21/28 December 2019 | New Scientist | 21
2019 through a lens
report, which has led people to suggest there
are now 11 years to avoid climate catastrophe.
All this has spilled over into the political
mainstream. “Thanks to action outside
[the UK] parliament, it’s now impossible for
politicians to ignore it,” says Rebecca Willis
at Lancaster University, UK. “Everyone,
including [prime minister] Boris Johnson,
is falling over themselves to say we want
to get to net zero. That shift is amazing.”
US congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez may
have seen her vision for a Green New Deal,
a massive infrastructure programme to
cut carbon emissions and tackle inequality,
defeated in the US senate, but it still put
climate change at the centre of US politics.
Dave Reay, a climate scientist at the
University of Edinburgh, UK, says 2019
has been the “most positive year I can
remember on climate change”.
Whether it all translates into bold action
remains to be seen. The litmus test, says
Nuttall, will come next year, when we find
out how ambitious new carbon-cutting
plans are from the countries signed up to
the Paris deal. Maybe 2020 will be the year
I start on the optimism beat. ❚
Adam Vaughan is chief reporter
at New Scientist and is based in
our London office
Sledding
through water
Photographer
Steffen M. Olsen
Agency Danish
Meteorological Institute
Dog and sled is still
one of the best ways to
travel around northern
Greenland. However, a
warm start to June meant
that an ankle-deep layer
of meltwater rested on
Inglefield Bredning fjord’s
sea ice. Steffen Olsen at
the Danish Meteorological
Institute captured this
photo when he was left
with no choice but to
wade through it for
an expedition.
03
02
CRISPR
The full potential of genetic
engineering was unlocked in 2012
with the cheap and easy CRISPR
system for editing DNA. Its use
has since exploded, unfortunately
including the widely condemned
creation of the first gene-edited
babies in China in 2018.
Gravitational waves
In 1916, Albert Einstein predicted that
space-time – the fabric of the universe –
was disturbed by strange ripples known as
gravitational waves. Exactly a century later,
the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave
Observatory collaboration announced that it
had finally spotted these waves emanating
from a pair of merging black holes.
The heaviest
land predator
on record is
Scotty the
T. r e x, which is
estimated to
have weighed
8870
kilograms
