Over the last few years I've grown increasingly concerned about the overwhelmingly complex set of intersecting problems broadly referred to as "the Climate Crisis". When I first started my career, I was content to simply donate a few dollars to environmental groups and vote for politicians who at least expressed concern about things like greenhouse emissions to feel like I was "doing my part" to help avert disaster. As my concerns grew, I expanded my sense of "doing my part" to include things like: donating to think tanks that do not accept corporate funding (which seems to explain why they're able to publish reports/proposals like this), volunteering for political campaigns, organizing car pools, buying local, etc.
But one thing I have never done is grapple with the question, "What role can bioinformaticians play in averting or at least mitigating the Climate Crisis?" Off the top of my head, I can name two research areas where our skills might be helpful:
Biofuels (which might reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted, I guess?)
Weather-Resistant Crops (which might help stabilize societies besieged by extreme weather events)
I'm sure there are many other areas of bioinformatics research that might prove important to dealing with the Climate Crisis so please respond with any thoughts/links/ideas relating to that. Obviously, part of my rationale for posting this is because I am considering a career change so I would be particularly interested in anything that a cancer researcher might easily transition into.
Also, I feel it is extremely important for people like us (scientifically and technologically literate) to think critically about and discuss the myriad and complex issues that make up this crisis in hopes that doing so might make us better positioned to help deal with it. Here's a few questions that I would really like to get this communities' thoughts on:
What are the incentive structures that impede governments, businesses and institutions from taking more aggressive actions to reduce greenhouse emissions?
Which countries/regions are most at risk of becoming uninhabitable and where are the resulting "climate refugees" most likely to seek asylum?
What technologies and proposed solutions actually have potential to alleviate the causes of the Climate Crisis and which ones are misguided and/or scams?
What else can people with a bioinformatician's skill set do to help avert disaster?
Since this post is very open-ended in the responses it invites, I humbly suggest that posting "Answers" that address just one of the various issues I've raised might help make the reply threads easier to read if people responding to the same issue later on post their thoughts as a reply-to-the-answer rather than a reply-to-the-original-post.
It's not directly about the climate crisis, more about environmentalism in general, but biodiversity genomics could be a field to go into. Projects like Darwin Tree of Life, Vertebrate Genomes Project and Earth Biogenome Project between them aim to sequence the genomes of all eukaryotes on Earth. The aims of these projects are not to directly affect the climate crisis, but there is no doubt that working to preserve biodiversity will have the upshot of maintaining forests etc, which will have a positive impact.
I think the biogenome project is especially relevant for another reason, the loss of "in vivo" diversity by accelerated extinction of species. It has been predicted, for example, that ocean acidification threatens coral reefs like the Great Barrier Reef.
We have to capture some of the diversity of genes, genomes, proteins, and enzymes in databases before it is inevitably lost. That makes me sad to be honest.
May I remind everyone of some important issues:
The catch is that it is necessary to distinguish between "science" and "scientology". I have no interest in contributing to a forum that treats these two equally, and will withdraw all my existing contributions and direct all users of my software away from here should that happen here.
The best heuristic I know of is to allow discussion of technical problems and disallow evangelism. Anyone fine with a discussion with almost exactly the same technical content, just with "climate crisis" replaced with the far less controversial "climate change", is welcome here. I don't see how anyone who doesn't find that to be an acceptable compromise belongs on this forum.
Do whatever you please
As I have said in my answer below, the point of this thread it not to convince anyone of the reality of climate change, or its urgency.
If you do not feel there is a climate crisis, you cannot add any meaningful content which addresses the OP, so feel free to move on. As Michael said, this is a Q&A site, and those comments do not address the Q.
If your response to this thread is to direct legitimate bioinformatics questions away from the site, that's pretty immature, and not befitting a community moderator, but feel free to take all the help requests yourself, I can't see myself losing any sleep over that.
All meaningful technical content addressing the OP concerns ordinary-scale climate change. There is no technical content addressing the difference between dealing with ordinary-scale climate change and an actual "climate crisis" which starts to spiral out of control. And that's not because the difference is empty (cf. geoengineering).
Since the original poster doesn't seem interested in the difference either, there is no constructive reason to use the term "crisis", and there are very, very strong reasons not to on a public forum in 2019. There are numerous climate-change-related discussions on far-higher-profile forums like Hacker News which have been derailed by people pushing back against apocalyptic language; I am very far from alone in being instinctively offended by religious authority.
I'll acknowledge that some of my direct responses to the original poster could have been more diplomatic, but that doesn't change the fact that public discussion of climate issues has been so poisoned by bogus apocalyptic claims that it is necessary for him to go out of his way to dissociate himself from them to promote constructive progress on the non-apocalyptic but still very real problems in this area. This includes using a title without the word "crisis", which is just asking for a response like Dan D's.
This particular discussion appears to have died down so it can be left untouched, but the above describes how I will moderate similar posts in the future. And if that isn't okay, this is a community that fundamentally does not include me, so I really have no choice but to withdraw (which, as you note, potentially leads to more work for me; I'm okay with that).
And I will acknowledge that I also could have been more diplomatic with you. Sorry about that. Despite our disagreements, I'm much more interested fostering a productive discussion that people can learn from (myself included) than I am in "being right" so I propose a compromise:
From now on, I'll use the term "climate change" whenever posting on this forum. I won't use terms like "climate crisis", "climate emergency", etc unless, perhaps, I am specifically discussing the merits of these terms or quoting someone. If you or anyone else convinces me that my sense of urgency is unwarranted, I will change every instance of my using the term "climate crisis" to "climate change" (including the title) except in sentences where I was either discussing the merits of the term or quoting someone.
All I ask in exchange is that you participate in some good faith discussion, share some more of what you know/think and try to be clear/diplomatic in your posts. Science is ultimately a collaborative endeavor; there's obviously a lot about it that is inherently competitive (spirited debate, forum hygiene, etc) but at the end of the day we're all trying to help each other learn more and figure things out. Maybe you could blow some new life into this forum by posting a fresh answer to the original prompt?
Hi, I can tell you that the discussion has died down in part because people didn't find it worthwhile to discuss nitty-gritty details, about whether there is a crisis or not or to iterate some talking points that you had the chance to make extremely clear. It might also in part be the non-constructive undertone in this discussion that put people off. This is unfortunate because I have some more ideas about how bioinformatics could help to solve climate change or reduction of carbon emissions if you will. And some others might have posted theirs, and so the thread could have become a valuable resource of ideas for new projects. But instead, the thread got totally derailed. I would like you to read my initial comment about some important issues once more and see if it makes more sense to you now.
I hope you will find a good way to contribute in a constructive way to this forum, even though you disagree with someone on this forum about some topics unrelated to bioinformatics, and you will go on to support Pllnk, because it will be useful to many.
speaking seriously - take less flights (which means going to less conferences), don't eat beef, don't litter, sort the garbage, take bike instead of a car. that's what bioinformatics can suggest to the World.
Find out the genes cascade that supports methane eruption from cows into the atmosphere and suggest a way how to fix it.
These genes are mostly known. The methane comes from anaerobic methanogenic archaea (see kegg) in the bowels of the cows. One could feed cattle some anti-methanogenic compounds, but in my mind, we will not get around having fewer cattle globally. And that means consuming less beef.
then the challenge would be to find genes that are responsible for the beef's taste and make a vector injection into e.g. chicken. but this is kinda high-tech approach - not only bioinformatics but also genetic engineering, so does not directly answers the question raised by the author, since it requires not only efforts of bioinformaticians, but also biotechnologists.
Not sure if you are joking, but just in case: there is no objective determinant - therefore no gene - that determines taste. Beef tastes "better" to us than chicken because it has higher fat content, and our gustatory receptors have evolved to like high-calorie food because back in the day of hunters and gatherers that ensured the survival of our species. Contrary to popular belief, mostly pure protein (chicken, basically) does not taste as good as fat and carbs because it is less preferred source of energy. Now that for some of us the food is readily available it would be much better if we liked the taste of low-calorie foods, but thousands of years of evolution can't be undone just like that.
Here is a more concrete argument: potatoes (starch) and grass (cellulose) have roughly the same nutritional values as they are both polymers of glucose. Yet we can digest starch and not cellulose, which is why potatoes taste "better" to us than grass. Ask the cows, who can digest cellulose, and they will tell you that grass tastes much better than potatoes. Again, there is no such thing as objectively better-tasting types of food, as it all comes down to subjective taste that has been tuned over many years of evolution.
then we need genetically modify humans so we could absorb cellulose...
yes, it was a joke, since the overall topic for me looks like "how agriculture can help in astrophysics", but I liked your explanation a lot.
That is not going to be effective, the greenhouse-footprint of poultry is slightly better than beef (It might be a factor of >5x reduction, so that's a step ahead though). I think we need to go for plant-based products and possibly add some leg-hemoglobin-derived heme for improved iron uptake and for the taste.
This is:
a good challenge for bioinformaticians! Model such organisms in silico - sounds interesting.
What if we transfer cow's genes into a potato? We will have potato with the taste of a beef. I'd write a Nature Correspondence with this brave plan.
Yes, please do ;)
You don't need to move any genes to achieve this. We have been doing the equivalent thing for decades by topping baked potatoes with butter. Or by frying them.
totally reasonable, but butter = cows. nah, we need to find a way of XXIst century.
I think I read about a project last year in Netherlands where they were trying to build a functioning cell in silico. Maybe by UniGroningen? If anyone has any links for this please do post.
That is already something in that direction.
Inventing a green cow it is done by science, not by bioinformatics.
We definitely need innovative approaches to solve the problem whilst thinking a little outside the box, because I for one, will not be eating any less beef any time soon :P
Is bioinformatics needed for producing lab-grown meat? That's certainly one way to reduce cattle farming and climate change, while keeping the omnivores happy.
please moderators don't ban me from this board
I guess there is a solution - even if it was reported as quite pricey
https://www.foxnews.com/science/japanese-scientists-create-meat-from-poop
A hoax, the entire reporting for this was based on a YouTube video: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2011/07/08/meat-made-from-human-feces-hoax-or-japans-best-new-invention/#2d5a69436d9e
then we still need bioinformaticians to fix it...
Potentially, but I think a more practical solution is just to come up with technologies which can help support more sustainable farming practices