President Obama delivering the 2014 State of the Union address image courtesy of The White House/Pete Souza

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists decided to leave the small hand of its symbolic “Doomsday Clock” at five minutes to midnight. The amount of time left until midnight represents how close we are to global disaster. The clock’s hands were set at two minutes to midnight at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s. In an open letter to the members of the UN Security Council, the Bulletin’s scientific board wrote that while we took some steps to reduce the danger posed by nuclear weapons—by reducing stockpiles of weapons-grade material and negotiating an agreement to limit Iran to the peaceful use of nuclear power—we didn’t do enough to limit carbon dioxide emissions or address other emerging technological dangers. The letter concludes that “the risk of civilization-threatening technological disaster remains high”.

As part of a deal reached in Geneva in November, Iran disconnected centrifuges that were used to produce highly enriched uranium at its Natanz nuclear facility. Highly enriched uranium can be further refined to weapons grade relatively easily. Iran also said it would dilute or convert to uranium oxide the rest of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium over the next six months. In exchange, the US suspended billions of dollars worth of sanctions against Iran.

According to a new model in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, people who survive a low-yield nuclear explosion and can reach high-quality shelter within five minutes should risk exposure to nuclear fallout to do so. The US government currently recommends that people shelter in place for at least 12 hours after a nuclear explosion. But Michael Dillon, an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, says his model shows that tens of thousands of lives could be saved in large cities that suffer a nuclear attack if people moved quickly to high-quality shelters.

The US military suspended 34 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch officers for cheating on proficiency exams. More officers may ultimately be implicated in the scandal. Some missile officers said off the record that they feel the need to cut corners because of the pressure to score well on proficiency tests. Last April, 17 officers were stripped of their launch authority after military inspectors rated the 91st Missile Wing’s mastery of Minuteman III launch operations as “marginal”.

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico were able to produce 10 billion high-energy neutrons in a Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion (MagLIF) experiment. The number of neutrons produced is an indicator of the number of fusion reactions the experiment produced. MagLIF uses a powerful electric field to compress a cylinder filled with preheated fusion fuel. The experiment fell orders of magnitude short of producing the number of fusion reactions necessary for ignition, but suggested that it might be possible to use MagLIF to produce controlled fusion if the inputs are increased. Fusion power, if it can be made to work, has the potential to produce large amounts of clean energy using readily available fuel.

US Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in the US were 2.1% higher in 2013 than in 2012. Part of the reason for the increase is that as natural gas rose in price relative to coal, more power was generated by burning coal. The European Commission proposed replacing binding national targets for renewable energy production with an overall goal of producing 27% of Europe’s energy from renewables by 2030. Critics complained that the proposed new policy would be harder to enforce since it wouldn’t be clear how much renewable energy individual countries are responsible for producing. The European Commission also said that the EU should aim to cut carbon emissions to 40% below the 1990 level by 2030. Total emissions were 18 percent below the 1990 level in 2012.

According to a leaked draft of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the options for reducing climate change, it’s unlikely that we will be able to limit global warming to just 2° C (3.6° F) over pre-industrial levels without new efforts to limit carbon emissions. Unless more is done, emissions growth is likely to continue in spite of increases in energy efficiency and clean energy production. The draft report notes that governments spend more money subsidizing fossil fuels than they do subsidizing clean energy.

In his 2014 State of the Union address, President Obama called for an end to fossil fuel subsidies, although he said the “all-of-the-above” energy strategy of the US was working. Obama argued that natural gas could serve as a low-emission “bridge fuel” to a cleaner economy. But Obama said that in any case we need to act with more urgency. “Climate change is a fact,” he said. “And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say, yes, we did.”

David Keith and Mike Hulme debated on The Breakthrough whether geoengineering can be used to counteract the effects of carbon emissions on the global climate. Hulme, a professor of climate and culture at King’s College London, argued that the evidence is that while geoengineering could reduce the global average temperature, it might make regional climate change even worse. In addition, Hulme said that geoengineering is “ungovernable” in the sense that it would be impossible for international organizations to agree on a geoengineering policy that would work for the entire world. Geoengineering might even become a new source of international conflict. Keith, a professor of applied physics at the Harvard, said that current climate models suggest that geoengineering a actually wouldn’t destabilize regional climates. And Keith argued that the fact that we don’t have the institutions right now to govern the use of the technology doesn’t mean we should abandon geoengineering research.

Human cases of the H7N9 bird flu are on the rise in China. Just five new cases were reported between June and November, but 73 new cases were reported in the first three weeks of January alone. This “second wave” of new cases is probably at least partly seasonal. It may also be related to the increase in travel and the trade in live birds that precedes Chinese New Year on January 31. China stopped live bird trading in several cities in the province of Zhejiang, where most of the recent cases have been. According to FluTrackers’ unofficial count, there have been 273 cases and 58 deaths since the disease first emerged in humans in February 2013. The H7N9 virus does not so far appear to spread among humans in any sustained way.

According to a paper in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, hospital patients in Iowa were nearly 3 times as likely to be carrying methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureas (MRSA) if they lived within a mile of a farm housing 2,500 or more pigs. MRSA is one of the most common causes of hospital-acquired infections. Because MRSA is resistant to the antibiotics traditionally used to treat staph infections it can be very difficult to treat. MRSA has repeatedly been found to be connected to pig farming and pig manure, although it isn’t clear how the infection might be transmitted to humans.

Two new models suggested that Earth may be able to support life for at least 1 billion more years. An older model suggested that as the sun got hotter the planet would experience runaway warming that would vaporize liquid water in just 600 to 700 million years. But two new 3D climate models suggest that parts of the planet will remain livable for substantially longer. If these new models are right, it may mean that the habitable zones around stars are wider—and that there are more habitable planets in the galaxy—than scientists had previously thought.

Luke Muehlhauser and Nick Bostrom argued in Think that we will probably “create our own intellectual successors” in the form of intelligent machines. Since artificial intelligence, once developed, would likely be able to copy and improve itself rapidly, we need to ensure that any AI we develop is friendly to our interests if we don’t want it to sacrifice our well-being to whatever goal it is pursuing. “A superintelligent AI might thus become quickly superior to humanity in harvesting resources, manufacturing, scientific discovery, social aptitude, and strategic action, among other abilities,” Muehlhauser and Bostrom write. “We might not be in a position to negotiate with it or its descendants, just as chimpanzees are not in a position to negotiate with humans.”

This news summary was put together in collaboration with 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 December 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).