California Rim Fire image courtesy of the USDA.

California governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for San Francisco County when a large wildfire on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains threatened to disrupt public utilities. Two of the three hydroelectric power stations in the region were forced to shut down. San Francisco also gets 85% of its water from the nearby Hetch Hetchy reservoir. Most of the western US is in drought and the recent increase in the number and severity of wildfires may be partly the result of climate change. Leia Guccione and James Sherwood argued that communities with smart microgrids stand the best chance of surviving a catastrophe:

Without human beings around to perform certain routine tasks, the electricity system will quickly cease to function. In regions dependent on fossil fuels for electricity generation (i.e. the entire US), power plants will shut down, or “trip,” within 24 hours (or less) without continuous fuel supply. As soon as one plant trips offline, voltage at various points along the transmission system will drop below preset thresholds, spurring a domino effect as automated protection devices kick in and disconnect additional sections of the network. This cascade of trips would bring the system to a standstill, and a blackout would ensue.

Electrical infrastructure could be damaged by a fire, a hurricane, or a geomagnetic solar storm—like the 1859 “Carrington Event”—as well as by cyber and physical attacks. If the electrical infrastructure failed, among other things many communities would no longer have clean drinking water. While critical facilities like hospitals and pumping stations generally have on-site generators to provide backup power, these systems fail at high rate and cannot provide power for very long. But microgrids that generate and store electricity locally from renewable resources should be able to provide continuous power if something happens to other parts of the power system.

President Obama canceled a fall summit in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin after Russia granted temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, who leaked details of a US National Security Agency secret electronic surveillance program. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in a statement that there had not been “enough recent progress in our bilateral agenda with Russia to hold a US-Russia summit in early September.” President Obama faced domestic pressure to call off the summit after Russia granted asylum to Snowden. Tensions between the US and Russia have been growing over US missile defense systems in Europe and Russia’s support of Syria and Iran. The diplomatic spat seems to dim the prospects for nuclear arms control, since the US and Russia have almost 94% of the world of the world’s nuclear warheads. Matt Rojansky told Foreign Policy that without a Russian counterpart it would be difficult for Obama to meet his goal of cutting the number deployed strategic nuclear weapons by one-third.

Sharon Gaudin reported in Computerworld that the US Army is looking at integrating autonomous robots into field units. The Army already uses semi-autonomous robots as tools to carry out a variety of tasks. Greg Hudas, the Army’s chief engineer for ground vehicle robotics, said that the Army could have robotic vehicles that make their own decisions within 5-10 years. But human soldiers will have to be able to trust their ability to perform their roles before robots can operate as autonomous squad members. “The issue is can I have a squad augmented with robots cover more ground, be more effective, do more things on a 72-hour operation than they can today?” Lt. Col Stuart Hatfield said. “We see a transition from a dumb robot being a tool to it becoming a member of the team. Do I have a robot that carries my stuff or do I have robot that is a member of the squad?”

NASA released a graphic showing the orbits of the 1,400 known potentially-hazardous asteroids in relation to the orbit of the Earth. NASA considers asteroids potentially hazardous if they have a diameter of at least 140 meters and come within 4.7 million miles of intersecting the Earth’s orbit. NASA rates the threat that individual asteroids pose within the next 100 years from 0-10 on the Torino Scale, where 0 means a negligible risk and 10 means certain global disaster. The asteroid 2007 VK184, which based on current observations has a 0.055% chance of hitting the Earth before 2048, rates as a 1 on the Torino Scale. 2007 VK184 is the only known asteroid that currently rates higher than a 0. The National Research Council estimated in 2010 that we had identified 85% of the asteroids large enough to cause a worldwide catastrophe.

Scientists found a segment of the MERS virus in the feces of an Egyptian tomb bat living in an abandoned house in Bisha, Saudi Arabia. The virus was a perfect genetic match for a sample of the virus taken from Bisha’s index-case patient, who worked near where the bat was found. The finding lends credence to the theory that bats are the source of the disease. The Egyptian tomb bat feeds on insects and normally has little contact with people, so more work is needed to determine how the virus is transmitted to humans and whether it has other animal hosts. Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance and a contributor to the study, said that victims may have contracted the virus by breathing in dried bat droppings. Daszak also said that the finding underscored the fact that more and more diseases are making the jump from animals to humans as human activity brings us into closer contact with animal populations. “This isn’t all about bats carrying nasty viruses,” Daszak said. “ The real issue is what do we do in the environment that brings us into contact with these viruses. And if we can modify how we work in the environment—and be less intrusive and more clever about the way we develop agriculture and other things—we should be able to avoid these problems.”

Science and Nature published a letter from 22 flu researchers calling for “gain-of-function” experiments that would make the H7N9 bird flu virus more transmissible among humans. The researchers argued we need such experiments to fully assess the risk of novel viruses like H7N9. Science published a roundup of responses to their letter here. The US Department of Health and Human Services announced that it will review such experiments “in light of potential biosafety and biosecurity risks” before funding them. Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard, said

The benefits are sketchy and uncertain for doing this kind of research, while the risk of creating a highly virulent, highly transmissible strain of flu are significant; the probability of an accidental or deliberate release is small, but the consequences would be potentially staggering. The fact that the global population is being put at risk by such experiments, to an appreciable but unknown degree, without being informed, much less consenting, is an ethical problem that has not been faced squarely.

Adel Mahmoud, an infectious disease specialist at Princeton, called it “laughable” to claim that such studies are likely to help predict whether a virus could become pandemic.

A British Medical Journal paper found strong evidence that the H7N9 bird flu virus has already been transmitted between humans. The paper described the case of a 32-year-old woman who appears to have caught the virus from her father while providing him with bedside care. The virus that was isolated from her was genetically identical to a sample of the virus that had been isolated from her father. The woman apparently had had no exposure to live poultry before contracting the virus. James Rudge and Arthur Coker pointed out that the fact that none of the 43 other close contacts of either the woman or her father contracted the disease suggests the probability of human-to-human transmission of the virus is low. They noted that there’s still no evidence of sustained transmission among humans, and that other flu strains that have animal origins have been occasionally transmitted among humans without becoming pandemic.

In Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, David Shlaes and Brad Spellberg found that some bacteria behind common ICU infections are rapidly becoming resistant to the major last-resort antibiotics. Populations of one of the bacteria, Acinetobacter baumannii, already show a 50% resistance to carbapenem-class antibiotics. A PLoS One paper found that a fungicide called ciclopirox inhibits the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria like Acinetobacter baumannii and Escherichia coli, which makes it a promising target for drug development. But right now there are few treatment options for serious antibiotic-resistant infections. Shlaes and Spellberg suggested that the US Food and Drug Administration should revise its clinical trial design rule to encourage pharmaceutical companies to develop more new antibiotics.

The Global Footprint Network announced that August 20 was “Earth Overshoot Day”—the day by which humanity has used the amount of renewable resources the planet will produce in the entire year. From this perspective, everything we consume for the rest of the year depletes the planet’s long-term stock of resources. According to The Global Footprint Network, we began consuming more than the planet produced sometime in the mid-1970s. Earth Overshoot Day has been getting earlier almost every year since then. The Global Footprint Network estimates that we now use renewable resources about 1.5 times as fast as the planet produces them.

A Nature Geoscience paper found that sea levels at the end of the last interglacial period 118 thousand years ago were 9 meters higher than they are today. Planetary temperatures at that time were roughly the same as the temperatures that are expected as the result of global warming. The paper suggested that sea levels may have risen 5 meters in a period less than a thousand years. The rapid rise in sea levels was presumably caused by the melting of polar ice sheets. A study in Nature Climate Change estimates that as sea levels rise global damage from flooding could exceed $1 trillion a year in 2050 if coastal cities don’t do more to protect themselves. According to the study, large developing cities like Guangzhou and Mumbai are the most at risk. Miami, New York, and New Orleans also appear to be among the most vulnerable cities. Low-lying cities like Amsterdam that have done more to prepare for flooding may actually be less vulnerable.

Another Nature Geoscience paper found evidence that earthquakes can release large quantities of methane from gas-hydrate-bearing sediments at the bottom of the ocean. The paper estimated that a 1945 earthquake in Pakistan caused the release of at least 10 million cubic yards of methane from the floor of the Arabian sea over the almost 60 years since. Because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, the release of undersea methane could contribute to global warming. Joel Johnson, a geology professor not involved in the study, told The New York Times that since because methane dissolves in the seawater it is not clear how much methane actually reaches the atmosphere. And a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory study found that reducing human soot and methane emissions would slow global warming by just 0.16 °F by 2050—about one third as much as earlier studies suggested. Steve Smith, the study’s lead author, said that it might be worth reducing human soot and methane emissions for health reasons, but that if we want to slow global warming “the focus needs to be on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.”

A Nature Climate Change letter found that ocean acidification may amplify global warming. Dimethyl sulfide produced by marine phytoplankton is the largest source of atmospheric sulphur. Atmospheric sulphur cools the Earth by seeding the formation of clouds, which reflect some sunlight back into space. Temperature increases may raise the productivity of phytoplankton, which would act as a brake on global warming by increasing the cloud cover. But the Nature Climate Change study found that marine phytoplankton produce less dimethyl sulfide in a low-pH environment. That suggests that as higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere cause the oceans to acidify, the production of dimethyl sulfide could drop, slowing the formation of clouds and exacerbating global warming.

A meta-analysis in Science concluded that the incidence of violence rises as the climate becomes hotter or as rainfall deviates from the norm. The paper finds that on average the frequency of interpersonal violence increases 4% and the frequency of intergroup conflict increases 14% with each standard deviation change toward warmer temperatures or more extreme rainfall. The authors said that while climate is just one of many factors that contribute to violence “anthropogenic climate change could worsen conflict outcomes across the globe.” Geography professor Edward Carr commented that media coverage of the paper made too much of the suggestion that climate change might exacerbate conflict. Carr pointed out that because we don’t know specifically why more extreme climates are associated with higher levels of violence—whether it’s because the climate affects food supplies, employment, or levels of aggression, for example—it’s fairly speculative to suggest that climate change will necessarily lead to higher levels of violence in the future.

A forthcoming study in Canadian Public Policy finds that the per capita consumption of carbon-emitting fuels has declined 17.4% in British Columbia since the province instituted a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Economic growth in British Columbia has kept pace with growth in Canada over the same period, although carbon emissions fell only slightly in the rest of the country. Taxing carbon allowed British Columbia to reduce income tax rates to the lowest level in Canada. A 2012 poll found that 64% of British Columbians supported the tax as a way to fight climate change. Stewart Elgie, the study’s lead author, said that “BC’s experience shows that it is possible to have both a healthier environment and a strong economy—by taxing pollution and lowering income taxes.”

In a New York Times opinion piece, four Republican former heads of US Environmental Protection Agency called for action to slow climate change. They argued that a market-based approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions like a carbon tax would be the best option if it were possible. If Congress won’t pass a carbon tax, they support the plan President Obama announced in June to use his executive powers to reduce emissions and increase investment in clean energy technology. “We can have both a strong economy and a livable climate,” they wrote. “”All parties know we need both. The rest of the discussion is either detail, which we can resolve, or purposeful delay, which we should not tolerate.”

The anthropologist Louise Leakey wrote in The Huffington Post that people who are alive today have been witness in their lifetimes “to more change to the planet, to the diversity of life, global climate and natural habitats” than during all of the rest of human history. She said that

The question that needs to be asked is if we can rise to the opportunity, to use our technology to better understand our impact, to stem the tide of extinction on land and in the oceans, to preserve what we have left, and to discover and understand more about our past. What the fossil record does is force us to contemplate our place on the planet. We are but one species of several hominids that inhabited planet earth and like our distant cousins who went extinct fairly recently, our time on the planet is also finite. It won’t take much to tip the balance against us.

Nick Beckstead, Peter Singer, and Matt Wage wrote that the extinction of the human race would be a tragedy not only because it would probably mean the violent deaths of billions of people, but also because there would be no future generations of human beings. They argued that we can and should do more to reduce our risk of going extinct: “We could track more asteroids, build better bunkers, improve our disease surveillance programs, reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, encourage non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, and strengthen world institutions in ways that would probably further decrease the risk of extinction.”

This news summary was put together in collaboration with and is cross-posted at Anthropocene. Thanks to Seth Baum, Kaitlin Butler, and Grant Wilson for help compiling the news.

For last month’s news summary, please see GCR News Summary July 2013.

You can help us compile future news posts by putting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).