GCR News Summary October 2015

Post Date November 02, 2015
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Banjarbaru wildfire image courtesy of Amirin

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists published former US airman John Bordne’s first-hand account of his commanding officer’s refusal to launch nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis. On October 28, 1962, Bordne says the secret US missile site in Okinawa where he served received orders to launch missiles at four targets. Bordne said that even though the launch orders were initially confirmed the officer in charge suspected the orders were a mistake both because the US forces were not at DEFCON1 …

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The Far Future Argument for Confronting Catastrophic Threats to Humanity: Practical Significance and Alternatives

Post Date October 14, 2015
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View the paper “The Far Future Argument for Confronting Catastrophic Threats to Humanity: Practical Significance and Alternatives”

Certain major global catastrophes could cause permanent harm to humanity. A large body of scholarship makes a moral argument for confronting the threat of these catastrophes based on a concern for far future generations. The far future can be defined as anything beyond the next several millennia, including millions or billions of years from now, or even longer. Given the moral principle of caring about everyone equally, including people …

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Confronting the Threat of Nuclear Winter

Post Date October 14, 2015
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Category nuclear war, publications

View the paper “Confronting the Threat of Nuclear Winter”

Nuclear weapons explosions send large quantities of smoke high into the atmosphere. The smoke blocks incoming sunlight and destroys ozone, causing major environmental harms worldwide, including cold temperatures, reduced precipitation, and increased ultraviolet radiation. In technical terms, nuclear winter refers to cooling such that winter-like temperatures occur during summer, as caused by nuclear war. This paper uses the term nuclear winter more generally to refer to the full set of global environmental harms from nuclear war. The …

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Isolated Refuges for Surviving Global Catastrophes

Post Date October 14, 2015
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View the paper “Isolated Refuges for Surviving Global Catastrophes”

The long-term success of human civilization is of immense importance because of the huge number of lives at stake, in particular the lives of countless future generations. A catastrophe that causes permanent harm to human civilization would be a similarly immense loss. Some measures taken pre-catastrophe could help people survive and carry humanity into the future. This paper analyzes how refuges could keep a small population alive through a range of global catastrophe scenarios. The paper considers …

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Introduction: Confronting Future Catastrophic Threats to Humanity

Post Date October 14, 2015
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View the paper “Introduction: Confronting Future Catastrophic Threats to Humanity”

Humanity faces a range of threats to its viability as a civilization and its very survival. These catastrophic threats include natural disasters such as supervolcano eruptions and large asteroid collisions as well as disasters caused by human activity such as nuclear war and global warming. The threats are diverse, but their would-be result is the same: the collapse of global human civilization or even human extinction.

These diverse threats are increasingly studied as one integrated field, using …

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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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September Newsletter: AI, Nuclear War, and News Projects

Post Date September 15, 2015
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Dear friends,

I’m delighted to announce three new funded projects. Two of them are for risk modeling, on artificial intelligence and nuclear war. These follow directly from our established nuclear war and emerging technologies research projects. The third is for covering current events across the breadth of global catastrophic risk topics. This follows directly from our news summaries. It is an honor to be recognized for our work and to have the opportunity to expand it. Please stay tuned as these projects unfold.

As always, thank you …

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New Global Challenges Foundation Projects

Post Date September 14, 2015
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Category announcement, nuclear war

GCRI has two new funded projects with the Global Challenges Foundation, a philanthropic foundation based in Stockholm.

The first project is a quarterly report of everything going on in the world of global catastrophic risks. The reports will be an expanded version of our monthly news summaries, with some new features and an emphasis on work going on around the world to reduce the risks.

The second project is a risk analysis of nuclear war. Prior GCRI nuclear war research modeled the probability of specific nuclear war …

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GCR News Summary August 2015

Post Date September 02, 2015
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Korean Demilitarized Zone fence image courtesy of Sangmun Shin/Republic of Korea Ministry of National Defense under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license (image has been cropped)

North and South Korea exchanged artillery fire after two South Korean soldiers were injured by land mines. South Korea claimed North Korea was responsible for placing the mines near a South Korean guard post in the Demilitarized Zone separating the two countries. South Korea responded by using loudspeakers to broadcast propaganda across the border. The Centre for North Korea-US Peace’s Kim Myong-chol, who some …

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Confronting Future Catastrophic Threats to Humanity

Post Date September 01, 2015
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Confronting future catastrophic threats to humanity is a special issue of the journal Futures co-edited by Bruce Tonn and myself. It contains 11 original articles discussing a range of issues on catastrophic threats. It is part of ongoing attention to catastrophic threats in Futures.

Relative to prior collections, such as the 2008 book Global Catastrophic Risks and the 2009 special issue of Futures Human Extinction, this special issue aims to contribute more of a practical focus to the study of catastrophic threats to humanity, in order to better guide humanity’s …

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