GCR News Summary April 2016

Post Date May 03, 2016
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Alpha Centauri and Southern Cross image courtesy of Claus Madsen/ESO, CC BY 4.0

John Kerry became the first US Secretary of State to visit the site of the US nuclear attack on Hiroshima. Kerry wrote in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial guest book that the site was “a stark, harsh, compelling reminder not only of our obligation to end the threat of nuclear weapons, but to rededicate all our effort to avoid war itself.” William J. Broad and David E. Sanger wrote in The New York Times …

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GCR News Summary March 2016

Post Date April 04, 2016
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Go game image courtesy of Jaro Larnnos under a Creative Commons license

Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo computer program beat 9-dan professional go player Lee Se-dol 4-1 in a five-game match. Lee has won 18 international titles and is widely regarded as one of the best Go players in the world. AlphaGo made a number of decisive moves that the human players found completely surprising and “beautiful”. The South Korean Go Association granted AlphaGo an honorary 9-dan ranking for its “sincere efforts” to master the game at a level approaching …

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GCR News Summary December 2015

Post Date January 05, 2016
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March on the Paris climate talks image courtesy of John Englart under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license (the image has been cropped)

Nearly 200 countries agreed in Paris to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to keep the average global temperature “well below” 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels. The Paris Agreement was intended to reduce human carbon emissions below the amount that can be absorbed by natural carbon sinks by the second half of the century. National targets under the agreement are not enough to keep the temperature increase below 2°C, …

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GCR News Summary November 2015

Post Date December 03, 2015
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Chinese power plant image courtesy of Tobias Brox under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (the image has been cropped)

Turkish F-16s shot down a Russian Su-24 fighter-bomber near the border between Turkey and Syria. Some reports indicate that the Russian plane’s pilots were shot and possibly killed as they parachuted from their damaged plane. It was the first time a NATO member shot down a Russian military plane since the end of the Cold War. Turkey claimed the Russian plane violated its airspace for five minutes and …

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GCR News Summary September 2015

Post Date September 30, 2015
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Svalbard seed vault image courtesy of Erlend Bjørtvedt under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (image has been cropped)

In a joint statement ahead of the December Paris Climate Conference, US president Barack Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping said they would “move ahead decisively to implement domestic climate policies, to strengthen bilateral coordination and cooperation, and to promote sustainable development and the transition to green, low-carbon, and climate-resilient economies”. China announced that in 2017 it would establish a national carbon market covering the iron and steel, nonferrous metals, power …

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GCR News Summary July 2015

Post Date August 04, 2015
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Arecibo Observatory image courtesy of H. Schweiker/WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF

Iran reached an agreement with the P5+1 countries—the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany—to limit Iran’s nuclear program. The deal requires Iran to reduce its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98% for 15 years. Iran also agreed to cut the number of centrifuges it currently uses to enrich uranium roughly in half and to enrich uranium to no more than 3.7% U-235 (the isotope that powers both nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons). Nuclear …

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GCR News Summary June 2015

Post Date June 29, 2015
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Solar flare image courtesy of NASA/SDO under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license (image has been cropped)

Pope Francis issued an encyclical saying the natural environment is “the patrimony of all humanity” and calling for a “new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet”. Pope Francis warned that we are warming the planet, depleting its reserves of clean water, and destroying its biodiversity:

Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation …

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GCR News Summary April 2015

Post Date May 12, 2015
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US Secretary of State John Kerry addressing the Non-Proliferation Review Conference image courtesy of the US State Department

Angela Kane, the UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, warned that the nuclear powers’ lack of meaningful progress toward disarmament could undermine the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). US Secretary of State John Kerry said at the NPT Review Conference that as of September, 2014 the US had 4,717 nuclear warheads—87 fewer than the year before. Kerry said that the US planned to accelerate dismantling its approximately 2,500 retired warheads by …

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GCR News Summary March 2015

Post Date April 03, 2015
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EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Federica Mogherini and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in Lausanne image courtesy of the US State Department

Iran and the P5+1 countries—the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany—worked past a March 31 deadline to reach a framework agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. Iran agreed to limit its uranium-enrichment program to producing low-enriched uranium with 6,104 older-generation centrifuges at a single site in Natanz. Iran also agreed to give up 97% of its existing stockpile of enriched uranium and …

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GCR News Summary February 2015

Post Date March 05, 2015
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US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva image courtesy of the US Department of State

The Global Challenges Foundation published a report on the risks human civilization faces (GCRI’s Seth Baum and Robert de Neufville contributed content to the report). The report identified 12 different areas of risk “that for all practical purposes can be called infinite”. These are nuclear war, global pandemics, climate change, ecological catastrophe, asteroid impacts, super-volcano eruptions, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, bad global governance, the …

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