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Humanity's Chance to Reverse Amazon's Slide Toward Tipping Point Is 'Shrinking'
The world's largest rainforest showed "ominous indicators," including wildfires and extreme drought, in 2024.
Dec 31, 2024
The Amazon, sometimes called the "lungs of the planet," this year showed signs of further inching toward a much-feared tipping point, threatening the very existence of the world's largest rainforest.
Rampant wildfires and extreme drought ravaged large parts of the Amazon in 2024. The fires and dry conditions were fueled by deforestation and the El Niño weather pattern, and also made worse by climate change, according to the World Economic Forum. "The number of fires reached its highest level in 14 years this September," the group reported in October.
Drought has also impacted the Amazon River, causing one of the river's main tributaries to drop to its lowest level ever recorded, according to October reporting from The Associated Press. The drop in the river has negatively impacted local economies and food supplies.
Andrew Miller, advocacy director at Amazon Watch, told the AP last week that the fires and droughts experienced across the Amazon in 2024 "could be ominous indicators that we are reaching the long-feared ecological tipping point."
"Humanity's window of opportunity to reverse this trend is shrinking, but still open," he said.
The Amazon plays a vital role in keeping the planet healthy. 150-200 billion tons of carbon are stored in the Amazon, and it also carries 20% of the earth's fresh water to sea.
According to the World Economic Forum, if the Amazon tipping point is reached, "it will release billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere through fires and plants dying off. This would further exacerbate climate change and make the 1.5°C goal impossible to achieve. It would also alter weather patterns, which would impact agricultural productivity and global food supplies."
A paper published in the journal Nature in February indicates that up to half of the rainforest could hit a tipping point by the middle of the century. "We estimate that by 2050, 10% to 47% of Amazonian forests will be exposed to compounding disturbances that may trigger unexpected ecosystem transitions and potentially exacerbate regional climate change," explained the researchers behind the paper.
However, it wasn't all bad news out of the Amazon in 2024. According to the AP, the amount of deforestation in Brazil and Colombia declined in this year. In Brazil, which houses the largest chunk of the Amazon, forest loss dropped 30.6% compared to the year prior, bringing it to the lowest level of destruction in nearly a decade.
The improvement is an about-face from a couple of years ago, when the country registered 15-year high of deforestation during the leadership of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Brazil is now led by the left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who—despite presiding over this drop in deforestation—has also come under scrutiny, as APnoted, by environmentalist for backing projects that they argue could harm the environment.
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Report Warns Generative AI Could Turbocharge Climate Disinformation
"The climate emergency cannot be confronted while online public and political discourse is polluted by fear, hate, confusion, and conspiracy," one campaigner warned.
Mar 07, 2024
Members of a global coalition on Thursday released a report detailing "significant and immediate dangers" that artificial intelligence poses to the climate emergency.
"AI companies spread hype that they might save the planet, but currently they are doing just the opposite," said Michael Khoo at Friends of the Earth, part of the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) coalition. "AI companies risk turbocharging climate disinformation, and their energy use is causing a dangerous increase to overall U.S. consumption, with a corresponding increase of carbon emissions."
As AI has rapidly developed over the past year, global leaders and experts—from United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—have sounded the alarm about the technology furthering disinformation on all topics.
The World Economic Forum earlier this year "identified AI-generated mis- and disinformation as the world's greatest threat (followed by climate change)," notes the new CAAD report. Citing cases in Slovakia and the United States, it says that "the world is already seeing how AI is being used for political disinformation campaigns."
"AI models will allow climate disinformation professionals and the fossil fuel industry to build on their decades of disinformation campaigns."
"AI models will allow climate disinformation professionals and the fossil fuel industry to build on their decades of disinformation campaigns," the document warns. "More recent attempts, such as falsely blaming wind power as a cause of whale deaths in New Jersey or power outages in Texas, have already been effective."
The publication specifically points to potential abuse of generative artificial intelligence, systems that create content—including text, images, music, and videos—in response to prompts. It states that "generative AI will make such campaigns vastly easier, quicker, and cheaper to produce, while also enabling it to spread further and faster."
Such content can include deepfakes, audio or video of a person appearing to say something they never did. The publication highlights that "an August 2023 study focusing on climate change-related deepfakes found over a quarter of respondents across age groups were unable to identify whether videos were fake."
"Adding to this threat, social media companies have shown declining interest in stopping disinformation, reducing trust and safety team staffing," the document stresses.
Invoking an old Facebook motto, Kairos Fellowship's Nicole Sugerman said that "we must not allow another 'move fast and break things' era in tech; we've already seen how the rapid, unregulated growth of social media platforms led to previously unimaginable levels of online and offline harm and violence."
In addition to social media, the report outlines concerns about disinformation spreading via large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, search engines, and online advertising. Sarah Kay Wiley, director of policy at Check My Ads, noted that "we are already seeing how generative AI is being weaponized to spin up climate disinformation or copy legitimate news sites to siphon off advertising revenue."
"Adtech companies are woefully unprepared to deal with generative AI and the opaque nature of the digital advertising industry means advertisers are not in control of where their ad dollars are going," she continued. "Regulation is needed to help build transparency and accountability to ensure advertisers are able to decide whether to support AI-generated content."
Oliver Hayes at CAAD member Global Action Plan also demanded swift intervention, arguing that "the climate emergency cannot be confronted while online public and political discourse is polluted by fear, hate, confusion, and conspiracy."
"In a year when 2 billion people are heading to the polls, this represents an existential threat to climate action."
"In a year when 2 billion people are heading to the polls, this represents an existential threat to climate action," he said. "We should stop looking at AI through the 'benefit-only' analysis and recognize that, in order to secure robust democracies and equitable climate policy, we must rein in Big Tech and regulate AI."
The report features recommendations for companies, lawmakers, and regulators to boost accountability, safety, and transparency related to AI. The suggestions echo coalition letters to U.S. President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and apply to not only disinformation but also energy and water use.
The limited company statements that are available and independent research show that the proliferation of LLMs "is already causing energy use to skyrocket," which "comes on top of the highest rate of increase in U.S. energy consumption levels since the 1990s," the document notes.
On top of that, "training large language models such as GPT-3 can require millions of liters of freshwater for both cooling and electricity generation," the report explains. "This thirsty industry therefore contributes to local water scarcity in areas that are already vulnerable, and could exacerbate risk and intensity of water stress and drought with greater computing demands."
Greenpeace USA senior strategist Charlie Cray said that "the skyrocketing use of electricity and water, combined with its ability to rapidly spread disinformation, makes AI one of the greatest emerging climate threat-multipliers."
"Governments and companies must stop pretending that increasing equipment efficiencies and directing AI tools towards weather disaster responses are enough to mitigate AI's contribution to the climate emergency," he added.
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Argentine Unions Lead General Strike Against Milei's Neoliberal Blitz
"In 40 years of democracy, there has never been such a frontal attack on the labor sector," said one union leader.
Jan 24, 2024
Many thousands of Argentine workers walked off their jobs and took to the streets Wednesday in a general strike led by the nation's largest labor unions against far-right President Javier Milei's all-out assault on worker rights, vital social programs, and the right to protest.
The opposition-aligned Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT), an umbrella labor group boasting about 7 million members, led the general strike against Milei, a 53-year-old self-described "anarcho-capitalist" who took office last month following his decisive victory in November's presidential runoff.
Marching under the slogan, "Our Homeland Is Not For Sale," the CGT-led demonstrators filled streets in the capital Buenos Aires and smaller cities around the South American country of nearly 46 million inhabitants.
"We called a march on [January] 24 to defend labor rights, severance pay, collective bargaining agreements, social security, and the right to protest, all of which have been attacked by the DNU," CGT explained on social media, referring to Milei's December 20 Decree of Necessity and Urgency.
CGT leader Pablo Moyano said Wednesday in Buenos Aires that "every time a [neoliberal] model wins, the first thing they target is the workers."
Martín Lucero, head of the private teachers' union in Rosario, Argentina's third-largest city, toldLa Capital that "in 40 years of democracy there has never been such a frontal attack on the labor sector" as there has been under Milei.
Estela De Carlotto, who leads the activist group Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo—founded by grandmothers searching for children kidnapped under Argentina's U.S.-backed 1976-83 military dictatorship, which Milei has praised—toldBuenos Aires Times that the demonstration "is a way of giving support to this resolution from the people to form a protest and a call of attention for this whole situation we are living with this strange government."
Milei—who said he gets political advice from his dogs—has unleashed what critics have called "a textbook case of shock therapy" on the Argentine people and the country's moribund economy, devaluing the peso by 50%, slashing social spending, reducing government subsidies, and opening the nation to foreign capitalist exploitation.
According to Juan Cruz Ferre, a postdoctoral fellow at the Program in Latin American Studies at New Jersey's Princeton University:
The economic plan was followed by an all-encompassing presidential decree issued on December 20, affecting issues as diverse as labor law, healthcare, foreign trade, private property, and mining. The general thrust of it is very clear: an attack on workers' rights, the liberalization of the economy, the strengthening of big business through market deregulation and numerous incentives, and the erosion of protections for tenants, the environment, and small businesses.
Although courts have suspended parts of Milei's decree in response to legal challenges, Cruz Ferre explained, "attention has now shifted to a mirror bill presented to Congress, which includes all issues contained in the decree, plus a request of extraordinary powers to the executive for a period of four years."
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week, Milei
hailed the corporate executives and wealthy global elites gathered there as "heroes" and "creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we've ever seen."
From November to December, prices in Argentina increased by more than one quarter, compared with just under 13% the previous month. Annual inflation now stands at 211%, with Argentina rivaling Lebanon for the dubious global top spot.
"In this government of Milei, all the food halls of all the social organizations, of the churches, have not received food [from the government]," one Buenos Aires protester said during Wednesday's march.
"There is no food; they told us that there is no money," the demonstrator added, even as the government adopts "measures in favor of the wealthy sector."
The CGT on Wednesday published a statement "in defense of the civil, social, and labor rights of our nation."
"Today we see how the government seeks to break the social contract through policies and reforms that only seek to subjugate the rights and achievements of the Argentine people," the statement asserted. "We reaffirm our conviction about the importance of social dialogue as the only tool to grow with equity, and that allows us to develop a 'sustainable strategy to achieve development, production, and decent work, with social justice.'"
Argentine Security Minister Patricia Bullrich
dismissed the strike as the work of "mafia unionists, poverty managers, complicit judges, and corrupt politicians, all defending their privileges, resisting the change that society decided democratically and that the president leads with determination."
From Brazil to Belgium, unions throughout the Americas and Europe staged solidarity rallies with Argentine workers.
"The [Argentine] government adopted a perverse combination of radical political authoritarianism with dictatorial tendencies and ultraliberal policies that mostly undermine workers," Unified Workers' Central, Brazil's largest trade union, said in a statement.
Myriam Bregman, a Socialist Workers' Party member of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Argentina's National Congress, said in a Wednesday interview with Left Voice that "international solidarity is key to defeating Milei's attacks on the working class in Argentina."
"Milei, as he made clear at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, is a friend to the superrich, whom he treats as heroes," she added. "It is in the interests of the international working class that we prevent the government from moving forward with its anti-worker policies."
Cruz Ferre wrote that "the current [Argentine] government has declared war on workers, women, human rights activists, the environment, and more. The goal is clear: to make tabula rasa of all past gains and concessions to the working class, and reset the conditions for profits through the unrestrained exploitation of labor."
"A determined, organized, and massive resistance will be necessary to preserve the rights that are today under attack," he added. "The outcome of these battles will have implications for many years to come."
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