Early climate adapters show warming world how to cope

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We still cannot predict exactly how climate change will affect each part of the world, but the people on the front lines are showing others how to adapt

IT IS hard to prepare for a disaster, but harder still to prepare for a disaster that you can't identify. Yet that is the quandary facing many nations, which still don't know how climate change will affect them – even though it is already happening. That means many communities must prepare for the unknown.

We are running out of time to gather scientific evidence, says Koko Warner of the United Nations University (UNU) in Bonn, Germany. It is clear that climate change is happening, driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases, and its impacts will be felt around the world. But it has proved difficult to predict how events like floods and droughts will change in specific areas over the coming decades.

The second instalment of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report came out on Monday (see "World must adapt to unknown climate future, says IPCC"). In earlier IPCC reports, part two made regional predictions, to tell communities what will happen around them. But this year's report instead focuses on how people are, and should be, adapting to climate change.

"We cannot wait for climatologists to establish exactly what role climate change played in different events," says Kees van der Geest, also at UNU. "We want to build societies that are more protected against possible deterioration. We want to know why some things work, what doesn't work well, how we can improve, how we can make our society better prepared."

On a global level, the IPCC warns of a laundry list of calamities. We are told that cities will flood; farms will be hit by heat and drought; infrastructure will be threatened by extreme weather; fish stocks will be depleted; heat waves will claim lives; coasts will fall into the sea; and some aquifers will run dry.

But on a local level, which is what matters to people and governments, the impacts of climate change are devilishly difficult to model. They depend not only on changing weather but on how society responds. For instance, whether UK towns flood more in future depends not just on how high the seas get and how much it rains – which are difficult enough to model – but also on how rivers are managed, whether people build on floodplains and the area of land coated in concrete. Natural variability in the climate poses a further problem.

"Even if one had precise predictions of future meteorology, that would not mean one had precise predictions of droughts and floods," says Mike Hulme of King's College London. The same is true of food security, public health and access to water.

Communities won't get exact forecasts. "That would require a crystal ball," says Richard Betts of the UK Met Office in Exeter. "But we can assess risk, and whether risks are changing. Then it's up to society and politicians to decide what level of risk is acceptable." For example, New York City has decided the risks are great, so it has a plan to hold back rising seas.

To find out how people are experiencing climate change, Warner, van der Geest and their colleagues went to nine countries in Asia, Africa and Micronesia, surveyed 3269 households, and conducted 100 focus groups and interviews (see "Voices from the front lines").

"We find people who are already experiencing a lot of climatic variability, and people who are doing a lot themselves, not just changing what they do but also who have traditional systems already in place to spread risk," says van der Geest. "If a farmer in Africa has two hectares, he will try to diversify his crops and sowing dates so that if there's a drought he doesn't lose everything in one go."

Events caused by sea level rise are some of the few that can be firmly linked to climate change. To cope with saltwater invading fields, more Bangladeshi farmers are planting salt-tolerant rice. Nearly a third of those surveyed have flushed their fields with fresh water, either bought from neighbours or drained from rivers using new irrigation channels.

Coping mechanisms

In Bhutan, farmers say the monsoon is changing, so they must cope with more variable rains. The majority of those surveyed said they perform rituals, but half changed their systems of sharing water with their neighbours, or bought water. Some relatively wealthy farmers have bought gasoline pumps to bring water up from lowland rivers.

Many farmers have had to relocate, some repeatedly. After a severe flood struck Mozambique in 2001, the government moved people to higher ground. But these locations are vulnerable to drought and have poorer soils. Many kept their houses on high land but moved their fields back down, and now have to spend time commuting back and forth. Yields have improved, but the farmers run the risk of losing entire harvests to floods.

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Mammogram risks raise doubts about blanket screening

The benefits of mammograms have been overblown and the harms underplayed, concludes a review of studies looking at breast cancer screening since the 1960s. Rather than blanket screening every woman every few years once they reach a certain age, the review recommends only screening those identified as being at high risk.

A mammogram is not much better than the much maligned prostate cancer screening test (PSA), which has been found to lead to many cases of unnecessary and debilitating treatment, says the lead author of the review, Nancy Keating of the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

"The harms are real and the benefits very modest," says Keating. "For years, we knew that prostate screening was problematic, but we always thought we had a winner in mammography. Now we're finding it's not that different from the PSA."

In the US, women of any age have a 2.7 per cent risk of dying from breast cancer. The review found that, overall, a mammogram reduces this by about 19 per cent. However, the actual number of women saved per mammogram performed is very small. For every 10,000 women screened annually for 10 years, approximately five in their forties would be saved, 10 in their fifties and 42 in their sixties.

Unnecessary treatment

For women between 40 and 60 being screened annually for 10 years, approximately half will receive a false positive result, which will require them to return for more tests. More worryingly, for women who receive a diagnosis of cancer, about 1 in 5 will be overdiagnosed. This means they will be treated even if their cancer would never do any them any harm because it was indolent – slow growing and non-aggressive.

According to a 2009 report for the US Preventive Services Task Force, the risk of false alarms for the PSA test was 12 per cent and the risk of overdiagnosis 50 per cent.

In terms of breast cancer, says Keating, the key is to move away from the idea that all women over a certain age should have a mammogram, as is the recommendation in the US, Canada and the UK. Instead, doctors should assess each woman individually, taking into account factors like her age, her family history and other genetic factors that either raise or reduce her likelihood of cancer. Only those at higher risk should be screened.

Aggressive or indolent

"We can clearly increase the benefits if we find a way to direct resources to those likely to benefit most, and avoid harm by doing less for those least likely to benefit," says Laura Esserman at the University of California, San Francisco. She says that several additional screening tests and procedures are becoming available that should make this possible, including genetic-susceptibility tests, breast density measurements, and methods of distinguishing indolent from aggressive cancers.

Claire Knight, health information manager at Cancer Research UK, points out that a recent independent review of breast screening commissioned by the charity estimated that breast screening saves about 1300 lives in the UK each year. But, for every life saved, three women are diagnosed with a cancer that would never have gone on to harm them.

"Future research could help distinguish between which breast cancers need to be treated and which can safely be left," says Knight. "A better understanding of the disease could also give a more specific picture of each woman's risk, enabling more accurate decisions about who should be screened."

Journal reference: JAMA, DOI: 10.1001/jama.2014.1398

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Dino-killing asteroid cleared way for modern reef fish

Out of crisis comes opportunity. An asteroid-triggered mass extinction 65 million years ago famously wiped out the dinosaurs – but it may also have helped establish the modern reef fish communities.

Coral reefs are home to 7 per cent of all vertebrate species, despite occupying less than 0.01 per cent of Earth's surface, and there is a mind-boggling array of reef fish. But about 92 per cent of them belong to one group: the acanthomorphs.

Samantha Price at the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues looked at the features of today's reef and non-reef acanthomorphs to establish the ecological niches they occupy. The team then plotted that information on an evolutionary tree of acanthomorphs that they had built last year using DNA data. Doing so allowed them to pinpoint when in prehistory the different kinds of acanthomorph moved onto reefs.

Reef rush

They found two peaks of reef colonisation by acanthomorphs. One began 25 million years before the mass extinction that marked the end of the Cretaceous, and the second peak of colonisation began right after that cataclysmic event. The earliest acanthomorphs to arrive on the reefs occupied very different ecological niches from one another – later arrivals filled in the gaps, ultimately creating the marine biodiversity hotspots we know today.

"Before the mid-Cretaceous, the early antecedents of the fish species we associate with reefs today – wrasse, parrotfish, clownfish – were unlikely to be living on reefs," says Price. Instead, prior to the two peaks of acanthomorph colonisation, reefs were inhabited by now-extinct groups of fish that weren't related to the acanthomorphs.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the acanthomorphs outcompeted these other fish, says Price. "All we have is a pattern, we have to be careful suggesting a process."

In fact, the first peak of acanthomorph reef colonisation actually coincides with a decline in the number of coral reefs and the rise of a different kind of reef built from mollusc shells. The acanthomorphs may have been better able to adapt to these new mollusc reefs than the other fish previously associated with coral reefs. The asteroid impact killed off these mollusc-based reefs, triggering the return of coral reefs and perhaps enabling the second pulse of acanthomorph colonisation.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2014.0321

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Private moon-landing hopeful dodges dangers in desert

Video: Rocket tries on moon lander's danger dodger

Look out, moon. A private company has sent its lunar-lander steering system on a test flight, taking one small step towards a planned moon mission next year.

Astrobotic of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is one of 18 teams competing for the Google Lunar X Prize, which offers $20 million to the first private group that lands a spacecraft on the moon, has it travel at least 500 metres, and receives two videos from their lunar vehicle. And all by the end of 2015.

This week Astrobotic released video (above) of a rocket launching and landing in the Mojave desert using their hazard-detection system, which will ultimately be part of the moon lander. This uses cameras and lasers to guide the lander towards a safe touchdown.

"It's like our astronaut-in-a-box," says Astrobotic's CEO John Thornton. On the test flight, the rocket shot 260 metres into the air and landed safely 250 metres away. For this first flight, the craft flew on a pre-programmed path and took data to make sure its parts worked properly. The next test is due in a few months, when the system will control the rocket's route autonomously to avoid hazards.

Lake of Death

The team's hoped-for lunar destination is a basin called the Lake of Death, where astronomers have spotted a pit with a collapsed wall that could act as a natural ramp down into an underground cave. This location would provide natural shielding from micrometeorites, cosmic radiation and other hazards on the lunar surface.

"If you're underground on the moon, you're protected," says Thornton. "It's a good place to be if you're a human, or even a robot. We imagine that you could build an inflatable habitat and have a long-term moon base there."

The rocket used in the desert test can only reach suborbital heights, so Astrobotic has a different ride lined up for their moon shot. The company has signed a deal with private firm SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, to launch their lander on a Falcon 9 rocket, akin to the one now being used to send astronauts to the space station.

"We're all sweating a little bit on the timeframe right now," says Thornton. "But we think that it's achievable."

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The dream maker: My app shaped their slumbers

Golden slumbers: can sweet sounds send you to a pleasant place? (Image: Carl De Keyzer/Magnum)

Imagine being able to plant ideas in hordes of sleeping brains. My app did just that

IN THE film Inception , Leonardo DiCaprio plays a dream architect who enters sleepers' subconscious minds and manipulates their dreams. The idea of dream control quickly caught public imagination and the film became a huge hit.

But that was fiction. Is it really possible to direct someone else's night-time wanderings? I set out to answer that question with the Dream:ON project, which used people's smartphones to subtly manipulate their dreams as they slept. Half a million people subscribed, allowing us to track the patterns of their dreams in unprecedented detail – with results showing that the forces shaping our nocturnal life are even more mysterious than I had imagined.

The idea of manipulating dreams has a ...

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Catching cancer: The riveting quest for a killer virus

• Book information


• Cancer Virus: The story of Epstein-Barr virus by Dorothy H. Crawford, Alan Rickinson and Ingólfur Johannessen


• Published by: Oxford University Press


• Price: £16.99

Epstein-Barr virus: the curiosity that revolutionised medicine (Image: Cavallini James/BSIP/Science Photo Library)

About 95 per cent of us are infected with the Epstein-Barr virus. Cancer Virus is the compelling, thriller-like tale of its discovery

FEW words have the power to induce terror: cancer is one, virus another. Imagine, then, the awful potency of something that merges the two.

The Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is a curiosity, as well as a killer. Around 95 per cent of us are infected with it, but it rarely has symptoms. When it does, the virus manifests in many guises. The childhood cancer of the blood Burkitt's lymphoma, glandular fever (infectious mononucleosis) and MS have all been associated with Epstein-Barr.

Cancer Virus tells its story through the scientists who worked on it. It reads like a thriller, starting with the mystery of the African children with swollen faces – caused by Burkitt's lymphoma – and the controversial idea that a virus might be behind it. The book moves on to the revelation that the same virus was implicated in seemingly unrelated diseases, and finally to ways to destroy it.

The authors also offer a potted history of virology, touching on the discovery of infectious agents at the turn of the 20th century, and highlighting how technological limitations made it so difficult to prove the link between cancer and a virus.

Cancer Virus made me reflect on just how quickly biology has progressed: in the 1960s, electron microscopy was in its infancy, and DNA-based techniques for characterising what might be lurking in tissue simply didn't exist. Even proving the presence of viral particles was a massive challenge.

All three narrators were involved in EBV research and so occasionally veer into complex explanations – they do provide a helpful glossary, though. Overall, the book is compelling and colourful, capturing the romance of scientific discovery so well that it is exciting and accessible. It made me wish I had been involved in unravelling such a fascinating mystery.

The discovery of EBV paved the way for the identification of other cancer-causing viruses, including human papillomavirus (HPV), and hepatitis B. These account for between 3 and 4 per cent of western cancers, but in Africa they are responsible for about 33 per cent. The knowledge gained in the riveting search for EBV is leading to vaccination programmes that should slash the human toll.

This article appeared in print under the headline "The killer within"

Linda Geddes is a biology features editor for New Scientist

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Today on New Scientist

Colours of time smeared in mountain-sized tectonic rip

A spectacular satellite view of China's Piqiang fault shows 50 million years of Earth's history torn asunder

Mini robot space surgeon to climb inside astronauts

The fist-sized robot would slide into your abdomen to perform emergency surgery in deep space. Its first zero-gravity test is slated for later this year

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Colours of time smeared in mountain-sized tectonic rip

(Image: Landsat/USGS/NASA)

WHAT a striking display of the greatest powers on Earth: layers of rock, stacked over millions of years, ripped apart by tectonic forces.

This satellite image is of the Piqiang fault in north-western China. The horizontal stripes are geological layers that have been scrunched up and pushed to the surface by the Indian tectonic plate colliding with the Eurasian plate. In each band of stripes the coloured layers from green to red span about 50 million years, capturing pivotal moments in our planet's history.

Take, for example, the lower green layer, representing the moss blankets that thrived in the Silurian period. It gives way to a thin, pale blue stripe in the middle, formed in the early Devonian, around 400 million years ago. This is when ferns and shrubs came into their own, full of insects and other creepy-crawlies like mites and scorpions. By the mid-Devonian – the large red band – rooted shrubs had cropped up, soon followed by Earth's first trees.

A deep vertical fault line splits the mountains in two. Those to the right of the picture are sliding northwards at a rate between 5 and 10 centimetres a year – "about as fast as your fingernails grow," says geologist John Cosgrove of Imperial College London. As you can see, they have been travelling for quite some time. The 3-kilometre offset between them took tens of thousands of years to form.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Mismatched mountains"

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Mini robot space surgeon to climb inside astronauts

It could one day answer the prayers of astronauts who need surgery in deep space. The miniature surgeon slides into the body through an incision in the belly button. Once inside the abdominal cavity – which has been filled with inert gas to make room for it to work – the robot can remove an ailing appendix, cut pieces from a diseased colon or perforate a gastric ulcer.

The fist-sized doctor, a product of Virtual Incision in Lincoln, Nebraska, will have its first zero-gravity test – in an aircraft flying in parabolic arcs – in the next few months. While aloft, the surgery bot will perform a set of exercises to demonstrate its dexterity, such as manipulating rubber bands and other inanimate objects.

The hope is that such robots will accompany future astronauts on long deep-space missions, when the chances are higher that someone will experience physical trauma. "It must be an emergency if you would consider surgery in space," says team member Shane Farritor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Medical emergency

For now, the only humans in space venture no further than the International Space Station. Astronauts are carefully screened for health issues before leaving Earth, and the ISS has an escape capsule standing by in case of emergencies, so home is just hours away. Many worrisome health issues that can occur in space return to normal back on Earth (see "Space travel squashes hearts", below). But NASA has plans for human missions to an asteroid and eventually Mars, and getting home quickly won't be an option.

Surgery in space would be extremely difficult. Without gravity, it is easy for bodily fluids like blood to float free and contaminate the cabin. And space capsules can only carry a certain amount of weight, so medical tools need to be relatively light but capable of handling many kinds of situations.

"Everything that we take for granted, even something as simple as putting a Band Aid down on a table, is difficult in space," says Dmitry Oleynikov at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. "That difficulty increases logarithmically when you're trying to do complex procedures such as an operation."

Virtual Incision has been working on its design for a few years. The latest version weighs 0.4 kilograms. It has two arms loaded with tools to grab, cauterise and suture tissue, and its head is a small video camera. The feed relays to a control station, where a human surgeon operates it using joysticks.

Space surgeons

Prototypes have performed several dozen procedures in pigs. The team says the next step is to work in human cadavers and then test the technology in a living human on Earth.

Remote-operated technologies would have a disadvantage in space, because the further away a spaceship gets, the greater the time delay in communications signals. Virtual Incision hopes to avoid this problem by training astronauts to perform procedures on each other.

James Burgess at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh thinks robots like these could be particularly useful if they can learn to act more autonomously.

"You could imagine situations in the future where you can actually dial in a surgery from the ground and it can be put together and performed in space," says Burgess.

This article will appear in print under the headline "Robot surgeon fits inside astronauts"

Space travel squashes hearts

Absence makes the heart grow rounder, at least if you're an astronaut. Ultrasound scans of space travellers show that their normally pear-shaped hearts become more spherical during extended stints away from Earth.

Christopher May at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and colleagues scanned the hearts of 12 astronauts before and after trips to the International Space Station. The team also trained the astronauts to scan their own hearts while in space, using an ultrasound machine on the station.

In results presented at a cardiology conference in Washington DC last week, the team revealed that zero gravity makes hearts become 9.4 per cent more spherical, on average, measured as the ratio of heart height to width. The hearts returned to normal when the astronauts came home, but the shape-shift may reduce pumping efficiency in space and could cause lingering problems.

The findings will be used to improve exercise regimes designed to keep astronauts fit on long-term trips, such as a mission to Mars. The results also match predictions made by simulations designed to show what happens to stressed hearts, boosting confidence in the use of such models for studying heart disease on Earth. Jacob Aron

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Stuff: A few of your favourite things

We asked New Scientist readers what item you had purchased in the past decade that brought you the most happiness – for a chance to win a set of gorgeously bound popular science books from the Folio Society. Nearly 2000 of you got back to us in our online poll. Your answers inspired, amused and at times even bewildered us, but above all they showed just how deeply we connect to the things we own.

Unsurprisingly, there are many bibliophiles among you – both those who relish collections of paperbacks and those who praised their e-readers for allowing them to carry an entire library around with them (see diagram, below). For many of you, the object of happiness was a specific book: the text book recommended by a professor that spurred a career; the "really mouldy copy of a children's tale I'd borrowed from a dying library when I was little".

Not all of you are bookworms. Many of you listed the bicycles, fishing rods, hiking boots or other gear that helps you enjoy the great outdoors. Others were most fulfilled by the technologies that bring the outside world into our homes and hands – laptops, tablets, home computers and smartphones. Kristina Schindler, for example, told us that her laptop "allowed me to live abroad while staying easily connected to loved ones. It is also the main tool for my beloved degree."

Love was a common theme. Many of you mentioned wedding or engagement rings, but Sheree Jonker's was perhaps the most surprising. "My girlfriend hates jewellery. I proposed to her with a red ring pop… she said yes, then ate it."

You also celebrated your pets, even if the notion of "buying" them didn't sit quite right. As Jared Cole told us, "I never think of my dog Grimm as property, but I did buy his freedom. I couldn't have better spent that cash."

Gifts, cars and cameras

Through your chosen possessions we got other glimpses of your biggest challenges: "An eternity ring for my wife after I was diagnosed with a brain tumour and given months to live – five years ago!" wrote Richard Dunning.

You celebrated gifts that you gave to others, favourite cars, cameras that captured your travels and friendships, the seeds with which you started a garden – even the "truckload of manure" with which you made it grow. You celebrated the homes that you bought, the university education that fulfilled you, the plane tickets and trips that brought you to other places in the world and returned you to friends and family.

So how much did your happiness set you back? Of course, there were some big-ticket items – a handful of you said the thing you bought in the past 10 years that made you happiest cost more than $10,000. But most of you paid less than $1000, and for nearly half of you, the thing cost less than $100 (see diagram, below).

Whatever you spent, the diversity and enthusiasm of your answers showed that psychologist Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia is on to something: money can buy happiness. You just have to spend it right.

Read more: "Our stuff: Why it's human nature to own things"

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