scientificamerican--2020-12-21--Large Methane Leaks Reveal Long-Standing Shortfalls in Oversight

Ever since a father and son managed to draw four whiskey barrels of oil from a hand-dug hole near California ’ s Kern River 121 years ago , productive oil and gas wells have multiplied like mushrooms across the area .
Though such wells are expected to emit minimal amounts of greenhouse gases during the oil-extraction process , scientists from a space-related research group were shocked by the size of the methane plumes they detected when they flew an infrared sensor over Kern County in 2015 .
Repeating the flights three more times in the next three years confirmed the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at least six times more of the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere in one day than the Environmental Protection Agency had estimated they should emit in a year .
Karen Jones is one of the scientists at the Aerospace Corporation , the California-based nonprofit organization that conducted the aerial survey .
She says she felt mystified by what she calls a lack of action among the oil fields ’ operators and regulators as she watched the methane—the second-highest contributor to human-caused warming after carbon dioxide—continuously spew over the years .
“ The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t supposed to be there , ” she says .
Revelations like Aerospace ’ s , which the nonprofit published in a report this past summer , are becoming more common .
For years , oil and gas companies have been required to detect and repair methane leaks in their equipment .
But scientists have produced dozens of studies over the past decade that suggest the current methods and technology used by industry to detect leaks—and by regulators to estimate how much methane is emitted—are inadequate to catch the actual scale of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ satellite companies may soon make high-quality data about methane publicly available and ubiquitous , potentially creating more pressure to address the situation .
Action to plug leaks and prevent further air pollution may be stymied in the meantime , though : the Trump administration took numerous steps that could weaken environmental protections , including rules outlining how companies monitor for and locate natural gas leaks in their equipment ( methane is the main component of natural gas ) .
Whether they will be reversed when the Biden administration enters the White House , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it happens , remains to be seen .
Scientists say people of color and low-income communities , who already suffer disproportionately from the consequences of air pollution , will continue to bear much of the health brunt of such regulatory rollbacks .
And more methane in the atmosphere is also likely to speed up the already accelerating process of global warming .
Using instruments on satellites and planes , researchers have , in recent years , revealed what they say are substantial inaccuracies in existing official methane emission counts .
In 2014 a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ study in Geophysical Research Letters exposing the largest U.S. methane anomaly that had ever been detected from space .
The team calculated that the emissions around the hotspot—centered on the Four Corners region , where Arizona , Colorado , New Mexico and Utah meet—exceeded EPA estimates for the area and persisted for years in all seasons .
The second-biggest emissions hotspot they identified was located near California ’ s San Joaquin Valley , home of most of Kern County .
Since 1990 , the EPA has prepared an annual greenhouse gas inventory with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all the country ’ s human-made sources .
Based on typical emission rates some of the largest oil and gas companies have reported regarding their own infrastructure—such as individual pumps , valves and storage tanks—the EPA calculates what it expects the rest of the equipment in the industry to be giving off .
David Lyon , a scientist at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund ( EDF ) , says the EPA may not have enough of the relevant data—and thus could underestimate the extent of leaks and other unexpected events .
And because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the atmosphere than properly working equipment , missing such events would make the inventories wrong , says EDF ’ s chief scientist Steven Hamburg .
The EPA says it takes a comprehensive approach when estimating greenhouse gases in its inventories .
“ EPA ’ s emission estimates in the GHG [ greenhouse gas ] Inventory include the full range of conditions , including ‘ abnormal events ’ or ‘ super-emitters , ’ ” says agency spokesperson James Hewitt .
“ In addition , where data are available , emissions estimates for large anomalous @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” In response to subsequent questions , however , the EPA says that it “ is correct that data are not available for every oil and gas emissions event from 1990 to recent years ... .
Given the variability of practices and technologies across oil and gas systems , it is possible that EPA ’ s estimates do not include all emissions from abnormal events.
” To check for possible differences between estimates and actual emissions , EDF researchers led a team of experts in amassing ground-based and airborne field measurements of methane @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the U.S. over a four-year period .
In research published in Science in 2018 , the group contended that in 2015 industry infrastructure emitted 60 percent more methane—at least an extra 4.9 million metric tons—than the EPA ’ s inventory estimate .
That discrepancy is slightly less than the amount of methane emitted into the atmosphere by all the cattle in the U.S. Part of the reason for the discrepancy may be the fact that oil and gas companies are only required to monitor emissions infrequently and with outdated technologies , according to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Since 2016 the EPA has required oil and gas operators in every state to search for methane leaks using handheld infrared cameras or devices that detect volatile organic compounds [ VOCs ] .
In Chevron ’ s oil fields in Kern County , employees inspect infrastructure with such devices “ at least annually , ” according to company representative Veronica Flores-Paniagua .
But the cameras are expensive and can be imprecise , says Lee Fuller , executive vice president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America—a trade association and lobbying group for oil @ @ @ @ @ @ @ see an apparent emission , one of the challenges is [ that ] it will show you there ’ s something coming out , [ but ] it doesn ’ t tell you what it is , ” he says .
Though the handheld cameras might show that a certain hatch should be closed or that a seal needs repair , “ you don ’ t know how much it was emitting.
” “ The purpose of leak detection and repair is to find and fix leaks , not to measure leaks , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sources are identified , they can generally be repaired without measurement.
” Fuller also suggests that the requirement to use the devices discourages businesses from considering more accurate data from sources such as airborne sensors and satellites .
“ Even if you do that , you still have to do the old technology as well , ” he says .
“ So it ’ s a double cost instead of a single cost.
” Despite expressing support for efforts to minimize methane leaks last year , EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler announced in August @ @ @ @ @ @ @ significantly reduced requirements for oil and gas operators to monitor infrastructure that could be leaking .
In 2016 the Obama administration ’ s EPA had decided to start regulating methane separately from other kinds of air pollution , and added requirements for checking transmission and storage facilities for natural gas—infrastructure known to be leak-prone .
Wheeler ’ s changes undo both .
Though semi-annual monitoring of fugitive emissions at wells and compressor stations will continue to be required , the 2020 changes remove the need for monitoring transmission and storage infrastructure , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Since “ pollution controls used to reduce VOC emissions also reduce methane emissions , ’ according to the EPA , the agency now indicates that distinct methane regulation is unnecessary .
This development has sparked legal pushback from environmental groups and some objections from leaders in the oil and gas industry .
They include Gretchen Watkins , president of Shell Oil Company , who said in an interview with NPR that she was frustrated to hear the news because the negative impacts of leaks and fugitive emissions are well known .
But the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could actually streamline the application requirements for using emerging technologies—including airborne sensors and satellites .
“ The EPA recognizes that new technologies that are expected to enter the market could help locate the source of fugitive emissions sooner and at lower costs than the current technologies required , ” he says .
Still , that potential ( and small ) silver lining is unlikely to negate concerns about the health and environmental side effects of the rule change or the avalanche of other environmental regulatory rollbacks announced this past summer .
The latter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rules on air pollution , as well as historic deregulation of the National Environmental Policy Act—which governs reviews for thousands of federal agency programs , such as drilling projects .
The incoming Biden administration could seek to reverse these policy changes , though some could take years to redo through the federal regulatory bureaucracy .
An analysis from the Rhodium Group , an independent research outlet , found that the recent rollbacks of methane regulations by the EPA and the Bureau of Land Management would cause oil and gas facilities to release an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by 2035 .
That would be bad news for everyone ’ s health .
In addition to its role in hastening global warming , methane contributes to ground-level ozone ( the main ingredient in smog ) , which can harm the lungs .
And burning methane , like any fossil fuel , produces chemicals that form particles of pollution that are a risk factor for many serious diseases , including asthma , Alzheimer ’ s and Parkinson ’ s .
( Though burning methane produces less of these than coal or oil .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ along with methane , from oil and gas infrastructure have been shown to damage major human organs and cause cancer .
More methane emissions would be particularly harmful for already disadvantaged groups .
Nationally , average concentrations of air pollutants in the homes of people of color are sharply higher than those recorded in the homes of white people .
Black Americans are 75 percent more likely to live in communities next to industrial facilities whose operation directly affects them in some way .
Exposure to concentrated amounts of methane itself can cause @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , nausea and vomiting , and general weakness .
“ We ’ re talking about real people living along the fence line where leaks are wafting over , ” says Timothy O ’ Connor , a senior attorney at EDF and a former inspector of industrial facilities in California .
Meanwhile some states have been experimenting with aerial technology projects to better monitor methane emissions .
In partnership with the California Air Resource Board ( CARB ) , one of the agencies involved in enforcing the state ’ s pollution rules , scientists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( JPL ) mapped most of California ’ s methane-emitting infrastructure with an airborne sensor from 2016 through 2018 .
Their research , published last year in Nature , found that 10 percent of individual methane sources contributed roughly 60 percent of California ’ s total methane emissions .
This result indicates that abnormal activity adds significantly to total methane counts .
The JPL researchers ( who were not affiliated with the Aerospace Corporation ) found a number of leaks and malfunctions in the Kern County area , says the study ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ CARB is now exploring a new collaboration with Planet , a company that owns satellites that provide daily images of the Earth .
Through NASA ’ s Carbon Monitoring System , scientists have conducted methane surveys in Texas , Mexico , California , Utah , Colorado and Arizona and are planning to conduct more in California , Louisiana , Colorado and the Gulf of Mexico .
But nowhere in the country have oil and gas companies or their regulators expanded these kinds of pilot programs to the extent needed to adequately measure emissions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Even in California , there are gaps , ” he adds .
The Independent Petroleum Association of America ’ s Fuller says gaps may result from the fact that regulators are limited by the current legal structure and need time to test the reliability and cost of the technologies for more widespread applications .
Such piecemeal efforts may be superseded by 2022 , when EDF plans to launch a satellite that it says will collect unprecedented global data on changing methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure on a regular basis .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ free on a publicly accessible platform .
In September GHGSat , a satellite company that sells the information it collects , launched another of its methane-tracking satellites into space and promised that satellite would deliver 100 times higher resolution than similar products .
Scientists are excited by these tools .
“ The eye-in-the-sky approach will ultimately solve this problem , ” says Rob Jackson , an ecologist and professor at Stanford University , who has authored multiple studies tracking methane emissions .
“ There 'll be nowhere to hide .
”

Ever since a father and son managed to draw four whiskey barrels of oil from a hand-dug hole near California’s Kern River 121 years ago, productive oil and gas wells have multiplied like mushrooms across the area. Though such wells are expected to emit minimal amounts of greenhouse gases during the oil-extraction process, scientists from a space-related research group were shocked by the size of the methane plumes they detected when they flew an infrared sensor over Kern County in 2015. Repeating the flights three more times in the next three years confirmed the initial reading: some wells were releasing at least six times more of the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere in one day than the Environmental Protection Agency had estimated they should emit in a year.
Karen Jones is one of the scientists at the Aerospace Corporation, the California-based nonprofit organization that conducted the aerial survey. She says she felt mystified by what she calls a lack of action among the oil fields’ operators and regulators as she watched the methane—the second-highest contributor to human-caused warming after carbon dioxide—continuously spew over the years. “The gas coming out of Kern County isn’t supposed to be there,” she says.
Revelations like Aerospace’s, which the nonprofit published in a report this past summer, are becoming more common. For years, oil and gas companies have been required to detect and repair methane leaks in their equipment. But scientists have produced dozens of studies over the past decade that suggest the current methods and technology used by industry to detect leaks—and by regulators to estimate how much methane is emitted—are inadequate to catch the actual scale of the problem.
Nonprofit groups and private satellite companies may soon make high-quality data about methane publicly available and ubiquitous, potentially creating more pressure to address the situation. Action to plug leaks and prevent further air pollution may be stymied in the meantime, though: the Trump administration took numerous steps that could weaken environmental protections, including rules outlining how companies monitor for and locate natural gas leaks in their equipment (methane is the main component of natural gas). Whether those rules will be reversed when the Biden administration enters the White House, and how long that process will take if it happens, remains to be seen.
Scientists say people of color and low-income communities, who already suffer disproportionately from the consequences of air pollution, will continue to bear much of the health brunt of such regulatory rollbacks. And more methane in the atmosphere is also likely to speed up the already accelerating process of global warming.
Eyes in the Sky
Using instruments on satellites and planes, researchers have, in recent years, revealed what they say are substantial inaccuracies in existing official methane emission counts. In 2014 a group of six scientists published a blockbuster study in Geophysical Research Letters exposing the largest U.S. methane anomaly that had ever been detected from space. The team calculated that the emissions around the hotspot—centered on the Four Corners region, where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet—exceeded EPA estimates for the area and persisted for years in all seasons. The second-biggest emissions hotspot they identified was located near California’s San Joaquin Valley, home of most of Kern County.
Since 1990, the EPA has prepared an annual greenhouse gas inventory with the aim of estimating the emissions from all the country’s human-made sources. Based on typical emission rates some of the largest oil and gas companies have reported regarding their own infrastructure—such as individual pumps, valves and storage tanks—the EPA calculates what it expects the rest of the equipment in the industry to be giving off.
David Lyon, a scientist at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), says the EPA may not have enough of the relevant data—and thus could underestimate the extent of leaks and other unexpected events. And because leaks spew many times more methane into the atmosphere than properly working equipment, missing such events would make the inventories wrong, says EDF’s chief scientist Steven Hamburg.
The EPA says it takes a comprehensive approach when estimating greenhouse gases in its inventories. “EPA’s emission estimates in the GHG [greenhouse gas] Inventory include the full range of conditions, including ‘abnormal events’ or ‘super-emitters,’” says agency spokesperson James Hewitt. “In addition, where data are available, emissions estimates for large anomalous leak events are estimated separately and included.” In response to subsequent questions, however, the EPA says that it “is correct that data are not available for every oil and gas emissions event from 1990 to recent years.... Given the variability of practices and technologies across oil and gas systems, it is possible that EPA’s estimates do not include all emissions from abnormal events.”
To check for possible differences between estimates and actual emissions, EDF researchers led a team of experts in amassing ground-based and airborne field measurements of methane coming from oil and gas facilities across the U.S. over a four-year period. In research published in Science in 2018, the group contended that in 2015 industry infrastructure emitted 60 percent more methane—at least an extra 4.9 million metric tons—than the EPA’s inventory estimate. That discrepancy is slightly less than the amount of methane emitted into the atmosphere by all the cattle in the U.S.
Part of the reason for the discrepancy may be the fact that oil and gas companies are only required to monitor emissions infrequently and with outdated technologies, according to several experts interviewed for this story. Since 2016 the EPA has required oil and gas operators in every state to search for methane leaks using handheld infrared cameras or devices that detect volatile organic compounds (VOCs). In Chevron’s oil fields in Kern County, employees inspect infrastructure with such devices “at least annually,” according to company representative Veronica Flores-Paniagua. But the cameras are expensive and can be imprecise, says Lee Fuller, executive vice president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America—a trade association and lobbying group for oil and gas producers. “If you see an apparent emission, one of the challenges is [that] it will show you there’s something coming out, [but] it doesn’t tell you what it is,” he says. Though the handheld cameras might show that a certain hatch should be closed or that a seal needs repair, “you don’t know how much it was emitting.”
“The purpose of leak detection and repair is to find and fix leaks, not to measure leaks,” Flores-Paniagua says. “If emissions sources are identified, they can generally be repaired without measurement.”
Fuller also suggests that the requirement to use the devices discourages businesses from considering more accurate data from sources such as airborne sensors and satellites. “Even if you do that, you still have to do the old technology as well,” he says. “So it’s a double cost instead of a single cost.”
Despite expressing support for efforts to minimize methane leaks last year, EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler announced in August that he had signed two rules that significantly reduced requirements for oil and gas operators to monitor infrastructure that could be leaking. In 2016 the Obama administration’s EPA had decided to start regulating methane separately from other kinds of air pollution, and it added requirements for checking transmission and storage facilities for natural gas—infrastructure known to be leak-prone. Wheeler’s changes undo both steps. Though semi-annual monitoring of fugitive emissions at wells and compressor stations will continue to be required, the 2020 changes remove the need for monitoring transmission and storage infrastructure—and for methane to be regulated separately. Because “pollution controls used to reduce VOC emissions also reduce methane emissions,” according to the EPA, the agency now indicates that distinct methane regulation is unnecessary.
This development has sparked legal pushback from environmental groups and some objections from leaders in the oil and gas industry. They include Gretchen Watkins, president of Shell Oil Company, who said in an interview with NPR that she was frustrated to hear the news because the negative impacts of leaks and fugitive emissions are well known. But the EPA’s Hewitt says the reversal could actually streamline the application requirements for using emerging technologies—including airborne sensors and satellites. “The EPA recognizes that new technologies that are expected to enter the market could help locate the source of fugitive emissions sooner and at lower costs than the current technologies required,” he says.
Still, that potential (and small) silver lining is unlikely to negate concerns about the health and environmental side effects of the rule change or the avalanche of other environmental regulatory rollbacks announced this past summer. The latter include the EPA altering how it creates rules on air pollution, as well as historic deregulation of the National Environmental Policy Act—which governs reviews for thousands of federal agency programs, such as drilling projects. The incoming Biden administration could seek to reverse these policy changes, though some could take years to redo through the federal regulatory bureaucracy.
An analysis from the Rhodium Group, an independent research outlet, found that the recent rollbacks of methane regulations by the EPA and the Bureau of Land Management would cause oil and gas facilities to release an extra 592 million metric tons of methane by 2035. That would be bad news for everyone’s health. In addition to its role in hastening global warming, methane contributes to ground-level ozone (the main ingredient in smog), which can harm the lungs. And burning methane, like any fossil fuel, produces chemicals that form particles of pollution that are a risk factor for many serious diseases, including asthma, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. (Though burning methane produces less of these than coal or oil.) The VOCs that are emitted, along with methane, from oil and gas infrastructure have been shown to damage major human organs and cause cancer.
More methane emissions would be particularly harmful for already disadvantaged groups. Nationally, average concentrations of air pollutants in the homes of people of color are sharply higher than those recorded in the homes of white people. Black Americans are 75 percent more likely to live in communities next to industrial facilities whose operation directly affects them in some way. Exposure to concentrated amounts of methane itself can cause headaches, dizziness, loss of consciousness, nausea and vomiting, and general weakness. “We’re talking about real people living along the fence line where leaks are wafting over,” says Timothy O’Connor, a senior attorney at EDF and a former inspector of industrial facilities in California.
Nowhere to Hide
Meanwhile some states have been experimenting with aerial technology projects to better monitor methane emissions. In partnership with the California Air Resource Board (CARB), one of the agencies involved in enforcing the state’s pollution rules, scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) mapped most of California’s methane-emitting infrastructure with an airborne sensor from 2016 through 2018. Their research, published last year in Nature, found that 0.2 percent of California’s methane-emitting infrastructure—from the oil and gas, dairy and landfill industries—contributed at least a third of the state’s total methane emissions. This result indicates that abnormal activity adds significantly to total methane counts. The JPL researchers (who were not affiliated with the Aerospace Corporation) found a number of leaks and malfunctions in the Kern County area, says the study’s lead author Riley Duren of JPL.*
CARB is now exploring a new collaboration with Planet, a company that owns satellites that provide daily images of the Earth. Through NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System, scientists have conducted methane surveys in Texas, Mexico, California, Utah, Colorado and Arizona and are planning to conduct more in California, Louisiana, Colorado and the Gulf of Mexico. But nowhere in the country have oil and gas companies or their regulators expanded these kinds of pilot programs to the extent needed to adequately measure emissions at scale, Duren says. “Even in California, there are gaps,” he adds. The Independent Petroleum Association of America’s Fuller says gaps may result from the fact that regulators are limited by the current legal structure and need time to test the reliability and cost of the technologies for more widespread applications.
Such piecemeal efforts may be superseded by 2022, when EDF plans to launch a satellite that it says will collect unprecedented global data on changing methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure on a regular basis. The group plans to provide those data for free on a publicly accessible platform. In September GHGSat, a satellite company that sells the information it collects, launched another of its methane-tracking satellites into space and promised that satellite would deliver 100 times higher resolution than similar products. Scientists are excited by these tools. “The eye-in-the-sky approach will ultimately solve this problem,” says Rob Jackson, an ecologist and professor at Stanford University, who has authored multiple studies tracking methane emissions. “There'll be nowhere to hide.”
*Editor's Note (12/22/20): This paragraph has been updated to more accurately reflect the distribution of methane emissions in California.


scientificamerican--2020-12-21--See Fast Radio Bursts Come of Age

See Fast Radio Bursts Come of Age

New subfields in astronomy tend to follow a particular sequence : Something new is observed .
Researchers scratch their heads , then look for more examples of it .
At first , each discovery in the new category—say , an exoplanet or gravitational-wave event—generates excitement .
Eventually they begin to feel routine .
But that is when the science gets interesting : with enough examples , patterns emerge , and inaccurate hypotheses are weeded out .
In 2020 the study of fast radio bursts ( FRBs ) has crested to that point .
For nearly two decades radio telescopes have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ light .
They come from distant galaxies and last just a fraction of a second , typically never to reappear .
With hundreds of FRBs now recorded , researchers have enough data points to begin drawing conclusions about the universe .
One big player in the search is the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment ( CHIME ) , a telescope that has detected more than 700 FRBs since the start of 2019 .
CHIME researcher Cherry Ng says that with all the new results coming in and with coordination among astronomers growing , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ figure out what these are.
” Here 's the story of this field so far .

New subfields in astronomy tend to follow a particular sequence: Something new is observed. Researchers scratch their heads, then look for more examples of it. At first, each discovery in the new category—say, an exoplanet or gravitational-wave event—generates excitement. Eventually they begin to feel routine. But that is when the science gets interesting: with enough examples, patterns emerge, and inaccurate hypotheses are weeded out.
In 2020 the study of fast radio bursts (FRBs) has crested to that point. For nearly two decades radio telescopes have been detecting these distinctive pinpoints of radio light. They come from distant galaxies and last just a fraction of a second, typically never to reappear. With hundreds of FRBs now recorded, researchers have enough data points to begin drawing conclusions about the universe.
One big player in the search is the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), a telescope that has detected more than 700 FRBs since the start of 2019. CHIME researcher Cherry Ng says that with all the new results coming in and with coordination among astronomers growing, “we can all work together to figure out what these are.” Here's the story of this field so far.


scientificamerican--2020-12-22--Baby Bees Deprive Caregivers of Sleep

Baby Bees Deprive Caregivers of Sleep

If there ’ s one thing we can all agree on , it ’ s that taking care of babies is a demanding business .
New parents are always on duty , and late-night feedings and fussing leave caregivers chronically sleep-deprived .
Turns out the issue is not unique to humans .
Because the same thing happens to bees .
Researchers found that worker bees who care for the brood get less sleep than their sisters , because bee babies produce chemicals that keep their caretakers awake .
The findings appear in the journal Current Biology .
[ Moshe Nagari @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Up Sleep to Care for Offspring that Are Not Their Own ] It seems that all animals sleep , including the birds and the bees .
Yet this daily phenomenon still remains blanketed in mystery .
“ The exact function of sleep is still an enigma , but we know that reduced or sleep loss is associated with reduced performance , health and survival.
” Moshe Nagari was a postdoc at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem when he started studying sleep .
In particular , he was curious about how animals can sometimes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ important work to do , especially moms tending to their young .
“ Killer whale mothers , for example , follow their cubs for the first few weeks postpartum and hardly ever sleep in this time .
For several weeks.
” Rather than swimming along with killer whales for a couple of months , Nagari focused his attention on bumblebees .
In these colonies , a queen lays the eggs and worker bees called nurses care for the resulting hatchlings .
To start , Nagari confirmed that when nurses were housed with larvae @ @ @ @ @ @ @ didn ’ t have babies to attend to .
“ So our first intuition was that the larvae are constantly signaling to the nurse bees that they are hungry , and this signaling is what ’ s keeping the nurse bees awake.
” So the researchers replaced the larvae with pupae , a developmental stage that doesn ’ t require constant feeding .
“ And to our surprise , we found that nurse bees with pupae slept even less than the bees that were housed with feeding larvae.
” These babies , it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ swaddling .
“ Indeed , in our observations we saw that the nurses were incubating the pupae at the expense of sleep.
” What ’ s more , the babies didn ’ t even have to be there .
It seems that simply surrounding the nurses with the cocoons in which the pupae had been resting was enough to keep the caregivers awake and on their toes .
Which suggests that baby bees secrete a chemical that does the work of a late-night cup of coffee .
“ If this interpretation is true @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pheromones from juveniles can modulate the sleep of caregiver adults in any animal.
” Keeping adult bees from getting their Zzzzzs .

Full Transcript
If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that taking care of babies is a demanding business. New parents are always on duty, and late-night feedings and fussing leave caregivers chronically sleep-deprived. Turns out the issue is not unique to humans, because the same thing happens to bees. Researchers found that worker bees who care for the brood get less sleep than their sisters, because bee babies produce chemicals that keep their caretakers awake. The findings appear in the journal Current Biology. [Moshe Nagari et al., Bumble bee workers give up sleep to care for offspring that are not their own]
It seems that all animals sleep, including the birds and the bees. Yet this daily phenomenon still remains blanketed in mystery.
“The exact function of sleep is still an enigma, but we know that reduced or sleep loss is associated with reduced performance, health and survival.”
Moshe Nagari was a postdoc at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem when he started studying sleep. In particular, he was curious about how animals can sometimes sacrifice shut-eye when they’ve got important work to do—especially moms tending to their young.
“Killer whale mothers, for example, follow their cubs for the first few weeks postpartum and hardly ever sleep in this time for several weeks.”
Rather than swimming along with killer whales for a couple of months, Nagari focused his attention on bumblebees. In these colonies, a queen lays the eggs, and worker bees called nurses care for the resulting hatchlings. To start, Nagari confirmed that when nurses were housed with larvae, they slept significantly less than bees who didn’t have babies to attend to.
“So our first intuition was that the larvae are constantly signaling to the nurse bees that they are hungry, and this signaling is what’s keeping the nurse bees awake.”
So the researchers replaced the larvae with pupae, a developmental stage that doesn’t require constant feeding.
“And to our surprise, we found that nurse bees with pupae slept even less than the bees that were housed with feeding larvae.”
These babies, it seemed, needed the bee equivalent of swaddling.
“Indeed, in our observations, we saw that the nurses were incubating the pupae at the expense of sleep.”
What’s more, the babies didn’t even have to be there. It seems that simply surrounding the nurses with the cocoons in which the pupae had been resting was enough to keep the caregivers awake and on their toes—which suggests that baby bees secrete a chemical that does the work of a late-night cup of coffee.
“If this interpretation is true, this is the first evidence that pheromones from juveniles can modulate the sleep of caregiver adults in any animal....”
Keeping adult bees from getting their z’s.
—Karen Hopkin
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]


scientificamerican--2020-12-21--Trump Signs Directive to Bolster Nuclear Power in Space Exploration

Nuclear power will be a big part of the United States ’ space exploration efforts going forward , a new policy document affirms .
President Donald Trump on Wednesday ( Dec. 16 ) issued Space Policy Directive-6 ( SPD-6 ) , which lays out a national strategy for the responsible and effective use of space nuclear power and propulsion ( SNPP ) systems .
“ Space nuclear power and propulsion is a fundamentally enabling technology for American deep-space missions to Mars and beyond , ” Scott Pace , deputy assistant to the president and executive secretary of the National Space @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Wednesday .
“ The United States intends to remain the leader among spacefaring nations , applying nuclear power technology safely , securely and sustainably in space.
” Nuclear systems have been important parts of the nation ’ s exploration portfolio for decades .
For example , many of NASA ’ s highest-profile robotic explorers—including the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 interstellar probes , New Horizons Pluto spacecraft and Curiosity Mars rover—have derived their power from radioisotope thermoelectric generators ( RTGs ) , which convert to electricity the heat generated by the radioactive decay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ SNPP systems could help that portfolio expand considerably in the near future .
For instance , NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy are working together on a fission-reactor project called Kilopower , which could provide juice for crewed outposts on the moon and Mars .
And NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has hailed nuclear thermal propulsion , which would harness the heat thrown off by fission reactions to accelerate propellants to incredible speeds , as a potential game-changer for the agency ’ s deep-space exploration efforts .
SPD-6 firms up and formalizes that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the document , which you can read here , states that the U.S. should develop , by the mid-2020s , fuel production and processing capabilities sufficient to support a variety of nuclear space systems , from RTGs to nuclear thermal and nuclear electric propulsion .
Another goal laid out by SPD-6 is the demonstration of a “ fission power system on the surface of the moon that is scalable to a power range of 40 kilowatt-electric ( kWe ) and higher to support a sustained lunar presence and exploration of Mars.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ late 2020s if possible , the document states .
SPD-6 is the sixth space policy directive signed by President Trump , as its name suggests .
SPD-1 officially instructed NASA to return astronauts to the moon to help prepare for crewed Mars missions ; SPD-2 eased regulations on the private spaceflight industry ; SPD-3 aimed to help with space-traffic management ; SPD-4 directed the Department of Defense to establish the U.S. Space Force ; and SPD-5 laid out a cybersecurity policy for U.S. space systems .
As that list indicates , President Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ domain .
He also resurrected the National Space Council , which had been dormant since the early 1990s .
And just last week , he issued a new national space policy , which aims to bolster national security and American leadership in space , among other goals .
Copyright 2020 Space.com , a Future company .
All rights reserved .
This material may not be published , broadcast , rewritten or redistributed .

Nuclear power will be a big part of the United States’ space exploration efforts going forward, a new policy document affirms.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday (Dec. 16) issued Space Policy Directive-6 (SPD-6), which lays out a national strategy for the responsible and effective use of space nuclear power and propulsion (SNPP) systems.
“Space nuclear power and propulsion is a fundamentally enabling technology for American deep-space missions to Mars and beyond,” Scott Pace, deputy assistant to the president and executive secretary of the National Space Council, said in an emailed statement Wednesday. “The United States intends to remain the leader among spacefaring nations, applying nuclear power technology safely, securely and sustainably in space.”
Nuclear systems have been important parts of the nation’s exploration portfolio for decades. For example, many of NASA’s highest-profile robotic explorers—including the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 interstellar probes, New Horizons Pluto spacecraft and Curiosity Mars rover—have derived their power from radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which convert to electricity the heat generated by the radioactive decay of plutonium-238.
More extensive use of SNPP systems could help that portfolio expand considerably in the near future. For instance, NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy are working together on a fission-reactor project called Kilopower, which could provide juice for crewed outposts on the moon and Mars.
And NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has hailed nuclear thermal propulsion, which would harness the heat thrown off by fission reactions to accelerate propellants to incredible speeds, as a potential game-changer for the agency’s deep-space exploration efforts.
SPD-6 firms up and formalizes that commitment to SNPP systems. For example, the document, which you can read here, states that the U.S. should develop, by the mid-2020s, fuel production and processing capabilities sufficient to support a variety of nuclear space systems, from RTGs to nuclear thermal and nuclear electric propulsion.
Another goal laid out by SPD-6 is the demonstration of a “fission power system on the surface of the moon that is scalable to a power range of 40 kilowatt-electric (kWe) and higher to support a sustained lunar presence and exploration of Mars.” This should happen by the mid- to late 2020s if possible, the document states.
SPD-6 is the sixth space policy directive signed by President Trump, as its name suggests. SPD-1 officially instructed NASA to return astronauts to the moon to help prepare for crewed Mars missions; SPD-2 eased regulations on the private spaceflight industry; SPD-3 aimed to help with space-traffic management; SPD-4 directed the Department of Defense to establish the U.S. Space Force; and SPD-5 laid out a cybersecurity policy for U.S. space systems.
As that list indicates, President Trump has been quite active in the space-policy domain. He also resurrected the National Space Council, which had been dormant since the early 1990s. And just last week, he issued a new national space policy, which aims to bolster national security and American leadership in space, among other goals.
Copyright 2020 Space.com, a Future company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


scientificamerican--2020-12-21--Incoming EPA Chief Vows 'Sense of Urgency on Climate'

Michael Regan on Saturday gave his first speech as the presumptive head of EPA , and his brief remarks were transformative—both for the 44-year-old Black man who grew up in the shadow of the 1950s-era H.F. Lee power plant in North Carolina , and for the battered federal agency he is poised to inherit .
“ Growing up as a child , hunting and fishing with my father and grandfather in eastern North Carolina , I developed a deep love and respect for the outdoors and our natural resources , but I also experienced respiratory issues that required me to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and allergens were especially bad , ” said Regan during his introduction by President-elect Joe Biden in Wilmington , Del .
There ’ s little question where the lung-searing pollution came from .
The 382-megawatt H.F. Lee Plant was one of Duke Energy Corp. ’ s baseload coal burners .
It spewed millions of tons of carbon dioxide and other criteria air pollutants every year since its opening in 1951 .
What Regan didn ’ t yet know was how H.F. Lee would inform his budding career in environmental science .
“ I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ connections between our environment and our health , how the world around us contributes to or detracts from our enjoyment of life , ” he said .
“ So after completing my education in environmental science , there was one place in particular that I wanted to work , the EPA.
” He made it three times over—first as a summer intern at the nearly 14,000-employee agency , then as national program manager for the Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards , and now as Biden ’ s pick for the agency @ @ @ @ @ @ @ joined on the senior climate team by one of his predecessors , Gina McCarthy , who led the agency under President Obama .
Regan , one of six members of the Biden-Harris climate leadership team introduced Saturday , looks to join the incoming administration after four years at the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality , where he worked to shrink the state ’ s sizable carbon footprint while transitioning its energy and transportation sectors toward carbon-free fuels .
Biden called Regan “ a proud son of North Carolina ” and praised him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not just with regulated industrial and business sectors , but also with “ fence-line communities ” most affected by pollution from industrial plants , highways and other emissions sources .
Such communities have “ carried the burdens of industrial progress for much too long without sharing in any of the benefits , ” Biden said .
Regan said he will act quickly to address those environmental inequities .
“ We will move with a sense of urgency on climate change , protecting our drinking water , and enact an environmental justice framework that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he said .
“ And as a state official , I understand how actions from EPA can help or hurt local efforts .
We ’ re going to ensure that EPA is once again a strong partner for the states , not a roadblock.
” The promises are backed by more than environmental science , a field in which Reagan is well versed .
( He holds degrees from North Carolina A & T State and George Washington universities . )
They are also based on personal experience in North Carolina , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disasters during his tenure at DEQ in Raleigh .
Among them was 2018 ’ s Hurricane Florence , widely considered the worst natural disaster in North Carolina history .
Florence ’ s destruction , including to Regan ’ s hometown of Goldsboro , population 35,000 , caused more than $ 24 billion in damage statewide .
Florence was preceded by Matthew , another catastrophic storm , in 2016 , and was followed by Hurricanes Dorian in 2019 and Isaias this year .
As head of DEQ , Regan oversaw the cleanup of thousands @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the pickup of hundreds of tons of debris , and the removal of thousands of dead livestock—mostly hogs and chickens—and the cleanup of toxic spills both onshore and offshore associated with the recent string of hurricanes .
Regan also oversaw the implementation of Democratic Gov .
Roy Cooper ’ s sweeping environmental Executive Order 80 .
The 2018 document called for a top-to-bottom overhaul of the state ’ s climate policies , including programs to transition to a clean energy economy and prepare the state for future climate disasters .
The nearly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , one month before another storm , Category 1 Hurricane Isaias , landed on the state ’ s coast .
Regan , who chaired the state ’ s Climate Change Interagency Council , was prescient in his comments about storms and the need for climate resilience .
“ Michael is somebody who starts with the science , and he knows how frequent and intense these storms are going to become under a changing climate , ” said Will McDow , director of landscape resilience at the Environmental Defense Fund ’ s North Carolina @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eastern North Carolina , so he knows what storms do to these rural communities , whether it ’ s farmers , small landowners or business owners , ” added McDow , who has known Regan for more than a decade .
“ He also knows about communities in the floodplain that are disproportionately impacted ” by floods .
A spokesperson at the North Carolina DEQ declined to comment on Regan ’ s record on climate change and environmental disasters , referring questions to the Biden-Harris transition team .
In a 2019 newspaper op-ed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the “ disruption ” caused by global changes , whether to the environment via climate change or the economy through technological innovation .
He called such disruptions “ our new normal ” and challenged readers to persevere through climate disasters .
“ We can not continue to ignore the reality that we will face more frequent and extreme weather .
We must rebuild stronger , smarter and faster , ” he said .
“ As we begin another hurricane season with even greater challenges facing North Carolina this year , the administration @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state to prepare our most vulnerable communities , ” he said at the time .
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E & E News .
E & E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net .

Michael Regan on Saturday gave his first speech as the presumptive head of EPA, and his brief remarks were transformative—both for the 44-year-old Black man who grew up in the shadow of the 1950s-era H.F. Lee power plant in North Carolina, and for the battered federal agency he is poised to inherit.
“Growing up as a child, hunting and fishing with my father and grandfather in eastern North Carolina, I developed a deep love and respect for the outdoors and our natural resources, but I also experienced respiratory issues that required me to use an inhaler on days when pollutants and allergens were especially bad,” said Regan during his introduction by President-elect Joe Biden in Wilmington, Del.
There’s little question where the lung-searing pollution came from. The 382-megawatt H.F. Lee Plant was one of Duke Energy Corp.’s baseload coal burners. It spewed millions of tons of carbon dioxide and other criteria air pollutants every year since its opening in 1951.
What Regan didn’t yet know was how H.F. Lee would inform his budding career in environmental science.
“I’ve always been curious about the connections between our environment and our health, how the world around us contributes to or detracts from our enjoyment of life,” he said. “So after completing my education in environmental science, there was one place in particular that I wanted to work, the EPA.”
He made it three times over—first as a summer intern at the nearly 14,000-employee agency, then as national program manager for the Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards, and now as Biden’s pick for the agency’s administrator. He will be joined on the senior climate team by one of his predecessors, Gina McCarthy, who led the agency under President Obama.
Regan, one of six members of the Biden-Harris climate leadership team introduced Saturday, looks to join the incoming administration after four years at the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, where he worked to shrink the state’s sizable carbon footprint while transitioning its energy and transportation sectors toward carbon-free fuels.
Biden called Regan “a proud son of North Carolina” and praised him for his commitment to addressing pollution concerns not just with regulated industrial and business sectors, but also with “fence-line communities” most affected by pollution from industrial plants, highways and other emissions sources. Such communities have “carried the burdens of industrial progress for much too long without sharing in any of the benefits,” Biden said.
Regan said he will act quickly to address those environmental inequities.
“We will move with a sense of urgency on climate change, protecting our drinking water, and enact an environmental justice framework that empowers people in all communities,” he said. “And as a state official, I understand how actions from EPA can help or hurt local efforts. We’re going to ensure that EPA is once again a strong partner for the states, not a roadblock.”
The promises are backed by more than environmental science, a field in which Reagan is well versed. (He holds degrees from North Carolina A&T State and George Washington universities.)
They are also based on personal experience in North Carolina, which has seen a disproportionate number of climate disasters during his tenure at DEQ in Raleigh.
Among them was 2018’s Hurricane Florence, widely considered the worst natural disaster in North Carolina history. Florence’s destruction, including to Regan’s hometown of Goldsboro, population 35,000, caused more than $24 billion in damage statewide. Florence was preceded by Matthew, another catastrophic storm, in 2016, and was followed by Hurricanes Dorian in 2019 and Isaias this year.
As head of DEQ, Regan oversaw the cleanup of thousands of miles of toxified and denuded waterways, the pickup of hundreds of tons of debris, and the removal of thousands of dead livestock—mostly hogs and chickens—and the cleanup of toxic spills both onshore and offshore associated with the recent string of hurricanes.
Regan also oversaw the implementation of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s sweeping environmental Executive Order 80. The 2018 document called for a top-to-bottom overhaul of the state’s climate policies, including programs to transition to a clean energy economy and prepare the state for future climate disasters.
The nearly 400-page plan was rolled out last June, one month before another storm, Category 1 Hurricane Isaias, landed on the state’s coast. Regan, who chaired the state’s Climate Change Interagency Council, was prescient in his comments about storms and the need for climate resilience.
“Michael is somebody who starts with the science, and he knows how frequent and intense these storms are going to become under a changing climate,” said Will McDow, director of landscape resilience at the Environmental Defense Fund’s North Carolina office.
Regan “also comes from eastern North Carolina, so he knows what storms do to these rural communities, whether it’s farmers, small landowners or business owners,” added McDow, who has known Regan for more than a decade. “He also knows about communities in the floodplain that are disproportionately impacted” by floods.
A spokesperson at the North Carolina DEQ declined to comment on Regan’s record on climate change and environmental disasters, referring questions to the Biden-Harris transition team.
In a 2019 newspaper op-ed, Regan challenged North Carolinians to respond to the “disruption” caused by global changes, whether to the environment via climate change or the economy through technological innovation. He called such disruptions “our new normal” and challenged readers to persevere through climate disasters.
“We cannot continue to ignore the reality that we will face more frequent and extreme weather. We must rebuild stronger, smarter and faster,” he said.
“As we begin another hurricane season with even greater challenges facing North Carolina this year, the administration’s leadership has better positioned our state to prepare our most vulnerable communities,” he said at the time.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.


scientificamerican--2020-12-21--Hawaii's Kilauea Volcano Erupts with Dramatic Lava Fountains

Hawaii 's Kilauea volcano erupted beginning Sunday ( Dec. 20 ) night local time , with dramatic lava fountains and huge puffs of gas and steam being launched from the summit crater called Halemaʻumaʻu , the Hawaii Volcano Observatory ( HVO ) , part of the U.S. Geological Survey ( USGS ) , reported .
Though the shield volcano is one of Earth 's most active volcanoes , constantly spewing lava from its fissures , the recent eruption is much more dramatic than the `` background '' streams of lava that consistently flow from volcanic cracks .
`` For the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Volcano Observatory has recorded ground deformation and earthquake rates at Kilauea Volcano 's summit and upper East Rift Zone that have exceeded background levels , '' since a 2018 eruption , the observatory said in a statement Sunday .
Just after 9:30 p.m. HST ( 2:30 a.m. EST , 7:30 a.m. UTC ) , the volcano observatory picked up a glow in the crater at Kilauea 's summit , just before the eruption began .
Several fissures opened up in the walls of the crater , which was filled with water ; sizzling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the lake , causing the water to boil away as it was replaced with the molten rock .
The crater 's northern fissure sent out a huge lava fountain , extending some 165 feet ( 50 meters ) high , the HVO reported .
About an hour later , at 10:36 p.m. HST ( 3:36 a.m. EST , 8:36 a.m. UTC ) , a 4.4-magnitude earthquake shook the ground beneath the volcano 's south flank .
The center of the earthquake was about 4 miles ( 6 kilometers ) deep and about 8.7 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Fern Forest , inside Hawaii Volcanoes National Park .
More than 30 earthquakes of magnitude-4 or greater have shook Kilauea 's south flank in the past 20 years , according to HVO , with most of them caused by the abrupt movement of the south flank as it moves southeast over the oceanic crust .
`` HVO continues to monitor Kīlauea as the situation is rapidly evolving with this evening 's eruption at the summit of Kīlauea , '' David Phillips , HVO 's acting scientist-in-charge , said in the statement .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of 2018 when the floor of the Pu ' u ' Ō ' ō 's crater , on the eastern side of the volcano 's rift zone , collapsed on April 30 , pushing magma underground southeast , Live Science reported at the time .
On May 3 , a magnitude-5.0 earthquake struck the Big Island near the Pu ' u ' Ō ' ō crater .
That shaking sent lava racing into residential subdivisions in the Puna district of the Big Island .
Mandatory evacuations of the Leilani Estates and Lanipuna Gardens @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Future company .
All rights reserved .
This material may not be published , broadcast , rewritten or redistributed .

Hawaii's Kilauea volcano erupted beginning Sunday (Dec. 20) night local time, with dramatic lava fountains and huge puffs of gas and steam being launched from the summit crater called Halemaʻumaʻu, the Hawaii Volcano Observatory (HVO), part of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), reported.
Though the shield volcano is one of Earth's most active volcanoes, constantly spewing lava from its fissures, the recent eruption is much more dramatic than the "background" streams of lava that consistently flow from volcanic cracks.
"For the past several weeks, the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory has recorded ground deformation and earthquake rates at Kilauea Volcano's summit and upper East Rift Zone that have exceeded background levels," since a 2018 eruption, the observatory said in a statement Sunday.
Video from W rim of the caldera just before midnight. As of December 21 at 1:30 a.m. HST, the growing lava lake has almost reached the level of the lowest down-dropped block that formed during the 2018 collapse events. Over the past 2 hours, the lake has risen by ~10 m (32 ft). pic.twitter.com/Qbx1d6hbq4 — USGS Volcanoes�� (@USGSVolcanoes) December 21, 2020
Just after 9:30 p.m. HST (2:30 a.m. EST, 7:30 a.m. UTC), the volcano observatory picked up a glow in the crater at Kilauea's summit, just before the eruption began. Several fissures opened up in the walls of the crater, which was filled with water; sizzling lava poured through the cracks and into the lake, causing the water to boil away as it was replaced with the molten rock. The crater's northern fissure sent out a huge lava fountain, extending some 165 feet (50 meters) high, the HVO reported.
About an hour later, at 10:36 p.m. HST (3:36 a.m. EST, 8:36 a.m. UTC), a 4.4-magnitude earthquake shook the ground beneath the volcano's south flank. The center of the earthquake was about 4 miles (6 kilometers) deep and about 8.7 miles (14 km) south of Fern Forest, inside Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. More than 30 earthquakes of magnitude-4 or greater have shook Kilauea's south flank in the past 20 years, according to HVO, with most of them caused by the abrupt movement of the south flank as it moves southeast over the oceanic crust.
"HVO continues to monitor Kīlauea as the situation is rapidly evolving with this evening's eruption at the summit of Kīlauea," David Phillips, HVO's acting scientist-in-charge, said in the statement.
The last dramatic eruption occurred in the spring of 2018 when the floor of the Pu'u 'Ō'ō's crater, on the eastern side of the volcano's rift zone, collapsed on April 30, pushing magma underground southeast, Live Science reported at the time. On May 3, a magnitude-5.0 earthquake struck the Big Island near the Pu'u 'Ō'ō crater. That shaking sent lava racing into residential subdivisions in the Puna district of the Big Island. Mandatory evacuations of the Leilani Estates and Lanipuna Gardens subdivisions followed.
Copyright 2020 LiveScience.com, a Future company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


scientificamerican--2020-12-21--Moderna COVID Vaccine Becomes Second to Get U.S. Authorization

A week after granting an emergency-use authorization for the country ’ s first COVID-19 vaccine , US regulators have followed with a second : another RNA vaccine , this one made by Moderna of Cambridge , Massachusetts .
The emergency-use authorization followed quickly after a panel of external advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration ( FDA ) voted unanimously , with one abstention , to recommend use of the vaccine on 17 December .
One week earlier , the agency authorized a similar vaccine made by Pfizer of New York City and BioNTech of Mainz , Germany , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ did the same .
The speed of these authorizations reflects the urgency of the pandemic , and is a testament to the scientific advances that made rapid vaccine development possible , said immunologist James Hildreth , president of Meharry Medical College in Nashville , Tennessee , at the panel meeting on Thursday .
“ To go from having a sequence of a virus in January to having two vaccines available in December is a remarkable achievement.
” The authorization is a first for Moderna , a ten-year-old biotechnology company that had long pledged @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a therapeutic agent , but had yet to push a drug or vaccine all the way through to the clinic .
It will join a growing list of organizations with coronavirus vaccines that are being deployed around the world , including teams in China and Russia .
In the United States , the vaccines offer a glimmer of hope amid the prospect of a tough winter .
The country is logging thousands of deaths from COVID-19 each day , and this is expected to rise over the winter holiday season .
Coronavirus infections @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to reach the primary endpoint of its trial five months earlier than expected , said Jacqueline Miller , senior vice-president and head of infectious diseases at the company .
Moderna ’ s vaccine , which was developed in collaboration with the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases , works in the same way as the one produced by Pfizer and BioNTech .
Both consist of RNA molecules encased in lipid nanoparticles .
The RNA in both vaccines encodes a slightly modified form of the SARS-CoV-2 protein known as spike , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Once taken up by cells , the RNA is used to produce the protein , which then triggers an immune response .
The RNA does not enter the nucleus where the cell ’ s genome resides , and is degraded by the cell within a day of the injection .
Like Pfizer ’ s vaccine , Moderna ’ s seems to be highly effective—about 94 % —at preventing symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections .
Its safety profile is also similar to Pfizer ’ s , with fatigue , headaches and pain at the site @ @ @ @ @ @ @ side effects .
Since the Pfizer vaccine was rolled out in the United Kingdom and the United States , there have been occasional reports of recipients experiencing severe allergic reactions called anaphylaxis after being injected .
There have been no signs of such reactions so far in the Moderna trial , which excluded people who have had anaphylactic reactions to previous vaccines , but not those with other allergies , such as reactions to food .
The two vaccines differ in the composition of the lipid nanoparticle that encases the RNA , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be stored at higher temperature than Pfizer ’ s , which must be kept at −70 °C , much colder than a normal freezer .
Moderna ’ s vaccine can be stored in a −20 °C freezer for 6 months , and in a refrigerator ( at about 4 °C ) for 30 days .
This promises to streamline the logistics of deploying the vaccine , particularly in rural areas and in countries with limited health-care infrastructure .
FDA advisers spent much of the 17 December committee meeting discussing when and how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the placebo arm of Moderna ’ s trial after an emergency-use authorization is granted .
Once a coronavirus vaccine becomes available , participants might choose to leave the trial to guarantee that they can get a jab .
Maintaining the integrity of clinical trials after vaccine authorization—to collect data on long-term safety and the duration of protection—is a looming challenge for developers .
Last week , Pfizer proposed that when its participants become eligible to receive a vaccine as part of a national roll-out , study investigators will tell them whether they received @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has instead proposed to ‘ unblind ’ its whole trial at once after it receives an emergency-use authorization , telling all of its participants which treatment they have received , and offering to vaccinate those in the placebo arm using doses that had already been set aside for the clinical trial .
Some FDA advisers cautioned that this approach would sacrifice valuable weeks of data collection , and allow some participants to receive the vaccine ahead of others in similar priority groups in their communities .
Others argued that although the approach is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ given the complexity of the vaccine roll-out in the United States , where individual state and local governments will set their own priorities .
“ It ’ s such a hodgepodge here , it ’ s impractical , ” said biostatistician Jeannette Lee at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock .
Offering trial participants the vaccine could help the company keep them enrolled in the study , so that it can continue to collect data about safety and immunity , said Lindsey Baden , an infectious disease specialist at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Massachusetts , who was asked by Moderna to speak about the issue to the committee .
Some healthcare workers who participated in the trial were already leaving to get the Pfizer vaccine , he said .
“ If we lose our volunteers the opportunity to learn anything further will be substantially impaired , ” he said .
“ We have to be practical.
” This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on December 18 2020 .

A week after granting an emergency-use authorization for the country’s first COVID-19 vaccine, US regulators have followed with a second: another RNA vaccine, this one made by Moderna of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The emergency-use authorization followed quickly after a panel of external advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) voted unanimously, with one abstention, to recommend use of the vaccine on 17 December. One week earlier, the agency authorized a similar vaccine made by Pfizer of New York City and BioNTech of Mainz, Germany, about a week after UK regulatory authorities did the same.
The speed of these authorizations reflects the urgency of the pandemic, and is a testament to the scientific advances that made rapid vaccine development possible, said immunologist James Hildreth, president of Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, at the panel meeting on Thursday. “To go from having a sequence of a virus in January to having two vaccines available in December is a remarkable achievement.”
The authorization is a first for Moderna, a ten-year-old biotechnology company that had long pledged to revolutionize medicine by harnessing RNA as a therapeutic agent, but had yet to push a drug or vaccine all the way through to the clinic. It will join a growing list of organizations with coronavirus vaccines that are being deployed around the world, including teams in China and Russia.
In the United States, the vaccines offer a glimmer of hope amid the prospect of a tough winter. The country is logging thousands of deaths from COVID-19 each day, and this is expected to rise over the winter holiday season. Coronavirus infections are so rampant that Moderna was able to reach the primary endpoint of its trial five months earlier than expected, said Jacqueline Miller, senior vice-president and head of infectious diseases at the company.
RNA vaccine
Moderna’s vaccine, which was developed in collaboration with the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, works in the same way as the one produced by Pfizer and BioNTech. Both consist of RNA molecules encased in lipid nanoparticles. The RNA in both vaccines encodes a slightly modified form of the SARS-CoV-2 protein known as spike, which enables the virus to infect human cells.
Once taken up by cells, the RNA is used to produce the protein, which then triggers an immune response. The RNA does not enter the nucleus where the cell’s genome resides, and is degraded by the cell within a day of the injection.
Like Pfizer’s vaccine, Moderna’s seems to be highly effective—about 94%—at preventing symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections. Its safety profile is also similar to Pfizer’s, with fatigue, headaches and pain at the site of injection among the most often cited side effects.
Since the Pfizer vaccine was rolled out in the United Kingdom and the United States, there have been occasional reports of recipients experiencing severe allergic reactions called anaphylaxis after being injected. There have been no signs of such reactions so far in the Moderna trial, which excluded people who have had anaphylactic reactions to previous vaccines, but not those with other allergies, such as reactions to food.
The two vaccines differ in the composition of the lipid nanoparticle that encases the RNA, and Moderna’s formulation allows the vaccine to be stored at higher temperature than Pfizer’s, which must be kept at −70 °C, much colder than a normal freezer. Moderna’s vaccine can be stored in a −20 °C freezer for 6 months, and in a refrigerator (at about 4 °C) for 30 days. This promises to streamline the logistics of deploying the vaccine, particularly in rural areas and in countries with limited health-care infrastructure.
Continuing trials
FDA advisers spent much of the 17 December committee meeting discussing when and how to offer a vaccine to participants in the placebo arm of Moderna’s trial after an emergency-use authorization is granted. Once a coronavirus vaccine becomes available, participants might choose to leave the trial to guarantee that they can get a jab. Maintaining the integrity of clinical trials after vaccine authorization—to collect data on long-term safety and the duration of protection—is a looming challenge for developers.
Last week, Pfizer proposed that when its participants become eligible to receive a vaccine as part of a national roll-out, study investigators will tell them whether they received the vaccine or a placebo. Moderna has instead proposed to ‘unblind’ its whole trial at once after it receives an emergency-use authorization, telling all of its participants which treatment they have received, and offering to vaccinate those in the placebo arm using doses that had already been set aside for the clinical trial.
Some FDA advisers cautioned that this approach would sacrifice valuable weeks of data collection, and allow some participants to receive the vaccine ahead of others in similar priority groups in their communities. Others argued that although the approach is not ideal, it might be necessary given the complexity of the vaccine roll-out in the United States, where individual state and local governments will set their own priorities. “It’s such a hodgepodge here, it’s impractical,” said biostatistician Jeannette Lee at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.
Offering trial participants the vaccine could help the company keep them enrolled in the study, so that it can continue to collect data about safety and immunity, said Lindsey Baden, an infectious disease specialist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, who was asked by Moderna to speak about the issue to the committee. Some healthcare workers who participated in the trial were already leaving to get the Pfizer vaccine, he said. “If we lose our volunteers the opportunity to learn anything further will be substantially impaired,” he said. “We have to be practical.”
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on December 18 2020.


scientificamerican--2020-12-22--Ravens Measure Up to Great Apes on Intelligence

Full Transcript
Ravens are known for their exceptional intelligence—in fact, they’re sometimes called “flying primates.”
“We knew they are very smart, but nobody had really tested this using a big and comprehensive test battery, which also then really enabled us to say, ‘Is their cognitive performance similar to those of great apes or not?’”
Simone Pika is a cognitive scientist at the University of Osnabrück in Germany. She and her colleagues wanted to see how ravens would measure up to primates across a wide array of tasks, so they subjected eight ravens to something called the Primate Cognition Test Battery—a series of 33 different tasks designed to assess various aspects of intelligence among primates.
For example, one test is a game of cups you might have seen at a fair—put an object under one of three cups, move the cups around and guess which cup the object is under. Other tasks tested the ravens’ ability to determine cause and effect or to understand different quantities. Peanuts were a popular test item to keep the birds motivated.
Overall the researchers found that four-month-old ravens, which you might think of as “teenage” ravens, did just as well on most tasks as adult chimps and orangutans—except on tests of spatial skills.
“And that was a little surprising to us. But we used a test battery that was designed to test primate cognition. And these are tasks which may make sense for human children and great apes. And now we use this for a species which is very different. They are flying; they have beaks, communicate with beaks, don’t have hands. So I would say here maybe the task we used to test their spatial skills could be improved.”
The results appear in the journal Scientific Reports. [Simone Pika et al., Ravens parallel great apes in physical and social cognitive skills]
Kaeli Swift is a behavioral ecologist who studies crows and other corvids at the University of Washington. She says she was impressed by the results—and how comprehensive the tests were—but says it can be hard to assess intelligence by comparing across species.
“I’d like to see a shift in our language from comparing ravens to primates, like calling them flying primates, to rethinking how we scale animals—and not putting them on such a linear scale, right, where we’re like, ‘Wow, birds are as smart as apes. That’s amazing. Who would have thought?’ It’s like, well, there’s a bunch of really smart animals, and their natural history informs a lot of their physical and social cognition. And it’s much less linear than the narrative we often tell.”
Animal intelligence, she says, is much more complex and variable than we think.
—Christopher Intagliata
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]


scientificamerican--2020-12-22--Evaluating COVID Risk on Planes, Trains and Automobiles

With COVID-19 reaching the most dangerous levels the U.S. has seen since the pandemic began, the country faces a problematic holiday season. Despite the risk, many people are likely to travel using various forms of transportation that will inevitably put them in relatively close contact with others. Many transit companies have established frequent cleaning routines, but evidence suggests that airborne transmission of the novel coronavirus poses a greater danger than surfaces. The virus is thought to be spread primarily by small droplets, called aerosols, that hang in the air and larger droplets that fall to the ground within six feet or so. Although no mode of public transportation is completely safe, there are some concrete ways to reduce risk, whether on an airplane, train or bus—or even in a shared car.
Credit: Amanda Montañez
Airplanes
At a casual glance, air travel might seem like the perfect recipe for COVID transmission: it packs dozens of people into a confined space, often for hours at a time. But many planes have excellent high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters that capture more than 99 percent of particles in the air, including microbes as SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID. When their recirculation systems are operating, most commercial passenger jets bring in outside air in a top-to-bottom direction about 20 to 30 times per hours. This results in a 50–50 mix of outside and recirculated air and reduces the potential for airborne spread of a respiratory virus. Many airlines now require passengers to wear a mask during flights except for mealtimes, and some are blocking off middle seats to allow more distancing between people. Companies have also implemented rigorous cleaning procedures between flights. So how does this translate into overall risk?
“An airplane cabin is probably one of the most secure conditions you can be in,” says Sebastian Hoehl of the Institute for Medical Virology at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany, who has co-authored two papers on COVID-19 transmission on specific flights, which were published in JAMA Network Open and the New England Journal of Medicine, respectfully. Still, a handful of case studies have found that limited transmission can take place onboard. One such investigation of a 10-hour journey from London to Hanoi starting on March 1 found that 15 people were likely infected with COVID-19 in-flight—and that 12 of them had sat within a couple of rows of a single symptomatic passenger in business class. (The results were published this month in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.) Most of these flights occurred early on in the pandemic, however, and in the case of the March 1 flight, masks were likely not worn, the researchers wrote. Meanwhile a recent Department of Defense study modeled the risk of in-flight infection using mannequins exhaling simulated virus particles and found that a person would have to be exposed to an infectious passenger for at least 54 hours to get an infectious dose. This finding assumes the infected passenger is wearing a surgical mask, however, and it does not account for the dangers involved in removing the mask for meals or talking or in moving about on the plane.
With flying, COVID risk really comes down to how closely one sits to other people and for how long, whether or not everyone is wearing a mask, and how infectious any passengers are at the time. If you happen to be seated close to a person who is actively “shedding” the virus, especially if it is a long flight or that person is not wearing a mask, there is a higher chance that you will get the disease. But if you are seated relatively far from others, and everyone is wearing a mask, your risk is probably fairly low. Being in a crowded airport or taking a taxi to get there could be a bigger concern, though.
Subways and Trains
This past spring the novel coronavirus tore through New York City, reaching a peak of thousands of new cases per day in April. Initially some researchers blamed the metropolis’s bustling subway—which carried 5.5 million commuters on a typical pre-COVID weekday—for making it the epicenter of the pandemic in the U.S. But later reviews of the evidence suggest mass transit systems have not been major drivers of viral spread. In August the New York Times asked several international transportation agencies whether any superspreading events had been linked to mass transit, and they said none had. A September report by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) examined the coronavirus’s spread in cities around the globe that had robust public transit systems. It found no correlation between mass transit use and transmission of the virus. Many of the cities in question required commuters to wear masks.
The APTA report suggested that commuters should reduce risk by wearing a mask and staying six feet apart and that train cars should be well ventilated. Most major cities’ subways and trains constantly recirculate a mixture of fresh air and older air, both of which are pulled through a filter rated on the MERV (minimum efficiency reporting value) scale. MERV-13 filters are less efficient than HEPA filters, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommends them for reducing the number of airborne viral particles. A number of subway and train systems use lower-rated MERV filters that are still capable of at least reducing the volume of coronavirus in the air. The APTA report notes that on most systems’ subway cars and buses, new air replaces stale air almost 18 times an hour. Passenger train operator Amtrak claims to cycle air through cabins 44 times an hour. But even with fresh air available, an infected passenger can still transmit the coronavirus to someone who is sitting in close proximity—so riders should attempt to space themselves out and avoid densely packed cars whenever possible. Mask wearing reduces risk and is now mandatory on many forms of transit in the U.S., including New York City’s subway and bus systems, as well as Amtrak trains throughout the country. Finally, experts suggest that limiting the length of a ride can also be helpful: 15 minutes on a subway is safer than a multihour train trip.
Buses
Many buses have HVAC (heating, ventilating and air-conditioning) systems similar to those on subways and trains, with one additional factor: buses are more likely to have windows that open. Windows, as well as open ceiling vents, allow fresh air to enter the vehicle. In addition, in a city system (as opposed to a long-distance ride), buses make frequent stops. Doing so allows outside air to flood in each time the doors open. In a case study of a bus in China, a passenger with the novel coronavirus was able to infect many other riders, including those seated up to seven rows away. There seemed to be less risk of transmission, however, for people who were seated near windows and doors that could open.
In addition to snagging window seats, bus riders should look for the same safety features they would on a subway: a mask requirement, good ventilation and adequate spacing between passengers. Limiting rides to short trips may also be helpful. Some bus companies have installed clear partitions between drivers and passengers. Doing so might limit the spread of virus-carrying droplets from coughing, sneezing, breathing or speaking but is unlikely to prevent viral transmission via smaller airborne particles.
Taxis, Ubers and Lyfts
Before the pandemic, many people would not think twice about ordering a ride-share car or hailing a taxi. But now the idea of being in such an enclosed space with a stranger can seem like a life-and-death proposition. It is nearly impossible for drivers and passengers to remain six feet apart in a car, so transmission is definitely possible. An NEJM study in March reported on a Thai taxi driver who fell ill and tested positive for the coronavirus after driving some tourists who had been coughing but wearing a mask. Reliable data on the frequency of COVID transmission in cars is lacking, however.
Keeping the windows open and making sure the air system is set to take in outside air instead of recycling it should reduce the risk. Wearing a mask also probably helps, and ride-share companies Uber and Lyft both require drivers and passengers to do so. These companies have also stopped offering car pools (except in Uber’s case for people who work together), so passengers are only exposed to the driver and anyone in their own party. Some drivers have even installed a plastic shield between the front and back seats. But as is the case with buses, these barriers would likely only protect against larger droplets, not aerosols. Shorter rides—especially those under roughly 15 minutes—pose a lower risk than long ones. And keeping conversation to a minimum could also reduce the danger because talking is known to release aerosols that can spread the virus. If the rate of community transmission in your region is low, chances are that taking the occasional taxi or ride-share car is not a huge risk—provided you wear a mask and keep the windows open as much as possible.
Read more about the coronavirus outbreak from Scientific American here. And read coverage from our international network of magazines here.


scientificamerican--2020-12-22--The Top Five Climate Stories of 2020

The Top Five Climate Stories of 2020

This year began with terrifyingly massive blazes that tore across eastern Australia , and it will end with a photo-finish race to see if 2020 will beat 2016 as Earth ’ s hottest year on record .
Though the coronavirus pandemic has been a defining story of 2020 , the year has been a notable one on the climate front as well .
Developments have ranged from an agonizing array of warming-fueled disasters that impacted the lives and livelihoods of millions around the world , to signs that some countries ( including China and members of the European Union ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving this warming .
Here is a roundup of five of the biggest climate stories of the year : The flames of record-breaking conflagrations tore through the parched parts of Australia , the lush Amazon and huge swaths of the Western U.S. this year .
In Australia , fires early in the year affected hundreds of millions of wild animals and spewed smoke 20 miles up into the atmosphere .
In California , a relentless onslaught of blazes torched more than four million acres—almost doubling the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most area burned in a season .
The August Complex fire alone scorched more than 1 million acres , making it by far the largest in California ’ s recorded history .
Millions in the West felt the fires ’ impacts as smoke spread , making the air unhealthy to breathe .
The Amazon also saw terrible destruction from blazes , including in virgin forest .
Rising temperatures can contribute to devastating fire seasons because they increase the odds of having major heat waves that dry fuels out ; this makes for bigger @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also exacerbate droughts .
A study submitted in March found that for Australia , extreme fires like the ones seen this year are now 30 percent more likely because of climate change .
These massive blazes also pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere , worsening the warming—so actual fires are adding fuel to the proverbial one .
Once the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season got going , it did not seem to want to stop .
From the May arrival of Tropical Storm Arthur ( before the official June 1 start of the season @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the year saw a record 30 named storms—the most of any single season .
For only the second time ever , forecasters used up the official hurricane name list and had to move on to the supplemental Greek alphabet .
In addition to the sheer number of storms , 27 of those that formed this year were the earliest of their storm sequence to do so .
As ocean waters continue to warm—and reach temperatures that can support hurricanes earlier in the year—it is possible those records could be broken in the future @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , so it is still uncertain where it will rank in the pantheon of annual global temperatures .
But it will definitely vie for the top spot .
As of November ’ s end , 2020 was only 0.02 degree Fahrenheit behind 2016 at the same point , according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data that go back 141 years .
And that is without the major El Niño event that boosted global temperatures four years ago .
The fact that 2020 will at least come close to 2016 is evidence of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fuel burning and other human activities that emit heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere .
If this year does take the number one spot , the pace at which new annual heat records are being set means it may not keep it for very long .
As flights were grounded and car commutes were cut by more people staying home this year amidst the pandemic , global greenhouse gas emissions dropped by about 7 percent—an unprecedented amount .
It is not a silver lining though , as it underscores the extent to which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the goals of limiting warming and preventing its worst effects .
Future annual reductions need to be on par with this year ’ s , but must be sustained and not nearly as disruptive , experts say .
That means instead of relying on the largely individual actions that drove much of this year ’ s change , extensive and concerted government policy initiatives are needed , as well as investment in clean energy and transportation .
In terms of tackling climate change , the biggest story of the year was probably the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the election of Joe Biden as president .
Although this flip will not happen until after Biden is inaugurated on January 20 next year , his positions on climate change are already sending a clear signal to businesses , state governments and other countries about where the federal government will stand on the issue during his tenure .
The administration of Donald Trump rolled back numerous environmental regulations , including several that are key to reining in greenhouse gas emissions .
These include reducing requirements to ramp up fuel efficiency in cars and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ industry to monitor for leaks of methane , a potent greenhouse gas .
Biden has pledged to undo these rollbacks , but this will take time in many cases ; new rules will have to be shaped through the required federal bureaucratic channels .
One of the first changes Biden has said he will make is to reverse another major climate move Trump took this year : pulling the U.S. out of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming .
Biden has pledged to start the process to reenter the accord @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and this has been seen as a sign to the rest of the world that the U.S. wants to be a major player in international efforts to tackle climate change once again .

This year began with terrifyingly massive blazes that tore across eastern Australia, and it will end with a photo-finish race to see if 2020 will beat 2016 as Earth’s hottest year on record.
Though the coronavirus pandemic has been a defining story of 2020, the year has been a notable one on the climate front as well. Developments have ranged from an agonizing array of warming-fueled disasters that impacted the lives and livelihoods of millions around the world, to signs that some countries (including China and members of the European Union) are making efforts to move forward on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving this warming.
Here is a roundup of five of the biggest climate stories of the year:
Raging Wildfires
The flames of record-breaking conflagrations tore through the parched parts of Australia, the lush Amazon and huge swaths of the Western U.S. this year. In Australia, fires early in the year affected hundreds of millions of wild animals and spewed smoke 20 miles up into the atmosphere. In California, a relentless onslaught of blazes torched more than four million acres—almost doubling the state’s previous record for the most area burned in a season. The August Complex fire alone scorched more than one million acres, making it by far the largest in California’s recorded history. Millions in the West felt the fires’ impacts as smoke spread, making the air unhealthy to breathe. The Amazon also saw terrible destruction from blazes, including in virgin forest.
Rising temperatures can contribute to devastating fire seasons because they increase the odds of having major heat waves that dry fuels out. This makes for bigger and more intense fires. Warming can also exacerbate droughts. A study submitted in March found that for Australia, extreme fires like the ones seen this year are now 30 percent more likely because of climate change. These massive blazes also pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, worsening the warming—so actual fires are adding fuel to the proverbial one.
Flurry of Hurricanes
Once the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season got going, it did not seem to want to stop. From the May arrival of Tropical Storm Arthur (before the official June 1 start of the season) through Hurricane Iota in November, the year saw a record 30 named storms—the most of any single season. For only the second time ever, forecasters used up the official hurricane name list and had to move on to the supplemental Greek alphabet. In addition to the sheer number of storms, 27 of those that formed this year were the earliest of their storm sequence to do so. As ocean waters continue to warm—and reach temperatures that can support hurricanes earlier in the year—it is possible those records could be broken in the future.
Chart-Topping Heat?
The year is not over yet, so it is still uncertain where it will rank in the pantheon of annual global temperatures. But it will definitely vie for the top spot. As of November’s end, 2020 was only 0.02 degree Fahrenheit behind 2016 at the same point, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data that go back 141 years. And that is without the major El Niño event that boosted global temperatures four years ago. The fact that 2020 will at least come close to 2016 is evidence of the long-term warming trend driven by fossil fuel burning and other human activities that emit heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. If this year does take the number-one spot, the pace at which new annual heat records are being set means it may not keep it for very long.
COVID-Driven CO 2 Drop
As flights were grounded and car commutes were cut by more people staying home amid the pandemic this year, global greenhouse gas emissions dropped by about 7 percent—an unprecedented amount. That drop is not a silver lining, though, because it underscores the extent to which humanity now has to go to reach the goals of limiting warming and preventing its worst effects. Future annual reductions need to be on par with this year’s but must be sustained and not nearly as disruptive, experts say. That means instead of relying on the largely individual actions that drove much of this year’s change, extensive and concerted government policy initiatives are needed, as well as investment in clean energy and transportation.
U.S. Reversal
In terms of tackling climate change, the biggest story of the year was probably the impending reversal in the U.S.’s position with the election of Joe Biden as president. Although this flip will not happen until after Biden is inaugurated on January 20 next year, his positions on climate change are already sending a clear signal to businesses, state governments and other countries about where the federal government will stand on the issue during his tenure. The administration of Donald Trump rolled back numerous environmental regulations, including several that are key to reining in greenhouse gas emissions. These include reducing requirements to ramp up fuel efficiency in cars and relaxing requirements for the oil and gas industry to monitor for leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Biden has pledged to undo these rollbacks, but this will take time in many cases. New rules will have to be shaped through the required federal bureaucratic channels. One of the first changes Biden has said he will make is to reverse another major climate move Trump took this year: pulling the U.S. out of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming. Biden has pledged to start the process to reenter the accord on his first day in office, and this has been seen as a sign to the rest of the world that the U.S. wants to be a major player in international efforts to tackle climate change once again.