Mirrors in space and underwater curtains: can technology buy us enough time to save the Arctic ice caps?
Forty years on, Moore's research network, the University of the Arctic, has identified 61 potential interventions to slow, stop and reverse the effects of the changing climate in the region. These concepts are constantly being updated and some will be assessed at a conference in Cambridge this week, where scientists and engineers will meet to consider if radical, technological solutions can buy time and stem the loss of polar ice caps.
'We want to get them down to maybe 10 [ideas] that it's possible to proceed with. No one is talking about deployment yet,' Moore says, insisting that research is about 'excluding the non-starters, the hopeless ideas'. 'But we may have ideas that work if we start them now; if we don't do something for 30 years, it could be too late.'
The best way to do that, he says, 'is by evaluating them in a rational manner; otherwise it's just guesswork or religion'.
From sunlight reflection methods (SRM) by brightening Arctic clouds, stabilising ice sheets with huge underwater curtains to stop warm water melting glaciers, and even building vast mirrors in space, ideas that were once closer to science fiction have become increasingly mainstream.
'None of these ideas are going to fix everything,' says Moore, adding that part of the issue will be to weigh up the potential cost against the perceived benefit.
For Dr Shaun Fitzgerald, director of Cambridge University's centre for climate repair, which is hosting the conference, it has been a 30-year journey – from working in emissions reduction to exploring more radical ideas to save the Arctic – as he became aware of 'our futile progress' in slowing the climate crisis.
'I felt an obligation to further our knowledge in these other areas,' he says. Some of the more outlandish sounding ideas to be debated include the use of 10km-wide sunshades suspended between Zeppelin-sized airships and creating corridors of anchored rafts to help Arctic wildlife that require ice floes. Other measures are already under way. Last year, British startup Real Ice and Dutch company Arctic Reflections undertook projects that pumped water on to the ice to refreeze it.
For many critics, the ethical and legal questions around many of these interventions make geoengineering a fraught subject. In 2021, for example, the Saami Council, which represents the interests of the Saami people across Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia, joined NGOs in criticising the proposed pilot of a Harvard-led project that wanted to test plans for stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). This method involves introducing aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet by mimicking the effect of a large volcanic eruption. The plan was, the Saami Council wrote, a 'real moral hazard'.
With sensitivities such as these in mind, the Cambridge conference also features contributions on ethics, governance, sustainability and public engagement.
Among the interventions identified by Moore to slow, stop and reverse the effects of the climate emergency in the Arctic, some have been significantly researched already. But many ideas have barely made it off the drawing board, require enormous funds or have little chance of being done at sufficient scale.
The conclusions, so far, are that ocean-based concepts come with far more uncertainty, limitations and risks, while a few scored so low against most criteria that the study declares them to be 'unsuitable for further consideration'.
One of these – modifying ocean currents – was first mooted during the cold war, when blocking off the Bering strait was suggested to make the Arctic more habitable. Years later, the climate activist Rolf Schuttenhelm made a similar suggestion but with the aim of increasing Arctic sea ice.
'It's very easy to go wrong, and no one knows the right path,' Moore says. 'You proceed all the time with local benefits, and in the end, hope there can be global benefits.'
Fitzgerald would not be drawn on which concepts he considers frontrunners, and says: 'It's really important that we maintain an open mind on different approaches.'
However, much of the attention is on SAI and marine-cloud brightening (MCB). Prof Peter Wadhams, head of Cambridge University's Polar Ocean Physics Group, calls MCB a 'very potent' method. 'It has the significant advantage that you can turn off the process if it appears to have a harmful effect, as it is implemented on a smaller scale,' he says.
He is less enthusiastic about SAI, believing that it would be a dangerously long-lived intervention compared with MCB. Thickening sea ice, on the other hand, is impractical, he says, because of the huge amount of energy required. 'It may work on a small scale,' he says. 'But not on a scale that would make a difference. Marine-cloud brightening remains the best bet and the most carefully thought-out.'
Earlier this year, UK scientists announced that they will launch outdoor geoengineering experiments, including into marine-cloud brightening, as part of a £50m government-funded programme. However, opposition is building in some quarters – in response to a petition, a debate was held in the UK parliament this week on making geoengineering illegal, while in the US, the Tennessee state legislature has banned it entirely.
To critics who say potential catastrophes outweigh benefits, Fitzgerald says: 'The risks of not doing something need to be compared against the risks of trying to do something. The research has to continue at pace because of the pace of climate change.'
He adds: 'If we think it's bad now, we've got to think about the next 100 or so years.'
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The Guardian
7 hours ago
- The Guardian
Science could enable a fascist future. Especially if we don't learn from the past
Science is in crisis. Funding infrastructures for both basic and applied research are being systematically decimated, while in places of great power, science's influence on decision making is waning. Long-term and far-reaching studies are being shuttered, and thousands of scientists' livelihoods are uncertain, to say nothing of the incalculable casualties resulting from the abrupt removal of life-saving medical and environmental interventions. Understandably, the scientific community is working hard to weather this storm and restore funding to whatever extent possible. In times like these, it may be tempting to settle for the status quo of six months ago, wanting everything simply to go back to what it was (no doubt an improvement for science, compared to the present). But equally, such moments of crisis offer an opportunity to rebuild differently. As Arundhati Roy wrote about Covid-19 in April 2020, 'Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.' What could science look like, and what good could science bring, if we moved through the portal of the present moment into a different world? At worst, science will play its part in accelerating us toward a tech-obsessed end-times-fascist future. At best, science will broaden its power as a positive force, serving the wellbeing of humans and nature alike. Imagining this latter vision in exquisite detail is essential, and we argue here that to first envision and then work towards the best version of science, we need to reckon honestly with science's past and present. Most crucially, we need to confront the commonplace claim that science is – or ought to be – objective and apolitical, uninfluenced by human culture, norms, or values. The current moment has rudely awakened many scientists to the fact that research is indeed political, and further makes clear that scientists' attempts to distance themselves from politics will backfire. Denying the inherent entanglements of science and politics leaves scientists lacking the capacity and tools to mount effective defenses against bad-faith political attacks. This denial also allows science to go unquestioned when it undermines the needs and rights of marginalized beings and places. As much as scientists might wish for science to be cleanly separable from politics, decades of research demonstrates that this has never been true, and never could be. The field of science studies examines the inherently human processes of science – who defines what science is, who gets to conduct scientific research, who pays for it, who benefits from it, who is harmed by it – and how these human dynamics shape scientific knowledge. Feminist science studies in particular documents how power and oppression shape scientific findings and applications, demonstrating that even 'science at its most basic' is in fact inextricable from politics. Some of the most compelling, and consequential, examples of such entanglement can be found in human and animal biology. Consider an analysis of 19th-century science on human race and sex from Sally Markowitz, which clearly reveals the influence of white supremacism on basic biology. Markowitz shows how 19th-century scientists not only asserted that human races are biological categories, but also that the so-called white race is evolutionarily superior. To 'prove' this politically-motivated claim, these scientists first decided that the degree of distinction between men's and women's bodies (or 'sexual dimorphism') was proof of evolutionary superiority, and then claimed, on the basis of selective measurements, that sexual dimorphism is supposedly greater in Europeans than in Africans. Women of African descent were thus mismeasured as both less female and less human than their white counterparts – rendering all people of African descent more 'animal-like'. This 19th-century research has had far-reaching consequences, from justifying enslavement, to supporting eugenic sterilization practices well into the 20th century, to contemporary controversy around the 'femaleness' of elite Black and brown female athletes, among other examples. It may be tempting to relegate such blatant instances to the past, and claim that scientists have since corrected such mistakes. But in fact these ghosts continue to haunt us. In our new book, Feminism in the Wild, we – an evolutionary biologist and a science studies scholar – dive deep into how contemporary scientists describe and understand animal behavior, and find the dominant political perspectives of the last 200 years reflected back to us. Scientific research on mating behavior in species ranging from fruit flies to primates is entangled with patriarchal expectations of masculinity and femininity. Scientists' understanding of animals' foraging behavior mirrors a capitalist theory of economics, based upon assumptions of scarcity and optimization, and expectations of individualism are pervasive throughout scientific research on how animals behave in groups. Contemporary researchers express surprise, for instance, at elephants who alter their eating habits to accommodate a fellow herd member disabled by poachers, at ravens who alert one another to the presence of food in the dead of winter, or at female dolphins who begin lactating without having given birth in order to nurse calves whose mothers have died. Dominant evolutionary theories do not explain such instances of care on their own terms, but instead insist that these behaviors must ultimately be self-interested. Not coincidentally, these theories rooted in individualism only rose to dominance in the last 50 years or so, alongside the rise of neoliberalism. Meanwhile, eugenic perspectives, rooted in racism, classism, and ableism, constrain how scientists understand sex, intelligence, performance and more, in humans and animals alike. For example, today's scientists are still somewhat shocked by lizards who successfully navigate tree trunks and branches with missing limbs, as these agile lizards undermine the presumed correlation between an animal's appearance, performance, and survival that's captured in the phrase 'survival of the fittest'. Other scientists continue to argue that peahens (for instance) choose to mate with the most beautiful peacock, despite his expansive tail's costly impediments, because beauty is a 'favorable' trait even if it doesn't promote survival. Such arguments about female mate choice are rooted in a theory developed decades ago by mathematician and evolutionary biologist Ronald A Fisher, a vocal advocate of 'positive eugenics', which means encouraging only people with 'favorable' traits to reproduce. Leonard Darwin (son of Charles Darwin), in his 1923 presidential address to the Eugenics Education Society, made this connection between Fisher's theories and eugenics explicit, stating: 'Wonderful results have been produced…by the action of sexual selection in all kinds of organisms…and if this be so, ought we not to enquire whether this same agency cannot be utilized in our efforts to improve the human race?' Leonard Darwin then went on to deliver an astoundingly modern-sounding description of sexual selection before considering its implications for effective eugenics propaganda. We offer these examples (and many more, in our book), to show that scientific research on the evolution of animal behavior remains thoroughly and undeniably political. But the moral of our story is not that scientists must root out all politics and strive for pure neutrality. Rather, feminist science studies illustrates how science has always been shaped by politics, and always will be. It is therefore incumbent upon scientists to confront this reality rather than deny it. Thankfully, for as long as science has been aligned with systems of oppression, there have been scientists and other scholars resisting this alignment, both explicitly and implicitly. In Feminism in the Wild, we detail the work of scientists developing new mathematical models about female mating behavior that discard old assumptions aligned with patriarchy and eugenics, instead demonstrating that it's possible and even likely that female animals are not necessarily concerned with mating with the 'best' males and that mate choice can be a more flexible and variable affair. We discuss a rich history of theories about animals' behavior in groups that take both individual and collective well-being seriously. And we explore alternatives rooted in queer, Indigenous, and Marxist standpoints, which counter the dominant view that animal behavior is all about maximizing survival and reproduction. Ultimately, we show that it is possible—and even desirable—to fold political analysis into scientific inquiry in a way that makes science more multifaceted and more honest, bringing us closer to the truth than a science which denies its politics ever could. In this historical moment scientists must embrace, rather than avoid, the political underpinnings and implications of scientific inquiry. As Science's editor-in-chief Holden Thorp put it in 2020, 'science thrives when its advocates are shrewd politicians but suffers when its opponents are better at politics.' We agree, and further insist: scientists must reckon honestly and explicitly with the ways in which the knowledge they produce, and the processes by which they produce it, are already and unavoidably political. In doing so, scientists may lose the shallow authority they have harbored by pretending to be above the political fray. They will instead have to grapple with their own political perspectives constantly, as part of the scientific process—a rougher road, no doubt, but one that will lead us to a stronger science, both more empirically rigorous and more politically resilient. Imagine if scientists seized this moment to remake science even while fighting for it. As MacArthur Genius and feminist science studies scholar Ruha Benjamin recently stated: imagination is '[not] an ephemeral afterthought that we have the luxury to dismiss or romanticize, but a resource, a battleground.' And, she continues: 'most people are forced to live inside someone else's imagination.' United in the goal of building a stronger science, we call upon scientists to put our imaginations to work differently, in ways that move us through this nightmare portal into a dreamier world, where justice is not cropped out of scientific endeavors but rather centered and celebrated. Ambika Kamath is trained as a behavioral ecologist and evolutionary biologist. She lives, works, and grows community in Oakland, California, on Ohlone land Melina Packer is Assistant Professor of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, on Ho-Chunk Nation land. She is the author of Toxic Sexual Politics: Economic Poisons and Endocrine Disruptions
BBC News
8 hours ago
- BBC News
Turbulence is increasing. Here's how the aviation industry is trying to smooth things out
Climate change is creating stronger turbulence. Aircraft designers hope innovative new techniques will reduce its effects. "We saw blood on the ceiling… It was just complete havoc." This was one passenger's description of the scene after a Singapore Airlines flight was hit by severe turbulence while passing over the south of Myanmar in 2024. A lot of people were on the floor." Early this spring, a United Airlines Boeing 787 also hit severe turbulence while cruising above the Philippines. A flight attendant was thrown against the ceiling, resulting in a concussion and a broken arm. Turbulence incidents like these are increasing as a result of human-caused climate change. Severe clear-air turbulence (Cat), meaning very rough air that is invisible to satellites, radar and the human eye, has increased 55% since 1979 – when reliable meteorological records began, according to research by Paul Williams, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading. Turbulence is expected to treble worldwide by the 2050s and will likely have a major impact on routes across East Asia and the North Atlantic. It could affect people's willingness to fly at all. Among the most common reasons people give when justifying a fear of flying are loss of control and a past experience with turbulence. But turbulence, besides being potentially dangerous, also costs the aviation industry money, causing wear and tear to vehicles and lengthening some flights as pilots try to evade it. Such manoeuvres mean using up more fuel and increasing emissions. Although turbulence is usually a matter of discomfort rather than injury or death, the rising volume of chaotic motions in the atmosphere means airlines, scientists and engineers are faced with coming up with ways of mitigating the problem. Turbulence Solutions based in Baden, Austria, has developed small "flaplets" that may be added to larger flaps (or ailerons) on aircraft wings. The flaplets adjust their angle slightly in order to counteract changes in airflow based on pressure readings taken immediately in front of them on the wing's leading edge. It helps to stabilise the plane, a bit like how birds use tiny adjustments of their feathers while flying. The company says its technology can reduce turbulence loads felt by passengers by more than 80%. So far it has only tested the technology on small aircraft – though CEO Andras Galffy, himself an aerobatics pilot, feels confident that it will scale to support far larger planes. "The common view is you can either avoid or accept turbulence and deal with it by buckling up and reinforcing the wing," he tells me. "But we say you don't need to accept it. You just need the right counter-signal. For light aircraft there was always this pain but even for commercial aviation it's getting more serious because turbulence is increasing." Flying directly through eddies, vortices and updrafts with minimal disturbance requires not only precision engineering but a lot of advanced mathematics and an analysis of fluid dynamics. (Air, like water, is a fluid). The picture will always be complicated because the fundamental nature of turbulence is that it is chaotic. Small perturbations, from how wind deflects off a building to the wake of another aircraft, can change the behaviour of currents in the air. It's hard for humans to comprehend, but it might be easier for AI. "Machine learning is very good at finding patterns within high dimensional data," says Ricardo Vinuesa, a researcher in fluid mechanics, engineering and AI at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. "Turbulence might just be the perfect application for AI." In a recent experiment, Vinuesa and colleagues from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and TU Delft tested an AI system that controlled "synthetic jets" of air on a simulated aircraft wing. The AI itself was trained using deep reinforcement learning, a process whereby the model learns using trial-and-error, a little like when a toddler learns to walk. "Rather than measuring upstream, we can use AI to create very accurate numerical simulations of what airflow is doing based on measurements taken directly at the wing," he says. "And where neural networks are usually considered black boxes, we use explainable AI, which allows us to determine which measurements are most important to the predictions generated by the model." Vinuesa and his colleagues are working with tech companies to develop the technology further. Last year, a team from Caltech and Nvidia deployed extreme turbulence inside a wind tunnel to test an AI-powered sensing and prediction system for drones with promising results. Researchers at Nasa's Langley Research Center tested a purpose-built microphone capable of detecting ultra-low infrasound frequencies created by whorls of clear-air turbulence up to 300 miles (480km) away. Another approach that has been in active development since at least 2010 involves the use of Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) to create a 3D map of the air around a plane, much as self-driving cars create a point cloud of nearby objects and vehicles, in order to navigate their environment. A 2023 Chinese study proposed a "dual-wavelength" Lidar system, which they claim can observe light-to-moderate Cat between seven and 10km (4.3 to 6.2 miles) ahead of the aircraft. Unfortunately, the lower density of air molecules at high altitude means the instruments become too large, heavy and energy-hungry to be of use in existing commercial aircraft. The convergence of manufacturing, AI and new sensors could transform aviation in the second half of the 21st Century. But what happens today? Before take-off, pilots check weather briefings and study jet stream charts. They consult flight planning software and check forecasts such as the Graphical Turbulence Guidance (GTG) to which Paul Williams contributed. "About 20 years ago we could forecast around 60% of turbulence," he says, "today it's more like 75% and I suppose it's my career goal to push that number up and up." When I ask what holds back progress, Williams says it is access to turbulence data measured by aircraft. "Research scientists have to buy the data, and it's not cheap." More like this:• Aircraft turbulence is worsening with climate change• The aircraft that may fly like a flock of geese• How long-haul travel may change With advanced computation, AI and ever-more satellites, weather forecasting is improving, but there is a general lack of wind measurements above the Earth's surface. What we do know comes from around 1,300 weather balloon sites around the planet and the accelerometers on roughly 100,000 commercial flights that take to the skies each day. Turbulence Aware from the International Air Transport Association (IATA) anonymises and shares real-time turbulence data and is now used by airlines including Air France, EasyJet and Aer Lingus. For passengers, there are a growing number of apps that provide access to data seen only by pilots and dispatchers up to now, one of which is Turbli. "I use Turbli," says Williams. "I've found it to be reasonably accurate given the proviso that they don't know your exact route so can't be 100% accurate. But it's a little like a hypochondriac googling their symptoms," he adds. "I'm not sure it always helps." -- For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
The Herald Scotland
2 days ago
- The Herald Scotland
Hurricane researchers plan a 'fleet' of sharks to help forecasts
"By attaching these tags ... to sharks, which are wide-ranging, mobile predators, we will be able to observe a much larger part of the ocean that typically remains unobserved," said marine ecologist Aaron Carlisle of the University of Delaware, in an email to USA TODAY. He said it's not so much that we can't obtain these data using other means (such as vessels or autonomous vehicles), it's that those other platforms are very expensive and are limited in where they can go. In addition, "remote sensing via satellite-based sensors only looks at the surface, and it is what is going on below the surface that is really critical for many oceanographic/climate processes (such as hurricanes)." Water temps drive hurricane formation According to Carlisle, water temperature, and how it changes with depth, is what drives ocean heat content, and that is generally what drives hurricanes. He said salinity is important too, but is less critical for this particular issue in this region. Indeed, according to the National Weather Service, the first condition for hurricane formation is that ocean waters must be above 79 degrees F. "Below this threshold temperature, hurricanes will not form or will weaken rapidly once they move over water below this threshold. Ocean temperatures in the tropical East Pacific and the tropical Atlantic routinely surpass this threshold," the weather service said. What species of sharks are being used? Blue sharks and mako sharks are two of the species that were the best suited to carry these tags, due to their movement and diving characteristics. This isn't the first time animals have been used in a similar way for scientific research. Animals such as seals and narwhals have been tagged to track hard-to-reach areas in the Arctic and Antarctic, the Washington Post reports. Dolphins and whales have also been used by Russia for military purposes. Will the data captured by the sharks be used during actual hurricanes? "Yes, our goal is to have a 'fleet' of sharks carrying these tags during the hurricane season, and they will be providing real-time oceanographic data across the North Atlantic that will be fed into various ocean models that are used to predict hurricane strength, intensity, direction, etc.," Carlisle said in an e-mail. So far, his team conducted tagging experiments with the sharks in May, with some success. "As to whether the sharks will be in the actual hurricanes remains to be seen, but I suspect they will avoid them and won't be surfacing during hurricanes!" Is the goal to have the sharks deployed this year, during the 2025 season? This year, researchers are still working out bugs and are limited in the number of tags that can be deployed due to the continuing after-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had a huge impact on this project, Carlisle reported. "Our hope, if we obtain sufficient additional funding to keep things moving forward, is that we will be actually doing this type of work on a larger scale in 2026 (if lucky) or more likely 2027." Funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been more than satisfactory for the project so far, and Carlisle said "the agency has been incredibly supportive of us throughout this process." The teams' partner, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Association Coastal Ocean Observing System, has also been helpful. NOAA budget cuts: Dramatic budget cuts at NOAA could put weather forecasts in peril, lives in danger Are the sharks harmed by having the tags attached to them? "That's a topic that we are keenly aware of in our field," Carlisle said. "Attaching anything to an animal will have some impact on the animal, but we do everything in our power to minimize any negative impacts on the animal." In addition, Carlisle and his team go through a thorough permitting and review process that ensures they do everything they can to minimize impacts on animals. Beyond that, he said they need the animals to be "happy and healthy" in order to provide the team with good data, as they are carrying very expensive equipment (each tag costs about $6,000), so if the tag has significant deleterious impacts on the animal, "we aren't just hurting the animal but we're essentially throwing the tag away." The tags will not be on the animals permanently: researchers use parts that will corrode over time, allowing the whole tag package to fall off the animal.
