It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, January 18, 2020
Take care when examining the economic impact of fires. GDP doesn't tell the full story
Estimates of the economic damage caused by the bushfires are rolling in, some of them big and some unprecedented, as is the scale of the fires themselves.
These types of estimates will be refined and used to make – or break – the case for programs to limit the impact of similar disasters in the future. Some will be used to make a case for – or against – action on climate change.
But it’s important they not be done using the conventional measure of gross domestic product (GDP).
GDP measures everything produced in any given period.
It is a good enough measure of material welfare when used to measure the impact of a tourist event or a new mine or factory or something like the national broadband network, but it can be misleading – sometimes grossly misleading – when used to measure the economic impact of a catastrophe or natural disaster.
That’s because it measures the positives brought about the recovery from disasters but leaves out some of the negatives caused by the destruction.
For example:
building a new house has a positive impact on GDP, even if the old house was burnt down
a military evacuation has a positive impact on GDP, even though the circumstances that make it necessary are life-threatening and traumatic
bushfires stimulate GDP by creating more demand for health services, even as the victims suffer from smoke inhalation, burns or post-traumatic stress disorder.
It is possible to get at the full story
Economic modelling pioneered in Australia, and used to estimate the impact of terrorism and epidemics makes it possible to prepare measures of welfare that take account of the costs of disasters.
Among the immediate costs in the first months after a bushfire disaster would be:
the direct cost of fire-fighting
the cost of temporarily relocating residents
health costs, such as treatment of burns and respiratory illnesses
loss of work days associated with firefighting, injuries, illnesses, displacement and loss of life
a downgrading of consumer confidence
destruction of assets including homes, farms, businesses and natural resources and the associated disruption of economic activity including tourism, agriculture and housing
the cost of replacing or rebuilding these assets
Longer term impacts would derive from:
health problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder leading to negative impacts on quality of life and labour supply
long term damage to ecosystems, including contamination of water, and extinction or severe loss of animal species including those necessary to agricultural production, such as bees
reputational damage leading to possible permanent downgrading of tourism activity in affected regions and in Australia more broadly
potential ongoing reluctance to invest in Australia
potential increases in cost of living in bushfire prone regions due to increases in insurance costs.
It involves going beyond GDP
The longer term impacts of disasters on a nation’s GDP are clearly negative, deriving from a decline in productive capacity (labour, capital and natural resources) which unambiguously detracts from economic welfare.
In the immediate aftermath, expenditure on reconstruction of homes and other assets can add to GDP, but the funding of these activities (whether direct or through insurance) adds to debt and can drag on household consumption, either immediately or in the future. A related measure, Gross National Income (GNI) takes this into account and is generally a better measure of economic welfare.
Bushfire-induced health expenditure stimulates both GDP and GNI but detracts from welfare.
Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, can hardly be considered an improvement in standard of living.
To offset this inappropriate “good news”, it is possible to construct an index of leisure-adjusted GNI which takes into account the downgraded quality of leisure time.
As a starting point for such estimates, the prime minister’s department sets the statistical value of a year of life free of injury, disease and disability at A$182,000 (2014 dollars).
And it depends on where you are
Aggregated measures like GDP, GNI and leisure-adjusted GNI do not show the distribution of economic impact.
An event that strips a small amount from the incomes of everybody is different from one that decimates just a few regions, yet looks the same in a nationwide measure, so it is important that any economic analysis also looks at regional impacts.
The work is yet to be done, but it is safe to say that the conventional link between GDP and economic welfare (“more is better”) breaks down when assessing tragedies, particularly ones with profound regional impacts.
When campaigning to be US president Bobby Kennedy (John F Kennedy’s brother) said that GDP measures “everything… except that which makes life worthwhile”.
It’d be wise to bear that in mind when considering the policy response to the bushfires.
PUTIN DISMISSES PARLIAMENT TRUMP JEALOUS
Russia's constitutional changes are designed to perpetuate power of Vladimir Putin's elite
During the Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly.
Saturday, January 18, 2020 11:20 AM UTC
Russian president Vladimir Putin has always enjoyed the decisive move that takes everyone by surprise. Long periods of quiet are broken by a sudden, shocking manoeuvre.
This was the case with his package of reforms following the Beslan school hostage crisis in September 2004, and again with the announcement in September 2011 that he planned to return to the Kremlin, following the four-year presidency of his close colleague, Dmitry Medvedev. The Russian constitution, agreed after a referendum in December 1993, stipulates that nobody can serve more than two consecutive terms, and so, after the gap, Putin legitimately returned to the Kremlin.
On January 15 2019 in his annual address to Russia’s Federal Assembly, Putin sprang yet another surprise package of changes, signalling the beginning of a transition period that could last up to the end of his fourth constitutionally-mandated term of office in 2024.
The speech fired the starting gun on another managed succession, although Putin’s personal role at the end of this time is unclear. It appears he is seeking to create a management structure for the country’s affairs without his direct involvement.
Putin’s speech was followed by the immediate resignation of Medvedev as prime minister and of his cabinet, and the appointment of the former head of the Federal Tax Service, Mikhail Mishustin, as prime minister. Medvedev was appointed to the new post of deputy head of the Security Council, subordinate to the council’s head, Putin.
But Putin’s proposals represent neither a “January coup”, as some Russian media described it, nor democratisation. Rather, they are a way to ensure the continuity of the current elite and the system they preside over.
Where power lies
In his speech, Putin outlined the most significant package of constitutional reforms since 1993, suggesting seven amendments to the constitution. Some have a democratising edge while others are clearly designed to create a repertoire of institutions to perpetuate Putinism without Putin.
The most crucial was a suggestion by Putin to allow the State Duma to appoint the prime minister, and then “the deputy prime ministers and federal ministers at the prime minister’s recommendation”. The president would have no right to reject the candidates approved by parliament.
This would represent a major transfer of power back to the legislature from the presidential executive, raising the status of parliament. If approved, the changes could also provide a path for the United Russia political party and its leader (currently still Medvedev) to formalise its control of power from within the legislature.
Putin did not stop there, and he also asserted that Russia: “Cannot properly advance and even exist sustainably as a parliamentary republic.” The country would therefore remain “a strong presidential republic” – and a proposed constitutional change would reinforce this structure. The president would set the government’s tasks and priorities and maintain the right to sack the prime minister and ministers. The president would continue to exercise direct control over the armed forces and the entire law enforcement system (the siloviki).
A third change concerned the personnel staffing the nation’s top offices, who would no longer be allowed to have foreign citizenship or residence permit. The requirements would be even tougher for presidential candidates, who must have had permanent residency for at least 25 years with no foreign citizenship or residence permit.
Putin then noted that:
People are discussing the constitutional provision under which one person cannot hold the post of the President of the Russian Federation for more than two successive terms. I do not regard this as a matter of principle, but I nevertheless support and share this view.
This classically ambiguous formulation pointed the way to the imposition of a conclusive two-term limit on future Russian presidents, rather than the current limit on them serving two consecutive terms.
A fourth change stressed the need to increase the role of governors in federal decision-making due to Russia’s enormous size and diversity. In 2000, Putin restored the State Council as a presidential consultative body, bringing together the heads of the regions and some officials. He has now extolled the quality of its work and proposed making it a formal constitutional body. Many have speculated that the State Council could then provide a platform for his continued indirect leadership.
Sovereignty and living standards
Fifth, he proposed to entrench in the constitution a law passed in December 2015 that granted domestic legislation priority over international law. Putin argued that: “Russia can be and can remain Russia only as a sovereign state. Our nation’s sovereignty must be unconditional.” The changes would constitutionally entrench the principle that Russian norms take precedence over international law and treaties.
A sixth proposal reflected a major theme of his speech: the question of improving the country’s standard of living and dealing with demographic, climate and other issues. He suggested a constitutional change to “seal the principles of a unified system of public authority”. This would include expanding the authority of local government, alongside a constitutional provision to ensure the regular adjustment of pensions for inflation.
A final seventh proposal granted the Federation Council, Russia’s upper legislative house, the constitutional authority to dismiss Constitutional and Supreme Court judges in the event of misconduct, on the proposal of the president. How such misconduct would be defined opens up a range of possible abuses by politicians.
As the amendments represented “substantial changes”, Putin proposed they would be put to the people in a referendum. A 75-strong working group has already begun work to formulate the text of the draft amendments to the constitution.
Overall, the changes slightly diminish the president’s powers and restore greater balance in the relationship between the executive and legislative authorities. The introduction of some checks and balances would ensure that Putin’s legacy would not be easily undone. But the reforms are as much about ensuring that Putin’s system will endure as about perpetuating his leadership.
Richard Sakwa does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
With costs approaching $100 billion, the fires are Australia's costliest natural disaster
A firefighting helicopter tackles a bushfire near Bairnsdale in Victoria’s East Gippsland region, Australia. STATE GOVERNMENT OF VICTORIA
Saturday, January 18, 2020 12:29 PM UTC
It’s hard to estimate the eventual economic cost of Australia’s 2019-20 megafires, partly because they are still underway, and partly because it is hard to know the cost to attribute to deaths and the decimation of species and habitats, but it is easy to get an idea of its significance – the cost will be unprecedented.
The deadliest bushfires in the past 200 years took place in 1851, then 1939, then 1983, 2009, now 2019-20. The years between them are shrinking rapidly. Only a remote grassfire in central Australia in 1974-75 rivalled them in terms of size, although not in terms of material burnt or loss of life.
The term “megafire” is a new one, defined in the early 2000s to help describe disturbing new wildfires emerging in the United States – massive blazes, usually above 400,000 hectares, often joining up, that create more than usual destruction to life and property.
Australia’s current fires dwarf the US fires that inspired the term.
They are 25 times the size of Australia’s deadliest bushfires, the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria that directly killed 173 people, and are so large and intense that they create their own weather in which winds throw embers 30 kilometres or more ahead of the front and pyro-cumulus clouds produce dry lightning that ignites new fires.
The Black Saturday fires burnt 430,000 hectares. The current fires have killed fewer people but have so far burnt 10.7 million hectares – an area the size of South Korea, or Scotland and Wales combined.
There are easy-to-measure costs…
The federal government has promised to put at least A$2 billion into a National Bushfire Recovery Fund, which is roughly the size of the first estimate of the cost of the fires calculated by Terry Rawnsley of SGS Economics and Planning.
He put the cost at somewhere between A$1.5 and $2.5 billion, using his firm’s modelling of the cost of the NSW Tathra fires in March 2018 as a base.
It’s the total of the lost income from farm production, tourism and the like.
Final Report, 2019 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission
It came up with an estimate for tangible costs of A$4.369 billion, which after inflation would be about $5 billion in today’s dollars.
… and harder-to-measure costs
Tangible costs are those easily measured including the cost of replacing things such as destroyed homes, contents and vehicles.
They also include the human lives lost, which were valued at A$3.7 million per life (2009 dollars) in accordance with a Commonwealth standard.
The measure didn’t include the effect of injuries and shortened lives due to smoke-related stroke and cardiovascular and lung diseases, or damage to species and habitats, the loss of livestock, grain and feed, crops, orchards and national and local parks.
Also excluded were “intangibles”, among them the social costs of mental health problems and unemployment and increases in suicide, substance abuse, relationship breakdowns and domestic violence.
The cost of intangibles can peak years after a disaster and continue to take tolls for decades, if not generations.
Deloitte put the tangible costs of the Black Saturday fires at A$3.1 billion in 2015 dollars and the intangible costs at more than that again: A$3.9 billion, producing a total of A$7 billion, which would be A$7.6 billion in today’s dollars.
Black Saturday is a staring point
This season’s megafires are, so far, less costly than the 2009 Victorian fires in terms of human life, roughly on par in terms of lost homes, and less costly for other structures.
But given that considerably more land has been burnt we can expect other costs to eclipse those of Black Saturday.
As of today, 25 times as much land has been burnt.
Scaling up the royal commission’s Black Saturday figures for the size of the fire and scaling them down for the fewer deaths and other things that shouldn’t be scaled up produces an estimate of tangible costs of A$103 billion in today’s dollars.
The Deloitte Access Economics ratio of intangible to tangible costs suggests a total for both types of costs of A$230 billion.
As it happens, the tangible costs estimate is close to an estimate of A$100 billion prepared using different methods by University of Queensland economist John Quiggin.
The reality won’t be clear for some time.
There are several weeks of fire season remaining, and we are yet to reach the usual peak season for Victoria, which is the first week of February.
What we can safely say, with weeks left to go, is that these fires are by far Australia’s costliest natural disaster.
UFOs: Leaked footage can threaten national security, says US Navy
The presence of UFOs or Unidentified Flying Objects has continuously baffled many, from enthusiasts to government agencies. Recently, the United States Navy has warned that having to release more footage of these mysterious aerial vehicles could pose a threat to national security.
Express reports that many sightings of anonymous air crafts have been inquired about to the government. These sightings of unidentified flying objects have forced officials to acknowledge them, but the footage taken of these sightings was never released. Due to the increasing inquiries and footage that are being leaked to the public, the authorities said that no more footage nor cases of these sightings should be made public as it could endanger the country’s national security.
Through a Freedom of Information Act Request, the officials said they found slides that were classified as Top Secret. After reviewing the slides, they found that according to the Original Classification Authority or OCA, any release of the materials or footage would cause damage to the national security of the United States. However, this statement may only intrigue those who are really curious about what the government knows about these mysterious aerial vehicles.
In recent years, there have been a few sightings that were made public as those who have spotted them came forward to reveal the details. The first of which was in 2004 and the second encounter which became highly talked about was in 2017 when leaked US Navy radar footage showed an anonymous aircraft that was glowing and flying erratically.
Meanwhile, aside from UFOs, many have wondered about the possibility of life existing on other planets such as Mars. The Red Planet has often been the destination for space agencies all over the world as of late, and a recent report reveals that alien enthusiasts have spotted what appears to be three human-like statues on the dunes of the planet. Scott Waring, a known UFO enthusiast, claims that this is conclusive evidence that there is life on Mars.
Waring analyzed the images released by NASA’s Curiosity Rover, and he calls the statues the “Mona Lisa” of the Red Planet. He went on to explain that one of the statues seemingly is of a woman wearing a green robe, with long hair down to the shoulders. Another statue, Waring claims, is of a bald man wearing a green outfit as well. While he claims that this is proof of life on another planet, Waring believes that the agency is intentionally misleading the public.
Aliens: Strange moving lights spotted in the United Kingdom
Thor_Deichmann/Pixabay
Wednesday, January 1, 2020 1:15 PM UTC
For decades, many have often wondered when they would be able to spot alien life on Earth. A recent report reveals that some unidentified flying objects or UFOs were seen hovering over England and Wales.
Some time the previous week, Express reports that England and Wales have seen their share of strange moving lights hovering in the sky. Over the weekend, people in Oxfordshire and South Yorkshire have also witnessed the same strange moving lights in the sky, leading people to believe that they may have seen an alien spacecraft. According to some eyewitnesses who recounted what they saw on social media, the lights were traveling in a single file, and there were about 20 lights in total.
Some even said that the lights were fading out at some point. Although a few have said that it may just be satellites, the pattern of which the lights moved was unusual. It is not the first time people in Wales have seen an occurrence like this either as some locals in North Wales have also spotted strange moving lights in the sky earlier in the month.
Astronomers who took notice of these sightings have concluded that these lights really do come from outer space. However, the very visible presence in the night skies may be attributed to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX satellites called Starlink. According to the East Anglian Astrophysical Research Association, they clarified that the moving train of lights that are incredibly visible in the night sky are the Starlink project of Musk’s SpaceX program, providing accessible internet to everyone.
Meanwhile, NASA has shared a photo captured by their Curiosity Rover on Mars that has all the enthusiasts and scientists talking. The photo shows what could be an alien base on the Red Planet shaped like a letter B, at least according to self-proclaimed UFO expert Scott Waring. Waring explained that while he was studying the image taken by the Rover, he noticed a spot on the terrain that may have been created through mining.
Waring then found a large structure by a supposed hill, surrounded by other structures. The hillside, in particular, had a capital letter B on it. He then speculated what that letter might mean to extraterrestrial life on the Red Planet, but he is certain that this would serve as proof that aliens have lived and thrived on Mars.
One of the mysteries of life is death itself and whether there is life after death is a question that many have always wanted to know. Recently a scientist explained what death is actually like.
The ancient Egyptians believed that there was an afterlife, but it still bears wondering if there actually is such a thing as an afterlife. In a recent Oz Talk, Dr. Sam Parnia from the NYU Langone School of Medicine described what it is like. After speaking to many people who have had near-death experiences, Dr. Parnia summed up that dying is “comfortable” and began to explain the process.
Parnia said that as we die, the brain loses oxygen and the heart stops beating and once it happens, everything in the body begins to shut down and then we become unconscious to what is happening outside. “We become lifeless and motionless and that is the time that the doctors use to give us the time of death,” said Parnia.
The scientist has written many books and conducted several studies regarding death and the afterlife, including speaking to many people who have had near-death experiences and even trying to bring people back from near-death. Dr. Parnia also shares that there is a mental process that happens when someone dies. This mental process is what leaves survivors of near-death experiences wanting death again. “When we die, the experience is not unpleasant for the vast majority of people,” says Parnia.
He says that even those who have experienced pain before dying, such as sickness or injury, the process of death “becomes very comfortable, it is very blissful, peaceful.”
Meanwhile, other people have also spoken up about their experience with death. Previously, Reddit user Pwnograpik recalled his experience on the site. After getting sick overseas and being forced to go on a Keto diet that wound up destroying the lining of his stomach, he checked himself into a hospital in his home country. However, his body was rejecting all the IV and hydration that was being given to him and he recalls “everything went black” and was clinically dead for three minutes.
During those three minutes, he said that he did not see angels nor bright lights. He did not hear any voices either. He likened the situation to being on another planet. “When I looked down there was sand, and there was very shallow water. It was like an endless shore.” He even described that same feeling of bliss “It just felt like every single problem I had, every single issue no matter how big or small was just gone.”
Astronomers discover bizarre stretchy objects unlike anything else in our galaxy By Georgina Torbet January 18, 2020
Astronomers have discovered a mysterious new class of objects at the heart of the Milky Way, unlike anything else found previously in our galaxy. The objects “look like gas but behave like stars,” according to senior researcher Andrea Ghez, as they start off small and compact but are stretched to a larger size when they approach the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy.
The researchers believe these objects could teach us about the evolution of stars and what happens to celestial bodies in environments of extreme gravity. What are these strange objects?Artist’s impression of G objects, with the reddish centers, orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. The black hole is represented as a dark sphere inside a white ring (above the middle of the rendering).Jack Ciurlo
The puzzle began in 2005 when astronomers identified an object near the center of our galaxy called G1, which seemed to be orbiting around the supermassive black hole there in a strange way. In following years, five more objects numbered G2 to G6 were discovered. At first, these objects were thought to be clouds of gas. But one odd thing researchers noticed was that when the object G2 came very close to the event horizon of the black hole, it wasn’t torn apart in the way they would have expected. Instead, it initially stretched out, before rebounding back toward its original state.
“At the time of closest approach, G2 had a really strange signature,” Andrea Ghez, Professor of Astrophysics and director of the UCLA Galactic Center Group, said in a statement. “We had seen it before, but it didn’t look too peculiar until it got close to the black hole and became elongated, and much of its gas was torn apart. It went from being a pretty innocuous object when it was far from the black hole to one that was really stretched out and distorted at its closest approach and lost its outer shell, and now it’s getting more compact again.”
Now, new analysis of data on the six G objects makes astronomers think that they were formed when binary stars collided. Binary stars are twin star systems, in which two stars are locked in a mutual orbit. But sometimes, these stars can smash together and merge, producing a huge cloud of dust and gas surrounding the now singular merged star. These mergers are thought to be rare, but as the gravitational forces in this particular region of space are so extreme, it could be causing these mergers to happen more regularly than elsewhere in the galaxy.
The dramatic region at the heart of the Milky Way Artist’s impression of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the spiral galaxy NGC 3147, located 130 million light-years away.ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser
Right in the center of our galaxy is a behemoth of a black hole called Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star). Even though it is 2.6 million times the mass of our Sun, it is only around 120 Astronomical Units across (an Astronomical Unit is the distance between the Earth and the sun). That means that a tremendous amount of mass is squeezed into a relatively small space, and the black hole exerts a very strong gravitational pull.
This type of black hole is called a supermassive black hole, and astronomers believe that almost all galaxies have such black holes at their centers (though there areexceptions). We are just beginning to learn about the secret lives of these monster black holes, with surprising findings like the fact that planets may be able to form around them as well as the recent discovery of the G objects.
One of the challenging but also exciting features of investigating the heart of the Milky Way is that it is an extreme environment where density and gravitational forces are much stronger than they are in our solar system. “The Earth is in the suburbs compared to the center of the galaxy, which is some 26,000 light-years away,” Ghez explained in the statement. “The center of our galaxy has a density of stars 1 billion times higher than our part of the galaxy. The gravitational pull is so much stronger. The magnetic fields are more extreme. The center of the galaxy is where extreme astrophysics occurs — the X-sports of astrophysics.”
Ghez’s team is the same one that discovered last year that the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way is getting hungrier. The team theorized that blobs of gas could have been sucked off a nearby star and fallen into the black hole, producing a change in brightness as the gas glows when falling into the event horizon.
How the G objects were identified Orbits of the G objects at the center of our galaxy, with the supermassive black hole indicated with a white cross. Stars, gas and dust are in the background.Anna Ciurlo, Tuan Do/UCLA Galactic Center Group
To identify the G objects, the researchers looked at data about the center of the Milky Way gathered at the W.M. Keck Observatory and used a technique called adaptive optics. Adaptive optics enables more accurate imaging by limiting the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere in real time, allowing astronomers to peer deeper into the heart of our galaxy.
They had to distinguish the G objects from other clusters of nearby stars, so they used a tool called the OSIRIS-Volume Display which can identify objects’ spectra so they could track the movements of the G objects in isolation.
As the data used to investigate the objects spans more than two decades, the scientists have a good level of confidence that what they are observing is a real phenomenon and more than just a single strange aberration. “The unique dataset that Professor Ghez’s group has gathered during more than 20 years is what allowed us to make this discovery,” Anna Ciurlo, a UCLA postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the paper describing the findings, said in the statement. “We now have a population of G objects, so it is not a matter of explaining a one-time event like G2.” What these mysterious objects teach us about star evolution
If these G objects are indeed formed by the merging of binary stars, this has implications for the way we think about mergers occurring under extreme gravitational forces. “Mergers of stars may be happening in the universe more often than we thought, and likely are quite common,” Ghez said.
“Black holes may be driving binary stars to merge. It’s possible that many of the stars we’ve been watching and not understanding may be the end product of mergers that are calm now. We are learning how galaxies and black holes evolve. The way binary stars interact with each other and with the black hole is very different from how single stars interact with other single stars and with the black hole.”
The confirmation of the existence of these objects also means we can look forward to some dramatic events when they approach close to the black hole. “One of the things that has gotten everyone excited about the G objects is that the stuff that gets pulled off of them by tidal forces as they sweep by the central black hole must inevitably fall into the black hole,” co-author Mark Morris, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, said in the same statement. “When that happens, it might be able to produce an impressive fireworks show since the material eaten by the black hole will heat up and emit copious radiation before it disappears across the event horizon.”
Black holes reside in the heart of galaxies, and in a span of billions of years, can consume everything it can come across, including light. Recently, some scientists have spotted strange celestial objects lurking around the milky way galaxy, seemingly approaching the supermassive black hole.
Express reports that astronomers from UCLA discovered unusual objects close to Sagittarius A. The objects in question look like clouds or clusters of gas but they exhibit the same behavior as stars. Under observation, they found that these objects are getting stretched out and compacted in their orbits because of the gravitational pull of the black hole. The scientists have estimated that the orbital time of these unusual objects is within the range of 100 to 1000 years.
This is not the first time astronomers found strange beings or objects lurking within the galaxy. The first was back in 2005, and the scientists that discovered it have formally referred to it as G1, and five more were found since then, from G1 to G6. According to the researchers, G2, in particular, had a strange signature when it approached the black hole.
While they were not unusual enough for scientists to really take notice, their behavior towards the black hole’s gravitational pull was what got their attention. What these objects are is yet to be determined but the UCLA scientists have theorized that these may be binary stars. Binary stars are two stars that orbit each other and form a cluster of larger stars when they merge.
Meanwhile, black holes, in general, have always been elusive in nature. Now, a report reveals that astronomers have discovered a way to further learn about these celestial entities. Scientists from the European Southern Observatory found clouds of gas that surround these supermassive black holes. Dr. Emanuele Paolo Farina said that these gases are what these black holes consume.
It also bears noting that some of these beings or primordial black holes go back 12 billion years or 12 billion light-years away. These very old black holes are thought to be the remains of the first stars that lit up the universe called the Cosmic Dawn.
Dr. Farina stated, “We are now able to demonstrate for the first time, primordial galaxies do have enough food in their environments to sustain the growth of supermassive black holes and vigorous star formation.”
‘A red-flag warning’: Scientists alarmed by mass death of 1 million seabirds from a hot ocean ‘blob’
Dead common murres were found on the beach in Cochrane Bay, Prince William Sound on Jan 10, 2016. These birds were part of the large die-off of common murres across the Gulf of Alaska in 2015-2016. (Photo: Sarah Schoen/USGS Alaska Science Center)
On the heels of new research showing that the world’s oceans are rapidly warming, scientists revealed Wednesday that a huge patch of hot water in the northeast Pacific Ocean dubbed “the blob” was to blame for killing about one million seabirds.
The peer-reviewed study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, was conducted by a team of researchers at federal and state agencies, conservation groups, and universities. They tied the mass die-off to “the blob,” a marine heatwave that began forming in 2013 and grew more intense in 2015 because of the weather phenomenon known as El Niño.
“About 62,000 dead or dying common murres (Uria aalge), the trophically dominant fish-eating seabird of the North Pacific, washed ashore between summer 2015 and spring 2016 on beaches from California to Alaska,” the study says. “Most birds were severely emaciated and, so far, no evidence for anything other than starvation was found to explain this mass mortality. Three-quarters of murres were found in the Gulf of Alaska and the remainder along the West Coast.”
Given that previous studies have shown “that only a fraction of birds that die at sea typically wash ashore,” the researchers put the death toll closer to a million.
“The magnitude and scale of this failure has no precedent,” lead author John Piatt, a research biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, said in a statement. “It was astonishing and alarming, and a red-flag warning about the tremendous impact sustained ocean warming can have on the marine ecosystem.”
Piatt and study co-author and University of Washington professor Julia Parrish explained that the team believes the blob—which spanned hundreds of miles—limited food supply in the region, leading the birds to starve.
“Think of it as a run on the grocery stores at the same time that the delivery trucks to the stores stopped coming so often,” Parrish said. “We believe that the smoking gun for common murres—beyond the marine heatwave itself—was an ecosystem squeeze: fewer forage fish and smaller prey in general, at the same time that competition from big fish predators like walleye, pollock, and Pacific cod greatly increased.”
Piatt added that “food demands of large commercial groundfish like cod, pollock, halibut, and hake were predicted to increase dramatically with the level of warming observed with the blob, and since they eat many of the same prey as murres, this competition likely compounded the food supply problem for murres, leading to mass mortality events from starvation.”
According to CNN, which reported on the study Thursday:
The blob devastated the murres’ population. With insufficient food, breeding colonies across the entire region had reproductive difficulties for years afterward, the study said. Not only did the population decline dramatically, but the murres couldn’t replenish those numbers.
During the 2015 breeding season, three colonies didn’t produce a single chick. That number went up to 12 colonies in the 2016 season—and in reality it could be even higher, since researchers only monitor a quarter of all colonies.
Thomas Frölicher, a climate scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland who was not involved in the new study, discussed the blob’s connection to the human-caused planetary emergency with InsideClimate News.
“It was the biggest marine heatwave so far on record,” said Frölicher, who noted that such events have doubled in frequency over the past few decades. “Usually, we are used to heatwaves over land. They are much smaller in size, and they do not last as long. In the ocean, this heatwave lasted two or three years.”
Frölicher warned that “if we follow a high-greenhouse-gas-emissions scenario, these heatwaves will become 50 times more frequent than preindustrial times” by 2100. He said that even if the international community achieves a low-emissions scenario in line with the Paris climate agreement, marine heatwaves would still be 20 times more frequent.
“What that means is that in some regions, they will become permanent heatwaves,” he added. “This gives us some insight into the future.”
The study—which its authors expect to inform research on other mortality events related to marine heatwaves—was published just weeks after University of Washington scientists found what some have called “the blob 2.0” forming in the Pacific. That discovery came as “quite a surprise” to those researchers.
University climatologist Nick Bond told local media that “the original blob was so unusual, and stood above the usually kind of variations in the climate and ocean temperatures that we thought ‘wow, this is going to be something we won’t see for quite a while.'”
Pacific 'blob' heatwave feared to have killed a million birds
The study, published on Wednesday by the PLOS One scientific journal, found that the seabirds probably starved to death due to a 1,000-mile body of warmer water that affected the north-eastern Pacific between 2013 and 2016.
The higher temperatures impacted their food supply, with diminishing supplies of plankton leading to a both a drop in the population of the smaller fish eaten by the birds and increased competition from other predators.
More than three-quarters of the dead murres were found in the Gulf of Alaska, but the actual number is likely to be around one million as only a small number of birds that die at sea are normally washed ashore.
The scientists said that mass deaths of murres, also known as common guillemots, happen sporadically, but described the scale of the incident in 2015-16 as "unprecedented and astonishing".
Study links warming to 'Blob' that killed Pacific seabirds
About 1 million common murres died during a 2015-16 heat wave, scientists have said. Researchers believe that a disrupted food supply led to the mass die-off of the North Pacific seabirds.
Approximately 1 million seabirds known as the common murre died because of food-supply disruptions during a heat wave from summer 2015 to spring 2016, according to a study published Wednesday in PLOS One. Julia Parrish, a University of Washington ecologist and co-author of the paper, linked the "relatively new" increased frequency of such heat waves to climate change.
The study called the number of birds — many of breeding age — killed over a geographic area the size of Canada "unprecedented and astonishing." According to researchers, "the most powerful marine heat wave on record," which ran from 2014 to 2016, created a mass of seawater known as "the Blob." That coincided with the warmed Pacific of an El Nino period.
About 62,000 emaciated murres washed ashore dead or dying along the North American Pacific coastline during the heat wave. Scientists estimate the total deaths at between 500,000 and 1.2 million.
Parrish said the heat wave had a twofold effect. First, elevated temperatures reduced the quality and quantity of phytoplankton, reducing the quantity and quality of herring, sardines and anchovies: fish eaten by common murres, which measure 1 foot (30 centimeters), fly fast and can hunt 650 feet below the water's surface. Second, warming waters meant that salmon and Pacific cod, which compete with the murres, needed to eat more.
The murres' need to consume half of their body mass every day has become their evolutionary "Achilles heel" as the climate changes, John Piatt, a research biologist at the US Geological Survey's Alaska Science Center and the paper's lead author, told the AFP news agency. "Everything they do depends on that breast muscle," he said. "When they can't eat three or four days, they burn up all that muscle" — and can no longer fly or dive.
Murre colonies across the entire region failed to produce chicks for years during and after the heat wave event, the study found. Several other species experienced mass die-offs during the same period, including tufted puffins, Cassin's auklets, sea lions and baleen whales. But, by all metrics, including overall number and geographic extent, the common murres experienced by far the largest die-off.
Taken together, the mass deaths demonstrate that "a warmer ocean world is a very different environment and a very different coastal ecosystem for many marine species," Parrish said, calling seabirds, as highly visible members of that system, "bellwethers of that change."
DW mkg/sms (AFP, PLOS One)
'The blob,' food supply squeeze to blame for largest seabird die-off
Adult common murres return to island and sea stack colonies from California to Alaska, spending three months during each summer to breed. A single chick takes two parents to hunt for fish, such as the rockfish -- a staple of the California murre diet -- pictured here. Credit: Jane Dolliver
The common murre is a self-sufficient, resilient bird.
Though the seabird must eat about half of its body weight in prey each day, common murres are experts at catching the small "forage fish" they need to survive. Herring, sardines, anchovies and even juvenile salmon are no match for a hungry murre.
So when nearly one million common murres died at sea and washed ashore from California to Alaska in 2015 and 2016, it was unprecedented—both for murres, and across all bird species worldwide. Scientists from the University of Washington, the U.S. Geological Survey and others blame an unexpected squeeze on the ecosystem's food supply, brought on by a severe and long-lasting marine heat wave known as "the blob."
Their findings were published Jan. 15 in the journal PLOS ONE.
"Think of it as a run on the grocery stores at the same time that the delivery trucks to the stores stopped coming so often," explained second author Julia Parrish, a UW professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. "We believe that the smoking gun for common murres—beyond the marine heat wave itself—was an ecosystem squeeze: fewer forage fish and smaller prey in general, at the same time that competition from big fish predators like walleye, pollock and Pacific cod greatly increased."
Common murres washing onto beaches in the Homer, Alaska, area were so abundant in early 2016 that volunteer beach surveyors were forced to collect and photograph them in batches. Credit: COASST
Common murres nest in colonies along cliffs and rocky ledges overlooking the ocean. The adult birds, about one foot in length, are mostly black with white bellies, and can dive more than two football fields below the ocean's surface in search of prey.
Warmer surface water temperatures off the Pacific coast—a phenomenon known as "the blob"—first occurred in the fall and winter of 2013, and persisted through 2014 and 2015. Warming increased with the arrival of a powerful El Niño in 2015-2016. A number of other species experienced mass die-offs during this period, including tufted puffins, Cassin's auklets, sea lions and baleen whales. But the common murre die-off was by far the largest any way you measure it.
From May 2015 to April 2016, about 62,000 murre carcasses were found on beaches from central California north through Alaska. Citizen scientists in Alaska monitoring long-term sites counted numbers that reached 1,000 times more than normal for their beaches. Scientists estimate that the actual number of deaths was likely close to one million, since only a fraction of birds that die will wash to shore, and only a fraction of those will be in places that people can access.
Many of the birds that died were breeding-age adults. With massive shifts in food availability, murre breeding colonies across the entire region failed to produce chicks for the years during and after the marine heat wave event, the authors found.
"The magnitude and scale of this failure has no precedent," said lead author John Piatt, a research biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's Alaska Science Center and an affiliate professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. "It was astonishing and alarming, and a red-flag warning about the tremendous impact sustained ocean warming can have on the marine ecosystem."
On Jan. 1 and 2, 2016, 6,540 common murre carcasses were found washed ashore near Whitter, Alaska, translating into about 8,000 bodies per mile of shoreline -- one of the highest beaching rates recorded during the mass mortality event. Credit: David B. Irons
From a review of fisheries studies conducted during the heat wave period, the research team concluded that persistent warm ocean temperatures associated with "the blob" increased the metabolism of cold-blooded organisms from zooplankton and small forage fish up through larger predatory fish like salmon and pollock. With predatory fish eating more than usual, the demand for food at the top of the food chain was unsustainable. As a result, the once-plentiful schools of forage fish that murres rely on became harder to find.
"Food demands of large commercial groundfish like cod, pollock, halibut and hake were predicted to increase dramatically with the level of warming observed with the blob, and since they eat many of the same prey as murres, this competition likely compounded the food supply problem for murres, leading to mass mortality events from starvation," Piatt said.
As the largest mass die-off of seabirds in recorded history, the common murre event may help explain the other die-offs that occurred during the northeast Pacific marine heat wave, and also serve as a warning for what could happen during future marine heat waves, the authors said. UW scientists recently identified another marine heatwave forming off the Washington coast and up into the Gulf of Alaska.
"All of this—as with the Cassin's auklet mass mortality and the tufted puffin mass mortality—demonstrates that a warmer ocean world is a very different environment and a very different coastal ecosystem for many marine species," said Parrish, who is also the executive director of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, known as COASST. "Seabirds, as highly visible members of that system, are bellwethers of that change."
More information: Piatt JF, Parrish JK, Renner HM, Schoen SK, Jones TT, Arimitsu ML, et al. (2020) Extreme mortality and reproductive failure of common murres resulting from the northeast Pacific marine heatwave of 2014-2016. PLOS ONE (2020). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0226087
Warm ocean water triggered vast seabird die-off, experts say
by Dan Joling FEBRUARY 10, 2017
In this Jan. 7, 2016 file photo, dead common murres lie washed up on a rocky beach in Whittier, Alaska. A year after tens of thousands of common murres, an abundant North Pacific seabird, starved and washed ashore on beaches from California to Alaska, researchers have pinned the cause to unusually warm ocean temperatures that affected the tiny fish they eat.(AP Photo/Mark Thiessen, File)
A year after tens of thousands of common murres, an abundant North Pacific seabird, starved and washed ashore on beaches from California to Alaska, researchers have pinned the cause to unusually warm ocean temperatures that affected the tiny fish they eat.
Elevated temperatures in seawater affected wildlife in a pair of major marine ecosystems along the West Coast and Canada, said John Piatt, a research wildlife biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. Common murres are an indicator of the regions' health.
"If tens of thousands of them are dying, it's because there's no fish out there, anywhere, over a very large area," Piatt said.
To see such effect over two sizeable marine ecosystems is extraordinary, he said.
Deaths of common murres in Alaska likely were multiplied when starving birds in December 2015 were hit by vicious Gulf of Alaska winter storms, Piatt said.
Common murres look like thin penguins. They can fly miles in search of schools of finger-length fish and can dive and swim nearly 600 feet deep to capture them. However, the birds' high metabolism means they have to eat a lot. If they don't eat prey matching 10 to 30 percent of their body mass daily, they can use up fat reserves and drop to a critical threshold for starvation within three days.
Common murres eat small forage fish: capelin, from the smelt family, and juvenile pollock, which as adults are caught for fast-food fish sandwiches. Both fish were largely absent when the National Marine Fisheries Service conducted surveys in summer 2015.
In this Jan. 7, 2016, file photo, shows dead common murres on a rocky beach in Whittier, Alaska. A year after tens of thousands of common murres, an abundant North Pacific seabird, starved and washed ashore on beaches from California to Alaska, researchers have pinned the cause to unusually warm ocean temperatures that affected the tiny fish they eat. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen, File)
Common murres paid the price. Volunteers and federal researchers last year counted the carcasses of 46,000 dead murres in Alaska and another 6,000 in California, Oregon and Washington.
Die-offs of seabirds occur periodically, but this one was spectacular. Only a fraction of the dead birds likely reached shore, Piatt said. And only a fraction of Alaska coastline was surveyed. A conservative extrapolation indicates 500,000 or more common murres died, Piatt said.
Nearly all were emaciated. As birds starved, they consumed their own fat and protein until they lost deadly amounts of body mass.
"You can't keep yourself heated, and then you die," Piatt said. "It's an agonizing, awful death. And then on top of that, some of them probably drowned."
Starting in 2014, the temperature in the upper 300 feet of water was as much as 4.5 degrees warmer than normal. NASA explained it like this: An unusually strong and persistent ridge of atmospheric high pressure appeared over the northeastern Pacific, weakening winds and easing normal, wind-driven churning, which promoted upwelling of deep, cold water to the surface. It led to a lens of unusually warm surface water that a University of Washington meteorologist dubbed "the Blob."
Forage fish feed on zooplankton, and cold water produces the biggest, fattiest versions, said Shannon Atkinson, a physiologist and researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
In this March 11, 2016, file photo, Wildlife biologists Rob Kaler of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Sarah Schoen of the U.S. Geological Survey examine body parts of a common murre during a necropsy in Anchorage, Alaska. Kaler and Schoen are among scientists attempting to find out the reason for a massive common murre die-off in the North Pacific that began one year ago. A year after tens of thousands of common murres, an abundant North Pacific seabird, starved and washed ashore on beaches from California to Alaska, researchers have pinned the cause to unusually warm ocean temperatures that affected the tiny fish they eat. (AP Photo/Dan Joling, File)
"What that means is there's not as much energy, and the energy that's being transferred up the food web is not as energetically rich," Atkinson said.
Warm ocean temperatures also affect big North Pacific fish such as halibut, cod, pollock and arrowtooth flounder, Piatt said. Their metabolism increases as the temperature increases, and they have to eat more.
"The dominant food for those fish is—get ready—juvenile pollock, capelin, sand lance," Piatt said. "These fish are in direct competition with the birds now, and typically in most of these northern ecosystems, the large, predatory fish eat an order of magnitude more of those forage prey than the birds and mammals combined."
The rates of carcass recovery by volunteers monitoring beaches in the Gulf of Alaska returned to normal levels in July 2016, Piatt said. However, common murres continued to have trouble finding food, and it showed up in breeding, he said.
Common murres lay eggs in approximately 230 Alaska cliff colonies. Heather Renner, supervisory wildlife biologist at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, monitors some of the largest.
"In 2016, we had widespread breeding failure at all of the colonies in the Gulf of Alaska, as well as the Bering Sea," she said. "It was a highly unusual event. Murres don't fail regularly."
In this Jan. 7, 2016, photo, dead common murres lie on a rocky beach in Whittier, Alaska. A year after tens of thousands of common murres, an abundant North Pacific seabird, starved and washed ashore on beaches from California to Alaska, researchers have pinned the cause to unusually warm ocean temperatures that affected the tiny fish they eat. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen, File)
Breeding was normal at colonies in the Arctic and the Aleutians, she said.
There's no question for Piatt that Pacific warmth was the ultimate cause of the common murre die-off.
"They died of starvation because there was no food," Piatt said. "There was no food because there was no fish. And there was no fish because these warm waters did something to them."
Richard Sakwa does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
