March on the Paris climate talks image courtesy of John Englart under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license (the image has been cropped)

Nearly 200 countries agreed in Paris to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to keep the average global temperature “well below” 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels. The Paris Agreement was intended to reduce human carbon emissions below the amount that can be absorbed by natural carbon sinks by the second half of the century. National targets under the agreement are not enough to keep the temperature increase below 2°C, but parties to the agreement are supposed to introduce new plans to lower emissions every five years. The deal also calls for trillions of dollars to be spent on developing renewable energy sources and on adapting to climate change. Earth Institute director Jeffrey Sachs called the deal “a diplomatic triumph”, but John Cassidy noted in The New Yorker that the deal is non-binding, does not impose any carbon taxes, and defers many of the hardest decisions to the future.

Ramón Méndez, Uruguay’s head of climate policy, said that almost 95% of Uruguay’s electricity—and 55% of the country’s total energy if you incude fuel used for transportation—comes from renewable energy sources. As its “Intended Nationally Determined Contribution” (INDC) to the Paris Agreement, Uruguay pledged by 2017 to cut carbon emissions by 88% below the average from 2009-13. Uruguay has been able to cut emissions dramatically in part because it has natural resources like wind and sun that are conducive to renewable power generation. “What we’ve learned is that renewables is just a financial business,” Méndez said. “The construction and maintenance costs are low, so as long as you give investors a secure environment, it is a very attractive.”

An article in Nature Climate Change found that global emissions of greenhouse gases may have declined slightly in 2015. The main reason is that carbon emissions fell almost 4% in China as the country burned less coal to make electricity. The authors said the decline is likely to be only temporary, since India and other developing countries may increase their emissions from fossil fuels in the coming decades. But it is possible that greenhouse gas emissions could peak not too far in the future. “Global emissions need to decrease to near zero to achieve climate stabilization,” Corinne Le Quéré, one of the study’s authors, told The Washington Post. “We are still emitting massive amounts of CO2 annually—around 36 billion tons from fossil fuels and industry alone. There is a long way to near zero emissions.”

Iran shipped 25,000 pounds—nearly its entire stockpile—of low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia. The move means that Iran no longer has enough uranium to produce a nuclear weapon. Iran agreed to ship its LEU to Russia as part of the nuclear deal signed over the summer. Under the deal, Iran still has to take apart centrifuges and disable a plutonium reactor that could be used to make nuclear in the future. US Secretary of State John Kerry said that the shipment of LEU to Russia increased Iran’s “breakout time”—the time it would need to produce a weapon—to more than 6 months.

There were no new confirmed cases of Ebola in December. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the end of human-to-human transmission in Guinea, but surveillance will remain heightened there for an additional 90 days. Human-to-human transmission will also be declared over in Liberia if there are no new cases before January 14. Sierra Leone remains in a state of heightened surveillance, but WHO considers the outbreak over in all other countries.

A research team from China and Japan reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that Eurasian avian-like H1N1 swine influenza viruses—the most common type of flu virus in Chinese pigs—poses a similar threat to the H1N1 swine flu virus that caused a pandemic in humans in 2009. The study found that the viruses preferentially bind to human-type receptors and could be transmitted by airborne droplets among ferrets, whose respiratory systems closely resemble the human respiratory system. The authors said that mutations on the viruses’ PB2 genes suggest they could replicate well in humans. Like the 2009 swine flu, the viruses might cause a more serious disease in humans than they do in pigs and antibody tests indicate that humans may have little immunity to the viruses. The authors conclude that the viruses “may pose the highest pandemic threat among the avian influenza viruses currently circulating in animals”.

Life sciences consulting group Gryphon Scientific released a risk-benefit analysis for the National Institutes of Health as part of a federal review of “gain-of-function” research that makes pathogens potentially more dangerous in order to better understand how they work. The Obama administration temporarily stopped federally-funded gain-of-function research in October 2014 pending further study of the dangers it might pose. The report compared the cost and benefits of gain-of-function research on influenza viruses and coronaviruses to research already being conducted on wild-type viruses. Gain-of-function research is controversial because while it could be used to prevent or mitigate disease outbreaks, engineered viruses could pose a novel pandemic risk. 

A paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters found that massive stellar flares observed on Sun-like stars are probably produced by the same physical processes that produce solar flares on the Sun. A superflare that size could release as much energy as 100 billion megatons of TNT—1,000 times the energy of typical solar flares—and could devastate Earth’s electrical infrastructure. But while it is possible the Sun could produce a superflare that size, lead author Chloë Pugh said that observations of the Sun’s activity suggest it is “extremely unlikely”.

A study in Astronomy & Geophysics found that the risk of a giant comet hitting the Earth may be higher than previously thought. The authors noted that hundreds of giant comets—called “centaurs” because their trajectories are a cross between asteroids and comets—have been discovered in the last couple decades. Centaurs can be between 50-100 km across (between 31-62 miles across) and can have more mass than all the asteroids known to cross Earth’s orbit. Although no centaur is known to pose an immediate threat to Earth, one could be deflected toward Earth when it crosses the orbit of a large planet like Jupiter or Saturn, breaking up as it approached the inner solar system. The authors wrote that impact with a giant comet’s debris would be “inevitable” and “would produce intermittent but prolonged periods of bombardment lasting up to 100,000 years”. “In the last three decades we have invested a lot of effort in tracking and analyzing the risk of a collision between the Earth and an asteroid,” lead author Bill Napier said. “Our work suggests we need to look beyond our immediate neighborhood too, and look out beyond the orbit of Jupiter, to find centaurs.”

A group of Silicon Valley investors—including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Y Combinator president Sam Altman, PayPal founder Peter Thiel, and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman—announced they were funding an non-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research center called OpenAI. OpenAI’s ultimate goal is the development of an “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), a machine with the same broad intelligence of a human being. Elon Musk has repeatedly expressed concerns that, in spite of its potential benefits, AI could pose a danger to humanity. “We could sit on the sidelines or we can encourage regulatory oversight,” Musk said, “or we could participate with the right structure with people who care deeply about developing A.I. in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity.”

The University of Cambridge announced it is establishing the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) , an interdisciplinary center to study “the opportunities and challenges to humanity from the development of artificial intelligence”. The new center will work with the Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) and the Cambridge and Oxford’s joint Strategic AI Research Centre. “As a species, we need a successful transition to an era in which we share the planet with high-level, non-biological intelligence,” center director Huw Price said. “We don’t know how far away that is, but we can be pretty confident that it’s in our future. Our challenge is to make sure that goes well.”

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 November 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).