~ WEBINAR EVENT SERIES CO-SPONSORS ~
The FAN Initiative, Millennium Alliance for Humanity and Biosphere, The Resilience Project & The New School at Commonwealth
Ghastly Discussions & Response
Global polycrisis: The causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement
Multiple global crises—including the pandemic, climate change, and Russia’s war on Ukraine—have recently linked together in ways that are significant in scope, devastating in effect, but poorly understood. Dr. Michael Lawrence, a Fellow at the Cascade Institute Read...
They asked an A.I. chatbot questions. The answers sent them spiraling.
Before ChatGPT distorted Eugene Torres’s sense of reality and almost killed him, he said, the artificial intelligence chatbot had been a helpful, timesaving tool. In recent months, tech journalists at The New York Times have received quite a few such messages, sent by...
On r/collapse, people are ‘kept abreast of the latest doom’. Its moderators say it’s not for everyone
The threat of nuclear war, genocide in Gaza, ChatGPT reducing human cognitive ability, another summer of record heat. Every day brings a torrent of unimaginable horror. It used to be weeks between disasters, now we’re lucky to get hours. For many, the only sane...
The business of betting on catastrophe
The pandemic bonds — a financial device made up by one of the world’s most powerful institutions, the World Bank — can seem like a great idea for raising money to fight pandemics. Money is pooled ahead of time, rather than waiting for governments to pony up monies to...
Can we see our future in China’s cameras?
I couldn’t imagine such blasé faith in public safety back when I last lived in China, in 2013, but on this visit it was true: Cameras gawked from poles, flashed as we drove through intersections, lingered on faces as we passed through stations or shops. And that was...
Global wheat yields would be ‘10%’ higher without climate change
The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looks at data on climate change and growing conditions for wheat and other major crops around the world over the past 50 years. It comes as heat and drought have this year been...
Q&A with Jason Pruet
Jason Pruet is working with teams across the Laboratory to help prepare for a future in which artificial intelligence will reshape the landscape of science and security. Five years ago, he viewed AI as just another valuable tool, but because of recent advances in the...
The impunity of the unscathed: Risk, elite security, and the rage of MAGA populism
Beck’s foresight, rendered in the late 20th century, finds chilling resonance in the contemporary political landscape, nowhere more starkly than in the rise of MAGA-style populism. This phenomenon, often simplistically dismissed as a reaction to economic inequality or...
Reading Octavia Butler in a time of change
Following the January wildfires in Los Angeles and the inauguration of President Donald Trump, many people once again turned to the writing of Octavia Butler for comfort, guidance and reflection. Butler, who grew up in Pasadena and has been called “the...
Navigating complexity: Embracing the human pace
For over two years, we’ve been working with diverse partners to understand how groups of organisations can collaborate more effectively to tackle challenges bigger than any single entity could manage alone. This journey has generated a wealth of detailed and complex...
Critical responses to global systemic risk in an era of polycrisis
The world is in the midst of a polycrisis, where multiple, interconnected crises are unfolding simultaneously, ampli-fying one another in unpredictable ways. This is not merely a confluence of independent crises, but rather an intricate web of interconnected...
Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future
Corey J.A. Bradshaw, Paul R. Ehrlich, Andrew Beattie, Gerardo Ceballos, Eileen Crist, Joan Diamond,Rodolfo Dirzo, Anne H. Ehrlich, John Harte, Mary Ellen Harte, Graham Pyke, Peter H. Raven1 William J. Ripple, Frédérik Saltré Christine Turnbull, Mathis Wackernagel and Daniel T. Blumstei
An international group of 17 leading physical and social scientists, including OMEGA Advisory Board member Joan Diamond, have produced a comprehensive yet concise assessment of the state of civilization, warning that the outlook is more dire and dangerous than is generally understood.
The paper has generated over a thousand media articles and interviews which suggests that public interest is extremely high despite competing news– insurrection, inauguration, and pandemic.
This Ghastly study has been covered in media organizations including CNN World, Reuters, The Guardian, International Business Times, Taipei Times, The Irish Times, and the University of California among many others.
See full article published by Frontiers in Conservation Science, 13 Janurary 2021.