global warming, what are the chances?

OSLO (Reuters) - Evidence for man-made global warming has reached a “gold standard” level of certainty, adding pressure for cuts in greenhouse gases to limit rising temperatures, scientists said on Monday.

“Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals,” the U.S.-led team wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change of satellite measurements of rising temperatures over the past 40 years.

They said confidence that human activities were raising the heat at the Earth’s surface had reached a “five-sigma” level, a statistical gauge meaning there is only a one-in-a-million chance that the signal would appear if there was no warming.

Such a “gold standard” was applied in 2012, for instance, to confirm the discovery of the Higgs boson subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe.

Benjamin Santer, lead author of Monday’s study at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said he hoped the findings would win over skeptics and spur action.

“The narrative out there that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong,” he told Reuters. “We do.”

Mainstream scientists say the burning of fossil fuels is causing more floods, droughts, heat waves and rising sea levels.

U.S. President Donald Trump has often cast doubt on global warming and plans to pull out of the 197-nation Paris climate agreement which seeks to end the fossil fuel era this century by shifting to cleaner energies such as wind and solar power.

Sixty-two percent of Americans polled in 2018 believed that climate change has a human cause, up from 47 percent in 2013, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

artificial leaves

One can not help but marvel at the ingenuity of nature. Leaves, for instance, do an incredible job of converting carbon dioxide (CO2) into oxygen, making a better planet for us all.

Impressively, researchers have successfully copied nature and created artificial leaves that work just as well or even better than real ones. These engineered leaves mimic photosynthesis effectively; however, they have one caveat. So far, they only work in labs.

Because they use pure, pressurized carbon dioxide from tanks, these little marvels of engineering could not be taken outside in the real world where they could help with reducing CO2, until now.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) have invented a solution that could see artificial leaves be used in the real world. Better yet, their leaves would be 10 times more effective at converting CO2 than real ones.

"So far, all designs for artificial leaves that have been tested in the lab use carbon dioxide from pressurized tanks. In order to implement successfully in the real world, these devices need to be able to draw carbon dioxide from much more dilute sources, such as air and flue gas, which is the gas given off by coal-burning power plants," said Meenesh Singh, assistant professor of chemical engineering in the UIC College of Engineering and corresponding author on the paper.

To solve this dilemma, Singh and his team have devised an artificial semi-permeable membrane that would allow water to evaporate when hit by sunlight. When this occurs the water would also pull in carbon dioxide from the air.

Then, an artificial photosynthetic unit would convert carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide and oxygen. The carbon monoxide would be collected and used in the development of synthetic fuels. The oxygen, however, could be released back into the environment where it is very much needed.

"By enveloping traditional artificial leaf technology inside this specialized membrane, the whole unit is able to function outside, like a natural leaf," Singh said.

stop buying water

Like most people, I’m frustrated over the plastic pollution problem and wonder if anything I do will make a difference. So last week Craig and I met after work at Hanauma Bay to attend a talk given by a speaker representing Plastic Free Hawaii, a branch of the Kokua Hawaii Foundation started by musician Jack Johnson and his wife, Kim. The charitable organization is dedicated to environmental education, one being a program to reduce our consumption of single-use plastic.

And there I sat with my Plastic Free Hawaii bag full of single-use plastic. I had stopped at a grocery store for our dinner of sushi and drinks.

The subjects of plastic use, recycling, landfills, fishing gear and burning trash for electricity are so complex, and so biased, that after listening to the Hanauma Bay talk and spending hours on the internet, I’m still not convinced of the best way to deal with our island trash.

I am, however, convinced of one thing: We must stop buying drinking water in plastic bottles.

In one of the most successful marketing rip-offs of our lifetime, corporations have convinced people they need to buy water. Bottling companies have also persuaded people that to be healthy they should drink water all day long in substantial quantities.

The doctors I know think that the advertising to drink more (meaning buy more) water has caused people to be obsessed about dehydration. Feeling thirsty, they tell me, is not harmful. Pay attention to this natural drive, and when it happens, drink something.

A mind-boggling 50 billion plastic bottles of water are sold in the U.S. each year. That’s just one number I chose for this column, but the internet has dozens of websites offering nearly any drinking water statistic you prefer to believe.

I prefer to believe that Hawaii’s tap water is of high quality. That’s why I was so angry recently when I heard a vendor at the Honolulu airport tell a visitor that she needed to buy a bottle of water to go with her sandwich because you can’t drink tap water in Hawaii.

Hawaii has some of the purest water in the country. The vendor told me, though, he doesn’t believe that.

If you don’t trust government reports or scientific studies, or don’t like the taste of your water, install a filter on your kitchen faucet. If you prefer sparkling water, buy a Soda Stream machine that makes it.

The ever-changing pluses and minuses of recycling, HPOWER, packaging, waste dumps and drinking water are hard to sort out in our overcrowded, throw-away world. But to me there’s no question about buying water. This swindle of the century litters oceans, fouls beaches, fills trash cans and stokes fears of illness.

What with packaging as it is today, it’s nearly impossible to not buy plastic. Not buying water, though, and spreading the word, is one big thing we can do to help.

It’s one more reason to love visiting, and living in, Hawaii. It’s safe to drink the water.

-- Susan Scott, Ocean Watch, Star Advertiser, 1/19/19

immunotherapy

Cancer has an insidious talent for evading the natural defenses that should destroy it. What if we could find ways to help the immune system fight back?

It has begun to happen. The growing field of immunotherapy is profoundly changing cancer treatment and has rescued many people with advanced malignancies that not long ago would have been a death sentence.