Is the world being destroyed?

"Today, the data shows a looming mismatch between the world’s strengthened climate ambitions and the availability of critical minerals that are essential to realising those ambitions."

“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice,” the poet Robert Frost mused in 1920. Frost famously held “with those who favor fire,” and that poetic view surprisingly coincides with mainstream scientific consensus about the end of the world, which states the sun will in some seven billion to eight billion years evolve into a red giant star that will scorch and perhaps even engulf Earth.

Yet when that happens, Earth will already have been dead for billions of years, and will more resemble present-day Venus. As the sun slowly brightens over time on its path to becoming a red giant, it will eventually cross a critical threshold in which its luminosity surpasses our planet’s ability to dissipate absorbed radiation out into space. At that point, somewhere between one billion and three billion years from now, Earth’s surface temperature will steadily rise until the boiling oceans throw a thick blanket of steamy water vapor around the planet. All that water vapor, itself a potent greenhouse gas, will raise temperatures higher still to cook another greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, out of Earth’s rocks. The end result will be a “runaway greenhouse” in which the planet loses its water to space and bakes beneath a crushing atmosphere of almost pure carbon dioxide.

Earlier this year, for the first time in human history, atmospheric carbon dioxide reached 400 parts per million (ppm), surpassing a preindustrial average of about 280 ppm that has prevailed with slight variations for the past several million years. Pessimistic projections from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast atmospheric carbon dioxide levels soaring beyond 1,000 ppm later this century. As the world warms not from a brightening sun but from fossil fuel–burning humans, some scientists have wondered just how close our planet might be to tumbling into a runaway state. Studies in the 1980s and ‘90s suggested the present-day Earth was safe against a runaway, but a paper published this week in Nature Geoscience argues that “the runaway greenhouse may be much easier to initiate than previously thought.” Indeed, the study suggests that without the cooling effects of certain types of clouds, modern Earth would already be well on its way to broiling like Venus. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

According to the study’s lead author, Colin Goldblatt of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, the disturbing result hinges less on carbon dioxide and more on humble water vapor, which recent investigations have shown absorbs solar radiation more efficiently than previously believed. “The old answer was that a runaway on Earth right now was theoretically impossible,” Goldblatt says. “Even if you evaporated a big chunk of ocean it would just rain back out, because the water vapor would radiate away more thermal energy than it absorbed through sunlight. Our new calculations show that a water vapor–rich atmosphere absorbs more sunlight and lets out less heat than previously thought, enough to put the Earth into a runaway from which there would be no return.”

The upside of the new study is that even though a climate runaway may be possible in theory, it remains very difficult to cause in practice through human greenhouse gas emissions. “We’ve estimated how much carbon dioxide would be required to get this steamy atmosphere, and the answer is about 30,000 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is actually good news in terms of anthropogenic climate change,” Goldblatt says. Thirty thousand ppm is about 10 times more carbon dioxide than most experts estimate could be released from burning all available fossil fuels, he notes, although such high values could in theory be reached by releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide from the Earth’s vast deposits of limestone and other carbonate rocks.

A cloudy outlook

Not everyone is convinced Goldblatt’s result is valid, however. James Kasting, a geoscientist at The Pennsylvania State University, suspects that even in theory an anthropogenic runaway remains out of reach of humanity. Kasting performed many of the earlier seminal studies that seemed to rule out a present-day runaway, and with his student Ramses Ramirez is currently polishing a new study that reinforces those conclusions. No matter how much carbon dioxide is pumped into the present-day Earth’s atmosphere in Kasting’s models, the resulting heating is insufficient to cause the planet to rapidly boil off its oceans. “The bottom line,” Kasting says, “is that we do not get a runaway.”

Like Goldblatt’s team, Kasting’s group studies Earth’s climate using a one-dimensional model that simulates the absorption, transmission and reflection of sunlight by a single surface-to-space strip of atmosphere. These models’ sophisticated treatment of light’s interactions with air closely reproduce the observed warming effects of carbon dioxide, water vapor and other greenhouse gases, yet they contain only the crudest approximations of Earth’s changing weather and surface. Such models are particularly poor at accounting for the complex effects of clouds, which, depending on where and how they form, can either cool or heat the planet: Thick, low-lying clouds tend to reduce temperatures by reflecting greater amounts of sunlight back to space, whereas high, thin clouds will warm the planet by letting light pass through then trapping more of the absorbed heat. The differences between Kasting’s and Goldblatt’s conclusions largely boil down to Kasting’s 1-D approximations of clouds providing slightly more cooling whereas Goldblatt’s provide slightly less.

Three-dimensional modeling is the only way around this impasse, yet current 3-D climate models aren’t up to the task of simulating how Earth’s clouds and weather will change within a very steamy or CO2-rich atmosphere. “Using today’s best models to address these extremes is like trying to drive up a mountain in a Honda Civic,” Goldblatt says. “A Civic can take you coast to coast on paved roads, but take it off-road and you run into problems. Today’s models are like that right now—they aren’t designed for extreme atmospheres. If you want to model the runaway greenhouse, you need the equivalent of a Humvee for your climate model that will take you to these wild places.”

Kasting’s group recently received funding from NASA to work with other teams to develop better 3-D models, and a handful of other research groups in Europe are also pursuing similar goals.

Out of the fire, into the frying pan

Outside of better models, other useful constraints on the runaway greenhouse scenario come from the Earth’s long history. Measurements of 56-million-year-old sedimentary rocks have revealed an event during the mid-Cenozoic era called the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) in which a millennia-scale pulse of greenhouse gases warmed the globe. The PETM pulse seems to have been roughly equivalent to what humans could release through burning all recoverable fossil fuels, and may have warmed the planet in excess of 10 degrees Celsius, but clearly no catastrophic runaway occurred, for otherwise we would not now be here. If it didn’t happen then, many researchers suggest, it won’t happen now from a similar, anthropogenic spike of greenhouse gas.

“All these geological records tell us that even with very high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the past, Earth avoided runaway,” Goldblatt acknowledges. “But that doesn’t tell us how much margin of error we have today or how close things came in the past. It’s a bit like walking around on top of a foggy cliff and not knowing whether you’re a meter or a kilometer from the edge. Even simple modeling can let you work out some hard limits to help guide behavior.”

Already a wealth of modeling suggests that easily achievable amounts of global warming would fall far outside safety margins long before Earth began any runaway transition to Venus. In 2010 a study from Steven Sherwood at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and Matthew Huber at Purdue University calculated that warming slightly in excess of 10 degrees C—like that of the PETM and of pessimistic scenarios for future fossil-fuel burning—could render large portions of the planet uninhabitable for many creatures. Unprotected humans and other warm-blooded mammals can overheat and die in humid conditions hotter than about 35 degrees C, because their metabolisms produce more heat than can be easily dissipated into the surrounding air. The latest results from Kasting’s group, which are still under review, suggest that such conditions could prevail across much of the planet if human civilization burns enough fossil fuel to quadruple atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.

Reaching such dangerous levels “is certainly doable,” Huber says. “It’s our decision whether or not to dedicate the next century to burning these reserves.... There used to be subtropical forests near the poles 50 million years ago, and that doesn’t sound so bad. But the fossil record closer to the equator is really poor, and that may be an indication that life was extremely stressed during these warm periods. If over half the surface area of the planet becomes inhospitable, it will not render Earth uninhabitable, but it will be unrecognizable and existentially challenging for the majority of the people, species and communities on Earth.”

As nightmarish as a runaway greenhouse seems, whether or not modern Earth is susceptible to it should perhaps be seen as essentially an academic point. Microbes could endure and even flourish on a planet at the brink of runaway, but people would still be steam-cooked whether or not such a hothouse world tipped over into a more Venusian climate. Leaving aside other effects of global warming like rising seas, stronger storms, longer droughts and plummeting biodiversity, Kasting says, “the problem of heat stress alone could become lethal to humans well before any runaway happens, and that danger may be much closer than previously realized. This is serious enough to warrant our full attention.”

Mineral wealth can, if exploited responsibly, contribute to public revenue and provide economic livelihoods for many. However, if poorly managed, mineral development can lead to a myriad of negative consequences, including:

• Significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions arising from
energy-intensive mining and processing activities.
• Environmental impacts, including biodiversity loss and social
disruption due to land use change, water depletion and
pollution, waste-related contamination and air pollution.
• Social impacts stemming from corruption and misuse of
government resources, fatalities and injuries to workers and
members of the public, human rights abuses including child
labour and unequal impacts on women and girls.

In addition, these risks may lead to supply disruption, which could
slow the pace of clean energy transitions. It is therefore imperative
for both companies and governments to manage the environmental
and social impacts of mineral production.

Eminent Australian scientist Professor Frank Fenner, who helped to wipe out smallpox, predicts humans will probably be extinct within 100 years, because of overpopulation, environmental destruction and climate change.

Fenner, who is emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, said homo sapiens will not be able to survive the population explosion and “unbridled consumption,” and will become extinct, perhaps within a century, along with many other species. United Nations official figures from last year estimate the human population is 6.8 billion, and is predicted to pass seven billion next year.

Fenner told The Australian he tries not to express his pessimism because people are trying to do something, but keep putting it off. He said he believes the situation is irreversible, and it is too late because the effects we have had on Earth since industrialization (a period now known to scientists unofficially as the Anthropocene) rivals any effects of ice ages or comet impacts.

Fenner said that climate change is only at its beginning, but is likely to be the cause of our extinction. “We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island,” he said. More people means fewer resources, and Fenner predicts “there will be a lot more wars over food.”

Easter Island is famous for its massive stone statues. Polynesian people settled there, in what was then a pristine tropical island, around the middle of the first millennium AD. The population grew slowly at first and then exploded. As the population grew the forests were wiped out and all the tree animals became extinct, both with devastating consequences. After about 1600 the civilization began to collapse, and had virtually disappeared by the mid-19th century. Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond said the parallels between what happened on Easter Island and what is occurring today on the planet as a whole are “chillingly obvious.”

While many scientists are also pessimistic, others are more optimistic. Among the latter is a colleague of Professor Fenner, retired professor Stephen Boyden, who said he still hopes awareness of the problems will rise and the required revolutionary changes will be made to achieve ecological sustainability. “While there's a glimmer of hope, it's worth working to solve the problem. We have the scientific knowledge to do it but we don't have the political will,” Boyden said.

Fenner, 95, is the author or co-author of 22 books and 290 scientific papers and book chapters. His announcement in 1980 to the World Health Assembly that smallpox had been eradicated is still seen as one of the World Health Organisation’s greatest achievements. He has also been heavily involved in controlling Australia’s feral rabbit population with the myxomatosis virus.

Professor Fenner has had a lifetime interest in the environment, and from 1973 to 1979 was Director of the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at ANU. He is currently a visiting fellow at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the university, and is a patron of Sustainable Population Australia. He has won numerous awards including the ANZAC Peace Prize, the WHO Medal, and the Albert Einstein World Award of Science. He was awarded an MBE for his work on control of malaria in New Guinea during the Second World War, in which Fenner served in the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps.

We now smash, grab and pull some 100 billion tonnes of raw material out of the fabric of the planet in just a single year. That’s equivalent to destroying two-thirds of the mass of Mount Everest every 12 months.

Roughly half of the raw materials we extract go into the world’s built environment. Construction creates an estimated third of the world's overall waste, and at least 40% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Compare that to the 2-3% caused by aviation, which people fret far more about.

The "waste" from the consumption of these raw materials is dumped in such vast quantities that its environmental imprint has helped to create a new epoch, dubbed the Anthropocene. Future archaeologists will dig through strata of manufactured detritus to discern how we lived.

But this stuff that we make and discard today also contains a treasure trove of materials we could be using to our benefit. It's been calculated that one tonne of mobile phones contains 300 times more gold than a tonne of the best quality gold ore, as well as significant quantities of silver, platinum, palladium and rare earths – all things we scar the earth to get more of by ongoing mining. The vast quantities of copper inside billions of cables worldwide is a far more concentrated source of reusable metal than the less than 1% in top-grade ore.

This all gives rise to an obvious question – why don't we re-use what we've already extracted, rather than gouging the planet for ever more raw materials? This thought has spurred a growing band of architects and building firms to look at how to re-use the huge range of materials already hiding within our built environment, from concrete and wood to the metallic bounty within electronic waste.

In 2005, Rotterdam-based architecture firm Superuse laid down a marker for a new vision of construction by completing Villa Welpeloo, the world's first contemporary house to be made with a majority of waste construction materials. Steel from old textile machinery and timber from damaged industrial cable reels are among the total 60% of second hand materials used.

Then in 2013, UK architect Duncan Baker-Brown outdid Superuse by using over 90% waste materials to build the Brighton Waste House. Baker-Brown combined various different materials from used denim to plastic DVD cases and discarded toothbrushes to make the wall cavity insulation, and old bicycle inner tubes to provide sound and impact floor insulation. Around 10 tonnes of chalky soil destined for landfill was diverted to create rammed earth walls, while used carpet tiles rescued from an office provided exterior cladding.

"The waste house is a 'live' research project that gets people thinking where materials come from and where they end up," says Baker-Brown. He has laid out a blueprint for a new way of minimal waste construction in his 2017 book The Re-Use Atlas, and teaches its principles to a rising generation of architects and builders at the University of Brighton’s architecture school. He offers a simple but powerful redefinition of waste as being "just useful things in the wrong place".

While these ideas would be included under the "circular economy" banner, Baker-Brown uses a more striking phrase: he calls for the need to "mine the Anthropocene" rather than dig up new material. "We need to become ‘urban miners’ and re-work [or] re-use previously made buildings, components, and material sources, " he wrote in a rallying call to action published in the Royal Institute of British Architects Journal in 2019.

"Why don't we re-use what we've already extracted, rather than gouging the planet for ever more raw materials?"

Baker-Brown is currently completing a pavilion for the world-famous Glyndebourne Opera in Sussex, the UK, built from waste products including oyster shells, champagne corks and "reject" underfired brick from a nearby brickworks. Crucially, he is also using these materials in a way that facilitates any later deconstruction – such as joining elements with bolts rather than glue – to create what he calls "a material store for the future".

The idea of designing buildings specifically with re-use in mind has acquired the tag "design for deconstruction". The 2012 Olympics showed these ideas in action through the construction of temporary accommodation for 17,000 athletes in London. This used buildings designed to be refashioned afterwards into sustainable homes for locals, thanks to things like full-storey partition walls that could be moved easily into new configurations.

However, those seeking to mine the Anthropocene have to work largely with existing buildings that were not designed for de- or re-construction. Dutch firm Maurer United Architects has responded to this challenge by building 125 new social housing units using over 90% of recycled materials from old adjacent blocks of flats on the Superlocal Estate in the Dutch town of Kerkrade.

Giant concrete floor sections were cut and lifted from the old buildings and set down to provide frameworks for the new homes, while leftover concrete was ground on site for re-use, an approach the firm's founder Mark Maurer called "smart demolition".

A key to successfully mining the Anthropocene for our future built environment is working out ways to re-use existing materials in myriad forms. Folke Köbberling, a professor of architecture-related art at Technical University Braunschweig in Germany, has spent years honing ways to re-use materials. "Using found material is different to working with brand new materials, " she says. "These materials have a story. We look for materials and try to use them as they come in a very flexible way."

One example is the amphitheatre she and colleague Martin Kaltwasser constructed in 2008 at the Wysing Arts Centre just outside Cambridge in the UK. Made primarily from 400 wooden pallets rescued from local construction sites, it also features windows from old glasshouses and teak floors repurposed from discarded Cambridge University shelves. Built for a total cost of just €5,000 (£4,270/$5,660) the building was envisaged to provide a distinctive arts venue for two years before being taken apart to re-use its materials elsewhere. But it is still going strong.

Köbberling has also found that discarded raw sheep wool acts as superb wall insulation and pollution filter, and has turned thousands of plastic bottles and cups discarded at the Berlin Marathon into material for bus shelter roofs.

Connecting the supply of these materials with the demand for components is a key element in the drive to reinvent "waste" as new construction materials. "We have to find a way to create prosperity and added value not by the production of new goods but from the maintenance and management of existing goods," says Michael Ghyoot, co-founder of Brussels-based design firm Rotor, one of the companies driving efforts to make reuse easier for building professionals.

Rotor has teamed up with other firms across Europe in an EU-funded project to build up an online directory which has so far signed up just over 1,000 specialised salvage dealers and allied businesses (the original target of signing up 1,500 was primarily hindered by the global pandemic). It is also creating a pre-demolition tool kit to help businesses assess the re-use potential of materials and products present in buildings slated for demolition or redevelopment.

Paris-based Bellastock's remodelling of the 59-storey Montparnasse Tower is another example of mining the Anthropocene in action. It is using concrete, glass and steel from the building's facade and interior to help create new levels and spaces, with no recourse to the wastefulness of demolition. The transformed tower is due to complete in time to welcome visitors to the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Mathilde Billet, technical director of reuse at Bellastock and project manager on the Montparnasse Tower de/reconstruction, argues that embedded attitudes in the building sector, rather than practical barriers, are the main hurdle to widespread implementation of re-use principle.

"The hardest thing is to change our way of thinking," she says, adding that awareness raising, training, conferences and simply talking can remove much of this fear of change. "We need to imagine the city as a material bank, conducive to re-use. There are no significant changes. It just takes a little agility and will."

• The study shows that humans always hunted the largest available animals until they became exceedingly rare or extinct, and then went on to target the next-largest. When only small animals remained in their environment, humans began to domesticate animals and developed agriculture.

• The researchers hypothesize that technological advancements throughout human evolution were driven by the need to hunt progressively smaller and faster animals.

• The researchers: "The study suggests that ever since the advent of humankind, humans have always ravaged their natural environment, but also found solutions for the problems they created. Damage to the environment, however, was often irreversible".

A groundbreaking study by researchers from Tel Aviv University tracks the development of early humans' hunting practices over the last 1.5 million years – as reflected in the animals they hunted and consumed. The researchers claim that at any given time early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their surroundings, which provided the greatest quantities of food in return for a unit of effort.

In this way, according to the researchers, early humans repeatedly overhunted large animals to extinction (or until they became so rare that they disappeared from the archaeological record) and then went on to the next in size – improving their hunting technologies to meet the new challenge. The researchers also claim that about 10,000 years ago, when animals larger than deer became extinct, humans began to domesticate plants and animals to supply their needs, and this may be why the agricultural revolution began in the Levant at precisely that time.

The study was conducted by Prof. Ran Barkai and Dr. Miki Ben-Dor of the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, Prof. Shai Meiri of the School of Zoology and Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, and Jacob Dembitzer, a research student of Prof. Barkai and Prof. Meiri, who led the project. The paper was published in the prestigious scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

The study, unprecedented in both scope and timespan, presents a comprehensive analysis of data on animal bones discovered at dozens of prehistoric sites in and around Israel. Findings indicate a continual decline in the size of game hunted by humans as their main food source – from giant elephants 1-1.5 million years ago down to gazelles 10,000 years ago. According to the researchers, these findings paint an illuminating picture of the interaction between humans and the animals around them over the last 1.5 million years.

Prof. Barkai notes two major issues presently addressed by prehistorians worldwide: What caused the mass extinction of large animals over the past hundreds of thousands of years – overhunting by humans or perhaps recurring climate changes? And what were the driving forces behind great changes in humankind – both physical and cultural – throughout its evolution?

Prof. Barkai: "In light of previous studies, our team proposed an original hypothesis that links the two questions: We think that large animals went extinct due to overhunting by humans, and that the change in diet and the need to hunt progressively smaller animals may have propelled the changes in humankind. In this study we tested our hypotheses in light of data from excavations in the Southern Levant covering several human species over a period of 1.5 million years."

Jacob Dembitzer adds: "We considered the Southern Levant (Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Southwest Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon) to be an 'archaeological laboratory' due to the density and continuity of prehistoric findings covering such a long period of time over a relatively small area - a unique database unavailable anywhere else in the world. Excavations, which began 150 years ago, have produced evidence for the presence of humans, beginning with Homo erectus who arrived 1.5 million years ago, through the neandertals who lived here from an unknown time until they disappeared about 45,000 years ago, to modern humans (namely, ourselves) who came from Africa in several waves, starting around 180,000 years ago."

The researchers collected all data available in the literature on animal bones found at prehistoric sites in the Southern Levant, mostly in Israel. These excavations, conducted from 1932 until today, provide a unique sequence of findings from different types of humans over a period of 1.5 million years. With some sites comprising several stratigraphic layers, sometimes thousands of years apart, the study covered a total of 133 layers from 58 prehistoric sites, in which thousands of bones belonging to 83 animal species had been identified. Based on these remains, the researchers calculated the weighted mean size of the animals in each layer at every site.

Prof. Meiri: "Our study tracked changes at a much higher resolution over a considerably longer period of time compared to previous research. The results were illuminating: we found a continual, and very significant, decline in the size of animals hunted by humans over 1.5 million years. For example, a third of the bones left behind by Homo erectus at sites dated to about a million years ago, belonged to elephants that weighed up to 13 tons (more than twice the weight of the modern African elephant) and provided humans with 90% of their food. The mean weight of all animals hunted by humans at that time was 3 tons, and elephant bones were found at nearly all sites up to 500,000 years ago.

"Starting about 400,000 years ago, the humans who lived in our region - early ancestors of the Neandertals and Homo sapiens, appear to have hunted mainly deer, along with some larger animals weighing almost a ton, such as wild cattle and horses. Finally, in sites inhabited by modern humans, from about 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, approximately 70% of the bones belong to gazelles – an animal that weighs no more than 20-30kg. Other remains found at these later sites came mostly from fallow deer (about 20%), as well as smaller animals such as hares and turtles."

Jacob Dembitzer: "Our next question was: What caused the disappearance of the large animals? A widely accepted theory attributes the extinction of large species to climate changes through the ages. To test this, we collected climatic and environmental data for the entire period, covering more than a dozen cycles of glacial and interglacial periods. This data included temperatures based on levels of the oxygen 18 isotope, and rainfall and vegetation evidenced by values of carbon 13 from the local Soreq Cave. A range of statistical analyses correlating between animal size and climate, precipitation, and environment, revealed that climate, and climate change, had little, if any, impact on animal extinction.”

Dr. Ben-Dor: "Our findings enable us to propose a fascinating hypothesis on the development of humankind: humans always preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their environment, until these became very rare or extinct, forcing the prehistoric hunters to seek the next in size. As a result, to obtain the same amount of food, every human species appearing in the Southern Levant was compelled to hunt smaller animals than its predecessor, and consequently had to develop more advanced and effective technologies. Thus, for example, while spears were sufficient for Homo erectus to kill elephants at close range, modern humans developed the bow and arrow to kill fast-running gazelles from a distance."

Prof. Barkai concludes: "We believe that our model is relevant to human cultures everywhere. Moreover, for the first time, we argue that the driving force behind the constant improvement in human technology is the continual decline in the size of game. Ultimately, it may well be that 10,000 years ago in the Southern Levant, animals became too small or too rare to provide humans with sufficient food, and this could be related to the advent of agriculture. In addition, we confirmed the hypothesis that the extinction of large animals was caused by humans – who time and time again destroyed their own livelihood through overhunting. We may therefore conclude that humans have always ravaged their environment but were usually clever enough to find solutions for the problems they had created – from the bow and arrow to the agricultural revolution. The environment, however, always paid a devastating price."

A trend over 1.5 million years doesn't fit into a doomsday cult mentality.

Hope is not an effective strategy for dealing with a pandemic.

Two years in, we should all know that. Yet I’ve been watching with concern bordering on alarm as the omicron variant has entered the country and started spreading. It has become the dominant variant of the coronavirus, taking over from delta (itself no slouch) in a matter of days in some places. If it’s not in your neck of the woods yet, it will be soon.

Alongside this there has been a steady tide of coverage and commentary suggesting that omicron causes mostly mild disease — the implication being that it’s not much to worry about, that if we only stay the course we can ride this one out, too.

But that’s premature. Let me be clear: I’m not stating definitively that omicron has some grim future in store for us. I’m saying that there are red flashing warning signs, that we underestimate this virus at our peril and that even the best-case scenario is still bad.

Barely a month after it was discovered, there’s still quite a bit we don’t know about omicron. The three key areas to focus on are transmissibility, disease severity and immune evasion.

It is clear from data emerging around the world that omicron is highly transmissible and spreads more quickly than delta, which has caused enormous waves of infection in the United States and other nations, including in the parts of southern Africa where omicron was first reported.

Genome sequencing in South Africa, Britain, Denmark, Norway and other countries makes clear that when omicron takes root, it takes off really fast. We are already starting to see signs of that in the United States: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Monday evening that omicron made up 73 percent of U.S. coronavirus cases between Dec. 12 and Dec. 18.

If the disease caused by this variant is mostly mild, we could avoid the worst outcomes. It is important to remember that vaccination, especially among those boosted, protects well against severe illness. Unvaccinated people in South Africa and Britain have been shown to be at far higher risk of getting hospitalized than vaccinated ones.

But a “mild” case of covid-19 can still make you miserable, even bedridden, for days. Huge numbers of “mildly ill” people unable to go to work or school can cause enormous societal disruption, especially while we’re experiencing labor shortages and supply-chain problems. There’s also the risk of long covid, which can cause physical and cognitive issues for many weeks and months after recovery from the acute phase of illness, and which we still don’t understand very well, even two years into the pandemic.

And finally, there’s math. Let’s pull a number out of thin air for demonstration’s sake and say that only 2 percent of omicron cases are severe enough to cause hospitalization. Good news, right? Not if omicron also causes exponentially more infections in a condensed time. Two percent of a huge number is a very large number indeed. With hospitals across the United States already strained to the breaking point, the implications are frightening.

So how severe is omicron, relative to delta? We haven’t seen crushing waves of hospitalizations in the countries where omicron took hold first, such as South Africa. That is good news because it probably means omicron is not causing significantly more severe disease than other variants. But it does not mean we’re out of the woods on severity.

Time and again throughout this pandemic, TV talking heads, politicians and many others have gotten tripped up on the simple and immutable fact that hospitalizations lag infection. It can take weeks for an infection to progress to the point where the patient needs to be hospitalized. Omicron burst onto the scene only four weeks ago. Not enough time has passed for us to have a firm grip on disease severity.

Again that’s because of math: When a variant spreads extremely rapidly, as omicron seems to do, it can send false signals of reassurance on disease severity.

You’ve probably seen graphs from several countries showing that the number of omicron cases has skyrocketed in a matter of days. By contrast, hospitalizations have barely ticked up. Perhaps those graphs have been presented side by side with charts showing that by the time delta caseloads were this high, hospitalizations were starting to climb dramatically. That may seem reassuring. It is not. Remember: It has been at most a week or two since almost any part of the world started to see omicron infections in any significant number. You would not expect hospitalizations to follow this quickly. That’s not how covid works. The comparison with delta is misleading because it took delta longer to reach a critical mass of cases. We thought delta was fast, but it became dominant over a couple of months. During that prolonged period, a certain percentage of people who had been infected early got sick enough to require hospitalization. With omicron, we are not talking months but weeks; the case growth has been so compressed, there hasn’t been time for disease progression in those who were sickened early on. We need to wait two or three more weeks until we can make even a tentative judgment on disease severity. And by that time, many more people will have been infected.

The science on the ability of omicron to evade immunity has been moving incredibly quickly. Recent data from a large South African study suggests that the two-dose regimen of the Pfizer vaccine offers 33 percent protection against infection and 70 percent protection against hospitalization. A booster will probably raise those numbers.

It seems clear that breakthrough infections in the fully vaccinated will be more common with omicron than they were with delta. That is not good news, for all the reasons I outlined when talking about high transmissibility. It does also appear, as we would expect and hope, that vaccines remain strongly protective against severe illness. But that finding unfortunately carries a couple of caveats.

As I noted, not enough time has elapsed since omicron first hit the scene, even in South Africa, for us to get a full picture of hospitalization risk. And the coronavirus has swept through South Africa several times in the past two years, so a very large proportion of the population has prior immunity from past infection with other variants. Its population is on average younger than in most other countries, so not as likely to develop severe disease. This could be an important factor in blunting disease severity. All that means that South Africa’s experience may not be applicable to other populations — notably, the reservoirs of people in the United States who remain unvaccinated and who have not yet contracted the coronavirus in any form.

So what does all this mean?

It means we must be vigilant. We must take all the precautions that have become so familiar and yes, so wearying. Get vaccinated. As soon as you’re eligible, get boosted. Wear good masks in crowded indoor places. Keep a distance when you can. Wash your hands often.

And on a national level, it is past time for a clear-eyed rethinking of our pandemic policies.

Omicron’s very existence reminds us that this virus will keep mutating and will continue to pose grave threats for years to come. It is past time to rally the world to deliver billions more vaccine doses to developing nations. It is past time to make rapid tests readily, freely, widely available. It is past time to demand clear and forthright public health communication from officials at every level. And it is past time to develop proactive strategies for living in a world where the coronavirus is continually circulating and we work to minimize its toll.

We have come a long way since the start of the pandemic. Vaccines protect against severe disease in many people, and we can soon expect to have new therapeutic options to combat the virus in those who do need hospitalization. But the dizzying pace of omicron’s advance creates problems of its own if many doses of those therapeutics are needed more quickly than they can be manufactured.

In March 2020, the threat of the virus was indistinct. This time, the leaps and bounds we have made in testing and genomic surveillance mean we can see it coming. It is just moving more quickly than anyone could have imagined — and more quickly than any of us can pivot to respond to it.

Hope is deeply important to all of us as human beings. But hope is not a strategy. We need to maintain hope in the face of omicron. It just won’t be enough on its own.

One thing that’s hard to grasp about the climate crisis is that big changes can happen fast. In 2019, I was aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a 308-foot-long scientific research vessel, cruising in front of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. One day, we were sailing in clear seas in front of the glacier. The next day, we were surrounded by icebergs the size of aircraft carriers.

As we later learned from satellite images, in a matter of 48 hours or so, a mélange of ice about 21 miles wide and 15 miles deep had cracked up and scattered into the sea.

It was a spooky moment. Thwaites Glacier is the size of Florida. It is the cork in the bottle of the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains enough ice to raise sea levels by 10 feet. The mélange that disintegrated was not part of the glacier itself, but a mix of icebergs and sea ice that had cozied up next to it. Still, the idea that it could just fall apart overnight was mind-blowing.

As it turns out, the ice breakup I witnessed was not a freak event. A few weeks ago, scientists participating in the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a $25 million five-year-long joint research program between the National Science Foundation in the U.S. and the Natural Environment Research Council in the U.K., presented their latest research. They described the discovery of cracks and fissures in the Thwaites eastern ice shelf, predicting that the ice shelf could fracture like a shattered car window in as little as five years. “It won’t scatter out into sea as quickly as what you saw when you were down there,” Erin Pettit, a glaciologist at Oregon State University and one of the lead principal investigators in the ITGC, later told me. “But the basic process is the same. The ice shelf is breaking up and could be gone in less than a decade.”

Given the ongoing war for American democracy and the deadly toll of the Covid pandemic, the loss of an ice shelf on a far-away continent populated by penguins might not seem to be big news. But in fact, the West Antarctic ice sheet is one of the most important tipping points in the Earth’s climate system. If Thwaites Glacier collapses, it opens the door for the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet to slide into the sea. Globally, 250 million people live within three feet of high tide lines. Ten feet of sea level rise would be a world-bending catastrophe. It’s not only goodbye Miami, but goodbye to virtually every low-lying coastal city in the world.

But predicting the breakup of ice sheets and the implications for future sea level rise is fraught with uncertainty. Depending on various emissions scenarios in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, we could have as little as one foot of sea level rise by the end of the century, or nearly six feet of sea level rise (of course, rising seas won’t stop in 2100, but that date has become a common benchmark). “The difference between those [models] is a lot of lives and money,” says Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University and one of the great ice scientists of our time. Alley adds: “The most likely place to generate [the worst scenario] is Thwaites.”

Or to put it more urgently: “If there is going to be a climate catastrophe,” Ohio State glaciologist Ian Howat once told me, “it’s probably going to start at Thwaites.”

The problem is, understanding what’s going on at Thwaites is fiendishly complex. As I wrote in 2017:

The trouble with Thwaites, which is one of the largest glaciers on the planet, is that it’s also what scientists call “a threshold system.” That means instead of melting slowly like an ice cube on a summer day, it is more like a house of cards: It’s stable until it is pushed too far, then it collapses.

Thwaites is very different from other big glaciers, such as those in Greenland. For one thing, it is not melting from above, due to warmer air temperatures. It’s melting from below, due to warmer ocean water eating away at its underbelly. More importantly, the terrain beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet is peculiar. “Think of it as a giant soup bowl filled with ice,” Sridhar Anandakrishnan, an expert in polar glaciology at Penn State University, once told me. In the bowl analogy, the edge of the glacier — the spot where a glacier leaves the land and begins to float — is perched on the lip of the bowl 1,000 feet or more below sea level. Scientists call that lip the “grounding line.” Below the lip, the terrain falls away on a downward slope for hundreds of miles, all the way to the Transantarctic Mountains that divide East and West Antarctica. At the deepest part of the basin, the ice is about two miles thick.

What this means is that once the warm water gets below ice, it can flow down the slope of the bowl, weakening the ice from below. Through a mechanism called “marine ice-cliff Instability,” you can get what amounts to a runaway collapse of the ice sheet that could raise global sea levels very high, very fast.

That’s why, when I wrote my 2017 Rolling Stone story about Thwaites, I dubbed it “The Doomsday Glacier.” (The name stuck — if you type the phrase into Google now, you get half a million hits.)

In a worst-case scenario, how fast could Thwaites collapse? No one knows. The IPCC data is the best guide for sea level rise for the rest of this century, although Alley cautions me that even six feet of sea level rise by 2100 is not the worst-case scenario.

“We just don’t know what the upper boundary is for how fast this can happen,” Alley says. “We are dealing with an event that no human has ever witnessed before. We have no analog for this.”

In the past few years, scientists have made a lot of progress in understanding the dynamics of Thwaites. On our 2019 cruise, scientists discovered troughs in the seabed that allowed warm water to flow underneath the ice shelf. Scientists have mapped the underside of the glacier itself, tracked crevasses in the ice shelf, and located pinning points that might slow the retreat of the ice. The change has been dramatic: “The net rate of ice loss from Thwaites Glacier is more than six times what it was in the early 1990s,” says Rob Larter, a geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey who was the chief scientist on my trip to Antarctica in 2019.

The recent news about Thwaites’ eastern ice shelf breaking up in the next five years was not really a surprise to anyone who has been tracking the science closely. After the sudden disintegration of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002, scientists realized that Antarctica was far less stable than many had believed. The discovery of cracks and fissures at Thwaites further underscore just how dynamic the changes already underway are.

To be clear, there is a big difference between an ice shelf and the glacier itself. The ice shelf is like a thumbnail that grows out from the glacier and floats on the ocean. Because it is already floating, when it melts it doesn’t in itself contribute to sea level rise (just as when ice cubes melt in your glass, they don’t raise the level of liquid).

But ice shelves are important because they buttress glaciers. Like the flying buttresses of Notre Dame, they give the walls of ice stability. And when they break up, the land-based glacier is free to flow much faster into the sea. And that does raise sea levels.

So yeah, if Thwaites loses a significant part of its ice shelf in five years, that’s a big deal.

But even if a big part of the ice shelf does crack up, there is a lot of unknown complexity in how it will play out. “A first question is, if the ice-shelf breakage continues, will the whole ice shelf be lost, or will a short ice shelf remain, at least in some places?” Richard Alley emailed me. “Almost all ice-shelf ice is buttressing, generating friction that holds back the non-floating ice, so loss of part, most or all of the ice shelf will increase flow of non-floating ice into the ocean. But the most-important buttressing tends to arise closest to the grounding zone, so if a short ice shelf does remain, it may still provide important buttressing, and the speedup of flow and thinning will be smaller than they could be with full ice-shelf loss.”

Here you see the problem. Even predicting how the crackup of the ice shelf will impact the flow of the glacier is difficult to estimate.

And this is only one of the uncertainties that scientists face when trying to predict whether or not Miami will be underwater by 2100. There is further uncertainty in exactly where and when the ice will fracture, how much warm water will be pushed up beneath the glacier by changing winds and ocean currents, how the character of the bed the glacier rests on will speed up or slow down the glacier’s slide into the sea. Whether the bed is hard rock or muddy till can have a big impact on the velocity of the glacier, just as the texture of snow affects how fast you ski down a mountain. “Ice is alive,” says Pettit. “It moves and flows and breaks in ways that are difficult to anticipate.”

Paradoxically, the more scientists learn about what’s going on at Thwaites, the more divergent the latest climate models have become about its future. Consider the results of two models by highly respected scientists published side by side in Nature earlier this year. One model suggests that Thwaites stays fairly stable until temperatures rise above 2 C of warming. Then all hell breaks loose. Thwaites begins to fall into the sea like a line of dominoes pushed off a table and soon takes the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet with it. And once the collapse begins, according to this model, it will be impossible to stop — at least on any human time scale. In a century or so, global sea levels could rise 10 feet, which would swamp South Florida and Bangladesh and many other low-lying regions of the world.

In the other model, global sea level rise only differs by 4½ inches between a 1.5 C global temperature rise and a 3 C temperature rise (which is a little above where we are headed with under current emissions scenarios). And much of that comes from increased melt in Greenland and mountain glaciers. As for Antarctica, the paper says explicitly: “No clear dependence on emissions scenario emerges for Antarctica.”

So what to make of all this?

“The current divergence among model predictions is actually a good sign because it means that scientists are probing different parameterizations, representations of processes, and hypotheses,” writes Jeremy Bassis, a geophysicist at the University of Michigan. Bassis suggests not focusing so much on the long-term uncertainty and highlighting instead what scientists know about the next few decades. “The skill of models in predicting sea level change on decadal time scales is high, and we already have actionable projections on these time scales. We should be emphasizing that fact in discussions with community members, stakeholders, and decision-makers, so they can move ahead with important adaptation and mitigation planning.”

But in the long run, it is not clear that the dynamics of ice sheet collapse that are underway at Thwaites can be stopped. As glaciologist Eric Rignot put it in 2015, in Antarctica, “the fuse has been blown.” Even if we cut carbon emissions to zero tomorrow, warm water will continue to flow beneath the ice sheet for decades, destabilizing the ice and further pushing the glacier toward eventual collapse. This doesn’t means that cutting carbon pollution to zero isn’t an important goal — nothing, in fact, is more important or more urgent. “We may have a small safety margin in Antarctica, but not a large one,” says Alley. Even if the fuse is blown, cutting emissions fast could slow it all down to a millennium-long crack-up that will give us more time to adapt. One way or another, our future is written in ice.

A new study published in March spells deadly consequences for the 3.7 billion people living in the tropical belt i.e. between 20°N and 20°S latitudes— that includes majority of us in peninsular India — if global warming isn’t limited to 1.5°C. The scientists say this will be because humidity along with extreme heat will make it impossible for us living in the tropics. However, humidity has been largely missing from the talk about extreme heat events induced by climate change. There is always much discussion around maximum temperatures but that’s not the only factor that affects human health, survivability and how our bodies respond to the temperature increase. And this paper highlights the thin margin we have before humidity unleashes its wrath.

The tropical belt in red band, with half of India falling in the equatorial zone.

However, to understand the implications of the study’s findings in detail, we need to go through a bit of context. So here goes, a rather long but essential detour:

Before publishing this newsletter, I put up an informal poll on my Instagram account to see if people perceived the link between humidity, heat and associated risks and discomfort. I asked which summer is more bearable to them, the humid, sweaty heat of coastal Chennai or the dry, furnace-like extreme heat of landlocked Delhi. The poll result pretty much leaned towards Chennai instead of Delhi. This could be because of a number of biases in the sample (people who responded) such as familiarity with cities, my account audience demographics etc etc but largely it seemed no one was particularly bothered about Chennai’s high humidity as compared to Delhi’s clearly perceivable higher heat. And it’s a problem that high humidity isn’t perceived as an issue because it royally messes up things for our bodies.

When measuring temperature, there are two indicators of importance - dry bulb temperature and wet bulb temperature. Dry bulb temperature is our normal thermometer reading that tells us how hot it is. Wet bulb temperature on the other hand tells us a temperature reading when humidity is taken into account. At 100% humidity, i.e. when the air is carrying the maximum amount of moisture content it can, wet bulb and dry bulb temperatures would be the same. Anything lesser than 100% humidity would mean lower wet bulb temperatures than dry bulb temperatures.

Why is wet bulb temperature important though?

Because it controls our ability to cool down when it is hot. Our bodies regulate heat to keep our core internal temperature at a steady 98°F through the process of perspiration via our skin that is at a slightly lower temperature of about 91 °F. This temperature difference between the body and skin leads to the transfer of extra heat from body to skin, which then produces sweat, which when evaporated cools down our bodies overall. However, when humidity is high, the body is unable to evaporate the sweat produced because the air is already high in moisture content and the air temperature isn’t as high to evaporate both the moisture content in the air and on our bodies. This leaves the heat trapped in our bodies and that’s why humid days feel much hotter than dry days at the same temperature.

For instance, have you ever experienced this— a normal table/ceiling fan in humid weather helps but a fan in dry heat feels rather useless? Because in dry heat the sweat is evaporating on its own and the body is already doing the best it can to cool itself and the fan isn’t helping additionally. In hot and humid conditions though, the body isn’t able to thermoregulate properly because the sweat isn’t evaporating and that is why a fan in this particular situation feel divine. And an air cooler in humid weather feels muggy but in dry heat, it feels like heaven. All thanks to relative humidity, of which wet bulb temperature is a measure.

The wet bulb temperature(TW) of 35°C marks our upper physiological limit:

Beyond this limit, human bodies simply lose the ability to thermoregulate body temperature through perspiration and we are prone to severe health impacts and death due to overheating at that point. This wet bulb temperature can be achieved through several combinations of heat and humidity. As an example, one combination could be 50% relative humidity and 45°C air temperature, where the wet bulb temperature reaches 35°C. Play with this calculator to see how TW changes with respect to humidity and temperature - https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/wet-bulb

The lethal relationship between heat stress and humidity:

Heat stress or heat exhaustion is when the body cannot cool itself down when exposed to extreme heat and that can lead to internal organ failure and death in extreme cases. For a long time, scientists were concerned only with the maximum air(dry bulb) temperature as an indicator of heat stress related impacts. But in the recent years, the impact of humidity has become more relevant. Scientists find that heat stress extremes more often coincide with extreme values of humidity rather than temperature—in other words, that humidity variations are more important than those of temperature in creating extreme heat stress, as seen in journal article How Important is Humdity in Heat Stress?

According to one research that analysed documented heat events across the world between 1980 and 2014, at higher humidity levels, temperatures as low as even 20℃ can be lethal. But as temperature increases, even 20% humidity can be lethal. The hexagons are non-lethal heat events that happened during the study period over selected locations and it is clear that only lower temperatures with high humidity didn’t lead to human fatalities.

Read more on this paper here: Billions to face ‘deadly threshold’ of heat extremes by 2100, finds study

Where does humidity become a problem?

Right now, if you compare temperatures between Chennai and Delhi, Delhi temperatures this week are hovering between a maximum of 38 to 42°C but the humidity is between 7 to 25%. Chennai, on the other hand has lower maximum temperature between 31 to 35°C but humidity is between 78 to 90%. This translates into Delhi having a maximum wet bulb temperature of about 20°C which is manageable where as Chennai can have it as high as 33°C which honestly feels dreadful!

This difference will be felt hugely by people who are in the outdoors and/or without air conditioning and on a windless day. The ability of a human body to cool down from evaporation is based not just on heat and humidity but also whether there is shade/sunshine and wind. When it comes to dry heat, even in high temperatures it is possible to survive the heat by taking shelter in shade, cooling down with water and replenishing lost water and salts in the body because the thermoregulation is still functioning. With humid heat, the only option is go to a place with lower temperature and/or humidity because after hitting a certain limit(35°C TW), thermoregulation doesn’t function anymore. This becomes particularly problematic for people in agrarian and physical labour intensive countries like India where a majority of people are forced to be in the harsh outdoor working conditions without an escape.

(Coming back to the many people who voted Chennai to be a better place in summer than Delhi, it’d be interesting to see how many of them could sustain at full productivity/survive the summer without being in air conditioned spaces.)

What does the new study say then?

The study found that within the tropical belt, i.e 20º N to 20º S latitudes, the wet bulb temperatures is closely correlated to mean tropical warming. Earlier it was thought that localised conditions may have a greater effect on regional wet bulb temperatures but the analysis found it is controlled by established atmospheric dynamics and thus can be robustly projected on regional scales. They were able to confirm this by comparing observational data from the past 40 years. Without getting into the specifics, the conclusions of the paper are these below -

1. That global climate models predict wet bulb temperature will increase roughly uniformly in the tropics by about 1°C for each 1°C of tropical mean warming.

2. In a 1.5 °C warmer, the likely range for maximum wet bulb temperature increases across all tropical land regions (20° S–20° N) is 1.33–1.49 °C, consistent with the simulated tropical mean warming of ~1.4 °C in a 1.5 °C warmer climate.

3. The maximum 3-hourly wet bulb temperature ever experienced in the past 40 years by 99.98% of the land area within 20°S–20°N is below 33 °C.

4. Therefore, a 1.5 °C or 2 °C warmer world will likely exempt the majority of the tropical area from reaching the survival limit of 35 °C.

In plain speak, researchers are able to successfully project the range of wet bulb temperature over the tropics. They found the TW changes linearly with temperature rise over the tropics. The current maximum wet bulb temperature observed over the tropics is below 33 °C. This means we have a limit of 2°C before hitting the catastrophic upper limit of 35 °C. But since wet bulb temperature over tropics correlates linearly with mean temperature rise, this means a 1.5 degree rise in temperature will bring us dangerously close to the upper limit and 2°C will meet the limit.

And so, for the tropics to be liveable in future, it is absolutely imperative to limit warming to 1.5 °C!

Sadly, current global climate pledges amount to 1% reduction in overall emissions by 2030 whereas we need almost 50% reduction in emissions by 2030 to meet 1.5°C target. And the world is on track to seeing more than 3°C warming by 2100 currently, given the existing climate pledges and commitments.

So we’re toast in the tropics! No scratch that, we’ll be, errm, steamed?

Okay I don’t want to leave you on a sad note. Here’s what we can do - demand stringent emission reductions to meet 1.5°C target and proactive adaptation initiatives to help us weather high wet bulb temperatures without loss of life or productivity.

****
Three additional things to remember:

1. High wet bulb temperature is a problem not just in the tropics, it is lethal everywhere. Just that this study focuses on tropical regions and how wet bulb temperature will likely change with global warming. However, even those in northern plains of India that fall outside of tropic region or anywhere else in the world really would be impacted by the combination of high heat + humidity. Everyone will need to adapt to this because with high wet bulb temperatures, we’re in unchartered territory. Prolonged exposure to high wet bulb temperatures for just a few hours is enough to be potentially fatal.

2. High dry bulb temperatures are also just as problematic. There is a high correlation between harmful heat stress and humidity but our bodies aren’t compatible with extremely high temperatures in any case. Fortunately though, it is possible to reduce the harmful impacts of exposure to dangerous dry heat as we’ve been doing for centuries in the extremely hot desert and arid regions around the world. However, there’s a limit to this as well and the adaptation to high heat comes with severely reduced mobility and time spent outdoors during periods of high heat events. This doesn’t bode well for human productivity either in labour intensive regions like India or any other hot and vulnerable parts of the world like Asia, Africa, Australia etc.

3. Global warming will increase humidity everywhere. As temperature rises, two things will change - a) the ability of air to hold more moisture as it expands due to warming and b) the amount of moisture in the air will also increase because more warming equals more evaporation from water bodies on the planet. This means we can expect increasing humidity in all our coastal areas, cities next to huge water bodies like lakes or rivers, and inland areas that get high moisture-laden monsoon winds.

The scientists say this will be because humidity along with extreme heat will make it impossible for us living in the tropics

This latest doomsday porn is silly.

maxdancona wrote:

This latest doomsday porn is silly.

Every time you say the word 'porn', I picture an immature, middle-aged man whacking off in front of his computer. Not an image I want in my head.

Can't you use a more appropriate word?

Not an image I want in my head.

The extreme left is ignoring this reality; I fail to see how they plan to cover these increased costs other than the idea that everything can be solved with a bumper sticker written on Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's ass.

These articles are made to shock and titillate rather than inform.

Ever-growing environmental threats are pushing many animals and plants to the brink of extinction — the scale of which hasn't been seen since dinosaurs died out, the German branch of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said on Wednesday.

The stark warnings came as WWF Germany released its "Winners and Losers of 2021," an annual list of animals whose existence is now acutely under threat — as well as conservation victories.

Facing a mass extinction event 'within the next decade'

There are currently 142,500 animal and plant species on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) — 40,000 of which are "threatened with extinction."

It is the largest number of species to be included on the Red List since it was established in 1964, according to WWF Germany.

"Around one million species could go extinct within the next decade — which would be the largest mass extinction event since the end of the dinosaur age," the organization said in a statement.

WWF Germany director Eberhard Brandes said decisive environmental protection policies were urgently needed, particularly in the fight against climate change.

"Species conservation is no longer just about defeating an environmental problem, but is rather about the question of whether or not humanity will eventually end up on the Red List in an endangered category — and thereby become a victim of its own lifestyle," he said.

Polar bears and other species on thin ice in 2021

Among the animals most acutely threatened — and among the "losers" on this year's WWF list — are the African forest elephant, whose population has declined by 86% within just 31 years.

Polar bears made the list as well, as the rapid melting of pack ice in the Arctic Ocean is making it impossible for the animals to adapt. Experts estimate the Arctic Ocean could be completely ice-free in the summer of 2035, WWF Germany said.

The familiar green faces and loud summer chirping of Germany's tree frogs and toads are also under threat — with 50% of Germany's native amphibian species currently listed as endangered on the national Red List. Unabated construction is limiting their habitats while roads have become death traps.

Grey cranes and migratory fish that move on land also earned a spot on the 2021 "losers" list, as well as the noble pen shell — the largest clam in the Mediterranean Sea.

Lucky Bustards and other 2021 animal 'winners'

The WWF noted that there were some "rays of hope" in the world of environmental conservation this year.

One of the rarest big cats in the world, the Iberian lynx, saw a "successful comeback" in Spain and Portugal. In 2002, only 94 of the lynx were found. The population has grown more than tenfold, with the most recent count in 2020 showing over 1,100 are currently alive.

The population of great bustards in Germany saw significant progress in 2021, with their population reaching the highest level in 40 years. Researchers counted 347 of the birds this year — compared with just 57 birds in 1997.

The WWF also logged a success in efforts to conserve the Indian rhinoceros population in Nepal. As part of a cooperation with the government, stricter protection measures were implemented — which have helped the rhino's population grow by 16% since 2015.

Bearded vultures, blue whales and crocodiles in Cambodia also saw their population numbers grow.