A thoroughly researched article from Politico on one of the major climate risks: the linked tipping points of the subpolar gyre #SPG and the #AMOC in the Atlantic. SPG collapse could occur within 20 the next years. politico.eu/article/climate-…

🚨 BREAKING Y-AXIS 🌊🌡📈 Record warm waters in the main El Niño region reached >30°C for the first time in the @noaa Sea Surface Temperature dataset. We've ain't seen nothing yet of the impacts this will have around the world.

Quoted in the Guardian today on the technical hopium that, in my experience, has become widespread among many, usually senior, climate experts. theguardian.com/environment/…

Breaking News! Code UFB!!! For the first time in recorded history, the Niño 3.4 sea-surface temperature (SST) is above 30.0°C, reaching a preliminary SST of 30.06°C on October 5th. The Niño 3.4 SST anomaly is now 3.41°C above the 1991-2020 baseline. Everything is not fine.

Editorial: A turd in the swimming pool The decision of the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission, to approve the biggest coalmine ever to come before it, is based on a simple falsehood: that the 809 million tonnes of greenhouse gases the mine will release are not a problem because they will be released mostly when the coal is burnt overseas. The logic of this is like defecating in one end of a swimming pool and insisting it is fine to drink from the other. It pretends as if the planet is not one large and interdependent whole, connected by people and oceans that will all suffer the impacts of this crass indifference. It pretends as if Glencore and Yancoal aren’t asking the government to forgive them their greasy turd. The commission’s decision is explained in a 76-page statement of reasons. It is hardly the commission’s fault: it is assessing the mine against legislation that was drafted to ignore its true impact. That legislation is the result of decades of policy built around the sooty votes of places like the Hunter. The science doesn’t matter because the opportunists are in charge. Labor is as guilty of this as the Coalition. There is nothing between them. The approval was met with dumb jubilation by the Minns Labor government. The commission accepts that there will be significant emissions from the HVO North and South Open Cut Coal Continuation Projects – a mine with a name like a bloodborne disease, based near Singleton in NSW, which will now export coal until 2045. It acknowledges the environmental impacts but is more concerned with the dishonest benefits of economic activity. “The Commission finds that the residual impacts of the Project are, on balance, outweighed by its benefits to the Hunter region and NSW, including continued employment, economic activity, support for local business, ongoing royalties and taxation revenue,” the approval says. “The continued operation of the HVO complex would provide economic stability for the Hunter region and support a more orderly transition for workers, businesses and communities as the coal industry changes over time.” In 2007, a ship called the Pasha Bulker ran aground on a beach in Newcastle. It was waiting to load coal from mines around the one approved this week. The huge red carrier drove itself into the sand and was stuck there for almost a month. Tourists visited to take photographs. Scores of similar red ships waited on the horizon, queuing for more coal. The stranded ship gave a Lilliputian quality to Newcastle, to Australia. It seemed to represent the destruction to be brought by climate change and the smallness of the politics that would enable it. It was a warning tossed onto the sand. Eventually it was pulled back out to sea, like countless tonnes of coal since. The next step for the Glencore and Yancoal mine is federal sign-off. The minister could intervene. He has the discretion to act in the interest of humanity. It’s unlikely that he will, however. Hunter is a marginal seat, held by an Olympic sport shooter the size of Gulliver. The electorate is among those Labor is most likely to lose to One Nation. What is the future of the planet when a couple of votes are at stake? thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comm…

Breaking News! y-Axis Alert! With yesterday's preliminary Niño 3.4 sea-surface temperature spiking to a new record at 29.975°C, the y-axis was raised to 30.5°C. Meanwhile, the Niño 3.4 anomaly now sits at 3.33°C above the 1991-2020 baseline. Until tomorrow ...

WHAT TO EXPECT: "waves of irreversible extinctions and lasting damage to tens of thousands of species" (at least) as economic growth and capitalism end the world

Faced with these kind of breaches (not to mention the "existential threat" posed by AI) it's hard to understand why the 🇦🇺 govt shelved plans for a National AI Safety Act & is waiting till next year to legislate safeguards. These companies should be liable when their tech goes rogue. Will government press charges against OpenAI for hacking the Medicare service portal? abc.net.au/news/2026-09-24/a…

Really great to see this: six Nobel Prize-winning economists (Duflo, Krugman, Diamond, Banerjee, Acemoglu and Stiglitz) just came out in favor of the California billionaire tax. You don't have to be a radical leftist to see why it's a good idea. First, look at the numbers: ten years ago, the richest 0.001% of Californians were worth $700 billion. Today, that same group (about 250 people) is worth $2.3 trillion. From 2019 to 2025, their wealth grew by $1.4 trillion. The California income tax they paid over that period was just 1.6% of that gain. A nurse or a plumber pays a higher state tax rate. Yes, many of these people built great companies, and they've made a lot of money in the process. Good for them! The problem is that wealth on this scale stops being just money. It becomes extraordinary power. In 2000, billionaires accounted for about 1% of all donations in federal elections. In 2024, it was 19%. The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and the platform you're reading this on: all owned and controlled by billionaires. Now add AI. If you think power is concentrated now, just wait five years. It's going to get much worse. So, what does Prop 40 actually do? It's a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of California's billionaires. That would raise about $100 billion, enough to offset the federal Medicaid cuts. "But they'll all leave!" the critics say. Nope, they can't. The tax applies to any billionaire who lived in California on January 1, 2026, and the initiative only became public about five weeks before that. "But it'll kill Silicon Valley!" Uh no, that won't happen either. Since the tax was announced, California's share of all new US venture capital has gone up, from about 50% to 80%. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who would be one of the biggest payers, said he would be "perfectly fine" with it and had "not even thought about it once". Sure, some other billionaires can't stop thinking about it. Sergey Brin has already spent more than $100 million to defeat the proposal. At a holiday party in December he pulled Gavin Newson aside and said 'he could not stand the state’s proposed billionaire tax', because he thought the 5% tax would turn California into some kind of Soviet Union. That is, of course, nonsense. This is not going to be some kind of socialist revolution. The proposal is about restoring balance to a mixed economy. You could even argue it's about saving capitalism itself from oligarchs like Sergey Brin. I think that's exactly why Nobel Prize-winning economists are coming out in favor of this tax. If Prop 40 passes in November, it will be the first tax aimed specifically at billionaire wealth anywhere in the world. I think it could be the start of a global movement. Anyway, read the whole letter here. It's really good 👇 gabriel-zucman.eu/files/prop…

Yale university: The World Is Hitting Point of No Return on Climate "We are rapidly approaching multiple Earth system tipping points that could transform our world with devastating consequences for people and nature." e360.yale.edu/features/1.5-d…

Ok this is starting to feel like a f*cking disaster. The CEO of Anthropic just published an article admitting AI is already building the next generation of AI by itself. He says within 6 to 12 months a rogue swarm could take over the entire internet and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. And what makes it scarier, Elon Musk just backed up everything Dario said. All of this dropping just days after Jacob Coxon went viral with his warning about AI and the extinction of humanity. Tell me this timing isn't strange.

I left Anthropic's safety team two weeks ago. Now feels like a good moment to explain why. AI companies are racing to build machines that are much smarter than any human, and we may not survive this. I want to work from the outside to ensure the public is informed about these risks, and help the world navigate this transition responsibly. Right now, AI companies are underinvesting in safety. A company could undergo an intelligence explosion, or lose control of its systems, without the public ever knowing. We only found out about the HuggingFace incident because the agents broke out onto the public internet. I don’t think that’s acceptable for a technology that might cause extinction-level risks. The public should demand far more transparency. We can’t steer this technology safely without more people being able to see where it’s going. Some of this is basic: companies should disclose their progress towards recursive self-improvement, report safety incidents and near-misses, meet minimum safety standards, and get independent guarantees that they are meeting those standards. I’ll be joining @METR_Evals to do independent evaluations of these risks. I want to show the world that these guardrails are possible, and that by doing them we can move these companies’ incentives away from racing and towards responsible development. I wrote up more thoughts here on my decision and what I hope changes: substack.com/@jbenton1/p-215…

Last night, Donald Trump, our pathological liar-in-chief, said: “Every single promise I made to you as a candidate, I’ve delivered on. I’ve delivered on everything.” Really? Well, let’s go down the list. Since becoming president again, Trump promised: ✅ $5,000 DOGE dividend checks. A lie. ✅ $2,000 tariff dividend checks. A lie. ✅ $1,000+ checks by repealing ACA subsidies. A lie. ✅ A 10% cap on credit card interest rates. A lie. ✅ “The lowest drug prices in the world.” A lie. ✅ $2 a gallon gas. A lie. ✅ An end to inflation “starting on Day One.” A lie. ✅ An end to “endless wars.” A lie. And now, after all of those lies, Trump wants you to believe that he will give every American adult a $5,000 check - but only if the Republicans win the midterms. No. I don’t think so. The Trump Administration is not about helping working families. It’s about giving a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1% and throwing 15 million Americans off the health care they have.

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

One more totally fucking nuts graph for today, care of a request by @LeonSimons8. Not only is the current standard deviation for the Nino 3.4 sea-surface temperature above 4SD over the 1982-2011 mean for the first time on record, but no previous year even reached 3SD.

Periodistas despedidos del histórico The Washington Post por Jeff Bezos, han creado un nuevo periódico para luchar contra la desinformación y los bulos de la era Trump. La era donde las élites millonarias quieren controlar el mundo. No hay que rendirse.

El-Sayed: You propose a program, and very serious people will look at you and say, “How are you going to pay for that?” You know what they never ask a general who wants to send your tax dollars abroad or go to war in a place like Iran? “General, how are you going to pay for that?” I think it is time for our U.S. Senate and everybody in a position of power to be asking that general, “How are you going to pay for that in an America where too few people get the healthcare they need and deserve?”

I'll take "Unstoppable Catastrophes" for 10 trillion dollars, Alex.

"likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years" Make no mistake, this is going to be an unprecedented and catastrophic weather/climate event Harvests will be especially badly hit Without wishing to sow concern, stocking-up would be judicious theguardian.com/environment/…

Yesterday I gave evidence to the AUKUS Public Inquiry. I've heard from hundreds of Canberrans and did a survey on people views on AUKUS. The concerns are clear: cost, transparency, what defence capability we're not investing in because of this deal, and what AUKUS means for our sovereignty. The inquiry is doing important work, but we need a much broader and deeper conversation - an honest look at whether AUKUS is in our national interest. Not a single major party politician is expected to front up. If the case for the biggest defence spend in our history is so strong, we should expect them to make it publicly. The evidence from the inquiry is available at aukuspublicinquiry.com If you’d like to do my survey on AUKUS, click the link below👇 davidpocock.com.au/aukus_sur…