Call us Homo slobbus.
It took roughly four billion years for the first living bit of protoplasm, bred perhaps in an undersea volcanic vent or a warm pond, to grow and evolve into the 1.1 trillion tons of biomass that inhabit Earth today. But all of that is outweighed by the plastic, concrete and other material that humans have produced in the last century alone in the form of everything from roads and skyscrapers to cars, cellphones, paper towels and bobblehead dolls.
That was the takeaway of a meticulous global inventory of stuff, natural and unnatural, compiled in 2018 by Yinon M. Bar-On, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, and his colleagues. They synthesized data from a vast number of scientific studies, from large global measurements to rough guesstimates. One figure widely quoted by pest control companies: There are 1,000 pounds of termites for every human on Earth. If you like big numbers, the 2018 report is delicious reading.
Recently, Brice Ménard, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University, and Nikita Shtarkman, a computer scientist and graphic artist, visualized Dr. Bar-On’s research. The two had previously collaborated on an online map of the universe, which has been viewed more than a million times.
https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/12/04/130489_1_04visualUploader-48699_wg_1080p.mp4
Their new visualization represents various kinds of living matter and “technostuff” in the form of cubes, with sizes proportional to their total weight on Earth.
“This is the portrait of our planet,” Dr. Ménard wrote in an email. “I thought everyone should know about it. I decided to create a powerful visualization so everyone can see this with their own eyes and better appreciate what has happened during our own lifetime.”
https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/12/27/131525_1_27sci-biocubes-new-19075_wg_1080p.mp4
Life started long ago and proceeded slowly at first. Ninety percent of Earth’s biomass today is plants. Another sizable chunk is in the microbes — viruses, bacteria, algae and fungi — the biochemical threads that bind us.
Humans — some eight billion people weighing 120 million tons — account for only about one one-thousandth of Earth’s current biomass, according to Dr. Bar-On’s study. Termites and their mounds account for 445 million tons, according to recent estimates.
But we humans have had a much larger impact on our planet, especially recently. There are now 1.3 trillion tons of man-made stuff on the planet, almost all of it built in the 20th century. The biggest portion of it is more than 600 billion tons of concrete, followed by about 400 billion tons of sand, gravel and other aggregate materials used in construction. Earthlings have built two billion cars, Dr. Ménard wrote in the email, and 70 billion tons of asphalt to drive them on.
https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/12/27/131526_1_27sci-biocubes-new-29061_wg_1080p.mp4
“The website enables many comparisons that, once seen, can no longer be unseen,” he said. For instance, humans outweigh wild animals 10 to 1, a fact that surprised Dr. Ménard. (“In my experience, most people expect the opposite.”) But we weigh only half as much as the livestock herds we maintain to eat. Perhaps more ominously, humans use 100 times their own mass in plastic.
“I knew the numbers,” Dr. Ménard said. “But seeing this made me much more conscious about my plastic footprint and the need to reduce it — something everyone can attempt doing.”
https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/12/27/131527_1_27sci-biocubes-new-79885_wg_1080p.mp4
The future looks as if it will be worse, Dr. Ménard said, as the world’s population increases and countries add more infrastructure, requiring ever more energy and fossil fuels. All that concrete absorbs heat and keeps cities from cooling off at night. The global temperature rose a full degree Celsius during the building boom of the 20th century. “Our animation showing the rise of the technomass comes with an unavoidable rise of the global temperature,” Dr. Ménard said.
Onward and upward.
Children are suffering and dying from diseases that emerging scientific research has linked to chemical exposures, findings that require urgent revamping of laws around the world, according to a new paper published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
Authored by more than 20 leading public health researchers, including one from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and another from the United Nations, the paper lays out “a large body of evidence” linking multiple childhood diseases to synthetic chemicals and recommends a series of aggressive actions to try to better protect children.
The paper is a “call to arms” to forge an “actual commitment to the health of our children”, said Linda Birnbaum, a former director of the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and a co-author of the paper.
In conjunction with the release of the paper, some of the study authors are helping launch an Institute for Preventive Health to support the recommendations outlined in the paper and to help fund implementation of reforms. A key player in launching the institute is Anne Robertson, vice-president of Robertson Stephens Wealth Management and a member of the family that built RJ Reynolds Tobacco.
The paper points to data showing global inventories of roughly 350,000 synthetic chemicals, chemical mixtures and plastics, most of which are derived from fossil fuels. Production has expanded 50-fold since 1950, and is currently increasing by about 3% a year – projected to triple by 2050, the paper states.
Meanwhile, noncommunicable diseases, including many that research shows can be caused by synthetic chemicals, are rising in children and have become the principal cause of death and illness for children, the authors write.
Despite the connections, which the authors say “continue to be discovered with distressing frequency”, there are very few restrictions on such chemicals and no post-market surveillance for longer-term adverse health effects.
“The evidence is so overwhelming and the effects of manufactured chemicals are so disruptive for children, that inaction is no longer an option,” said Daniele Mandrioli, a co-author of the paper and director of the Cesare Maltoni Cancer Research Center at the Ramazzini Institute in Italy. “Our article highlights the necessity for a paradigm shift in chemical testing and regulations to safeguard children’s health.”
Such a shift would require changes in laws, restructuring of the chemical industry and redirection of financial investments similar to what has been undertaken with efforts to transition to clean energy, the paper states.
The paper identifies several disturbing data points for trend lines over the last 50 years. They include incidence of childhood cancers up 35%, male reproductive birth defects have doubled in frequency and neurodevelopmental disorders are affecting one child in six. Autism spectrum disorder is diagnosed in one in 36 children, pediatric asthma has tripled in prevalence and pediatric obesity prevalence has nearly quadrupled, driving a “sharp increase in Type 2 diabetes among children and adolescents”.
“Children’s health has been slipping away as a priority focus,” said Tracey Woodruff, a co-author of the paper and director of the University of California San Francisco’s (UCSF) program on reproductive health and the environment. “We’ve slowly just been neglecting this. The clinical and public health community and the government has failed them.”
The authors cite research documenting how “even brief, low-level exposures to toxic chemicals during early vulnerable periods” in a child’s development can cause disease and disability. Prenatal exposures are particularly hazardous, the paper states.
“Diseases caused by toxic chemical exposures in childhood can lead to massive economic losses, including health care expenditures and productivity losses resulting from reduced cognitive function, physical disabilities, and premature death,” the paper notes. “The chemical industry largely externalizes these costs and imposes them on governments and taxpayers.”
The paper takes issue with the US Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) of 1977 and amendments, arguing that even though the law was enacted to protect public health from “unreasonable risks” posed by chemicals, it does not provide the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with the authorities needed to actually meet that commitment.
Instead, the manner in which the law is implemented assumes that all manufactured chemicals are harmless and beneficial and burdens government regulators with identifying and assessing the chemicals.
“Hazards that have been recognized have typically been ignored or downplayed, and the responsible chemicals allowed to remain in use with no or limited restrictions,” the paper states. “In the nearly 50 years since TSCA’s passage, only a handful of chemicals have been banned or restricted in US markets.”
Chemical oversight is more rigorous in the European Union, the paper says, but still fails to provide adequate protections, relying heavily on testing data provided by the chemical industry and providing multiple exemptions, the paper argues.
The authors of the paper prescribe a new global “precautionary” approach that would only allow chemical products on the market if their manufacturers could establish through independent testing that the chemicals are not toxic at anticipated exposure levels.
“The core of our recommendation is that chemicals should be tested before they come to market, they should not be presumed innocent only to be found to be harmful years and decades later,” said , a co-author who directs the program for global public health and the common good at Boston College. “Each and every chemical should be tested before they come to market.”
Additionally, companies would be required to conduct post-marketing surveillance to look for long-term adverse effects of their products.
That could include bio-monitoring of the most prevalent chemical exposures to the general population, Mandrioli said. Disease registries would play another fundamental role, he said, but those approaches should be integrated with toxicological studies that can “anticipate and rapidly predict effects that might have very long latencies in humans, such as cancer”. Clusters of populations with increased cancer incidences, particularly when they are children, should trigger immediate preventive actions, he said.
Key to it all would be a legally binding global chemicals treaty that would fall under the auspices of the United Nations and would require a “permanent, independent science policy body to provide expert guidance”, the paper suggests.
The paper recommends chemical companies and consumer product companies be required to disclose information about the potential risks of the chemicals in use and report on inventory and usage of chemicals of “high concern”.
“Pollution by synthetic chemicals and plastics is a major planetary challenge that is worsening rapidly,” the paper states. “Continued, unchecked increases in production of fossil-carbon–based chemicals endangers the world’s children and threatens humanity’s capacity for reproduction. Inaction on chemicals is no longer an option.”
Landrigan said he knew the effort faces an uphill climb and could be particularly challenging given the incoming Trump administration, which is widely expected to favor deregulation policies.
“This is a tough subject. It’s an elephant,” he said. “But it is what needs to be done.”
Further longer-term studies with larger, more diverse populations are needed.
Abstract
Pesticides affect a diverse range of non-target species and may be linked to global biodiversity loss. The magnitude of this hazard remains only partially understood. We present a synthesis of pesticide (insecticide, herbicide and fungicide) impacts on multiple non-target organisms across trophic levels based on 20,212 effect sizes from 1,705 studies. For non-target plants, animals (invertebrate and vertebrates) and microorganisms (bacteria and fungi), we show negative responses of the growth, reproduction, behaviour and other physiological biomarkers within terrestrial and aquatic systems. Pesticides formulated for specific taxa negatively affected non-target groups, e.g. insecticidal neonicotinoids affecting amphibians. Negative effects were more pronounced in temperate than tropical regions but were consistent between aquatic and terrestrial environments, even after correcting for field-realistic terrestrial and environmentally relevant exposure scenarios. Our results question the sustainability of current pesticide use and support the need for enhanced risk assessments to reduce risks to biodiversity and ecosystems.
Fast fashion and drinks cans among technological-age matter most likely to endure as fossils, say scientists
As an eternal testament of humanity, plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones are not a glorious legacy. But two scientists exploring which items from our technological civilisation are most likely to survive for many millions of years as fossils have reached an ironic but instructive conclusion: fast food and fast fashion will be our everlasting geological signature.
“Plastic will definitely be a signature ‘technofossil’, because it is incredibly durable, we are making massive amounts of it, and it gets around the entire globe,” says the palaeontologist Prof Sarah Gabbott, a University of Leicester expert on the way that fossils form. “So wherever those future civilisations dig, they are going to find plastic. There will be a plastic signal that will wrap around the globe.”
Fast food containers dominate ocean plastic, but aluminium drinks cans will also be part of our legacy. Pure metals are exceptionally rare in the geological record, as they readily react to form new minerals, but the cans will leave a distinct impression.
“They’re going to be around in the strata for a long time and eventually you would expect little gardens of clay minerals growing in the space where the can was. It’s going to be a distinctive, new kind of fossil,” says the geologist Prof Jan Zalasiewicz, a leading proponent of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch that reflects the impact of modern humanity on the planet, who with Gabbott has written a book on technofossils, Discarded.
Another fast food staple, chicken, is also destined for immortality. Bones are well known as fossils, but while those of modern broiler chickens are fragile – they are bred to live fast, dying fat and young – the sheer volume will ensure many survive into the geological record.
At any moment, there are about 25 billion live chickens in the world, vastly more than the world’s most abundant wild bird, say Gabbott and Zalasiewicz, making them likely to be the most abundant bird in all of Earth’s history. The sudden appearance of vast numbers of a monstrous bird five times bigger than its wild forebear will certainly strike future palaeontologists.
Clothes will also make an abrupt entry into humanity’s fossil record. For millennia, clothes were made from natural and easily rotted materials such as cotton, linen and silk. Today, the world’s growing population often wears mass-produced synthetic garments that are rapidly dumped.
“We are making them in ridiculous amounts,” says Gabbott – about 100bn garments a year, double the number 20 years ago. “People would be surprised just how many clothes are actually out there in the environment as well. I work to clean rivers in the city of Leicester and about a quarter of the stuff that we take out is clothing. We also stick them into landfills, which are like giant mummification tombs.” As the geologists say in their book: “It is already clear that much of modern fashion will end up being, in the deepest possible sense, truly timeless.”
The last of the signature technofossils is also the most solid example: concrete. It is already essentially a rock, so it is readily preserved, and it exists in colossal quantities. Enough concrete is cast each year to provide four tonnes to every person on Earth, adding to the existing 500bn tonne stockpile.
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Abstract
The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is the world's strongest ocean current and plays a disproportionate role in the climate system due to its role as a conduit for major ocean basins. This current system is linked to the ocean's vertical overturning circulation, and is thus pivotal to the uptake of heat and CO2 in the ocean. The strength of the ACC has varied substantially across warm and cold climates in Earth's past, but the exact dynamical drivers of this change remain elusive. This is in part because ocean models have historically been unable to adequately resolve the small-scale processes that control current strength. Here, we assess a global ocean model simulation which resolves such processes to diagnose the impact of changing thermal, haline and wind conditions on the strength of the ACC. Our results show that, by 2050, the strength of the ACC declines by ∼20% for a high-emissions scenario. This decline is driven by meltwater from ice shelves around Antarctica, which is exported to lower latitudes via the Antarctic Intermediate Water. This process weakens the zonal density stratification historically supported by surface temperature gradients, resulting in a slowdown of sub-surface zonal currents. Such a decline in transport, if realised, would have major implications on the global ocean circulation.
