Iranian Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei image courtesy of the Foundation for Holy Defence Values, Archives and Publications

Iran reached a deal with China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK, the US to temporarily limit the amount of uranium it enriches. Iran agreed for the next six months to stop production and dilute its stock of highly-enriched uranium, to stop installing new centrifuges, to stop work on a heavy-water reactor capable of producing plutonium, and to allow greater oversight from the International Atomic Energy Agency. In exchange, the six other states agreed to ease trade sanctions and unfreeze around $4 billion of revenue from Iranian oil sales held in overseas accounts. Other sanctions against Iranian oil and banking interests would remain in place. The deal is intended to be a first step toward comprehensive, long-term agreement. An arms race in the Middle East would complicate other global issues and could escalate into a larger conflict. Former US Defense Undersecretary Walter Slocombe said a fundamental change in Iranian nuclear policy would make Congress less likely to finance the anti-missile program that is a major point of contention between the US and Russia. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the deal didn’t go far enough to limit Iran’s nuclear program and called it “a historic mistake”. But it’s not clear Netanyahu would be willing to accept any deal with the current Iranian regime.

Japan announced at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Conference of Parties in Warsaw that it would not cut greenhouse gas emissions as much as it had originally promised. Japan shut down its 50 nuclear plants after reactors in Fukushima were severely damaged by the earthquake that devastated the country in March, 2011. Delegates to the conference agreed to develop national climate mitigation targets by early 2015 and to increase funding to climate mitigation projects. Guardian reporter Fiona Harvey wrote that developing countries are increasingly divided between rapidly-industrializing countries that are opposed to emissions limits and vulnerable countries that want larger emission cuts. Philippine delegate to the conference Naderev Sano broke down in tears talking about the thousands of people killed in the Philippines by the recent typhoon. Although it’s not clear that Typhoon Haiyan was directly caused by climate change, rising temperatures have apparently increased the frequency of extreme weather events. “We can fix this,” Sano said. “We can stop this madness. Right now, right here.”

A Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency report found that global carbon dioxide emissions were a record high in 2012. But the report also found that emissions grew at just 1.1%—after of growing an average of 2.9% a year over the previous decade—even though the world economy grew 3.5%. That suggests that emissions growth may be “decoupling” from economic growth.  According to the latest UN Environmental Programme analysis, we need to emit somewhere between 8 and 12 gigatons less carbon dioxide than current targets allow in order to keep the global average temperature from rising more than 2° C (3.6° F).

A Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study estimated that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) underestimates national methane emissions by a factor of 1.5. The study found that emissions from livestock and from fossil fuel extraction and processing are substantially higher than has generally been thought. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and the study casts doubt on whether methane can serve as a low impact “bridge” between other fossil fuels and carbon-free energy. Four well-respected climate scientists—Ken Caldeira, Kerry Emanuel, James Hansen, and Tom Wigley—published an open letter calling for the development of safe nuclear energy systems. They argued that because it will take a while for renewable energy sources to meet the global demand for energy, “there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power.”

Former Vice President Al Gore and investment manager David Blood—who together run a sustainable investment firm—wrote in The Wall Street Journal that most companies are not valuing carbon assets correctly. But not taking into account the cost of carbon emissions to society, companies are not accurately pricing the risk that regulations, market forces, or social pressures will effectively strand their assets like fossil fuels whose value depends on being able to emit carbon cheaply. Gore and Blood argued that unless investors identify and hedge against carbon risk—or divest their carbon assets entirely—they will pay a financial price when the carbon asset bubble bursts.

New studies in Science and Nature argue that asteroids around the size of the one that exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk are more common and more dangerous than has generally been believed. The new research suggests that meteors between 10 and 50 meters across would still be large enough to cause “nuclear-weapon sized detonations”. Astronomers have identified about a thousand such asteroids close to the Earth’s orbit, but based on records of recent impacts there may be a million near-Earth objects that size. Astronaut Chris Hadfield wrote that because supporting human life away from Earth is vastly more difficult than sustaining human life on Earth, we need to treat Earth as kindly as we would treat as any spacecraft we depended upon for our survival.

Two women who attended the Hajj in Saudi Arabia tested positive for Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in Spain. One of the women checked into a hospital with pneumonia in Saudi Arabia, but was not diagnosed with MERS until she returned to Spain. The two women travelled together and shared a room in Saudi Arabia. It’s not known whether the disease from one woman to another or whether both women were infected by some common source. Public health officials had worried that pilgrims to Mecca would spread MERS around the world, but the two women are the only probable cases of MERS known to have attended the Hajj. A sick camel in Jeddah whose owner has MERS also tested positive for the virus, although it’s not clear whether the camel was the source of the patient’s infection. And health officials in Qatar found MERS in camels that two other MERS patients had contact with. The virus has also been found in bats living in Saudi Arabia. A Lancet study estimated that at least 62% of symptomatic cases of the MERS have gone undetected. The study suggested that MERS may be able to sustain transmission among humans if efforts aren’t taken to control the disease, although it also may be less deadly than it has seemed. The study’s authors said that the evidence is that “a slowly-growing epidemic is underway.”

Superbug author Maryn McKenna looked at what will happen if resistance to antibiotics becomes widespread. Without antibiotics people an injury as minor as a infected scratch or piercing could be fatal. Childbirth would become dangerous again. Severe burns would be extremely difficult to treat. Deaths from pneumonia would increase dramatically. And treatments that carry a risk of infection—including invasive surgery, chemotherapy, and organ transplantation—would be extremely risky. Bacteria that resist a broad spectrum of antibiotics have become increasingly common as antibiotic use has become routine in medicine and agriculture. Drug companies have been reluctant to develop new antibiotics as they have begun to lose their effectiveness more quickly. “A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it,” World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan said last year. “Things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill.”

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 October 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).