GCR News Summary May 2013

Sunset from Mauna Loa Observatory image courtesy of NOAA/Eric Johnson.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration reported that for the first time the daily mean atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory was higher than 400 parts per million. The concentration of CO2 has grown at an increasing rate since the observatory began taking measurements in 1958. The concentration of CO2 is generally believed to be 40% higher than it was before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It …

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GCR News Summary April 2013

You can help us compile future news posts by putting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).

So far 115 people have been diagnosed with a strain of bird flu known as H7N9 that was previously unknown in humans. Twenty-three of the people known to have contracted the disease have already died. The discovery of a 4-year-old boy who has the virus but who has no apparent …

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GCR News Summary March 2013

This post marks the first of what we hope will be an ongoing series of global catastrophic risk news summaries. You can help by posting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send them via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).

In Science, British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees argued that we need to take existential risk more seriously. Foreign Policy did a profile of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, which Rees helped …

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Double Catastrophe Article At Scientific American

Another quick FYI: I have a new article up at Scientific American blogs, When global catastrophes collide: The climate engineering double catastrophe. This article summarizes my recent journal article with Tim Maher and Jacob Haqq-Misra, Double catastrophe: Intermittent stratospheric geoengineering induced by societal collapse.

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New Paper: Geoengineering Double Catastrophe

GCRI has a new academic paper out. Double catastrophe: Intermittent stratospheric geoengineering induced by societal collapse, by Seth Baum, Timothy Maher, and Jacob Haqq-Misra, has been accepted for publication in Environment, Systems and Decisions.

The paper discusses a global catastrophe scenario involving climate change, geoengineering, and a separate catastrophe. In the scenario, stratospheric geoengineering is conducted to cool the warming temperatures associated with climate change. Then, an initial catastrophe separate from climate change prevents humanity from continuing the geoengineering, causing a rapid temperature increase. The initial …

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Meet The Team Tuesdays: Tim Maher

This post is part of a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members. It’s running one day late this week. Yesterday my attention was fixed on Hurricane Sandy, which still loomed over my apartment.

It turns out that there are not many people working on both climate change policy and contact with extraterrestrials. But here at GCRI and our parent organization Blue Marble Space, well, yes, we do both, sometimes in the same study. So Tim must have been pretty surprised when he found us via web searches …

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