One or Two Bright Spots

Some good news, courtesy of Fix the News (formerly Futurecrunch). Heaven knows we could all use some:

Researchers discovered that the drug Lenacapavir eliminates HIV infection completely.

Global tuberculosis deaths fell to their lowest level in history. 

In South Asia infant mortality fell 75% between 1990 and 2022. 

200 million more children have acquired access to clean water and sanitation at school since 2015. As of 2024, about 500 million children worldwide have free or nearly-free school lunch. 

In Brazil, the deforestation of the Amazon has fallen by 50% since 2022. 

In the United States, the removal of four dams from the Klamath River has been completed ahead of schedule. No word on whether the new administration plans to put them all back.

Power companies, corporations, local governments, and individuals installed 660 GW of new solar power generation this year.

Thailand and Greece (inter alia) legalized same-sex marriage.

NASA launched the Europa Clipper mission, which should please fans of 2010: Odyssey Two.

Everything else is pretty terrible, but that’s not exactly new.

Colder Connections

 

As he plied his loathsome trade in the summer of 1751, the slave-ship captain Henry Ellis paused to engage in a little scientific exploration. En route to Jamaica, in the vicinity of latitude 25 North, Ellis lowered into the ocean a sealed bucket with controllable valves, able to take and hold samples of seawater from multiple depths. To the probe’s designer Ellis reported his success in taking samples from exceptional depths, up to a mile below the surface. His findings surprised him: from a surface temperature of about 25 Celsius, the seawater rapidly chilled with increasing depth, falling to a low of 5-10 C, then rising again below 1300 meters to a maximum of 12 degrees Celsius. The deep, cold water also proved more salty than expected. A practical man - slavers weren’t idealists - Captain Ellis used the chilled water samples to refrigerate his supply of wine.

 

Slaver Ellis wasn’t conducting oceanographic investigations for a laugh. He considered himself a natural philosopher, having served as de facto science officer on an expedition to the Northwest Passage in 1746-47. After his return Ellis published a book on the voyage, describing the explorers’ reconnaissance of Greenland, trade with the Inuit, and eventual failure to find an ice-free channel beyond Hudson Bay. The voyage and book ingratiated Ellis with a number of scientifically-inclined noblemen, who doubtless helped him raise the capital for his trade in human beings. One high-born friend, Lord Halifax, later appointed Ellis royal governor of Georgia, a colony that had recently legalized slavery. Ellis helped negotiate a stable peace settlement with the neighboring Muskogee Creeks, doubtless thinking himself a humanitarian for doing so. (See Julie Sweet, Negotiating For Georgia (2005), 188 on his governorship.) Illness drove the governor from Savannah after a year, but Ellis eventually returned to American office in Halifax, as lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia.

Detail from Ellis’s 1746-47 voyage

 

The results of Captain E’s deep-sea experiment remained little-known until the 1790s, when Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, theorized that the mass of cold, salty water Ellis discovered was a current of cold seawater, analogous to the Gulf Stream nearer the surface. In the twentieth century, oceanographers concluded that both warm and cold Atlantic currents comprised a great conveyor-belt extending from the Antarctic to the Arctic, powered by heat and the transfer of salts - the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). In our own time, climate scientists have expressed concern that the accelerated melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps, the flow of low-salinity water into the polar zones of the AMOC, and the disruption of thermohaline circulation will shut down the whole circuit. Since the warming Gulf Stream is part of the AMOC, this will spell pretty bad news for Europe. For parts of North America, too: the Gulf Stream deflects a substantial volume of seawater from the East Coast, and its dissipation will cause the relative sea level to rise, contributing to the inundation of low-lying communities.

 

Careful readers will note that the Atlantic Overturning currents also tie together many of Henry Ellis’s ports of call and places of residence: Greenland, whose melting ice caps now threaten to shut down the Gulf Stream, and the coastal cities of Savannah and Halifax, which are likely to experience considerable flooding if the Atlantic basin sloshes slightly westward. Ellis himself lacked the notional birds-eye view needed to make these connections, or to observe that he had helped make the Atlantic both a web of human-made connections and an avenue of human misery. If he’d made these observations, though, I doubt that they would have changed his behavior. One didn’t rise to high rank in the British Empire on the strength of humane sentiments.

Those Weird and Luminous Lights in the Sky Don't Necessarily Mean Bad News

 

In March 1716 Edmond Halley became one of thousands of northern Europeans to witness a powerful display of the Northern Lights. The aurora manifested in England as streams of reddish-yellow light, perpendicular to the ground but spreading at the zenith to form a “corona.” Halley, later famed for predicting the periodicity of a certain comet*, published his observations of aurora borealis in the British Royal Society’s principal periodical. His article proved remarkable for two reasons. First, Halley attributed the aurora not to the glory of God or Earth’s venting of luminiferous vapors, but to an effusion of “magnetical effluvia” that the Earth’s magnetism drew toward the North Pole. Halley was only partially correct - today we know that the Northern Lights are caused by charged solar particles impacting the Earth’s magnetic field - but he did at least connect the phenomenon with terrestrial magnetism.

 

Photo by AstroAnthony via Wikimedia

Second, Halley observed that the Northern Lights had become quite rare in Europe. Apart from a few low-powered manifestations over the winter of 1707-08, he knew of no recorded appearances of the aurora since 1621. The Lights had in fact appeared a few other times in the previous century: in 1661-62 over England and Germany, and a couple of times in Romania in the early 1700s. That aurora borealis had not been seen in Halley’s homeland in over fifty years currently seems indisputable, and worthy of explanation.

In The Global Crisis (2013, p. 13), Geoffrey Parker pointed out the likely cause of the aurora’s long absence. As the Sun is the active agent in producing auroras, during periods of reduced solar radiation they tend to weaken or disappear altogether. Halley’s Hiatus (to coin a phrase) coincided with a period of drastically reduced sunspot activity - strong evidence of weakened solar output - that modern Earth scientists call the Maunder Minimum (1640-1715). This same period saw, not coincidentally, intermittent spells of drought and foul winter weather throughout the world, culminating in the devastating winter of 1708-09. The return of the auroras to northern Europe coincided with an increase in sunspot activity and solar output, and the subsequent decades saw a steady increase in the world’s population and food supply and the stabilization of some of its more powerful empires (e.g. Russia and China). Foul weather and failed harvests did not become commonplace again until the late 1780s. What Halley and his contemporaries were witnessing, then, was not an ill omen but a predictor of better times to come - the climatological end of the seventeenth century.   

 

 

* A disappointing one, for those of us who remember the dismal display Halley’s Comet put on in 1986. I’m told that astronomers expect no better from the 2061 encounter.