EThis year I received an email from a reader who raises background questions about an article I wrote more than four decades ago. Looking at the time gap, it was a foggy memory. To be honest, it was almost not present. So I was fascinated – then I was surprised when I read the feature.
I wrote about British ice scientist John Mercer, author of the Book A. 1978 nature paper He warned that the continuous increases in the consumption of fossil fuels would cause the high amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He warned that global temperatures may rise by 2 degrees Celsius by the middle of the twenty -first century, causing large ice loss on the Polish and threatening a height of 5 meters in sea levels.
Temperatures today 1.5C warmer From what they were in pre -industry times Sea surface levels It rises with an acceleration rate. As Mercer also predicted, global warming has a significant effect on the columns. Snow disappears, threatens to renew the coastal areas inhabited by the Earth with melted water and falls the ability of the planet to reflect solar radiation into space. The high temperature is likely to rise.
Mercer was not the first scientist warning that our world faced a future for global warming, but his paper, with his very specific expectations, was the oldest of my concept examination. In the late 1970s, most climate concerns were concentrated in the media at the arrival of the new Ice Age. Mercer – which is based at the Institute of Antarctic Studies at Ohio State University – predicted the opposite. And he insisted on this is a hot and humid future. These dark expectations have been echoed since then by swelling of numbers of scientists who have increased their urgent warnings about the risks they posed. Climate. I was in pain to register this in observer Often to the cycle of hostile responses from the denials of climate change-and check our addiction to our addiction Fossil fuel It will have dangerous consequences on our planet.
The most surprising scientific story that you covered remains As an editor of science in the paper Over the past 42 years, although I must also give me the credit for many wonderful developments that have occurred in that period that have been my reporting topics. This includes our increasing mastery of DNA science, the creation of mobile phones and computers, our ability to improve the lesion of the cancer, and discover this Hoomo, the sane You have African origin. The most prominent events were included at the bottom of this article, and each of them explains how the armed researchers turned our understanding of our being and our place in it since the eighties.
However, its effects seem slim compared to the effect that will happen if our interference in our planet’s climate continues at its current rate. This is, simply, the greatest scientific experience that humans have done. Our constantly increasing emissions of greenhouse gases change the Earth – with our own types to be the subject of the main test.
The melting of ice covers, coastal coastal floods, drought, severe storms, and heat waves calms down to the displacement of hundreds of millions of their homelands as the large pieces of our planet become unimportant for housing. “In such a future, we will not come less than the collapse of the living world – the thing that our civilization depends on.” Sir David Attenburo in Life on our planet.
Our scientific creativity and creativity can definitely help us in facing the next destruction, and it may be expected. We definitely have the intellectual ability to stop the changes that await us. Unfortunately, my experiences as an editor of science otherwise – just as I have seen breathtaking developments in science, have witnessed large parts of society that manage their heads and deliberately rejects the facts that were presented to them. The unwanted partner’s exempt from our increasing scientific development was.
My first meeting came with a denial to combat science with AIDS in the 1980s. Scientists follow the reason: virus It is now known as HIV Which, they indicated, transmitted sexually. This point was disputed by many individuals who claimed to be caused by “defective” lifestyles and denied that AIDS was caused by a virus. This destroyed international influence was supposed to have after South African President Thau Mbeki asked many AIDS deniers to join the Presidential Consulting Committee in this disease. This was followed by the widespread blocking treatments for AIDS in South Africa, with the death of the disease from the disease to hundreds of thousands of people.
A more amazing example is provided by Covid. Our understanding of the disease has gradually changed after its appearance in late 2019, and advice was changed when scientists learned more about its causes. Handwash was dropped as a talisman and outdoor survival has become acceptable. This uncertainty was fed by social media.
Then the vaccines came, and the Internet went to excessive. The immunization against Covid was associated with exaggerated numbers of deaths, and this issue was politicized, especially in the United States, where many Republicans supporting Trump decided to avoid the vaccine. The result was a dark distortion of COVID infection in the United States, with many republican provinces that death rates have been much higher compared to strong democratic provinces.
This insult continued for the mind. The United States now has an explicit Speaking vaccine as a health secretary Although measles, the disease that is defeated by vaccines is in increasing numbers, along with early death reports, as the effect of anti -faxes takes a grip in the country.
In the case of the climate crisis, it was long -term denial, malignant inaccurate. The allegations that scientists have been caught by facts have been proven that they are unfounded while climate expert warnings have proven, from John Mercer, ascending, very accurate. As a result, we are now standing on the threshold of the continuous rise in global temperatures – because the deniers were very effective in preventing progress towards the introduction of international agreements to reduce fossil fuel emissions.
The anti-science movements have always been with us, of course-from the rise of the flat land to the creation of early groups opposed to development. However, the current track is now very worrying, as the United States provides the most worrying examples.
“It is undoubtedly political and related to the rise of the oath in the United States,” says Sir Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society. This is partly because Trump and many Republicans have specialized in elite universities in the United States, and these are places where the great flag occurs.
“On the other hand, the recent rise in the right -wing parties in European countries has not been reflected with the abuse of science, and yet the worst in this UK has not yet been hit.
Equippers
DNA In 1982, when I joined observerThe research in the dioxeriponocalic acid was the substance from which our genes are made, in its cradle. Today we can sequence the entire genotations of men and women, and have revealed the conveys from the biological data that revolutionized medical practice. Forensic science has also been transformed by developing DNA fingerprints, while our understanding of our development was transformed into its head through our ability to sequence the DNA from the tissue scraps left by our predecessors. Among the breaches taken this way, our discovery was that we are one day PrimitiveAnd that their DNA constitutes 1-2 % of European or Asian genes.
Gravity waves Albert Einstein, who thought he could not be discovered on Earth. He said that these ripples in the series of time communication of the place-although they are largely resulting from active events-will be confused with a small part of their original size by the time when they reached the ground. However, in 2015, researchers in Louisiana and Washington-in the discovery of the gravitational waves resulting from the merger of two black holes using giant laser interference standards that were able to measure wavelengths to a few hundred billion billion of the meter. This success has since opened a completely new way to study the universe.
Web When I started working as a correspondent, we wrote our stories on handwriting machines, and when I got out of the office, we called in our stories to the detainees of human copies. The creation of mobile phones, the Internet and strong personal computers since then has transformed mass communication thanks to developments in a set of technologies, including nanotechnology, semiconductors, sensors, fiber optics, satellites and atomic watches. Today, the mobile phone has a process of processing and memory capacity of the most powerful millions of times than the computer that led the APollo 11 mission to the moon.
Outside Africa Forty years ago, those who studied human origins were divided into two groups. One of the two sides argued that modern humans have evolved separately from the ancestors in different regions around the world. The other group said this Hoomo, the sane It evolved in Africa before spreading from the continent to take over the planet. The previous theory was known as the multiple hypothesis, while the latter was called as a theory outside Africa. Detailed studies on excavations, ancient DNA, stone tools and other artifacts have since solved the problem, and we now know that the recent theory is correct. Basically we are all Africans under the skin.
James Web telescope for space Forty years ago, men and women were expected to soon create colonies on the moon and Mars. However, since then, Human Spaceflight has suffered from financial setbacks and the public interest. On the contrary, the creation of advanced robot investigations has been about studying the heavens, a trend crowned with the release of 2021 of the world’s most powerful observatory, James Web telescope for space. It now reveals the universe with unprecedented details with early results showing that the universe was already profound in the process of forming stars shortly after the Baby Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.
