English references

Collapse has historically benefited the 99%. […] That’s the amazing conclusion of Luke Kemp, author of Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse.  Luke is a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and has spent the past five years studying the collapse of civilisations throughout history. He joins me to explain his research, detailing the difference between complex, collective civilisations and what he calls “Goliaths”, massive centralising forces by which a small group of individuals extract wealth from the rest through domination and the threat of violence. Today, he says, we live in a global Goliath.

The long read: Churning quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at the rate we are going could lead the planet to another Great Dying

As corporate interest in ocean carbon removal grows, researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are testing the safety and effectiveness of one such technique in the Gulf of Maine.

The unspoken truth about humanity's frightening future.

Larry Page. The name instantly evokes Google. He co-founded the search engine that reshaped how we explore the web. Now, whispers suggest he’s pivoting to AI manufacturing.Two publications lit the match: Tech in Asia and The Hindu. Both allege Page quietly built a team of robotics and data-savvy wizards. The result? A stealthy startup aimed at merging artificial intelligence with factory floors. The company’s identity remains hidden. Yet the words “AI manufacturing” capture attention. Manufacturing is massive, vital, and often riddled with inefficiencies. If Page wants to optimize it, the outcome could be game-changing.

Have you ever thought about what would happen if all life in the ocean disappeared? A recent study explores this extreme scenario to understand how ocean biology shapes the past, present, and future climate. The ocean plays a critical role in regulating Earth's climate. It is a massive carbon store that absorbs about 25% of human-caused emissions and thus helps maintain a relatively low CO2 level in the atmosphere. But what would happen if all marine life—from the tiniest plankton to the largest whales—disappeared? A recent study delves into this extreme scenario to uncover the crucial role that ocean biology plays in mitigating climate change.

Previous health impact assessments of temperature-related mortality in Europe indicated that the mortality burden attributable to cold is much larger than for heat. Questions remain as to whether climate change can result in a net decrease in temperature-related mortality. In this study, we estimated how climate change could affect future heat-related and cold-related mortality in 854 European urban areas, under several climate, demographic and adaptation scenarios. We showed that, with no adaptation to heat, the increase in heat-related deaths consistently exceeds any decrease in cold-related deaths across all considered scenarios in Europe. Under the lowest mitigation and adaptation scenario (SSP3-7.0), we estimate a net death burden due to climate change increasing by 49.9% and cumulating 2,345,410 (95% confidence interval = 327,603 to 4,775,853) climate change-related deaths between 2015 and 2099. This net effect would remain positive even under high adaptation scenarios, whereby a risk attenuation of 50%

NASA satellites discovered that Earth's surface has lost enough water to empty Lake Erie two and a half times since 2015. And the problem could be here to stay.

Scientists may have to rethink the relationship between the ocean’s circulation and its long-term capacity to store carbon, new research from MIT suggests. As the ocean gets weaker, it could release more carbon from the deep ocean into the atmosphere — rather than less, as some have predicted.

Harry is a U.K.-based senior staff writer at Live Science. He studied marine biology at the University of Exeter before training to become a journalist. He covers a wide range of topics including space exploration, planetary science, space weather, climate change, animal behavior, evolution and paleontology. His feature on the upcoming solar maximum was shortlisted in the "top scoop" category at the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) Awards for Excellence in 2023. 

With up to three billion people expected to be displaced by climate change by 2100, does there need to be a shift in the way we think about national borders, asks Gaia Vince?

UN says a global ‘backlash’ against climate action is being stoked by fossil fuel companies

The floods displaced more than 80,000 people, led to over 150,000 being injured and, on the 29th of May, to 169 fatalities with 44 people still missing (Governo do Estado de Rio Grande do Sul, 2024). Essential services were also disrupted, leaving 418,200 households without electricity and over a million consumer units without water. Dozens of municipalities lost telephone and internet services.

Mass extinctions during the past 500 million y rapidly removed branches from the phylogenetic tree of life and required millions of years for evolution to generate functional replacements for the extinct (EX) organisms. Here we show, by examining 5,400 vertebrate genera (excluding fishes) comprising 34,600 species, that 73 genera became EX since 1500 AD. Beyond any doubt, the human-driven sixth mass extinction is more severe than previously assessed and is rapidly accelerating. The current generic extinction rates are 35 times higher than expected background rates prevailing in the last million years under the absence of human impacts. The genera lost in the last five centuries would have taken some 18,000 y to vanish in the absence of human beings. Current generic extinction rates will likely greatly accelerate in the next few decades due to drivers accompanying the growth and consumption of the human enterprise such as habitat destruction, illegal trade, and climate disruption. If all now-endangered genera

Population ecologist William Rees, with the University of British Columbia's School of Community and Regional Planning, is reminding denizens of Earth that the planet can only support so many people. In his paper published in the journal World, he points out that many models have been developed over the years that show that only a certain number of animals (such as rats) can live in a given environment—they all show that at some point, a population correction occurs.

Unearthly skies and unhealthy air resulting from Canadian wildfires may persist for days.

abs_empty

An increase in the pace at which sea levels are rising threatens “a mass exodus of entire populations on a biblical scale”, the UN secretary general has warned. The climate crisis is causing sea levels to rise faster than for 3,000 years, bringing a “torrent of trouble” to almost a billion people, from London to Los Angeles and Bangkok to Buenos Aires, António Guterres said on Tuesday. Some nations could cease to exist, drowned under the waves, he said.

The team led by Robert Cowie, a research professor at the University of Hawaii, argues that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species was too focused on the loss of bird and mammal species — and not focused enough on invertebrates, a much larger group.

The sediments preserved in these cliffs in Devon were laid down in the early Triassic period, just after the greatest mass extinction in the history of multicellular life that brought the Permian period to an end 252m years ago. Around 90% of species died, and fish and four-footed animals were more or less exterminated between 30 degrees north of the equator and 40 degrees south.