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"Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because of sex, race, color, creed, or national origin."In the US Constitution, the closest thing to an equal-rights assurance may be the 19th amendment, which guarantees women the right to vote.

Technically, the last deadline to ratify the ERA passed in 1982. However, Congress has the power to vote to simply extend the deadline if 38 states end up approving it. So, once the ERA gets one more state's blessing, there may be more legislative red tape to get through before it reaches official amendment status. Here are the states that have not voted to ratify the amendment:

The first objective led Spain to build up a naval force in the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium) that preyed on Dutch shipping in the North Sea and, on the diplomatic front, to cultivate the friendship of James I of England and even to contemplate the restoration of Frederick V to the Palatinate and the marriage of Philip IV’s devoutly Roman Catholic sister to the heretic prince of Wales (later Charles I).

From 1630, when Sweden and France actively intervened in the war, Spain rapidly lost the initiative. The war was fought on a global scale

In the autumn of 1640 Olivares scraped together the last available troops and sent them against the Catalan rebels. Claris countered by transferring Catalan allegiance to the king of France, “as in the time of Charlemagne” (January 1641). French troops now entered Catalonia, and only after French forces withdrew with the renewed outbreak of the French civil wars (the Fronde) were the Castilians able to reconquer Catalonia (1652)

The revolt of Catalonia gave the Portuguese their opportunity. The lower classes and the clergy had always hated the Castilians, and the Portuguese aristocracy and the commercial classes—previously content with the patronage and the economic opportunities that the union with Spain had provided—had become dissatisfied during the preceding 20 years.

Rather than allow themselves to be sent to fight the Catalan rebels, the Portuguese nobility seized power in Lisbon and proclaimed the duque de Bragança as King John IV of Portugal (December 1640).

In 1643 the French king’s cousin, Louis II de Bourbon (the Great Condé), broke the Spanish tercios and their reputation for invincibility at the Battle of Rocroi in northeastern France.

When the emperor conceded French claims to Alsace and the Rhine bridgeheads, the “Spanish Road” to the Netherlands was irrevocably cut, and the close alliance between the Spanish and the Austrian branches of the house of Habsburg came to an end. With Portugal in revolt and Brazil no longer an issue between the Dutch and the Spaniards, Philip IV drew the only possible conclusion from this situation and rapidly came to terms with the United Provinces, recognizing their full independence

But Philip IV had not changed his basic policy. He wanted to have his hands free for a final effort against France, even after Catalonia had surrendered. Once again the temporary weakness of France during the Fronde confirmed the Spanish court in its disastrous military policy.

More important than these relatively minor territorial losses was the realization throughout Europe that Spain’s pretensions to hegemony had definitely and irremediably failed. The Spaniards themselves were slow to admit it. Philip IV had made concessions to France in order, once again, to have his hands free against the last unforgiven enemy, Portugal. There was no longer any rational basis for his hopes of success. All schemes for financial and tax reforms were still being blocked by vested interests, and the government again had declared bankruptcies in 1647 and 1653.

Not only had Charles placed Sweden in a calamitous situation internationally but he had left behind him a legacy of domestic troubles. His usurpation of the throne had meant not only the expulsion of a Roman Catholic sovereign whose rule seemed to threaten Sweden’s Lutheranism but also the defeat of the aristocratic constitutionalism of the Council of State, and it had been followed by the execution of five leading members of the high aristocracy.

Charles IX had intervened in Russia to prevent the Poles from placing their own candidate on the Russian throne;

The king observed the spirit of the charter. The aristocracy found in Gustav a king favourable to their interests. He enlisted the nobility in the service of the state and thus provided them with numerous economic benefits.

The first decade of the reign, therefore, saw the creation of the Supreme Court (1614) and the establishment of the Treasury and the Chancery as permanent administrative boards (1618), and by the end of the reign an Admiralty and a War Office had been created—each presided over by one of the great officers of state.

And in the 1620s a thorough reform professionalized local government and placed it securely under the control of the crown. The Council of State became, for the first time, a permanent organ of government able to assume charge of affairs while the king was fighting overseas.

Thus, the fate of Europe was bound up with what happened in Livonia or Prussia. Protestant Europe was slow to appreciate the connection, but as the Protestant cause plunged to disaster in Germany, its leaders increasingly turned their eyes to Gustav as a possible saviour.

The disastrous defeat (1626) of Christian IV of Denmark, who had intervened in Germany without such an assurance, justified his caution, but it also made Swedish intervention inevitable.

Gustav landed in Germany without allies. Whatever the feelings of the Protestant populations, the Protestant princes resented Swedish interference, and the refusal of George William of Brandenburg to cooperate with the Swedes thwarted Gustav’s attempts to save Magdeburg from capture and sack at the hands of Tilly’s armies. In September John George of Saxony, provoked by violations of his neutrality, formally allied himself with Sweden.

the old security had become the new indemnity. Many Germans feared, and some Swedish diplomats now believed, that a final settlement must probably entail the deposition of the German emperor Ferdinand II and the election of Gustav as emperor in his place. It was a solution he must certainly have contemplated, but there is no firm evidence of his attitude; probably he considered it only as a last resort. Certainly it would have alienated those German allies who had no wish to exchange a Habsburg domination for a Swedish one.

His death came at a moment when it had already begun to appear that the victory he believed to be essential to the stability of Germany and the security of Sweden might be more difficult to achieve than he had imagined. But he had lived long enough to deflect the course of German history. His intervention in the Thirty Years’ War, at a moment when the armies of the Habsburg emperor and the German princes of the Catholic League controlled almost the whole of Germany, ensured the survival of German Protestantism against the onslaughts of the Counter-Reformation.

By supporting the German princes against the emperor, Gustav Adolf defeated the attempts of the Habsburgs to make their imperial authority a reality and thus played a part in delaying the emergence of a united Germany until the 19th century.

“It is really the doubling of the speed of glacier melt that is most concerning.” The new understanding of past melting means forecasts can now be made with far more confidence but the outlook is dire, he said. “It looks devastating and there is no doubt in my mind, not a single grain of doubt, that [the impact of the climate crisis] is what we are seeing.

Temperature data from the region also shows an average rise of 1C from 2000-16 compared with 1975-2000. Calculations show this rise is consistent with the amount of ice being lost. “Even glaciers in the highest mountains of the world are responding to global air temperature increases driven by the combustion of fossil fuels,”

at least a third of the ice in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya ranges was already doomed to melt by the end of the century, even if drastic action to cut emissions was taken immediately. Without action, two-thirds would go.

The scientists used this data to track the changes in 650 Himalayan glaciers. On average, the glacier surfaces sank by 22cm (8.6 inches) a year from 1975 to 2000. But the melting has accelerated, with an average loss of 43cm a year from 2000 to 2016.

“Increasingly uncertain and irregular water supplies will impact the 1 billion people living downstream from the Himalaya mountains in south Asia.”

“For the wellbeing of the people there, our results are of course the worst possible. But it is what it is, and now we have to prepare for that scenario. We have to worry a lot, because so many people are affected

“To stop the temperature rises, we have to cool the planet,” he said. “We have to not only slow down greenhouse gas emissions, we have to reverse them. That is the challenge for the next 20 years.”

Many drivers say they prefer the elevated ride height and bigger cargo space. Auto manufacturers can charge a premium for the vehicles, which cost only slightly more to produce than similar-sized cars because they share much of the same engineering. For instance, the average price paid for a midsize SUV in May was $37,790, nearly $12,000 higher than a midsize sedan, according to sales data from Kelley Blue Book.

Japanese and South Korean car companies have also rolled out new sport-utility offerings as their earnings have been hit by slowing sedan sales—long a sweet spot for brands like Toyota and Honda.

Fairly or not, HR is seen as the division of the company that slows things down, generates endless memos, meddles in employees’ personal business, holds compulsory “trainings,” and ruins any fun and spirit-lifting thing employees come up with

the real reason many workers don’t love human resources is that while the department often presents itself as functioning like a union—the open door for worker complaints, the updates on valuable new benefits—it is not a union

should the economy change, or should management decide to go in another direction, HR can just as quickly become assassin as friend

Most of the time, if the man is truly important to the company, the case is quickly whisked out of HR’s hands, the investigation delivered to lawyers and the final decision rendered by executives. These executives are under no legal imperative to terminate an alleged offender or even to enforce a particular sanction, only to ensure that the woman who made the report is safe in the future.

The task force had been charged with determining how much progress the country had made since that historic decision. Its finding: very little. “Much of the training done over the last 30 years has not worked as a prevention tool,” the task force found. That’s an incredible statement—three decades of failure.

It reveals that sexual harassment is “widespread” and “persistent,” and that 85 percent of workers who are harassed never report it. It found that employees are much more likely to come up with their own solution—such as avoiding the harasser, downplaying the harassment, or simply enduring it—than to seek help from HR. They are far more likely to ask a family member or co-worker for advice than to file a complaint, because they fear that they will face repercussions if they do.

This is why all of that training—the videos and online courses and worksheets—seems so useless: because it’s designed to serve as a defense against an employment lawsuit. The task force cited a study that found “no evidence that the training affected the frequency of sexual harassment experienced by the women in the workplace.” The task force also said that HR trainings and procedures are “too focused on protecting the employer from liability,” and not focused enough on ending the problem.

What HR is actually responsible for—one of the central ways the department “adds value” to a company—is serving as the first line of defense against a sexual-harassment lawsuit

there is only one way to eradicate harassment from a workplace: by creating a climate and culture that starts at the very top of the company and establishes that harassment is not tolerated and will be punished severely. Middle managers can’t change the culture of a company;

“Pricing carbon correctly is a concrete and cost-effective way to slow climate change. We are wasting an opportunity to steer our economics along a low-carbon growth path and losing precious time with every day that passes.”

An abundance of carbon credits and exemptions for major emitters has plagued emission-trading systems in Europe and California, making credits cheap and hindering their effectiveness

A series of recent developments, though, have provided a glimmer of hope for would-be carbon taxes. The United Kingdom’s adoption of a carbon tax in the power sector produced a 58 percent drop in emissions from 2012 to 2016.

The biggest development of all may be in China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, which has taken steps toward its own emissions trading program. China’s move has the potential to narrow the gap between global carbon prices and climate costs to 63 percent in the early 2020s, OECD found.

The OECD report compared effective carbon rates—taxes on fossil fuels, carbon taxes and emission-trading credits—against estimated climate costs, which it projected at €30 ($35) per ton of carbon. The result is a carbon pricing gap, the difference between actual carbon rates and climate costs.

The organization found that countries with larger carbon pricing gaps tend to have more energy-intensive economies. Russia and China, for instance, have gaps of 100 percent and 90 percent, respectively, OECD found.

Less energy-intensive economies, by contrast, have less ground to make up. OECD measured the gap in Spain at 51 percent, Ireland at 42 percent and France at 41 percent

The carbon pricing gap in the United States, the world’s second-largest emitter, was 75 percent.

“If the world is to cope with climate change, policymakers will need to pull every lever at their disposal,” he writes. “Faced with this threat, to indulge in the idea that central banks, as key agencies of the state, can limit themselves to worrying about financial stability … is its own form of denial.”

In England, by contrast, Carney has convened 33 central banks to investigate how to “green the financial system.” According to Axios, every powerful central bank is working with him—except for Banco do Brasil and the Fed.

Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, in 2015, in a speech which has subsequently received massive coverage—and he is a man, after all, absolutely of the global financial establishment—coined the idea of a climate Minsky moment. [Editor’s note: A Minsky moment is when an asset’s price suddenly collapses after a long period of growth.]

We would need [fossil-fuel assets] to be on the balance sheet of actors who were under huge pressure in a fire-sale situation and who couldn’t deal with a sudden revaluation. We would need an entire network of causation to be there, which is what produced the unique crisis of 2007 to 2008.

So imagine that we stay on our current path, and we’re headed toward 3 or 4 degrees’ [Celsius] temperature change. And then imagine some of the nonlinearities kick in, which the climate scientists tell us about, and we face a Fukushima-style event.

What happens next? You then get nervous democratic politicians—and not necessarily those who are known for their populism, but just nervous democratic politicians—suddenly deciding that we have to stop doing one or another part of our carbon-based economy. It has to stop, and it has to stop immediately. And then you get big shocks. Then you get sudden revaluations.

In other words, the success of the delaying tactics of the carbon lobby create a situation in which we’re then faced with the possibility of a sudden regulatory shock

“One-third of equity and fixed income assets issued in global financial markets can be classified as belonging to the natural resource and extraction sectors, as well as carbon-intensive power utilities, chemicals, construction, and industrial goods firms.”

Whether that will, in fact, ease the formation of majorities in Congress is another question. Because, after all, it does somehow have to get through the Senate, you know.

Germany is far, far more exposed. A huge slice of their economy is basically all about internal combustion engines, and so that number includes all of those stocks, for sure.

If we saw a huge shock to, say, European equity [exchange-traded funds], which were heavily in German automotive, that’s the sort of trigger that we might be looking at.

This is not simply a zero-sum game; this is a structural transformation that has many very attractive properties. There’s loads of excellent jobs that could be created in this kind of transition.There’s no reason why, even by conventional GDP-type metrics, it need even be associated with the kind of feel-bad factor of slow GDP growth. Then [you could] also link it to a revival of social democracy for the United States. From a progressive political point of view, that’s obviously extremely attractive.

there’s also a deeper view: that climate change is the situation within which all other politics will happen for the next several generations, at least.

ever since the 1990s that’s been the logjam on any serious American commitment.

When you look at a third of securities tied up in the carbon economy and the evidence for decoupling GDP growth from carbon emissions maybe not being as strong as we’d like, do you think the change that needs to happen is realistic?

Tooze: Realistic? No. I mean, depends what you mean by realism. The scale of the challenge requires a boldness of action for which there is no precedent. That’s the only good purpose that the war analogies serve

Meyer: In your piece, you write: “Those in the United States who call for a Green New Deal or a Green Marshall Plan are, if anything, understating the scale of what is needed.”

Do you think climate action needs to be larger than, say, the U.S. mobilization for World War II?

Tooze: Well, less large in absolute terms. Because even the U.S. was spending almost 40 percent of GDP on World War II. And if you’re the Soviet Union, you’re spending 55 to 60 percent in 1940. We don’t need to do anything like that. It needs to be much bigger than the New Deal, which in fiscal-policy terms was really quite trivial.

Crucially, what makes it totally unlike the war is that there’s no happy end. There’s no moment where you win and then everything goes back to the way it was before, but just better. That’s a misunderstanding

This isn’t crash dieting; this is a permanent change in lifestyle, and we need to love that and we need to live it and we need to own it and we need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that this is for us and for all subsequent generations of humans.

It isn’t just the oil and gas majors, because they wouldn’t get you to 30 percent. Exxon isn’t big enough to get you to that kind of percentage. It’s Exxon, and [the major automakers] Daimler and BMW, and the entire carbon-exposed complex.

all the really hard choices need to be made by people like China and India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and Indonesia

You don’t have that very much in Germany. There isn’t anyone in Germany saying, “Which bit of mid-20th-century history is this most like?,” mercifully. The one analogy that has popped up in Germany is reunification, which I actually think is quite a good one, because that’s still an ongoing problem

in the American case, it would be civil rights and Reconstruction, which isn’t a particularly optimistic comparison to draw. It’s an ongoing problem, it’s a deep historic problem, it only happened once, we still haven’t fixed it, and we’re not at peace.

Meyer: There’s a kind of shallow view of climate change: that it is something we need to avert or stop. And that’s somewhat true

furthermore—and much more fundamentally than any of those things—this isn’t really about America. I mean, America can be an obstacle and get in the way, but none of the really hard choices needs to be made by Americ

like Reconstruction or the civil-rights movement, it needs to be something that people take on like a moral commitment, in the same way they take on genocide prevention as a moral commitment

problems that we thought we’d fixed, like the Green Revolution and the feeding of the world population, for instance—totally not obvious that those fixes cope with the next 20 years of what’s ahead of us. The food problem that was such an oppressive issue globally in the 1970s may resurge in an absolutely dramatic way.

Meyer: Given all that, if Jerome Powell decided that he wanted to intervene on the side of climate action, what could he do? What could the Fed do?

Tooze: What I think the Fed should announce is that it enthusiastically supports the idea of a bipartisan infrastructure push focused on the American electrical network, first and foremost, so that we can actually hook up the renewable-generating capacity—which is now eminently, you know, realistic in economic terms. Setting a backstop to a a fiscal-side-led investment push is the obvious thing.

It is indeed a highly appropriate response to an environment of extremely low interest rates, and [former Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers & Co. would argue that it might help, as it were, to suck us out of the state of secular stagnation that we’re in.

another avenue to go down—for the Fed to take a role in helping develop a classification of green bonds, of green financing, with a view also to rolling out comprehensive demands for disclosure on the part of American firms, for climate risks to be fully declared on balance sheets, and for due recognition to be given to firms that are in the business of proactively preparing themselves for decarbonization.

You could, for instance, declare that the Fed views with disfavor the role of several large American banks in continuing to fund coal investment. Some of the carbon-tracking NGOs have done very good work showing and exposing the way in which some of the largest, the most reputable American banks are still in the business of lending to Big Coal. Banking regulation could be tweaked in a way that would produce a tilt against that.

the classic role of the Fed is to support government-issued debt. Insofar as the Green New Deal is a government-issued business, the Fed has just an absolutely historical warrant for supporting fiscal action.

with regards to the broader economy, the entire federal-government apparatus essentially stood behind the spread of home ownership in the United States and the promotion of suburbanization through the credit system. And kind of what we need is a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the energy transition.

if the question is, Is there historical warrant for the financial agencies of government in the United States biasing the property structure in the economy in a certain way?, the answer is emphatically yes—all the way down to the grotesque role of the New Deal financial apparatus in enshrining the racial segregation of the American urban space, with massive effects from the 1930s onward.

The idea of neutrality should not even be allowed in the room in this argument. It’s a question of where we want to be biased. If you look at QE, especially in the U.K. and the EU, it was effectively fossil-biased.

monetary policy is not neutral with regards to the environment. There’s no safe space here. The only question is whether you’re going to lead in the right way

Meyer: Last question. With any of this, is there a role for interested Americans to play if they are not particularly tied to the financial- or monetary-policy elite?

Tooze: Support your congressperson in doing exactly what AOC did in the hearings with Powell a couple of weeks ago

[Editor’s Note: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked Powell whether inflation and unemployment are still closely connected, as the Fed has long argued.]

Applaud, follow with interest, raise questions. That’s exactly what needs to be happening. The politicization of monetary policy is a fact.

If we don’t raise these questions, the de facto politics is, more often than not, conservative and status quo–oriented. So this, like any other area, is one where citizens—whether they’re educated and informed or not—need to wise up, get involved, and follow the arguments and develop positions.

So applaud your congresspeople when they do exactly what AOC was doing in that situation. In many ways, I thought it was one of the most hopeful scenes I’ve seen in that kind of hearing in a long time.

The [white-supremacist] ideology is spreading more into the mainstream than it ever has before. There aren’t checks and balances to counter it. There aren’t programs being funded to help people disengage from extremism. Some of the rhetoric coming from the very top is emboldening extremists.

Picciolini: Unfortunately, I think that the underpinnings of the ideology have always been there. The extremists were on the fringe, and very visible, but other people weren’t willing to voice those beliefs.

I never thought we would have a social and political climate that really kind of brought it to the foreground. Because it’s starting to seem less like a fringe ideology and more like a mainstream ideology.

Kathy Gilsinan: What role does the internet play? There’s a lot of discussion about internet radicalization for members of ISIS—is this a parallel process for white-supremacist movements

Thirty years ago, marginalized, broken, angry young people had to be met face-to-face to get recruited into a movement. Nowadays, those millions and millions of young people are living most of their lives online if they don’t have real-world connections. And they’re finding a community online instead of in the real world, and having conversations about promoting violence.

White-supremacist terrorists—the ones who have left dozens dead in attacks in Pittsburgh, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas, in recent months—aren’t just trying to outdo one another, he told us. They’re trying to outdo Timothy McVeigh

If ads are being served on their videos, chances are good, depending on how many views, they’re making ad revenue based on Google, Facebook, YouTube, serving ads against their content. So, in that sense, de-platforming is good. It does slow them down quite a bit. From my perspective, it also makes people harder to reach.

Picciolini: It’s a whole lot of listening. I listen for what I call potholes: things that happen to us in our journey of life that detour us, things like trauma, abuse, mental illness, poverty, joblessness. Even privilege can be a pothole that detours us. As I listen to those—rather than debate or confront them about their ideology, but creating a rapport with them—I start to fill in those potholes. I will find resources in their community to help them deal with the trauma, with whatever it is that was the motivation for them to go in that direction. Nobody’s born racist; we all found it. Then I leverage the community around them to try to engage them and support them, and try to find ways for them to crawl out of that hole. Typically what I found is, people hate other people because they hate something very specifically about themselves, or are very angry about a situation within their own environment, and that is then projected onto other people

Bayoumy: What are some of the things that prompt these people to question their beliefs?  Picciolini: Certainly not facts. It’s very emotional. I try to take them through an emotional journey where they come to the conclusion that they’ve changed, and it’s not me telling them that they’ve changed. What I’ve found least effective is me telling them that they’re wrong, or me telling them that they need to think a certain way. Typically these people are pretty idealistic, although they’re lost, typically pretty bruised emotionally, and they have very low self-esteem.

Picciolini: I’ve always found it very difficult to sway opinion when it’s a group of people. When people are in a group, they tend to not be as vulnerable or as forthcoming. So I think it has to be a personal journey

it’s not an easy process; it’s a very, very long process. If you think about quitting smoking, or drinking, or anything like that. For me, from the time I was 14 years old till I was 23, those were kind of the adult developmental years, so there were a lot of things that I had to unlearn.

Picciolini: I think we can be equipped. There’s just no will to build something about domestic extremism. We don’t currently have any hate-crime laws that apply to online activity, but photoshopping someone’s face onto an Auschwitz prisoner on Twitter isn’t so different from spray-painting a swastika in a synagogue. I think we need to start asking ourselves what kind of policies need to be in place, not to limit speech, but to protect people from it. I don’t know what the answer is there.

I just think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. They’re all trying to outdo each other, not just the last person, but Timothy McVeigh. Terrorists will always find another way to do it. I have to ask myself, Do we have white-nationalist airline pilots? There have to be. I knew people in powerful positions, in politics, in law enforcement, who were secretly white nationalists. I think we’d be stupid and selfish to think that we don’t have those in the truck-driving industry.

Extreme floods that have historically struck some coastal cities and small island nations once every 100 years will become an annual occurrence by 2050

if emissions continue to increase, global sea levels could rise by more than three feet by the end of this century — around 12 percent higher than the group estimated as recently as 2013

Melting glaciers could harm water supplies, and warming oceans could wreck marine fisheries.

“The conclusion is inescapable: The impacts of climate change on the ocean are well underway. Unless we take very serious action very soon, these impacts will get worse — much, much worse.”

More than 100 scientists from around the world contributed to the latest report by the IPCC, which found that profound and potentially devastating consequences lie ahead for marine life, Arctic ecosystems and entire human societies if climate change continues unabated.

While dozens of smaller nations did unveil plans for coming years, the world’s largest emitters have stopped short of committing to transformational changes.

Sea level rise is accelerating, and the world could see 3.6 feet in total sea level rise by the year 2100 in a very high-emissions scenario. In 2013, t

The ocean is losing oxygen, growing more acidic, taking up an increasing amount of heat, and becoming more stratified, with warm water at the surface preventing cooler, nutrient rich waters from rising. All of these changes have profound consequences for marine ecosystems.

when scientists behind the report looked at an alternative method for gauging how much seas could rise — simply canvassing the views of experts — even larger estimates emerged. The group’s findings only highlight “likely” amounts of sea level rise, meaning they do not represent worst-case scenarios.

For some major coastal cities, a historical 100-year flood event will happen annually by the year 2050. That includes large cities such as Jakarta, Manila, Bangkok, Lima, Singapore, Barcelona and Sydney, the report says

“Even our language has to adapt: What once was called ‘climate change’ is now truly a ‘climate crisis.’ … We are seeing unprecedented temperatures, unrelenting storms and undeniable science.”

“The world’s coasts provide a home to around 1.9 billion people and over half of the world’s megacities — all of which are in grave danger if we don’t act immediately to prevent rising temperatures and sea levels,”

“Extreme high temperatures, coastal flooding, and more frequent natural disasters are becoming the new normal. ... This is what the climate crisis looks like now.

the system could still tip toward very large ice losses from Greenland and Antarctica. If that happens, the rate of sea-level rise could become truly catastrophic, especially by the years 2200 and 2300, when it could exceed 10 feet.

Permafrost, which contains enormous amounts of carbon that can be released as it thaws, has warmed to “record high levels.” Summer Arctic sea ice extent is now probably lower than at any time in “at least 1,000 years,” and the oldest, thickest ice has already declined by 90 percent.

“Over the 21st century, the ocean is projected to transition to unprecedented conditions,”

In the United States, cities facing fast-moving sea-level danger include Los Angeles, Miami, Savannah, Honolulu, San Juan, Key West and San Diego.

One of the most shocking findings involves “marine heat waves,” which have been blamed for mass deaths of corals, kelp forests and other key ocean organisms. The large majority of these events are already directly attributable to climate change, and by the year 2100, they will become 20 times more common in the best case, and 50 times as common in the absolute worst case, compared with the late 1800s

Many of these changes to oceans and ice are unfolding in parts of the Earth where few people live, and so the shifts are not always readily visible to most humans. But the changes taking place there ultimately will affect people around the globe, in the form of rising seas and other impacts. And as those impacts worsen, so does the difficulty of adapting to them.

the grim findings in Wednesday’s report should be a call to action.

"We must not let these climate change impacts paralyze us,” she said in an email. “We must address root causes of climate change by slowing and eventually stopping accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions.”

There is much that humans can do to blunt the expected impacts in the meantime, she said, such as restoring mangroves and protecting reefs and marshes to reduce storm impacts on coastal communities.

“Alone, these measures cannot meet all the challenges of climate change to oceans and coasts, but they are doable, cost-effective and make a difference,”

Ever since President Trump came into office, a record high turnover and unfilled jobs have emptied offices across wide sections of the federal bureaucracy. Now, current and former administration officials and disaster experts say the coronavirus has exposed those failings as never before and left parts of the federal government unprepared and ill equipped for what may be the largest public health crisis in a century.

Some 80 percent of the senior positions in the White House below the cabinet level have turned over during Mr. Trump’s administration, with about 500 people having departed since the inauguration

Between Mr. Trump’s history of firing people and the choice by many career officials and political appointees to leave, he now finds himself with a government riddled with vacancies, acting department chiefs and, in some cases, leaders whose professional backgrounds do not easily match up to the task of managing a pandemic.

Equally notable may have been the resignation last year of Scott Gottlieb, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, who was an early advocate for broad coronavirus testing and stronger mitigation policies. He was succeeded by Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, a noted oncologist, who has struggled during Senate hearings to explain some of his positions. The agency is largely viewed as slow in engaging the private sector to develop tests for the coronavirus. Many members of Mr. Gottlieb’s team departed with him, leaving the agency with many people new to their jobs.

The Department of Homeland Security, the agency tasked with screening at airports and carrying out the travel restrictions that were Mr. Trump’s first major action to combat the coronavirus, is full of vacancies. Of the 75 senior positions listed on the department’s website, 20 are either vacant or filled by acting officials.

Even National Park Service vacancies have taken a toll. The park service — which has its own police force — in recent days closed some parking lots near the Tidal Basin on the National Mall, where the cherry blossoms attract huge crowds each year, and urged people to stay away. Mayor Muriel Bowser stepped in and limited access to the area and sent police officers and members of the National Guard to enforce the shutdown.

Even the Pentagon, which is broadly viewed as better positioned than many other agencies for the pandemic response, is not immune. More than a third of all Senate-confirmed civilian positions at the Defense Department are vacant or filled by temporary officials, a peak level for the administration outside of the transition period, according to Pentagon statistics. Of 60 senior positions, 21 lack permanent appointees.

All vaccines work according to the same basic principle. They present part or all of the pathogen to the human immune system, usually in the form of an injection and at a low dose, to prompt the system to produce antibodies to the pathogen. Antibodies are a kind of immune memory which, having been elicited once, can be quickly mobilised again if the person is exposed to the virus in its natural form.

Cepi’s original portfolio of four funded Covid-19 vaccine projects was heavily skewed towards these more innovative technologies, and last week it announced $4.4m (£3.4m) of partnership funding with Novavax and with a University of Oxford vectored vaccine project. “Our experience with vaccine development is that you can’t anticipate where you’re going to stumble,” says Hatchett, meaning that diversity is key. And the stage where any approach is most likely to stumble is clinical or human trials, which, for some of the candidates, are about to get under way.

An illustration of that is a vaccine that was produced in the 1960s against respiratory syncytial virus, a common virus that causes cold-like symptoms in children. In clinical trials, this vaccine was found to aggravate those symptoms in infants who went on to catch the virus. A similar effect was observed in animals given an early experimental Sars vaccine. It was later modified to eliminate that problem but, now that it has been repurposed for Sars-CoV-2, it will need to be put through especially stringent safety testing to rule out the risk of enhanced disease.

Once a Covid-19 vaccine has been approved, a further set of challenges will present itself. “Getting a vaccine that’s proven to be safe and effective in humans takes one at best about a third of the way to what’s needed for a global immunisation programme,” says global health expert Jonathan Quick of Duke University in North Carolina, author of The End of Epidemics (2018). “Virus biology and vaccines technology could be the limiting factors, but politics and economics are far more likely to be the barrier to immunisation.”

Because pandemics tend to hit hardest those countries that have the most fragile and underfunded healthcare systems, there is an inherent imbalance between need and purchasing power when it comes to vaccines. During the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, for example, vaccine supplies were snapped up by nations that could afford them, leaving poorer ones short. But you could also imagine a scenario where, say, India – a major supplier of vaccines to the developing world – not unreasonably decides to use its vaccine production to protect its own 1.3 billion-strong population first, before exporting any.

• This article was amended on 19 March 2020. An earlier version incorrectly stated that the Sabin Vaccine Institute was collaborating with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi) on a Covid-19 vaccine.

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, London, and a former government adviser, said ministers have worked on the assumption that feeding Britain can be left to the market and big retailers. While ministers have been in discussion with supermarket chief executives during the pandemic, Lang argues they are failing to grasp the structural weaknesses in the food system and the scale of food poverty.

Lang added: “Borders are closing, lorries are being slowed down and checked. We only produce 53% of our own food in the UK. It’s a failure of government to plan.”

“Some £1bn extra food and groceries were bought by households in the last two to three weeks. That’s like Christmas but worse because it’s gone on for three times as long,” said Andrew Opie, director of food at the British Retail Consortium, the supermarket trade association.

Supermarkets have built supply chains of immense complexity and sophistication over the last four decades, affording customers a choice of more than 40,000 lines from around the world – from dozens of different kinds of pasta to a permanent global summertime of fresh fruits and vegetables.

The consequences of a disrupted supply chain will be most acute for the millions in households whose incomes are so low that they have depended on food banks or free meals at school or in daycare centres, which have now closed.

She added: “We may need the army to oversee biosecurity as caterers, for example in school kitchens, supply hubs and to enforce social distancing as people collect food from them.”

The government has also been working on a scheme for parents of the 1.6 million children who had been on free school meals, with vouchers which can be redeemed in supermarkets. Campaigners, however, argue the vouchers should be usable for nutritionally-balanced meals from school kitchens, which could be kept open.

The industry can see other threats on the near horizon. The British food system is largely built on a cheap and highly flexible labour force, which can be turned on and off like a tap. Now that is drying up as Brexit, travel restrictions and fear of illness are keeping away the migrants who have typically done that work.

It is creating around eight new hubs from which children in low-income families and isolated adults can have food delivered to their doors. “We have the data to identify people who are likely to be struggling and have mobilised staff,” said its director of public health, Jason Strelitz, but the council was still waiting for government to commit money.

"It's unacceptable that we're sending medical professionals like lambs to the slaughterhouse without giving anything to protect themselves," said Dr. Marianne Hamra, who works in New Jersey. "Bandanas and scarves? C'mon CDC -- that's completely ridiculous."

Meanwhile, New York has now topped Washington state as the new epicenter of coronavirus cases with at least 20,875 infected, according to CNN's tally of cases.

In New Jersey, 35 physicians and nurses are no longer working at Holy Name Medical Center because they are either have or are suspected of having Covid-19.

"I'm very concerned that if things don't slow down, if the supply chains do not open up, if we don't figure out a way to get the nurses in here from the federal government (and) from the military," he said. "I feel in a week or so from now I may not be able to feel the same way."

A nurse in western Ohio said that, save for one specific unit where Covid-19 patients are supposed to be sent, nurses at the medical center are forbidden from wearing masks -- not just N95 masks, but surgical masks or any masks.

"I don't want to bring anything home to my kids," she said. "I'm a single mom. I signed up to be a frontline worker, but I don't have the equipment to do it."

Milla Kviatkovsky, a hospitalist physician in San Diego, helped launch a petition on Change.org called "US Physicians/Healthcare Workers For Personal Protective Equipment in Covid-19 Pandemic."

Many physicians, she said, worry about the ethical implications of institutions saying it's ok to perform procedures without protective gear when it's never been ok before.

"Are we doing more harm than good by going in there with no equipment and potentially spreading this to so many other people?" she said in an interview with CNN. "Are we taking out the front lines to our defense when we're so early on in the equivalent of a health care war right now?"

Severe economic collapse, something like war, can bring changes so sudden that there is no time to adapt. Melissa Dellapasta, 45, was setting up a meal for executives of the Cleveland Indians on March 12 when everyone seemed to just get up and leave. An announcement had come: Baseball was postponed indefinitely. She has not worked since.

Young parents said they now understood the extreme stress their parents experienced when they had been laid off, a mood they mistook as just another bout of grown-up grumpiness.

Within a week of its first confirmed case, South Korea’s disease control agency had summoned 20 private companies to the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit and told them to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed. A week after that, the first diagnostic test was approved and went into battle, identifying infected individuals who could then be quarantined to halt the advance of the disease.

Some 357,896 tests later, the country has more or less won the coronavirus war. On Friday only 91 new cases were reported in a country of more than 50 million.

The US response tells a different story. Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Donald Trump went on air on CNBC and bragged: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

Though the decision to allow private and state labs to provide testing has increased the flow of test kits, the US remains starkly behind South Korea, which has conducted more than five times as many tests per capita. That makes predicting where the next hotspot will pop up after New York and New Orleans almost impossible.

Today, 86,012 cases have been confirmed across the US, pushing the nation to the top of the world’s coronavirus league table – above even China.

Most worryingly, the curve of cases continues to rise precipitously, with no sign of the plateau that has spared South Korea.

Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the US government’s response to international disasters at USAid from 2013 to 2017, frames the past six weeks in strikingly similar terms. He told the Guardian: “We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.”

If Trump’s travel ban did nothing else, it staved off to some degree the advent of the virus in the US, buying a little time. Which makes the lack of decisive action all the more curious.

It was not until 29 February, more than a month after the Journal article and almost six weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the country that the Trump administration put that advice into practice. Laboratories and hospitals would finally be allowed to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process.

In the absence of sufficient test kits, the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initially kept a tight rein on testing, creating a bottleneck. “I believe the CDC was caught flat-footed,” was how the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, put it on 7 March. “They’re slowing down the state.”The CDC’s botched rollout of testing was the first indication that the Trump administration was faltering as the health emergency gathered pace. Behind the scenes, deep flaws in the way federal agencies had come to operate under Trump were being exposed.

In 2018 the pandemic unit in the national security council – which was tasked to prepare for health emergencies precisely like the current one – was disbanded. “Eliminating the office has contributed to the federal government’s sluggish domestic response,” Beth Cameron, senior director of the office at the time it was broken up, wrote in the Washington Post.

It was hardly a morale-boosting gesture when Trump proposed a 16% cut in CDC funding on 10 February – 11 days after the World Health Organization had declared a public health emergency over Covid-19.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates the diagnostic tests and will control any new treatments for coronavirus, has also shown vulnerabilities. The agency recently indicated that it was looking into the possibility of prescribing the malaria drug chloroquine for coronavirus sufferers, even though there is no evidence it would work and some indication it could have serious side-effects.

As the former senior official put it: “We have the FDA bowing to political pressure and making decisions completely counter to modern science.”

Trump has designated himself a “wartime president”. But if the title bears any validity, his military tactics have been highly unconventional. He has exacerbated the problems encountered by federal agencies by playing musical chairs at the top of the coronavirus force.

The president began by creating on 29 January a special coronavirus taskforce, then gave Vice-President Mike Pence the job, who promptly appointed Deborah Birx “coronavirus response coordinator”, before the federal emergency agency Fema began taking charge of key areas, with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, creating a shadow team that increasingly appears to be calling the shots.“There’s no point of responsibility,” the former senior official told the Guardian. “It keeps shifting. Nobody owns the problem.”

So it has transpired. In the wake of the testing disaster has come the personal protective equipment (PPE) disaster, the hospital bed disaster, and now the ventilator disaster.Ventilators, literal life preservers, are in dire short supply across the country. When governors begged Trump to unleash the full might of the US government on this critical problem, he gave his answer on 16 March.In a phrase that will stand beside 20 January 2020 as one of the most revelatory moments of the history of coronavirus, he said: “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment – try getting it yourselves.”

In the absence of a strong federal response, a patchwork of efforts has sprouted all across the country. State governors are doing their own thing. Cities, even individual hospitals, are coping as best they can.

Condoleezza Rice, a former U.S. secretary of state who serves on the C3.ai board and was recently named the next director of the Hoover Institution

Known as the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, the new research consortium includes commitments from Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago, as well as C3.ai and Microsoft.

Thomas M. Siebel, founder and chief executive of C3.ai, an artificial intelligence company in Redwood City, Calif., said the public-private consortium would spend $367 million in its initial five years, aiming its first awards at finding ways to slow the new coronavirus that is sweeping the globe.

The new institute plans to award up to 26 grants annually, each featuring up to $500,000 in research funds in addition to computing resources.

The institute’s co-directors are S. Shankar Sastry of the University of California, Berkeley, and Rayadurgam Srikant of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Successful A.I. can be extremely hard to deliver, especially in thorny real-world problems such as self-driving cars.

In recent decades, many rich Americans have sought to reinvent themselves as patrons of social progress through science research

Forbes puts Mr. Siebel’s current net worth at $3.6 billion. His First Virtual Group is a diversified holding company that includes philanthropic ventures.

The first part of the company’s name, Mr. Siebel said in an email, stands for the convergence of three digital trends: big data, cloud computing and the internet of things, with A.I. amplifying their power. Last year, he laid out his thesis in a book

“In no way am I suggesting that A.I. is all sweetness and light,” Mr. Siebel said. But the new institute, he added, is “a place where it can be a force for good.”

Critics promptly called the idea unworkable, saying it would cause chaos in a region that serves as the economic engine of the eastern United States, accounting for 10 percent of the population and 12 percent of GDP.

The United States has now recorded more than 122,000 cases of the respiratory virus, the most of any country in the world.

CDC warns residents of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut against non-essential travel

Since the virus first appeared in the United States in late January, Trump has vacillated between playing down the risks of infection and urging Americans to take steps to slow its spread.

Trump said on Saturday afternoon that he might impose a ban on travel in and out of New York and parts of New Jersey and Connecticut,

He offered few specifics.

Trump’s announcement came as the U.S. death count crossed 2,100, more than double the level from two days ago.

The CDC later warned the states’ residents against non-essential domestic travel for 14 days.

It was the latest reversal for Trump, who has been reluctant to order U.S. companies to produce much-needed medical supplies, despite the pleas of governors and hospital workers.

Tests to track the disease’s progress also remain in short supply, despite repeated White House promises that they would be widely available.

Though Trump has apparently opted not to impose checkpoints on highways and airports leading out of New York, some states have imposed limits of their own.

New Yorkers arriving in Florida and Rhode Island face orders to self-isolate if they intend to stay, and the governors of Pennsylvania and West Virginia have asked visiting New Yorkers to voluntarily self-quarantine.

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu on Saturday asked all visitors to his state who don’t come for work reasons to voluntarily self-quarantine.

New coronavirus cases in China leveled off after the government imposed a strict lockdown of Wuhan, the epicenter of the disease.

Any travel restrictions, voluntary or not, might be too late.

As the virus spread, state and local officials ordered residents to stay at home. More than 204 million Americans are living under these unprecedented restrictions, according to a CNN analysis.

A record number of Americans filed new jobless claims, a reflection of the economic distress created by closures associated with emergency measures to contain the virus. These latest figures from the Labor Department only account for the first week of Trump's two-week plan.

At the same time, the US significantly ramped up testing, a key element of the strategy to wipe out the virus. But the US still lags behind other nations in tests conducted per person.

Congress snapped into action and passed two historic bills to deal with the public health crisis and economic meltdown, including a $2 trillion stimulus that Trump signed into law on Friday

Cases have been diagnosed in all 50 states.

he defended the decision not to implement the tighter restrictions seen in Denmark, France and the UK. “We all, as individuals, have to take responsibility. We can’t legislate and ban everything,” he said. “It is also a question of commonsense behaviour.

The best explanation for why Sweden is such an outlier centres on the unusual level of independence given to government agencies such as Tegnell’s, and the reluctance of politicians to override them.

His team at the Public Health Agency of Sweden is critical of the Imperial College paper that warned this month that 250,000 people in the UK would die if the government failed to introduce more draconian measures.

“We have had a fair amount of people looking at it and they are sceptical,” says Tegnell. “They think Imperial chose a number of variables that gave a prognosis that was quite pessimistic, and that you could just as easily have chosen other variables that gave you another outcome. It’s not a peer-reviewed paper. It might be right, but it might also be terribly wrong. In Sweden, we are a bit surprised that it’s had such an impact.”

“As long as the Swedish epidemic development stays at this level,” he tells the Observer, “I don’t see any big reason to take measures that you can only keep up for a very limited amount of time.”

“They’re listening to the health department; they’re listening to the experts they have on hand.”

More than 2,000 Swedish university researchers published a joint letter on Wednesday questioning the Public Health Agency’s position, while the previous week saw leading epidemiologists attack the agency in emails leaked to Swedish television.

“How many lives are they willing to sacrifice so as not to lockdown and risk greater effects on the economy?”

Tegnell argues that because in Sweden there are almost no stay-at-home parents, closing schools would have knocked out at least a quarter of doctors and nurses, crippling the health service

Tegnell even questions whether stopping the progress of the virus is desirable. “We are just trying to slow it, because this disease will never go away. If you manage, like South Korea, to get rid of it, even they say that they count on it coming back

While Tegnell understands that he will be blamed if Sweden ends up in a similar situation to that of Italy, he refuses to be panicked. “I wouldn’t be too surprised if it ended up about the same way for all of us, irrespective of what we’re doing,” he says. “I’m not so sure that what we’re doing is affecting the spread very much. But we will see.”