, - The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medine
Stephan: The leading scientists in the world are crying out to us and those who govern us. Time is running out, and an existential threat is upon us. We are not responding as we should, and we are running out of time.
Nobel Prize Laureates and Other Experts Issue Urgent Call for Action After ‘Pur Planet, Our Future’ Summit
This statement was inspired by the discussions at the 2021 Nobel Prize Summit, issued by the Steering Committee and co-signed by Nobel Laureates and experts.
Preamble
The Nobel Prizes were created to honor advances of “the greatest benefit to humankind.” They celebrate successes that have helped build a safe, prosperous, and peaceful world, the foundation of which is scientific reason.
“Science is at the base of all the progress that lightens the burden of life and lessens its suffering.” Marie Curie (Nobel Laureate 1903 and 1911)
Science is a global common good on a quest for truth, knowledge, and innovation toward a better life. Now, humankind faces new challenges at unprecedented scale. The first Nobel Prize Summit comes amid a global pandemic, amid a crisis of inequality, amid an ecological crisis, amid a climate crisis, and amid an information crisis. These supranational crises are interlinked and threaten the enormous gains we have made in human progress. It is particularly concerning that the parts of the world projected to experience many […]
Stephan: When I left university I was offered a position with National Geographic, and the first story I was assigned was about the migration of Monarch butterflies, It is an astonishing story I have never forgotten. The butterflies fly for thousands of miles stopping in the same trees their parents stopped in. When a tree is cut down the next generation picks a new tree and every generation thereafter of that genetic line stops in that same tree, on their migration. How can they possibly know? That story of the monarchs and their migration was what aw2akened me to the reality there was some kind of connection amongst the monarchs that had nothing to do with their tiny brains, and that realization grew ultimately to the realization that all life is nonlocally connected and interdependent. Now because of human stupidity and greed, the monarchs have been pushed to the edge of extinction. However, there is some good news. At the last-minute California under Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom aided by a collection of conservation groups, and Californians is taking responsibility for what humans have done and is trying to rectify it.
In one of the biggest mobilizationsof resources and talent ever organized to save an insect, the state of California is teaming with conservation groups, biologists and scores of citizen scientists to rescue the western monarch butterfly from the brink of extinction.
To do this, they are placing their hopes on an unassuming, poisonous plant called milkweed.
Monarch butterflies, known for their distinctive orange and black pattern, once flocked to California in the millions, spending the winter clumped on trees as they migrated to and from the state’s central coast.
But the population has sharply declined from 4.5 million in the 1980s, dropping to nearly 200,000 in recent decades before taking a precipitous dive in 2018. That year, the population fell to nearly 30,000, and when volunteers counted again in November, it had dropped to fewer than 2,000 – representing a 99% collapse in the last three decades.
“It was really grim,” saysAngela Laws, an endangered species conservation biologist with the Xerces Society, which conducts the November population counts using an army of volunteer naturalists.
Stephan: When I started meditating seriously in 1965 I quit drinking hard spirits because it interfered with my practice, and many of my friends did likewise. Over the space of just a few years it seemed an entire generation turned from hard alcohol to marijuana and wine. But over the following decades I have watched the rise and fall of alcohol, and noticed recently that whiskey is now back amongst the television ads. This interesting essay tracks America's use of hard alcohol. Like smoking for me it has more negatives than positives, but that is not the general view.
Few things are more American than drinking heavily. But worrying about how heavily other Americans are drinking is one of them.
The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock because, the crew feared, the Pilgrims were going through the beer too quickly. The ship had been headed for the mouth of the Hudson River, until its sailors (who, like most Europeans of that time, preferred beer to water) panicked at the possibility of running out before they got home, and threatened mutiny. And so the Pilgrims were kicked ashore, short of their intended destination and beerless. William Bradford complained bitterly about the latter in his diary that winter, which is really saying something when you consider what trouble the group was in. (Barely half would survive until spring.) Before long, they were not only making their own beer but also importing wine and liquor. Still, within a couple of generations, Puritans like Cotton Mather were warning that a “flood of RUM” could “overwhelm all good Order among us.”
George Washington first won elected office, in 1758, by getting voters soused. (He is […]
Stephan: I don't think most people have any concept of what climate change is going to be like, no one has ever lived under the conditions that are coming. What should be happening is that all the world's governments should be cooperating, instead, they are jockeying with one another, and in the United States one party, the Republicans, isn't even sure climate change is real.
Oxygen levels in the world’s temperate freshwater lakes are declining faster than in the oceans. Credit: Gretchen Hansen, University of Minnesota
TROY, N.Y. — Oxygen levels in the world’s temperate freshwater lakes are declining rapidly — faster than in the oceans — a trend driven largely by climate change that threatens freshwater biodiversity and drinking water quality.
Research published today in Nature found that oxygen levels in surveyed lakes across the temperate zone have declined 5.5% at the surface and 18.6% in deep waters since 1980. Meanwhile, in a large subset of mostly nutrient-polluted lakes, surface oxygen levels increased as water temperatures crossed a threshold favoring cyanobacteria, which can create toxins when they flourish in the form of harmful algal blooms.
“All complex life depends on oxygen. It’s the support system for aquatic food webs. And when you start losing oxygen, you have the potential to lose species,” said Kevin Rose, author and professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “Lakes are losing oxygen 2.75-9.3 times faster than the oceans, a decline that will have impacts throughout the ecosystem.”
Stephan: What stands out for me about many of the Republican governors in office today is not only their incompetence as governors but their sheer nastiness. Here is a story explaining why I think as I do. This is a really ugly trend, but they consistently act in this way.
White supremacist Republican Governor of Texas Greg Abbott. Credit Bob Daemmrich/ZUMA Wire
In addition to stripping a key lifeline from millions of jobless workers across the country, Republican governors’ plans to prematurely cut off emergency unemployment benefits could cost local economies an estimated $12 billion as previously covered individuals and families lose the extra $300 in weekly federal aid they were using to buy groceries and other necessities.
According to a report (pdf) released Wednesday by the Joint Economic Committee, a congressional panel chaired by Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), the decision by dozens of Republican governors to cut off the $300-per-week boost to unemployment insurance “will take over $755 million from UI beneficiaries and their families on average.”
“These numbers, while rough estimates, nonetheless probably understate the extent of the economic loss caused by this decision,” the report reads. “By ending these programs early, states are refusing billions of already appropriated federal dollars that could be spent in local groceries, restaurants, and retail shops.”
The JEC’s cost estimate does not include Maryland, which earlier this […]
