Brazil Is Pushing the US Out of World’s Biggest Soybean Market

Tarso Veloso, Isis Almeida and Hallie Gu
Mon, July 24, 2023 
 

A DECADE OF BRAZILIAN HEGEMONY

(Bloomberg) -- The world’s soybean market is dominated by one major buyer: China. For years, Brazil has taken an increasingly bigger share of that trade away from the US.

Now, South America’s shippers are even starting to dominate during the typical season lull.

Chinese buyers are snapping up Brazilian soybeans for delivery in October, a time of year when US exports are typically at their peak, according to people familiar with the trades. More deals for the fourth quarter are still likely to be done, according to people, who asked not to be identified because the deals are private.

The sales come as Brazil is reaping a record crop and offering much lower prices than rival producers. They also reflect President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s plan to seek closer ties with China as part of his growth plan for Latin America’s largest economy.

“We still have competitive premiums for at least another month or so,” Thiago Milani, head of trading and origination for 3Tentos, a family-owned agribusiness company in Brazil, said referring to the country’s shipping prices.

American farmers are losing their competitive edge in the global agriculture markets as Brazilian production expands. Geopolitical tensions have also prompted China to seek deeper ties with the South American nation and reduce its historical reliance on the US.

Lula’s plan to deepen relations with China includes getting more funding from the Asian nation and reducing the role of the dollar in foreign trade transactions. A Brazilian delegation’s trip to China earlier this year yielded more than 15 agreements worth about $10 billion in Chinese investment pledges.

It’s currently profitable for Chinese processors to crush Brazilian beans to make cooking oil and animal feed, whereas margins are negative for US supplies, data compiled by Bloomberg show. As a result, Chinese buyers are snapping up Brazilian cargoes earlier in the season.

In fact, purchases were so early that there are already five vessels scheduled to pick up cargoes in Brazil in September, according to Alphamar shipping agency. This is the earliest ever in the season for that kind of trade, shipping data show.


“There’s huge stocks at farms now that will find their way to the ports over the next few months, so we will see more vessels on the lineup soon,” said Arthur Neto, Alphamar’s commercial director.

The purchases also come as US crops, which typically get harvested starting in September, are under pressure from hot, dry weather. In June, the American soy crop was in the worst condition in three decades, before rains returned to the Midwest.

Still, the weather is now set to turn hot and dry again. Soybean futures in Chicago are up more than 5% this quarter to about $14.20 a bushel.

“From the weather point of view, the chance of an improvement in crop conditions isn’t high,” Chinese broker Huatai Futures said in a report on Friday. “The supply of new-season US soybean crop is unlikely to expand greatly.”

--With assistance from Jasmine Ng, Alfred Cang and Vanessa Dezem.

ChatGPT creator says AI advocates are fooling themselves if they think the technology is only going to be good for workers: 'Jobs are definitely going to go away'

Jacob Zinkula

TechCrunch
Tue, July 25, 2023 

Open AI CEO Sam AltmanBrian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch

The rise of generative AI technology could have productivity benefits for many workers.


But OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says some jobs are "definitely going to go away."


New jobs could be created in their place, but not all displaced workers will benefit.

Generative AI technology like ChatGPT could boost productivity for many workers in the years ahead. But some Americans are likely to lose their jobs in the process.

That's according to Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Altman has said AI's development could provide the "most tremendous leap forward" for people's quality of life. But he's also said it'd be "crazy not to be a little afraid of AI" and its potential to create "disinformation problems or economic shocks."

In a new interview with The Atlantic, Altman pushed back on the idea that the AI boom will only have a positive impact on workers.

"A lot of people working on AI pretend that it's only going to be good; it's only going to be a supplement; no one is ever going to be replaced," he said. "Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop."

Since ChatGPT rolled out last November, experts have spoken about the ways AI could serve as a valuable assistant to workers — helping them become more productive and spend less time on boring tasks. Some experts have expressed optimism that AI won't result in the widespread job displacement many Americans fear and that instead, they should be more worried about their co-workers using these technologies to supplant them.

"You will not be replaced by AI but by someone who knows what to do with AI," Oded Netzer, a Columbia Business School professor, previously told Insider.

But Altman's comments speak to the harsh reality: Even if most jobs aren't displaced, some are likely to go by the wayside. In March, Goldman Sachs forecasted that 300 million full-time jobs across the globe could be disrupted — not necessarily replaced — by AI.

"History tells us that simplification is often merely a step towards automation," Carl Benedikt Frey, an Oxford economist, previously told Insider. "AI assistants that analyze telemarketers' calls and provide recommendations are being trained with the ultimate goal of replacing them."

The widespread adoption of AI could also create new jobs, however. Altman told The Atlantic that he expects better — perhaps higher-paying jobs — will be created in place of the ones that are disrupted.

"I don't think we'll want to go back," he said.

The question, however, is whether displaced workers will be able to navigate their way to these new gigs.

Ethan Mollick, an associate professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, pointed to the late-19th century automation of telephone operators — then a common profession for women — as an example of workers struggling to adapt to technological change.

"When you got rid of operators, then basically young women were able to adjust, find new jobs and were able to adapt," he said. "But older women took a lifelong hit to wages — were never able to find as good a job again."

World's 1st 'boomerang meteorite' — a rock that left Earth, spent millennia in space, then returned — possibly discovered in the Sahara Desert


Harry Baker

LIVE SCIENCE
Tue, July 25, 2023 

An uneven dark rock


Researchers have proposed that an unusual rock, which was recently discovered in northern Africa, could be the first ever known "boomerang meteorite" — a space rock that originated on our planet before being ejected into space and then later tumbling back to Earth. However, not everyone agrees with the new findings, which have yet to be peer-reviewed.

The meteorite, which is named NWA 13188 and weighs around 23 ounces (646 grams), was discovered by meteorite hunetrs in an unknown part of the Sahara Desert in Morocco in 2018. Nobody saw the rock fall to Earth and its composition was discovered to be very similar to a specific type of volcanic rocks known to scientists, which has led to speculation about its origins.


But a group of researchers who have recently analyzed the rock now believe that it is a terrestrial meteorite, a rock that originated on Earth and was catapulted into space millions of years ago, and which has only just fallen back to our planet. Jérôme Gattacceca, a meteoriticist at Aix-Marseille University in France, presented his team's findings July 11 at an international geochemistry conference in Lyon, France. (Their work has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.)

If the team is correct, NWA 13188 will be recognized as the first official terrestrial meteorite found on Earth.

Related: Never-before-seen crystals found in perfectly preserved meteorite dust

A cross section of a meteorite

The researchers believe that NWA 13188 is a meteorite because it has a "well-developed fusion crust" — a fine layer of heat-shocked rock on its surface, which is a sign that it partially burned up in Earth's atmosphere and is not a feature found in volcanic rocks on Earth.

The team also found traces of isotopes (elements with differing numbers of neutrons in their nuclei) including beryllium-3, helium-10 and neon-21, which suggest that the rock was exposed to cosmic rays — high-energy particles that move through space at nearly the speed of light. The level of these isotopes suggests that the rock was in space for at least 10,000 years, but possibly much longer.

There are two possible scenarios for how the meteorite was once ejected into space: The first is that a massive volcanic eruption launched it directly into space, and the second is that it was catapulted out of the atmosphere by a colossal asteroid impact. The researchers believe that the latter explanation is the most likely because no recorded volcanic eruption has been powerful enough to launch rocks into space.

Not everyone is ready to classify the rock as a boomerang meteorite.

"It is an interesting rock," Ludovic Ferrière, a curator of the meteorite collection at the Natural History Museum Vienna in Austria, who was not involved with the new analysis, told Live Science's sister site Space.com. But it requires "more investigations to be conducted before making extraordinary claims." Without being able to trace it to an impact crater or knowing how old it is, it is hard to pin down exactly how the rock left or reentered Earth, he added.

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Others think that the rock could also have been birthed elsewhere in the solar system despite its similarities to Earth rocks. "I think there is no doubt that this is a meteorite," Frank Brenker, a geologist at the Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany, who was not involved with the new analysis, told Space.com. "It is just a matter of debate if it is really from Earth."

The research team is planning further analysis to work out the exact age of the rock and search for any other clues that may determine how it was catapulted away from Earth.

NWA 13188 could potentially be the first boomerang meteorite found on Earth, but it is not the first possible terrestrial meteor to ever be discovered. In a 2019 study published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, researchers identified an unusual chunk of rock from the moon during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971, which contains tiny fragments of quartz, feldspar and zircon that all likely originated on Earth. They propose that this chunk of rock was ejected from our planet when the moon was much closer to our planet, billions of years ago.

Researchers discover mysterious interstellar radio signal reaching Earth: "Extraordinary"

Eric Lagatta, USA TODAY
Tue, July 25, 2023

A long exposure photo shows the Milky Way galaxy star cluster in March from Indonesia.

Mysterious radio wave pulses from deep in space have been hitting Earth for decades, but the scientists who recently discovered them have no concrete explanation for the origin of the signals.

For 35 years, the strange blasts of energy in varying levels of brightness have occurred like clockwork approximately every 20 minutes, sometimes lasting for five minute intervals. That's what Curtin University astronomers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) concluded in research published last week in the journal Nature.

The discovery of the signal, which researchers named GPMJ1839-10, has the scientists baffled. Believed to be coming from around 15,000 light years away from Earth, the signal has been occurring at intervals and for a period of time previously thought to be impossible.

“This remarkable object challenges our understanding of neutron stars and magnetars, which are some of the most exotic and extreme objects in the universe,” lead author Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker said in a statement on ICRAR's website.

Alien technology? Harvard professor finds fragments that could be of otherworldly origin
First signal detected from 2018 data

Using data gathered in 2018, astronomers first detected another magnetar spinning much slower than usual and sending similar signals every 18 minutes. But by the time they analyzed the data in 2020, it was no longer producing radio waves, according to Hurley-Walker.

So they looked again, knowing that the chance was high they would find another long-term radio source.

The team of astronomers used the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope in Western Australia to scan the Milky Way galaxy every three nights for several months. They didn't have to wait long to find what they were looking for.

Within no time, a new source was discovered in a different part of the sky, this time repeating every 22 minutes with five-minute pulses.

Studying records at the Very Large Array in New Mexico, which maintains the longest-running archive of data, the researchers discovered that the source's pulse was first observed in 1988.

What's even more alarming than that this radio signal was able to go undetected for more than three decades is that scientists have not determined with confidence what it could be.

'Internet apocalypse': How NASA's solar-storm studies could help save the web
Is it a sign extraterrestrial life? Not so fast...

But before you go assuming that E.T. is trying to phone our planet, the researchers do have other theories about what may be causing it.

Even Hurley-Walker noted in an article she penned on The Conversation — a media outlet with articles written by academics and researchers — that it can be tempting to include extraterrestrial intelligence as a possible source of the signal. In fact, that's what happened when the first pulsar was discovered and astrophysicists nicknamed it "LGM 1" for "Little Green Men 1" before additional observations caused them to rule the possibility out.

The most likely culprit, researchers say, is pulsars, neutron stars that blink and rotate like lighthouses emitting energetic beams as they rotate toward and away from Earth. But pulsars slow down as time passes, their pulses growing fainter with age until they eventually stop producing radio signals.

What's more confounding: the object that the researches detected resembles a pulsar, but spins 1,000 times slower.

Another explanation researchers offer is that the object could be an ultra-long period magnetar, a rare type of neutron star with extremely strong magnetic fields that can produce powerful bursts of energy. But until recently, all known magnetars released energy at intervals ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes — far more often than the 22-minute intervals that this object emits radio waves, according to the study.

Magnetars also generate radio waves for several months before stopping, not for 35 years and counting, according to researchers. The radio emissions should be slowing down, but as observations show, it is not.

In fact, researchers note that it shouldn't be possible for it to produce radio waves at all. The object is spinning so slow as to fall below the "death line," a critical threshold where a star’s magnetic field becomes too weak to produce radio emissions.

To determine what's behind the mysterious pulsing, the astronomers said that additional observations and study are needed.

“Whatever mechanism is behind this," Hurley-Walker said in the statement, "is extraordinary.”

The discovery joins a list of mysterious finds this year beyond Earth's gravitational pull.

In May, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories unveiled strange findings after recording unidentified sounds in the stratosphere using solar-powered balloons.

And in January, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope discovered an exoplanet outside our solar system that shares similar qualities with Earth.

A strange signal from deep space has been detected every 22 minutes for more than 30 years. Scientists have no idea what is causing it.


Marianne Guenot

LIVE SCIENCE
Mon, July 24, 2023

An artist's impression of a magnetar, a dying neutron star. Scientists think they've found a pulsating star that defies the physics of stars.

ICRAR

A mysterious object spotted in the cosmos is beaming radio waves toward Earth every 22 minutes.


Signals from this type of cosmic object usually slow down over time.


But this one has been sending signals for more than 30 years, and scientists can't figure out why.

A cosmic object that has been pulsing radio waves toward Earth every 22 minutes for more than 30 years has left scientists baffled.

The object is thought to be a dying star that is emitting energy from its poles. But it's spinning too slowly to exist.

"Assuming it's a magnetar, it shouldn't be possible for this object to produce radio waves. But we're seeing them," said Natasha Hurley-Walker, a radio astronomer from Curtin University in Australia who led the research, in a statement.

A phenomenal cosmic lighthouse that shouldn't exist

An artist's impression of the dying star, The star is thought to be a magnetar, which is ruled by intense magnetic fields, here shown in orange. ICRAR

This object, given the scientific name of GPM J1839−10, sets itself apart because it is remarkably slow and remarkably stable.

"Astronomers expect to see some repeating radio signals in space, but they usually blink on and off much more quickly," Hurley-Walker told The Conversation.

At the end of their life, stars can collapse into neutron stars, superdense objects that pack billions of tons of matter into tiny little spaces, per NASA.

Some neutron stars shoot brilliant beams of light and energy from their magnetic poles. We only pick up the signal as the beam washes over our planet, similar to the light from a lighthouse blinking to a boat offshore.

These create repeated blips on Earth that are so consistent that scientists that first detected them wrongly thought they could be communications from aliens in outer space. But since then, they have figured out they are the gasps of a dying star beaming through the universe.

This star is crossing the death line

Scientists expect pulsating neutron stars to slow down until they reach a "death line." This is a theoretical threshold that dictates that stars that are too slow are about to die. This threshold is usually thought to be crossed when the pulses slow to more than a few minutes apart.

But the pulses coming from GPM J1839−10, the team found, came every 22 minutes. And these could last up to five minutes each, defying all expectations.

"The object we've discovered is spinning way too slowly to produce radio waves," Dr Hurley-Walker said.

This wasn't the first time a super slow object like this one had been spotted.

The same team had previously spotted another slow object that pulsed every 18 minutes or so, lasting up to a minute each. The team postulated the beams were coming from a magnetar, a neutron star with intense magnetic fields.

But GPM J1839−10 had one more science-defying surprise in its pocket.

A dying star that refuses to die out

A segment of the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia that was used to pick up the signal from the star.

Pete Wheeler, ICRAR

Looking through archives, Hurley-Walker said the team uncovered GPM J1839−10's "real surprise."

This object's pulses had been picked up, unnoticed, by observatories around the world for years, beaming "like clockwork, every 1,318.1957 seconds, give or take a tenth of a millisecond," per Hurley-Walker.

This goes against what we know about neutron stars. These are expected to die out in months. For instance, the 2018 object only blazed for a short while, between January and March 2018.

But the first record of GPM J1839−10's pulses dates back to 1988 — about 33 years ago.

This could mean the object is a new type of stellar system altogether.

"This remarkable object challenges our understanding of neutron stars and magnetars, which are some of the most exotic and extreme objects in the universe," said Hurley-Walker.

The team will now be trying to reconcile their observations with what we know about the physics of stars.

"Whatever mechanism is behind this is extraordinary," she said.

SO MUCH FOR ONSHORING
Driven by AI boom, TSMC to invest $2.9 billion in advanced chip plant in Taiwan


Sarah Wu and Yimou Lee
Mon, July 24, 2023 

Taiwanese chip giant TSMC holds a ceremony in Tainan

By Sarah Wu and Yimou Lee

TAIPEI (Reuters) -Driven by a surge in demand for artificial intelligence, Taiwanese chip maker TSMC plans to invest nearly T$90 billion ($2.87 billion) in an advanced packaging facility in northern Taiwan, the company said on Tuesday.

"To meet market needs, TSMC is planning to establish an advanced packaging fab in the Tongluo Science Park," the company said in a statement.

CEO C.C. Wei said last week that TSMC is unable to fulfil customer demand driven by the AI boom and plans to roughly double its capacity for advanced packaging - which involves placing multiple chips into a single device, lowering the added cost of more powerful computing.

For advanced packaging, especially TSMC's chip on wafer on substrate (CoWoS), capacity is "very tight," Wei said after the company reported a 23% fall in second-quarter profit.

"We are increasing our capacity as quickly as possible. We expect this tightening will be released next year, probably towards the end of next year."

The world's largest contract chipmaker said TSMC's position as the leading manufacturer of AI chips - including for chip designers Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices - has not offset broader end market weakness as the global economy recovers more slowly than it had expected.

The Tongluo Science Park administration has officially approved TSMC's application to lease land, the company said, adding the new plant in the northern county of Miaoli would create about 1500 jobs.

Even as the leading Apple supplier ramps up its expansion abroad, it plans to keep its most advanced chip technology in Taiwan, a global powerhouse in manufacturing semiconductors that power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles.

($1 = 31.3230 Taiwan dollars)

(Reporting by Sarah Wu and Yimou Lee; Editing by Kim Coghill and Jamie Freed)

MARK YOUR CALENDARS

Gulf Stream current could collapse in 2025, plunging Earth into climate chaos: 'We were actually bewildered'

LIKE THE END OF THE MAYAN CALENDAR

Ben Turner

LIVE SCIENCE
Tue, July 25, 2023

A view of hurricanes forming over the Atlantic Ocean, created by assembling images acquired on Sept. 6, 2017 by NASA's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) satellite.

A vital ocean current system that helps regulate the Northern Hemisphere's climate could collapse anytime from 2025 and unleash climate chaos, a controversial new study warns.

The Atlantic Meridional Ocean Current (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, governs the climate by bringing warm, tropical waters north and cold water south.

But researchers now say the AMOC may be veering toward total breakdown between 2025 and 2095, causing temperatures to plummet, ocean ecosystems to collapse and storms to proliferate around the world. However, some scientists have cautioned that the new research comes with some big caveats.

The AMOC can exist in two stable states: a stronger, faster one that we rely upon today, and another that is much slower and weaker. Previous estimates predicted that the current would probably switch to its weaker mode sometime in the next century.

Related: Gulf Stream could be veering toward irreversible collapse, a new analysis warns

But human-caused climate change may push the AMOC to a critical tipping point sooner rather than later, researchers predicted in a new study, published Tuesday (July 25) in the journal Nature Communications.

"The expected tipping point — given that we continue business as usual with greenhouse gas emissions — is much earlier than we expected," co-author Susanne Ditlevsen, a professor of statistics and stochastic models in biology at the University of Copenhagen, told Live Science.

"It was not a result where we said: 'Oh, yeah, here we have it'. We were actually bewildered."
AMOC as a global conveyor belt

Atlantic Ocean currents work like an endless global conveyor belt moving oxygen, nutrients, carbon and heat around the globe. Warmer southerly waters, which are saltier and denser, flow north to cool and sink below waters at higher latitudes, releasing heat into the atmosphere.

Then, once it has sunk beneath the ocean, the water slowly drifts southward, heats up again, and the cycle repeats. But climate change is slowing this flow. Fresh water from melting ice sheets has made the water less dense and salty, and recent studies have shown that the current is at its weakest in more than 1,000 years.

A simplified animation of the global AMOC

The region near Greenland where the southerly waters sink (known as the subpolar gyre) borders a patch that is hitting record low temperatures, while the surrounding seas climb to all-time highs, forming an ever-expanding 'blob' of cold water.

The last time the AMOC switched modes during the most recent ice age, the climate near Greenland increased by 18 to 27 degrees Fahrenheit (10 to 15 degrees Celsius) within a decade. If it were to turn off, temperatures in Europe and North America could drop by as much as 9 F (5 C) in the same amount of time.

Direct data on the AMOC's strength has only been recorded since 2004, so to analyze changes to the current over longer timescales, the researchers turned to surface temperature readings of the subpolar gyre between the years of 1870 and 2020, a system which they argue provides a 'fingerprint' for the strength of AMOC’s circulation.

By feeding this information into a statistical model, the researchers gauged the diminishing strength and resilience of the ocean current by its growing year-on-year fluctuations.

The model's results alarmed the researchers — yet they say that checking them only reinforced their findings: The window for the system's collapse could begin as early as 2025, and it grows more likely as the 21st century continues.

"I don't consider myself very alarmist. In some sense it's not fruitful," Peter Ditlevsen, a professor of physics and climate science at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, told Live Science. "So my result annoys me, in some sense. Because it [the window for possible collapse] is so close and so significant that we have to take immediate action now."

Rough seas in the Southern Atlantic Ocean.

Controversy over the predicted collapse

Oceanographers and climate experts have said that while the study provides a worrying warning, it comes with some big uncertainties.

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"If the statistics are robust and are a correct/relevant way to describe how the actual modern AMOC behaves, and the changes relate (solely) to changes in the AMOC, then this is a very concerning result," David Thornalley, a professor of ocean and climate science at University College London, told Live Science in an email. "But there are some really big unknowns and assumptions that need investigating before we have confidence in this result."

Other climate scientists have gone so far as to pour cold water on the findings, suggesting it is "wholly unclear" that observed surface temperature evolution of AMOC can be linked to the strength of its circulation.

"While the mathematics seem expertly done, the physical foundation is extremely shaky: It rests on the assumption that the collapse shown by simplified models correctly describes reality — but we simply do not know, and there is no serious discussion of these simplified models' shortcomings,'' Jochem Marotzke, a professor of climate science and the director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, told Live Science in an email. "Hence, while the paper might be a valid 'what if' exercise in time series analysis in a specialized journal, it falls way short of its self-proclaimed goal of estimating the evolution of the circulation solely from observations."

The researchers behind the new study say their next steps will be to update their model with data from the last three years, which should narrow their window for predicted collapse.

Atlantic Ocean current could collapse soon. How you may endure dramatic weather changes.

Doyle Rice, USA TODAY
Updated Tue, July 25, 2023


Now this could be something to really worry about.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – a large system of ocean currents that carry warm water from the tropics into the North Atlantic – could collapse by the middle of the century, or possibly any time from 2025 onward, because of human-caused climate change, a study published Tuesday suggests.

Such a collapse could trigger rapid weather and climate changes in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. If it were to happen, it could bring about an ice age in Europe and sea-level rise in cities such as Boston and New York, as well as more potent storms and hurricanes along the East Coast.

It also could lead to drastically reduced amounts of rain and snowfall across the central and western U.S., the study's authors say.


Earlier studies about the AMOC collapse drew comparisons to the scientifically inaccurate 2004 disaster movie "The Day After Tomorrow," which used such an ocean current shutdown as the premise of the film.

"We estimate a collapse of the AMOC to occur around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions," the study authors write.

The AMOC collapse is one of several dangerous climate "tipping points" scientists say are possible because of climate change.

A tsunami floods New York City in the wake of a catastrophic climatic shift in a scene from the 2004 motion picture "The Day After Tomorrow." The premise of the scientifically inaccurate film mirrors that of several recent studies about the collapse of a key ocean current.

What is the AMOC?

“The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation really is one of our planet’s key circulation systems,” said Niklas Boers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, the author of an earlier study on the topic.

The AMOC is a crucial conveyor belt for ocean water and air, which creates weather. Warm, salty water moves north from the tropics along the Gulf Stream off the U.S. East Coast to the North Atlantic, where it cools, sinks and heads south.

The faster it moves, the more water is turned over from warm surface to cool depths.

The cycle keeps northern Europe several degrees warmer than it would otherwise be and brings colder water to the coast of North America.

Studies in 2018 and 2021 have found that a collapse of the AMOC is possible at some point this century.

What's new in this study?

Using new statistical tools and ocean temperature data from the past 150 years, researchers calculated that the AMOC will stop – with 95% certainty – between 2025 and 2095. "Using new and improved statistical tools, we’ve made calculations that provide a more robust estimate of when a collapse is most likely to occur, something we had not been able to do before," said study co-author Susanne Ditlevsen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen.

The researchers' prediction is based on observations of early warning signals ocean currents exhibit as they become unstable.

The calculations contradict the message of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, in which an abrupt change in the AMOC is considered "unlikely" this century.

"Our result underscores the importance of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible," said study co-author Peter Ditlevsen, also from the University of Copenhagen.

How could climate change cause the AMOC to collapse?

Study co-authors Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen explained to USA TODAY how the collapse of the AMOC could occur: "Greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming, which speeds up the melting of Greenland ice. The melted freshwater entering the North Atlantic can then disrupt the AMOC, potentially causing major climate disruptions.

"When the increased meltwater from Greenland enters the North Atlantic, it's freshwater, which is lighter than the salty seawater around it," the Ditlevsens said. "This excess freshwater can disrupt the normal sinking of the salty water, weakening or even shutting down the AMOC. If the AMOC collapses, it can have far-reaching effects on weather patterns and ocean currents, leading to significant climate changes."

What do others say?

Experts not involved in this study offer mixed reviews of its conclusions. Michael Mann, of the University of Pennsylvania, said, "I’m not sure the authors bring much to the table other than a fancy statistical method. History is littered with flawed predictions based on fancy statistical methods; sometimes they’re too fancy for their own good."

But Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told USA TODAY that "a single study provides limited evidence, but when multiple approaches lead to similar conclusions, this must be taken very seriously. Especially when we're talking about a risk that we really want to rule out with 99.9% certainty. The scientific evidence now is that we can't even rule out crossing a tipping point already in the next decade or two.

"There is still large uncertainty where the tipping point of the AMOC is, but the new study adds to the evidence that it is much closer than we thought just a few years ago."

The study was published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature Communications.

Contributing: The Associated Press; Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY

Climate Scientists Horrified That Their Predictions Were Correct



Victor Tangermann

FUTURISM
Tue, July 25, 2023

Climate Monsters

Temperatures are soaring around the world, beating decades-old records and even venturing into unprecedented territory.

Devastating heat waves are gripping much of the northern hemisphere, a perfect storm of the return of El Niño piling onto already high temperatures caused by climate change.

And veteran climate experts are watching, horrified that their predictions from many years ago are turning into an overwhelming reality.

"We knew by the mid-1990s that lurking in the tails of our climate model projections were monsters," wrote Bill Hare, physicist and climate scientist and chief executive of Climate Analytics, in an opinion piece for The Guardian that compiles the thoughts of a number of climate experts. "Monstrous heatwaves, catastrophic extreme rainfall and floods, subcontinental-scale wildfires, rapid ice sheet collapse raising sea level meters within a century."

"But as today’s monstrous, deadly heatwaves overtake large parts of Asia, Europe, and North America with temperatures the likes of which we have never experienced," he added, "we find even 1.2 [degrees Celsius] of global warming isn’t safe."
Help Less

Other experts lamented that their repeated warnings over the decades have largely fallen on deaf ears.

"As the situation deteriorates, it makes me wonder how I can be most helpful at a time like this," wrote Joëlle Gergis, senior lecturer in climate science Fenner School of Environment and Society. "Do I keep trying to pursue my research career or devote even more of my time to warning the public?"

Matthew England, scientia professor at the University of New South Wales, wondered whether 2023 is "finally going to be the year when any doubts about the climate change crisis are blown away by a spate of costly climate extremes."

The answer is as obvious as ever: we need to act now.

"This is what climate change looks like now," Lesley Hughes, board member of the Climate Change Authority and an emeritus professor at Macquarie University, warned. "And this is what climate change looks like in the future, though it will likely continue to get worse."

"Now all the projected changes are happening, so I reflect on how much needless environmental damage and human suffering will result from the work of those politicians, business leaders and public figures who have prevented concerted action," Ian Lowe, emeritus professor in the School of Science at Griffith University wrote.

"History will judge them very harshly," he added.

New giant solar project expected to transform former surface mine in Eastern Kentucky

Courtesy of the Office of Gov. Andy Beshear

Bill Estep
Tue, July 25, 2023 

A giant solar array on a former surface coal mine in Eastern Kentucky could one day generate enough electricity to serve the equivalent of 500,000 homes, helping combat climate change, company and state officials announced Tuesday.

The project would turn a site that produced a product blamed for contributing to global warming to one that will help cut carbon emissions that cause warming, supporters said.

“You are witnessing the future right here,” Jennifer Morris, CEO of The Nature Conservancy, said at the announcement.

BrightNight, a renewable power company, plans to build the solar array on the former Starfire mine, which is in Perry, Knott and Breathitt counties.

The plan is to build the project in four stages, ultimately reaching capacity to generate 800 megawatts of electricity after the final phase, said BrightNight CEO Martin Hermann.

The investment in the project would be $1 billion. It would be the largest solar project in Kentucky and one of the largest in the nation on a former surface mine, the partners said in a news release.

Hermann said the project will transform a coal mine, reinvest in a region that has been an energy leader and wants to continue that role, and show the power of corporate purchasing to drive development of renewable energy.

“I think we have a great milestone today,” he said.

Rivian, which works to promote use of renewable energy to electrify the transportation sector, has committed to buying enough power from the project to provide up to 450 million miles of driving with renewable power, according to a news release.

“We need to have projects like this happening thousands of times over” to speed up the transition to carbon-free energy, said Rivian founder RJ Scaringe.

The Nature Conservancy’s involvement in the project included advising Rivian on choosing a renewable energy project to support.

The organization also will buy power from the project to help reach its sustainability plans.

The Nature Conservancy and Rivian developed a guide on how companies can back projects aimed at boosting clean-energy projects, based on the principles of protecting the climate; conservation, including protecting habitat; and helping communities.

The Starfire project will put dormant land back into productive use generating clean electricity and avoid having to cut trees to make space for solar panels or use agricultural land, said Morris.

“Significant investments in infrastructure will be critical to solving the climate crisis, but how we invest is just as important as how much we invest,” Morris said. “We need to make sure both people and the planet are central to these decisions, especially in communities like the Appalachians that have powered America for centuries and have tremendous natural resources.”

Central Appalachia, including Eastern Kentucky, is a priority area for the organization to protect because it is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet.

The goal is to start construction on the first phase of the Starfire project in 2025 and begin generating power in 2027.

However, that timetable depends on the operator of the grid the power would feed into, PJM, finishing a study on how to integrate electricity from the array into its system, Hermann said.

Hermann said the project would create an estimated 250 direct construction jobs in each of the four phases, as well as related jobs.

The facility would provide few jobs after it is finished, but could drive other investments and boost tax revenue for local governments, supporters said.

“This is an investment in the future of Kentucky,” Rocky Adkins, senior advisor to Gov. Andy Beshear, said at the event.

Hermann said former state Auditor Adam Edelen, who has a separate solar project underway in Martin County, helped originate the Starfire project.

Rebecca Goodman, secretary of the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, said the state would like to see more solar projects on reclaimed mine sites.

Coal companies started mining at Starfire more than 50 years ago and ultimately mined and reclaimed 20,000 acres. Coal from the site “helped build America,” said Adkins, who once worked for the company that operated the mine.

The site for the solar array is near the Olive Branch community being developed to provide homes for people displaced by devastating flooding in the Hazard area on July 28, 2022.

BrightNight and the state are discussing ways the company can help at that development, according to a news release.

It’s difficult to attribute any single weather disaster to climate change.

But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said human activity that puts greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, including burning coal, has caused global warming that drives adverse events such as more intense storms, drought and wildfire.

ICYMI

British Medical Journal series calls for inquiry into Canada's COVID-19 response, highlighting shortfalls


A new series published in the BMJ medical journal is calling for an independent inquiry into Canada's COVID-19 response.

Experts from 13 organizations across Canada, including doctors, nurses, researchers, law and humanitarian specialists, along with Jocalyn Clark, a Canadian who is the BMJ's international editor, wrote the seven articles published late Monday.

"We see this as the next step in the pandemic," said Dr. Sharon Straus, physician-in-chief at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto and one of the senior authors of the "Accountability for Canada's COVID-19 Response" series.

"This is the start of preparing for the next emergency,” she said.

The articles identify shortfalls in Canada's COVID-19 response, including difficulty reaching vulnerable and marginalized populations who were most at risk, the catastrophic deaths in long-term care homes and inconsistent public health messages across provinces and territories.

The articles also acknowledge successes in Canada's pandemic response, including a vaccination rate of more than 80 per cent.

"An evaluation two years into the pandemic said the country had lower COVID case and death burdens and higher vaccination coverage than most other G10 countries," the authors said in a BMJ editorial summarizing their findings.

"But this overall impression of adequacy masks important inequalities by region, setting and demography."

A series of articles previously published in the BMJ about the U.K.'s COVID-19 response helped to inform an inquiry in that country, Straus said, so the authors are hoping the same will happen in Canada.

ESSENTIAL WORKERS AND MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES

It's important to look closely at who bore "the burden of the pandemic," Straus said.

Those people included essential workers making low wages and living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, she said.

One of the learnings Straus hopes will emerge from an inquiry into the COVID-19 response is how critical it is to "build relationships with the communities who are most likely to be involved in these health inequities before the next health emergency."

Those relationships can help ensure marginalized communities are included in research and that their needs are prioritized in public health outreach, she said.

LONG-TERM CARE FAILURES

An inquiry is needed to ensure "accountability for losses," including 53,000 deaths in Canada — many of those in long-term care, the authors said.

"A particular disgrace is Canada being at the top of wealthy nations for COVID-related deaths in care homes for older people, despite more than 100 reports foreshadowing a nursing home crisis," they wrote.

Those reports identified issues such as chronic underfunding in long-term care and a lack of sufficient support for staff, Straus said.

Some provincial governments are already walking back some of the measures they put in place to strengthen long-term care, she said, including sick benefits for staff. Straus also noted it's important to ensure long-term care homes don't use the four-bed rooms where COVID-19 and other illnesses can easily spread.

”We have a responsibility to those individuals who died to make sure that we do better by them ... so that it doesn’t happen again. We don’t want to risk the lives of more older adults and those who care for them,” Straus said.

REGIONAL DISPARITIES AND STAFFING SHORTAGES

A national inquiry should also include recommendations for "reforming Canada's healthcare and public health systems, which were struggling pre-pandemic and are currently on life support," the authors wrote.

COVID-19 resulted in "an exodus of exhausted and distressed healthcare workers," they wrote, noting that Canada has a "critical workforce shortage that is ongoing."

Canada's decentralized health-care system, with provinces and territories responsible for their own public health responses, contributed to inconsistent COVID-19 messaging and directives across the country, the BMJ articles said.

The Public Health Agency of Canada develops "national clinical and public health guidelines," but it "lacks the powers to direct provincial and territorial health agencies or other bodies with similar mandates to implement its recommendations," they said.

"Each province and territory devised its own interventions and timelines for protective measures such as school closures, border controls and closures, prohibition of gatherings, and masking requirements, leading to substantial variation in policy and practice across the country, widely varying hospital admission rates, and public confusion."

A key lesson from that, Straus said, is the need to be "explicit and transparent" about why there are different approaches in different regions.

Not being transparent about why public health decisions are made lead to "mistrust," she said.

Examining what went well and what went wrong in Canada's COVID-19 response through an independent inquiry is "essential," the authors wrote.

"Failing to look at the past will ensure an unchanged future. Undoubtedly, lessons can be drawn to inform new health investments and preparedness, and much learning comes from decisions and actions that failed or faltered," they wrote.

When asked to respond to the call for a national inquiry and the issues raised by the BMJ series, Guillaume Bertrand, press secretary for federal health minister Jean-Yves Duclos, said in an email that they are "committed to a review of the response to COVID-19 in order to take stock of lessons learned and to better inform preparations and responses to future health emergencies.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 24, 2023.

Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.

Nicole Ireland, The Canadian Press

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/07/experts-call-for-independent-inquiry.html

Hollywood uncertainties may raise demand for Canadian talent, observers suggest

The Canadian Press
Mon, July 24, 2023 



TORONTO — Twin Hollywood strikes that stalled U.S. film and TV production could raise demand for Canadian talent if the job action stretches beyond the summer.

Industry observers say that would largely depend on how long the work stoppages last and would pale in comparison to current job losses and broader disruption that’s almost certain to deepen with a long labour fight.

However, production delays appear to be behind NBC’s announcement last week to schedule the third season of CTV’s hospital drama “Transplant” on Thursdays this fall instead of “Law & Order: SVU,” as previously announced.

And the CEO of the Canadian network OutTV says more U.S. broadcasters could turn northward for content if the simultaneous writers and actors strikes continue into September.

Brad Danks says he hasn’t yet seen a big push by U.S. networks and streamers to stock up on foreign content, but he’s sure exploratory talks are underway.

Meanwhile, one prominent Toronto casting director says non-SAG Canadian actors could have an advantage at auditions as long as their unionized U.S. peers are off the job.

Stephanie Gorin says the uncertainty over whether and how U.S. actors can work in Canada contributed to an all-Canadian cast being hired for a new series she worked on recently.

Members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the Writers Guild of America are each striking over similar issues including compensation and guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence.

The labour action targets productions backed by members of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, including some shooting in Canada.

Canadian productions with Canadian casts and crew are able to continue working.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 24, 2023.

Cassandra Szklarski, The Canadian Press