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Heat Waves Around the World Push People and Nations ‘to the Edge’

Millions of Americans are once again in the grips of dangerous heat. Hot air blanketed Europe last weekend, causing parts of France and Spain to feel the way it usually does in July or August. High temperatures scorched northern and central China even as heavy rains caused flooding in the country’s south. Some places in India began experiencing extraordinary heat in March, though the start of the monsoon rains has brought some relief.

It’s too soon to say whether climate change is directly to blame for causing severe heat waves in these four powerhouse economies — which also happen to be the top emitters of heat-trapping gases — at roughly the same time, just days into summer.

While global warming is making extreme heat more common worldwide, deeper analysis is required to tell scientists whether specific weather events were made more likely or more intense because of human-induced warming.

Even when scientists look at how often temperatures exceed a certain level relative to a moving average, they still find a big increase in the frequency of simultaneous heat waves.

Deepti Singh.
Singh

A recent study, coauthored by Deepti Singh, a climate scientist at Washington State University, found that the average number of days between May and September with at least one large heat wave in the Northern Hemisphere doubled between the 1980s and the 2010s, to around 152 from 73. But the number of days with two or more heat waves was seven times higher, growing to roughly 143 from 20. That’s nearly every single day from May to September.

The study also found that these concurrent heat waves affected larger areas and were more severe by the 2010s, with peak intensities that were almost one-fifth higher than in the 1980s. On days when there was at least one large heat wave somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, there were 3.6 of them happening per day on average, the study found.

These “dramatic” increases came as a surprise, Dr. Singh said.

She and her co-authors also looked at where concurrent heat waves occurred most frequently during those four decades. One pattern stood out: Large simultaneous heat waves struck parts of eastern North America, Europe, and central and eastern Asia increasingly often between 1979 and 2019 — “more than what we would expect simply by the effect of warming,” Dr. Singh said.

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New York Times

Archaeology students aim to determine if Fort Vancouver National Historic Site was used for schools

More than 20 college students kneeled in the warm July heat, sifting through small square holes in the freshly dug ground on the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, searching for nails, ceramic remnants and other relics from the past.

Kaeli Stephens, an anthropology major from Washington State University Vancouver, said that she’s enjoyed the fact that the excavation is open to the public, where family and friends can walk up and ask questions about the work she loves doing.

“Seeing women in STEM out here is so cool,” she said. “And I love when little girls walk by and say, ‘I want to be like that when I grow up.’ ”

The crews will use the archaeology lab in the stockade to analyze their findings. After the field school the staff with the National Park Service will do a more detailed analysis and write a report on the excavation.

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The Columbian
KPVI

What Republicans Know (and Democrats Don’t) About the White Working Class

There’s an important social and economic divide that drives working-class whites that progressive elites mostly miss — to their political peril.

Ever since J.D. Vance became the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio, journalists and pundits have been preoccupied with how Vance’s politics have shifted since the 2016 publication of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

In his memoir, Vance pitted two groups of low-status whites against each other—those who work versus those who don’t. In academic circles, these two groups are sometimes labeled the “settled” working class versus the “hard living.” A broad and fuzzy line divides these two groups, but generally speaking, settled folks work consistently while the hard living do not. The latter are thus more likely to fall into destructive habits like substance abuse that lead to further destabilization and, importantly, to reliance on government benefits.

Vance has not renounced that divisive message. He no doubt hopes to garner the support of the slightly more upmarket of the two factions—which, probably not coincidentally, is also the group more likely to go to the polls. While elite progressives tend to see the white working class as monolithic, Vance’s competitiveness in the Ohio Senate race can be explained in no small part by his ability to politically exploit this cleavage.

As a scholar studying working-class and rural whites, I have written about this subtle but consequential divide. I have also lived it. I grew up working-class white, and I watched my truck driver father and teacher’s aide mother struggle mightily to stay on the “settled” side of the ledger. They worked to pay the bills, yes, but also because work set them apart from those in their community who were willing to accept public benefits. Work represented the moral high ground. Work was their religion.

Jennifer Sherman.
Sherman

Vance and my parents are mere anecdotes, yes, but scholars, including sociologist Jennifer Sherman of Washington State University, have studied folks like them in both urban and rural locales and have documented the phenomenon they represent.

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Politico

Doctoral Training Is Ossified. Can We Reinvent It?

Lessons from the short-lived Next Generation Humanities Ph.D. program.

Todd Butler.
Butler

In 2016, Todd Butler, an English professor at Washington State University, joined a committee charged with exploring changes in graduate education. At first, the group’s planning sessions felt typical: the slow consensus-building, the circling conversations. But then something shifted. “Two months into our planning process, the dean of the grad school said to all of us who were assembled there, ‘Are we just going to talk about doing something, or are we going to do it?’” Butler perked up: “I was not interested in writing another internal white paper that would get read, be appreciated, and stall out somewhere.” He saw the work as vitally important — an opportunity not just to improve graduate education but to articulate the importance of the humanities to a rural, land-grant university like Washington State.

Butler and his colleagues had received a grant from National Endowment for the Humanities under a new grant program called the Next Generation Humanities Ph.D. Begun in 2015, its mandate was broad, offering funds for graduate institutions to rethink doctoral education in the humanities. The goal was to focus on what the NEH delicately called “disparities between graduate-student expectations for a career in academe and eventual career outcomes,” and to further the role of the humanities in public life. Colleges could apply for either a planning grant, with the NEH matching an institutional commitment of up to $25,000, or an implementation grant of $350,000, to further efforts already under way. In 2016, the NEH awarded an initial round of grants: 25 planning grants and three implementation grants. Grantees planned to study a host of possible changes in doctoral education: practicum internships, curricular reform, professionalization, changes in academic advising and mentoring, and even new dissertation formats.

And then, in 2017, the program was quietly canceled. What went wrong?

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Chronicle of Higher Education

Three projects receive $150,000 in final round of Cougar Cage event

Three projects proposed by Washington State University researchers were awarded $50,000 each in this spring’s Cougar Cage event.

Over the course of a day in Seattle, six faculty research projects were evaluated by the Palouse Club — a group of WSU alumni dedicated to supporting the university — in the culmination of the third semi-annual Cougar Cage event. The six projects were hand-selected by WSU leadership from a pool of 26 submissions representing WSU students, faculty, and staff from across the system.

Courtney Meehan.
Meehan

The selected projects include “Study of cannabis, human milk composition, and infant development,” led by Courtney Meehan, CAS associate dean for research and graduate studies and professor of anthropology.

To address the historical lack of research on pregnant and breastfeeding women, Meehan seeks to populate the information desert surrounding these vulnerable individuals and their children. Her proposed study will assess whether milk composition differs among women who use and do not use cannabis, and how the presence of cannabinoids in milk affects infant development. Meehan hopes the results will enable healthcare providers to offer evidence-based advice and allow mothers to make more informed decisions.

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WSU Insider