climate

A Mammoth Solution

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Scientists look to extinct genes to protect endangered species, climate

Shot of an elephant with mouth open among tree trunks, grass and other greenery in the background

An Asian elephant eats tree bark in Tamil Nadu, India. Modifying elephant genomes could help save these endangered species and allow them to transform Arctic landscapes to protect against climate change.

The first time geneticist George Church visited Siberia was the first summer the permafrost melted.

Permafrost by its nature is supposed to stay frozen year-round, but in a marker of encroaching climate change, in 2018 the top layer of soil thawed and didn’t refreeze. Microbes began to eat the carbon that had been locked away in the ice and released it into the air as methane gas. Church watched a teammate light a match and ignite a pocket of the gas that hovered over the softening bog they stood in.

“That was an ominous sign,” Church recalled. Today, he says, thawing permafrost is burping up methane “at an alarming rate,” given that the gas “is 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide in contributing to global warming.”The sight reinforced Church’s determination to combat climate change by ensuring that the world’s permafrost stays frozen, keeping its estimated 1.4 trillion tons of stored carbon—two and a half times more than the Amazon rainforest harbors—tucked safely away.

His plan for doing so: Genetically modifying a group of elephants to thrive in the cold and moving them north so their daily activities contribute to preserving and restoring Arctic environments.

Harvard Medicine News spoke with Church about this unusual approach to climate mitigation and the latest developments in his lab’s efforts. Church is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and a founding core member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

HMNews: There have been a lot of headlines about resurrecting mammoths to repopulate and reshape the Arctic tundra. What exactly are you doing?

Church: People tend to use the shorthand that we’re de-extincting mammoths: bringing them back to life after the last of them died about 4,000 years ago. We’re not. At least, not in the near future. We’re trying to de-extinct genes. The field has actually already done this with two genes that confer cold-resistant properties to organisms. The idea is to safely introduce these and other genes into present-day elephants so the elephants can comfortably live in and restore Arctic environments.

HMNews: Why manipulate elephant genomes?

Church: The main reasons have to do with biodiversity and climate mitigation.

A question we get asked frequently is, Why de-extinct something that already had its chance; why don’t you focus on endangered species and saving them from going extinct? Well, that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re dealing not with mammoths but with modern endangered species.

All elephant species are endangered. We’re trying to give them new land in the Arctic that’s far away from humans, who are the major culprits causing extinction. We’re trying to cure Asian elephant-specific herpesvirus, which can be deadly, especially in young elephants. We’re trying to develop tools that might be useful for other endangered species that other teams might be interested in working on.

The two-for-one is that not only would the elephants get a new homeland, but their homeland is in desperate need of environmental restoration, and they can help. Moving genetically adapted elephants to the Arctic offers an opportunity to sequester, or remove from the atmosphere, significant amounts of carbon and to prevent more carbon from escaping.

Understanding how this might work requires connecting a few dots. Elephants knock over trees, reducing bark that absorbs sunlight and heats the ground. Clearing a portion of the tree cover allows the animals to walk through new areas and pack down the snow there, facilitating permafrost freeze. Otherwise, the snow forms a fluffy, insulating layer that keeps the topsoil warm.

Basically, the idea is that we need to convert a portion of trees in the Arctic back to grass, and elephants are the only living large herbivore that will do that. They do so quickly and easily, and they like doing it. So a genetically adapted elephant-mammoth hybrid might prove to be a good proxy species for the ecological role the woolly mammoth used to play.

HMNews: Why dig up genes from the past?

Church: We’re trying to gather genetic diversity. We know diversity is useful for survival in a changing or new environment, and we’re getting better at identifying and gathering genes that are important for a given trait—in this case, cold tolerance and virus resistance.

We’re no longer limited to searching for beneficial genes in one elephant herd or even the global elephant population; now we can go all around the world, even to distant species, and back in time up to 1 million years to discover and obtain those genes. The DNA that mammoths left behind in their bones can offer us the genetic code for traits like warm, woolly hair and thick, subcutaneous fat.

HMNews: How are you engaging with the ethical questions raised by this kind of work?

Church: Most of the projects I’ve worked on in my career—like the publicizing and privacy of personal genomes, development of devices that print synthetic DNA, gene drives that eliminate malaria parasites from mosquitoes—require broad public engagement. The problem isn’t always getting scientists engaged; it’s getting the public engaged. People are focused on how to put food on the table and get their kids educated. The latest cutting-edge scientific thing is not always perceived as important.

As a start, my research group has worked with HMS geneticist Ting Wu’s Personal Genetics Education Project to brief Congressional staffers, who then bring information back to their constituents. We’re working with writers who reach millions of people through their narratives—and the Arctic elephant story resonates particularly well. We’re reaching out to representatives of key populations, including people from Indigenous groups, Arctic farming communities, other industries, and governments. We’ll engage with anyone who wants to participate, whether they take a positive or negative view of the work.

Head shot of Church in a suit with trees in the background

Now we can go all around the world, even to distant species, and back in time up to 1 million years to discover and obtain [beneficial] genes.

—George Church

HMNews: You co-foundedColossal Biosciences, a private company dedicated to developing genetic technologies for de-extinction and ecosystem restoration. What’s your relationship to it?

Church: I am a scientific co-founder of Colossal but have no management role there. The company is providing funding for my lab’s work toward creating an elephant-mammoth hybrid through a sponsored research agreement with Harvard. It’s fairly open-ended research that we would have done anyway if we’d had the money for it—in fact, we were already doing some of the work through sparsely funded or volunteer labor. Now that Colossal has dedicated some funding to it, this work in my lab is a much more concerted and defined project that we’ll be pursuing over the next few years.

HMNews: Although funding for the gene de-extinction and elephant adaptation project doesn’t come from any public or health-focused institutions such as the NIH, you do, of course, work at a medical school. Does this research have any relation to human health?

Church: Definitely. First of all, climate change itself is a human health issue. Preventing further warming or reversing existing damage by sequestering carbon would safeguard human lives along with the ecosystems.

Side products of the Colossal effort will be technologies from my lab, with an additional potential for great impact on human health. Some of what we’re doing with reproductive medicine in elephants, like making gametes and finding ways to handle premature births, may open a path into various assistive reproductive technologies in humans, making those procedures safer for all sorts of cases.

There is a lot that human medicine and animal medicine can learn from one another. We’ve seen in the past that a lot of our work on reading and writing DNA and developing medical diagnostics and therapeutics is directly translatable to veterinary efforts.

HMNews: How is basic, curiosity-driven research driving this endeavor?

Church: Our lab does a lot of basic engineering and a little bit of basic science, and we’re heavily dependent on basic science from our close colleagues. An example of such “pure” science was the discovery of a repetitive family of gene sequences now called CRISPR. That was seen as just a bunch of “junk DNA” at first, and now it has revolutionized our ability to edit genes for medical and industrial purposes. The genomic sequencing of lots of vertebrate species, including extinct species, was basic science without necessarily any particular goal in mind, and that has been very valuable.

HMNews: What part of the elephant-mammoth project is your lab focused on right now?

Church: We’re trying to efficiently identify and test genes that would provide adaptation to Arctic environments. We’ve been developing methods for multiplexed editing—the ability to make thousands of genetic and epigenetic changes at once. This allows us to turn adult elephant cells into pluripotent stem cells, introduce the changes, and mature the cells back into adult-like tissues fast, within four days to a couple of weeks, so we can then study our genes of interest as a batch. Speed and volume are important because introducing a single change and waiting for an entire elephant embryo to mature would take 22 months. In the time it would take to study every gene candidate that way, the climate crisis would either be resolved by some other method or have caused societal collapse.

Our record for multiplexed editing in general now is 22,000 edits in a few days. The number of edits we’ll need to make in the elephant isn’t clear yet. It could be as few as 40, which is the number of changes we made in the pig genome to facilitate organ transplantation to humans, and it probably won’t be more than 500,000, which is the number of fixed genetic differences between mammoths and elephants.

We’re also pushing the science forward on reprogramming techniques to grow healthy gametes and promote safe in vitro fertilization and embryonic development so that when the research is ready to deploy, elephants can successfully gestate the genetically modified offspring. Because we don’t want to hinder the reproduction of endangered species.

HMNews: What steps remain?

Church: The big ones are the multiplexed editing and both accelerated and normal in vitro development. For initial testing, you want accelerated development. For complete testing and to ultimately birth calves, you need normal-speed development.

Elephant on grass, facing camera

It’s a similar kind of ambitious, engineering-focused, team-based target that President Kennedy set when he declared we would put a person on the moon within a decade.

—George Church

Getting ready for further down the road: Strategies are being developed for where the elephants should be located, how to guide them away from places where people live and toward places where they could contribute to reducing carbon risk, and what the appropriate landscapes and flora should be, including specific flowering plants they like to eat. These behavioral and geopolitical realities might take more time than the actual engineering.

People with sophisticated modeling tools want to be involved. It’s better to find out now with a good model whether there’s a problem than six years from now. Carbon reserves vary from place to place in the Arctic, and it might take dispersing elephants over only a small fraction of its 20 million square kilometers, in precisely targeted areas, to get the climate impact we want.

HMNews: Colossal says it’s striving for an ecological proxy of a mammoth within five to six years. Does that seem realistic? What kind of timeline do you envision?

Church: The six-year estimate for birthing an Arctic-adapted elephant calf is an ideal-case scenario based on working backwards from the 22-month gestation period, figuring another two years to achieve successful IVF embryos in mice, and two years in between for “debugging” the system for producing healthy elephant fetal development. That assumes everything goes smoothly along the way, which doesn’t typically happen.

I used to predict that reaching the final stage would take a very long time, maybe decades, because we didn’t have any appreciable funding, and it does depend on funding. Today, I think six years is a good goal to strive for—but it’s not a promise. It’s a similar kind of ambitious, engineering-focused, team-based target that President Kennedy set when he declared we would put a person on the moon within a decade. The scientific challenges of this project are considerable but ultimately surmountable. The bioethical dimensions are paramount. The execution will no doubt be daunting. However, we owe it to science, to humankind, to our fellow species, and to our planet to try.

2023 confirmed as world’s hottest year on record

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graphic

By Mark Poynting & Erwan Rivault

BBC News Climate & Verify Data Journalism teams

The year 2023 has been confirmed as the warmest on record, driven by human-caused climate change and boosted by the natural El Niño weather event.

Last year was about 1.48C warmer than the long-term average before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels, the EU’s climate service says.

Almost every day since July has seen a new global air temperature high for the time of year, BBC analysis shows.

Sea surface temperatures have also smashed previous highs.

The Met Office reported last week that the UK experienced its second warmest year on record in 2023.

These global records are bringing the world closer to breaching key international climate targets.

“What struck me was not just that [2023] was record-breaking, but the amount by which it broke previous records,” notes Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University.

The margin of some of these records – which you can see on the chart below – is “really astonishing”, Prof Dessler says, considering they are averages across the whole world.

Multiple line chart showing daily average global air temperature, with a line for each year between 1940 and 2023. The 2023 line is far above any previous level for much of the second half of the year.

An exceptional spell of warmth

It’s well-known that the world is much warmer now than 100 years ago, as humans keep releasing record amounts of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

But 12 months ago, no major science body actually predicted 2023 being the hottest year on record, because of the complicated way in which the Earth’s climate behaves.

During the first few months of the year, only a small number of days broke air temperature records.

But the world then went on a remarkable, almost unbroken streak of daily records in the second half of 2023.

Look at the calendar chart below, where each block represents a day in 2023. Records were broken on the days coloured in the darkest shade of red. From June, we’re looking at a new record most days.

Calendar showing which year holds the daily global air temperature record for each day of the year. In the second half of 2023, almost every day broke the previous daily record, including a 116-day streak between 15 August and 8 December.

More than 200 days saw a new daily global temperature record for the time of year, according to BBC analysis of Copernicus Climate Change Service data.

This recent temperature boost is mainly linked to the rapid switch to El Niño conditions, which has occurred on top of long-term human-caused warming.

El Niño is a natural event where warmer surface waters in the East Pacific Ocean release additional heat into the atmosphere.

But air temperatures have been boosted unusually early on in this El Niño phase – the full effects had not been expected until early 2024, after El Niño had reached maximum strength.

This has left many scientists unsure about exactly what is going on with the climate.

“That raises a bunch of really interesting questions of why [2023 was] so warm,” notes Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a science organisation in the US.

Consequences felt worldwide

Another notable feature of the 2023 warmth is that it has been felt pretty much worldwide.

As the map below shows, almost all of the globe was warmer than recent 1991-2020 levels – a period that was itself nearly 0.9C warmer than before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels in the late 1800s.

Map showing annual average air temperatures around the world in 2023 compared with 1991-2020 levels. Almost all of the world experienced above average temperatures, especially northern Canada, parts of the Arctic and Antarctic, and western South America.

This record global warmth has helped to worsen many extreme weather events across large parts of the world in 2023 – from intense heatwaves and wildfires across Canada and the US, to prolonged drought and then flooding in parts of east Africa.

Many occurred on scales far beyond those seen in recent times, or at unusual points of the year.

“These are more than just statistics,” says Prof Petteri Taalas, the Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization between 2016 and 2023.

“Extreme weather is destroying lives and livelihoods on a daily basis.”

Flames and smoke as a wildfire burns a forest in Quebec, Canada.
Image caption,Canada’s wildfire season was by far its worst on record.

The temperature of the air is only one measure of the Earth’s rapidly changing climate. Also in 2023:

In fact, the world’s ocean surface has been on an unbroken streak of record-breaking days since 4 May, BBC analysis of Copernicus data shows. As the chart below illustrates, many days have seen records broken by a huge margin.

Multiple line chart showing daily average global sea surface temperature, with a line for each year between 1940 and 2023. The 2023 line is above any previous level from 4 May onwards, and at times by a huge margin.

A warning for 2024 and beyond

The year 2024 could be warmer than 2023 – as some of the record ocean surface heat escapes into the atmosphere – although the “weird” behaviour of the current El Niño means it’s hard to be sure, Dr Hausfather says.

It raises the possibility that 2024 may even surpass the key 1.5C warming threshold across the entire calendar year for the first time, according to the UK Met Office.

Nearly 200 countries agreed in Paris in 2015 to try to limit warming to this level, to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

It refers to long-term averages over 20 or 30 years, so a year-long breach in 2024 wouldn’t mean the Paris agreement had been broken.

But it highlights the concerning direction of travel, with each hot year bringing the world closer to passing 1.5C over the longer term.

Human activities are behind this long-term global warming trend, even though natural factors like El Niño can raise or reduce temperatures for individual years, and the temperatures experienced in 2023 go far beyond simply natural causes.

Look at the chart below. At the time, 1998 and 2016 were record-breaking years, boosted by strong El Niño warming. But these don’t come close to the new 2023 records, marked in the darkest reds.

Distribution of global air temperature differences from the 1991-2020 average, for every year between 1940 and 2023. The year 2023 saw temperatures far above any previous year, even compared with those influenced by strong El Nino events like 1998 and 2016.

“2023 was an exceptional year, with climate records tumbling like dominoes,” concludes Dr Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

This latest warning comes shortly after the COP28 climate summit, where countries agreed for the first time on the need to tackle the main cause of rising temperatures – fossil fuels.

While the language of the deal was weaker than many wanted – with no obligation for countries to act – it’s hoped that it will help to build on some recent encouraging progress in areas like renewable power and electric vehicles.

This can still make a crucial difference to limit the consequences of climate change, researchers say, even though the 1.5C target looks likely to be missed.

“Even if we end up at 1.6C instead, it will be so much better than giving up and ending up close to 3C, which is where current policies would bring us,” says Dr Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London.

“Every tenth of a degree matters.”

Climate, pandemic, and war: an uncontrolled multicrisis of existential proportions

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In the heat of the pandemic we parked our response to climate change. In the heat of Russia’s war on Ukraine the pandemic and climate change now take a back seat. That’s inevitable to some degree, and it’s understandable that an illegal act of aggression that is killing thousands and displacing millions is our most urgent challenge. Yet, climate action is most urgent too, as reinforced by the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Health professionals and the communities we serve are facing tremendous stress,” argue Renee Salas and colleagues, “but we must not turn our attention away from the climate emergency” (doi:10.1136/bmj.o680).1

Political attention is easily diverted, with a desire to move on. Take Russia’s targeting of health workers and facilities, for example, which is in breach of international conventions. Why wasn’t Russia held to account for similar tactics in Syria, tactics that drove health workers and facilities underground (doi:10.1136/bmj.o605)?2 Why now the headlong rush to say that the pandemic is behind us, when cases are rising and more troubling variants are a distinct possibility (doi:10.1136/bmj.o638, doi:10.1136/bmj.o654)?34 In mitigation, existential threats rarely come in threes, but our inability, to coin a term, to “multicrisis” might be the most serious existential threat of all.

Climate change and the covid pandemic are contributing to increasing demand for mental health services (doi:10.1136/bmj.o672, doi:10.1136/bmj.o585).56 But the healthcare workforce is also in crisis (doi:10.1136/bmj.o684, doi:10.1136/bmj.o674),78 not only struggling with delivering mental health services but also consistently failing to meet cancer care targets (doi:10.1136/bmj.o682).9 In a service besieged by patient inquiries and interruptions to care (doi:10.1136/bmj.o665, doi:10.1136/bmj.o655),1011 the importance of clinical leadership has never been more apparent, although clinical leaders, once motivated by a combination of “money, power and glory, and altruism,” are harder to find (doi:10.1136/bmj.o651).12 The answer, says Partha Kar, might be to motivate people to tackle the real world challenges of the NHS rather than overselling a “shiny new world.”

Yet simplifying complexity is the political game. “We now have effective antivirals” is the political messaging, when the evidence on molnupiravir says we don’t (doi:10.1136/bmj.o443, doi:10.1136/bmj.m3379).1314 “Omicron isn’t a worry,” when despite vaccination it continues to account for substantial morbidity and mortality (doi:10.1136/bmj-2021-069761)15; and the neurological impact of covid, among growing evidence on the long term clinical burden of covid-19, is beginning to emerge (doi:10.1136/bmj-2021-068373).16 It’s this expedient logic that leads to decisions to dismantle genuine world class initiatives, such as the UK’s covid surveillance system, which remains essential while a global pandemic continues to rage (doi:10.1136/bmj.o562),17 and to sell the UK’s acclaimed vaccine manufacturing and innovation centre to the private sector (doi:10.1136/bmj-2022-069999).18 What happens when the next pandemic, the next crisis, inevitably emerges doesn’t seem to be a problem for today’s leaders.

If you dismantle the pillars of public health (doi:10.1136/bmj.o631),19 get rid of world class innovations born of adversity, allow dictators to bomb and destroy health workers and facilities; fail to invest in systems, processes, and long term solutions to deal with the health and wellbeing impacts of our multicrisis world—in short, sell a shiny new dream when society’s problems are deep and grave—it is no wonder that humanity continues to pile one existential crisis on top of another. As difficult as it is, this global multicrisis demands our full attention and better control.

Source: BMJ

Even a ‘Limited’ Nuclear War Could Wreck Earth’s Climate And Trigger Global Famine

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Deadly tensions between India and Pakistan are boiling over in Kashmir, a disputed territory at the northern border of each country.

A regional conflict is worrisome enough, but climate scientists warn that if either country launches just a portion of its nuclear weapons, the situation might escalate into a global environmental and humanitarian catastrophe.

On February 14, a suicide bomber killed at least 40 Indian troops in a convoy travelling through Kashmir. A militant group based in Pakistan called Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed responsibility for the attack. India responded by launching airstrikes against its neighbour – the first in roughly 50 years – and Pakistan has said it shot down two Indian fighter jets and captured one of the pilots.

Both countries possess about 140 to 150 nuclear weapons. Though nuclear conflict is unlikely, Pakistani leaders have said their military is preparing for “all eventualities“. The country has also assembled its group responsible for making decisions on nuclear strikes.

“This is the premier nuclear flashpoint in the world,” Ben Rhodes, a political commentator, said on Wednesday’s episode of the “Pod Save the World” podcast.

For that reason, climate scientists have modelled how an exchange of nuclear weapons between the two countries – what is technically called a limited regional nuclear war – might affect the world.

Though the explosions would be local, the ramifications would be global, that research concluded. The ozone layer could be crippled and Earth’s climate may cool for years, triggering crop and fishery losses that would result in what the researchers called a “global nuclear famine”.

“The danger of nuclear winter has been under-understood – poorly understood – by both policymakers and the public,” Michael Mills, a researcher at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, told Business Insider.

“It has reached a point where we found that nuclear weapons are largely unusable because of the global impacts.”

Why a ‘small’ nuclear war could ravage Earth

When a nuclear weapon explodes, its effects extend beyond the structure-toppling blast wave, blinding fireball, and mushroom cloud. Nuclear detonations close to the ground, for example, can spread radioactive debris called fallout for hundreds of miles.

But the most frightening effect is intense heat that can ignite structures for miles around. Those fires, if they occur in industrial areas or densely populated cities, can lead to a frightening phenomenon called a firestorm.

“These firestorms release many times the energy stored in nuclear weapons themselves,” Mills said. “They basically create their own weather and pull things into them, burning all of it.”

Mills helped model the outcome of an India-Pakistan nuclear war in a 2014 study. In that scenario, each country exchanges 50 weapons, less than half of its arsenal. Each of those weapons is capable of triggering a Hiroshima-size explosion, or about 15 kilotons’ worth of TNT.

The model suggested those explosions would release about 5 million tons of smoke into the air, triggering a decades-long nuclear winter.

The effects of this nuclear conflict would eliminate 20 to 50 percent of the ozone layer over populated areas. Surface temperatures would become colder than they have been for at least 1,000 years.

The bombs in the researchers’ scenario are about as powerful as the Little Boy nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, enough to devastate a city.

But that’s far weaker than many weapons that exist today. The latest device North Korea tested was estimated to be about 10 times as powerful as Little Boy. The US and Russia each possess weapons 1,000 times as powerful.

Still, the number of weapons used is more important than strength, according to the calculations in this study.

How firestorms would wreck the climate

Most of the smoke in the scenario the researchers considered would come from firestorms that would tear through buildings, vehicles, fuel depots, vegetation, and more.

This smoke would rise through the troposphere (the atmospheric zone closest to the ground), and particles would then be deposited in a higher layer called the stratosphere. From there, tiny black-carbon aerosols could spread around the globe.

“The lifetime of a smoke particle in the stratosphere is about five years. In the troposphere, the lifetime is one week,” Alan Robock, a climate scientist at Rutgers University who worked on the study, told Business Insider.

“So in the stratosphere, the lifetime of smoke particles is much longer, which gives it 250 times the impact.”

The fine soot would cause the stratosphere, normally below freezing, to be dozens of degrees warmer than usual for five years. It would take two decades for conditions to return to normal.

This would cause ozone loss “on a scale never observed,” the study said.

That ozone damage would consequently allow harmful amounts of ultraviolet radiation from the sun to reach the ground, hurting crops and humans, harming ocean plankton, and affecting vulnerable species all over the planet.

But it gets worse: Earth’s ecosystems would also be threatened by suddenly colder temperatures.

Screen Shot 2019 03 01 at 3.52.36 pm(Mills et al., Earth’s Future, 2014)

The fine black soot in the stratosphere would prevent some sun from reaching the ground. The researchers calculated that average temperatures around the world would drop by about 1.5 degrees Celsius over the five years following the nuclear blasts.

In populated areas of North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, changes could be more extreme (as illustrated in the graphic above). Winters there would be about 2.5 degrees colder and summers between 1 and 4 degrees colder, reducing critical growing seasons by 10 to 40 days. Expanded sea ice would also prolong the cooling process, since ice reflects sunlight away.

“It’d be cold and dark and dry on the ground, and that would affect plants,” Robock said. “This is something everybody should be concerned about because of the potential global effects.”

The change in ocean temperatures could devastate sea life and fisheries that much of the world relies on for food. Such sudden blows to the food supply and the “ensuing panic” could cause “a global nuclear famine”, according to the study’s authors.

Temperatures wouldn’t return to normal for more than 25 years.

The effects might be much worse than previously thought

Robock is working on new models of nuclear-winter scenarios; his team was awarded a nearly US$3 million grant from the Open Philanthropy Project to do so.

“You’d think the Department of Defence and the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies would fund this research, but they didn’t and had no interest,” he said.

Since his earlier modelling work, Robock said, the potential effects of a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan have gotten worse. That’s because India and Pakistan now have more nuclear weapons, and their cities have grown.

“It could be about five times worse than what we’ve previously calculated,” he said.

Because of his intimate knowledge of the potential consequences, Robock advocates the reduction of nuclear arsenals around the world. He said he thinks Russia and the US – which has nearly 7,000 nuclear weapons – are in a unique position to lead the way.

“Why don’t the US and Russia each get down to 200? That’s a first step,” Robock said.

“If President Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize, he should get rid of land-based missiles, which are on hair-trigger alert, because we don’t need them,” he added.

“That’s how he’ll get a peace prize – not by saying we have more than anyone else.”

A shift in climate

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has done much to alert politicians to the effects of global warming. But to push climate change up the agenda, it will need to do the same for the public.

Hoesung Lee has laid out a vision for his tenure as the fourth chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The South Korean economist says that he wants to increase coordination between the working groups, work with more scientists from developing countries, boost interaction with the business and financial industries and expand the panel’s influence by making its findings easier to digest. Above all, Lee says that he wants to be remembered as the man who shifted the panel’s focus towards solutions. Those are all worthy goals, but the organization that assesses — and in some senses oversees — the world of climate science is well placed to do a lot more.

The basic science underlying climate change has been firmly established, and we now know much more about not only the threats posed by a rapidly warming world, but also the options humanity has for changing course. Even though the commitments that have been proffered going into the United Nations climate summit in Paris at the end of next month are generally tepid, the governments of the world by and large recognize the problem and know that they need to act. What else can the IPCC do? The answer is plenty, and Lee’s emphasis on solutions is one piece of the puzzle.

Most of the world’s major emitters — rich, poor and in between — have offered commitments and policies to move their countries in the right direction. Without concerted action in the decades to come, however, these commitments will fall well short of what the best science suggests is needed to achieve the formal goal of limiting the rise in global average temperatures to 2 °C. Political leaders are leaving the hard work for later, and could well be committing future generations to more warming than anybody wants to experience.

This is partly because of a lack of political leadership and of active opposition by entrenched industrial interests, as environmentalists argue. But it is also evidence of the vastness of the challenge. It is not easy to transform the global economy and industrial base for a large and growing population, much of which is still mired in poverty but wants access to the modern conveniences that so many on the planet take for granted. The world needs a full suite of technologies that are not only cost-effective but also socially and politically viable. Here, the IPCC has a particular part to play.

“The real challenge is to raise public awareness about the risks of inaction.”

The weak commitments going into Paris are also evidence of a disconnect between scientists, who think that the evidence speaks for itself, and citizens and policymakers, who have a lot of other things on their minds. The IPCC is looking at bringing science writers and graphics experts on board in an effort to improve its reports. A linguistics study published earlier this month showed that the IPCC summaries for policymakers score low in terms of readability, and recommends that key panel members receive science-communication training (R. Barkemeyer et al. Nature Clim. Changehttp://doi.org/79f; 2015). All this makes sense, but communicating the science more clearly is just the first, and a relatively minor, step.

The IPCC’s reports are aimed mainly at — and written in coordination with — governments, yet politicians at the very highest levels are already talking about climate change. The unfortunate truth is that taking steps to combat climate change is way down the political agenda, and that makes more aggressive action difficult. The real challenge is to raise public awareness about the risks of inaction — as well as the benefits of action — and to identify policies that can pass the political litmus test.

Here, as Lee himself has said, the IPCC has an important role. The panel must generate and incorporate knowledge about how information filters through society and about the kinds of policies that are most likely to work. This is the domain of sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and political scientists, and they must be an integral part of the IPCC’s sixth assessment.

The IPCC has had its controversies, including a glitch in its 2007 projection for Himalayan glacier melt and this year’s resignation of former chairman Rajendra Pachauri, who faces — and denies — accusations of sexual harassment. But the challenges that face the panel today are in many ways a result of its success. Much ground has been covered; the challenge now, for both researchers and the IPCC, is to adapt and to identify research that will help policymakers to bridge the gap between what they say they want to do and what they are actually doing.

Researchers find tie between global precipitation and global warming.

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The rain in Spain may lie mainly on the plain, but the location and intensity of that rain is changing not only in Spain but around the globe.

A new study by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists shows that observed changes in global (ocean and land) precipitation are directly affected by human activities and cannot be explained by natural variability alone. The research appears in the Nov. 11 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Emissions of heat-trapping and ozone-depleting gases affect the distribution of precipitation through two mechanisms. Increasing temperatures are expected to make wet regions wetter and dry regions drier (thermodynamic changes); and changes in will push storm tracks and subtropical dry zones toward the poles.

“Both these changes are occurring simultaneously in global precipitation and this behavior cannot be explained by natural variability alone,” said LLNL’s lead author Kate Marvel. “External influences such as the increase in are responsible for the changes.”

The team compared climate model predications with the Global Precipitation Climatology Project’s global observations, which span from 1979-2012, and found that natural variability (such as El Niños and La Niñas) does not account for the changes in global precipitation patterns. While natural fluctuations in climate can lead to either intensification or poleward shifts in precipitation, it is very rare for the two effects to occur together naturally.

“In combination, manmade increases in greenhouse gases and stratospheric ozone depletion are expected to lead to both an intensification and redistribution of global precipitation,” said Céline Bonfils, the other LLNL author. “The fact that we see both of these effects simultaneously in the observations is strong evidence that humans are affecting global precipitation.”

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Marvel and Bonfils identified a fingerprint pattern that characterizes the simultaneous response of precipitation location and intensity to external forcing.

“Most previous work has focused on either thermodynamic or dynamic changes in isolation. By looking at both, we were able to identify a pattern of precipitation change that fits with what is expected from human-caused climate change,” Marvel said.

By focusing on the underlying mechanisms that drive changes in global precipitation and by restricting the analysis to the large scales where there is confidence in the models’ ability to reproduce the current climate, “we have shown that the changes observed in the satellite era are externally forced and likely to be from man,” Bonfils said.

Robotic tractor to deliver precision planting.

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05_RoboticTractor_Crop

A robotic tractor and seeding machine with unprecedented planting accuracy will improve agricultural productivity for farmers and enable cropping on 20% more land, UNSW inventors say.

Broad acre farming currently requires an operator to be present in the cabin of large tractors, but this is often perceived as being unproductive, says Associate Professor Jay Katupitiya from the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at UNSW.

Furthermore, large tractors are expensive and compact the soil as they move, creating crop lines. Crop lines render roughly 20% of land on large paddocks unusable and means cropping must happen in the same direction every year, which degrades soil health.

To solve this problem, Katupitiya has partnered with the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) to develop a lighter, more affordable agricultural machine that can accurately follow and plant seeds along a predefined path without a human operator.

“This system has the ability to lay seeds within one to two centimetres of lateral accuracy on rough agricultural terrain, which is an unprecedented level of precision for an autonomous machine,” says Katupitiya.

Achieving this precision with existing technology has been challenging because the forces generated by a plough digging into soil often cause seeding implements to veer off course. However, advanced control systems and sensors, and an optimised design, enable the UNSW invention to automatically correct against these deviations.

“Our unique design and technology allows farmers to know exactly where their crop is,” says Katupitiya. “It means the same machine can be used repeatedly throughout the cropping season to carry out all other subsequent tasks, such as weeding, fertilising and growth monitoring.”

The UNSW-developed machine, which measures just three-metres wide, is a more affordable and lightweight option for farmers, says Katupitiya, which doesn’t create crop lines.

“The flexibility of being able to access more land and plant crops in different directions has advantages for crop growth through better uptake of remnant nutrients, and a better yield,” says Katupitiya.

The research team behind the invention were finalists in the 2012 Eureka Prize for Innovative Use of Technology. They are now working with the GRDC to pursue further development and commercial production.

 

 

Quiet Climate Milestones.

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 “All we are not stares back at what we are.” —“The Sea and the Mirror” W.H. Auden

Throughout my life, there have been poets and poems I’ve carried with me everywhere, like a briefcase that’s always packed and sitting by the front door. And while it might sound strange, I’ve found myself coming back to Auden in the past few weeks after two things happened in the climate world. First, it was the European Union effectively giving up on its emission trading scheme (ETS) for regulating carbon pollution. Then it was the news that atmospheric carbon levels had reached a new record concentration of 400 parts per million (ppm).

As global milestones go, this was a quiet one. Life went on much as it had when we stood at 399.9 ppm, and few will remember exactly where they were when they heard the news. What it means, though, is that the atmosphere now has more of the heat-trapping gases driving climate change than ever before, taking us further away from the 350 ppm level scientists agree we can safely handle. With the effective collapse of the ETS, our challenge in responding becomes even greater.

Which brings me back to Auden. I can’t help thinking about this line because I can’t help thinking these two events show that we’re simply not rising to meet our potential. When it comes climate change, we’re avoiding the tough decisions instead of stepping up to the challenge, pure and simple. Seeing us cross the 400 ppm threshold or reading another climate denier distort the facts in the papers, I know we are better than this. Because what we are not, as Auden would have it, is extraordinary.

As we celebrate Memorial Day, think back to the generations that came before us and the existential challenges they faced. The ones, for example, who came together selflessly to defeat Nazi tyranny, whether they were daily risking death on the front lines or working hard on the home front. They took on this challenge because there were people and places in their lives they loved deeply and utterly, and there was nothing they wouldn’t do to protect them. And in part because of that love, they won.

We don’t have to face bullets, but we do have to face reality and make real choices about climate change. Those of us who’ve been working in the movement for decades are used to being called merchants of doom and gloom (and sometimes much worse). These names miss the point entirely. What gets me out of bed isn’t dread, but love for the faces that appear in my picture frames and around my breakfast table. Given a choice between giving up my arms or something happening to my family or friends, I’d offer you my legs too. Just like any mother, I want my children to have the freedom to make the lives they want. I also want to be able to run in the mountains and savor a cup of Moka Java in the morning. I could go on and everyone will have their own list, but in every case, this means taking care of what we love on this exquisite planet.

This is the challenge of our time, the one that will define us to our grandchildren and beyond. The good news is that the solution starts with a simple step: putting a price on carbon. With a price on carbon, we curb the carbon pollution accelerating climate change and ultimately take care of what we love. It will not be easy, but it’s a challenge we can solve together. It’s past time to step up, to be worthy of the generations before us and faithful to the ones who’ll come after.

Source: Source: http://climaterealityproject.org

 

 

Side effects of fluorescent light.

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Admit it, you don’t like the cold, lifeless light that emits from these bulbs, but what you don’t know may hurt you!

Better to vie for the warm welcoming glow of old school incandescent bulbs then to roll the dice with these bulbs that, if you dare break one, spew toxic matter all over the place.

-Headaches

-Migraines

-Eye discomfort

-Eye strain

-Enhanced tumor formation

-Contributes to agoraphobia

-Endocrine disruption

-Increased stress

At the end of the day, natural sunlight is the best option because it brings a full spectrum of light frequencies.  The unbalanced light emitted from fluorescent bulbs has been studied thoroughly and it is a wonder why many government officials are pushing for regulations requiring their use over incandescent bulbs.  In fact, incandescent bulbs emit a more balanced spectrum light that is more similar to sunlight then fluorescent bulbs.  It is no surprise that many people are willing to pay more in electric bills and replacement in order to avoid the cold, lifeless glow of these mercury laden lights.

Scientists Officially Link Processed Foods To Autoimmune Disease.

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Scientists Officially Link Processed Foods To Autoimmune Disease

 

The modern diet of processed foods, takeaways and microwave meals could be to blame for a sharp increase in autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, including alopecia, asthma and eczema.
A team of scientists from Yale University in the U.S and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, in Germany, say junk food diets could be partly to blame.

‘This study is the first to indicate that excess refined and processed salt may be one of the environmental factors driving the increased incidence of autoimmune diseases,’ they said.

Junk foods at fast food restaurants as well as processed foods at grocery retailers represent the largest sources of sodium intake from refined salts.

The Canadian Medical Association Journal sent out an international team of researchers to compare the salt content of 2,124 items from fast food establishments such as Burger King, Domino’s Pizza, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Subway. They found that the average salt content varied between companies and between the same products sold in different countries.

U.S. fast foods are often more than twice as salt-laden as those of other countries. While government-led public health campaigns and legislation efforts have reduced refined salt levels in many countries, the U.S. government has been reluctant to press the issue. That’s left fast-food companies free to go salt crazy, says Norm Campbell, M.D., one of the study authors and a blood-pressure specialist at the University of Calgary.

Many low-fat foods rely on salt–and lots of it–for their flavor. One packet of KFC’s Marzetti Light Italian Dressing might only have 15 calories and 0.5 grams fat, but it also has 510 mg sodium–about 1.5 times as much as one Original Recipe chicken drumstick. (Feel like you’re having too much of a good thing? You probably are.

Bread is the No. 1 source of refined salt consumption in the American diet, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Just one 6-inch Roasted Garlic loaf from Subway–just the bread, no meat, no cheeses, no nothing–has 1,260 mg sodium, about as much as 14 strips of bacon.

How Refined Salt Causes Autoimmune Disease

The team from Yale University studied the role of T helper cells in the body. These activate and ‘help’ other cells to fight dangerous pathogens such as bacteria or viruses and battle infections.

Previous research suggests that a subset of these cells – known as Th17 cells – also play an important role in the development of autoimmune diseases. In the latest study, scientists discovered that exposing these cells in a lab to a table salt solution made them act more ‘aggressively.’

They found that mice fed a diet high in refined salts saw a dramatic increase in the number of Th17 cells in their nervous systems that promoted inflammation. They were also more likely to develop a severe form of a disease associated with multiple sclerosis in humans.

The scientists then conducted a closer examination of these effects at a molecular level. Laboratory tests revealed that salt exposure increased the levels of cytokines released by Th17 cells 10 times more than usual. Cytokines are proteins used to pass messages between cells.

Study co-author Ralf Linker, from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, said: ‘These findings are an important contribution to the understanding of multiple sclerosis and may offer new targets for a better treatment of the disease, for which at present there is no cure.’ It develops when the immune system mistakes the myelin that surrounds the nerve fibres in the brain and spinal cord for a foreign body.

It strips the myelin off the nerves fibres, which disrupts messages passed between the brain and body causing problems with speech, vision and balance.

Another of the study’s authors, Professor David Hafler, from Yale University, said that nature had clearly not intended for the immune system to attack its host body, so he expected that an external factor was playing a part.

He said: ‘These are not diseases of bad genes alone or diseases caused by the environment, but diseases of a bad interaction between genes and the environment.‘

Humans were genetically selected for conditions in sub-Saharan Africa, where there was no salt. It’s one of the reasons that having a particular gene may make African Americans much more sensitive to salt.

‘Today, Western diets all have high salt content and that has led to increase in hypertension and perhaps autoimmune disease as well.’

The team next plan to study the role that Th17 cells play in autoimmune conditions that affect the skin.

‘It would be interesting to find out if patients with psoriasis can alleviate their symptoms by reducing their salt intake,’ they said.

‘However, the development of autoimmune diseases is a very complex process which depends on many genetic and environmental factors.’

Stick to Good Salts

Refined, processed and bleached salts are the problem. Salt is critical to our health and is the most readily available nonmetallic mineral in the world. Our bodies are not designed to processed refined sodium chloride since it has no nutritional value. However, when a salt is filled with dozens of minerals such as in rose-coloured crystals of Himalayan rock salt or the grey texture of Celtic salt, our bodies benefit tremendously for their incorporation into our diet.

“These mineral salts are identical to the elements of which our bodies have been built and were originally found in the primal ocean from where life originated,” argues Dr Barbara Hendel, researcher and co-author of Water & Salt, The Essence of Life. “We have salty tears and salty perspiration. The chemical and mineral composition of our blood and body fluids are similar to sea water. From the beginning of life, as unborn babies, we are encased in a sack of salty fluid.”

“In water, salt dissolves into mineral ions,” explains Dr Hendel. “These conduct electrical nerve impulses that drive muscle movement and thought processes. Just the simple act of drinking a glass of water requires millions of instructions that come from mineral ions. They’re also needed to balance PH levels in the body.”

Mineral salts, she says, are healthy because they give your body the variety of mineral ions needed to balance its functions, remain healthy and heal. These healing properties have long been recognised in central Europe. At Wieliczka in Poland, a hospital has been carved in a salt mountain. Asthmatics and patients with lung disease and allergies find that breathing air in the saline underground chambers helps improve symptoms in 90 per cent of cases.

Dr Hendel believes too few minerals, rather than too much salt, may be to blame for health problems. It’s a view that is echoed by other academics such as David McCarron, of Oregon Health Sciences University in the US. He says salt has always been part of the human diet, but what has changed is the mineral content of our food. Instead of eating food high in minerals, such as nuts, fruit and vegetables, people are filling themselves up with “mineral empty” processed food and fizzy drinks.

Study Source:

This is the result of a study conducted by Dr. Markus Kleinewietfeld, Prof. David Hafler (both Yale University, New Haven and the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, and Harvard University, USA), PD Dr. Ralf Linker (Dept. of Neurology, University Hospital Erlangen), Professor Jens Titze (Vanderbilt University and Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg, FAU, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg) and Professor Dominik N. Muller (Experimental and Clinical Research Center, ECRC, a joint cooperation between the Max-Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine, MDC, Berlin, and the Charite — Universitatsmedizin Berlin and FAU) (Nature, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11868)*. In autoimmune diseases, the immune system attacks healthy tissue instead of fighting pathogens.

Source: Prevent Disease