Is Hothouse Earth Avoidable?

Nearly 50 years ago, the Club of Rome’s report “Limits to Growth” warned that if economic growth continued fast without regard for the environment, the world could face ecological and economic collapse in the twenty-first century. Yet that is essentially     21     has happened. As new research for the Club of Rome shows — and the latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states — the world     22     well be headed towards disaster.

Many wrongly     23    (interpret) the “Limits to Growth” as an attack on uncontrolled economic expansion. In fact, the report argued that     24     the unlimited-growth pathway was chosen, it would require complementary policies (including funding)     25     (preserve) the planet’s limited life-support systems.

This argument     26     (ignore). Instead, the world has continued to pursue fast growth, without regard for the environmental consequences. This has enabled us to make enormous progress in reducing poverty, increasing longevity, and increasing wealth.     27     it has come at a high cost to the formation of the society and the restoration of the planet.

As scientists have conclusively shown, in the last decade, we have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, in which human activity — in particular, economic activity — has been the dominant factor     28    (influence) Earth’s climate and environment. In the Anthropocene, our planet’s life-support system is changing faster than ever.

Climate change now represents a clear and present danger. If our planet becomes just 2°C warmer than pre-industrial temperatures, we may be placed irreversibly on the path toward “Hothouse Earth” — a situation     29     temperatures are many degrees warmer than today, sea levels are considerably higher, and extreme weather events are     30    (common) — and more destructive — than ever.

The Next Frontier: Using Thought to Control Machines

Technologies are often billed as transformative. For William Kochevar, the term is justified. Mr Kochevar is paralysed below the shoulders after a cycling accident, yet has managed to feed himself by his own hand. This     31     progress is partly thanks to electrodes, implanted in his right arm, which stimulate muscles. But the real magic lies higher up. Mr Kochevar can control his arm using the power of thought. His intention to move is     32     in neural(神经的) activity in his motor region; these signals are detected by implants in his brain and     33     into commands to activate the electrodes in his arms.

An ability to decode thought in this way may sound like science fiction. But brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) like the BrainGate system used by Mr Kochevar provide evidence that mind-control can work. Researchers are able to tell what words and images people have heard and seen from neural activity alone. Information can also be encoded and used to stimulate the brain. Over 300, 000 people have cochlear(耳蜗的) implants, which help them to hear by     34     sound into electrical signals and sending them into the brain. Scientists have “    35    ” data into monkeys heads, instructing them to perform actions via electrical pulses.

As our Technology Quarterly in this issue explains, the pace of research into BCIs and the scale of its ambition are     36    . Both America’s armed forces and Silicon Valley are starting to focus on the brain. Facebook dreams of thought-to-text     37    . Kernel, a startup, has $100m to spend on neurotechnology. Elon Musk has formed a firm called Neuralink; he thinks that, if humanity is to survive the arrival of artificial intelligence, it needs an upgrade. Entrepreneurs imagine a world in which people can communicate using thoughts, with each other and with machines, or acquire     38     abilities, such as hearing at very high frequencies.

These powers, if they ever materialise, are decades away. But well before then, BCIs could open the door to wonderful new     39    . Imagine stimulating the visual region to help the blind, making new neural    40     in stroke victims or monitoring the brain for signs of depression. By turning the firing of neurons into a resource to be used, BCIs may change the idea of what it means to be human.

How comfortable are you around water? Are you a strong swimmer or do you struggle to keep your head above water? Are you comfortable venturing into the deeper water or do you prefer to move into shallow water where the bottom is ____?

Most people expose themselves to water and swimming situations according to their ____ levels of skill and comfort. The same might be true as you assess your comfort level with different academic environments ____ a good college “fit”. Just as you might study a body of water to figure out its temperature, depth and current before venturing in, you need to ____ the difficulties, pace and depth of an academic environment —and your ability to keep your “head above water” if admitted—before deciding to apply.

When looking at academic difficulties as a(n) ____ of “fit”, you are likely to find that you have the capacity to “get the job done” academically in a range of college environments.____, you are not likely to have difficulty with the “water” itself. You will fit best, however, at colleges and universities where your ability and preparation enable you to rise to new levels of ____.

Your goal should be to find academic environments where your levels of ability and preparation will enable you to achieve well as you stretch yourself ____. These places represent appropriate “bodies of water” for you academically.

The best ____ of comprehension regarding your preparedness to meet the academic requirements of various colleges and universities are your high school teachers. Because they are very familiar with your capabilities, your teachers can offer ____ help in identifying the colleges where you will find the best academic programs for you.

Assuming you are able to find appropriate environments academically, you then need to assess the ____ of your school reports for admission to those colleges. How does your academic record (grades and test scores) pile up against those of other students who will be ____, most (about 90%) of whom are just like you in that they can do the work too?

You need to be honest in ____ this part of the picture, especially if you are considering colleges that can be highly selective and tend to admit very small percentages of the students who apply. A lot of students get in over their heads competitively when they fail to consider the real odds of gaining admission. While you might feel you are a ____ candidate at schools that can be very choosy, the reality is that you need to be in the top 25 percent of applicant pools at such schools to have a fighting chance of being admitted. By the way, you don’t ____ your chances of getting into at least one such school by applying to a dozen of them!

In 1888 an Egyptian farmer digging in the sand near the village of Istabl Antar uncovered a mass grave. The bodies weren’t human. They were feline — ancient cats that had been mummified(木乃伊化的) and buried in holes in astonishing numbers. “Not one or two here and there”, reported English Illustrated Magazine, “but dozens, hundreds, hundreds of thousands, a layer of them, a layer thicker than most coal joints, ten to twenty cats deep. ” Some of the linen-wrapped cats still looked presentable, and a few even had golden faces. Village children peddled the best ones to tourists for change; the rest were sold as fertilizer. One ship transported about 180,000, weighing some 38, 000 pounds, to Liverpool to be spread on the fields of England.

Those were the days of generously funded explorations—that dragged through acres of desert in their quest for royal tombs, and for splendid gold and painted masks to decorate the estates and museums of Europe and America. The many thousands of mummified animals that turned up at religious sites throughout Egypt were just things to be cleared away to get at the good stuff. Few people studied them, and their importance was generally unrecognized.

In the century since then, archaeology has become less of a treasure hunt and more of a science. Archaeologists now realize that much of their sites’ wealth lies in the majority of details about ordinary folks—what they did, what they thought, how they prayed. And animal mummies are a big part of that.

“They’re really displays of daily life,” says Egyptologist Salima Ikram. After peering beneath bandages with x-rays and cataloguing her findings, she created a gallery for the collection — a bridge between people today and those of long ago. “You look at these mummified animals, and suddenly you say, Oh, King So-and-So had a pet. I have a pet. And instead of being at a distance of 5,000-plus years, the ancient Egyptians become clearer and closer to us.”

● Stocky, slow-moving whale, rarely grows beyond 15 metres in length

● Flippers are a third of body length; variable dorsal fin size and shape; saw-toothed trailing edge on flukes, often raised when diving

● Bumpy tubercles on top of head

● Body colour is dark brown to black; often extensive white on flippers and underside of body and flukes; such patterns enable individual recognition

● Bushy blow, occasionally V-shaped

● 270-400 olive baleen plates

Humpback whales belong to the rorqual (groove-throated) family, which includes fin, sei, Bryde’s, minke and blue whales. The big family migrate between winter tropical breeding areas (North West Shelf, Great Barrier Reef, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiii, Tonga) and summer Antarctic feeding areas. Once common in New Zealand waters, humpbacks are now rarely seen and may migrate further offshore. Males compete for mates either by physical fight or by song. Females give birth to their young every two to three years; some non-breeding females probably remain in the southern waters during winter. Young humpback whales return to their area of birth but in later life some wander between breeding areas. Humpbacks eat small shrimps and other schooling prey, such as fish, forming small, cooperative groups of two to three individuals to feed.

Similar species: Easily identifiable due to a ‘hump’ back when submerging, but at a distance may be confused with other species that raise their flukes when diving, such as sperm, right and blue whales.

Protection status: Recovering well from past whaling and now numerous in some former migration and aggregation areas, rarely seen in others.

Right now, I am looking at a shelf full of relics, a collection of has-beens, old-timers, antiques, fossils. Right now, I am looking at a shelf full of books. Yes, that’s right. If you have some spare cash (the going rate is about $89) and you are looking to enhance your reading experience, then I highly suggest you consider purchasing an e-reader. E-readers are replacing the books of old and I welcome them with open arms (as you should).

An e-reader is a device that allows you to read e-books. An e-book is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images or both, and produced on, published through and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital. The Oxford Dictionary of English defines the e-book as “an electronic version of a printed book”, but e-books can and do exist without any printed equivalent.

E-readers put printed books to shame. E-readers are superior to printed books because they save space, are environmentally friendly and provide helpful reading tips and tools that printed books do not.

The average e-reader can store thousands of digital books, providing a genuine library at your fingertips. What is more, the e-reader itself is very small. It is easy to hold and can fit in a pocketbook or briefcase easily. This makes handling wooden giant such as War and Peace and Anna Karenina a breeze. Perhaps the only drawback to the space-saving aspect of an e-reader is that it requires you to find new things to put on your shelves.

In addition, e-readers are environmentally friendly. The average novel is about 300 pages long. So, if a novel is printed 1000 times, it will use 300,000 pieces of paper. That’s a lot of paper! And for the super bestsellers, these figures increase dramatically. For example, the Harry Potter book series has sold over 450 million copies. That’s about 2 million trees! Upon viewing these figures, it is not hard to grasp the severe impact of printed books on the environment. Since e-readers use no trees, they represent a significant amount of preservation in terms of the environment and its resources.

Finally, e-readers provide helpful reading tips and tools that printed books do not. The typical e-reader allows its user to adjust letter size, letterform and line spacing. It also allows highlighting and electronic bookmarking.

Furthermore, it grants users the ability to get an overview of a book and then jump to a specific location based on that overview. While these are all nice features, perhaps the most helpful of all is the ability to get dictionary definitions at the touch of a finger. On even the most basic e-reader, users can find instant definitions without having to hunt through a physical dictionary.

It can be seen that e-readers are superior to printed books. They save space, are environmentally friendly and provide helpful reading tips and tools that printed books do not. So what good are printed books? Well, they certainly make nice decorations.

Sustainable Cities Need More Than Parks, Cafes and a Riverwalk

There are many standards that aim to rank how green cities are. But what does it actually mean for a city to be green or sustainable?

We’ve written about what we call the “parks, cafes and a riverwalk” model of sustainability, which focuses on providing new green spaces, mainly for high-income people. This vision of shiny residential towers and waterfront parks has become a widely-shared conception of what green cities should look like.     67    

Gentrification(住宅高档化) has become a catch-all term used to describe neighborhood change, and is often misunderstood as the only path to neighborhood improvement. In fact, its defining feature is displacement. Typically, people who move into these changing neighborhoods are wealthier and more educated than residents who are displaced.

A recent flood of new research has focused on the displacement effects of environmental cleanup and green space initiatives.     68    

Land for new development and resources to fund extensive cleanup of poisonous sites are scarce in many cities.     69     And in neighborhoods where gentrification has already begun, a new park or farmers market can worsen the problem by making the area even more attractive to potential high-income people and pricing out long-term residents. In some cases, developers even create temporary community gardens or farmers markets or promise more green space than they eventually deliver, in order to market a neighborhood to buyers looking for green pleasantness.

    70     It makes deindustrialization seem both inevitable and desirable, often by quite literally replacing industry with more natural-looking landscapes. When these neighborhoods are finally cleaned up, after years of activism by longtime residents, those advocates often are unable to stay and enjoy the benefits of their efforts.

Desertification

Desertification is one of the world’s most alarming processes of environmental degradation(退化). The issue is often unclear, however, by a common misperception: that it’s a “natural” problem of advancing deserts in faraway developing countries. In fact, desertification is about land degradation: the loss of the land’s biological productivity, caused by man-made factors and climate change.

Each year, desertification and drought cause an estimated $42 billion in lost agricultural production. The risks of desertification are sufficient and clear. It contributes to food insecurity, hunger and poverty, and can give rise to social, economic and political tensions that can cause conflicts, further poverty and land degradation. The great urgency of this challenge led the United Nations General Assembly to state 2006 to be the International Year of Deserts and Desertification (IYDD). It is a strong reminder of the urgent need to address the far-reaching implications of this problem. United Nations General Secretary recently summarizes in this way: “I look forward to working with Governments, civil society, the private section, international organizations and others to focus attention on this crucial issue, and to reverse the trend of desertification and set the world on a safer, more sustainable path of development.”

The IYDD also presents a golden opportunity to get the message across strongly and effectively that desertification is a global problem which we ignore at our risk. It is important to recognize that dry-lands are home to some of the most magnificent ecosystems of this world. These unique natural habitats have been home to some of the world’s oldest civilizations. They stand like open-air museums, bearing witness to bygone eras. The Year will therefore also celebrate the delicate beauty and unique inheritance of the world’s deserts.