Svalbard seed vault image courtesy of Erlend Bjørtvedt under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (image has been cropped)
In a joint statement ahead of the December Paris Climate Conference, US president Barack Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping said they would “move ahead decisively to implement domestic climate policies, to strengthen bilateral coordination and cooperation, and to promote sustainable development and the transition to green, low-carbon, and climate-resilient economies”. China announced that in 2017 it would establish a national carbon market covering the iron and steel, nonferrous metals, power generation, building materials, and paper industries. China also said it would adopt a “green dispatch” system that would give low-carbon electricity priority over power generated from fossil fuels on its electrical grid. In addition, the US and China agreed to implement new fuel-efficiency standards for heavy-duty vehicles. “When the world’s two largest economies, energy consumers, and carbon emitters come together like this,” President Obama said, “there’s no reason for other countries, whether developed or developing, not to do so as well.”
A study in Science Advances concluded on the basis of simulations using the Parallel Ice Sheet Model that burning the world’s currently attainable reserves of fossil fuels would melt most of the Antarctic ice sheet, causing the oceans to rise by tens of meters over the next thousand years. Some of the world’s largest businesses—including Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Goldman Sachs, Nike, Starbucks, Salesforce, Steelcase, Voya Financial and Walmart—announced that they would join the RE100 campaign and commit to sourcing all of their electricity from renewable sources. IKEA, Unilever, and Marks & Spencer are among the companies that had previously joined the RE100 campaign.
Inside Climate News reported that Exxon scientists knew as early as 1977 that burning fossil fuels was causing global warming. James F. Black, a senior Exxon scientist, told Exxon’s Management Committee that carbon emissions from fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually threaten humanity. Exxon’s own extensive research into the impact of carbon emissions in the early 1980s confirmed Black’s view. In 1982, Exxon circulated an internal memo among Exxon management saying that there were “potentially catastrophic events” that “might not be reversible” without “major reductions in fossil fuel combustion”. Inside Climate News wrote that in later 1980s Exxon cut back its climate research staff and began to publicly undermine its researchers’ own conclusions. ExxonMobil responded that Inside Climate News had “cherry-picked documents… to distort our history of climate research”. Bill McKibben noted that in 1997, before climate negotiations in Kyoto, Exxon’s then-CEO Lee Raymond told a group of Chinese leaders and oil industry executives that the planet was cooling and that carbon regulation “defies common sense”. “All it would’ve taken is for one prominent fossil fuel CEO to know this was about more than just shareholder profits, and a question about our legacy,” Penn State climatologist Michael Mann told Inside Climate News. “But now because of the cost of inaction—what I call the ‘procrastination penalty’—we face a far more uphill battle.”
Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London have requested permission from the British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to edit the genome of human embryos. Kathy Niakan’s team proposes to use CRISPR/Cas9 techniques to alter the genomes of donated embryos in order to test the function of the genes involved in the early stages of fertilization. Nature reported in April that a Chinese team had used CRISPR/Cas9 to modify the gene responsible for a potentially-fatal disease in non-viable embryos. Germline modification is controversial because altered genes could be passed onto future generations. In a comment in Nature earlier in the year, a group of researchers called for a voluntary moratorium on germline editing.
After 42 days without a case, the World Health Organization (WHO) for the second time declared Liberia free of Ebola. There have been fewer than 10 new cases of Ebola a week since the end of July. WHO said that the epidemic has moved into a new distinct new phase that requires improved surveillance to keep the virus from reemerging. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz report that they have developed a way to detect Ebola and other similar viruses using optofluidic chips. The technology could make it possible to reliably identify hemorrhagic fever viruses outside of a laboratory.
The civil war in Syria has prompted the first withdrawal from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The Arctic vault functions as a backup facility for the world’s seed banks by preserving varieties of thousands of food crops from all over the world. The seeds were requested by the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) to replace a collection in the city of Aleppo that was damaged during the war. “Protecting the world’s biodiversity in this manner is precisely the purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault,” a spokesman for the group that runs the vault said.
Daniel Baker, a professor of planetary and space physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told the US House Science, Space, and Technology Committee that if the solar storm that passed by the Earth in July 2012 had hit, it would have caused massive blackouts, cut off municipal water supplies, damaged a wide range of electrical devices, and done trillions of dollars worth of damage. Baker said it is only a matter of time before a solar superstorm hits the Earth. High-voltage transformers, which carry 60-70% of the nation’s electricity, may be particularly vulnerable. Right now early warning satellites could give a little as 10 minutes warning before a major storm. “The [power suppliers] would like to have eight hours warning—on the timescale of a work shift—so they can spin up enough reserve power and make plans for where an event might be hitting local time, and think about how they might divert current from one region to another or possibly selectively shut down parts of the grid,” Baker said. “That’s quite an elaborate process, and it would take a fair amount of time.”
This news summary was put together in collaboration with Anthropocene. Thanks to Tony Barrett, Seth Baum, Kaitlin Butler, and Grant Wilson for help compiling the news.
For last month’s news summary, please see GCR News Summary August 2015.
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).
