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Dan Drollette writes:
We absolutely, positively, must tackle climate change speedily. Or as the authors of this article put it: "By 'speed,' we mean measures—including regulatory ones—that can begin within two-to-three years, be substantially implemented in five-to-10 years, and produce a climate response within the next decade or two." (Quick aside: one of the authors, Mario Molina, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1995, for his work on holes in the ozone layer.)
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Lasrick writes:
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has published a terrific piece in their March issue from digital forensic researchers who have developed an AI early warning system to monitor how manipulated content online can lead, in some cases, to violent conflict and societal instability. The article has been made open-access, so freely available.
The authors are collaborating with those in war and peace studies with the specific goal of helping prevent violence due to malignant disinformation in particular places and at particular times – places where there is a strong likelihood of violence breaking out.
Another goal is to look at the impacts of coordinated online disinformation on electoral politics. They write: "We uncovered a trove of disturbing material related to the Indonesian election. A key question for policy makers is how this information should be used. With respect to a policy agenda, there are several immediate use cases for an AI early warning system for violence that can benefit the international security community."
These AI tools "can help combat the psychological warfare of targeted misinformation campaigns on the internet." Great read.
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Lasrick writes:
Earth and especially its oceans have been accumulating such a vast amount of heat due to human-caused global warming that it’s difficult to comprehend-- most people have little if any sense what 10 zettajoules per year really means. Climate scientist Dana Nuccitelli goes through the analogies to help people get a sense of what's happening: Five atomic bombs (Hiros) per second. Or two Hurricane Sandys. Or "The heat accumulating in Earth’s oceans over the past 25 years is also equivalent to every person now on Earth running 35 standard household microwave ovens nonstop during Justin Bieber’s entire lifetime." Whatever analogy you use, Nuccitelli points out that "So far, many governments appear more inclined to keep increasing fossil fuel extraction than taking the necessary steps to slow global heating."
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Lasrick writes:
Last week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its iconic Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest the clock has ever been to the metaphorical "doomsday." Besides nuclear weapons risks and climate change, the clock is now keeping track of information warfare, which "hold[s] the potential to create economic, social, and military chaos, increasing the possibility of misunderstandings or provocations that could lead to war, and fomenting public confusion that leads to inaction on serious issues facing the planet."
Right on cue, Matt Field posts an article describing how disinformation about the coronavirus is being used to create fear and loathing of protestors in India who have been rallying against an amendment to the country’s citizenship law. "Elsewhere, biosecurity experts debunked a theory, circulating online and in the Washington Times newspaper, that a Chinese government-linked lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had caused the outbreak, the latest in a long line of conspiracy theories linking outbreaks to various governments."
As Field points out, "the world will likely see more fake news purveyors trying to take advantage of what the World Health Organization has declared a global health emergency."
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Lasrick writes:
Scientists with only the pursuit of truth in mind have proven—through meticulous radio-carbon dating and NO TASTING AT ALL—that half the bottles of expensive aged Scotch whisky they tested weren’t as old and valuable as purported.
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kindagetit writes:
Facebook has a policy of deleting Instagram content by people supportive of the Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a US drone strike this month. The company says it's deleting posts on Instagram to comply with US sanctions, including those against Soleimani's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. But a major US Supreme Court case from 2010 dealt with a similar issue, and the court was clear that speech, even supportive speech, by someone independent of a sanctioned terrorist group did not violate laws against providing "material support" to groups on the State Department's Foreign Terrorist Organization list. Legal scholar Laurence Tribe weighs in.
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Lasrick writes:
On the surface, who could disagree with quashing the idea of supposed killer robots? Dr. Larry Lewis, who spearheaded the first data-based approach to protecting civilians in conflict, wants us to look a bit closer.
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Lasrick writes:
A likely US drone strike near the Baghdad International Airport late last week that killed top Iranian military leader Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Although the circumstances are not entirely clear, it appears a US MQ-9 Reaper launched the strike against the general; the attack was the latest chapter in the long story of drone wars in Iraq. Like neighboring Syria, Iraq today is a hotbed of unmanned aerial activity. Dan Gettinger, the founder of the Center for the Study of the Drone, has a great primer here on military drones in the country, including a rundown of who's operating them and the types of drone technology that is proliferating there.
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Lasrick writes:
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a year-end compilation of their best writing in disruptive technology. Editor Matt Field pulls together stories from the explosion at Russia's VECTOR Institute, where one of the world's stores of smallpox is housed, to a proposal from US deterrence experts to let AI control the nuclear launch button. It's quite a collection.
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Lasrick writes:
Like many of the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls, Andrew Yang has an ambitious plan to wean America off fossil fuels. Unlike many of the other candidates, however, a key piece of his plan involves harnessing nuclear power— in particular, thorium. According to Yang, thorium is “superior to uranium on many levels.” But Yang isn’t alone; thorium boosters have been extolling its supposed virtues for years. Do the claims about thorium actually hold up? Nicholas R. Brown of the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Tennessee and John Krzyzaniak of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists fact-check five claims Yang has made about thorium.
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Lasrick writes:
In a stunning change, India has been aggressively pivoting away from coal-fired power plants and towards electricity generated by solar, wind, and hydroelectric power. "The reasons for this change are complex and interlocking, but one aspect in particular seems to stand out: The price for solar electricity has been in freefall, to levels so low they were once thought impossible." This is a piece of exceptionally good news, as it follows on the heels of the general chaos and weakening of goals that seem to have come out of last week's UN climate conference in Madrid, where the United States, Australia, and Brazil pushed for carbon loopholes, sending the conference into overtime and diluting the call for countries to strengthen their commitments under the Paris Agreement.
António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, had been pushing for the world's biggest emitters to do much more. Guterres took to Twitter over the weekend: "I am disappointed with the results of #COP25. The international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation & finance to tackle the climate crisis. But we must not give up, and I will not give up."
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Lasrick writes:
How can the average person on the street—who is not a climate scientist, and more than likely has never met a climate scientist—readily discern the facts of science from the seemingly reasonable arguments of nonfactual climate denialism? Try "Cranky Uncle," the smartphone application that uses the latest findings in a branch of psychological research called inoculation theory to offer a possible solution to climate misinformation. The game was developed by John Cook, founder of Skeptical Science, to help users spot the fallacies of climate denial. He explains in this piece the science behind the development of the game and why it works.
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Lasrick writes:
You may remember the explosion at VECTOR, once a center of Soviet biological warfare research. Filippa Lentzos, senior research fellow jointly appointed in the Departments of War Studies and of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London, just posted an update on what happened after the explosion. Her research focuses on biological threats and on the security and governance of emerging technologies in the life sciences, and she's been covering the accident since it first happened in September.
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Dan Drollette writes:
The incident should serve as yet another wake-up call that the nuclear power industry needs to take cybersecurity more seriously.
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Lasrick writes:
Two Canadian climate researchers had both calculated their carbon budgets and long believed that a single transatlantic flight would blow their annual carbon budget. Then they spoke to a mathematics colleague, who helped them crunch the numbers.
