Jean-Pascal Van Ypersele

In 1999, two colonels in China’s People’s Liberation Army wrote a strategy piece called Unrestricted Warfare. It gives guidance on how China can defeat the United States and the West in general. The 228 pages are a surprisingly easy and entertaining read. They’re also illuminating.

A new study finds two persistent mental shortcuts—not ignorance—are why people keep overrating recycling and underrating flying less.

Imagine being told that your children cannot play outside because the grass and soil in your local area is so polluted that it endangers their health. You are not allowed to eat the eggs from the chickens in your garden because eating them could diminish your immune system and/or lead to certain types of cancer. No, this is not the plot of a dystopian novel these are very real consequences for people living in places that are severely polluted by PFAS. Also known as forever chemicals.

Study also finds high humidity means people in hundreds of cities are enduring their worst ever heat stress

The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately, as the city has reached a “point of no return” that will see it surrounded by the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a stark new study has concluded. Ongoing sea-level rise and the rampant erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up the New Orleans area within a few generations, with the new paper estimating the city “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century”.

Continued global heating could set irreversible course by triggering climate tipping points, but most people unaware

Scientists expect 41% of the projected global population to face the extremes, with ‘no part of the world’ immune

Perception, pattern-seeking, and the role of neurodivergence in a failing civilisation

I always say that models are not predictions; they are qualitative illustrations of what the future could be. But as the future gets closer to the present, models can start being seen as predictive tools. It is the weather/climate dichotomy, so aptly exploited to confuse matters by politically minded people in the discussion about climate. Right now, we are getting close to the point that we could forecast a collapse in the same way as we can forecast the trajectory of a tropical storm. So, you remember how “The Limits to Growth” generated a long term forecast in 1972. Here it is

The UK has announced much harsher rules for asylum seekers including the prospect of more deportations for those whose applications fail. The US is trebling the size of its deportation force. The EU is doubling its border budgets. And in the coming decades, hundreds of millions of people might be displaced by ecological changes.