November 8, 2023: Our current climate moment, the growing threat of machine-generated news and what our editors are reading this week. —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | | Climate evidence from Earth's history suggests that opportunities remain for humans to preserve our "fragile moment" on the planet, renowned climate scientist Michael Mann recently told Scientific American. The interview explores lessons from eras when Earth's climate was akin to a hothouse or a snowball, as detailed in Mann's new book Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth's Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis. Early on, ancient microorganisms capable of photosynthesis were among the living things that dramatically affected the planet's climate. Today we are the living things doing so.
The biggest concern: Humans are warming our climate much more rapidly in the current era than in the paleoclimate record. If Earth's eight billion people are adapted to a climate that is quickly changing and we continue to warm the planet, "that's a real danger," Mann says.
The takeaway: Mann's messages these days pair the words "urgency" and "agency." The urgency: climate change already has had devastating consequences and there's far worse to come if we don't act. The agency: the paleoclimate record tells us that we can avoid triggering runaway warming if we act quickly and dramatically.
More on climate: Electric Vehicles Might Not Yet Have Replaced as Much Car Mileage as Hoped | 3 min read Quitting Cows Could Have Big Environmental Impacts, but It's Harder Than It Sounds | 9 min read | | |  | Credit: sankai/Getty Images | The history of nuclear weapons production and detonation is encoded in the shells of turtles taken from such sites between the 1950s and 1980s, a new study reveals. Miniscule amounts of uranium detected in the shells of turtles point to a new way to track the impact of the invention of the atom bomb on people and ecosystems. (The health of these particular turtles, which managed to survive the nuclear exposure, likely wasn't affected by the very small amounts of uranium found in their shells, the researchers say.)
How it works: The fission, or splitting, of radioactive elements such as uranium and plutonium gives nuclear weapons their power. The creation and detonation of these weapons shed these elements. Elements then are taken up into local soil and water, where plants and eventually animals such as turtles can consume them.
The takeaway: The turtle-shell technique could help track exposures to nuclear fuel and help scientists understand how radioactive materials move from soil and water into living things.
| | | • Starfish are heads. Just heads.| 4 min read | | | • The first full-color science images from the Euclid space telescope showcase crystal-clear views of hundreds of thousands of cosmic objects. | 8 min read | | | • AI gets much of the blame these days for turning digital news into hot garbage. But a decades-old tool for digital plagiarism, called an article spinner, is also on the job, threatening to pollute the news with misinformation, writes science journalist Charles Seife, director of the Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism at New York University. A spinner program generates novel-seeming pieces of content out of stolen words, synthesized sources and a thesaurus. But at its core, the threat from AI is the same as the threat from the article spinner—a future where misinformation drowns out reality, Seife writes. | 6 min read | | | • The newly confirmed NIH Director faces such issues as tightening budgets and making drugs more affordable. | Axios | | | • Communities in North America and New Zealand are working on teaching algorithms to understand Indigenous languages. | New Scientist | • Planetary scientist and aerospace executive Alan Stern writes about his recent suborbital flight to space, in nine installments to date. | The Space Review | | | This newsletter's tone is fairly serious today, perhaps influenced by news that the U.S., Russia and Saudi Arabia plan to drill for more oil and gas in 2030 than at any point in history, according to a new United Nations-backed report. Many of the world's fossil fuel giants are on track this decade "to produce twice the amount of fossil fuels than a critical global warming threshold allows," writes Hiroko Tabuchi. The story includes some positive news: an official report in September stated that the worst-case climate change scenarios sketched in the early 2010s appear now to look less likely, thanks to the Paris Agreement in 2015 and growth in clean energy. And here's an uplifting quote from historian Howard Zinn that I've seen circulating online this week. It starts: "To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness."
| Reach out anytime with feedback and inspirational notes from history: newsletters@sciam.com. Until tomorrow! | —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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