There’s a very real chance the planet will warm up an average of 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) this century — and that would be disastrous.

In such a brutally hot world, scientists agree, deadly heat waves, massive wildfires, and damaging downpours will come far more often and hit much harder than they do today. The ocean will be hotter too, and more acidic, causing fish declines and likely the end of coral reefs. In fact, a quarter or so of the Earth’s species may go extinct in such conditions or be headed that way. Our coastlines would be reshaped, a consequence of sea levels rising foot after foot, century after century, drowning places like Charleston, South Carolina’s Market Street, downtown Providence, Rhode Island, and the Space Center in Houston.

All of this, as climate scientist Daniel Swain of the University of California, Los Angeles put it, would be bad: “Bad for humans. Bad for ecosystems. Bad for the stability of the Earth systems that we humans depend on for everything.”

Experts can’t say exactly how likely this future is because that depends on what humankind does to mitigate the worsening climate crisis, especially over the coming decade. But for world leaders gathering this weekend in Glasgow for the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), this future may well become an inevitability if they don’t agree to more aggressive and immediate measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The collective global goal under the Paris climate agreement is to prevent rising global temperatures from increasing no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), with no more than 1.5 degrees (2.7 Fahrenheit) as ideal. But currently, we’re on track for almost double that — a potentially catastrophic 3 degrees.

“I fear that without science-based policy, and that most ambitious target being achieved, we will be facing a 3 degree C world by later this century,” Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech and one of the authors on the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s almost unimaginable, frankly.”

So, what might 3 degrees Celsius of warming look like?

The starting point for measuring future warming isn’t today — it’s the late 1800s, when reliable global temperature records started becoming available. More than a century later, the planet has already warmed a little more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) due to the accumulation of fossil fuel pollutants such as carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. That’s an average, but some places have already gotten much warmer.

Adding two more degrees to the more than 1 degree we’ve already added would make our world much hotter and disproportionately hotter on land. Here’s why: About 70% of the planet is covered in water, and water warms more slowly than land.

“If the whole world is warmed by 3 degrees Celsius,” Swain explained, “all of the land area has to warm by a lot more than that.”

That would likely be about 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer on average over land, or collectively 4.5 degrees, according to Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and energy systems analyst at the Breakthrough Institute. And it will likely be even hotter in the Arctic, which is already warming roughly three times the rate of the rest of the planet.

One way to envision what this might look like in the places in which we live is to consider the projected number of days where the local temperature hits or exceeds 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius). Earlier this century, Arizona experienced roughly 116 days of such high temperatures, Texas experienced about 43 days, Georgia about 11 days, Montana approximately 6 days, and Massachusetts just 1 day, according to modeling by the Climate Impact Lab.

Were global temperatures to rise by an average of 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, those numbers would spike to an estimated range of 179 to 229 days of at least 95 degrees Fahrenheit days in Arizona, 135 to 186 days in Texas, 85 to 143 days in Georgia, 46 to 78 days in Montana, and 26 to 66 days in Massachusetts, per the same analysis.

Just this summer, the Northwest Pacific heat wave brought Death Valley-like temperatures to British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington, killing hundreds of people in an event that scientists agree would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. Then a record-setting downpour dropped about 9 inches in the middle of Tennessee, killing about two dozen people. And last weekend, more than 5 inches dropped in a day in California’s capital city of Sacramento, setting a new record.

“What I think about is: What would the shocking event be in a 3-degree-warmer world?” Swain said.

It’s impossible to know the answer exactly. But the general contours of what it could look like are already clear: even more common and intense extreme heat events and similarly more frequent and intense downpours, even in places that are expected to get drier in such a world. This is true for almost anywhere on the planet.

“There are very few places on Earth that are not going to see an increase in the maximum precipitation intensity,” Swain said, later adding: There are “very likely zero places that are not going to experience an increase in the most extreme hot days.”

Statistics from the latest IPCC report support this. What was considered a 1-in-10 year extreme heat event, such as a heat wave, in the late 1880s would be more than 5.6 times likely to occur in a 3-degrees-warmer world. The outcome could be higher power costs due to an explosion of air conditioning, which could trigger power supply problems. Those without access to cooling could suffer more heat sickness. And then there’s the issue of water shortages; together with ongoing heat waves, they could spur massive crop failures.

Likewise what was previously considered a 1-in-10 year extreme precipitation event over land would be more than 1.7 times likely to occur. These types of disasters have historically caused washed out roads, flooded homes and businesses, and knocked out power lines.

Meanwhile, regional disasters will also increase in frequency and intensity. Think more prolonged droughts and bigger wildfires along the West Coast and more powerful hurricanes along the Gulf Coast and East Coast. Worse, a phenomenon called “compounding disasters” could mean such events hit in rapid succession or simultaneously. A recent example of this was Louisiana’s Lake Charles, which suffered through multiple federally declared disasters in a year: back-to-back hurricanes including a devastating Category 4 storm, followed by a winter storm, and then intense flooding.

In a 3-degrees-warmer world, the coastlines of today will largely be gone, endlessly reduced over the coming centuries by rising seas.

By the end of 2100, sea levels are expected to rise by about 2 feet on average. That would be near catastrophic for small island nations. Most of Maldives, large swaths of the Bermuda archipelago, and some of Seychelles island, including its airport, could be underwater. So too could large parts of Thailand’s capital of Bangkok, home to more than 5 million people; the Netherland’s Amsterdam, the Hague, and Rotterdam cities, which are, combined, home to about 2 million people; and much of the US Gulf Coast, including sections of the big cities like New Orleans and Texas’s Galveston. These examples are based on mapping by the research group Climate Central, whose projections do not account for current or future defenses constructed to counter rising water levels.

Water will continue rising next century and the one after. So jumping to 2,000 years in the future, Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University, expects water levels to be somewhere between 13 feet to more than 30 feet above current levels. That much water, assuming there’s no defenses in place against the rising levels, would likely inundate parts of California’s Bay Area and Los Angeles and reconfigure much of the Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida coasts, according to Climate Central mapping

“An estimated 12% of the current global population living on land could be threatened under long-term future sea level rise under the 3 degrees Celsius scenario,” said Scott Kulp, a principal computational scientist at Climate Central. “So that amounts to 810 million people.”

The projection to 2100 doesn’t account for the possibility of the world’s ice sheets rapidly melting, and even the longer term estimates don’t assume a total rapid collapse even though it’s possible. “The more we push the system above 2 degrees Celsius — but we don’t know how much — the more the chance we trigger ice sheet processes that could rapidly increase sea level rise,” Kopp explained in an email.

Perhaps the most frightening thing about a 3-degrees-warmer world is an uncertainty about how it would impact the way our natural so-called “carbon sinks” — think plants and trees, soil, and even the ocean — regularly and consistently pull carbon dioxide out of the air. If any one of these sinks were to stop absorbing as much carbon, more carbon would linger in the atmosphere, fueling global warming.

Or there’s a possibility that one of the more longer-term carbon sinks could simply vanish. Right now, for example, there’s a layer of frozen ground, called permafrost, spread across parts of the planet including the poles. Collectively, all this permafrost stores more carbon than is currently in the atmosphere. As the planet warms, the permafrost layer will thaw, releasing some of that carbon into the atmosphere along the way and fueling more warming in a dangerous feedback loop.

“Half of our emissions right now are pulled back into the ground by natural carbon sinks that have been functioning decade in, decade out at the same service levels,” said Cobb of Georgia Tech. “So going forward, as a climate scientist, it is very concerning that we are beginning to understand that there’s a real risk that these natural carbon sinks could stop functioning as well at higher warming levels.”

As the Breakthrough Institute’s Hausfather put it: “The thing is even if we think we’re on track for a 3 degree warmer world under current policies, we certainly can’t rule out a 4 degree warming world.” ●

When I was a teenager, magazines were everywhere — the doctor’s office, the magazine aisle at the grocery store where my mom shopped, piled up on the babysitter’s couch. The really good issues were passed around by the parents in my neighborhood. I was struck by the images on the covers, but only in the very basic sense that I wanted to understand what was going on in the heads of the teens and celebrities on the covers. How the magazine sausage was made? That would remain a mystery to me for decades.

Around the same time, in Boston, Phillip Picardi was thinking about magazines as well. He would go on to have the kind of magazine career that kids can only dream of — he worked at Teen Vogue during its most political days, founded the LGBTQ-lensed Them magazine, served as the editor-in-chief of Out magazine, and worked for Refinery29 and Allure. Now, Picardi is back to his journalism roots and working for himself: he’s a master’s student at Harvard Divinity School and runs a popular newsletter and podcast, “Unholier Than Thou,” both of which look at the intersection of religion, spirituality, and culture. We spoke with him about 10 images that inspired the trajectory of his career (and the tarot).

“Of all the saints, Sebastian seems to have captured the gay imagination the most. Nearly all art historical depictions show him as a lithe young twink, bound to a tree, being — ahem — penetrated by a whole bunch of arrows. It took me quite a few years into young adulthood to realize why I was so drawn to these images. (Please don’t worry; it doesn’t have to do with the blood.) Funnily enough, St. Sebastian may have been a martyr, but as the story goes, he wasn’t actually killed by bow and arrow. Miraculously, he survived the bow and arrows and was nursed back to health by a Christian woman — then, he went in search of the Roman emperor who had ordered him killed due to his Christianity. Naturally, the emperor saw him and, once again, ordered him dead (this time by being clubbed). Somehow, the artists of the Renaissance preferred the first execution to the second. (It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why that might be.) Now, this image lives on my forearm as one of my favorite tattoos, inked by the lovely and talented Ruby May Quilter.”

“I was raised with all the rich (and, as you now know thanks to good ol’ Sebastian, vaguely homoerotic) imagery of Catholicism — sweaty six-packed bodies and all. I’d say the second-most important imagery relating to my sexual awakening were Abercrombie & Fitch shopping bags and catalogs. In some weird way, Abercrombie’s printed editions were like some sort of modern version of Physique Pictorial — selling (very effectively) homoeroticism by placing beefcake men in distinctly masculine environments, like locker rooms and sporting activities.

Fashion has long used nudity as an effective mechanism for selling expensive clothing and accessories, and Abercrombie was, in a way, following in the legacy of brands like Dolce & Gabbana and Calvin Klein. But, being a mall brand, it also held a grip over the suburban teenage psyche — one that perpetuated the idea of beauty as thin (for women) and muscular (for men) and was overwhelmingly white. The obsession I had with Abercrombie was utterly toxic, from the way I squeezed into XS polo shirts that never fit to the body ideals I held myself to but would never meet. When my parents refused to let me come out of the closet to my other friends and family, I responded by making a collage of Abercrombie models in Microsoft Paint and then setting it as the background of my Myspace page. (They were not amused.)

The high-fashion photographer Bruce Weber, long synonymous with iconic American black-and-white imagery, was responsible for many of Abercrombie’s most iconic shoots. Decades after these images first surfaced, many models would come forward to accuse him of sexual harassment and assault. Weber just settled a lawsuit brought by multiple male models in August of this year and did not admit guilt. It is truly hard to come to grips with the legacy these images left behind, what they stood for, and how they still endure — for some of us in our psyches, and for others of us in much more tangible ways.”

“The first tabloid story I ever really followed was Brad, Angelina, and Jennifer Aniston. I was completely in love with Jen from Friends, but then I came to love Angelina Jolie during Mr. and Mrs. Smith (and, if I’m being honest, Brad Pitt in that movie was the mood board for my current haircut). The summer I came out, I saw her Vanity Fair cover on the newsstand and it quickly became the first magazine article I ever read.

The styling and imagery was, of course, genius. Jen in a crisp white shirt — free of fashion pretension, but still looking classic, easy, and beautiful. Her bedhead, light suntan, and fresh makeup made her look like she’d just come back from a vacation. Maybe, in a way, she did. It’s unfortunate, in a way, that this image is also a part of my imagination and upbringing — these photos were taken by Mario Testino, who (like Weber) was accused of sexual assault by some of his subjects.

More than the visuals, though, the profile was incredible — the access, the candor, the description of her romantic life falling apart and her willingness to keep it all moving. It was the first time I realized that journalism wasn’t just a newspaper, and that storytelling could really be amplified when you know what visual elements to incorporate to really build your narrative. I finished the profile and went through the rest of that issue of Vanity Fair and decided that maybe I wanted to work in magazines. It was, I figured (perhaps very naively), a much more hospitable career to gay people than my initial dream of being a lawyer.”

“After Vanity Fair, I started reading Vogue fairly religiously. There was one issue — and I haven’t been able to find it since — where Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief, talked about marriage equality. At the time, I was attending Catholic school and was really grappling with the idea that I was a sinner and shouldn’t get married or have sex. To read in black and white about other gay people — especially folks succeeding in fashion — was massively influential. When it came time to decide where I might want to apply to college, I was crystal clear: I wanted to go to NYU, and I wanted to intern for Vogue. (Both things would later come true.)

The particular issue shown here is one of my favorites of Vogue — when I read about the Model as Muse exhibit, my friend from middle school convinced me we needed to take a road trip to New York to go see it. Her mom agreed to drive us, and that was my first time ever at the Met. I could never have dreamed that, around eight years later, I’d be walking the red carpet at the Met Gala — as the chief content officer of Teen Vogue.”

“We did a lot of important work at Teen Vogue, but the most intense chapter of my career there was during the March for Our Lives in 2018. For years, we’d been covering school shootings, the effects it had on kids’ mental health, and what kind of gun activism was happening on the ground in different places throughout the country. Parkland was a tipping point — one marked very clearly by vocal young people like Sarah Chadwick, Jaclyn Corin and X González, but one that was also built on by activists like Nza-Ari Khepra, who lost her friend years earlier to a shooting in Chicago. Samhita Mukhopadhyay, a longtime feminist blogger, journalist, and author, had just joined Teen Vogue as our executive editor and teamed up with our politics editor, Alli Maloney, on framing the coverage and identifying other youth activists for the casting.

The covers were the most popular we’d ever run on digital at the time, and they were lensed by Tyler Mitchell, who would (later that year) make history. One was also, sadly, photoshopped by right-wing trolls. The video of this cover shows Emma ripping up a target paper — a statement that kids were not targets, but were being made out to be by apathetic government officials. They changed the target paper to be the Constitution, lightened Emma’s skin, and made other alterations to the image. The fake image went viral, and I had to go on Good Morning America to defend it.”

“At some point before launching Them and while still at Teen Vogue, I joined the team at Allure for about a year to help steer the digital editorial operations and strategy. I started my editorial career in the beauty department, and I truly never stopped caring deeply about beauty — even though my interests took on a much more expansive purview as I got older. It was an honor to work for Allure, and especially to show my ideas to the magazine’s then-EIC, Michelle Lee, who was the first woman of color to lead the publication.

Before this issue came to fruition, there was a lot of talk online about phrases like “bikini body” — these sort of seemingly innocuous and even cutesy terms we just accept as typical but are actually creating norms or expectations that are harmful to how we view ourselves (and how others view us). I felt like we could argue the same thing about “antiaging”: Why do we want to be anti a process that is inevitable, and even natural? Why are we being marketed to combat or fight aging and, thus, capitalizing on insecurities? And what was it about antiaging that seemed to so obsessively focus on women as aging “poorly” versus men, who allegedly “age better”?

My proposal to Michelle was that Allure banish the phrase “antiaging” from its editorial, but also that the magazine would create a call to action for industry leaders to do the same. That was basically the extent of my contribution, though — from there, Michelle (together with Marie Suter, the magazine’s creative director; Jenny Bailly, the beauty director; and Danielle Pergament, the executive editor) created a really stunning and comprehensive issue that worked to destigmatize aging while still allowing readers to have intelligent and honest resources about products and procedures they might be interested in. Helen Mirren was such a great casting for the cover, and I believe she was followed up by the iconic Angela Bassett the next year.

Looking back on it a few years later, I have a lot of thoughts about this effort — particularly about whether or not the use of different language or terminology actually helped to change the way we talk or think about aging, or the ways in which women are pressured to age “gracefully” rather than just embracing who they are. I also wonder whether or not it can be truly authentic given that it’s just a reframing of how we sell products to people rather than a more full-throated critique of shame as a marketing tactic. However, I love that Allure always provides smart and well-researched options for people looking for a product or a procedure — and I think the gesture and the magazine’s many efforts (led by Michelle and now continued by Jessica Cruel) to diversify its covers and castings are important and positive strides to help better reflect what beauty really is.”

“This is my favorite image and my favorite cover I’ve ever helped to make happen in my entire career — which is a little bit ironic, considering it really was a joint effort between Janet Mock (who guest edited the issue and helped cast and ideate this entire cover shoot), Raquel Willis (this was her first issue as executive editor at Out, and she worked with Janet on all its details), and Mickalene Thomas, the fine artist. This issue marked the first time in Out’s nearly 30-year history that men were absent from the bylines, photography, and credits of every single page. It was only our second issue with my team at Out — the most diverse team ever to work for the magazine — and it really may have been our best. (I’m sure my former colleagues will all argue with me about this via text message when they see this, and I can’t wait!)

Here, you see pictured the Stonewall veteran Miss Major, a Black trans woman who was at the uprising in 1969. At her feet is Tourmaline, the artist who helped to bring Marsha P. Johnson’s legacy towards the forefront of our cultural awareness and celebration in recent years. (Tourmaline’s artwork has since been acquired by some of the most major museums in New York City.) This issue came out at the beginning of 2019, which marked the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, and having a full spread celebrating Black women activists and artists (including Barbara Smith from the Combahee River Collective, Alicia Garza, and Charlene Carruthers) was a really powerful statement. In the years since this came out, we’ve seen Thomas’s portraits of Miss Major and Tourmaline from this issue at protests and parades — the greatest feeling of all.”

“Right before we began work on the Out 100, the most important franchise at Out magazine, we faced layoffs and budget cuts that basically meant we were working with the least resources for the franchise in recent memory.

It was atop all of our minds when we began the Out 100 that the proverbial plug could be pulled on our project at any minute. Raquel, our executive editor, made it her mission to create something that she was truly proud of. The Trans Obituaries Project, a GLAAD Award–winning feature, opened with a profile of Layleen Cubilette-Polanco, an Afro-Latinx trans woman who died while in solitary confinement at Rikers Island. Layleen’s death prompted activism throughout New York, bringing attention to the epidemic of violence against trans women of color and also stoking the appetite for closing Rikers (and, more broadly, prison abolition). Raquel followed the profile of Layleen with obituaries for each of the trans women of color we lost in 2019, all of whom were a part of the Out 100, and a framework that explains how to end this systemic, cultural, and direct violence.

The cover, shot by Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., shows Layleen’s mother looking at a portrait of her late daughter. It was a powerful photo that captured the solemnity of this family’s grief, but also a reminder of how loved Layleen was (and still is) by her family.”

“I will be honest with you: I was terrified to run this photo shoot in print. But after my first time going to a full circuit of Fashion Weeks (that means Milan, London, Paris, and New York), my fashion director, Yashua Simmons, convinced me we needed to do a fetish shoot. Leather was all over the men’s runways, and it all seemed a little overtly…fetishistic.

It’s funny, because we most often see hypersexualized photo shoots in European magazines, and they often wink at homoeroticism without actually going there. There was a certain legacy of respectability and sexuality that we were contending with at Out, and a few members of our team (including the writer Mikelle Street) were adamant that we needed to include the fetish and leather communities in our coverage more holistically. So, instead of models, the team cast folks from the community, and Yashua summoned leather from all sorts of high-fashion designers. We had a porn star spit-shining a boot with his tongue, men sniffing each other’s armpits, and leather daddies posing in all their glory.

It is hardly the most revolutionary thing we’d ever run, but looking back, I do appreciate that our team was always able to find space for pleasure — especially “deviant” pleasure — amidst all the other work we were doing. Above all, I think the photos are sexy, dignified, and still feel like art, which is absolutely the result of a beautiful collaboration between Hao Zeng and Yashua.”

“During the pandemic, I felt lost in a way I didn’t even know that I could. I was kind of caught in this weird purgatory (there’s that Catholicism again) and was unsure if I wanted to jump back into a job or continue hoping that I’d find a brand-new path. Right around Christmas, my friend Tourmaline sent me the Rider-Waite tarot deck and Rachel Pollack’s book 78 Degrees of Wisdom, and I spent two full weeks completely immersed in its pages. When I was younger, I was told that things like the tarot or astrology were heretical and, in some cases, the work of the devil. Unpacking the deck and the book felt weirdly like betraying some childhood rule that stuck with me into adulthood.

It was the tarot I consulted when the prospect of divinity school first crossed my desk (via my friend, the poet Cleo Wade) in December. I got a lot of different cards that felt like good signs for an application — the Chariot, for one, and the Three of Wands. I sent in my application and promised myself I’d try and forget about it until decisions came in, which was March 15th. One morning in early March, I was doing my daily pull when I drew a card I’d never drawn until then: the Hierophant. The card depicts a priest seated on a throne, two followers on either side of him. Its meanings suggest orthodoxy, churches, and institutions of higher education. “That’s weird,” I said to myself. “I’m not supposed to hear from Harvard for another two weeks.” I wondered if something was wrong with my application or my transcript, so I opened my laptop and checked my email. There, waiting for me, was my acceptance letter. I’m sure a lot of people think I’m crazy, or could say it was just a coincidence. Lately, I’ve realized that I prefer to live my life believing that there’s more to all of this than just a bunch of happy coincidences or luck. I’d like to believe there’s something more.”

Days after a mysterious new illness was declared a pandemic last March, a prominent scientist in France announced that he had already found a cure.

Based on a small clinical trial, microbiologist Didier Raoult claimed that hydroxychloroquine, a decades-old antimalarial drug, was part of a 100% effective treatment against COVID-19. Then–US president Donald Trump promptly proclaimed that the finding could be “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.”

But the study seemed off to Elisabeth Bik, a scientist turned science detective living in Silicon Valley. Bik has a sharp eye for spotting errors buried in arcane scientific papers, particularly when it comes to duplicated images. And much about Raoult’s paper looked fishy, as she later noted on her blog. Unfavorable data was left out, and the trial’s timeline was mathematically impossible. “Something does not seem quite right,” she wrote.

Before long, Bik would learn the price of raising such concerns. Raoult and a coauthor went on to call her a “witch hunter,” a “mercenary,” and a “crazy woman” on Twitter and in the press. Then, in April 2021, Raoult’s collaborator announced that they had filed a criminal complaint against Bik and a spokesperson for PubPeer, a website where she and others post scientific criticism, accusing them of blackmail, extortion, and harassment. He tweeted out a screenshot of the complaint, revealing her home address to the world.

These were the most direct threats Bik had ever received for identifying problems in scientific research — an activity she sees as integral to science. Alarmed, she tweeted a plea: “I could use some legal help.”

Tens of thousands of discoveries about the coronavirus have been made over the last two years, launching countless debates about policy and behavior. How deadly is the virus? Who should wear masks and where? How well do the vaccines fend off infections? But to find the right answers, studies must be accurate, verifiable, and responsibly done. Do a paper’s numbers add up? Are the images real? Did the scientists do the experiment they describe doing, follow ethical standards, minimize bias, and properly analyze their results?

The answer to all these questions, even before the pandemic, was: not as often as you might think. And COVID has made science’s frequent inability to police itself a clear problem with incredibly high stakes.

Because as vital as error detection is to keeping the whole enterprise honest, those who do it say there is no individual upside. No one pays them to comb through papers for mistakes. On the other hand, it’s a great way to make enemies fast. “It pisses people off,” said Nick Brown, a fellow data sleuth who cut his teeth exposing sloppy food-marketing research in 2017.

Bik’s efforts to clean up science are immense: Since 2014, she’s contributed to the retractions of at least 594 papers and 474 corrections. But Raoult is a daunting adversary. He’s authored thousands of papers and heads a leading infectious disease research institute in France. And during the pandemic, he has become one of the world’s biggest champions of hydroxychloroquine. His Twitter following has swelled to over 850,000, more than twice that of France’s health minister. His institute’s YouTube videos, many of which feature him, have been viewed 96 million times.

The legal threat against Bik came at a highly vulnerable time for her. Two years ago, she quit her biotech industry job to be a full-time scientific misconduct investigator, piecing together a living from consulting, speaking fees, and Patreon donations. Within the scientific community, where fact-checking almost universally happens on one’s own time and dime, Raoult’s move to press charges was a clear warning.

“We support the work needed to investigate potential errors and possible misconduct and believe the scientific community can do more to protect whistleblowers against harassment and threats,” said a letter in support of Bik signed by more than 2,000 researchers and 30 scholastic organizations in May. They aren’t wrong to worry: more recently, other scientists have also sent legal threats Bik’s way.

Science watchdogs have always worked alone on the periphery of the research enterprise. The pandemic is laying bare how vulnerable — and vital — they are.

“I’m convinced there is a chilling effect,” Bik told BuzzFeed News. “I’m feeling the cold, too.”

Bik has always had a discerning eye. She swears that she is merely average at puzzles and slow to recognize faces, but patterns — like in tiles and floor panels — leap out at her. “I guess most people don’t see that,” she said over a Zoom call.

Growing up in Gouda, the Netherlands, Bik was an avid bird-watcher who dreamed of being an ornithologist. Later she traded in her binoculars for a microscope, earning a PhD in microbiology at the University of Utrecht. Her first job out of school, on staff at a hospital, involved scanning for infectious disease microbes in patients’ samples.

In the early 2000s, she moved with her husband to Northern California. For over a decade, she worked on early efforts at Stanford University to map and analyze the microbiome, the thriving communities of bacteria inside our bodies.

Bik’s first foray into scientific misconduct began with the accidental discovery that she was a victim of it. Around 2013, she was reading an academic article about plagiarism and, on a whim, plugged a random sentence from one of her papers into Google Scholar. It popped up, verbatim, in another author’s text. It was a turning point. If she had just chosen another sentence, she said, “my whole career might not have changed at that moment.”

Another lightbulb moment came when she was reading a graduate student’s PhD thesis on inflammation and cancer and laid eyes on a particular Western-blot photograph. In these images, proteins show up as dark splotches, like grayscale Mark Rothko paintings. Bik realized that the same photo appeared in two different chapters, ostensibly for different experiments, and that research articles based on the thesis repeated the errors. She reported the duplicates to journal editors in 2014. Following a university investigation, the papers were retracted.

Her discoveries coincided with a burgeoning movement to ferret out bad science. In the early 2010s, some of psychology’s most high-profile findings began falling apart, whether because they were false positives generated from cherry-picking, could not be replicated by other labs, or, in rare instances, were outright fakes. Economics, artificial intelligence, and cancer research have also reckoned with their own crises.

Science is often mistakenly referred to as self-correcting. But peer reviewers — outside experts who review studies before they’re published in journals — are neither paid nor always qualified to assess the papers they’re assigned. Months or years can pass before journals correct or retract papers, if they ever do. And universities have little incentive to investigate or punish professors over questionable work. Nudging any of these entities into taking action tends to require behind-the-scenes work — and sometimes public pressure.

Enter the website PubPeer. Founded in 2012 by a scientist, a graduate student, and a web developer, it’s now a widely used forum where commenters can weigh in on any paper and study authors can respond. Posters can be anonymous. But PubPeer is not simply Reddit for research trolls: Critiques must be based on publicly verifiable information. As its FAQ states, “You can’t say, ‘My friend used to work in the lab and said their glassware is dirty.’”

Boris Barbour, one of PubPeer’s coorganizers, acknowledged that the site is “an experiment, sometimes an uncomfortable one — there’s not a safety net for some of what we do.” But he added that “it is a maybe necessary and certainly practical approach to making something happen, to correcting some of the literature.”

Bik single-handedly drives much of the discussion on PubPeer, where she’s flagged or weighed in on more than 5,500 papers. In 2016, she put her powers to the test. She looked up 20,621 papers that contained Western blots and manually scanned them for duplicates. Two microbiologists agreed with 90% of her picks. Together, they reported that 4 percent of the studies, which had appeared in 40 journals over nearly two decades, contained copied images, a “disturbingly common” phenomenon. In a follow-up, Bik found duplicated images in 6% of 960 papers from a single journal over seven years. Extrapolating out to the millions of biomedical papers published over the same period, that means that as many as 35,000 studies could be worthy of retraction, she estimated.

“She’s the Liam Neeson of scientific integrity,” said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science, ​​a nonprofit that promotes reproducibility in science. “She has a remarkable eye for detection … it has a magician-like quality in some cases.”

When Bik, 55, sits down to work, she puts on her tortoiseshell reading glasses and zooms in on images on her curved 34-inch computer screen. Hundreds of tiny turtle figurines line her home office, a collection she tracks in a detailed spreadsheet. Hung above her workstation is an illustration of a peacock, flashing its eye-spotted feathers in all their colorful, patterned glory.

Only in the last year or so has Bik started using software to help scan for uncanny similarities. Otherwise, her process is manual, akin to close-reading clouds in the sky or bloodstains at a crime scene. When observing cells in an image, “I see it looks like a dog or fish or two cells squashed together,” she said. “I look for those same groups of cells in the other panel. It’s almost like there’s a little ping in my brain if I see them.”

Toward the end of March 2020, as cities and states shut down, Bik suddenly had even more time to put her scanning abilities to the test. And Raoult’s hydroxychloroquine study was making headlines worldwide.

After the SARS outbreak of 2002, Raoult had hypothesized that, based on lab studies, hydroxychloroquine and a related drug, chloroquine, could be “an interesting weapon” to fight future outbreaks. When early studies out of China identified chloroquine as a promising agent against SARS-CoV-2, Raoult promoted them — and then set out to test the idea himself.

In his study, 14 COVID patients admitted to hospitals in southern France in early March 2020 were treated with hydroxychloroquine, and six more also received azithromycin, an antibiotic. On the sixth day, most of the people who received no treatment were still COVID-positive. But he reported that about half of the patients on hydroxychloroquine alone, and all of the ones taking it with the antibiotic, were testing negative.

Bik had known of Raoult, a fellow microbiologist, and had seen Trump’s tweets raving about his latest discovery. Unlike most papers she scrutinizes, his didn’t have worrisome images. But other irregularities caught her eye.

Why, she wondered, did Raoult’s team leave out a number of patients who dropped out of the trial, including those who transferred to intensive care or died? Without these negative outcomes included, the results looked more promising. If the study received ethics approval on March 6, and the patients were tracked for 14 days, how did the authors submit their paper to the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents on the 16th? And how was it accepted for publication less than 24 hours later? Impossible to ignore was the fact that one of the study’s authors, Jean-Marc Rolain, was the editor-in-chief of the journal.

“This would be the equivalent of allowing a student to grade their own paper,” Bik wrote on her blog, Science Integrity Digest, on March 24. “Low [sic] and behold, the student got an A+!”

Days later, the scientific society overseeing the journal said that an editor besides Rolain had been involved in reviewing the manuscript but admitted that the study was below its standards. It commissioned outside experts to take a closer look at whether concerns such as Bik’s had merit.

But by then, Raoult’s narrative that the drug was a miracle cure had assumed a life of its own. Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, traveled to Marseille to meet Raoult. Trump’s endorsement of the research, and later his claim that he was taking hydroxychloroquine himself, sent sales soaring and dried up supplies for patients who depend on it to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. Then, in an abrupt move that shocked many scientists, the FDA authorized the drug for emergency use against COVID. Nearly 1 in 4 COVID-19 clinical trials launched that spring were studying hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine.

In April 2020, when Bik first raised alarms about Raoult’s study, the scientist was displeased. “The witchhunter @MicrobiomDigest is not attentive to details when she judges that a study is useful to her paranoiac fights!” he tweeted. “Fake news.”

By the end of the year, large clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine would find no effect against the coronavirus, and the FDA would revoke its authorization, citing the risk of severe heart complications.

Raoult’s was among the first of many COVID-19 studies to fall under the scrutiny of dedicated watchdogs like Bik. Researchers, students, journalists, and others have also spotted, sometimes by accident, things that don’t add up.

One of the biggest examples, ironically, drew a conclusion that was the opposite of Raoult’s: that hydroxychloroquine wasn’t just ineffective against COVID, it was also likely to kill you. In May 2020, that news led at least two major clinical trials to grind to a halt. But the basis for the explosive finding — a database compiled by a startup named Surgisphere — collapsed when outside researchers pointed out inconsistencies. Three of the paper’s authors admitted that their collaborator, Surgisphere’s founder, had refused to share the data with them. They retracted that paper from the Lancet and a second from the New England Journal of Medicine. (Surgisphere’s founder defended his company and claimed it was not responsible for any issues with the data.)

Allegedly fraudulent data had slipped past two of science’s most exclusive journals. But with preprints — essentially first drafts, uploaded straight to the internet — there aren’t even gatekeepers to blame. Being able to immediately share cutting-edge science is useful, especially in a pandemic. It also means no peer reviewer or journal editor is checking for oversights and methodological problems.

One widely publicized preprint reported that hospitalized coronavirus patients were 90% less likely to die when given ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug that proponents have touted as a cure-all. But a trio of sleuths found big problems in the data, including entries from dead patients. The preprint was taken down in July over “ethical concerns.” (Its lead author has defended the study and said he was not consulted before it was removed.)

In the prepandemic era, you would put your preprint “on the table of the coffee break room and say, ‘Please, anybody, read it,’” said Nosek of the Center for Open Science. During the Zika outbreak of 2015 to 2016, 78 preprints were posted on one server, bioRxiv. In contrast, upwards of 19,000 SARS-CoV-2 preprints have been uploaded to bioRxiv and a new server, medRxiv, since the pandemic started.

Some say the deluge demands more oversight. “We need some minimum level of quality control,” Brown said. “We’re churning out millions of papers.”

But to Nosek, the issues raised by preprints predate preprints themselves. “The interesting thing of the moment is almost all of the events are entirely ordinary — not in terms of [being] acceptable, but ordinary,” he said. “Yes, this is what’s happening in research practice all the time.”

Now, however, the stakes of getting things wrong are unbelievably high. In June, a group of scientists wrote in JAMA Pediatrics — another prestigious journal — that children in face coverings were inhaling “unacceptable” levels of carbon dioxide. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor of medicine, praised it on Fox News and called mask-wearing “child abuse.” Soon after, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom Bhattacharya has advised, blocked schools from requiring masks in the classroom, claiming in an executive order that “forcing children to wear masks could inhibit breathing.”

That study was retracted by the journal after scientists complained about its methodological problems. (The authors have said they stand by their findings and that their critics were not qualified to judge them.)

One of the study’s most outspoken detractors was James Heathers, a longtime data detective. He believes that many are taking advantage of the pandemic to build their personal brands. “There are people in science who think basically any crisis is an opportunity, anything that becomes a topic du jour is something they should chase,” he said, adding that he wasn’t referring to anyone in particular. “A lot of COVID work is an extension of that same mentality” — that is, “maximally flashy and minimally insightful.”

Until spring 2020, Raoult was best known as an eminent microbiologist who founded and heads the research hospital Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection, or IHU. He has discovered or codiscovered dozens of new bacteria — a group of them are named Raoultella — as well as giant viruses. By many accounts, his extensive reach in the scientific community is matched by his temper: In 2012, Science magazine described him as “imaginative, rebellious, and often disdainful.” “He can make life hard for you,” one researcher said.

A handful of Raoult’s thousands of publications have also fallen under scrutiny. In 2006, the American Society for Microbiology banned him and four coauthors from its journals for a year over a “misrepresentation of data” after a reviewer spotted figures that were identical, but shouldn’t have been, across two versions of a submitted manuscript. (Raoult objected to the ban, saying he wasn’t at fault.) And some researchers noticed that Raoult was on one-third of all papers to ever appear in a single journal, which was staffed by some of his collaborators.

Last year, Raoult’s team issued a correction to a 2018 study, and another from 2013 was retracted altogether (the journal said that Raoult could not be reached when it was making its decision). Both contained apparently duplicated or otherwise suspect images, first spotted by Bik, who has flagged more than 60 other studies of his on PubPeer for potential issues.

And by July of last year, his most infamous study had been looked over by even more outside experts commissioned by the journal’s publishers. The scientists did not hold back. “Gross methodological shortcomings,” “non-informative,” and “fully irresponsible,” one said. Another group said it “raised a lot of attention and contributed to a demand for the drug without the appropriate evidence.”

Despite acknowledging these flaws, the leaders of the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, which publishes the journal along with Elsevier, opted not to retract the study. “We believe, in addition to the importance of sharing observational data at the height of a pandemic, a robust public scientific debate about the paper’s findings in an open and transparent fashion should be made available,” they said. Around the same time, a group of 500 French infectious disease experts filed a complaint with local health officials, accusing Raoult of spreading misinformation about hydroxychloroquine.

Raoult defended his “seminal work,” arguing that the call for a retraction had “no justification other than the opinion of people who were fiercely hostile to” hydroxychloroquine. At a French Senate hearing that September, he once again downplayed criticisms of his research. Bik had “managed to find five errors in a total of 3,500 articles,” he said, while acknowledging that there were potentially a small number of other errors as well. He denied ever committing fraud.

At the Senate hearing, Raoult called Bik a term that translates to “head hunter,” a “girl” who had been “stalking” him since he was “famous.” And around Thanksgiving, biologist Eric Chabrière, a frequent collaborator of Raoult’s and a coauthor of the hydroxychloroquine study, tweeted that Bik “harasses” and “tries to denigrate” Raoult.

He invoked her past employment at uBiome, a microbiome-testing startup that the FBI raided in 2019. (Bik, who was scientific editorial director there until the end of 2018, has said that she was never questioned and was not involved in the founders’ alleged scheme to defraud insurers and investors.) Chabrière also accused her of being paid by the pharmaceutical industry.

“I am not sponsored by any company, but you can sponsor me at @Patreon,” Bik tweeted back, linking to her account. As she explained to Chabrière, she is also a consultant to universities and publishers who want suspicious papers investigated.

“Happy to investigate any papers of your institute, too, as long as you pay me :-),” she added.

Over the following months, Chabrière would call her “a real dung beetle,” “a mercenary who only obeys money,” and a person “paid to attack and discredit certain targets.” His supporters piled on, sometimes with vague threats. Meanwhile, Raoult called her a “crazy woman” and a “failed researcher” of “medium intelligence.”

Then, on April 30 of this year, Chabrière tweeted a screenshot of a legal complaint allegedly filed with a public prosecutor in France. It accused her and Barbour, the PubPeer coorganizer, of “moral harassment,” “attempted blackmail,” and “attempted extortion.” Her home address was listed. The tweet was later deleted.

According to the French newspaper Le Monde, the basis of the blackmail allegation was her tweet offering to investigate papers for a fee. The complaint also noted that a total of 240 papers by Raoult and nearly 30 by Chabrière were flagged on PubPeer, mostly by anonymous commenters. “As long as we stick to scientific criticism, this is beneficial to science. But there, it goes beyond the limits and prevents my clients from working,” a lawyer for Raoult and Chabrière told the newspaper.

Bik stands by her critiques and denies ever blackmailing or harassing anyone. And as of October, she said she had not seen the full complaint or been contacted by any attorneys or authorities. Raoult, Chabrière, and their lawyer did not return multiple requests for comment from BuzzFeed News.

The episode highlighted the divisive rise of public peer review, where hundreds of people can instantly weigh in on a finding. Young and internet-fluent scientists tend to look favorably on this shift toward transparency. But others argue that “cancel culture campaigns in social media,” as one oft-criticized researcher has put it, taint the scientific process.

That unease was apparent in a statement on Raoult’s legal filing from the French National Centre for Scientific Research, where Barbour, the PubPeer co-organizer, is a neuroscientist. While calling critiques “indispensable when they are constructive and backed by cogent arguments,” the institution admitted that it had “serious reservations” about the fact that PubPeer critics do not have to share their real names. This, it wrote, contributes to “the excesses of certain social networks for which anonymous insults and accusations are commonplace.” (Barbour declined to comment on the complaint.)

But some data sleuths point out that threats like Raoult’s are a good reason to stay anonymous. And while scientific discourse is traditionally polite, deliberate, and conducted behind closed doors, they say that doesn’t work during a pandemic.

After Hampton Gaddy, an undergraduate student at the University of Oxford, inquired about 26 fishy COVID studies by a single researcher and made his complaints public, all of them were withdrawn. The author did not dispute the retractions.

“There’s something unhelpful in the way we think about science as a self-correcting process,” Gaddy said. “It makes you think that it’s just going to correct itself on its own.”

Not long after Raoult’s criminal complaint was announced, attorneys came after Bik over different critiques. These involved a professor in China who claimed that he could kill cancer cells in a petri dish by “emitting external Qi,” the life force believed in traditional Chinese medicine to exist in everything. He repeated this procedure in more than a half-dozen studies, often with Harvard-affiliated researchers.

In 2019, Bik accused the studies of failing to describe the process in sufficient detail. But in a pair of cease-and-desist letters in May, lawyers for the scientists argued that they had properly described their methods, accusing her of publishing false and defamatory statements and mocking Chinese medicine.

Bik deleted her tweets but refused to retract her blog post or PubPeer comments. “This is a scientific discussion,” she wrote back to one attorney.

She also found it curious that it took two years for these lawyers to come knocking. “I think they thought I was being threatened by Didier Raoult and then decided, ‘Maybe she’s in a vulnerable position, let’s slap on another threat,’” Bik said. (The attorneys did not return requests for comment.)

While Bik accepts that blowback comes with the territory, she has less of an appetite for needless conflict these days. She regrets joking with Chabrière as she did and has toned down the sarcasm on Twitter, where 111,000 people now follow her every word. “I feel more watched,” she said. “I think about what I tweet and how that could look in a courtroom.” That said, as one of the few women widely known for being a science watchdog, Bik has always been conscious of how she comes across and is used to constantly being questioned by men. “It’s a very thin line as a woman that we have to make between saying what we think is right and not coming across as very aggressive,” she said.

A degree of paranoia also colors her offline life. Upon trying to enter the Netherlands on a recent trip, she went to scan her passport and the machine informed her there was an error. As an employee walked over, the first thought that went through her head was Oh my god, I’m going to be arrested right now. (It was just a glitch.)

Brushes with the law may still be rare for scientific fact-checkers, but being on the receiving end of antagonism isn’t.

“People hate you,” said Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiology graduate student at the University of Wollongong in Australia who has dug through some of the pandemic’s most flawed studies. “Even people who are not involved with the study think you are a nasty, grubby troll sitting in a basement finding mistakes in others’ work.” Having ruffled all the feathers he’s ruffled, he feels unsure over what his post-PhD future holds.

That’s why data sleuths don’t usually rely on fact-checking to pay the bills. They support themselves through any number of other ways — attending graduate school (Meyerowitz-Katz is working at a public health agency while finishing his degree), working at a company (Heathers), or being retired (Brown). That makes their “job” inaccessible to most people, they said.

“If you are someone in that precarious position or someone who is a person of color from a disadvantaged background, doesn’t have financial resources, and can’t afford to ever be sued or even [face] the threat of a lawsuit, they’re just driven away from it,” Meyerowitz-Katz said.

Is there a future where watchdogs have proper careers, funded by the institutions they’re trying to fix? Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, thinks that they have a place in the system. Funders could back fellowships for data sleuths “so they can dedicate time rather than having it be marginalized work,” he said.

But Brown believes that he and his colleagues are most effective on the margins, where they are beholden to no one but themselves. “The instant you have somebody funding you to do this kind of thing,” he said, “it’s like, ‘Why did you fund Nick Brown?’”

As someone who makes a living exposing bad science, Bik is exceptional in more ways than one, her peers say.

“She should be receiving awards and prizes. Journals should be asking her to check stuff,” Heathers said. “The fact you can do everything she’s done and still be in a position where the system hasn’t directly rewarded you speaks very poorly of that system.”

Last month, the dispute between Bik and Raoult seemed to be winding down. The founding members of the IHU Méditerranée Infection announced that Raoult will be replaced as the head of the institution next September. The head of Marseille’s hospital system cited the need to “turn a page.” The decision, which Raoult protested, came amid reports that some of his studies are under investigation for alleged ethics violations.

In a recent interview, Bik said she felt optimistic that this one particular feud appeared to be quieting down. There are so many other fights to focus on: more dodgy images, more suspect papers, more scientists and journals and universities needing to clean up their acts. It’s become the pattern of her life.

“I’ll probably be doing this for a while, until all science misconduct has been resolved and all science is completely honest and clear,” she said with a laugh. “And then I can retire, I guess.”

But Raoult, it seems, is not quite ready to move on. Just last week, he said in a YouTube video that the people who made “attempts to blacklist us on scientific journals … will have to be arrested … including Madame Bik,” according to a translation that Bik shared on Twitter. She quickly locked her account to, she said, “prevent the next wave of insults, jail threats, and death wishes from reaching me.” Retirement would have to wait another day. ●