Science Friday - SCOTUS Restricts EPA, Scientist Rebellion Protests, Kansas Wheat Problems, Early Science Films. July 1, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

Supreme Court Limits EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulating Ability This week, in its final round of opinions for the term, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Congress had not explicitly given the Environmental Protection Agency the power to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants under the terms of the Clean Air Act.  “Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day.’ But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme in Section 111(d). A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body,” wrote Chief Justice Roberts in the majority opinion in the case, West Virginia v. EPA.   The ruling could hinder efforts globally to combat climate change, and could also affect regulations issued by other federal agencies dealing with "major questions" that would dramatically affect the economy. Timothy Revell, deputy U.S. Editor at New Scientist, joins Ira to talk about the decision and other stories from the week in science, including new studies of the canine evolutionary tree, a look back at 10 years of the CRISPR gene-editing technique, the launch of the CAPSTONE mission, and what our nose can tell us about potential relationships.   The Scientist Rebellion: “We’re Not Exaggerating” About The Climate Crisis Earlier this year, more than 1,000 scientists in 26 countries risked arrest during protests against climate change inaction. In Washington D.C., Rose Abramoff and other demonstrators chained themselves to the White House fence before being arrested. Across the country, Peter Kalmus chained himself to the doors of a JPMorgan Chase & Co. Bank in Los Angeles and gave an impassioned speech: “The scientists of the world are being ignored. And it’s got to stop. We’re going to lose everything. And we’re not joking. We’re not lying. We’re not exaggerating.” Just recently, the Supreme Court recently cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s power (EPA) to regulate carbon emissions, a major step back in the climate movement. Abramoff, a global change ecologist based in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab based in Los Angeles, California, are members of an international group of scientists called Scientist Rebellion, who committed to sounding the alarms about the climate crisis. They join Ira to talk about the state of the climate movement, what it’s like to be a climate activist in the United States, and the power of disruption.   Drought In Western Kansas Exacerbates Global Wheat Shortage Russia's war in Ukraine has disrupted global food supplies, driving up demand and prices for wheat. But after months of drought, many western Kansas farmers won’t have a crop to sell. This time of year, the wheat growing in this part of western Kansas should be thigh-high and lush green.But as a months-long drought continues to parch the region, many fields tell a different story. “There’s nothing out there. It’s dead,” farmer Vance Ehmke said, surveying a wheat field near his land in Lane County. “It’s just ankle-high straw.” Across western Kansas, many fields planted with wheat months ago now look like barren wastelands. The gaping spaces between rows of brown, shriveled plants reveal hardened dirt that’s scarred with deep cracks from baking in the sun. Of all the years for drought to hit western Kansas wheat farmers, it couldn’t have come at a worse time. Even with wheat selling for near-record-high prices as the war in Ukraine disrupts the world’s food supplies, a lot of farmers in western Kansas won’t have any to sell. And those who made it through the drought with enough crop to harvest will likely end up with far fewer bushels than they had last year, a downturn that limits the state’s ability to help ease the global food crisis. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.   See Science In Motion At “Twitch, Pop, Bloom” It’s not unusual for people to crowd into a theater to see a big blockbuster about science. But when’s the last time you saw people clamoring for seats for an educational film made by scientists? The answer is likely never. But this was not unusual in the early 1900s, when film was an up-and-coming medium and science was capturing the public’s imagination. This summer, the Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) in Queens, New York, is highlighting science education films of the past in the new exhibit “Twitch, Pop, Bloom: Science in Action.” SciFri producer Kathleen Davis speaks to Sonia Epstein, MOMI’s associate curator of science and film, about how these early videos and research went hand-in-hand at the dawn of cinema, and the historical significance of some of the videos in the exhibit.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, scientists upping their climate protests to the point of getting arrested and a look at a failing wheat crop in Kansas. But first, news this week that ties in both of those stories as the Supreme Court issues are ruling that has the potential of limiting the EPA's ability to regulate emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from power plants. The 6-3 ruling in the case, West Virginia v. EPA, was a win for industry and some conservative states and could have larger repercussions on the ability of other agencies to regulate on major issues. Joining me now to talk about that and other stories of the week in science is Tim Revel, Deputy U.S. editor at New Scientist. Welcome back to Science Friday, Tim. Thanks for having me.

Okay, walk us through this ruling from the Supreme Court. What did they actually say? Yeah, so it's a bit intricate this one. And my new scientist colleague James Deneen, he wrote a brilliant explainer on this yesterday. Effectively, the case boils down to who has the legal authority to curb emissions from power plants. And it starts back in the 1960s with the Clean Air Act that was passed by Congress, which gave the EPA the power to enforce regulations to improve air quality. And then fast forward to 2015, President Obama's Clean Power Plan used those powers to set guidelines around carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. But then that never came into force because 22 states thought that overstepped the mark, so they sued. However, before the Supreme Court issued a ruling, the clean power plan was actually replaced by President Trump's affordable clean energy rule, which rolled back these protections. However, then a different group of states sued and the affordable clean energy rule was blocked by a federal court. So if you're following

us so far, these blockages effectively put everything back to ground zero. So we're in a place where President Biden wanted to use their EPA powers to try and curb emissions as he saw fit, but hadn't yet done so. But then a number of coal companies and coal producing states, including West Virginia, then petitioned the Supreme Court's decision on Trump's rule to reconsider the federal court's decision. So that's where we are now. That's the case that they've issued a decision on. So the ruling isn't that the EPA cannot regulate CO2. It's just that this one section of the Clean Air Act can't automatically be interpreted to give them that power. Yeah, it's about how much power it gives.

And the ruling effectively says that the EPA can't make sweeping regulations for power plant emissions. And one thing that was on the table that now isn't is some sort of cap and trade system where power plants could only emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide and the EPA could set that across the board. They'll still have the power to set controls for individual power plants. but that's obviously a much less whole-scale power than potentially doing that across the board. I see. So how big a deal is this for trying to scale back carbon emissions? Well, the effects are big, but perhaps not quite as big as some had initially feared. So electricity production in the US is the second largest source of greenhouse emissions behind transportation. So it is a big deal. And the Biden administration wants to make electricity generation carbon free by 2035. And so this ruling

absolutely limits the possibilities of doing that. And President Biden described it as a devastating decision yesterday. But Congress potentially can still pass legislation to help achieve these goals, or it could even explicitly grant the EPA the powers that the Supreme Court says it currently doesn't have. The problem is politically, that seems unlikely to happen at the moment. Yeah, Congress isn't doing a whole lot of passing of anything these days. Let's move on to a space story that has sort of been lost in the haze of all the political news that's been coming out this week. And that's the launch of a small spacecraft called Capstone, a launch towards the moon, opening up sort of a new era of moon exploration, correct?

Yeah, this is super exciting. It's really nice to have something to look forward to as it makes its journey towards the moon. So Capstone blasted off from the Mahaya Peninsula in New Zealand on Tuesday this week. And as you say, it's now on its way to the moon. over the next few days, it's going to be performing a few little course corrections, and then it will be on the trajectory that it needs to take to actually reach the moon, which it plans to do by mid-November. And then once it gets there, it will then go into this pretty peculiar orbit,

which ranges from just 1,600 kilometers above the moon at its nearest point, and then 70,000 kilometers at its furthest point. Wow, that's like a big egg-shaped kind of orbit. What is the reason for that? Yeah, so it is really strange. And all of this is part of the Artemis program, which ultimately it aims to put a man and the first woman on the moon by 2025. And so this orbit is a bit of a test run for what's to come. One of the key parts of the Artemis program is the Lunar Gateway Space Station.

And this is a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency that's due to launch in 2025. And it's going to be using this same peculiar orbit. And the idea is that if you have an orbit where you get a bit closer to the moon and then you're a bit further away, you can use that to your advantage. So when you're closer, you can send down landers, rovers, and astronauts. And when you're a bit further away, that's a good point to then head back to Earth or intercept spacecraft on its way in. But an orbit like this hasn't really been tested before. So one of the main objectives for Capstone is to test that it really will work. Yeah. And so this is part of that bigger plan where there's going to be sort of a permanent

orbiting space station that will use this orbit and then land people on the moon. Yeah, that is the plan. And the, you know, NASA's worked it out. They've done the mass. And the hope is that this orbit will work because it's in a nice balance between the gravity of the moon and the gravity of Earth. But you don't want to send your space station to go and test it out. You want to try something a bit smaller first. And so that's a big part of Capstone. Yeah, I get that. I get that. We have a long history of testing stuff out. And what's also interesting about this mission is that the launch is done by, private space firm and wasn't anywhere near Cape Canaveral, right? Yeah, so it was in New Zealand, and quite a lot of this project has been done by private companies. The rocket, quite a lot of the control systems, and this is a real big difference. If you look back to the Apollo missions when NASA first went to the moon, that was all done by NASA in-house, pretty much. And now you're seeing a very large portion of the technology and also the software being outsourced to private companies.

All right, let's move on to an anniversary. This week marks the 10th anniversary of a technology that has taken biology by storm. And I'm talking about, of course, CRISPR. Tell us about that. Yeah, so it's happy birthday to CRISPR this week. And lots of outlets have been looking at, you know, what's CRISPR done over the last 10 years? How did it get there in the first place? And what does the future hold?

You know, you'll know CRISPR as this gene editing technique that's been used for everything now from creating gene-edited tomatoes that are resistant to drought, to attempting to alter genes in people that cause diseases. And it was just such a big breakthrough and has immediately been applicable in so many different situations. I think it's quite hard to even comprehend that it's only 10 years old. Yeah, because people were expecting and are expecting very big things from CRISPR. Yeah. So what it really allows is researchers to edit DNA. And key to this are these proteins called cast proteins that are found in bacteria and help defend against viruses. And these proteins can be programmed to find a particular sequence of DNA and then either edit it

in one way or another. And so this technique is extremely versatile and can be used in many, many different situations. It's also really cheap, but it's also raised ethical questions, and it did so pretty early on about the potential applications and possibilities. Yeah, one of those big questions that's always raised when we talk about gene, editing is what could we do with it for use in people? Could you gene edit a person from the very beginning? Yeah. So that, even before CRISPR, that was a ethical debate that people would have. And then CRISPR really turbocharged that. And then in 2018, it stopped being a theoretical discussion, actually became a practical one, when very controversially, he, uh, Jankui, a biophysicist in China,

edited the genes of human embryos to have resistance to HIV. But then, implanted those into two women, which led to the birth of three children in Shenzhen, China. And that was widely condemned. You know, it was really early on for CRISPR. We didn't know the safety of potentially doing that. And he actually went to prison for performing that. But it really put into practical focus the power of CRISPR as a technique. Let's move on to some less controversial biological news.

And I'm talking about new findings on where modern domestic dogs came from. Interesting. Yeah, this is really interesting. So it's pretty much consensus at this point that modern domesticated dogs descend from Eurasian grey walls from at least 15,000 years ago. But the story of exactly when and exactly where they were domesticated is still a bit of a mystery. And so researchers have looked at the DNA from the skeletal remains of 72 ancient wars from Europe, Siberia and North America. And some of these were up to 100,000 years old. And the researchers compared the ancient genomes to the genomes of

early and modern day dogs to see if any of these wolves were more closely related to them, which would give us a hint of their origins. And so how clear is the evolutionary trail here? They didn't find a smoking gun, which would have been a wolf that was very genetically similar to modern day dogs. But what they did find was you could say maybe like one suspicious looking gun and another one that was a little bit warm. And they found that modern dogs are most similar to ancient wolves in Siberia,

suggesting one possible origin, but also that there was a link to. an ancient dog in the Middle East from around 7,000 years ago. Two dogs. Two dogs. Yeah. So this does throw a bit of shade into exactly how we should interpret this. So one interpretation is that dogs were domesticated in two different locations and then mixed. The other is that they emerged just once and then later bred with this other wolf population.

So it seems that there could be two origins for modern day dogs or it could be a case of some mixing later on. Love it. Finally, let's talk about the importance of smell in our relationships. Something we're kind of suspect, don't we? Yeah, I really love this story. My colleague, new scientist, Alice Klein, reported on this this week. And it's about, you know, when you meet someone and you just click, and this study suggests that, well, maybe smell could be a part of that. And so in the experiment, the team recruited 20 pairs of same-sex non-romantic friends. and people who said that when they first met, they clicked straight away. And then the team used this very imaginatively named device for analyzing odors called an electronic nose

to sniff the t-shirts worn by each of the participants. And you've got to think, there's a grad student somewhere sighing with relief that they didn't have to be the person sniffing those t-shirts. Anyway, so this electronic nose, it found that body odor was more similar between friend pairs than between random pairs. Well, maybe that's where the whole idea of, you know, we have instant chemistry comes from. It's the chemistry of your nose. Yeah, absolutely. And like people, you know, you often have friends that are similar to you in many different ways. So perhaps smell is just another one of them.

And there you have it. Tim, thank you for taking time to be with us today. Always great stuff. Thanks for having me. Tim Revel, Deputy U.S. editor at New Scientist. We have to take a break. And when we come back, a look at a climate protest movement. The Scientist Rebellion. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. More than 50 years ago, leading up to and following the very first Earth Day in 1970, all across the U.S., scientists, activists, and the public marched through the streets fighting for clean air and water regulations. And now we are living through another crisis, one that's only getting worse with time, climate change. Science confidently tells us that we have to make big changes fast to curb emissions, and we heard earlier just yesterday that the Supreme Court issued a major ruling that curbed the EPA's power to regulate carbon emissions. I've been thinking lately about how impassioned environmental scientists were back in the day, seeking change, scientists like Paul Ehrlich and Carl Sagan appearing on major talk shows,

warning of environmental destruction, and one Barry Kaminer ran for president on a third party. So I got to wondering, where is the rebellion this time? And I found it alive and, well, how well is it? That's what I want to find out with my next guests, whose actions make them bona fide climate activists. Let me introduce them. Peter Kalmas, a climate scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California,

who chained himself to a bank. Rose Abramoff is a global change ecologist, based in Knoxville, Tennessee, who changed herself to the White House fence. And let me say that both of my guests are speaking on their own behalf and not their institutions. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Thanks so much. Thanks for having us. You know, I said you are bona fide activist because you both have the street credit for that title. Peter, let me begin with you. Your protest in L.A. where you change yourself to a bank. Walk me through that, will you? Yeah. So it grew out of a sense of getting more desperate every year about inaction over climate breakdown.

And I've got two kids, two young sons. And I've been a climate activist really for 16 years. And then the IPCC report, the Working Group 3 report, came out on April 4th. And it said extremely clearly that we have to have a moratorium starting right now a new fossil fuel infrastructure. And that's the thing that really gets me is that we're in a climate emergency. And yet world leaders still keep wanting to build out. fossil fuel infrastructure, totally against the scientific consensus. And so out of desperation, I joined a group called Scientists Rebellion, which planned a global day of action on April 6th. And what

we decided to do here in Los Angeles was to highlight what you could call the money pipeline. So these big investment banks, J.P. Morgan Chase is the biggest of them all in terms of funding new fossil fuel projects, which is what has to stop. So we wanted to basically bring attention to that part of the crisis. So that's what we did. Well, after you change yourself to the J.P. Morgan Bank, what happened? We had these kind of kryptonite bike chains. There were two sets of double doors, and there were four of us willing to risk, as we say. And so we locked the doors closed first to prevent, you know, sort of altercations with people coming in and, you know, trying to get out and being frustrated. There were other doors to the building. And then we simply chained our wrists to the

door handles and we waited. And a couple hours later, they decided to close the bank for the day and we cheered. And then shortly after that, the police arrived in force. There were probably at least 80, maybe 100 police in full riot gear. And they asked us to leave and we politely declined. And then they arrested us, put us in handcuffs and locked us in the slammer for about six hours and then let us out shortly after midnight. And that's where we're at now. We have a court date for misdemeanor trespassing. And Rose, you change yourself to the White House fence. Please tell us about that. Sure. So my approach to activism is also borne out of decades of inaction and trying to follow the rules and engage in primarily educational and political advocacy sort of within the boundaries of

what people are used to. After so much in action, as Peter described, I decided to try and think within the longer lens of history and take up tactics that have been historically effective at creating sweeping changes with fewer people who believe strongly. And so on that day, April 6th, I was working with a couple of other groups. I was working with a group called declare emergency, which demands that President Joe Biden declare a climate emergency and generally use his executive powers to mitigate climate change. And I was working with two other groups indigenous water protectors, honor the earth in Camp McGezy. And so together with four other women, of which two were indigenous, we chained ourselves to the White House fence using a couple

of different tools. We also had a bike lock, Peter. The bike lock is a popular symbol of moving away from automotive emissions. We locked on without incident. The police were on the scene very quickly. They were already, there were already a few stationed in various parts of the park in front of the White House fence. They cleared the park extremely quickly, moving everyone who was supporting us away from us and maybe half an hour or two an hour, we're able to assemble the tools they needed to cut us off. So they needed bolt cutters. They needed a circular saw for the bike lock. Were you arrested? We were, yes. We were risking arrest and we were arrested. The amount of warming that we're facing threatens our lives and threatens the lives of hundreds of millions,

eventually billions of people. And so I really have the distinct sense that we're fighting for our lives and that we need to start thinking about what we're willing to do in order to defend ourselves. I want to know, do you think you really accomplished anything concrete by doing this? As I say, I've watched protests for the last 50 years. Some are successful. Some are not certainly the civil rights movement, believed in civil disobedience. They were up a notch. Do you think that you can get the attention, Peter, that you desire for real change here? I felt. a huge shift after April 6th and the scientists' rebellion. I see, first of all, I've connected with dozens, hundreds maybe of young activists around the world who are similarly engaging in civil

disobedience. And I think they're frustrated that more scientists and more people in power and more people with authority aren't stepping up to the plate and speaking out like that this is an actual emergency and speaking through their actions, right, communicating through their actions instead of Justin Peer Review papers. So it's been very heartening to them. But I think even more importantly, I've sensed a shift in how the mainstream media has been discussing climate breakdown. What is the shift that you're seeing? The shift is that the mainstream media is starting to do things, like say that basically communicate the narrative that we are potentially at risk of losing everything here and that the fossil fuel industry has been basically lying for decades and causing this to happen.

have to get to this point. Also, Ira, there was one concrete result. I'm not sure if you can credit it to us, but following the April rebellion sometime afterwards, Joe Biden did somewhat fulfill one of the stated demands of declare emergency, which was to authorize, utilize the Defense Production Act in order to facilitate transition to renewables. So I think that there is some evidence that the increased awareness at the very least of the climate crisis can push. legislators and the executive office to make change. Let's talk about yesterday's Supreme Court ruling that cut the EPA's power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, actually undoing climate activism. Is it frustrating to live in a country that has the

power to limit greenhouse gases and actually go in the opposite direction? Absolutely. I mean, we know that the United States accounts for the great majority of historical per capita excess emissions, And so it really, we have a special place in history and not a good special place in history as being one of the greatest creators of the climate crisis. And so I think it behooves us to take a leadership role in limiting our emissions. The Biden administration has made some promises, you know, in the opinion of many in the scientific community, it's not enough to limit catastrophic breakdown. but we're not even on track to meet those emissions targets. And this EPA ruling hamstrings us further. Well, you're both climate scientists.

Do you need more support from other scientists to join you or the scientist, you know, the scientist rebellion? The more people engaging in whatever way they can in climate action, including enough to risking arrests through civil disobedience, the better. I think this is it. It's do or die time. We need to get the movement as strong as it can get as quickly as possible, in my opinion. There's basically capture going on by the fossil fuel industry, capture of our political system through donations, which are essentially bribes to politicians, capture of the media by basically owning the corporations and, you know, reporters feel like they can't say what they might otherwise say. even capture of the United Nations sort of annual conferences, the conferences of the parties,

they try to hammer out international agreements to stop climate change. If the fossil fuel industry has infiltrated sort of the power structures of our collective decision-making to that degree, there's no other conclusion to draw, but that the grassroots movement has to get stronger than that. The people in charge, the people in power have to be more afraid of the grassroots movement, basically the voters than of the fossil fuel industry. So let's talk about the voters. Do you think the voters are behind you?

Or do you think that it's really just still very hard to get people to care about the climate? Yeah. So one of the things that I think about a lot is how the media has been, like I said, captured essentially by whatever it is, by really rich people by the fossil fuel industry, Ruper Murdoch with Fox News, for example. and even the not ultra-conservative media where it hasn't really been telling the story for years and years, they would want to tell both sides, right? And they would have like debates.

They would have a climate denier who came in with anti-science, with incorrect facts. The false equivalence. Right, with cherry-picked data. And they would expect, you know, climate experts to push back against that. And the public got, you know, very confused. And the fossil fuel industry, as is very well documented now, has spent decades literally putting out disembate

information and trying to confuse the public and trying to minimize public concern. But don't you then come across as alarmists or the crazies, the fringe element being portrayed that way? Well, I think one major issue here is that there's no direct line from scientists to the people. We're filtered through media. We're filtered through this false equivalency. And so you don't get a sense of the conversations that we're having within the scientific community with ourselves because science communication is often filtered. through this extremely careful language, very risk-averse language in order to maintain this sense that we're calm and unbiased and collected. But when we're standing at the water cooler,

we are freaking out. And that doesn't get communicated to the general public. You know, I've been trying to raise the public sense of urgency for such a long time. And it hasn't been working that well. And so I'm like, well, let's try. climate disobedience. We'll see if that works. And to me, the results of that experiment were really astounding. You're listening to Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And what kinds of tactics are you planning for the future? Can you talk about them? In a broad sense, yes. I participated in an action just last weekend supporting the debt for climate campaign, which is essentially an international global South led movement to try and cancel global South debt so that they can use that money

to transition to renewables. And so scientists rebellion and the movement in general are trying to support each other and coalesce as much as possible around these broad yet achievable specific demands that can help with climate mitigation, help with transitions, and help with equity, like the equity issues related to mitigating climate change. And I think you'll see a perseverance and potentially an escalation of tactics as the climate crisis escalates. Interesting. Rosdie, do you encourage other scientists to join scientist rebellion? Absolutely. I think, you know, we as scientists think of ourselves as the, you know, last great community that cannot be bought, you know, or so we think, we believe that in the truth and in speaking the truth.

And so I think it's more important than ever now that we not be afraid of what we might lose and really try to communicate the truth as forcefully as possible and not rely on the sort of cultural tendency to water down the severity and the urgency in order to appear calm. We need to abandon that because you mentioned that climate activists are accused as alarmists, but I think that there is cause for alarm. And so in that sense, we may be able to reclaim that term. You know, Earth scientists and climate scientists and biologists and ecologists, we have front row seats to the destruction of Earth's life support system

and the destruction of these ecosystems and these animals and plants and fungi are on this planet. In my mind, it's really a cosmic thing. I started out as an astrophysicist, and I switched in a climate scientist. in 2012, I think a lot of Earth scientists are just observing this and observing these changes. And they're studying these systems because they love these systems. And they're failing and dying in front of their eyes. And we're feeling terror. We're feeling desperation.

And again, just empirically writing our papers and showing the plots that are, you know, the trends are getting stronger and stronger. and the signals are getting stronger and stronger. And it hasn't been working. The way it should work is those data should convince policymakers of the extreme risk that we're heading into and the growing costs in terms of human lives in terms of our collective future as a human species

on this pale blue dot. They should start taking action according to science, but they are not. And we could argue about why they're not. already expressed my opinion as to why. But we can't keep doing what we've been doing that hasn't been working. We have to try something new. And right now, I think civil disobedience is a very fruitful thing to try doing. Rose, you agree? Yes. I mean, scientists can usually make, research scientists can make a lot more money. I could make a lot more money working

for the fossil fuel industry using my exact skill set. But I choose not to. I study the earth because I love it, and I can't bear to see what's happening to it. Ira, can I end with a quote from Carl Sagan from his book, The Demon Haunted World? Sure. All right. So he was warning against the sort of anti-science that we witnessed yesterday with the Supreme Court decision. He said, the candle flame gutters, its little pool of light trembles, darkness gathers, the demons begin to stir. we have to, as a society, listen to scientists.

We have been sounding the alarm so clearly for such a long time, and we've been being ignored. And that has to stop because the costs are mounting rapidly. I want to thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Peter Kalmas, climate scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Rose Abramoff is a global change ecologist based in Knoxville, Tennessee. Thanks again. Thank you for having us on Ira. Thank you so much.

Coming up, the climate crisis is having a big impact on one of America's most important crops right in the middle of a global food crisis. We'll head to the wheat fields of Kansas. Right after this short break, stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News.

Iowa Public Radio News. Local stories of national significance. As Russia's war on Ukraine continues, food shortages are cropping up for countries that rely on Ukraine's normally abundant wheat harvest, Bangladesh, Egypt, Pakistan, and others. Shortages are driving up the prices for wheat to near record highs. And in the U.S., normally abundant wheat crops from Kansas could potentially have helped. The wheat state produced nearly a quarter of U.S. wheat last year, but this year's wheat crop planted last fall may not help as much as hope. because after months of drought, the Kansas wheat harvest is looking frustratingly small.

High Plains Public Radio reporter David Condos is here with the story of the state of the wheat in Kansas. Welcome to Science Friday, David. Yeah, thank you for having me, Ira. Nice to have you. Okay, how exactly is this year's wheat crop looking compared to last year? Yeah, it's not great, unfortunately, especially for some of the farmers out in western Kansas. Looking statewide, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says about 40% of Kansas wheat is in poor or very poor condition. And, you know, that's up from just 13% at this time last year. And as you

mentioned, you know, Kansas produces a ton of wheat, but there's expected to be a steep drop from last year. And when all set and done, the state's total harvest is expected to be close to 100 million bushels smaller than last year. So that's a big drop. What does that look like? You know, when you think of a wheat field, you might picture in your mind this kind of stock image of a beautiful, you know, field full of this tall wheat swaying in the breeze. A lot of fields look very different from that this year. I talked with some people who, who cross the state surveying crop conditions and they said it's common for wheat to look, you know, scrawny and brown. In some places you can see, you know, these deep cracks in the hardened dirt between the rows, you know, from being baked in the sun. even among decent looking wheat, you know, the plants may be so short, so stunted by this drought,

that there's been real concern about whether or not combines will be able to reach low enough to harvest them properly. And so I rode along with Western Kansas wheat farmer Vance Emke, and he gave me a tour of some of these hard hit fields near his property, and here's how he described the scene. There's nothing out there. You know, it's just ankle-high straw. The yield on that is zero. Yeah, these are not amber waves of grain, are they?

No, no, yeah. It's so bad that projections estimate that, you know, maybe one of every 10 fields planted with wheat in Kansas will end up being abandoned because there just isn't enough a crop to bother harvesting. Yeah, and of course this shortage is all because of the drought. How bad has the drought been? It's been bad, you know, maybe the worst drought here in a decade.

Modern wheat seeds have. been bred to be more drought resistant, but the conditions this year have just pushed them to the limit. And so, you know, the entire western half of the state of Kansas is in some level of drought and has been for months. Some parts of southwest Kansas have been experiencing extreme or exceptional drought, you know, the two highest levels on the U.S. drought monitor scale since Christmas. And so while we have gotten some rains recently, it's, you know, too late in the growing cycle for this week crop for that rain to even help it, you know, basically too little too late, at least for this year. And, you know, when you think about how important that is for the wheat in this area,

you know, a lot of it is dry land, meaning it's not irrigated and depends entirely on rainfall for all of its water. And, you know, some of these places are so deep in drought that even after some recent rains, it would still take, you know, an additional three, four, five inches of rain just to get back to their year-to-date average. No kidding. And I talked with Daryl Stroutes, who heads up the Kansas Wheat Alliance, and here's how he put it. I'm always reminded of an old proverb that says that a farmer that has too much water has a lot of problems. A farmer that doesn't have enough water has only one. And I think that's kind of where we are. Just to put that in perspective, you know, the definition of a desert is a place that gets 10 inches of precipitation or less than a year.

And, you know, we're about halfway through the year and lots of Western Kansas hasn't gotten even five inches of precipitation yet. So it's essentially desert conditions for a lot of these farmers. And of course, there's a wheat crop that's supposed to go into the ground in the fall. So it's too late to plant more wheat until next year, right? Right. Yeah. And that's something like you mentioned, you know, Ukraine, the wheat crop that they're harvesting now, that was planted months before the invasion of Ukraine. And so it's not something where you can, you know, just create more wheat. The next wheat crop will be coming up, be planted this fall. And so, you know, who knows how the drought might impact that as well. Yeah. What about states, other states that produce a lot of wheat? Have they been having the same drought issues? Yeah, a lot of them have. And, you know, while Kansas is kind of the top state for this winter wheat, there's plenty grown in other neighboring states across the Great Plains, and the drought definitely hasn't stopped at our state line. You know, if anything, it has been worse in some of these other states. And like I mentioned earlier, you know, it's estimated that at least 10% of the wheat fields here in Kansas won't produce enough wheat to bother harvesting. You know, estimates say that that might be more, maybe even a third. of wheat fields could be abandoned in Colorado or even up to three-fourths of fields in Texas. I talked about this global food shortage. Are other countries that are wheat producers around the

world having their own weather issues this year? Yeah, and it's been a global problem. And I think it really highlights kind of the fragility of the global food system because the world desperately needs this wheat right now. But like you mentioned, it's not just Kansas that's having trouble meeting that need. You know, other big wheat producers like India and China have also seen weather damage their crop, you know, from either too much heat or even too much rain. You know, it can also damage the crop and has done that. And of course, when you talk about wheat and production and farmers, you're talking about money, right? Wheat prices are really high. They're not getting that money if they can't harvest the wheat. Right. And that's obviously

the frustrating thing for farmers in this area is that, you know, wheat demand is, you know, wheat demand is up and prices have been near record levels, but even, you know, the crops that are above average this year, they're going to harvest significantly less than they did last year. And for, you know, a lot of farmers in Western Kansas, their harvest might not even be enough to cover their costs because, you know, remember, the price of other things that farmers need like diesel fuel and fertilizer has, have also gone up this year. And so, you know, that Western Kansas farmer that I talked with Vance Emke figures that at least half of the wheat fields in his region, it won't harvest enough for those farmers to break even.

They're losing money, even with the highest price of wheat that we've probably ever seen in the past 50 or 100 years. Wow, that is, that's sad to hear. What about long-term predictions for the climate in Western Kansas? Does that suggest that we're in for a long period of drought? Yeah, and I mean, the scary thing is, just looking at short term, you know, this current drought is still going on. It's been going on for months and is still here, and no one. knows when it might end. You know, projections say it could stick around for months through the summer, but, you know,

Kansas historically is no stranger to droughts that can last much longer than that. You know, you think of the dust bowl, you know, so this drought could last even into next year. But, you know, longer term, I think it does highlight the challenges that farmers face in a dry area like this, you know, where there's kind of a delicate balance that climate change could upset because if parts of Western Kansas are already so dry that growing wheat is a bit of a challenge, you know, any further incremental changes in how hot or how dry this region becomes will make farming that much harder. And so if, you know, if you think of Western Kansas as this kind of borderline region or this, you know, canary in a coal mine for looking at, you know,

how drought and farming and climate change are interacting, you know, we could see significant impacts from that here in coming years, maybe even before some of those changes start impacting other places, you know, east of here. Considering how frustrating it sounds that farmers are and how little money they're making on this wheat, are they talking about either possibly planting less wheat next year or switching to possibly less water-intensive crops? Yeah, like you mentioned, you know, there are other crops that might need even less water like cotton, for example, is one crop that's starting to be grown in southwest Kansas. The other thing, like I mentioned, is, you know, these new varieties of drought-resistant wheat. seeds that researchers have been breeding for the past few decades and have, you know, helped this year from becoming much worse than it might have otherwise been. And, you know, the last thing is,

you know, when you're thinking about water conservation and soil conservation and soil health, that farmer I talked with Vance Emke, he gave me the example when he was driving me around that, you know, he was looking at his fields and some neighboring fields that were doing worse. And he expects his crop to be a little above average this year. And he credits that to, you know, caring for his soil. letting the ground rest. And when he drove me around and pointed out some of those fields that look worse, you could still see some of those corn stalks among the shriveled wheat from the corn harvest that came right before they planted the wheat. And that means that soil didn't get to rest and recover in between those plantings. And so there are, you know, there are some conservation

practices like that, that at least in the mind of some farmers, would really help as well. So we're keeping our fingers crossed for you. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. David. Thank you again for having me on. David Kondo's reporter for High Plains Public Radio and the Kansas News Service. David is based in the town of Hayes, Kansas. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. You know, it's not unusual for people to crowd into a theater to see a big blockbuster about science or science fiction. Think about the successes of Jurassic World movies or any sci-fi disaster film. But when was the last time you saw people clamoring for seats for an educational film made by scientists. The answer is, well,

maybe never. But this was not unusual in the early 1900s when film was an up-and-coming medium and science was capturing the public's imagination. Well, this summer, our friends at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York, are highlighting science education films of the past. SciFri's Kathleen Davis takes us into the new exhibit, Twitch, Pop, Bloom, Science, and Action. This charming sound is from the film Magic Mixies by F. Percy Smith and Mary Field. It's a microscopic, black and white look at a sci-fri favorite topic, slime mold reproduction. Funny little things like tiny toadstools are sometimes to be found on dead wood or on decaying leaves. These little breaths are called mixes.

The narration describes what the viewer sees on screen. Slime mold spores moving and grooving. At times, it veers into less scientifically accurate territory. Part of their life, they are vegetables, and part of their life they are animals. And probably, they would be minerals, too, if they could. Now, we know in 2022 that fungi are their own category of spore-producing organisms. So not vegetable, animal, or mineral. But all in all, the film is a really cutting edge and informative look at the reproduction of fungi.

That's especially cool considering it was released in 1931, just four years after the first talkie, or movie with sound. Magic Mixies is one of nine films you can see as part of Twitchpot Bloom, Science and Action. The films in the collection were all released between 1904 and 1936. Sonia Epstein, the museum's associate curator of science and film, is the brains behind the exhibit. This was a time when scientists were really motivated by new technologies, including ones like the microscope and x-rays and things like that. But cinema, you know, sort of fell into the realm of another tool for research, and they developed these, in some cases, ad hoc techniques to film things motivated by,

a desire to observe and understand and further their research. An example of that can be found in the film Motion Study of a Bullet Penetrating a Soap Bubble by Lucian Bull. It's exactly what it sounds like. What's incredible is that the film is more than 100 years old and still feels novel, and its impact went beyond the realms of science and film. And what he discovered by filming it was actually that the soap bubble doesn't burst until the bullet exits. So it enters it and the soap bubble remains whole. And he went on to contribute to the study of ballistics during World War I. So, you know, really using the medium, if you will, as an essential part of research. And I think that is a lot of what makes these films feel so

resonant or necessary because they were. Another film by Jean Commando is called Agent of la syphilis. The film is a microscopic look at the bacteria that causes syphilis. In 1909, this was groundbreaking work. Ciphylus was devastating. At the time, it was known as the third great plague. People with the disease could get massive sores, hair loss, and permanent damage to the nose. Siphilus ruined lives, and scientists like Jean Comandon were desperate for an answer as to how it works. He was looking at the bacteria that caused it and noticed through filming it that they moved in a very distinctive way that they had this particularly wiggling motion. And so by discovering that and showing his film widely, they were able to come up with a new way of diagnosing syphilis,

which was by looking at a blood sample. And if they could see this distinctive bacteria, then they could diagnose it at an earlier stage. And people could do things like isolate. Comandons desired a film bacteria led to the development of new technology, a camera that could film at a microscopic level. It was sort of hailed as this new innovation in medical research and also film technology, so it's a really interesting time. Sonia says one of the most interesting things about these films is that they weren't just made for the scientific community.

They were educational films meant for a general audience. These movies would be shown not just in cinemas, but in libraries and other venues in town for the masses. The exhibit features a wall of photos and newspapers. paper clippings related to the films. One article from the New York Times bears the headline, microbes caught in action. There are also marketing materials drumming up excitement for the opportunity to learn about science in a theater. There's a term that comes from people who study the history of film called a cinema of attractions. And that's a term that applies to,

I would say, a lot of the films in this exhibit where people were also coming to see film not for necessarily the story that it would tell, but to see the kind of magic of cinema. And these science films really showed that. I mean, they were showing bacteria that was living under the skin. You know, when else can you see that? With this exhibit, Sonia wants to give people the chance to see these films the way they were meant to be seen,

in public with other people who want to learn. Twitchpot Bloom Science in Action runs through July 17th at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. For Science Friday, I'm Kathleen Davis. Thank you, Kathleen. And hey, if you want to see a more modern video about sly molds, we have a great one up there on our website, sciencefriday.com slash moamy.

That's M-O-M-I. You can also see pictures of the exhibit at that link. And that about wraps up this hour of SciFri. Before we go, a special welcome this week to folks listening to us on Delaware Public Media. And hello again to listeners in Washington, D.C. on WAMU. Glad to have you with us again. Here's Charles Bergquist with some of our colleagues who helped make this show happen.

Thanks, Ira. Emma Gomez and D. Peter Schmidt are our digital producers. Jordan Smudjik and Jason Rosenberg are our grants managers. Ariel Zitch is our director of audience. Beth Rami is our controller. and I'm radio director Charles Bergquist. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Charles. B.J. Leidman compose our theme music. Wishing you and yours a happy and safe Fourth of July weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm I Refledo.