The Global Challenges Foundation published a report on the risks human civilization faces (GCRI’s Seth Baum and Robert de Neufville contributed content to the report). The report identified 12 different areas of risk “that for all practical purposes can be called infinite”. These are nuclear war, global pandemics, climate change, ecological catastrophe, asteroid impacts, super-volcano eruptions, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, bad global governance, the collapse of the global system, and other still unknown dangers. While the report does not estimate the total risk of catastrophe, Stuart Armstrong, one of the lead authors of the report, said that “putting the risk of extinction [over the next 100 years] below 5 percent would be wildly overconfident”.
Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany agreed to a ceasefire in Ukraine monitored by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Ukraine agreed to constitutional reform that would allow the disputed regions greater local control. All sides agreed to grant amnesty to people involved in the fighting and to withdraw heavy weapons and foreign troops from Ukrainian territory. But two weeks after the agreement US Secretary of State John Kerry threatened new sanctions against Russia, saying that “neither Russia nor the forces it is supporting have come close to complying with their commitments”.
British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said at the Munich Security Conference that Russia may have “lowered the threshold” for using nuclear weapons. Fallon also said that there has been an increase in Russian military activity around the airspace and borders of NATO countries. Russia’s military doctrine would allow it to use nuclear weapons in response to either a nuclear strike or an attack that could threaten the state’s existence. The BBC also reported that there has been an increase in talk about the possibility of a nuclear war with the West in the Russian media. Julio Godoy noted that NATO and Russia are both modernizing their nuclear arsenals. Both sides, Godoy said, are “more than armed to their teeth with nuclear weapons”.
The last two satellites in Russia’s ballistic early warning system went offline. Technical delays have delayed the launch of Russia’s new “Tundra” early warning satellites until at least July. That leaves Russia dependent on its ground-based radars to detect incoming missiles. Ground-based radars on their own may be unreliable as an early warning system. In the 1995 “Norwegian rocket incident” Russian forces considered a retaliatory launch after a radar crew tracked a scientific rocket that looked like it could be a missile launched from a US nuclear submarine.
“There are now ten times fewer people diagnosed with Ebola each week than there were in September last year,” Special Envoy on Ebola David Nabarro told the UN General Assembly. But Nabarro warned that eliminating new infections completely may be “the hardest part of the response”. Although transmission of the disease has fallen to very low levels in Liberia, progress in Sierra Leone and Guinea remains uneven. A Wellcome Trust report stressed the continued importance of accelerating the development of Ebola vaccines. “Despite falling infection rates in West Africa,” the report said, “the risk that the current Ebola outbreak may not be brought completely under control remains.”
An opinion piece in mBio argues that it is possible Ebola could spread through droplets propelled through the air:
It is very likely that at least some degree of Ebola virus transmission currently occurs via infectious aerosols generated from the gastrointestinal tract, the respiratory tract, or medical procedures, although this has been difficult to definitively demonstrate or rule out, since those exposed to infectious aerosols also are most likely to be in close proximity to and in direct contact with an infected case.
The paper did note that true “airborne” transmission of the disease—in which an infectious agent remains suspended in the air for a substantial time or across a long distance—is still unlikely. “The West Africa Ebola epidemic surprised even the most astute infectious disease experts in the global public health community,” the report said. “We should not assume that Ebola viruses are not capable of surprising us again at some point in the future.”
According to a classified memo released under the Freedom of Information Act, scientists at a top-secret military research unit in England have been studying whether a non-state actor like al-Qaida or ISIS could use the Ebola virus for bioterrorism. While an Ebola attack would probably cause a panic, Ebola might not make a very effective bioweapon because the virus has a long incubation time and spreads largely through contact with symptomatic individuals. “Could terrorists go to West Africa, get infected, then come back and sit on The Tube?” bioterror expert Fillippa Lentzos asked. “Sure, but they’re not going to be functional for very long. They’re going to be very sick and you’ll see that. So they would have only a small window in which to operate. And in a country with a developed public health system like the UK, there would be plenty of chances to clamp down on an outbreak.”
The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) called for more research on the use of geoengineering to fight climate change. The NAS study looked at two different geoengineering strategies: 1) removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; and 2) increasing the amount of sunlight the planet reflects back into space. The panel that conducted the study found that removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would pose relatively few risks, although it would be expensive and might take a long time to have an effect. Reflecting solar radiation back into space would likely be cheap and relatively effective, the panel said, but would be so risky that it would be “irrational and irresponsible” to try except as a last-ditch effort to prevent a global catastrophe.
Rutgers Climate scientist Alan Robock wrote in The Guardian that the CIA asked him in 2011 whether it would possible to detect attempts by other countries to control the climate. Robock wondered whether the CIA was also interested in whether it would be possible for the US to control the climate without other countries knowing. Using geoengineering as a weapon is prohibited by the UN Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques. But Robock said that since climate change is a threat both to the US and entire world, it should not be a surprise the CIA is interested in geoengineering. “I don’t want to be working on geoengineering,” Robock added. “But I don’t yet see the political will in the world to address global warming.”
This news summary was put together in collaboration with Anthropocene. Thanks to Tony Barrett, Seth Baum, Kaitlin Butler, and Grant Wilson for help compiling the news.
For last month’s news summary, please see GCR News Summary January 2014.
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).
Image credit: US Department of State
