(Bloomberg) — A population equivalent to that of Germany — 83 million people — could be killed this century because of rising temperatures caused by greenhouse-gas emissions, according to a new study that might influence how markets price carbon pollution.
The research from Columbia University’s Earth Institute introduces a new metric to help companies and governments assess damages wrought by climate change. Accounting for the “mortality cost of carbon” could give polluters new reasons to clean up by dramatically raising the cost of emissions.
Advertisement
Article content
“Based on the decisions made by individuals, businesses or governments, this tells you how many lives will be lost or saved,” said Columbia’s Daniel Bressler, whose research was published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications. “It quantifies the mortality impact of those decisions” by reducing questions down “to a more personal, understandable level.”
Read more: How Biden Is Putting a Number on Carbon’s True Cost: QuickTake
Adapting models developed by Yale climate economist and Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus, Bressler calculated the number of direct heat deaths that will be caused by current global-warming trajectories. His calculations don’t include the number of people who might die from rising seas, superstorms, crop failures or changing disease patterns affected by atmospheric warming. That means that the estimated deaths — which approximates the number of people killed in World War 2 — could still be a “vast underestimate,” Bressler said.
Advertisement
Article content
Every 4,434 tons of carbon spewed in 2020 into the Earth’s atmosphere will kill one person this century, according to the peer-reviewed calculations that see the planet warming 4.1 degrees Celsius by 2100. So far the planet has warmed about 1.1 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial times.
The volume of pollution emitted over the lifetime of three average U.S. residents is estimated to contribute to the death of another person. Bressler said the highest mortality rates can be expected in Earth’s hottest and poorest regions in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
Read more: Life and Death in Our Hot Future Will be Shaped by Today’s Income Inequality
The new metric could significantly affect how economies calculate the so-called social cost of carbon, which U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration set at $51 a ton in February. That price on pollution, which complements carbon markets like the European Union’s Emissions Trading System, helps governments set policy by accounting for future damages. But the scale revealed by Bressler’s research suggests the social cost of carbon should be significantly higher, at about $258 a ton, if the world’s economies want to reduce deaths caused by global warming.
Advertisement
Article content
A higher cost on carbon pollution could immediately induce larger emission cuts, which in turn could save lives. Capping global average temperature increase to 2.4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, compared with modest emissions reductions that would warm the planet 3.4 degrees Celsius, could save 74 million people from dying of heat.
“People shouldn’t take their per-person mortality emissions too personally,” said Bressler. Governments need to mobilize “large-scale policies such as carbon pricing, cap and trade and investments in low carbon technologies and energy storage.”
Can’t afford to join a commercial space mission offered by Jeff Bezos or Richard Branson? Consider the next best thing: seeing a starry, starry night in a sea of darkness, unimpeded by artificial light, at one of the International Dark Sky Parks in the U.S. It’s a rare treat, since light pollution prevents nearly 80 percent of Americans from seeing the Milky Way from their homes.
The International Dark-Sky Association (IDSA) has certified 14 of the nation’s 63 national parks as dark sky destinations. So visitors can take full advantage of such visibility, many of them offer specialized after-dark programs, from astronomy festivals and ranger-led full-moon walks to star parties and astrophotography workshops. If you prefer to stargaze on your own at a park, the National Park Service recommends bringing a pair of 7-by-50 binoculars, a red flashlight, which enhances night vision, and a star chart, which shows the arrangement of stars in the sky.
Here are seven of the IDSA-certified parks where you can appreciate how the heavens looked from the Earth before the dawn of electric light.
|
Photos
1 of
PHOTO BY: Getty Images
Arches National Park (Utah)
If there’s one state stargazers should be sure not to miss, it’s Utah, which boasts the country’s greatest number of certified dark sky national parks, with five: Arches, Bryce, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef and Zion. Arches stands out with more than 2,000 signature sandstone arches that form dramatic backdrops for the celestial show overhead. For the best viewing spots, avoid the lights of Moab to the south and head north to the Balanced Rock picnic area, the Garden of Eden viewpoint, Panorama Point and the Windows section. Under the right conditions, you might even see Saturn’s rings with standard binoculars. Ranger-led stargazing programs, during which rangers introduce visitors to the wonders of the night sky followed by stargazing and telescope viewing, take place in spring and fall around the new moon at Panorama Point or the park’s visitor center. These events rotate between Arches and nearby Canyonlands.
2 of
PHOTO BY: Deb Snelson/Getty Images
Big Bend National Park (Texas)
Thanks to its remote desert location and low humidity, this sprawling park in southwestern Texas has the least light pollution of any other national park in the continental U.S. No wonder, as the song says, “The stars at night are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas.” You can attend one of Big Bend’s star parties, when amateur astronomers gather to observe the night sky together; take a guided moonlight walk; or use your binoculars on your own to enjoy an evening of meteor showers, constellation spotting or Milky Way viewing. On a clear night, countless stars will dazzle you, including from the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light years away.
3 of
PHOTO BY: Kotomi Ito/Getty Images
Bryce Canyon National Park (Utah)
Marry the world’s largest collection of hoodoos (irregular columns of rocks) with one of the country’s darkest night skies and you have pure magic. At Bryce you can watch the Milky Way slash a silvery arc across the sky while thousands of stars illumine the park’s otherworldly rock formations. Stargazing is serious business here. Park rangers and volunteer astronomers operate about 100 astronomy programs per year. They include constellation tours, when rangers with lasers point out constellations visible in the night sky, and one- to two-mile-long full moon hikes, when the interplay of shadows and moonlight lend the hoodoos an eerie glow. For an overdose of celestial majesty, plan your trip around the four-day Annual Astronomy Festival in late June and participate in a collective astronomy art project, which entails creating watercolor paintings of planets in our solar system and an astronomical art “masterpiece” to unveil on the last day of the festival.
4 of
PHOTO BY: Jon Hicks/Getty Images
Death Valley National Park (California)
America’s driest national park — a sprawling 3.4-million-acre desert — makes an ideal setting for admiring the stars and, if you’re lucky, for spotting meteors. Death Valley nights are so dark that the International Dark-Sky Association classifies them at the highest (Gold Tier) level, meaning that light pollution is so low that you see “views close to what could be seen before the rise of cities.” Many heavenly bodies viewed from Death Valley aren’t visible with the naked eye anywhere else in the world. For an introduction to the cosmos, join a ranger program during the cooler winter to learn about topics including space science, planetary science, space exploration, light pollution and the lore surrounding our night skies. Or visit during the annual Dark Sky Festival each spring, which includes special ranger programs; guest speakers from organizations such as NASA; and the Exploration Fair, where scientists from NASA, Caltech, the SETI Institute and other groups offer demonstrations to engage visitors. If you’re on your own, head to Badwater Basin, Harmony Borax Works, Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes or Zabriskie Point, favorite spots for astrophotographers looking to capture their night images.
5 of
PHOTO BY: Carlos Fernandez/Getty Images
Grand Canyon National Park (Arizona)
Yes, the iconic Grand Canyon, one of the World’s Seven Natural Wonders, is clearly the main attraction at this park. But stick around after dark and you’ll be rewarded with stellar views of another kind. See the Milky Way cast your shadow on the Earth on a moonless night. Or thrill to a tableau of star clouds, nebulae, meteor showers and even planets like Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Key stargazing spots on the South Rim include Desert View Watchtower, a mecca for snapping award-worthy images of the watchtower with a Milky Way backdrop; Mather Point; and Moran and Lipan points, both right off of Desert View Drive. On the canyon’s less-visited North Rim, you can have the stars all to yourself at Bright Angel Point.
In mid-June, visitors can join a free star party on the South Rim with the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association and on the North Rim with the Saguaro Astronomy Club of Phoenix, to enjoy astronomy talks, constellation tours and telescope viewings. Night sky photography workshops and constellation talks take place throughout the year.
6 of
PHOTO BY: James Ronan/EyeEm/Getty Images
Great Basin National Park (Nevada)
What makes Great Basin such a stargazing superstar? It has the ideal conditions, with high elevation and low humidity. It offers rare deep-space viewing from the Great Basin Observatory, the first research-grade observatory built in a U.S. national park. And as one of the least visited parks — it had only 120,248 visitors in 2020 — you can admire the night skies with hardly anyone else around.
On clear, moonless nights, head to such popular viewing spots as the Baker Archaeological Site and Mather Overlook to be awed by countless stars and planets (note that stars twinkle but planets don’t), meteor showers, man-made satellites, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way. From May through September, astronomy programs offer ranger talks and full moon hikes, telescope viewing at the astronomy amphitheater and solar telescope viewing from the Lehman Caves Visitor Center. On select summer evenings, hop aboard the Great Basin Star Train in the nearby town of Ely, guided by Great Basin National Park’s Dark Rangers. Along the way, you can disembark and use high-powered telescopes to see distant planets and deep-space objects. Finally, come for the annual Astronomy Festival, Sept. 22-24, to enjoy guest speakers, photo workshops, telescope viewings and tours of the Great Basin Observatory.
7 of
PHOTO BY: Steve Burns/Getty Images
Voyageurs National Park (Minnesota)
Stars aren’t the only things that shine at this remote water-based park near the Canadian border. When conditions are right, the aurora borealis lights up the night sky with its shimmering streaks of blue, green, purple and red. While these rare light phenomena can’t be forecast, winter’s longer nights increase the chances of seeing them. While watching for the northern lights, keep a lookout for the Milky Way, satellites, shooting stars and other celestial objects. Voyageurs often hosts a three-day star party in August, with special ranger programs, Perseid meteor shower viewing, constellation tours and solar system walks.
Join today and save 43% off the standard annual rate. Get instant access to discounts, programs, services, and the information you need to benefit every area of your life.
Award-winning travel writer Veronica Stoddart is the former travel editor of USA Today. She has written for dozens of travel publications and websites.
While we think of the moon as a static place, sometimes an event happens that reminds us that things can change quickly.
On March 4, a human-made object (a rocket stage) slammed into the moon and left behind a double crater, as seen by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission.
Officials announced June 23 that they spotted a double crater associated with the event. But what’s really interesting is there’s no consensus about what kind of rocket caused it.
China has denied claims that the rocket was part of a Long March 3 rocket that launched the country’s Chang’e-5 T1 mission in October 2014, although the orbit appeared to match. Previous speculation suggested it might be from a SpaceX rocket launching the DISCOVR mission, but newer analysis has mostly discredited that.
Here’s what the March 4 rocket crash site looked like from a wider field of view.
NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
On a broader scale, the value of LRO observations like this is showing how the moon can change even over a small span of time. The spacecraft has been in orbit there since 2009 and has spotted numerous new craters since its arrival.
It’s also a great spacecraft scout, having hunted down the Apollo landing sites from orbit and also having tracked down a few craters from other missions that slammed into the moon since the dawn of space exploration.
It may be that humans return to the moon for a closer-up look in the coming decade, as NASA is developing an Artemis program to send people to the surface no earlier than 2025.
LRO will also be a valuable scout for that set of missions, as the spacecraft’s maps will be used to develop plans for lunar bases or to help scout safe landing sites for astronauts.
The Near InfraRed Planet Searcher (NIRPS) instrument, developed in part at the Université de Montréal and the Université Laval, has successfully performed its first observations. Mounted on ESO’s 3.6-m telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, NIRPS’s mission is to search for new exoplanets around stars in the solar neighbourhood.
This photograph shows the NIRPS instrument and its adaptive optics system, which is installed at ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope. The light collected from the telescope is aimed through a series of mirrors before being injected into an optical fibre. Thanks to this adaptive-optics system, disturbances in the Earth’s atmosphere can be corrected for, allowing for sharper observations. Credit: N. Blind (Observatoire de Genève)/NIRPS consortium/ESO.
“NIRPS has been a long time in the making, and I’m thrilled with how this mission has come together!” says René Doyon, Director of the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic and Institute for Research on Exoplanets, Université de Montréal, and co-Principal Investigator of NIRPS. “This incredible infrared instrument will help us find the closest habitable worlds to our own Solar System.”
The instrument will focus its search on rocky worlds, which are key targets for understanding how planets form and evolve, and are the most likely planets where life may develop. NIRPS will search for these rocky exoplanets around small, cool red dwarf stars — the most common type of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, which have masses from about two to ten times smaller than our Sun.
NIRPS will search for exoplanets using the radial velocity method. As a planet orbits a star, its gravitational attraction causes the star to “wobble” slightly, causing its light to be redshifted or blueshifted as it moves away from or towards Earth. By measuring the subtle changes in the light from the star, NIRPS will help astronomers measure the mass of the planet as well as other properties.
NIRPS will search for these spectral wobbles using near-infrared light as this is the main range of wavelengths emitted by such small, cool stars. It joins the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) in the hunt for new rocky worlds. HARPS, which has been installed on ESO’s 3.6-m telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile since 2003, also uses the radial velocity method, but operates using visible light. Using both instruments simultaneously will provide a more comprehensive analysis of these rocky worlds.
Another key difference between the two instruments is that NIRPS will rely on a powerful adaptive optics system. Adaptive optics is a technique that corrects for the effects of atmospheric turbulence, which cause stars to twinkle. By using it, NIRPS will more than double its efficiency in both finding and studying exoplanets.
“NIRPS joins a very small number of high-performance near-infrared spectrographs and is expected to be a key player for observations in synergy with space missions like the James Webb Space Telescope and ground-based observatories,” adds François Bouchy, from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and co-Principal Investigator of NIRPS.
Discoveries made with NIRPS and HARPS will be followed up by some of the most powerful observatories in the world, such as ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the upcoming Extremely Large Telescope in Chile (for which similar instruments are in development). By working together with both space- and ground-based observatories, NIRPS will be able to gather clues on an exoplanet’s composition and even look for signs of life in its atmosphere.
To be able to operate in the infrared, the Near Infrared Planet Searcher (NIRPS) instrument needs to be kept extremely cool, to prevent heat from interfering with the observations. Here we see the cylindrical cryogenic chamber within which the instrument’s optical parts are installed. The cryogenic chamber keeps the components in a vacuum environment and cooled down to a freezing -190 degrees Celsius. Credit: F. Bouchy (Observatoire de Genève)/NIRPS consortium/ESO.
NIRPS was built by an international collaboration led by the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic and the Institute for Research on Exoplanets team at the Université de Montréal in Canada and the Observatoire Astronomique de l’Université de Genève in Switzerland. Much of the mechanical and optical assembly and testing of the instrument was performed over the last few years at Université Laval’s Centre for Optics, Photonics and Lasers (COPL) laboratories by Prof. Simon Thibault and his team. The National Research Council of Canada’s Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre contributed to the conception and construction of the spectrograph.
“After two years of integrating and testing the instrument in the lab, it is amazing for the optical engineering team to see NIRPS on the sky.” mentions Prof. Simon Thibault who is affiliated with the COPL and iREx and who overviewed optical integration and test phases at Université Laval.
Here we see the first raw data from the NIRPS instrument, the spectrum of Barnard’s star. Each horizontal line corresponds to a narrow region of light where both the absorption lines from the star and the absorption from the Earth’s atmosphere are visible. The dotted lines correspond to the so-called comb spectrum, a “ruler” that is used as a reference for the horizontal lines, so scientists can know which wavelengths of light they correspond to. Credit: ESO/NIRPS consortium.
Many Canadian members of the NIRPS have been working on site at La Silla for the instrument’s commissioning period and will continue to do so over the next several months to ensure the NIRPS’s scientific operations. The NIRPS science team, which includes several Canadian astronomers, is guaranteed 720 nights on the instrument during its first 5 years of operations due to their important contribution to the project. While the whole team was excited for NIRPS’s first light, it is safe to say that the best is yet to come!
More Information
The institutes involved in the NIRPS consortium are the Université de Montréal, Canada; the Université de Genève, Observatoire Astronomique, Switzerland; the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Porto, Portugal; the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain; the Université de Grenoble, France; and the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil.
The Canadian NIRPS team, led by Université de Montréal/The Institute for Research on Exoplanets/Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic and including Université Laval, the National Research Council of Canada’s Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre, and the Royal Military College, was awarded funding by the Canadian Fund for Innovation to build the NIRPS instrument.
Contacts
René Doyon Professor, NIRPS co-Principal Investigator Institute for Research on Exoplanets and Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic — Université de Montréal Tel: +1 514 343 6111 x3204 Email: rene.doyon@umontreal.ca
Simon Thibault Professor, NIRPS optical engineering team Centre for Optics, Photonics and Lasers — Université Laval Québec Tel: +1 418 656 2131 x 412766 Email: simon.thibault@phy.ulaval.ca
Anne-Sophie Poulin-Girard Research Associate, NIRPS optical engineering team Centre for Optics, Photonics and Lasers — Université Laval Québec Tel: +1 418 656 2131 x 404646 Email: anne-sophie.poulin-girard@copl.ulaval.ca
Canadanewsmedia uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
