Taking Stock: Nordic nomads
Brazilian supercows | Lessons of the Montreal Protocol | Nordic nomads
Brazilian supercows are taking over the world—The Economist
What a bovine beauty pageant says about the future of the world’s beef supply
‘. . . ExpoZebu is the world’s largest fair of zebu, an Indian strain of cattle whose distinguishing features are a humped back and sagging dewlaps. Brought to Brazil in the 19th century, it proved more resistant to heat and parasites than European breeds. Today zebus make up 80% of Brazil’s 239m-strong herd of cattle. Their proliferation has helped to transform Brazil from a country where hunger was common to the world’s largest net exporter of food.
‘Brazil’s agricultural revolution began in the 1970s, when a series of military governments poured money into rural credit and created Embrapa, the state-owned agricultural-research firm. Its scientists developed crops well adapted to tropical weather, in particular a tall, drought-resistant grass from Africa called brachiaria. This opened the country’s vast interior up to farming and cattle ranching (at the cost of massive deforestation). Breeding programmes then began beefing the zebus up. The average weight of a slaughtered cow in Brazil has gone up by 16% since 1997. . . .
‘Famous country singers and powerful politicians roam ExpoZebu, but the cows are the stars (with names like “Genghis Khan” and “Lady Gaga”). . . .
‘The improvements . . . have allowed Brazil to account for almost a quarter of the world’s beef exports. That share is set to expand. The World Organisation for Animal Health, based in Paris, is expected soon to declare Brazil free of foot-and-mouth disease. The move “will totally change Brazil’s image”, says Luiz Josakhian of the Brazilian Association of Zebu Breeders. . . .
Beside the road out of Uberaba, an advertisement featuring muscular cows boldly declares Brazil’s mission: “Better cows for a better world.”
economist.com | @TheEconomist
Do look up: how science and international cooperation closed the ozone hole—Nature
Forty years ago this month, scientists reported that human activities had punctured Earth’s protective ozone layer. What happened next offers a masterclass in international science-diplomacy.
‘In May 1985, scientists reported the first evidence of a substantial loss of ozone high in the atmosphere above Antarctica. Concern had been growing for more than a decade that a class of fluorinated chemicals used in everything from spray cans to solvents to refrigerators might be harming the stratospheric ozone layer, which is some 15–30 kilometres above Earth’s surface and filters out a large amount of harmful ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. At the time, many scientists thought that ozone depletion was a long-term problem that would unfold over the coming century. However, a group at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK, led by geophysicist Joe Farman, showed that a hole had already appeared.
The shock of this revelation led to a swift global effort and the creation of one of history’s most successful environmental treaties, the Montreal Protocol. Policymakers and researchers should revisit how that success was achieved in a world that was, as it is today, sharply divided.
‘. . . These studies came at a time when environmental awareness and regulation was on the rise globally. The United States took one of the first steps, with a ban on CFCs in spray cans in 1978. By that time, governments had begun discussing a collective plan to stop ozone depletion. In March 1985, just weeks before the publication of Farman’s team’s paper, more than 20 countries signed the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer. It urged governments to control emissions of ozone-depleting substances (ODS) “to the maximum extent practicable” while another, legally binding agreement was negotiated. This was to be the Montreal Protocol, which was adopted in 1987. Among other actions, states agreed to reduce the production and consumption of certain CFCs to 50% of 1986 levels by 1999.
The treaty laid the foundations for a remarkable success. As of 2024, worldwide emissions of the main ODS are 99% lower than at their peak, in 1989, and the ozone layer is on track to recover to pre-1980 levels by mid-century.
‘There is still work to do. . . . Nevertheless, the protocol remains a model for successful action to solve a global problem. In fact, the model was so successful that it was swiftly applied to another problem entering the international consciousness, and in 1992 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was agreed in an effort to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”.
‘Scholars have spent decades studying the Montreal Protocol, and how and why it worked. Part of the answer lies in its structure.
The agreement is organized around a strategy that is rare in public policy: start gently, learn by doing, win the trust of stakeholders, then scale up. This is complemented by regular science and technology assessments, which have been central to discussions about how best to phase down and then phase out ODS.
‘High-income countries led the way on taking swift and meaningful action, which included getting industry on board. They also provided financial assistance to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) so that these, too, could phase out the chemicals. The protocol has a compliance system through which governments monitor each other’s performance and pay attention to any nation not meeting its obligations. The result is a functional global partnership anchored in research, trust and experience.
‘Climate action has not followed the same path. Emissions cuts did start gently, informed by scientific assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. However, although high-income countries—which are responsible for the bulk of historical emissions—were supposed to take the lead in making cuts, they have been slow to act. Moreover, the support they pledged to provide to help LMICs develop their economies cleanly and sustainably has been—and remains—well below what is needed. And when it comes to accepting the consensus of research, the fossil-fuel industry has been particularly resistant. For many years, it was involved in an organized campaign to undermine and attack climate science and the need for climate action. Even today, there is little trust between the various parties.
‘Despite this, the UNFCCC and its associated legally binding agreements have had some effect. The Paris climate agreement, adopted in 2015, is beginning to operate like the Montreal Protocol, encouraging countries to do what they can now while increasing their ambitions over time. Climate finance to LMICs is rising, albeit slowly. Global emissions are expected to peak soon, and renewable-energy use is rocketing globally. These are all signs of progress.
‘Solving the problem of the disappearing ozone layer was undoubtedly simpler than solving climate change has proved to be. . . .
‘Since the Montreal Protocol, international agreements have come thick and fast, among them commitments to protect biodiversity and combat desertification. New agreements continue to be brokered; last month, a draft for a pandemic treaty was agreed, and in August talks will resume on an accord to eliminate plastics pollution.
‘The Montreal Protocol offers important lessons. . . .’
nature.com | @nature
Sami reindeer herders at the turn of the 20th century (via Wikipedia).
Nomads to natives: How Bronze-Age Sami newcomers became eternally Nordic—Razib Khan
A circumpolar toolkit, a Uralic tongue and hybrid genetics set the Sami apart
‘The European Union recognizes exactly one European people as indigenous: the Sami, hardy inhabitants of Norway, Sweden and Finland’s northern reaches. These northernmost Europeans are the picture of culturally unique: nomadic reindeer herders who speak Finno-Ugric languages very different even from the Finnish, to whose speakers they are related (you may recall Finnish speakers call their nation Suomi, the term Finland (like Lapland) is just an exonym care of their Swedish neighbors). The Sami were Europe’s last pagan people. Forcibly converted to Lutheranism only in the 1700’s, their shamanic practices left them open to accusations of blasphemy which occasionally ended with them being burned at the stake.
‘Today, about 100,000 Sami remain, half in Norway (mostly in the northern region of Finnmark), the next largest group in Sweden, then about 10,000 in Finland, with finally a small residual in Russia and scattered across the global diaspora (the actress Renee Zellweger has a Norwegian, partially Sami, mother). Though now largely restricted to the Arctic regions of the Nordic nations, historically the Sami were present much further south. Their status as indigenous peoples plainly rests on their statelessness, marginality, and a historical record which attests that settlers of ethnic Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish heritage pressed them ever further northward over the last millennium, in step with the emergence and consolidation of the modern nation-state. Stateless and marginalized for certain, but are the Sami indigenous under any meaningful definition of the term? Are they even Europe’s most indigenous people?
‘Well, it’s complicated. They are and they aren’t. And that stark divide between some of Europe’s genuinely most indigenous, rooted ancestry and some of its most recent, barely prehistoric genetic inputs runs a variegated course through nearly every Sami genome. Sami average some 60% deeply indigenous European heritage and some 40% genuinely exotic ancestry inputs from interlopers who reached Europe’s most remote corner just some three millennia ago, a hybrid of Siberians and the remote foragers who ranged between the Baltic and the Urals. . . .’
razibkhan.com | @razibkhan
Arresting headlines
‘AI models are capable of novel research’: OpenAI’s chief scientist on what to expect: Jakub Pachocki, who leads the firm’s development of advanced models, is excited to release an open version to researchers—Nature
DeepMind unveils ‘spectacular’ general-purpose science AI: System improves chip designs and tackles unsolved maths problems, but has not been rolled out to researchers outside the company—Nature
Take Nature’s AI research test: find out how your ethics compare: What’s your view on using AI for peer review and for writing research papers? Is it ethically OK to use ChatGPT or other generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools to write the first draft of a research paper — and if so, how should that be disclosed Journals are currently wrangling with their policies on this and other aspects of AI for writing papers and for peer review. Nature posed various scenarios to more than 5,000 researchers, garnering surprisingly diverse responses. Here, you can answer the questions yourself to see how your views compare.—Nature
CRISPR is used in landmark treatment to correct genetic misspelling of a single patient: Treatment of baby with rare disease could usher in era of personalized genome editing—STAT News