As the remnants of Hurricane Ida barreled north in September 2021, Chris Erdner heard a startling warning on TV: Residents in her area needed to seek shelter immediately. Erdner’s quiet suburban neighborhood in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, was directly in the path of a tornado.

Erdner and her husband rushed to the basement. “I don’t know if you’ve ever heard it,” she said, of the “incredible noise” generated when a tornado passes overhead. “It sounds like a freight train.” Although the tornado only lasted a short time, it felt much longer. Listening to the storm raging outside, Erdner wondered if the heavy steel doors leading from the yard to the basement would be ripped off. 

“It shocked us,” said Erdner, who grew up in eastern Pennsylvania and has lived in the same house in Upper Dublin Township for more than 30 years. “One of the things we always liked about living in this area of Pennsylvania is that we didn’t usually have to worry about things like tornadoes and hurricanes.” 

Since that frightening day in 2021, Erdner has noticed more tornado watches and warnings issued for her area, and she worries what this might mean for the future. “Because if this is some sort of effect from climate change,” she said, “this is not going to get better, this is going to get worse, right?” 

According to National Weather Service data, 37 tornado warnings have been issued in Erdner’s area since 1986, and 27 of them occurred after 2010. Data on tornadoes in Pennsylvania dating back to the 1950s seems to show a slight increase, with the most active years all after 1980.

Erdner’s concerns about climate change, trends and risk were echoed by residents in western Pennsylvania in June, when six tornadoes hit the state within an hour. Two tornadoes rated EF2, the same rating as the 2021 tornado, with estimated wind speeds between 111 and 135 miles per hour, were also recorded in May, and there have been 22 tornadoes in Pennsylvania so far this year. With 1,495 tornadoes occurring across the United States from January through July, this year’s preliminary count is second only to 2011 and well above average for the first seven months of a year. In places not typically associated with tornadoes, like West Virginia, Alabama and New York, longtime residents are asking similar questions to Erdner’s.

Scientists who study tornadoes say the answers to those questions are evolving and complex. “We can definitely say that over the last 30 years in the Northeast, we have seen more tornadoes, and there have been more favorable environments for tornadoes. Both of those things are true,” said Victor Gensini, a scientist at Northern Illinois University who researches tornadoes and climate.

“We cannot definitively say that we know what’s causing it,” he said. “We believe it’s incredibly, extremely consistent with our projections of a warming climate, but there’s still a lot more work to do.”

Tornadoes are rare, especially in the Northeast, but they can happen anywhere if the circumstances are right. They have been documented in every U.S. state. Since 2004, tornadoes have caused roughly $90 million in property damage in Pennsylvania alone. 

Paul Markowski, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University, first became interested in the science of weather as a kid in 1985, watching news coverage as a series of tornadoes hit Pennsylvania, killing 64 people and setting records for the deadliest tornado in state history. 

“The laws of physics that govern atmospheric motions are agnostic about county, state and country,” he said. “If you get Oklahoma conditions in Pennsylvania, you’ll get an Oklahoma event.”

New research suggests that tornadic activity may be shifting east and north, away from Tornado Alley, which traditionally runs through Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas. A 2018 study Gensini co-authored found there was an upward trend in tornado frequency across parts of the Northeast, the Southeast and the Midwest, and a decrease in tornadoes in some parts of Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado. Activity is becoming more concentrated, with more tornadoes occurring on fewer days, and there are also changes in the seasonality of tornadoes: less frequent in the spring and summer and more frequent in the fall and winter.

Pinpointing what might be causing these changes, and how much of a change is actually happening for any given metric, is extremely complicated. Harold Brooks, a senior scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory, said the effects of climate change are like a chain with many links. Rising temperatures, for example, are an early and direct link on the chain. Increasing rainfall is another. But the formation of tornadoes isn’t impacted by climate change in straightforward ways. 

As the planet warms, “some of the variables we expect will become more favorable [for tornadoes]. Some will become less favorable,” Brooks said. “We don’t even know exactly how many links there are on the chain, let alone what the chain is.”

Gensini hopes that in the future, it will be possible to connect tornadic activity to climate change with a rapid attribution system similar to modeling that scientists currently use to analyze heat waves, but more research is needed to reach that point.

One of the obstacles to analyzing tornadoes’ long-term behavior is their relative rarity. Because they are unusual, datasets concerning their appearance are small. Consistent records for tornadoes in the U.S. only go back to the 1950s, making the record even smaller.

“That’s a very short record compared to other climate records we have. There are no proxy data for tornadoes, and because of that, it’s hard to establish trends. There’s a lot of year-to-year variability in tornadoes, and that’s essentially noise that is masking any trend,” Markowski said. “I’m not saying there aren’t trends there. It’s just harder to see them.”

Markowski does not think there is enough historical information about tornadoes to say with certainty that they are becoming more frequent in the U.S. as a whole or in Pennsylvania, but he said there is convincing evidence that tornadic activity is moving east and north. 

Tornado data in the United States is also compromised by lack of consistency in everything from tornadoes’ intensity (which is based on after-the-fact damage assessments) to the National Weather Service alerts that residents get on their phones and TVs about storms. 

“Humans are issuing those watches and warnings and have their own biases. I can sometimes tell who’s working a particular shift by looking at what product is getting issued,” Markowski said.

Increases in population and residential development and the availability of phones that can also shoot video, as well as growing interest in storm chasing, all play a role in the documentation of tornadoes, too. That’s had a corresponding—and confounding—effect on the record. 

“Thirty years ago, if a tornado happened in a farm field in Kansas, unless it hit the farmer’s house, it’s probably not in the database,” Gensini said. “Today, if you have the weakest of all weak tornadoes in that same field in Kansas, I can promise you at least 10 storm chasers are on it, and that video is up on YouTube within 10 minutes.” The success of this summer’s blockbuster “Twisters” is evidence that the public’s fascination with tornadoes isn’t likely to die down anytime soon.

Brooks said meteorologists who study tornadoes and extreme weather often have stories about storms they witnessed firsthand that do not match the information that ended up in the official record. “There’s an F2 tornado in the database in June of 1987 in East Central Illinois,” he said, “and I was three miles from the tornado, and I can guarantee you there was no F2 tornado there.” 

In part because of these anecdotal experiences, meteorologists wonder how much trust can or should be placed in the historical record. “Even when we see the trends we can measure based on the data, there’s still uncertainty,” Brooks said.

What these uncertainties about cause, effect and trend lines mean for the average person is a separate question. Scientists say increases in tornadic activity outside the confines of Tornado Alley are small and may not be meaningful when trying to assess risk on an individual level. On a larger scale, however, they have huge implications.

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“The increases we’re talking about are like one tornado in a county per decade,” Gensini said. “That sounds like really, really small increases, but when you start aggregating over the entire state, it’s actually a really, really big deal.” 

Even a tiny increase in the number of tornadoes in the Northeast and mid-South could correspond to a much greater potential for damage and loss of life because those regions have higher population densities compared to the Great Plains. In the South, more poverty and the prevalence of mobile homes mean that more residents are vulnerable to the effects of extreme weather.

It’s important to understand that what makes an extreme weather event a “disaster” is not the event itself but the number of people and buildings in its path, Gensini said. “No disasters are natural. I hate that term. Disasters are man-made constructs, because the disaster wouldn’t happen if humans weren’t there.” 

“Studying the climate and studying the changes in the climate is incredibly important. We definitely need to know if tornadoes are going to get stronger or more frequent in certain geographies,” he said. “But the reality is, we know for certain that there are going to be more tornado disasters in the future, and it has nothing to do with climate and everything to do with the fact that the human-built environment is continuing to grow.”

For organizations concerned with collective risk, like government agencies and insurance companies, these changes matter. “As an individual, 10 percent really shouldn’t change your risk perception very much, because tornadoes are still relatively rare events,” Brooks said. “But it may matter a lot to people like a statewide emergency manager, right?” 

In 2023, Pennsylvania’s Emergency Management Agency ranked tornadoes as a “medium risk,” alongside threats like drought, wildfires and landslides. Compared to 2018, nine more counties ranked tornadoes and wind storms as a high risk. The agency determined that more than 4 million people live in areas vulnerable to tornadoes in Pennsylvania, and the value of exposed buildings tops $1 trillion. In a statement, PEMA’s director, Randy Padfield, said threats from tornadoes “are always evolving.”

“PEMA wants the public to be aware of the risks that tornadoes pose, ensure they have a way to receive weather alerts and take appropriate actions to protect themselves and their family members should a tornado impact their area,” he said. 

A tornado watch means that conditions are favorable for a tornado to form, while a warning means that one has been sighted or detected by radar. Markowski said if you’re issued a tornado watch, you should pay attention to your surroundings and be ready to act in case a warning is issued. Warnings are more serious and can contain directions to take cover immediately, preferably in a storm shelter or basement.

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Markowski advocated for “more surgical” and precise tornado warnings. “There is harm in overreacting,” he said. “The ‘crying wolf’ effect is real.” For people unused to tornado alerts, receiving a warning that turns out to be a false alarm could be deadly in the future. “If you’re in sunshine and your phone is buzzing telling you to go to the basement and you didn’t even perceive a threat, I guarantee you, if you’re human, you will respond differently the next time.”

In Oklahoma, in the heart of Tornado Alley, Markowski said, the general public is far more weather-savvy than elsewhere in the country.“They have to be, because not being aware can get you killed there,” he said. 

Oklahomans’ expertise is evidence that “it is possible to teach people and elevate their understanding” about tornadoes and storms, regardless of their background or level of education, he said. Knowing how to interpret and respond to weather alerts saves lives in Oklahoma and may become more important elsewhere as changes in tornadic activity expose different parts of the country.

When Erdner went outside after the storm had passed her Pennsylvania neighborhood, everything had changed. The front yard was littered with hunks of roofing from a nearby construction site, nails exposed; drain pipes and gutters; chimney caps and shards of glass. Upended telephone poles and mature trees lay horizontally on the ground, wires and roots crisscrossing the road. A neighbor’s trampoline was carried by the wind into Erdner’s garden shed and then down the block. “We walked up and down the street, as did all of our neighbors, just checking on each other to make sure everyone was OK,” she said.

Their house sustained $10,000 in property damage, including to fencing, a screened-in porch and siding, and they spent $5,000 to clear fallen trees from the yard. The house was without electricity for six days. Despite all of this destruction, Erdner considers herself lucky. 

“It’s strange, what tornadoes do,” she said. “Some of our neighbors did not fare as well as we did.” 

The tornado tore the second floor off two of her neighbors’ houses. Half a mile away, in Fort Washington, a woman was killed when a tree fell onto her house.

Three years later, Erdner’s neighborhood is still not the same as it was before the tornado, and neither is she. She pays far more attention to weather forecasts for storms now and reaches out to friends who live close by to make sure they’ve seen and acted on alerts. 

“It was really traumatizing. You don’t really realize it until there’s another warning or watch, and then you feel it,” she said. “Physiologically, it all comes back.”

But global warming doesn’t happen in a smooth progression. Like housing prices, the general trend is up, but there are ups and downs along the way.

Behind much of the ups and downs is the El Niño phenomenon. An El Niño event is a reorganization of the water across the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean. El Niño is so important to the workings of worldwide weather, as it increases the temperature of the air on average across all of Earth’s surface, not only over the Pacific. Between El Niño events, conditions may be neutral or in an opposite state called La Niña that tends to cool global temperatures. The oscillation between these extremes is irregular, and El Niño conditions tend to recur after three to seven years.

The warm El Niño phase of this cycle began to kick in a year ago, reached its peak around the end of 2023, and is now trending neutral, which is why the record-breaking streak has ended.

The 2023–2024 El Niño was strong, but it wasn’t super-strong. It doesn’t fully explain the remarkable degree to which the past year broke temperature records. The exact influence of other factors has yet to be fully untangled.

We know there is a small positive contribution from the sun, which is in a phase of its 11-year sunspot cycle in which it radiates fractionally more energy to the Earth.

Methane (also a byproduct of the fossil fuel industry, alongside cattle and wetlands) is another important greenhouse gas, and its concentration in the air has risen more rapidly in the past decade than over the previous decade.

Scientists are also assessing how much measures to clean up air pollution might be adding to warming, since certain particulate air pollutants can reflect sunlight and influence the formation of clouds.

A Temperature Ratchet

Across the global ocean, 2023 was a devastating summer for coral reefs and surrounding ecosystems in the Caribbean and beyond. This was followed by heavy bleaching across the Great Barrier Reef off Australia during the southern hemisphere summer. While it is El Niño years that tend to see mass mortality events on reefs around the world, it is the underlying climate change trend that is the long-term threat, as corals are struggling to adapt to rising temperature extremes.

NASA is still deciding what to do about its two Starliner astronauts who are effectively stranded in space, but says a decision will be made in the next two weeks.

Right now, the space agency is looking at a few options for astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who departed Earth in early June for the International Space Station (ISS) and were expected to return eight days later. However, the trip was marred by thruster failures and helium leaks, which raised doubts about the Starliner capsule’s ability to return to Earth safely and has left the astronauts in limbo more than two months later.

On a live call to media Wednesday, NASA officials said they’re analyzing more data before making a decision by the end of next week or the beginning of the next.

They have to decide whether they will keep Wilmore and Williams at the ISS until early next year, when they could catch a ride back to Earth on SpaceX’s next flight in February 2025. The troubled Boeing-built capsule, in that case, would be sent back to Earth empty.

“We’ve got time available before we bring Starliner home and we want to use that time wisely,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s space operations mission chief.

Switching to SpaceX would require bumping two of the four astronauts assigned to the next ferry flight, targeted for late September. Wilmore and Williams would take the empty seats in SpaceX’s Dragon capsule once that half-year mission ends.

NASA said another logistical issue is at play, as well: the ISS only has room for two U.S. capsules at a time, meaning the Starliner would have to depart ahead of the arrival of SpaceX’s Dragon, to give the newly-arriving spacecraft a place to park.

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SpaceX currently has a crew of four working at the ISS. While that crew was scheduled to return to Earth this month, they saw an additional month added to their scheduled stay of six months due to the uncertainty over Starliner.

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Boeing Starliner astronauts’ return could be delayed until 2025: NASA

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Despite a litany of issues for the Starliner, which have plagued the capsule almost since inception, Boeing has repeatedly said they have full confidence in the vessel.

However, Dr. Simeon Barber, a space scientist at Open University, told the BBC he believes there is very little information that could convince those at NASA who are concerned about a safe return aboard the troubled Starliner.

“It seems that there are decision makers at NASA who are unconvinced that a safe return can be guaranteed, which is why they have brought in experts to look through the data to try and diagnose the fault in a small component in a complex propulsion system that is in space.

“It is hard to see how that will be possible, so it feels to me that we are heading inexorably towards a return on SpaceX’s Dragon Spacecraf.”

Starliner’s June launch marked a high-stakes test mission required before NASA could certify the spacecraft for routine astronaut flights.

In July, Williams and Wilmore appeared in a NASA-hosted livestream from the ISS and said they felt confident the Starliner would get them home safely. They also said they were happy to spend extra time in space and were busy helping the ISS crew and running various experiments and tests while in orbit.

Wilmore said during the livestream they went into the mission knowing there would be kinks, noting, “This is the world of test. This is a tough business.”

“Human spaceflight is not easy in any regime, and there have been multiple issues with every spacecraft that’s ever been designed, and that’s just the nature of what we do,” Wilmore said. “You know that mantra, ‘Failure is not an option.’”

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NASA astronauts stuck on ISS have ‘real good feeling’ Boeing Starliner will ‘bring us home

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“They will do what we ask them to do. That’s their job as astronauts,” said NASA chief astronaut Joe Acaba on Wednesday, highlighting the flexibility required by the job.

From the beginning, the Starliner project has been massively overbudget and plagued by setbacks and delays. And since liftoff, the capsule has had five helium leaks, five manoeuvring thrusters go dead and a propellant valve fail almost completely, prompting the crew in space and mission managers in Houston to spend more time than expected pursuing fixes mid-mission.

The latest in-flight problems follow years of other challenges Boeing has faced with Starliner, including a 2019 uncrewed test failure where dozens of software glitches, design problems and management issues nixed its ability to dock to the ISS.

A 2022 repeat uncrewed test had a successful docking, but uncovered additional software issues and problems with some of the capsule’s thrusters.

Eager to have competing services and backup options, NASA hired SpaceX and Boeing to transport astronauts to and from the space station after the shuttles retired in 2011.

SpaceX’s first astronaut flight was in 2020. Boeing suffered so much trouble on its initial test flight without a crew in 2019 that a do-over was ordered. Then more problems cropped up, costing the company more than $1 billion to fix before finally flying with astronauts on board.

— with files from the Associated Press

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Timer malfunction causes Boeing Starliner capsule to fail first mission

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A 51-foot fin whale got stuck in shallow waters at a Los Angeles beach and died before rescuers could get to the scene. This tragic tale comes as the U.S. continues to battle multiple “unusual mortality events” affecting large whale species.

Lifeguards at Torrance Beach spotted the whale in distress around 6 p.m. and called wildlife experts, the Los Angeles County Fire Department, Lifeguard Division posted on X. At that time, the fin whale was still alive. The fin whale is an endangered species and is the second largest species of whale after the blue whale.

Experts from the Marine Mammal Care Center and National Marine Fisheries Service responded but they determined the whale was dead when they arrived. The experts noted the fin whale appeared to be in poor health. It was skinny and had visible bumps on its skin, which is unusual for the species.

The exact cause of the whale’s death is unknown but lifeguards told local media that the whale appeared to have beached itself. Specialist Keith Matassa with the Marine Mammal Care Center told Fox11 that whales sometimes beach themselves when they’re near death because they can no longer swim or support themselves in the water.

Wildlife officials took samples of the dead whale to try and identify a cause of death and why it was in such poor health. The whale was originally estimated to be about 35 to 40 feet long but an official measurement showed it was upwards of 51 feet. Fin whales can grow up to 70 feet so experts believe it was a juvenile.

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Lifeguards asked the public to stay away from the beached whale’s body as emergency workers devised a plan to remove the carcass.

“Due to its size & location it is expected that the whale will remain on the beach while responders create a plan to remove it,” lifeguards wrote on X. “If you are in the area please give the animal & responders plenty of space to work!”

By Sunday afternoon the whale was gone. Fox11 reports that lifeguards towed the whale out to sea using a boat.

This incident comes as wildlife experts have been sounding the alarm about a surge in large whale deaths. The situation is so bad that the U.S.’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries Division has three active “unusual mortality events” it is investigating concerning various species of whale.

Since 2016, the agency has been looking into the large number of humpback whale strandings and deaths along the Atlantic coast. The cause of the unusual mortality event is unknown, though the agency suspects it has something to do with human activity, particularly boats striking the whales. So far, 227 humpback whales have died along coastal states in the eight-year period.

Apart from humpback whales, NOAA is also concerned about right whales and minke whales. Experts have observed an unusual mortality event for right whales since 2017 and minke whales since 2018.

There isn’t an active alert for fin whales currently but the species was the subject of investigation after a large number washed ashore in Alaska and British Columbia in 2015 and 2016. In total, 46 whales died, including 12 fin whales and 22 humpback whales in Alaska. Five fin whales and seven humpbacks died in B.C. A definitive cause was never found but experts suspected ecological factors like the 2015 El Nino could have played a role.

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Dead humpback whale washes up on N.S. shore

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What will you be doing only a decade from now when advanced versions of the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT have wormed their way into the fabric of life?

According to some experts, you may be out of a job. Two current labour disputes involving autoworkers and screenwriters are at least partly about the future threat of AI.

When AI comes for the jobs, writers may be among the first to go, warn two respected technology mavens writing in Foreign Affairs magazine. And they are not alone in that view. Even current versions of the AI program ChatGPT can sketch clearer prose than most humans, they say. And those programs are getting better. 

By 2035, as “white-collar workers lose their jobs en masse,” declare Ian Bremmer and Mustafa Suleyman, AI will be running hospitals and airlines and courtrooms. “A year ago, that scenario would have seemed purely fictional; today, it seems nearly inevitable.”

Thumb-twiddling time?

For Bremmer and Suleyman, job losses are a relatively mundane result of the AI revolution. Their ultimate concern is nothing less than the usurping of government power by intelligent machines and those who control them.

But will massive numbers of writers and lawyers and stockbrokers and coders and office workers really be sent home to twiddle their thumbs in a little over 10 years? There are many thoughtful skeptics who say there are really good reasons why that just won’t happen. And at the core of it all, they say, is our unique humanity.

Peeking 10 years into the future leaks into the realm of science fiction, and those who imagine the future — while sometimes offering useful warnings — can easily get things wrong. Viewing the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey is a good reminder.

“Anyone who says they can tell you that they can predict what’s going to happen is either deluded or lying,” said Canadian science fiction writer Karl Schroeder, who has written about AI in his novel Stealing Worlds and the short story The Suicide of our Troubles.

There is a certain irony in the comment, since Schroeder is also a professional futurist helping companies prepare for what may be around the corner.

He is convinced there is a value in using imagination to frame the possible extent of the AI problem as it becomes better at human tasks.

“It isn’t any different from the question of what to do with the jackhammer when you’re the guy with the pickaxe,” Schroeder said. 

Essential human skills

The lack of certainty over how AI will develop — and how quickly — means its eventual impact is open to infinite speculation, he said. As governments around the world consider how to regulate it, the unknowable nature of what AI will become is just one of many complications.

But unless intelligent machines grow into evil geniuses that decide to crush us like bugs, said Schroeder and everyone else I talked to, there is one certainty in the future relationship between humans and machines, and that is humanity.

“Much of what we do as humans, even though we have our official job titles, goes outside of the official job descriptions,” said AJung Moon, who teaches computer engineering at McGill University in Montreal.

While the artificial intelligence and robotics expert sees various portions of jobs being stolen away by smart software, as that happens, she said, humans will do more of the things AI isn’t so good at.

In her own job teaching university students, she sees AI taking away the boring, bureaucratic and redundant parts of the work, leaving her more time for the kind of human interaction that leads to student success.

“What is their learning journey like? What is their life like?” Moon said. “I can actually get to more forming of connections with my students.”

Things robots cannot do

As someone who has been working at the leading edge of robotics for more than a decade, Moon said a lot of work humans do is in no danger from AI. Hands-on human finesse, the “haptic feedback” of human touch, fine motor skills, the ability to switch abruptly from gentle care and stroking to heavy tasks, or figuring out how to fix old piping in an old house — “that is impossible right now.”

Despite the imminent arrival of devices like Elon Musk’s Optimus robot, Moon said she doesn’t see AI changing that any time soon, meaning that the many jobs that require human judgment, instant decisions and human dexterity will continue to need humans.

In a hospital, for example, artificial intelligence can count the pills, do the paperwork and help create efficiencies in treatment. The advantage is that it will leave more time for tasks where humanity remains indispensable.

That essential humanity entailing not just what we do and how we do it, but the reasons for doing it, is encapsulated in a concept called “human centricity.” It is an approach at the core of work by anthropologist Paul Hartley, CEO of the Toronto-based Human Futures Studio, a kind of management consultancy that has helped tech companies from going off track.

“It’s an articulation of how to keep people really at the centre,” he said.

Hartley, author of the book Radical Human Centricity, said the concept predates recent thinking about AI, growing out of notions about “user experience,” or “UX,” in the technology sector where tech geeks might be tempted to wander off into the never-never land of technology for technology’s sake.

In some science fiction future, AI may eventually be able to think for itself and find its own motivations that are incomprehensible to us. But until that time, no matter how advanced, AI will remain a tool for use by humans for human purposes, Hartley said.

The essential lesson of human centricity is that technology and software tools, including AI, have no purpose if they fail to respond to human needs.

The requirements of humanity, insists Vurain Tabvuma, a professor at the Sobey School of Business at St. Mary’s University in Halifax who has collaborated with Hartley, are also at the heart of why human work will never be supplanted by AI.

Even after it becomes ubiquitous in a decade or so, Tabvuma said he foresees AI as being similar to previous technological advances that, in theory, killed jobs. Human librarians used to bring him books and articles. Now he gets them online.

Machines replaced weavers. Rooms of typists and calculators have been replaced by email and spreadsheet software. Robots have been taking the place of humans on assembly lines and in warehouses for years. But none of those changes have reduced the amount of work people do. Unemployment has never been so low, and many of us seem busier than ever.

WATCH | Students who turn to AI face penalties, universities warn:

Universities warn of penalties as students increasingly turn to AI

University students are getting ready to hit the books, take notes and write essays. At least that’s how academic leaders hope they’ll approach their studies, in the age of artificial intelligence — or AI.

Capitalism to the rescue

Reminiscent of the prediction by economist John Maynard Keynes in his 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren that by now we would be working 15-hour weeks, Tabvuma thinks we probably won’t have a chance to put our feet up this time, either.

Some have warned that the capitalist economy will use AI against human workers, but he said that history shows the capitalist free market will guarantee future work because it will keep finding new ways to use human talent and resources. Tabvuma’s analysis echoes a statement by tech entrepreneur Jack O’Holleran in an essay earlier this month.

“If AI can do 10 times the work of a coder, the majority of companies won’t fire nine of their 10 software engineers,” O’Holleran wrote. “They’re just going to [expand to] 100 times the amount of output they can produce with their current team of 10.”

Tabvuma said it is in the nature of the capitalist economy — the constant renewal known as “creative destruction” or “churn,” motivated by a search for profits — to repeatedly eliminate routinized work and use the resources saved in that process to create new work. AI will not stop that process, he said.

“Over time companies will identify an opportunity, and over time they will start working to make the most of that opportunity,” Tabvuma said. 

And the process does not just happen in a corporate setting. Tabvuma talks to his students about the history of art and artisans going back to Greek and Roman times. On the surface, it appears that techniques for creating posters and painting using printing and photography and then computers have been progressively replacing the skills of human artisans.

“It moves away from people and firmly into the realm of technology,” Tabvuma said. But that has not eliminated artists, he said: “You look at it right now in history? We have never had more artists in the world.”

Human replacement or human helpers

Tabvuma also rejects the idea that a single corporate entity will take hold of artificial intelligence and use it to concentrate wealth and power and dominate humanity. For one thing, while it is now new and expensive, AI will become cheap and widely available to a new generation that understands how to use it. He said it will be hard for any business or sector to corner the market.

“Some of these ideas are advocated by people who believe that the world we live in is a constant and that the businesses we see are always constant, but in capitalist economies, the businesses we interact with right now are not going to exist 10 years from now, or 20 or 30 years from now,” Tabvuma said. At some point, companies like Facebook and Amazon and Apple are going to fail, he said.

“There will be other companies that come up, and if they’re coming up, they will employ people and expand their workforce, improve their technology and gain market share.”

And as for the work of writers offering you something you actually want to read? Tabvuma said as well as manual dexterity, humans have another big advantage.

“Think of the interaction you and I are having right now, the fact that you thought of ‘How am I going to write this new article? I’m going to reach out to these people and interview them, and then out of that process. I’m going to write this article,'” Tabvuma said.

“And that is not physical dexterity, it’s mental dexterity.”

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This week:

• How oceans could be used for carbon capture on a big scale
• Dam! Beavers pose a methane problem in the Arctic
• Humidity makes a sweltering apartment that much harder to live in

How oceans could be used for carbon capture on a big scale

Scientists have said we’re poised to overshoot the 1.5 C warming target enshrined in the Paris Agreement, and that in order to return to 1.5 C by 2100, we would need to remove vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Carbon capture from smokestacks or the air, using technology and tree planting, has received a lot of attention and funding. But last week, a few hundred scientists around the world argued that more attention should be paid to carbon capture in the ocean.

“The ocean’s carbon content is 50 times larger than what is in the atmosphere. Its sheer size also means that ocean-based climate solutions can be scaled to significantly mitigate climate risk,” they wrote in a letter posted on the web page of Ocean Visions, a non-profit umbrella group for universities and oceanographic institutions focused on ocean-climate restoration solutions.

The problem? Even scientists know little about the effectiveness, risks or impacts of ocean carbon capture solutions. 

Kate Moran, president and CEO of Ocean Networks Canada and a spokesperson for the scientists who wrote the letter, said more information is crucial for making policy decisions about ocean carbon capture.

“We do need to, as a collective community, get behind research needed to understand these issues, and it’s pretty urgent,” she said in an interview from the Canadian Coast Guard ship Tully off the coast of B.C., where she is doing some of that research.

The letter was signed by a number of scientists from the Canadian firm Planetary Technologies, including its chief ocean scientist, Will Burt. Planetary Technologies ran its first ocean tests of its carbon capture technology in Halifax harbour this week (see photo above).

Burt hopes the letter helps the public “build some confidence that what we’re doing is … widely believed scientifically to be worth exploring.”

WATCH | Scientists hope antacid could help relieve climate change

Scientists hope antacid could help relieve climate change

Halifax Harbour is getting a dose of Tums to see if that will help remove carbon from the atmosphere. Paul Withers has the story.

By now, you might be asking, “OK, but what kinds of solutions are we even talking about?” 

They fall into two main categories: biotic and abiotic.

Biotic ocean carbon removal is similar to planting trees on land to absorb CO2, except it involves marine or coastal ecosystems and plants. The carbon they store is called blue carbon, and it can involve:

Seaweed or “macroalgae” such as kelp. The carbon can later be sequestered — for example, by sinking it to the ocean floor. (That’s one of the solutions Moran was researching on the Tully last week.)

Microscopic organisms called microalgae or phytoplankton, encouraged to grow by fertilizing the ocean with nutrients such as iron.

Plants in coastal ecosystems, such as tidal salt marshes, mangrove forests or seagrass meadows. Restoring degraded coastal ecosystems doesn’t just store carbon, it also reduces emissions from sources like erosion.

Abiotic solutions include:

Ocean alkalinity enhancement. This is being tested by Planetary Technologies. It involves adding “antacids” made of rock dust, such as magnesium hydroxide, to the ocean to neutralize dissolved CO2. This converts the CO2 into stable minerals and salts, effectively removing it from the carbon cycle. Like a sponge that’s been squeezed out, the water regains the capacity to absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere. In the photo above, you can see Dalhousie University researchers taking measurements from a boat after the antacid was added to the water, along with a red dye that helps track how the antacid spreads. Burt says this technology should also reverse ocean acidification that harms coral reefs and shellfish.

Electrochemical ocean carbon dioxide removal. This technology uses electricity to separate seawater into acidic and alkaline solutions. Each of those solutions uses a different method to remove CO2 from seawater (one of them is very similar to ocean alkalinity enhancement). California-based Captura and Montreal-based Deep Sky plan to test this technology in eastern Quebec in 2024.

Planetary Technologies’ Burt said that while reducing emissions is by far the best tool for tackling climate change, “we’re going to need more than that.” 

Ocean carbon capture “could be a really key player.” 

— Emily Chung

Old issues of What on Earth? are here. The CBC News climate page is here. 

Check out our radio show and podcast. This week, meet the people doing the dirty work of planting millions of trees, one by one, across Canada. What On Earth airs on Sundays at 11 a.m. ET, 11:30 a.m. in Newfoundland and Labrador. Subscribe on your favourite podcast app or hear it on demand at CBC Listen.

Watch the CBC video series Planet Wonder featuring our colleague Johanna Wagstaffe here.

Reader feedback

Gaille Musgrove responded to last week’s story on invasive species: 

“I live north of Toronto in a township called Adjala-Tosorontio. I love it here. Unfortunately, I have invasions of all kinds of plant species that I have never seen before. Something called ground clover (no relation to real clover) has spread all over my property. It choked out my grass and is invading my gardens. We also have something called dog strangling vine, which has pulled down a fence and killed many trees. 

“In the 46 years that we have lived here, we have lost all of our butternut trees, all of our beautiful beech trees and now something is eating our spruce trees. It is very distressful.”

Write us at whatonearth@cbc.ca. 

Have a compelling personal story about climate change you want to share with CBC News? Pitch a First Person column here.

The Big Picture: Beavers pose methane problem in the Arctic

Climate change is helping beavers colonize the Arctic, and those beavers are in turn causing more climate change. A study by Alaskan researchers that looked at aerial and satellite photos of Alaska’s Arctic tundra between 1949 and 2019 (see below) found that dams built by beavers created 11,000 new ponds between 1980 and 2019.

A new study by the same team finds those ponds are releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, accelerating climate change. The methane is produced as vegetation flooded by the dams rots in the absence of oxygen, and as the spreading water thaws the surrounding permafrost. The researchers say this means beavers in the Arctic will initially increase the release of methane, although they don’t know what the long-term impacts will be.

Interestingly, while beavers may be bad for climate change in the North, they’re being recruited to protect against the impacts of wildfires and droughts in places like California. Research shows that areas with beavers are more resilient to wildfire impacts and have more open water during droughts compared to areas without beavers.

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

• Filmmakers have launched a petition calling on Toronto’s International Film Festival to drop sponsorship from RBC, noting it’s one of the world’s biggest financiers of fossil fuels.

• A California high school is offering paid student internships for climate action with the aim of preparing the students for green jobs. Bonus: The students have saved their district $850,000 US on a $2.9-million energy budget.

Humidity makes a sweltering apartment that much harder to live in

On a hot summer day, the air in Sridharan Vankeepuram’s room can be nearly unbearable.

“It feels like a furnace inside,” he said.

His small bedroom — crammed with a single bed and desktop computer — doesn’t get much cooler at night, especially when it’s humid, as is often the case during a Montreal heat wave.

Vankeepuram has spent the past two years in an aging brick building on the western edge of Montreal’s downtown, while completing his MBA at Concordia University. One day in July, Vankeepuram’s room felt like it was 39 C when taking the humidity into account.

To better understand the challenges of living in extreme heat as the climate changes, this summer CBC News installed sensors in 50 homes that were either wholly or partly without air conditioning across five Canadian cities, including Montreal.

(CBC used “heat index” to measure the combination of air temperature and humidity, rather than humidex, a similar index developed in Canada.)

The sensors took temperature and humidity readings every 10 minutes. In some places — particularly in apartments in Toronto, Windsor and Montreal — the humidity made the residences feel much hotter. Winnipeg and Vancouver, which tend to have drier heat, were the other two cities featured in the project.

For half of the 56 days measured, Vankeepuram’s room didn’t drop below 26 C, the threshold considered dangerous for seniors and those with pre-existing conditions if they’re exposed to it for a prolonged period. And Vankeepuram’s room consistently felt even warmer, because of the humidity.

Knowing he would move out after graduating, Vankeepuram didn’t invest in an air conditioner. On the worst days, he took multiple showers or brought a bucket of ice water into his room.

For others, the consequences can be more dire. Humans cool down by sweating, but when the air is saturated with moisture, that doesn’t work as well.

“The more humid it is in the air, the harder it is for that process to occur,” said Prof. Daniel Gagnon, a researcher at the Montreal Heart Institute. “We might still produce sweat, but instead of it evaporating, it will drip off onto the floor and then we lose all of its cooling power.”

Gagnon, an associate professor at the school of kinesiology and exercise science at the University of Montreal, reviewed CBC’s data and found it striking that although Montreal escaped the worst of the Canadian summer’s heat, the temperatures inside often felt like more than 30 C with the humidity factored in.

“We need to factor in humidity as well, because a given temperature might be comfortable if it’s very dry, but become very uncomfortable if it’s very humid, and the body’s response to those environments will also be different,” Gagnon said.

Research isn’t conclusive on whether humidity increases the likelihood of mortality in cases of extreme heat, but it nevertheless puts strain on the body. 

During a historic 2018 heat wave, 66 people died in Montreal — and 80 per cent of those people died in their homes.

Gregory Walton, a 51-year-old who lives in an apartment in Windsor, Ont., said nights are especially difficult. In his apartment, the temperature almost never dropped below 26 C during the period CBC monitored and, with the humidity, it felt like nearly 32 C on one particularly muggy day.

Overall, in Montreal, Toronto and Windsor, high rates of relative humidity sometimes added as much as five to seven degrees to how hot a residence felt.

Here are the highest heat index measures our sensors recorded, by city:

• Windsor: 39.

• Montreal: 39.

• Toronto: 38.

• Winnipeg: 37.

• Vancouver: 34.

Climate scientists say hotter, more humid summers are likely in the coming years, as the planet warms, largely because of the burning of fossil fuels.

According to Environment and Climate Change Canada, a humidex in the mid- to high-30s is when the average healthy person should be more careful. Above 40 is considered extremely high and all unnecessary physical activity should be avoided.

Dr. David Kaiser, associate medical director at Montreal Public Health, said over the long term, better urban planning and changes to housing will help bring down the heat — and humidity — indoors.

In the more immediate term, Kaiser said the most at-risk would benefit from having an air conditioner. British Columbia recently announced a $10-million program for free air conditioners for those most vulnerable to the heat.

“I think it’s important from a health perspective that if you have an air conditioner at home and it works, you’re not going to die in a heat wave,” Kaiser said.

— Benjamin Shingler

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Editor: Andre Mayer | Logo design: Sködt McNalty