the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a $25 million five-year-long joint research program between the National Science Foundation in the U.S. and the Natural Environment Research Council in the U.K., presented their latest research. They described the discovery of cracks and fissures in the Thwaites eastern ice shelf, predicting that the ice shelf could fracture like a shattered car window in as little as five years. “It won’t scatter out into sea as quickly as what you saw when you were down there,” Erin Pettit, a glaciologist at Oregon State University and one of the lead principal investigators in the ITGC, later told me. “But the basic process is the same. The ice shelf is breaking up and could be gone in less than a decade.”
Given the ongoing war for American democracy and the deadly toll of the Covid pandemic, the loss of an ice shelf on a far-away continent populated by penguins might not seem to be big news. But in fact, the West Antarctic ice sheet is one of the most important tipping points in the Earth’s climate system. If Thwaites Glacier collapses, it opens the door for the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet to slide into the sea. Globally, 250 million people live within three feet of high tide lines. Ten feet of sea level rise would be a world-bending catastrophe. It’s not only goodbye Miami, but goodbye to virtually every low-lying coastal city in the world.
But predicting the breakup of ice sheets and the implications for future sea level rise is fraught with uncertainty. Depending on various emissions scenarios in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, we could have as little as one foot of sea level rise by the end of the century, or nearly six feet of sea level rise (of course, rising seas won’t stop in 2100, but that date has become a common benchmark). “The difference between those [models] is a lot of lives and money,” says Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University and one of the great ice scientists of our time. Alley adds: “The most likely place to generate [the worst scenario] is Thwaites.”
Or to put it more urgently: “If there is going to be a climate catastrophe,” Ohio State glaciologist Ian Howat once told me, “it’s probably going to start at Thwaites.”
The problem is, understanding what’s going on at Thwaites is fiendishly complex. As I wrote in 2017:
The trouble with Thwaites, which is one of the largest glaciers on the planet, is that it’s also what scientists call “a threshold system.” That means instead of melting slowly like an ice cube on a summer day, it is more like a house of cards: It’s stable until it is pushed too far, then it collapses.
Thwaites is very different from other big glaciers, such as those in Greenland. For one thing, it is not melting from above, due to warmer air temperatures. It’s melting from below, due to warmer ocean water eating away at its underbelly. More importantly, the terrain beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet is peculiar. “Think of it as a giant soup bowl filled with ice,” Sridhar Anandakrishnan, an expert in polar glaciology at Penn State University, once told me. In the bowl analogy, the edge of the glacier — the spot where a glacier leaves the land and begins to float — is perched on the lip of the bowl 1,000 feet or more below sea level. Scientists call that lip the “grounding line.” Below the lip, the terrain falls away on a downward slope for hundreds of miles, all the way to the Transantarctic Mountains that divide East and West Antarctica. At the deepest part of the basin, the ice is about two miles thick.
What this means is that once the warm water gets below ice, it can flow down the slope of the bowl, weakening the ice from below. Through a mechanism called “marine ice-cliff Instability,” you can get what amounts to a runaway collapse of the ice sheet that could raise global sea levels very high, very fast.
That’s why, when I wrote my 2017 Rolling Stone story about Thwaites, I dubbed it “The Doomsday Glacier.” (The name stuck — if you type the phrase into Google now, you get half a million hits.)
In a worst-case scenario, how fast could Thwaites collapse? No one knows. The IPCC data is the best guide for sea level rise for the rest of this century, although Alley cautions me that even six feet of sea level rise by 2100 is not the worst-case scenario.
“We just don’t know what the upper boundary is for how fast this can happen,” Alley says. “We are dealing with an event that no human has ever witnessed before. We have no analog for this.”
In the past few years, scientists have made a lot of progress in understanding the dynamics of Thwaites. On our 2019 cruise, scientists discovered troughs in the seabed that allowed warm water to flow underneath the ice shelf. Scientists have mapped the underside of the glacier itself, tracked crevasses in the ice shelf, and located pinning points that might slow the retreat of the ice. The change has been dramatic: “The net rate of ice loss from Thwaites Glacier is more than six times what it was in the early 1990s,” says Rob Larter, a geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey who was the chief scientist on my trip to Antarctica in 2019.
The recent news about Thwaites’ eastern ice shelf breaking up in the next five years was not really a surprise to anyone who has been tracking the science closely. After the sudden disintegration of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002, scientists realized that Antarctica was far less stable than many had believed. The discovery of cracks and fissures at Thwaites further underscore just how dynamic the changes already underway are.
To be clear, there is a big difference between an ice shelf and the glacier itself. The ice shelf is like a thumbnail that grows out from the glacier and floats on the ocean. Because it is already floating, when it melts it doesn’t in itself contribute to sea level rise (just as when ice cubes melt in your glass, they don’t raise the level of liquid).
But ice shelves are important because they buttress glaciers. Like the flying buttresses of Notre Dame, they give the walls of ice stability. And when they break up, the land-based glacier is free to flow much faster into the sea. And that does raise sea levels.
So yeah, if Thwaites loses a significant part of its ice shelf in five years, that’s a big deal.
But even if a big part of the ice shelf does crack up, there is a lot of unknown complexity in how it will play out. “A first question is, if the ice-shelf breakage continues, will the whole ice shelf be lost, or will a short ice shelf remain, at least in some places?” Richard Alley emailed me. “Almost all ice-shelf ice is buttressing, generating friction that holds back the non-floating ice, so loss of part, most or all of the ice shelf will increase flow of non-floating ice into the ocean. But the most-important buttressing tends to arise closest to the grounding zone, so if a short ice shelf does remain, it may still provide important buttressing, and the speedup of flow and thinning will be smaller than they could be with full ice-shelf loss.”
Here you see the problem. Even predicting how the crackup of the ice shelf will impact the flow of the glacier is difficult to estimate.
And this is only one of the uncertainties that scientists face when trying to predict whether or not Miami will be underwater by 2100. There is further uncertainty in exactly where and when the ice will fracture, how much warm water will be pushed up beneath the glacier by changing winds and ocean currents, how the character of the bed the glacier rests on will speed up or slow down the glacier’s slide into the sea. Whether the bed is hard rock or muddy till can have a big impact on the velocity of the glacier, just as the texture of snow affects how fast you ski down a mountain. “Ice is alive,” says Pettit. “It moves and flows and breaks in ways that are difficult to anticipate.”
Paradoxically, the more scientists learn about what’s going on at Thwaites, the more divergent the latest climate models have become about its future. Consider the results of two models by highly respected scientists published side by side in Nature earlier this year. One model suggests that Thwaites stays fairly stable until temperatures rise above 2 C of warming. Then all hell breaks loose. Thwaites begins to fall into the sea like a line of dominoes pushed off a table and soon takes the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet with it. And once the collapse begins, according to this model, it will be impossible to stop — at least on any human time scale. In a century or so, global sea levels could rise 10 feet, which would swamp South Florida and Bangladesh and many other low-lying regions of the world.
In the other model, global sea level rise only differs by 4½ inches between a 1.5 C global temperature rise and a 3 C temperature rise (which is a little above where we are headed with under current emissions scenarios). And much of that comes from increased melt in Greenland and mountain glaciers. As for Antarctica, the paper says explicitly: “No clear dependence on emissions scenario emerges for Antarctica.”
So what to make of all this?
“The current divergence among model predictions is actually a good sign because it means that scientists are probing different parameterizations, representations of processes, and hypotheses,” writes Jeremy Bassis, a geophysicist at the University of Michigan. Bassis suggests not focusing so much on the long-term uncertainty and highlighting instead what scientists know about the next few decades. “The skill of models in predicting sea level change on decadal time scales is high, and we already have actionable projections on these time scales. We should be emphasizing that fact in discussions with community members, stakeholders, and decision-makers, so they can move ahead with important adaptation and mitigation planning.”
But in the long run, it is not clear that the dynamics of ice sheet collapse that are underway at Thwaites can be stopped. As glaciologist Eric Rignot put it in 2015, in Antarctica, “the fuse has been blown.” Even if we cut carbon emissions to zero tomorrow, warm water will continue to flow beneath the ice sheet for decades, destabilizing the ice and further pushing the glacier toward eventual collapse. This doesn’t means that cutting carbon pollution to zero isn’t an important goal — nothing, in fact, is more important or more urgent. “We may have a small safety margin in Antarctica, but not a large one,” says Alley. Even if the fuse is blown, cutting emissions fast could slow it all down to a millennium-long crack-up that will give us more time to adapt. One way or another, our future is written in ice.
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