Science
UN: Don’t forget to save species while fixing global warming
To save the planet, the world needs to tackle the crises of climate change and species loss together, taking measures that fix both and not just one, United Nations scientists said.
A joint report Thursday by separate U.N. scientific bodies that look at climate change and biodiversity loss found there are ways to simultaneously attack the two global problems, but some fixes to warming could accelerate extinctions of plants and animals.
For example, measures such as expansion of bioenergy crops like corn, or efforts to pull carbon dioxide from the air and bury it, could use so much land — twice the size of India — that the impact would be “fairly catastrophic on biodiversity,” said co-author and biologist Almut Arneth at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
Read:Forecast: 40% chance Earth to be hotter than Paris goal soon
Policy responses to climate change and biodiversity loss have long been siloed, with different government agencies responsible for each, said co-author Pamela McElwee, a human ecologist at Rutgers University.
The problems worsen each other, are intertwined and in the end hurt people, scientists said.
“Climate change and biodiversity loss are threatening human well-being as well as society,” said report co-chair Hans-Otto Portner, a German biologist who helps oversee the impacts group of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Earth’s naturally changing climate shaped what life developed, including humans, but once people in the industrialized world started pumping fossil fuels into the air, that triggered cascading problems, Portner said.
Read:Carbon storage offers hope for climate, cash for farmers
“It’s a high time to fix what we got wrong,” he said. “The climate system is off-track and the biodiversity is suffering.”
There are many measures that can address both problems at once, the report said.
“Protecting and restoring high-carbon ecosystems,” such as tropical forests and peatlands, should be high priority, said co-author Pete Smith, a plant and soil scientist at the University of Aberdeen.
While some climate solutions can increase species loss, scientists said efforts to curb extinctions don’t really harm the climate.
Read:‘Next big wave’: Radiation drugs track and kill cancer cells
Yunne Shin, director of research at French National Research Institute, said the bulk of measures taken to protect biodiversity will also help curb climate change. While she applauded growing interest in nature-based solutions, she said, conservation measures “must be accompanied by clear cuts in emissions.”
“This report is an important milestone,” said Simon Lewis, chairman of global change science at University College London, who was not part of the report.
“Finally the world’s bodies that synthesize scientific information on two of the most profound 21st century crises are working together,” he said. “Halting biodiversity loss is even harder than phasing out fossil fuel use.”
Spacecraft buzzes Jupiter’s mega moon, 1st close-up in years
NASA’s Juno spacecraft has provided the first close-ups of Jupiter’s largest moon in two decades.
Juno zoomed past icy Ganymede on Monday, passing within 645 miles (1,038 kilometers). The last time a spacecraft came that close was in 2000 when NASA’s Galileo spacecraft swept past our solar system’s biggest moon.
Read:NASA picks Venus as hot spot for two new robotic missions
NASA released Juno’s first two pictures Tuesday, highlighting Ganymede’s craters and long, narrow features possibly related to tectonic faults. One shows the moon’s far side, opposite the sun.
“This is the closest any spacecraft has come to this mammoth moon in a generation,” said Juno’s lead scientist, Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “We are going to take our time before we draw any scientific conclusions, but until then we can simply marvel at this celestial wonder – the only moon in our solar system bigger than the planet Mercury.”
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Ganymede is one of 79 known moons around Jupiter, a gas giant. Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei discovered Ganymede in 1610, along with Jupiter’s three next-biggest moons.
Launched a decade ago, Juno has been orbiting Jupiter for five years.
‘Next big wave’: Radiation drugs track and kill cancer cells
Doctors are reporting improved survival in men with advanced prostate cancer from an experimental drug that delivers radiation directly to tumor cells.
Few such drugs are approved now, but the approach may become a new way to treat patients with other hard-to-reach or inoperable cancers.
The study tested an emerging class of medicine called radiopharmaceuticals, drugs that deliver radiation directly to cancer cells. The drug in this case is a molecule that contains two parts: a tracker and a cancer-killing payload.
Trillions of these molecules hunt down cancer cells, latching onto protein receptors on the cell membrane. The payload emits radiation, which hits the tumor cells within its range.
“You can treat tumors that you cannot see. Anywhere the drug can go, the drug can reach tumor cells,” said Dr. Frank Lin, who had no role in the study but heads a division at the National Cancer Institute that helps develop such medicine.
Results were released Thursday by the American Society of Clinical Oncology ahead of its annual meeting this weekend. The study was funded by Novartis, the drug’s maker, which plans to seek approvals in the United States and Europe later this year.
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When cancer is confined to the prostate, radiation can be beamed onto the body or implanted in pellets.
But those methods don’t work well in more advanced prostate cancer. About 43,000 men in the United States each year are diagnosed with prostate cancer that has spread and is no longer responding to hormone-blocking treatment.
The study tested a new way to get radiation treatment to such patients.
It involved 831 men with advanced prostate cancer. Two-thirds were given the radiation drug and the rest served as a comparison group. Patients got the drug through an IV every six weeks, up to six times.
After about two years, those who received the drug did better, on average. The cancer was kept at bay for nearly nine months compared to about three months for the others. Survival was better too — about 15 months versus 11 months.
The gain may not seem like much, but “these patients don’t have many options,” said ASCO president Dr. Lori Pierce, a cancer radiation specialist at the University of Michigan.
Radioactivity can reduce blood cell production, which can lead to anemia and clotting problems for patients. In the study, 53% of the patients had serious side effects compared to 38% of patients in the comparison group. Both groups were allowed to get other treatments.
Also read: Covid impact: Cancer deaths likely to rise in coming years, says WHO
The results pave the way for government approval and will boost interest in radiation drugs, Lin said.
Others already in use include Novartis’ Lutathera for a rare type of cancer of the stomach and gut.
And Bayer’s Xofigo is approved for men whose prostate cancer has spread to the bone but not elsewhere. Xofigo targets areas where the body is trying to repair bone loss from tumor damage, but it isn’t directly aimed at prostate cancer cells wherever they may be in the body.
Since the experimental drug targets tumor cells, “that would be a first for prostate cancer,” Lin said.
In the coming decade, such drugs “will be a major thrust of cancer research,” said Dr. Charles Kunos, who worked on standards for radiopharmaceutical research at the National Cancer Institute before leaving to join University of Kentucky’s Markey Cancer Center. “It will be the next big wave of therapeutic development.”
“There’s great potential” with drugs being tested for melanoma and breast, pancreatic and other cancers, said Dr. Mary-Ellen Taplin of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who had no role in the study but reviewed the data.
As for prostate cancer, “it opens up a range of future strategies,” including at earlier stages of disease and alongside other treatments, said study leader Dr. Michael Morris of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
NASA picks Venus as hot spot for two new robotic missions
NASA is returning to sizzling Venus, our closest yet perhaps most overlooked neighbor, after decades of exploring other worlds.
The space agency’s new administrator, Bill Nelson, announced two new robotic missions to the solar system’s hottest planet, during his first major address to employees Wednesday.
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“These two sister missions both aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world capable of melting lead at the surface,” Nelson said.
One mission named DaVinci Plus will analyze the thick, cloudy Venusian atmosphere in an attempt to determine whether the inferno planet ever had an ocean and was possibly habitable. A small craft will plunge through the atmosphere to measure the gases.
It will be the first U.S.-led mission to the Venusian atmosphere since 1978.
The other mission, called Veritas, will seek a geologic history by mapping the rocky planet’s surface.
Read:Forecast: 40% chance Earth to be hotter than Paris goal soon
“It is astounding how little we know about Venus,” but the new missions will give fresh views of the planet’s atmosphere, made up mostly of carbon dioxide, down to the core, NASA scientist Tom Wagner said in a statement. “It will be as if we have rediscovered the planet.”
NASA’s top science official, Thomas Zurbuchen, calls it “a new decade of Venus.” Each mission — launching sometime around 2028 to 2030 — will receive $500 million for development under NASA’s Discovery program.
The missions beat out two other proposed projects, to Jupiter’s moon Io and Neptune’s icy moon Triton.
The U.S. and the former Soviet Union sent multiple spacecraft to Venus in the early days of space exploration. NASA’s Mariner 2 performed the first successful flyby in 1962, and the Soviets’ Venera 7 made the first successful landing in 1970.
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In 1989, NASA used a space shuttle to send its Magellan spacecraft into orbit around Venus.
The European Space Agency put a spacecraft around Venus in 2006.
Chinese cargo spacecraft docks with orbital station
An automated spacecraft docked with China’s new space station Sunday carrying fuel and supplies for its future crew, the Chinese space agency announced.
Tianzhou-2 spacecraft reached the Tianhe station eight hours after blasting off from Hainan, an island in the South China Sea, China Manned Space said. It carried space suits, living supplies and equipment and fuel for the station.
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Tianhe, or Heavenly Harmony, is third and largest orbital station launched by China’s increasingly ambition space program.
The station’s core module was launched April 29. The space agency plans a total of 11 launches through the end of next year to deliver two more modules for the 70-ton station, supplies and a three-member crew.
China was criticized for allowing part of the rocket that launched the Tianhe to fall back to Earth uncontrolled. There was no indication about what would happen to the rocket from Saturday’s launch.
Read:China delays supply mission to newly launched space station
Beijing doesn’t participate in the International Space Station, largely due to U.S. objections. Washington is wary of the Chinese program’s secrecy and its military connections.
Forecast: 40% chance Earth to be hotter than Paris goal soon
There’s a 40% chance that the world will get so hot in the next five years that it will temporarily push past the temperature limit the Paris climate agreement is trying to prevent, meteorologists said.
A new World Meteorological Organization forecast for the next several years also predicts a 90% chance that the world will set yet another record for the hottest year by the end of 2025 and that the Atlantic will continue to brew more potentially dangerous hurricanes than it used to.
For this year, the meteorologists say large parts of land in the Northern Hemisphere will be 1.4 degrees (0.8 degrees Celsius) warmer than recent decades and that the U.S. Southwest’s drought will continue.
The 2015 Paris climate accord set a goal of keeping warming to a few tenths of a degree warmer from now. The report said there is a 40% chance that at least one of the next five years will be 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial times — the more stringent of two Paris goals. The world is already 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times.
Read:Carbon storage offers hope for climate, cash for farmers
Last year, the same group forecasted a 20% chance of it happening.
The doubling of the odds is due to improvements in technology that show it has “actually warmed more than we thought already,” especially over the lightly-monitored polar regions, said Leon Hermanson, a climate scientist at the United Kingdom’s Met Center who helped on the forecast.
“It’s a warning that we need to take strong action,” Hermanson said.
Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann, who wasn’t part of the report, said he is “almost certain” the world will exceed that Paris warming threshold at least once in the next few years. But he said one or two years above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) isn’t as worrisome as when the overall trend of temperatures stays above that level.
Mann said that won’t happen probably for decades and could still be prevented.
Stephen Hawking’s archive, office acquired for UK public
London’s Science Museum and the Cambridge University library said Wednesday they have acquired a large collection of items belonging to late physicist Stephen Hawking, from his personalized wheelchairs to landmark papers on theoretical physics and his scripts from his appearance on “The Simpsons.”
The entire contents of Hawking’s office at Cambridge — including his communications equipment, memorabilia, bets he made on scientific debates and office furniture — will be preserved as part of the collection belonging to the Science Museum Group.
Hawking occupied the office at the university’s department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics from 2002 until shortly before his death in 2018.
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Highlights will go on display at the London museum early next year. Museum officials are also hoping to create a touring exhibition in the U.K. before setting up a permanent display in London.
Meanwhile, his vast archive of scientific and personal papers, including a first draft of his bestselling “A Brief History of Time” and his correspondence with leading scientists, will remain at Cambridge University’s library.
The institutions’ acceptance of Hawking’s archive and office meant that his estate settled 4.2 million pounds ($5.9 million) in inheritance tax.
This was done through a U.K. government plan which allows those who have such tax bills to pay by transferring important cultural, scientific or historic objects to the nation. Artefacts accepted under the plan are allocated to public collections and available for all.
Hawking studied for his PhD at Cambridge and later became the university’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, the same post that Isaac Newton held from 1669 to 1702.
Cambridge’s acquisition of the 10,000-page archive means that Hawking’s papers will join those of Newton and Charles Darwin at the university library, where they will soon be free for the public to access.
“The archive allows us to step inside Stephen’s mind and to travel with him round the cosmos to, as he said, ‘better understand our place in the universe,’” said Jessica Gardner, the university’s librarian.
“This vast archive gives extraordinary insight into the evolution of Stephen’s scientific life, from childhood to research student, from disability activist to ground-breaking, world-renowned scientist,” she added.
Read:Carbon storage offers hope for climate, cash for farmers
Diagnosed with motor neuron disease at 22 and given just a few years to live, Hawking survived for decades, dying in 2018 at 76. His work on the mysteries of space, time and black holes captured the imagination of millions, and his popular science books made him a celebrity beyond the preserves of academia. Hollywood celebrated his life in the 2014 biopic “The Theory of Everything.”
Hawking’s children, Lucy, Tim and Robert, said they were pleased that their father’s work will be preserved for the public for generations to come.
“My father would be so pleased and I think maybe at the same time, just a tiny bit overwhelmed that he was going to form part of the ... history of science, that he was going to be alongside the great scientists, the people whose work he really admired,” Lucy Hawking said.
Cosmic 2-for-1: Total lunar eclipse combines with supermoon
The first total lunar eclipse in more than two years coincides with a supermoon this week for quite a cosmic show.
This super “blood” moon will be visible Wednesday across the Pacific — offering the best viewing — as well as the western half of North America, bottom of South America and eastern Asia.
Better look quick: The total eclipse will last about 15 minutes as Earth passes directly between the moon and the sun. But the entire show will last five hours, as Earth’s shadow gradually covers the moon, then starts to ebb. The reddish-orange color is the result of all the sunrises and sunsets in Earth’s atmosphere projected onto the surface of the eclipsed moon.
“Hawaii has the best seat in the house and then short of that will be California and the Pacific Northwest,” said NASA’s Noah Petro, project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. New Zealand and Australia also will have prime viewing.
Read:Solar eclipse on the longest day of the year
Circling the moon for 12 years, the orbiter will measure temperatures changes on the lunar surface during the eclipse. Telescopes atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea also will monitor the moon, Petro said.
The moon will be setting and the sun rising along the U.S. East Coast, leaving skygazers — Petro in Virginia included — pretty much out of luck. Europe, Africa and western Asia will miss everything. There will be livestreams available.
Everyone everywhere, though, can still soak in the brighter than usual moon, weather permitting.
The moon will be more than 220,000 miles (357,460 kilometers) away at its fullest. It’s this proximity, combined with a full moon, that qualifies it as a supermoon, making it appear slightly bigger and more brilliant in the sky.
Last month’s supermoon, by contrast, was 96 miles (155 kilometers) more distant.
Read: 2-for-1: Total lunar eclipse comes with supermoon bonus
Unlike a solar eclipse, there’s no harm in looking at an eclipsed moon.
More lunar shows are on the horizon.
“For people who might feel like we’re missing out, set your calendars for Nov. 19 of this year,” Petro said. This will be a nearly total eclipse where the moon dims but doesn’t turn red.
The next total lunar eclipse will be May 2022. The last one was January 2019.
China’s Mars rover touches ground on red planet
China’s first Mars rover has driven down from its landing platform and is now roaming the surface of the red planet, China’s space administration said Saturday.
The solar-powered rover touched Martian soil at 10:40 a.m. Saturday Beijing time (0240 GMT), the China National Space Administration said.
China landed the spacecraft carrying the rover on Mars last Saturday, a technically challenging feat more difficult than a moon landing, in a first for the country. It is the second country to land and operate a spacecraft on Mars, after the United States.
Read:China receives photos from Mars: state-run media
Named after the Chinese god of fire, Zhurong, the rover has been running diagnostics tests for several days before it began its exploration Saturday. It is expected to be deployed for 90 days to search of evidence of life.
The U.S. also has an ongoing Mars mission, with the Perseverance rover and a tiny helicopter exploring the planet. NASA expects the rover to collect its first sample in July for return to Earth as early as 2031.
China has ambitious space plans that include launching a crewed orbital station and landing a human on the moon. China in 2019 became the first country to land a space probe on the little-explored far side of the moon, and in December returned lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s.
Carbon storage offers hope for climate, cash for farmers
The rye and rapeseed that Rick Clifton cultivated in central Ohio were coming along nicely — until his tractor rumbled over the flat, fertile landscape, spraying it with herbicides.
These crops weren’t meant to be eaten, but to occupy the ground between Clifton’s soybean harvest last fall and this spring’s planting. Yet thanks to their environmental value, he’ll still make money from them.
Farmers increasingly have been growing offseason cereals and grasses to prevent erosion and improve soil. Now, they’re gaining currency as weapons against climate change.
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Experts believe keeping ground covered year-round rather than bare in winter is among practices that could reduce emissions of planet-warming gases while boosting the agricultural economy, if used far more widely.
“For too long, we’ve failed to use the most important word when it comes to meeting the climate crisis: jobs, jobs, jobs,” President Joe Biden said in his April address to Congress. One example, he added: “Farmers planting cover crops so they can reduce the carbon dioxide in the air and get paid for doing it.”
Clifton, 66, started growing cover crops several years ago to improve corn, soybean and wheat yields. Then he read about Indigo Agriculture, a company that helps businesses and organizations buy credits for carbon bottled up in farm fields. He signed a contract that could pay about $175,000 over five years for storing greenhouse gases across his 3,000 acres (1,214 hectares).
“If you can get something green on the ground year-round, you’re feeding the microbes in the soil and it’s a lot healthier,” he said, touring a barn loaded with cultivating and harvesting equipment. “And if somebody wants to pay you to do that, it looks to me like you’re foolish not to do it.”
Agriculture generates about 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions: methane from livestock, nitrous oxide from fertilizers, carbon dioxide from machinery.
All industries are under pressure to reduce emissions, primarily by switching to renewable energy.
But farming has something most others don’t: the ability to pull carbon dioxide, the most prevalent climate-warming gas, out of the atmosphere and store it. Plants use it in photosynthesis, their process of making food.
Besides cover crops, promising techniques for carbon storage include reducing or eliminating tillage and letting marginal croplands revert to plains or woods, said Adam Chambers, a U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service air quality scientist.
Agriculture won’t be “the sole solution, but I see it as a solid plank in an overall program to address climate change over the next few decades,” said David Montgomery, a University of Washington geologist.
The National Academy of Sciences estimates agricultural soils could take in 250 million metric tons (276 million tons) of atmospheric carbon dioxide annually, which would offset 5% of U.S. emissions.
Some caution against overselling farmland’s potential. Iowa State University ecologist Steven Hall says that at some soil depths, microbes convert carbon absorbed by cover crops into gas that returns to the atmosphere.
“It may make sense to pay farmers to do this,” he said. “But I would go into it a bit more suspicious that we’ll get a maximum performance on all farms.”
The federal government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars helping farmers make environmentally friendly changes. Since 2005, those actions have produced an eight-fold increase in prevention of greenhouse gas emissions, the NRCS says.
The latest U.S. Census of Agriculture in 2017 found more farmers were switching from conventional soil tilling, a big source of carbon pollution, to reduced or no-till practices. It also recorded a 50% increase in cover cropping over five years.
But the 15.4 million acres (6.2 million hectares) planted in cover crops were just 6.7 % of the land suitable for it.
Biden has ordered the Department of Agriculture to craft a plan for making such practices so common that the U.S. farm industry would become the world’s first to achieve net zero emissions.
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Secretary Tom Vilsack has pledged bigger payments for pulling marginal lands out of crop production to make way for carbon-absorbing grasses, trees and wetlands. He announced $330 million for local climate partnerships and $25 million for testing new ideas.
Supporters say unless the actions are mandatory, which farmers resolutely oppose, more financial incentives will be needed.
The agriculture department is consulting industry groups about tapping the $30 billion Commodity Credit Corp., which helps keeps farm incomes and prices stable, to establish a “carbon bank” that could pump in more funds.
Republican lawmakers say financing carbon storage should be left to rapidly developing private markets.
Indigo Agriculture is among recent arrivals brokering sales of credits for farmland carbon to buyers wanting smaller environmental footprints. Thousands of growers with a combined 2.7 million acres (1.09 million hectares) have signed with Indigo to receive payments for greenhouse gas storage, said Chris Harbourt, head of its carbon program.
The Boston-based company’s agronomists help producers adopt the techniques. It uses farm management data, soil sampling and modeling software to calculate credits, based on volumes of gases pulled underground or prevented from being generated.
IBM, J.P. Morgan Chase and Barclays are among buyers of Indigo’s credits. Farmers currently get $15 for each metric ton ($15 per 1.1 ton) of carbon with payments phased in over several years.
The extra cash is nice but hardly a windfall, said Lance Unger, who recently enrolled 7,500 acres (3,035 hectares) near Carlisle, Indiana. More important is that carbon-sequestering steps also mean bigger yields and profitability from lands packed with organic nutrients, the third-generation farmer said.
“I want to make our farm better for the fourth generation,” said Unger, 33, strolling through corn stubble in a field he now tills more lightly than before. He also uses cover cropping and more efficient fertilizing, which reduces nitrous oxide emissions.
Still, some farmers are reluctant to change habits ingrained over generations. Others wonder whether carbon markets will work.
Pending U.S. Senate and House bills would help farmers get started and provide third-party inspections to verify improvements. The chief Senate sponsor, Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, said attitudes have changed since she unsuccessfully proposed a similar program in 2009.
“Farmers have been hit right in the head with one weather disaster after another. They know the climate is changing,” the Democrat said.
The measures have bipartisan sponsorship and support from industry groups such as the American Farm Bureau Federation. The Environmental Defense Fund is among green organizations backing it.
But an opposing coalition of other environmentalists and small-farm groups says credit markets let corporate polluters outsource carbon reduction instead of mending their own ways.
The critics told Congress that farmers who adopt the newer land management practices could abandon them later. “Without adequate measurement tools or guarantees of permanence, quantifying soil carbon to use in a carbon market becomes a guessing game and does not guarantee actual reductions in greenhouse gases,” they said.
Read: World carbon dioxide emissions drop 7% in pandemic-hit 2020
Bruno Basso, a Michigan State University soil and plant scientist, said farmers are unlikely to resume old ways after seeing how the changes benefit their lands. Carbon storage methods and technology to assess their performance are improving, he added.
The NRCS and Colorado State University continue refining an online system that calculates carbon stored and greenhouse gases prevented through conservation efforts. It’s based on factors such as location, soil types, tillage practices, nutrient applications and crop cultivation.
Such complex data analysis lends credibility to eco-friendly agriculture, once widely associated with “offbeat farmers,” said Keith Paustian, a soil and crop scientist at Colorado State.
“It seems to some degree utopian, but what is best for the planet can also be what’s best for farmers and society,” he said.