Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Risk of helium shortage due to Qatar crisis
 Helium has two special abilities. It is extremely light, and it can get extremely cold without freezing.

Largely for these reasons, the element is needed to use or make all sorts of things: semiconductors, rocket fuel, computer hard drives, the Large Hadron Collider, magnets in MRI machines, airships, scuba tanks, arc welding, anything that needs to be super cold, and of course, balloons.

So when helium shortages hit in 2006 to 2007 and 2011 to 2013, the consequences rippled far beyond birthday parties. The Earth is not actually running out of helium, but imbalances in the market, especially around a U.S. government helium reserve, did cause those shortages. Thankfully, relief was on the way. New helium plants came on line in Qatar, and the country quickly went from producing a small sliver of the world’s helium to 25 percent of it in 2016.

Now, Qatar is at the center of a regional crisis that seems to be about many different things, none of them helium. Yet the helium supply chain is tangled up in it. Qatar usually sends its supply over land through Saudi Arabia to a large port in the United Arab Emirates, from which the helium goes out to Singapore and then factories and labs around the world. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have cut off this route as part of the dispute.

It got bad. Because its helium had nowhere to go, Qatar suspended helium production in early June. Production resumed around July 2, and helium will probably take a more complex and expensive route via a port in Oman, according to Phil Kornbluth, a helium industry consultant. Furthermore, it’ll take a few more weeks for helium production to get back to normal due to the logistics of getting specialized liquid helium canisters back to Qatar and slowly cooling them before they can be used again.

Qatar is producing helium again, but the political crisis is not over.

“The thing this really highlights,” says Kornbluth, “is that the helium supply chain, even though there’s ample supply when everything is running, is inflexible and fragile.” The challenges of handling liquid helium and the fact that it’s only made as byproduct of natural gas in a few places around the world all make helium a tricky product to source. Qatar is producing helium again, but the political crisis is not over. It’s been a wake-up call.

The industry has been trying to make the helium supply more reliable. That could mean severing the link between helium and natural-gas extraction. Helium makes up a minuscule amount of natural gas. While Qatar’s natural gas doesn’t exactly have high concentrations of helium (0.05 percent), the country produces so much natural gas that its has accumulated helium byproduct for a tidy second business. The U.S., the world’s top helium producer ahead of Qatar, extracts helium from natural-gas fields around the Texas panhandle.

Since helium is only a byproduct, it’s hard for other helium suppliers to step up when something like the Gulf crisis happens. Producing a little bit more helium requires producing a lot more natural gas—and energy companies aren’t going to do that for the sake of their secondary helium businesses.

That’s why the helium industry has gotten excited about the recent discovery of a giant helium deposit in Tanzania. This discovery has nothing to do with natural gas. Instead, the gas trapped underground is as high as 10 percent helium, with nitrogen accounting for the rest. A company called Helium One has formed to tap the deposit. “Because we’re pure helium, we could potentially act as a buffer to the world’s helium supply,” says Thomas Abraham-James, CEO of Helium One. If a political crisis deepened in the Middle East or ExxonMobil temporarily shut down its U.S. helium plant for maintenance, he says, then Helium One could step in.

Past helium shortages have also taught users to conserve helium. “The context is anxiety and instability in the market,” says Richard Clarke, a helium industry consultant.

Labs, for example, have started to recycle helium. The element likes to float off, but it is possible to recover via ventilation systems. Clarke notes that makers of MRI machines, which require liquid helium to make their magnets cold enough to superconduct, also recover helium when old machines are decommissioned. The element is too important to let go to waste.

The interruption of Qatar’s helium production is, in the big picture, just a small and unintended part of the current political crisis. Yet the supply chain of just one element touches so many industries—energy, medicine, electronics, rocketry—and the consequences can go far beyond the Gulf.

Output: The current political crisis involving Middle Eastern nation Qatar has thrown into sharp relief the vulnerability and inflexibility of the helium supply chain, after Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates blocked a trade route used to export the gas. The situation in Qatar, which produced a quarter of the world's helium in 2016, has sounded a warning to the energy, medicine, electronics and rocket industries that rely on the super-cold gas. However, a rich new deposit in Tanzania that holds up to 10% helium, could act as a supply buffer should Middle East or US supplies falter for any reason.


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French publishers swallow rivalries to combat Facebook and Google
 The existential threat of Google and Facebook are causing competitors to ally in France. Major French national newspaper and magazine groups are setting aside traditional rivalries to scale their digital advertising offers to rival the duopoly, while also ridding their digital ad supply chains of unnecessary intermediaries.

Le Monde and Le Figaro, traditionally fierce newspaper rivals, are letting advertisers book digital ad campaigns across their combined portfolio, using the same display or video ad formats for the first time. At the same time, Lagardère, Prisma Media, Condé Nast, Le Parisien and broadcaster M6 are pooling audience data in an initiative involving around 15 publishers.

Both Le Monde and Le Figaro have stressed that combining forces in this way is a necessary step if they’re to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google for advertising spend. Their alliance, called “Skyline,” is an intentional show of strength to the advertising market. Together, these media groups generated 35 million unique users in May, according to Médiamétrie. From September, advertisers will have the option to run campaigns across all the sites of the 20 media brands they have between them, which include HuffPost.fr, a media partner of Le Monde’s in France. In France, that puts them behind Google, which has 44 million visitors, Facebook (40 million) and Microsoft (36 million).

Advertisers will be able to check their campaign via auditor Integral Ad Science, which is already a partner of both media groups. “The Skyline project is all about giving the message to the market that these media forces are bigger and stronger — that they want to combine forces and regain strength with advertisers,” said Etienne Watrigant, executive lead for publishers at Integral Ad Science in France.

Meanwhile, the separate audience-data pooling alliance with 15 publishers, called “Gravity,” reaches 44 percent of the French population every day, a figure that will rise to 50 percent by the fall, according to alliance member Les Echos. Google reportedly has a market reach of 60 percent, and Facebook has 70 percent in France, although eMarketer puts Facebook’s reach at around the 40 percent mark there.

Publisher alliances have a checkered history. Le Monde and Le Figaro chiefs defended the timing of the launch in their press briefing to French media, saying that previously joining forces would have been blocked by the Competition Authority, but the rise of tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple have changed the stakes.

The time is also ripe for traditional media groups to capitalize on some of the challenges the platforms are facing regarding brand safety (YouTube) and low viewability (Facebook). “They want to show French agencies and advertisers that they perform well when it comes to brand safety and viewability,” said Clément Bascoulergue, France sales director for Integral Ad Science. “Walled gardens are facing new challenges. Also, publishers have a new challenge to deal with next year with the new policies around cookies coming into force in Europe, so now is a good time to make this play.”

Although the premise of each alliance is similar (to have the scale and data play to compete with the duopoly), there are big differences in each approach. The Gravity alliance is a data-pooling initiative, an approach Le Monde and and Le Figaro don’t favor.

“Switching the data of my internet users to a kind of pot that would market them without my having mastered it is a mistake,” said Louis Dreyfus, managing director of Le Monde Group, in a press briefing to French media.

Skyline’s advertiser customers will be able to target users of the sites of both groups according to their profiles, purchase intentions and locations, as well as by categories like news or lifestyle. Both media houses will continue to sell their own inventory, too, and 50 people from across each company will be dedicated to Skyline.

The French media market is highly fragmented, meaning that advertisers typically deal with Google and Facebook, then dozens of separate publishers. Other programmatic ad alliances exist in France, like La Place and Audience Square — both of which are in talks over a potential merger. But La Place has contained more midsize publishers, not media juggernauts like Le Monde, Le Figaro or Lagardère. Gravity is more akin in model to the ongoing (and first) publisher programmatic marketplace in France.

Output: Competing French publishers have set aside their differences and joined forces to form Skyline, a project enabling advertisers to book digital promotional campaigns across their combined portfolio, producing 35 million unique users in May, according to Médiamétrie. The move is an attempt to shift ad spend from the Facebook and Google duopoly and will target users based on their profiles, purchase intentions and locations. In addition, around 15 publishers, including Condé Nast and M6, have formed Gravity, a data-sharing initiative set to reach up to half the French population every day.


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Brands drawn in by Snapchat's popularity among younger users
 Snapchat clone Instagram Stories may now be too big for advertisers to ignore, but many believe Snapchat still has a role to play.

Here are four brands that are trying to grow their Snapchat presences, with input from marketers on why the app’s popularity among younger users, not its scale, make it hard to discount at this point.

Adidas

Updates to self-service ads and measurement on Snapchat over the last six months have moved Adidas away from using specific handles and traditional publishing methods (like building an organic presence) and toward the app’s advertising products, particularly the augmented reality features.

“One area in particular we are exploring is Snapchat’s highly developed AR offer,” said Daniel Bulteel, global social media director at Adidas. “The merging of the digital and physical world offers so much potential to us in the world of sports.”

Bulteel said Adidas uses both Instagram Stories and Snapchat, but the company views them as different platforms that each provide unique opportunities. “From our research, we see our consumers use the two platforms in completely different ways,” he said, “so we shape our creative accordingly.”

River Island

After making its Snapchat debut last summer, River Island has since concluded it’s not the place for direct sales. People are not on “trying to shop proactively” on Snapchat, said Angela Asiedua, senior brand digital marketing manager, after seeing Snap Ads that linked users to its online store had “increasingly high” bounce rates.

Instead, River Island treats Snapchat as a broadcast channel. Its chain geofilter, which switched to a new filter every two hours over a 24-hour period last month, reached 16.5 million users and gained over 500,000 engagements, according to the company. The campaign’s inspiration came from a similar one the retailer ran last year that inadvertently revealed how people use the app while they shop. “We put geofilters over all our stores in the U.K., and in half, we had comms promoting them, while had nothing in the other half. The disparity between the stores that had comms and those that didn’t wasn’t as large as we anticipated. It shows that our organic consumers are actively browsing our stores with their mobile [phones] in hand, actively seeking out comms from brands in those spaces,” said Asiedua.

However, measurement issues stunt the understanding of how those behaviors on the app might impact other mediums such as SEO, said Asiedua. “I think Snapchat still has work to do when it comes to helping us close the [customer journey] loop and understanding how we’re retargeting customers and prospective ones from that platform.”

O2

Snap Ads and Spectacles are the immediate future for O2 on the app, according to the company.

The union proved popular earlier this year when the brand needed a way to trumpet a series of celebratory gigs for the 10th anniversary of its O2 venue in London. Influencers wearing Snapchat Spectacles recorded the gigs so the telecom company could then create a 10-second Snap Ad using the footage, a move that generated double the expected amount of response rates.

It’s little wonder then why the brand isn’t writing Snapchat off just yet. An O2 spokesperson explained: “Both platforms are geared toward driving brand engagement, but we see them as having slightly different audience demographics: Instagram Stories, mid-to-late twenties and above; compared to Snapchat’s younger, millennial 16-22 bracket.”

Sony Music

To introduce its series of immersive events at the turn of the year, Sony Music brought its DJ duo The Chainsmokers to Snapchat. Visitors to a “snow-covered forest” it erected were encouraged to use geofilters alongside Snap Ads of trailers and videos of the event as they walked through the installation. Sony Music chose Snapchat to bolster the experiential push in order to reconnect itself with 18- to 24-year-olds. The company declined to share numbers from the stunt, but revealed Snapchat drove some of the highest impressions among its target audience and the platform was among the lowest cost-per-views of all the media channels used.

“The greater transparency Snapchat is providing, along with the self-service buying options, means that it will continue to be an important, exciting and creative platform for us and for future campaigns,” said Tom Winbow, the director of strategy and business development at Ralph, the agency behind the campaign.

Output: Four major brands have revealed how their Snapchat strategies are helping boost sales and engagement. Sports retailer Adidas sees the most potential in the social media site's augmented reality features, while clothing company River Island sees Snapchat as a broadcast channel, with consumers actively browsing stores with "mobiles in hand". London venue O2 has had success with the Spectacles tool, and music corporation Sony chose Snapchat to connect with 18- to 24-year-olds, calling it an "important, exciting and creative platform".


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US news outlets push for collective power to take on tech giants
 Google and Facebook continue to gobble up the digital advertising market, siphoning away revenue that once paid for the quality journalism that Google and Facebook now offer for free.

They are gaining increasing control over digital distribution, so newspapers that once delivered their journalism with their own trucks increasingly have to rely on these big online platforms to get their articles in front of people, fighting for attention alongside fake news, websites that lift their content, and cat videos.

And for all of Google’s and Facebook’s efforts to support journalism by helping news organizations find new revenue streams — and survive in the new world that these sites helped create — they are, at the end of the day, the royals of the court. Quality news providers are the supplicants and the serfs.

It’s an uneasy alliance that has publishers chafing at the returns they receive from Google and Facebook, which rely on the free flow of premium news and information.

Output: Scores of US newspapers, from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, and scores of mid-sized dailies, have embarked on a battle to win Congressional anti-trust support that would allow them to negotiate collectively and redress the "asymmetric, disadvantageous relationship" with Google and Facebook, according to the New York Times. The two digital giants consume up to almost 60% of the advertising market, leaving traditional publishers struggling to compete. The group, led by newspaper industry trade group The News Media Alliance, will be asking for a rarely-granted limited antitrust exemption.


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Earth is experiencing its sixth mass extinction, say scientists
 A “biological annihilation” of wildlife in recent decades means a sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history is under way and is more severe than previously feared, according to research.

Scientists analysed both common and rare species and found billions of regional or local populations have been lost. They blame human overpopulation and overconsumption for the crisis and warn that it threatens the survival of human civilisation, with just a short window of time in which to act.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, eschews the normally sober tone of scientific papers and calls the massive loss of wildlife a “biological annihilation” that represents a “frightening assault on the foundations of human civilisation”.

Prof Gerardo Ceballos, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, who led the work, said: “The situation has become so bad it would not be ethical not to use strong language.”

Previous studies have shown species are becoming extinct at a significantly faster rate than for millions of years before, but even so extinctions remain relatively rare giving the impression of a gradual loss of biodiversity. The new work instead takes a broader view, assessing many common species which are losing populations all over the world as their ranges shrink, but remain present elsewhere.

The scientists found that a third of the thousands of species losing populations are not currently considered endangered and that up to 50% of all individual animals have been lost in recent decades. Detailed data is available for land mammals, and almost half of these have lost 80% of their range in the last century. The scientists found billions of populations of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians have been lost all over the planet, leading them to say a sixth mass extinction has already progressed further than was thought.

A graphic showing wildlife population loss Billions of animals have been lost as their habitats have become smaller with each passing year.

The scientists conclude: “The resulting biological annihilation obviously will have serious ecological, economic and social consequences. Humanity will eventually pay a very high price for the decimation of the only assemblage of life that we know of in the universe.”

They say, while action to halt the decline remains possible, the prospects do not look good: “All signs point to ever more powerful assaults on biodiversity in the next two decades, painting a dismal picture of the future of life, including human life.”

Wildlife is dying out due to habitat destruction, overhunting, toxic pollution, invasion by alien species and climate change. But the ultimate cause of all of these factors is “human overpopulation and continued population growth, and overconsumption, especially by the rich”, say the scientists, who include Prof Paul Ehrlich, at Stanford University in the US, whose 1968 book The Population Bomb is a seminal, if controversial, work.

“The serious warning in our paper needs to be heeded because civilisation depends utterly on the plants, animals, and microorganisms of Earth that supply it with essential ecosystem services ranging from crop pollination and protection to supplying food from the sea and maintaining a livable climate,” Ehrlich told the Guardian. Other ecosystem services include clean air and water.

“The time to act is very short,” he said. “It will, sadly, take a long time to humanely begin the population shrinkage required if civilisation is to long survive, but much could be done on the consumption front and with ‘band aids’ – wildlife reserves, diversity protection laws – in the meantime.” Ceballos said an international institution was needed to fund global wildlife conservation.

The research analysed data on 27,500 species of land vertebrates from the IUCN and found the ranges of a third have shrunk in recent decades. Many of these are common species and Ceballos gave an example from close to home: “We used to have swallows nesting every year in my home near Mexico city – but for the last 10 years there are none.”

The researchers also point to the “emblematic” case of the lion: “The lion was historically distributed over most of Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East, all the way to northwestern India. [Now] the vast majority of lion populations are gone.”

Where lions used to live, and where they live now. Historically lions lived across Africa, southern Europe, the Middle East, all the way up to Northwestern India. Today their habitat has been reduced to a few tiny pockets of the original area.

Prof Stuart Pimm, at Duke University in the US and not involved in the new work, said the overall conclusion is correct, but he disagrees that a sixth mass extinction is already under way: “It is something that hasn’t happened yet – we are on the edge of it.”

Pimm also said there were important caveats that result from the broad-brush approach used. “Should we be concerned about the loss of species across large areas – absolutely – but this is a fairly crude way of showing that,” he said. “There are parts of the world where there are massive losses, but equally there are parts of the world where there is remarkable progress. It is pretty harsh on countries like South Africa which is doing a good job of protecting lions.”

Robin Freeman, at the Zoological Society of London, UK, said: “While looking at things on aggregate is interesting, the real interesting nitty gritty comes in the details. What are the drivers that cause the declines in particular areas?”

Freeman was part of the team that produced a 2014 analysis of 3000 species that indicated that 50% of individual animals have been lost since 1970, which tallies with the new work but was based on different IUCN data. He agreed strong language is needed: “We need people to be aware of the catastrophic declines we are seeing. I do think there is a place for that within the [new] paper, although it’s a fine line to draw.”

Citing human overpopulation as the root cause of environmental problems has long been controversial, and Ehrlich’s 1968 statement that hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation in the 1970s did not come to pass, partly due to new high-yielding crops that Ehrlich himself had noted as possible.

Ehrlich has acknowledged “flaws” in The Population Bomb but said it had been successful in its central aim – alerting people to global environmental issues and the the role of human population in them. His message remains blunt today: “Show me a scientist who claims there is no population problem and I’ll show you an idiot.”

Earth’s five previous mass extinctions

End-Ordovician, 443 million years ago

A severe ice age led to sea level falling by 100m, wiping out 60-70% of all species which were prominently ocean dwellers at the time. Then soon after the ice melted leaving the oceans starved of oxygen.

Late Devonian, c 360 million years ago

A messy prolonged climate change event, again hitting life in shallow seas very hard, killing 70% of species including almost all corals.

Permian-Triassic, c 250 million years ago

The big one – more than 95% of species perished, including trilobites and giant insects – strongly linked to massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia that caused a savage episode of global warming.

Triassic-Jurassic, c 200 million years ago

Three-quarters of species were lost, again most likely due to another huge outburst of volcanism. It left the Earth clear for dinosaurs to flourish.

Cretaceous-Tertiary, 65 million years ago

An giant asteroid impact on Mexico, just after large volcanic eruptions in what is now India, saw the end of the dinosaurs and ammonites. Mammals, and eventually humans, took advantage.

Output: The world’s sixth mass extinction is under way and is more severe than anticipated, according to a study by Mexican and American scientists. The researchers discovered that billions of regional and local populations of both common and rare species have been lost due to human overpopulation and overconsumption. The scientists claimed that the situation is so severe that “it would not be ethical not to use strong language” and referred to the development as a “biological annihilation” that constitutes a “frightening assault on the foundations of human civilisation”. Up to 50% of individual losses have occurred in recent decades.


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Two studies find coffee may reduce risk of premature death
 Drink coffee? It won’t hurt you, and may reduce your risk of an early death

Good news, coffee drinkers: A couple of massive new studies that looked at hundreds of thousands of people for about 16 years finds that a few cups of coffee a day won’t hurt you and could lower your risk of dying prematurely.

The studies reinforce previous findings that drinking an 8-ounce cup of joe (or three) won’t hurt you, but the authors of the new works and other experts say caveats abound.

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“Our results suggest that moderate coffee drinking, up to about three cups a day, is not harmful to your health, and that incorporating coffee into your diet could have health benefits,” said Neil Murphy, of the World Health Organization, a lead author on one of two studies published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine. “[We] found no evidence that coffee drinking above a certain level is detrimental to health.”

Murphy told STAT his is the largest study on coffee and mortality to date.

In the study, researchers with the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer and Imperial College London tracked 521,000 adults from 10 European countries who self-reported their coffee consumption over an average of 16 years. They looked for associations between the amount of coffee consumed and various health indications, but it’s not a cause-and-effect relationship. In investigating more than 40,000 deaths from this group, the team found that participants who fell into the highest 25 percent of coffee consumers had a lower risk of death due to any cause compared to non-coffee drinkers. They saw a reduced risk of early death by diseases related to the digestive and circulatory systems. The researchers also discovered a link between higher coffee consumption and lower risk of early death by lung cancer in men.

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And they also looked at suicide — completed suicides were lower for coffee drinkers, but only in men.

In a second study of 180,000 people tracked for an average of 16 years, University of Southern California investigators found drinking one to six cups of coffee per week led to a decreased risk of early death. The study was focused on non-white populations, and their findings proved consistent for coffee drinkers across racial and ethnic groups.

Both studies adjusted findings to take into account that people who drink larger amounts of coffee are likely to smoke tobacco products as well.

One of the USC study’s senior authors, V. Wendy Setiawan, an assistant professor at Keck School of Medicine, said coffee consumption may be linked a lower risk of early death for people with heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, stroke, and kidney disease. Drink one cup per day, and the risk of dying early from those diseases decreases by 12 percent, she said.

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However, Setiawan said the study didn’t find the same relationship between coffee and deaths related to influenza, pneumonia, Alzheimer’s disease, or intentional self-harm.

Dr. Eliseo Guallar, an epidemiologist with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who was not involved in the study, wrote in an editorial accompanying the studies that he’s hesitant to draw too many positive conclusions about coffee’s health. “Recommending coffee intake to reduce mortality or prevent chronic disease would be premature,” he wrote.

Setiawan, like Murphy and Guallar, is cautious about hype.

“We cannot say coffee will prolong your life,” Setiawan said. “We can say moderate coffee consumption can be incorporated into diet for a healthy lifestyle. For most, it seems, it likely won’t cause harm.”

Output: Moderate coffee drinking of up to three cups a day is not harmful and could even be beneficial, according to two studies published in the annals of internal medicine. One study, which followed 521,000 adults from 10 countries for 16 years, found that those in the highest 25% of coffee drinkers had a lower risk of death from any causes and a reduced risk of early death from diseases of the circulatory and digestive systems. A second study also found that drinking one to six cups of coffee per week decreased the risk of early death.


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UK government liquidates recruitment tax avoidance scheme
 An aggressive tax avoidance scheme, linked to one of the recruitment industry’s highest-profile names, is being liquidated in a move that could prevent HM Revenue and Customs from recouping millions of pounds.

The scheme, which experts say raises questions over triggering a possible criminal investigation, has been promoted by Anderson Group, one of the sector’s leading financial services firms. It has been used by recruitment agencies supplying low-paid workers to businesses including Marks & Spencer and Dixons Carphone.

The arrangements – which work by setting up thousands of tiny firms to exploit VAT and national insurance rules that were originally designed to help very small businesses – have netted vast windfalls for those involved.

The Guardian has seen evidence showing that the closure of parts of the scheme followed Anderson being asked by HMRC’s fraud and investigation service for details about the large numbers of VAT registration applications made on behalf of Anderson clients last year.

Documents show that almost 2,000 of the Anderson scheme’s mini companies are now being simultaneously liquidated.

Tax experts said the moves make it extremely difficult to pursue the defunct firms for any potential VAT or national insurance debt – particularly as each mini company appears to only have a Philippines-based director and barely any retained assets.

Dan Neidle, a tax partner at City law firm Clifford Chance, said that in his view the scheme had been set up to avoid tax. He said: “I am troubled by the involvement of multiple Philippine individuals, when there is no commercial or tax reason to involve anyone offshore. The obvious inference is that the purpose of choosing the Philippines was to hinder HMRC’s ability to investigate and recover any tax due.

“The courts have struck down almost every tax avoidance case that has come before them in the last 10 years. This scheme is almost certain to meet the same fate. The difference is the obvious hopelessness of the scheme, and the steps the promoters took to hide their tracks. That should prompt HMRC to pursue the companies and individuals involved more aggressively than they would if it were just another a failed tax avoidance scheme. A prosecution for tax fraud may not be out of the question.”

Jolyon Maugham QC, a tax barrister at Devereux Chambers, said that in his opinion “aspects of [the structure] look designed to thwart HMRC’s ability to recover tax due to it – and investigate whether it is due”. He added that the scheme appeared to possess features “that would cause me to want to explore whether the promoters have crossed the line into the criminal arena”.

Anderson Group did not respond directly to questions about the scheme’s legality.

In a statement issued in response to the Guardian’s request for comment, group commercial director Steven Zahab said: “Anderson Group is a global provider of support services across a range of markets and sectors. In all cases our services are provided in accordance with the law as it stands and, where appropriate, under advisement from counsel. If the law changes, then our services do so as appropriate. We constantly seek QC or other professional opinion to ensure that we act within the rules at all times.”

The tax schemes were supposed to work by transferring contracts of low-paid workers from a single large employment agency into a web of thousands of tiny companies. So, if an employment agency previously supplied a warehouse with 300 workers, the scheme’s promoters might create 150 new tiny companies, each employing two workers.

The structure was used to justify registering thousands of tiny companies for the flat-rate VAT scheme, which allows very small firms to charge VAT at 20%, but pay it back to the exchequer at about half that rate.

It also created thousands more companies from which to claim the government’s £3,000 employment allowance, a jobs subsidy that is only claimable once a year by a single firm.

Such tactics, which have been used by a number of companies, are said to have cost the taxpayer a total of “hundreds of millions” and have proved controversial.

In 2015, following a BBC investigation into Anderson, HMRC issued a notice advising anybody using schemes designed to exploit the employment allowance to withdraw from doing so to “avoid the costs of litigation and minimise any interest and penalties due on underpaid national insurance”.

Last year, following a Guardian undercover investigation, the government attempted to close down the VAT portion of these schemes.

While there are tax experts who say that the schemes comply with UK tax legislation, they typically argue the component companies in the structure must be independent of each other.

Anderson insists it was independent of the schemes. It said its involvement with these tax avoidance products was limited to it helping to sell the arrangements alongside a “former client” called MyPSU.

However, the Guardian has seen evidence linking Anderson to MyPSU, as well as the mini companies employing the workers.

The links between Anderson and MyPSU include:

Internal Anderson documents showing how the VAT flat-rate scheme made Anderson hundreds of thousands of pounds a week – and most of its profit – from a series of recruitment agencies;

Companies House filings showing that all of the directors running MyPSU were simultaneously Anderson employees;

A sales pitch revealing how a MyPSU representative presented himself as a current Anderson employee and explained how MyPSU was created within Anderson; and,

Documents showing that Anderson’s majority shareholder, Adam Fynn, registered the MyPSU internet domain name. Fynn’s name was removed from the registration following the Guardian’s questions on the subject.

Anderson Group’s links to the mini companies in the scheme include Companies House filings showing:

Alona Varon, a former director of MyPSU and resident of the Philippines, was also a director of scores of the scheme’s mini companies being liquidated. Varon is additionally a director of Varon Services, which in December 2016 changed its name from Anderson Legal Services. It was wholly owned by an Anderson subsidiary, until a change to the shareholder register was filed on the day the Guardian asked about the links;

Samantha Forbes, an employee of Fynn’s unconnected business the Drinks Experience Group, was company secretary of scores of the mini companies now in liquidation; and,

Anderson acted as an agent for many of the mini companies now being shut down.

Anderson repeatedly declined to answer the Guardian’s questions about the links to MyPSU and the mini companies – or how monies accrued via a small business VAT scheme were treated as its own profits.

The group added it does not believe it was connected to MyPSU or the mini companies, and said that public registers linking Anderson and other parties in the scheme were altered after the Guardian’s questions “served as a reminder for former clients to bring their records up to date”.

Fynn, Forbes and Varon did not comment.

Marks & Spencer said it had been supplied with workers by the logistics group DHL, which in turn hired workers from 24.7 Recruitment, an employment agency that used MyPSU. DHL said it was not aware of the scheme.

Dixons Carphone said it had not known about the arrangements or benefited from them.

Neither MyPSU Ltd, which is no longer trading, nor 24.7 commented. A subsequent sister firm of MyPSU, MyPSU Subcontractors, is now in liquidation.

What is Anderson Group?

Anderson Group describes itself as “the UK’s leading provider of support services to the recruitment and contracting sector”.

Founded in 2005 by “employment industry and accountancy experts who shared a vision; to be a leading voice for the rights of recruiters and contractors” the company has grown sufficiently to augment its base in Luton with offices in the Philippines and India.

It now boasts of being a “£100m+ global operation” providing “outsourced business process services to some 200 recruitment agencies and SME businesses and accountancy support services for tens of thousands of contract workers”.

The growth has made Anderson one of the best-known names in the recruitment industry, and it was the headline sponsor of the Recruiter Awards for Excellence for 2014, 2015 and 2016.

The business is controlled by the 33-year-old Adam Fynn via his Fynn Holdings, a holding company that owns about 80% of the shares in Anderson Commercial Holdings Ltd, which in turn owns a number of the Anderson operating businesses.

Output: The UK government has said it will liquidate a tax-avoidance scheme promoted by the financial services firm Anderson Group following concerns that experts say could result in a criminal investigation. The scheme — which establishes thousands of very small firms in order to exploit national insurance and VAT rules designed to benefit small businesses — has been used by recruitment agencies that have provided workers for companies including Dixons Carphone and Marks & Spencer. The scheme is believed to have cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Researchers develop battery electrode that can charge in seconds
 Drexel University researchers have developed two new electrode designs, using MXene material, that will allow batteries to charge much faster. The key is a microporous design that allows ions to quickly make their way to redox active sites. Credit: Drexel University

Can you imagine fully charging your cell phone in just a few seconds? Researchers in Drexel University's College of Engineering can, and they took a big step toward making it a reality with their recent work unveiling of a new battery electrode design in the journal Nature Energy.

The team, led by Yury Gogotsi, PhD, Distinguished University and Bach professor in Drexel's College of Engineering, in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, created the new electrode designs from a highly conductive, two-dimensional material called MXene. Their design could make energy storage devices like batteries, viewed as the plodding tanker truck of energy storage technology, just as fast as the speedy supercapacitors that are used to provide energy in a pinch—often as a battery back-up or to provide quick bursts of energy for things like camera flashes.

"This paper refutes the widely accepted dogma that chemical charge storage, used in batteries and pseudocapacitors, is always much slower than physical storage used in electrical double-layer capacitors, also known as supercapacitors," Gogotsi said. "We demonstrate charging of thin MXene electrodes in tens of milliseconds. This is enabled by very high electronic conductivity of MXene. This paves the way to development of ultrafast energy storage devices than can be charged and discharged within seconds, but store much more energy than conventional supercapacitors."

The key to faster charging energy storage devices is in the electrode design. Electrodes are essential components of batteries, through which energy is stored during charging and from which it is disbursed to power our devices. So the ideal design for these components would be one that allows them to be quickly charged and store more energy.

To store more energy, the materials should have places to put it. Electrode materials in batteries offer ports for charge to be stored. In electrochemistry, these ports, called "redox active sites" are the places that hold an electrical charge when each ion is delivered. So if the electrode material has more ports, it can store more energy—which equates to a battery with more "juice."

Collaborators Patrice Simon, PhD, and Zifeng Lin, from Université Paul Sabatier in France, produced a hydrogel electrode design with more redox active sites, which allows it to store as much charge for its volume as a battery. This measure of capacity, termed "volumetric performance," is an important metric for judging the utility of any energy storage device.

To make those plentiful hydrogel electrode ports even more attractive to ion traffic, the Drexel-led team, including researchers Maria Lukatskaya, PhD, Sankalp Kota, a graduate student in Drexel's MAX/MXene Research Group led by Michel Barsoum, PhD, distinguished professor in the College of Engineering; and Mengquiang Zhao, PhD, designed electrode architectures with open macroporosity—many small openings—to make each redox active sites in the MXene material readily accessible to ions.

"In traditional batteries and supercapacitors, ions have a tortuous path toward charge storage ports, which not only slows down everything, but it also creates a situation where very few ions actually reach their destination at fast charging rates," said Lukatskaya, the first author on the paper, who conducted the research as part of the A.J. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute. "The ideal electrode architecture would be something like ions moving to the ports via multi-lane, high-speed 'highways,' instead of taking single-lane roads. Our macroporous electrode design achieves this goal, which allows for rapid charging—on the order of a few seconds or less."

The overarching benefit of using MXene as the material for the electrode design is its conductivity. Materials that allow for rapid flow of an electrical current, like aluminum and copper, are often used in electric cables. MXenes are conductive, just like metals, so not only do ions have a wide-open path to a number of storage ports, but they can also move very quickly to meet electrons there. Mikhael Levi, PhD, and Netanel Shpigel, research collaborators from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, helped the Drexel group maximize the number of the ports accessible to ions in MXene electrodes.

Use in battery electrodes is just the latest in a series of developments with the MXene material that was discovered by researchers in Drexel's Department of Materials Science and Engineering in 2011. Since then, researchers have been testing them in a variety of applications from energy storage to electromagnetic radiation shielding, and water filtering. This latest development is significant in particular because it addresses one of the primary problems hindering the expansion of the electric vehicle market and that has been lurking on the horizon for mobile devices.

"If we start using low-dimensional and electronically conducting materials as battery electrodes, we can make batteries working much, much faster than today," Gogotsi said. "Eventually, appreciation of this fact will lead us to car, laptop and cell-phone batteries capable of charging at much higher rates—seconds or minutes rather than hours."

More information: Maria R. Lukatskaya et al, Ultra-high-rate pseudocapacitive energy storage in two-dimensional transition metal carbides, Nature Energy (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nenergy.2017.105 Journal information: Nature Energy

Output: Researchers at Drexel University's College of Engineering in Philadelphia have developed a battery electrode design that could work as quickly as a supercapacitor, but also store much more energy, according to an article in the journal Nature Energy. The team developed a thin film using the highly conductive material MXene for the electrode design. MXene is macroporous (with many small openings), which allows ions to quickly reach electrical charge storage sites, enabling the storage of much more power.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Climate change reveals failure of human imagination: NY Magazine
 To read an annotated version of this article, complete with interviews with scientists and links to further reading, click here.

I. ‘Doomsday’

Peering beyond scientific reticence.

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.

Related Stories The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated Edition

The Doomsday vault is fine, for now: The structure has been secured and the seeds are safe. But treating the episode as a parable of impending flooding missed the more important news. Until recently, permafrost was not a major concern of climate scientists, because, as the name suggests, it was soil that stayed permanently frozen. But Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful. In other words, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over.

Maybe you know that already — there are alarming stories in the news every day, like those, last month, that seemed to suggest satellite data showed the globe warming since 1998 more than twice as fast as scientists had thought (in fact, the underlying story was considerably less alarming than the headlines). Or the news from Antarctica this past May, when a crack in an ice shelf grew 11 miles in six days, then kept going; the break now has just three miles to go — by the time you read this, it may already have met the open water, where it will drop into the sea one of the biggest icebergs ever, a process known poetically as “calving.”

But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings; the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past; our uncertainty about uncertainty, which the climate writer Naomi Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing as though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible; the way we assume climate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere; the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers; the discomfort of considering a problem that is very difficult, if not impossible, to solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear. But aversion arising from fear is a form of denial, too.

In between scientific reticence and science fiction is science itself. This article is the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule.

The present tense of climate change — the destruction we’ve already baked into our future — is horrifying enough. Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade. Two degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold of catastrophe: tens of millions of climate refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues serial reports, often called the “gold standard” of climate research; the most recent one projects us to hit four degrees of warming by the beginning of the next century, should we stay the present course. But that’s just a median projection. The upper end of the probability curve runs as high as eight degrees — and the authors still haven’t figured out how to deal with that permafrost melt. The IPCC reports also don’t fully account for the albedo effect (less ice means less reflected and more absorbed sunlight, hence more warming); more cloud cover (which traps heat); or the dieback of forests and other flora (which extract carbon from the atmosphere). Each of these promises to accelerate warming, and the history of the planet shows that temperature can shift as much as five degrees Celsius within thirteen years. The last time the planet was even four degrees warmer, Peter Brannen points out in The Ends of the World, his new history of the planet’s major extinction events, the oceans were hundreds of feet higher.*

The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating. This is what Stephen Hawking had in mind when he said, this spring, that the species needs to colonize other planets in the next century to survive, and what drove Elon Musk, last month, to unveil his plans to build a Mars habitat in 40 to 100 years. These are nonspecialists, of course, and probably as inclined to irrational panic as you or I. But the many sober-minded scientists I interviewed over the past several months — the most credentialed and tenured in the field, few of them inclined to alarmism and many advisers to the IPCC who nevertheless criticize its conservatism — have quietly reached an apocalyptic conclusion, too: No plausible program of emissions reductions alone can prevent climate disaster.

Over the past few decades, the term “Anthropocene” has climbed out of academic discourse and into the popular imagination — a name given to the geologic era we live in now, and a way to signal that it is a new era, defined on the wall chart of deep history by human intervention. One problem with the term is that it implies a conquest of nature (and even echoes the biblical “dominion”). And however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have already ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. That is what Wallace Smith Broecker, the avuncular oceanographer who coined the term “global warming,” means when he calls the planet an “angry beast.” You could also go with “war machine.” Each day we arm it more.

II. Heat Death

The bahraining of New York.

In the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population has chronic kidney disease, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago. Photo: Heartless Machine

Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having to continually cool off, like panting dogs. For that, the temperature needs to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing heat off the skin so the engine can keep pumping. At seven degrees of warming, that would become impossible for large portions of the planet’s equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem; in the jungles of Costa Rica, for instance, where humidity routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when it’s over 105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal. And the effect would be fast: Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out.

Climate-change skeptics point out that the planet has warmed and cooled many times before, but the climate window that has allowed for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history. At 11 or 12 degrees of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat. Things almost certainly won’t get that hot this century, though models of unabated emissions do bring us that far eventually. This century, and especially in the tropics, the pain points will pinch much more quickly even than an increase of seven degrees. The key factor is something called wet-bulb temperature, which is a term of measurement as home-laboratory-kit as it sounds: the heat registered on a thermometer wrapped in a damp sock as it’s swung around in the air (since the moisture evaporates from a sock more quickly in dry air, this single number reflects both heat and humidity). At present, most regions reach a wet-bulb maximum of 26 or 27 degrees Celsius; the true red line for habitability is 35 degrees. What is called heat stress comes much sooner.

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Actually, we’re about there already. Since 1980, the planet has experienced a 50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or extreme heat; a bigger increase is to come. The five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002, and soon, the IPCC warns, simply being outdoors that time of year will be unhealthy for much of the globe. Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today. As Joseph Romm has put it in his authoritative primer Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain “would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.” The high-end IPCC estimate, remember, is two degrees warmer still. By the end of the century, the World Bank has estimated, the coolest months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century. Air-conditioning can help but will ultimately only add to the carbon problem; plus, the climate-controlled malls of the Arab emirates aside, it is not remotely plausible to wholesale air-condition all the hottest parts of the world, many of them also the poorest. And indeed, the crisis will be most dramatic across the Middle East and Persian Gulf, where in 2015 the heat index registered temperatures as high as 163 degrees Fahrenheit. As soon as several decades from now, the hajj will become physically impossible for the 2 million Muslims who make the pilgrimage each year.

It is not just the hajj, and it is not just Mecca; heat is already killing us. In the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population has chronic kidney disease, including over a quarter of the men, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago. With dialysis, which is expensive, those with kidney failure can expect to live five years; without it, life expectancy is in the weeks. Of course, heat stress promises to pummel us in places other than our kidneys, too. As I type that sentence, in the California desert in mid-June, it is 121 degrees outside my door. It is not a record high.

III. The End of Food

Praying for cornfields in the tundra.

Climates differ and plants vary, but the basic rule for staple cereal crops grown at optimal temperature is that for every degree of warming, yields decline by 10 percent. Some estimates run as high as 15 or even 17 percent. Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, we may have as many as 50 percent more people to feed and 50 percent less grain to give them. And proteins are worse: It takes 16 calories of grain to produce just a single calorie of hamburger meat, butchered from a cow that spent its life polluting the climate with methane farts.

Pollyannaish plant physiologists will point out that the cereal-crop math applies only to those regions already at peak growing temperature, and they are right — theoretically, a warmer climate will make it easier to grow corn in Greenland. But as the pathbreaking work by Rosamond Naylor and David Battisti has shown, the tropics are already too hot to efficiently grow grain, and those places where grain is produced today are already at optimal growing temperature — which means even a small warming will push them down the slope of declining productivity. And you can’t easily move croplands north a few hundred miles, because yields in places like remote Canada and Russia are limited by the quality of soil there; it takes many centuries for the planet to produce optimally fertile dirt.

Drought might be an even bigger problem than heat, with some of the world’s most arable land turning quickly to desert. Precipitation is notoriously hard to model, yet predictions for later this century are basically unanimous: unprecedented droughts nearly everywhere food is today produced. By 2080, without dramatic reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought, much worse than the American dust bowl ever was. The same will be true in Iraq and Syria and much of the rest of the Middle East; some of the most densely populated parts of Australia, Africa, and South America; and the breadbasket regions of China. None of these places, which today supply much of the world’s food, will be reliable sources of any. As for the original dust bowl: The droughts in the American plains and Southwest would not just be worse than in the 1930s, a 2015 NASA study predicted, but worse than any droughts in a thousand years — and that includes those that struck between 1100 and 1300, which “dried up all the rivers East of the Sierra Nevada mountains” and may have been responsible for the death of the Anasazi civilization.

Remember, we do not live in a world without hunger as it is. Far from it: Most estimates put the number of undernourished at 800 million globally. In case you haven’t heard, this spring has already brought an unprecedented quadruple famine to Africa and the Middle East; the U.N. has warned that separate starvation events in Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Yemen could kill 20 million this year alone.

IV. Climate Plagues

What happens when the bubonic ice melts?

Rock, in the right spot, is a record of planetary history, eras as long as millions of years flattened by the forces of geological time into strata with amplitudes of just inches, or just an inch, or even less. Ice works that way, too, as a climate ledger, but it is also frozen history, some of which can be reanimated when unfrozen. There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years — in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice.

The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million — about 5 percent of the world’s population and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.

Experts caution that many of these organisms won’t actually survive the thaw and point to the fastidious lab conditions under which they have already reanimated several of them — the 32,000-year-old “extremophile” bacteria revived in 2005, an 8 million-year-old bug brought back to life in 2007, the 3.5 million–year–old one a Russian scientist self-injected just out of curiosity — to suggest that those are necessary conditions for the return of such ancient plagues. But already last year, a boy was killed and 20 others infected by anthrax released when retreating permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the bacteria at least 75 years earlier; 2,000 present-day reindeer were infected, too, carrying and spreading the disease beyond the tundra.

What concerns epidemiologists more than ancient diseases are existing scourges relocated, rewired, or even re-evolved by warming. The first effect is geographical. Before the early-modern period, when adventuring sailboats accelerated the mixing of peoples and their bugs, human provinciality was a guard against pandemic. Today, even with globalization and the enormous intermingling of human populations, our ecosystems are mostly stable, and this functions as another limit, but global warming will scramble those ecosystems and help disease trespass those limits as surely as Cortés did. You don’t worry much about dengue or malaria if you are living in Maine or France. But as the tropics creep northward and mosquitoes migrate with them, you will. You didn’t much worry about Zika a couple of years ago, either.

As it happens, Zika may also be a good model of the second worrying effect — disease mutation. One reason you hadn’t heard about Zika until recently is that it had been trapped in Uganda; another is that it did not, until recently, appear to cause birth defects. Scientists still don’t entirely understand what happened, or what they missed. But there are things we do know for sure about how climate affects some diseases: Malaria, for instance, thrives in hotter regions not just because the mosquitoes that carry it do, too, but because for every degree increase in temperature, the parasite reproduces ten times faster. Which is one reason that the World Bank estimates that by 2050, 5.2 billion people will be reckoning with it.

V. Unbreathable Air

A rolling death smog that suffocates millions.

By the end of the century, the coolest months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century. Photo: Heartless Machine

Our lungs need oxygen, but that is only a fraction of what we breathe. The fraction of carbon dioxide is growing: It just crossed 400 parts per million, and high-end estimates extrapolating from current trends suggest it will hit 1,000 ppm by 2100. At that concentration, compared to the air we breathe now, human cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.

Other stuff in the hotter air is even scarier, with small increases in pollution capable of shortening life spans by ten years. The warmer the planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by mid-century, Americans will likely suffer a 70 percent increase in unhealthy ozone smog, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has projected. By 2090, as many as 2 billion people globally will be breathing air above the WHO “safe” level; one paper last month showed that, among other effects, a pregnant mother’s exposure to ozone raises the child’s risk of autism (as much as tenfold, combined with other environmental factors). Which does make you think again about the autism epidemic in West Hollywood.

Already, more than 10,000 people die each day from the small particles emitted from fossil-fuel burning; each year, 339,000 people die from wildfire smoke, in part because climate change has extended forest-fire season (in the U.S., it’s increased by 78 days since 1970). By 2050, according to the U.S. Forest Service, wildfires will be twice as destructive as they are today; in some places, the area burned could grow fivefold. What worries people even more is the effect that would have on emissions, especially when the fires ravage forests arising out of peat. Peatland fires in Indonesia in 1997, for instance, added to the global CO2 release by up to 40 percent, and more burning only means more warming only means more burning. There is also the terrifying possibility that rain forests like the Amazon, which in 2010 suffered its second “hundred-year drought” in the space of five years, could dry out enough to become vulnerable to these kinds of devastating, rolling forest fires — which would not only expel enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere but also shrink the size of the forest. That is especially bad because the Amazon alone provides 20 percent of our oxygen.

Then there are the more familiar forms of pollution. In 2013, melting Arctic ice remodeled Asian weather patterns, depriving industrial China of the natural ventilation systems it had come to depend on, which blanketed much of the country’s north in an unbreathable smog. Literally unbreathable. A metric called the Air Quality Index categorizes the risks and tops out at the 301-to-500 range, warning of “serious aggravation of heart or lung disease and premature mortality in persons with cardiopulmonary disease and the elderly” and, for all others, “serious risk of respiratory effects”; at that level, “everyone should avoid all outdoor exertion.” The Chinese “airpocalypse” of 2013 peaked at what would have been an Air Quality Index of over 800. That year, smog was responsible for a third of all deaths in the country.

VI. Perpetual War

The violence baked into heat.

Climatologists are very careful when talking about Syria. They want you to know that while climate change did produce a drought that contributed to civil war, it is not exactly fair to saythat the conflict is the result of warming; next door, for instance, Lebanon suffered the same crop failures. But researchers like Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang have managed to quantify some of the non-obvious relationships between temperature and violence: For every half-degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. In climate science, nothing is simple, but the arithmetic is harrowing: A planet five degrees warmer would have at least half again as many wars as we do today. Overall, social conflict could more than double this century.

This is one reason that, as nearly every climate scientist I spoke to pointed out, the U.S. military is obsessed with climate change: The drowning of all American Navy bases by sea-level rise is trouble enough, but being the world’s policeman is quite a bit harder when the crime rate doubles. Of course, it’s not just Syria where climate has contributed to conflict. Some speculate that the elevated level of strife across the Middle East over the past generation reflects the pressures of global warming — a hypothesis all the more cruel considering that warming began accelerating when the industrialized world extracted and then burned the region’s oil.

What accounts for the relationship between climate and conflict? Some of it comes down to agriculture and economics; a lot has to do with forced migration, already at a record high, with at least 65 million displaced people wandering the planet right now. But there is also the simple fact of individual irritability. Heat increases municipal crime rates, and swearing on social media, and the likelihood that a major-league pitcher, coming to the mound after his teammate has been hit by a pitch, will hit an opposing batter in retaliation. And the arrival of air-conditioning in the developed world, in the middle of the past century, did little to solve the problem of the summer crime wave.

VII. Permanent Economic Collapse

Dismal capitalism in a half-poorer world.

The murmuring mantra of global neoliberalism, which prevailed between the end of the Cold War and the onset of the Great Recession, is that economic growth would save us from anything and everything.

But in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, a growing number of historians studying what they call “fossil capitalism” have begun to suggest that the entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly in the 18th century, is not the result of innovation or trade or the dynamics of global capitalism but simply our discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power — a onetime injection of new “value” into a system that had previously been characterized by global subsistence living. Before fossil fuels, nobody lived better than their parents or grandparents or ancestors from 500 years before, except in the immediate aftermath of a great plague like the Black Death, which allowed the lucky survivors to gobble up the resources liberated by mass graves. After we’ve burned all the fossil fuels, these scholars suggest, perhaps we will return to a “steady state” global economy. Of course, that onetime injection has a devastating long-term cost: climate change.

The most exciting research on the economics of warming has also come from Hsiang and his colleagues, who are not historians of fossil capitalism but who offer some very bleak analysis of their own: Every degree Celsius of warming costs, on average, 1.2 percent of GDP (an enormous number, considering we count growth in the low single digits as “strong”). This is the sterling work in the field, and their median projection is for a 23 percent loss in per capita earning globally by the end of this century (resulting from changes in agriculture, crime, storms, energy, mortality, and labor).

Tracing the shape of the probability curve is even scarier: There is a 12 percent chance that climate change will reduce global output by more than 50 percent by 2100, they say, and a 51 percent chance that it lowers per capita GDP by 20 percent or more by then, unless emissions decline. By comparison, the Great Recession lowered global GDP by about 6 percent, in a onetime shock; Hsiang and his colleagues estimate a one-in-eight chance of an ongoing and irreversible effect by the end of the century that is eight times worse.

The scale of that economic devastation is hard to comprehend, but you can start by imagining what the world would look like today with an economy half as big, which would produce only half as much value, generating only half as much to offer the workers of the world. It makes the grounding of flights out of heat-stricken Phoenix last month seem like pathetically small economic potatoes. And, among other things, it makes the idea of postponing government action on reducing emissions and relying solely on growth and technology to solve the problem an absurd business calculation.

Every round-trip ticket on flights from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.

VIII. Poisoned Oceans

Sulfide burps off the skeleton coast.

That the sea will become a killer is a given. Barring a radical reduction of emissions, we will see at least four feet of sea-level rise and possibly ten by the end of the century. A third of the world’s major cities are on the coast, not to mention its power plants, ports, navy bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshlands, and rice-paddy empires, and even those above ten feet will flood much more easily, and much more regularly, if the water gets that high. At least 600 million people live within ten meters of sea level today.

But the drowning of those homelands is just the start. At present, more than a third of the world’s carbon is sucked up by the oceans — thank God, or else we’d have that much more warming already. But the result is what’s called “ocean acidification,” which, on its own, may add a half a degree to warming this century. It is also already burning through the planet’s water basins — you may remember these as the place where life arose in the first place. You have probably heard of “coral bleaching” — that is, coral dying — which is very bad news, because reefs support as much as a quarter of all marine life and supply food for half a billion people. Ocean acidification will fry fish populations directly, too, though scientists aren’t yet sure how to predict the effects on the stuff we haul out of the ocean to eat; they do know that in acid waters, oysters and mussels will struggle to grow their shells, and that when the pH of human blood drops as much as the oceans’ pH has over the past generation, it induces seizures, comas, and sudden death.

That isn’t all that ocean acidification can do. Carbon absorption can initiate a feedback loop in which underoxygenated waters breed different kinds of microbes that turn the water still more “anoxic,” first in deep ocean “dead zones,” then gradually up toward the surface. There, the small fish die out, unable to breathe, which means oxygen-eating bacteria thrive, and the feedback loop doubles back. This process, in which dead zones grow like cancers, choking off marine life and wiping out fisheries, is already quite advanced in parts of the Gulf of Mexico and just off Namibia, where hydrogen sulfide is bubbling out of the sea along a thousand-mile stretch of land known as the “Skeleton Coast.” The name originally referred to the detritus of the whaling industry, but today it’s more apt than ever. Hydrogen sulfide is so toxic that evolution has trained us to recognize the tiniest, safest traces of it, which is why our noses are so exquisitely skilled at registering flatulence. Hydrogen sulfide is also the thing that finally did us in that time 97 percent of all life on Earth died, once all the feedback loops had been triggered and the circulating jet streams of a warmed ocean ground to a halt — it’s the planet’s preferred gas for a natural holocaust. Gradually, the ocean’s dead zones spread, killing off marine species that had dominated the oceans for hundreds of millions of years, and the gas the inert waters gave off into the atmosphere poisoned everything on land. Plants, too. It was millions of years before the oceans recovered.

IX. The Great Filter

Our present eeriness cannot last.

So why can’t we see it? In his recent book-length essay The Great Derangement, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh wonders why global warming and natural disaster haven’t become major subjects of contemporary fiction — why we don’t seem able to imagine climate catastrophe, and why we haven’t yet had a spate of novels in the genre he basically imagines into half-existence and names “the environmental uncanny.” “Consider, for example, the stories that congeal around questions like, ‘Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?’ or ‘Where were you on 9/11?’ ” he writes. “Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, ‘Where were you at 400 ppm?’ or ‘Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?’ ” His answer: Probably not, because the dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, especially in novels, which tend to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the poisonous miasma of social fate.

Surely this blindness will not last — the world we are about to inhabit will not permit it. In a six-degree-warmer world, the Earth’s ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters that we will just start calling them “weather”: a constant swarm of out-of-control typhoons and tornadoes and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly with climate events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations. The strongest hurricanes will come more often, and we’ll have to invent new categories with which to describe them; tornadoes will grow longer and wider and strike much more frequently, and hail rocks will quadruple in size. Humans used to watch the weather to prophesy the future; going forward, we will see in its wrath the vengeance of the past. Early naturalists talked often about “deep time” — the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. What lies in store for us is more like what the Victorian anthropologists identified as “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience, described by Aboriginal Australians, of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea — a feeling of history happening all at once.

It is. Many people perceive climate change as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries — a helpful perspective, in a way, since it is the carbon-burning processes that began in 18th-century England that lit the fuse of everything that followed. But more than half of the carbon humanity has exhaled into the atmosphere in its entire history has been emitted in just the past three decades; since the end of World War II, the figure is 85 percent. Which means that, in the length of a single generation, global warming has brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe, and that the story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is also the story of a single lifetime. My father’s, for instance: born in 1938, among his first memories the news of Pearl Harbor and the mythic Air Force of the propaganda films that followed, films that doubled as advertisements for imperial-American industrial might; and among his last memories the coverage of the desperate signing of the Paris climate accords on cable news, ten weeks before he died of lung cancer last July. Or my mother’s: born in 1945, to German Jews fleeing the smokestacks through which their relatives were incinerated, now enjoying her 72nd year in an American commodity paradise, a paradise supported by the supply chains of an industrialized developing world. She has been smoking for 57 of those years, unfiltered.

Or the scientists’. Some of the men who first identified a changing climate (and given the generation, those who became famous were men) are still alive; a few are even still working. Wally Broecker is 84 years old and drives to work at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory across the Hudson every day from the Upper West Side. Like most of those who first raised the alarm, he believes that no amount of emissions reduction alone can meaningfully help avoid disaster. Instead, he puts his faith in carbon capture — untested technology to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which Broecker estimates will cost at least several trillion dollars — and various forms of “geoengineering,” the catchall name for a variety of moon-shot technologies far-fetched enough that many climate scientists prefer to regard them as dreams, or nightmares, from science fiction. He is especially focused on what’s called the aerosol approach — dispersing so much sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere that when it converts to sulfuric acid, it will cloud a fifth of the horizon and reflect back 2 percent of the sun’s rays, buying the planet at least a little wiggle room, heat-wise. “Of course, that would make our sunsets very red, would bleach the sky, would make more acid rain,” he says. “But you have to look at the magnitude of the problem. You got to watch that you don’t say the giant problem shouldn’t be solved because the solution causes some smaller problems.” He won’t be around to see that, he told me. “But in your lifetime …”

Jim Hansen is another member of this godfather generation. Born in 1941, he became a climatologist at the University of Iowa, developed the groundbreaking “Zero Model” for projecting climate change, and later became the head of climate research at NASA, only to leave under pressure when, while still a federal employee, he filed a lawsuit against the federal government charging inaction on warming (along the way he got arrested a few times for protesting, too). The lawsuit, which is brought by a collective called Our Children’s Trust and is often described as “kids versus climate change,” is built on an appeal to the equal-protection clause, namely, that in failing to take action on warming, the government is violating it by imposing massive costs on future generations; it is scheduled to be heard this winter in Oregon district court. Hansen has recently given up on solving the climate problem with a carbon tax alone, which had been his preferred approach, and has set about calculating the total cost of the additional measure of extracting carbon from the atmosphere.

Hansen began his career studying Venus, which was once a very Earth-like planet with plenty of life-supporting water before runaway climate change rapidly transformed it into an arid and uninhabitable sphere enveloped in an unbreathable gas; he switched to studying our planet by 30, wondering why he should be squinting across the solar system to explore rapid environmental change when he could see it all around him on the planet he was standing on. “When we wrote our first paper on this, in 1981,” he told me, “I remember saying to one of my co-authors, ‘This is going to be very interesting. Sometime during our careers, we’re going to see these things beginning to happen.’ ”

Several of the scientists I spoke with proposed global warming as the solution to Fermi’s famous paradox, which asks, If the universe is so big, then why haven’t we encountered any other intelligent life in it? The answer, they suggested, is that the natural life span of a civilization may be only several thousand years, and the life span of an industrial civilization perhaps only several hundred. In a universe that is many billions of years old, with star systems separated as much by time as by space, civilizations might emerge and develop and burn themselves up simply too fast to ever find one another. Peter Ward, a charismatic paleontologist among those responsible for discovering that the planet’s mass extinctions were caused by greenhouse gas, calls this the “Great Filter”: “Civilizations rise, but there’s an environmental filter that causes them to die off again and disappear fairly quickly,” he told me. “If you look at planet Earth, the filtering we’ve had in the past has been in these mass extinctions.” The mass extinction we are now living through has only just begun; so much more dying is coming.

And yet, improbably, Ward is an optimist. So are Broecker and Hansen and many of the other scientists I spoke to. We have not developed much of a religion of meaning around climate change that might comfort us, or give us purpose, in the face of possible annihilation. But climate scientists have a strange kind of faith: We will find a way to forestall radical warming, they say, because we must.

It is not easy to know how much to be reassured by that bleak certainty, and how much to wonder whether it is another form of delusion; for global warming to work as parable, of course, someone needs to survive to tell the story. The scientists know that to even meet the Paris goals, by 2050, carbon emissions from energy and industry, which are still rising, will have to fall by half each decade; emissions from land use (deforestation, cow farts, etc.) will have to zero out; and we will need to have invented technologies to extract, annually, twice as much carbon from the atmosphere as the entire planet’s plants now do. Nevertheless, by and large, the scientists have an enormous confidence in the ingenuity of humans — a confidence perhaps bolstered by their appreciation for climate change, which is, after all, a human invention, too. They point to the Apollo project, the hole in the ozone we patched in the 1980s, the passing of the fear of mutually assured destruction. Now we’ve found a way to engineer our own doomsday, and surely we will find a way to engineer our way out of it, one way or another. The planet is not used to being provoked like this, and climate systems designed to give feedback over centuries or millennia prevent us — even those who may be watching closely — from fully imagining the damage done already to the planet. But when we do truly see the world we’ve made, they say, we will also find a way to make it livable. For them, the alternative is simply unimaginable.

*This article appears in the July 10, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.

*This article has been updated to provide context for the recent news reports about revisions to a satellite data set, to more accurately reflect the rate of warming during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, to clarify a reference to Peter Brannen’s The Ends of the World, and to make clear that James Hansen still supports a carbon-tax based approach to emissions.

Listen to this story and more features from New York and other magazines: Download the Audm app for your iPhone.

Output: Humans are failing to comprehend the crisis of climate change due to “scientific reticence,” climate denialism, imaginative failure and basic fear, according to an article in the New York Magazine. The article highlights key aspects of the potential climate disaster that could result in another mass extinction event, including temperature increases, a collapse in the food supply due to drought and heat, the release of diseases from melting Arctic ice and the mutation of existing diseases, suffocating smog caused by pollution, increased war and migration, economic collapse, rising ocean levels and acidification, and human incomprehension of the issue.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Crab-shelling robot could help save jobs in Newfoundland
 The robots are coming. And they're headed for rural Newfoundland.

The world's first full-on crab plant robot sits inside a tall, plastic chamber roughly the size of a shipping container. A conveyor belt carries the splayed crab into the chamber, where a robot scoops them up and places them on one of two plastic saddles.

And then the blade descends.

The dismemberment is swift: there's a short screech as the blade cuts through the shell and sends tiny chunks of meat into the air.

The legs tumble into a grey plastic tub below, sorted, sectioned and ready to go.

The machine was unveiled this spring, developed by Canadian Centre for Fisheries Innovation, in partnership with the College of the North Atlantic, Ocean Choice International and the Marine Institute.

Its functions are simple — cut the crab in half, or remove its legs — but its impact could be enormous.

The machine was designed to be a part of a robotic system that would extract the meat from the crab's shells, a process which is often done overseas.

Its designers are also hoping it will solve a few workforce problems in fish plants caused by changing demographics in rural Newfoundland.

"Younger people are not being attracted to the industry," said Bob Verge, managing director of the Canadian Centre for Fisheries Innovation.

"A large part of the labour force in our processing sector now comes from the baby boomer generation. We can't replace those baby boomers with an equal number of younger people."

Work has been shipped overseas

According to Verge, the meat extraction used to be done by hand in Newfoundland and Labrador plants, but the labour became too expensive.

The sections are now being sent overseas for meat extraction, where the labour is considerably cheaper.

Bringing that step back to Newfoundland plants would allow plant operators to make more money and get more value from the resource.

Crab are send down a belt to be processed robotically. (Eddy Kennedy/CBC)

"Instead sending our crab out as sections with meat in its shell, we can get a higher price if we sold the meat instead," he said.

Verge hopes the robotic crab butcher will solve a sociological problem, too.

The population in rural Newfoundland is aging and shrinking. Many young people in rural Newfoundland leave their communities for good when they come of age.

It's a looming crisis for the province, and it's affecting the processing workforce.

"If you talk to operators of fish plants today, everybody needs more people," he said.

Bob Verge runs the Canadian Centre for Fisheries Innovation, which promotes research and development in the seafood industry. (Eddy Kennedy/CBC)

Greg Pretty, industrial director at the Fish, Food and Allied Workers union (FFAW), backs this up.

"The average age is about 55 years old now in seafood processing," said Pretty. "To backfill those positions, it's often difficult."

Fish plant jobs are wet and cold, and they don't pay much: maybe $15 or $16 an hour.

They're also seasonal — the crab season is short, and plants need a lot of people for a short amount of time.

Are robots taking jobs from people?

Both Verge and Pretty say concerns about the crab butchering robot replacing workers are not entirely supported.

Verge said that since the machine's ultimate intent is meat extraction, a job which is performed overseas, the robot would not be replacing any existing jobs in rural Newfoundland.

Stephen King, one of the robot's engineers, sets the machine to cut crab into sections. (Eddy Kennedy/CBC)

What's more, he said machines like these can actually increase the quality of the jobs available in plants and help attract young workers.

"[Technology] attracts those young people," he said. "It creates better, different jobs."

Instead sending our crab out as sections with meat in its shell, we can get a higher price if we sold the meat instead. - Bob Verge

Pretty agrees with him, at least about the quality of the jobs offered.

"In instances where a company purchased a lot of machinery we find while there is a displacement of actual labour there is an increase of skilled trades," he said.

"Somebody has to maintain those machines. In that, there is also an increase in income for the individuals."

"That doesn't affect the season, unfortunately."

Processing is a backbone of rural industry

It's a complicated and pressing problem for the province: though it's easy to find someone who will say there are too many processing plants, those plants are essential to rural Newfoundland.

Several studies out of the Harris Centre at Memorial University have found it to be what's called a propulsive industry. In a nutshell, while processing contributes little to the province's overall gross domestic product, it holds up many of the other industries in rural communities.

Rob Greenwood is the executive director of the Harris Centre at Memorial University. (Sarah Smellie/CBC)

"The fish plant in a community and the fish harvesting people who bring the fish into the plant don't necessarily show up as the main source of GDP in the region," said Rob Greenwood, executive director of the Harris Centre.

"But if you go to the welding shop, they exist to service the harvesters and the plant, for the most part. If you go to the trucking business, most of their business is because of the fish activity," he said.

"If you go to the motel, yeah they get some tourists for three months of the year, but it's people coming and going in the fish industry."

In other words, if fishing thrives, rural Newfoundland thrives.

Right now, both fishing and rural communities are undergoing unprecedented levels of change, driven by technology and changing demographics. Greenwood says only time will tell whether technology and demographics will work together, or against each other.

Output: The Canadian Centre for Fisheries Innovation (CCFI) has developed the world’s first crab-shelling meat extraction machine, with plans to introduce it into Newfoundland plants. The robot dismembers the crab with swift efficiency, and could help create more profit for the Newfoundland economy by removing a reliance on exporting crab sections overseas, where the labour of meat extraction is cheaper. The plant could mitigate the problem of not having enough young workers in Newfoundland, offering a technology-based incentive to stay in the area, according to Bob Verge, MD of CCFI.