Permafrost warming in parts of Alaska 'is accelerating'

Scientists are concerned that in a warming world, some of this permanently frozen layer

will thaw out and release methane gas contained in the icy, organic material.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and researchers estimate that the amount in

permafrost equates to more than double the amount of carbon currently in the

atmosphere.

Melting fast

Worries over the current state of permafrost have been reinforced by Prof Romanovsky.

A professor at the University of Alaska, he is also the head of the Global Terrestrial

Network for Permafrost, the primary international monitoring programme.

He says that in the northern region of Alaska, the permafrost has been warming at about

one-tenth of a degree Celsius per year since the mid 2000s.

"When we started measurements it was -8C, but now it's coming to almost -2.5 on the

Arctic coast. It is unbelievable - that's the temperature we should have here in central

Alaska around Fairbanks but not there," he told BBC News.

In Alaska, the warming of the permafrost has been linked to trees toppling, roads buckling

and the development of sinkholes.

Prof Romanovsky says that the current evidence indicates that in parts of Alaska, around

Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope, the permafrost will not just warm up but will thaw by

about 2070-80.

"It was assumed it would be stable for this century but it seems that's not true any more,"

he told BBC News.

'Convincing' case

He says the current permafrost evidence has convinced him that global warming is real

and not just a product of natural variation.

"Ten years ago, if you asked permafrost scientists around the globe I would say 98%

would say: 'The thawing at Prudhoe Bay won't happen by the end of this century'," Prof

Romanovsky explained.

"But now I think it is very possible, and I changed my opinion right during the last four

years. I was in the 98%, but now I say it's possible.

"About 10 years ago when I looked at our records, I said that they all show that permafrost

temperatures should cool down a bit on multi-decadal timescales.

"I told myself that if it would not cool down I would 100% believe in global warming, and

now I believe 100% that we have this very serious trend of warming," he said.

While engineering can prevent the thawing of permafrost underneath important structures,

there is little that can be done to prevent the general melting of the layer.

Scientists believe that the thawing will be gradual, with no major tipping point. There are

many unknown factors about the rate of thawing and whether the impacts will be the same

across all Arctic regions.

There are also concerns about the bubbling of methane from undersea permafrost in the

shallow waters off the Russian Arctic, but researchers say they do not know yet how

significant this might be.

There is also a worry about giant sinkholes, some of which appeared in Siberia last year.

Experts say that melting permafrost may have unleashed enough methane

to cause the ejection of material that formed the holes.

Indirect impacts

Another expert in the field acknowledged that while the problems in Alaska were serious,

scientists were getting a better handle on the amounts of carbon that were likely to be

released.

However, Prof Ted Schuur from Northern Arizona University recognised that, despite the

scientific progress, the fact was that thawing would occur and methane would leach into

the atmosphere.

"Even if we stopped all emissions today, the Arctic has momentum where there is going to

be more warming, more permafrost degradation and some carbon coming out already - we

have started the ball rolling in some senses."

"It is probably not triggering a runaway climate effect but it adds to our problem. It

accelerates the problem, of climate change. To me that is worrisome because it makes the

problem harder."

Prof Schuur added that indirect impacts of warming were also speeding the thaw. In

Alaska in 2015, there were near-record wildfires, which he said heightens the exposure of

permafrost to warmer air.

He believes that political negotiations on a new global climate deal, currently underway in

Germany and set to conclude in Paris in December, are essential to the long term

preservation of permafrost.

"The climate negotiators meeting in Bonn, and in Paris, won't immediately be able to

change what happens with the fire season in Alaska next year, but we can slow the

process down by focussing on human emissions and in my mind that's the best bet to

have the most control.

"It's very hard to control these landscape global processes that are occurring in the Arctic."

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Obama promotes anti-heroin strategy in coal country

People in West Virginia don't like Barack Obama. But in a state with the nation's

highest rate of lethal overdoses, they're ready to try anything - even the president's

lefty approach to fighting drugs.

Obama is talking with people in an auditorium at the old Roosevelt Junior High School,

which is now a community centre in the Charleston, West Virginia's East End

neighbourhood.

He's open-minded about drugs. As he wrote in his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, he

smoked marijuana and tried cocaine when he was in high school.

(He doesn't anymore. When I asked a spokesman, Eric Schultz, on Air Force One whether

the president smoked pot in the White House, Schultz gave me a hard stare and said:

"No.")

Yet it doesn't take "Freudian analysis", as Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon University

says, to understand why Obama favours innovative ways to look at the nation's drug

problem.

The number of lethal heroin overdoses in the US has nearly tripled in three years,

experts write, with more than 8,250 people dying every year.

The number of those who've overdosed on prescription drugs has also jumped. About

23,000 people died in 2013, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, twice the

number from 2001.

The president no longer has faith in draconian measures once championed by "drug

warriors", as Keith Humphreys, a Stanford professor who served as a senior adviser in the

Obama White House, describes them.

"There was a mentality for a long time that said: 'They don't need treatment'," Humphreys

says. "'They need a kick in the ass'."

Humphreys grew up in West Virginia. A lot of these warriors were living in his home state.

Many were in the room with Obama.

The president's visit to West Virginia, a state once known for coal mining and now for

heroin, is part of his effort to combat drug abuse and reform the criminal justice system.

He wants to help addicts, not punish them, and has pushed for new sentencing laws for

non-violent drug offenders so they don't spend decades behind bars.

He says law enforcement remains part of the effort against drugs. But he says authorities

should target "drug kingpins and violent gangs".

Still old habits die hard, and his visit underscores challenges that remain.

In August, White House officials announced they were investing $13.4m (£8.7m) to help

states and local governments in the Appalachians, a region that includes West Virginia,

learn more about heroin trafficking and its use. Beyond that, the federal government

spends billions to fight drug abuse across the country.

Obama also wants to provide training for physicians who prescribe opioids - and wants to

see more physicians certified to prescribe buprenorphine, which helps those with

addictions.

For these efforts, Obama needs the people in the room.

In foreign policy, the president has a lot of control. When it comes to fighting drugs,

though, he has to depend on others.

"The president can push," says Peter Reuter, a criminal justice professor at the University

of Maryland. "But it's still up to states."

In the US, officials at the state and local level run prisons and police departments and

come up with programmes to fight drug abuse.

"This is going to have to be everybody working together," Obama tells about 250 political

leaders, law enforcement officials and healthcare workers who've gathered at the

community centre. It's a place that's been hit hard.

He's speaking on a stage in a basketball court in the old school, a limestone-and-brick

building on Ruffner Avenue that dates to the 1920s. A hoop is attached to one of the pale-

yellow walls. A scoreboard is mounted nearby. The ceiling has missing tiles, and chunks of

paint dangle over the room.

In the morning old people come here for exercise class, and children show up later for an

after-school programme. Police officers from the city's traffic unit also work here.

The people in the room have over time developed a nuanced view of the problem - and of

the president.

Jim Johnson, who works in nearby Huntington as director of the mayor's office on drug

policy, is sitting in the fourth row. He admits the president is an unlikely hero.

"President Obama is not popular in the state of West Virginia," he says. "But this problem

is bigger than anything we have ever faced."

For many here the problem isn't political, it's personal. One guest, John Temple, a

university professor in West Virginia who has written a book about addiction, American

Pain, has seen students fall into the world of prescription drugs.

Obama is sitting next to Michael Botticelli, the director of the White House office of national

drug control policy who has been in treatment for alcohol abuse. West Virginia Gov Earl

Ray Tomblin's brother was arrested for distributing an illegal drug. Charleston Mayor

Danny Jones' 25-year-old son has been arrested for possession of drugs.

"The users are them," Humphreys says. "It shows you this is everywhere."

One speaker, Jordan Coughlen, a student at West Virginia University, says he's on "long-

term recovery". His dark hair is neatly slicked back and he's wearing pressed trousers.

"Opiates were my lover, my teacher and my best friend," he says.

Afterwards Obama thanks him for speaking out. "Jordan is living proof that when it comes

to substance abuse," he says, treatment and recovery are possible.

But change takes time.

After White House officials announced their initiative to look at drug trafficking in the

Appalachians, an enlightened effort that emphasises health and safety rather than punitive

measures, police officers arrested nearly 100 people in the central part of West Virginia in

August.

Known as Operation Mountain Justice, it was "the largest mass arrest of alleged drug

offenders in West Virginia history", at least according to local news.

The people arrested didn't seem like drug kingpins. Many had been workers in the local

mines.

The coal industry has suffered. West Virginia now has one of the nation's highest

unemployment rates. "People have nothing to live for," says a physician, Hassan Amjad,

who practices 60 miles from Charleston.

Some of his patients have black lung, a deadly respiratory disease that afflicts miners.

Others are addicted to drugs. He prescribes an opioid called Suboxone to help.

Amjad tells me people in West Virginia hate Obama because of his environmental policies.

They believe his push for climate change regulations have hurt the coal industry and made

things harder for them.

(Flying on Air Force One, Schultz acknowledges that things have been tough here. Still as

he says: "The decline in coal jobs started well before this president came into office.")

But still they've welcomed him to the event on Wednesday.

Charleston Police Chief Brent Webster is sitting on the stage with the president. Webster is

bald and athletic, and he's wearing his blue uniform.

"We basically have a community of zombies for lack of a better word, walking around," he

says. The federal money, he says, helps them get addicts into treatment.

In his heart, though, he's still a police officer - and wants to lock up bad guys. "We can

always use additional law enforcement resources - I'm not going to lie to you," he tells the

president. Obama laughs.

Other people in the room say they understand. As a former West Virginia police chief,

Johnson - now the director of the mayor's office on drug policy office in Huntington - is

hardly a progressive, but he's starting to think like one.

He says he doesn't know the details of the mass arrest that took place in August in the

central part of the state, for example.

But he knows about one that was done last year, by his former colleagues in the

Huntington police department. They picked up a couple hundred people, he said, but many

were just addicts. Meanwhile people kept overdosing.

"We came to the realisation that we couldn't arrest our way out of the drug problem," he

says.

He says they tracked drugs in their city on a screen with topographical-like makings - "like

a weather map". More than a decade ago, drugs were found in small areas around town.

Last year they were everywhere.

"It was so dramatic," he says, describing the maps. "It looks like a sunny day in 2004 and

like a thunderstorm in 2014."

He and others have fought drugs in their town for years, and things were only getting

worse.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting

different results," he says.

Towards the end of his presentation, Obama says people now have a better understanding

of what needs to be done. But it's still hard. "We've got to make sure the money is

following the insight," he says.

Obama unclips a microphone and steps down from the stage. He shakes hands with

people in the audience and smiles. A John Denver song, Take Me Home, Country Roads,

suddenly blares out of loudspeakers.

The mood is festive, a sharp contrast to the sombre moments during the event. But not

everybody looks upbeat.

Temple is standing in the back, holding a copy of his book under his arm.

"I think it's amazing that he's here but policy-wise there's more that needs to be done," he

says.

"If this were another disease, we'd be pulling out the stops," he says, watching the

president at the front of the room.

He knows it's not Obama's fault. But he shakes his head as if to say: it's frustrating.

Crocodiles sleep with one eye watching

Crocodiles can sleep with one eye open, according to a study from Australia.

In doing so they join a list of animals with this ability, which includes some birds, dolphins

and other reptiles.

Writing in the Journal of Experimental Biology, the researchers say the crocs are

probably sleeping with one brain hemisphere at a time, leaving one half of the brain active

and on the lookout.

Consistent with this idea, the crocs in the study were more likely to leave one eye open in

the presence of a human.

They also kept that single eye trained directly on the interloper, said senior author John

Lesku.

"They definitely monitored the human when they were in the room. But even after the

human left the room, the animal still kept its open eye… directed towards the location

where the human had been - suggesting that they were keeping an eye out for potential

threats."

The experiments were done in an aquarium lined with infrared cameras, to monitor

juvenile crocodiles day and night.

"These animals are not particularly amenable to handling; they are a little snippy. So we

had to limit all of our work to juvenile crocodiles, about 40-50cm long," said Dr Lesku, from

La Trobe University in Melbourne.

As well as placing a human in the room for certain periods, the team tested the effect of

having other young crocs around. Sure enough, these also tended to attract the gaze of

any reptiles dozing with only one eye.

This matches what is known of "unihemispheric sleep" in aquatic mammals, such as

walruses and dolphins, which seem to use one eye to make sure they stick together in a

group.

By contrast, birds use this strategy to watch out for predators. "In threatening situations,

birds will increase their use of unihemispheric sleep and maintain their open eye on any

potential threat," Dr Lesku explained.

"It seems to be a bit of both, in the case of these juvenile saltwater crocodiles."

Everybody else is doing it

The next step will be to confirm that, as well as simply opening one eye, the crocs are

indeed only - physiologically - half asleep.

"Ultimately we would require electrophysiological recordings - so you'd have to look at

brain waves in both hemispheres of a sleeping crocodile, to say: is one hemisphere awake

while the other is asleep."

Dr Lesku is already preparing those experiments, working with colleagues in Germany to

stick electrodes - carefully - on the heads of Nile crocodiles.

Meanwhile, the discovery of one-eyed sleep in crocodiles firmly fixes this capacity to yet

another branch of the evolutionary tree.

We and our fellow land mammals, it seems, are running out of company in our all-

consuming slumber.

"To me, the most exciting thing about these results is they provide some evidence to think

that the way we sleep might be novel, in an evolutionary sense," Dr Lesku said.

Half-brain sleeping, he explained, may have evolved in a shared ancestor of reptiles and

birds, and separately in the aquatic mammals - or perhaps in an even more distant

ancestor, shared by birds, reptiles and mammals, before ancient land mammals somehow

lost the knack.

"We tend to think of our sleep as the norm: a behavioural shutdown that is a whole-brain

affair. And yet if birds sleep unihemispherically, and if crocodiles and other reptiles that

engage in unilateral eye closure - if it turns out that they are also also sleeping

unihemispherically, then suddenly our sleep becomes unusual.

"Then, pretty much the only things that aren't sleeping this way are the terrestrial

mammals."

Are productivity apps more hype than help?

There are hundreds of apps claiming to help us become more productive, efficient

and organised.

And the smartphone is to blame, says Dr Sharon McDonald, a reader in computing at the

University of Sunderland.

"In theory, people can now make better use of what might have previously been 'dead

time' - for example, making notes during the daily commute.

"Thus productivity apps tie in with the basic notion of increasing productivity by using one's

time in a smarter way."

The sector is expected to be worth $58bn (£37bn) globally by 2016, according to app

research firm VisionMobile.

And research from software company Salesforce.com last year suggested such apps can

boost worker productivity by more than 34%.

But are they really more hype than help?

Exasperation v. addiction

They're a "massive" waste of time, thinks Crawford Warnock, managing director of PR and

communications agency, Firstname Communications.

"I have used Evernote, Outlook, reminders on the iPhone, Procraster and stacks of others.

They all follow the same pattern - enthusiastic use and exploration followed by a moment

of frustration, and then they fall off."

He is not alone in experiencing app exasperation. Yet others swear by them.

David Carr, strategy director at marketing and technology agency, Digitas LBi, says he is

"addicted" to Evernote, the popular cloud-based app designed for note taking, archiving,

and collaboration.

Productivity apps: 2015 Webby Award winners and nominees

•Evernote iOS app

•Pocket

•Swipes

•Humin

•Boxer

Having stuck doggedly with Delicious - the social bookmarking service - to store links to

interesting articles, the experience became "so bad" that he fell into the arms of Evernote.

"Now I'm addicted to it. It has transformed how I capture thoughts, insights and articles.

I've become a taxonomy geek happily tagging everything I come across for later recall."

Mr Carr has set up nearly 2,000 tags for his saved content and expects to add many more.

"It lets me get on with the actual thinking and collaborating rather than chasing down

elusive examples," he says.

'Achieving more'

But Jon Cunningham, consultant at business development agency, Hob-Nob New

Business, takes an opposing view.

"Evernote became an unmanageable beast," he says. "Too many search variables, and

too difficult to discern the important and urgent from everything else."

Instead, he was seduced by the charms of Trello, a project management app that uses

"cards" and "boards" to segment projects and allocate tasks between colleagues.

It has won his heart - for now - chiefly enabling him to operate an "empty email inbox

policy".

"I can forward emails to a Trello inbox then allocate the job to another person ...it's a much

more useful tool for getting things done," he says.

Tom Roberts, managing director of Tribal Worldwide London, goes so far as to say that

Trello runs his life.

"Right now, we have a large pitch on and we are using Trello to run and orchestrate the

entire process. For me it's less about time saving, exactly, and more about achieving more

during the working day."

Joined-up working?

But the smartphone has also become a double-edged sword, facilitating the "always on"

culture and eating into our leisure time.

And Jonathan Green, a director at consultancy KPMG, says that while many productivity

apps are "profoundly useful at an individual level", they have limited benefits for

employees of larger organisations due to lack of integration with existing IT systems.

"It means there is discontinuity in how employees work as they move away from their

desk," he says.

Security concerns

This lack of integration also raises data security issues, something LBi's Mr Carr

acknowledges.

He says he and some of his colleagues are using the Evernote app via a personal, free or

premium account, which has security implications because they are not specifically

designed for business.

"While we wouldn't use the service for highly sensitive material, this does mean that non-

critical information, even if it is raw notes, recordings or web links, is being stored on US

servers."

This means the data could theoretically be nabbed by US authorities under the USA

Patriot Act.

And with the recent decision by the European Court of Justice to tear up

the Safe Harbour data-sharing agreement between the US and Europe,

businesses need to be even more alert as to where and how their potentially sensitive data

is being stored.

Cutting the slack

Despite such drawbacks, there is an undoubted thirst for tech that helps - or seems to help

- make our working lives easier.

Take Slack, for example, a popular real-time messaging app that spans desktop and

mobile.

Alex Hamilton, chief executive of Radiant Law, a corporate law firm with offices in London

and Cape Town, says his firm adopted the app to help tackle the deluge of emails.

"We have pretty much got rid of internal emails," he says. "The ability to channel

discussions is very powerful, and the ability for anyone to join open conversations has

helped us really boost transparency across the firm.

"Most of all, it's just really easy to use and people like using it."

Fun and simplicity seem to be key to a productivity app's success.

"Like any good relationship, you have to commit fully to your chosen productivity app as

it's easy to slip out of using it when the honeymoon period is over," says Jason Cartwright,

boss of web development agency, Potato. He is a fan of both Trello and Slack.

But try telling that to Crawford Warnock. He maintains that his best investment has been a

wallboard "and more pens".