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Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! In fact American scientific‘s Fast ScienceI’m Rachel Feltman. Let’s start with some science stories you might have missed this week.
First, you’ll recall that I mentioned last week that an unprecedented number of states were experiencing drought. Those dry conditions have helped keep wildfires at bay, including in surprising places like Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Here to tell a little more about that situation Andrea Thompson, a American scientific associate editor covering environment, energy and Earth sciences.
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Andrea Thompson: So many of us are used to wildfires in the West, especially in recent years in places like California, but there have been over 500 wildfires since October 1st in New Jersey. There have been about 200 wildfires in Massachusetts in October, which is an increase of (roughly) 1,200 percent of the average. So, you know, obviously that’s really unusual.
And the reason it’s happening is because of the drought conditions there and in much of the country. In terms of population, it is actually half of the country, about 149 million people.
The reason we’re seeing drought in the East right now is because we’ve just had a long period without much rain. This has been especially true in the Northeast. We have seen some rain in some places recently, especially from Louisiana to the Ohio River Valley.
Some parts of the Southeast have managed to get quite a bit of wet and have seen some improvement in the drought, but every now and again, you know, it takes rainfall like this to fully dig through. And some areas like New York or Washington DC recently had very light rain, which doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t really help. This is just to prevent the drought from getting worse.
As we will see when drought conditions ease, this will be different for different parts of the country. It is very difficult to make accurate predictions weeks or months in advance. But there are predictions that can somehow be made to tell the odds of whether conditions will be warmer or cooler, wetter or drier. So in parts of the US, you know, we may be seeing wetter conditions coming, in the Northeast right now, warmer than average, drier at least for the next few weeks. But, you know, how it continues in the winter, it’s hard to say right now.
Feltman: In some disturbing news from other planets a study in Science last Thursday warns that mismanaged plastic waste globally could almost double from 2020 levels by 2050 if we continue on our current trajectory. The researchers used machine learning to analyze data on plastic production and waste management, along with information on socio-economic trends, to estimate how our plastic problem may evolve over the coming decades. While the findings are deeply troubling, and suggest that annual greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic system could grow by more than a third if nothing changes, the authors also came up with some possible solutions. The researchers simulated the results of eight interventions currently under consideration in the draft United Nations plastic pollution treaty. The good news is that the authors found that four of these policies, if implemented together, could cut plastic-related greenhouse gas emissions by a third by 2050. Unfortunately, those policies are likely to be a pretty tough sell: limiting virgin plastic production to 2020 levels to begin with. We should also mandate that new products contain at least 40 percent recycled plastic. Also, we should impose a heavy tax on plastic packaging. Then a $50 billion investment in global waste management would be the icing on the cake. So we better get cracking. And by we I mean the UN
Unfortunately We also have an extra update on H5N1It is one of the viruses that cause bird flu. This year’s bird flu strain is spreading among cattle and other animals and has infected at least 46 humans in the US. So far, in general, it has been explained that they are relatively mild cases. But last week, health officials in British Columbia, Canada, announced that a previously healthy teenager was in critical condition. Initial symptoms of conjunctivitis, fever and cough progressed to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). this is a life-threatening condition. Health officials are still working to find the source of the teenager’s infection and confirm that she has not passed the virus on to anyone else. But it’s a reminder that H5N1 can cause serious illness and efforts to keep it from circulating should reflect that.
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But we also received some encouraging public health news. Last week we released federal data From 2023 on sexually transmitted infections. STIs have been on the rise in recent years, but data from 2023 shows a roughly 10 percent decline in early-stage syphilis, when it’s most contagious. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that’s the first significant decline we’ve seen in more than 20 years. Gonorrhea cases also fell for the second year in a row. There is still much work to be done, especially regarding congenital syphilis, which is an STI transmitted to newborns during childbirth. This continued to rise in 2023. Now, we saw a smaller increase in congenital syphilis cases in 2023 than in previous years, which is big. But since this potentially deadly disease is completely preventable—pregnant women should be screened for syphilis and given antibiotics before giving birth—we have no excuse not to eradicate it completely. So basically, these numbers should motivate the government to put even more money into sex education, STI screening and treatment, and public awareness, so we’re finally moving in the right direction.
Now we have a quick update to share 29th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Changemore precisely known as COP29. The meeting started last Monday in Azerbaijan. American scientific has a reporter on the floor there, so here are some key takeaways from Friday’s meetings.
Alec Luhn: My name is Alec Luhn. I am a member of the Pulitzer Center which is looking at the COP29 climate summit. The goal of this year’s summit is to increase international climate finance from $100 billion a year to $1 trillion a year or more. But it has been bad from the beginning.
At first the countries could not agree on which country to hold. National leaders did not appear. France has boycotted the summit. Argentina has left early. And of course, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, promising to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement.
Now, the climate envoy Biden, the energy secretary, a congressional delegation – all have come to COP29 promising to continue the energy transition in the US despite Trump. But the point is that the financial target must now be agreed without any real guarantee from the US, which is traditionally one of the loudest voices here, along with the European Union and China. So that climate tricycle is missing a wheel, and it reflects an uncertain time for the climate as a whole, while the energy transition is underway (and) wind and solar have overtaken other energy sources, because we’re not moving fast enough.
We have just learned that emissions have continued to rise this year. They have not yet begun to decline despite almost 30 years of these climate peaks. And a glaring reminder of that is another report that came out, and I covered that American scientificEven if we stopped emitting carbon tomorrow, a certain amount of sea level rise is likely already locked in from the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet.
So the climate crisis is more urgent than ever, and yet our international mechanisms to deal with it are weaker than ever – some former diplomats, including the former president of the UN climate body, wrote a letter to the COP saying. It is no longer fit for purpose and needs to be reformed to have any real chance of solving this problem.
Feltman: Let’s end with a quick Uranus stop, full of surprises as always. When NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft compressed In 1986, the ice giant received some confusing data about the planet’s magnetosphere. A planet’s magnetic field is dominated by bubbles that help protect the celestial body from the destructive force of charged particles from the sun and other cosmic sources.
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So here’s what Voyager 2 saw in the 1980s: the spacecraft detected belts of electron radiation that, at least in our solar system, were rivaled only by the super intensities found around Jupiter. But things didn’t quite add up. In Uranus’ magnetosphere, scientists expected to see a lot of plasma—the ionized particles that help fuel the radiation belts—but the belts themselves seemed to be the only action in town, so to speak. Scientists also did not find the water ions they had expected to see from Uranus’ moons.
A new look at the Voyager 2 data reveals a new explanation: We just captured Uranus on an off day, a rare one indeed, researchers reported in a study published last Monday. Researchers believe that a massive solar wind event hit Uranus’ magnetosphere before Voyager 2’s flyby, hypothesized to have removed any remaining plasma and temporarily exposed the radiation belts. Scientists suspect that Uranus experiences these conditions about 4 percent of the time. That means it’s likely that the ice giant’s moons—which were written off as geologically inactive after those discoveries in the 1980s—actually produce water ions that were temporarily displaced by bad space weather. In other words, secret underground oceans are back on the table For the moons Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon.
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That’s it for this week’s roundup of science news. We’ll be back on Wednesday.
Fast Science produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck check out our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. subscribe American scientific for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
In fact American scientificthis is Rachel Feltman. Have a great week!
