Category Climate crisis

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How to live a good life in difficult times: Yuval Noah Harari, Rory Stewart and Maria Ressa in conversation

From superintelligent AI to the climate and democracy, three leading thinkers discuss how to navigate the future

What happens when an internationally bestselling historian, a Nobel peace prize-winning journalist and a former politician get together to discuss the state of the world, and where we’re heading? Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli medieval and military historian best known for his panoramic surveys of human history, including Sapiens, Homo Deus and, most recently, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Maria Ressa, joint winner of the Nobel peace prize, is a Filipino and American journalist who co-founded the news website Rappler. And Rory Stewart is a British academic and former Conservative MP, writer and co-host of The Rest Is Politics podcast. Their conversation ranged over the rise of AI, the crisis in democracy and the prospect of a Trump-Putin wedding, but began by considering a question central to all of their work: how to live a good life in an increasingly fragmented and fragile world?

YNH People have been arguing about this for thousands of years. The main contribution of modern liberalism and democracy was to try to agree to disagree; that different people can have very different concepts of what a good life is, and they can still live together in the same society, agreeing on some very basic rules of conduct. And the challenge was always that people who think they have the absolute answer to what is a good life try to impose it on others, partly because, unfortunately for many ideologies, an inherent part of the good life is attempting to make everybody live it. And even more unfortunately, in many cases, it seems that it is easier to impose it on others than to do it ourselves. If we take the original crusade in medieval Christian Europe, you have all these people who can’t live a Christian life of modesty and compassion and love your neighbour, but they are able to travel thousands of kilometres to kill people and try to force them to live according to these principles. And what we are witnessing in the world right now is more of the same.

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If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies review – how AI could kill us all

If machines become superintelligent we’re toast, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. Should we believe them?

What if I told you I could stop you worrying about climate change, and all you had to do was read one book? Great, you’d say, until I mentioned that the reason you’d stop worrying was because the book says our species only has a few years before it’s wiped out by superintelligent AI anyway.

We don’t know what form this extinction will take exactly – perhaps an energy-hungry AI will let the millions of fusion power stations it has built run hot, boiling the oceans. Maybe it will want to reconfigure the atoms in our bodies into something more useful. There are many possibilities, almost all of them bad, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and who knows which will come true. But just as you can predict that an ice cube dropped into hot water will melt without knowing where any of its individual molecules will end up, you can be sure an AI that’s smarter than a human being will kill us all, somehow.

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Clearing the Air by Hannah Ritchie review – practical climate optimism

A data scientist rebuts 50 arguments against green technology with lively pragmatism and authority

What are we going to do about the climate crisis? As extreme weather events become the new normal, we still hear from “sceptics” who think the energy transition is unnecessary, a massive leftwing plot. Hannah Ritchie, a global development data scientist and the author of Not the End of the World, has followed that work up with a book that addresses 50 objections to the adoption of greener technology.

To start with, we need some tough love. It’s time, Ritchie insists, to abandon the slogan “Keep 1.5 alive”, referring to an aspiration to limit global warming to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. “The 1.5C target is dead,” she announces flatly. “The public – who are repeatedly told that 1.5C is still within reach – will start to lose trust when we pass that target.”

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Look up: five hopeful novels about the climate crisis

Can fiction make us more optimistic about tackling Earth’s environmental emergency? These eco-focused books have hope at their core

‘Can literature be a tool to encourage something better – creating eco-topia on the page, so it might be imagined off it?” asks the novelist Sarah Hall in this weekend’s Guardian magazine. Climate fiction – or “cli-fi” – continues to grow as a genre in its own right; the first Climate fiction prize was awarded this year. And while the roots of environmental fiction are in apocalypse and despair, these five writers are moving beyond dystopia to hopeful possibilities.

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Blue sky thinking: why we need positive climate novels

Environmental fiction is booming – but can it move beyond dystopia to a brighter vision of the future?

Nearly a quarter of a century ago when I published my first novel, Haweswater, about the impact of dam-building in north-west England, nature writing felt quite different, at least for me. Several landmark novels about climate apocalypse and survivalism had been published, including Z for Zachariah by Robert C O’Brien and The Death of Grass by John Christopher, but there was no imperative to write about such things. These stories involved anomalistic catastrophes – a mutated virus, nuclear war – and they were very bleak. They resonated but also seemed unusual. At the other end of the scale, Ben Elton’s Stark had comedically outlined the nature of oligarchic greed, resource consumption, and the ruination we were hurtling towards, while the Bezos and Musk equivalents could head off-world – not quite so funny now.

The public knew about climate issues, though terminology often stressed them individually – ozone depletion, greenhouse warming, desertification, coral bleaching – rather than total Earth systems breakdown. Disparate, visionary science fictions didn’t indicate a genre movement yet. There was a luxury of choice regarding stories related to nature – no elephant in the room (or polar bear), if you didn’t tackle climate-change concerns.

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