Archive for sentience/cognition

19

Jan

2024

You Are All Terminators. (I Am Not.)

Way back in grad school— when VHS was a thing and computer screens were all monochrome and a 20-Megabyte hard drive was the kind of thing only supervillains could afford—a bunch of us rented “The Terminator” for the weekend and watched it between bouts of AD&D. Inevitably we came upon the iconic first-person T-800 view. […]

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01

Nov

2022

The Pong Imperative: Driving Dishbrain to Suicide.

Achilles Desjardins had always found smart gels a bit creepy. People thought of them as brains in boxes, but they weren’t. They didn’t have the parts. Forget about the neocortex or the cerebellum—these things had nothing. No hypothalamus, no pineal gland, no sheathing of mammal over reptile over fish. No instincts. No desires. Just a […]

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20

Jun

2022

The Jovian Duck: LaMDA and the Mirror Test

You all must know about this Google LaMDA thing by now. At least, if you don’t, you must have been living at the bottom of Great Bear Lake without an Internet connection. Certainly enough of you have poked me about it over the past week or so. Maybe you think that’s where I’ve been. For […]

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28

Apr

2022

The Aspirational Zombie.

Long-time readers of the ‘crawl might remember that I’ve never had much patience for the AI’s Just Wanna Live trope. I put my bootprint on it in my very first novel— “Expert defense witnesses, including a smart gel online from Rutgers, testified that neuron cultures lack the primitive midbrain structures necessary to experience pain, fear, […]

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25

Mar

2021

What Dreams May Come.

Interrogating the Dream Anyone who caught my talk at Ratio back in 2017 might vaguely recall a curious claim: that the Human corpus callosum—that bundle of neurons connecting our cerebral hemispheres—has a bandwidth in the same ballpark as that of a modern cell phone, once you take noise correction and synaptic redundancy into account. I […]

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16

Sep

2019

Debunking the Debunkers: Free Will on Appeal.

If you read The Atlantic, you may have heard the news: A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked! Libet’s classic eighties experiments, the first neurological spike in the Autonomist’s coffin, has been misinterpreted for decades! Myriad subsequent studies have been founded on a faulty and untested assumption, the whole edifice is a house […]

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12

Sep

2018

The Split-brain Universe

An extended Nowa Fantaskyka remix. The year is 1982. I read Isaac Asimov’s newly-published Foundation’s Edge with a sinking heart. Here is the one of Hard-SF’s Holy Trinity writing— with a straight face, as far as I can tell— about the “consciousness” of rocks and trees and doors, for Chrissakes. Isaac, what happened? I wonder. […]

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25

Jul

2018

HemiHive, in Hiding

If you’ve been following my writing for any length of time, you’ll know how fascinated I am by Krista and Tatiana Hogan, of British Columbia. I’ve cited them in Echopraxia’s end notes, described them in online essays; if you caught my talk at Pyrkon last year you might remember me wittering on about them in […]

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23

Oct

2017

My Dinner with Ramez: or, The Identity Landscape.

A week or two ago— just before all the stuff with Kevin went down— I hung out with Ramez Naam for an evening. (If you know who I am you certainly know who he is; his Nexus trilogy burned across the charts in a way I can only dream of.) We snarfed. We drank. We […]

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06

Dec

2016

Dolphinese

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams. —Blindsight Believe it or not, the above quote was inspired by some real-world research on language and dolphins. Admittedly the real-life inspiration was somewhat less grotesque: scientists taught a […]

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Calendar

April 2024

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Signposts en route to Oblivion

April ’24

• Climate change predicted to cost the global economy $38 trillion annually by midcentury, or six times what it would cost to keep warming to a merely-catastrophic 2°C.

Of course, all those Exxon-Mobil CEOs will be long dead by then, so don’t expect anyone to move on this.

• Arctic permafrost now a net carbon producer.

• Globally, hottest March in History. That’s ten consecutive monthly world records broken.

Remember when they were warning we might exceed 1.5°C as early as 2030? We already did that. For the past solid year.

• The East Antarctic Plateau just hit 38.5°C above its seasonal average. In related news, emperor penguin colonies are collapsing.

March ’24

• 2023 was 0.2°C higher than expected and no one knows why. (No, it wasn’t El Nino.)

• Great Barrier Reef bleaching again. Fifth time in eight years, if anyone’s counting.

• “Last Chance Tourism” is a thing now. “Quick, they’re going extinct! How can we make a buck off that?”

• A good candidate for Least Surprising Development Of The Week: major banks abandoning the “bare minimum environmental standards” for fossil fuel development that they themselves invented. Not that those were in any way binding in the first place, of course.

• It’s official: Avian Flu now in mainland Antarctica. (Previous cases were only confirmed among island populations south of the Circle.)

February ’24

• First Human fatality from recently-discovered arctic Alaskapox virus (who readers may remember from my recent story “Contracting Iris“): also bubonic plague surfaces in Oregon.

Cats implicated in both cases. Go cats!

• North Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation en route to catastrophic tipping point”: 1m Atlantic sea-level rise, Europe cools so fast that “no realistic adaptation measures can deal”.

Significant uncertainty remains regarding when exactly the collapse will occur. Let’s just ignore that Nature paper that says it could happen as soon as 2025…

• New “Category 6” hurricane proposed. Because hurricanes are way stronger now than they were in the old days.

January ’24

• Air pollution from Alberta Tar Sands 1,900-6,300% higher than previously reported. Meaning the tar sands emit as much air pollution as all other Canadian sources combined.

• Greenland losing thirty million tones of ice per hour, 20% more than previously thought. Another nail in AMOC‘s coffin.

• Norwegian government approves deep-sea mining. I’ve spoken to a couple of Norwegian scientists who think this is a very bad idea. They have a lot of company.

• We made it to 1.48°C in 2023! 0.17°C higher than last year, and we could break 1.5 in just a few months!

Come on, you ecocidal shitstains! Let’s show those candy-ass coral reefs who’s boss!

• Raptors on the African savanna in deep shit. 88% have declined over the past 40 years; 69% are in danger of extinction.

• So, H5N1 is killing polar bears now. How very seasonal.

What, did you think pandemics were only a human thing?

2023

November ’23

• COP28 lobbyists to present meat as ‘sustainable nutrition’. Because apparently, putting an oil company CEO in charge of the whole event wasn’t sufficiently farcical.

• Earth just experienced the hottest year in recorded history, and probably within the past 125,000 years. A quarter of the global population exposed to “dangerous extreme heat events” for at least a 10-day period.

They say next year’s going to be worse.

• UK forests facing “catastrophic collapse” within 50 years. On the up side, that means they’ll outlast civilization itself by a good two decades.

• Number of species in danger of extinction doubles to two million. Personally I bet that’s extremely conservative; we don’t even know how many species are out there in the first place.

• World’s governments plan to produce more than twice the 1.5°C-limit for fossil fuels by 2030. Plus ca change.

October ’23

• Avian flu makes it to Antarctica, after a massively successful South American Tour that killed “500,000 seabirds and 20,000 sea lions in Chile and Peru alone”. Let’s see if they can top that down on Bird Island.

• Another tipping point passed: looks like we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet no matter what we do; there’s “no significant difference between mid-range emissions scenarios and the most ambitious targets of the Paris Agreement.” Goodbye, coastal cities. PopSci coverage here.

• Twenty one species removed from the Endangered species list because they’re, um, extinct. Well, that’s one way to clear the backlog.

September ’23

• Swiss glaciers decline 10% by volume in two years. Measurement stopped on some glaciers because they’re, um, gone already.

• OK, I’ll admit this is pretty cool: Water from portable desalinator potentially “cheaper than tap water”. Solar powered, fits in a suitcase, 4-6l/hr.

• Senior oil executives providing “support” to COP28. Plus ca change…

• 98% of Europeans breathing air that exceeds WHO pollution standards. Two-thirds of them are breathing air that’s over twice those standards. Not a green post because pollution is, you know, bad. But not a red one either, because the associated annual deaths of 400,000 of the world’s most cancerous pest species has gotta be some kind of silver lining, yes?

• Nipah outbreak in India. When this bug goes global—and sooner or later, it will go global—it’s gonna make smallpox look like a head cold.

• Antarctica warming “much faster than models predicted“, because of course it is. PoSci coverage here.

• Hottest Summer Evar, by two-thirds of a degree. From the Dept. of Duh.

• Tropical mosquitoes bring their disease-vectoring ways to Paris, en route to the Baltic. Right on schedule.

August ’23

• Leader of religion that forbids birth control laments environmental destruction. Well, I suppose it’s easier than doing something about all kids they’ve raped and murdered.

• Oh, and filed under “News So Unsurprising It’s Barely Even News”: July 2023 officially the hottest month ever recorded. A record that’ll probably stand for about thirty-one days.

• Amazon leaders fail to commit to end deforestation by 2030. Something about not wanting to give up “extractive industries”.

• Tick-borne deathly red-meat allergies may affect hundreds of thousands! That’s one way to cut back on meat consumption—and by the way, did I call it or what?

Now, if only some feisty ecoterrorists could port that trait into mosquitoes and horseflies…

• Irony of the week: Stricter controls on maritime pollution increase global heating. Seems all those airborne sulfates increased cloud reflectivity; now they’ve been reduced, more solar radiation gets through.

• Ocean surface temperature now hotter than any time in recorded history, and still climbing. Parboiled fish floating belly-up off Florida.

• Hey, everybody: leprosy’s back! (Just in Florida so far, but not for long: armadillos are leprosy reservoirs, and thanks to climate change those guys are already as far north as Nebraska.)

July ’23

• The deep sea gets a one-year reprieve from mining. China finally backed down.

• Antarctic sea ice at record low.

• G20 countries fail to reach agreement on cutting fossil fuels again. Because, you know. Maybe it’s all just sunspots or something.

• And July 4 was even worse.

• July 3 was the hottest day the planet has known since we started keeping records.

June ’23

• The nation of Tuvalu is uploading itself into the digital realm. Because its days are pretty clearly numbered in this one.

• Climate change amped the odds of the current Texas heat wave by five times. On the up side, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving state. Except maybe Florida.

• In case you were getting bored of humans changing the global climate, here’s something new: Humans are also changing the axial tilt of the planet by depleting groundwater reservoirs.

• Oh, bother. Canada’s on fire again.

• Ice-free summer Arctic ahead no matter what we do. Previous models, suggesting we might save the ice cap if we really cut back our emissions, underestimated ice loss.

All together now: the optimists are always wrong, and the pessimists are too optimistic.

May ’23

• Still on track to hit 1.5°C by 2027. Of course, if you only look at temperatures over land masses, we blew past that benchmark years ago.

• Alberta—heart of the Canadian fossil fuel industry, home to the Athabasca Tar Sands, hotbed of climate-change denialism—is on fire. Gosh. Who could have seen this coming?

April ’23

• World’s ocean surface temperature hits record high. After three years of La Niña tamping down on the cooker, it’s back to business as usual.

• Increased flow of Antarctic meltwater compromising abyssal circulation. Deep ocean stagnates; shallow ecosystems starve for want of upwelled nutrients.

• Canadian bank world’s biggest financier of global fossil fuel projects. It’s not like you can expect the federal government to chip in—they already gave more than $15 billion to the oil industry in 2022 alone…

March ’23

• 8000-km swathe of sargassum weed headed for the Florida coastline. What’s not to like? Massive overgrowth, increased bioproductivity, increased CO2 absorption. The only thing it fucks up is Florida’s human population—and really, who deserves it more?

• ‘Murrica’s “environmental president” approves 576m-barrel oil drilling project in Alaska, “potentially producing more than twice as many emissions than all renewable energy projects on public lands by 2030 would cut combined.”

• Humans and their livestock now account for 98% of the planet’s terrestrial mammalian biomass. (When you include marine mammals we’re only at 94%, if you want to put a positive spin on things.)

• New UN finalizes deal to protect (most) international waters. Although I might downgrade this to orange depending on what it ends up saying about deep-sea mining.

• New GI-tract disease caused by plastics documented in seabirds.

• The Guardian tries to put a happy face on the fact that emissions continued to rise in 2022 by saying at least they didn’t rise as much as they did the year before.

February ’23

• Antarctic sea ice hits record low. In unrelated news, it’s 15°C today in Toronto. In the middle of February.

• Wind and solar were EU’s top electricity source in 2022. Despite—or maybe because of—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

January ’23

• Now even neural nets are telling us that things are worse than we thought: 80% chance we hit 2°C by 2065 even assuming carbon neutrality.

• World’s oceans hottest ever recorded in 2022. Absorbed about 10 zettajoules more heat than in 2021.

• Current carbon offsets are bullshit.

• Best-case (1.5°C) scenario: Half of all glaciers gone by 2100. Current trajectory: two thirds.

December ’22

• COP15: Politicians desperate for some kind of win praise a non-binding biodiversity agreement with no enforcement, no accountability, and which doesn’t even mention commercial fishing or agriculture. (At least it can’t possibly do worse than its predecessor, which failed to meet a single one of its goals.)

November ’22

• “None” now second-largest religious demographic in England and Wales. The US is still a fundamentalist nuthouse, of course, but you take your wins where you can find them.

• Over 20K dead from this year’s heat waves in western Europe alone. (Although maybe this should be a green post. Surely fewer of us is a good thing?)

• This year’s carbon emissions on track to be highest ever. Way to bend that curve, guys.

• Previously-documented decline in human male fertility is accelerating!

• Fossil fuel reps at COP27 up 25% over last year.”More than the combined delegations from the 10 most climate-impacted countries.”

• Equipment designed to cut methane emissions is failing.

• Past eight years hottest on record; each hotter than the one before. Follow the link if you want the ugly and consistent details about methane, CO₂, arctic sea ice, glacier melt, and sea level rise. Bet you can guess the bottom line, though.

October ’22

• No credible pathway to 1.5°C; currently on track for 2.8°C by 2100. Only hope is a radical and immediate transformation of global energy, food, and financial systems. Good luck with that.

September ’22

• Christianity could well be a minority religion in the US within the next few decades. And it’s not other religions taking up the slack, either; the population is becoming increasingly nonreligious.

This assumes that no massive social upheavals cause everyone to turn back to religion as a security blanket, mind you. Not necessarily a safe bet these days.

• At least a third of Pakistan is underwater.

August ’22

• All by itself, Greenland Ice Sheet decline will cause at least a 27cm rise in sea level no matter what we do now. “a very conservative rock-bottom minimum … Realistically, we will see this figure more than double within this century.” PopSci coverage here.

• On the plus side, life expectancy in the U.S. continues to decline. Assuming anyone, you know, still trusts the CDC.

• Australian wildfires are probably enlarging the Antarctic ozone hole. And I thought the ozone layer was the one thing we’d managed to put right.

• Oh, great: polio’s back.

• Apropos of nothing in particular, turns out even a teensy nuclear war could cause global famine. On the up side, a major war would cut the numbers of the world’s most pernicious pest species by more than half.

• Okay, I’ll give you this one: the curiously-named “Inflation Reduction Act” at least gets the US off the sidelines and taking a first step. Even though it’s not nearly enough. Even though the cheerleaders seem to be breezing past the fact that the IRA makes offshore windfarm development contingent on an annual sacrifice of 60 million acres to the fossil fuel industry.

At this point, you take what you can get.

July ’22

• Democratic Republic of Congo opening vast tracts of forest (including gorilla habitat) to oil extraction. “Our priority is not to save the planet”, proclaims their government’s climate guy.

Don’t sweat it, dude. It’s not anyone’s priority.

• Monarch butterflies officially endangered. Kind of surprised it took them so long.

• From Britain to China, record-breaking heat-waves, forest fires, and evacuations. “Not a very normal situation,” reads one quote from a Portuguese meteorologist. Yes it is, dudette. These days, it very much is.

• US Supreme Court guts the EPA’s options for regulating carbon emissions. Because why just force people to have more babies when you can do that and increase the carbon bootyprints of each larva in the bargain?

June ’22

• Desertification: Central Asian deserts have expanded by a hundred kilometers since the eighties.

May ’22

• Exxon fails to wriggle out of going on trial for fucking over the planet and lying about it. This does absolutely nothing to mitigate climate change or to de-oil a single marine organism, but at least the odds of fucking up a few of the culprits may have improved a little.

• You know those 50+°C heatwaves that are all the rage in India and Pakistan these days? A hundred times more likely now, thanks to climate change. Once every three years, instead of once every three centuries.

• Pollution responsible for 1 out of every 6 deaths on the planet. That’s nine million a year.

Put that together with the ongoing decline in Human fertility, this problem might just take care of itself.

• It’s now basically a coin toss whether we blow through 1.5°C within the next five years.

• 91% of the Great Barrier Reef bleached this year. And the year’s not over.

• Fossil industry embarked on 646Gt worth of “carbon bombs“, more than enough to blow through the planet’s entire remaining carbon budget for a 1.5°C scenario. Then again, 1.5 was always a pipe dream anyway, right? And besides, there’s a war on.

• Swapping out just 20% of global beef production for mycoprotein could, by midcentury, cut deforestation (and associated emissions) in half.

April ’22

• Over 15,000 mammal-to-mammal zoonoses expected over the next half-century as a result of climate change.

• A fifth of all reptile species are threatened with extinction. Popsci coverage here.

• And of course, mere hours after the IPCC’s latest report emphasises yet again how we absolutely cannot afford to approve new fossil-fuel megaprojects, the Trudeau government approves a new fossil-fuel megaproject.

They promise it won’t have any “significant adverse environmental effects”, though. Cross their hearts.

• 1.5° is officially off the table. Now, the most optimistic scenario hinges on sucking carbon back out of the air to compensate for the inevitable “overshoot”.

March ’22

• Great Barrier Reef bleaching yet again, during an El Nina this time (which is supposed to be when corals catch a break from the heat). “It’s also happening faster than was predicted 20 years ago.”

• Coal surging, renewables stagnating, thanks to the war. I guess we can kiss goodbye even Cop26’s delusional and miniscule hopes of 1.5°C.

On the up side, none of this matters in the event of a nuclear war.

• 175 countries pledge to act on plastic pollution. It’s not a deal so much as a pledge to work out a deal, but at least it’s a legally-binding deal covering the the whole production cycle. Popsci coverage here.

• Latest IPCC Report is out. “brutal“… “bleakest warning yet”… impacts “sooner and greater than we originally thought”…

Ah, what’s the use. We’ve heard it all before, and we do fuck-all.

February ’22

• U.S. Oil Industry Uses Ukraine Invasion to Push for More Drilling at Home. And less environmental regulation. And more pipelines. You know the list.

• SW US megadrought now worst in at least 1,200 years. At least.

• Global methane hits 1,900ppb. Been spiking since 2007. Arctic-thaw feedback suspected.

January ’22

• Coal is in ascension again. All hail the post-covid economic recovery.

• Ghost Flights are back. Up to 2.1 million tons of greenhouse gas emitted as empty planes fly around the skies of Europe. Didn’t we end this shit back in 2020?

December ’21

• You know how the Arctic is warming “twice as fast” as the rest of the world? Turns out it’s actually warming twice as fast as that. So, four times. Yet another case of exceeding the worst-case scenario.

November ’21

• The moral case for destroying fossil fuel infrastructure. About the only thing I’d disagree with is the claim that there’s no moral case for taking human life. Oh, and “Ethical” would have been a better word to use than “moral”.

• In the wake of COP26, Biden administration selling off drilling rights to 80 million seabed acres in the Gulf of Mexico. Way to “lead by example”, you duplicitous scumbag.

• Oh, here’s a cute little post-mortem tidbit from COP26: researchers were frequently prevented by the conference organizers from accessing the rooms where negotiations were taking place“. Kinda tells you all you need to know about how science factors into these things.

• You may have heard that if every country honors the commitments made thus far at Glasgow, we could be looking at a merely disastrous increase of 1.8°C, instead of the downright catastrophic 2-plus.Wrong. Try 2.4°C. (PopSci coverage here.)

• Hey, the grass roots finally accepts the reality of climate change! Of course, we’re still willing to do fuck-all about it.

October ’21

• You know how we’re supposed to cut emissions in half by 2030? Current pledges, even if implemented, will only cut them by 17% according to the most recent UN Report (popsci coverage here). Yet another “thundering wake-up call”; so much for “building back better”.

• 45% of Americans Don’t Believe Humans Cause Climate Change. Which probably still makes them smarter than Pyro650: at least most of them admit that climate change exists.

• Fossil fuel industry gets subsidies of $11,000,000 a minute. Also, Biden signed as many drilling permits in the first six months of his administration as Trump did in his first year, during a time when no new drilling can occur past 2021 if we want to have a hope in hell of achieving even the flaccid half-assed commitments of the Paris Accord

September ’21

• Coral reef coverage declined by 50% worldwide between the fifties and 2007. And that was before all those massive bleaching events hit the Great Barrier Reef.

• Still on track for 3°C, thanks to virtually every Paris signatory not even coming close to meeting their commitments. (The only country that is on track? Gambia.)

• Of course, they haven’t won a lot yet— and the moment they start, governments will probably just pass legislation to ban these kinds of lawsuits— but attribution studies are coming into their own when it comes to suing corps and countries for screwing the pooch on climate change. (Personally I’d like to see more in the way of jail terms and death penalties— but as usual, the good news is so far and few between you pretty much have to take what you can get.)

August ’21

• Big Oil has a plan to deal with climate change. Basically, it’s suck up every drop of oil we can, for as long as we can, while getting governments and taxpayers to fund our ultimate and inevitable switch to renewables.

• Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions are about to undergo the biggest jump since 1990, thanks to the post-covid economic ‘recovery’. Ah well. At least they’re learning to live with the whole catastrophic-flooding thing…

• Hey, here’s a teensy glimmer of hope: coal-free steel. Note they didn’t say “carbon-neutral” steel, so I don’t know how “green” it is. Still. We take what we can get.

• Down in the US, this passing Summer of the Furnace has changed people’s minds about climate change not at all. Hell, 1 in 4 don’t even think it’s any big deal.

• Parts of the March ’22 IPCC report leaked seven months early by scientists fearing the usual governmental watering-down. How fucked are we? See for yourself.

• Yup. We’re fucked even more unequivocally than we were the last time the IPCC checked in. Popsci coverage here.

• Revenge Travel. It’s a thing.

• Oh goodie. Looks like the Gulf Stream might be shutting down. Too many downstream effects to list here.

• Last July worst for wildfires, globally, since records began.

• The Greenland Ice Sheet lost enough meltwater to cover Florida to a depth of two inches last, um, Tuesday. 8.5 billion tonnes in one day. It’s not even a record.

July ’21

• “Everything is on fire.” Siberia hit by unprecedented burning.

• Remember “Limits to Growth”? Turns out they were right all along. Recent analysis suggests that business-as-usual will lead to global societal collapse around 2040, right on schedule. J. Industrial Ecol. report downloadable here.

• Even now—even now— the G20 won’t agree on commitments to combat climate change. Four of the miserable fuckers have put forth plans that would lead to a 5C rise in global temperatures if everyone adopted them.

• Not to be outdone by the Europeans catastrophic flooding also in China! All that coal-powered economic growth, finally paying off.

• Tired of the same old stories about heat waves, droughts, and wildfires? You’re in luck! Climate change causes catastrophic flooding in Europe, too! Climate Change. A Catastrophe for Every Mood.

• The Amazon rainforest is now a net carbon producer. Goodbye, “Lungs of the Planet”. It was nice knowing you.

• June ’21 was the hottest ever recorded in the US. Wanna bet July breaks that record?

• Last June’s inferno over on N’Am’s western reaches was rendered 150 times more likely due to climate change.

• Hate to sound like a broken record but once again, worse than the worst-case scenario: Nobody saw the Lytton conflagration coming. Scientists never factored “heat domes” into their models.

June ’21

• ExxonMobil lobbyists filmed saying oil giant’s support for carbon tax a PR ploy. ExxonMobil shocked and appalled by these allegations.

May ’21

• Electric cars ‘will be cheaper to produce than fossil fuel vehicles by 2027’. One source even says this will happen by 2024.

• Europe to clamp down on air and water pollution under green deal. “The overarching goal is to eliminate all harmful contamination by 2050.” Good words. Let’s hope the actions live up to them.

• Heartened by so many governments suddenly hopping on the green bandwagon? Even if they all keep all their commitments, we’re still looking at a 2.4C global increase. Ah, well. 1.5C was always “aspirational” anyway…

April ’21

• Australian Academy of Science: holding warming to 1.5C now “virtually impossible“. (As usual, the Hope Police object to the dire wording, but even they admit it’s “super-challenging” and “hanging in the balance”.)

• Coal is powering the post-covid economic recovery. This year’s coal usage expected to rival peak burn of 2014.

• European droughts over the past five years are “unprecedented in the past 2,110 years“. Popsci coverage in The Guardian.

• Carbon emissions to soar in 2021 by second highest rate in history. Massive surges in coal power in the US and China.

The Covid Dip. It was nice while it lasted.

• Only 3% of the world’s ecosystems remain intact. We might be able to recover up to 20% through species reintroduction if we really get off our asses, but what are the odds?

March ’21

• Disease outbreaks more likely in deforestation areas. Well, duh.

• Bottom trawling releases as much carbon as air travel. Not to mention the sheer physical damage of clearcutting entire benthic ecosystems. Popsi coverage here.

• Bladeless, even windless wind power. From giant wobbling dildos to streetlamp-mounted little turbines that harness air displaced by passing traffic.

• Former CIO for sustainable investing at BlackRock states that “Green Investing” is Bullshit. Turns out capitalism is incompatible with decarbonization pretty much by definition. Who knew.

• Geoengineering goes mainstream. At least, the National Academies of Sciences thinks we should be taking a serious look.

• Falling sperm counts ‘threaten human survival’. It’s old news—and I remain skeptical that linear regression is the appropriate analysis in any case—but wouldn’t it be nice if our sperm counts really did hit zero by midcentury? And we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves.

• Hey, new Ebola outbreak in Guinea. Actually it’s been going on since January, but who can keep track? (Also it now appears that Ebola can lie dormant in a host for up to 5 years, and then jump out and out break all over again…)

• Northern California’s Kelp forest ecosystem reduced by 95% since 2013. Crash instigated by a “multiyear marine heat wave”.

• UN agrees on standards to put a monetary value on ecosystems. Works great until Jeff Bezos pulls out his checkbook and says Okay, I’ve bought the Amazon. Let’s burn the fucker down.”

• Global carbon emissions on track to surpass pre-Covid levels. December emissions 2% higher in 2020 than in 2019. Goodbye, Covid dip. You were nice while you lasted.

February ’21

• Chance of keeping global warming below 2C currently 2%. Goodbye, coral reefs.

• Nineteen out of twenty Australian ecosystems are seriously fucked (i.e., “experiencing potentially irreversible environmental changes.”) Guardian coverage here.

• China doubles the number of “Protected” animal species. Now there’s, like, six of them. (Just kidding. Really, it’s nice to see they’ve given up on the whole wolf-extermination thing.)

• Global “Peace Levels” have declined 2.5% since 2008. (Actually this dates from last August but I just discovered it now.) In your face, Stephen Pinker.

• 20% of all Human mortality due to particulate air pollution. 30% in east Asia. Guardian coverage here.

• US Cities are vastly underestimating their carbon emissions. The uncounted difference adds more annual emissions than the entire state of California. PopSci coverage here.

January ’21

• Past estimates of sea-level rise are too conservative. The worst-case scenario gets even worse, yet again. PopSci coverage here.

• Global ice loss now following IPCC’s worst-case trajectory. Which might be relatively good news, given how many indicators are trending to worse than worst-case. PopSci coverage here.

• Electric cars will be cheaper than the fossil-powered variety by 2023-2025. Of course, fossil-powered SUV sales are still going through the roof.

• Increased rewilding of landscape in rich countries, thanks to declining birth rates. See what happens if we just ignore that whole Judeo-Christian “fill up the world with thy numbers” edict?

• Three quarters of the world’s sharks and rays are in danger of extinction. As usual, a conservative estimate. Popsci perspective here.

• Electric car batteries with five-minute charging times produced. 1000 – 2500 recharge cycles without significant battery degradation.

• Future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. “The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms—including humanity—is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts.” Popsci summary here.

• World’s insects suffering ‘death by a thousand cuts’. A series of papers in PNAS. Popsci summary here.

• Solar now cheapest electricity in history. Oil use still hasn’t peaked— and won’t without “stronger climate action”— but it’s something.

• 2020 hottest year in recorded history. Technically tied with 2016, but 2016 cheated by getting an El Niño boost.

December ’20

• Monarch butterflies are endangered under the ESA, but won’t get protection because ‘it costs too much’. Not the only such species, by a long shot.

• Mass die-off of birds in south-western US ’caused by starvation’. One guess what the drought that caused the starvation was caused by.

• Fighting the Covid recession by amping up fossil-fuel production. Imagine my surprise.

• Global human-made mass now exceeds all living biomass. This doesn’t even include landfills.

• Water now trading on the Stock Market. Hey, at least they haven’t monetized the air we breathe. Yet.

• EU’s biggest oil producer closes deal to shut down its entire oil industry. Legally binding on future governments and everything.

• November 202 hottest November on Record, beating out runners-up 2016 and 2019. During an El Nina no less, which acts to cool the planet.

• By 2030, world’s governments plan to produce more than double the fossil fuels than would be consistent with curbing global warming. Meeting even the half-assed Paris accords requires cutting fossil fuel production by 6% annually. Current plans: an annual increase of 2%.

• Media Reframes Projected Failure to Meet Carbon-Reduction Targets as Being ‘Within Striking Distance’ . If every country honors their pledges (which virtually none have done up to this point) we’re still looking at 2.1C increase by centuries’ end. But hey, let’s move the goalposts and call it a win.

• Cloned Meat Goes Commercial. Only in Singapore, so far. And highly carbon-intensive until it scales up. But in a world in which 96% of mammalian biomass is people and livestock, it’s a start.

November ’20

• Once covid passes, we plan on driving even more. We’re a bit more restrained when it comes to flying, at least. Be still my heart.

October ’20

• A fifth of the world’s countries are in danger of ecosystem collapse. Odd. I didn’t realize that “ecosystems” respected international boundaries…

• Arctic methane deposits starting to release, scientists find. Preliminary findings. Still awaiting confirmation. But if true, another cascade has begun.

• China pledges Carbon-neutrality by 2060. The bad news is, talk is cheap from the world’s biggest coal-burner. Good news is, totalitarian regimes can turn on a dime if they really want to. None of that messy pandering-to-the-voter bullshit.

• Over half the Great Barrier Reef has disappeared since the nineties. As usual, this estimate is conservative; it doesn’t include major bleaching events over the past year.

• California wildfires spawn first ‘gigafire’ in modern history. One fire, one-million-plus acres.

• Climate change could tip 1.45 million km² of Amazonian rainforest to savannah by century’s end. Admittedly a conservative estimate. Popsci coverage here.

September ’20

• World fails to meet a single one of the UN’s 2010 Aichi biodiversity targets to put the brakes on global ecocide. Not a single fucking one. Report here.

• Northern Hemisphere’s 2020 summer hottest in recorded history.

• Global wildlife populations down by 68% since 1970. Two thirds down, one to go.

August ’20

• Greenland Ice Sheet has passed Point of No Return. Already the largest single contributor to rising sea levels. Now there’s no Off switch.

• Rising temperatures on track to kill as many people as all current infectious diseases combined. Original paywalled study here.

July ’20 and earlier

• Forget future development; emissions resulting from projects already committed/underway mean we can kiss 1.5°C goodbye as an attainable target.

• Covid Means Fewer Children!. Even better, the fertility decline preferentially affects those with the biggest carbon bootprints (i.e., urbanites in rich countries).

• 2020: the worst year ever for the fossil fuel industry. “We’re still in for a long and ugly fight”, they admit. Still.

• Virtual extinction of Polar bears within eighty years due to climate change. But it’s not all bad. A few straggly survivors may be all Coca Cola needs to keep its advertising campaign within the bounds of good taste.

• Green power beats fossil fuels for first time in Europe. Still less than half, and pandemic-temporary. But something. Also when there’s a renewables surplus they pay you to consume electricity.

• Unsuitable for ‘human life to flourish’: Up to 3B will live in extreme heat by 2070.

• Record-breaking Siberian winter keeps 2020 on track to be hottest year in recorded history. Covid Pause? What Covid pause?

• It hit 80F in the Arctic this week. Not to mention the zombie fires.

• 2019: the Hottest Year in Europe’s Recorded History.

• Ecuador To Sell A Third Of Its Amazon Rainforest To Chinese Oil Companies.

• Amazon could switch from carbon sink to carbon source within twenty years.. “Decades ahead of even the most pessimistic climate models.”

• The Great Barrier Reef is experiencing its third mass-bleaching event in five years.. Hey, just because nobody’s talking about it doesn’t mean it’s stopped happening.

• E.P.A., Citing Coronavirus, Drastically Relaxes Rules for Polluters. But it’s okay, because they’re also asking companies to “act responsibly”.

• Australian Bushfires destroyed over a fifth of the continent’s temperate broadleaf forests. This year alone. Who knows what next year might bring?

• Global carbon emissions fall 2%. It’s pathetic progress and utterly insufficient, but I’ll take what I can get.

• Australia’s Bushfires Completely Blasted Through the Models. They weren’t supposed to get this bad for another eighty years.

• A quarter of climate-change tweets are from bots. The vast majority of them denialist.

• January 2019 warmest in recorded history.

• Good news for a change: Global emissions didn’t increase in 2019.

• Climate change displaced 17.2 million from their homes in 2019.

• Atmospheric triflouromethane—a greenhouse gas 12,000x worse than CO₂— reaches record levels.

• We’re currently adding 5 Hiroshima bombs worth of heat per second to the world’s oceans. And climbing.

• Climate threats now dominate long-term risks. Global leaders finally admit risks outweigh those from cyberattacks, pandemics, geopolitical conflict and weapons of mass destruction. Well, duh.

• Earth just had its hottest decade on record. NASA’s Gavin Schmidt admits 1.5C goal unattainable.

• 2019 UN Emissions Gap Report (global emissions have to drop by 7.6% annually starting now or we’re even more fucked).

• 3.2C unless emission-control efforts tripled.

• Greenhouse gases accelerated to new peak in 2018.

• Nature: Predicted extent of global flooding is triple previous estimates.