The climate changing power of 400 billion toasters

Inside Science introduction

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1:16Hello, welcome to Inside Science from the BBC World Service with me, Tom Whipple. In the time it takes me to read this sentence, 25 atomic bombs worth or so of extra energy will be transferred from the Pacific to the atmosphere. Yes, it's a super El Nino, the Oceanic Climate Ex Machina. We catch up with what it's been up to. Our international man of science, Roland Pease, will also take us back in time to visit our Neanderthal cousins and investigate a curious-looking injury.

1:47And the man who is fighting against Indian herbal medicine and a lot of the Indian establishment with it. The first of a series looking at finalists for the Maddox Prize for Standing Up for Science. Joining me is someone who always stands up for science, Lizzie Gibney, reporter from Nature. Lizzie, you've been looking at some of the other news. What have you found? So I am going to be telling you how to tell the difference between a human idea and one that comes from AI and a little bit of rare good news about coral reefs. Excellent.

The Super El Nino

2:18Back in May, we checked in on the developments in the Eastern Pacific's ocean currents that we call El Nino. We said that stirrings in the surface suggested that it might just be quite a big one. Now it seems that everyone is talking about it and it's definitely big. So what is the El Nino and what is it really up to? Lizzie and I are here with Mark Maslin, Professor of Physical Geography at University College London. Mark, first of all, what is it in ocean terms? What is the El Nino? So El Nino is a coupled system between the winds and the oceans in the Pacific Ocean.

2:52And what happens is that every so often the trade winds, which are blowing from South America towards Australia, weaken. And because of that, all of that cold water that's been pushed from South America towards Australia doesn't. And that warm pool of water around Australia starts to spread out. And most importantly, it allows all the heat that's been stored up in the ocean to come to the surface and be released into the atmosphere. And so we see massive changes all around the tropics and the subtropics during an El Nino period.

3:27We also see a huge amount of heat released back into the atmosphere. Now, historically, I've been reading some of the historical stuff and, you know, this has been linked to famines in India to, I mean, possibly slightly less plausibly to the French Revolution. But this ends up being, I've completely failed to put the energy in terms that actually makes sense to a human. But it's a vast amount and it affects almost everything, doesn't it? So some of the estimates are 10 zettujoules of energy is released through an El Nino event. Now, you're going to look at me and go, what's a zettujoule?

3:59So if you take all the energy that humans use in one year, that's half a zettujoule. So this is 20 times the amount of energy that we as a species use each year. So it's a huge amount of energy going back into the atmosphere. Now, remember, this energy is not new energy. It's actually heat that's been stored up by the oceans and this has been added to by climate change. So we've been pumping heat into the oceans for decades and every so often it comes back and hits us during an El Nino.

4:31And so this is a super El Nino. What does that mean anything or is that just journalists talking and what can we expect from it? So scientists never give these wonderful super or I heard Godzilla El Nino. However, I'm a little bit freer with that and I think that calling it super is really important. So if we think about it, an El Nino gets called when there's a nominally in the Pacific Ocean surface temperatures of about half a degree. That's a moderate.

5:02We then have a strong, which is about one and a half degrees warming and then a very strong above two degrees. We're at three degrees. This is the strongest anomaly we've ever had. And our predictions suggest that could go up to four degrees of an anomaly. So this is a huge El Nino. So I'm very happy with the term. This is a super El Nino. This is a once in a historic record because of all that extra heat due to climate change. And is it getting harder to predict the effects of El Nino?

5:33That's what I want to know, because, of course, now we've got they come in these cycles, but we're overlaying that on an ever warming earth. Like, do we know what the effects are going to be for present day El Ninos? So we have a really good idea of what the effects of El Nino are. So we know that if you look at droughts and wildfires, they're going to occur in places like India, southern Asia and even Indonesia. So we know where those are going to happen. We know that the actual heavy rains and flooding that will happen in Africa, southern South America.

6:05The problem here is that we know the effects, but we don't know when, how and how severe. And that's then when we come down to trying to predict weather. To what extent is this like a time machine to our future? Because it's chucking in a lot more energy into the atmosphere, but it's not doing it uniformly. It's not quite as simple as this is just 0.2 degrees of warming, is it? So the answer to that is more complicated. So first, the actual heat that's going to be put into the atmosphere now and through to next year will be temperatures globally that resemble 10 to 20 years into the future.

6:42Chicago University has estimated there'll be about 450,000 heat related deaths due to El Nino. So that's looking into the future. But El Nino is a particular weather event that affects the tropics and the subtropics. Climate change affects everywhere. And the difference is we're seeing warming in Europe at twice the rate of the global temperature rise. And we're seeing in the poles three to four times the warming, the polar anthracification.

7:13So the problem here is that it is giving us an idea of the temperatures in the future, but the weather impacts are very El Nino-like, as in they are tropical, subtropical, whereas climate change affects everywhere and actually affects the poles and the high latitudes a lot more. How long have we got? When is this going to stop? And do you think we're ready for what's coming? So El Nino is predicted to carry on until at least February 2027. It may linger on.

7:44And again, our models suggest that we're not quite sure if it's going to tail off or whether it suddenly stops. The problem here is that heat, I told you, the 10 zettujoules of energy that's been pumped into the atmosphere, that's going to make next year one of the hottest years. And I actually, I'm going to be brave. I'm going to say it will be the hottest year on record.

Neanderthal injuries and care

8:06Thank you, Mark. Now time to check in with Roland Pease with a look at the dark side of prehistoric life. A tale of probable violence, but also some charity among Neanderthals, Tom. The new evidence comes from a cave at Shanidar in Iraqi Kurdistan I'd not heard of, but which is well known to archaeologists, Cambridge University's Emma Pomeroy told me, because digs there in the 1950s transformed our attitudes to Neanderthals. It's a huge cave.

8:37It's huge and open. And it became famous first because of work done in the 50s by Dr. Ralph Zalecki. He found the skeletal remains of 10 Neanderthal men, women and children. And there were several remarkable individuals. So there was one who had a major head injury, making him lightly blind in one eye. He was paralysed in his right arm. He'd lost the right arm from just above the elbow. He was partially deaf, but he survived to a good age.

9:10And Zalecki argued that he must have been cared for. There was another individual controversially known as the Flower Burial. Zalecki argued that there was clusters of pollen under the body, which he interpreted the body being put on a bed of flowers. And those interpretations really went against some of the common interpretations of the time, of Neanderthals being kind of brutish, unfeeling, unintelligent. So he really put the site at the centre of some of those debates.

9:42And it's still very much debated today. I mean, you've gone back and I guess for several years now, you've been excavating further individuals from there. And the one that you're talking about in this week's paper is one who is severely injured, you think, possibly by a spear. Tell me about that. Yes. So this is an individual who was actually part of a cluster of individuals associated with that famous Flower Burial. And this person was at the bottom of that cluster.

10:13They're very incomplete. So we've only got a few ribs, a complete right hand and the left shoulder blade, the scapula, along with seven teeth. And for the spear injury, what we have in that left shoulder blade is an almost perfectly circular hole. It's about 15 millimetres in diameter. From that hole, there are fractures radiating outwards. And that's a sign that the hole was made around the time the individual died.

10:46So it didn't heal at all, you're saying? Yes, exactly. So we looked at the edges of that hole under a microscope and under micro CT or from micro CT images. And we can see that there's absolutely no healing. It hasn't even started to heal. So we can be sure that happened around the time that they died. When I hear something like this, my obvious reaction is that this would have been some kind of violence. But I suppose if you don't have the spear, you don't know how that injury was caused. That's going a step too far, is it?

11:18Potentially. And we have to consider all the possible explanations. And obviously one kind of explanation might be that it was an accident. Someone accidentally got struck by a spear. And that is a possibility. But violence is also another strong possibility. And based on experiments by other people, I think that this injury would have been caused not by a spear that was thrown, but by what we call a thrusting spear. I mean, that's very brutal.

11:48But the context of this is also this individual had a broken tooth, is that right? Which you think is very significant. Yes. So although the jaws and the rest of the skull aren't preserved, we do have these seven teeth. And several of those are quite remarkable. But especially one of the front teeth, it's split long ways and half of that's missing. The teeth next to it have turned round a little bit. So they must have had some really hard blow to the face to actually split a tooth like that and move some of the others.

12:25Was it at the same time as the spear injury? No, because we can say that for the spear injury that happened around the time they died, but for the teeth and for the face injury, we can say that they survived some time after that because calculus has formed over the teeth. And this particular split tooth is almost completely covered in that calculus. And that shows us that they must have been alive for some time after that injury happened. I mean, it must have been ghastly painful.

12:58Absolutely. I think it would have been excruciating. It would have damaged the bone around it. Obviously, the nerves would have been exposed. Yeah, I think it would have been absolutely horrible. But this, to you, talks of a community of care amongst these individuals. It's a strong possibility. If you think about a facial injury like that, they would have had trouble speaking for a while, trouble eating, trouble drinking, and also have been in a huge amount of pain.

13:30So it's very likely that they might have needed some help from other members of their social group. We always have to be a little careful with our interpretations of care. I think in this case, we can argue that they did receive some care because their body was deposited in this cluster of individuals. It was the first one put in this group. And that suggests that they were cared for in death. Their body was cared for in death in a similar way to those who died and were placed or buried above subsequently.

14:05So I think we can argue they were still an important part of that community. So where does this leave Shenidar Cave then in the context of our understanding of Neanderthals? As you say, you know, the standard perception, even today, despite what we know, is that they were very brutish. But they sound almost like no different from Homo sapiens to me. I think that's the point. I mean, we still use the term Neanderthal as a bit of an insult, but the evidence has been accumulating now for several decades that they were pretty similar to us and capable of these similar emotions, potentially, although those don't preserve.

14:45But ways of thinking, complex behaviour. And I think what's interesting about this individual is that they encapsulate some of that complexity of Neanderthal behaviour. Which is actually common to us as well, to us Homo sapiens as well. Absolutely. We're not all good, not all bad. Absolutely. And I think we can look around us today and we're particularly aware of it at the moment that humans can be terribly violent to one another. But also, on the positive side, we see a great deal of caring behaviour and looking after one another.

15:22Further rehabilitation of our Neanderthal cousins by Emma Pomeroy, whose paper just appeared in Scientific Reports. Dom. Thank you, Roland. You're listening to Inside Science from the BBC World Service. Tell us what science you think we should be investigating. Our email address is insidescience at bbc.co.uk. When intimate itch strikes, waiting it out isn't always an option. That's why there's Vagisil Maximum Strength Anti-Itch Cream. It provides fast relief from intense external feminine itching and burning.

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Detecting AI ideas

17:12Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit SimpliSafe.com slash licenses for alarm license information. Lizzie, bringing us back to the present day, have you got any news for us? Absolutely. So the story I have today is from a pre-print and I wrote about it in Nature. And it's about being able to detect where ideas come from. So a lot of people are using chatbots now to write all kinds of different texts. And the front line in this is kind of moving. It's becoming increasingly acceptable that you might polish your writing, say, with AI.

17:44And people will say, oh, but the underlying ideas, the concepts, they are mine. Well, this detector is claiming that it can actually tell where the ideas themselves have come from. God, that's fascinating. So there's so much. I mean, how? So first of all, they take a million documents, around half of which are human generated and half are AI generated. And these are things like research papers, stories, news articles. They strip them of their style. They just create an outline. And then they train a machine learning algorithm on those outlines, on these million outlines.

18:17And it learns to tell the difference between them in this kind of way that algorithms do. So it's able to pick up on subtle patterns that show differences in the arguments and the flow and things that are not to do with the actual exact text itself that can tell the difference between AI and human. Mark, another step towards our obsolescence. So now I'm curious, are there any examples of an original idea coming from AI? Because if they're searching through all of human knowledge, my ideas, I'm pretty sure I'm standing on the shoulder of giants.

18:47I'm standing on previous scientists. I'm building on their ideas. So it's not my idea. I'm just trying to improve them. Where does that originality come in? Is that just human or can you find it in AI? I think that's a really big open question at the moment. Open AI have had a lot of success in maths recently that you may have seen. And in fact, I think reported on the show. It's obviously there is doing something. I think it's still an open question whether what it's doing is finding links and finishing sentences, you know, that people have never actually reached those conclusions. Or if it is fundamentally finding something new, I don't think we know yet.

19:21In maths, yeah, the examples are some of these have been solved by pulling techniques from fields that no one would have worked on bringing them together. But the big example is move 37 in Go, which was AlphaGo's move that just felt like alien game playing. But look, anyway, let's move back to humans and particularly human way of doing science. What is it like to be reviled or even hated for trying to do your science? Here on Inside Science, we speak with many practising researchers each week, but it's not very often that their work leads directly to them being sued or punished or even cancelled.

19:58For the next few weeks, we end to bring you some insights from around the world from scientists whose evidence-based contributions to public discourse have not always been universally well received.

Fighting traditional medicine in India

20:07Dr. Siriyak Abhi Phillips is a clinical hepatologist or liver doctor based in Kerala, India. He's famous in his country, but not necessarily loved. He's spoken out regularly and continues to do so against traditional Indian medicine or Ayurveda. Even though we call it Indian medicine, it's actually global medicine because it's everywhere. It's in the US, it's in the UK. People are moving more towards Ayurvedic practices. Traditional products are being sold all over the world. So, tradition-wise, even though Ayurveda is India's original ancient medicine, so to speak, there are other aspects of traditional medicine also within India.

20:47So, this comes under a term known as Ayush. So, we have an independent autonomous ministry with public funds completely used for promotion instead of regulation for this particular Ayush industry. So, Ayush is A for Ayurveda, Y is for yoga and naturopathy, U is for Yunani, that is ancient Persian medicine, then comes S for Siddha, which is South Indian version of Ayurveda, and then comes homeopathy. And why did you decide to get involved in speaking out about this?

21:18It's because of my patients. So, during my practice, when I started off as a junior consultant, I started seeing a lot of patients with unexplained jaundice and hepatitis. They suddenly started having liver failure from nowhere. And all the common causes that we do see in our place, for example, alcohol or viruses like hepatitis A, hepatitis B, etc., were all negative. So, like a detective, we figured out that, you know, the reason for the severe liver injury and liver failure in many of these patients was because of traditional medicines.

21:48And unfortunately, we lost a lot of these patients because once liver failure sets in, the only way to make the patient survive into the future is through a liver transplant. And we don't have a centralized system. Patients pay out of pocket for a liver transplant. So, a lot of them cannot afford a liver transplant. A lot of them don't have donors in the family or they don't get a liver donor in time. And because there was this loss that was entirely preventable, I started doing, you know, education from a patient level as well as a public level beyond my outpatient department regarding what harms alternative medicines can actually cause.

22:23And that is how all of this started. And what reaction have you had? Because presumably you've had a lot of people, you have a lot of followers on social media. There are a lot of people who like this message, but not everyone does, do they? No, I mean, I don't think a lot of people like what I do and what I say, but it's essential that I keep doing it. Ayurveda is deeply rooted in religion. I mean, there is a lot of religiosity and faith and belief in the system. Even though I don't practice my religion, I have a Christian name. And because of that, they thought this was, you know, anti-Hindu or anti-India propaganda.

22:54So that was the biggest issue that I faced initially, because I was talking about what they thought was, you know, from a religious point of view. But it was never a religious point of view. It's purely from a pseudoscience point of view. Other than that, I've been taken to the court. I am also fighting multiple criminal and civil defamation cases in courts, even now. And I have been summoned to the medical councils to prove myself. So the backlash has been really bad and it keeps continuing. Why do you keep continuing? So this comes back to who I am, you know.

23:26So I'm a doctor. And as a doctor, I'm an educator. So doctor, the word doctor means to teach. So I have to educate first. And I believe in primary prevention rather than, you know, damage control. So just by saying that, you know, herbal medicines are not tested and they are unscientific, doesn't actually get into people's minds because all of them have a lot of these cognitive biases, a lot of confirmation biases, which need to be broken down. So I think primarily it's all about education and prevention of diseases rather than, you know, going for damage control. And I think this is the most important point.

23:58What have you achieved and what do you think your legacy will be? What I have achieved is that I have broken the immunity that alternative medicine actually enjoyed in India. There was a time when people, even modern medical practitioners would tell patients to, you know, just try Ayurveda. For a nation to progress, it has to progress through science. There is no other way. And I think this is the legacy that has to be carried forward. That was hepatologist Dr. Syriak Abbey-Phillips, who is one of the finalists in this year's John Maddox Prize in partnership with Sense About Science and Nature.

24:31It's not the only science thing in partnership with nature.

Restoring bleached coral reefs

24:35This week, I am too. I am partnered with nature reporter Lizzie Gibney. Lizzie, you've got one last bit of news that you want to talk about. I do. And this is a rare bit of good news. So this is hope for bleached corals out there. So bleaching is when your coral ends up ejecting these little algae that live symbiotically within it that actually provide nutrients. And that can happen actually relating back to what we were talking about before when the seas are warming. They end up stressed and starved. And it's kind of one step away from death for corals. And we know that these bleaching events are happening increasingly.

25:08So in this study, which was published in Science Advances and that one of my colleagues wrote about in Nature, it's a way that you can restore coral using a very, very simple method. It brings them back to life, almost like with one simple trick, in about eight weeks. Talk us through it. And coral reefs are quite famously quite big. Is this something that can be done practically? Well, so they actually, they discovered this by accident. So in the lab, they had one fragment of healthy coral that happened to be touching with a bit of bleached coral. And they found that they could literally see the colour was seeping back into the bleached coral.

25:44And so they did a little trial. They had five pairs of healthy and bleached coral, one where they were touching and in the other five sets where they were just a millimetre apart. And even after touching for just a week, after eight weeks, ones that had contact, the bleached coral had been completely rejuvenated. Whereas in the case where there was even a millimetre gap, after 20 weeks, that coral completely died. So that's quite exciting because it's something that is very, very simple. And what they figured out is when they looked with a high-powered microscope that actually the corals are fusing.

26:15And it's almost like a tiny bridge that the algae are transferring across. But there's a big caveat, which is that this only works between corals that are of the same genetic material, the same organism. This would not work between species. And the researchers also don't know that there might be something specific to the coral type that they were looking at that meant this happened. But you could see perhaps a case where you have a nursery, a kind of protected area where you keep lots of specimens of coral and keep them healthy. And that you might be able to then use those strategically to reseed a bleached area, for example.

26:49This is just one idea. It's very early days. But I think people are quite excited by the fact that it's even possible. Mark, coral bleaching and what coral is up to has been quite political in the last 20 years. We've had a lot of people worried about coral reefs and worried about them dying off. But particularly this year, we've had a lot of people saying, actually, you know what? The Great Barrow Reef has got more coral than ever before. What's going on and where do climate scientists sit in this? So this is the classic denial, which is you give facts like the glaciers are melting.

27:22We have all the evidence. We have real evidence that coals are bleached and being destroyed all around the world. And then someone comes along and goes, no, no, no, no, no, that's not true. Let's look at the science. Most of the coral reefs around the world are threatened. El Nino is particularly problematic because of the peak surface temperatures. And guess what? What happens is they get stressed, they eject these sort of algae, and then they die. The problem here is how do we actually make sure that those surface temperatures don't hit those peaks?

27:56It's not the average, it's that peak. It's like us. We're fine in warm conditions. If you have a peak temperature, that's when we start to lose people and they die. OK, so this is exactly the same with coals. So we need to actually try to ameliorate the temperatures, which, of course, is a global problem where we have to reduce global emissions as quick as possible. But also, this is an amazing story because guess what? We can help nature to rebuild itself. And this is something that scientists have been amazed about, because if you leave nature alone or you give it a little helping hand, it will come back so fast.

28:32Look at the recovery of the whales to pick up on another story that you've already covered. So, again, life always finds a way. If we can help it like this, brilliant. But we have to stop doing silly things like putting sewage into the seas near coral reefs. That's all for its stressism. We need to reduce climate change to try and protect them. And, again, we then have to ignore this disinformation that is pouring into our social means, saying, no, no, no, the scientists don't really know.

29:02Of course our coral reefs are fine. It's not true. Well, look, so mixed news for coral, but good news for coral. And if you take nothing else from this week's show, pointy-six can be dangerous. You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Tom Whipple. Goodbye from me, and it's goodbye from Mark. Goodbye. And goodbye from Lizzie. Goodbye.

29:23How's a movement that started off as a meme taking on India's prime minister? I'm Tristan Redmond, co-host of the BBC's Global Story podcast. On today's show, we hear how the so-called cockroach movement has motivated young people across the world's biggest democracy to protest for their rights. How could they reshape the country? For more, listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your pods.

29:53I'm Tristan Redmond, co-host of the BBC's Global Story podcast. I'm Tristan Redmond, co-host of the BBC's Global Story podcast. I'm Tristan Redmond, co-host of the BBC's Global Story podcast. I'm Tristan Redmond, co-host of the BBC's Global Story podcast. I'm Tristan Redmond, co-host of the BBC's Global Story podcast. I'm Tristan Redmond, co-host of the BBC's Global Story podcast. I'm Tristan Redmond, co-host of the BBC's Global Story podcast. I'm Tristan Redmond, co-host of the BBC's Global Story podcast. I'm Tristan Redmond, co-host of the BBC's Global Story podcast. I'm Tristan Redmond, co-host of the BBC's Global Story podcast.