by United Nations press release…Food, water, energy crises, human tragedies in 2023-2025 detailed in sweeping analysis by U.S. National Drought Mitigation Center
and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification
Droughts worldwide pushing tens of millions towards starvation, says report
by Fiona Harvey in The Guardian…Water shortages hitting crops, energy and health as crisis gathers pace amid climate breakdown
Thinking long-term about infrastructure
by School of International Futures…75 years is a long enough period of time for the world to change in ways that are unanticipated. For this reason, scenarios that take a longer term view should have within them elements that are genuinely discomfiting.
They asked an A.I. chatbot questions. The answers sent them spiraling.
by Kashmir Hill in The New York Times…Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some people, conversations with the technology can deeply distort reality.
On r/collapse, people are ‘kept abreast of the latest doom’. Its moderators say it’s not for everyone
by Sam Wolfson in The Guardian…‘This is the idea of catabolic collapse: that what we’re living through is a series of crises … It’s not going to be a sudden event.’ A subreddit tracking apocalyptic news in a calm, logical way comforts users who believe the end times are now
The business of betting on catastrophe
by Susan Erikson in MIT Press…World Bank pandemic bonds paid out only after death tolls passed a threshold. They’re part of a booming market where investors turn calamity into capital.
Can we see our future in China’s cameras?
by Megan K. Stack in The New York Times…It’s not that our government is using the surveillance infrastructure in the same manner as China. It’s that, as far as the technology goes, it could.
Global wheat yields would be ‘10%’ higher without climate change
by Orla Dwyer in Carbon Brief…Climate science has “done a remarkable job of anticipating global impacts on the main grains and we should continue to rely on this science to guide policy decisions”, Lobell, the lead study author, says in a press release.
He adds that there may be “blind spots” on specialised crops, such as coffee, cocoa, oranges and olives, which “don’t have as much modelling” as key commodity crops, noting:
“All these have been seeing supply challenges and price increases. These matter less for food security, but may be more eye-catching for consumers who might not otherwise care about climate change.”
Q&A with Jason Pruet
by Kyle Dickman in Los Alamos National Laboratory…For a variety of reasons, government support for big science has been eroding since then. Now, AI is starting to feel like the next great foundation for scientific progress. Big companies are spending billions on large machines, but the buy-in costs of working at the frontiers of AI are so high that no university has the exascale-class machines needed to run the latest AI models. We’re at a place now where we, meaning the government, can revitalize that pact by investing in the infrastructure to study AI for the public good.
The impunity of the unscathed: Risk, elite security, and the rage of MAGA populism
by Nils Gilman in Small Precautions…MAGA, in its rawest form, embodies the fury of those who feel that the burden of these risks has been disproportionately offloaded onto them, while the beneficiaries of the modern system — the “elites” — remain largely untouched. Consider the climate change debate: for many in the MAGA base, the imposition of green policies is perceived as a direct attack on their livelihoods, a demand by scientific and intellectual elites that they make personal sacrifices for a problem they feel they did not create (and which may not even exist, according to many of them) and which are not a burden for those advocating for the changes.
More in this tag
Jul
06
2023
Global polycrisis: The causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement
by Dr. Michael Lawrence at The Cascade Institute….. In this framework, a global crisis arises when one or more fast-moving trigger events combines with...
Sep
15
2025
Bioregional coordination: Sacred work in a time between worlds
by Benjamin Life in Omniharmonic…Start small. Start where you are. Start with what you have. But start. Because the infrastructure for life-affirming governance...
Sep
15
2025
Reframing the future
by Patrick Dowd of The Long Now Foundation…The practice of reframing how we think about time has been woven into Long Now’s DNA since our inception, and yet...
Sep
12
2025
Resilience science must-knows: A road to action for decision-makers
by the Global Resilience Partnership…This is more than a report—it’s a movement to ensure resilience and adaptation science translates into action and impact. It...
Aug
19
2025
Resilience revisited 014: Beyond the binary of “Resilience is Resistance” – Imagining resilience as oscillation
by Tamzin Ractliffe on LinkedIn…Here’s the challenge this powerful formulation reveals: existing power structures are also extraordinarily resilient at...
Aug
01
2025
The world economy is on the brink of epochal change
by Mark Blyth in The Atlantic…Capitalism’s operating system is due for a major upgrade. How that turns out depends on enormously consequential political...
Jul
31
2025
Why is ChatGPT telling people to email me?
by Kashmir Hill in The New York Times…reporter who writes about A.I. finds her work is catching on — with the Chatbot she often writes about.
Jul
30
2025
Dimensions of the Great Turning
from The Work That Reconnects Network,,,In the Work That Reconnects we uplift and celebrate the story of the Great Turning, the essential shift to a way of living and...
Jul
29
2025
Rethinking resilience
by Alene Dawson in John Templeton Foundation News…”One way to think about resilience is the ability to recover from or successfully manage obstacles,...
Jul
28
2025
Donella meadows revisited
by Donella Meadows with Calvin Po in Future Observatory Journal… In this previously unpublished text, the renowned systems thinker sets out a vision for...
Jul
25
2025
Texan stoicism provides comfort, and excuses, after the flood
by J. David Goodman in The New York Times…Texans often draw on the idea of their own self-reliance during times of adversity. Gov. Greg Abbott has used it to...