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The Green Planet Monitor

The Green Planet Monitor

著者： David Kattenburg
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 Listen, Read, Watch2017-23 Earth Chronicle Productions 政治・政府 生物科学 社会科学 科学
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  • Green Planet Monitor Podcast

    Green Planet Monitor Podcast
    2023/07/09
    GPM # 18 It’s neither a drunkard’s dream nor a woolly Socialist notion: a universal basic income, guaranteed for a nation’s citizens – perhaps residents too – in return for … nothing. Just to get by. No far-fetched idea, the Universal Basic Income (UBI) concept is endorsed by the World Bank. The universal basic income concept “holds an attractive promise of change across many lines,” the World Bank stated in a 2020 report. “These include coverage potential, fairness in social contracts, power relations in labor markets, and gender equity.” Just two countries have implemented UBI systems, for limited periods – the Islamic Republic of Iran and Mongolia. Among the longest standing and most successful guaranteed income systems — the Alaska Permanent Fund. In the UK, a group of social entrepreneurs are preparing to launch their own locally-led pilot study to see how UBI systems play out on the ground, in people’s lives. It will be a community-driven project. Two communities have been selected to participate: the Grange area of East Finchley, in north London, and the South Tyneside town of Jarrow. Jarrow residents have good reason to be interested in the Universal Basic Income pilot project. In October 1936, two hundred men marched from Jarrow to London to protest unemployment. Cleo Goodman leads the UBI pilot project, currently in the scoping, community-consultation and fundraising stage. Goodman co-founded the Basic Income Conversation project in 2019, based at a think tank called Autonomy, that specializes in the future of work. I reached Cleo Goodman in Edinburgh. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the podcast link above, or go here. Jarrow “Crusaders” set off for London in October 1936 to protest unemployment. The Biden Administration has just announced it plans to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine. Ukrainian forces seem to be bogged down in their struggle against the Russians. As both sides slaughter each other, Washington reckons cluster bombs have something positive to contribute in its proxy war with Russia. Russia has also reportedly used cluster munitions in its invasion of Ukraine. Human rights groups have condemned the idea of sending cluster munitions to Ukraine. Several EU/NATO member states have voiced concern. Cluster munitions release scores of little bomblets that fly through the air and bounce around, slicing and dicing human flesh. Many of them don’t explode, littering the landscape with munitions that continue to kill for years, especially kids. As Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War Two drags on, thoughts turn to the First World War – the one that was supposed to end all wars. On August 4, 1914 – 109 years ago — Germany invaded little Belgium. Three weeks later, in an orgy of destruction, German troops laid seven Belgian towns to waste. The “Martyr Cities,” they came to be called. Leuven (Louvain, in French) was one of them. Of all the acts committed by German troops in Leuven in August 1914, none sparked more international outrage than the destruction of Leuven university library, a treasure trove of European literature and art, torched by the Germans on the night of August 25, 1914. Here’s a story I produced on the hundredth anniversary of that dreadful event – an event elderly residents of Leuven remember. Click on the podcast link above, or go here. Mark Deretz, Leuven University archivist, beside carbonized remains of old library. (David Kattenburg) It’s something human beings take for granted: the World is a very human place — covered by concrete and tall buildings; cars racing this way and that; food from all corners of the planet. Some green space — for us humans. Earth’s human age has a name – the Anthropocene. Dutch chemist Paul Crützen coined it, twenty years ago. The Anthropocene, Crützen said, should be declared a new ‘Epoch’ in Earth history, terminating the one we’ve been in for the past 12,000 years, the Holocene. Some time this summer, a panel of scientists — the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) — will move Crützen’s idea up a notch, with a proposal of their own on how Earth’s human age should be defined – geologically. [Editor’s note: This happened on Tuesday, July 11. Read about it here]. Paul Crützen’s original idea was that the Anthropocene began with the 18th century Industrial Revolution. In 2019 — a decade of research under its belt — the AWG decided it actually began around 1950, at the start of the “Great Acceleration’, when the scale, scope and pace of humanity’s impact on Planet Earth started to skyrocket. American environmental historian John McNeill, a colleague of Crutzen’s, had come up with the term in 2005, inspired by a 1944 work by Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. McNeill’s idea would be corroborated by a set of ‘Great Acceleration curves’, or ...
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    59 分
  • Green Planet Monitor Podcast

    Green Planet Monitor Podcast
    2023/07/17
    GPM # 19 Planet Earth. We humans tend to think of it as ours, to do with as we please. Over the past two centuries, that’s exactly what humans have done. Humanity’s transformation of Earth’s atmosphere, land surface and oceans has a name – the Anthropocene. Dutch chemist Paul Crützen and American biologist Eugene Stoermer coined the term a quarter century ago. Last week, at a geology conference in Lille, France, a scientific panel presented their formal definition of the Anthropocene — when it began, how it should be ranked in the official geological time scale and where human impacts are best observed in the rock record. The panel’s proposed location — a little lake in southern Ontario. To be more precise, the Anthropocene Working Group’s proposed ‘reference standard’ or prototype for the base of a new Earth stage/age and epoch/series is a 2-centimeter segment of a sedimentary core pulled from the bottom of Crawford Lake, in Milton, Ontario, an hour’s drive west of Toronto. Crawford Lake sediments, as it happens, have been studied for years. Back in the 1970’s, palynologists pinpointed corn pollen there, dating to the 14th and 15th centuries, the legacy of indigenous people who lived along the lake’s shores, cultivating their Three Sisters — corn, beans and squash. Above those corn pollen grains, in layers (varves) laid down in the mid-20th century, Anthropocene researchers have pinpointed the fingerprints of less benign human activity — spheroidal carbonaceous particles from high-temperature coal burning and radioactive plutonium from thermonuclear weapons tests that peaked in the mid-1950s. That distinct layer is now being put forward as the Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), marking the base of the Crawfordian stage/age, and a brand new Epoch/series – the Anthropocene — thereby terminating the one we’ve been in for the past 12,000 years, the Holocene. The more popular name for a GSSP – a ‘Golden Spike’. This past Tuesday, at the 4th International Congress of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, in the northern French city of Lille, two members of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) presented their results. The geological definition the AWG is now proposing – centering on the Crawford Lake GSSP — will need to be ratified by the body that commissioned it, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy. If that happens, the proposal will move up to the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), then to the supreme arbiter of all matters geological, the International Union of Geological Sciences. At each stage, supermajority approval will be required. The proposal’s future is anything but certain. If it manages to climb to the pinnacle of the geo-bureaucratic hierarchy, ratification or rejection could be announced in August 2024, at the 37th congress of the International Union of Geological Sciences, in Busan, South Korea. If the IUGS ratifies the Anthropocene as a new Epoch, terminating the Holocene, it will be a momentous event. Never before have geologists announced the start of a new Epoch in their own life times – one caused by humans themselves. Crawford Lake’s selection as the proposed Anthropocene’s ‘Golden Spike’ culminates years of analysis. Twelve candidate GSSPs were originally put forward, from locations around the planet. This was narrowed down to nine, of which four received votes in various voting rounds. Full details on the nine sites can be found here. A great read. Listen to the AWG’s Anthropocene announcement in this podcast edition. Click on the button on top, or go here. Colin Waters, chair of the AWG, is the first you’ll hear. Francine McCarthy follows. McCarthy is a geologist at Brock University, and the scientific director of Team Crawford. This is technical stuff. Listen closely. Colin Waters, Francine McCarthy and Martin Head outside the STRATI 2023 conference in Lille (David Kattenburg) Last week’s announcement of a proposed definition of the Anthropocene may come as a surprise to some. Aren’t we already in the Anthropocene, ordinary people ask? Not according to those who govern Earth’s official time scale — the International Chronostratigraphic Time Chart. Judging from the public comments of ranking geologists, the AWG’s proposed formal definition, announced last week in the French city of Lille, may well wither on the geo-bureaucratic vine. Further indication of which way the wind blows was on display at the International Commission of Stratigraphy’s conference in Lille, last week. After having suggested that the AWG’s proposed definition of the Anthropocene and its candidate Golden Spike could be publicly announced at the conference, organizers did a volte-face. Crawford Lake findings could be presented to stratigraphers by AWG chair Colin Waters and Crawford Lake researcher Francine McCarthy, they said — as planned — but media would not be welcome. Certainly not ...
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    58 分
  • Green Planet Monitor Podcast

    Green Planet Monitor Podcast
    2023/07/23
    GPM # 20 In a recent appeal to the world, Canadian AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton and 180 other leading scientists and luminaries issued a warning about the existential threats to humanity posed by … not climate change, not the demise of Earth’s biosphere … but artificial intelligence. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI,” their statement reads, “should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” According to other AI practitioners and observers, the prospects of human extinction at the hands of self-reproducing, self-defending generative AI systems and autonomous killer robots are overblown. The scariest things about AI – they warn — are much more mundane. “Big data increases inequality and threatens democracy,” Cathy O’Neil wrote in her 2016 work, Weapons of Math Destruction. Then there’s AI’s carbon footprint. According to a 2019 report in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review magazine, cloud computing is responsible for two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — a larger carbon footprint than the global airline industry. According to a more recent report, ‘training’ a single AI model consumes more energy than a hundred American households. The GPM spoke with Dylan Baker, a research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the audio box on top, or go here. Ever wonder what secrets lurk within your personal genetic source code? How much DNA did you inherit from Neanderthals? Perhaps you’re the proud owner of a sports gene! Hopefully no skeletons in the closet – like the Alzheimer’s allele. Would you want to know? If so, consumer genome kits can oblige, in exchange for a bit of spit. Listen to this story in today’s podcast, produced in 2013. Click on the audio box on top, or go here. Update: The US FDA warned 23andMe about marketing health predictive genome testing in 2013. In 2017, the FDA authorized it to market Late-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s and Hereditary Thrombophilia risk reports. As for National Geographic’s Geno Kits, the Society stopped marketing these in 2019. National Geographic says, at its website, that it deleted or destroyed DNA data in June 2020, with the exception of info from users who consented to their use for population-related research. UBC Professor Rosie Redfield checks her genome test results (David Kattenburg) Their precise scientific name is a mouthful. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. But you don’t want to get them in your mouth. Hard to avoid. Forever chemicals are in non-stick cookware; greasy food wrap; microwave popcorn bags … even lipstick. They don’t break down, they build up in your body, and they’re very bad for your health. And, most people have them in their blood! A recent mapping study reports that PFASs are present at high concentrations in thousands of spots across the UK and Europe. A similar exercise was carried out in the US. Now, a scientific study from California reports nine compounds in the blood of pregnant women and umbilical cords. Jessica Trowbridge is the study’s lead author. Trowbridge is a research scientist in the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco. Here’s more about the program’s research. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the audio box on top, or go here. Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.
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    59 分
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