The likely collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) would change the British climate dramatically. CC-licensed photo by I Bird 2 on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Cold comfort. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought • The Guardian
Damian Carrington:
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The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas.
The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system and was already known to be at its weakest for 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis. Scientists spotted warning signs of a tipping point in 2021 and know that the Amoc has collapsed in the Earth’s past.
Climate scientists use dozens of different computer models to assess the future climate. However, for the complex Amoc system, these produce widely varying results, ranging from some that indicate no further slowdown by 2100 to those suggesting a huge deceleration of about 65%, even when carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning are gradually cut to net zero.
…The Amoc is a major part of the global climate system and brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. A collapse would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50-100cm to already rising sea levels around the Atlantic.
…[Prof Stefan] Rahmstorf [at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany], who has studied the Amoc for 35 years, has said a collapse must be avoided “at all costs”. “I argued this when we thought the chance of an Amoc shutdown was maybe 5%, and even then we were saying that risk is too high, given the massive impacts. Now it looks like it’s more than 50%. The most dramatic and drastic climate changes we see in the last 100,000 years of Earth history have been when the Amoc switched to a different state.”
The Amoc is slowing because air temperatures are rising rapidly in the Arctic because of global heating. That means the ocean cools more slowly there. Warmer water is less dense and therefore sinks into the depths more slowly. This slowing allows more rainfall to accumulate in the salty surface waters, also making it less dense, and further slowing the sinking and forming an Amoc feedback loop.
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Carbon removal industry reels as Microsoft retreats • The New York Times
David Gelles:
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Over the last several years, Microsoft almost single-handedly established the market for carbon dioxide removal technologies, a nascent field that aims to scrub the planet-warming gas from the atmosphere to counter climate change.
But now, Microsoft is stepping back from the industry it helped create, telling some companies that it is pausing future purchases of carbon removal credits, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The news was first reported by Heatmap.
The development could be a major blow to the hundreds of startups developing carbon removal technologies, which have raised more than $5bn in recent years.
Though the field is in its infancy and hundreds of companies are pursuing different strategies, proponents of the technology say that because there is so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it’s not enough to reduce emissions; excess amounts also have to be removed to stave off the worst consequences of global warming.
Melanie Nakagawa, Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer, said the company’s carbon removal program had not ended.
“Our decarbonization approach combines reduction, removal and efficiency, and carbon removal is one piece of that equation,” she said in a statement. “At times we may adjust the pace or volume of our carbon removal procurement as we continue to refine our approach toward sustainability goals.”
Microsoft was one of the first big companies to make an ambitious climate pledge. In 2020, the company said it intended to remove “all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975.”
But as big tech companies, including Microsoft, have raced to build data centres for artificial intelligence, their emissions have increased in recent years, making it harder to achieve those goals.
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Expect Apple to water down its climate statements too, and Google, and Amazon, and Facebook, and.. The problem is always that the planet doesn’t take immediate action. It bides its time. Though the many carbon-removing schemes have always looked hopelessly optimistic. Trying to remove a few hundred parts per million of a not-very-reactive gas is a huge challenge in chemistry, physics and thermodynamics.
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Bosses say AI boosts productivity – workers say they’re drowning in ‘workslop’ • The Guardian
Ramin Skibba:
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Ken, a copywriter for a large, Miami-based cybersecurity firm, used to enjoy his job. But then the “workslop” started piling up.
Workslop is an unintended consequence of the AI boom. It’s what happens when employees use AI to quickly generate work that seems polished – at least superficially – but is in fact so flawed or inaccurate that it needs to be heavily corrected, cleaned up or even completely redone after it’s passed on to colleagues.
For Ken, the problem started after his company’s CEO laid off several of his colleagues and mandated that remaining workers use AI chatbots, saying it would boost their productivity. While initial drafts were a breeze to create, Ken and his co-workers had to spend more time rewriting, correcting errors and resolving disagreements between each other’s chatbots than if they had never used AI at all.
“Quality decreased significantly, time to produce a piece of content increased significantly and, most importantly, morale decreased,” said the copywriter, who spoke under a pseudonym for fear of losing his job. “Everything got a whole lot worse once they rolled out AI.” Ken said the company’s executives shifted the blame to staff when they pushed back about AI-fueled productivity decreases.
Ken’s experience reflects an emerging divide between employees and their leaders when it comes to AI: a recent survey of 5,000 white-collar US workers found that 40% of non-managers say AI saves them no time at all at work, while 92% of high-level executives say it makes them more productive.
So what’s causing this workslop deluge? The answer is more complex than being simply a case of workers cutting corners. The real driving force connects back to the C-suite.
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How surprising that it’s people looking to cut costs who are creating the problems that mean the costs they cut aren’t cut at all.
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Man used AI to make false statements to shut down London nightclub, police say • The Guardian
Helena Horton and Rob Davies:
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A businessman has pleaded guilty to making false statements in order to shut down a nightclub, which police believe were generated using AI.
A Metropolitan police source said the use of AI to generate letters by complainants who do not exist is a growing issue.
Aldo d’Aponte, 47, the CEO of Arbitrage Group Properties, pleaded guilty to writing two letters, supposedly by his neighbours, objecting to the reopening of Heaven nightclub, which temporarily closed after a rape allegation against one of its security guards.
D’Aponte was given a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay £85 costs and a £26 victim surcharge.
Heaven, an LGBTQ nightclub in central London had its licence suspended in November 2024 after a 19-year-old woman accused a bouncer of rape. It was allowed to reopen with enhanced welfare and security policies after a council hearing held a month later. The worker was later found not guilty of the alleged offence.
During the council hearing, council officials received letters, sent via an encrypted email address, all of which were detailed in their complaints about the nightclub.
Philip Kolvin KC, a planning lawyer, decided to investigate the letters pro bono, because while acting for the nightclub during the licence suspension his suspicions were aroused by the unusual character of the objection to the nightclub reopening.
When the letters were put through an AI detection generator they were identified as almost certainly written using artificial intelligence.
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“A growing issue”. Perhaps we’re going to shift back to people filing their objections in person at council offices. Email was nice, but in the age of AI, it’s over.
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Marvel, DC and Planet of the Apes actor forced to sell house as “middle class actors forced out of Hollywood” • Variety
William Earl:
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Kirk Acevedo, a working actor who has appeared in series for Marvel (“Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”) and DC (“Arrow”) and in movies such as “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” and “Insidious: The Last Key,” gave a stark breakdown of the difficulty of being a middle-class actor since the pandemic.
Acevedo appeared on the March 23 episode of Ryan M. Perez’s podcast “An Actor Despairs” and spoke about how Hollywood’s “middle class” has been “squeezed out.”
“2021 comes, and I’m up for some TV shows; it just goes one way, this way, and that would have saved me. That would’ve saved me. That doesn’t work, and I keep coming in second place, and the reality is second place, you’re the first one to lose.” he said. “So, I went from working non-stop, to now I got to sell my house. I got to sell my house, and everyone’s going through this. I have so many friends, people you know, actors you know, that had to sell their houses.”
…Acevedo also broke down how recurring television roles that might seem to pay well can’t cover many lifestyles once expenses are removed.
“Let’s say you do 10 guest spots,” he said. “That’s $100,000, right? You have an agent and manager. So, we take 20% out. That’s $80,000. We got taxes, too … $45,000. Let’s say your rent is … let’s go on the low side, we won’t even go on the high side, say $3,000. That’s pretty low. That’s $36,000. Can you survive off of 10 episodes? You could if you’re just starting out.”
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In the past, actors (and others) got “residuals” from repeat showings of TV episodes they’d been in; streaming services killed that, replacing them with one-off payments. That creates tax and cashflow problems for actors. It’s a tough business already, but if the middle class of actors get squeezed out, who replaces them?
And now..
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Inside Doug Liman’s $70m AI movie starring Gal Gadot and Casey Affleck • The Wrap
Emily Zemler:
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A $70m movie about the mysterious creator of Bitcoin quietly wrapped principal photography in London last month in a gray box that could have passed for a storage facility.
On the surface, it’s a pretty standard feature — Doug Liman directing a cast that includes Gal Gadot, Pete Davidson, Casey Affleck and Isla Fisher in a globe-trotting thriller about the search for the identity of the person who invented the decentralized cryptocurrency.
Except for one thing: “Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi” is described as the first fully-generated, studio-quality AI feature film.
Acme AI & FX — founded by Ryan and Matt Kavanaugh, Garrett Grant and Lawrence Grey — produced the independent feature, which was shot entirely on a custom-built soundstage over 20 days, using AI to make what would have traditionally cost $300m, according to the film’s producers.
TheWrap got exclusive access to the set of the movie — a large, drab room with a few props and basic set dressings, looking more like a stage for a one-act play than a film set. In place of finished backgrounds were giant walls with X’s on them, to be filled in by AI in post-production. Also missing: a traditional lighting system. Large overhead lamps brightly lit the entire set, but the usual trappings of a lighting department were nowhere to be seen. Again, the lighting will be filled in during post-production.
…It’s something that drew Liman, the boundary-pushing director behind “The Bourne Identity,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” and “Edge of Tomorrow,” to the project.
“We approached this film and this company with the ethical approach of making sure that every crew member is sustained and accounted for in the process,” Grant said. “It wasn’t left for a computer to interpret — we were the ones guiding it. And nothing beats the human being as far as creative ingenuity and craftsmanship. That’s how we built the company and this process with this film.”
…“We decided to use AI very early on,” Kavanaugh told TheWrap during one of two visits to the set in March. “We budgeted out what it would be to do it practically and it was over $300 million. It has about 200 distinct locations, from Antarctica to Antigua to Vegas, which is obviously unproducible. We realized we could bring down the cost by utilizing some of the AI tools out there.”
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The post-production is certainly going to be doing some heavy lifting there. For reference, The Bourne Identity had a production budget of $60m in 2002, which at normal inflation would be $110m today. (Probably more.) Will the actors get usable residuals, though?
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Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution • Nature
Ewen Callaway:
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The biggest ever study of ancient human DNA shows that human evolution has accelerated over the past 10,000 years.
Researchers identified hundreds of gene variants that evolved through natural selection in ancient people from western Eurasia — Europe and the Middle East — after the dawn of agriculture. Changes to these genes had widespread ramifications for the health of present-day populations.
“We are seeing dramatic changes,” says David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who co-led the 15 April Nature study. However, some researchers remain unconvinced by the scale of the findings and results that show natural selection has affected gene variants underlying highly complex traits, such as mental illness and cognition.
Homo sapiens emerged in Africa around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, before expanding to nearly every corner of the planet. The advent of farming introduced new foods, pathogens and other challenges, as people began living in larger groups and in closer proximity to animals.
Humans clearly adapted to these upheavals. But genomic studies of present-day and ancient people have uncovered only a smattering of genetic signs of natural selection, particularly for advantageous genes that have surged to high frequency, or ones that have proved to be harmful and become less common.
The best‑known example of such “directional selection” is a genetic variant that maintains production of the lactose enzyme into adulthood, which enables many people of European ancestry to digest milk throughout their lives.
… A variant that confers HIV resistance in modern humans became more common between 6,000 and 2,000 years ago, possibly because it also protected against plague-causing bacteria.
Evolution has also shaped the appearance of Europeans. Akbari and Reich’s team found ten variants linked to lighter skin tone that had signals of selection. A cause of male pattern baldness became much less common over the past 7,000 years, contributing to an estimated 1–2% decrease in the prevalence of baldness.
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This goes against our normal expectation – that agriculture slowed down evolution. Quite the opposite.
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Universe is expanding faster than expected: Scientists struggle to explain cosmic acceleration – Times of India
Times of India:
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Not only is the Universe expanding, but its expansion is actually happening at a speed higher than was thought possible until recently. For many years now, physicists have been trying to establish the speed of galaxy movement through the Hubble constant. But the different measurement results have posed a dilemma for modern physics, and it seems like there is an inconsistency somewhere within our universe. The problem that lies before physicists is commonly known as the “Hubble tension” problem, and, despite recent discoveries and more detailed observations, it still lacks explanation. This unresolved discrepancy may point toward new physics beyond our current understanding of cosmology.
The expanding Universe theory was first observed in 1929 by Edwin Hubble; however, recent findings have uncovered something else. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) from the early Universe seems to show a lower expansion rate compared to observations made from nearby galaxies, which showed a higher expansion rate.
As cited in the article, ‘A Comprehensive Measurement of the Local Value of the Hubble Constant with 1 km s−1 Mpc−1 Uncertainty from the Hubble Space Telescope and the SH0ES Team‘ in Astrophysics, Hubble Space Telescope astronomers reported that:
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“The Hubble Constant is now determined with an uncertainty of less than 2.4%, yet the discrepancy with early-Universe predictions persists”
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This difference is not insignificant. In fact, the difference between these results is so significant that scientists cannot explain the disparity through observational error alone.
“Dark Energy” is one such phenomenon, which, according to popular belief, comprises around 68% of the universe and causes the acceleration of the expanding universe.
But the exact nature of this entity is still a mystery. Dark energy’s true nature can be said to be the most important open question in cosmology.
Dark energy could very well be time-dependent. This theory would solve the puzzle concerning different expansion rates. It has even been suggested that this calls for some physics yet unknown.
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We’ve figured out the size of the proton. But meanwhile the universe is getting away from us.
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CEO of bitcoin firm championed by Nigel Farage leaves company • The Guardian
Helena Horton:
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The chief executive of a bitcoin company promoted by Nigel Farage has left his role as the venture attempts to convince investors that it is going to deliver “long-term value” for shareholders.
Stack BTC was launched to much fanfare in March this year, with Farage and former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng becoming some of its first shareholders. The company says its founder is Paul Withers, a friend of the Reform UK leader who owns a gold bullion company that Farage has also promoted, Direct Bullion.
However, Stack BTC is a renamed company which was founded in 2021 by Jai Patel, whose departure as chief executive was announced on Wednesday. The company, formerly called Kasei Investment Holdings, invested in cryptocurrency and a range of other digital assets. It aimed to encourage over-45s to invest their money in cryptocurrencies.
Kasei was liquidated last year. It launched with $6.1m (£4.5m) in share capital, but on liquidation returned approximately $3.4m (£2.5m) to shareholders and removed most of the board. The company said at the time it failed because of “a combination of adverse market conditions, volatility in digital asset valuations and an inability to raise further capital” which “left the company without the critical mass or funding necessary to execute its investment objectives”.
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For those unfamiliar with him, Kwasi Karteng was the chancellor to Liz Truss, who holds the record for the shortest tenure as British PM. Together they announced a plan to cut taxes without any explanation of where funding would come from; Karteng then made it worse by going on TV at the weekend and saying the cuts were only the start. He was then fired remotely by Truss as she desperately tried to shore up her premiership. (Didn’t work.)
Anyhow, crypto for the over-45s! A group most likely in the UK to have huge amounts of money in the form of their houses, an asset that is both solid and has increased in value faster than almost anything over the past 30 years. Should be a doddle persuading them.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 