Is the world being destroyed?

The peak of the wildfire season in California usually occurs between July and November, when hot, dry winds are most frequent. This year promises a hefty fire season. The west of the U.S., including California, is in extreme or even ‘exceptional’ drought and summer heatwaves are on the doorstep.

Summer fires in California increased almost 800% between the 1970’s and 2019. This number stems from before the devastating record fire season of 2020. In 2020 over 4% of the state’s roughly 100 million acres total land area burned. The first ‘gigafire’ was recorded, i.e. over 1 million acres burnt in a single fire. Which is more than double the previous record 2 years earlier. Another fire destroyed 10%-14% of mature sequoias. The chief Science from the National Park: “I cannot overemphasize how mind-blowing this is for all of us. These trees had lived for thousands of years. They had survived dozens of wildfires already.”

The cause of forest fires is pretty straightforward. More heat (also called ‘temperature-induced vapor pressure deficit’) accounts for nearly all growth in forest fires in California. California has warmed about 1.7°C / 3°F. If we continue on the path of the RCP 8.5 scenario of the IPCC, in a couple of decades there will be no more forest fires to burn in California, according to a Columbia University scientist studying wildfires in California. The scientist’s studies point out that in 2070 up to half of all trees would burn in a single year. That is of course impossible. It means that long before that the once-mighty forests of California will have given way to scrub, grassland and desert.

California is a canary in a coal mine. Research published in Science indicates that globally most (or even all!) trees alive today will not be able to survive the climate expected in 40 years. More extreme heat waves and droughts are lethal for forests. The study suggests that just as corals reached a tipping point and are bleaching on a global scale, so might forests perish on a global scale. Some trees will make way for different species associated with different biomes (such as oaks instead of spruce), others, like the forests of California, will disappear altogether.

Plastics are everywhere. They’re in our water, in our food, and even in the air we breathe. They show up in remote glaciers and deep in the ocean.

And plastic is largely made up of carbon, which is released into the environment when that trash breaks down. So when Aron Stubbins was planning lectures about the Earth’s carbon cycle, he decided to take a look at how much carbon that plastics were adding to our planet’s natural systems.

What he found was “surprising,” says Stubbins, a professor of marine and environmental sciences, chemistry and chemical biology, and civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern. “It was clear that there were some environments in which plastics are now a significant amount of the carbon. There’s as much plastic-carbon as there is natural carbon in some ecosystems.”

So Stubbins reached out to other colleagues that study plastics and natural sediment cycles to confirm his calculations and discuss the implications. With their input, Stubbins put together a sketch of the global plastic-carbon cycle, and further calculated the amount of carbon that plastics add to the environments that they pollute. Their results were published in the journal Science last week.

“We’ve added a new material plastic carbon cycle alongside the natural carbon cycle,” Stubbins says. The implications of that are still unknown, he says, but so much carbon introduced by plastic pollution into the natural environment could have a ripple effect across life forms, ecosystems, and even the planet’s climate.

Plastic production and use began in earnest around 1950. By 1962, Stubbins found, the amount of carbon in plastics that had been created surpassed the total amount in all humans on the planet. By 1994, plastic-sourced carbon topped the amount of the chemical element in all animals. We all are, after all, carbon-based life-forms. “The plastics are just building up,” he says.

That plastic-sourced carbon shows up in all kinds of ecosystems around the globe, but some of the most significant accumulation occurs in the surface waters of subtropical ocean gyres, where ocean currents cycle in just such a way that floating materials accumulate in a sort of patch.

And those areas of the ocean are naturally low in carbon, Stubbins says. So, if the plastics that end up there are dissolving and releasing their carbon into that ecosystem, it could significantly alter the chemistry there.

It’s possible that it might also alter the climate, he adds. That’s because a thin layer on the surface of the world’s oceans plays an important role in the exchange of material between the ocean and the atmosphere. The aerosols and trace gases involved in that exchange can “change atmospheric chemistry, which can change climate,” he says. “So if there’s this high concentration of plastics in that particular layer at the very surface of the sea, then that could have ramifications for the lower atmosphere.”

For scientists trying to understand the natural carbon cycle and climate change, the presence of so much plastic-originating carbon could throw off their calculations, Stubbins says. “We think we’re only measuring natural organics, and so if we’re measuring plastics at the same time, then that skews our data. So we need to be aware that there may be plastics in our samples, particularly in these systems.”

There’s still a lot to learn about how plastics are influencing the Earth’s natural systems, says Samuel Muñoz, assistant professor of marine and environmental sciences, and civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern. One question that he’s particularly intrigued by is how the flow of sediments changes around the world with bits of plastic mixed in.

“We’ve spent more than a century trying to understand how sediment moves through the environment,” he says. “And now there’s this whole other material that’s, in some places, fairly important. But the mechanisms by which it moves are going to be different. Sometimes it’ll float instead of sink. Sometimes it can become airborne more easily. Sometimes it won’t settle out in a water column as easily as sediment does.”

“Yeah, plastics are everywhere, but there’s a lot we don’t know about them,” Muñoz says. “I see this paper as almost a call to arms to scientists” to figure out the myriad ways that this material changes the Earth’s systems.

Current rates of plastic emissions globally may trigger effects that we will not be able to reverse, argues a new study by researchers from Sweden, Norway and Germany published on July 2nd in Science. According to the authors, plastic pollution is a global threat, and actions to drastically reduce emissions of plastic to the environment are “the rational policy response.”

Plastic is found everywhere on the planet: from deserts and mountaintops to deep oceans and Arctic snow. As of 2016, estimates of global emissions of plastic to the world’s lakes, rivers and oceans ranged from 9 to 23 million metric tons per year, with a similar amount emitted onto land yearly. These estimates are expected to almost double by 2025 if business-as-usual scenarios apply.

“Plastic is deeply engrained in our society, and it leaks out into the environment everywhere, even in countries with good waste-handling infrastructure,” says Matthew MacLeod, Professor at Stockholm University and lead author of the study. He says that emissions are trending upward even though awareness about plastic pollution among scientists and the public has increased significantly in recent years.

That discrepancy is not surprising to Mine Tekman, a PhD candidate at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany and co-author of the study, because plastic pollution is not just an environmental issue but also a “political and economic” one. She believes that the solutions currently on offer, such as recycling and cleanup technologies, are not sufficient, and that we must tackle the problem at its root.

“The world promotes technological solutions for recycling and to remove plastic from the environment. As consumers, we believe that when we properly separate our plastic trash, all of it will magically be recycled. Technologically, recycling of plastic has many limitations, and countries that have good infrastructures have been exporting their plastic waste to countries with worse facilities. Reducing emissions requires drastic actions, like capping the production of virgin plastic to increase the value of recycled plastic, and banning export of plastic waste unless it is to a country with better recycling” says Tekman.

A poorly reversible pollutant of remote areas of the environment

Plastic accumulates in the environment when amounts emitted exceed those that are removed by cleanup initiatives and natural environmental processes, which occurs by a multi-step process known as weathering.

“Weathering of plastic happens because of many different processes, and we have come a long way in understanding them. But weathering is constantly changing the properties of plastic pollution, which opens new doors to more questions,” says Hans Peter Arp, researcher at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) and Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) who has also co-authored the study. “Degradation is very slow and not effective in stopping accumulation, so exposure to weathered plastic will only increase,” says Arp. Plastic is therefore a “poorly reversible pollutant”, both because of its continuous emissions and environmental persistence.


Plastic residue being filtered out of food waste collected in Norway after fermentation to biogas and soil fertilizer.


Remote environments are particularly under threat as co-author Annika Jahnke, researcher at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and Professor at the RWTH Aachen University explains:

“In remote environments, plastic debris cannot be removed by cleanups, and weathering of large plastic items will inevitably result in the generation of large numbers of micro- and nanoplastic particles as well as leaching of chemicals that were intentionally added to the plastic and other chemicals that break off the plastic polymer backbone. So, plastic in the environment is a constantly moving target of increasing complexity and mobility. Where it accumulates and what effects it may cause are challenging or maybe even impossible to predict.”

A potential tipping point of irreversible environmental damage

On top of the environmental damage that plastic pollution can cause on its own by entanglement of animals and toxic effects, it could also act in conjunction with other environmental stressors in remote areas to trigger wide-ranging or even global effects. The new study lays out a number of hypothetical examples of possible effects, including exacerbation of climate change because of disruption of the global carbon pump, and biodiversity loss in the ocean where plastic pollution acts as additional stressor to overfishing, ongoing habitat loss caused by changes in water temperatures, nutrient supply and chemical exposure.

Taken all together, the authors view the threat that plastic being emitted today may trigger global-scale, poorly reversible impacts in the future as “compelling motivation” for tailored actions to strongly reduce emissions.

“Right now, we are loading up the environment with increasing amounts of poorly reversible plastic pollution. So far, we don’t see widespread evidence of bad consequences, but if weathering plastic triggers a really bad effect we are not likely to be able to reverse it,” cautions MacLeod. “The cost of ignoring the accumulation of persistent plastic pollution in the environment could be enormous. The rational thing to do is to act as quickly as we can to reduce emissions of plastic to the environment.”

A fresh hazard has been uncovered in the oil and gas industry: For the past decade, the Environmental Protection Agency has knowingly allowed oil companies to use chemicals that could break down into PFAS — a class of highly toxic, long-lasting compounds also known as “forever chemicals,” which have been linked to cancers, birth defects, and other serious health problems, a new report has found.

The report, released by Physicians for Social Responsibility and first reported by The New York Times, is based on internal EPA documents obtained using the Freedom of Information Act. The documents show that the agency approved three new chemicals for use in drilling and fracking in 2011, despite clearly stated concerns about their safety: namely, that as the chemicals broke down, they would become PFAS, which, the agency said, could create a persistent, toxic threat. (The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The EPA didn’t keep public records of where these chemicals were used, but through the FracFocus database, which tracks chemicals used in fracking around the country, the advocacy group determined that at least 1,200 wells across Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas, and Wyoming used PFAS — or chemicals that, once degraded, turn into PFAS — between 2012 and 2020. But because many states don’t require companies to report the chemicals that they inject, that number could be much higher.

The chain of possible exposure is vast — from workers in the oil fields, to truckers that haul the chemicals to disposal sites, to the communities and waterways that surround them. “The evidence that people could be unknowingly exposed to these extremely toxic chemicals through oil and gas operations is disturbing,” Dusty Horwitt, the author of the report, said in a statement. “Considering the terrible history of pollution associated with PFAS, EPA and state governments need to move quickly to ensure that the public knows where these chemicals have been used and is protected from their impacts.”

Details about the chemicals used in fracking and drilling are notoriously difficult to bring to light. The documents were heavily redacted — concealing trade names of chemicals and even the name of the company that applied for approval — likely due to a loophole that allows oil companies to conceal information about the chemicals they use as “trade-secrets.” But testing of oil and gas waste has found a wealth of carcinogens, heavy metals, and radioactive elements. One 2016 report from the EPA found more than 1,600 different chemicals involved in fracking alone.

But this is the first time that the use of PFAS in oil and gas drilling has been publicized, and the chemicals add a new layer of hazards to the industry.

There are thousands of PFAS chemicals — all man-made compounds of carbon and fluorine — and they are toxic even in minuscule concentrations; as little as one cup in 8 million gallons of water is enough to make the water toxic.

Of the thousands of PFAS compounds that have been developed, only some have been studied for their health impacts, but so far, they’ve all raised alarms. PFOA — the PFAS chemical that contaminated the drinking water around a DuPont Teflon plant in West Virginia and inspired the 2019 film Dark Waters — is linked to cancers, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, pre-eclampsia, and ulcerative colitis. In an EPA assessment of the two most common PFAS chemicals, studies found connections to birth defects, accelerated puberty, and damage to the liver and immune system. One study even found that infants who are exposed to PFAS have a weakened response to vaccines.

The dilemma, though, is that “PFAS are really useful chemicals,” said Linda Birnbaum, a toxicologist and former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, in a press conference yesterday. They’re exceptionally slippery, and good at repelling water and oil — which is why, in the decades after their invention in the 1930s, they were used in everything from stain-resistant carpeting to fire-fighting foam to the plastic lining inside popcorn bags. And while the EPA documents don’t indicate how or where the chemicals were used in the process of oil and gas extraction, a 2008 paper written by a DuPont researcher found that the “exceptional” water-repelling characteristics of chemicals like PFAS showed promise for use in oil and gas extraction.

But for all of their usefulness, the chemical bonds in the man-made PFAS are impossible to break down, so the chemicals accumulate in our environment and in our bodies, earning them the nickname “forever chemicals.” One 2007 study found that more than 98 percent of Americans have them in their bloodstream. Parents are even able to pass PFAS to their children through breastfeeding.

For that reason, the EPA worked with manufacturers to phase out the use of PFAS chemicals, and they haven’t been produced in the U.S. since 2012. But it’s still possible to use existing stores of the chemicals, or to import products that use them, a workaround that the oil and gas industry appeared to use. The report found that oil companies started importing the chemicals for commercial use in November 2011, shortly after they were approved by the EPA, and continued until at least 2018.

In the report, Physicians for Social Responsibility urges the EPA to issue a moratorium on the use of PFAS in the oil and gas industry, track where they’ve been used, and begin health assessments on the communities and wildlife that surround the wells.

They also insist that the government hold the oil and gas industry responsible for removing PFAS from the environment, but that won’t be easy. Because PFAS compounds don’t break down, “once it’s in the environment, there’s no easy way to get rid of it,” said Birnbaum.

The leading cleanup method requires activated charcoal, “similar to what you find in a Brita filter, except the quantities have to be much, much greater,” explained Horwitt, the study’s author. “And then once that carbon fills up with PFAS — and perhaps other contaminants — you’d have to dispose of it somewhere. And landfills can be reluctant to accept this waste.”

Even if a system of removal and disposal was accessible to oil and gas companies, it’s still unlikely that the oil and gas industry will ultimately pay for this damage. They’ve already shirked responsibility for millions of “orphaned” wells across the country — which could cost as much as $300 billion to clean up. Not to mention that fracking and drilling companies have been declaring bankruptcy at an unprecedented pace. By the time the government could get around to holding them responsible, those companies are likely to be gone, says Silverio Caggiano, a hazardous waste expert who contributed to the report. “It’s going to be the taxpayer that gets caught with a bill for cleaning this all up.”

Following years of warnings and mounting fears among scientists, "terrifying" research revealed Wednesday that climate change and deforestation have turned parts of the Amazon basin, a crucial "sink," into a source of planet-heating carbon dioxide.

Though recent research has elevated concerns about the Amazon putting more CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than it absorbs, the new findings, published in the journal Nature, were presented as a "first" by scientists and climate reporters.

From 2010 to 2018, researchers for the new study—led by Luciana Gatti of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research—conducted "vertical profiling measurements" of carbon dioxide and monoxide a few miles above the tree canopy at four sites in Amazonia.

The researchers found that "Southeastern Amazonia, in particular, acts as a net carbon source" and "total carbon emissions are greater in eastern Amazonia than in the western part." The former, they noted, has been "subjected to more deforestation, warming, and moisture stress" than the latter in recent decades.

As The New York Times reported Wednesday:

- In an accompanying article in Nature, Scott Denning, a professor in the department of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, wrote that the paper's "atmospheric profiles show that the uncertain future is happening now."

- In an emailed response to questions, Dr. Denning praised the new study as the first real large-scale measurement—from various altitudes across thousands of kilometers and remote sectors—of the phenomenon, an advance beyond the traditional measurement at forest sites. The results show "that warming and deforestation in eastern Amazonia have reversed the carbon sink at regional scale and that the change is actually showing up in atmospheric CO2," he wrote.

Gatti told The Guardian that "the first very bad news is that forest-burning produces around three times more CO2 than the forest absorbs. The second bad news is that the places where deforestation is 30% or more show carbon emissions 10 times higher than where deforestation is lower than 20%."

According to the newspaper—which noted the role of emissions from deliberately set fires for beef and soy production as well as the global criticism that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has faced for encouraging the soaring deforestation:

- Fewer trees meant less rain and higher temperatures, making the dry season even worse for the remaining forest, she said: "We have a very negative loop that makes the forest more susceptible to uncontrolled fires."

- Much of the timber, beef, and soy from the Amazon is exported from Brazil. "We need a global agreement to save the Amazon," Gatti said. European nations have said they will block an E.U. trade deal with Brazil and other countries unless Bolsonaro agrees to do more to tackle Amazonian destruction.

The study comes after a March analysis, published in the journal Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, that took into account not only CO2 but also methane, nitrous oxide, black carbon, biogenic volatile organic compounds, aerosols, evapotranspiration, and albedo.

The new findings also follow an April study, published in Nature Climate Change, that focused on Brazil, which is home to the majority of the incredibly biodiverse and threatened rainforest that spans nine countries.

Comparing that research to Wednesday's, Denning said that "they're complementary studies with radically different methods that come to very similar conclusions."

The researchers from the April study, who relied on satellite monitoring, found that between 2010 and 2019, the Brazilian Amazon released 16.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, while only taking in 13.9 billion tonnes—meaning that over a decade, it released nearly 20% more CO2 than it absorbed.

"We half-expected it, but it is the first time that we have figures showing that the Brazilian Amazon has flipped, and is now a net emitter," said co-author Jean-Pierre Wigneron, a scientist at France's National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA), at the time. "We don't know at what point the changeover could become irreversible."

Agence France-Presse reported that in a statement about the study, INRA said that "Brazil saw a sharp decline in the application of environmental protection policies after the change of government in 2019," referencing when Bolsonaro was sworn in as president.

"Imagine if we could prohibit fires in the Amazon—it could be a carbon sink," Gatti said Wednesday, noting the negative impact of converting swaths of the rainforest last for agriculture. "But we are doing the opposite—we are accelerating climate change."

A virulent and fast-moving coral disease that has swept through the Caribbean could be linked to waste or ballast water from ships, according to research.

The deadly infection, known as stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD), was first identified in Florida in 2014, and has since moved through the region, causing great concern among scientists.

It spreads faster than most coral diseases and has an unusually high mortality rate among the species most susceptible to it, making it potentially the most deadly disease ever to affect corals. More than 30 species of coral are susceptible. It was found in Jamaica in 2018, then in the Mexican Caribbean, Sint Maarten and the Bahamas, and has since been detected in 18 other countries.

In Mexico, more than 40% of reefs in one study had at least 10% of coral infected by SCTLD, and nearly a quarter had more than 30%. In Florida, regional declines in coral density approached 30% and live tissue loss was upward of 60%.

Scientists have not yet been able to determine whether the disease is caused by a virus, a bacterium, a chemical or some other infectious agent, but the peer-reviewed study in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science supports the theory that ballast water from ships may be involved. Conducted in the Bahamas by scientists at the Perry Institute for Marine Science, it found that SCTLD was more prevalent in reefs that were closer to the Bahamas’ main commercial ports, in Nassau and Grand Bahama, suggesting a likely link between the disease and ships.

Judith Lang, scientific director at the Atlantic and Gulf Rapid Reef Assessment project, which has been tracking the disease, said: “The prevailing currents in the Caribbean push seawater to Florida and not in the reverse direction, and the predominant wind direction is westward. So human dispersal [to those three territories] in 2018 seems necessary.”

In 2017, the spread of deadly pathogens by ships when they discharge ballast water prompted the International Maritime Organization to implement the Ballast Water Management Convention, which requires that ships discharge their ballast water – used to maintain the ship’s stability – 200 nautical miles from shore in water at least 200 metres deep before entering port, to ensure they do not bring in harmful foreign pathogens.

In the Bahamas, SCTLD has spread rapidly since first being identified in December 2019.

Krista Sherman, senior scientist at the Perry Institute and a co-author of the recently published paper, said: “The disease is spread along about 75km of reef tract, about 46 miles – so for Grand Bahama that is a large structure of reef. We’re talking about mostly covering the entire southern coastline of the island.”

The disease is also widespread in the coral reefs of New Providence, where the Bahamas’ capital, Nassau, and main port are located. The study notes the presence of international container ships, cruise ships and pleasure boats at that location, as well as a fuel shipping station.

Infection rates among the most susceptible species were 23% and 45% across New Providence and Grand Bahama respectively, and recent mortality rates have reached almost 43%.

With the exception of two species, the researchers found “there was a significant relationship” between the disease and proximity of reefs to the major shipping ports. They noted “an increasing proportion of healthy colonies as distance from the port increased on both islands, and a greater proportion of recently dead colonies closer to the port than farther away”.

The locations where SCTLD is prevalent in the Bahamas are all popular with tourists, recreational fishers and divers, Sherman said.

There are concerns that the coral disease could affect the country’s main fishery export, spiny lobster, said Adrian LaRoda, president of the Bahamas Commercial Fishers Alliance. Although the lobster fishers work further out to sea, the industry would be affected if the reefs die. The spiny lobster fishery brings in $90m (£66m) a year and employs 9,000 people.

“Any negative impact on our reefs would definitely drastically affect our spiny lobsters because the mature animals migrate [from the reefs] to the fish aggregating devices [a technique for catching fish],” LaRoda said. He added that the lobsters’ reproduction rate and the food supply for juvenile lobsters in the reef would also be affected.

The Bahamian government has set up a national taskforce to tackle the problem. Currently, the most effective treatment for the disease is the application of the antibiotic amoxicillin directly to the corals, which has seen some success in reducing mortality, but no realistic permanent solution is available.

According to Lang, rather than treating the symptoms, there is a need to tackle the possible human-made causes. “Given a chance, nature can heal naturally,” she said.

A deadly, hard-to-treat fungal infection that has been spreading through nursing homes and hospitals across the United States is becoming even more dangerous, according to researchers, who for the first time have identified several cases in which the fungus, Candida auris, was completely impervious to all existing medication.

The finding, released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is an alarming development in the evolution of C. auris, a tenacious yeast infection discovered in Japan in 2009 that has since spread across much of the world.

Federal health officials say the bug has spread even more widely during the coronavirus pandemic, with overwhelmed hospitals and nursing homes struggling to keep up with the surveillance and control measures needed to contain local outbreaks.

In the new report, the C.D.C. said, five of more than 120 cases of C. auris were resistant to treatment.

The C.D.C. did not identify the facilities where the novel infections took place, but health officials said there was no evident link between the outbreaks, which occurred in Texas at a hospital and a long-term care facility that share patients, and at a single long-term care center in Washington, D.C. The outbreaks took place between January and April.

Nearly a third of the infected patients died within 30 days, according to the C.D.C., but because they were already gravely ill, officials said it was unclear whether their deaths were caused by the fungus.

Over the past eight years, the C.D.C. has identified more than 2,000 Americans colonized with C. auris — meaning the fungus was detected on their skin — with most cases concentrated in New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California. Between 5 and 10 percent of those colonized with the pathogen go on to develop more serious bloodstream infections.

Once it gains a foothold, the fungus is difficult to eliminate from health care facilities, clinging to cleaning carts, intravenous poles and other medical equipment. While relatively harmless to those in good health, the yeast infection can be deadly to seriously ill hospital patients, residents of long-term care facilities and others with weakened immune systems.

“If you wanted to conjure up a nightmare scenario for a drug-resistant pathogen, this would be it,” said Dr. Cornelius J. Clancy, an infectious diseases doctor at the VA Pittsburgh Health Care System. “An untreatable fungus infection would pose a grave threat to the immunocompromised, transplant recipients and critically ill patients in the I.C.U.”

While C. auris has long been notoriously hard to treat, researchers for the first time identified five patients in Texas and Washington, D.C., whose infections did not respond to any of the three major classes of antifungal medication. So-called panresistance had been previously reported in three patients in New York who were being treated for C. auris, but health officials said the newly reported panresistant infections occurred in patients who had never received antifungal drugs, said Dr. Meghan Lyman, a medical officer at the C.D.C. who specializes in fungal diseases.

“The concerning thing is that the patients at risk are no longer the small population of people who have infections and are already being treated with these medications,” she said.

Infectious disease specialists say the coronavirus pandemic has probably accelerated the spread of the fungus. The shortages of personal protective equipment that hobbled health care workers during the early months of the pandemic, they say, increased opportunities for the fungus’s transmission, especially among the thousands of Covid-19 patients who ended up on invasive mechanical ventilation.

The chaos of recent months also did not help. “Infection control efforts at most heath care systems are stretched thin in the best of times, but with so many Covid patients, resources that might have gone to infection control were diverted elsewhere,” Dr. Clancy said.

For many health experts, the emergence of a panresistant C. auris is a sobering reminder about the threats posed by antimicrobial resistance, from superbugs like MRSA to antibiotic-resistant salmonella. Such infections sicken 2.8 million Americans a year and kill 35,000, according to the C.D.C.

Dr. Michael S. Phillips, chief epidemiologist at NYU/Langone Health, said health systems across the country were struggling to contain the spread of such pathogens. The problem, he said, was especially acute in big cities like New York, where seriously ill patients shuttle between nursing homes with lax infection control and top-notch medical centers that often draw patients from across a wider region.

“We need to do a better job at surveillance and infection control, especially in places where we put patients in group settings,” he said. “Candida auris is something we should be concerned about, but we can’t lose sight of the bigger picture because there are a lot of other drug-resistant bugs out there we should be worried about.”

It was my lovely doctor wife who leaned over to me and said: “Did you know scores of people in Canada are dead because of the heat? Near Vancouver?” Suffering a severe case of brain fog thanks to being in a pandemic for a year and counting now, I was tuned out. “Hmm,” I replied, absently. And then I woke up, suddenly hearing the words. “Wait, what?”

Canada’s not exactly a place you associate with “people dead from the heat.” And yet it’s a grim tale of what’s to come.

This isn’t a heatwave. It’s a dying planet.

Much of the Pacific Northwest is trapped under what climate scientists are calling a “heat dome.” It stretches up and down the coast. Temperatures have rocketed off the charts. It was 115 degrees in Portland, Oregon. That’s hotter than Cairo, Egypt, or Karachi, Pakistan.

This is a region of the world that should be temperate and cool — not boiling hot. But it’s trapped under a “heat dome,” which is a huge region of high pressure, that creates an effect literally akin to a pressure cooker. Yesterday’s “heat waves” — a few days of higher than normal temperatures are giving way to “heat domes” — something much more catastrophic, as the planet warms beyond all recognition, in ways profound hostile to us.

Why do I say “dangerous”? Well, what is life under extreme heat like?

The day before, I’d read an article about the hottest place on earth, which is Jacobabad, in Pakistan. It claims that title because average temperatures go beyond 52ºC. Remember, the heat dome in the Pacific Northwest has already pushed temperatures there almost within striking distance of that — the 115 Fahrenheit is 46 degrees Celsius. Portland and Seattle reached temperatures that are approaching the hottest city on earth.

That’s “climate change,” or far more accurately put, global warming. We are beginning to be boiled alive.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, consider life in Jacobabad. People don’t leave the house much when it’s that hot. They stay inside, trying to stay cool however they can. Business, commerce, trade, social events — all these things come to a halt. What does that sound like to you? It sounds a lot like lockdown. If you want to understand what the world will look like a few years or decades hence, the last year is — grimly — a very good guide. Extreme heat is a lot like pandemic lockdown, because these are both catastrophes that are on the verge of being unsurvivable.

Jacobabad broils for months. Portland and Vancouver and Seattle’s heat dome will go away. But that’s a distinction without much of a difference. Because chances are the heat dome will be back next year, for longer. And so too the year after that. This is what living on a planet that’s heating rapidly is.

What happens when Jacobabad gets even hotter? What happens as the Pacific Northwest experiences heat domes for longer, more frequently?

For that, you need to understand the notion of “wet bulb temperature.” It accounts for heat stress to living things. When you cover a thermometer with a wet cloth, you record the temperature at which sweat cools the body with evaporation. Here’s how climate scientist Simon Lewis puts it. “Humans cannot survive prolonged exposure to a wet-bulb temperature beyond 35ºC because there is no way to cool our bodies. Not even in the shade, and not even with unlimited water.

Did you get that? Beyond 95 degrees Fahrenheit — which is what 35ºC is — at 100% humidity, you’re dead. Fast. Bang. You can’t cool yourself. You go into organ failure, and literally boil alive from the inside, as your proteins denature (you can think my doctor wife for that lovely description.)

Now, that wet bulb temperature has only been reached in a few places, for a few hours — so far. But we are now experiencing dramatic, massive warming as a globe. Warming which only, frankly, extremists and idiots can go on denying. You only have to think about how much hotter summer’s gotten wherever you are to literally feel how much our planet’s heating. We’re going to cross that line. Nobody can say for sure when. But what we can say is that we’re heading towards it at light speed, faster than anyone thinks. Portland and Vancouver being as hot as the hottest places on earth?

As we cross the wet-bulb threshold of about 35ºC, places simply become unlivable. Lewis says “something truly terrifying is emerging: the creation of unliveable heat.”

What happens as we cross that line? Well, you might think: I’ll just run my AC harder! Bzzt, wrong. ACs need lower humidity to work well, and the more humid conditions get, the harder they need to work. Meanwhile, the harder you work your AC, the more the power grid, stressed by demand, unable to cope, will crash regularly — just as it does in Jacobabad, or it did in Portland and Vancouver.

We don’t have a technology that’s going to allow us to live comfortably on a boiling planet. I know that you might think we do, because, like me, you’re used to the luxury of air conditioned bliss. The truth is that technology only works in a profoundly narrow range of environmental conditions, maybe from 50 to 100 Fahrenheit, with relatively low humidity. We aren’t going to be able to air-condition our way out of being boiled alive.

Instead, entire regions of the planet will simply become, as Lewis says, unlivable. Some place will suffer regular heat domes. Some, like Jacobabad, will just be too hot, period, year round. And some will have a drier heat that produces megafires, over and over again. There a lot of ways — too many — that you get to “unlivable.”

Those places are also going to be a lot more numerous than we think. All those air conditioned glass towers in Miami? Good luck with that as the planet warms. All those steel and glass luxury skyscrapers in Manhattan? Have fun with a power grid that needs more juice than the entire East Coast can supply.

What happens as a place becomes unlivable? Massive levels of disruption do. People have already fled Jacobabad. As “human capital flight” ensues, disruptions happens on three levels. The place people are fleeing from gets poorer and more unstable. The place they’re fleeing to usually doesn’t want them there, especially if they’re coming with nothing.

And they will be coming with nothing, all these climate refugees and migrants, because, well, most of us have just one real asset, if we’re lucky, and that’s our homes. But if you have to leave a place because it’s gotten too hot to live there…nobody’s buying your home. It’s worthless. Congratulations, now you’re something like a war refugee — fleeing with the clothes on your back, and the money you can take with you.

As societies face these kinds of obstacles, they tend to destabilize. Let’s talk about another effect of extreme heat and warming for a moment — the megadrought the American West faces. Right about now, most of us are pretending that it isn’t a big deal. That’s because there are still a few meagre resources left to tap. But once what’s left of the water’s gone, it’s gone. For good. How are cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles going to survive? The classic pattern goes like this: the rural hinterlands suffer the effects of drought and famine first, and then it creeps inwards, towards richer, more developed urban centres. Right about now, the West’s mega drought is felt in California’s once-lush farming valleys. But as it spreads east and west, like a cancer, as it’s sure to do — what then?

Then…bang. Catastrophe. There’s another whole category of refugees you might never have considered. Not people fleeing from extreme heat, but people fleeing for fresh water. What do we even call these new categories of migrants and refugees? We don’t even have names for them — and yet these changes are already upon us. And that’s the point.

We are now living on a dying planet. It’s not dying in an ultimate and final sense — probably not, anyways, although there’s still some chance we end up with a cycle of runaway warming so severe we end up like Venus. We’re living on a dying planet in the sense that it’s heating up incredibly fast, faster than it has for hundreds of millions of years, quite possibly the fastest it’s ever heated up.

And as the planet continues warming, faster and faster, living things are going to die. Lots of lots of them. Trillions upon trillions of them. Trees, insects, animals, fish. Rivers, oceans, skies, if you think of those as living things, too. And us.

What’s certain not to survive is this way of life. We can’t use the technologies we have now to fight the Existential Threats already on our doorstep. You can’t air condition way out of a boiling planet. We can’t use the cultural mores, values, norms, and institutions we have now to fight them, either — materialism, greed, selfishness, carelessness, indifference, and so on.

Where does that leave us? You probably already suspect my answer. This isn’t a heatwave — it’s a dying planet. Our civilisation is now beginning to collapse. When Portland and Seattle are almost as hot as Jacobabad — the hottest place on earth — which itself is becoming so that that soon it will literally be unsurvivable…then, my friends, we are a civilisation that has literally cooked itself alive. In the combustion and fumes of its own addiction to exploitation, stuff, toys, hate, rage, all the ways we try to escape from our own demons of loneliness, despair, ignorance, and powerlessness.

We’re living on a dying planet. I guess the question then is: who gets to survive?