sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Fifty years ago today, astronauts aboard Apollo 17, NASA’s last crewed mission to the Moon, took an iconic photograph of our planet. The image became known as the Blue Marble — the first fully illuminated picture of Earth, in color, taken by a person. Now, scientists have re-created that image during a test run of a cutting-edge digital climate model. The model can simulate climatic phenomena, such as storms and ocean eddies, at 1-kilometer resolution, as much as 100 times sharper than typical global simulations.

To re-create the swirling winds of the Blue Marble — including a cyclone over the Indian Ocean — the researchers fed weather records from 1972 into the supercomputer-powered software. The resulting world captured distinctive features of the region, such as upwelling waters off the coast of Namibia and long, reedlike cloud coverage. Experts say the stunt highlights the growing sophistication of high-resolution climate models. Those are expected to form the core of the European Union’s Destination Earth project, which aims to create a ‘digital twin’ of Earth to better forecast extreme weather and guide preparation plans.

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Long-time Slashdot reader gordm shares an interesting video from the United Nations Climate Change Conference. “At COP27, Tobias Holle (activist with Youth Strike for Climate) debated Mark Nelson (founder of Radiant Energy Fund) as to whether nuclear power can help us tackle climate change.”

The event took place at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s “Atoms for Climate” pavillion, where the IAEA’s climate advisor presented the debate’s topic as “Nuclear Energy: Climate Friend or Foe?” (and introduced the two debaters as “enthusiastic young climate champions”). The Youth Strike for Climate activist objected to commiting humanity to 1 million years of maintaining nuclear waste. But he also argued that extreme weather was creating additional security risks, that the per-kilowatt hour cost was economically prohibitive, that nuclear plants were politically unpopular — and that anyways, they take too long to build giving our current climate crisis. “We need fast solutions.”

The Radiant Energy founder disagreed, arguing over specific statistics and insisting that nuclear energy should be considered a low-carbon energy solution, and also safe. (He pointed out that Chernobyl’s nuclear plant actually continued operating for 14 years after its 1986 nuclear accident.) Interestingly he also argued that in the Netherlands there’s a museum of nuclear waste — a science museum attached to their nuclear facility — “where they don’t just have the high-level waste, they have the highest part of high-level waste, the most dangerous isotopes, separated from the nuclear fuel. The most radioactive stuff — very hot for 500 years — and they have a tour where you can walk over it, and you can feel the warmth from the floor from the radioactive isotopes….

“You can absolutely manage the safe, secure, and even educational storage of the most radioactive isotopes… We know very well how to manage it.”

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A new global tracker created by the nonprofit Climate Trace is helping to make clear exactly where major greenhouse gas emissions are originating. According to NPR, the interactive map “uses a combination of satellites, sensors and machine learning to measure the top polluters worldwide.” From the report: It observes how much greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — are being emitted at specific locations, such as power plants and oil refineries. Former Vice President Al Gore, who is a founding member of the initiative, said it is meant to serve as a more reliable and accurate alternative to companies self-reporting their emissions estimates. “Cheating is impossible with this artificial intelligence method, because they would have to somehow falsify multiple sets of data,” he told NPR’s Michel Martin on All Things Considered.

The emissions tool employs over 300 satellites; sensors on land, planes and ships; as well as artificial intelligence to build models of emission estimates. Right now, it tracks about 72,000 of the highest emitting greenhouse gas sources. That includes every power plant, large ship and large plane in the entire world, Gore said. And that’s just the beginning. By next year, Gore hopes to be tracking millions of major emitting sites. “We will have essentially all of them,” he said. Gore said 75% of the world’s greenhouse emissions come from countries that have made pledges to become carbon-neutral by 2050. “Now that they know exactly where it’s coming from, they have tools that will enable them to reduce their emissions,” he told NPR.

He added that the database, which is free and accessible online, can help inform countries about how much pollution is being emitted by the companies they are working with or considering working with. It is not enough for companies to self-report, he said. For instance, Climate Trace found that the oil and gas industry has been significantly underreporting its emissions. That doesn’t mean companies were intentionally cheating, Gore added. However, he said underreporting prevents governments and the public from staying on track with their net-zero pledge. Six regional governments in Mexico, Europe and Africa have already entered into working agreements for using the tool, Gore said.

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fahrbot-bot shares a report from Live Science: Swarming bees produce so much electricity that they may affect local weather, new research suggests. The finding, which researchers made by measuring the electrical fields around honeybee (apis mellifera) hives, reveals that bees can produce as much atmospheric electricity as a thunderstorm. This can play an important role in steering dust to shape unpredictable weather patterns; and their impact may even need to be included in future climate models.

Insects’ tiny bodies can pick up positive charge while they forage — either from the friction of air molecules against their rapidly beating wings (honeybees can flap their wings more than 230 times a second) or from landing onto electrically charged surfaces. But the effects of these tiny charges were previously assumed to be on a small scale. Now, a new study, published Oct. 24 in the journal iScience, shows that insects can generate a shocking amount of electricity.

To test whether honeybees produce sizable changes in the electric field of our atmosphere, the researchers placed an electric field monitor and a camera near the site of several honeybee colonies. In the 3 minutes that the insects flooded into the air, the researchers found that the potential gradient above the hives increased to 100 volts per meter. In other swarming events, the scientists measured the effect as high as 1,000 volts per meter, making the charge density of a large honeybee swarm roughly six times greater than electrified dust storms and eight times greater than a stormcloud. The scientists also found that denser insect clouds meant bigger electrical fields — an observation that enabled them to model other swarming insects such as locusts and butterflies.

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France has become the latest country to pull out of the controversial energy charter treaty (ECT), which protects fossil fuel investors from policy changes that might threaten their profits. The Guardian reports: Speaking after an EU summit in Brussels on Friday, French president, Emmanuel Macron, said: “France has decided to withdraw from the energy charter treaty.” Quitting the ECT was “coherent” with the Paris climate deal, he added. Macron’s statement follows a recent vote by the Polish parliament to leave the 52-nation treaty and announcements by Spain and the Netherlands that they too wanted out of the scheme.

The European Commission has proposed a “modernization” of the agreement, which would end the writ of the treaty’s secret investor-state courts between EU members. That plan is expected to be discussed at a meeting in Mongolia next month. A French government official said Paris would not try to block the modernization blueprint within the EU or at the meeting in Mongolia. “But whatever happens, France is leaving,” the official said. While France was “willing to coordinate a withdrawal with others, we don’t see that there is a critical mass ready to engage with that in the EU bloc as a whole,” the official added.

The French withdrawal will take about a year to be completed, and in that time, discussion in Paris will likely move on to ways of neutralizing or reducing the duration of a “sunset clause” in the ECT that allows retrospective lawsuits. Progress on that issue is thought possible by sources close to ongoing legal negotiations on the issue.

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Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels made this summer’s brutal droughts across the Northern Hemisphere — which dried up rivers, sparked unprecedented wildfires and led to widespread crop failure — 20 times more likely, according to a new study. Yahoo News reports: Climate change is rewriting normal weather patterns in real time, said the study by World Weather Attribution, a consortium of international scientists who examine the link between rising average global temperatures and extreme weather. The droughts that affected North America, Europe and Asia this summer were so extreme that they would normally be considered a 1-in-400-year event, the study found, but due to climate change, the planet can now expect a repeat of those conditions every 20 years. Individual daily temperature records in Europe were repeatedly broken over the summer of 2022, and the extreme heat was blamed for 24,000 deaths on the continent. Higher average temperatures also dramatically increase evaporation rates, drying out soils and vegetation and leading to a heightened wildfire risk, all of which negatively impact farming.

“In Europe, drought conditions led to reduced harvests. This was particularly worrying, as it followed a climate-change-fueled heat wave in South Asia that also destroyed crops, and happened at a time when global food prices were already extremely high due to the war in Ukraine,” Friederike Otto, professor of climate science at Grantham Institute in the U.K. and one of the authors of the study, said in a statement. But as the summer of 2022 showed, climate change amplifies seemingly contradictory effects, worsening drought while also dramatically increasing the risks of extreme precipitation events. In addition to drying out soil, increased evaporation rates due to higher temperatures result in higher levels of atmospheric moisture. “Our analysis shows that last summer’s severe drought conditions across large parts of the Northern Hemisphere were fueled by human-induced climate change. The result also gives us an insight on what is looming ahead. With further global warming we can expect stronger and more frequent droughts in the future,” Dominik Schumacher, researcher at ETH Zurich and one of the authors of the study, said in a statement.

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“The poles are warming several times faster than the global average,” Phys.org reminds us, “causing record smashing heatwaves that were reported earlier this year in both the Arctic and Antarctic. Melting ice and collapsing glaciers at high latitudes would accelerate sea level rise around the planet.

“Fortunately, refreezing the poles by reducing incoming sunlight would be both feasible and remarkably cheap, according to new research published Friday in Environmental Research Communications.”

Scientists laid out a possible future program whereby high-flying jets would spray microscopic aerosol particles into the atmosphere at latitudes of 60 degrees north and south — roughly Anchorage and the southern tip of Patagonia. If injected at a height of 43,000 feet (above airliner cruising altitudes), these aerosols would slowly drift poleward, slightly shading the surface beneath. “There is widespread and sensible trepidation about deploying aerosols to cool the planet,” notes lead author Wake Smith, “but if the risk/benefit equation were to pay off anywhere, it would be at the poles.”

Particle injections would be performed seasonally in the long days of the local spring and early summer. The same fleet of jets could service both hemispheres, ferrying to the opposite pole with the change of seasons.
newly designed high-altitude tankers would prove much more efficient. A fleet of roughly 125 such tankers could loft a payload sufficient to cool the regions poleward of 60 degreesN/S by 2 degreesC per year, which would return them close to their pre-industrial average temperatures. Costs are estimated at $11 billion annually — less than one-third the cost of cooling the entire planet by the same 2 degreesC magnitude and a tiny fraction of the cost of reaching net zero emissions.
Smith calls the idea “game-changing” (while also warning it’s “not a substitute for decarbonization”).

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Blue light from artificial sources is on the rise, which may have negative consequences for human health and the wider environment, according to a study. From a report: Academics at the University of Exeter have identified a shift in the kind of lighting technologies European countries are using at night to brighten streets and buildings. Using images produced by the International Space Station (ISS), they have found that the orange-coloured emissions from older sodium lights are rapidly being replaced by white-coloured emissions produced by LEDs. While LED lighting is more energy-efficient and costs less to run, the researchers say the increased blue light radiation associated with it is causing “substantial biological impacts” across the continent. The study also claims that previous research into the effects of light pollution have underestimated the impacts of blue light radiation.

Chief among the health consequences of blue light is its ability to suppress the production of melatonin, the hormone that regulates sleep patterns in humans and other organisms. Numerous scientific studies have warned that increased exposure to artificial blue light can worsen people’s sleeping habits, which in turn can lead to a variety of chronic health conditions over time. The increase in blue light radiation in Europe has also reduced the visibility of stars in the night sky, which the study says “may have impacts on people’s sense of nature.” Blue light can also alter the behavioural patterns of animals including bats and moths, as it can change their movements towards or away from light sources.

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Researchers have discovered a second impact crater on the other side of the Atlantic that could have finished off what was left of the dinosaurs, after an asteroid known as Chicxulub slammed into what is now the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago. The BBC reports: Dubbed Nadir Crater, the new feature sits more than 300m below the seabed, some 400km off the coast of Guinea, west Africa. With a diameter of 8.5km, it’s likely the asteroid that created it was a little under half a kilometre across. The hidden depression was identified by Dr Uisdean Nicholson from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK. […] “Our simulations suggest this crater was caused by the collision of a 400m-wide asteroid in 500-800m of water,” explained Dr Veronica Bray from the University of Arizona, US. “This would have generated a tsunami over one kilometre high, as well as an earthquake of Magnitude 6.5 or so. “The energy released would have been around 1,000 times greater than that from the January 2022 eruption and tsunami in Tonga.”

Dr Nicholson’s team has to be cautious about tying the two impacts together. Nadir has been given a very similar date to Chicxulub based on an analysis of fossils of known age that were drilled from a nearby borehole. But to make a definitive statement, rocks in the crater itself would need to be pulled up and examined. This would also confirm Nadir is indeed an asteroid impact structure and not some other, unrelated feature caused by, for example, ancient volcanism. […] Prof Sean Gulick, who co-led the recent project to drill into the Chicxulub Crater, said Nadir might have fallen to Earth on the same day. Or it might have struck the planet a million or two years either side of the Mexican cataclysm. Scientists will only know for sure when rocks from the west African crater are inspected in the lab. “A much smaller cousin, or sister, doesn’t necessarily add to what we know about the dinosaurs’ extinction, but it does add to our understanding of the astronomical event that was Chicxulub,” the University of Texas at Austin researcher told BBC News.

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Polio is back, monkeypox isn’t slowing down, COVID-19 is still around — and now there’s more not-so-good news on the infection front: over 200 human diseases could get worse because of climate change, according to a new study. From a report: Researchers have known for a long time that the changing climate affects disease. Warmer temperatures can make regions newly hospitable to disease-carrying mosquitoes, while floods from more frequent storms can carry bacteria in their surges of water. Most research, though, only focused on a handful of threats or one disease at a time. The new study, published in Nature Climate Change, built a comprehensive map of all of the ways various climate hazards could interact with 375 documented human infectious diseases. The authors reviewed over 77,000 scientific articles about those diseases and climate hazards. They found that, of those 375 diseases, 218 could be aggravated by things like heatwaves, rising sea levels, and wildfires.

The study found four main ways climate change exacerbates diseases. First, problems happen when changes cause disease-carrying animals to move closer to people. For example, animal habitats are disrupted by things like wildfires that drive bats and rodents into new areas, increasing the likelihood they’ll transmit diseases like Ebola to people. Other research shows that climate change makes viruses more likely to jump from animals to people, as happened with the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. That phenomenon also likely contributed to the 2016 Zika outbreaks.

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