New story in Science and Health from Time: How Amy Coney Barrett Could Alter the Future of the U.S.’s Climate Change Policy How Amy Coney Barrett Could Alter the Future of the U.S.’s Climate Change Policy

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.

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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.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Republicans Claim Addressing Climate Change Is Too Expensive. Americans Aren’t Buying It, a New Poll Shows Republicans Claim Addressing Climate Change Is Too Expensive. Americans Aren’t Buying It, a New Poll Shows

“It’s too expensive.” Republicans have uttered this refrain time and again to reject nearly every proposal aimed at addressing climate change. It’s what drove the U.S. rejection of global climate deals in the 1990s and essentially the only context in which the Trump campaign brings up climate change today.

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.”

Read more: Donald Trump’s Campaign Crafted a Careful Climate Message. Trump Ignored It

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.

That debate hit a fever pitch in recent years as Americans have grown increasingly aware of and concerned about the science of climate change. Republicans have changed their tactics as a result, increasingly arguing that mitigation efforts are 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.

Read more: Why Some Republicans are Rethinking Climate Change

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.

Read more: Rural Americans Have Faced Outsize Hardship Under President Trump. Will They Still Vote for Him?

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.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Donald Trump’s Campaign Crafted a Careful Climate Message. Trump Ignored It Donald Trump’s Campaign Crafted a Careful Climate Message. Trump Ignored It

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 that 67% 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.

New story in Science and Health from Time: ‘A Climate Emergency Unfolding Before Our Eyes.’ Arctic Sea Ice Has Shrunk to Almost Historic Levels ‘A Climate Emergency Unfolding Before Our Eyes.’ Arctic Sea Ice Has Shrunk to Almost Historic Levels

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.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: Signs of Life on Venus Hint at Biology Pretty Much Anywhere in the Universe Signs of Life on Venus Hint at Biology Pretty Much Anywhere in the Universe

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.

New story in Science and Health from Time: How Climate Change May Be Contributing to Our Political Instability How Climate Change May Be Contributing to Our Political Instability

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.

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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.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Astronomers Find Potential Sign of Life in Venus’ Atmosphere Astronomers Find Potential Sign of Life in Venus’ Atmosphere

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.”

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter: @borenbears

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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.