May 2013 Newsletter

Post Date May 13, 2013
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Dear friends,

If there’s one thing we know from the study of risk, it’s that sudden, unexpected events can change the game. So it was for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the subject of a new paper by GCRI Deputy Director Grant Wilson. So too it is right now for GCRI and our parent organization Blue Marble Space, which recently lost its 501c3 tax status. For Deepwater Horizon, the result was several deaths plus massive environmental and economic damage. For GCRI, it means we have to …

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GCR News Summary March 2013

Post Date March 26, 2013
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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: Intermittent Stratospheric Geoengineering Induced By Societal Collapse

Post Date March 05, 2013
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View the paper “Double Catastrophe: Intermittent Stratospheric Geoengineering Induced By Societal Collapse”

To date, most research on global catastrophes analyzes one risk at a time. A better approach uses systems analysis to capture the many important interactions between risks. This paper analyzes a global catastrophe scenario involving climate change, geoengineering, and another catastrophe. We call the scenario “double catastrophe”. 

Climate change and stratospheric geoengineering.The rising temperatures of global climate change pose great risks to humanity and ecosystems. Climate change can be slowed by reducing emissions of greenhouse …

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Double Catastrophe Article At Scientific American

Post Date February 06, 2013
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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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January 2013 Newsletter

Post Date January 10, 2013
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Dear friends,

Happy new year. 2012 was GCRI’s first full year in existence. It was a great year for us. We grew from three people to ten, launched a new website, publications, resources for the GCR community, and more. Now, having survived the December 2012 apocalypse, we look forward to an even better 2013.

We’re sending out the January newsletter a few days late because we wanted to include two new papers that were recently accepted for publication – one on geoengineering and one on nuclear war. Each paper demonstrates a key theme that …

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New Paper: Geoengineering Double Catastrophe

Post Date January 04, 2013
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Category emerging technologies, environmental change, publications

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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