At COP29, The World’s Top Polluters Are No-Shows

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. Later in the hour, a medical historian breaks down the gurgling, growling history of the gut and how our understanding of it has evolved over time. Plus, a newly discovered fossil could help us understand how bird brains evolved. But first, the UN’s International Climate Conference, known as COP29, got underway this week in Azerbaijan.

We’ve talked about this conference on the show before, where leaders from around the world come together to find ways to lower emissions and coordinate financial efforts. And a big focus this year was to negotiate a deal for wealthier countries to financially compensate developing nations who’ve gone through climate change-related damage. The only problem is that world leaders from the top-polluting countries, like the US and China, aren’t showing up.

Here to explain more and give us an update on other science stories from this week is Umair Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox, based in Washington, DC. Welcome back, Umair.

UMAIR IRFAN: Hey, Ira. Thanks for having me back.

IRA FLATOW: So what’s going on with COP29 this year? Why aren’t the US and China in the room where it happens?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, as you noted, it is getting off to a subdued start. Part of it is just that, I think, expectations are a bit lower for this conference, that while others had really high-agenda items, this one does seem to be a little bit more in the weeds. But there are also a whole lot of other world events going on that other leaders are distracted by.

Next week, the G20 summit, where the top 20 largest economies in the world are supposed to meet in Brazil. And so many world leaders have decided to prioritize that. The United States, as you may recall, just also went through a presidential election, where we’re likely to see some big changes in our international climate policy. And so this has been something of a lower-profile event for a lot of diplomats.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, yeah. Can you remind us of the types of deals made at past conferences?

UMAIR IRFAN: Right. Well, this is where, as you noted, where countries hash out the details of their plans to address climate change. So the big things are laying out commitments, that basically going out and publicly putting a stake down and saying that this is exactly what we plan to do to mitigate climate change, here’s how we plan to do it, here’s how much we’re going to invest.

And that sort of creates this sort of public accountability measure. And then from there, what countries also do is come up with ways with how they’re going to pay for it, pay for their own mitigation measures, but also to help the countries that contributed the least to climate change, the ones who are the low-emitters but are also already facing the effects of rising temperatures, sea level rise, and so on.

This latter part, the money aspect of it, has always been a really thorny discussion topic. And this year at this year’s COP, they struggled just to get the agenda agreed to because they were going to talk so much about money. And they finally got that through. But it’s likely to be something that they’re going to be arguing about for much of the conference as it stretches through next week.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. OK, let’s move on to space news, something really cool. Scientists learned that we’ve probably got an inaccurate picture of Uranus when Voyager 2 flew past it in 1986. What’s that about?

UMAIR IRFAN: Right. When Voyager 2 was passing the planet, it got a really strange snapshot of the planet. It noticed that the protective magnetic field around Uranus was actually devoid of plasma and was much smaller than it was expected to be when it’s found around other planets. And so scientists for a long time were very puzzled by this, that what is it about Uranus that leads to these strange electromagnetic phenomenon that’s different from other planets?

But this week, scientists released a study that found that we actually caught the planet with Voyager 2 at a very unique time in its history, and it was during what they said was a big increase in solar activity. The planet was actually at that moment getting walloped by wind from the sun, basically a phenomenon what’s called a co-rotating interaction region. This plasma from the sun, this burst of activity was sweeping out into space, and it was hammering the magnetosphere around Uranus.

And that led to the depletion of plasma around the planet. And it was pretty surprising that scientists had not considered that this mechanism was at work before.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, so I guess next time we do a quick flyby of a planet, they’re going to have to pay a little more attention to what the sun’s doing at that time.

UMAIR IRFAN: Exactly, yes. NASA is planning to launch another spacecraft in 2032 towards Uranus. And also, as they study other planets, they’re going to have to keep in mind that anytime they take a snapshot, that it’s just a snapshot in time, and that planets can actually undergo some pretty big changes very quickly.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, that’s what science is all about, isn’t it?

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah learning the hard way.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, that snapshot in time. OK, next, we’ve got a bit of a worrying statistic. And I mean, alcohol consumption is up this year. It seems like that side effect from COVID is still sticking around, perhaps?

UMAIR IRFAN: That does seem to be the case, that, in the United States, we saw a fairly moderate decline in alcohol consumption throughout much of the 20th century. Then, we saw a slight uptick starting to begin in the ’90s. And then, at the start of COVID, there was a pretty big spike in alcohol consumption. The rate of alcohol-related deaths in 2020 had risen almost 25% compared to the year before.

That’s for what scientists think is for a lot of the obvious reasons– people were cooped up at home, people had lost their jobs, and people were just drinking to cope with the stress. But since a lot of the pandemic restrictions have lifted, that high level of alcohol consumption has remained, and has, in fact, continued to climb upwards. We’ve seen in past periods of intense stress, like after 9/11 or after hurricanes like Katrina, we saw alcohol consumption go up and then go back down.

But the sustained level of high consumption here is a bit worrying, and scientists are trying to tease apart why. One idea is that alcohol is, in fact, addictive, that high levels of consumption can lead to persistent levels of consumption. But there may be other factors as well, that things like access to behavioral health services may have gone down during the pandemic and may never have been restored.

And so a lot of people who are trying to curb their own alcohol use have not found the resources that they need to be able to do so.

IRA FLATOW: Gotcha. For our next story, a team of scientists found Amber in one of my favorite places, Antarctica. It seems like the last place you’d find amber, right?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, yeah. I mean, typically, when we study the past in Antarctica, scientists look at ice cores and they look at sediment samples. But while looking at a sediment core about 3,000 feet below the Amundsen sea in West Antarctica, they found a chunk of amber. And amber is a really interesting way to get a snapshot into the past because not only does it trap air and particles, it tends to trap pieces of living organisms and sometimes even entire living organisms.

So it gives you a really interesting window into what was alive during that period of time. Now, this chunk of amber was dated to roughly 90 million years ago. So this is during the Cretaceous period. So this is when dinosaurs were on the Earth, but also when the continents were in slightly different positions. Parts of Antarctica were further north. But that doesn’t necessarily explain why there were trees there on their own.

Now, we do see evidence that Antarctica had forests before, but it was also still very far south. And what scientists theorize is that part of the mechanism here is that the forests actually helped the continent absorb more heat. Ice tends to reflect sunlight back into space and keep things cool, but this layer of forest cover actually kind of reversed that trend and helped generate its own ecosystem that kept it viable for forest growth.

IRA FLATOW: Well, that is interesting. I remember when they found coal in Antarctica a while back.

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, it turns out that it was a lot more biologically productive than it looks right now and may have looked very different. It wasn’t always this frozen landscape that we see today.

IRA FLATOW: Continental drift. All right. Sticking with some cool nature finds, it looks like the world’s largest organism might also be its oldest. How big, how old are we talking about here?

UMAIR IRFAN: This is a organism called Pando. It is a quaking Aspen. This is actually not a tree, but a system of trees that are genetically identical. It spans more than 100 acres in Utah. It reproduces through cloning itself. And while at the surface it looks like 47,000 distinct trees, below the ground, it’s actually interconnected. And for a long time, scientists have said that this is basically considered to be the world’s largest organism. It’s also the heaviest.

And now, they have evidence that it’s also the oldest. Because it reproduces by making shoots of itself, looking at the tree rings themselves doesn’t tell the whole story, because some of those trees are going to be much younger, some are going to be much older. And so what scientists did was they investigated a lake bed near Pando, and they found pollen there in the soil, sediment samples, and looked at samples going back up to 60,000 years.

And they found that Pando might actually be about 16,000 years old, basically around the end of the last Ice Age, when glaciers began to retreat in that area.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. So if you go there, you see a forest, but they’re all connected underground through some sort of root system, or it’s one big thing?

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, exactly. And part of what’s remarkable here is that these trees are genetically identical. And so for 16,000 years, this organism has been able to reproduce and send its trees up without making very many mistakes in doing so. That having being alive and being able to make that many copies of yourself and do so very close to perfectly is something pretty remarkable. We struggle to do as humans. That’s part of why we get cancer.

So figuring out how this organism was able to preserve its genome for such a long time could yield some really important findings that could benefit us.

IRA FLATOW: All right. And let’s wrap this up with this story. There’s a new genetic test that could help detect some hard-to-diagnose infections. Tell us about that.

UMAIR IRFAN: Right. Researchers at the University of California San Francisco this week put out a couple of studies looking at ways that they could analyze DNA and RNA from patients and try to figure out what is causing diseases. The traditional way that we diagnose infections is by looking at proteins and other related substances that are produced by infections or by our immune system’s response to them.

But sometimes when you do those tests, they come up blank, and it’s hard to diagnose exactly what is causing that problem. And so scientists theorized that what if you could just take a sample of biofluids and just try to analyze every bit of genetic material that’s in there? And they found out that, yeah, that’s actually something that’s useful. They were able to, looking at spinal fluid, able to diagnose 86% of neurological infections in a samples that they gathered over a seven-year period, looking at about 4,800 samples.

And they also found that by looking at the genetic material, they could also figure out when there’s a new pathogen, that potentially even detect new viruses when they see some genetic material that doesn’t line up with anything in their databases. This is obviously going to be a very slow, expensive way to run a test, and so probably not going to be a front-line diagnostic.

But when it comes to really hard-to-treat cases or when other infections have got doctors stumped, this could be a very useful backstop.

IRA FLATOW: Cool. Cool stuff as always, Umair. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

UMAIR IRFAN: My pleasure. Thank you for having me, Ira.

IRA FLATOW: Umair Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox, based in Washington, DC.

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