Wednesday, August 11, 2021

Global emissions must peak by 2025 to keep warming at 1.5°C: We need deeds not words

FOUR YEARS BEFORE CLIMATE EXTINCTION STARTS

IN EARNEST

IPCC report: global emissions must peak by 2025 to keep warming at 1.5°C—we need deeds not words — The IPCC’s modelling shows global emissions must peak by the middle of the decade for warming of just 1.5°C to be possible. Credit: IPCC Report Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C

Earth could exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming—the "safe" limit for temperature rise outlined in the Paris Agreement—as soon as the early 2030s, according to a landmark report by the world's most senior climate scientists. Even in the most optimistic scenario, where the global community manages to significantly rein in greenhouse gas emissions, there is still only a 50:50 chance that global temperature rise will stop there.

The report's conclusion that staying below 2 degrees Celsius this century will only happen if emissions reach net zero by 2050 is well publicized. But there is one, rather more urgent addendum to that: global emissions must peak some time in the middle of this decade. In other words, within the next few years.

Let that sink in. It is a message which should concentrate the minds of every person on our planet. This is not "climate alarmism." It is, as far as experts can ascertain, fact.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, often referred to as the IPCC, is the international body behind the report. Established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme, the IPCC provides governments at all levels with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies. It currently has 195 members and relies on thousands of scientists who volunteer their time to support its work.

After eight years of painstaking work, the panel's Working Group I report (WGI) has been published, providing a detailed assessment of the physical science underpinning past, present and future climate change. It is the definitive statement of the current levels of greenhouse gas emissions and their impact on the global climate, how they are changing, and how these figures relate to our targets for reducing them.

It will be followed in February 2022 by the WGII report, which will cover the impacts of climate change, adapting to them and how vulnerable different parts of the world are, and in March 2022 by the WGIII report outlining options for mitigating the climate crisis. Notably, it is a conservative assessment, and necessarily so because the IPCC goes to great lengths to avoid undermining the science by sounding false alarms. Which means, in IPCC terms, this is about as loud and urgent an alarm as we are likely to hear.

Extreme weather events

We can't say we weren't warned. In 2019 the IPCC published its Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5˚C. This gave us the UN's "12 years to save the planet" media soundbite—and the more urgent message that we had 18 months to decide how to do it.

The Paris Agreement commits us to limiting the average global temperature rise to 2˚C, which is based on accepting the impacts we think, with a high degree of confidence, that we can cope with. It also sets an aspirational target of 1.5˚C, which is considered the "safe" limit.

Neither limit means completely avoiding the impacts, but they minimize their disruption to our global society as we know it. Going beyond those limits increasingly risks sudden, highly disruptive and, over human timeframes, irreversible impacts.

However, recent extreme weather events such as the shocking flash floods in Germany and Belgium, the Canadian heatwave, the deluge that hit the Black Sea region and recent wildfires on the Greek island of Evia have led some scientists to conclude that what we are seeing now is "off the scale" in terms of what climate models have been predicting.

But the world has consistently failed to agree and enact concrete actions in response. This lack of action really matters because, as the IPCC report notes, any future temperature target is closely tied to the emissions up to that point. It is much easier to stop putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it is to remove it, and the more we emit the more we degrade the ecosystems that naturally soak it up.

This urgency is leading climate scientists themselves to call for others in their field to speak out.

Deeds not words

With all eyes now turning to the COP 26 Glasgow climate summit, the Scottish "think and do" tank Common Weal has compiled a list of 21 for 21: the climate change actions Scotland needs now. Common Weal include a range of experts, many of whom, like the IPCC's scientists, contribute their time for free.

These actions largely detail the institutional changes needed in the energy sector. According to the IPCC, about 85% of CO₂ emissions come from burning fossil fuels. Naturally some are focused on Scotland, although these could be adopted elsewhere.

Drawing from more than six years of energy and climate change policy research by Common Weal, the Energy Poverty Research initiative, and the Built Environment Asset Management Centre at Glasgow Caledonian University, supported by members of other expert networks, and include:

Introducing a law requiring the capture and recycling of waste heat
Ending the use of coal and nuclear power
Banning new oil and gas exploration, and divesting from fossil fuels
Making grid-connection charges fair for all
A legal right to work from home
A legal right to a warm and energy-efficient home

20-minute neighborhoods, which provide all of people's need within a 20-minute walk, with links to sustainable transport and good cycling infrastructure.

Some people might worry about actions which ban or restrict the use of fossil fuels, but such is the urgency of the situation that, just like lockdowns during a pandemic, failing to taking action now will necessitate even more restrictive steps further down the line.

We need to remember that these actions will be offset by a better life for all of us—less poverty, better health, more jobs, stronger communities and better natural environments for us all to live in safely and enjoy.

'Not too late' to prevent 'runaway climate change': EU

Provided by The Conversation

Five crucial steps to reverse our trajectory towards an uninhabitable Earth

by Tim Knight, Fauna & Flora International

The headlines speak for themselves. The pictures paint a thousand words. Our planet is in flames. Lives and livelihoods are being destroyed. Our cities are under water. The biodiversity and ecosystems that are central to human survival are being incinerated before our eyes. This is our last chance to put out the fire.

The message in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is unequivocal: there is no longer any doubt—if there ever was—about the scale of the climate crisis, about humankind's role in driving climate change and exacerbating extreme weather events, about how much we have changed the planet. And we can say with absolute certainty that things will continue to get worse unless urgent changes are made.

To stand even the remotest chance of meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement (which aims to limit warming to 1.5oC above pre-industrial levels), we need action to halve emissions by the end of this decade. This report is a timely reminder to the world's leaders, captains of industry, investors and consumers that a radical shift in policy is needed right here, right now.

Crucially, we need to protect and restore nature. Our old-growth forests, our oceans, our peatlands, our mangroves and our seagrass beds are our greatest allies in the epic struggle to avert climate chaos. Fauna & Flora International (FFI) has been banging this drum for longer than we care to remember. Last year, we launched the Our One Home campaign, calling for the protection and restoration of nature to be made a global priority and for an exponential increase in investment in locally led conservation initiatives.

Five breakthroughs for nature

Our five breakthroughs for nature echo and expand upon those same themes, emphasizing the urgent need to transform our relationship to the natural world on which we ultimately all depend. In a nutshell, here is the handful of headline actions that we are advocating:

We need to put nature at the heart of decision-making, with governments and the private sector held accountable for making nature a global priority.
An annual investment of US$500 billion to protect and restore nature is a minimum requirement, with funding diverted from environmentally harmful activities into nature-positive initiatives.
The communities and local organizations working on the front line of conservation are the ones best placed to address the interrelated biodiversity and climate crises through action at local level, but they need far more support.
Safeguarding nature is crucial to climate stability and human health, and we need to redouble our efforts to halt the destruction and degradation of these vital life-support systems.
For far too long, advances in technology have worked to the detriment of nature, but they have enormous untapped potential to support its conservation. Technological innovation is not a silver bullet—and needs to go hand in hand with drastic emissions cuts—but it's a vital weapon in our armory.

A narrowing window

This five-act structure is what we think it will take to avert catastrophe in the real-life drama that is unfolding all around us. But at the risk of sounding like a stuck record, the window of opportunity for addressing this global crisis and averting the worst impacts of climate and biodiversity meltdown is rapidly narrowing.

Every fraction of a degree of warming makes our planet more unsafe. The IPCC report warns that until the world has reached net-zero greenhouse gasses the planet will continue to heat up, with dangerous and irreversible impacts locked in for millennia. But the report's findings also remind us that every action taken to limit emissions and warming brings us closer to a safer future.

There is much left to fight for and, with the very future of our one home at stake, there has never before been as much climate ambition as there is today. But that ambition needs to be articulated in action, not words, starting now. If not now, then when?UN science panel to release key report on climate change

More information: IPCC report: www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-asses … ort-working-group-i/

Provided by Fauna & Flora International

COUNTERINTUITIVE

Grazing cattle can reduce agriculture's carbon footprint

by Adam Russell, Texas A&M University

Ruminant animals like cattle contribute to the maintenance of healthy soils and grasslands, and proper grazing management can reduce the industry's carbon emissions and overall footprint, according to a Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientist.

Richard Teague, Ph.D., professor emeritus in the Department Rangeland, Wildlife and Fisheries Management and senior scientist of the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture and the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center at Vernon, said his research, "The role of ruminants in reducing agriculture's carbon footprint in North America," published in the Soil and Water Conservation Society's Journal of Soil and Water Conservation presents sustainable solutions for grazing agriculture.

The published article, authored by Teague with co-authors who include Urs Kreuter, Ph.D., AgriLife Research socio-economist in the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology, Bryan-College Station, was recognized at the society's recent conference as a Soil and Water Conservation Society Research Paper for Impact and Quality.

Teague's research showed appropriate grazing management practices in cattle production are among the solutions for concerns related to agriculture's impact on the environment. His article serves as a call to action for the implementation of agricultural practices that can improve the resource base, environment, productivity and economic returns.

"We went to the society because it represents professionals who know soils, and to have it published and then recognized by them is huge and shows the validity of the work," he said. "I am extremely proud of the work and my fellow contributors at Texas A&M and around the country. And I believe it to be a good example for how science can present solutions to serious issues related to agricultural production."

Ruminants as part of the solution

To ensure long-term sustainability and ecological resilience of agricultural landscapes, he said cropping and grazing management protocols are needed that can regenerate soil systems and ecosystem functions previously lost by neglect and destructive management practices. Fortunately, many problems caused by some current cropping and grazing agriculture practices can be avoided by ecologically sensitive management of ruminants in mixed crop and grazing agroecosystems.

Effective soil management measures provide the most significant possibilities for achieving sustainable use of agricultural land amid a changing and increasingly variable climate, Teague said. Regenerative agricultural practices restore soil health and ecosystem function to support ecologically healthy and resilient agroecosystems. These practices improve net profitability and enhance ecosystem and watershed function.

Reducing carbon footprint with ruminants, regeneration

Grassland ecosystems co-evolved with herbivores over many thousands of years as complex, dynamic ecosystems comprised of grasses, soil biota, grazers and predators, that deteriorate in the absence of periodic grazing, Teague said. His research suggests moving toward regenerative practices designed to improve soil biology and function.

Ruminant livestock are an important tool for achieving sustainable agriculture with appropriate grazing management, Teague said.

A key element is that grazing cattle on permanent perennial grasslands with appropriate management helps develop soil biology to improve soil carbon, rainfall infiltration and soil fertility. Thus, much more carbon dioxide equivalents are sequestered into the soil than are emitted by cattle in that management unit, Teague said. Such management increases the production of forages, allowing for more livestock to provide improved economic returns compared to conventional methods.

Permanent cover of forage plants is highly effective in reducing soil erosion and increasing soil infiltration, and ruminants consuming grazed forages under appropriate management results in considerably more carbon sequestration than emissions, Teague said.

Incorporating forages with ruminants to manage regeneration of ecological function in agro-ecosystems can elevate soil carbon, improve soil ecological function, and enhance biodiversity and wildlife habitat if incorporated within goal-oriented planning and monitoring protocols.

"In non-cropping and cropping areas, grazing ruminants in a manner that enhances soil health reduces the carbon footprint of agriculture much more than by reducing ruminant numbers and provides highly nutritious food that has sustained pastoral livelihoods and cultures for centuries," he said.

Regenerative ag practices for future prosperity

Teague said research can harm public discourse related to sustainable agriculture more than help unless scientists take a much broader view of agriculture as it is and can be. This broad view includes the potential societal and economic ramifications of proposed changes but also warrants providing solutions that can be used in policy and ultimately in the evolution of more sustainable global food and fiber production.

"The scientific investigations that call for the reduction or elimination of cattle and livestock agricultural production must consider the full impacts of the entire food production chain, and of different cropping and livestock alternatives," Teague said.

Collectively, conservation agriculture aimed at regenerating soil health and ecosystem function supports ecologically healthy and resilient agroecosystems, improves net profitability and enhances watershed function, Teague said.

"When we're talking about science, we need to look at the full spectrum of what is happening, weigh the positives and negatives of our options and be honest about the outcomes," he said. "Then, we seek the most sustainable solution."Cow-calf grazing practices could determine, mitigate greenhouse gas emissions

More information: W. R. Teague et al, The role of ruminants in reducing agriculture's carbon footprint in North America, Journal of Soil and Water Conservation (2016). DOI: 10.2489/jswc.71.2.156

Journal information: Journal of Soil and Water Conservation

Provided by Texas A&M University

Archaeologists reveal origins of famous Stone Age monument

by University of Manchester

Archaeologists from the Universities of Manchester and Cardiff have discovered the origins of Arthur's Stone, one of the UK's most famous Stone Age monuments.

Manchester's Professor Julian Thomas, who led the excavation, says the imposing Herefordshire tomb is linked to nearby 'halls of the dead', which were discovered in 2013.

It is the first time the construction—which inspired the 'stone table' in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—has been properly excavated.

Dating to the Neolithic period in 3700BC, Arthur's Stone is located on a lonely hilltop outside of the village of Dorstone, facing the Black Mountains in south Wales.

Archaeologists always assumed that its massive capstone raised on a series of supporting stones and lesser chamber with a right-angled passage had stood within a wedge-shaped stone cairn, similar to those found in the Cotswolds and South Wales. However, Professor Thomas and Cardiff's Prof Keith Ray showed the monument originally extended into a field immediately to the south of the tomb.

Arthur's Stone is a scheduled monument cared for by English Heritage. The excavations took place in an area to the south of the burial chamber, outside of the area of guardianship.

They found that the tomb had first been a long mound composed of stacked turf, retained by a palisade of upright posts set in a narrow palisade surrounding the mound. However, when the posts rotted away and the mound had collapsed, an avenue of larger posts were added, leading toward the mound from the Golden Valley below.

"Although Arthur's Stone is an iconic Megalithic monument of international importance, its origins had been unclear until now. Being able to shine a light on this astonishing 5700 year old tomb is exciting, and helps to tell the story of our origins," says Thomas.

The initial mound, identifiable in the palisade slot and the parch-marks visible from the air surrounding the stone chambers, points toward the nearby hilltop of Dorstone Hill.

However the later avenue of posts, together with the two stone chambers and an upright stone located immediately in front of them, align on the far horizon in the gap between Skirrid and Garway Hill to the south-east.

"The different orientations of the two phase of construction are significant because our excavations on Dorstone Hill in 2011-19 revealed three long mounds similar in construction to that now known to represent the first stage of Arthur's Stone," added Professor Thomas.

"Each of these three turf mounds had been built on the footprint of a large timber building that had been deliberately burnt down. So Arthur's Stone has now been identified as being closely connected with these nearby 'halls of the dead', which hit the headlines in 2013.

"Indeed, the block of upland between the Golden Valley and the Wye Valley is now becoming revealed as hosting an integrated Neolithic ceremonial landscape."

The excavations at Arthur's Stone form part of the Beneath Hay Bluff Project, which has been investigating early prehistoric southwest Herefordshire since 2010, under the directorship of Keith Ray and Julian Thomas, with associate directors Nick Overton (University of Manchester) and Tim Hoverd (Herefordshire Council).

Stonehenge isn't the only prehistoric monument that's been moved – but it's still unique

Provided by University of Manchester

Evidence of ancient earthquake found in Jerusalem

by Phys.org

A team of researchers with the Israel Antiquities Authority has found evidence of a strong earthquake occurring in the city of Jerusalem approximately 2,800 years ago. The group has posted their initial findings on their Facebook page.

Prior research had uncovered evidence of a large earthquake in Israel in the mid-eighth century B.C. at sites such as Hatzor and Tell es-Safi/Gath, but no evidence had been found in Jerusalem. In this new effort, the researchers found evidence of damage from the time at a dig site in the City of David National Park, along with references to the earthquake in the Hebrew Bible.

The researchers note that the earthquake was mentioned in both the book of Zechariah and the book of Amos. Both described the damage that had resulted in Jerusalem many years after the event, suggesting it must have made a big impact on people living there at the time. More importantly, they found physical evidence in the form of broken pottery, lamps, cooking utensils, furniture and crumbled walls. They also found what they describe as a "row of shattered vessels" reminiscent of damage seen in other earthquakes. The artifacts had been covered over by the survivors of the earthquake who had then built structures on top of it, creating what the team describes as a layer of destruction. In looking at the damaged goods, they could find no evidence of fire or intentional damage, such as from invaders, leaving an earthquake as the most likely candidate. They also note that the buried depth of the artifacts helped place them to the time of the earthquake.

The researchers were surprised by the things they found at the dig site because prior research had shown that Jerusalem continued to exist as a city after the earthquake, up to the time of the Babylonian destruction which occurred approximately 200 years later. They suggest that it appears likely that while Jerusalem was strongly impacted by the earthquake, it was not the epicenter. The team is scheduled to give a presentation outlining their work at this year's City of David Research Conference.

Earthquake felt in Massachusetts, Rhode Island

World's biodiversity maps contain many gaps, study finds

by Yale University

As the world's nations prepare to set new goals for protecting biodiversity, Yale researchers have identified where data gaps continue to limit effective conservation decisions.

In a new study, a team of researchers created maps and assessed regional trends in how well existing species data are able to represent the distribution of 31,000 terrestrial vertebrates worldwide and therefore help inform policies and actions for sustaining biodiversity and its benefits.

"These maps highlight the most rewarding opportunities for citizen scientists, and government agencies, and scientists to support biodiversity monitoring and help close critical knowledge gaps," said Walter Jetz, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and of the environment, director of the Yale Center for Biodiversity and Global Change (BGC), and senior author of the paper.

The study was published Aug. 10 in the journal PLOS Biology.

The need for such information is critical as environmental and policy leaders continue to create strategies to protect species diversity worldwide as part of the Convention on Biological Diversity, an international treaty with the aim of conserving and managing global biodiversity which is assessing progress towards those goals.

Jetz and his team have created one of the key tools used by world leaders to monitor, research, and create policies that protect species worldwide—the Map of Life.

In the new study, the researchers present a framework to help pinpoint where additional monitoring is most needed. While there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of data collected on vertebrate species in the past 20 years, they find, not all of this data has yielded new insights on biodiversity. For instance, data on bird species shared by citizen scientists and others tend to be redundant due to the popularity of certain species commonly found in highly populated areas. Most new data collected on birds are from the same species and places.

The analysis was conducted by Yale's Ruth Oliver, an associate research scientist at the Center for Biodiversity and Global Change, Jetz, and colleagues.

Alarmingly, the study finds that data critical for characterizing biodiversity in many countries has levelled off or, in some cases, even decreased. According to the analysis, 42% of countries have inadequate information on vertebrate biodiversity and have seen either no increase or a decrease in data coverage. Only 17% of countries have achieved sufficient data coverage and also seen an increase in new information on species.

"We hope our work quantifying the tremendous complementary value of observations of underreported biodiversity can support more effective data collection going forward," Oliver said. "It's amazing how much we still don't know about the known species on this planet."

While the indices used in the study were used to demonstrate the biological diversity of terrestrial vertebrates, they can be readily updated as new data becomes available and expanded to other taxa, such as marine and invertebrate species. This work is supported by the Map of Life team and the results are available for exploration at mol.org/indicators/coverage.Researchers create map of undiscovered life

More information: Oliver RY, Meyer C, Ranipeta A, Winner K, Jetz W (2021) Global and national trends, gaps, and opportunities in documenting and monitoring species distributions. PLoS Biol 19(8): e3001336. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001336

Journal information: PLoS Biology

Provided by Yale University

Planting forests may cool the planet more than thought

by Princeton University

Planting trees and replenishing forests are among the simplest and most appealing natural climate solutions, but the impact of trees on atmospheric temperature is more complex than meets the eye.

One question among scientists is whether reforesting midlatitude locations such as North America or Europe could in fact make the planet hotter. Forests absorb large amounts of solar radiation as a result of having a low albedo, which is the measure of a surface's ability to reflect sunlight. In the tropics, low albedo is offset by the higher uptake of carbon dioxide by the dense, year-round vegetation. But in temperate climates, the concern is that the sun's trapped heat could counteract any cooling effect forests would provide by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

But a new study from Princeton University researchers found that these concerns may be overlooking a crucial component—clouds. They report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the denser cloud formations associated with forested areas means that reforestation would likely be more effective at cooling Earth's atmosphere than previously thought.

"The main thing is that nobody has known whether planting trees at midlatitudes is good or bad because of the albedo problem," said corresponding author Amilcare Porporato, Princeton's Thomas J. Wu '94 Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. "We show that if one considers that clouds tend to form more frequently over forested areas, then planting trees over large areas is advantageous and should be done for climate purposes."

As anyone who has felt a cloud pass over the sun on a hot day knows, daytime clouds have a cooling—albeit transient—effect on the Earth. In addition to directly blocking the sun, clouds have a high albedo, similar to ice and snow. Clouds, however, are notoriously difficult to study and have been largely discounted from many studies examining the effectiveness of natural climate change mitigation, including reforestation, Porporato said.

To consider reforestation in the context of cloud coverage, Porporato worked with lead author Sara Cerasoli, a Princeton graduate student in civil and environmental engineering, and Jun Ying, an assistant professor at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology who previously was a postdoctoral fellow in Porporato's research group. Their work was supported by the Carbon Mitigation Initiative based in HMEI.

Porporato and Yin previously reported that climate models underestimate the cooling effect of the daily cloud cycle. They also reported last year that climate change could result in increased daily cloud coverage in arid regions such as the American Southwest that are currently ideal for solar power production.

For the latest study, Cerasoli, Porporato and Yin investigated the influence of vegetation on cloud formation in midlatitude regions by combining satellite data of cloud coverage from 2001-10 with models related to the interaction between plants and the atmosphere.

The researchers modeled interactions between different types of vegetation and the atmospheric boundary layer—which is the lowest layer of the atmosphere and interacts directly with the Earth's surface—to determine whether cloud formation is differentially affected by vegetation type. They focused on regions in the 30-45 degree latitudinal range, roughly from the subtropics to the hemiboreal zones such as the northern Midwestern United States. They considered the effects of both reforestation—restoring lost tree cover—and afforestation, which entails planting forests in areas that were previously treeless, though this may come with other environmental costs.

The team found that for midlatitude regions, the cooling effect of clouds—in combination with that of carbon sequestration—outweighed the solar radiation that forested areas absorbed.

The models showed that clouds form more frequently over forested areas than over grasslands and other areas with short vegetation, and that this enhanced cloud formation had a cooling effect on Earth's atmosphere. The researchers observed from the satellite data that clouds also tend to form earlier in the afternoon over forested areas, which results in a longer duration of cloud cover and more time for clouds to reflect solar radiation away from the Earth.

The findings could help develop policies for allocating land for reforestation and agriculture—wetter midlatitudinal areas such as the eastern United States or southeastern China are well-suited to reforestation and afforestation, but also are appealing for agriculture. One approach would be to pair midlatitudinal reforestation with the distribution of drought-tolerant crops for regions less suited to reforestation, the study authors reported.

However, the authors urged that we must be cautious when making the leap from science to policy. "We can't just consider climate change, but must also consider other factors, such as biodiversity and the fact that land is also needed for food production," Cerasoli said. "Future studies should continue to consider the role of clouds, but should focus on more specific regions and take their economies into account."

"The first thing is to not make things worse," Porporato added. "So many things are connected in the earth system. The nature of interactions between, for example, the water cycle and climate mean that if you change one thing, it's very difficult to predict how other parts of the system will be affected."

The paper, "Cloud cooling effects of afforestation and reforestation at midlatitudes," was published Aug. 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Satellites reveal how forests increase cloud and cool climate

More information: Sara Cerasoli et al, Cloud cooling effects of afforestation and reforestation at midlatitudes, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2026241118

Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Provided by Princeton University

The Unexpected Outcome of Ransomware: An Industrial Digital Revolution

By Duncan Greatwood, Xage 08.10.2021

The Colonial Pipeline ransomware hack cost $4.4 million in ransom and millions more in lost profits, reputational damage, and governmental scrutiny. Following the attack, the rising volume and severity of cyberattacks are forcing federal agencies to incentivize cybersecurity overhauls. But behind the government’s calls for change are the struggles of industries to embrace the digital revolution.

While there are applications of data-driven automation spread across industrial sectors, these innovations co-exist with workflows that share data via clipboards, and waste hours or even days and weeks waiting for information from partners to be captured, circulated and acted on.

Now, with Biden’s executive order to improve the nation’s cybersecurity posture, 100-day plan to address the security of an aging power grid, and the Department of Homeland Security’s new directive for U.S. pipelines, industries that have yet to fully adopt modern technology are being heavily encouraged to enhance cybersecurity processes and technologies to safeguard operations — a challenge that can be complex and expensive to address.

For many operations, this task feels just as difficult as it is needed. Fixing the security problems inherited from joining new and legacy equipment together (a common and often necessary approach in the industrial world) requires more than a new security solution off the rack; it requires a whole new mindset.

Security can no longer be thought of as merely a defensive tactic. Instead, it needs to be understood as the foundation for transitioning to “smart” infrastructure — a vision that’s been circulating for close to a decade now, but has grown more popular in theory than it has in practice.

The vision for a smart power grid, for instance, looks something like this:

Electric substations are managed by IoT devices that can communicate with administrators, partners and customers in real-time; various energy assets — wind, water, solar, nuclear, and fossil fuels — are all automatically blended to optimize generation and distribution; energy-intensive spaces, like data centers or large office buildings, as well as residential homes, all have smart thermostats that leverage machine learning to optimize heating and cooling, driving down costs and energy consumption.

While these ideas aren’t new, it took a series of high profile cyberattacks to prove that this vision for a smart grid (or any connected infrastructure) is predicated on a sufficient cybersecurity posture.

For example, the only way to enable fully automatic voltage adjustments at an electric substation, or communicate in real-time with thermostats, streetlights, and office heating systems, is if those interactions are made secure. Otherwise, large-scale investments in digitizing infrastructure would create too many cyber vulnerabilities to be worth the hassle.

Now that we know that cybersecurity is an essential component of smart infrastructure, what’s next? According to Biden’s recent executive order, the security strategy that could offer an answer is a complete departure from traditional models. The directive encourages operators to adopt a zero trust architecture, the modern alternative to perimeter-based security.

You can think of zero trust as putting a lock on every door to your house, including the fridge, pantry, and microwave — with each individual family member possessing a unique access key to each location. This is in contrast to a traditional security approach, whereby regular locks, with just one master key, are placed on the front and back doors.

Within this zero trust architecture, utility administrators would give each user, device and application its own unique identity with specific access protocols. And in the off chance that a cyber criminal does get in, the system would isolate the entity and adjust its controls to prevent it from accessing anything further.

Lack of granular control is precisely why incidents like the Colonial Pipeline ransomware hack can easily escalate to a point where the operation is forced to shut down, and it’s why nearly each week we see a new large-scale cyberattack cripple yet another critical operation.

With a zero trust strategy implemented to protect everything from 20-year old systems with no passwords or encryption, to future IoT devices with digital identities, operators will begin to feel the benefits of digital transformation. They’ll experience easy remote access, efficient data sharing and convenient collaboration with partners, all resulting from a tactic previously considered purely defensive and costly.

With mandates and incentives to adopt a different approach, the Biden administration isn’t just elevating the role of security in building smart infrastructure; it’s redefining what it means to be secure. In the process, and perhaps without fully realizing it, they’re encouraging the industrial world to start a new digital revolution of its own.

— Duncan Greatwood is chief executive officer of Xage

The art of science

Nature Physics volume 17, pages869–870 (2021)

details

They say a picture tells a thousand words, so by that accounting, the visual word count of a Nature Physics paper doubles that of its text. So how best to use that budget?

The German painter Margaret Leiteritz made a name for herself a century ago by turning scientific data into works of art1. As long-time Leiteritz fans, we at Nature Physics are firm believers in the idea that information carries an intrinsic beauty. When we select images for the cover of our issue each month, we always prioritize those featuring real data. And those data that don’t make it to the cover are lovingly curated in our Instagram account (www.instagram.com/nature.physics/). But aesthetics is only a small part of what makes a figure beautiful — and effective.

Reproduced with permission from: far left, ref. 3, Springer Nature Ltd; top left, ref. 4, H. Kamerlingh Onnes, Commun. Phys. Lab. Univ. Leiden. Suppl. 29 (Nov. 1911); top centre, ref. 5, APS; top right, ref. 6, APS; bottom left, CERN, under a Creative Commons license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/); bottom right, ref. 7, AAS.

The message a paper tells in its figures can be more persuasive than that of its text. And like the written word, scientific images benefit from a certain economy. Great scientific figures are self-contained and self-evident, conveying only the information necessary to support a paper’s claims.

That’s not to say that brevity should give way to misinformation. We are committed to reproducibility in scientific research, and encourage authors to provide all the data necessary to allow others to understand and replicate their findings. But for this we allocate up to ten extended data files that are integrated into the online version of the paper, in addition to a separate document containing supplementary information. This way, specialists can easily access exhaustive imaging data, for example, leaving the authors free to convey clear, uncluttered information in the figures accompanying the main text of the paper.

Effective figures are also coherent. The caption of each figure published in a Nature Physics paper begins with a single unifying title, regardless of how many parts it has. So ideally, each figure should convey a single message. Think of it as a built-in structure: each paper relays the findings of a study in four (or six) chapters, each with its own illustration.

A look back at the history of scientific figures reveals how easily excellent figures capture key findings. For example, James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 report of the structure of DNA famously included only a schematic in support of their revolutionary claim (pictured, far left) — perhaps because the data underpinning the discovery weren’t theirs to publish2.

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes offered more information when he presented his discovery of superconducting mercury at the first Solvay conference in 1911 — but the unmistakable jump in resistance (top left) was just as minimal, and as clear, as the double helix. The quantized nature of the Hall voltage of a two-dimensional electron gas was similarly clear in the plot that earned Klaus von Klitzing the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics (top centre).

The existence of the charm quark was writ large in the signal of what later became known as the J/ψ meson (top right), and the news that neutral charm mesons oscillate — or mix — was similarly effective in a 2013 Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) result (bottom left). Another triumph of data fitting came two decades earlier, when the cosmic microwave background measured on the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite was shown to be consistent with the blackbody spectrum, lending crucial support to the Big Bang hypothesis (bottom right).

These plots may not be the masterworks of Margaret Leiteritz, but with a bit of thought and care, figures can be an essential tool for conveying the central conclusions of a scientific paper. And for those discoveries that really do make a difference, in time we can also learn to appreciate them as iconic representations of human enquiry.

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