3 Minutes to Midnight

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the clock two minutes closer to Doomsday.

World leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe. These failures of political leadership endanger every person on Earth.

Update (April 12):  The Next System Project is an attempt to address this failure of leadership.

Update (June 26):  Climate lawsuits may be a new way to force governments to take action.

Update (April 17, 2016):  The Next System Project is starting a series of teach-ins and interviewed Noam Chomsky.

Breaking Point

A report card on the conditions needed for a stable environment published in Science finds that four of nine boundaries have been exceeded.  The lead author is Will Steffen of the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Center.

What the science has shown is that human activities — economic growth, technology, consumption — are destabilizing the global environment.

Almost as a side note, another Science study finds that the oceans may be on the brink of a mass extinction.

Update (January 24):  Steffen also has a paper that illustrates how practically all of the environmental damage has occurred since 1950.

Sea Level Rising Faster

Claiming sea level rise from 1900 to 1990 has been overestimated, a study published in Nature finds that the rise since 1990 is about 25 percent faster than previously thought.

Class Bias

A Pew Research report called The Politics of Financial Insecurity shows a correlation between one's level of financial security and whether government should help the needy or whether the poor have it easy.

Unfortunately, those least secure are also less likely to vote.

Leave It In the Ground

A study published in Nature by Christophe McGlade and Paul Ekins of University College London describes how much fossil fuel reserves must be abandoned to hold global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

Hottest Year

After a string of monthly records, the Japan Meteorological Agency announces that 2014 was the hottest year since records began about 120 years ago.  The JMA data now puts 1998 in second place by 0.05 degree Celsius.  2013 was the third warmest.

Update (January 16):  Both NOAA and NASA confirm that 2014 is the warmest year in the temperature record.  The NOAA data puts 2010 and 2005 in second place by 0.04 degree Celsius.

Update (January 25):  Assuming no anthropogenic climate change, the probability that 13 of the 15 warmest years occurring since 2000 is about one in 27 million.  That's good evidence to reject the null hypothesis.

Update (February 7):  Lindsay Abrams points out that rankings are not as significant as the fact that 14 of the 15 warmest years have occurred since 2000.

Update (March 18):  The three months ending with February are now the warmest winter on record.

Update (July 27):  An overview of climate for 2014.

Thermodynamics and Life

Jeremy England of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hypothesizes that Darwinian evolution may be a special case of "dissipation-driven adaptation of matter".  The idea is a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics and seems to imply that under the right circumstances the emergence of life may be inevitable.

What I get out of his talk is that complex structures emerge from systems that adapt to external forces by forming resonant responses which allow for greater dissipation of energy and thus higher entropy than other systems.  It seems like physical laws "compel" matter to optimize the production of entropy.

For me, this ties into Caleb Scharf's arguments against "rare Earth" and how, while our place in the Universe has some unique aspects, we are not exceptional.  Scharf says we need to acknowledge that the Copernican Principle is both right and wrong.  The exact circumstances of the Earth may be quite unusual, but is likely to be only one pathway to complex life.  It's somehow comforting to imagine that the origin and evolution of life is a logical consequence of universal physics.