Happy Apocalypse Day

Post Date December 21, 2012
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Category outreach

On behalf of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, I would like to wish you all a happy apocalypse day. As you most likely already know, today, 21 December 2012, is the day that some people have misinterpreted as being the day that the world ends. While the skies are very cloudy here in New York City, I am otherwise pleased to report that the world has not actually ended.

While the threat of apocalypse today could be easily dismissed, the overall ongoing threat of global catastrophe …

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New Time Zones Resource

Post Date December 20, 2012
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Category resources

GCRI is pleased to announce the publication of its newest resource for the global catastrophic risk community, a time zone coordination guide. This resource is helpful for anyone who needs to coordinate activities across multiple time zones around the world, whether for global catastrophic risk or for other purposes.

Global catastrophic risk is of course an inherently global issue. Likewise addressing it benefits from contributions from around the world. GCRI is increasingly active in facilitating a global conversation about global catastrophic risk. Sometimes these conversations are …

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December 2012 Newsletter

Post Date December 10, 2012
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Recently, GCRI released its monthly email newsletter. The main updates are reprinted in the blog below.  To sign up for our newsletter, click here.

GCRI Releases Organization Directory Resource

As part of GCRI’s efforts to map the talent available for global catastrophic risk, we have compiled a directory of GCR organizations. The directory lists 117 organizations, with descriptive annotations for each. Further details are available here. This is one of several resources GCRI is developing in support of the global catastrophic risk community, as is the blogs & newsfeeds resource we released last …

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GCRI Welcomes Research Assistant Kaitlin Butler

Post Date December 05, 2012
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Category environmental change, law & policy, new affiliate

We’re pleased to announce our newest affiliate, Research Assistant Kaitlin Butler. Here’s her bio from the GCRI People page.

Kaitlin is a Research Assistant for the Consortium for Climate Risks in the Urban Northeast, a NOAA Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments project. Kaitlin holds an M.A. in Climate and Society from Columbia University (2011) and a B.A. in Sociology from Vassar College (2007). As a GCRI Research Assistant, Kaitlin contributes to GCRI research on environmental change, law & policy, and psychology & communications.

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Katherine Thompson Gives GCRI Public Lecture On Psychology Of Uncertainty

Post Date December 05, 2012
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Category online lectures, psychology & communications, uncertainty

In GCRI’s first public lecture (26 November 2012), Katherine Thompson spoke on the psychology of uncertainty in a talk titled “What We Think About When We Think About Probability: How Our Experience Affects the Way We Perceive the Risk of Rare Events”. Katherine is a PhD student in Psychology at Columbia University and researcher with Columbia’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, a group I’m also affiliated with. She’s been working on, among other things, the psychology of disaster preparedness [1].

Global catastrophic risk is fundamentally …

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GCRI Crowdfunding Campaign: International Treaties For Emerging Technologies

Post Date December 04, 2012
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Category emerging technologies

Grant Wilson and Seth Baum (myself) have just launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign Preventing Technological Disaster Through International Treaties. The campaign is raising funds to write a new paper extending Grant’s recent publication Minimizing global catastrophic and existential risks from emerging technologies through international law.

Crowdfunding is raising funds via large numbers of people. Websites like Indiegogo let people post projects for funding, and then anyone interested can contribute funds. Crowdfunding has been used to raise often quite large amounts of funding for a wide range …

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New Organization Directory Resource

Post Date December 04, 2012
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GCRI is pleased to announce the publication of its newest resource for the global catastrophic risk community, a directory of GCR organizations. The resource features 117 organizations, each with an annotation describing the organization.

The organizations listed here work on many different aspects of GCR. The organizations cover many specific GCRs and many approaches to addressing the risks. There are also many types of organizations, including think tanks, university research groups, government agencies, and private foundations. The organizations come from many different countries, though most are …

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GCRI Nuclear War Group Discusses Nuclear Winter

Post Date December 03, 2012
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Category discussion groups, nuclear war

On Thursday 8 November 2012, GCRI hosted the third of a series of discussions among a group of nuclear war scholars. This discussion focused on the topic of nuclear winter.

Meeting participants included Martin Hellman of Stanford, Benoit Pelopidas of Bristol, James Scouras of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, George Michael of the U.S. Air Force’s Air War College, and Tony Barret, Seth Baum, Jacob Haqq-Misra, and Tim Maher, all of GCRI.

The group discussed several aspects of nuclear winter. A key question is how …

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New Publication: Teaching Astrobiology In A Sustainability Course, By Seth Baum

Post Date December 03, 2012
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Category astrobiology, publications

GCRI now has its second academic publication: Teaching astrobiology in a sustainability course by Seth Baum (i.e. me, your humble GCRI blogger).

This paper is based on Geog 30, an introductory undergraduate sustainability course I taught at Penn State. The basic idea is that while sustainability education usually focuses on sustainability on Earth, much can be learned from considering life in the universe. (Astrobiology is the study of life in the universe.) This includes a direct connection to GCR: In order to sustain Earth-originating life beyond …

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Meet The Team Tuesdays: Grant Wilson

Post Date November 27, 2012
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Category emerging technologies, environmental change, law & policy, meet the team Tuesdays

This post is part of a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members.

This past June, I was getting ready for a trip overseas when I get an email from a recent law school graduate interested in global catastrophic risk and looking for career suggestions. I was immediately intrigued. Legal thinking has an important role to play in GCR, but not many people in law gravitate to GCR. (See discussion in Arden Rowell’s Meet The Team interview.) Grant was so interested in GCR that he wanted career advice …

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