Latest news with #DoomsdayClock
Time of India
11 hours ago
- Politics
- Time of India
Dangerous bombing
Bombing nuclear power plants is a very risky and dangerous thing to do. Right now, Israel and the United States are doing just that — and they should stop. Almost 80 years ago, in August 1945, two cities in Japan — Hiroshima and Nagasaki — were destroyed by nuclear bombs. Over 2.2 lakh people died, and many more were hurt for years after. The world saw how horrible nuclear weapons could be, and most countries agreed they should never be used again. So in 1970, a big agreement called the Non-Proliferation Treaty (or NPT) was signed. Countries promised not to build more nuclear weapons. Iran signed it. Israel did not. But overall, it helped keep the world safer — only nine countries have nuclear bombs today. And the big accidents at nuclear power plants — like Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 — all happened by mistake, not in war. Each time, countries worked to make safety better. But now, dangerous things are happening again. In 2022, when Russia attacked Ukraine, it also captured Europe's biggest nuclear power plant. Luckily, there was no disaster. But just last week, Israel bombed several of Iran's nuclear sites. These are not weapons — they are working or nearly working power plants. If bombs damage them, they could leak radiation and hurt thousands of people and the environment — just like Chernobyl. This isn't the first time. In 1981, Israel bombed a nuclear plant in Iraq before it could be used. They knew they couldn't do it after the plant was running, or it would have caused a huge disaster. They were careful again in 2007 when bombing a plant in Syria that was still being built. Back in 1981, even the U.S. was angry at Israel for bombing Iraq's plant. But today, leaders like Putin, Trump, and Israel's Netanyahu don't seem to care about the risks. In 1991, during a war, the U.S. destroyed two nuclear plants in Iraq — it was very dangerous. Why are we repeating those mistakes now? Iran may now leave the nuclear safety treaty. If that happens, other countries might think they also need nuclear weapons to stay safe. That would make the world more dangerous for everyone. There's a clock called the Doomsday Clock that shows how close the world is to a big disaster. Right now, it's just 89 seconds from midnight — the closest ever. Bombing nuclear plants brings us even closer. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists find the best crops to grow during the apocalypse
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Scientists have figured out what crops we'd need to grow in the event of a global catastrophe. . | Credit: Bulgac/Getty Images If a global catastrophe suddenly led to a nuclear winter, millions of people could starve. But now, scientists have figured out what crops we would need to grow to sustain a city if such a calamitous event occurred. According to a new study, farming spinach, sugar beets, wheat and carrots in urban and near-urban areas could feed the population of a midsize city in a post-apocalyptic world. The scientists built on previous research to determine the optimal crops to plant after a global catastrophe — such as nuclear war, extreme pandemics or solar storms. Their goal was to find the most efficient way to feed a person using the least amount of land. "[The research] actually wasn't inspired by the current, you know, geopolitical environment," said study lead author Matt Boyd, founder and research director of Adapt Research, an independent research organization. "But it has turned out to be very relevant, obviously, to the current geopolitical environment," Boyd told Live Science. Current events include unpredictable international politics, ongoing war in the Middle East and Europe, weaponized artificial intelligence and the ever-mounting destruction from climate change. In January, the Doomsday Clock, which indicates how close humanity is to a species-threatening disaster, ticked one second closer to midnight — the closest it has ever been to catastrophe. In the new study, published Wednesday (May 7) in the journal PLOS One , the researchers looked at how the population of a midsize city could survive with agriculture in the event of a global disaster. The study examined two scenarios should disaster strike: what to grow in and around a city under normal climate conditions, and what to grow in the event of a nuclear winter. The optimal crop to grow in a temperate city in normal conditions turned out to be a humble legume: peas. "Peas are a high protein food. They grow well in urban agriculture environments," Boyd said. "If you want to feed someone, growing peas minimizes the amount of land you need to feed that person." However, pea plants are not frost-resistant. In the event of a nuclear winter — which could be caused by nuclear war, a supervolcano eruption or a huge asteroid strike — sunlight would be blocked "due to all the soot and everything that's been thrown up into the stratosphere," Boyd said. This in turn would lead to lower temperatures and make it harder for plants to photosynthesise. In that scenario, a hardier combination of spinach and sugar beets are a better choice, the researchers found. Related: 'Nuclear winter' from a US-Russia conflict would wipe out 63% of the world's population Boyd and study co-author Nick Wilson , a professor of public health at the University of Otago, Wellington came to these conclusions in part by using the data from a meta-analysis of urban agriculture research that analyzed the yield of different crops in dozens of cities around the world. The researchers used Palmerston North in New Zealand as a case study of a midsize city. | Credit:Peas, for example, rose to the top in normal conditions because they require 3,143 square feet (292 square meters) of land to satisfy one person's caloric and protein needs for a year, whereas a combination of cabbage and carrots required 8,364 square feet (777 square meters), said Boyd — almost three times as much land. The researchers chose Palmerston North in New Zealand, but the findings can apply to similar cities worldwide, the researchers said. With a population of roughly 90,000, it's a globally midsize city, Boyd said, plus "it's inland, like many cities around the world, and it has reasonably low density, suburban type housing, not sort of Manhattan-style skyscrapers and so forth." The scientists then used Google imagery of Palmerston North to work out the total amount of available green spaces that could be used to grow crops, such as front lawns, backyards and parks. "Surprise, surprise. The city can't feed all its people," Boyd said. If food is only grown within the city bounds, the available land can feed about 20% of the population with crops that maximize protein and food energy per square foot under normal climate conditions. That number shrinks to about 16% during nuclear winter. To feed the rest of the population, people would need land immediately outside the city — about one-third of the size of the city's built urban area — to sow additional efficient crops. In the case of Palmerston North, that's about 2,817 acres (1,140 hectares), plus another 272 acres (110 hectares) of canola to convert into biodiesel to fuel tractors and other farm machinery. Spinach would help sustain a population during a nuclear winter, researchers found. | Credit: Sally JaneIn the land just outside the city, the study found that potatoes are ideal for a normal climate scenario, and a combination of 97% wheat and 3% carrots is the optimal ratio during a nuclear winter because they have a higher tolerance for colder temperatures. Even in cities, "there is a ton of farmland that can be used to grow food," said Theresa Nogeire-McRae , a landscape ecologist at American Farmland Trust and affiliate faculty at Oregon State University, who was not involved in the study. 'People settled cities where they did for a good reason,' Nogeire-McRae told Live Science. 'It was the rich soil near riverbanks. It's a good commodity. Let's not throw that away." She added that the methods of study were sound and the findings were reasonable. Related stories —14 of the deadliest natural disasters in history —Atlantic ocean currents are weakening — and it could make the climate in some regions unrecognizable —A long-lost ice sheet could predict the future of New York City — one in which Lower Manhattan and Coney Island are 'perpetually submerged' Boyd noted there are a number of unknowns that would impact crop yield in the real world. Soil quality is a big variable, because lower quality soil would yield fewer crops. He also assumed a scenario where water systems were still flowing — "but you can imagine global catastrophe scenarios where there's additional obstacles and problems," he said. He also doesn't expect people will only eat peas for an entire year, but planting the most efficient crops minimizes the amount of land needed to feed a population. Boyd said this study could be used as a first step for cities looking to use resilient urban agriculture in land use policy. "Decisions that might seem optimal in one lens, maybe economically, may look a little bit less optimal if you were also including a lens like resilience, safety and well-being," he said.
Chicago Tribune
06-05-2025
- Climate
- Chicago Tribune
Doomsday Clock closest it's ever been to midnight amid climate, nuclear, AI threats
As aquifer dries up, some Will County towns say they aren't worried about running out of water The challenge with continuing to depend on groundwater is the unpredictability and sensitivity of the deep aquifer, experts say. January 28, 2025 at 5:00 p.m. Earth is moving closer to destruction, a science-oriented advocacy group said Tuesday as it advanced its famous Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds till midnight, the closest it has ever been.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA say huge man-made structure is actually slowing down Earth's rotation
Changing the laws of time is functionally impossible, yet NASA has revealed that one gigantic man-made structure in China is so big that it might just have altered Earth's rotation. With the ever-looming Doomsday Clock ticking down, it would be nice to have a little more time every year to get things done, even if most people would spend it staring at their phone. While you might have thought that this was an impossibility, NASA have now discovered that a major landmark in China is so unbelievably huge that it's actually extended the length of the year by altering the rotation of our planet. As reported by LADbible, Dr. Benjamin Fong Chao at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has revealed research that links the size and weight of the Three Gorges Dam in China to a change in the Earth's orbit. Completed in 2012, the Three Gorges Dam stretches across the Yangtze River near Sandouping, and is the world's largest power station when considering its installed capacity. It's also 2,335 meters wide and sits 185 meters above sea level at its peak, costing $20.4 billion in total by the end of its construction. Due to its ability to hold roughly 40 cubic kilometers - equality to around 10 trillion gallons - of water, the Three Gorges Dam provides a shift in mass that increases the length of every single day on Earth by 0.06 microseconds, making our planet more round in the middle and flatter on top in addition. Unfortunately, this extension of time isn't something that you would be able to feel in any capacity, as a single microsecond is the equivalent of 0.000001 seconds, so the amount that the Three Gorges Dam actually 'moved' time amounts to just 0.00000006 seconds. For the Earth to move enough to create a single second of additional time, you'd need the equivalent shift in mass of 16,666,666 Three Gorges Dams, although that might scale a little differently if it all occurred at once! Dr. Chao has further added that this movement "amounts to a bit more than 3 days over the entire age of the universe," so in the grand scheme of 13.8 billion years, it's not too much to worry about thankfully. "Can we just take it all at once now in the form of an extra three-day weekend?" jokes one user in a Reddit thread following the news, with another adding that we "slowed down the earth before [we got] GTA 6." It's certainly another hefty gut punch to any flat Earthers still persisting out there too, although you would have thought that clear evidence from some of the world's most knowledgable scientists would have been enough to convince them otherwise.
New York Times
23-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The World Seems to Be Surrendering to Climate Change
The scope of President Trump's assault on the country's climate ambitions, over just three months, is not just enraging but also perversely awe inspiring. In the run-up to the November election, conventional analysis suggested that a Trump victory would mean an additional four billion tons of CO2 emissions to the atmosphere by 2030, a total surrender on the climate pledges the country had made under the Paris Agreement and the functional end of the global goals that agreement established among nearly all the world's nations. But in many ways, on climate as on other fronts, the administration has been worse than was feared — taking an ax to the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office, pressuring foreign countries to increase their consumption of American liquefied natural gas as part of the administration's trade war and casting the whole future of President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act in doubt. As Matthew Zeitlin wrote in Heatmap last week, an end to subsidies for green energy under the act could strip solar power of its cost advantage over natural gas, and the Trump administration has tried to block states from pursuing climate goals on their own. It has been haphazardly sabotaging the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, presumably for the sin of working on climate-related assessments, and canceling so much research funding that public agencies and university programs alike are feeling they're in free fall. During his first administration, Trump loved to talk about tree planting as an alternative climate solution; in this term, he's canceling those programs, too. The Biden administration sometimes boasted about its whole-of-government response to climate change; this is a whole-of-government counteroffensive. But the story of retreat from climate politics is larger than Trump or his desire to make America more of a petrostate and is more worryingly global than merely MAGA. Just a few years ago, worldwide climate concern seemed to be reaching new peaks almost monthly, with cultural momentum growing and policy commitments following. Then came Covid, inflation and higher interest rates, which made the cost of living and global debt crises worse — and above all, perhaps, a new accommodation to the brutal realities of climate change that some call pragmatism and some normalization. Surveys still show widespread climate concern; in a poll covering 130,000 people in 125 countries, 89 percent of respondents said they wanted stronger action. But at the highest levels of discourse and policy debate, just a few years since the Inflation Reduction Act and Boris Johnson declaring, 'It's one minute to midnight on that Doomsday Clock,' the tide is going out on climate alarm. In truth, it has been for a while. In Europe, leaders have spent the years since Russia's invasion of Ukraine reckoning with the energy crisis that it produced and, in part, rethinking the commitments of the continent's landmark Green Deal. In Britain officials are debating dropping legally binding commitments to reach net-zero carbon emissions. In Mexico its climate scientist president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is building fossil-fuel infrastructure, and in Canada the new prime minister, Mark Carney, chose as his first official act the repeal of the country's landmark carbon tax. None of these moves are back breakers for climate action, and some may even be defensible to climate campaigners on the basis of political necessity. But tellingly, each would have been very hard to imagine five years ago. From 2019 to 2021, governments around the world added more than 300 climate adaptation and mitigation policies each year. In 2023 the figure was under 200. In 2024 it was under 50. Carney is a former central banker who's spent years rallying the financial world in support of climate goals, as part of what is called the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. In the year after it was announced in 2021, the alliance's industry-led banking arm added nearly 100 signatories. Over the past year, the group has added fewer than 10 members, and since December, it has lost BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. The S&P Global Clean Energy Transition Index has been in steady decline, the energy analyst Nat Bullard recently noted, with its value falling by more than half since 2021. This month a symposium sponsored by the People's Forum in New York raised the prospect that just a few years past its much-ballyhooed heyday, we had already reached the end of green capitalism. Perhaps the phrase was always an alibi for business as usual, an opportunity for the profit-minded to surf the zeitgeist and lay claim to ecological beneficence. But even so, there has been an undeniable change. When Bloomberg recently analyzed earnings calls of S&P 500 companies going back to 2020, it found that the companies talked about the environment in the first quarter of 2025, on average, 76 percent less than they did three years ago. And when financiers do talk about it, the tone is very different. Five years ago, the chatter was about the business opportunity of a successful transition; these days, as Kate Aronoff wrote recently in The New Republic, it is much more likely to emphasize the opportunities of a hotter world (booming demand for air-conditioning, for instance). A recent report from Morgan Stanley declared that the goals of keeping warming within the limits that more than 190 nations adopted a decade ago in Paris are now well out of reach, thanks to 'recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts': Populism, inflation, energy prices and the cost of living crisis and interest rates and the cost of financing anything, let alone something with a relatively low rate of return. Other reports from JPMorgan Chase and the Institute of International Finance reached the same conclusion. What is perhaps most shocking about this is that, as I've written, these very same probable outcomes were what gave rise to the wave of climate alarm that seemed to so profoundly improve our climate prospects just a few years ago. In the aftermath of the Paris Agreement and thanks to the work of scientists working to clarify the stakes of honoring it, we got a glimpse of a world 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than preindustrial levels and were, collectively, terrified into action by what we saw. In the years since, we've watched warming accelerate and many of those premonitions become real in the form of once unimaginable disasters. But for many, the terror has subsided, giving way to a sort of heavy acquiescence. Last week the writer and activist Bill McKibben titled a reflection on the subject 'A Chill Falls on the Climate Community' — he's trying to reignite the flame with a major action toward the end of this summer — and last month Bill Gates's climate initiative, Breakthrough Energy, closed its policy and advocacy office and laid off much of its staff in Washington, suggesting that there was little to agitate for when it comes to climate in today's D.C. There, earlier this month the Council on Foreign Relations began a Climate Realism initiative — offering among its guiding principles that the world should give up on its cherished goals of limiting warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius and instead prepare for a far more punishing 3 degrees or more. To some in the audience, it seemed like a declaration of indifference masquerading as pragmatism. 'Even if we stop clinging to 1.5,' the Carnegie Endowment's Noah Gordon asked plaintively, 'must we concede 3?' Consider this as a moral challenge, and the answer must be 'no.' As a matter of carbon math, though, the problem looks harder to solve. These days, when reckoning with the loss of cultural momentum, climate advocates will often point to green records set each year — worldwide annual solar power installations having more than doubled since 2021, annual global investment in the energy transition doubling to $2 trillion in just three years, renewables producing 92.5 percent of added worldwide power capacity last year. And although a staggering share of that global progress is taking place in China, in the United States the progress can be similarly breathtaking: wind capacity up 23-fold in two decades, according to a new analysis in Vox, utility-scale battery capacity up 29-fold in just five years and more U.S. electricity generated by renewables than fossil fuels last year, for the very first time. Climate optimists look at all that and say, whatever the politics, economics has made the energy transition unstoppable. In the long run, over generations, that still seems like a safe bet to me. But it's in the short run, just decades, that the pathways to what we once identified as relatively livable futures will be made or broken. And there I find myself wondering: How unstoppable is the transition, really? I'll write more about that in the coming weeks.
