I’m a scientist who has gotten death threats. I fear what may happen under Trump

Michael E. Mann is a professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. He co-authored, with Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles, “The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy.”

Donald Trump’s pick of Scott Pruitt for
Environmental Protection Agency
administrator is just one of many ominous signs.

My Penn State colleagues looked with horror at the police tape across my office door.

I had been opening mail at my desk that afternoon in August 2010 when a dusting of white powder fell from the folds of a letter. I dropped the letter, held my breath and slipped out the door as swiftly as I could, shutting it behind me. First I went to the bathroom to scrub my hands. Then I called the police.

It turned out to be cornstarch, not anthrax. And it was just one in a long series of threats I’ve received since the late 1990s, when my research illustrated the unprecedented nature of global warming, producing an upward-trending temperature curve whose shape has been likened to a hockey stick.

Read the opinion piece by Michael E. Mann in The Washington Post - “I’m a scientist who has gotten death threats. I fear what may happen under Trump.”

As Earth Warms, the Diseases That May Lie Within Permafrost Become a Bigger Worry

Veterinarians perform a health check-up on
 a young deer on the Yamal Peninsula in
Siberia after an anthrax outbreak there. 

This past summer anthrax killed a 12-year-old boy in a remote part of Siberia.
 At least 20 other people, also from the Yamal Peninsula, were diagnosed with the potentially deadly disease after approximately 100 suspected cases were hospitalized. Additionally, more than 2,300 reindeer in the area died from the infection. The likely cause? Thawing permafrost. According to Russian officials, thawed permafrost—a permanently frozen layer of soil—released previously immobile spores of Bacillus anthracis into nearby water and soil and then into the food supply. The outbreak was the region's first in 75 years.

Researchers have predicted for years that one of the effects of global warming could be that whatever is frozen in permafrost—such as ancient bacteria—might be released as temperatures climb. This could include infectious agents humans might not be prepared for, or have immunity to, the scientists said. Now they are witnessing the theoretical turning into reality: infectious microorganisms emerging from a deep freeze.

Read the Scientific American story - “As Earth Warms, the Diseases That May Lie Within Permafrost Become a Bigger Worry.”