Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label nerds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nerds. Show all posts

Thursday, February 01, 2024

Today's Nerd Thing

50 years ago, we sent guys to the moon, where they picked up a bunch of rocks, which turned out to be about the same age as Earth rocks, and had about the same composition.

There's a zombie planet trying to get out.


Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Today's Nerd Thing

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched about a month apart in 1977.

They're about 15 billion miles away, and while V1 went quiet this past December, the nerds are hoping to get a fix for it, and V2 seems to be doin' fine and goin' strong.

By golly, I love me some nerds.


In only 40,000 years, the Voyagers
will be closer to another star
than they are to our sun.




Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Today's Nerdy Thing

Sometimes knowing too much about how something is done kinda spoils the magic. For me, it just makes the magic more amazing. Especially when it's about the magic of music.

I can sing a little, and I've been banging around on my guitar for a good long time, and while I can usually play &/or sing the right notes at the right time, it only occasionally results in what I can reasonably call "real music".

So when I get a chance to see how that "real music" is made, I'm at once tickled by the beauty and the spectacle of it all - plus it's always good to learn something new - and I can see a very good excuse for not being better at it myself. Taken together, that's actually pretty comforting for me.

Aimee Nolte explains:




Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Down The Road


In 1916, Albert Einstein wrote down an equation describing the "stimulated emission of light". It was a tiny bit of his work that attracted no attention at the time. It just lay there for decades in a pile of other bits and pieces of quantum physics stuff.

40 years later, it became the foundation for a technology that led to the invention of the laser.

Neither Einstein nor the many nerds who followed were thinking, "Y'know what, I think barcodes and inventory control is what we should be working towards - and a digital music format would be cool too..."

Today, right about ⅓ of the world's entire GDP depends on some aspect of information technology - creating, processing, storing, retrieving and transmitting information - but if you had asked those nerds 50 or 60 or 70 years ago, "OK, so how does this benefit me right here and right now?", they wouldn't have had answers. And if instant gratification is your only criterion for whether or not you fund their work, you'd cut their budgets and the work would either be wasted, or delayed to the point of being lost - potentially for generations.

Twenty years before Einstein, an English physicist name JJ Thomson proved the existence of the electron, overturning 2,000 years of humans' "understanding" of the structure of atoms.

Neither of these discoveries had any practical application at the time.

Can you tell me what part of your existence right now isn't either dependent upon or tied in some way to electronics?

Support your local nerds

Monday, September 25, 2023

Today's Nerd Thing

The first permanent tools - the ones that were more than strictly ad hoc and disposable - probably predate our human ancestors.

"It is a testament to how difficult it is for intelligent life to emerge on a planet of tooth and claw."


Sunday, September 24, 2023

Yay Nerds


I just fuckin' love me some nerds.

Imagine what the world could be like if what these guys are doing took priority over the utter bullshit ambitions of way too many asshole politicians.

The asteroid Bennu


A NASA Spacecraft Comes Home With an Asteroid Gift for Earth

The seven-year OSIRIS-REX mission ended on Sunday with the return of regolith from the asteroid Bennu, which might hold clues about the origins of our solar system and life.

A brown-and-white capsule that spent the last seven years swooping through the solar system — and sojourning at an asteroid — has finally come home. And it has brought a cosmic souvenir: a cache of space rock that scientists are hungry to get their hands on.

On Sunday morning, those scientists waited eagerly as the pod shot through Earth’s atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour. It gently parachuted down into the muddy landscape of the Utah Test and Training Range, about 80 miles west of Salt Lake City, at 8:52 a.m. local time.

The capsule’s landing is a major win for a NASA mission called OSIRIS-REX, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resources Identification and Security-Regolith Explorer. The spacecraft set out in 2016 to retrieve material from Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid about 190 feet wider than the height of the Empire State Building. Researchers hope this pristine space dirt will reveal clues about the birth of our solar system and the genesis of life on Earth.

“This is a gift to the world,” said Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and the principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REX mission, at a news conference last month.

Scientists who were working on the mission endured many twists and turns, including a seven-year struggle to get the project greenlit by NASA. Their perseverance paid off as OSIRIS-REX became the first American spacecraft to retrieve material from an asteroid, bringing back a staggering amount of matter from space for scientists around the world to study. But the victorious final act means so much more for the OSIRIS-REX team members, many of whom “grew up on this mission,” according to Dr. Lauretta.

“A little bit of us is on that spacecraft,” said Rich Burns, the OSIRIS-REX program manager at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, at the news conference. “And a little bit of us is coming home with it.”

Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid, is currently many millions of miles from our planet. Like other asteroids in the solar system, it is a geological relic of the protoplanetary disk — a swirling mix of gas and dust that eventually coalesced into planets — that surrounded our sun billions of years ago. One theory is that small worlds like Bennu once seeded Earth with the prebiotic ingredients needed to form life.

But it is difficult to test this idea using meteorites, pieces of asteroids that reach Earth’s surface, which are heated by the atmosphere and are then contaminated by microbes on the ground, Dr. Lauretta said. Instead, many scientists turn their eyes (and their instruments) to space.

This is not the first chunk of an asteroid brought back to Earth. In 2010, the Hayabusa mission, led by the Japanese space agency JAXA, managed, in spite of technical troubles, to recover less than a milligram of material from a near-Earth asteroid named Itokawa. A decade later, a follow-up mission, Hayabusa2, retrieved a few grams of space rock from Ryugu. With that sample, scientists have found evidence suggesting that asteroids had delivered water to the early Earth, and discovered the presence of uracil — a building block of RNA, a molecule that helps form proteins.

OSIRIS-REX’s delivery will provide an abundant new stock of space rock. The team anticipates about half a pound of unsullied asteroid dirt. Shogo Tachibana, a planetary scientist at the University of Tokyo who led the Hayabusa2 sample analysis and is now a co-investigator on OSIRIS-REX, has “no idea” whether Bennu will be anything like Ryugu — but it’s what he is most looking forward to finding out.

From the beginning, the mission was a marathon. American scientists had long dreamed of fetching dust from an asteroid, and in 2004, a group submitted an application for what would become OSIRIS-REX. But NASA returned the project with the lowest ranking: Category 4, or “thanks, but no thanks,” Dr. Lauretta said. “The first proposal just bombed.”

The team tried again in 2007. This time, it scored a ranking of Category 1 — but failed to snag funding because the budget was too large.

The third time was the charm. NASA selected the project in 2011. “So that began our real journey,” said Harold Connolly, a cosmochemist at Rowan University who joined OSIRIS-REX 15 years ago. The team spent another half-decade “making sure all our little ducks were in a row,” he said, including designing and building the spacecraft, mapping the trek to Bennu and plotting the science campaign.

OSIRIS-REX launched in 2016, embarking on a roundabout series of fuel-efficient loops before arriving at Bennu on Dec. 3, 2018.

ImageA view looking into the OSIRIS-REx Curation Lab, which has shiny white walls and a shiny light gray floor, and a metal working station that is sealed off with gloves.
The OSIRIS-REX Curation Lab, where samples will be processed, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.Credit...Mark Felix/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Despite the meticulous planning, the mission repeatedly faced the unexpected. “I call Bennu the trickster,” Dr. Lauretta said endearingly. “Because it has challenged us constantly on this program.”

Mission specialists expected Bennu’s surface to consist of smooth, sandy seas of fine particles. But as the asteroid came into focus, they found it was rocky and rough, with boulders, some 10 stories tall, sprinkled throughout. That made finding a place where the spacecraft could safely retrieve a sample from the surface riskier.

Engineers were troubleshooting that problem when Bennu threw them another loop: It was spewing rubble into space. That was “really exciting scientifically,” said Sandy Freund, the OSIRIS-REX program manager at the aerospace company Lockheed Martin. But “from an engineering standpoint,” the discovery posed a new problem.

The mission scientists frantically churned out calculations to make sure OSIRIS-REX was safe from being struck by the asteroid’s gravelly plumes. The operations team swiftly wrote new navigation software that could compensate for the rugged terrain on Bennu.

The next big hurdle was to select a sample site: a place where the spacecraft could safely fill its canister with fine grain regolith. That was made more difficult by the uneven ground of Bennu. Photos of the asteroid revealed some sandy regions on the surface — but only inside bowl-shaped craters. “We got to get inside one of those,” Dr. Lauretta said, to the distress of the operations team. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

The margin for error was small. Touch down wrong, and the spacecraft may have faced a fate like Hayabusa, which crash-landed on its asteroid. Or worse: OSIRIS-REX comes down on a slope and runs into what Dr. Lauretta calls “the banana peel scenario,” where it slips and falls into a crater.

“And then it’s all over,” he said.

After two years of surveying the asteroid, the mission team chose a spot it named Nightingale, near the asteroid’s north pole. In October 2020, OSIRIS-REX punched the surface of Bennu using a tool that was supposed to bounce off Bennu like a pogo stick.

But it did not exactly bounce as planned. Dr. Connolly recalled that he was shocked at how deep the instrument penetrated into the asteroid — about one and a half feet.

“We thought it would be a little more firm,” he said. “But it turns out gravity is basically the only thing that’s holding it together.”

The blow excavated a 30-foot-wide crater and blasted dusty debris into space — an unintentional experiment that revealed some properties of Bennu’s subsurface.

The surprises didn’t end there. When the team checked to make sure it had collected a large enough sample, it found the chamber overflowing with regolith.

“We had overachieved,” Ms. Freund said. “It was wedged open and leaking into space.” Every movement of the spacecraft led to greater loss of Bennu’s dust, like the way salt comes out of a shaker.

The team immediately halted all planned maneuvers to prevent losing any more of its precious cargo. Instead, the crew rushed to stow what remained in the leaky chamber within the return capsule.

Six months later, OSIRIS-REX captured one last look at Nightingale and then began the two-year journey back to Earth. “It was definitely an adventure,” Dr. Lauretta said.

In the days leading up to the sample’s plunge into Earth’s atmosphere, Dr. Lauretta was having trouble sleeping. He tried to push away “all of the doom scenarios” like what happened with NASA’s Genesis, a probe that grabbed plasma from the solar wind to bring back to Earth. In 2004, it crashed into a Utah desert when the parachute for its return capsule failed to deploy. (Despite the rough landing, researchers were able to recover and analyze the sample.)

“And that felt like a gut punch then,” Dr. Lauretta said while squeezing a stress ball shaped like the OSIRIS-REX capsule. Approaching the latest sample return was “unlike anything I’ve ever felt before,” he added. “I feel like there’s an electric wire at the base of my spine, just tingling.”

Michael Puzio, an engineering major at North Carolina State University, also felt “a bit terrified” leading up to the sample’s return. In third grade, Mr. Puzio won a contest to name the asteroid Bennu. It ignited in him a love of space and a dream to be an astronaut.

“But I think it’s in good hands,” Mr. Puzio added. The mission team “is pretty good at math, so I’ve heard.”

At 2 a.m. local time on Sunday morning, the OSIRIS-REX command team in Littleton, Colo., evaluated the landing conditions and held a go-or-no-go poll on the capsule drop. The team voted go and OSIRIS-REX released the capsule at 4:42 a.m.

Four hours later, it entered Earth’s atmosphere. The first parachute inflated 19 miles above the surface; a second was deployed just minutes later, slowing the cargo’s speed to 11 miles per hour.

For Dr. Lauretta, the safe return is both a professional achievement and a personal one: Michael Drake, the former principal investigator of OSIRIS-REX, died only five months after the mission was funded. “You need to be the one that finishes the dream,” Dr. Lauretta said Dr. Drake told him. “And so I did.”

The capsule and its contents are headed to a temporary clean room near the Utah landing site and then will be transferred to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Scientists plan to crack open the canister on Tuesday, and get a small amount of the material into the lab for what Dr. Connolly calls a “quick look” analysis. In October, the sample team will reveal the first results to the world, including Bennu’s composition and how it compares with material brought back from the asteroids studied by the Japanese missions.

Dr. Connolly struggled to express what it meant to him that the mission had come back to Earth.

“I feel like a little kid again,” he said. “I’m just so happy to be able to tell the story that these rocks contain.”

Scientists will spend the next two years conducting a more robust investigation of the asteroid. Small portions of the sample will be handed off to JAXA and the Canadian Space Agency for their own analyses.

Up to 75 percent of Bennu’s regolith will remain in storage so that scientists in the future can “work on the sample with new techniques that we don’t even know exist yet,” Dr. Connolly said.

The OSIRIS-REX mission may have come to an end, but the spacecraft remains fully operational in space. It will next visit Apophis, another near-Earth asteroid that was once seen as a major threat to crash into Earth. More recent measurements determined that the asteroid will pass by Earth in 2029, within one-tenth of the distance to the moon.

The new project is named OSIRIS-APEX, where APEX means Apophis Explorer, and may provide information for mitigating more hazardous encounters with asteroids.

The leader of OSIRIS-APEX will be Dani Mendoza DellaGiustina, a former student of Dr. Lauretta’s who is now a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona. It is another example of how the journey to Bennu and back has, from the project’s conception, raised a generation of scientists in the field.

“I’ve been working on some incarnation of this mission basically my entire adult life,” Dr. DellaGiustina said. She added that while she was “super stoked” about OSIRIS-REX’s return, “for me, it’s definitely not the last hurrah.”

Wednesday, July 12, 2023

Today's Nerd Thing

The JWST has been in place and functional for a year, and we're getting our money's worth.

Rho Ophiuchi, the star-forming region closest to Earth


JWST keeps finding cosmic gems, black holes and surprising galaxies

NASA is marking the anniversary of the James Webb Space Telescope’s scientific debut with the release of a spectacular new image


The James Webb Space Telescope was designed to tunnel deeper into space and farther back in time than any previous observatory, with the audacious goal of seeing the very first galaxies that lit up the young universe. Creating pretty pictures was always a pleasant but ancillary feature of having this amazing new piece of hardware out in space.

Today, 365 days after NASA unveiled the mission’s first batch of data and images, it’s clear that the JWST can produce the hard science and the beauty shots with equal aplomb. NASA is marking the first anniversary of the JWST’s scientific debut with the release of a new image, demonstrating the telescope’s ability to re-envision the universe. The dramatic, somewhat hallucinatory image captures the dynamism of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth, where planetary systems like our own could be in the initial stages of forming.

“The telescope is working better than we could have possibly hoped for,” said NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby, who earlier this month became the senior project scientist for the JWST.

The scientific community was a little conservative in planning their agenda for the first year of observations, but this next year of science will take full advantage of what the telescope can do, Rigby said. “We’re getting bolder in year two.”

The JWST’s journey around the sun has not been without speed bumps. The first year of scientific operations included a brief pause in data collection for safety reasons and a heart-stopping collision with space dust that forced project managers to fly the observatory more or less backward from now on.

But the scientists working with the telescope’s downloaded data are thrilled by its performance as it peers into the infrared portion of the spectrum, gathering light that can’t be collected by its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.

The big headline so far is that the JWST has seen lots of surprisingly bright galaxies in the early universe. This proved to be a bit befuddling.

No, the JWST did not disprove the big bang theory. Cosmology has not gone the way of phrenology. But the observations of so much light coming from the early period of galaxy formation led to a lot of head-scratching. Observation and theory have not been perfectly aligned.

“I think there is a tension,” said physicist Massimo Stiavelli, the JWST mission head at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “This is undeniable, because things are different from what we thought they would be.”

The JWST was conceived in the late 1980s as the successor to the yet-to-launch Hubble, but suffered many years of delays and near-death encounters with budget-minded lawmakers. It’s a $10 billion investment. It is not designed with the kind of modular features that would enable replacement parts if something went screwy.

Also it’s way out in deep space, in a gravitationally stable orbit around the sun called L2 that keeps it roughly a million miles from Earth. NASA doesn’t currently have spaceships to carry astronauts to L2 and back.

All this reinforces the joy among scientists that the telescope works as planned.

For a telescope of this design, a year is a big deal. The telescope’s mirrors have to remain extremely cold and can’t be pointed anywhere near the sun, so don’t expect to see any pretty JWST images of Venus. But a full orbit gives the telescope a chance to cover most of the universe.

JWST, which launched on Christmas morning 2021, has actually made one-and-a-half orbits, but the first six months were devoted to deploying its huge array of gold-coated hexagonal mirrors and a sprawling sun shade to keep them cool, as well as fine-tuning its instruments.

The light gathered by those mirrors carries information about multiple layers of the universe, from the farthest, dimmest, barely perceptible galaxies to more flamboyant galaxies in the foreground and star-forming clouds of dust and gas within our own Milky Way. And it’s looked at our immediate neighborhood, the solar system, returning poster-worthy pictures of Jupiter and Saturn that are jammed with scientific data.

The early universe is where the JWST has done its most interesting and, at times, puzzling investigations. The goal is to understand how the early universe evolved, how galaxies formed and how we got to where we are — on a planet orbiting a star on one of the spiral arms of a large galaxy.

“Our home is the Milky Way,” said Brant Robertson, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “That is a galaxy. It’s a beautiful galaxy. We can take pictures from the inside. But it begs the question: How did it get here? How did it form?”

This cosmic archaeology is why the JWST was built in the first place. One strange feature of the universe is that light is eternal. It gets fainter but it’s still there, including the most ancient light, heavily shifted into the infrared portion of the spectrum by the expansion of space that’s been happening since the big bang. Astrophysicists can use the JWST to scan for extremely high-redshift galaxies, digging ever deeper into the past.

Robertson co-wrote one of two recent papers that describe the most distant galaxy yet detected and confirmed by the JWST, named JADES-GS-Z13-0. It was found at redshift 13.2, which corresponds to about 320 million years after the big bang. There are claims of possible galaxies at higher redshifts, but they await confirmation, he said.

Asked what the galaxy looks like, he said: “It’s a smudge.”

But what if you could somehow get in a spacecraft and transport yourself through various wormholes into the distant past and hover right next to that galaxy. Then what would it look like?

“If you could be right up next to it, the galaxy itself would be very blue to your eyes, because it’s forming stars,” Robertson said. “It would be a very blue sparkler in the early universe.”

A puzzle about early galaxies

Right away, astronomers looking at the JWST data on the early universe spotted something that defied expectations: a lot of oddly bright galaxies.

Brightness is an approximation for mass. Very bright galaxies, therefore, would normally be assumed to be very massive. But galaxies need time to grow. The theorists had previously worked out a general timeline for the evolution of early galaxies, and the ones detected by the JWST look at first glance remarkably mature for their age.

The JWST may be telling scientists that galaxy formation in the early universe was somehow more efficient than previously known.

“There’s some tweaking we need to do in our theories for how those very early galaxies formed and grew their stars,” said Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

“Nothing we’ve seen makes me think we’ve broken cosmology,” Rigby said. “What it is telling us is that galaxies got their act together earlier than we gave them credit for.”

Counterintuitively for those of us who are not astrophysicists, black holes could be another factor in the luminosity of those early galaxies. Although by definition a black hole is a structure with such an intense gravity field that even light cannot escape, the region around a black hole can glow as gas and dust become superheated falling toward the event horizon.

Last year Rebecca Larson, at that time still a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, saw something peculiar as she scrutinized data from an extremely distant galaxy named CEERS 1019. It emitted that light more than 13 billion years ago — back when the universe was just getting rolling, and galaxies were small, ill-formed gaggles of hot, young, bright-blue stars.

Larson was puzzled by the unusually bright light coming from the core of CEERS 1019. “What the heck is this?” she thought.

What she guessed it to be — correctly — is a supermassive black hole. The galaxy, though young, had already managed to grow a black hole that scientists estimate to have a mass equal to 10 million suns. A report from Larson and her colleagues describe this as the earliest active supermassive black hole ever detected.

Excitement over exoplanets

What the past year has also started to show is that the JWST is, in the words of astrophysicist Garth Illingworth, a “spectroscopic powerhouse.” It has proved to be spectacular at picking through the spectra of the light it gathers, which carries information about the object being observed.

That ability yielded one of the telescope’s first major discoveries: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a giant planet, WASP 39b, orbiting a distant star. The planet itself isn’t visible with current technology. But as it passes in front of, or behind, its parent star, the changes in starlight encode information about the atmosphere of the planet.

Until the JWST, no one had made a definitive detection of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, said Knicole Colon, a NASA astrophysicist.

“The first time we saw the spectral signature of that feature, it was just beautiful,” she said. “It hit us in the face. Here’s this whopping signal, which was fantastic.”

To be clear, scientists looking at spectra are looking at graphical presentations of data, not actual images. Larson, who found the supermassive black hole, was so transfixed by the spectral signature of a central bright region in that galaxy that, as she put it, “I never thought to go look at the actual images from JWST.”

That’s when Kartaltepe showed her the image of the galaxy obtained by the telescope. Strikingly, the galaxy had three bright spots, with a particularly bright spot right in the middle. That was Larson’s supermassive black hole.

“I just started crying,” she said.

Thursday, June 29, 2023

Today's Nerd

"... a brand new physics..."

My new favorite phrase from my new favorite ÜberNerd.




Tuesday, June 20, 2023

The Antropocene Epoch

The gain is always tempered by the cost.

God love the nerds


HIDDEN BENEATH THE SURFACE

Digging deep into a humble lake in Canada, scientists found a spot on Earth like no other — and a record that could redefine our history of the planet

This summer, researchers will determine whether Crawford Lake should be named the official starting point for this geologic chapter, with pollution-laden sediments from the 1950s marking the transition from the dependable environment of the past to the uncertain new reality humans have created.

In just seven decades, the scientists say, humans have brought about greater changes than they did in more than seven millennia. Never in Earth’s history has the world changed this much, this fast. Never has a single species had the capacity to wreak so much damage — or the chance to prevent so much harm.

“It’s a line in the sand,” said Francine McCarthy, a professor of Earth sciences at Brock University in Ontario, who has led research on Crawford Lake. “The Earth itself is playing by a different rule book. And it’s because of us.”

Seeking the golden spike

Every new phase of Earth’s history begins with a “golden spike” — a spot in the geologic record where proof of a global transformation is perfectly preserved.

These spikes are like exclamation points in the story of the planet, punctuating a tale of shifting continents, evolving species and temperatures that rose and fell as carbon levels fluctuated in the atmosphere. They mark the starts of epochs — small segments of geologic time. And they have helped scientists interpret the forces that shaped Earth’s past climates, which in turn allows them to forecast the effects of modern warming.

In 2009, the International Commission on Stratigraphy — an obscure scientific body responsible for defining the phases of Earth’s past — created a new working group to investigate the evidence for the Anthropocene. The group’s mission: to identify a potential “golden spike” site that might convince fellow scientists of the new epoch’s validity.

Their search spanned from mountain summits to the depths of the ocean, from the Antarctic ice sheet to tropical coral reefs. And, in 2018, it led them to McCarthy’s office door.

Before that moment, few beyond her field knew of McCarthy’s research studying lake sediments for signs of past climate change. Her outreach work was meaningful, but largely local: advocating for conservation of the Great Lakes, teaching geology to students at her midsize public university.

Crawford Lake was similarly modest — just a pretty little pool at a park in the Toronto suburbs. Schoolchildren liked to visit its reconstructed Indigenous longhouses. Locals treasured it as a quaint spot to have a picnic and watch for birds.

Yet McCarthy’s colleague Martin Head, a geologist at Brock who had been involved with the Anthropocene Working Group, was intrigued by the rare chemistry uncovered at Crawford.

No other water body is known to possess this particular combination of attributes, making Crawford Lake a unique bellwether of global change.

“It’s a freak of nature, but it’s my little freak of nature,” McCarthy said. “And it’s perfect for what we need.”

As she considered her colleague’s proposal, McCarthy thought about the decades she’d spent studying prior planetary upheavals. Her work on lake sediments from the past several million years had shown her how dramatic swings in temperature destabilized ecosystems and drove species to extinction.

Without drastic action to stave off modern climate change, she said, that history could repeat.

The diary of the Earth

McCarthy stood on the shore of Crawford Lake, watching the April breeze ruffle the water surface, waiting for work to begin.

First, researchers had to tether a wooden raft in the deepest part of the lake, right over the spot they wanted to sample.

To extract the lake’s layered sediments, the team used a tool called a “freeze corer,” but more affectionately known as “the frozen finger.” The long aluminum wedge was filled with a mixture of alcohol and dry ice, making it much colder than the surrounding water, soil and air.

They suspended the freeze corer from a tripod and lowered it through a hole in the raft. Down, down it went, through 75 feet of water, until finally it sank into the squishy mud on the lake bottom.

Then they waited. It would take about 40 minutes for the lake sediments to freeze onto the corer’s chilly surface.

Finally, it was time to pull the corer back up. Clinging to its face was a five-foot slice of mud, cut from the lake bottom like a piece from the center of a cake.

Back on shore, McCarthy traced a gloved finger over the core’s delicate brown and white stripes — sharper than any other sample she’d seen.

She had uncovered dozens of Crawford Lake cores by that point — but every extraction felt special, and strangely intimate. Each sample, she knew, would give her a glimpse into a thousand years of the lake’s history, revealing its deepest responses to the changing world above. Each was like a new page from the diary of the Earth.

What secrets would she find inside?

The archive inside Crawford Lake’s cores shows how human pressures on the lake built up over the centuries like steam inside a kettle, until finally the kettle boiled over.

But humanity’s influence hasn’t always been so destructive. The first people to make their mark on the lake were Native villagers who built longhouses near the lakeshore. Researchers have counted more than two centuries’ worth of sediments from the lake’s “Indigenous period” containing crop pollen and other evidence of human habitation alongside ancient goose droppings and traces of trees.

Around the start of the 16th century, all signs of the settlement vanished for reasons still unknown. Yet the seasonal process that built the lake’s layers remained.

Sediments from subsequent eras showed Europeans’ growing influence on the landscape. White pine pollen counts dwindled as people cut down trees. Traces of ragweed marked how different species flourished in the cleared land.

The impacts piled up throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Tiny black bits of fly ash — a byproduct of burning coal and oil — drifted into the lake from rapidly industrializing cities. Heavy metals like copper and lead increased in the mud.

And then, around 1950, the world reached a tipping point.

“This is when humans essentially overwhelmed the Earth as a functioning system,” said Head, McCarthy’s collaborator. Crawford Lake — and the rest of the planet — were fundamentally, irrevocably transformed.

The sharpest sign of change was a surge in radioactive plutonium that started in Crawford Lake’s mud around 1950. The element rarely occurs naturally on this planet; it could only have come from nuclear weapon tests happening thousands of miles away.

Other shifts weren’t necessarily new, but they appeared at scales ten or a hundred times greater than anything the lake had seen before. A lighter form of nitrogen — a molecular signature of burning fossil fuels — proliferated. The amount of fly ash increased eightfold in less than five years. Acid rain, caused by pollution reacting with water in the atmosphere, diminished the calcite layers.

Still more sediments recorded irreversible losses. Certain microbe species were eliminated locally. The amount of elm pollen plummeted — a consequence of the invasive fungus that was decimating North America’s tree populations at the time.

All the while, greenhouse gas pollution made the planet inexorably hotter. The lake’s calcite layers became thicker during warm years; pollen grains show how the forest composition shifted to include more heat-loving tree species.

Average temperatures in southern Canada have increased about 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in this time. The globe as a whole is now warmer than it’s been at almost any point since the end of the last ice age.

Researchers were able to calculate summer temperatures from the pollen detected in the core sediments

These changes all are the result of what scientists call “the Great Acceleration” — the dramatic, simultaneous surge in almost every measure of human activity that started in the mid-20th century and continues through today.

The same evidence appears all over the planet, in every potential golden spike site the Anthropocene Working Group has examined. Peat bogs, ocean basins, the skeletons of coral reefs — even the ice of Antarctica has been permanently tainted by human pollution.

“What we have measured, in a very objective and quantitative way, is we are living in a world with conditions that are no longer within the last 11,000 years of natural variability,” McCarthy said. “The Earth is, in fact, fundamentally different.”

‘Where we have a story to tell’

When the last core samples were taken from Crawford Lake this spring, Catherine Tammaro couldn’t bring herself to watch.

To the Wyandot artist and faithkeeper, who is descended from the people who likely once lived here, the lake is a living being. She calls this space “Kionywarihwaen” — a Wyandot name meaning “where we have a story to tell.”

And Crawford Lake had already endured so much painful history. Dredging up its sediments — even for science — felt like another invasion.

But after hours of reflection alongside representatives from other First Nations, Tammaro had come to agree that the coring should go forward.

“It’s like a surgical operation,” she said. “It’s painful, but we recognize that it should be done … because it may help prevent further climate disaster by adding to our understanding of how humans have had an impact on the Earth.”

The extraction of this core was one of the last steps before the Anthropocene Working Group selects its preferred “Golden Spike” site, a decision that is expected this summer. Crawford Lake is considered a top candidate for the recognition.

Before the Anthropocene — and the lake — can claim a place in geologic history, the proposal must undergo several more rounds of voting. And not all geologists are convinced the Anthropocene belongs on Earth’s 4.6-billion-year timeline. Some say this period of overwhelming human influence has been too brief to know whether it is truly an epoch, a span that typically lasts millions of years. Others have pointed out that — unlike the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs and other epoch-defining events — human-caused changes didn’t happen simultaneously all around the world.

“Formalizing the Anthropocene creates a hard and bright line, and you either exist on one side or the other,” said Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine. “But really, it’s been a long gradient, a long process of changing how we live.”

Yet advocates for naming the new epoch say Crawford Lake’s sediments make clear the stark contrast between human impacts before 1950 — which were mostly local and often reversible — and the rapid transformation wrought by modernity.

Unless the world takes drastic steps to curb global warming, pollution and declines in biodiversity, the situation will become worse, said geologist Colin Waters, chair of the Anthropocene Working Group. Scientists warn that the planet is getting dangerously close to climate “tipping points,” where ice melt will accelerate and major weather systems could collapse.

“It is a permanent legacy of human impacts on the planet, written in the rock record,” Waters said.

Yet as much as the Anthropocene is a recognition of humanity’s culpability, it is also a declaration of human agency, McCarthy believes. Alongside geologic evidence of environmental destruction, Crawford Lake holds proof of people’s capacity for repair.

In 1963, when nations agreed to ban nuclear weapons testing that could contaminate the water and atmosphere, plutonium concentrations in Crawford Lake started to diminish. Fly ash counts fell after the United States and Canada required new pollution controls at power plants and other industrial facilities. The revitalization of the lake’s distinctive calcite bands during the 1980s is a sign of successful efforts to combat acid rain.

But not all changes captured in the Crawford cores can be so quickly undone. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations will remain elevated for tens of thousands of years. It will take at least as long, and a dramatic drop in temperature, for the polar ice sheets to return to their preindustrial majesty.

But “it’s not just a doomsday story,” McCarthy said. “It is a ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ story. It shows we can make meaningful change.”

She estimates that Crawford Lake will continue to accumulate new sediments for at least 10,000 years. That means a geologist in the distant future will be able to dig into those layers just as McCarthy has.

They will see whether the world managed to zero out carbon emissions and stabilize global warming.

They will learn whether people preserved threatened species and set aside nuclear weapons.

And they will discover what lessons humanity drew from this record of the Earth.

Sunday, June 18, 2023

Today's Nerds


Early this year, the James Webb Space Telescope glitched, and shut down its Near Infrared Imager gizmo - and it stayed down for two weeks.

The nerds figured out the most likely cause was that it got zapped by some kind of high energy particle put out by a super nova - or some such.

And how did these amazingly talented and high-value tech wizards fix it?

Yup - they turned it off, and then turned it back on again.

God love the ÜberNerds.

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

Light In The Attic


I worry a bit about things like CTE and Dementia and Alzheimer's.

I played some pretty hard football for half a dozen years, so CTE is a fair (though fairly low)  probability, but the prospect of actually losing my mind to something like Alzheimer's Disease kinda freaks me out.

I can only think of a couple of Great Aunts in my family who went a little wacky once they landed north of about 90 - it's just that there's all kinds of weird shit in the environment that could be lookin' to get me one way or another, and Alzheimer's is the really big scary one for me because it can come from practically any direction.

Luckily, they're starting to get a handle on it - they at least know a lot more about the mechanisms - and now there's this new thing that says there may be a gene that can delay the onset of the disease, even if you're pretty much "destined" to get it.

If it pans out, there's a pretty good chance to produce medicines that inoculate against it, or allow for mitigation and management. 

Yay, nerds BTW.


How one man's rare Alzheimer’s mutation delayed the onset of disease

Genetic resilience found in a person predisposed to early-onset dementia could potentially lead to new treatments.


Researchers have identified a man with a rare genetic mutation that protected him from developing dementia at an early age. The finding, published on 15 May in Nature Medicine1, could help researchers to better understand the causes of Alzheimer’s disease and potentially lead to new treatments.

For nearly 40 years, neurologist Francisco Lopera at the University of Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia, has been following an extended family whose members develop Alzheimer’s in their forties or earlier. Many of the approximately 6,000 family members carry a genetic variant called the paisa mutation that inevitably leads to early-onset dementia. But now, Lopera and his collaborators have identified a family member with a second genetic mutation — one that protected him from dementia until age 67.

“Reading that paper made the hair on my arms stand up,” says neuroscientist Catherine Kaczorowski at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “It’s just such an important new avenue to pursue new therapies for Alzheimer’s disease.”

Mutated protein

Lopera and his colleagues analysed the genomes and medical histories of 1,200 Colombians with the paisa mutation, which causes dementia around ages 45—50. They identified the man with the second mutation when he was 67 and had only mild cognitive impairment.

When the researchers scanned his brain, they found high levels of the sticky protein complexes known as amyloid plaques, which are thought to kill neurons and cause dementia, as well as a protein called tau that accumulates as the disease progresses. The brain looked like that of a person with severe dementia, says study co-author Joseph Arboleda, an ophthalmologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. But one small brain area called the entorhinal cortex, which coordinates skills such as memory and navigation, had low levels of tau.

The researchers found that the man had a mutation in a gene coding for a protein called reelin, which is associated with brain disorders including schizophrenia and autism. Little is known about reelin’s role in Alzheimer’s, so the researchers genetically engineered mice with the same mutation. In mice, the mutated form of reelin caused the tau protein to be chemically modified, limiting its ability to cluster around neurons.

The study challenges the theory that Alzheimer’s disease is primarily driven by amyloid plaques, which are the targets of several drugs recently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. The drugs effectively remove amyloid from the brain, but lead to only a moderate improvement in rates of cognitive decline.

The fact that the man stayed mentally healthy for so long despite the many amyloid plaques in his brain suggests that Alzheimer’s is more complicated, says Yadong Huang, a neurologist at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, California. He suggests that there could be multiple subtypes of Alzheimer’s, only some of which are driven by amyloid. “We do need different pathways to really finally deal with this disease,” he says. The link to tau, he says, is especially promising because it suggests that tau plays a role in mental decline. Several therapies targeting tau are currently in clinical trials.

Shared mechanisms

Lopera says that the reelin mutation is extremely rare in the general population, but that his team is now looking for this and other mutations among people with the paisa mutation. The man’s sister, who had both the paisa and reelin mutations, began developing cognitive impairment at age 58 and severe dementia at 64 — later than average for someone with the paisa mutation. The authors say that she had experienced head injuries and had other disorders that could have contributed to her developing dementia earlier than her brother.

Arboleda notes that the mutated reelin protein binds to the same receptors as a protein called APOE, which is also associated with Alzheimer’s disease in people who do not have the paisa mutation. In 2019, the same group had identified a woman with the paisa mutation who developed dementia 30 years later than average, owing to a mutation in APOE2. Like the man in the latest study, the woman’s brain contained much higher levels of amyloid than would be expected in someone with so few Alzheimer’s symptoms.

“It’s really cool because it’s telling us there’s some shared mechanisms,” Kaczorowski says. Reelin and APOE compete to bind to the receptor, and the two findings suggest that either a stronger reelin protein or a weaker APOE protein can protect the brain against the disease. Arboleda says this suggests that therapies targeting reelin or APOE might be even more effective in sporadic Alzheimer’s cases, which tend to be less aggressive and progress more slowly than the early-onset type that the Colombian family experiences.

As with many people with Alzheimer’s, the man’s hippocampus — a brain region controlling learning and memory — was smaller than average at the time of his death, suggesting that it was degenerating. But because his cognitive abilities remained relatively intact, Kaczorowski says, neurons in other parts of the brain might have repurposed themselves to make up for the damage. Knowing whether that happens, she adds, could help to inform future therapeutic strategies.

“The vast majority of research focuses on why some people have Alzheimer’s, very few are on conditions where a factor can go against this disease,” says Huang. He says that further research is needed to pin down the mechanism through which reelin and APOE affect tau, and whether targeting these proteins could help people with Alzheimer’s who do not have the paisa mutation. “This is one of those few cases that really opens the door for anti-Alzheimer’s research.”

self-portraits

Saturday, April 22, 2023

Deep Thought


The Milky Way is bigger
than your standard-issue galaxy.
The average galaxy has about
100 million stars.
The nerds' best guess right now
is that there's something like 2 trillion galaxies.

That's about 200,000,000,000,000,000,000
stars in the
"observable universe."

200 QUINTILLION STARS

This Is A Good Thing?





Thursday, April 13, 2023

Today's Glorious Nerds

Galaxies dancing

Pillars Of Creation

Ring Nebula

Neptune

95% of our universe is made up of something we can't see or feel or hear. But it's there - we call it dark matter, or dark energy - because it has to be there, because there's no such thing as 'nothing'. Empty space is not empty.

This needs to be seen as a significant moment. It feels like we're at a weird place in our evolution - like hominins in Africa a few million years ago. We're up on our hind legs, and our little simian brains are developing pretty well, but while we may have given it a name, we still have no fucking clue what the wind is.



One question:
How can a galaxy be more than 33 billion light years away in a universe that's 14 billion years old?

You make my head hurt, nerds - but in a good way - so keep doin' that.

One other question:
Why can't we concentrate on this kinda thing, and stop with all that other shit like war and conquest and domination?

Thursday, April 06, 2023

Smarterness


And then they found that every decade we were getting a few IQ points smarter.

Yes - that's a little fishy, especially so when we find out that after a while, IQ scores plateaued, and then started going down a bit.

So, what the fuck is up with this shit?


Adam Conover debunks the IQ Test, and Dr Rina Bliss pushes us to rejigger our perceptions of "intelligence".


Our general environment - air and water quality, stress, food and housing security, and a host of other factors - has a considerable impact on our overall intelligence genome, and the changes we experience in our own genetic makeup are passed along to our children, who of course then pass them along to their children.

The dumbing down of America is not just about reality TV and information siloes.



Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change your DNA sequence, but they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence.

"Seize the learning moment."


“Neuroplasticity” refers to your brain’s ability to restructure or rewire itself when it recognizes the need for adaption. In other words, it can continue developing and changing throughout life.
  1. Play video games
  2. Travel
  3. Make music
  4. Learn a new language
  5. Do some artsy stuff
  6. Exercise

Monday, April 03, 2023

Lovin' The Nerds



Researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a micro-robot the size of a single biological cell.

This innovative micro-robot utilises both electricity and magnetic fields for navigation and is capable of identifying, capturing, and transporting individual cells. The micro-robot demonstrates remarkable precision in capturing single red blood cells, cancer cells, and bacteria without the need for tagging. Although tests have been conducted outside the human body, researchers hope to expand to in vivo testing for future applications.

Combining electrical and magnetic propulsion

The hybrid micro-robot, measuring only 10 microns in size, is inspired by bacteria and sperm cells, and is capable of both autonomous and controlled movement within the body. While electrical propulsion enables selective cargo loading, transport, and release, as well as cell deformation, the magnetic propulsion system offers precise steering and functionality across a wide range of temperatures and conductivity levels.

According to Gilad Yossifon, the corresponding author of the study, micro-robots which relied solely on electrical guiding mechanisms were ineffective in certain environments where the electric drive was less effective. This is where the complementary magnetic mechanism comes into play, allowing the micro-robot to overcome the limitations faced by its electrically powered counterparts.

Enhanced cell identification and capture

The hybrid micro-robot demonstrates an advanced ability to distinguish healthy cells from drug-damaged cells and dying cells undergoing natural apoptosis. This technology allows the micro-robot to capture non-labelled cells by sensing their status, making it the first study to use micro-robot-based sensing of label-free apoptotic cells.

Yossifon explains that their new development significantly advances the technology in two main aspects: hybrid propulsion and navigation. By combining both electric and magnetic propulsion systems, the micro-robot is better equipped to identify, capture, and transport single cells without the need for tagging, either for local testing or retrieval and transport to an external instrument.

Opening doors to multiple applications

This innovative hybrid micro-robot has the potential to support a wide range of medical applications, such as medical diagnosis at the single-cell level, introducing drugs or genes into cells, genetic editing, and targeted drug delivery within the body[. Additionally, it could contribute to environmental efforts by removing polluting particles, assisting in drug development, and creating a “laboratory on a particle” for further research and analysis.

The tests conducted so far have been outside the human body, but researchers are hopeful that in vivo testing will eventually become possible, unlocking even more potential for this groundbreaking technology. The study, detailing the development and capabilities of this hybrid micro-robot, was published in Advanced Science.

Friday, March 31, 2023

It's Not What We Think It Is

... or more accurately: It's not what they've been telling us to think it is.

Marketing is an astounding thing - it can do so much.

Except it can't - not really.

Ask any Russian grunt sleeping in the Ukrainian mud right now, how all that Kremlin hype is translating to battlefield success.

Anyway, artificial intelligence in real-world terms is bullshit.


I don't think we don't have to worry about it, but computers achieving consciousness, and then moving to enslave all of humankind is a low-probability thing. What we have to worry about is billionaire plutocrats who are using our infatuation with high tech shit like AI - and our willingness to be dazzled - in order to distract us from a plan to enslave us that they've been running for 50,000 years.


Monday, March 20, 2023

Are We Fucked?

The nerds keep telling us we can prevent the worst of the Climate Change effects if we can get our shit together and really dig into the problems now so we can hit some of our carbon reduction goals by 2030.

They also keep telling us we're not dealing with it very well, and that we prob'ly won't be able to do enough, and so we're headed for a period of time during which we're going to see some of our worst apocalyptic nightmares blossom into a dystopian reality that makes the cynical expectations of HL Mencken and Ambrose Bierce look like a Brady Bunch Christmas episode.



World is on brink of catastrophic warming, UN climate change report says

A dangerous climate threshold is near, but ‘it does not mean we are doomed’ if swift action is taken, scientists say


Human activities have transformed the planet at a pace and scale unmatched in recorded history, causing irreversible damage to communities and ecosystems, according to one of the most definitive reports ever published about climate change. Leading scientists warned that the world’s plans to combat these changes are inadequate and that more aggressive actions must be taken to avert catastrophic warming.

Want to know how your actions can help make a difference for our planet? Sign up for the Climate Coach newsletter, in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday.


At our current global pace of carbon emissions, the world will burn through its remaining “carbon budget” by 2030. Doing so would put the long-term goal of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius irrevocably out of reach.

Why the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius?
Keeping warming below this threshold would help save the world’s coral reefs and preserve the Arctic’s protective sea ice layer. It could also stave off dramatic sea level rise by avoiding further destabilization in Antarctica and Greenland.
So where do we stand now?
The world has already warmed more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures. We charted over 1,200 different scenarios for climate change over the coming century; of those, 230 pathways achieve the warming goal — although only 112 may be realistic.
What can be done?
Not all hope is lost. Tackling global warming is an enormous feat, but there are many people, organizations and activists making bold strides. We’re tracking their stories in our Climate Solutions section.

The report released Monday from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found the world is likely to miss its most ambitious climate target — limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures — within a decade. Beyond that threshold, scientists have found, climate disasters will become so extreme people cannot adapt. Heat waves, famines and infectious diseases will claim millions of additional lives. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered.

Monday’s assessment synthesizes years of studies on the causes and consequences of rising temperatures, leading U.N. Secretary General António Guterres to demand that developed countries like the United States eliminate carbon emissions by 2040 — a decade earlier than the rest of the world.

With few nations on track to fulfill their climate commitments and with the developing world already suffering disproportionately from climate disasters, he said, rich countries have a responsibility to act faster than their low-income counterparts.


The world already has all the knowledge, tools and financial resources needed to achieve its climate goals, according to the IPCC. But after decades of disregarding scientific warnings and delaying climate efforts, it adds, humanity’s window for action is rapidly closing.

“Climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and planetary health,” the report says. “The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”

Calling the report a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb,” Guterres announced on Monday an “acceleration agenda” that would speed up global actions on climate.

Emerging economies including China and India — which plan to reach net zero in 2060 and 2070, respectively — must hasten their emissions-cutting efforts alongside developed nations, Guterres said.

Both the U.N. chief and the IPCC also called for the world to phase out coal, oil and gas, which are responsible for more than three quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions.

“Every country must be part of the solution,” Guterres said. “Demanding others move first only ensures humanity comes last.”

A stark scientific outlook

Already, the IPCC’s synthesis report shows, humanity has fundamentally and irreversibly transformed the Earth system. Emissions from burning fossil fuels and other planet-warming activities have increased global average temperatures by at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the start of the industrial era. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hasn’t been this high since archaic humans carved the first stone tools.

These changes have caused irrevocable damage to communities and ecosystems, evidence shows: Fish populations are dwindling, farms are less productive, infectious diseases have multiplied, and weather disasters are escalating to unheard of extremes. The risks from this relatively low level of warming are turning out to be greater than scientists anticipated — not because of any flaw in their research, but because human-built infrastructure, social networks and economic systems have proved exceptionally vulnerable to even small amounts of climate change, the report said.

The suffering is worst in the world’s poorest countries and low-lying island nations, which are home to roughly 1 billion people yet account for less than 1 percent of humanity’s total planet-warming pollution, the report says. But as climate disruption increases with rising temperatures, not even the wealthiest and most well-protected places will be immune.

The researchers say it’s all but inevitable that the world will surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the early 2030s — pushing the planet past a threshold at which scientists say climate change will become increasingly unmanageable.

In 2018, the IPCC found that a 1.5C world is overwhelmingly safer than one that is 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the pre-industrial era. At the time, scientists said humanity would have to zero out carbon emissions by 2050 to meet the 1.5-degree target and by 2070 to avoid warming beyond 2 degrees.

Five years later, humanity isn’t anywhere close to reaching either goal. Unless nations adopt new environmental policies and rapidly shift their economies away from fossil fuels, the synthesis report says, global average temperatures could warm by 3.2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. In that scenario, a child born today will live to see several feet of sea level rise, the extinction of hundreds of species and the migration of millions of people from places where they can no longer survive.

“We are not doing enough, and the poor and vulnerable are bearing the brunt of our collective failure to act,” said Madeleine Diouf Sarr, Senegal’s top climate official and the chair for a group of least developed countries that negotiate together at the U.N.

She pointed to the damage wrought by Cyclone Freddy, the longest-lasting and most energetic tropical storm on record, which has killed hundreds of people and displaced thousands more after bombarding southern Africa and Madagascar for more than a month. The report shows that higher temperatures make storms more powerful and sea level rise makes flooding from these storms more intense. Meanwhile, the death toll from these kinds disasters is 15 times higher in vulnerable nations than in wealthier parts of the world.

If the world stays on its current warming track, the IPCC says, global flood damages will be as much as four times higher than if people limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“The world cannot ignore the human cost of inaction,” Sarr said.


The price of delay

Though much of the synthesis report echoes warnings scientists have issued for decades, the assessment is notable for the blunt certainty of its rhetoric. The phrase “high confidence” appears 118 times in the 26-page summary chapter. Humanity’s responsibility for all the warming of the global climate system is described as an unassailable “fact.”


Yet the report also details how public officials, private investors and other powerful groups have repeatedly failed to heed those warnings. More than 40 percent of cumulative carbon emissions have occurred since 1990 — when the IPCC published its first report on the dangerous consequences of unchecked warming. The consumption habits of the wealthiest 10 percent of people generate three times as much pollution as those of the poorest 50 percent, the report said.

Decades of delay have denied the world any hope of an easy and gradual transition to a more sustainable economy, the panel says. Now, only “deep, rapid and … immediate” efforts across all aspects of society will be able to stave off catastrophe.

“It’s not just the way we produce and use energy,” said Christopher Trisos, director of the Climate Risk Lab in the African Climate and Development Initiative at the University of Cape Town and a member of the core writing team for the synthesis report. “It’s the way we consume food, the way we protect nature. It’s kind of like everything, everywhere, all at once.”

But few institutions are acting fast enough, the report said. November’s U.N. climate conference in Egypt ended without a resolution to phase down oil, gas and coal — a baseline requirement for curbing climate change. Last year, China approved its largest expansion of coal-fired power plants since 2015. Amid soaring profits, major oil companies are dialing back their clean-energy initiatives and deepening investments in fossil fuels.


Humanity is rapidly burning through the amount of pollution the world can afford to emit and still meet its warming targets, the IPCC said, and projected emissions from existing fossil fuel infrastructure will make it impossible to avoid the 1.5-degree threshold.

World leaders at November's COP27 summit in Egypt. (Mohammed Salem/Reuters)
Yet even as environmental ministers met in Switzerland last week to finalize the text of the IPCC report, the U.S. government approved a new Arctic drilling project that is expected produce oil for the next 30 years, noted Hans-Otto Pörtner, a climatologist at Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute and a co-author of a dozen IPCC reports, including the latest one.

“These decisions don’t match reality,” he said. “There is no more room for compromises.”

Failure to act now won’t only condemn humanity to a hotter planet, the IPCC says. It will also make it impossible for future generations to cope with their changed environment.

There are thresholds to how much warming people and ecosystems can adapt to. Some are “soft” limits — determined by shortcomings in political and social systems. For example, a low-income community that can’t afford to build flood controls faces soft limits to dealing with sea level rise.

But beyond 1.5 degrees of warming, the report says, humanity will run up against “hard limits” to adaptation. Temperatures will get too high to grow many staple crops. Droughts will become so severe that even the strongest water conservation measures can’t compensate. In a world that has warmed roughly 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) — where humanity is currently headed — the harsh physical realities of climate change will be deadly for countless plants, animals and people.

‘It does not mean we are doomed’
Despite its stark language and dire warnings, the IPCC report sends a message of possibility, said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and a member of the core writing team for the report.

“It’s not that we are depending on something that still needs to be invented,” she said. “We actually have all the knowledge we need. All the tools we need. We just need to implement it.”

In many regions, the report says, electricity from renewable sources like solar and wind is now cheaper than power from fossil fuels. Several countries have significantly reduced their emissions in the past decade, even as their economies grew. New analyses show how efforts to fight climate change can benefit society in countless other ways, from improving air quality to enhancing ecosystems to boosting public health. These “co-benefits” well outweigh the costs of near-term emissions reductions, even without accounting for the long-term advantages of avoiding dangerous warming.

Report authors say the IPCC’s assessment comes at a moment of truth for climate action. Starting this year, nations are required to start updating the emissions-cutting pledges they made in Paris in 2015.

The pledges are far from sufficient to fulfill the goals of the Paris agreement, the IPCC says, and most nations are not on track even to meet even those targets. Countries must cut their greenhouse gas emissions by almost half before 2030 for the world to have a 50-50 chance of limiting warming t0 1.5 degrees, the report said.

Unless the world commits to much deeper and faster emissions this decade, it will probably be impossible to limit warming to 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius, the IPCC said. People will live with consequences of that failure for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

“This is a truly a unique moment to be alive," said Kaisa Kosonen, a climate expert for Greenpeace International who represented the nonprofit at the synthesis report approval meeting last week. “The threats are bigger than ever before, but so are our opportunities for change.”

The need to consider climate change’s unequal impacts is a through line in this latest IPCC report. costs of climate change. At last year’s U.N. climate conference, nations agreed to establish a fund that would help pay vulnerable communities for irreversible harms. By the time diplomats meet again in Dubai in December, they are expected to hash out the details of that fund, determining who deserves compensation and who should be on the hook for the bill.

The need to consider climate change’s unequal impacts is a through line in the latest IPCC report. Stronger social safety nets and “redistributive policies that shield the poor and vulnerable” can help build support for the kind of disruptive changes needed to curb carbon emissions, it says. Sharing resources with low-income countries and marginalized communities is necessary to enable them to invest in renewable energy and other forms of sustainability.

“It gives a goal to work towards, to a world that looks different,” Otto said of the report. “It does not mean we are doomed."