On March 18, Russia formally annexed the Ukrainian province of Crimea. Russian troops without official markings occupied the Crimean peninsula earlier in the month after Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country. The Crimean peninsula was part of Russia before it was transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954. Crimea is important to Russia in part because the city of Sevastopol is home to Russia’s only naval base that is completely free of ice in the winter. Crimea also played an important role in Russian political and religious history.
Ukraine mobilized its own military while Russia massed troops along the eastern border of Ukraine. Demonstrators for and against unification with Russia clashed in the eastern part of Ukraine, where Russian speakers are a majority. The US accused Russia of violating the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which both countries agreed to respect “the Independence and Sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” in exchange for Ukraine’s dismantling its nuclear arsenal and acceding to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
President Obama told the Nuclear Security Summit at The Hague that the US wouldn’t respond militarily unless Russia attacked NATO member countries. But NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said events in Crimea would “have an impact on the thinking about arms control, including nuclear policies”. Russia held military exercises—which it said had been planned months before—to increase its readiness to launch a large-scale nuclear offensive. A significant exchange of nuclear weapons would not only devastate both countries, but could also put enough soot into the atmosphere to trigger a nuclear winter and cause a global famine. And elevated tensions increase the risk that false alarms could lead to inadvertent nuclear war. “A century ago, two groups of countries whose real common interests vastly outweighed their differences allowed themselves to be drawn into a European war in which more than 10 million of their people died and every country suffered irreparable losses,” Anatol Lieven wrote. “In the name of those dead, every sane and responsible citizen in the West, Russia, and Ukraine itself should now urge caution and restraint on the part of their respective leaders.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report on the risks of climate change found that the risk of “severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts” will go up as the global temperature rises. Reducing the rate and amount of temperature change would reduce the risks. If the temperature rises 4°C (7.2°F) or more above pre-industrial levels—which recent studies suggest will happen before the end of the century if we stay on the current path—the risk of severe damage to unique and threatened ecosystems, widespread species extinction, and significantly reduced global and regional food security will be “high to very high”. The report also found that poor and otherwise marginalized people are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change. “The science linking human activities to climate change is analogous to the science linking smoking to lung and cardiovascular diseases,” The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) wrote in its own separate report. The report warned that if we don’t take action, we risk “pushing our climate system toward abrupt, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible changes with highly damaging impacts.”
Roughly 1,000 people were displaced in March by unusually high tides in the Marshall Islands. An Environmental Research Letters study found that 7% of the world’s population lives in areas that will be under water if the global average temperature rises 3°C (5.4°F). As many as 12 countries could lose half their current land area to rising sea levels. Nearly one-fifth of cultural world heritage sites—including the Statue of Liberty, the Tower of London, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa—are in areas that would be likely to be affected.
The Future of Humanity Institute’s Stuart Armstrong told The Next Web that the development of superhuman artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the few things that could cause the extinction of the human race. Armstrong wrote in his recent book that
Over the course of a generation or two from the first creation of AI—or potentially much sooner—the world will come to resemble whatever the AI is programmed to prefer. And humans will likely be powerless to stop it.
Armstrong told The Next Web that we need to find some way to program AI with formal rules that would prevent it from interfering with a good life for humans. Ben Goertzel commented that we won’t be able to design such rules from philosophical first principles. In order to develop a theory of how AI evolves, Goertzel said, we need to run empirical studies of early-stage artificial intelligence systems.
An outbreak of the Zaire strain of the Ebola hemorrhagic fever virus in Guinea killed 80 people. Eleven cases of Ebola were confirmed in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, which has a population of around 2 million. Laboratory tests also confirmed two cases in Liberia. It is the first time Ebola has been found in West African countries in nearly 20 years. Guinea banned the sale and consumption of bats—a popular local food—which are thought to be the main source of the disease. The Zaire strain of Ebola is one of the most deadly viruses known and has killed as many as 90% of the people who have contracted it in previous outbreaks. Ebola is highly infectious and can spread rapidly after humans make contact with infected animals. UNICEF said that health workers in Guinea—at least 8 of whom have already died in the outbreak—urgently need protective gear like masks, gloves, and aprons. “In Guinea, a country with a weak medical infrastructure,” UNICEF representative Mohammed Ag Ayoya said, “an outbreak like this can be devastating.”
Researchers revived a 30,000-year-old virus from the Siberian tundra. According to a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the virus belongs to a recently discovered family of giant viruses that infect amoebas. The paper warned that viruses that infect humans and animals could reemerge when the permafrost melts. “People will go there, they will settle there, and they will start mining and drilling,” the paper’s lead author Jean-Michel Claverie said. “Human activities are going to perturb layers that have been dormant for 3 million years and may contain viruses.”
This news summary was put together in collaboration with Anthropocene. Thanks to Seth Baum, Kaitlin Butler, and Grant Wilson for help compiling the news.
For last month’s news summary, please see GCR News Summary February 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 Embassy in Kyiv
