On Tuesday, Los Angeles County caught fire. Driven by unusually strong Santa Ana winds, as my colleagues report, five fires have ignited some 27,000 acres of land (and counting), and forced state officials to issue evacuation orders for more than 100,000 residents. Five people have already died in the fires, authorities say.

The Palisades Fire, in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, and the Eaton Fire, impacting Altadena and Pasadena to the east, are the largest. While it’s unclear how exactly the fires started, experts point to a combination of factors that have made conditions ripe for disaster. The entire region has seen extremely low autumn and winter rainfall, with downtown Los Angeles, the LA Times reports, seeing less than a quarter of an inch of rain since October 1—compared to an average 4.64 inches in a typical season.

“You combine that with the high winds, and you really have the perfect storm in terms of a big fire event,” said Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

To better understand how this happened and what anyone can do about it, I spoke to Keeley, who explained what the Santa Ana winds are, how climate change comes into play, what homeowners can do to protect themselves, and how goats—yes, goats—can help.

What’s going on with the Santa Ana winds? Why are they so strong?

When you get high pressure in the east, and low pressure off the coast, you get winds moving from east to west. Normally, winds blow from the ocean onto the land. That’s a normal wind flow. When we get a Santa Ana wind, everything reverses. And because the pressure system is often very high, you get very severe winds.

I saw reports of 60-to-70-mile-per-hour winds. Typically, it’s more likely to be half that speed. If you have fires being blown at 60 miles per hour, it’s extremely dangerous because people often don’t have time to get out. But it’s obvious from the Eaton Fire that they didn’t. Not everybody got out.

Scientists have warned that with climate change, fires and fire seasons will get worse. But can we attribute these fires to climate change?

Well, there’s really no way to ascribe a particular fire event to climate change. Climate change involves data that show climate trends over time. No question, though, that climate change is exacerbating our fire regime and affecting fires, making them potentially worse.

Understandably, much of the focus right now is on the loss of life and property. What about impacts to the ecosystem?

In a nutshell, these high-severity fires are not a problem. These ecosystems are well adapted to high-severity fires. Where the fire started in Pacific Palisades, for example, is chaparral vegetation. It’s a shrubland vegetation. We have good evidence that this vegetation has evolved along with fire for at least 20 million years.

In California, we have perhaps 100 herbaceous species—like wildflowers—that are only seen after a fire. They come up in abundance after a fire, they persist for maybe a year or two, and then they disappear, remaining as dormant seeds.

But what we’re seeing now is more of these severe fire events. With more frequent fires, we’re seeing large expanses of our native shrublands being eliminated and replaced by weeds. And so there’s large portions of native, California vegetation that have been totally lost.

So what does that mean for controlled burning? Should we be doing more controlled burns to prevent this kind of fire? Less?

With these fires, controlled burning would likely have had no impact whatsoever. With forests in California, we’ve caused fuels [shrubs, leaves, and other plant material] to accumulate, so we have to do prescription burning to keep those fuels down. I’m very much an advocate of burning in these forests.

But when you get to Southern California and chaparral, it’s totally different. Fires, first off, were never very frequent there. And with more people in the landscape starting more and more fires, we have no unusual fuel accumulation. And so doing prescription burning isn’t going to change the fuel structure.

Plus, when you have Santa Ana winds, it doesn’t matter what the fuel structure looks like. It doesn’t matter if you have done prescription burning. When you have these high winds, even if they run into a prescribed burn, the embers are just blown right over that burned area and ignite on the other side.

Firefighters do need space to fight a fire, so doing fuel treatments around homes makes sense if you want to defend homes. However, prescription burning can be dangerous in Southern California, so [officials] often use animals like goats to reduce the fuels.

So goats could be one part of the solution for preventing the worst fire damage—what about other solutions?

Just doing a “fuel break”—that’s what they call these areas—doesn’t stop these fires from burning homes. It’s not the flames from the fire that ignite homes. Most homes are ignited by embers that blow in the wind and land on the house.

And to stop that, there’s a lot that homeowners can do in terms of what is called “hardening” your home, basically making it more fire-safe.

In the last 20 years, we’ve had five times more area burn due to power lines than in the previous 20.

For example, just the types of vents in your roof can have a big impact. A lot of construction is done with “open eaves,” with attic vents parallel to the ground, so when the embers are blown, they blow right in and ignite the home. But the home I live in now, we have “closed eaves,” where the vents are covered and point down towards the ground, so there’s less chance for embers to get in the attic.

As a scientist who’s watching all of this happen, do you think there is any context that’s been missing from the coverage?

It’s important to recognize where the fire started. The Eaton Fire started right in the middle of a developed area. It’s not one of these fires that started off in the mountains east of LA and then burned down into LA so that people had a chance to plan. This started right within the urban environment. That’s the primary reason why it was so destructive.

We don’t know what the [direct] causes are, but there’s reason to believe they may have been driven by power line failures. In the last 20 years, we’ve had five times more area burn due to power line failure–ignited fires than in the previous 20 years.

So the big message is, climate change may be exacerbating all this, but population growth is another factor that we have to keep in mind. In the last 20 years, we’ve added something like 6 million people to California. You add that many people, and they end up having to live further and further out from the urban environment—and oftentimes, in areas of extreme risk.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

So much of this year felt like a fever dream: The attempted assassination of Donald Trump. A career-ending presidential debate. The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Abortion bans. Presidential immunity. The Alaska Airlines door fiasco. Diddy’s arrest. Raygun. Baldoni-Gate. Tradwives!

I, personally, am tired.

Which is why, this year, I’m leaning into my nerdish tendencies and rounding up some good, interesting, or inspiring news stories from the science world—promising discoveries, exciting new data, historic events, and unsung heroes.

In the hope of providing relief from the hell that has been 2024, here’s a non-comprehensive list of the year’s coolest science stories, both big and small:

Possibly the first-ever photo of a newborn great white shark

Wildlife filmmaker Carlos Gauna and University of California, Riverside, PhD student Phillip Sternes spotted what appears to be a baby great white shark off the coast of California last year. In January, the team published the photos in the journal Environmental Biology of Fishes.

“Where white sharks give birth is one of the holy grails of shark science. No one has ever been able to pinpoint where they are born, nor has anyone seen a newborn baby shark alive,” Gauna said in a UC Riverside press release. “There have been dead white sharks found inside deceased pregnant mothers. But nothing like this.”

A powerful microorganism named “Chonkus”

From the carbon-dioxide–rich waters near Vulcano, a volcanic island just north of Sicily, researchers isolated a new microorganism, cyanobacterium UTEX 3222, nicknamed “Chonkus,” for its ability to consume carbon dioxide, Grist reports. When grown in the lab, it’s notably dense, as one scientist described it, like “green peanut butter.”

“If scientists can figure out how to genetically engineer it,” Grist‘s Sachi Kitajima Mulkey writes, “this single-celled organism’s natural quirks could become supercharged into a low-waste carbon capture system” to fight climate change. (That may be easier said than done. Read more about Chonkus here.)

Water on asteroids

For the first time, scientists detected water on the surface of an asteroid: two asteroids, in fact, Space.com‘s Samantha Mathewson reported in February, named Iris (124 miles in diameter) and Massalia (84 miles). That’s significant because scientists theorize that Earth’s water—which you and I and every other living thing on this planet need to live—originally came from asteroids. The finding backs up that theory.

And it could help spawn new theories about life outside of Earth. “Understanding of the distribution of water through space will help researchers better assess where to search for other forms of potential life,” Mathewson writes, “both in our solar system and beyond.”

Meat-eating squirrels

Honestly, ground squirrels were always a little suspect. (Are they really that different from rats?) But now, researchers have uncovered unsettling new information about their diets. Beyond consuming nuts, seeds, and acorns, a new study shows, squirrels in California also hunt and eat voles, which are small rodents—a behavior pattern the authors say had never been documented before.

“I could barely believe my eyes,” Sonja Wild, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Davis, and an author of the study, said in a press release. “From then, we saw that behavior almost every day. Once we started looking, we saw it everywhere.” The squirrels’ vole-hunting habits coincided with a boom in the state’s vole population, the researchers said, but it’s unclear what exactly sparked the change.

And yes, there’s video.

The historic, dual emergence of two cicada broods

This year, two groups of cicadas—the Great Southern Brood and the Northern Illinois Brood—emerged to breed after more than a decade burrowed in the ground, the first such dual event since 1803. As the New York Times put it, “The last time the Northern Illinois Brood’s 17-year cycle aligned with the Great Southern Brood’s 13-year period, Thomas Jefferson was president.”

If you caught this year’s event, consider yourself lucky. It’ll be another 221 years until the next time the broods emerge simultaneously.

This photo of a “bizarre” blob-headed fish

Just look at this thing.

Although it’s technically a species “new to science,” as Mongabay reports, this bristlemouth armored catfish was well-known to the Indigenous Awajun people in Peru who worked with scientists at Conservation International to identify the species in 2022.

In a report released this month, the nonprofit organization officially announced the “bizarre” fish and 26 other new species.

An injectable, long-lasting HIV drug

An effective HIV vaccine has eluded scientists for decades. But now, a new drug could be what the journal Science calls “the next best thing“: an injectable that offers protection from infection for six months.

Here’s Science, which recently named the drug its 2024 Breakthrough of the Year:

A large efficacy trial in African adolescent girls and young women reported in June that these shots reduced HIV infections to zero—an astonishing 100% efficacy. Any doubts about the finding disappeared 3 months later when a similar trial, conducted across four continents, reported 99.9% efficacy in gender diverse people who have sex with men.

Many HIV/AIDS researchers are now hopeful that the drug, lenacapavir, will powerfully drive down global infection rates when used as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). “It has the potential, if we can do it right, which means going big and getting it out there,” says Linda-Gail Bekker, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Cape Town who led one of the two efficacy trials for the drug’s maker, Gilead Sciences.

The vulnerability of meteorologist John Morales

If there’s a good news story about climate communication to come out of this year, it’s that of John Morales. In October, the veteran Miami meteorologist went viral for his emotional weather briefing on Hurricane Milton, as the storm approached central Florida from the Gulf of Mexico.

As I reported at the time, Morales initially hesitated to share a video of the briefing, during which he teared up, on X. “I was just kind of embarrassed,” he told me. “I was like, how can I lose it like that on TV?”

But to me (and many others, apparently), Morales was just the right messenger for the moment. His briefing has since been shared thousands of times, and his interview with Mother Jones was among our most-read environmental stories this year.

For decades, he said, people knew him as a “just-the-facts” kind of guy. “But the truth is that with climate-driven extremes putting us in a place that we haven’t been before, it’s very difficult to stay cool, calm, and collected.”

I debated whether to share this. I did apologize on the air. But I invite you to read my introspection on @BulletinAtomic of how extreme weather driven by global warming has changed me. Frankly, YOU should be shaken too, and demand #ClimateActionNow. https://t.co/09vxgabSmX https://t.co/GzQbDglsBG

— John Morales (@JohnMoralesTV) October 7, 2024

Over the years, Donald Trump hasn’t exactly been a champion of science. As president and on the campaign trail, he called climate change a “hoax“; oversaw the rolling back of more than 100 environmental policies; directed agencies to cut down on expert guidance; pushed unproven Covid treatments; pulled out of the Paris climate agreement (and pledged to do so again); and claimed, without evidence, that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer. Ahead of his next stint in the Oval Office, he has nominated a vaccine denier to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services, promised to rid federal agencies of potentially tens of thousands of career staffers, and said he intends to shutter the Department of Education.

“Trump has basically said he is waging war on science and scientists.”

“Trump has basically said he is waging war on science and scientists,” said Jennifer Jones, the director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a nonprofit science advocacy group.

And that “war” likely won’t be limited to researchers within the federal government. To get a better sense of how scientists are feeling about their work under Trump 2.0, I spoke with a handful of researchers at public and private universities, PhD students, postdocs, and startup founders. Many described concerns about losing funding, avoiding terms like “climate change” in federal grant applications and other paperwork, and losing access to federal datasets. Some even feared for their own safety. Others, due to their field, felt confident their work would be insulated from the future Trump administration. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid putting their research at further risk.

While their testimonials by no means offer a comprehensive picture of the scientific community’s stance on Trump, they do shed some light on how some researchers feel about the next four years, and what exactly is keeping them up at night. As one PhD student in California bluntly put it, “There are a lot of days where I feel very much like just quitting all of this.”

Here are some ways another Trump administration may complicate their work:

Funding—and federal research priorities—may change.

In academia, finding funding can be a struggle, with or without Trump in office. To cover their salaries, researchers often require several grants, which can be competitive and may only cover a few years at a time. “You’re essentially building the railroad track as you’re going down the railroad track,” Oliver Bear Don’t Walk IV, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington studying Indigenous health, described it. With Trump promising to shake up federal agencies like NIH, they said, “it can add a lot more uncertainty to an already pretty uncertain process.”

While none of the researchers I spoke with expressed concern about losing their current funding under Trump, the future was a different story. “Because I’m already on this existing grant, I’m already funded for the next couple years,” the California PhD student, a NASA-funded ecologist studying tree health and drought, said. But “what happens next is a big question mark for me.”

Funding in fields that involve climate science, equity, and diversity initiatives may be particularly vulnerable. As Inside Higher Ed reports, Trump allies including Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and tech billionaire Elon Musk have criticized the National Science Foundation, which provides billions of dollars in federal funding to researchers each year, for grants related to things like gender, race, or social and environmental justice. These “questionable projects,” Cruz argued in an October report, are essentially “left-wing ideological crusades” and have led to, in Musk’s words, “the corruption of science.”

Now researchers aren’t sure what funding they’ll be able to rely on. Eldrick Millares, the co-founder and CEO of Illuminant Surgical, a Los Angeles–based, medical device startup aimed at helping doctors make fewer mistakes in spinal surgery, said that some of the company’s current federal grants offer extra funding for hiring employees from underrepresented groups. Before Trump’s victory, Millares said Illuminant had plans to use those funds to hire people from lower-income or rural backgrounds in West Virginia, where some of the company’s potential partners are located. “We were really excited about that,” Millares said. “That might be gone next year.”

As Jones sees it, cutting funding for certain areas of study would fit into part of Trump’s larger campaign of attacks against scientists. (By UCS’s count, the first Trump administration led more than 200 attacks on science.) “By threatening to shrink those grants, you’re scaring those people into silence.”

Researchers worry they’ll have to avoid controversial buzzwords like “diversity” or “climate change.”

To protect themselves, many of the researchers I spoke with told me they expect they may need to reframe their research to appeal to the new administration.

“I’ll be finishing my PhD smack in the middle of the early Trump administration,” the California student said. “There’s a NASA postdoc program that I might apply to, and I’ve started to mold how I would pitch continuations of my research in ways that don’t involve climate.” Hypothetically, he said, he could pivot to describing a project as addressing “wildfire risk,” rather than “climate change.” It’s not ideal, he said, but “there’s part of me that wants to insulate myself against whatever funding changes come. [I’d] still do good research, but also protect myself.”

Other researchers might have more difficulty pivoting. “It’s hard for me to imagine how I would talk about the injustices that have happened to Indigenous people if it becomes taboo to talk about health equity,” Bear Don’t Walk, who is a citizen of the Apsáalooke Nation, said. When he first applied for his postdoc grant, he made a point to mention how the US government’s actions—including colonization, boarding schools, and land dispossession—continue to affect Indigenous health today. In other words, equity is at the heart of Bear Don’t Walk’s research. “It was important to me that I didn’t mince words…And now I’m like, well, okay, am I going to have to start mincing words?”

“Now I’m like, well, okay, am I going to have to start mincing words?”

In some ways, some sources noted, scientists are always tweaking their research proposals to fit the wants of agencies. That’s just good grant writing. But what if the words researchers use impact the research that eventually gets done? “If we’re no longer able to study certain things in health equity or talk about systemic racism in medical practice and education,” one medical researcher argued, “then we essentially can’t move the needle and try to fix some of the issues.”

Scientists aren’t sure they’ll have access to federal data or tools.

On top of everything else, the scientists I talked to worry they’ll have even less access to information under the new Trump administration. “I rely on a lot of federal data,” one postdoc who studies energy policy said. “I think there are a lot of open questions as to the quality and reliability and continued provision of federal data.” That includes, he said, data from the US Census (which, as my colleague Ari Berman has reported in detail, the first Trump administration attempted to meddle with), and agencies like the Energy Information Agency, which has provided “best-in-class” data on energy consumption and production in the US since the 70s, including data about energy companies. “If that gets compromised,” the postdoc says, “I think researchers in general will be much more dependent on the companies themselves to provide the data, and there’s no real reason to think that the companies will be totally honest or transparent in doing that.”

“In general, I expect a lot less transparency and a lot less disclosure” from the federal government, he said, “which will make it much harder to evaluate the impacts of federal actions.”

James Hu, Millares’ co-founder at Illuminant, noted that his company is in the process of getting its medical device approved by the Food and Drug Administration. If the FDA undergoes an increase in “efficiency,” under an HHS led by Robert Kennedy Jr., there may be shorter wait times for approvals. But if FDA scientists resign en masse in response to Kennedy’s appointment (as current and former government officials reportedly fear will happen), that might slow things down for the agency. “We’ve spent a lot of time trying to get a good relationship with our FDA reviewers,” Millares said, “and if they leave, that would be really tough, because then we kind of have to start over,” he said.

Good scientists may leave the field, be pushed out, or never join at all.

Some researchers told me they’re worried about their or their colleagues’ safety, particularly in red states. The California student, who is trans, said he’s not willing to move to “a good half” of states after he finishes his PhD due to hostility toward trans people. “I would leave science before I moved to Florida. I would move to the private sector and get an industry job or something well before I moved to Missouri or Tennessee.”

“I would leave science before I moved to Florida.”

UCS’s Jones, a former environmental studies professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, where she was tapped by the university to direct the school’s Center for Environment and Society, says she left in 2023 in part due to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ anti-science policies. “It was just increasingly clear to me that I was, at best, going to have to just shut up, crawl underneath the table, and not do the work that I thought I had been brought to do.”

Now she worries her experience in Florida may be emblematic of what’s about to happen in the rest of the country. “As Trump wages a war of intimidation and fear against scientists,” Jones said, “you’re going to have a lot fewer people raising their hand to serve the public good through science into the future, right?”

Three weeks after Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina, Brandi Hand, a marketing and communications writer and based just outside of Asheville, offered some practical advice to her community: In a Facebook post that’s since been shared thousands of times, she wrote, “Find ways to laugh.” “Be gentle.” And, “Get ready for the rest of the world to forget about us,” among other tips.

Asheville was supposed to be a climate haven.

Hand, after all, had been through this before. She grew up in Louisiana. In August 2005, she and her husband, Tom, lost their New Orleans home and everything they owned in Hurricane Katrina, a storm that killed nearly 1,400 people and displaced around a million others. She watched their once-vibrant neighborhood of Gentilly wither. Seeking a fresh start—and safety from hurricanes—they moved to the mountains of Western North Carolina in 2008. If such a thing existed, Asheville was supposed to be a climate haven.

Then Helene came, and left what at least one official called “biblical” damage in its wake. More than 200 people died. An estimated 126,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged in North Carolina alone. Luckily, this time, Hand’s home was spared, but as she wrote on Facebook, “[E]verything else is exactly the same—the feelings of helplessness, anxiety, grief, confusion, anger.” On top of it all, last month, Hand’s grandfather died.

Below, in her own words, Hand shares what it’s like to live through not just one of the most deadly hurricanes ever to hit the United States, but two. While media reports typically capture the big-picture toll of disasters like Katrina and Helene, she said, they often miss many of life’s smaller tragedies: the loss of favorite restaurants, shops, parks, and libraries. The loss of normalcy. As she told me when I spoke with her earlier this month, as the rest of the world moves on, she’s worried about what’s next for North Carolina.

Her story has been edited and condensed for clarity.

As a little girl, my grandfather taught me about how dangerous New Orleans would be if a major hurricane ever hit. He would show me a bowl—New Orleans is in the middle of the bowl, and the edges of the bowl are the surrounding levees. If those levees break, all of the water comes into New Orleans, and it just sits there. And so he always taught me, you have to leave. You have to get out. So for me, it was never a question.

When we evacuated, we had our two vehicles. Tom took our two dogs and I took the four cats in their carriers, and we took about four days’ worth of clothes and dog food and cat food. That’s what we evacuated with.

“Lake Pontchartrain was in my house, basically.”

It was a good month before we were able to go back to see our house. Like most homes in New Orleans, it was raised three feet off of the ground, but there was 10 feet of water in my neighborhood, so we ended up having seven feet of water in our home. Lake Pontchartrain was in my house, basically. And it takes a long time for that water to go away.

We could see where the water had sat for weeks. It was just disgusting—just sludge. And by the time we had gotten there, there was already mold. You could smell it, just mold everywhere. We even had mold growing on the shingles of our house, which I didn’t even know was possible.

We couldn’t save our plates and bowls and things, because the water gets into those porous materials, and you can’t ever get it out. Our clothes—you had to break them to put them into bags because they dried stiff like concrete. We had to get rid of everything. We [eventually] sold our house to a contractor, and moved into the house next door.

It’s a very wearing and taxing thing to live in a place that doesn’t work anymore. Everybody is living in a broken city. It’s not like when something horrific happens to a particular family, like their house burns down, and your community can gather around them and support them and make sure they’re taken care of. This happened to an entire city of people. So everybody isn’t at their best. Everybody is suffering.

[One day,] I was napping, and I awoke to the sound of gunshots that sounded really close. I found out later on that somebody had been murdered on my block. That was the last straw for me. My husband came home from work later that evening, and I’d started boxing things up. I was like, “We’re moving.”

January 1, 2008, we arrived in Candler, North Carolina, just outside of Asheville. It was a very practical decision—we thought. I wanted to live somewhere where this would never happen again. We got a map out and we looked at all these different places in the United States that we considered safe. We ruled out entire areas because of hurricanes and earthquakes and that sort of thing. And Asheville kept rising to the top.

“I wanted to live somewhere where this would never happen again.”

We do know some people who lost everything, but Candler was one of the more fortunate areas. We live right on Hominy Creek, and it’s normally about six to 12 inches deep. It became a raging river overnight. I have videos of storage containers, entire trees, and a van going by. The creek bed will never be the same again.

We have thousands and thousands of dollars in damage to our land that we can’t afford to fix. We were going to create an orchard and a garden, things that I had been dreaming about for years and had been saving up for. We have massive cracks in the land, and according to the geoengineer who came out and looked at it, a lot of it is going to fall into the river.

We didn’t have flood insurance. Because why would we? We’re at high elevations here. That’s my big worry for just about everybody in western North Carolina. Katrina didn’t completely ruin us financially because we had flood insurance. For those people who have lost their homes [in Helene], are they going to be expected to pay a mortgage for the next 20 to 30 years on a home that was completely destroyed?

The Friday that Helene hit here, we had already planned to leave to go to Louisiana so that I could say goodbye to my grandfather before he died. He was more like a dad to me than he was a grandparent. And his body was filling up with fluid.

I kept saying to Tom, “We’ve got to go.” And he kept saying, “It’s not safe yet to go. We have to wait for this wind to die down, we have to wait for this rain to die down.” And I was feeling okay about it until—I call it my hurricane instinct, kicked in. It was around one o’clock on Friday, and I said, “If we don’t leave in the next 10 minutes, I’m never going to see my grandfather again.” And so we did. We just got in the car and left.

My instinct was right. Had we left even 45 minutes later—they had started closing down roads. There were landslides. Everything was flooded. So we just got very lucky that we left when we did. I got to see him.

That’s another thing people don’t think about in these disasters. Babies are being born, people are dying. People are getting sick. People are going through divorce. Whatever it is, life still goes on.

I felt a little crazy. I didn’t know where to put my grief. When I was with my grandfather, when I was in the room with him, I could just be with him. But later, my mind would just start—I couldn’t land on any one thing. That’s why I’m still struggling right now. I still haven’t fully grieved. I still haven’t fully dealt with what has happened to my community here.

You can never prepare yourself for what it’s like to lose things that you count on. Entire parks are just gone. In Asheville, our River Arts District where a lot of our artists do and sell their work, that was just absolutely annihilated by the water.

You take for granted that you’re going to see your older neighbor walk around the block every day, and you can almost set your watch to it. And then that neighbor is gone forever, and you have no idea if he’s dead or alive. That was New Orleans.

You depend on your library, or your favorite local little noodle restaurant. They’re gonna be there—and then they’re just gone. It’s really difficult to get your head around that.

You have the big news, like the number of deaths. But what people don’t know about is the small stuff. The very ground underneath your feet is not solid in the same way again, for the rest of your life.

“You have the big news, like the number of deaths. But what people don’t know about is the small stuff.”

Our news cycle is so fast that if you don’t hear about something, when you’re on the outside, you assume that everything is okay. That’s just not the case. Winter is coming to North Carolina and people are living in tents. The water is not safe. You cannot drink it. Some people can’t even bathe in it because it affects their skin so negatively. [Editor’s note: After Hand spoke with Mother Jones, seven weeks after Helene, Asheville announced its tap water is now drinkable.]

This isn’t even close to over for this area. And knowing what I know, we’re in for a lot more heartache. People are going to leave because they have to. Businesses are going to leave because they have to.

And if the world can forget about the people of New Orleans starving to death in the streets—before going through Katrina, I didn’t think that something like that could happen in this country. The whole world saw it, and then they forgot about us. So I know that that’s going to happen again in this area.

I’m usually a very optimistic person, but I’m not sure I’m there yet. I just have to put my faith in the people of this area and their ability to take care of one another. I think we’re good at that.

Voters in Washington state narrowly passed a measure to preserve “energy choice” and block the state from discouraging natural gas—delivering a significant blow to climate efforts in one of the country’s greenest states. After days of counting, the measure, I-2066, passed Thursday with about 52 percent support, according to the Associated Press.

I-2066, as I reported earlier this month, fits into a growing, national backlash to progressive policies encouraging electrification across the United States, following lawsuits against Berkeley, California, New York State, and Washington, DC, places which moved to ban gas hookups in new construction in recent years. About half of US states have passed laws preemptively blocking state or local governments from banning gas.

Now, by passing a measure that prohibits local or state policies that “discourage” natural gas use or “promote electrification,” Washington State just went even further. As I wrote:

I-2066, a measure funded by fossil fuel and construction groups to “protect energy choice,” wouldn’t merely prevent local governments from banning “natural” gas in new buildings—with its broad language, climate advocates say, the measure might also be used to block state incentives encouraging people to switch to energy-efficient electric appliances. If it passes, they worry, it could provide a blueprint for the fossil fuel industry to oppose similar policies nationwide.

As Patience Malaba, executive director of the Housing Development Consortium, an affordable housing advocacy group, told me, I-2066 “would undo clean energy efforts in Washington state, which will make new homes dependent on polluting fossil fuels for decades to come.”

I-2066 was one of two climate-related measures on the ballot in Washington. In a victory for climate advocates, voters shot down a sister measure, I-2117, that would have rolled back Washington’s cap-and-trade program, which has raised about $2 billion for environmental programs in the state.

And it’s not the end of the story for I-2066: “There will be a challenge to the constitutionality of the initiative in order to protect Washington’s action on climate and clean air,” Leah Missik, a researcher and policy developer at Seattle-based environmental group Climate Solutions, said in a statement.

But to supporters of I-2066, the measure’s passage is a clear indication of Washingtonians’ desire to keep gas appliances around. As Greg Lane, the executive vice president of the Building Industry Association of Washington, which sponsored I-2066, said in a statement, the results “sent a thunderous message to policy makers at every level of government that natural gas service must be maintained as we address the energy demands in Washington state.”

In the last five years, as the movement to ditch gas-fueled stoves and heaters has spread across the country—it’s also ignited a backlash.

In 2019, Berkeley, California, became the first American city to ban gas hookups in new buildings, a rule intended to reduce carbon emissions—and improve indoor air quality in light of growing evidence that gas stoves emit pollutants linked to asthma and cancer. Dozens more cities followed suit.

The California Restaurant Association sued Berkeley, and the city eventually backed down and repealed its policy. Places with similar laws, including New York state and Washington, DC, were slapped with lawsuits too. Conservatives at the highest levels of government warned the public, misleadingly, that liberals were coming for people’s gas stoves. About half of US states, mostly but not all red, have since passed laws preemptively barring local governments from regulating gas.

This slice of the culture wars is now on the ballot in Washington, one of the country’s most climate-forward states. I-2066, a measure funded by fossil fuel and construction groups to “protect energy choice,” wouldn’t merely prevent local governments from banning “natural” gas in new buildings—with its broad language, climate advocates say, the measure might also be used to block state incentives encouraging people to switch to energy-efficient electric appliances. If it passes, they worry, it could provide a blueprint for the fossil fuel industry to oppose similar policies nationwide.

“This is a national threat,” says Leah Missik, a researcher and policy developer at Climate Solutions, a Washington State environmental group opposing the initiative. “Washington is somewhat of a testing pool for them to see if they can go further in weaponizing the initiative process to threaten climate progress.”

So how did Washington—the state that gave us REI, modern backpacks, and the “greenest governor” in America—come to consider a measure to preserve gas appliances?

I-2066 “would undo clean energy efforts in Washington state,” says one advocate, “which will make new homes dependent on polluting fossil fuels for decades to come.”

Experts told me I-2066 is largely a response to two progressive climate policies. First, there was a tweak to Washington’s building codes: About a quarter of the state’s carbon emissions come from heating and powering buildings. Last year, the State Building Code Council voted to require new buildings to meet certain energy efficiency standards, a policy that favored electric appliances like heat pumps over more wasteful, gas-powered ones. (Seattle went further, passing a policy requiring many large, existing buildings to reach net zero emissions by 2050.)

Then, earlier this year, the Democrat-controlled state legislature passed a wonky, but impactful green energy law, House Bill 1589, which requires Washington’s largest utility, Puget Sound Energy, to outline a plan for full electrification.

When that passed, the Building Industry Association of Washington, a major funder of I-2066, released a statement claiming the law “clears the path” for Puget Sound Energy to “force its 800,000 natural gas customers to convert their homes to all-electric,” at a cost of “$40,000 to $50,000 per household.”

According to Puget Sound Energy, the bill doesn’t “force” electrification—it is, primarily, a law to help the utility plan to go electric. Plus, climate advocates say, the switch to all-electric buildings is inevitable, given the climate and health dangers of gas. And helping utility companies prepare, they argue, will reduce costs for customers in the long run.

We can do the energy transition “in a chaotic and unmanaged way, or we can do it in a fair and managed way,” says Jan Hasselman, a Seattle-based senior attorney at Earthjustice, an organization that opposes I-2066. HB 1589 aimed to help ease the state into the transition, he says, but “this initiative is a chaos bomb thrown into the middle of that process that will make energy more expensive and the future more complicated.”

The notion that Washington was shoving clean energy down people’s throats gained traction nonetheless. Let’s Go Washington, a group run by hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, and backed by the National Association of Home Builders and Koch Industries, which is heavily invested in fossil fuels, took up a signature drive and successfully got I-2066 on the ballot, along with three other measures. One of the others, I-2117, would roll back Washington’s cap-and-invest program, which has raised about $2 billion for state green energy programs, but also, critics say, pushed up the price of gasoline. (Heywood was unavailable for an interview with Mother Jones, and the Building Industry Association of Washington did not respond to an interview request.)

“It’s the perception that is important,” explains Aseem Prakash, a political science professor at the University of Washington. “And the perception is that these climate laws are imposing new costs that people are not willing to undertake.”

If passed—and polling suggests its odds are good—I-2066 would repeal key parts of HB 1589 and, as Axios reports, require the state to revise the new building codes next year to no longer disadvantage gas. To supporters, that would mean preserving consumers’ “energy choice.” To opponents, it’d be a major setback to the state’s ability to address the climate crisis.

I-2066 “would undo clean energy efforts in Washington state,” says Patience Malaba, executive director of the Housing Development Consortium, an affordable housing advocacy group, “which will make new homes dependent on polluting fossil fuels for decades to come.”

More broadly, the measure’s passage would serve as a symbolic rebuke to progressive electrification policies. “We had a lot of success,” Hasselman says. “We moved the ball forward quite a bit, and now we’re seeing a real pushback.”

“I do worry,” he adds, “if the billionaires and the fossil fuel companies pour enough money into these initiatives to be successful, it sends a terribly chilling message for the whole nation.”

In August, political science professor Ashley Moraguez started the fall semester at the University of North Carolina Asheville with “grand plans” for engaging students on electoral politics. As the director of UNC Asheville Votes, a nonpartisan student-run group, Moraguez planned for fall to be the “Semester of Civics”—including voter registration tabling events, meet-and-greets with local candidates, and a “Party at the Polls” in Reed Plaza with food and live music.

North Carolina is a crucial swing state that will likely be won by a razor-thin margin; Trump leads Harris there by about 1 percentage point.

For students, an age group with historically low turnout, these efforts weren’t an abstract exercise: North Carolina is a crucial swing state that will likely be won by a razor-thin margin. Donald Trump won the state by less than 75,000 votes in 2020 and now leads Kamala Harris there by about 1 percentage point, according to recent polls. In other words, every vote in North Carolina matters.

Then in late September, Hurricane Helene hit. The storm dumped nearly 14 inches of rain on Asheville, causing roads and neighborhoods to flood and killing nearly 100 people statewide. UNC Asheville, a campus of 2,900 undergraduates, lost electricity and running water. Students and faculty relocated. Classes were canceled and will be held virtually for the rest of the semester.

Now, after Helene, getting to the polls—or getting a hold of an absentee ballot—got even harder for college students in western North Carolina.

This has made Moraguez’s work more challenging, and also much more important. With the campus closed, the university relocated its early voting site from the student union to the edge of campus, at a health center. Moraguez and UNC Asheville Votes pivoted to providing virtual resources—a website, Instagram page, and email address where students could ask voting-related questions. “I’m really heartened by how many students, amidst everything they’re dealing with, have been reaching out with questions so that they’re making sure that their ballots do count,” she says.

Still, she says, it’s hard to know who, or how many, the group is reaching. Parts of western North Carolina still don’t have utilities, electricity, or wifi. And many students, understandably, have more pressing issues than figuring out how to vote. “They’ve lost their homes and their loved ones,” Moraguez says. “And they’re just trying to figure out how to survive right now.”

As a political science professor and voting leader in Asheville, Moraguez is uniquely positioned to explain the challenges this key demographic faces post-Helene. And she, at least in part, understands what they’re going through: When I spoke to her earlier this month, on the first day of early voting in North Carolina, she had no reliable internet or potable water at her home in Asheville and had spent the previous weeks “bouncing around” and staying with family in other parts of North Carolina and Georgia.

Here’s an edited and condensed version of our conversation:

With the university on hiatus and then switching to remote classes, there’s almost an echo to what happened when Covid broke out. Did the pandemic help prepare you for this? Does it feel familiar?

Yes and no. In the 2020 election cycle, we had to completely rethink how we did voter engagement on campus. I’ve learned a lot since 2020 about how to engage people remotely.

Students taught me how to use social media more effectively. We figured out how to communicate better about complex electoral information over email through trial and error. We had the website ready to go. We had the Instagram page ready to go. We didn’t have to start those from scratch, as we did in 2020. So in that respect, despite these really unfortunate and tragic situations, we were ready to pivot our electoral engagement efforts much more quickly than in the past.

The challenge is that I still don’t have reliable internet at my home. I don’t have potable water at home. Will I be able to teach online? Do I go stay with family? My students are going to have utility and infrastructure issues. Those issues are more severe than I remember from 2020.

What do you mean when you say students helped you learn to navigate social media better?

When I was in college, Facebook was the social media of choice. I graduated from college in 2009. I wasn’t super familiar with Instagram Stories, and I don’t think I fully recognized the extent to which young people do get some of their information and news from social media.

Students really taught me how to more effectively convey useful information on social media in a way that’s palatable to young people, and how to make things more aesthetically pleasing, more likely to get attention. I don’t primarily get my news from social media, and so it was really helpful for me to have students leading this. I’ve learned just as much from them as they have from me.

What are your biggest challenges right now in getting-out-the-vote efforts?

It’s hard to know who we’re reaching. I fear that in our campus outreach efforts— since they all have been online—that we’re missing some potential voters in western North Carolina who are most affected by these storms.

Our State Board of Elections and our state legislature have adopted a slate of emergency measures to help voters in western North Carolina have better access to the polls, but those changes are only effective in so far as voters are aware of them.

“They’ve lost their homes and their loved ones, and they’re just trying to figure out how to survive right now.”

And there are some people who just have much more pressing issues on their plate right now than thinking about the election. They’ve lost their homes and their loved ones, and they’re just trying to figure out how to survive right now. And you know, their votes matter, their voices matter. And I think right now, especially, we want to hear from people who are having those experiences, but they might not be getting the information they need or have the capacity to vote right now.

I was in college during the 2016 election. I requested an absentee ballot from Florida, which is where I grew up and where I was hoping to vote. It never came. And I just never followed up on it and never voted. Is there a concern that, at the end of the day, these are teenagers or young adults in their early 20s and we’re asking a lot of them to stay on top of voting?

It’s undoubtedly true that young people—which I’m defining as 18 to 25, roughly—have lower voter turnout rates than other demographic groups. But I think there’s a couple reasons why that is and why it’s unfair to compare young voters to older groups.

Political science research shows us that voting is habitual. It’s a habit that you develop over time, and once you get into that habit, you are going to almost certainly be a reliable voter for the rest of your life. And so how can we expect first-time voters to have those habits when they haven’t been legally allowed to engage in those habits?

There’s also a narrative out there about young people being really apathetic and not caring about issues, and that is just not what I observe in working with young people in or outside of the classroom. Instead, I tend to see it as an issue of access. It’s just hard to get involved. There’s a lot of rules and deadlines and barriers in place, regardless of where you live. There’s just a big startup cost to getting involved. And so if there isn’t someone there to help you navigate that, it can be really disincentivizing to vote or to get engaged in politics otherwise, because you just don’t know where to start.

For students who are studying at UNC Asheville from out of state, will they be able to access the absentee ballots sent from their home states?

Overwhelmingly, our students are North Carolina residents. I think this year, about 13 percent of our student body is an out-of-state US resident. So that would equate to about 300 to 400 students. Of those students, it’s hard to know how many of them would be registered in North Carolina versus in their home state.

“There’s a narrative out there about young people being really apathetic and not caring about issues, and that is just not what I observe.”

For those students who were on campus and had requested an absentee ballot before the storm hit, it is possible [they] had to evacuate before they received their ballot. It’s hard to know how many students this is affecting, but almost certainly, it is affecting some voters.

The advice we’ve been giving those voters is to contact their local or county elections office as soon as possible and request a reissuance of their ballot.

Historically, after severe hurricanes, you often see a decline in voting. Has disaster-related voter suppression come up in your classes at all?

I teach courses on US elections. We talk about barriers to voting, not just devices or laws in place that could make it easier or more difficult for people to vote, but also socioeconomic factors that can make it harder for some groups of people to vote than others. I’ve never spoken with my students specifically about how natural disasters and recovery efforts could affect the dynamics, but rest assured that we will be once our classes pick back up.

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Donald Trump has all sorts of odd grievances. He’s complained about low water pressure and toilets, magnetic elevators, a lack of Christmas cheer in advertisements, tiny windows, tiny fish, Abraham Lincoln’s negotiation skills, “the world” generally, and more. But perhaps his favorite thing to hate? Wind turbines.

In more than 100 social media posts over the last 12 years, he’s claimed that wind turbines are “ugly” and “disgusting looking,” “inefficient,” “unreliable,” “noisy,” “neighborhood-destroying,” “bird-killing” “monstrosities” that “cause tremendous damage to their local ecosystems.” (It’s true wind turbines kill birds—but not nearly as many as cars, buildings, and cats.) It’s a weirdly specific vendetta: It’s not as if Trump has some sort of personal, financial stake in blocking this one form of renewable energy. (Oh wait, he does.)

But as president, Trump went full wind-spiracy. At a Republican fundraiser in 2019, Trump claimed that wind turbines cause cancer. “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value,” he said. “And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay?”

Following the event, several outlets fact-checked the president. For one, there’s no reason to think wind turbines would cause a decrease in property value anywhere near 75 percent. As FactCheck.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan fact-checking organization, reported at the time, most studies on the issue “indicate small or no changes to property values.”

And, critically, there is no known link between wind turbines and cancer. The American Cancer Society said at the time it was “unaware of any credible evidence linking the noise from windmills to cancer.” Nor is there any reason to think so, according to FactCheck.org:

Cancer, or what scientists think of as uncontrolled cell growth, is at heart a genetic disease because it starts when a cell has or acquires a mutation in its DNA that allows it to grow unchecked, as the National Cancer Institute explains…

Sound waves, however, aren’t thought to mutate DNA or to cause cancer in any other way. In fact, some sound waves help diagnose cancer, and they might even fight off the disease, researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research outside London have found.

The only plausible way wind turbines might contribute to even a small amount of cancer risk is by increasing stress or disrupting sleep. But it hasn’t yet been demonstrated that those problems do contribute to cancer risk, or that they are caused by turbine noise. Trump’s claim is baseless.

Trump’s wind tales continued after his time in office. Last year, Trump blamed wind power for rising energy costs (wind is the cheapest source of new energy in the country) and said wind turbines have made whales go “crazy” and die. (Just to be clear—there is no evidence of this.)

“They are washing up ashore,” he said, adding, “You wouldn’t see that once a year—now they are coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They are driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”

Typically, I don’t watch reality television for the politics. After a day spent covering topics like climate misinformation, our crumbling democracy, and the literal death of nature, I watch reality TV to escape politics.

Which is why, last week, I was eager to throw on a pair of sweatpants, pop some corn, melt into my couch, and binge the seventh season of Netflix’s Love Is Blind, cocooned in blankets and romanticist fluff. This was my safe place. At least it was supposed to be.

Love, in fact, is not blind. But it sure as hell is good television.

If you haven’t seen the show, allow me to summarize: Around 30 heterosexual singles sign up to date in individual, single-room “pods” with the aim of getting engaged “sight unseen” after just 10 days. The couples that do get engaged meet face-to-face for the first time in a dramatic, red-carpet reveal. Producers then follow them as they vacation in a tropical locale, return to their jobs, and attempt to date in the “real world” until they split or get married 28 days later. With a few exceptions, most of the couples break up. Love, in fact, is not blind. But it sure as hell is good television.

And like most reality TV shows I watch (and I watch a lot), Love Is Blind normally exists in a political bubble: Aside from one relatively groundbreaking discussion of abortion in season three, any discussions of politics between the couples, if they are filmed at all, are left on the cutting room floor, and the cast members’ political affiliations are left a mystery. (This is your warning: spoilers ahead!)

But in a noticeable deviation from previous seasons, season seven, which takes place in the Washington, DC, area, puts politics front and center. The season includes topics like dating across the aisle, having a change of heart in voting for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, and a whopping, 12-minute dinner-table conversation about religion, Barbie vs. Past Lives, and the role of the United States military in American imperialism. It was, as Time magazine described it, “easily the most substantive conversation Love Is Blind has ever aired.”

The conversation, between Ramses Prashad, a 35-year-old program associate at a justice reform nonprofit, and 32-year-old lawyer and former Navy service member Marissa George, begins in episode seven with the two discussing their wedding plans. Having both grown away from their Christian and Mormon upbringings, they agree to “anything but a cis-hetero” officiant—which in turn leads to a conversation about religion broadly.

After George says she believes in past lives, Prashad says they need to watch Past Lives, referring to the 2023 film starring Greta Lee. George agrees—but only after the two watch the 2023 box-office hit Barbie. “Barbie made me realize I’m not accepting any man who supports [the] patriarchy,” George says. “It took Barbie to make you realize that?” Prashad jokes.

“I was working my way up there. I had to leave the military behind,” George says. “People do not realize the, like, brainwashing that [the] military does.”

Prashad, who grew up in Venezuela, notes the US military has “destabilized entire countries.” He references James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, saying that to love a country is to critique it. George responds that while she doesn’t support “half the shit the military does in other countries,” she supports the individual members within it. “I am proud of my service,” she says. “I support the troops, babe.”

“I always stand with people who are under the hammer of US imperialism.”

In episode eight, Prashad elaborates, saying that if George were to reenter the military, it would be a deal breaker. “We talk about things like Palestine right now,” he explains to three of George’s friends. “I always stand with people who are under the hammer of US imperialism. I feel for those people and so it’s hard for me to see myself in the future with someone who is actively involved in the military.”

As someone who has dated across the aisle, this sort of discussion felt authentic—and refreshing. It’s not often producers let social commentary slip into the final cut, let alone devote more than a few minutes to it.

Take ABC’s Bachelor franchise, where conversations about religion or politics primarily occur in the “fantasy suites”—the only time the contestants aren’t filmed: In Season 16 of The Bachelorette, which aired in 2020, for instance, Tayshia Adams reportedly ends her relationship with contestant Ivan Hall due to religious differences discussed behind closed doors. (ABC did air a conversation between the two about Black Lives Matter, but only after the franchise was criticized for having a race problem. More on reality TV’s botched attempts to diversify here.)

Two seasons earlier, after Huffington Post first reported that Bachelorette finalist Garrett Yrigoyen had liked transphobic memes, and memes mocking “leftist women” and immigrants, he apologized on-air, without addressing specifics. “Some stuff came out about my social media,” he said on the live, After the Final Rose special, “and I didn’t realize the effect behind a double-tap or a like on Instagram…I didn’t mean to hurt anybody’s feelings or do anything like that.”

On the most recent season of Love Island USA, the only conversation I can recall that remotely references a world outside the islander’s plush, colorful villa is when 22-year-old contestant Kaylor Martin asks, after seeing her UK-based love interest, Aaron Evans, in short shorts, “The UK isn’t Europe, right?“

To be sure, Love Is Blind doesn’t deserve any major awards for airing a conversation about the military. As Time put it, “The conversation doesn’t settle their conflict, which they continue to hash out in subsequent episodes.” (I flipped through the newest episodes, which aired Wednesday—things aren’t looking good for Ramses and Marissa.) “Nor does it have the specificity or factual rigor to genuinely educate viewers on the issue at hand.” And it certainly doesn’t excuse legitimate criticisms of the show, like its platforming of outdated beauty standards and allegedly exploitative labor practices.

But the plotline does inch reality TV closer to an acknowledgment that relationships, love, and marriage are political. Whatever promise of neutrality drew me to Love Is Blind in the first place is broken, my safe space momentarily disrupted. And you know what? I’m okay with that, because reality television is a little more real for it.

On Monday afternoon, Miami meteorologist John Morales went viral. In a video that’s been shared thousands of times on social media, Morales gave an emotional briefing on the status of then-Category 5 Hurricane Milton in the Gulf of Mexico, which is now barreling toward Central Florida. “It’s just an incredible, incredible, incredible, hurricane,” Morales said on the air for NBC 6 South Florida. Then, getting visibly choked up, he added, “It has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours,” a sign the storm had rapidly strengthened. “I apologize,” he said after a beat. “This is just horrific.”

Morales initially debated whether to share the video on X. “I was just kind of embarrassed,” he told me over the phone Monday night. “I was like, how can I lose it like that on TV?”

I debated whether to share this. I did apologize on the air. But I invite you to read my introspection on @BulletinAtomic of how extreme weather driven by global warming has changed me. Frankly, YOU should be shaken too, and demand #ClimateActionNow. https://t.co/09vxgabSmX https://t.co/GzQbDglsBG

— John Morales (@JohnMoralesTV) October 7, 2024

But after he did, the moment seems to have struck a chord. Morales, a meteorologist with 40 years of experience and the founder of weather forecasting company Climadata, said the feeling was a long time coming—a mixture of anxiety about increasing extreme weather, “frustration for lack of action on climate,” and concern for the people in Milton’s path.

For decades, he said, people knew him as a “just-the-facts” kind of guy. But as climate change increasingly fuels storms like Milton, he says, it’s been harder to stay calm and collected. Climate change, in essence, has changed him. As he wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists after Helene hit the Southeast last month, “I look at storms differently. And I communicate differently.”

Below, in his own words, Morales reflect on how the climate crisis has changed his relationship with meteorology. His story has been edited and condensed for clarity:

I grew up in Puerto Rico. So, for years I had been tracking tropical storms and hurricanes. In 1979, there was a big hurricane that passed south of Puerto Rico, and then slammed into the Dominican Republic, a category five hurricane named David. And I think it was the clincher for me in terms of, Hey, this is a field of science that I want to pursue.

[On Monday,] I was at the home office, just as we were about to go on air for the noon newscast, and an urgent bulletin came out from the National Hurricane Center indicating that Milton had become a Category 5 hurricane. I had a chart in front of me, and I looked at the barometric pressure they were reporting at noon, and I compared it to just what had been reported in the pre-dawn hours. And I go, Oh, my goodness.

“The propensity for hurricanes to become extremely intense is just increasing tremendously.”

It’s funny how millibars can get a nerd to lose it. Millibars is a way of measuring barometric pressure. It just absolutely dropped like a rock. I couldn’t believe it dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours, which is an indication of rapid intensification.

People have known me as the just-the-facts, non-alarmist guy. I’ve always been very calm. It’s been very few hurricanes in which I’ve become anxious for. So this was certainly a departure. I think it really shocked a lot of the people that have known me as a weathercaster for 33 years.

So it was a mixture of angst about increasing extremes, frustration for lack of action on climate knowing where we’re going, and just empathy for the victims or future victims in Milton’s path. I was just feeling anxiety about what’s going to happen to them and how nervous they must be.

It was just yet another example, like Helene, Milton, Otis, Dorian, Harvey, Katrina, Irma—I mean, it’s just a whole laundry list of extreme weather fueled by the warming climate. I can tell you right now that the temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico—sea surface temperatures—are record hot, a condition that climate change made anywhere from 400 to 800 times more likely. The number of Cat 4 and 5 hurricanes over the last 20 years is significantly more than over the previous 20 years. The propensity for hurricanes to become extremely intense is just increasing tremendously.

[Climate change] is here, and it’s happening already, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I hope it gets better, if we take the action that we need to take.

I feel different. I have a hard time staying cool when I know what’s about to unfold. Everybody and their brother, every meteorologist I know, knew what this hurricane was going to do. And then suddenly, it does it. And you still can’t help yourself from being astounded that it did happen.

After 40 years in a career, hopefully, I get a little leeway from the folks who are accustomed to seeing me cool as a cucumber. But the truth is that with climate-driven extremes putting us in a place that we haven’t been before, it’s very difficult to stay cool, calm, and collected. It’s a level of agitation and dismay when you know what’s about to unfold and the type of damage and suffering it’s going to cause.

In a debate-night surprise, climate science got near-top billing during the vice presidential face-off between Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. JD Vance in New York on Tuesday, as the sprawling impacts of Hurricane Helene, which killed at least 160 people, were still being felt across the Southeast.

Just after an opening that addressed the escalating crisis in the Middle East, CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell noted that climate change is only making storms like Helene worse and asked Vance if he agreed with Donald Trump’s assertion that climate change is a “hoax.” Vance, in a pattern that repeated across the night, couldn’t bring himself to contradict the former president.

Instead, he pointed a finger at his opponents. If Democrats “really believe that climate change is serious,” he argued, “what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America.” That’s because, he said, America is the “cleanest economy in the entire world” in terms of “carbon emissions” per “unit of economic output.” He also pushed for investing in nuclear and natural gas.

It’s unclear what Vance meant by “unit of economic output.” But by most metrics, the US is not a clean economy. The US has among the highest carbon emissions per capita, one of the highest total annual emissions, a mediocre record on carbon emissions per dollar of GDP, and was most recently ranked 34th in the world in its Environmental Performance Index, a measure of a country’s environmental stewardship, including climate change mitigation.

Walz countered that the Biden-Harris administration has made “massive investments” in green technology—the “biggest in global history“—with the Inflation Reduction Act. The law, Walz said, has created 200,000 jobs across the country. (As CNN noted in its fact-check of the debate, some of those jobs may be promised, but not yet created; it’s difficult to come up with an exact figure of jobs sparked by the IRA.)

As for Hurricane Helene, both Vance and Walz shared their condolences with the victims of the flooding. As Vance said, “It’s an unbelievable, unspeakable human tragedy.”

On the campaign trail, Gov. Tim Walz is having a hell of a good time—at least rhetorically speaking. In his Democratic National Convention acceptance speech in August, the vice presidential candidate said “hell” three times, including that his former students could teach Donald Trump “a hell of a lot” about leadership. And, in one of the biggest applause lines of the night, he praised Minnesotans for minding their “own damn business” about their neighbors’ reproductive choices.

Two weeks earlier, in his first speech as Kamala Harris’ running mate, Walz told a crowd in Philadelphia that Trump would “damn sure” take the country backward and referred to Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, as “just weird as hell.” In other words, Walz likes to swear, albeit in a fairly wholesome way. As University of Memphis psychology professor Roger Kreuz wrote in the Conversation in August after uncovering dozens of uses of the word “damn” in Walz’s speaking engagements, “Clearly, this term is part of the candidate’s normal speaking style and has been for many years.”

Viewers interpreted swearing to be “more emotionally realistic than measured speech.”

Harris hasn’t shied away from swearing either. In a viral social media video from NowThis, Harris reveals her favorite swear word “starts with ‘M’ and ends with ‘ah, not ‘er'”—suggesting she meant motherf*cka. On the debate stage in mid-September, Harris pointed to Trump as “that…” before trailing off, “former president.” Some viewers speculated she intended the audience to fill in the pause with their curse word of choice.

Among those speculators is UK-based science writer Emma Byrne, author of the book, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language. Whether or not Harris’ pause was deliberate, Byrne told me, it was effective because “there were a lot of people who put their own swear word in there.”

Of course, profanity is nothing new in presidential politics. As Rolling Stone tabulated back in 2012—after then-president Barack Obama referred to then-Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) as a “bullshitter“—presidential swearing dates back at least as far back Abraham Lincoln, with reported pottymouths including Lyndon Johnson and Richard “[Expletive Deleted]” Nixon. In 2010, Joe Biden referred to the passing of the Affordable Care Act as “a big fucking deal” and George W. Bush, caught on a hot mic, called a New York Times reporter a “major-league asshole.” Trump, too, is a frequent swearer. (See: “shithole countries,” Sen. Ted Cruz being a “pussy,” and “I’m f*cked.”).

There’s a good chance these politicos knew what they were doing. As Byrne told me, some studies have shown that viewers may interpret swearing to be “more emotionally realistic than measured speech.” When used the right way by a politician, it can help them come across as authentic and relatable. For politicians like Walz, that’s part of the brand.

To get a better understand how swearing operates in politics, I spoke with Byrne over Zoom. You can read an edited and condensed version of our call below:

Why might a politician or public figure choose to use a swear word—or not? What does it signal to the audience?

It used to be thought that swearing showed a loss of emotional regulation, a lack of vocabulary. But actually, people with larger vocabularies also tend to have larger swearing vocabularies, and swearing is quite often used as a way of conveying everything from excitement to sympathy as well as frustration or anger. I think we’ve gotten over the idea that swearing is just rhetorically a failure.

At the time I wrote the book, there was some research that had come out from law departments, particularly in places like the Netherlands, that looked at swearing and the effect on the perceived credibility of the speaker. Particularly in legal or courtroom settings, some degree of swearing was rated as being more emotionally realistic than measured speech. So I wondered whether or not swearing would become like hand gestures in the 1990s, when politicians learned how to do body language. Some research in the late 90s suggested that certain gestures showed openness or decisiveness, and you found politicians consciously doing these gestures.

I wonder if now some of this swearing isn’t quite as spontaneously emotional as it’s played out. Or whether some of it is that just people are more relaxed about using that side of their vocabulary. But I do think it’s pretty instrumental as a way of connecting.

There is a viral clip of Kamala Harris at an [Asian American and Pacific Islander] event where she says, “Sometimes people will open the door for you…sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that f*cking door down.” Why do you think this line worked—or didn’t?

It certainly worked for me. One of the reasons why I thought it looked authentic was that it seemed like there was a degree of conflict before she said it. It didn’t come out completely fluently. It wasn’t a line that looked well-rehearsed—although very good politicians are great at saying everything as if they’re saying it for the first time.

Also, this was before she was campaigning to be president. When she said it, it was to a very specific audience. The more specific your audience is, the easier it is to choose the right kind of swearing, because you know the kind of cultural references that are allowable. When you’re now speaking to an entire nation, hoping that they will elect you as president, that immediately becomes more of a gamble.

Your book would suggest that it might be more of a gamble for women than for men. How might the calculus be different for women who swear?

There is definitely a higher social risk for women to swear. There is a [2001] study, it’s a couple of decades old now, and I would love for it to be repeated. But [researchers] distributed a whole bunch of questionnaires with sentences that were allegedly quotes from people. Half of these quotes were randomly labeled as coming from women, and half as coming from men.

People were asked to rate how offensive, how upsetting, how much the swearing made them think that the person speaking was dislikeable or that they wouldn’t want to spend time with them. Whenever a swearing sentence was labeled as coming from a woman, those judgments became considerably harsher. But for men, [participants tended to think] I’d work with this guy.

I hope that things are changing. I think that idea that women swearing was somehow surprising or unusual may have faded away a bit.

In your book, you point out that not all swear words are created equal. In the context of politics, it feels like there’s a difference between a politician using “damn” versus “f*ck”—I feel weird even saying that on a call in a professional setting. How are these words perceived differently and why?

One of the ways we know how intensely a swear word is experienced is by wiring people up to what’s called a Galvanic skin response monitor. Basically, it’s measuring how sweaty your palms get. You can also look at how fast your heart rate goes. The stronger swear words tend to have a stronger physiological reaction. So it’s not just a matter of taste or decorum. It’s a matter of how your brain and your body are responding to those swear words.

“You have to be incredibly aware of your audience when swearing if you’re going to do it effectively.”

There are some swear words—particularly there’s one that we used in the UK in the 90s, begins with a “c.” There was a kind of reclamation of it on this side of the Atlantic, and particularly women would call their male friends this word. But as I started to do talks about the book, I realized that younger millennials would just go, “No, that’s an atrocious word.” In the States, it never lost its misogynistic overtones. So it’s something I’ve dropped from my vocabulary because I know that for a lot of people, both older and younger than me, it doesn’t hit the way that it did with my exact contemporaries. It’s one of those things that you have to be incredibly aware of your audience when swearing if you’re going to do it effectively.

I’m thinking way back to 2016 and the time that Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman.” There’s no swear word used there, but it was clearly derogatory, and there was an awful lot of misogyny in the way that he used that. During the most recent debate, Harris’ [use of] “that…former President” left so much space for people to put in whatever swear word they felt comfortable with, if they wanted to put one in there.

You’re talking about the moment when Harris kind of pauses in referring to Trump as “that [pause] former president”—

Yeah. Yep.

So even the suggestion that she might have used the curse word there was effective?

Yes, and I’m not sure that it was deliberate. I don’t know whether she wanted to just say, “that man” or “that person.” And of course, she didn’t swear. I have no reason to believe she intended to swear, but there were a lot of people who put their own swear word in there.

As the election race tightens, how should we think about swearing in politics generally?

Swearing is emotive. Whether it’s spontaneous or deliberate, there is something emotional going on. And as with every other message from a politician, asking yourself, Does that emotion fit with my values? Does it fit with what I want from my country?

“Whether it’s spontaneous or deliberate, there is something emotional going on.”

Rather than just going, Oh, strong word, what does this emotional message say about this candidate’s values and because of their values, their likely behavior?

Don’t let that little spike in adrenaline stop you from applying the same deliberative reasoning that you’d do in deciding how to cast your ballot.

In a debate-night surprise, climate science got near-top billing during the vice presidential face-off between Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. JD Vance in New York on Tuesday, as the sprawling impacts of Hurricane Helene, which killed at least 160 people, were still being felt across the Southeast.

Just after an opening that addressed the escalating crisis in the Middle East, CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell noted that climate change is only making storms like Helene worse and asked Vance if he agreed with Donald Trump’s assertion that climate change is a “hoax.” Vance, in a pattern that repeated across the night, couldn’t bring himself to contradict the former president.

Instead, he pointed a finger at his opponents. If Democrats “really believe that climate change is serious,” he argued, “what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America.” That’s because, he said, America is the “cleanest economy in the entire world” in terms of “carbon emissions” per “unit of economic output.” He also pushed for investing in nuclear and natural gas.

It’s unclear what Vance meant by “unit of economic output.” But by most metrics, the US is not a clean economy. The US has among the highest carbon emissions per capita, one of the highest total annual emissions, a mediocre record on carbon emissions per dollar of GDP, and was most recently ranked 34th in the world in its Environmental Performance Index, a measure of a country’s environmental stewardship, including climate change mitigation.

Walz countered that the Biden-Harris administration has made “massive investments” in green technology—the “biggest in global history“—with the Inflation Reduction Act. The law, Walz said, has created 200,000 jobs across the country. (As CNN noted in its fact-check of the debate, some of those jobs may be promised, but not yet created; it’s difficult to come up with an exact figure of jobs sparked by the IRA.)

As for Hurricane Helene, both Vance and Walz shared their condolences with the victims of the flooding. As Vance said, “It’s an unbelievable, unspeakable human tragedy.”

On the campaign trail, Gov. Tim Walz is having a hell of a good time—at least rhetorically speaking. In his Democratic National Convention acceptance speech in August, the vice presidential candidate said “hell” three times, including that his former students could teach Donald Trump “a hell of a lot” about leadership. And, in one of the biggest applause lines of the night, he praised Minnesotans for minding their “own damn business” about their neighbors’ reproductive choices.

Two weeks earlier, in his first speech as Kamala Harris’ running mate, Walz told a crowd in Philadelphia that Trump would “damn sure” take the country backward and referred to Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, as “just weird as hell.” In other words, Walz likes to swear, albeit in a fairly wholesome way. As University of Memphis psychology professor Roger Kreuz wrote in the Conversation in August after uncovering dozens of uses of the word “damn” in Walz’s speaking engagements, “Clearly, this term is part of the candidate’s normal speaking style and has been for many years.”

Viewers interpreted swearing to be “more emotionally realistic than measured speech.”

Harris hasn’t shied away from swearing either. In a viral social media video from NowThis, Harris reveals her favorite swear word “starts with ‘M’ and ends with ‘ah, not ‘er'”—suggesting she meant motherf*cka. On the debate stage in mid-September, Harris pointed to Trump as “that…” before trailing off, “former president.” Some viewers speculated she intended the audience to fill in the pause with their curse word of choice.

Among those speculators is UK-based science writer Emma Byrne, author of the book, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language. Whether or not Harris’ pause was deliberate, Byrne told me, it was effective because “there were a lot of people who put their own swear word in there.”

Of course, profanity is nothing new in presidential politics. As Rolling Stone tabulated back in 2012—after then-president Barack Obama referred to then-Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) as a “bullshitter“—presidential swearing dates back at least as far back Abraham Lincoln, with reported pottymouths including Lyndon Johnson and Richard “[Expletive Deleted]” Nixon. In 2010, Joe Biden referred to the passing of the Affordable Care Act as “a big fucking deal” and George W. Bush, caught on a hot mic, called a New York Times reporter a “major-league asshole.” Trump, too, is a frequent swearer. (See: “shithole countries,” Sen. Ted Cruz being a “pussy,” and “I’m f*cked.”).

There’s a good chance these politicos knew what they were doing. As Byrne told me, some studies have shown that viewers may interpret swearing to be “more emotionally realistic than measured speech.” When used the right way by a politician, it can help them come across as authentic and relatable. For politicians like Walz, that’s part of the brand.

To get a better understand how swearing operates in politics, I spoke with Byrne over Zoom. You can read an edited and condensed version of our call below:

Why might a politician or public figure choose to use a swear word—or not? What does it signal to the audience?

It used to be thought that swearing showed a loss of emotional regulation, a lack of vocabulary. But actually, people with larger vocabularies also tend to have larger swearing vocabularies, and swearing is quite often used as a way of conveying everything from excitement to sympathy as well as frustration or anger. I think we’ve gotten over the idea that swearing is just rhetorically a failure.

At the time I wrote the book, there was some research that had come out from law departments, particularly in places like the Netherlands, that looked at swearing and the effect on the perceived credibility of the speaker. Particularly in legal or courtroom settings, some degree of swearing was rated as being more emotionally realistic than measured speech. So I wondered whether or not swearing would become like hand gestures in the 1990s, when politicians learned how to do body language. Some research in the late 90s suggested that certain gestures showed openness or decisiveness, and you found politicians consciously doing these gestures.

I wonder if now some of this swearing isn’t quite as spontaneously emotional as it’s played out. Or whether some of it is that just people are more relaxed about using that side of their vocabulary. But I do think it’s pretty instrumental as a way of connecting.

There is a viral clip of Kamala Harris at an [Asian American and Pacific Islander] event where she says, “Sometimes people will open the door for you…sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that f*cking door down.” Why do you think this line worked—or didn’t?

It certainly worked for me. One of the reasons why I thought it looked authentic was that it seemed like there was a degree of conflict before she said it. It didn’t come out completely fluently. It wasn’t a line that looked well-rehearsed—although very good politicians are great at saying everything as if they’re saying it for the first time.

Also, this was before she was campaigning to be president. When she said it, it was to a very specific audience. The more specific your audience is, the easier it is to choose the right kind of swearing, because you know the kind of cultural references that are allowable. When you’re now speaking to an entire nation, hoping that they will elect you as president, that immediately becomes more of a gamble.

Your book would suggest that it might be more of a gamble for women than for men. How might the calculus be different for women who swear?

There is definitely a higher social risk for women to swear. There is a [2001] study, it’s a couple of decades old now, and I would love for it to be repeated. But [researchers] distributed a whole bunch of questionnaires with sentences that were allegedly quotes from people. Half of these quotes were randomly labeled as coming from women, and half as coming from men.

People were asked to rate how offensive, how upsetting, how much the swearing made them think that the person speaking was dislikeable or that they wouldn’t want to spend time with them. Whenever a swearing sentence was labeled as coming from a woman, those judgments became considerably harsher. But for men, [participants tended to think] I’d work with this guy.

I hope that things are changing. I think that idea that women swearing was somehow surprising or unusual may have faded away a bit.

In your book, you point out that not all swear words are created equal. In the context of politics, it feels like there’s a difference between a politician using “damn” versus “f*ck”—I feel weird even saying that on a call in a professional setting. How are these words perceived differently and why?

One of the ways we know how intensely a swear word is experienced is by wiring people up to what’s called a Galvanic skin response monitor. Basically, it’s measuring how sweaty your palms get. You can also look at how fast your heart rate goes. The stronger swear words tend to have a stronger physiological reaction. So it’s not just a matter of taste or decorum. It’s a matter of how your brain and your body are responding to those swear words.

“You have to be incredibly aware of your audience when swearing if you’re going to do it effectively.”

There are some swear words—particularly there’s one that we used in the UK in the 90s, begins with a “c.” There was a kind of reclamation of it on this side of the Atlantic, and particularly women would call their male friends this word. But as I started to do talks about the book, I realized that younger millennials would just go, “No, that’s an atrocious word.” In the States, it never lost its misogynistic overtones. So it’s something I’ve dropped from my vocabulary because I know that for a lot of people, both older and younger than me, it doesn’t hit the way that it did with my exact contemporaries. It’s one of those things that you have to be incredibly aware of your audience when swearing if you’re going to do it effectively.

I’m thinking way back to 2016 and the time that Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman.” There’s no swear word used there, but it was clearly derogatory, and there was an awful lot of misogyny in the way that he used that. During the most recent debate, Harris’ [use of] “that…former President” left so much space for people to put in whatever swear word they felt comfortable with, if they wanted to put one in there.

You’re talking about the moment when Harris kind of pauses in referring to Trump as “that [pause] former president”—

Yeah. Yep.

So even the suggestion that she might have used the curse word there was effective?

Yes, and I’m not sure that it was deliberate. I don’t know whether she wanted to just say, “that man” or “that person.” And of course, she didn’t swear. I have no reason to believe she intended to swear, but there were a lot of people who put their own swear word in there.

As the election race tightens, how should we think about swearing in politics generally?

Swearing is emotive. Whether it’s spontaneous or deliberate, there is something emotional going on. And as with every other message from a politician, asking yourself, Does that emotion fit with my values? Does it fit with what I want from my country?

“Whether it’s spontaneous or deliberate, there is something emotional going on.”

Rather than just going, Oh, strong word, what does this emotional message say about this candidate’s values and because of their values, their likely behavior?

Don’t let that little spike in adrenaline stop you from applying the same deliberative reasoning that you’d do in deciding how to cast your ballot.

As he took a seat on stage at a climate conference in New York City on Wednesday, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts admitted that even he was surprised he had been invited to speak.

Heritage, after all, is the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, a controversial policy wish list to reshape the federal government, including gutting many environmental regulations. The event, “Climate Forward,” hosted by the New York Times, was dedicated to “understanding our rapidly warming world,” with speakers including EPA Administrator Michael Regan, conservationist Jane Goodall, and the President of Guyana, Mohamed Irfaan Ali.

“That sounds like weather to me, not climate,” Roberts said.

Roberts, who penned the forward to Project 2025, seemed an unlikely guest, but as he put it, “I’ll go anywhere to talk about how the climate agenda is ending the American Dream.” He seized the speaking opportunity to dismiss climate science and argue that it was the climate agenda—not climate change itself—that should most concern people.

At the start of the panel, moderator and Times reporter David Gelles promised the audience an “open, respectful dialogue.” Aside from the occasional hiss from the crowd (and one audience member who left early, holding a middle finger in the air in protest), it was.

Project 2025, Gelles began by reminding the audience, proposes drastically cutting funding for climate research, weakening bedrock laws like the Clean Air Act and Endangered Species Act, undoing key parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, and more—all at a time when climate-fueled extreme heat, wildfires, and storms increasingly threaten people’s lives. “I’d like to start this conversation,” Gelles said, turning to Roberts, “by asking you not what you would undo, but what is your proactive proposal to deal with climate change?”

To Roberts, however, climate wasn’t the real issue. Progressive climate policies were. The Inflation Reduction Act, he said, was imposing the will of “elites” on the American people by forcing a transition to clean energy and electric vehicles. (“I’m very happy, by the way, in my diesel F-150,” Roberts later joked, “because I enjoy my high carbon lifestyle.”)

The energy transition, he argued, “has been so artificial, it has been so accelerated,” he said, “that [it] is actually harming people far more than any of the harms that you would cite from so-called climate change.” By “harms,” Robert seemed to mean that electrification has brought with it higher energy bills (the switch to renewables is one of many factors that can affect prices) and more frequent electricity shut-offs.

As for the harms of climate change? Roberts pointed to studies, including those by Heritage, that show a reduction in climate-related deaths in the last century. As Reuters notes, while disaster-related deaths have indeed decreased in the last 100 years, that’s in part because prediction tools and preparedness have gotten better. But in the meantime, the number of disasters—and the associated cost of them—has only continued to increase. By 2050, as the Times writes, climate change may be to blame for an estimated 14.5 million deaths.

When asked about Donald Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025, despite the majority of its authors being former Trump appointees, Roberts said that the Trump campaign and Heritage were currently operating in separate “lanes.” “They exist in a political lane in a political season,” he said. “We exist in a policy lane and are waiting for the policy-making season.”

Later, Gelles again pushed Roberts to acknowledge the risk posed by climate change, noting that last year was the hottest in recorded history. “Is there any degree of warming that you think the United States or the world should stay below?” he asked. “Is there any level at which it becomes too dangerous?”

Roberts declined to give a direct answer, instead downplaying the science—again. “That sounds like weather to me, not climate,” he said. “A hot year.”

As he took a seat on stage at a climate conference in New York City on Wednesday, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts admitted that even he was surprised he had been invited to speak.

Heritage, after all, is the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, a controversial policy wish list to reshape the federal government, including gutting many environmental regulations. The event, “Climate Forward,” hosted by the New York Times, was dedicated to “understanding our rapidly warming world,” with speakers including EPA Administrator Michael Regan, conservationist Jane Goodall, and the President of Guyana, Mohamed Irfaan Ali.

“That sounds like weather to me, not climate,” Roberts said.

Roberts, who penned the forward to Project 2025, seemed an unlikely guest, but as he put it, “I’ll go anywhere to talk about how the climate agenda is ending the American Dream.” He seized the speaking opportunity to dismiss climate science and argue that it was the climate agenda—not climate change itself—that should most concern people.

At the start of the panel, moderator and Times reporter David Gelles promised the audience an “open, respectful dialogue.” Aside from the occasional hiss from the crowd (and one audience member who left early, holding a middle finger in the air in protest), it was.

Project 2025, Gelles began by reminding the audience, proposes drastically cutting funding for climate research, weakening bedrock laws like the Clean Air Act and Endangered Species Act, undoing key parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, and more—all at a time when climate-fueled extreme heat, wildfires, and storms increasingly threaten people’s lives. “I’d like to start this conversation,” Gelles said, turning to Roberts, “by asking you not what you would undo, but what is your proactive proposal to deal with climate change?”

To Roberts, however, climate wasn’t the real issue. Progressive climate policies were. The Inflation Reduction Act, he said, was imposing the will of “elites” on the American people by forcing a transition to clean energy and electric vehicles. (“I’m very happy, by the way, in my diesel F-150,” Roberts later joked, “because I enjoy my high carbon lifestyle.”)

The energy transition, he argued, “has been so artificial, it has been so accelerated,” he said, “that [it] is actually harming people far more than any of the harms that you would cite from so-called climate change.” By “harms,” Robert seemed to mean that electrification has brought with it higher energy bills (the switch to renewables is one of many factors that can affect prices) and more frequent electricity shut-offs.

As for the harms of climate change? Roberts pointed to studies, including those by Heritage, that show a reduction in climate-related deaths in the last century. As Reuters notes, while disaster-related deaths have indeed decreased in the last 100 years, that’s in part because prediction tools and preparedness have gotten better. But in the meantime, the number of disasters—and the associated cost of them—has only continued to increase. By 2050, as the Times writes, climate change may be to blame for an estimated 14.5 million deaths.

When asked about Donald Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025, despite the majority of its authors being former Trump appointees, Roberts said that the Trump campaign and Heritage were currently operating in separate “lanes.” “They exist in a political lane in a political season,” he said. “We exist in a policy lane and are waiting for the policy-making season.”

Later, Gelles again pushed Roberts to acknowledge the risk posed by climate change, noting that last year was the hottest in recorded history. “Is there any degree of warming that you think the United States or the world should stay below?” he asked. “Is there any level at which it becomes too dangerous?”

Roberts declined to give a direct answer, instead downplaying the science—again. “That sounds like weather to me, not climate,” he said. “A hot year.”