The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and President Trump’s quick nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett has escalated an already-tense political environment in the U.S., shaking up the presidential campaign and animating activists across the political spectrum. A remade Supreme Court populated by Trump appointees threatens to overturn abortion rights, roll back voter protections and scrap the Affordable Care Act.
The future of the Court will also shape the future of U.S. climate policy. A Supreme Court remade in the vision of the right could take aim at existing climate change measures—and the legal justifications underpinning them—while also impeding the ability of federal government agencies to implement new ones. At the heart of the issue is the role of federal agencies and their ability to regulate, an area known as administrative law. In the U.S. at least, it’s hard to conceive of a comprehensive climate-fighting regime that doesn’t rely on agencies to play a role regulating emissions. Conservative jurists are generally skeptical of these powers, and it’s likely a more conservative Supreme Court would seek to limit them.
That wouldn’t necessarily doom future presidential or legislative attempts at creating new and more stringent climate rules, but it’d make it all a lot harder. “It’s not a death knell,” says Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “But it’s going to require great care by Congress and the [next presidential] administration to avoid these problems.”
How agencies became so important
For the uninitiated, administrative law can sound esoteric, but it has played a central role in creating our current climate protections. Some issues are too complicated to be solved by Congress alone, so Congress has in many cases passed laws that create a broad framework but leave the implementation up to federal agencies. In the environmental space, that history dates back to the 1970s: Congress passed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act to address rampant pollution in the U.S, and the Environmental Protection Agency administered the laws.
Climate change wasn’t included in the original mandate of the EPA, and Congress has never explicitly told the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, but as global warming science grew increasingly alarming, the agency was forced to incorporate reducing greenhouse emissions into its mandate. Troubled by the federal government’s inaction, a group of states led by Massachusetts sued the EPA in 2006 to demand the agency act to reduce emissions. The following year, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision known as Massachusetts vs. EPA that the agency needed to regulate greenhouse gas emissions if EPA scientists found they endangered human health. The Court’s decision meant that combating climate change was, effectively, a responsibility of the executive branch.
Thanks to that ruling, the EPA became the primary regulator of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. When President Barack Obama failed to pass climate legislation through Congress in 2009, he turned to the agency and others to create new rules using the Clean Air Act and other existing law. Almost all of the significant climate measures enacted under President Obama—think the Clean Power Plan, vehicle emissions standards and methane rules—came via one of the federal agencies
Trump came to office keen to undo these regulations, and his Administration has spent the last four years using its authority to push agencies to move climate policy in reverse. In total, Trump has sought to roll back some 100 environmental rules, according to a New York Times count last updated on July 15. “There has been nothing like this administration on the environment in the last 50 years,” says William Reilly, who headed the EPA under George H.W. Bush, referring to what he called Trump’s “general dereliction” of duty to protect the environment.
But while Trump has sought to tear up the country’s climate regulation, his efforts have been met with major challenges. Because Massachusetts vs EPA still stands, the administration is still technically responsible for fighting climate change, and his rollbacks need to show sound legal and scientific reasoning—which can be hard to come by given Trump’s primary motivation has little to do with science or law. This reality has tied up many of his deregulatory moves in the courts. The administration has only succeeded in 15 of the 87 attempted rollbacks that have been litigated, according to data from the Institute for Policy Integrity.
If a more conservative Supreme Court decides to revisit Massachusetts vs EPA, the result could make it significantly easier for Trump or a future president to eliminate these rules—and hinder the ability for a new administration to make new rules. There are multiple scenarios that could play out over the coming years.
What comes next
Biden has telegraphed repeatedly that he plans to make fighting climate change a top priority if he defeats Trump in November: he has called for the U.S. to hit net zero emissions by 2050 and eliminate the carbon footprint of the power sector by 2035. What kinds of measures he could actually enact to reach those goals will depend significantly on the composition of the Supreme Court.
If Biden wins without a Congressional majority, he would likely struggle to pass legislation through a divided Congress and, like Obama, would need to turn to agencies to make rules in the absence of a new law. A Biden EPA would likely try to implement all sorts of emissions-reduction measures, using the Clean Air Act as its justification.
But conservative jurists have already indicated how they would fight that. In 1984, the Supreme Court created a precedent known as “Chevron deference,” which gave agencies leeway to interpret laws passed by Congress if they deal directly with the agency’s work. So, in this case, the EPA is given significant deference to interpret the Clean Air Act. Conservatives have criticized that practice since the beginning, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who could be the new swing vote on the Court, has criticized it. The doctrine “can be antithetical to the neutral, impartial rule of law,” Kavanaugh wrote in 2016. Moreover, the Supreme Court could overturn or significantly weaken Massachusetts vs EPA, and the practice of using agencies to address climate change would be vulnerable to legal challenge or foreclosed entirely.
In theory, a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress would fix this problem. Congress could pass a law that requires the EPA to regulate emissions, effectively bypassing Massachusetts vs EPA. Or Congress could create a different regulatory framework entirely.
But conservative jurists are one step ahead of such measures. For decades, conservatives have touted a principle known as the “nondelegation doctrine,” which rejects Congress’s ability to give too much power to agencies. Conservatives have had limited success using that argument in court thus far, but that could easily change if the Supreme Court shifts ideologically. And it could effectively prevent new climate laws that require an agency like the EPA for implementation.
“The reshaping of the judiciary under the Trump Administration toward a right-leaning judiciary that is not only willing but eager to shrink the administrative state is simply not compatible with strong regulation of anything,” says Cara Horowitz, executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law.
Finally, there’s a very real chance that Trump ends up in office for a second term. In that case, it’s safe to assume that the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court would continue its conservative bent, chipping away at the power of agencies to address climate change. That would aid in Trump’s ongoing rollbacks and grind even the currently insufficient climate policies to a halt.
Fighting back
A hard right turn by the Supreme Court—not to mention the impact of the hundreds of federal judges Trump has appointed to lower federal courts—would clearly pose deep challenges for a Biden Administration, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t fight back.
Environmental lawyers say if Democrats control Congress, they would need to craft very explicit climate laws that can’t be interpreted as delegating too much authority to agencies to avoid legal challenges. Perhaps more importantly, Horowitz says, Democrats might want to consider how they can reshape the judiciary more broadly to avoid the near-impossible challenges created by conservative jurists. “Rather than trying to shape your policy to match the current Court,” says Horowitz, “maybe figure out a way to shape the judiciary to match what you want to do with your policy.” In other words, the ongoing discussions about whether a potential Biden Administration should try to expand and pack the Supreme Court matters a lot for the course of climate policy.
A version of this article was originally published in TIME’s climate newsletter, One.Five. Click here to sign up to receive these stories early.
But few Americans are buying it, a new poll shows. Nearly half of Americans think addressing climate change will help the economy while only 29% believe that climate policy will cause harm, according to a new report by researchers at Stanford University, Resources for the Future (RFF) and ReconMR. “It’s just an argument that doesn’t work,” says report author Jon Krosnick, a Stanford social psychologist professor who studies political behavior of the argument that climate policy hurts jobs. “The argument has never convinced even a majority of Republicans.”
The report—shared exclusively with TIME—relies on a survey of 999 American adults between May and August and shows broad U.S. support for a range of climate policies. Significant majorities support tax incentives, carbon pricing and regulations as means to reduce emissions. More than 80% of Americans believe the U.S. should offer tax incentives for utilities that make power with renewable energy; more than 80% support key U.S. commitments under the Paris Agreement; and nearly two-thirds support a requirement for all cars to get at least 55 miles per gallon by 2025. “It’s not like 52-48, or that kind of thing,” says Krosnick. “There are clear leanings.”
The research speaks to a fault line that has come to define rhetoric around climate policy over the past decade. Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 promising a climate policy that would create “millions of new jobs.” Republicans fought his climate measures throughout his presidency, with some denying the science of climate change and others saying it would be too expensive.
Before the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S., climate change was poised to be a central topic on the campaign trail. And, while COVID-19 may have eclipsed climate change in the headlines, polls have shown that voters remain concerned. Data from RFF, Stanford and ReconMR shows that 81% of Americans believe that Earth’s temperature has increased over the last 100 years—an uptick over recent years.
Former Vice President Biden has sought to campaign on this concern, proposing a suite of policies that he says would eliminate the U.S. carbon footprint by 2050 while creating millions of jobs. “When Donald Trump thinks about climate change he thinks: ‘hoax,’” Biden said during a Sept. 14 speech. “I think: ‘jobs.’ Good-paying, union jobs that put Americans to work building a stronger, more climate resilient nation.” Many leading economists and others who study climate policy have called for such measures to boost economic growth and reduce emissions.
Meanwhile, Trump has railed against the proposed Green New Deal and accused Biden of supporting climate policies that the Democratic nominee has not in fact endorsed—like abolishing the U.S. production of fossil fuels. “Millions of jobs will be lost, and energy prices will soar,” he said at the Republican National Convention. However, most climate scientists and economists agree that leaving climate change unchecked will create a wide range of environmental and social harms that will significantly hinder the global economy.
Even though this approach lacks broad appeal, the Trump’s campaign strategy could still activate select voters in influential pockets of the country. Voters in western Pennsylvania who depend on revenue from fracking, for instance, may be concerned about losing their jobs if the oil and gas industry suffers under new climate policy. Some voters—particularly rural Americans who drive long distances and spend a larger share of their income on energy than their urban counterparts—might waiver at the prospect of increased energy costs.
Still, the report finds that U.S. concern on climate is driven less by personal economic concerns and more by broader societal interests. Concern that climate change will significantly harm future generations better predicted support for action on climate change than respondent concern that it would harm them personally. “It’s not about the pocketbook,” says Krosnick.
The report is the third in a series from RFF and Stanford released ahead of the election to look at American behavior and climate change. A previous report showed that the percentage of Americans who care passionately about climate change and personally prioritize it has risen dramatically in recent years, from 13% in 2015 to 25% in 2020. The second report found that three quarters of Americans believe they have seen the effects of climate change and 80% say they support more stringent building codes to adapt to the effects of climate change.
The survey is the latest in a string of polling that shows sustained interest and concerned in climate change in the U.S. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released Sept. 19 showed climate change as the top concern for Democratic voters and trailing coronavirus and the economy overall. A June poll from Pew Research Center found that nearly two-thirds of Americans want more aggressive action from the federal government on climate change.
All of this suggests that public opinion will be eager for new climate policy should Democrats win control of the White House and Congress in November. But public opinion is just the start.
For months, the Trump campaign’s public statements and the President’s prepared remarks have repeated a message on climate change carefully calibrated not to alienate Republicans worried about the health of the planet: regardless of the science, Democratic plans to address the issue are too expensive. Last week, President Trump disregarded his own campaign’s meticulous messaging and offered an assessment of climate change so out of touch with most voters that it may have made even some of his loyalest supporters cringe.
During a stop in California to observe the destruction caused by the state’s wildfires, Trump called for better forest management to reduce the risk of fire. When pressed by a state official on the link between climate change and worsening wildfires, Trump spoke bluntly — and inaccurately. “It will start getting cooler,” he said, seemingly conflating the upcoming change of season with the long-term shifting climate. Challenged further, he replied, “I don’t think science knows actually.”
The moment — and Trump’s dismissal of climate change more broadly — indicates how disconnected Trump has grown from the popular understanding of the problem. Voters increasingly understand that climate change is happening, and Republicans, including in Trump’s own campaign, are seeking to adjust their message on the issue to match public sentiment. Trump hasn’t seemed to notice.
“I would encourage the President to look at the science,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally who represents South Carolina, said at an event last year. “Admit that climate change is real, and come up with solutions that do not destroy the economy like the Green New Deal.”
Understanding the Trump campaign’s strategy on the issue requires looking back to last year, when the Democratic primary was heating up and the word “coronavirus” would have elicited blank stares in most circles. At the time, climate change seemed poised to be a major issue on in the 2020 race. Some polls showed the issue ranking neck-and-neck with health care as the top issue among Democratic primary voters, and most of the wide field of Democratic contenders scrambled to endorse proposals for a Green New Deal, a massive government spending program that paired emissions reduction with a focus on social justice issues.
But Democrats weren’t alone. Polling from the Pew Research Center found that67% of all U.S. adults thought the federal government wasn’t doing enough to address climate change. And these findings seem to match the Trump campaign’s internal polls. John McLaughlin, one of Trump’s top pollsters, said in an interview last year for the podcast Climate 2020 that the “vast majority of Americans”understand that climate change is happening, but that they remain receptive to arguments that proposed solutions are too costly. “Voters are highly cynical,” he said. “They don’t want to lose their jobs over this and they don’t want to pay a lot of money.”
The Trump’s campaign’s official message has played out along those lines. The campaign avoids questioning the science of climate change and instead offers exaggerated claims about the price tag of climate policy. In recent months, the Trump campaign has sent email blasts saying Biden has endorsed “a job-killing war on energy” and called his climate policy “socialism.” After Biden delivered a speech on climate change on Sept. 14, for example, the Trump campaign released a “fact check” that took issue with everything from Biden’s claim that Trump didn’t listen to experts regarding wildfires to Biden’s promise of clean energy jobs. Notably absent was any skepticism about the fundamental fact that the Earth is warming and humans are to blame.
Knowing that an ever-increasing number of voters are concerned about these issues, Trump’s aides have also sought to soften the President’s environmental record of regulatory rollbacks and unilateralism with a more positive narrative. Last year, Trump hosted an event at the White House to highlight his environmental “accomplishments,” which he claimed included reducing carbon emissions and ensuring the “cleanest air” and “crystal clean” water. During a Sept. 8 event in Florida, a state already facing many climate-related challenges, Trump simultaneously endorsed a ban on offshore drilling in the state and claimed that he was “number one since Teddy Roosevelt” on environmental protection.
The ongoing efforts to paint Trump in a green light aren’t matched with substantive policy. Trump’s environmental agenda has consisted largely of undoing rules and regulations created under President Barack Obama, from a rollback of vehicle emissions standards to a nixing of emissions rules for power plants to the departure from the Paris Agreement, the landmark global deal aimed at combating climate change. A Sept. 17 analysis from the Rhodium Group, an independent research that analyzes energy and climate data, found that Trump’s climate rollbacks could add as much as 1.8 gigatons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2035. That’s about a third of the country’s emissions last year.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the message of Trump, as an individual candidate, has at times departed from the calibrated message constructed by his campaign. When left to improvise, Trump has made light of climate science and rejected the scientists responsible for producing it.
That messaging aligned with many Republicans a decade ago, but today most of the party’s leaders either say they understand that man-made climate change is a reality or avoid talking about the issue entirely. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for example, said he accepted the scientific consensus on global warming last year as talk of the Green New Deal rippled across Capitol Hill. “I do. The question is how do you address it,” he said when asked whether he believed in man-made global warming. “The way to do this consistent with American values and American capitalism is through technology and innovation.”
McConnell hasn’t offered anything in the way of substantive climate policy, but other Republicans have proposed piecemeal legislation, calling for measures to promote the planting of trees and funding for clean-energy innovation. The desire to promote climate-change credentials has been especially strong among vulnerable Republicans. Graham and Cory Gardner of Colorado, both GOP senators up for re-election in November, have both put their names on a handful of modest environment issues this year and last, including the formation of the Roosevelt Conservation Caucus last year.
This is a far cry from Trump’s climate denial, but, in some ways, it is a distinction without a difference. Acknowledging that climate change is real does nothing if that admission isn’t accompanied by meaningful policies to address it. And on that score, there isn’t much to show.
From the bridge of the Arctic Sunrise, an old ice-breaking fishing trawler turned research vessel now plying the polar waters between Greenland and northern Norway, Laura Meller has an unparalleled view of our planet’s future. It is both gorgeous, and terrifying. The early autumn sunlight bathes the scattered icebergs in soft pink and orange hues that glimmer with the gentle swell.
“It is so soft and quiet out here that it’s difficult to remember that we are literally looking at a climate emergency unfolding before our eyes,” she says by satellite-enabled WhatsApp. Meller is a polar advisor for a Greenpeace expedition plying the edge of the polar ice cap to document the minimum extent of sea ice this year, a potent indicator for overall global climate health. The prognosis is grim.
On Sept.21, scientists at the United States-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC), announced that Arctic sea ice coverage had contracted to a near-unprecedented minimum of 3.74 million square kilometers on Sept. 15, the second lowest in 42 years of records.Arctic sea ice has already lost two-thirds of its volume over the past four decades, part of an alarming trend in polar warming that that is already seeing impacts across the globe. “It is a traumatic picture,” says Meller, of the satellite images provided by NASA that the NSIDC used to make its assessment. “The rapid disappearance of sea ice is a sobering indicator of how closely our planet is circling the drain.”
Polar sea ice minimums—the extent that ice melts during the summer months before starting to form again as winter returns— are not merely a problem for polar bears and Inuit hunters who rely on ice to preserve their traditions and culture. When there isn’t enough ice to reflect the sun’s rays back into space, that heat is instead absorbed by the ocean, accelerating further ice melt while altering ocean currents, weakening the jet stream and changing wind patterns. The effects ripple through the global ecosystem, manifesting in greater drought, heat, floods and storms. While this year’s record breaking wildfire season in the U.S., or the series of hurricanes wreaking havoc in the country’s south, cannot be directly linked to this year’s near-record loss of ice in the Arctic, they are all symptoms of the same ailment: increasing carbon emissions.
The symptoms are also apparent elsewhere in the northern polar region. On Sept. 14, just a day before the Arctic officially reached its minimum level of ice cover, The Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland reported that Greenland’s largest remaining ice shelf had just jettisoned a chunk of ice twice the size of Manhattan. The Arctic Sunrise was too far away to see the glacier break apart, but the resulting flotilla of icebergs could easily be spotted on satellite images. “Such a massive piece of ice collapsing into the ocean like that—the planet doesn’t really have much more powerful ways of alerting us to the crisis,” says Meller.
Daniella Zalcman—GreenpeaceAn aerial view of the Arctic Sunrise in the Arctic, on Sep. 15, 2020.
It’s the second year in a row that Greenland’s glaciers have seen record losses of ice; overall, the region has warmed by an average of about 3C since 1980, resulting in unprecedented levels of melting. New research published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment last month indicates that Greenland’s melting ice sheet has already passed the point of no return. Even if the climate were to stop warming today, researchers found, the glaciers will continue to melt for some time.
Meanwhile, another study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, says that the effects of global warming in the Arctic are so severe that the climate there is already shifting from one dominated by ice and snow to one characterized by open water and rain. The beginnings of that transition can already be seen from space.
Satellites have been taking snapshots of Arctic sea ice since 1979, and ice coverage had been declining by about 12 percent per decade, until 2007, when it started accelerating into near record lows almost every year. The year 2012 saw the least amount of ice, but 2020 is a close second, says Twila Moon, the deputy lead scientist at the NSIDC. “We should be thankful for any year we are not seeing a record, but second place is still abysmal and indicative of the completely changed world we are living in.”
NSIDC/NASAThis graph shows the average September extent of Arctic sea ice over the years. (Arctic sea ice reaches its minimum each September. )
Global sea levels are largely unaffected by sea ice melt, as it was already displacing ocean water when frozen. The loss of land based glaciers and ice shelves, however, has serious consequences. Were it to melt entirely, Greenland’s ice sheet could raise sea levels by at least 20 feet (6 meters), putting many of the worlds’ coastal cities under water. Even at current rates of warming that eventuality is still a few centuries away. But when the sea ice disappears, it can accelerate the loss of land-based ice as well, by pulling out the stoppers that keep it locked up on shore, says Moon.
Scientists estimate that meltwater running off the Greenland ice sheet in 2019 was enough to raise global sea levels by more than 2 mm. It may not sound like much, but over time it is enough to flood low-lying islands and cities, especially combined with storm surges and high tides. “Our ice sheets, our glaciers, they are all holding water that would otherwise be in the ocean,” says Moon. “The more rapidly we warm the climate, the more rapidly we lose the ice, and the more rapidly it moves to our shores.”
Daniella Zalcman—GreenpeaceThe Arctic sea ice edge off the coast of Greenland, on Sep. 15, 2020.
The solution, she says, is as obvious as it is difficult: stop the rate of fossil fuel emissions. “If we take decisive action now, we can slow the rate of ice loss, we can slow the rate of changing water levels, we can slow coastal erosion and flooding. And that gives us more time to adjust to the changes that already are coming.”
Even if carbon emissions were to somehow to end today, much of the Arctic’s ice melt would stay locked in for years to come, the result of global warming over the past few decades. That’s all the more reason to act now, Moon says. “We are behind the curve of how we are going to adapt to sea level rise that is already coming from past actions, and if we continue with this pace of emissions, we will have even more to catch up to.”
To go to Venus is to go to hell. One of the most brilliant and beautiful objects in the night sky, Venus is a near twin of Earth in size and mass but it is radically different in almost every other way. Its surface temperature averages 470º C (880º F), or hot enough to melt lead. Its atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide, with a ground-level pressure 90 times greater than that on Earth—the equivalent of being under 914 m (3,000 ft.) of water. Spacecraft that descend through the Venusian atmosphere can make much of the trip without a parachute, descending like a marble in a can of house paint.
This is not—it needn’t be said—a place that could likely harbor life. Except that now it very much needs to be said that it looks like it might.
That astonishing possibility arose out of observations made by the James Clerk Maxwell telescope in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert, and published yesterday in Nature Astronomy. The study’s authors, led by Cardiff University astronomer and professor Jane Greaves, did not find life itself. What they found instead were significant quantities of the toxic gas phosphine, which is a known byproduct of microorganisms that thrive in anaerobic environments—or those lacking free oxygen. In theory, the gas could be produced by volcanoes or the interaction of lightning with the atmosphere, but the concentrations in which the researchers found the stuff on Venus seemed far too high for those periodic, non-biological processes to be responsible. Instead, something must be steadily producing and regularly replenishing the gas, and that something looks to investigators like it could well be biology.
“[We] exhaustively went through every possibility and ruled all of them out: volcanoes, lightning strikes, small meteorites falling into the atmosphere,” Sara Seager, an MIT planetary scientist and co-author of the paper, told the Associated Press. “Not a single process we looked at could produce phosphine in high enough quantities to explain our team’s findings.”
This is by no means the first time investigators have contemplated the possibility of life in so inhospitable a place as Venus. Early in the planet’s history, Venus, like Mars, was likely a watery world similar at least in that way to Earth. Due to its lack of a magnetic field, Mars’s atmosphere was stripped away by the sun at some point, causing the water to sputter away into space. In the case of Venus, the planet’s lack of global plate tectonics prevented carbon dioxide from being plowed back into the ground, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect—exacerbated by the planet’s closer proximity to the sun than Earth’s—causing the oceans to boil away. The water vapor in the air only made the greenhouse heating worse.
But Venus had hundreds of millions of temperate years before it lost its water in which microbial life could have formed on the ground and then migrated up through the atmosphere to higher elevations—50 or so km (31 mi.)—where the pressure is closer to that of the Earth at sea level and the temperature is a balmy, shirtsleeves 30º C (86° F). There, bacteria could survive and thrive.
Not everyone is persuaded that the new findings mean biology on Earth’s sister planet. For one thing, the Venusian clouds are exceedingly high in sulfuric acid, meaning the microbes would have had to evolve a way to deal with its corrosive effects. For another thing, just because investigators have ruled out known alternative sources of phosphine doesn’t mean unknown ones aren’t responsible.
“It’s not a smoking gun,” co-author David Clements, an Imperial College of London astrophysicist, told the AP. “It’s not even gunshot residue on the hands of your prime suspect, but there is a distinct whiff of cordite in the air which may be suggesting something.”
One of the things it suggests is that the solar system—and perhaps the universe by implication—could well be teeming with life. If a blast-furnace world like Venus could harbor atmospheric organisms and frigid desert like Mars could harbor them in aquifers underground, what does it say about rich water worlds like the Jovian moons Europa and Ganymede, the Saturnian moon Enceladus and the dwarf planet Pluto, which are believed to harbor salty, liquid oceans beneath their surface, where life would have had billions of years to evolve? What does it say about the larger cosmos, where water is abundant? What does it say about even humble asteroids and meteorites that have landed on Earth carrying hydrocarbons and amino acids?
Life may well be exceedingly hard to achieve—found only on a one-off world like Earth and nowhere else. Or, it might be exceedingly easy, requiring nothing more than chemistry, energy and time to emerge—or maybe it falls somewhere in between. Today, the betting feels a little more like it tips to the easy side. Our solar system is more dynamic than we ever believed—and there is no reason the same could not be true of the cosmos as a whole.
If you pick up the newspaper these days, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the headlines: historic wildfires, a deadly pandemic and an impending U.S. election unlike any in recent memory. When you take a step back, it seems a bit like the fabric of society is fraying. Climate change isn’t entirely responsible for any of these problems, but there is a growing body of literature suggesting that climate change shapes political and social stability.
Research has shown repeatedly that warmer temperatures and more extreme weather contribute to a slew of adverse outcomes: violent crime, political instability and the collapse of regimes, to name a few. This year is likely to be the first- or second-hottest year on record, and extreme weather and climate-related events have struck from coast to coast in the U.S., not to mention around the world, and so it’s worth asking: what role does climate change play in our current political instability?
It’s a controversial question. For years, many politicians and commentators shuddered when scientists or climate activists discussed climate change in relation to individual storms or wildfires, accusing them of politicizing disaster—and, in those cases, the link to climate change was relatively straightforward. The evidence connecting climate change and political stability has been less obvious, but is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore. Warmer temperatures and extreme weather exacerbate social stress and worsen economic outcomes; these in turn affect political behavior. A landmark 2013 paper in the journal Science found that a change in temperature of one standard deviation was associated with a 2.3% increase in interpersonal conflict rates and a 13.2% increase in the rate of intergroup conflict. By 2050, temperatures are expected to rise by two standard deviations in most places across the globe and by as much as four standard deviations in some places.
Those percentages may seem small, but in many cases they can be enough to lead to serious problems. “A lot of the way in which climate change is really bad is like death by 1,000 cuts,” says Solomon Hsiang, author of the 2013 study and director of the Global Policy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. “Some of the biggest problems are situations in which we don’t realize we’re being affected by the climate, because then we don’t do anything to protect ourselves.”
The past: a history of climate change-induced political upheavals
Climate has shaped human life from the very first civilizations. A range of studies have shown how weather and climatic conditions have led to the collapse of societies, from the decline of the Tang dynasty in China in the 10th century to the decline of the Mayan civilization around 900 A.D. to the reshaping of settlement in Africa before the common era.
A prime example is the city of Angkor, the capital of the Khmer Empire in Cambodia from the 9th to 15th centuries. In its 600-year existence, the Khmer civilization built a complex system of waterways to meet Angkor’s needs as well as to protect the city from flooding. But, as a 2010 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences laid out, the region was hit with a decades-long drought in the 15th century that came as global temperatures transitioned from a warm period to a cool period. At the same time, the empire faced other pressures—namely, conflict with a neighboring kingdom and economic pressure from a change in trade patterns. The combined effect was the collapse of Angkor.
It’s easy to think about ancient civilizations and chalk up their failures to naiveté. They didn’t surf the internet or zip around the world on airplanes; surely, 21st century civilizations can better adapt to climactic changes. The thing is, while we may be far more technologically advanced today, ancient civilizations didn’t spew hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The result of those emissions—created over a tiny fraction of human history—is a sharp temperature rise poised to blow the climatic changes faced by ancient civilizations out of the water. “We’re so tempted to look at the historical record and say, ‘those guys didn’t know what they were doing, but we are super sharp now,’” says Hsiang. “I’m pretty sure those guys thought the exact same thing.”
The present: a tumultuous time, politically and climatically
Today, the U.S. faces a wide range of challenges, most of which, at their core, have nothing to do with climate change: centuries of systemic racism, an ailing health care system and rampant economic inequality, to name a few. Globally, there’s a wide range of similarly vexing problems. There’s a case to be made for how climate change exacerbates these problems: urban heat islands make people of color more vulnerable to heat waves, flooding spreads water-borne diseases that stress health care systems and extreme weather hits the poorest hardest.
More subtly, extreme temperatures and weather shape human behavior, which in turn affects social and political stability. “We are creatures that live in an environment, our environment is our climate,” says Alexander Cohen, an assistant professor of political science at Clarkson University who studies climate and political behavior. “To analyze political behavior, or really any social behavior, without looking at this huge variable is to not tell the whole story.”
In these tumultuous times—both politically and climatically—there are several key factors of human behavior to consider. Research has shown that warm temperatures increase the odds of violent interpersonal interactions: cities see spikes in violent crime and police are more likely to use force in extreme heat. Studies have also found that people dealing with extreme heat are more likely to distrust outsiders. And research has shown that challenging weather shapes political decisions. “When people are uncomfortable, weather explains some of that,” says Cohen. “It can explain how they respond to public opinion surveys, we know that it affects how they vote, or if they vote at all.”
The research on these linkages is fairly nascent, and it’s hard to lay out precisely the subtle role climate is playing in our current turmoil. But, in recent weeks, hundreds of thousands have been displaced in California and Oregon, more than 10 million acres of farmland have been damaged by a storm in Iowa, and a pair of hurricanes have flooded parts of Louisiana and Texas. Temperatures across the country are on track to make this one of the hottest years on record. It’s hard to imagine this upheaval isn’t subtly feeding into the zeitgeist.
The future: what could come next if climate change is left unchecked
Climate change’s role in shaping politics and geopolitics today may be subtle, but in the future, its influence is certain to be more pronounced—and concerning. If climate change is left unchecked, bigger storms, unsurvivable heat and disappearing coastlines will leave billions displaced or struggling to survive. This would in turn create unprecedented strain on political and social institutions, not mention the global economy.
No one really knows exactly how the fallout will occur. But there’s a strong scientific basis to assume that without urgent action to stem emissions we’ll be in for many more years and decades of disturbing newspaper headlines—and they won’t be just about storms and heat waves.
A version of this article was originally published in TIME’s climate newsletter, One.Five. Click here to sign up to receive these stories early.
Astronomers have found a potential sign of life high in the atmosphere of neighboring Venus: hints there may be bizarre microbes living in the sulfuric acid-laden clouds of the hothouse planet.
Two telescopes in Hawaii and Chile spotted in the thick Venutian clouds the chemical signature of phosphine, a noxious gas that on Earth is only associated with life, according to a study in Monday’s journal Nature Astronomy.
Several outside experts — and the study authors themselves — agreed this is tantalizing but said it is far from the first proof of life on another planet. They said it doesn’t satisfy the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” standard established by the late Carl Sagan, who speculated about the possibility of life in the clouds of Venus in 1967.
“It’s not a smoking gun,” said study co-author David Clements, an Imperial College of London astrophysicist. “It’s not even gunshot residue on the hands of your prime suspect, but there is a distinct whiff of cordite in the air which may be suggesting something.”
As astronomers plan for searches for life on planets outside our solar system, a major method is to look for chemical signatures that can only be made by biological processes, called biosignatures. After three astronomers met in a bar in Hawaii, they decided to look that way at the closest planet to Earth: Venus. They searched for phosphine, which is three hydrogen atoms and a phosphorous atom.
On Earth, there are only two ways phosphine can be formed, study authors said. One is in an industrial process. (The gas was produced for use as chemical warfare agent in World War I.) The other way is as part of some kind of poorly understood function in animals and microbes. Some scientists consider it a waste product, others don’t.
Phosphine is found in “ooze at the bottom of ponds, the guts of some creatures like badgers and perhaps most unpleasantly associated with piles of penguin guano,” Clements said.
Study co-author Sara Seager, an MIT planetary scientist, said researchers “exhaustively went through every possibility and ruled all of them out: volcanoes, lightning strikes, small meteorites falling into the atmosphere. … Not a single process we looked at could produce phosphine in high enough quantities to explain our team’s findings.”
That leaves life.
The astronomers hypothesize a scenario for how life could exist on the inhospitable planet where temperatures on the surface are around 800 degrees (425 degrees Celsius) with no water.
“Venus is hell. Venus is kind of Earth’s evil twin,” Clements said. “Clearly something has gone wrong, very wrong, with Venus. It’s the victim of a runaway greenhouse effect.”
But that’s on the surface.
Seager said all the action may be 30 miles (50 kilometers) above ground in the thick carbon-dioxide layer cloud deck, where it’s about room temperature or slightly warmer. It contains droplets with tiny amounts of water but mostly sulfuric acid that is a billion times more acidic than what’s found on Earth.
The phosphine could be coming from some kind of microbes, probably single-cell ones, inside those sulfuric acid droplets, living their entire lives in the 10-mile-deep (16-kilometer-deep) clouds, Seager and Clements said. When the droplets fall, the potential life probably dries out and could then get picked up in another drop and reanimate, they said.
Life is definitely a possibility, but more proof is needed, several outside scientists said.
Cornell University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger said the idea of this being the signature of biology at work is exciting, but she said we don’t know enough about Venus to say life is the only explanation for the phosphine.
“I’m not skeptical, I’m hesitant,” said Justin Filiberto, a planetary geochemist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston who specializes in Venus and Mars and isn’t part of the study team.
Filiberto said the levels of phosphine found might be explained away by volcanoes. He said recent studies that were not taken into account in this latest research suggest that Venus may have far more active volcanoes than originally thought. But Clements said that explanation would make sense only if Venus were at least 200 times as volcanically active as Earth.
David Grinspoon, a Washington-based astrobiologist at the Planetary Science Institute who wrote a 1997 book suggesting Venus could harbor life, said the finding “almost seems too good to be true.”
“I’m excited, but I’m also cautious,” Grinspoon said. “We found an encouraging sign that demands we follow up.”
NASA hasn’t sent anything to Venus since 1989, though Russia, Europe and Japan have dispatched probes. The U.S. space agency is considering two possible Venus missions. One of them, called DAVINCI+, would go into the Venutian atmosphere as early as 2026.
Clements said his head tells him “it’s probably a 10% chance that it’s life,” but his heart “obviously wants it to be much bigger because it would be so exciting.”
The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
The first successfully cloned endangered Przewalski’s horse was born on Aug. 6 in a veterinary facility in Texas, San Diego Zoo Global announced on Friday. The horse was cloned from DNA of a male Przewalski’s horse cryopreserved by the zoo in 1980.
Przewalski’s horses are “critically endangered” animals that are found in Mongolia,per Smithsonian’s National Zoo.They’re considered the last species of “truly wild horses” and are “distant cousins” of modern day domestic horses, having likely split from a common ancestor around 500,000 years ago, per the Smithsonian.
Przewalski’s horses were once extinct in the wild, and while intensive breeding programs helped revive the species and reintroduce them into the grasslands of China and Mongolia, nearly all can be traced back to 12 Przewalski’s horses that were born in the wild, the San Diego Zoo said in its press release. The successful cloning of DNA collected 40 years is meant to introduce key generic diversity into the species that could benefit its survival. The zoo said the cloned Przewalski’s horse will eventually be transferred to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park and integrated into a herd of other Przewalski’s horses for breeding.
“The work to save endangered species requires collaborative and dedicated partners with aligned goals,” Paul A. Baribault, president of San Diego Zoo Global, said in a statement. “We share in this remarkable achievement because we applied our multidisciplinary approach, working with the best scientific minds and utilizing precious genetic material collected and stored in our wildlife DNA bio bank.”
The cloned Przewalski’s horse was named Kurt after Dr.Kurt Benirschke, the creatorof the San Diego Zoo Global Frozen Zoo, which has beencollecting and preserving genetic materialof endangered animals since 1975.
San Diego Zoo Global partnered withRevive & Restore—a wildlife conservation group that aims to incorporate biotechnology into conservation efforts—andViaGen Equine—a company that clones horses and pets—to successfully clone thePrzewalski’s horse.
“This birth expands the opportunity for genetic rescue of endangered wild species,”said Ryan Phelan, executive director of Revive & Restore, in a statement. “Advanced reproductive technologies, including cloning, can save species by allowing us to restore geneticdiversity that would have otherwise been lost to time.”
Przewalski’s horses are not the only species Revive & Restore is trying to revive via biotechnology. The group is attempting to revive at least six endangered or extinct species, includingthe Wooly Mammoth, which went extinct around 4,000 years ago. Other organizations and research facilities are also attempting to revive extinct or endangered species with biotechnology, including theInternational Islamic University Malaysia, which plans torevive the recently extinct Sumatran rhino.
On a cool winter’s day in early 2014, the American academic Nafees Hamid was invited for tea at the second-story at the Barcelona apartment of a young Moroccan man. It started well enough; they sat down at the kitchen table, chatting amiably in French while two acquaintances of the host sat nearby in the living room. Halfway through the conversation, though, things took a turn. “He started saying things like, ‘Why should we trust any Westerner?’” Hamid recalls. “‘Why would we not kill every one of them? Why should I even trust you—you are an American—sitting here? Why should I even let you out of my apartment?’” The man briefly left the kitchen and went into the living room to speak to the others in Arabic, a language in which Hamid is not fluent. But he repeatedly heard one word he did know: munafiq—a term that, at best, means hypocrite; at worst, “enemy of Islam.”
“I realized that they were talking about me, and that this was going in the wrong direction,” says Hamid, who had arrived hoping to coax the Moroccan to participate in a study.
As quietly as possible, he opened the second-story window and jumped out, his fall cushioned by the awning of a fruit stand below. Adrenaline spiking, he bolted to the safety of a crowded train station a few blocks away.
Field research on jihad has its hazards. Hamid, now 36, had come to the apartment knowing—from a questionnaire he had already filled out—that the Moroccan man harbored extremist inclinations. The effort was part of a larger project to discover the roots of radicalization and what might cause someone to fight or die—or kill—for their beliefs.
Richard MillingtonNafees Hamid in London on August 19, 2020.
But the work goes on, a part of a larger undertaking by an unusual network of policy experts and international scientists, many of whom have their own harrowing tales of escaping danger or navigating dicey situations in pursuit of groundbreaking research. Recently, the group published the first brain-imaging studies on radicalized men and young adults susceptible to radicalization. The private research firm behind the group’s work, Artis International, is officially headquartered in Scottsdale, Ariz., but doesn’t truly have a base. Its academics and analysts operate from far-flung places, tapping an array of funding from various governments, the U.S. military and academic institutions. The central goal of the firm is to advance peace by figuring out what motivates people to become violent—and how to reorient them toward conflict resolution, or prevent them from becoming violent in the first place.
That means getting as close to the perpetrators and their supporters as possible. Much of Artis’ work has been rooted in behavioral sciences and informed by straightforward research methods, like surveys. But Artis researchers have also pushed the boundaries of social science, through everything from experimental surveys on armed forces to psychological tests on imprisoned extremists. Its investigations have led researchers to the front lines of the war against ISIS, restive areas in North Africa, and lately into Eastern Europe and cyberspace.
Even by Artis standards, the recent brain-imaging studies conducted in Barcelona—the work that had Hamid leaping from a window—were remarkable for the level of risk the researchers undertook. The scientists wanted to find hard neurological evidence to support previous social-science findings and widely held assumptions: that extremists could be influenced by their peers, and later, that social exclusion may harden the beliefs of a budding extremist. To gather this sort of information, researchers like Hamid would have to scour the streets of Barcelona for extremists; somehow convince hundreds of them to take surveys; and then, after identifying the most radicalized, coax them to undergo multiple brain scans at a seaside hospital campus. What could possibly go wrong?
Origins: A Research Void
The roots of the Barcelona brain studies go back to 2005, when the U.S. government was still absorbing the 9/11 attacks. Richard Davis, who would go on to co-found Artis International two years later, had recently started working as a policy adviser for the U.S. Homeland Security Council (which reports to the President) and was alarmed by how the government came to its counter-terrorism strategies. “It became clear that many of the decisions that were being made—grand decisions about terrorism—were being made with little to no field-based scientific evidence backing them,” he says.
One key problem is that empirical extremism studies require access to materials that governments might not want to share, like transcripts of intercepted communications or interrogations, explains Liesbeth van der Heide, a research fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in the Hague. Ideally, the studies also involve access to extremists themselves, who are even harder to come by. “There aren’t many of them,” she says. And the ones that succeed in carrying out violent plans “tend to die in an attack or flee.”
So most terrorism research has tended to draw on secondary sources—reports in the media, for example, or other books or articles already published on the subject, resulting, she says, in “an echo chamber repeating what others have said.” An exhaustive 2006 review of 6,041 peer-reviewed studies on terrorism published from 1971 to 2003 found that only 3% were based on empirical data. “Thought pieces”—articles where authors discussed an issue theoretically or offered an opinion—accounted for 96%.
This alarmed Davis. He believed that any government interested in curbing violence needed not more thought pieces, but a more scientific understanding of the people who commit it based on primary sources. Academics already doing this sort of work were rare exceptions, but both Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer turned forensic and clinical psychiatrist, and Scott Atran, an anthropologist, had spent extensive time with members of militant jihadist groups, from the Afghan mujahedin to al-Qaeda. Davis sought them out in the fall of 2005, and by 2007 had convinced them to help him launch a firm dedicated to on-the-ground research into violence reduction. They named it Artis, Latin for “of art,” “of skill” or, in some usages, “of science.”
That same year, Artis cobbled together funding from a range of institutions—including the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the French National Centre for Scientific Research—to study the underlying causes of political violence. They decided to focus on a social-psychology concept called “sacred values”—a person’s deepest, most nonnegotiable values—which would lay the groundwork for their Barcelona brain scans.
Sacred Values
In the 1990s, social psychologists Jonathan Baron at the University of Pennsylvania and Philip Tetlock at the University of California, Berkeley, developed the concept of “sacred values” to counter economic theories that suggested everything had a price. Certain values (like human life, justice, civil liberties, environmental or religious devotion) could be so sacred to people that they would be unwilling to act against them, no matter the cost or consequence.
Atran, who had been studying values for decades through the lens of anthropology, began applying this concept to the study of violent extremists after 9/11. It occurred to him then that, perhaps, the perpetrators had committed the suicide attacks in defense of deep values the rest of the world had been overlooking. By 2007, Atran had advanced this line of thinking in several articles about jihadist terrorists. His Artis colleagues found evidence that material incentives may backfire when adversaries see the issues at the heart of a dispute (like land and nationhood) as “sacred.”
The Artis team continued to hone the connection between sacred values and violence into 2014, when a comment from President Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper Jr., gave them a renewed sense of purpose. In an interview, Clapper said that the U.S. had underestimated ISIS militants because predicting a group’s will to fight was “an imponderable.” In response to that comment, Atran and his colleagues decided to use their knowledge of sacred values to measure militants’ will to fight, which they believed was indeed “ponderable.”
That same year, they did survey-based research on networks in Spain and Morocco responsible for the 2004 Madrid bombings. It found that people were more willing to sacrifice their lives if they were part of a close-knit group that shared their sacred values. They also began laying the groundwork for a separate study, eventually published in 2017, that found that among members of various forces who fought against ISIS, those who expressed the most willingness to fight and die for abstract values like nationhood, heritage and religion tended to prioritize those values over their social groups, like family.
Still, by 2014 most such work had come from what fighters said in interviews or surveys. Atran was convinced that sacred values were so deep and powerful that the brain must process them differently than it processes decisions about more mundane issues. But to truly understand the relationships between neural pathways associated with such values and willingness to sacrifice for them, Atran and his colleagues believed they needed to get a look inside extremists’ heads.
Recruitment
Barcelona’s Raval district is a maze of graffiti-sprayed buildings and narrow streets. In recent years, chic galleries and boutique clothing stores have begun to spring up between halal butchers and Arabic-language bookshops, filling the boarded-up storefronts emptied by the waves of evictions that ravaged the primarily immigrant neighborhood following the 2008 financial crisis.
The locale has also been the epicenter for a number of foiled terrorist plots, and is carefully monitored by both Spanish and international intelligence bodies for jihadist activity. That made it an appealing place for Hamid and his colleagues to recruit radicalized men for their inaugural brain study on extremists. The Artis researchers planned to use a combination of behavioral tests and brain scans in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to see whether a hardened extremist’s “will to fight” for his sacred values was susceptible to peer influence.
In early 2014, the group decided to target a small pocket of extremists in Barcelona’s Pakistani community that authorities had been tracking for years. They set their sights on 20- to 30-something first-generation Pakistani men who openly supported Lashkar-e-Taiba, an al-Qaeda affiliate based in South Asia. Initially, Hamid’s recruitment strategy consisted of becoming a regular at neighborhood cafés and conspicuously reading articles or books that he imagined might appeal to a jihadist, in hopes that someone would approach him. “That really didn’t work,” he says. “It was far more effective to be transparent.”
So he started to look for Urdu speakers who seemed like they had time on their hands. When he saw likely candidates chatting with friends on park benches or sipping tea at one of the many outdoor terraces in the Raval district, Hamid would approach them cautiously. “I didn’t want to seem like I was stereotyping an entire population … I think, also, I just didn’t want to get punched in the face.”
He explained that he was a psychologist conducting surveys on people’s strongly held values related to religion, culture and politics. After chatting for a while, he would invite them to take an initial survey designed to assess a person’s level of radicalization, according to three specific criteria: their support of the militant jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba; their approval of violence against civilians; and, lastly, their expressed willingness to aid or participate in armed jihad. The survey took 30 to 60 minutes to complete, and Hamid paid everyone who took it €20 ($22) for their time. For the purposes of the study, a person who fit all three criteria was considered radicalized, in which case, Hamid would call them to ask if their friends might also want to take the survey.
As a Pakistani American, Hamid was acutely sensitive to the fact that the people he was approaching might feel profiled. (And in fact, a number of the nonradicalized people who gleaned the thrust of the survey questions were offended, he said.) However, he also recognized the scientific importance of focusing on this particular population.
“We wanted to study radicalization in the context of violent Sunni jihadism, which at the time we conducted our research was the main international terrorist threat,” he explains. It made sense to focus on recruiting from population (and Moroccan population for a follow-up study on the brains of budding radicals) because they represented the two biggest Sunni Muslim groups in the area. And, “the majority of people pulled into terrorist groups from the Barcelona region came from those two ethnic groups,” he says.
The Artis team also believed that it was scientifically important to study groups that weren’t white college students—a population so overly represented in cognitive-science study that they have their own acronym: people from white, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies (WEIRD). “Studying sacred values and willingness to fight and die in two separate ethnic groups with very different cultural backgrounds allowed us to examine the generalizability of our claims,” says Hamid.
To protect both the extremists and the study itself, rather than using names, the researchers assigned each volunteer a number. They also tried to avoid asking any questions in the surveys that might put them in tricky legal terrain. “I would tell [the volunteers], ‘Do not tell me anything about a crime you committed, because that will implicate me,’” says Hamid. Instead, the researchers asked hypothetical questions aimed at assessing participants’ beliefs and values, rather than what a person had already done or intended to do with them.
By the end of 2015, Hamid and his team had convinced 146 people to take the survey. He and his colleagues then followed up with the most radicalized of the group—the 45 men who met all three criteria—offering them an additional €100 ($120) to come to a laboratory for the rest of the study. Thirty men, ages 18 to 36, agreed.
Into the Lab
The Autonomous University of Barcelona’s fMRI lab is located in the basement of a blocky gray building flanked by patches of green lawn where, on sunny days, college students like to picnic and read books. There, a team led by Clara Pretus, a neuroscientist in her mid-20s, put these 30 men through the next stages of the study.
The men came to the lab in groups of three or four. After a brief orientation to ease their nerves, the brain scans would begin. The men would lay prone on the bed of the fMRI machine, which would back them into a tube. They wore goggles affixed to a video screen that would flick on and project a statement written in Urdu: “Prophet Muhammad must never be caricatured” or “The Qur’an should never be abused,” for example. Each statement touched on an issue that mattered to the group, based on previous surveys and interviews. The scientists knew which statements aligned with each man’s sacred and nonsacred values, based on those same previous surveys, and they wanted to know how their brains would respond to each. To figure this out, they asked the men to rate how willing they would be, on a scale of 1 to 7, to fight and die for each declaration.
The machine snapped pictures of their brains as the men used a handheld device to make their ratings. After they had gone through all the prompts, Pretus offered them the opportunity to review the slides again—but this time, they’d be able to see how their own responses compared with those supposedly given by their “peers.” This peer group was presented to the men as “the average opinion of the Pakistani community in Barcelona.” But in reality, the researchers had fabricated the ratings for the sake of the experiment. In some instances, the researchers made them appear to align with the men’s responses. In other cases, their “peers” appeared to be more inclined to fight and die for specific values. In still others, less.
After the men had seen how the ratings of their so-called peer group differed from their own, they were given the opportunity to go through the slides one last time—this time outside of the machine—and rate their willingness to fight and die for each statement once again. The scientists wanted to see if the responses from their “peer group” would make them alter their initial responses. In cases where anyone changed his mind, scientists would go back through the fMRI images to see what was happening in his brain as he reviewed the peer information that ultimately compelled him to reconsider his initial answer.
After they completed the final task, the men, whose names they never learned, were free to take their money and go, disappearing into the streets.
Findings
Over the following weeks, the team analyzed the data. As expected, the men expressed greater willingness to fight and die for their sacred values than for their nonsacred values. More interesting were what parts of the brain appeared involved with each question. When participants rated their willingness to sacrifice for their sacred values (defending the Qur’an, for example), parts of the brain linked to deliberation (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus and parietal cortex, which Pretus describes as parts of the fronto-parietal or “executive-control network”) were far less active than when they rated their willingness to kill and die for issues they cared about less (like the availability of halal food in public schools). Dr. Oscar Vilarroya, the lead neuro-scientist on the team, says this indicates that humans don’t deliberate about their sacred values: “We just act on them.”
While this may seem like common sense, the finding was significant, since nearly all sacred-values research to that point had been based on surveys and other tools that assessed what people said—not tied to brain activity. “When you’re taking a social survey, you can lie,” explains Atran. “But brain patterns can’t be faked.” It was the first published study scanning the brains of extremists.
Knowing extremists essentially don’t deliberate when considering the values most important to them confirmed something Atran long believed: that deradicalization programs focused on altering extremists’ beliefs through logic and reasoning, or through trade-offs and material incentives, are doomed to fail. Others had made this argument to explain why programs like France’s civics- and reward-focused deradicalization program, launched in late 2016, had flopped within a year. Here was brain science to support the case.
There was one finding of the study, though, that provided a glimmer of hope for an alternative approach: the areas in the brain linked to deliberation lit up when extremists realized their “peers” weren’t as willing to resort to violence to defend a particular value. And when given the opportunity, post–brain scan, to revise their initial answers to the question “How willing are you to fight and die for this value?” many of them adjusted their rating to better align with their peers. Hamid says this shows that peer groups, like family and friends, play a powerful role in determining whether an extremist will become violent. They will never be able to change the extremist’s core views or values, he says, but they can convince that person that violence is or is not an acceptable way to defend those values. This finding, Atran believes, could have real implications for governments and organizations working in counterterrorism.
“The lesson … is don’t try to undermine their values,” Atran says. “Try to show them there are other ways of committing to their values.”
Critiques and Real-World Applications
The team’s work, published in the Royal Society Open Science journal in June 2019, has garnered a flurry of attention, especially from social psychologists and other academics interested in human motivation. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University and author of the controversial book The Coddling of the American Mind, commended Atran and his colleagues on their “ecological validity”—how relevant the studies are to real-world problems. “We often use the easiest subjects to obtain, which are college students,” he says. “But Scott, at great expense and with great difficulty has always been committed to ecological validity—to studying people who are truly involved in extreme behavior, including terrorist behavior.”
But academics with a background in neuroscience, including Jay Van Bavel, an associate professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, and Patricia Churchland, who studies the intersection of brain activity and philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, expressed more caution. Churchland reviewed the study for Royal Society. In her review, she says, she warned that the brain regions and neural networks from which scientists drew their conclusions are still not very well understood and have been associated with a range of functions beyond simply “deliberation.”
Atran points out that he and his colleagues never set out to map the connection between brain parts and behaviors. Instead, they sought to—and did—find brain patterns that lined up with the results of behavioral studies. (He adds the usual science disclaimer: “All results are tentative, and we look for replication.”)
Meanwhile, as the academic world weighs the research, the Artis team has published additional brain studies on radicalization. And the U.S. military and foreign governments are already plotting how they might put the findings to use. Since the Barcelona work first began, Davis and Atran have been fielding calls from security officials around the world seeking advice on how to deal with radicalized populations and how to apply their research to newer problems, like criminal groups spreading disinformation and taking advantage of weak governance amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Davis is adamant that his researchers steer clear of directly advising any military or government—he doesn’t want the fate of suspects or a nation’s security to be pinned on one of them. But he’s happy to send his colleagues around the world to share their research findings and even collaborate on projects.
And, in a twist, the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado got in touch in 2016 seeking to collaborate and study how a cadet’s sacred values and identity with varying groups affect their willingness to fight and die. This April, the Academy, with Artis’ assistance, completed a small study that found that cadets who both viewed religion as a sacred value and strongly identified as a member of a religious group took greater risks than their peers in virtual combat situations. One key takeaway, according to Lieut. Colonel Chad C. Tossell, the director of the school’s Warfighter Effectiveness Research Center, is that the “spiritual strength” of soldiers is as important as the weapons and technology they use. An early draft of the study says the simulation designed for the research could be “useful for selection and training.”
Davis is encouraged by the constant interest he gets from governments, from those in the U.S. to Kenya to Kosovo. The U.S. military continues to aid in funding as the firm sets its sights on the next frontiers: figuring out how and why democratic institutions collapse and how cyberspace is being used to divide people and harden their values, turning nonsacred values into sacred ones. Artis’ work is “first and foremost about field-based scientific research,” and giving policymakers the facts they need to responsibly respond to the problems of the day, Davis says. “We can debate what the meaning of the empirical evidence is, but it’s better to have it than not to have it.
—With reporting by Mélissa Godin and Madeline Roache/London
