The report sparked outrage and applause when it was published in 1972.Image credit: santoelia/Shutterstock.com
When researchers revisited a damning report from the early 1970s that predicted global collapse within the coming century, they reached a worrying conclusion: their decades-old data was proving to be surprisingly accurate. Worse still, the planet was still heading down the same path with little sign of change on the horizon.
In 1972, a team of scientists from MIT used a computer model to look into the future of humanity after receiving a commission from the Club of Rome, an international group of leading academics, scientists, business leaders, and politicians.
Outdoor workers are vulnerable to prolonged heat waves like the one hitting Texas, which climate scientists warn are becoming more common.
David J. Phillip/AP
If there’s one kind of weather extreme that scientists clearly link to climate change, it’s worsening heat waves.
“They are getting hotter,” says Kai Kornhuber, adjunct scientist at Columbia University and scientist at Climate Analytics, a climate think tank. “They are occurring at a higher frequency, so that also increases the likelihood of sequential heat waves.”
In Texas, the Southern U.S. and Mexico, athree-week heat wavehas gripped the region with temperature records falling for days in a row. Extreme heat has also hit India, China and Canada, where widespread wildfires are burning.
“Most of the world’s population has experienced record-breaking heat in recent days,” says Daniel Swain, climate scientist at the University of California, Los…
Controversial new lab-grown meat has been slammed by nutritionists and farmers skeptical of its nutritional value — and whether it should even be labeled beef or chicken.
The US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration have given the green light to two companies, UPSIDE Foods and GOOD Meat, to sell their products — which are cultivated in a lab rather than coming from slaughtered animals — in the US.
The meat is created from live stem cells taken from the muscle and skin…
Tegmark is a professor doing AI research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
We know that an all-out U.S.-Russia nuclear war would be bad. But how bad, exactly? How do your chances of surviving the explosions, radiation, and nuclear winter depend on where you live? The past year’s unprecedented nuclear saber-rattling and last weekend’s chaos in Russia has made this question timely. To help answer it, I’ve worked with an amazing interdisciplinary group of scientists (see end credits) to produce the most scientifically realistic simulation of a nuclear war using only unclassified data, and visualize it as avideo. It combines detailed modeling of nuclear targeting, missile trajectories, blasts and the electromagnetic pulse, and of how black carbon smoke…
INDIANAPOLIS —Wildfire smoke blowing from Canadais causing low visibility in central Indiana and across much of the country. But the haze is the least of the problems, as the unhealthy levels of pollution can cause serious health impacts.
The good news is there are several ways to protect yourself and your family from some of the negative effects of the smoke.
But first, you need to understand the problem and why it is so hazy in Indiana.
Smoke is made of tiny particles of soot, carried in the air. It’s their size that makes them a problem. For a sense of scale, your average grain of sand is about 90 microns in diameter.
Forecasters say the only break much of America can hope for anytime soon from eye-watering dangerous smoke from fire-struck Canada is brief bouts of shirt-soaking sweltering heat and humidity.
These satellite images were taken on (from top left) June 6, June 7, June 25, and June 27, 2023. They show the wind movement from wildfire smoke in Quebec, Canada.Uncredited / AP
The only break much of America can hope for anytime soon from eye-watering dangerous smoke from fire-struck Canada is brief bouts of shirt-soaking sweltering heat and humidity from a southern heat wave that has already proven deadly, forecasters say.
And then the smoke will likely come back to the Midwest and East.
That’s because neither the 235 out-of-control Canadian wildfires nor the stuck weather pattern that’s responsible for this mess of meteorological maladies are showing signs of relenting for the next week or longer, according to…
Editor’s Note:Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 25 books, including the New York Times best-seller, “Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past” (Basic Books). Follow him on Twitter@julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Viewmore opinionon CNN.
People in vast swathes of America are breathing in thesmoky airfrom Canada’s record-breaking wildfires.Residentsof Chicago, Detroit and other areas in the Great Lakes regionwokeup to poor air qualitythis week. They are experiencing theunsettling fogthat New Yorkers lived through…
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 9.37 billion eggs were produced in May, up 4% from last year. David Silverman via Getty Images
First published on
Dive Brief
U.S. egg production numbers are on the rise, signaling a rebuild after bird flu decimated commercial flocks last year and sent prices skyrocketing.
A total of 9.37 billion eggs were produced in May, up 4% from last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Egg production levels were down as much as 6% earlier this year, but started to show signs of improvement in April.
Highly pathogenic avian influenza, a contagious disease often fatal to birds, has affected 325 U.S. commercial poultry flocks over the past year, but only seven cases have been reported since March. No cases were reported in the past 30 days.
Dive Insight
HPAI, often spread by migratory birds, affected more than 58 million commercial and wild birds in the past year, the country’s worst outbreak on record, according to USDA data. As cases spread, supplies tightened and prices soared, especially for eggs.
U.S. egg inventories were down 29% in December compared to the start of 2022. More than 43 million egg-laying hens died from disease or depopulation efforts last year. Wholesale egg prices surged 267% on increased holiday demand. They have since decreased as flocks are rebuilt and farmers adopt biosecurity measures as HPAI preventative.
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After last year’s outbreak, Brian Earnest, lead economist, animal protein at CoBank, said he anticipated HPAI to be a year-round issue in 2023 with a lingering expectation that it would be back in full force, but “that does not seem to be the case.”
Instead, the rate of infection among domestic commercial poultry flocks has significantly weakened, according to USDA data. No U.S. cases have been reported among egg-laying birds since December.
“It appears that maybe commercial flocks are growing some immunity to it,” Earnest said.
Two cultivated-meat companies can now sell their lab-grown chicken products in the U.S. But what does it taste like? Is it more ethical? And is this the end of factory farming as we know it?
Two cultivated-meat companies — Eat Just and Upside Foods — recently got full approvals from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to sell their lab-grown chicken products in the U.S. The federal green light comes months after both companies obtained confirmation from the Food and Drug Administration that their cell-cultivated meat was safe for human consumption.
Both companies are starting small, so it will be a while before you can buy their products at the grocery store. Upside Foods plans to sell its cultivated chicken to a San Francisco restaurant called Bar Crenn, while Eat Just’s brand, Good Meats, is collaborating with a Washington, D.C., restaurant owned by the celebrity chef and restaurateur Jose Andrés.
To better understand how cultivated meat could impact the meat industry, Yahoo News spoke with Bill Winders, a sociology professor specializing in food and agriculture at Georgia Tech and co-editor of “Global Meat: Social and Environmental Consequences of the Expanding Meat Industry.” Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Yahoo News: How will this change the way we eat meat — and food in general?
Bill Winders: I don’t think that it’s going to change that much about the way that we eat meat or food in general, in part because initially, it’ll be a really small contribution to meat production overall in the United States. In 2021, we produced about 21 million metric tons of chicken. That’s about 46 billion pounds of chicken in that one year. So Upside Foods, whatever they produce over the next year or five years — or even the next decade — is not going to be that significant in view of the overall meat industry.
What about in the long term? Is this the beginning of the end of factory farming as we know it?
From 2014 until today, the consumption and marketing of plant-based meat alternatives like Impossible and Beyond Meat has increased significantly. But it hasn’t changed meat production patterns. In fact, the big meat companies, like Tyson and others, actually got into plant-based meat. Part of that is because they saw that plant-based meats were a niche market that was profitable, and so they got into that market and made sure, essentially, that wasn’t going to interfere with the profits that they were making in traditional factory farming.
So I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same thing happen with cultivated meat — that once it becomes profitable and there’s a market niche for it, the big meat companies would get in on it as well. And in some ways, that can help to guard against those alternatives: like cultivated and plant-based meat impinging on what big meat companies really find their profits in — which is traditional or factory-farm industrial meat production.
Cultivation tanks at the Upside Foods plant, where lab-grown meat is cultivated, in Emeryville, Calif., on Jan. 11. (Peter DaSilva/Reuters/File Photo)
So could cell-cultivated meat be in competition with plant-based meat alternatives, like Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat?
Plant-based meats have increased faster than I think the lab-grown meats will. Plant-based meats use pea protein or soy, and there’s lots of soybeans and other field crops that can be used for those purposes, so it was much easier for them to scale up to production relatively quickly. But lab-grown meats have the added complication that the process to produce lab-grown meat is very expensive. And it’s a very capital- and technology-intensive process, in a way that the plant alternatives are not.
Does lab-grown meat taste different from traditional meat? Is it any more or less nutritious?
I’ve never tried lab-grown meat, but my understanding is that it tastes relatively the same. What I’ve read is that sometimes the color is maybe a little bit paler, a little bit different from traditionally produced meat. But otherwise, in terms of nutrition and in terms of taste, I think that it’s almost indiscernible.
Will there be regulations around disclaiming that chicken is lab-grown? Or could I be served cell-cultivated chicken at a restaurant and not even know it?
The recent USDA ruling was that lab-grown chicken will be labeled as “cell-cultivated.” So once it hits stores, when consumers go to the meat department at a grocery store and they’re looking at different meats, if they see one that’s labeled “cell-cultivated,” then it’s lab-grown.
But I don’t know how that ruling affects restaurants serving it. I assume that since it’s hitting restaurants first, and there are chefs that are teaming up with different companies like Upside Foods to sell lab-grown chicken in their restaurants, that they’re going to advertise it, because they want people to know that they can eat this lab-grown meat.
Cultivated chicken breast created at the Upside Foods plant. (Peter DaSilva/Reuters/File Photo)
For people who don’t eat meat for ethical reasons, could cultivated meat be considered a more ethical alternative?
It’s complicated. Certainly for people who are vegetarian or vegan for ethical reasons that involve how the animals are raised and the fact that they’re slaughtered, lab-grown meat would appear to get around those kinds of issues, because there’s no slaughtering involved, and the animals aren’t raised in small cages. However, for many vegetarians and vegans, it’s the consuming of animals that’s really the issue, so I expect that lab-grown meat won’t be appealing.
I think the bigger appeal may be for people who eat meat and may be aware of the issues of inhumane treatment or may be conflicted about the slaughtering of animals when they think about it. This may be a way to be able to continue the same dietary choices that they’ve made without having that inhumane treatment or other violence toward animals.
Can cultivated meat help solve some of the bigger problems facing us today, like world hunger or the environmental impact of factory farming?
In terms of world hunger, it’s really difficult to imagine a situation in which lab-grown meat would alleviate world hunger or would increase access to meat, in part because it’s going to be expensive for the foreseeable future. I think that lab-grown meat, initially, it’s really clear how it’s geared toward a niche market that’s really upscale in the United States, because it’s centered in San Francisco, it’s centered in particular restaurants with popular chefs, and I haven’t heard any proponents of lab-grown meat suggest that it would have those effects.
Environmentally, it’s not clear how much energy cultivated-meat production is going to use versus industrial meat production. There may be environmental trade-offs. The methane that’s produced and the CO2 emissions from industrial meat productions are quite large, and eliminating those or reducing those will benefit the environment a lot, but we do need to take a moment to consider how much energy and emissions will be produced with lab-grown meats.
Share on email (opens in new window)https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ACRpR/Data: Global Forest Watch/World Resources Institute; Note: Includes countries with at least 1 Mha of tropical primary forest in 2001; Map: Alice Feng/Axios
Despite global commitments to halt the loss of tropical forests, the world lost 10% more primary rainforest in 2022 than it did the year before.
Why it matters: The world’s tropical rainforests are a vast terrestrial carbon sink, but they are in jeopardy from logging, agricultural expansion and the effects of climate change, which is altering precipitation patterns.
Tropical rainforests are also a cradle of biodiversity.
Zoom in: New data released Tuesday morning from the University of Maryland (viewable in detail via the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch platform), shows the world lost 4.1 million hectares, or about 10 million acres, of primary rainforest in 2022.
Primary forests refer to mature forests in the tropics.
A WRI analysis shows that this amount of forest loss emitted 2.7 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, roughly equal to India’s annual fossil fuel emissions.
The intrigue: Primary forest loss was higher last year than in 2021 in Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which dominate the globe in primary forest coverage.
While Brazil had the highest loss of rainforest globally, greater increases in loss rates were seen elsewhere, such as Ghana and Bolivia.
Indonesia has limited forest loss rates significantly, compared with a few years ago, the data shows.
What they’re saying: “The 2022 numbers are particularly disheartening,” said Francis Seymour, a senior fellow at WRI. “Following the bold commitments in Glasgow… We had hoped by now to see a signal that we were turning the corner on forest loss,” she said during a press call.
“We’re headed in the wrong direction.”
The bottom line: Voluntary commitments aren’t sufficient to keep rainforests intact.
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Share on email (opens in new window)https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ACRpR/Data: Global Forest Watch/World Resources Institute; Note: Includes countries with at least 1 Mha of tropical primary forest in 2001; Map: Alice Feng/Axios
Despite global commitments to halt the loss of tropical forests, the world lost 10% more primary rainforest in 2022 than it did the year before.
Why it matters: The world’s tropical rainforests are a vast terrestrial carbon sink, but they are in jeopardy from logging, agricultural expansion and the effects of climate change, which is altering precipitation patterns.
Tropical rainforests are also a cradle of biodiversity.
Zoom in: New data released Tuesday morning from the University of Maryland (viewable in detail via the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch platform), shows the world lost 4.1 million hectares, or about 10 million acres, of primary rainforest in 2022.
Primary forests refer to mature forests in the tropics.
A WRI analysis shows that this amount of forest loss emitted 2.7 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, roughly equal to India’s annual fossil fuel emissions.
The intrigue: Primary forest loss was higher last year than in 2021 in Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which dominate the globe in primary forest coverage.
While Brazil had the highest loss of rainforest globally, greater increases in loss rates were seen elsewhere, such as Ghana and Bolivia.
Indonesia has limited forest loss rates significantly, compared with a few years ago, the data shows.
What they’re saying: “The 2022 numbers are particularly disheartening,” said Francis Seymour, a senior fellow at WRI. “Following the bold commitments in Glasgow… We had hoped by now to see a signal that we were turning the corner on forest loss,” she said during a press call.
“We’re headed in the wrong direction.”
The bottom line: Voluntary commitments aren’t sufficient to keep rainforests intact.
PublishedJune 28, 2023
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