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Florence DiTullio Joyce first women welder in WWII shipyards
Women in engineering and related trades
This is Florence “Woo Woo” DiTullio Joyce. She was the first woman hired by the Fore River Shipyard in 1942. She was hired when the shipyard lost most of their male employees to enlistment during WW2.
This was before women were generally hired for defense industries. She was accepted because she had a local reputation as an excellent oxy-acetalene welder. At the time, some congressmen had sworn women would never be hired for such jobs.
Her moniker (“Woo-woo”) was what the shipbuilders shouted when she arrived on site the first day. She kept the nick name, and owned it, painting it across the back of her welding jacket.
Her success was part of what led to the later hiring of tens of thousands of women.
________________________________________________
From Quincy 400, City of Quincy, MA
Meet Florence DiTullio Joyce, the first woman welder to be employed by the Fore River Shipyard in 1942. A Quincy High graduate who lived with her mother and sister on Washington Street, she learned of the opportunity through her uncle, Daniel Libertini, who was working for the shipyard at that time. In a 2009 interview with the Patriot Ledger Joyce said, “I was young and I just thought it would be something fascinating, something different.”
At that point in time, the United States was embroiled in World War II, and the Fore River Shipyard was producing more vessels than any other shipyard in the nation. Many of the shipyard’s skilled laborers had been young men who had been called to serve their country, but the ever-expanding war effort required employers to seek out energetic and enterprising young women to fill these roles in their stead.
Joyce’s employment ushered in the introduction of four other women to the force, and the group gained notoriety as “the first wave of ‘Winnie the Welders’” to engage in this trade. Ultimately, around 2,000 women were employed by the shipyard during the war years.
Joyce’s workday began at 7 a.m. and concluded at 3:30 p.m., and she spent a majority of her time in the shipyard’s steel mill. She earned, on average, $40 per week, “fashioning steel girders from sheet metal.” When she was interviewed at age 22, she reported that the work was “dangerous and tough– tougher than hell. But I love it!”
When she wasn’t working, Joyce and her sister would attend events hosted by the USO, or go dancing at the American Legion. Nights out on the town at that time cost about 20 cents. Though the on-going war was an ever-present part of their lives, she later remarked that, “It was serious because it was the war, but when you were young, it was fun because there were a lot of new people and different things to do.”
References
Dave Willhoite post on Florence DiTullio
Meet Florence DiTullio Joyce, Quincy 400
Mann, Jennifer. (2009, May 6). ‘Winnie the Welder’: Former female shipbuilder recalls war days.
Florence “Woo-Woo” DiTullio: Winnie the Welder. (2018)
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – claims and reality
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology proposed by Abraham Maslow. His first discussion of this idea was in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” in Psychological Review. This was was developed further in his 1954 book Motivation and Personality.
Created by FireflySixtySeven, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia
Yet contrary to popular belief, Maslow never created a pyramid to represent these needs. Nor did he conclude that in order for motivation to arise at the next stage, each stage must be satisfied. Much that teachers have heard about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs isn’t what he taught.
How his ideas were changed, incorrectly claimed as scientifically proven, and then became the basis of profitable seminars in business and education, is the subject of these papers:
Who Built Maslow’s Pyramid? A History of the Creation of Management Studies’ Most Famous Symbol and Its Implications for Management Education, by Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings and John Ballard, Academy of Management Learning & EducationVol. 18, No. 1, 3/1/2019
“Who Created Maslow’s Iconic Pyramid?” by Scott Barry Kaufman Scientific American, 4/23/2019
A modern packaging of Maslow’s work is popular in management training and secondary and higher psychology and education instruction.
Saul McLeod points out that
Maslow continued to refine his theory based on the concept of a hierarchy of needs over several decades. Regarding the structure of his hierarchy, Maslow proposed that the order in the hierarchy “is not nearly as rigid” as he may have implied in his earlier description. Maslow noted that the order of needs might be flexible based on external circumstances or individual differences. For example, he notes that for some individuals, the need for self-esteem is more important than the need for love. For others, the need for creative fulfillment may supersede even the most basic needs.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, 3/20/2020, Saul McLeod, Simply Psychology
In Scientific American, Scott Barry Kaufman writes
Abraham Maslow’s iconic pyramid of needs is one of the most famous images in the history of management studies. At the base of the pyramid are physiological needs, and at the top is self-actualization, the full realization of one’s unique potential. Along the way are the needs for safety, belonging, love, and esteem.
However, many people may not realize that during the last few years of his life Maslow believed self-transcendence, not self-actualization, was the pinnacle of human needs. What’s more, it’s difficult to find any evidence that he ever actually represented his theory as a pyramid.
On the contrary, it’s clear from his writings that he did not view his hierarchy of needs like a video game– as though you reach one level and then unlock the next level, never again returning to the “lower” levels. He made it quite clear that we are always going back and forth in the hierarchy, and we can target multiple needs at the same time.
If Maslow never built his iconic pyramid, who did? In a recent paper, Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings, and John Ballard trace the true origins of the pyramid in management textbooks, and lay out the implications for the amplification of Maslow’s theory, and for management studies in general. In the following Q & A, I chat with the authors of that paper about their detective work.
Question: Why did you set out to answer the question: Who built “Maslow’s Pyramid”?
My colleague Stephen Cummings and I have long been interested in how foundational ideas of our field, management studies, are represented in textbooks. Textbooks often present ideas very differently than in the original writings. We’re interested in understanding how and why this happens. We’ve taught Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for many years and were aware the pyramid did not appear in his most well-known works, so were interested in delving deeper. We contacted John Ballard, who knew Maslow’s work better than we did and who shared our concern about Maslow’s theory being misrepresented. Thankfully, he agreed to join us on the project.
Question: Do you think the popularity of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is due in part to the iconic appeal of the pyramid that became associated with it?
Yes, absolutely. Maslow wasn’t the first psychologist to develop a theory of human needs. Walter Langer presented a theory with physical, social and egoistic needs that appeared alongside Maslow’s in an early management textbook. And Maslow’s theory generally hasn’t performed well in empirical studies (although I’m aware of your recent research which challenges this).
In fact, this lack of empirical support is one of the main criticisms of the theory made by textbook authors. So why do they continue to include it? The pyramid. We know from having taught management courses for 20 years that if there’s one thing that students remember from an introductory course in management, it’s the pyramid. It’s intuitively appealing, easy to remember and looks great in PowerPoint. Students love it and because of that, so do textbooks authors, teachers, and publishers.
Question: So what’s your problem with the pyramid?
It’s described as ‘Maslow’s pyramid’ when he did not create it and it’s just not a good representation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It perpetuates unfair criticisms of the theory. For example, that people are only motivated to satisfy one need at a time, that a need must be 100% satisfied before a higher-level need kicks in, and that a satisfied need no longer affects behavior.
Another is the view that everyone has the same needs arranged and activated in the same order. In his 1943 article in Psychological Review Maslow anticipates these criticisms and says they would give a false impression of his theory. Maslow believed that people have partially satisfied needs and partially unsatisfied needs at the same time, that a lower level need may be only partially met before a higher-level need emerges, and that the order in which needs emerge is not fixed.
Question: How did this inaccurate interpretation of the hierarchy of needs become established in management textbooks?
It’s a complicated story and one we address fully in the paper. Douglas McGregor is a key figure, because he popularized Maslow within the business community. McGregor saw the potential for the hierarchy of needs to be applied by managers, but for ease of translation he deliberately ignored many of the nuances and qualifications that Maslow had articulated. To cut a long story short, McGregor’s simplified version is the theory that appears in management textbooks today, and most criticisms of Maslow’s theory are critiques of McGregor’s interpretation of Maslow.
Question: Did McGregor create the pyramid? Or if not, who did?
No pyramid appears in McGregor’s writing. Keith Davis wrote a widely-used management textbook in 1957 that illustrated the theory in the form of a series of steps in a right-angled triangle leading to a peak. The top level shows a suited executive raising a flag, reminiscent of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. But this representation of the theory did not catch on.
We traced the pyramid that we associate with the hierarchy of needs today to Charles McDermid, a consulting psychologist. It appeared in his 1960 article in Business Horizons ‘How money motivates men’ in which he argued the pyramid can be applied to generate “maximum motivation at the lowest cost”. We think McDermid’s pyramid was inspired by Davis’ representation, but it was McDermid’s image that took off. If there is an earlier pyramid, we did not find it.
Question: Is it right that you actually found no trace of Maslow framing his ideas in pyramid form? Where did you look, and how comprehensive was your search?
That’s correct. It was a comprehensive search. Maslow was a prolific writer. We examined all of his published books and articles that we could identify, as well as his personal diaries, which are published. John immersed himself in the Maslow archives at the Centre for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron in Ohio and examined many boxes of papers, letters, memos, and so forth. We found no trace of the pyramid in any of Maslow’s writings. Additionally, John went through pre1960 psychology textbooks for any discussions of Maslow. Most psych books in those times did not even mention Maslow.
Question: Why didn’t Maslow argue against the Pyramid once he saw it? He could have criticized it, right? I heard from someone who knew Maslow that he actually thought the pyramid on the back of the $1 bill was a fair representation of his theory.
Also, one of his students who took his course at Brooklyn College told me he would include a slide of the pyramid when he described his theory in class. So perhaps he was pleased with the iconic pyramid even if he didn’t invent the depiction himself?
Answer: Those are interesting questions. Maslow lived for 10 years after McDermid presented the pyramid. We found no evidence of Maslow challenging the pyramid at any time. We don’t think that’s because he regarded pyramid as an accurate representation. A more plausible explanation, which comes from our analysis of his personal diaries, is that aspects of his professional life were unravelling.
He felt underappreciated in psychology. The major research journals in psychology had been taken over by experimental studies, which depressed Maslow for their lack of creativity and insight. He also had more pragmatic concerns, suffering periods of ill health and financial difficulties. Key figures in the management community saw him as a guru and rolled out the red carpet. They gave him the recognition he felt he deserved. Furthermore, through speaking engagements and consulting, he could generate additional income. Seen in that light, it’s not surprising he went along with it.
Question: You wrote: “Inspiring the study of management and its relationship to creativity and the pursuit of the common good would be a much more empowering legacy to Maslow than a simplistic, 5-step, one-way pyramid.” I agree! It seems like Maslow’s original thinking about self-actualization is at odds with how business leaders treated the concept, right?
Definitely. Following the publication of Motivation and Personality in 1954, Maslow emerged as one of the few established psychologists to challenge the prevailing conformism of the 1950s. He spoke out on how large organizations and social conformity stifled individual self-expression. At times he was frustrated that the business community treated his theory of human nature as a means to a financial end–short-term profits–rather than the end which he saw, a more enlightened citizenry and society.
It would be great if students were encouraged to read what Maslow in the original. Students would better understand that motivating employees to be more productive at work was not the end that Maslow desired for the hierarchy of needs. He was concerned with creativity, freedom of expression, personal growth and fulfillment – issues that remain as relevant today in thinking about work, organizations, and our lives as they were in Maslow’s time.
State of the theory today
William Kremer and Claudia Hammond write
There is a further problem with Maslow’s work. Margie Lachman, a psychologist who works in the same office as Maslow at his old university, Brandeis in Massachusetts, admits that her predecessor offered no empirical evidence for his theory. “He wanted to have the grand theory, the grand ideas – and he wanted someone else to put it to the hardcore scientific test,” she says. “It never quite materialised.”
However, after Maslow’s death in 1970, researchers did undertake a more detailed investigation, with attitude-based surveys and field studies testing out the Hierarchy of Needs.
“When you analyse them, the five needs just don’t drop out,” says Hodgkinson. “The actual structure of motivation doesn’t fit the theory. And that led to a lot of discussion and debate, and new theories evolved as a consequence.”
In 1972, Clayton Alderfer whittled Maslow’s five groups of needs down to three, labelled Existence, Relatedness and Growth. Although elements of a hierarchy remain, “ERG theory” held that human beings need to be satisfied in all three areas – if that’s not possible then their energies are redoubled in a lower category. So for example, if it is impossible to get a promotion, an employee might talk more to colleagues and get more out of the social side of work.
More sophisticated theories followed. Maslow’s triangle was chopped up, flipped on its head and pulled apart into flow diagrams. Hodgkinson says that one business textbook has just been published which doesn’t mention Maslow, and there is a campaign afoot to have him removed from the next editions of others.
The absence of solid evidence has tarnished Maslow’s status within psychology too. But as a result, Lachman says, people miss seeing that he was responsible for a major shift of focus within the discipline.
“He really was ground-breaking in his thinking,” Lachman says. “He was saying that you weren’t acting on the basis of these uncontrollable, unconscious desires. Your behaviour was not just influenced by external rewards and reinforcement, but there were these internal needs and motivations.”
Abraham Maslow and the pyramid that beguiled business, William Kremer and Claudia Hammond, BBC World Service 9/1/2013
Links
Maslow’s Hierarchy: Separating Fact From Fiction
Female sexual anatomy
It is of critical importance for high school students to graduate high school with knowledge of how their bodies work. This includes sexual anatomy. In this resource we present anatomical information on external and internal female sexual anatomy.
There is a difference in student population between college level and high school level health and science classes. As such, we have taken care to select images that are anatomically correct yet not quite overt.
The vulva – external female sexual anatomy
The vulva includes
The inner and outer lips of the labia.
The clitoris.
The opening to the vagina (although the vagina itself is technically the long muscular opening moving back from this opening, see below.)
Vaginal glands, which are between the vulva and anus (the perineum).
The urethral opening. This is the opening to the urethra (the tube that carries urine outside of the body).
Image from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Above image from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Internal female reproductive system
Vagina (birth canal) – A muscular tube leading inside a woman’s body. Where sperm enters a woman. Also is where a baby is born from.
Cervix – The muscular wall at the end of the vagina. It has a tiny hole that sperm can swim through.
Uterus (womb) -A thick muscular organ. Has two purposes
(a) Allows sperm to pass, from the vagina, up towards the fallopian tubes
(b) If a woman becomes pregnant, the fetus will attach to the wall of the uterus and grow here.
Fallopian tubes – Tubes that connect the uterus to the ovary
(a) sperm swim up into these tubes. If the woman has recently released an egg, this is where the egg and sperm meet.
Ovary – these are where a woman’s eggs are stored. After puberty, women usually mature one egg a month.
Also see Human reproductive system
Also see Female reproductive system, Teens Health
.
consciousness
It is easy to ask “what is the brain, and how does it work?” A much more difficult question is “what is the mind?,” and “what is consciousness?”
Introduction
Consciousness is “awareness or sentience of internal or external existence”.
Despite centuries of analyses, definitions, and debates by philosophers and scientists, consciousness remains puzzling and controversial. It is “at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives”.
Perhaps the only widely agreed notion about the topic is the intuition that it exists. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied and explained as consciousness.
Sometimes “consciousness” is synonymous with ‘the mind’, other times just an aspect of mind.
In the past it was one’s “inner life”, the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition.
Today, with modern research into the brain it often includes any kind of experience, cognition, feeling or perception.
There might be different levels or orders of consciousness, or perhaps different kinds of consciousness – or just one kind with different features.
Other questions include whether only humans are conscious or all animals or even the whole universe. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises doubts whether the right questions are being asked.
( – Wikipedia, adapted, Consciousness)
Are there levels of consciousness?
Consciousness isn’t binary (It exists, or it doesn’t exist.)
Rather, it seems to exist on a smooth continuum from not at all, all the way up to what we humans experience.
There’s no reason to assume that our awareness & consciousness is the highest level – there may be higher levels, or different kids that we can’t imagine.
Image below from A better way to test for consciousness?
How does this relate to our bodies? What if we look at consciousness on the level of a person, and then down to smaller biological components?
Or what if we look at this on the level of a person, and then see how this changes when we look at how many people think when they interact?
“The scale problem of consciousness: Human conscious experience does not reflect information from every scale. Only information at a certain coarse-grained scale in the neural system is reflected in consciousness.”
Image from Chang, Acer & Biehl, Martin & Yu, Yen & Kanai, Ryota. (2019)
Information Closure Theory of Consciousness.
The hard problem of consciousness
“The meta-problem of consciousness is (to a first approximation) the problem of explaining why we think that there is a problem of consciousness.”
– Chalmers on the Meta-Problem
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how atoms and molecules work together to create a living being – like us! – that actually feels and experiences the world.
How does a living person – like us! – experience awareness? How can we feel alive, experience our own thoughts – when we are built out of parts that have no awareness at all?
How the brain works is one thing – that’s the (relatively!) “easy” problem. We already have learned much about the anatomy of the brain and what kind of cells it is made of.
We’re learning how information is sent from our eyes, ears, skin, etc. to the brain. We have even begin to learn how the brain mechanically follows the laws of physics to store, recall, and process information.
But how can we humans (and presumably, animals) experience qualia – instances of subjective, conscious experience?
The philosopher David Chalmers is the first to clearly and forcefully make people aware of what an amazingly hard question is, this hard problem of consciousness.
Easy problems are (relatively) easy because all that is required for their solution is to specify a mechanism that can perform the function.
That is, regardless of how complex the phenomena of easy problems may be, they can eventually be understood by following science as we have always known it.
But the hard problem of consciousness will “persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained”.
Chalmers, David (1995). “Facing up to the problem of consciousness” Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2 (3): 200–219.
On the other hand, the very existence of this hard problem is controversial. It has been accepted by many philosophers of mind but its existence is disputed by others.
Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, David J. Chalmers
Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness, David J. Chalmers
Consciousness as a State of Matter, Max Tegmark
Panpsychism: You are conscious but so is your coffee mug
Qualia Formalism in the Water Supply: Reflections on The Science of Consciousness 2018
Is consciousness an illusion?
(Text tba)
Has science shown that consciousness is an illusion?
Is Consciousness Real? Scientific American
The ‘me’ illusion: How your brain conjures up your sense of self
The consciousness illusion
There’s No Such Thing as Consciousness, According to Philosopher Daniel Dennett
Physical correlates of consciousness
If consciousness if real, then presumably it correlates to something going on in our brain.
What are the physical correlates of consciousness?
The controversial correlates of consciousness, George A. Mashour, Science 04 May 2018:
Vol. 360, Issue 6388, pp. 493-494, DOI: 10.1126/science.aat5616
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6388/493/tab-figures-data
Neuroscience Readies for a Showdown Over Consciousness Ideas: To make headway on the mystery of consciousness, some researchers are trying a rigorous new way to test competing theories. Philip Ball, 3/6/2019, Quanta Magazine
Neuroscience Readies for a Showdown Over Consciousness Ideas
Visualizing how consciousness might work
Consciousness might be explained by it being an emergent phenomenon,
Analogy – we can’t predict the existence or behavior of oceans from looking at a single molecule of water.
Yet when enough liquid water molecules come together, an ocean – with all of its complex behavior – emerges.
Perhaps consciousness is similar. It might emerge from the interplay of dynamics that we already are beginning to learn about.
“Psychologist and neuroscientist Grit Hein and Ernst Fehr from the Department of Economics, University of Zurich teamed up with Yosuke Morishima, Susanne Leiberg, Sunhae Sul and found that the way relevant brain regions communicate with each other is altered depending on the motives driving a specific behavioral choice.”
Hein G, Morishima Y, Leiberg S, Sul S, & Fehr E (2016). The brain’s functional network architecture reveals human motives. Science, 351 (6277), 1074-8 PMI
and
Elucidating the Nature of Human Consciousness Through Art: interview with Greg Dunn
Do we really need new physics to understand consciousness?
Are the laws of physics, as we currently understand them, truly insufficient to explain what consciousness is? Many philosophers and writers make this claim. If so then we would need to postulate, look for, and prove the existence of undiscovered laws of physics.
Many claims in this area have been raised over the last two centuries. But physicist Sean Carroll warns us to be very careful if we make any such claim.
He writes – “Consciousness and the Laws of Physics” is a new paper where I review how we understand physics pretty well, and consciousness not so well, so altering physics to account for consciousness should be a last resort. And that if you try to alter the ontology of the world by adding intrinsically mental aspects to it, *without* modifying the laws of physics, you don’t really explain anything at all. The very first thing any attempt to account for consciousness should do is to be honest about whether it implies a modification of the known laws of physics. If yes, be very specific about how the equations change; if no, you’re not helping.
Philosophical zombies
In physics and philosophy, one way to learn about something is to create a gedankenexperiment (“thought experiment.”).
It may be possible to learn more about minds and consciousness by creating philosophical/biological thought experiments. The most well known one is the question of the philosophical zombie:
A philosophical zombie is a hypothetical being who is physically identical to a normal human being, but completely lacks conscious experience. – David Chalmers.
If a philosophical zombie is possible, then conscious experience is independent of physical world.
This image from Masatoshi Yoshida the-hard-problem-of-consciousness
Consciousness and the universe
“The universe is sentient. We all know that. We are the sentient bit. What could consciousness be, except the universe witnessing itself?”
– Steven Moffat
“We believe that the universe itself is conscious in a way that we can never truly understand. It is engaged in a search for meaning. So it breaks itself apart, investing its own consciousness in every form of life. We are the universe trying to understand itself.”
– J. Michael Straczynski
Related articles
Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals
Possible minds
Consciousness creep Our machines could become self-aware without our knowing it
External articles
What Is Consciousness? Scientists are beginning to unravel a mystery that has long vexed philosophers, By Christof Koch, Scientific American, June 1, 2018
New Scientist articles
What Is Consciousness?
Consciousness, Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy
Consciousness. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Articles on consciousness from New Scientist
Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? The Guardian (article), UK
Why we need to figure out a theory of consciousness. The Conversation
Science catalog & supplier list
American Surplus and Supplies (Sciplus)
https://www.sciplus.com/
Arbor Scientific
https://www.arborsci.com/
Carolina
https://www.carolina.com/
Daydream Education (great science posters)
https://www.daydreameducation.com/
Delta Education (K-8)
https://www.deltaeducation.com/
Edmund Optics
https://www.edmundoptics.com/
Educational Innovations (Teachersource)
https://www.teachersource.com/
Fisher Scientific
https://www.fishersci.com/
Flinn Scientific
https://www.flinnsci.com/
Frey Scientific & CPO Science
http://www.freyscientific.com/
Hand2mind (K-8)
https://www.hand2mind.com/
Lab-aids
https://store.lab-aids.com/
Kelvin Educational
http://kelvin.com/
NASCO (STEM, STEAM products)
https://www.enasco.com/c/Education-Supplies/Steam
PASCO
https://www.pasco.com/index.cfm
Pittsco
https://www.pitsco.com/
School Speciality
https://www.schoolspecialty.com/?param=ssi
STEMfinity (technology, engineering, robotics)
https://www.stemfinity.com/
ThermoFisher Scientific (Massachusetts)
https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/order.html
Trend Enterprises posters
https://www.trendenterprises.com/home.cfm
Vernier
https://www.vernier.com/
VWR
https://us.vwr.com/store/product?keyword=educational%20classroom%20kits
Wards’s Science / SK Science Kit & Boreal Laboratories
https://www.wardsci.com/
Easy labs and manipulatives
Easy labs and manipulatives
Astronomy
TBA
Biology
Chemistry
Precipitates: Coca Cola and milk
Teaching about the Periodic Table
Creating the periodic table
Element Data Cards Lab instructions
Element Data Cards the cards themselves
Electrochemistry: Two potato clock
TBA
Earth Science
TBA
Physics
Gravity and tides: Why Is There a Tidal Bulge Opposite the Moon?
Inertial mass and gravitational mass lab
Measuring data with smartphone apps
Engineering/Simple machines
Catapult and Trebuchet build project
General science
Teaching science with augmented reality
________________
Exploratorium Science Snacks
(San Francisco, California)
Planet of the Humans: A critique of the documentary
A critique of Planet of the Humans, a 2020 documentary film by Michael Moore which implies that renewable energy is a hoax that helps the fossil fuel industry, something which the scientific community disagrees with.
‘A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Movement’: Michael Moore Damages Our Most Important Goal
By Bill McKibben
I’ll tell the story chronologically, starting a couple of weeks ago on the eve of the 50th Earth Day. I’d already recorded my part for the Earth Day Live webcast, interviewing the great indigenous activists Joye Braum and Tara Houska about their pipeline battles. And then the news arrived that Oxford University — the most prestigious educational institution on planet earth — had decided to divest from fossil fuels.
It was one of the great victories in that grinding eight-year campaign, which has become by some measures the biggest anti-corporate fight in history [but] in the next couple of hours came a very different piece of news. People started writing to tell me that the filmmaker Michael Moore had just released a movie called Planet of the Humans on YouTube. That wasn’t entirely out of the blue — I’d been hearing rumors of the film and its attacks on me since the summer before, and I’d taken them seriously.
Various colleagues and I had written to point out that they were wrong; Naomi had in fact taken Moore aside in an MSNBC greenroom and restated what she had already laid out to him in writing. But none of that had apparently worked; indeed, from what people were now writing to tell me, I was the main foil of the film. I put together a quick response, and I hoped that it would blow over.
… Basically, Moore and his colleagues have made a film attacking renewable energy as a sham and arguing that the environmental movement is just a tool of corporations trying to make money off green energy. “One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different from fossil fuels,” Ozzie Zehner, one of the film’s producers, tells the camera. When visiting a solar facility, he insists: “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels.”
That’s not true, not in the least — the time it takes for a solar panel to pay back the energy used to build it is well under four years. Since it lasts three decades, it means 90 percent of the power it produces is pollution-free, compared with zero percent of the power from burning fossil fuels. It turns out that pretty much everything else about the movie was wrong — there have been at least 24 debunkings, many of them painfully rigorous.
__________________________________________
A growing number of scientists and environmentalists are calling this documentary false and misleading. This collection of responses is being curated by getenergysmartnow.
- Planet of the humans: A reheated mess of lazy, old myths, Ketan Joshi
- Michael Moore’s environment film a slap in the face on Earth Day (on Medium), Cathy Cowan Becker
- 6 Reasons Why “Planet of the Humans” is a Disaster of Misinformation, Ben Wehrman
- 10 Reasons « Planet of the Humans » Gets Everything Wrong on Climate, Benjamin Tincq
- Why “Planet of the Humans” is crap, Tom Athanasiou, EcoEquity
- Film Review: Forget about PLANET OF THE HUMANS by Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore by Neal Livingston
- Michael Moore produced a film about climate change that’s a gift to Big Oil, Leah Stokes
- Planet of the Humans Comes This Close to Actually Getting the Real Problem, Then Goes Full Ecofascism, Brian Kahn, Gizmondo
- Meet the New Flack for Oil and Gas: Michael Moore, Josh Fox, The Nation
- Inside Clean Energy: 6 Things Michael Moore’s ‘Planet of the Humans’ Gets Wrong, Dan Gearino, Inside Climate News
- A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Movement’: Michael Moore Damages Our Most Important Goal, Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone
- POTH Traffics in Myths, Errors, and Dangerous Misdirection, John Rogers, Union of Concerned Scientists
- Planet of the Humans : Let’s just have a think…, Dave Borlace, Just Have a Think (note: a video response)
- The Important Debate POTH Misses, Kate Aronoff, New Republic
- Michael Moores New Film Turns Heroes into Villains and Villains into Heroes, Dr. Michael Mann, Newsweek
- Skepticism Is Healthy, but Planet of the Humans Is Toxic – A Critical Review is at Films for Action and is associated with their (temporarily) ending their distribution.
- Planet Of The Humans: Moore Trouble Than It’s Worth provides background to the film.
- Planet of the humans: A reheated mess of lazy, old myths is a well-documented, forcefully written, and devastating takedown from Ketan Joshi lays out clear examples of how the long journey to film release led to use of decade(+) data and fostered an utterly misleading discussion for 2020.
Definitely worth a read with time well spent on the follow-up This is where hard work got us (another post about the bad film).
For #EarthDay, Michael Moore (@MMFlint) releases fundamentally misleading film provides some of the initial expert Earth Day tweets making clear specific factual errors and misdirections.
Distributor pulls Michael Moore’s (@MMFlint’s) #PlanetOfTheHumans due to truthiness & errors discusses Film For Action’s ending its role in the film’s distribution with Josh Fox’s and a number of scientists’ letter to FFA that might have sparked this action. NOTE: FFA changed their minds and reposted the film.
[4/26/2020 addition]: Films For Action’s Statement on Planet of the Humans Why we took it down. Why we ultimately decided to put it back up (including this note). Plus our critiques and thoughts on the film. makes clear that FFA thought it was putting up an accurate film, was shocked to discover the extent of its inaccuracies and pulled the film, and then reinstated it due to science-misinformer pressure.
Michael Moore’s dangerous documentary by Paul Scott, an authority on EVs. He was featured in Who Killed the Electric Car? the 2006 documentary distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, and consulted for the follow up, Revenge of the Electric Car.
Michael Moore should be embarrassed. As Executive Producer on “Planet of the Humans”, an environmental hit-piece like none I’ve ever seen, he has done great disservice to the environmental movement.
Anyone interested in saving the planet who watched this poor excuse of a film, would come away thinking solar and wind energy were bad, and electric cars were horrible. I’m not kidding. They cherry pick information from 2011 on the Volt from ignorant people, and do the same for a small solar system installed a decade ago while representing this as state of the art. Huge lies were told through omission in this film!
Film Review: Forget about PLANET OF THE HUMANS by Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore by Neal Livingston, documentary film maker and environmental activist.
Planet of the Humans uses the most worn out editing techniques to emotionally manipulate the viewer. We see windmills from the early 1970’s, the early days of wind power, which are long gone. We see on the street facile interviews, with film editing techniques to make environmental leaders look dumb. We see dying orangutans as the film ends to make you cry. But nowhere does the film show us how to get off fossil fuels, by showing us where renewables are working. Nor does the film help us to stop forest destruction, by showing us places that have taken steps to protect nature, and there are many places that have done so.
Environmentalists demand that Michael Moore’s anti-EV film be retracted by Bradley Berman, Eletrek
Michael Moore’s environment film a slap in the face on Earth Day (on Medium), Cathy Cowan Becker, provides a substantive, documented, thoughtful review
instead of attacking fossil-fuel based system we live in and the politicians who are fiddling while Earth burns, what does Michael Moore go after? Environmentalists and renewable energy. It not only makes no sense, but it’s toxic to the environmental movement. It feels like a slap in the face from a one-time friend to have this released on Earth Day. …. spends most of its time attacking the major solution to lowering carbon emissions — renewables — and the environmentalists and environmental groups that spend their time trying to get our government to move toward clean energy. In doing so, the film repeats some of the ugliest climate denial tropes and provides fodder to the worst climate denial groups in the country. … When the “global warming is a hoax” crowd is touting your film, it’s time to examine yourself.
Planet of the Humans – A Critique, Julián Eduardo González Martínez,
I had the opportunity to watch “Planet of the Humans”, a new documentary directed by Jeff Gibbs, and sponsored by Michael Moore (it is free to watch on YouTube at the time of writing). As an engineer working on the field of sustainable energy, I reckoned it might be worth a watch, and ended up sorely disappointed with the result … In the end, “Planet of the Humans” leaves the casual viewer scrambling for answers, wondering if we have been sold a solution on an idea that in no way will help humanity move towards a post-oil society. However, poorly researched points, a messy and sprawiling plotline that intertwines technical truths with “alternative facts”, half-baked arguments, and a dose of cheap “eco-pity” footage, leaves this documentary on shaky grounds at best.
10 Reasons « Planet of the Humans » Gets Everything Wrong on Climate Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs’ new climate movie is a disgrace for both science and filmmaking, Benjamin Tincq,
« Planet of the Humans » achieves the exceptional feat of starting from a such great premise, only to deliver an absurd, scientifically illiterate conspiracy theory. In a nutshell, Gibbs’ conclusion is that clean energy is even worse than fossil fuels, that humanity is doomed, and that severe population control (voluntary or not) is the only option we have left to prevent the extinction of our entire species.
27 Apr 2020
6 Reasons Why “Planet of the Humans” is a Disaster of Misinformation, Ben Wehrman, is a well-organized and devastating laydown of POTH making clear how it exemplifies a FUD disinformation approach. Wehrman cogently discusses these six problem areas:
- Misrepresenting: “The first major problem with Planet of the Humans is its misrepresentation of the clean energy movement. In short, the producers lump ALL non-fossil fuel energy sources as “renewables,” when in truth this is simply not the case.”
- Short-sighted: “POTH focuses on a mix of “fake” renewables that have long been dismissed by the scientific community, and misrepresentative examples from the true solutions like wind, solar, and EVs.In doing this, POTH also avoids all consideration of the future”
- Horrible interview sourcing: “misrepresentation and short-sightedness of the clean energy movement can be quickly traced to the fact that the filmmakers don’t interview anyone who is even remotely qualified to speak on the matter.” Wehrman documents lots of festival organizers and attendees but no scientists, engineers, nor ….
- Miscellaneous skepticism, lies, and other BS: Green reached into “the hat of stone-aged FUD arguments, and ask[ed] them to college students & street hippies until [he had] enough “GOTCHA” moments to make a movie.” Outdated and deceptive commentary re solar, wind, batteries, EVs, ….
- It’s aimless: All that FUD to result at identifying and discussing (other than a Malthusian path of population reduction) any actual (set of) solutions and paths forward.
- Follow-up fail: After release, Moore made clear that the film had been (in essence) done for years but he was unable to secure a major distributor.
After this substantive takedown, Wehrman is reasonable enough to spend time to discuss many things POTH got right. But, on reflection, that a discussion requires 1,000s of words laying down failures before legitimately being able to discuss positives speaks exactly to the introduction to this annotated bibliography of review posts.
The wheel of first-time climate dudes (Or, alternatively: Why I don’t want to review Michael Moore’s climate change documentary) from Emily Atkin (Heated) isn’t a review but highlights how this fits within a long record of poorly informed (white male) people getting traffic for mediocre (often wrong) climate-related work while expert/experienced women/POC are left on the sidelines without the same mass media attention.
Really, the reason I don’t want to review this movie is because I’m tired of having to spend hours consuming and debunking messy-yet-blockbuster climate reporting from dudes who seemingly woke up a few mornings beforehand and decided they were climate journalists.
I feel like a hamster on a wheel: The Wheel of First Time Climate Dudes.
[Note: This is a Jeff Gibbs’ film and he didn’t wake up just a few mornings ago. Actually, a key part of the film’s problems is the accumulated nature of arguments and data seemingly from his thinking over a decade ago that wasn’t updated for today’s changed realities. See Ketan Joshi’s excellent discussion of this linked above.]
Really, Michael Moore? I watched your climate movie, and I have some questions. Emily Atkin, Heated. After having (see above) written a perspective before seeing the film, Atkin’s caved in and watched it due to the buzz and hearing of its impacts (such as people leaving 350.org due to its disinformation) … and found POTH to be even worse than feared.
Planet of the Humans reminded me of an argumentative essay from a lazy college freshman—as if, after a few hours of studying, he realized there wasn’t enough evidence to support the argument he chose for the assignment. But he was so wedded to the original idea, and didn’t want to waste the hours of work he did, so he overcompensated by being an overly aggressive narrator instead of starting over with a new argument.
Planet of the Humans: a film review Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore somehow make a climate change film without involving climate scientists, Solar Nerd, starts with “what the film gets right” and then turns to blowing apart Gibbs’/POTH‘s “strawman argument” “that that renewable energy not only isn’t better than fossil fuels, but is harmful because it’s the result of some kind of grand conspiracy between financial interests and big environmental groups to distract us from the real solution” of population control.
It’s a strawman argument. Climate researchers and the enviromental groups he trashes aren’t saying that green energy is the only thing we need to do. It’s widely acknowledged that the climate solution will need to be an all-of-the-above approach. Yes, that includes technical solutions like green energy and possibly even carbon sequestration, but also big changes to how live.
The post then uses substantive material to “pick apart some [of POTH’s] bad arguments and logical fallacies” but concludes with a frustration that all too many others share:
I realized that the thing I hate the most about it isn’t that it gets the science wrong, egregious as that is.
No, the worst part of this movie is that Gibbs thinks he’s made some kind of big revelation – that he’s asking Big Questions nobody has asked before.
So many have been asking and struggling with how to answer the “Big Questions” of POTH and, unlike Gibbs and Moore, have evolved with interactions and learning from that dialectic. Too bad Gibbs seemed to have disdain from learning from, documenting, and giving credit to a few decades of that process.
Planet of the Humans, a weak documentary on sustainable energy, Thijs Ten Brinck, Wattisduurzaam (original in Dutch), faces the pain that so many actually informed and expert people face
I don’t recommend watching the movie.
I would prefer to ignore this film. Unfortunately, experience with shock docs on energy is that climate skeptics and other contrarians spread bullshit like viruses. This increases the chance that people with a more pleasant attitude to life and society will also be exposed to the fallacies in the film.
Thus, a question: Is it best to ignore or better to identify failures/faults seeking to inoculate some portion of society to this deceit and equip people to deal with those duped by Gibbs and Moore? Brinck joined the crowd (as per above) seeking to foster herd immunity to POTH’s FUD disinformation. Brinck provides a concise and clearly structured highlighting of issues with the concluding section entitled “Lots of hand waving. No substance.”
No, Michael Moore did not make a documentary called “Planet of the Humans” by Greg Laden makes clear that I — like so many others — got something fundamentally wrong. POTH is not a Moore Film — it was written and directed by Jeff Gibbs and Moore doesn’t even appear in it.
Many people love and respect Michael Moore and his work, and a large number of individuals have, in my experience, decided that since this is a Michael Moore joint, it must be fabulous, and it must be true.
So, I say this to you, Michael Moore fan: This documentary sucks, but it is OK that it sucks. This is a documentary by Jeff Gibbs, not by Michael Moore. So, it is OK to pay attention to the many voices of critique.
28 April 2020
Michael Moore produced a film about climate change that’s a gift to Big Oil: Planet of the Humans deceives viewers about clean energy and climate activists, Leah Stokes, Vox, lays out why this film should have been “left on the cutting room floor”.
the film, directed by Jeff Gibbs, a long-time Moore collaborator, is not the climate message we’ve all been waiting for — it’s a nihilistic take, riddled with errors about clean energy and climate activism. With very little evidence, it claims that renewables are disastrous and that environmental groups are corrupt.
What’s more, it has nothing to say about fossil fuel corporations, who have pushed climate denial and blocked progress on climate policy for decades. Given the film’s loose relationship to facts, I’m not even sure it should be classified as a documentary.
Babies, Bathwater, and Planet Human, Rabett’s Run, tips the hat to other reviews and highlights three points: POTH put ideology before facts; biomass isn’t always horrific even if/as much of it is; and, that there is a “need [for] an “antiracists for population control” movement.”
Review: Planet of the Humans, Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute, is the most favorable of the posts included here (yet) with a recommendation (that I disagree with) to see the film even while discussing its problems.
The film is low on nuance, but our global climate and energy dilemma is all shades of gray. Gibbs seems to say that renewables are a complete waste of time. I would say, they are best seen as a marginal transitional strategy for industrial societies. Given climate change and the fact that fossil fuels are depleting, finite resources, it appears that if we want to maintain any sort of electrical energy infrastructure in the future, it will have to be powered by renewables—hydro, wind, or solar. … The future will be renewable; there simply isn’t any other option. What is very much in question, however, is the kind of society renewable energy can support.
Planet of the Humans Comes This Close to Actually Getting the Real Problem, Then Goes Full Ecofascism, Brian Kahn, Gizmondo, opens generously but then Kahn actually watched the film …
Michael Moore is a dude known for provocation. Every documentary he drops is designed to paint a world of sharp contrasts with clear bad guys. They’re designed to get a reaction and get people talking, so in some ways, him dropping a documentary he executive produced trashing renewable energy on Earth Day makes total sense.
I’ll leave the film criticism to those wiser than me … but I will say this: The movie is deeply flawed in both its premise, proposed solutions, and who gets to voice them.
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How do viruses spread? Airborne vs non-airborne
How do viruses spread?
Not by individual virus particles
An individual virus particle is unbelievably tiny.
Since they are so lightweight they can float in the air for relatively long distances. So that makes them airborne, right?
Yet these airborne individual virus particles are almost never a problem. People are not at risk of being infected by single viral particle.
Why not? We’re always inhaling single viral particles here and there. They quickly break down in our bodies, or if they persist then our immune system quickly wipes them out.
So if that ain’t the problem then what is? The problem is when we encounter an exhaled drop of fluid which may have many hundreds or thousands of such viral particles.
Droplets from sneezing and coughing
Sneezing or coughing sends out lots of tiny water droplets. Each droplet could hold thousands of viral particles. If we inhaled some of these drops then that could make us sick.
Most droplets are short range.
Larger ones usually travel about six feet before they fall to the ground. That’s why it is important to practice social distancing. Stay at least six feet away from people outside of your home.
In a room with insufficient ventilation those droplets can stay in the air longer and travel further. That’s a real problem.
But in a room with good ventilation those drops stay in the air for a shorter period of time, and safety increases.
Image from paper by Jianjian Wei and Yuguo Li. Airborne spread of infectious agents in the indoor environment
Smaller droplets remain in the air longer
Larger particles fall quickly, but small particles float in the air longer – and then dehydrate ( lose water molecules.) That leaves an even lighter particle.
These lighter particles are sometimes called a bioaerosol. They can remain airborne much longer, over 20 feet.
So if you are indoors – like in a restaurant – the air could become saturated with lots of these tiny droplet nuclei, making the location unsafe.
Health authorities suggest wearing a mask if you have to do so. Even an imperfect mask is better than none at all.
Tiny aerosol drops, less than 5 microns across, can float for hours in a place with little ventilation.
A micron is 0.001 millimeters , or 0.000039 inch.
Its symbol is μm
SARS-CoV-2 thus is effectively an airborne virus.
researchers reported earlier this year in The New England Journal of Medicine that SARS-CoV-2 can float in aerosol droplets—less than 5 microns across—for up to 3 hours, and remain infectious
You may be able to spread coronavirus just by breathing, new report finds, Science, AAAS, Robert F. Service, 4/2/2020
Yes, wearing cloth face masks works!
Cloth masks can help stop the spread of COVID-19, save lives and restore jobs.
“Some people have said that covering their faces infringes on their rights, but…it’s about protecting your neighbors…Spreading this disease infringes on your neighbors’ rights.” –Larry Hogan, Governor of Maryland (Republican)
“If everybody’s wearing a mask, it will dramatically reduce the opportunity and possibility of spread.” –Charlie Baker, Governor of Massachusetts (Republican)
Countries that have contained major COVID-19 outbreaks have close to 100% mask usage. An international review of the scientific research on masks by 19 experts (from Stanford, MIT, Oxford, UPenn, Brown, UNC, UCLA, and USF) concluded that:
Near-universal adoption of non-medical masks in public (in conjunction with other measures like test & trace) can reduce effective-R below 1.0 and stop the community spread of the virus.
Laws appear to be highly effective at increasing compliance and slowing or stopping the spread of COVID-19.
There are “34 scientific papers indicating basic masks can be effective in reducing virus transmission in public — and not a single paper that shows clear evidence that they cannot.” –The Washington Post
Read more about the science.
Masks4All
References
Flight of the aerosol, Ian M Mackay et al. Virology Down Under, 2/9/2020
Simple DIY masks could help flatten the curve. We should all wear them in public.
Also see How do viruses spread? Airborne vs non-airborne
Jeremy Howard writes
When historians tally up the many missteps policymakers have made in response to the coronavirus pandemic, the senseless and unscientific push for the general public to avoid wearing masks should be near the top.
The evidence not only fails to support the push, it also contradicts it. It can take a while for official recommendations to catch up with scientific thinking. In this case, such delays might be deadly and economically disastrous.
It’s time to make masks a key part of our fight to contain, then defeat, this pandemic. Masks effective at “flattening the curve” can be made at home with nothing more than a T-shirt and a pair of scissors. We should all wear masks — store-bought or homemade — whenever we’re out in public.
At the height of the HIV crisis, authorities did not tell people to put away condoms. As fatalities from car crashes mounted, no one recommended avoiding seat belts. Yet in a global respiratory pandemic, people who should know better are discouraging Americans from using respiratory protection.
… There are good reasons to believe DIY masks would help a lot. Look at Hong Kong, Mongolia, South Korea and Taiwan, all of which have covid-19 largely under control. They are all near the original epicenter of the pandemic in mainland China, and they have economic ties to China.
Yet none has resorted to a lockdown, such as in China’s Wuhan province. In all of these countries, all of which were hit hard by the SARS respiratory virus outbreak in 2002 and 2003, everyone is wearing masks in public.
George Gao, director general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, stated, “Many people have asymptomatic or presymptomatic infections. If they are wearing face masks, it can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others.”
My data-focused research institute, fast.ai, has found 34 scientific papers indicating basic masks can be effective in reducing virus transmission in public — and not a single paper that shows clear evidence that they cannot.
Studies have documented definitively that in controlled environments like airplanes, people with masks rarely infect others and rarely become infected themselves, while those without masks more easily infect others or become infected themselves.
Masks don’t have to be complex to be effective. A 2013 paper tested a variety of household materials and found that something as simple as two layers of a cotton T-shirt is highly effective at blocking virus particles of a wide range of sizes.
Oxford University found evidence this month for the effectiveness of simple fabric mouth and nose covers to be so compelling they now are officially acceptable for use in a hospital in many situations. Hospitals running short of N95-rated masks are turning to homemade cloth masks themselves; if it’s good enough to use in a hospital, it’s good enough for a walk to the store.
The reasons the WHO cites for its anti-mask advice are based not on science but on three spurious policy arguments.
First, there are not enough masks for hospital workers.
Second, masks may themselves become contaminated and pass on an infection to the people wearing them.
Third, masks could encourage people to engage in more risky behavior.
None of these is a good reason to avoid wearing a mask in public.
Yes, there is a shortage of manufactured masks, and these should go to hospital workers. But anyone can make a mask at home by cutting up a cotton T-shirt, tying it back together and then washing it at the end of the day. Another approach, recommended by the Hong Kong Consumer Council, involves rigging a simple mask with a paper towel and rubber bands that can be thrown in the trash at the end of each day.
… the idea that masks encourage risky behavior is nonsensical. We give cars anti-lock brakes and seat belts despite the possibility that people might drive more riskily knowing the safety equipment is there. Construction workers wear hard hats even though the hats presumably could encourage less attention to safety. If any risky behavior does occur, societies have the power to make laws against it.
Papers about effectiveness of basic masks #masks4all
About the author – Jeremy Howard is a distinguished research scientist at the University of San Francisco, founding researcher at fast.ai and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council.
Simple DIY masks could help flatten the curve. We should all wear them in public.
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More reason to wear face masks:
Experts said the choir outbreak is consistent with a growing body of evidence that the virus can be transmitted through aerosols — particles smaller than 5 micrometers that can float in the air for minutes or longer.
The World Health Organization has downplayed the possibility of transmission in aerosols, stressing that the virus is spread through much larger “respiratory droplets,” which are emitted when an infected person coughs or sneezes and quickly fall to a surface.
But a study published March 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that when the virus was suspended in a mist under laboratory conditions it remained “viable and infectious” for three hours — though researchers have said that time period would probably be no more than a half-hour in real-world conditions.
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Nell Greenfieldboyce writes
the question of whether or not the coronavirus can be “airborne” is extremely contentious right now — and it’s a question that has real implications for what people should do to avoid getting infected.
… a committee of independent experts convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has weighed in, in response to a question from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy about whether the virus “could be spread by conversation in addition to sneeze/cough-induced droplets.”
“Currently available research supports the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 could be spread via bioaerosols generated directly by patients’ exhalation,” says a letter from the committee chair. By bioaerosols, they are referring to fine particles emitted when someone breathes that can be suspended in the air rather than larger droplets produced through coughs and sneezes.
Even if additional research shows that any virus in such tiny particles is viable, researchers still won’t how much of it would need to be inhaled to make someone sick. But the committee experts also caution that uncertainty about all this is almost a given—because there’s currently no respiratory virus for which we know the exact proportion of infections that come from breathing the virus in versus coming into contact with droplets in the air or on surfaces.
“I personally think that transmission by inhalation of virus in the air is happening,” says Linsey Marr, an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech. But she says so far, health experts have largely discounted the possibility of transmitting this coronavirus in this way.
“From an infection prevention perspective, these things are not 100% black and white. The reason why we say ‘droplet’ versus ‘airborne’ versus ‘contact’ is to give overall guidance on how to manage patients who are expected to be infectious with a specific pathogen,” said Dr. Hanan Balkhy, assistant director-general for antimicrobial resistance at WHO, in an interview with NPR earlier this week.
As an expert who worked to contain an outbreak of the deadly MERS coronavirus in Saudi Arabia, she believes that this new virus should behave similarly to other severe coronaviruses — and that means, unless health-care workers are doing invasive procedures like putting in breathing tubes, the virus is expected to primarily spread through droplets.
Droplets are larger respiratory particles that are 5 to 10 micrometers in size. Those are considered “big,” even though a 5 micrometer particle would still be invisible to the naked eye. Traditionally, those droplets are thought to not travel more than about three feet or so after exhalation. That would mean the virus can only spread to people who get close to an infected person or who touch surfaces or objects that might have become contaminated by these droplets. This is why public health messages urge people to wash their hands and stand at least 6 feet away from other people.
An “airborne” virus, in contrast, has long been considered to be a virus that spreads in exhaled particles that are tiny enough to linger in the air and move with air currents, letting them be breathed in by passersby who then get sick. Measles is a good example of this kind of virus — an exhaled measles pathogen can hang suspended in a room for a couple hours after an infected person leaves.
The reality of aerosol generation, however, is far more complex than this “droplet” versus “airborne” dichotomy would suggest, says Marr. People produce a wide range of different-sized particles of mucus or saliva. These particles get smaller as they evaporate in the air and can travel different distances depending on the surrounding air conditions.
“The way the definitions have been set up, this “droplet” vs “airborne” distinction, was first established in the 1950s or even earlier,” says Marr. “There was a more limited understanding of aerosol science then.”
Even a 5 micrometer droplet can linger in the air. “If the air were perfectly still, it would take a half hour to fall from a height of 6 feet down to the ground. And, of course, the air isn’t perfectly still,” says Marr. “So it can easily be blown around during that time and stay in the air for longer or shorter.”
What’s more, coughs and sneezes create turbulent clouds of gas that can propel respiratory particles forward.
“For symptomatic, violent exhalations including sneezes and coughs, then the droplets can definitely reach much further than the 1 to 2 meter [3 to 6 feet] cutoff,” says Lydia Bourouiba, an infectious disease transmission researcher at MIT, referring to the distance typically cited as safe for avoiding droplet-carried diseases.
In fact, studies show that “given various combinations of an individual patient’s physiology and environmental conditions, such as humidity and temperature, the gas cloud and its payload of pathogen-bearing droplets of all sizes can travel 23 to 27 feet,” she wrote in a recent article published online by the Journal of the American Medical Association.
…. Some of the strongest evidence that an airborne route of transmission might be possible for this virus comes from a report published last month by the New England Journal of Medicine that described mechanically generating aerosols carrying the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the laboratory. It found that the virus in these little aerosols remained viable and infectious throughout the duration of the experiment, which lasted 3 hours.
WHO mentioned this study in its recent review of possible modes of transmission and noted that “this is a high-powered machine that does not reflect normal human cough conditions … this was an experimentally induced aerosol-generating procedure.”
It may have been artificial, says Marr, but “the conditions they used in that laboratory study are actually less favorable for survival compared to the real world. So it’s more likely that the virus can survive under real world conditions.”
Scientists Probe How Coronavirus Might Travel Through The Air
Reference: Turbulent Gas Clouds and Respiratory Pathogen Emissions: Potential Implications for Reducing Transmission of COVID-19
Lydia Bourouiba, JAMA insights, March 26, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.4756
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Aerosol and Surface Stability of SARS-CoV-2 as Compared with SARS-CoV-1
March 17, 2020 , DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc2004973
A novel human coronavirus that is now named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) (formerly called HCoV-19) emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and is now causing a pandemic. We analyzed the aerosol and surface stability of SARS-CoV-2 and compared it with SARS-CoV-1, the most closely related human coronavirus.
… We found that the stability of SARS-CoV-2 was similar to that of SARS-CoV-1 under the experimental circumstances tested. This indicates that differences in the epidemiologic characteristics of these viruses probably arise from other factors, including high viral loads in the upper respiratory tract and the potential for persons infected with SARS-CoV-2 to shed and transmit the virus while asymptomatic.
Our results indicate that aerosol and fomite transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is plausible, since the virus can remain viable and infectious in aerosols for hours and on surfaces up to days (depending on the inoculum shed).
These findings echo those with SARS-CoV-1, in which these forms of transmission were associated with nosocomial spread and super-spreading events, and they provide information for pandemic mitigation efforts.
Neeltje van Doremalen, Ph.D., Trenton Bushmaker, B.Sc.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Hamilton, MT
Dylan H. Morris, M.Phil., Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, Myndi G. Holbrook, B.Sc.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Hamilton, MT
Amandine Gamble, Ph.D.
University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA
Brandi N. Williamson, M.P.H.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Hamilton, MT
Azaibi Tamin, Ph.D., Jennifer L. Harcourt, Ph.D.
Natalie J. Thornburg, Ph.D., Susan I. Gerber, M.D.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA
James O. Lloyd-Smith, Ph.D.
University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, Bethesda, MD
Emmie de Wit, Ph.D., Vincent J. Munster, Ph.D.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Hamilton, MT
Aerosol and Surface Stability of SARS-CoV-2 as Compared with SARS-CoV-1
#NEJM
How to deal with a viral pandemic
What is a pandemic?
A pandemic is an epidemic occurring on a scale which crosses international boundaries, usually affecting a large number of people.
Pandemics can also occur in important agricultural organisms (livestock, crop plants, fish, tree species) or in other organisms.
from The Continuum of Pandemic Phases, CDC
The World Health Organization (WHO) has a classification – starts with the virus mostly infecting animals, with a few cases where animals infect people, then moves through the stage where the virus begins to spread directly between people, and ends with a pandemic when infections from the new virus have spread worldwide.
A disease is not a pandemic merely because it is widespread or kills many people; it must also be infectious. For instance, cancer is responsible for many deaths but is not a pandemic because the disease is not infectious or contagious.
(Intro adapted from Wikipedia article, Pandemic)
Viruses spread exponentially
How does the likelihood of death from any common cause compare to the likelihood of death from something that spreads exponentially? The important difference is that for any other cause of death, that cause is (a) usually not transmissible, and (b) the rate of death stays (more or less) the same over time.
But for deaths caused by a virus the situation is different – (c) it is transmissible from one person to another, and (d) the number of people infected grows exponentially over time.
Animation: Global Deaths Due to Various Causes and COVID-19
Methodology and sources for the animation
How would we respond to a pandemic?
What happens if a pandemic hits? Jon Evans, Techcrunch, 2/23/2020
Don’t get all disaster-movie here. Some people seem to have the notion that a pandemic will mean shutting down borders, building walls, canceling all air travel and quarantining entire nations indefinitely. That is incorrect.
Containment attempts can slow down an outbreak and buy time to prepare, but if a pandemic hits, by definition, containment has failed… [so] the focus will switch from containment to mitigation: slowing down how fast the virus spreads through a population in which it has taken root.
Mitigation can occur via individual measures, such as frequent hand washing, and collective measures, such as “social distancing” — cancellations of mass events, closures, adopting remote work and remote education wherever possible, and so forth.
The slower the pandemic moves, the smoother the demands on health-care systems will be; the less risk those systems will have of becoming overloaded; the more they can learn about how best to treat the virus; and the greater the number of people who may ultimately benefit from a vaccine, if one is developed.
Observed cases vs non-observed cases
How should we respond to a pandemic?
Past Time to Tell the Public: “It Will Probably Go Pandemic, and We Should All Prepare Now” by Jody Lanard and Peter M. Sandman
1. Tell friends and family to try to get ahead on their medical prescriptions if they can, in case of very predictable supply chain disruptions, and so they won’t have to go out to the pharmacy at a time when there may be long lines of sick people. This helps them in a practical sense, but it also makes them visualize – often for the first time – how a pandemic may impact them in their everyday lives, even if they don’t actually catch COVID-19….
2. We also recommend that people might want to slowly (so no one will accuse them of panic-buying) start to stock up on enough non-perishable food to last their households through several weeks of social distancing at home during an intense wave of transmission in their community. This too seems to get through emotionally, as well as being useful logistically.
3. Three other recommendations that we feel have gone over well with our friends and acquaintances: Suggesting practical organizational things they and their organizations can do to get ready, such as cross-training to mitigate absenteeism. Suggesting that people make plans for childcare when they are sick, or when their child is sick.
4. Right now, today, start practicing not touching your face when you are out and about! You probably won’t be able to do it perfectly, but you can greatly reduce the frequency of potential self-inoculation. …
How should we respond to a pandemic?
Develop vaccines
Josh Michaud, Associate Director Global Health at Kaiser Family Foundation, John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, writes:
CDC guidance urges flexibility in implementing mitigation measures, and continual re-assessment of their effectiveness as new information comes in. A “targeted, layered” approach that addresses current circumstances is the best practice.
The ultimate goal of such measures is to reduce the intensity of an outbreak, flattening out the epidemic curve and therefore reducing strain on the health system, and on social economic well-being (see this graphic representation).
KaiserScience 