Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin was tall and rugged, with the flowing beard and raucus mustache popular in the late 1800s. As a young geology professor, he hiked the flatlands of southeast Wisconsin, surveying tracks of long-gone glaciers. It was popular at the time to speculate on what caused the rise and fall of ice ages, and Chamberlin seized on one theory that pointed to a gas.

“The effect of the carbon dioxide and water vapor is to blanket the earth with a thermally absorbent envelope,” he wrote in 1899. He concluded that doubling that gas in the atmosphere would raise the temperature of the Earth by 8 or 9 degrees Celsius.

This relationship between carbon dioxide and the Earth’s temperature came to be known as the greenhouse effect. Chamberlin was right about the linkage, though he was off in the numbers.

The numbers are still elusive.

“We’ve grown leaps and bounds in our ability to collect climate data, particularly in the last 30 years since we’ve had satellites,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank in Oakland, California. “But at the end of the day, we need to know what is likely to happen in the next few decades and the rest of the century and centuries to come. And for that, you need some sort of model.”

The science of climate modeling – forecasting – has produced 30 or more different versions that try to predict how changes in the atmosphere will alter the climate.

All point in the same direction: Add greenhouse gases and warming will follow. But the details vary.   

“There are some things where there are very robust results and other things where those results are not so robust,” says Gavin Schmidt, who heads NASA’s respected climate modeling program at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. But the variances push skeptics to dismiss the whole field.  

“There’s enough stuff out there that people can sort of cherry-pick to support their preconceptions,” says Dr. Hausfather. “Climate skeptics ... were arguing that climate models always predict too much warming.” After studying models done in the past 50 years, Dr. Hausfather says, “it turns out they did remarkably well.”

But climate modelers acknowledge accuracy must improve in order to plot a way through the climate crisis. Now, a team of climatologists, oceanographers, and computer scientists on the East and West U.S. coasts have launched a bold race to do just that.

They have gathered some of the brightest experts from around the world to start to build a new, modern climate model. They hope to corral the vast flow of data from sensors in space, on land, and in the ocean, and enlist “machine learning,” a kind of artificial intelligence, to bring their model alive and provide new insight into what many believe is the most pressing threat facing the planet.

Their goal is accurate climate predictions that can tell local policymakers, builders, and planners what changes to expect by when, with the kind of numerical likelihood that weather forecasters now use to describe, say, a 70% chance of rain.

Tapio Schneider, a German-born climatologist at the California Institute of Technology and Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, leads the effort.

“We don’t have good information for planning,” Dr. Schneider told a gathering of scientists in 2019. Models cannot tell New York City how high to build sea walls, or California how much to spend to protect its vast water infrastructure.

They simply vary too much. For example, in 2015 in Paris, 196 countries agreed there will be alarming consequences if the planet warms by 2 degrees Celsius, measured from the industrial age. But when will we get there? Of 29 leading climate models, the answer ranges from 20 to 40 more years – almost the difference of a human generation – under current levels of emissions. That range is too wide to set timetables for action, which will require sweeping new infrastructure, everything from replacing fossil fuels to switching to electric vehicles to elevating homes.

“It’s important to come up with better predictions, and come up with them fast,” Dr. Schneider says.

Courtesy of Tapio Schneider

Researchers Anna Jaruga (from left) and Akshay Sridhar, as well as software engineer Sriharsha Kandala, work in the office of the Climate Modeling Alliance in California.

A blank slate

Most climate modelers use past data when they create a model. But that means there is a fire hose of fresh climate measurements that go mostly unused – from satellites, balloons, ships, planes, weather stations, and thousands of sensors floating in the seas. Dr. Schneider wants to plug into that stream and force a new model to learn from it.

“The crux is to use more data, period,” he says. He and his colleagues have spent two years figuring out how to do it. 

“The original idea was not to start over,” Dr. Schneider says. He talked with a friend at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Raffaele Ferrari, an Italian researcher who, befitting his name, has a penchant for automotive analogies. They realized, Dr. Ferrari says, “that you can take a race car and start replacing parts but pretty soon it becomes easier to build a new race car.”

The two men had been friends since they met one summer while graduate students in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Dr. Ferrari pursued oceanography, and helped build a much-used model for the oceans called the MIT General Circulation Model.

Oceans and the land are intimate partners with the atmosphere, but they often are studied separately. Dr. Schneider and colleagues at Caltech study the air; Dr. Ferrari and MIT researchers study the sea. Both men realized the advantage of joining forces.

In 2017 and 2018, Dr. Schneider convened a series of workshops at Caltech, grandly called the Future of Earth Systems Modeling. “We just invited the best people in the world” to hash through the topic, he says.

Their consensus was that “the development of climate models was struggling; something was not working,” Dr. Ferrari says. “They were looking for new ideas.” Gradually, they concluded they should build a new model. They named it the Climate Modeling Alliance – the acronym CliMA is “climate” in Italian and Spanish.

It is “scary to start with a blank slate,” Dr. Schneider says. 

But Dr. Ferrari notes, “By starting from scratch, you can clean up a lot of what has happened over time.” 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

MIT researcher Raffaele Ferrari is working with a team to create a new climate model.

Building a disruptor

It also is audacious. The group mapped out a project that will take at least five years of work by teams at Caltech, MIT, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and other institutions – tens of thousands of hours of research. It will take money – at least $25 million – that typically would come from government grants, but that appeared unlikely early on because of the Trump administration’s disaffection with science. 

And it threatens to ruffle feathers in the climate science world, especially at the established modeling centers, like Dr. Schmidt’s NASA group at Goddard. “I think they have oversold what they can do,” Dr. Schmidt says. Is a new model needed? “They would say yes. I would probably say no.”

There are three main U.S. government-funded climate centers: in New York City; Boulder, Colorado; and Princeton, New Jersey. Rather than compete with the established centers for federal financing, CliMA turned to private money. Soon, it won a pledge from former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt and Wendy Schmidt, whose philanthropy for the environment ranges from oil cleanup competitions to deep-sea submersibles. They pledged most of the funds needed for the first three years, and with smaller grants, CliMA launched on Sept. 11, 2018.

John Marshall, who developed the oceans model at MIT, says getting funds from outside the government is “a hugely important part of the project.”

“I see the project as a disrupter, like an Uber project,” he says. “Any organization which has been going for a long time, it kind of ossifies.” 

The other distinguishing feature, Dr. Marshall notes, is those working on it. “The model is actually less important than the team of scientists that you have around it,” he contends. In fact, the 60 to 70 researchers and programmers in the CliMA group represent a veritable United Nations. 

Somebody put a map on the wall at the CliMA house, a converted provost’s home at Caltech, and asked everyone to pinpoint their homes. “There were a lot of needles,” Dr. Schneider says.

Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

Meltwater from the Laohugou No. 12 glacier flows though the Qilian Mountains in China’s Gansu province. Glaciers in the rugged region are rapidly disappearing as a result of global warming.

A climate model that “learns”

CliMA decided on an innovative approach, to harness machine learning. Satellite and sensor information is freely available – much of it for weather forecasters. Dr. Schneider envisions “training” their model with the last three decades of data, and then routinely feeding it the latest updates. The model itself could “learn” from the data and calibrate its performance with formulas refined by AI, even as the climate changes.

Climate models work by dividing the globe into a grid. That allows computers to replicate conditions by calculating atmospheric formulas for each grid cell. These are not simple equations that focus only on the level of carbon dioxide; models now handle hundreds of factors that influence climate, ranging from solar radiation, particles from volcanoes, dust, ocean spray, and savannas, to agricultural fields and sea ice.

They do this in grid cells typically about 15 to 30 miles square and a few miles deep. CliMA strives for much smaller cells, but to model Earth’s whole atmosphere they would need supercomputers thousands of times faster than presently exist. Instead, CliMA will drill down on a sampling of smaller grids – some little more than 100 feet square and 15 feet deep – and use AI to teach the rest of the grid formulas from those samples.

By focusing on this level of detail, the CliMA group hopes to pick up influences on the climate that are often just roughly estimated. Chief on Dr. Schneider’s list is to gauge the influence of clouds. Low, flat, stratocumulus clouds gird huge swaths of the planet at any given time. But they are so wispy there is no good way of including them in models.  

They “are really important for Earth’s climate. They cool Earth by about 8 degrees Celsius globally, simply by reflecting sunlight,” Dr. Schneider says. Existing climate models underestimate their effect – he calls it a “blind spot” – creating large uncertainties in the models. At extreme levels of greenhouse gases, Dr. Schneider says, stratocumulus clouds could disappear entirely, jolting temperatures of the Earth. It might be one reason there were crocodiles in the Arctic 50 million years ago, the most recent hot period in Earth’s history.

But the team had a problem. While computers have gotten faster and faster, the very mechanics used by computer modelers is creaky. They have to tell a computer what to do, step by step, in a “language” the computer can decipher.

Since 1957, scientists have often used a programming language called Fortran. It is fast: Once written, it causes computers to act with great efficiency. That efficiency is vital when the number crunching is as big and complex as it is in a climate model, carrying out trillions of calculations per second.  

But Fortran is clunky and laborious to write. It must be further modified for today’s supercomputers. For younger programmers, it is kind of like ancient Latin. “If you tell undergrads you want help writing Fortran, nobody wants to get involved,” says Dr. Ferrari. “They think it’s the end of their career.” 

Newer languages – there are dozens, with names like Python, C, and C++ – are easier to write, but they take more time to process in the computer. For the CliMA modelers, that was a dilemma. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

“They said they thought they wanted to use Julia. I was tickled pink, really.” – Alan Edelman, a mathematician at MIT who created a new computer language (Julia), which members of the Climate Modeling Alliance are using (shown here with his corgi, Phil)

The man with the answer occupied an office on the seventh floor of MIT’s “CSAIL” building – the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence labs. Alan Edelman is known for bringing his pet corgi to classes and then dispatching students to find it when it wanders off. “He hasn’t figured out that the dog doesn’t sit there,” chuckles a colleague.   

Dr. Edelman also is an award-winning mathematician who pondered the computer language conundrum, and developed a new language in 2009. He called it Julia, and it bridged the language gap, he says: as fast as Fortran, and easier to use than Python.  

In September 2018, he got a “Dear Professor Edelman” email from Dr. Ferrari, and six hours later three fellow MIT professors who had been at the Caltech climate modeling sessions were perched on the narrow couch in his office.

“They said they thought they wanted to use Julia,” Dr. Edelman recalls. He immediately saw Julia and CliMA as a perfect match. “I was tickled pink, really.”  

But Julia had relatively few users, and in California, Dr. Schneider was worried it might flop. “Everyone was excited about Julia – so much so that I was very nervous, because it felt like too much groupthink,” he recalls. “What we’re trying to do has its own risk. Do we really want to load the risk of a new language on top of it?”

But the simplicity of using Julia was a game-changer. When the CliMA group began to cautiously use the new language, Dr. Edelman suddenly realized that other scientists and younger graduate students were poking their heads into his lab to learn about this new whiz-fast programming tool. People from different disciplines were interacting. “I didn’t see this coming,” he says.

The group at CliMA was quickly convinced. “There was no way we could have done it with another language,” Dr. Ferrari says. “After three or four months, we realized there was no way we could go back.”  

“Julia paid off for us better than they would have imagined,” Dr. Schneider admits.

An ambitious goal

With Julia, the team released CliMA 0.1, part of the first version of the model, in June. Dr. Schneider says their work is ahead of schedule, and he is encouraged.

They are a step toward providing climate information that will be useful at a local or regional level, helping predict the frequency of droughts, extreme rainfalls, heat waves, and major storms. Dr. Schneider even envisions a cellphone app that could give information to anyone contemplating, say, the purchase of a house or planning future crops for a farm. 

“You need granular information on a local level,” Dr. Schneider says. “The challenge, in the climate area, is how to make information actionable. There’s a large gap between what we scientists communicate and what people can actually use.”

To bridge that, they are looking to weather forecasters. “When they tell you that tomorrow it might rain, you don’t know exactly what to do. You want to know whether the probability is 10% or 100%,” Dr. Ferrari says. “If it’s 10%, you’re going to get an umbrella; if it’s 100% you might not go for a hike. So knowing that ... is crucial.”

Ultimately, he and Dr. Schneider say, they expect to achieve that. 

“We’ll see at the end,” Dr. Ferrari says. “It’s always a mistake to say that you shouldn’t try something new. Because that’s how you change the world.”

Party leaders in today’s 50-50 Senate are haggling over a power-sharing agreement, and that’s no surprise. Only twice in American history has the Senate had a dead-even split: in a special session in 1881, and exactly 20 years ago, on the heels of a contentious presidential election decided by the Supreme Court.

In that charged atmosphere, Sens. Trent Lott, Republican from Mississippi, and Tom Daschle, Democrat from South Dakota, managed to work out a way to share power and run the Senate. It wasn’t an easy deal to make, as the former senators describe in an interview with the Monitor, but it also wasn’t a complicated one.

Because a Republican, George W. Bush, was in the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney could break tie votes in the GOP’s favor, Senator Lott became the majority leader and controlled the agenda on the Senate floor. Republicans also chaired the committees. But the parties were given an equal number of members on the committees, and if a committee vote was tied, either party leader had the option to bring the legislation to the floor. 

The agreement wound up being short-lived, ending in June 2001 after Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party to become an independent and caucus with the Democrats. At that point, Senator Daschle became majority leader, though still working closely with his Mississippi colleague, especially when 9/11 hit three months later.

Now Sens. Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Mitch McConnell, Republican from Kentucky, say they want to use the 2001 agreement as their model. But Senator McConnell is insisting that the deal also include a protection of the 60-vote threshold to pass legislation (i.e., the filibuster). Some Democrats are pushing to get rid of the filibuster in order to be able to move legislation with a simple majority vote.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP/FIle

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. (left), and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., walk to the chamber after collaborating on an agreement in the Senate on a two-year, almost $400 billion budget deal that would provide Pentagon and domestic programs with huge spending increases, at the Capitol in Washington on Feb. 7, 2018.

Senators Lott and Daschle speak with one voice when it comes to working out an agreement, as well as handling an article of impeachment against former President Donald Trump that will be delivered to the Senate on Monday: Act with urgency. There’s no time to lose in solving the country’s problems.

An edited and condensed transcript of their remarks follows: 

Q: What will a 50-50 Senate mean for the president, his agenda, and his ability to govern?

Daschle: It’s primarily an opportunity to move his agenda. The majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has a lot of authority deciding what that legislative schedule is going to look like. Obviously, also it will mean that people in his party have the chairmanships in the committees. 

That said, I think it’s important to emphasize that in a 50-50 Senate, you really have to have bipartisanship to be able to move that agenda. It’s one thing to schedule something, it’s another to get it done. And I don’t think you’ll get it done unless you can see some real effort put into meaningful bipartisanship.

Q: What lessons does the power-sharing agreement you worked out hold for Senate leaders today?

Lott: One of the advantages that we had is that Tom and I had already been through some difficult things. We had a good relationship. I respected him. I trusted him. We did get a lot accomplished in the five months after we reached that agreement.

The components were pretty simple, although they weren’t easy to agree on because we had to sell whatever we agreed on through our conferences. Tom’s folks didn’t want to make a deal, and my people felt like they’d done too much.

I’ve been saying to people that everybody needs to calm down, and they should get the rules worked out. Our rules were accepted by voice vote. They’ve got work they need to do. They need to do confirmations, they’re going to do another COVID package. Hopefully they’ll do an infrastructure bill. There are some things that can have broad bipartisan support even in, especially in, a 50-50 Senate.  

Q: What was the most challenging thing about that agreement and how did you overcome it?

Daschle: I really look back with enormous admiration for Senator Lott. It took a lot of courage to come to the caucus and say, “Look, guys, we’ve got to give up some things here. We may be in the majority, but we’re in a 50-50 Senate.” And he got enormous pushback, but he showed just remarkable courage and stamina. It will be now up to Chuck Schumer to show that same degree of courage and willingness. 

Lott: When I took it to the Republican conference to outline the details, I did get strong pushback from some of my closest friends. Their argument was, “Look, we have the 51st vote, we’re the majority. Why should we be giving up so much, even if it might make things work a little better?” But cooler heads prevailed and they realized this was something that was good. When I looked at the history, the last time they had a tied Senate, it took them five months to work it out. It was not a pretty scene. I felt like we needed to get an agreement so we could go to work. In a way, I had a premonition that we might not have a majority very long – and of course, Jim Jeffords switched parties.

Q: You mentioned the comity in your relationship. You’re friends. But there’s no love lost between Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell. How do you improve that? The president is a creature of the Senate – can he help here?

Daschle: Trent and I had a red phone on our desks that were only connected to each other. We had every confidence that when that phone rang, it was going to be the other leader. The red phone was really a metaphor for our determination to communicate. Regardless of how close a friendship Mitch and Chuck have, they have to communicate. 

Trent and I both have strongly recommended to other presidents, and I’ve made the recommendation to President Biden’s staff, that he call the leadership down to the White House at least once a week, say, Tuesday mornings, to talk about the things they could do for that particular week.

It’s going to take inclusion, communication, and cooperation that comes from that constant communication. 

Lott: Even though Tom and I didn’t always agree philosophically, we had sort of common backgrounds. We both came from states with a lot of rural areas, agriculture and blue-collar backgrounds. Chuck and Mitch are very different. Chuck is New York City. Mitch was born in Alabama and represents Kentucky.

But you touched on a point that could be critical. President Biden is a creature of the Senate. He knows the place, he loves the place. I think he has the ability to nudge Chuck along and reach out to Mitch. 

Q: We have a divided nation, but also divided parties. Republicans just lost two Senate seats in Georgia and a presidential election. How can the GOP pick up the pieces and move forward again?

Lott: It will be a challenge. You still have some people that look to Trump to see what he’s going to have to say or do. You’ve got some more moderate type of senators that have been speaking out, like Mitt Romney and Susan Collins to a degree. But, you know, we don’t know exactly how this is going to play out. 

Who could have thought we’d lose both those Senate races in Georgia? But that’s what gave Democrats the 50-50 Senate. Now we’re going to have to figure out how we can move forward with a unified party.

Q: Senator Daschle, same question for you on the challenges within the Democrats. The president wants unity and bipartisanship, but some Democrats want to get rid of longstanding rules, cut Republicans out, and push their agenda through.

Daschle: I think the real question that every Democrat – and for that matter, every Republican – has to ask is, do we want to make a statement, or do we want to really make good law? You don’t make good law by making statements and then jumping up and down because you didn’t get your way. You’ve really got to work hard on a step-by-step, day-by-day basis to grind it out, find compromise. Trent has heard me say this far too many times, but compromise is not capitulation. Compromise is the oxygen of democracy. And we’ve got a need for a lot more oxygen going forward. Everybody needs to understand that, or we’re going to continue to face the enormous level of dysfunction that we’ve witnessed over the last few years. 

Q: Do you think the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol can be kind a wake-up moment for addressing these problems?

Lott: I hope it’s a wake-up point. It was one of the most depressing days that I have experienced in a long time. I just couldn’t believe that they were going into that building that I worked in and around for 39 years. I view it as a sacred place, a symbol of freedom and democracy. I was frankly outraged.

Republicans better think about how we’re going to talk to the people that were there and make sure that that sort of thing does not happen again. We got a lot of mending to do and it always begins at the top. But I do think Tom, and he makes the point and he’s absolutely right, we need better communication between and among ourselves, and not always talking at each other through the media.

Q: What repercussions, if any, do you think GOP senators who voted to object to the Electoral College results should face? 

Lott: I’ve found over the years that retribution is not a positive thing. Yesterday, we turned the page. We had an inauguration with a president that had a good message of unity. The best thing we can do is to start looking forward, take it one step at a time, deal with the issues at hand. 

Q: An impeachment trial of former President Trump is looming in the Senate. Will that get in the way of Biden’s start to his administration? 

Daschle: I’m encouraged by the conversations I’ve had in the last 24 hours that they’re considering the possibility of a three-day trial, which I think would really be in everyone’s interest. We know what the facts are. We don’t need a lot of give and take. It seems to me that the question is fairly clear-cut. 

Lott: I wish there was a way that we didn’t have to go through that. But the Constitution is pretty clear. If the speaker sends it over, the Senate has got to move forward. I’m hoping that they can reach an agreement and deal with it quickly as possible and as responsibly as possible so that we can move on.

Q: Do you think Senator McConnell might vote to convict?

Lott: He’s been pretty tough in what he had to say. Frankly, I doubt it, but he’s obviously not happy with the way the president handled things, certainly in the last few days.

Q: The president has a lot on his plate, from immigration to climate change to this big, $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill. Where do you see potential for common ground?

Daschle: I would say all the above, if it’s done right. I think there’s potential on infrastructure in particular. We recognize we still have many challenges in addressing COVID and the economy. The potential is there. It just really is going to be determined in part by the degree of cooperation and the degree of intensity around the effort that is made to get these issues addressed.

Q: What are your concluding thoughts about the new Congress and president looking ahead?

Lott: I thought the inauguration was positive. Hopefully, the tone has changed. I read the newspapers this morning and they seem happier today, as I thought they probably would. I just hope for the best.

Daschle: I thought the most inspiring moment was Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb.” America has a hill to climb and it will take leadership. It will take cooperation. And it will take a lot of persistence, but we can climb that hill.

Polina Ivanova/Reuters

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is interviewed on board a plane at an airport in Berlin before his departure for Moscow Jan. 17, 2021.

A very Russian political spectacle is unfolding with the return of irrepressible dissident Alexei Navalny to his homeland and his subsequent, highly personal challenge to President Vladimir Putin.

Mr. Navalny is calling for millions of Russians to take to the streets on Saturday to oppose corruption and injustice, and to fight for freedom against Mr. Putin and the now-rattled Kremlin. “Staying at home on this day means accepting that the villains will continue to lie, steal, and kill,” says the appeal on his website.

It’s a huge gamble for Mr. Navalny, whose personal courage and political flair have captured the attention of the Russian public, if not mass support, and left the Kremlin scrambling to keep up.

Despite facing a potentially long prison sentence, he blindsided authorities by returning to Russia from Germany this week, where he had been recovering from Novichok poisoning, allegedly at the hands of Russia’s FSB secret police. Arrested at the airport, he managed to keep in touch with supporters via social media, and even released an investigative video that accuses Mr. Putin of owning a lavish secret palace near the Black Sea.

The political tensions have the flavor of other personal feuds in Russian history between an almighty ruler and a hopeless challenger whose main claim is to moral authority, as expressed in the long-ago correspondence between Czar Ivan the Terrible and his exiled nemesis, Prince Kurbsky. So too the vendettas between Josef Stalin and Leon Trotsky; Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin; and, in an earlier phase of the Vladimir Putin era, the Kremlin leader and the imprisoned tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

“Russian politics is a very personalized business, and it is built not around ideas or platforms but around charismatic individuals,” says Vladislav Inozemtsev, an expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Mr. Navalny is definitely one of them, but he behaves in many respects not as one who is different from Mr. Putin but rather as one who resembles him too much.”

Mr. Navalny “is respected because he’s young and brave, but that’s not enough to succeed,” Mr. Inozemtsev says. “In his dissent with the current system he went too far to be tolerated. And in Russia, one doesn’t need to be guilty to be sealed away in prison.”

Dmitri Lovetsky/AP

Police officers detain supporters of opposition leader Alexei Navalny during a rally in St. Petersburg, Russia, Jan. 18, 2021, after Mr. Navalny was ordered into custody for 30 days following his arrest at a Moscow airport.

“Following his lodestar”

Long a thorn in the side of Russian authorities for his powerful video exposés of official corruption and his seemingly quixotic political challenges to the Kremlin, Mr. Navalny has personally accused Mr. Putin of ordering his poisoning. He returned to Russia this week apparently in anticipation of a showdown, and is clearly throwing down the gauntlet in his call for mass demonstrations.

“Navalny is unique among Russian political figures in defying the risk to his life,” says Masha Lipman, editor of Counterpoint, a journal of Russian affairs published by George Washington University. “He probably believes that all his risks and troubles will pay off eventually, and he will become president of Russia. He raises the stakes, over and over, as he did by returning to Russia, and publishing this video about Putin personally.

“What he is doing lies beyond rational political calculation,” she says. “He is following his lodestar, his deep belief that he can make change happen.”

Andrei Prokudin, a pro-Navalny activist in the western Russian city of Tver, says Mr. Navalny’s example is one to be followed.

“I can’t help but go out into the streets [on Saturday] because Navalny knew perfectly well that they would want to put him in jail, but he was not afraid to return to Russia. We can’t be afraid either,” Mr. Prokudin says. “When the state wants to put Navalny in prison, it wants to silence not only him but all of us. So, I hope a lot of people will show up and we will put enough pressure on Putin to force him to release Navalny.”

Opinion surveys do not suggest that Mr. Navalny commands enough public support to tip the political scales this weekend, or anytime soon.

One comprehensive poll, conducted by the independent Levada Center last September after his poisoning, found that public awareness of Mr. Navalny had grown significantly, and that approval of his actions had risen from 6% seven years earlier to 20%. But disapproval also jumped over the same period, from 35% to 50%.

While most were aware of the poisoning allegations, and a plurality believed Russian officials were probably to blame, there was little in the detailed answers given by Russians to suggest any surge in active support for Mr. Navalny.

“Navalny’s name is now familiar to everyone, but he doesn’t have millions of supporters,” says Dmitry Oreshkin, head of the Mercator Group, an independent Moscow political think tank. But even those he does have “don’t think it’s worth donating money to him and they are scared to attend protests in his support. People today don’t live so poorly that they will take such risks.”

Nor are Russians very well acquainted with Mr. Navalny beyond his defiant political persona. His political convictions and program are obscure, as are the sources of his support. His often explosive exposés of official corruption clearly lean upon materials provided to him by insiders.

Dmitri Lovetsky/AP

Masks depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) and Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny are for sale at a street souvenir shop in St. Petersburg, Russia, Jan. 17, 2021.

Time running out?

Despite being arrested 12 times over the past decade and being placed under house arrest, Mr. Navalny was able to travel around the country and engage in political organizing right up until his poisoning last August.

Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser and staunch Putin supporter, claims that Mr. Navalny has been protected over the years by members of Russia’s top elite who secretly oppose Mr. Putin, or are seeking to settle scores with elite rivals.

“There are powerful groups in Russia’s ruling class who are publicly pro-Putin, but privately have never accepted Putin’s hostile relations with the West,” says Mr. Markov. “These people protect Navalny, feed him materials for his anti-corruption stories, and help him in other ways. But that is all over now. Navalny has gone too far and there will be a united approach to dealing with him.”

Other analysts argue that the impression of monolithic Kremlin control is illusory, and that different factions of the government and security services differ over how to handle Mr. Navalny.

During Mr. Navalny’s return to Moscow this week, his plane was diverted from one airport to another, and he was subjected to a hearing in a makeshift courtroom set up in a police station – while he live-blogged the event on social media. Some say this reflects a state that seems panic-stricken or unable to muster a coherent response.

“There is no systematic approach,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Putin adviser turned critic. “They act like this because there are different departments that are not on the same page about what to do. Lately Putin doesn’t seem able to consolidate them, so they act independently and the result looks like chaos.”

Ms. Lipman argues that the Kremlin is evolving into a more repressive regime, and that is why the issue of how to handle Mr. Navalny is coming to a head.

“This explains why Navalny could get away with all he did in the past,” she says. “Formerly, the regime thought that Navalny running around doing his things was better than Navalny behind bars. No more. They wanted Navalny dead, and now they’ve decided to have him locked up for years.”

As a three-time Grand Slam champion and the world’s highest-paid female athlete, tennis player Naomi Osaka is a popular figure worldwide. In Japan, her image graces not only T-shirts and key holders, but now also the pages of manga – or comics. 

Two previous attempts at illustrating Ms. Osaka, who is biracial – in an Australian newspaper cartoon and a Japanese advertisement – misfired when both portrayed her with white skin and light-colored hair. 

But in December 2020, the magazine Nakayoshi debuted “Unrivaled NAOMI Tenkaichi” inspired by Ms. Osaka’s exploits (tenkaichi means “best of earth”). It avoids the earlier mistakes, in part because her sister, Mari, supervised the project. The tennis whiz – who was voted The Associated Press 2020 female athlete of the year in December – now joins manga’s crowded pantheon of strong female characters and a small but growing gallery of Black characters.

It’s a sign of progress in a genre in which accurate depictions of racial diversity have been hard to come by. Japanese society is known for erasing or obscuring racial and ethnic differences. But experts suggest that a slow change is bringing a new look to some manga.

“More mangaka [creators of manga] are putting in the effort to portray Black characters more respectfully and appropriately,” says LaNeysha Campbell, a manga essayist who regularly contributes to the pop culture website “But Why Tho?” “A great example of this is Aran Ojiro, a supporting character in ‘Haikyū!!’ His features and skin tone are done in a way that respectfully captures and portrays Black features.” 

Courtesy of Futago Kamikita, Tama Mizuno/Kodansha

The Japanese creators of the Naomi Osaka manga say their readers relate to strong female characters.

Author and Japan Times columnist Baye McNeil points to the earlier debacle over Ms. Osaka’s cartoon image as a catalyst for change. “As awareness is raised in various Japanese media,” he says, “some artists are definitely taking better care when they choose to include non-Japanese characters in their works. Nobody wants to be the focus of negative global attention. It’s sad, but sometimes it takes an incident like this to make people take notice.” 

Creators of manga, and its movie counterpart anime, have all too often relied on stereotypes in portraying the features of Black people. 

“In many classic manga from the 1980s and ’90s, Black people are drawn with big lips and portrayed as intimidating, often stupid characters,” points out longtime manga fan Diamond Cheffin. “Even in the early 2000s, you still find those Black caricatures.” 

Mr. McNeil ascribes manga artists’ attitude toward Black people to habit. “A lot of them are accustomed to drawing Black people in a certain way,” he says. “Though these characters are inaccurate, I don’t think they are necessarily intended to be offensive. It’s also true that those comics are not supposed to be consumed by non-Japanese.”

According to Ms. Campbell, until recently many Japanese manga artists have portrayed Black people in a less than flattering manner as a result of looking at Black culture through the lens of white American media.

“It is possible that the first impressions that Japanese audiences had of Black people were formed through these racist and stereotypical portrayals,” she says. “And while it has been well over 70 years since those depictions, they still contribute to the negative attitudes towards Black people and their offensive and problematic portrayals in manga.” 

Some manga characters testify to the artists’ love for Black culture. Many Japanese authors grew up consuming American comics, music, and movies, and strive to include those icons in their work as a sort of homage. But that can still lead to mischaracterization. One example is the character named Coffee in the popular TV show and subsequent manga series “Cowboy Bebop.”

“Coffee is a typical blaxploitation character,” says film and TV critic Kambole Campbell. “She is basically Foxy Brown, but on Mars.” The 1974 movie “Foxy Brown,” which starred Pam Grier as the hypersexualized protagonist, was criticized in the United States for its portrayal of Black people, particularly Black women. 

“Cowboy Bebop” director Shinichirō Watanabe took a different approach with the 2019 anime series “Carole & Tuesday,” whose co-protagonist is an overalls-wearing Black girl with dreadlocks and a bright smile.

Ms. Osaka, who has a Haitian father and a Japanese mother, has said she has experienced racism in Japan in the past. “Japan is a very homogenous country, so tackling racism has been challenging for me,” she wrote in a piece in July 2020 for Esquire. “I have received racist comments online and even on TV. But that’s the minority. In reality, biracial people – especially biracial athletes – ... have been embraced by the majority of the public, fans, sponsors, and media. We can’t let the ignorance of a few hold back the progressiveness of the masses.”

“Unrivaled NAOMI Tenkaichi,” the new manga about Ms. Osaka, is written with a different perspective in mind, and with an appeal to one of the groups that embraces the genre: teen girls. 

“We want to convey her charm,” write the story’s authors, Jitsuna and Kizuna Kamikita, a twin-sister team that signs their work as Futago Kamikita, in an email. “Not to mention her greatness as a tennis player. Naomi is a person full of humanity. We also like her ideas and her willingness to act on them. At the same time, she has a sense of humor that softens her seriousness.” They add, “We also think it’s essential to draw a warm story about the family who raised her.”

The choice of Ms. Osaka was a natural one for Nakayoshi, says the publication’s editor. “Self-reliant heroines and cool girls are very popular with our readers,” says Izumi Zushi.

Damian Dovarganes/AP/File

Two girls in Anaheim, California, read the Korean comic “Kill Me, Kiss Me.” Manga are consumed by all ages and genders.

In the comic, Ms. Osaka’s character plays “space tennis,” “traveling across the universe with her parents and sister to meet new challenges and protect everyone’s dreams and hopes from the ‘Darkness,’” Ms. Zushi says. 

Nakayoshi is one of the many publications targeting female readers, and the Kamikita twins are part of a massive female contingent. In the West, many people think that otaku, or nerd culture, is mainly a guy thing, but women – both as creators and consumers – represent a sizable part of the community. 

According to the Japan Magazine Publishers Association, in 2019 there were at least 23 magazines in the shojo (aimed at teenage girls) and josei (aimed at older readers) manga categories with a total monthly circulation of more than 1.5 million copies.  

Aside from the manga about Ms. Osaka, recent developments in the industry point to a new sensibility toward ethnic distinctions. “I do find that portrayal of Black people has come a long way,” the fan, Ms. Cheffin, says. “We are getting cool characters like Ogun from ‘Fire Force.’ Overall, this new generation is doing an awesome job. However, I’d like to see more Black characters on a greater scale, not just sprinkled here and there.” 

As artists become more aware of the global reach of manga, says Mr. McNeil, “the more they will learn to create stories and characters that take into consideration the diverse sensibilities of their growing readership.”

Reuters

Nurses in Nairobi, Kenya, do exercises to help them cope with the coronavirus outbreak.

A year after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars are only now discovering why some countries have done better than others in containing the virus. The main reason isn’t better medical equipment or more money. Rather, according to researchers at Columbia University, the Brenthurst Foundation, and other institutions, it is higher levels of trust within a society.

In a study that looked at 23 countries, the strength of a nation’s social compact made the most difference. “Countries with traditions of acting in concert against social problems and countries with histories of deference to public authorities fared better on compliance than countries lacking either or both,” researchers found.

A number of countries in Africa stood out, which helps explain why a continent with 17% of the world’s population has had only about 3% of the COVID-19 cases globally. The study looked at Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, which represent close to half of Africa’s population.

“In those societies where trust in governments is historically low, greater reliance had to be placed on bottom-up approaches led by frontline health workers to disseminate the correct information,” the study found. “Africa’s health-care systems are largely nurse-driven, an asset that made bottom-up approaches workable.”

In particular, direct communication with community health workers was set up quickly to deal with the crisis – sometimes even before the first virus cases were detected. In addition, the pandemic has now “served as a catalyst for improving both communication and trust between African citizens and their governments.”

These findings are significant in helping all countries improve on the core traits of trust between the people and their institutions: integrity, transparency, accountability, and compassion.

While levels of trust in government went up worldwide during the early months of the pandemic, the levels have fallen by an average 8% in the last six months, according to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, which tracks trust in 28 countries. The drop in trust was very high in China (30%) and the United States (40%).

“The Covid-19 pandemic, with more than 1.9 million lives lost and joblessness equivalent to the Great Depression, has accelerated the erosion of trust around the world,” according to the Edelman survey.

In a health crisis, leaders in a society must provide straight talk with facts, act with empathy, and address people’s fears, according to Edelman. And if Africa is any model, the people who do that best are local health workers embedded in their community and who are often the neighbors of those struck during a pandemic. The traits of trust can do much of the healing work.