The climate cost of war

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Hello and welcome to Inside Science.

I'm Marnie Chesterton and this show was first broadcast on the 21st of November 2024.

Coming up, the future of the big physics of tiny particles, thawing a saber-toothed tiger and a Christmas menace.

But this week we're starting the programme on a serious note.

The current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have had many immediate effects, millions of people displaced, many others injured and killed, and the destruction of buildings, towns and infrastructure.

There have also been global effects on the economy and supply chains.

But what about the cost to our climate?

Lots of you have been in touch asking about this, and you're right, it's rarely talked about.

So, we're talking about it now.

How significant are the climate impacts of conflicts?

And given the death and destruction, is it crass to even try and measure its carbon footprint?

Benjamin Nymark, senior lecturer at Queen Mary University in London, researches this area and joins me now.

Welcome, Ben.

Thank you so much for having me.

Given what I've just mentioned, why do we need to research the climate costs of war?

Yeah, and we've been thinking about this a lot, right?

We are very, very attuned to the death and destruction, and unfortunately, the numbing of statistics of death, particularly in Gaza.

And we are researching alongside colleagues, you know, making sure that all that death and destruction is accounted for as well.

However, we feel like the two are not separate, right?

They're not mutually exclusive.

Palestinians and people in the region are incredibly climate precarious.

If anything, they're going to be more affected by climate after effects.

We do not see these two sort of crises as mutually exclusive, but one, right?

We have to kind of change in a way our temporal thinking about climate effects, right?

For some reason, we have it in our head that the climate is still going to affect us in

25 years.

Climate effects are real in there now, and particularly for those living on the edge of climate precarity.

Aaron Powell, and how do you even go about unpicking this?

I mean, we had a question from listener Linda who wrote saying, I would really like to know how much damage the Ukraine and Middle East wars are causing.

And I know that you study the carbon footprint of the Israel-Gaza conflict that's taking place right now.

How do you even begin to approach this type of research?

This is a great question.

I get asked this all the time.

Like last year, around this time, I was sitting in a very strange place.

I was in Dubai, right, for the COP28 climate meetings.

You know, it was about a month after the

Hamas attacks on October 7th, and Israeli reprisals were in full steam, continuing to this day.

But no one at the UNFCCC COP meetings were even breaching the subject of war and climate.

I mean I was surprised, right?

And so we had to do something.

I came back with my team basically over the holiday break and we started to run numbers.

We went into investigative journalism mode and we collected what we knew were sort of the carbon intensive infrastructure, jet fuel from F-15s and 35s, diesel from tanks, bunker fuels, munitions, right?

What we knew were going to be sort of the heavy hitters in terms of carbon emissions.

Can you do that in a place that's, I mean, Gaza is also a bit of a black box when it comes to international journalism.

So how do you even get the data?

Yeah, that's a great question.

I mean, we triangulate, right?

We can't just pick and choose what numbers we want.

So we have to make sure the numbers are as close to right as possible.

And we estimate based on sort of wartime reporting and wartime fighting reports out of Israel, out of Jordan, out of of think tanks in DC and London, right?

There's a lot of reporting in terms of generally how many bombs are being dropped, how many sorties are being sort of flown,

how many cargo ships and cargo flights are now being sent to restock.

And so you have to take it all in and triangulate this data.

And so

what did you find?

Yeah, so we actually set up a snapshot analysis, right?

So this is a very, very conservative estimate and by no means a comprehensive account of the war.

But within the first 120 days, which were the really, really carbon-intensive aspects of the war, we found that, you know, what are these immediate effects, right?

So bombs, flights, cargo, diesel from tanks, that the first 120 days were greater than the annual emissions of sort of 21 individual small island state.

But we moved on from that.

You know, we also needed to look at infrastructure, right?

And sort of then you start.

So, wait, is this the infrastructure?

Because we have been asked specifically from listener Sandra about the climate cost of reconstruction.

Is this infrastructure being reconstructed?

No, this is no, this is infrastructure, war infrastructure, right?

So, actually looking, and so we've been doing this work for quite a bit in Iraq, sort of looking at concrete as a weapon of war, bunkers, and tunnels and walls, and actually looking at concrete as a sort of offensive weapon in war.

So, that moves up to 32 small and medium countries, the total emissions.

But then if we move to what you just mentioned, reconstruction, and this is where the huge toll gets taken.

You know, you're looking at 50 to 65 percent, if not more, of hospitals and schools and buildings and residential houses sort of being leveled in Gaza.

To rebuild that is probably twice the annual emissions of a country like New Zealand, putting it on par with that of sort of Finland.

And this is essentially within a period of not just 120 days of fighting, but also construction of walls and defensive tunnels and offensive tunnels and or rebuilding reconstruction.

Wow, that's it's huge and it's not just active conflict.

So one of our listeners, Erica, asked, why is there so little mention of the contributions of national militaries to climate change?

How much do military superpowers contribute to climate change?

Look, to be honest, we don't know, but we've been working really hard to find as close as we can estimates.

Military emissions have been estimated up to 5.5% of global emissions.

They're literally just behind China, India, and the U.S.

if they were equal to a country.

This is roughly equivalent to global shipping in terms of a sector.

Wow, and that's peacetime emissions.

Yes, that is only peacetime emissions.

And we know very, very little about wartime emissions.

Okay.

Now it's clear from what you're saying that war and militaries contribute significantly to cost to our climate.

But having done the accounting, what happens next?

That's a great question.

Recently we've been looking at multiple levels, right, to keep keep governments and their militaries' feet to the fire and trying to build awareness around this.

You know, we can't cut what we don't know.

Basically what I mean by that is we can't make meaningful cuts if we have inadequate baselines.

And what we're saying is, based on estimations that we've drawn, the military emissions gap is huge.

We really don't know what is

being reported and what is essentially being left out.

And so we're asking for governments and militaries to report in a transparent, comprehensive way to the UNFCCC and the scientific bodies of the IPCC.

We've actually developed frameworks.

We've developed tools for them to do so.

And we're just hoping that some of them adopt some of these tools.

Now, NATO came out with their own sort of framework that also has some holes in it, but it's a really good start.

Ben Nijmark, I'm afraid that's all we've got time for, but thank you so much for joining me and shedding some light on this area of climate contributions.

No, thank you so much.

It's been an absolute pleasure to share my research with you.

Now, a discovery.

An animal no human has seen alive for thousands of years, the sabre-toothed tiger, exquisitely preserved by ice, was recently announced by Russian scientists.

Dr.

Tori Heridge is an Ice Age paleobiologist from the University of Sheffield, and she's had the Insider's Guide following this story since her colleagues first noticed something unusual in the Siberian permafrost.

Here, she shares her insight into the unique window into the past provided by a very very special kitty.

It's the kind of discovery that will make any Ice Age researcher fall off her seat, which is pretty much what I did when my friend and colleague Dr.

Albert Potopopov emailed me in December 2020 with pictures of a frost-tinged body, accompanied by the line, We think we have a sabre-toothed kitten.

Picture a tiny, tawny ball of fur, tufty ears and a softly rounded whiskered face that ends in a somewhat determined-looking jaw, long, lanky forelegs outstretched, a chunky pair of paws, eyes closed, a kitten asleep.

But this particular kitten closed its eyes and took its last breath thirty five thousand years ago before becoming buried deep in the permafrost of northeastern Siberia.

There it lay frozen in a block of ancient ice, flesh and fur, tooth and bone perfectly preserved until 2020 when it was discovered in the banks of the Bajarica River.

Last week, Albert and a team of researchers from Russia announced to the world this fluffy little floofbull was, just as they had first thought, the kitten of a sabre-toothed cat.

To be precise, the scimiter-toothed cat Homotherium, a species of sabre-tooth that most likely lived in groups and hunted by day, and which sported a pair of impressively large serrated edged canines in its upper jaw.

Unlike its more famous sabre-toothed cousin Smilodon, fossils of Homotherium are rare, so any new find is therefore special.

But this find is also the first ever example of a sabre-toothed cat carcass to be discovered in the permafrost.

And that means it's the first time that any human has seen one in the flesh for at least 12,000 years.

This discovery means we can finally answer some questions that fossils alone can't tell us.

Of course, if no one alive has ever seen a sabre-toothed kitten, can we be sure this is the real thing?

There's no genetic evidence yet, but CT scans show although its baby teeth don't yet include the dagger-like canine so distinctive in adults, its incisors are arranged in an arc, a simitar cat feature that most likely helped Homotherium to better grasp its prey in its jaws.

The kitten has the long legs of Homotherium and claws that, just like those in cheetah's dogs and hyenas, do not fully retract.

These are two features that would have made this species a very efficient long distance runner, able to track large prey across the vast mammoth steppe of the Ice Age world.

But it's in the soft tissue where the revelations lie.

Chunky paws, much wider than the lions, were adapted for travel across snow and had unique square shaped paw pads.

The coat, which was so much darker than the sandy fur of cave lion cubs found in the region six years earlier, had no hint of spots or stripes.

The delicate blonde tendrils hanging down on either side of its jowls like a ghostly shadowing of its adult sabre teeth yet to come.

And finally a resolution to the debate over whether those teeth would have been visible at all.

It had a long upper lip which would have kept them hidden away, perhaps allowing just a final flash of serrated white before the jaw closed on a kill.

That such a remarkable relic of an ice age world could remain at all would be wonder enough, joining joining the ever-increasing ranks of frozen permafrost carcasses of mammoth, woolly rhino, horse, wolf and even cave lion cubs emerging from the permafrost in recent years.

But this kitten is truly unique.

Who knows if we'll ever find something like it again?

But also, who knows what will emerge from the permafrost next?

When it comes to extinct creatures, paleontologists usually have to infer living appearance from bones alone based on comparisons with similar animals we have living today.

For something like a sabre-toothed cat, which has no modern equivalent, this is tricky.

This little kitten shows we did a pretty good job, actually.

But it also offers up surprises that we would never have predicted, letting us know things that would have been a familiar sight to the Ice Age people who lived alongside them, right down to the poor prints that a scimitar-toothed cat would have left behind it in the snow.

Evocative insights into an extinct kitty, thanks to Dr.

Tori Herridge.

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Europe's premier particle smashing facility, CERN, has a new new boss.

The newly appointed Director General, particle physicist Mark Thompson, will begin his role in 2026, but has worked with CERN for decades.

In 2012, CERN made global headlines for their discovery of the Higgs boson, which gives the smallest particles in the universe their mass.

But wasn't that the final missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle of the periodic table for particle physics?

So, when Mark takes over, what physics is left for CERN to do?

On Inside Science, back in August, we discussed CERN's next massive project, the Future Circular Collider, or FCC, which is raising eyebrows with its 17 billion Euro price tag.

I started by asking Mark how the FCC was different from CERN's other huge particle smasher.

So, what we have at the moment, the Large Hadron Collider, 27 kilometre circumference, and it smashes together protons as hard as we possibly can.

Now, the future circular collider is kind of the next step.

So, it's 91 kilometers, so it's about three times the size.

In its first phase, which is what we're talking about now, the idea is to collide not protons, but electrons and positrons.

There is a global consensus that the next big machine needs to study the very strange particle, the Higgs boson, that we discovered in 2012.

And the main aim of this new collider is really to understand this completely new type of matter and use this as a window into new physics, but by making very, very precise measurements.

But you've already got the tool that you used to discover it over a decade ago.

Why can't you carry on using that?

To some extent we will.

So the thing that's happening at CERN at the moment is we are building the upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider to make it more powerful.

And that will enable us to make certain measurements of the properties of the Higgs boson.

But when you collide protons together, protons are not fundamental particles, they're made up of quarks.

So the actual collisions are quite messy.

When you collide electrons and positrons, you get very, very clean images of the what we call interactions.

So when we produce Higgs bosons at the future circular collider, we will be able to study it in incredible detail and with a precision you just cannot do at a Large Hadron Collider.

Is there any guarantee that you'd actually find anything interesting?

We know there's a huge amount about particle physics that we do not understand.

There are so many questions out there still.

Questions about the nature of dark matter.

There are some really interesting questions about we have a number of fundamental particles and they all have different masses and we don't know why they have different masses.

We believe it's the Higgs boson that gives them those masses.

So huge number of questions and with a precision machine like the future circular collider, we are opening a new avenue of exploration.

Are we guaranteed to make a new discovery?

You're never guaranteed and in some ways

we are exploring the unknown.

It wouldn't really be a discovery if you knew what you were going to discover.

But we are guaranteed to make measurements that will take our knowledge of the universe forward in very, very large steps.

The harsh reality, though, is that for most people, the Higgs boson, CERN, and particle physics really aren't part of their everyday life.

So how would you persuade the average person on the street that this future circular collider is worth pursuing?

So what we do when we create these very large projects in particle physics, we're trying to answer questions that are really, really difficult.

And to do that, we have to develop new technologies that have a relevance to particle physics, but they have relevance elsewhere.

So for example, the detector systems we build, which image these particles,

they are the background technology around many of the very, very high precision medical imaging that we have at the moment.

And of course, the World Wide Web, which was a long time ago now, came out of a tool that particle physicists developed almost to share data and information between themselves.

So it really is this downstream high technology that are developed in particle physics that then flows into, if you like, the real world.

And the challenge is when you do, of course, when you do these experiments, you don't know where that technology is going to end up.

I mean, I guess the people you really need to persuade are the politicians who are going to fund it or

not, as Germany is currently saying they don't want to.

How do you sell the prospect of a 17 billion Euro collider to them?

Do you go for the look at our past record?

I think there are a number of arguments that I think resonate with politicians.

Number one, actually, I think, is the genuine excitement behind the science, pushing the boundaries of knowledge in a very fundamental way.

I think there is a kind of a tangible sense that you're doing something really, really inspiring.

The second argument really is if you start to go down the economic route, that technological downstream benefit, that the people engaged in the project will have access to that technology.

They'll be part of developing the technology in their countries.

And the other aspect, which I don't think should be underplayed, is that these large high-tech projects provide brilliant training grounds for young people.

We end up equipping them with real skills right at the forefront of technology.

Now, some will stay in particle physics, but the majority don't.

I'm wondering, in your five years in charge, is there any other science aside from the FCC that you're hoping to kind of nail down?

The completion of the high-luminosity LHC upgrade is, I think, going to be a real opportunity, a real discovery opportunity.

What kind of discoveries?

The really exciting thing about the next phase is the amount of data we will take is about more than 10 times the amount of data we have now.

And the wonderful scientific community are doing a great job at adopting a very advanced tool, artificial intelligence, to make even better use of that data.

So, this is a real exploration of the unknown.

Now if you ask me what are we going to discover, I honestly don't know because we are looking to discover something completely new.

Well thank you and I guess good luck with your time in charge and good luck raising the funds.

Thank you.

Next, the Grinch that might steal Christmas.

And by steal I mean eat.

It's the attack of the eight-toothed spruce bark beetle.

You may have seen the headlines about it, greedily devouring Christmas trees.

Last month the Forestry Commission even banned planting of new spruce trees in parts of England to avoid it taking hold.

So I headed out to meet Sarah Facey, who's in charge of entomology response at Alice Holt Forest Research in Farnham.

It's her job to spot and hopefully stop new pests arriving here in the UK.

So this is the Holt Laboratory.

I'm looking at a door that says no unauthorised persons beyond this point.

Yes, so we have this special entrance lobby.

This is like a double airlock.

It's very important that we're able to handle things that are live.

So, if we get an interception of wood from a shipping container that has evidence of beta activity and it's supposedly been heat-treated so that everything in that should be dead, it's really important when we receive that sample that we can open it and say, actually, this is alive, this treatment has failed.

We're not going to go in there, are we?

I thought I'd spare you that and instead take you to the processing lab where we process dead specimens which are kept in glycol.

Perfect.

We're sat in a room and there's a little tube just there.

Can you tell me what's in the tube?

These are some Ips typographis adult beetles.

Eight-tooth spruce bark beetle is its common name, but it's one of the rare occasions where I think the scientific name is actually less of a mouthful than the common name, so I'm going to keep referring to it as Ips typographis.

So they're quite

small.

They're about the size of a grain of rice and I don't know, a little bit fluffy, although that's hard to see because they're in liquid, aren't they?

If you look very closely you can see the teeth which give them their name.

So if you look on their rear end.

They have the teeth on their rear end.

Yes, the teeth doesn't refer to teeth to mandibles, it refers to these spines which are in a ring-like structure.

I can see, I can see on that one.

Why do they have teeth on their rear end?

That depression that is lined with those spines is used to push the frass, which is the droppings of the beetle mixed in with the woody material that they're gnawing through to get to their food.

They push that back out of the hole using that sort of spade-like structure.

What I want to know is: where do they normally live?

What's their natural home?

This species is native to Europe and Asia, and they feed on spruce trees.

This species ordinarily functions as a secondary pest.

What's that mean?

That means that it attacks trees that are already dead or dying or stressed.

When forests are damaged by storms or stressed by the effects of climate change, the beetle can build up in numbers and reach colossal abundances.

Really, I've seen photographs of piles of beetles as tall as a human.

So we're talking millions upon millions of beetles.

Does that mean that they've caused widespread damage in Europe?

Absolutely.

So once they've built up enough numbers, they can then move on to attack healthy material functioning as a primary pest.

So that means that they can overwhelm the defences of healthy trees.

As well as some of these little beetles, we've also got a piece of bark here.

Now

I'm not quite sure how to describe this, but it's got what looks like the imprint of two leaves on it, but it's not leaves, is it?

So this is an Ipstopographus breeding gallery.

When the beetle attacks a tree, a male will bore a hole through the bark and he will release a pheromone, which is a special scent, into the air that attracts female beetles and other male beetles to say, I've found a stressed tree.

come and get some food.

So then he attracts two to three females, perhaps more, more, if he's lucky, that come into the chamber, the nuptial chamber that he's built, where the beetles breed.

So that's the party room.

Yep.

And then the females will bore up and down the length of the tree.

So they make these vertical galleries.

I mean it's like someone's scratched out a tunnel into

the bark.

Yes.

And along that she makes, carves out these little, they're called egg niches, where she lays a single egg and then radiating out across the width of the tree this time, we have these beautiful sort of sinuous galleries, which are the larval galleries.

The larvae can hear each other, so they know to stay away, so they're not competing too much for food.

And their food is the bark of the tree.

It's the phloem tissue.

And the phloem is what the tree uses as its highway for nutrients, I guess.

So you really don't want beetles disturbing that.

Yes, absolutely.

And during that process, it continues to eat, but obviously, quite voraciously now as an adult.

And then, all of those galleries sort of merge together, and you get to a point where there's no channel anymore for the nutrients made up in the canopy to be transferred down to the roots.

And at that point, the tree's in serious trouble?

Yes, at that point, the tree will be dying.

Can you give me some examples of where that's happened?

Absolutely.

So, across much of mainland Europe, Ips typographis damage has been increasing over over recent years.

So, as the effects of climate change become more apparent and storms happen with greater frequency and in intensity, then we get more of that stress material for Ips typographis to build up on.

So, how did these beetles end up in the UK?

Yes, so here in England, where Ips typographis is a regulated quarantine pest, we've seen small numbers of this beetle blowing over the channel into the southeast from the very large outbreaks occurring on the continent.

So, this fluffy little beetle is considered a huge pest in the UK?

Absolutely, it is a quarantine organism, so we have a statutory obligation to attempt eradication.

The aim is to prevent it from gaining a foothold and reaching our major spruce-growing areas in the north and west.

Spruce is also a Christmas tree, right?

Absolutely.

It's a very treasured Christmas tree.

We have approximately 725,000 hectares of spruce in the UK, which has a value of around £2.9 billion

annually.

So it's a really important resource that we're working to protect from this major threat.

Thankfully, beetles need quite a good area of bark in order to be able to carry out their reproduction successfully.

Ips does not attack trees below three metres in height.

So unless you've got a massive Christmas tree, it's probably safe.

Yes.

Is there anything though that Radio 4 listeners can do to kind of be on the lookout for this beetle?

It's keeping an eye on the forest, it's removing any storm damage material quickly.

We have the Tree Alert portal, which is run by Forest Research, and that's where if you find anything in your forest or you see anything you're worried about, you can snap a picture.

So that's how listeners can play their part in

saving Christmas.

Absolutely.

Thank you to Sarah Facey and hurrah that Christmas is still on.

You've been listening to BBC BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton.

The producers were Florian Bohr, Ella Hubber, and Jerry Holt.

Technical production was by Emily Preston.

The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

If you want to test your climate change knowledge, head to bbc.co.uk and search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to the Open University to take the quiz.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We the demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.