29/12/2019

The Big Science And Environment Stories Of 2019

BBC News - Paul Rincon

This year, millions of people around the world mobilised in protest to highlight the dire emergency facing our planet. Could 2019 prove to be the year when talk turned to action on the climate crisis? We looked back at some of the biggest stories of the year in science and the environment.

The year the world woke up?
Greta Thunberg (centre) is surrounded by demonstrators at a climate strike march in Vancouver, Canada in October. Reuters
In 2019, the reaction to the ongoing climate crisis switched up another gear. Inspired by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, the climate strike movement exploded this year. Millions took part in mass protests during the course of the year in countries as diverse as Australia, Uganda, Colombia, Japan, Germany and the UK.
Greta chose to make a statement when she sailed - rather than flew - to a UN climate meeting in New York. Summing up the trajectory for many who have joined popular climate movements, she told chief environment correspondent Justin Rowlatt: "I felt like I was the only one who cared about the climate and ecological crisis... it makes me feel good that I'm not alone in this fight."

 Greta Thunberg: "I feel like what I am doing is meaningful."

 The UK's Extinction Rebellion (XR) was making its point through non-violent direct action in 2019. The group, which aims to compel government action on climate change, occupied five prominent sites across central London in April 2019. Notably, they parked a pink boat in the middle of busy Oxford Circus bearing the phrase "Tell the Truth".
This year also saw the UK's Parliament - along with individual councils around the country - declare a climate emergency, granting what had been one of XR's key demands.
But there were also setbacks to political efforts aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The US - one of the world's top emitters - began the process of pulling out of the Paris Agreement. This deal was conceived in 2015 with the intention of keeping the global average temperature to below 2C. President Donald Trump said the pact was bad for the US economy and jobs.
This year's UN climate meeting - COP25 - ended in a deal many described as disappointing. The result means that the onus now falls on the UK to resolve many of the most challenging questions at COP26 in Glasgow in 2020.

'Ring of fire'
The first ever picture of a black hole: It's surrounded by a halo of bright gas pulled in by the hole's gravity. EHT Collaboration
In April, astronomers released the much anticipated first image of a black hole. This is a region of space from which nothing, not even light, can escape. The picture was taken by a network of eight telescopes across the world and shows what was described as "the heavyweight champion of black holes".
The 40 billion km-wide, spacetime-warping monster features an intense halo, or "ring of fire", around the black hole caused by superheated gas falling in.
The image caused a sensation and raised the profile of one computer scientist working on the project. 29-year-old Dr Katie Bouman helped develop an algorithm that allowed the image to be created. A picture of her with hands clasped over her mouth, barely containing her excitement at the astronomical picture on her laptop, quickly went viral.
But her fame led to trolling, with some accusing her of hogging credit for a male colleague's work. That team member, Dr Andrew Chael, quickly came to her defence. In an interview for the BBC 100 Women series, Dr Bouman said: "At first I was really taken aback by it. But... I do think it is important that we highlight the women in these roles."


Katie Bouman: "I wasn't expecting the attention I got."

Land and oceans under threat
Two major reports from the UN's climate science body revealed in sharp relief the extent to which humanity is ravaging Earth's land surface and her oceans. The first of these documents from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) warned that we must stop abusing the land if catastrophic climate change is to be avoided.
The report outlined how our actions were degrading soils, expanding deserts, flattening forests and driving other species to the brink of extinction. Scientists involved in the UN process also explained that switching to a plant-based diet could help combat climate change.
Even 1.5C of warming could devastate coral reefs. Getty Images
The second report, dealing with the world's oceans and frozen regions, detailed how waters are rising, ice is melting and species are being forced to move. As co-ordinating lead author Dr Jean-Pierre Gattuso said, "The blue planet is in serious danger right now, suffering many insults from many different directions and it's our fault." The authors believe that the changes we've set in motion are coming back to haunt us. Sea level rise will have profound consequences for low-lying coastal areas where almost 700 million people live.

Far-out fly-by
NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI/Roman Tkachenko
On 1 January, Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft made the most distant ever exploration of a Solar System object. Launched all the way back in 2006, it performed its primary task - a flyby study of the Pluto system - in 2015. But with plenty of gas still in the tank, mission scientists directed the spacecraft towards a new target, an object called 2014 MU 69.
MU 69, later dubbed Ultima Thule, and more recently Arrokoth, may be fairly typical of the primitive, icy objects occupying a distant zone of our Solar System known as the Kuiper Belt.
There are hundreds of thousands of objects out there like it, and their frigid state holds clues to how all planetary bodies came into being some 4.6 billion years ago.
Earlier this year, scientists presented details of what they had found at a major conference in Houston. They had determined that Arrokoth's two lobes formed when distinct objects collided at just 2-3m/s, about the speed you would run into a wall, according to team member Kirby Runyon.

Greenland's record melt
Climate scientist Steffen Olsen took this picture while travelling across melted sea ice in north-west Greenland. Steffen Olsen
In September, former UK chief scientist Sir David King said he was scared by the faster-than-expected pace of climate-related changes. One of the most shocking examples this year of the extreme events Sir David spoke of was surely the record ice melt in Greenland.
In June, temperatures soared well above normal levels in the Danish territory, causing about half its ice sheet surface to experience some melting. As David Shukman reported on his trip to the region, during 2019 alone, it lost enough ice to raise the average global sea level by more than a millimetre.
Underlining the rapid nature of the change, he returned to a glacier he had filmed in 2004 to find that it had thinned by as much as 100m over the period.


 A visit to the Sermilik glacier, which is rapidly melting.

Greenland's ice sheet stores so much frozen water that if the whole of it melted, it would raise sea levels worldwide by up to 7m. Although that would take hundreds or thousands of years, polar scientists told the American Geophysical Union meeting in December that Greenland was losing its ice seven times faster than in the 1990s.
Prof Andy Shepherd, of Leeds University, said: "The simple formula is that around the planet, six million people are brought into a flooding situation for every centimetre of sea-level rise."

Rocks from space
3D model of the asteroid Bennu, created using data from Nasa's Osiris-Rex mission. NASA
While civilisation-threatening asteroids are a staple of the movies, the probability of a sizeable space rock hitting our planet is very low. But as the dinosaurs found out, the risk does increase with time. Some 19,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) are being monitored, but many lurk undetected by telescopes, so there is always potential for a bolt-from-the-blue.
In March, Nasa scientists told the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) that a big fireball had exploded in Earth's atmosphere at the end of 2018. The space rock barrelled in without warning and detonated with 10 times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
Luckily, the rock blew up over the sea off Russia's remote Kamchatka Peninsula. But an outburst that size could have had serious consequences had it occurred nearer the ground, over a densely populated area.
Then in July, an asteroid the size of a football field buzzed Earth, coming within 65,000km of our planet's surface - about a fifth the distance to the Moon. The 100m-wide rock was detected just days before it passed Earth.
Meanwhile, two robotic spacecraft have been examining different NEAs close-up. Scientists working on Japan's Hayabusa mission reported that their asteroid, Ryugu, was made of rubble blasted off a bigger object. And the US Osiris-Rex spacecraft detected plumes of particles erupting from the surface of its target, Bennu.

 'Dirty secret' boosts warming
Electrical switchgear the world over often uses SF6 to prevent fires. Getty Images
The gas sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) isn't a household name. But as the most powerful greenhouse gas known to science, it could play an increasingly important role in discussions about climate change.
As environment correspondent Matt McGrath reported in September, levels are on the rise as an unintended consequence of the boom in green energy. The cheap, non-flammable gas is used to prevent short circuits and fires in electrical switches and circuit breakers known collectively as "switchgear".
As more wind turbines are built around the world, more of these electrical safety devices are being installed. The vast majority use SF6.
Although overall atmospheric concentrations are small for now, the global installed base of SF6 is expected to grow by 75% by 2030. Worryingly, there's no natural mechanism that destroys or absorbs the gas once it's been released.

Reigning supreme
Google
Quantum computers hold huge promise. The "classical" machines we use today compute in much the same way as we do by hand. Quantum computers promise faster speeds and the ability to solve problems that are beyond even the most powerful conventional types. But scientists have struggled to build devices with enough units of information (quantum bits) to make them competitive with classical computers.
A quantum machine had not surpassed a conventional one until this year. In October, Google announced that its advanced quantum processor, Sycamore, had achieved "quantum supremacy" for the first time. Researchers said it had performed a specific task in 200 seconds that would take the world's best supercomputer 10,000 years to complete.
IBM, which has been working on quantum computers of its own, questioned some of Google's figures. But the achievement represents an important step towards fulfilling some of the predictions.

Links
at No comments:

Report Shows 2019 Global Climate Problems

Canberra Times - Emily Beament, Press Association

Devastating Queensland floods are among climate disasters on every continent in 2019, a report says.
Australia was among every populated continent in 2019 hit by climate change-related extreme weather events, harming and displacing millions of people and costing billions, a new report by Christian Aid says.
A report from the charity identifies 15 of the most destructive droughts, floods, fires, typhoons and cyclones of the past year, which each caused damage of more than a $US1 billion ($A1.4 billion).
All of the disasters identified in the Counting the Cost report, including floods and bushfires in Australia, are linked with human-caused climate change, Christian Aid said on Thursday.
In some cases, studies have shown that climate change made them more likely or stronger, such as Cyclone Idai in Africa and floods in India and the US.
In others, the event was the result of shifts in weather patterns, such as higher temperatures and reduced rainfall making wildfires more likely, or warmer water temperatures that "supercharged" tropical storms.
"If anything, 2019 saw even more profound extreme weather events around the world than last year, including wildfires from the Amazon through to the Arctic, devastating out-of-season, simultaneous wildfires in California and Australia, winter heatwaves and devastating superstorms," Professor Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Centre at Pennsylvania State University, said.
"With each day now we are seemingly reminded of the cost of climate inaction in the form of ever-threatening climate change-spiked weather extremes."
Of the 15 events identified in the report, seven cost more than $US10 billion each, the charity said, and warned that the figures were likely to be an underestimate as in some cases they only include insured losses.
The most financially costly disasters identified by the report were wildfires in California, which caused $US25 billion in damage, followed by Typhoon Hagibis in Japan, which cost $US15 billion.
The next most financially costly were floods in the American Midwest in March ($US12.5 billion) and in China between June and August ($US12 billion, the report said.
The events with the greatest loss of life were floods in northern India which killed 1,900 and Cyclone Idai, which killed 1,300, Christian Aid said.
Cyclone Fani in India and Bangladesh in May displaced 3.4 million people.
The UK did not escape the weather extremes, with Storm Eberhard hitting the country along with Belgium and the Netherlands in early March, before moving east to affect Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Ukraine.
The storm caused damage across Europe costing $US1 billion to $US1.7 billion.
Analysis suggests severe wind storms will be increasingly likely to hit Europe as temperatures rise, and in the UK insurance claims from these kind of storms could increase by 50 per cent in some parts of the country.
The UK is set to host key UN climate talks in Glasgow in November next year.
At the talks, countries will be under pressure to increase their ambition in cutting greenhouse gases, to meet promises under the international Paris Agreement on climate change to curb temperature rises to 1.5C or 2C to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.
Dr Kat Kramer, Christian Aid's global climate lead and report co-author, said 2020 will be a "huge year" for how the world responds to the growing climate crisis.
"We have the biggest summit since the Paris Agreement was signed five years ago taking place in Glasgow, where countries must commit to further cut their emissions in line with the 1.5C temperature limit, and boost funding for poor countries suffering from the kind of impacts seen in this report.
"Last year, emissions continued to rise, so it's essential that nations prepare these new and enhanced pledges for action to the Paris Agreement as soon as possible."

The 15 climate-related extreme weather events identified in the report are:
  • January: Argentina and Uruguay, floods $US2.5 billion, five killed;
  • January-February: Australia, floods $US1.9 billion, three killed;
  • March: Europe, Storm Eberhard $US1-1.7 billion, four killed;
  • March: Southern Africa, Cyclone Idai $US2 billion, 1,300 killed;
  • March-June: Midwest and South US, floods $US12.5 billion, three killed;
  • March-April: Iran, floods $US8.3 billion, 78 killed;
  • May: India and Bangladesh, Cyclone Fani $US8.1 billion, 89 killed;
  • June-August: China, floods $US12 billion, 300 killed;
  • June-October: North India, floods $US10 billion, 1,900 killed;
  • August: China, Typhoon Lekima $US10 billion, 101 killed;
  • September-October: Japan, Typhoon Faxai $US5-$US9 billion, three killed) and Hagibis ($US15 billion, 98 killed);
  • September: North America, Hurricane Dorian $US11.4 billion, 673 killed;
  • September: Spain, floods $US2.4 billion, seven killed;
  • September: Texas, US, Tropical Storm Imelda, $US8 billion, five killed.
  • October-November: California, US, fires $US25 billion, three killed.
Links
at No comments:

(AU) The Bizarre, Apocalyptic Effects Of Australia’s Extreme Heat

Quartz - Alexandra Ossola

Thirsty Koala. Oakbank Balhannah CFS via AP
It’s just the beginning of Australia’s summer, and the heat has already been breaking records. On Dec. 18, temperatures rose to a national average of 40.9°C (105.6°F)—and it doesn’t look like the heat will relent anytime soon.
There are some predictable effects for extreme heat, such as drought, the increased frequency of wildfires, and poor air quality. And such heat is, of course, dangerous for humans, who risk heat stroke and dehydration.
But there are also other effects on animals and the environment that are already proving surprising. This is likely a sign of things to come, as researchers anticipate that climate change will make extremely hot periods like this one more common in Australia.

Koalas are dehydrated
The animals, of which there are only an estimated 100,000 left, live in what are now some of the hottest parts of the country. They consume water by eating leaves. As Fast Company reports, one effect of climate change is that those leaves now contain less water than they used to. Some koalas have reportedly come up to humans to drink water out of a bottle. Others have been trapped in habitats that have been subject to wildfires and have had to be treated for burns on their fur and paws.

Cows can no longer mate
In the Sydney Morning Herald, veterinarian Gundi Rhoades details the effects of extreme heat she has seen on the cattle industry in New South Wales. “They are becoming infertile from their testicles overheating. Mares are not falling pregnant, and through the heat, piglets and calves are aborting,” she writes.

Large numbers of wild animals are dying off
An incomplete list of animals that have died en masse in recent years: bats, fish, and horses. Many more were killed on purpose—after 90 feral horses were found dead next to a water source that had dried up, another 50 horses were so dehydrated that they were considered too weak to be relocated and had to be killed. Ranchers in western Australia shot at least 2,500 camels that, according to NPR, “threatened to drain ranchers’ [water] reserves for cattle.”

Birds are grounded
A garden designer told the New York Times earlier this month that he saw lots of birds seeking shade under trees instead of their typical position perched atop them. “I’ve been walking around the parklands, turning on the taps at the bottom of the trees. [The birds] with their beaks open, [were] all gasping for air,” he said.

Tropical fish are exploring new coasts
Last year, the Queensland grouper, which usually lives in the coral reefs off the coast of Australia’s northeast state, was seen off the uncharacteristically warm coast of New Zealand, 3,000 km (1,800 miles) away.

Fruit is baking on trees
It’s likely not surprising that crops aren’t doing well in the extreme heat. But earlier this year, Kris Werner, head of Dried Tree Fruits Australia, told ABC that his peaches and nectarines have been cooking on the tree branches where they grew.

A strange hot ocean blob appeared
Among the least explained phenomena is a patch of warm water, 1.5 times the size of Texas, that has appeared off the southeast coast of New Zealand. Researchers aren’t quite sure how it formed and what its effect is, according to the Guardian, but they suspect it’s a natural variation that hasn’t been dispersed because there hasn’t been much wind.

A man cooked pork in his car
Stu Pengelly, a resident of Perth, noticed that temperatures would get real hot in his Datsun Sunny. So he put a piece of pork on a pan on the seat of the car. Over the next 10 hours he monitored the temperature, which reached 81°C (178°F). “My warning is do not leave anyone or anything precious to you in a hot car, not for a minute,” he wrote on Facebook.

Links
at No comments: