New report shows key indicators of Earth’s health are ‘outside the safe operating space’ as climate disaster looms

Trucks carry wood from a deforested area in Para state, Brazil, during the Cop30 UN climate change conference in November 2025,. Photograph: Mauro Pimentel/AFP/Getty Images

Climate crisis

‘Planetary boundaries’ necessary for flourishing of life have been massively breached, scientists warn

Oliver Milman

Mon 21 Sep 2026

The planetary life support systems relied upon by humans have deteriorated to their worst levels ever recorded amid ongoing pollution and habitat destruction, according to a key yet grim annual update by scientists.

Of the nine “planetary boundaries” that help determine whether life can flourish on Earth, seven are being breached at their highest ever levels of transgression, according to the latest planetary health check, a process that was established in 2009.

The seven key indicators in the danger zone include climate change, change in biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater change, modification of biogeochemical flows, introduction of novel entities and, for the first time last year, ocean acidification.... READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/21/planetary-boundaries-breached-scientists-warn-climate-crisis

   [AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies here, there- and everywhere] 

"It’s worth remembering that no one actually asked for AI, and yet here it suddenly is trying to kill us. And even if that’s averted, it’s embedding itself in our workplaces and in our emotional lives (ChatGPT may be the largest provider of mental health services in the US), robbing us of the capacity for critical thinking, and threatening economic and social stability." Brigid Delaney

‘Flourishing is having a direct relationship with the natural world – not the world through a screen, or the natural world itself destroyed and degraded to create more capacity for screen-based existence.’ Photograph: Martyn Williams/Alamy

Opinion

 AI (artificial intelligence) 

We greet the news that AI could extinguish us with a glazed indifference. What is the way out of this nihilism?

There are several answers, and none of them will be provided by tech. One thing we must do is identify the ingredients for human flourishing

Brigid Delaney 

Sun 13 Sep 2026 

Imagining the future as almost entirely bleak has somehow crept into the collective consciousness this year.

Last week I was having coffee with an old friend. He was telling me about what his kids wanted to study when they went to university, when he suddenly broke off, stared into the middle distance and said, “I wish I’d never had children.”

He’d been a father for 20 years and I’d never heard him say that.

“Oh my god, why?”

He loves his kids beyond measure, but right at that moment, he looked desolate.

“AI,” he replied.

“What about it?”

It could have been anything AI-related at this point in time. Was it that AI was going to take all the jobs his kids would have done, rendering their lives impoverished and without purpose or meaning? Or was it environmental, with all the water and energy AI consumes that is going to create further stress on the climate and make the planet uninhabitable? Or was it the news that week that AI could “kill all humans” within the next 10 years?

It was the latter. We talked listlessly about the “killing all humans” thing for a bit, then moved on. But the shadow had fallen and I started wondering: is the polycrisis that we are facing so overwhelming that we don’t even have the capacity to talk about it with urgency any more? Instead it’s just there, in the air, ambient, like pollution, each particle containing its own particular doomsday scenario – and the only way to be in this atmosphere is to be numb to it.

Currently, for so many, all our past and future decisions are being refracted through this strange and dark moment.... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/14/we-greet-the-news-that-ai-could-extinguish-us-with-a-glazed-indifference-what-is-the-way-out-of-this-nihilism 

 AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies here, there- and everywhere]