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A More Sustainable Path to 2050

Science shows us a clear path to 2050 in which both nature and 10 billion people can thrive together.

August 30, 2019

Written for The Nature Conservancy Magazine Fall 2019 issue by Heather Tallis, former lead scientist for TNC.

A few years ago The Nature Conservancy began a process of reassessing its vision and goals for prioritizing its work around the globe. The resulting statement called for a world where “nature and people thrive, and people act to conserve nature for its own sake and its ability to fulfill and enrich our lives.”

That sounds like a sweet future, but if you’re a scientist, like I am, you immediately start to wonder what that statement means in a practical sense. Could we actually get there? Is it even possible for people and nature to thrive together?

Our leaders had the same question. In fact, when the vision statement was first presented at a board meeting, our president leaned over and asked me if we had the science to support it.

“No,” I said. “But we can try to figure it out.”

There is a way to sustain nature and 10 billion people.

Explore the path to a better world. Just 3 changes yield an entirely different future.

Ultimately, I assembled a collaborative team of researchers to take a hard look at whether it really is possible to do better for both people and nature: Can we have a future where people get the food, energy and economic growth they need without sacrificing more nature?

Modeling the Status Quo: What the World Will Look Like in 2050

Working with peers at the University of Minnesota and 11 other universities, think tanks and nonprofits, we started by looking into what experts predict the world will look like in 2050 in terms of population growth and economic expansion. The most credible projections estimate that human population will increase from about 7 billion people today to 9.7 billion by 2050, and the global economy will be three times as large as it is today.

Our next step was to create a set of mathematical models analyzing how that growth will influence demand for food, energy and water.

We first asked how nature will be doing in 2050 if we just keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them. To answer this, we assumed that expanding croplands and pastures would be carved out of natural lands, the way they are today. And we didn’t put any new restrictions on the burning of fossil fuels. We called this the “business as usual” scenario. It’s the path we’re on today. On this current path, most of the world’s energy—about 76%—will come from burning fossil fuels. This will push the Earth’s average temperature up by about 5.8 degrees Fahrenheit, driving more severe weather, droughts, fires and other destructive patterns. That dirty energy also will expose half of the global population to dangerous levels of air pollution.

Dig into the Research

Explore the models behind the two paths to 2050 and download the published findings.

We first asked how nature will be doing in 2050 if we just keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them.

Meanwhile, the total amount of cropland will increase by about the size of the state of Colorado. Farms will also suffer from increasing water stress—meaning, simply, there won’t be enough water to easily supply agricultural needs and meet the water requirements of nearby cities, towns and wildlife.

In this business-as-usual scenario, fishing worldwide is left to its own devices and there are no additional measures in place to protect nature beyond what we have today. As a result, annual fish catches decline by 11% as fisheries are pushed to the brink by unsustainable practices. On land, we end up losing 257 million more hectares (about 10 Colorados) of our native forests and grasslands. Freshwater systems suffer, too, as droughts and water consumption, especially for agriculture, increase.

Overall, the 2050 predicted by this business-as-usual model is a world of scarcity, where neither nature nor people are thriving. The future is pretty grim under this scenario—it’s certainly not a world that any of us would want to live in.

We wanted to know, “does it really have to be this way?”

Modeling a More Sustainable 2050

Next, we used our model to test whether predicted growth by 2050 really requires such an outcome. In this version of the future, we allowed the global economy and the population to grow in exactly the same manner, but we adjusted variables to include more sustainability measures.

The 2050 predicted by the business-as-usual model is a world of scarcity, where neither nature nor people are thriving. The future is pretty grim under this scenario—it’s certainly not a world that any of us would want to live in.

We didn’t go crazy with the sustainability scenario. We didn’t assume that everyone was going to become a vegan or start driving hydrogen cell cars tomorrow. Instead, the model allowed people to continue doing the basic things we’re doing today, but to do them a little differently and to adopt some green technologies that already exist a little bit faster.

In this sustainable future, we limited global warming to 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit, which would force societies to reduce fossil fuel consumption to just 13% of total energy production. That means quickly adopting clean energy, which will increase the amount of land needed for wind, solar and other renewable energy development. But many of the new wind and solar plants can be built on land that has already been developed or degraded, such as rooftops and abandoned farm fields. This will help reduce the pressure to develop new energy sources in natural areas.

We also plotted out some changes in how food is produced. We assumed each country would still grow the same basic suite of crops, but to conserve water, fertilizer and land, we assumed that those crops would be planted in the growing regions where they are most suited. For example, in the United States we wouldn’t grow as much cotton in Arizona’s deserts or plant thirsty alfalfa in the driest parts of California’s San Joaquin Valley. We also assumed that successful fishery policies in use in some places today could be implemented all over the world.

Under this sustainability scenario, we required that countries meet the target of protecting 17% of each ecoregion, as set by the Convention on Biological Diversity. Only about half that much is likely to be protected under the business-as-usual scenario, so this is a direct win for nature.

What 2050 Could Look Like

The difference in this path to 2050 was striking. The number of additional people who will be exposed to dangerous levels of air pollution declines to just 7% of the planet’s population, or 656 million, compared with half the global population, or 4.85 billion people, in our business-as-usual scenario. Air pollution is already one of the top killers globally, so reducing this health risk is a big deal. Limiting climate change also reduces water scarcity and the frequency of destructive storms and wildfires, while staving off the projected widespread loss of plant and animal species (including my son’s favorite animal, the pika, that’s already losing its mountain habitat because of climate change).

In the sustainability scenario we still produce enough food for humanity, but we need less land and water to do it. So the total amount of land under agricultural production actually decreases by seven times the area of Colorado, and the number of cropland acres located in water-stressed basins declines by 30% compared with business as usual. Finally, we see a 26% increase in fish landings compared to 2010, once all fisheries are properly managed.

Although the land needed for wind and solar installations does grow substantially, we still keep over half of nearly all the world’s habitat types intact, and despite growth in cities, food production and energy needs, we end up with much more of the Earth’s surface left for nature than we would under the business-as-usual scenario.

Our modeling research let us answer our question. Yes, a world where people and nature thrive is entirely possible. But it’s not inevitable. Reaching this sustainable future will take hard work—and we need to get started immediately.

3 Sustainable Changes To Make Now

That’s where organizations like TNC come in. The Conservancy is working on strategies with governments and businesses to adopt sustainable measures, providing near- and long-term benefits to society as a whole. Our research shows there’s at least one path to a more sustainable world in 2050, and that major advances can be made if all parts of society focus their efforts on three changes.

First, we need to ramp up clean energy and site it on lands that have already been developed or degraded. In the Mojave Desert, for instance, TNC has identified some 1.4 million acres of former ranchlands, mines and other degraded areas that would be ideal for solar development. We need to do much more to remove the policy and economic barriers that still make a transition to clean energy hard. Technology is no longer the major limiting factor. We are.

The most critical action each of us can take is to support global leaders who have a plan for stopping climate change in our lifetimes.

Second, we need to grow more food using less land and water. One way to do that is by raising crops in places that are best suited for them. The Conservancy has been piloting this, too. In Arizona, TNC partnered with local farmers in the Verde River Valley to help them switch from growing thirsty crops like alfalfa and corn in the heat of the summer to growing malt barley, which can be harvested earlier in the season with less draw on precious water supplies. This is not a revolutionary change—the same farmers are still growing crops on the same land—but it can have a revolutionary impact.

Finally, we need to end overfishing. The policy tools to do so have been available for many years. What we must do now is get creative about how we get those policies adopted and enforced. One example I have been impressed by is our work in Mexico, where TNC is involved in looking at the root causes of what’s limiting good fishing behavior. The answer is unexpected: social security debt that many fishers have accrued by being off the books for many years. The Conservancy is exploring an ambitious partnership and a novel financial mechanism that could forgive this debt and persuade more fishers to report their catch and adopt sustainability measures.

The Most Important Change Now: Clean Energy

These are just a few examples from North America. There are many more from around the world. To achieve a more sustainable future, governments, industry and civic institutions everywhere will have to make substantial changes—and the most important one right now is to make a big investment in clean energy over the next 10 years. That’s a short timeline, but not an impossible one. I don’t like what I’m seeing yet, but I’m hopeful. It took the United States just a decade to reach the moon, once the country put its mind to the goal. And solar energy is already cheaper (nearly half the price per megawatt) than coal, and outpacing it for new capacity creation—something no one predicted would happen this fast.

We need to do much more to remove the policy and economic barriers that still make a transition to clean energy hard. Technology is no longer the major limiting factor. We are.

How will we get there? By far the most critical action each of us can take is to support global leaders who have a plan for stopping climate change in our lifetimes. Climate may not feel like the most pressing issue at times—what with the economy, health care, education and other issues taking up headlines. But the science is clear: We’ve got 10 years to get our emissions under control. That’s it.

We’ve already begun to see the impacts of climate change as more communities face a big uptick in the severity and frequency of droughts, floods, wildfires, hurricanes and other disasters. Much worse is on the way if we don’t make the needed changes. It’s been easy for most of us to sit back and expect that climate change will only affect someone else, far away. But that’s what the people in Arkansas, California, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Washington, the Dominican Republic, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, India and Mozambique thought. Every one of these places—and many more—have seen one of the worst disasters on its historic record in the past 10 years.

There are so many paths we could take to 2050. Clearly, some are better than others. We get to choose. Which one do you want to take?

Stand up for a More Sustainable Future

Join The Nature Conservancy as we call on leaders to support science-backed solutions.

Getting to Sustainability

Carbon Capture

The most powerful carbon capture technology is cheap, readily available and growing all around us: Trees and plants.

Energy Sprawl Solutions

We can ramp up clean energy worldwide and site it wisely to limit the effect on wildlife.

Fishing for Better Data

Electronic monitoring can make fisheries more sustainable.

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What will the Earth be like in 500 years?

Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Professor Emeritus, Department of Geological Sciences, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Disclosure statement

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Binghamton University, State University of New York provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.

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Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected] .

What will the Earth be like in 500 years? — Lotte, Brookline, Massachusetts

Scientists can make some pretty accurate forecasts about the future. But predicting what the Earth will be like 500 years from now is a difficult task because there are many factors at play. Imagine Christopher Columbus in 1492 trying to predict the Americas of today!

We do know that two main types of processes change our planet: One involves natural cycles, like the way the planet rotates and moves around the Sun, and the other is caused by life forms, especially humans.

The Earth itself is on the move

The Earth is constantly changing.

It wobbles , the angle of its tilt changes and even its orbit changes to bring the Earth closer to or farther from the Sun. These changes happen over tens of thousands of years, and they have been responsible for ice ages .

Five hundred years isn’t very long in terms of geology.

Humans are changing the planet

The second big influence on the planet is living things. The effects of life on the planet are harder to predict. Disrupting one part of an ecosystem can knock a lot of other things off kilter.

Humans in particular are changing the Earth in many ways.

They cut down forests and break up important wildlife habitats to build cities and grow crops. They move invasive species around the planet, disrupting ecosystems .

They also contribute to global warming . People are causing the climate to change, mostly by burning fossil fuels that release more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the planet and atmosphere can handle.

Normally, greenhouse gases trap heat from the Sun the way the glass of a greenhouse does, keeping Earth warmer than it would be otherwise. That can be useful – until we get too much.

The result of too much carbon dioxide is that temperatures rise, and that can lead to dangerously hot summer days and melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica . Melting ice sheets raise the oceans, causing coastal areas to flood .

That’s what Earth is facing right now. These changes could lead to a very different planet in 500 years, depending in large part on how willing humans are to change their ways. A warming planet can also contribute to extreme weather like heat waves , storms and droughts that can change the land. All of Earth’s living forms are at risk.

Learning from the past 500 years

Looking back at the past 500 years, the living part of the Earth , called the biosphere, has changed dramatically.

The number of humans has increased from around 500 million people to over 7.5 billion today. More than 800 plant and animal species have become extinct because of human activities over that period. As the human population grows, other species have less space to roam. Sea level rise means even less land, and rising temperatures will send many species migrating to better climates.

Not all of Earth’s changes are caused by humans, but humans have worsened some of them. A major challenge today is getting people to stop doing things that create problems, like burning fossil fuels that contribute to climate change. This is one global problem that requires countries worldwide and the people within them to work toward the same goal.

Getting back to Christopher Columbus, he probably couldn’t have imagined a highway full of cars or a mobile phone. Technology will no doubt improve over the next 500 years, too. But so far, tech solutions haven’t scaled up fast enough to solve climate change. To keep doing the same things and expect someone else to fix the mess later would be a risky, expensive gamble .

So, the Earth in 500 years may be unrecognizable. Or, if humans are willing to change their behaviors, it may persist with its vibrant forests, oceans, fields and cities for many more centuries, along with its most successful residents, humankind.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to [email protected] . Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

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September 10, 2021

What will the planet look like in 50 years? Here's how climate scientists figure it out

by Margo Rosenbaum

Climate change scientists don't like to use the term "prediction." Rather, they're making "projections" about the future of the planet as sea levels rise, wildfires sweep the West and hurricanes become more ferocious.

There's a good reason for that.

In a world awash in misinformation—about medicine, politics and climate, and pretty much everything else—part of a scientist's job now involves teaching the public about how science works. Convincing the public to have faith in science means making precise, measured projects about the future.

They've got to overcome the big question: Can you really make accurate projections about what the planet will look like in 50 years, a century from now?

Climate scientists think they can, based on the past five decades of climate science that has proven accurate. Futurists, such as Jamais Cascio, a distinguished fellow for the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit foresight group based in Silicon Valley, study present trends and available data to lay out plausible outcomes for the future.

Today, a lot of Cascio's work is centered around climate change, helping people prepare for the future and make informed decisions for a warming world.

"Everything in the world," Cascio said, "every future outcome will have to be examined through the lens of climate."

In the future, climate change may only get worse. But how much worse will it get?

Scientists have relied on climate models for over 50 years. To people who aren't scientists, it's challenging to understand the calculations that go into these projections. So, what exactly is a climate model?

Meteorologists can make weather predictions for the next hour, or even week, based on weather data and forecast models that use humidity, temperature, air pressure, wind speed, among other current atmospheric, land and oceanic conditions. But with climate, a specific region's weather averaged over decades, is a little more challenging to project and understand.

An extension of weather forecasting, climate models factor in even more atmospheric, land and oceanic conditions to make longer-term forecasts. Using mathematical equations and thousands of data points, the models create representations of physical conditions on earth and simulations of the current climate.

Climate models predict how average conditions will change in a region over the coming decades as well as how the climate appeared before humans recorded it.

Researchers can then understand how these changing conditions could impact the planet, which is useful especially for understanding climate change, said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center based in the Bay Area.

"Perhaps the most important (purpose) is to try to suggest the types of changes that might occur as the world continues to emit CO2 and other greenhouse gases," Hausfather said.

The first climate model, developed over 50 years ago in the early days of climate science, helped scientists gauge how the ocean and atmosphere interacted with each other to influence the climate. The model predicted how temperature changes and shifts in ocean and atmospheric currents could lead to climate change.

Today, these models are much more complicated and run on some of the world's most powerful supercomputers. A decade ago, most models broke up the world into 250-kilometer segments, but now the models are 100 square kilometers. More regional patterns emerge when simulations are at a finer scale.

"People aren't drawing a picture of temperature and carbon dioxide and drawing a line through it and then extrapolating that into the future," said Gavin A. Schmidt, a senior climate adviser at NASA.

Through these advancements in technology, these models are becoming even more useful to scientists in understanding the climate of the past, present and future.

"Fortunately, they don't do such a terrible job," Schmidt said.

All of this works toward convincing the public and businesses to take action.

A majority of Americans already notice the effects of climate change around them, according to a Pew Research Center survey from 2020. But individuals, businesses and politics must "adapt to a radically and dangerously changing climate," Cascio said.

On the individual level, people must consider the climate in all of their monumental decisions: whether to have children; which car to buy; how to invest; when and where to buy a house. Governments are tasked with climate decisions that impact the future of entire nations, such as whether to invest in alternative energy or write policy curbing emissions.

Are climate models useful?

Instead of thinking about climate models as whether or not they are right, Schmidt said climate models should be considered as to whether they provide useful forecasts.

"Do they tell us things? Do they get things right more than you would have done without them?" Schmidt said.

Usually, the answer is yes, and what these models inform scientists is crucial for their understanding of the future climate.

Hausfather knows this better than anyone, as he led a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters analyzing the accuracy of early climate models. Some of the findings were included in the latest report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published in August.

Hausfather, along with co-author Schmidt, compared 17 model projections of global average temperature developed between 1970 and 2007 with actual changes in global temperature observed through the end of 2017.

Hausfather and his colleagues found promising news: Most of the models have been quite accurate. More specifically, 10 of the model projections show results consistent with observations. Of the remaining seven model projections, four projected more warming than observed while three projected less warming than observed.

But Hausfather and his colleagues realized this wasn't telling the whole story. After accounting for differences between modeled and actual changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other factors driving the climate, it turns out 14 of 17 model projections were "effectively identical" to warming observed in the real world.

"That was strong evidence that these models are effectively right," Hausfather said. "They're doing a very good job of predicting global temperatures."

The accuracy was particularly impressive in the earliest climate models, Hausfather said, especially given the limited observational evidence of warming at the time.

But not all of the early models were error-free. One of the first climate models, created in 1971 by climate scientists Rasool and Schneider, projected that the world would cool due to the cooling effect of atmospheric aerosols.

"(The researchers) thought that the cooling effect of these aerosols from burning fossil fuels that would reflect sunlight back to space would be much stronger than the warming effects of the greenhouse gas," Hausfather said.

While the 1970s were still in the early days of climate research, most of the scientific literature of the time was still pointing toward a warming future as much more likely. Yet, Rasool and Schneider's model still spurred a slew of news stories about a potential ice age. Even today, the model "still gets trotted out every now and then by folks trying to discredit climate science today," Hausfather said.

Now the model is proven to be wrong. It's a consensus among climate scientists that the planet is not cooling—instead it's warming at an alarming rate.

Even today, despite the promise of climate models shown by Hausfather's study, these models still have their limitations, especially with regard to the uncertainty of future emissions. Climate scientists are physicists—not economists or political scientists, and it's challenging to understand how policy will shape emissions standards.

"We don't have a crystal ball that can predict the future human behavior in terms of how much our emissions will change," Hausfather said. "We can just predict how the climate will respond to the emissions."

Issues of accuracy in climate models also still arise when models are pushed outside of their specific parameters. To combat this, climate models focus their projections on physical conditions seen in the natural world, instead of statistical probability, Schmidt said.

Researchers have more confidence in the predictability of physics than statistics, because physics doesn't change into the future. Researchers can have confidence that they can use these models outside of the time period where they have observational data, such as looking at climate during the last ice age, Schmidt said.

"How things get expressed might be different but the basic physics ... the underlying processes don't really change," Schmidt said.

Hausfather said there's still a lot of work still to improve climate models, but they are consistently getting better over time. Simulations of the Earth become sharper as more physical processes are added and computer power grows.

Why make projections for the future?

While climate scientists focus on physics to make forecasts for the future climate, Cascio and other futurists place scientific data in a larger context, making foresight based on climate change, new technological developments, as well as political and social movements. Futurism is "essentially anticipatory history," Cascio said.

"The idea is to take the science and embed it into a historian's understanding of how the world works to try to get a sense of what are the possible outcomes that we see going forward," Cascio said.

But, just like with climate models , uncertainty is inherent to the nature of projections. Futurists do not want to over-promise, but they provide a forecast of what could happen and reasons why it could happen, Cascio said.

Most of Cascio's work with climate change projects a grim future. In his perspective, an "absolutely radical" and "transformative" climate plan is necessary to make the necessary change. Plans that are "sensible and acceptable (are) almost definitely not enough."

"I really want to be wrong about all of this stuff," Cascio said, "because there are no futures that are not really depressing for the next generation."

Despite the despair projected by many climate scientists and futurists, there's still hope. If global emissions can be brought down to zero, Hausfather said the best climate model estimates illustrate that the world will stop warming.

"It's not too late to act," Hausfather said. "The world is not locked into a particular amount of warming."

Cascio still tries to consider himself a long-term optimist for the future, because the changes necessary to mitigate climate change will also lead to a much more "transparent and equitable" world, he said.

"If we can make it through the second half of this century, there's a very good chance that what we'll end up with is a really wonderful world," Cascio said.

Journal information: Geophysical Research Letters

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Daniela Jacob

Chair dkn future earth.

Dr. Daniela Jacob is Director of the Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), a scientific organizational entity of Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, and visiting professor at Leuphana University, Faculty of Sustainability. She is member of the European Commission’s Mission Board on “Adaptation to Climate Change including Societal Transformation” and was one of the coordinating lead authors of the IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 ° C above preindustrial level and one of the leading authors of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (Working Group 2). She is chair of the German Committee for Sustainability Research (DKN) and member of several other committees as well as member of the "Earth League", an international alliance of prominent scientists from first-class research institutions. Her main research fields and areas of interest are regional climate modeling and the hydrological cycle. Moreover, Daniela Jacob is Editor-in-Chief of "Climate Services", a scientific journal she founded together with the Elsevier publishing house.

Senior Advisor, Sustainability in the Digital Age

Amy Luers is the Senior Advisor of the Sustainability in the Digital Age Initiative and senior advisor to Future Earth. Luers also sits on the Foresight Committee of the Veolia Institute. She has over 25 years of experience working at the intersection of science, technology and policy. A former assistant director on climate resilience and information in the Obama White House and senior environment manager at Google, she is a member of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations and has served on committees of the U.S. Global Change Research Program and the National Academies of Sciences. Dr. Luers started her career working in rural water development in Latin America as co-founder and the first executive director of Agua Para La Vida (Water for Life). She spent a number of years directing the water and climate security work at the Skoll Global Threats Fund. She sits on several advisory boards including the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, STS Forum Regional Climate Action, the IEEE Committee on Ethically Designed AI for a Sustainable Planet, the International Observatory on the Societal Impacts of AI and Digital Technologies, and the US National Council for Science and the Environment. Amy Luers holds a Ph.D. in environmental science and an M.A. in international policy studies, from Stanford University; a B.S. and M.S. in environmental systems engineering from Humboldt State University; and a B.A. in philosophy from Middlebury College. She has published in both peer-reviewed and popular media on big data and the digital age, science communication, climate policy and vulnerability and resilience of human-environmental systems.

Johan Rockström

Co-chair, advisory committee.

Dr. Johan Rockström is the Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Professor at the Institute of Earth and Environmental Science at Potsdam University. Rockström is an internationally recognized scientist on global sustainability issues, where he led the development of the new Planetary Boundaries framework for human development in the current era of rapid global change. He is a leading scientist on global water resources, with more than 15 years of experience from applied water research in tropical regions, and more than 100 research publications in fields ranging from applied land and water management to global sustainability. Aside from his research helping to guide policy, Rockström consults several governments and business networks. He also acts as an advisor for sustainable development issues at noteworthy international meetings, such as the World Economic Forum, the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conferences (UNFCCC). Supplementarily, he chairs the advisory board for the EAT Foundation and the Earth League.

Robert Scholes

Distinguished professor, global change and sustainability research institute, witwatersrand university.

Bob is a Professor of Systems Ecology at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is a systems ecologist with a particular interest in the savannas of Africa. He trained under Prof Brian Walker at the University of the Witwatersrand and Prof Pedro Sanchez at North Carolina State University and has over three decades of field experience in many parts of Africa and the world. He is among the top 1 per cent of environmental scientists worldwide based on citation frequency, publishing widely in the fields of savanna ecology, global change, and earth observation. He has led several high-profile studies, such as the Assessment of Elephant Management, Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change and Strategic Assessment of Shale Gas Development, as well as large research campaigns, such as the SAFARI 2000 and Southern African Millennium Assessment. Scholes is the author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, third, fourth and fifth assessments. He has been on the boards of the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry, the South African National Parks and South African National Space Agency. He is a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences, fellow of the CSIR and the Royal Society of South Africa, a member of the South African Academy, a research associate of the CSIR, a National Research Foundation A-rated scientist and a winner of the National Science and Technology Forum Lifetime Contribution to Science Award.

Alistair Scrutton

Future earth (former).

Alistair Scrutton spent more than two decades as a foreign correspondent covering wars, elections, Olympic Games and royal weddings across four continents — in between managing to annoy Fidel Castro, Messi and the Dalai Lama with awkward questions. After university, he spent several years as a freelance journalist in Spain and Latin America working for the likes of the FT, Economist, San Francisco Chronicle and the Australian. He then joined Reuters for a 19 year career, first as correspondent in Peru and Buenos Aires before then moving to Washington, DC, as Latin America editor. He switched continents to cover South Asia from New Delhi, reporting on the war in Afghanistan as well as environmental challenges in Bhutan and India. His last assignment before joining Future Earth saw him as head of Nordic and Baltic editorial operations, working on pieces ranging from Greenland's adaption to climate change to the threat of Russia. He holds a Masters Degree in international relations and contemporary war from King’s College, London.

Gail Whiteman

Professor, world business council for sustainable development (wbcsd).

Professor Gail Whiteman is Director of the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business, and founder of Arctic Basecamp, a unique science-solutions outreach platform held annual alongside the World Economic Forum’s meeting at Davos. She is an expert on global risk from sustainability challenges, and is an invited speaker and regular contributor to the World Economic Forum. Her research utilises organisation theory on knowledge to analyse how a range of actors (companies, civil society, and local communities) make sense of ecological change and risk, and how these actors transform and build resilience across scales given environmental pressures and social inequities. Professor Whiteman is also the Professor-in-Residence at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and was actively involved in building science-based targets including those for a future low-carbon economy. Her research has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Ecology & Society, and Nature, etc.

Global launch events highlight Our Future on Earth 2020 around the world

Since the launch of Our Future on Earth 2020 on February 6, its media and global impact has increased thanks to the hard work of the international Future Earth community helping to promote this new report. Online coverage has expanded to over 200 international media outlets, in 60 countries and a dozen languages. Notable pieces included articles by The Guardian , Thomson Reuters and op-eds in The Conversation and Project Syndicate .

Future Earth’s regional structures mobilized to host events that consider the report’s key theme (interconnected social and natural science underpinning current events) within a regional context. Here are some highlights.

Feb 13, Bengalaru, India The Future Earth South Asia Regional Office, Divecha Center for Climate Change (DCCC), and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) hosted an event open to nearly 300 students and faculty from colleges in and around Bengalaru. It featured contributions from K. Kasturirangan, former Chariman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), among other distinguished regional scientists and politicians, and resulted in local media coverage.

Feb 19, Taipei, Taiwan Future Earth Taipei and the Center for Sustainability Science, Academia Sinica held a panel discussion gathering 40 participants including scientists, experts, government officers and funders to discuss the report’s findings. A series of videos and a description of the event are available here .

Feb 27, Dakar, Senegal A French-language event was organized by Editorial Board member David Akana  in partnership with the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the agricultural non-profit CORAF. The event welcomed about 60 participants, (UN agencies, NGOs, media, scientific and diplomatic community) and featured a video address by Robert Blasiak, lead author of the Ocean chapter. Media coverage of the regional launch include articles in Scidev , Seneweb , All Africa.com , APS , Afrique Actu and Sud Quotidien .

Feb 13, Pretoria, South Africa The Future Earth Regional Office for Southern Africa (FEROSA) Secretariat hosted a launch event during its Stakeholder Platform meeting held at the National Research Foundation (NRF). The Africa Launch was attended by over 70 delegates from eleven 11 countries across the continent; Angola, Botswana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The launch began with Professor Robert Scholes, a member of the report’s Editorial Board, provided an engaging account of the report’s purpose and origin. This was followed by a presentation from Dr Odirilwe Selomane, a co-author on the report’s Biodiversity chapter.  The launch was also attended by Professor Richard Calland, Politics Chapter lead author, and Coleen Vogel, Transformations Chapter co-author. Professor Calland also published an article in the Conversation Blog and in local media (South Africa Saturday Star), highlighting the report and his chapter’s message for the need to face climate denialism and right-wing populism.

Feb 21, Bucharest, Romania The Romanian National Committee of Future Earth presented the report during their annual meeting at the Romanian Academy. The meeting was attended by 21 members and colleagues from diverse research institutes and universities. The topics raised in the 11 chapters of the report were concisely exposed by Dr. Diana Dogaru, while Dr. Mihaela Sima focused her talk on the Future Earth survey of the scientists’ perception regarding global risks. Acknowledging the multidisciplinary character of climate change topics and the fact that business as usual cannot be a solution for sustainability, and consenting on the key topics of the Our Future on Earth Report 2020, the participants evoked the need for continuity for collaborative and transdisciplinary projects in Romania for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Feb 19, Hamburg, Germany The German Committee Future Earth and the Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS) gathered three video statements from the report’s authors and broadcast an open webinar in German, hosted by Daniela Jacob, a member of the report’s Editorial Board and Director of GERICS.

Feb 22, Sikkim, India The Integrated Mountain Initiative (IMI) – Sikkim Chapter ( inmi.in ) in association with Eco-Tourism & Conservation Society of Sikkim (ECOSS), Gangtok; World Wildlife Fund, Sikkim and Darjeeling; and Sikkim University in partnership, with the Future Earth South Asia office at the Divecha Centre for Climate Change (DCCC) organized a launch event for students, policy representatives and the non-profit sector. The event was covered by the local media . The counselor of IMI Sikkim, Mr P.D. Rai, former Member of Parliament (Lok-Sabha, India) and member of the Future Earth South Asia Governing Council convened the event and published an opinion article in the Sikkim Express and Summit Times.

Related News

Our Future On Earth 2020 Report Launched

Global Launch Events Highlight Our Future on Earth 2020 Around the World

'The future of life on Earth lies in the balance' – a picture essay

Almost 600 conservation experts have signed a letter by the wildlife charity WWF, published to coincide with UN report into loss of biodiversity

Almost 600 conservation experts have signed the Call4Nature open letter written by wildlife charity WWF, which is being published to coincide with the IPBES report (see letter below).

Overfishing

“We are overfishing our oceans at an alarming rate and choking them with plastic and other pollutants. If we want to see healthy seas that will continue to provide us with food, we need to stop this over-exploitation, protect our incredible marine environments and make sustainable fishing the norm, as we see here.” Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, chef and vice- president of Fauna and Flora International

A boat fishing for bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean Sea, which is only allowed for one month a year, from 15 May to 15 June

“I spent a month on a bluefin fishing boat and from what I have seen all the ICCAT (International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna) regulations were respected. Fishermen I talked with seemed to have developed an environmental awareness – at least they understand the importance of keeping the bluefin protected from overfishing, in order to continue fishing and making a living out of it.” Antonio Busiello, photographer

Deforestation

“Every year millions of hectares of pristine tropical rainforest are lost for the production of beef, soy, timber and palm oil. These magnificent forests store huge amounts of carbon and are home to some of our planet’s greatest wildlife. Their protection is critical to stop runaway climate change and halt the sixth mass extinction.” Jack Harries, film-maker activist and WWF ambassador

Elephants walk through an oil palm plantation and eat the trunks of felled old oil palm trees at Sabah Softwoods in Sabah, Borneo, Indonesia

“I had very mixed emotions when taking this image. I was struck with a sense of sadness at seeing the elephants in a seemingly unnatural environment for them. Equally, I was taken aback by watching them use this environment to their advantage as a food source, and the efforts of plantation owners to create wildlife corridors within their plantations to enable elephants to travel to connecting forest areas. I feel that it really highlights the threats that the species faces, yet also demonstrates the resilience they have to being able to adapt to a changing landscape.” Chris Ratcliffe, photographer

Wildlife trade

“The world is waking up to the fact that pangolins are facing extinction as a result of the illegal wildlife trade. Sadly, their natural defence is a gift to traffickers. When threatened they roll into a tight ball. This protects them from predators in the wild, but enables criminals to transport them with ease, just like footballs. To save these remarkable creatures, we need to spread the word and push to stop this illegal trade.” Paul De Ornellas, chief wildlife adviser at WWF

One of the ‘pangolin men’ of Zimbabwe, volunteers who spend their lives rehabilitating the animals after being rescued from poachers

“The man in this photo tends to this pangolin every day, ensuring its rehabilitation after being seized in anti-poaching operations. The image reflects the weight of human responsibility involved in the species and our world’s tomorrow. What we do to the animals we will end up doing to ourselves. Our very futures are intertwined for ever.” Adrian Stern, photographer

Plastic pollution

“Nature is our life support system and without it our lives on this earth would be impossible and unimaginable. We have to stop seeing the natural world as something to be exploited and taken for granted. Nature matters to me and it should matter to you. We need to put more value on our natural assets and stop destroying our precious planet.” Chris Packham, TV presenter, naturalist and founder of Wild Justice

A gannet hangs from a cliff, entangled in plastic fibres at RSPB Grassholm Island, Wales, UK

“Just eight miles off the Welsh mainland, RSPB Grassholm Island should be a paradise for gannets, but in recent years it has become a living hell . I visited the island with a rescue team, who visit each year to cut free the entangled birds. This panicked adult gannet struggled as it dangled from a cliffside, with ropes twisted around its neck like a hangman’s noose. The brave volunteers risked their own lives to creep to the edge of the clifftop and rescue this bird from its death sentence.” Sam Hobson, photographer

Land degradation

“Humankind has already seriously altered three-quarters of Earth’s land surfaces – with no hint of respite. If we are truly to live within the sustainable bounds of our extraordinary planet and leave the space for nature that it so desperately needs, we have to step back and be more considerate about the way we treat our world. More than that, we must actively work to repair the blatant damage we have done. And we have to do that immediately; starting today.” Mark Wright, director of science at WWF

“Trucks the size of a house look like tiny toys as they rumble along massive roads in a section of a mine. The largest of their kind, these 400 ton-capacity dump trucks are 47.5ft long, 32.5ft wide, and 25ft high. Within their dimensions you could build a 3,000 sq ft home. The scale of what we see in this image is truly unfathomable. It’s been reported that the landscape being industrialised by Tar Sands development could easily accommodate one Florida, two New Brunswicks, four Vancouvers, and four Vancouver Islands.” Garth Lenz, photographer

Polar ice cap melting

“The Arctic is in meltdown – it is warming over twice as fast as the global average. Climate change means that walrus, polar bears and people may soon face an ice-free Arctic ocean during the summer, unless we take urgent action now. Though it may seem remote, the impacts felt in the Arctic are not limited to national borders … Nature is crying out for help in every corner of the planet, and it is time for us to listen before we lose the wonders we take for granted.” Rod Downie, chief polar adviser at WWF

Waterfalls cascades in to the sea from the Austfonna polar ice cap on Nordaustlandet in the Svalbard archipelago, Norway

“I found the image I wanted whilst leading an expedition to Svalbard.The holy grail is to get the waterfalls from it, like we see in the image, a natural phenomenon that only used to occur in the warmest few weeks of the arctic summer. Not now. In recent years I’ve seen the waterfalls at times of the season when I’ve never expected to. And not just one or two waterfalls but many. This dramatic difference is a warning of things to come and one I was determined to record.” Andy Rouse, photographer

Freshwater habitats

“River dolphin populations in Asia are plummeting due to human activities such as dam building, fishing, boat traffic and pollution. We cannot allow that to happen to one of the Amazon’s most charismatic mammals. We need to act fast to save this species and avoid the fate of the baiji, the first river dolphin species driven to extinction by humans. Our freshwater habitats – including lakes, rivers and wetlands – are the most threatened of all our global habitats. We know that populations of freshwater species have suffered huge declines since 1970 - falling an average of 83%. That’s a staggering and depressing figure. Our rivers and streams are the blue arteries of our world. Without thriving freshwater habitats, our planet will not survive.” Damian Fleming, director of conservation at WWF

Federico Mosquera, endangered species coordinator from Omacha Foundation, a Colombian non-profit working in wildlife conservation issues, with a captured Amazon River Dolphin

“Federico Mosquera soothes a recently captured Amazon river dolphin, the first of its kind to be tagged with a GPS tracker. Amazon river dolphins are extremely tactile animals and direct contact seems to have a calming effect.

In 2017, WWF Bolivia, Brazil, and Colombia coordinated a tri-national effort to tag and study Amazon river dolphins, applying satellite GPS technology in a ground-breaking project, to better understand river dolphin health and migratory patterns.

Many net casts were unsuccessfully and the exhaustion and despair were starting to take a toll on the team until finally, on the sixth day, they managed to successfully tag one dolphin. Only after the dolphin was released, did they allow themselves to explode in joy and tears.

It was a memorable moment and I believe this image captures very well the profound respect that Federico, the team’s leading biologist, has for this species of dolphins and the immense pressure that he was under during the project. It also symbolises the intimate connection that we have with wildlife.” Jaime Rojo, photographer

Wildlife corridors

“Tigers can travel over 100km to establish their own territories, so these connecting habitats are critical for wild tiger population recovery, and to help achieve the global goal to double the number of wild tigers by 2022, from as few as 3,200 in 2010. However, they are under pressure from habitat loss and poaching. It’s crucial that we do all we can to maintain and connect their habitats, and protect tigers from being hunted. We are seeing tiger populations recover in areas where this is happening, which gives us great hope of protecting these incredible creatures for the future.” Rebecca May, tiger conservation manager at WWF

A wild tiger is captured on a camera trap in corridor eight one of a series of dedicated wildlife corridors between the National Parks of Bhutan

“When I look at this image , I can’t help thinking that we live in an incredible planet. All in this image is the result of millions of years of evolution, of work, to make it as perfect as it is. It reveals another world, unknown to most humans, something more beautiful and jaw-dropping than any science fiction movie. It makes me want to fight twice as hard to stop the current madness of the world.” Emmanuel Rondeau, photographer

The Call4Nature letter

Dear world leaders Nature provides us with the food we eat, the air we breathe and the water we drink. We depend on it to grow our crops, to source our medicines, to house us and to clothe us. When we destroy nature, we destroy the essentials on which we all depend. Today IPBES (Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, www.ipbes.net) – the independent global scientific body on biodiversity of more than 130 governments – publishes its report on the current state of life on Earth. The report paints an alarming picture of species extinctions, wildlife population declines, habitat loss and depletion of ecosystem services − adding to the existing wealth of evidence that we are losing nature at a dramatic and unsustainable rate. The report also makes clear the cause of this destruction: us. We are cutting down our forests, overfishing our seas, polluting our rivers, degrading our soils and changing our climate. This poses an urgent threat to all life on Earth – including ourselves. There is still time to protect what is left and to start restoring nature. But to do that, we must radically change the way we live, including how we use energy to power our societies, grow our food, and manage our waste. This is an immense task but many of the solutions are already at hand. Each of us has a role to play in bringing about this transformational change. But we need you, our political leaders, to lead − and to set us on a path to a future where people and nature thrive. Next year, there is an unmissable opportunity to choose a new direction for people and the planet. Important global decisions will be made on biodiversity, climate change and sustainable development at a series of UN meetings in 2020. Together, these form an action plan for change, a real New Deal for nature and people. But for this to happen, we need decisive and ambitious action from you. That’s why today: We call on you to stop funding activities that destroy nature. We call on you to put an end to deforestation and land degradation. We call on you to protect our oceans and marine life, especially against plastics. We call on you to encourage the transition to sustainable agricultural practices. We call on you to implement the Paris Agreement to halt climate change. The future of all life on Earth lies in the balance. We urge you to act now.

• The Guardian picture essay
• Biodiversity
• Conservation

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Review: We are all responsible for the future of our planet

Eric Holthaus experiences climate change as a wound, a rending in the fabric of society and ecology. For Holthaus, addressing climate change is a moral imperative because of its ecological and social implications. He is not alone in this, of course; for nearly five years, Holthaus’s Twitter profile prominently featured a quote from Pope Francis’ “Laudato Si’.”

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While culture-war figures point to the “naturalness” of epochal cycles of warming and cooling (indeed, climate fluctuates!), what ecologists and ethicists and meteorologists and activists mean by “climate change” is the human-driven intensification of climate change. The robust amplification of baseline climate cycles has had unprecedented dramatic effects in a short time frame, such that variation in (literal) degrees becomes a difference in (moral) kind. What to do?

The Future Earth is Holthaus’s attempt to answer that question. With diagnoses evocative of Bill McKibben’s earlier book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet , Holthaus begins with descriptions of the ecological and social deluges of degradations wrought by climate change. He continues by imagining the “future earth”—and human societies’ values—in the next several decades. This includes, of course, hoped-for policy changes. Beyond the pragmatics, Holthaus’s invocations are ethical. “We” are responsible for writing the story that is unfolding into the future, and what is needed is reformation in human connection: “Somehow, some way, we have to learn how to care about one another again.”

Eric Holthaus’s invocations are ethical. We are responsible for writing the story that is unfolding into the future, and what is needed is reformation in human connection.

Indeed, the personal narrative and appeal—and his willingness to name explicitly the struggle to make sense of the climate crisis in his own life—is part of why many people are drawn to Holthaus’s work. Perhaps the most lasting insight here is therefore Holthaus’s suggestion that the individual actions that matter most are “the ones that help make you personally more connected to the world and everyone in it.”

As an ethicist, I wanted more from this book, starting with a citational lineage in the pages (for example, the trope of imagined future climate-changed worlds goes back a long way, from Octavia Butler to Naomi Oreskes). And like many journalists, Holthaus personalizes scientific data via a personal-interest story; more extensive follow-ups might avoid a sense of climate disaster voyeurism.

Nonetheless, Holthaus is right: The future Earth will be shaped by those with the power either to fall asleep at the wheel or to consciously steer a different course. As Pope Francis might say, this task includes everyone.

This article also appeared in print, under the headline “The rendering of the planet ,” in the February 2021 , issue.

Christiana Zenner is an associate professor of theology, science and ethics at Fordham University in New York.

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A scientist’s final paper looks toward Earth’s future climate

By Patrick Lynch, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

A NASA scientist's final scientific paper, published posthumously this month, reveals new insights into one of the most complex challenges of Earth's climate: understanding and predicting future atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases and the role of the ocean and land in determining those levels.

A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was led by Piers J. Sellers, former director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, who died in December 2016. Sellers was an Earth scientist at NASA Goddard and later an astronaut who flew on three space shuttle missions.

The paper includes a significant overarching message: The current international fleet of satellites is making real improvements in accurately measuring greenhouse gases from space, but in the future a more sophisticated system of observations will be necessary to understand and predict Earth's changing climate at the level of accuracy needed by society.

Sellers wrote the paper along with colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Oklahoma. Work on the paper began in 2015, and Sellers continued working with his collaborators up until about six weeks before he died. They carried on the research and writing of the paper until its publication this week.

The paper focuses on the topic that was at the center of Sellers' research career: Earth's biosphere and its interactions with the planet's climate. In the 1980s he helped pioneer computer modeling of Earth's vegetation. In the new paper, Sellers and co-authors investigated "carbon cycle–climate feedbacks" – the potential response of natural systems to climate change caused by human emissions – and laid out a vision for how to best measure this response on a global scale from space.

The exchange of carbon between the land, ocean and air plays a huge role in determining the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which will largely determine Earth's future climate. But, there are complex interactions at play. While human-caused emissions of greenhouses gases are building up in the atmosphere, land ecosystems and the ocean still offset about 50 percent of all those emissions. As the climate warms scientists are unsure whether forests and the ocean will continue to absorb roughly half of the emissions – acting as a carbon sink – or if this offset becomes lower, or if the sinks become carbon sources.

Paper co-author David Schimel, a scientist at JPL and a longtime scientific collaborator of Sellers', said the paper captured how he, Sellers and the other co-authors saw this scientific problem as one of the critical research targets for NASA Earth science.

"We all saw understanding the future of carbon cycle feedbacks as one of the grand challenges of climate change science," Schimel said.

Scientists' understanding of how Earth's living systems interact with rising atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases has changed tremendously in recent decades, said co-author Berrien Moore III, of the University of Oklahoma. Moore has been a scientific collaborator with Sellers and Schimel since the 1980s. He said that back then, scientists thought the ocean absorbed about half of annual carbon emissions, while plants on land played a minimal role. Scientists now understand the ocean and land together absorb about half of all emissions, with the terrestrial system’s role being affected greatly by large-scale weather patterns such as El Niño and La Niña. Moore is also the principal investigator of a NASA mission called GeoCarb, scheduled to launch in 2022, that will monitor greenhouse gases over much of the Western Hemisphere from a geostationary orbit.

NASA launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) in 2014, and with the advancement of measurement and computer modeling techniques, scientists are gaining a better understanding of how carbon moves through the land, ocean and atmosphere. This new paper builds on previous research and focuses on a curious chain of events in 2015. While human emissions of carbon dioxide leveled off for the first time in decades during that year, the growth rate in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide actually spiked at the same time.

This was further evidence of what scientists had been piecing together for years – that a complex combination of factors, including weather, drought, fires and more, contributes to greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.

However, with the new combination of OCO-2 observations and space-based measurements of plant fluorescence (essentially a measure of photosynthesis), researchers have begun producing more accurate estimates of where carbon was absorbed and released around the planet during 2015, when an intense El Niño was in effect, compared to other years.

The paper follows a report from a 2015 workshop on the carbon cycle led by Sellers, Schimel, and Moore. Schimel and Moore both pointed out that every one of the more than 40 participants in the workshop contributed to a final scientific report from the meeting – a rare occurrence. They attributed this, in part, to the inspirational role Sellers played in spurring thought and action.

"When you have someone like Piers in the room, there's a magnetic effect," Moore said. "Piers had his shoulder to the wheel, so everyone had to have their shoulders to the wheel."

Schimel and Moore said the workshop paper lays out a vision for what's needed in a future space-based observing system to measure, understand, and predict carbon cycle feedbacks: active and passive instruments, and satellites both in low-Earth and geostationary orbits around the world. In the coming years, NASA and space agencies in Europe, Japan, and China, will all launch new greenhouse-gas monitoring missions.

"Piers thought it's absolutely essential to get it right," said Schimel, "and essential to more or less get it right the first time."

The authors dedicated the paper's publication to Sellers, and in their dedication referenced a Winston Churchill quote often cited by the British-born scientist. They wrote: "P.J.S. approached the challenge of carbon science in the spirt of a favorite Churchill quote, 'Difficulties mastered are opportunities won,' and he aimed to resolve the carbon–climate problem by rising to the difficulties and seizing the opportunities."

For more: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/05/1716613115

Related Terms

• Climate Change
• Greenhouse Gases

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Facts About Earth

• The Past, Present, and Future Of Planet Earth

Our planet Earth formed around 4.6 billion years ago. However, the planet started supporting life only after 2.2 billion years of its formation. Since then, many species of microbes, plants and animals have evolved on our planet, and many became extinct over the years. Currently, Earth supports close to 8 billion human beings, 8.7 million species of other animals and close to 1.3 million plant species.

Formation Of The Earth And The Moon

The solar nebula hypothesis is the most widely accepted model related to the formation of the Solar System. It claims that the solar nebula formed as a result of the Big Bang, and gave rise to the Solar System. Shock waves emitted by a nearby supernova could have triggered the contraction of the solar nebula, and caused it to rotate. Soon, various protoplanets began to take shape from this rotating mass of interstellar gas and dust. Our planet also was formed by accretion from the solar nebula.

The moon, our Earth's only natural satellite, was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, suggesting that it formed after the formation of the Solar System. The most widely accepted theory regarding the creation of the Moon states that the satellite formed when a celestial body of the size of Mars struck the Earth, and matter was ejected from both the Earth and the colliding body into the Earth's orbit which condensed to form the Moon.

Late, Heavy Bombardment

In the early days of the Earth and other newly formed planets of the Solar System, about 3.8 billion years ago, a large number of asteroids would collide with these planets. These collisions left gaping craters on the surface of the planets. During such bombardments, the comets, being bearers of water could have contributed much of the water in the oceans of the Earth.

Early Life Begins

Early life flourished with the release of oxygen to the Earth's atmosphere about 3.5 billion years ago as a result of cyanobacterial metabolism in the Earth's oceans. When and how these cyanobacteria, the earliest forms of life emerged on Earth, is still a mystery. The cyanobacteria performed photosynthesis which released oxygen that was absorbed by the ocean water. This oxygen got fixed in the form of iron oxide that built up in the form of sedimentary rock deposits on the ocean floor. As the iron was used up at later stages, the oxygen was released and started building up in the Earth's atmosphere. Soon, life dependent on oxygen began to evolve.

"Snowball Earth"

For some time, about 650 million years ago, the Earth was completely covered in ice from the tropics to the poles. This "snowball earth" period coincides with the pre-Cambrian period. Life underwent a growth decline during this period, and only life forms in the rare ice-free pockets of the Earth's surface survived.

Life Explodes

During the Cambrian period, life forms on Earth underwent major evolutionary changes and species evolved at a rapid pace. Soft-bodied creatures evolved in early Cambrian and those with hard shells evolved later.

Mass Extinction Events

Though life continued to evolve and diversify on Earth, such periods of growth and evolution were interrupted by mass extinction events where many major forms of life on Earth got completely or partially wiped out, and many were newly formed. Asteroids impacts, climate change, volcanic eruptions, etc., are being held responsible for such events of mass extinction. Dinosaurs also got eliminated during one such event.

Pangaea Lost

About 200 million years ago, the Earth witnessed the breakdown of the Pangaea, a supercontinent that had formed about 270 million years back. Tectonic movements of the Earth's tectonic plates triggered this separation. Now, life evolved separately on the isolated landmasses, leading to the independent evolution of life forms.

We Live In An Interglacial Period

Starting 2.5 million years ago, the Earth underwent a series of glacial and interglacial periods, which marked the advance and retreat of glaciers respectively. Today, we are living in the Holocene epoch, an interglacial period that began about 11,500 years back.

Future Earth

Climate change induced by man is the biggest challenge facing Earth currently. However, though this activity of man might wipe out species from the face of the Earth, the planet will definitely revive and restore its balance like it has done for millions of years. However, it is the sun, as the scientists predict, that will ultimately destroy the Earth. As this aging star of the Solar System will run out of hydrogen, the fuel that sustains it, the Sun will lose its integrity and expand in volume, burning all that comes in its path, including life on Earth. Ultimately, the Sun would die, immersing the Solar System in darkness forever.

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December 6, 2023

12 min read

In the Search for Life beyond Earth, NASA Dreams Big for a Future Space Telescope

Astronomers are moving ahead in planning NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory, a telescope designed to answer the ultimate question: Are we alone in the universe?

By Jonathan O'Callaghan

An artist’s concept comparing Earth and the sun ( left ) with an Earth-like exoplanet around a sunlike star ( right ). NASA is now planning a future space telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, that could image such worlds and seek signs of life upon them.

NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

The first steps to solve the millennia-old mystery of our true place in the universe happened, of all places, on a brisk and early Tuesday morning in the unremarkable conference room of a hotel in Washington, D.C. Here a team of legendary heroes assembled on Halloween—Gandalf and a Star Trek captain among them. Yet these were not just costumes donned by trick-or-treating scientists. They were a fitting metaphor for the 60 astronomers chosen to begin one of the grandest tasks imaginable, not just in space science but across the spectrum of human history: to design a telescope that can find, or refute, signs of life on planets orbiting other stars. Such a goal seems almost fanciful. Can we actually build a multibillion-dollar observatory with a good chance of discovering aliens on worlds beyond the solar system? The answer appears to be that we can, and if a growing list of pivotal decisions can be surmounted, we will. Life may be abundant in the universe or it may be incredibly rare—learning which is closer to the truth would be epochal. By this NASA-led project’s end, the aim is to “have enough observations to know either way,” says Courtney Dressing of the University of California, Berkeley.

Called the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) and targeted for launch around 2040, this would be by far the most ambitious and sophisticated telescope yet built. But its primary goal is almost childishly simple—to hunt for life on 25 Earth-like worlds. “This is the first telescope ever built that will be able to really address, in a scientific way, how common life is beyond the solar system,” says Marc Postman of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. “It could be zero percent or 100 percent or somewhere in between. We really have no measurement at all.” The journey is in its infancy; if it were to be imagined as a 100-meter race to launch, we would be “putting on our shoes,” Dressing says. But the prize that awaits at the finish line is enrapturing, a cultural shift in our understanding of our place in the cosmos. “It could be a society-changing discovery,” Postman says.

HWO will usher in an age unlike any other, one where we truly know Earth’s place among the stars. The path ahead, however, is fraught with challenges, not least the immense technological and political hurdles toward building such a machine. Can we solve them all to take our first glimpses of other living worlds? The journey to find and study alien Earths will span generations—but with their latest meeting, HWO’s architects have now taken its most significant first step.

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Super-Hubble

If alien life does exist, it has not made itself easily known. We have hunted for signals from intelligent civilizations, scoured the worlds of our solar system and tentatively probed some planetary atmospheres across interstellar gulfs, but a clear indicator of cosmic neighbors eludes us for now. To date astronomers have discovered more than 5,500 worlds orbiting other stars. The majority of these have tended to be worlds inhospitably heavy and hot. The handful close to Earth in mass and size push the boundaries of plausibility for harboring life as we know it; they reside in tight orbits around red dwarf stars much smaller than our sun. For a true test of life’s cosmic prospects, we need to find and study planets eminently like Earth orbiting stars like our sun. “This has been percolating in the community for a very long time,” Dressing says.

In 2021 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine instructed NASA to begin work on a machine to achieve this goal as part of its decadal survey, which gives the space agency its marching orders every 10 years. The decadal survey committee focused on two proposed telescopes up to the task—one called the Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor (LUVOIR) and the other, Habitable Exoplanet Observatory (HabEx)—which its final report combined into a single idea. The report instructed NASA to build a telescope that could observe in infrared, optical and ultraviolet light and “search for biosignatures from a robust number of about 25 habitable-zone planets.” Through the telescope’s optics, each world would be at best a lone, delicate dot of light—this is seemingly meager, but it would be enough to study the chemistry of the planets’ atmospheres for signs of life via gases such as oxygen and methane at a total estimated cost of no more than $11 billion in 2020 dollars. Mark Clampin, the Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., later gave this hybrid telescope its current name. “The one name I thought really captured the spirit of what we’re doing is the Habitable Worlds Observatory,” Clampin says. “This is the mandate we were given.”

Construction of the telescope is years away. In September 2023, however, NASA selected a group of about 60 scientists to begin planning a high-level “parts list” for HWO and its key components. The teams, one called the Science, Technology, Architecture Review Team (START) and the other the Technical Assessment Group (TAG), are expected across the next year to hold formal public meetings every few months alongside smaller-scale, more frequent intragroup meetings as well as broader discussions with the wider astronomy community. “It’ll be a busy year,” says Megan Ansdell, HWO’s program scientist at NASA Headquarters.

A three-day event in Washington, D.C., that started on October 31 was the first of these planning meetings—the starting gun in the decadal-paced race to make HWO a reality. “I want to encourage you all to breathe.... Just breathe for a moment,” said John O’Meara of the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, co-chair of START, who aptly later donned the Gandalf costume, on the first day of the meeting. “It took a long time to get here. It’s going to take a long time to go to the next step.... We’re going to be working together for a long time.” While the total number of both virtual and in-person attendees at the jubilant meeting numbered around 200, “it’s going to take hundreds if not thousands of people to get this done right,” O’Meara said. “I don’t know when this observatory is going to launch. But I do know I promised my wife I would retire when it does.”

A key theme of the planning meeting was that despite HWO’s name, the observatory should offer more than glimpses of light from putative mirror Earths. The immensity of the optics required to image exo-Earth analogues would make HWO supremely useful for many other astronomical tasks, too—similar to its workhorse predecessors such as NASA’s Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). “Studying dark matter is a possibility, the interstellar medium, galaxies—pretty much every aspect of astrophysics,” says Lee Feinberg of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. “This will be a general-class observatory.” Making that message clear will be key, said Jane Rigby of NASA Goddard, JWST’s senior project scientist, in a talk on day two of the meeting. “We have a lot of work to do,” she said. “We should stop calling it ‘Habitable Worlds’ because that [name] tells the general astrophysics community, ‘This is not for you.’” Postman describes it simply: “This is really like a ‘super-Hubble,’” he says.

Pale Blue Dot

The vision of HWO coalescing in its planners’ heads looks like something between JWST and Hubble in design. The telescope’s main mirror will likely be divided into honeycomblike segments—like that of JWST—allowing it to be folded up into one of several large new rockets under development, such as SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s New Glenn. “We see segmented as the way to go,” Clampin says. The mirror’s size—which greatly influences HWO’s ultimate acuity—is as yet unfinalized but will at minimum match JWST’s 6.5 meters (21 feet) and could scale up to reach 9 meters (30 feet). Like JWST, the telescope may sport a vast deployable sunshield to block incoming light from our home star and will be stationed at a deep-space locale 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Unlike JWST, however, which probes deeply into the infrared to see the faint thermal glow of ancient galaxies, HWO won’t require extreme cryogenic cooling to perform its observations. Instead of an unfurling sunshield, HWO’s mirror may be stored within a barrel-like tube, like Hubble’s. This shroud might solve one of the most worrisome issues faced by JWST: micrometeorite strikes have dinged and dented its large exposed mirror. “A lot of people are thinking that [shroud] looks good,” says Aki Roberge, associate director for technology and strategy in astrophysics at NASA Goddard.

Although its launch remains many years away, HWO’s key design features are already coming into focus. The telescope probably won’t be as big as the 15-meter LUVOIR concept illustrated here, but it will likely include a large segmented mirror and perhaps also a sprawling protective sunshield. HWO’s architecture could even continue evolving after launch; the telescope is designed to allow servicing missions for major upgrades and repairs. Credit:  NASA GSFC

HWO’s greatest technical challenge—imaging an Earth-like planet—is really twofold: the telescope needs not only a method to remove the otherwise-overwhelming glare of a planet’s star but also a way to hold itself breathlessly still to keep a targeted world in its sight. JWST was designed to exhibit a targeting drift as scant as one twentieth of a micrometer—a micrometer is a millionth of a meter and a fraction of the width of a human hair. The telescope has exceeded those capabilities by a factor of 10, Feinberg says, meaning that it is stable to within a strand of human DNA. Incredibly, HWO will still need to be “maybe a factor of 1,000 better,” he says, with a stability of up to tens of picometers—a unit of measurement that is a trillionth of a meter, less than the radius of a hydrogen atom. HWO will not need to constantly be so steady, but it will need to use this ultrastability mode when it looks at other Earths. A set of deformable optics—some of the telescope’s mirrors will be able to flex ever so slightly to eradicate any errors—will be one of several crucial tools to achieve the feat, HWO’s planners say.

To record a single photon of reflected light from an alien twin of Earth, HWO first needs to filter out circa 10 billion photons from the planet’s sunlike star. A coronagraph—essentially a small precision-shaped disk in the telescope’s optics to cover the star yet allow planetary light to pass through—will likely be HWO’s main way to achieve this Herculean task. HWO’s notional coronagraph would be limited to a relatively small swath of wavelengths—tuned for optimal sensitivity to Earth-sized worlds orbiting in the habitable zone or “Goldilocks zone” of sunlike stars, the circumstellar region where temperatures may be neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set for launch in 2027, will include a technological precursor for HWO’s coronagraph, albeit one that limits Roman to imaging planets larger than Jupiter . The performance of Roman’s coronagraph will provide crucial information for HWO’s grander aspirations. “The coronagraph [on Roman] is a technology demonstration,” Dressing says. “For HWO it’s a critical instrument.”

Another way to suppress starlight would be to use a giant, sunflower-shaped “starshade” formation-flying in space far ahead of HWO’s gaze to cast a deep, planet-revealing shadow across its optics. But a separate spacecraft is a much more complex and unwieldy starlight-suppression solution than a coronagraph and thus is unlikely to be part of HWO from the get-go. Instead most experts see a starshade as a possible post-launch add-on. “You can imagine launching HWO with a coronagraph, doing initial observations and then later launching a starshade,” Dressing says. That would allow planets to be seen further out from their stars and in more detail than with a coronagraph alone.

With either of these technologies HWO should be able to deliver pictures of potentially habitable alien worlds akin to the famous Pale Blue Dot image of Earth taken by the departing Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990 at the request of famed astronomer Carl Sagan. Exactly which systems HWO would target remains undecided. There are about 500 sunlike stars within 100 light-years of Earth—which is about as far as HWO’s life-finding survey seems likely to see. In January 2023 Eric Mamajek, deputy program chief scientist of NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program in California, co-authored a list of the most promising stars to observe within this volume of space. “I suspect that most of the top 50 or so have a very high probability of making it to the final survey list,” he says.

Settling on a target list is complicated by the fact that only HWO may be able to detect Earths in habitable zones around these stars, meaning that it would act as both surveyor and scrutinizer; no other presently planned telescope comes anywhere close to having similar capabilities. This does raise the question of whether enough targets can be found in the years ahead to serve as HWO’s raison d’être, but for the time being most astronomers appear unconcerned. Proxy measurements can still winnow down HWO’s targets. “If there’s a Jupiter right in the middle of the Goldilocks zone, you probably don’t want to bother looking for an Earth there,” says Bruce Macintosh, director of University of California Observatories at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “But it’s not actually that critical to mission success to know this star has an Earth and this one doesn’t, because the best Earth detector will be the mission we’re building”—HWO.

Renaissance

Worries over where, exactly, to point the telescope are part of what may be the project’s biggest challenge of all: ensuring unflagging support for the decades required to see it through, both from the public and from Congress, which will ultimately supply HWO with funding. “We need champions at [NASA] Headquarters, in Congress, in public and in industry so that when things are going tough, they’re talking on our behalf,” said Matthew Bolcar of NASA Goddard in a talk on day two of the HWO planning meeting. Heavily discussed were lessons to be learned from JWST, which was plagued by embarrassing and potentially ruinous budget overruns and schedule slips. In an effort to avoid those same mistakes, HWO is the crown jewel of a new NASA program called the Great Observatory Mission and Technology Maturation Program (GOMAP), which will carefully manage the budget and progress of the agency’s future large space telescope projects.

JWST’s ultimate success in spite of its setbacks, however, may be cause for optimism. “In the decade before we launched.... I can’t count how many people were like, ‘This thing’s never going to work,’” Rigby said in her talk; but, she said, the observatory’s above-expectations performance shows that “this is a doable thing.” And, many of HWO’s planners eagerly note, it will have a major advantage over JWST in that it will be designed from the start to be serviceable, just like Hubble. This means robots or astronauts could visit the telescope to periodically give it new leases on life, making repairs and swapping out instruments “sort of IKEA-style,” Roberge says.

If the technology and science behind HWO can be finalized, funding for the telescope can be secured and support for the project can be maintained, the payoff is almost unfathomable. In its study of some two dozen Earths in our corner of the galaxy, HWO will tell us if any of these worlds could support life or perhaps still do today. In the most wildly optimistic scenarios it could even see signs of technological civilizations, such as the night lights from notional alien metropolises or clear indicators of industrial pollution in an alien atmosphere. “You might use this telescope to look for ‘technosignatures’—evidence for not just simple life like bacteria but advanced life capable of building machines, industry, electric power, all of that,” Postman says. Such a possibility may seem far-fetched but remains at the edge of technical feasibility—and the possibility of success in such searches will forever remain zero if they are never undertaken.

On the other hand, HWO may scrutinize its targets and find none to contain anything we recognize as a sign of life, primitive or otherwise. Such an outcome would be disappointing but no less useful. It would be the best evidence yet that Earth truly is special in a cosmic sense—a precious oasis in a seemingly lifeless pocket of the Milky Way. “You would have a good upper limit on how rare life is right now,” Postman says. A robust detection of a living world, Dressing speculates, could drastically change our very culture, spurring a “whole new renaissance of art and literature”—not to mention even greater investments in more far-seeing space telescopes. Conversely, a failure to find anything might seem depressing but wouldn’t really be a “failure” at all—we humans would once again find ourselves seemingly solitary atop some cosmic pinnacle in a place of profound privilege we’d do well to better nurture and respect. “Either of those outcomes would be very interesting from both a scientific and philosophical point of view,” Postman says. We are lacing up our shoes at the start of that race to the ultimate prize. A podium of unbeatable knowledge awaits.

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Cosmic Forecast: Blurry With a Chance of Orbital Chaos

Astronomers have gotten better at tracking the motions of stars just beyond the solar system. But that’s made it harder to predict Earth’s future and reconstruct its past.

By Dennis Overbye

Regardless of what stock market analysts, political pollsters and astrologers might say, we can’t predict the future. In fact, we can’t even predict the past.

So much for the work of Pierre-Simon Laplace, the French mathematician, philosopher and king of determinism. In 1814, Laplace declared that if it were possible to know the velocity and position of every particle in the universe at one particular moment — and all the forces that were acting on them — “for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain, and the future, just like the past, would be the present to it.”

Laplace’s dream remains unfulfilled because we can’t measure things with infinite precision, and so tiny errors propagate and accumulate over time, leading to ever more uncertainty. As a result, in the 1980s astronomers including Jaques Laskar of the Paris Observatory concluded that computer simulations of the motions of the planets could not be trusted when applied more than 100 million years into the past or future. By way of comparison, the universe is 14 billion years old and the solar system is about five billion years old.

“You can’t cast an accurate horoscope for a dinosaur,” Scott Tremaine, an orbital dynamics expert at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., commented recently in an email.

The ancient astrological chart has now become even blurrier. A new set of computer simulations, which take into account the effects of stars moving past our solar system, has effectively reduced the ability of scientists to look back or ahead by another 10 million years. Previous simulations had considered the solar system as an isolated system, a clockwork cosmos in which the main perturbations to planetary orbits were internal, resulting from asteroids.

“The stars do matter,” said Nathan Kaib, a senior scientist with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz. He and Sean Raymond of the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux in France published their results in Astrophysical Journal Letters in late February.

The researchers discovered that a sunlike star named HD 7977, which currently lurks 247 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, could have passed close enough to the sun about 2.8 million years ago to rattle the largest planets in their orbits.

That added uncertainty makes it even harder for astronomers to forecast more than 50 million years into the past, to correlate temperature anomalies in the geological record with possible changes in the Earth’s orbit. That knowledge would be useful as we try to understand climatic changes underway today. About 56 million years ago, Dr. Kaib said, the Earth evidently went through the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, a period lasting more than 100,000 years during which average global temperatures increased as much as 8 degrees Celsius.

Was this warm spell triggered by some change in Earth’s orbit around the sun? We may never know.

“So I’m no expert, but I think that’s the warmest period in, like, the last 100 million years,” Dr. Kaib said. “And it’s almost certainly not caused by the Earth’s orbit itself. But we do know that long-term climate fluctuations are tied to Earth’s orbital fluctuations. And so if you want to figure out climate anomalies, it helps to be confident in what Earth’s orbit is doing.”

Dr. Tremaine noted, “The simulations are carefully done, and I believe the conclusion is correct.” He added, “This is a relatively minor change in our understanding of the history of the Earth’s orbit, but it is a conceptually important one.”

The really interesting story, he said, is how chaos in Earth’s orbit could have left a mark in the paleoclimate record.

The ability to track the movements of stars just beyond the solar system has been dramatically improved by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, which has been mapping the locations, motions and other properties of two billion stars since its launch in 2013.

“For the first time we can actually see individual stars,” Dr. Kaib said, “project them back in time or forward, and figure out which stars are close to the sun and which ones haven’t come close, which is really cool.”

According to his calculations, about 20 stars come within one parsec (about 3.26 light-years) of the sun every million years. HD 7977 could have come as close as 400 billion miles from the sun — about the distance to the Oort cloud, a vast reservoir of frozen comets on the edge of the solar system — or remained a thousand times as distant. Gravitational effects from the closer encounter could have rattled the orbits of the outer giant planets, which in turn could have rattled the inner planets like Earth.

“That is potentially powerful enough to alter simulations’ predictions of what Earth’s orbit was like beyond approximately 50 million years ago,” Dr. Kaib said.

As a result, he said, almost anything is statistically possible if you look ahead far enough. “So you find that, for instance, if you go forward billions of years, not all the planets are necessarily stable. There’s actually about a 1 percent chance that Mercury will either hit the sun or Venus over the course of the next five billion years.”

Whatever happens, chances are we won’t be around to see it. Stranded in the present, we don’t know for certain where we came from or where we are going; the future and the past recede into myth and hope. Yet we press forward trying to peer past our horizons in time and space. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in “The Great Gatsby”: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

An earlier version of this article misstated the possible distance between HD 7977 and the sun. It was 400 billion miles, not 4 billion. It also misstated Sean Raymond’s affiliation. He is at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux in France, not the University of Oklahoma.

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Dennis Overbye is the cosmic affairs correspondent for The Times, covering physics and astronomy. More about Dennis Overbye

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Essay on Save Earth for Students and Children

500+ words essay on save earth.

Earth and the resources of earth make life possible on it. If we were to imagine our lives without these resources, that would not be possible. As life cannot function without sunshine , air, vegetation , and water . However, this is soon going to be our reality if we do not save the earth now.

The resources earth provides us with are limited. They are blessings which we do not count. Human has become selfish and is utilizing the earth’s resources at a rapid rate. We need to protect them in order to protect our lives. This is so because man and all living organisms depend on the earth for their survival.

It is The Need of the Hour

To say that saving the earth is the need of the hour would be an understatement. All the activities of humans driven by greed and selfishness have caused immense damage to the earth. It is degraded it beyond repair. Almost all the natural resources are now polluted due to these activities.

When all these resources will be under threat, naturally lives of all living organisms will be under peril. This is why we need to save the earth at all costs. All the other issues are secondary and saving the earth is the main concern. For when the earth will not remain, the other issues will go away automatically.

Earth is the only planet which can sustain life on it. We do not have a planet B which we can move onto. This makes it all the more serious to save the earth and save our lives. If we do not take strict actions now, we will lose the chance of seeing our future generations flourish forever. Everyone must come together for the same causes, as we are inhabitants of this planet firstly and then anything else.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

How to Save Earth

As all human activities are impacting the lives of other organisms, humans only need to take steps to protect the earth and its resources. A little effort will go a long way on everyone’s end. Each action will make a difference. For instance, if one man decides to stop drinking bottled water, thousands of plastic can be saved from consuming.

Furthermore, we can start by planting more trees to make up for the deforestation that is happening these days at a rapid rate. When we plant more trees, ecological balance can be restored and we can improve the quality of life.

Similarly, we must stop wasting water. When done on individual levels, this will create a huge impact on conserving water. We must not pollute our water bodies by dumping waste in it. It is essential to save water most importantly as it is running out rapidly.

In short, the government and individuals must come together to save the earth. We can make people aware of the consequences of not saving the earth. They can be taught ways and how they can contribute to saving the earth. If all this collective effort starts happening, we can surely save our planet earth and make brighter earth.

{ “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “FAQPage”, “mainEntity”: [{ “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “Why must we save the earth?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “We need to save earth right away as it is the only planet that can sustain life. Earth supports life forms which no other planet does. Moreover, all the resources are being used up rapidly so we need to save them before they all get used up.”} }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “How can we save the earth?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”:”Everyone can take little steps to save the earth. We must not waste water and avoid the use of plastic. Moreover, we must plant more trees and encourage people to not pollute the environment.”} }] }

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Nowhere on Earth can we fully replicate the conditions on Mars. Special facilities can re-create certain elements with enough fidelity to test specific scenarios, but each is limited, leading to a plethora of platforms and scenarios required to span the conditions of Mars. In our prior post, “ The Right Stuff, ” the focus was using Ingenuity on Mars to test our macro capabilities: flying higher and faster, landing at various speeds, and generally expanding the flight envelope to retire the associated risk for future Martian rotorcraft. The holy grail, however, is understanding the microscale – not just proving Ingenuity can fly faster but knowing how it flies faster.

To answer the question, the NASA JPL Ingenuity team worked with our aerodynamics partners at NASA Ames to design, validate, and execute a Sys-ID test campaign. “Sys-ID” refers to a process called system identification, a data-driven method for understanding the complex behavior of a system by studying how specific inputs impact the motion of the vehicle.

In this case, a frequency sweep (sine wave with varying frequency) was injected into the control input to cause microscopic “nodding” of the vehicle in forward flight. The aerospace industry has long relied on these methods to characterize complex vehicle dynamics and validate simulation models. The same methods were used during ground testing of Ingenuity on Earth, but as previously noted, there was no comprehensive test environment on Earth to conduct full system testing like traditional Earth rotorcraft endure.

During the early phases of the mission, the required dynamic maneuvers were viewed as too risky to perform in-flight on Mars. As Ingenuity entered its third year of operations and neared the end of its ability to expand the flight envelope, the risks of Sys-ID became smaller and easier to justify. In late 2023, a three-month effort was spent to develop, test, and uplink a new software version that connected portions of Ingenuity’s software that were used for Earth-based Sys-ID testing with the code that controls the vehicle when flying horizontally.

Your browser does not support the video tag. Animation of Mars Helicopter Flight Test: This animation shows a simulation of the response of NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter to the system identification, or "Sys-ID," process. Credits: NASA/Ames. Download video ›

Animation depicts control input that results in microscopic “nodding” of the vehicle in forward flight .

The opportunity to conduct a Sys-ID flight was found in December 2023. Conditions were ideal within the lower section of Neretva Vallis (believed to be an old river valley) due to the terrain being nearly as flat as on the crater floor. Additionally, the mission schedule allowed for a break from the regular flights needed to stay ahead of the rover as it was conducting a scientific loop through Gnaraloo Bay. Two dedicated flights (Flights 68 and 69) were executed that successfully demonstrated the Sys-ID method in-flight and, for the first time on another planet, characterized the vehicle’s flight dynamics.

These flights prioritized collecting data in high-speed forward flight conditions – both within and beyond Earth-based testing to correlate and extend our knowledge. The importance of this is highlighted by Allen Ruan, Ames aeromechanics flight dynamicist, “Getting the data from these two flights, especially at the high forward flight speeds, closes the loop on prior years of simulation and ground testing and informs us on improvements for dynamics modeling and estimation of future Martian rotorcraft.”

The reason that these flights are so significant is because they provide key fundamental validation of rotorcraft models and methods which would otherwise require conditions that are impossible to replicate here on Earth. As explained by Tove Aagren, lead simulator at Ames and designer of the Sys-ID campaign, “An inherent challenge of working with Mars rotorcraft is that of model validation. Extraterrestrial flight necessitates high confidence in our prediction models, yet replicating the true flight condition to gain this confidence across an entire flight envelope in Earth-based testing is highly non-trivial. To this day, aspects of forward flight dynamics of Ingenuity remain associated with uncertainty. This is what makes the opportunity to characterize key vehicle dynamics in the true operating condition, i.e. on Mars, incredibly exciting. Not only for the novelty of the approach, but for the fundamental insights that we really cannot gain in any other way than through designated system identification flights.”

In order to execute this type of maneuver, Ingenuity had to fly a record distance at the previously tested max groundspeed of 10 m/s (22.3 mph). An out-and-back flight with Sys-ID segments in each leg guaranteed that for an expected east-west wind direction at least one leg is into the wind enabling testing at an airspeed greater than 10 m/s. Getting two flights’ worth of data at these high speeds provides a treasure trove that allows the team to increase confidence in the behavior of future rotorcraft at Mars.

Additionally, now that these Sys-ID methods have been demonstrated successfully, a process has been established that can be replicated for characterizing future flight vehicles earlier in their mission. This would better define the vehicle’s performance, allowing the operations team to plan with fewer unknowns and could enable future rotorcraft to be tested on Earth to meet only the minimum capability needed to complete the mission, and then validated to higher levels of performance after landing.

With in-flight system identification complete, Ingenuity followed in the footsteps of countless legends, test pilots who first pushed the limits of aerial flight, then space flight, and now Martian flight.

About This Blog

These blog updates were provided by the Mars Helicopter team. The Mars Helicopter was a technology demonstration to test the first powered flight on Mars.

Dates of planned test activities sometimes changed due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays, helicopter and/or rover status.

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Contributors +

• Ben Morrell Ingenuity Operations Engineer, NASA/JPL
• Bob Balaram Chief Engineer for the Mars Helicopter Project, NASA/JPL
• David Agle Media Representative, NASA/JPL
• Håvard Grip Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Chief Pilot, NASA/JPL
• Jaakko Karras Ingenuity Chief Engineer, NASA/JPL
• Josh Ravich Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Mechanical Engineering Lead, NASA/JPL
• Joshua Anderson Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Operations Lead, NASA/JPL
• Martin Cacan Ingenuity Pilot, NASA/JPL
• MiMi Aung Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Project Manager, NASA/JPL
• Teddy Tzanetos Ingenuity Team Lead, NASA/JPL
• Travis Brown Chief Engineer Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, NASA/JPL

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Journal of Materials Chemistry A

Amorphous–crystalline cofeb/nips3 vertical heterostructure with built-in electric field for robust ampere-level water oxidation..

Highly efficient oxygen evolution reaction (OER) electrocatalysts play a paramount role in future hydrogen energy deployment. The quest for earth-abundant OER catalysts is actively pursued for the sustainable deployment of water electrolysis. In this work, an amorphous-crystalline CoFeB/NiPS3 heterostructure was successfully fabricated to realize highly active water electrolysis. The heterostructure delivered an overpotential as low as 285 mV at 50 mAcm−2 and an ultrasmall Tafel slope of 96 mV dec−1, with impressive stability for 24 h. This powder achieved an excellent ampere-level current density of over 1 A cm−2. Theoretically, density functional theory (DFT) calculations exhibited that CoFeB/NiPS3 has the smallest energy barrier for formation of *OOH species (0.91 eV). It is also revealed that the presence of an internal polarization field (IPF) accelerates the electron transfer from CoFeB to NiPS3. This research provides a new opportunity for the development of all transition metal-based amorphous-crystalline heterostructure electrocatalysts for large current density water splitting.

• This article is part of the themed collection: Journal of Materials Chemistry A HOT Papers

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S. Zhao, Y. Liu, Y. Chen, L. Li, W. Zhai, Z. Guo and Z. Dai, J. Mater. Chem. A , 2024, Accepted Manuscript , DOI: 10.1039/D4TA01168F

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