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The nightmare scenario of Atlantic Ocean currents collapsing, with weather running amok and putting Europe in a deep freeze, looks unlikely this century, a new study concludes. In recent years, studies have raised the alarm about the slowing and potential abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic end of the ocean conveyor belt system. It transports rising warm water north and sinking cool water south and is a key factor in global weather systems. A possible climate change -triggered shutdown of what’s called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC could play havoc with global rain patterns, dramatically cool Europe while warming the rest of the world and goose sea levels on America’s East Coast, scientists predict. It’s the scenario behind the 2004 fictionalized disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, which portrays a world where climate change sparks massive storms, flooding and an ice age. Scientists at the United Kingdom’s Met Office and the University of Exeter used simulations from 34 different computer models of extreme climate change scenarios to see if the AMOC would collapse this century, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature. No simulation showed a total shutdown before 2100, said lead author Jonathan Baker, an oceanographer at the Met Office. It could happen later, though, he said. The currents have collapsed in the distant past. Still, the computer simulations should be reassuring” to people, Baker said. But this is no greenlight for complacency, Baker warned. The AMOC is very likely to weaken this century and that brings its own major climate impacts. The Atlantic current flows because warm water cools as it reaches the Arctic, forming sea ice. That leaves salt behind, causing the remaining water to become more dense, sinking and pulled southward. But as climate change warms the world and more fresh water flows into the Arctic from the melting Greenland ice sheet, the Arctic engine behind the ocean conveyor belt slows down. Previous studies predict it stopping altogether with one of them saying it could happen within a few decades. But Baker said the computer models and basic physics predict that a second motor kicks in along the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica. The winds there pull the water back up to the surface, called upwelling, where it warms, Baker said. It’s not as strong, but it will likely keep the current system alive, but weakened, through the year 2100, he said. Baker’s focus on the pulling up of water from the deep instead of just concentrating on the sinking is new and makes sense, providing a counterpoint to the studies saying collapse is imminent, said Oregon State University climate scientist Andreas Schmittner, who wasn’t part of the research. Those Southern Ocean winds pulling the deep water up act like a powerful pump keeps the AMOC running even in the extreme climate change scenarios, Baker said. As the AMOC weakens, a weak Pacific version of it will likely develop to compensate a bit, the computer models predicted. If the AMOC weakens but not fully collapses, many of the same impacts including crop losses and changes in fish stock likely will still happen, but not the big headline one of Europe going into a deep freeze, Baker said. Scientists measure the AMOC strength in a unit called Sverdrups. The AMOC is now around 17 Sverdrups, down two from about 2004 with a trend of about 0.8 decline per decade, scientists said. One of the debates in the scientific world is the definition of an AMOC shutdown. Baker uses zero, but other scientists who have been warning about the shutdown implications, use about 5 Sverdrups. Three of Baker’s 34 computer models went below 5 Sverdrups, but not to zero. That’s why Levke Caesar and Stefan Rahmstorf, physicists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research and authors of an alarming 2018 study about potential shutdown, said this new work doesn’t contradict theirs. It’s more a matter of definitions. An AMOC collapse does not have to mean 0 (Sverdrups) overturning and even if you would want to follow that definition one has to say that such a strong AMOC weakening comes with a lot (of) impacts, Caesar wrote in an email. The models show a severe AMOC weakening that would come with severe consequences. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. Seth Borenstein, AP science writer
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Kerry Doyle sat in an immigration courtroom observing a fellow judge finish a hearing in an asylum case late on a recent Friday afternoon when she received an email with an attachment titled terminated. Doyle had been a judge for only about two months and was in training to begin hearing cases soon at a recently opened Massachusetts court. Her colleagues helped her pack up her office before the afternoon was over, she said. This doesnt make sense for an administration that is prioritizing removals, Doyle said, using the legal word for deportation. You need the judges to hear the cases to order the person removed so that you can then carry out the removal order. Its a vital part of the system. So far, the administration of President Donald Trump has fired 22 immigration judges, including a group that worked as managers of their respective courts, according to the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, the union that represents immigration judges. The administration has also fired five senior managers of the immigration court system, the union said. As part of its efforts to reduce the size of the government workforce, the Trump administration has been firing federal employees on probationary status, meaning that they had recently been hired for their positions. Immigration judges are on probationary status for their first two years, according to the union, except for military veterans who have probationary status for only a year. When the administration sent federal employees its Fork in the Road email calling for voluntary resignations, it was supposed to exclude people who worked in immigration enforcement and national defense and for the Postal Service, according to the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. But the letters went to immigration judges anyway. Look up the definition of hypocrisy, its when someone says one thing but does another. The firing of immigration judges when we need more judges to enforce our immigration laws by this administration is a perfect example of hypocrisy, said Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, in an emailed statement to Beyond the Border. This outrageous move to fire immigration judges will only make the backlog of cases worse. This is the opposite of the administrations stated goals, Biggs said. The Trump administration and the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which operates the courts, did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication. Biggs estimated that the fired judges would have held 10,000 hearings this year. The courts currently have a backlog of more than 3.7 million cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which monitors government data on immigration through public records requests. Days after the firings, immigration Judge Samuel B. Cole, who has been hearing cases in Chicago since 2016 and has served as executive vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said that he would be stepping down. He declined to say more on the subject at this time. The firings affected courts across the United States, with California and Texas losing the most, according to the union. Five of the judges were based in Texas with three in Houston, one in Laredo, and one in El Paso. Four of the judges were based in California with one in San Diego and three in Concord. Rhana Ishimoto, the assistant chief immigration judge who managed the downtown San Diego court, disappeared from the immigration court website at the end of last week and was replaced with Anne Kristina Perry, who already served as assistant chief at the Imperial and Otay Mesa courts in Southern California. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Ishimoto was appointed to her position in May 2023 and previously worked as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney representing the government in immigration court cases. Ishimoto did not respond to a message on social media. On Wednesday morning, the downtown San Diego court, which operates on the fourth floor of the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Building, seemed largely business as usual. People with stacks of documents and plastic folders lined up in the courts lobby to file paperwork and check in for court hearings. In one courtroom, Judge Rico Bartolomei, who once served as assistant chief immigration judge in San Diego before stepping down from the managerial role to hear cases full time again, worked his way through a full docket of people from Venezuela, El Salvador, Haiti, Russia and Brazil. Almost all had recently crossed the border, mostly through the now defunct CBP One phone application that allowed people to schedule appointments to request asylum. Bartolomei greeted each person brightly, almost cooing, Hi Kaleb! at a toddler who approached the judge a few strides in front of his parents and older brother. He carefully explained their rights in court and offered them time to find attorneys. In the case of Kalebs parents, whom the government alleged were from Venezuela, he learned that they had moved to Arkansas. He asked how they had arrived in court that day. By bus, the family responded. How long did that take? he asked empathetically. About 36 hours, the family said. He moved their case to a court closer to them. He transferred three of the cases that he heard that morning to the court in Concord, California, which is now short three judges. Kate Morrissey, Capital & Main This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here. Will native-AI operating systems run our computers in the near future? Samantha, the AI that Theodore falls in love with in the 2013 movie Her is actually an OS. Thats how he meets her: He buys a new OS called OS1 (its not just an operating system, its a consciousness) and she is its persona. Samantha becomes his intuitive and personalized companion to all his digital stuff, from email to video games. ChatGPT set off the generative AI boom in part because consumers (not just academics and developers) saw shades of Her. Two years later, the chatbot is a major consumer destination and is the AI interface with which people are most comfortable and familiar. More than 400 million people around the world now use ChatGPT every week, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap recently told CNBC. For comparison, Apples iOS operates on more than 2 billion active devices worldwide, including more than 1.5 billion iPhones. Those are impressive numbers, but iOS is standing relatively still while ChatGPT is steadily moving up the adoption curve. Historically, Apples superpower has been its uncanny understanding of the user interfacethe technology that acts as the mediator between a human user and their digital tools and content. Apples user interfaces rely mainly on older input technologies, such as mouse-clicking and touchscreen-tapping (though Siri remains a problem child). ChatGPT feels more and more like a new generation of user interface, one thats powered by a very advanced mastery of language and the ability to intuit the intent behind a users input. Increasingly, it can act as a personal assistant with the ability to reason through problems. It can reason about things a user says with their voice or shows to the AI via their phone cam. Now OpenAI (and Anthropic) are rapidly developing the AIs ability to control computer functions and apps. At the moment, OpenAI is packaging all this stuff inside ChatGPT. But how long before a chatbot app no longer contains it? Throughout the day, I call up the ChatGPT desktop app (by hitting <Option> and <Space Bar>) to run quick research lookups. For $200 per month, it can conduct deep research projects and control my mouse as it uses the web. Its not a far leap from there to the AI using an app on my computer or printing something. Soon enough, Ill likely have a running voice dialog with my AI OS throughout the day. Like Samantha (presumably) did for Theodore, the OS will learn my workflows, habits, and preferences. (In fact, many people in the field of natural language are working hard to build EI, or emotional intelligence into these systems, so that your AI operating system can be your friend tooas Sam was to Theodore.) The analyst Ben Thompson said in a recent Stratechery newsletter that OpenAI itself has realized that ChatGPT (and everything contained in it) is taking over the focus of the company. Consumer tech companies . . . require a completely different culture and value chain than a research organization with an API on the side, he wrote. That is the fundamental reality that I suspect has driven much of the OpenAI upheaval over the last two-and-a-half years . . . In short, OpenAI started out as an AI research lab, then became a provider of one-size-fits-all foundation models to enterprises and developers, then watched as ChatGPT stole the show and became its main source of revenue and fame. The question is, where does ChatGPT go from here? I think it’s the OS. LLMs could help solve the glacial change of government systems Jen Pahlka has a big idea: She says we should use large language models (LLMs) to eat through the government red tape that often stymies badly needed change to bureaucratic systems. She should know. She served as deputy chief technology officer (DCTO) under the Obama administration and helped found the United States Digital Service (USDS). Pahlka says that change agents like the USDS often encounter thousands of pages of policy and regulations that may or may not apply to a proposed change to a government website or system. Those pages pile up administration by administration, often creating overlapping and conflicting rules or a tangle of ambiguities. And agency bureaucrats often use that ambiguity to put new proposals into a state of perpetual review, saying neither yes nor no, effectively freezing attempts at change that they dont really want anyway. Thats why interagency organizations like USDS need lawyers as much as they need top-notch designers and coders. LLMs could be another tool to cut through the ambiguity and shorten timelines. You can use an LLM to figure out why there are 7,719 pages [of rules and regulations around a proposed system change] and what of that could get reduced, Pahlka told Robert Safian in a recent Rapid Response podcast. You can pretty quickly get to this stuff is conflicting, this stuff is vestigial, this stuff is really controversial but you’ve got to deal with it. Pahlka has done work with Stanfords Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab), which is studying the development of LLMs that specialize in swimming through years of policies, guidelines, and regulations. Its still pretty early days, but its starting to get used that way, Pahlka says. I want to see somebody like the labor commissioner in a state saying, Oh yeah, we actually now have a regulatory environment that allows us to serve the needs of our state. Nvidia earnings: Good enough to keep the Boom booming Nvidias fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report on Wednesday marked the companys first since the Chinese company DeepSeek showed the world that it could train a world-class AI model with far fewer Nvidia GPUs than anyone thought possible. If any big AI companies ran to the phone to cancel their orders of Nvidias new Blackwell processors it wasnt apparent in the numbers the company reported. Revenues came in at $39.3 billion (35.6% from data center sales), up 78% from a year ago and up 12% from the previous quarter. Analysts had expected $38.04 billion. The company also said the good times would continue at least through the current quarter, in which it expects $43 billion in revenues. Analysts on the earnings call did, however zero in on the one weak point in the report: Nvidias profit margin, which remained flat for the second quarter in a row. But that metric is indicative of overall demand fo GPUs only in an indirect way. Also, the companys stock sagged somewhat in after-hours trading Wednesday, which is very dependent on the (mysterious) assumptions that institutional investors had already baked into the value of the stock. The bottom line is that the tech companies betting big on AIthink Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoftare not hedging on their infrastructure spending. Not yet, anyway. Blackwell generating billions in sales validates Nvidias top position just as the market is expanding on the agentic and physical AI fronts, wrote eMarketers Jacob Bourne in a research note published Tuesday. Short-term volatility is still on the horizon, but Nvidias market command remains unmatched.” More AI coverage from Fast Company: Anthropics new Claude AI model can decide between speed and deep thinking Autonomous AI agents are amazingand scary People are most worried about AI replacing these 2 jobs This new AI tool helps Walmarts merchandising team plan whats in stores Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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