La veille

Le nombre de recherches diminue sur Google. Les internautes préfèrent poser leurs questions à ChatGPT, ce qui réduit le renvoi vers les sites d’informations et donc leurs revenus. La qualité de l’information proposée par les IA est sujette à caution et sans information fiable, la démocratie est en danger.

Si l’on sait que les intelligences artificielles génératives proposent des réponses erronées, inventent et mentent parfois, la question se pose de savoir si elles sont responsables des contenus qu’elles proposent, et en particulier lorsqu’elles poussent un adolescent au suicide.

A première vue, vous pourrez probablement penser que l’auteur de ces lignes est soit en train de traverser un épisode de déprime passagère nourri par un doomscrolling trop intensif, soit qu’il s’aventure bien loin de ses terrains d’expertise habituels. Les deux seraient inquiétants, cela va sans dire. Pourtant, je souhaite que nous considérions un instant … Continuer la lecture de Et si la troisième guerre mondiale avait déjà commencé ? →

Atmospheric soot loadings from nuclear weapon detonation would cause disruptions to the Earth’s climate, limiting terrestrial and aquatic food production. Here, we use climate, crop and fishery models to estimate the impacts arising from six scenarios of stratospheric soot injection, predicting the total food calories available in each nation post-war after stored food is consumed. In quantifying impacts away from target areas, we demonstrate that soot injections larger than 5 Tg would lead to mass food shortages, and livestock and aquatic food production would be unable to compensate for reduced crop output, in almost all countries. Adaptation measures such as food waste reduction would have limited impact on increasing available calories. We estimate more than 2 billion people could die from nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and more than 5 billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia—underlining the importance of global cooperation in preventing nuclear war.

February 28, 2022. Human-induced climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature and affecting the lives of billions of people around the world, despite efforts to reduce the risks. People and ecosystems least able to cope are being hardest hit, said scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released today.

Five times in the last 500m years, more than three-fourths of marine animal species perished in mass extinctions. Each of these events is associated with a major disruption of Earth’s carbon cycle. How such catastrophes occur remains mysterious. But recent research increasingly points to the possibility that the Earth system – that is, life and the environment – may experience a cascade of disruptions when stressed beyond a tipping point.

We also asked about organisations’ risk response and approaches to planning. Our survey results support a picture of UK organisations that are taking steps to prepare for similar extreme weather, with the top three actions of organisations affected being capacity training or some form of knowledge transfer, investment in new technologies, and making an insurance claim. While just 16% of organisations reported having an adaptation plan, a considerable proportion (37%) said their organisation was planning to develop one.

We are about to go through the most profound shift in the climate debate in 20 years. The result will be the end of the gas industry’s hope of being a transition fuel, a brutal market disruption to the agriculture and livestock industries and the arrival of the climate emergency into public consciousness. This will all be driven by the acceptance of methane as the critical response to the climate emergency.

In 2018, a climate paper by Jem Bendell went viral, being downloaded over a million times. It helped to launch a worldwide movement of people seeking to reduce harm in the face of societal disruption and collapse. In this interview for Facing Future TV, Jem explains the concept of Deep Adaptation, how he developed the idea, what it means in practice, what he says to critics, and what his new book on the topic is about.

We develop roadmaps to transform the all-purpose energy infrastructures (electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, industry, agriculture/forestry/fishing) of 139 countries to ones powered by wind, water, and sunlight (WWS). The roadmaps envision 80% conversion by 2030 and 100% by 2050. WWS not only replaces business-as-usual (BAU) power, but also reduces it ∼42.5% because the work: energy ratio of WWS electricity exceeds that of combustion (23.0%), WWS requires no mining, transporting, or processing of fuels (12.6%), and WWS end-use efficiency is assumed to exceed that of BAU (6.9%). Converting may create ∼24.3 million more permanent, full-time jobs than jobs lost. It may avoid ∼4.6 million/year premature air-pollution deaths today and ∼3.5 million/year in 2050; ∼$22.8 trillion/year (12.7 ¢/kWh-BAU-all-energy) in 2050 air-pollution costs; and ∼$28.5 trillion/year (15.8 ¢/kWh-BAU-all-energy) in 2050 climate costs. Transitioning should also stabilize energy prices because fuel costs are zero, reduce power d