Strange Brew

While we have made great strides in improving drinking water quality around the world, incidents like the crisis in Flint Michigan http://nyti.ms/1RuBB29 indicate that access to safe water can still be an issue even in the most developed countries.  Access to safe drinking water is probably most tenuous in parts of the developing and recently developed world.  Check out this news story from the NYT reporting on recently released Chinese water pollution statistics: http://nyti.ms/25UCOFi  The headline statistic is that over 80% of the tested groundwater wells is unfit for bathing.

The World Tomorrow

Despite (or perhaps because of) how adaptable humans are, we tend to have a hard time planing for the future.  This hinders our ability to grapple with issues that have no or few immediate impacts, but that potentially have big long term ones.  Climate change is one of these issues.  Even climate scientists and policy makers who are thinking about the long term impacts of climate change tend to have a short frame of reference relative to the history of life on the planet.  A paper that just came out in Nature Climate Change, tries to broaden our time horizon a bit.  It summarizes some of the predictions for what a warmer world (caused by us now) will look like 10,000 years from now.  You can read the actual article here: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2923.html

and a news summary from the Washington Post here:

http://wpo.st/JBGA1

That story has a cool video from NASA showing actual data on the more recent sea level changes that have already happened over the last 23 years.

Age of the Humans?

As the class readings this week show, there is a lot of evidence that humans have profoundly altered the planet.  This BBC article:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35259194
reports on the scientific panel of experts that is trying to decide if these changes are profound enough to officially declare a new geologic epoch called the Anthropocene.  The panel is also trying to settle details like when exactly the Anthropocene should be defined as starting.
 The Panel's interim findings have just been published in Science:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/351/6269/aad2622

Currently, we are residing in the epoch classified as the Holocene that began about 12,000 years ago, which was preceded by the Pleistocene.