The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the spread of the Zika virus in Latin America and the Caribbean a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Zika is a virus primarily transmitted by mosquitos that was first identified in rhesus monkeys in Uganda in 1947. The most common symptoms of Zika virus disease are fever, rash, joint pain, and conjunctivitis, although in rare cases it may cause Guillain-Barré syndrome, which can leave patients completely paralyzed. Most people who infected with the virus show no symptoms at all. But recently, in Latin America, the disease appears to be associated with—although no direct causal relationship has been established—nearly 4,000 new cases of microcephaly, a congenital deformation of the skull, which leads to speech and motor problems, as well as to impaired vision. Officials in Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Jamaica have called on women to delay their pregnancies. WHO said that as many as 4 million people in the Americas could be infected with the disease by the end of 2016. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said that while it is likely the disease will spread locally within the southern US, it isn’t likely to spread rapidly there because the vulnerable regions are relatively unpopulated, widely use air conditioning, and have effective mosquito control programs. There is currently no specific treatment for or vaccine against Zika virus infections.
Shortly after a magnitude-5.1 earthquake was detected near a North Korean nuclear test site, North Korea announced that it had successfully tested a hydrogen bomb. North Korea said that the test was an an act of self-defense given the threat of a nuclear attack by the U.S. South Korea immediately put its military on alert. Experts were skeptical that North Korea had successfully tested a hydrogen bomb, which unlike conventional atomic weapons derives most of its explosive energy from nuclear fusion. One US official said that it may have been a failed test or a test of components of a hydrogen bomb, but the size of the earthquake and other intelligence suggested that that North Korea did not detonate a fully functioning hydrogen bomb. The UN Security Council “strongly condemned” the test, calling it a “clear violation” of Security Council resolutions as well as “a clear threat to international peace and security”. China said that it “firmly opposes” North Korea’s conducting a nuclear test and called on North Korea “to remain committed to its commitment of denuclearization and stop taking any actions that will make the situation worse”.
Cyber threat experts said that a power outage in late December that affected hundreds of thousands of homes in Ukraine may have been caused by a malware package called BlackEnergy. If true, it would be the first time that malware was known to have caused a blackout. “It’s a milestone because we’ve definitely seen targeted destructive events against energy before—oil firms, for instance—but never the event which causes the blackout,” iSIGHT Partners’ cyber espionage head John Hultquist told Ars Technica. “It’s the major scenario we’ve all been concerned about for so long.”
According to two different sets of data, 2015 was the hottest year on record by a large margin. The substantial increase in average surface temperature was partly due to an unusually strong El Niño pattern of warm water in the central Pacific. NASA data showed that 2015 was 0.13°C (0.23°F) warmer on average than 2014, which had previously been the warmest year on record. NASA said that 15 of the 16 hottest years on record were in this century. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) data put the increase at 0.29°F (0.16°C). NOAA said that 2015 was 1.62°F (0.9°C) over the 20th century average. “A lot of times, you actually look at these numbers, when you break a record, you break it by a few hundredths of a degree,” director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information Thomas Karl said. “But this record, we literally smashed. It was over a quarter of a degree Fahrenheit, and that’s a lot for the global temperature.”
NASA announced the formation of a new Planetary Defense Coordination Office responsible for the detection and tracking of “asteroids and comets whose orbit are predicted to bring them within 0.05 Astronomical Units of Earth; and of a size large enough to reach Earth’s surface”. The NASA Authorization Act of 2005 tasked NASA with the goal of finding 90% of all near-Earth objects (NEOs) more than 140m in diameter by 2020 “in order to assess the threat of such near-Earth objects to the Earth”. The new office was formed in response to a critical 2014 NASA Office of the Inspector General’s report that found that with NASA’s current structure it would fall short of that goal. NASA has so far identified about 6,800 of the estimated 25,000 NEOs more than 140m in diameter.
A new review in Science argued that we should consider the middle of the 20th century the beginning of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch defined by human activity. The review found that humans have changed the Earth’s geological process enough to leave a stratigraphic signature in sediments and ice distinct from that of the earlier Holocene epoch. Recent anthropogenic deposits contain a novel mix of elemental aluminum, concrete, and plastics that form “technofossils”. The amount of black carbon, ash, and carbonaceous particles increased sharply starting around 1950 from burning fossil fuels. The amount of nitrogen and phosphorus in the soil doubled over the last century as a result of fertilizer use. Sedimentary fluxes increased due to erosion caused by cutting down forests and building roads. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane began to change dramatically around 1950, accompanied by rising temperatures and sea levels. Nuclear weapons tests left a global “bomb spike” of artificial radionuclides from in sediments laid down between 1952 to 1980. The biologic record also shows dramatic changes, as extinction rates increased and ecosystems changed.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists left the hands of its symbolic “Doomsday Clock” at three minutes till midnight, indicating that “The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon”. The Bulletin concluded that the chance of catastrophe did not go down over the course of 2015. It said that while the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate agreement were “major diplomatic achievements”, they were offset by increasing tensions between the US and Russia and by rising global temperatures. “The world situation remains highly threatening to humanity,” The Bulletin wrote, “and decisive action to reduce the danger posed by nuclear weapons and climate change is urgently required.”
This news summary was put together in collaboration with Anthropocene. Thanks to Tony Barrett, Seth Baum, Kaitlin Butler, and Grant Wilson for help compiling the news.
For last month’s news summary, please see GCR News Summary December 2015.
You can help us compile future news posts by putting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).
Image credit: James Gathany/US Centers for Disease Control
