By Lawrence Torcello29 April 2017 (The Guardian) – Most of us have wondered about the human context of past crimes against humanity: why didn’t more people intervene? How could so many pretend not to know? To be sure, crimes against humanity are not always easy to identify while they unfold. We need some time to […]
By Mary Bowerman4 May 2017 (USA Today) – It’s no secret that physicist Stephen Hawking thinks humans are running out of time on planet Earth. In a new BBC documentary, Hawking will test his theory that humankind must colonize another planet or perish in the next 100 years. The documentary Stephen Hawking: Expedition New Earth, […]
10 February 2017 (Stockholm Resilience Centre) – A paper recently published in the journal The Anthropocene Review puts the current rate of change of Earth’s life support system in the context of the last 4-billion-year evolution of the biosphere. The paper, which is written by the centre’s Owen Gaffney and senior research fellow Will Steffen, […]
25 January 2017 (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) –Editor’s note: Founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear […]
26 January 2017 (AFP) – Comments by US President Donald Trump and a “darkening global security landscape” have made the world less safe, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned Thursday, moving its symbolic “Doomsday Clock” 30 seconds closer to midnight. The clock — which serves as a metaphor for how close humanity is […]
Fire burns at night in the refugee camp in Calais, France, known as “the Jungle”, 26 October 2016. Photo: AP 22 January 2017 (Desdemona Despair) – For a long time, Desdemona has feared that when the effects of global warming become obvious to everyone, governments will shut down our Earth observation science, so that collectively, […]
31 December 2016 (Desdemona Despair) – The data don’t lie. Unfortunately, the antiscience forces of the incoming Trump administration clearly intend to defund vital government data collection programs for climate science and Earth observation. In the extreme case, they could wage a war on scientific expertise, by stripping empiricism out of America’s regulatory systems altogether. […]
25 December 2016 (Desdemona Despair) – Ten years ago today, Children of Men, the brilliant, dystopian science fiction film, debuted in the United States. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men portrays Britain in the year 2027 as the last bastion of civilization standing against the imminent extinction of the human species. In 2006, Cuarón […]
By Sudhin Thanawala26 January 2016 STANFORD, California (AP) – Rising tension between Russia and the U.S., North Korea’s recent nuclear test and a lack of aggressive steps to address climate change are putting the world under grave threat, scientists behind a “Doomsday Clock” that measures the likelihood of a global cataclysm said Tuesday. The Bulletin […]
The future of life on Earth? Stromatolites growing in Hamelin Pool Marine Nature Reserve, Shark Bay in Western Australia. By Jim Galasyn18 January 2016 (Desdemona Despair) – Humans are collecting more biogeophysical data than ever, leading to a potential paradox: are we finally getting the data we need to manage the world, only to find […]
