Mammoth Hot Springs image courtesy of Brocken Inaglory under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license

Russian President Vladimir Putin told senior Russian officials that long-range conventional high- precision weapons could provide an alternative to nuclear deterrence. Long-range conventional weapons give Russia a conventional means of striking discrete targets quickly anywhere in the world. But conventional ballistic missiles could carry the same danger of escalation as nuclear weapons, since they are difficult to distinguish from nuclear weapons once they have been launched. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin also reiterated that Russia might retaliate with nuclear weapons if it were attacked with conventional weapons.

A Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper finds that there are no perfect substitutes known for 62 metals with industrial applications. Twelve of the elements the study looked at—dysprosium, europium, lanthanum, magnesium, manganese, rhenium, rhodium, thallium, thulium, ytterbium, and yttrium—don’t have any adequate substitutes at all right now. The paper notes that no country or region has enough of all these elements. “Modern technology,” the paper concludes, “is dependent on resources from every continent other than Antarctica, a situation that increases the potential for geopolitical machinations as far as resources are concerned.”

A Geophysical Research Letters study found that perfluorotributylamine (PFTBA) has the largest greenhouse effect on a per molecule basis of any known molecule. The study found that over a hundred years PFTBA has 7,100 times the warming effect as an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. PFTBA does not occur in nature, but is used in the manufacture of electronics. The study estimated that PFTBA remains in the atmosphere for at least 500 years. Because concentrations of PFTBA are low in the atmosphere its contribution to global warming has been small. But it belongs a broad class of industrial chemicals whose effects on the climate system are still not known. “PFTBA is just one example of an industrial chemical that is produced but there are no policies that control its production, use or emission,” study co-author Angela Hong said. “It is not being regulated by any type of climate policy.”

Scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center announced at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union that the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica won’t close until 2070. The scientists found that levels of chlorine in the atmosphere have fallen since the Montreal Protocol restricted the use of chlorofluorocarbons and related compounds that weaken the ozone layer. But levels of chlorine have not yet dropped far enough to definitively shrink the ozone hole. The size of the ozone hole fluctuates widely year to year, but changes in the size of the ozone hole appear primarily driven by variations in natural weather patterns. At the same meeting, two University of Utah geologists announced that the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone is two and a half times larger than had previously been thought. They estimated that it could erupt with 2,000 times that of the force of Mount St. Helens’ eruption in 1980 and produce enough volcanic material to have a dramatic effect on the planet’s climate. “It would be a global event,” lead author Jamie Farrell said. “There would be a lot of destruction and impacts around the globe.”

In a comment in Nature Climate Change, six scientists proposed increasing the price of meat—either by taxing meat directly or covering emissions produced by raising livestock under a carbon trading scheme—in order to reduce the amount of meat we produce and consume. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated in September that raising livestock accounts for about one-seventh of all greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began to phase in new guidance that meant to block farmers and ranchers from using antibiotics to make their livestock grow bigger. The policy would require farmers and ranchers to get a prescription from a licensed veterinarian to use the antibiotics on their animals. But the effectiveness of the policy depends on the voluntary cooperation of drug manufacturers. Federal officials hope that limiting the use of antibiotics will slow the development of antibiotic-resistant diseases. By one measure, around of 80% of the antibiotics sold in the US each year are used on livestock. The American Academy of Pediatrics called the policy “a promising first step”.

For the first time, a human was confirmed to carry a strain of the H10N8 bird flu virus. The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported that a 73-year-old woman who died of respiratory failure had tested positive for the virus. It’s not clear whether the virus was the cause of her death. Declan Butler wrote in Nature that the virus probably poses little immediate risk because it doesn’t have the surface protein mutations that seem to allow other strains of bird flu to infect humans. The woman had recently visited a live bird market, and there’s no evidence that the virus is being transmitted among humans. The Hong Kong Centre for Health Protection urged travelers to avoid contact with birds and bird droppings.

In other virology news, a group of 56 scientists sent an open letter calling on the European Commission to formally evaluate the risks of engineering viruses to become more deadly for research purposes. In 2011, a virologist in the Netherlands engineered the H5N1 bird flu to be transmitted through the air among ferrets in attempt to study how the flu could naturally evolve to become more dangerous. The letter to the European Commission argued that there would have to be “extraordinary practical benefits” to justify deliberately making a pathogen “more dangerous for humanity”.

California health officials decided not to include the genetic sequence of a newly discovered strain of botulism when they published their findings in the The Journal of Infectious Diseases. After consulting with the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, California officials decided the danger someone could use the sequence to develop a bioweapon was too large. The botulism toxin is fatal to humans in minute doses, it could take years to develop an antitoxin, and modern technology makes cloning a toxin relatively simple. In 2005, Science published the genetic sequence of the Spanish flu, which killed around 50 million people from 1918-1919.

Reuters reported that the US National Security Agency (NSA) paid security firm RSA $10 million to use a flawed random number generator, giving the NSA a “back door” it could use to crack RSA’s encryption products. Spiegel reported that the NSA’s Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO) maintains a shadow network of routers and servers it uses it uses to track internet activity. Spiegel found that the TAO has also been intercepting deliveries of computer hardware to install malware and collecting data from the fiber optic cables that carry internet traffic across the oceans.

A Federal District Court judge issued a preliminary injunction against the NSA’s program of keeping records of nearly every Americans’ phone calls. The Obama administration argued that the collection of call metadata—information about when phone calls were made and who participated in them—doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures”. In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled in Smith v. Maryland that the government could track the numbers dialed on a particular phone line without a warrant because people don’t have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” when they place calls through private companies. But District Court Judge Richard Leon rejected that argument on the grounds that the NSA program is much broader in scope than government surveillance was in 1979 and that people use their phones differently today. New York District Court Judge William Pauley later ruled in a separate but similar case that the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata is legal because it allows the NSA to “draw connections it might otherwise never be able to find.” But Judge Leon noted that the administration didn’t cite a single instance in which the program had prevented a terrorist attack. “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary’ invasion than this system of high-tech collection and retention of data on virtually every single citizen for the purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval,” Leon wrote. “Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.”

The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies—an advisory panel appointed by President Obama to review the government’s surveillance activities—recommended that the NSA stop keeping a database of American phone calls. In its 308-page report, the panel also recommended that the government be prohibited from weakening commercial software or undermine encryptions standards to make surveillance easier. The panel also said that foreign leaders who cooperate with the US should be accorded “a high degree of respect and deference”. And a group of major technology companies—AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo—published an open letter to Obama and the US Congress calling on them to create a transparent legal framework for electronic surveillance and stop the bulk collection of internet traffic. “The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state,” the letter said, “and away from the rights of the individual.”

This news summary was put together in collaboration with and is cross-posted at 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 November 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).