2023 smashes record for world’s hottest year by huge margin

Rapid reduction in fossil fuel burning urgently needed to preserve liveable conditions, say scientists, as climate damage deepens

Aftermath of a wildfire caused by a deadly heatwave near the city of Santa Juana, Chile, in February 2023. Photograph: Pablo Hidalgo/EPA
Aftermath of a wildfire caused by a deadly heatwave near the city of Santa Juana, Chile, in February 2023. Photograph: Pablo Hidalgo/EPA

2023 “smashed” the record for the hottest year by a huge margin, providing “dramatic testimony” of how much warmer and more dangerous today’s climate is from the cooler one in which human civilization developed.

Link to article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/09/2023-record-world-hottest-climate-fossil-fuel

How Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ reached millions online

Videos citing the document had been viewed far less than many TikTok posts. Then a journalist made a compilation and posted it to X, causing attention to the manifesto to explode.

Osama bin Laden in 1998. (Mazhar Ali Khan/AP) (Mazhar Ali Khan/AP)
Osama bin Laden in 1998. (Mazhar Ali Khan/AP) (Mazhar Ali Khan/AP)

On Monday, a TikTok user with 371 followers, using the screen name “_monix2,” posted a video where she read parts of Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” in which the late terrorist leader said his killings of nearly 3,000 Americans in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had been justified by the United States’ support of Israel’s “occupation” of the Palestinian territories.

LINK: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2023/11/16/guardian-osama-bin-laden-letter-to-america/

“We May Have Doomed Humanity” – Eric Weinstein

Chris and Eric Weinstein explore the ramifications of sidelining physics. Why does Eric Weinstein believe it’s crucial to prioritize physics? How does Eric Weinstein attribute physics decline to events in the ’80s? What are Eric Weinstein’s suggestions for restoring interplanetary physics to prominence?

Are We Facing the Reality of Civilizational Collapse?

The Hottest Days in 100,000 Years. How Long Do We Have, and What Does “Collapse” Mean for a Civilization?

The Hottest Days in 100,000 Years. How Long Do We Have, and What Does “Collapse” Mean for a Civilization?

 

The hottest series of days in 100,000 years. The world, for its part, looked away. Nobody much noticed. Us, humankind, going through this historic, epochal change. Things will never be the same again — not even if, somehow, the temperature “goes back down,” because the planet, of course, will by then have been altered, profoundly.

Those of us who are paying attention, though, might have begun to wonder: what about this thing called “civilizational collapse”? How close is it? What does it really mean?

LINK: https://eand.co/are-we-facing-the-reality-of-civilizational-collapse-18d2817cf85d

‘I didn’t see him show up’: Ex-Googlers blast ‘AI godfather’ Geoffrey Hinton’s silence on fired AI experts

Former colleagues say the machine learning pioneer failed to support them when they warned that AI could harm marginalized people.Former colleagues say the machine learning pioneer failed to support them when they warned that AI could harm marginalized people.

A Computer Generated Swatting Service Is Causing Havoc Across America

A Computer Generated Swatting Service Is Causing Havoc Across America

As the U.S. deals with a nationwide swatting wave, Motherboard has traced much of the activity to a particular swatting-as-a-service account on Telegram. Torswats uses synthesized voices to pressure law enforcement to specific locations.

LINK: https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7z8be/torswats-computer-generated-ai-voice-swatting