Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.

Critical 1.5C threshold breached over 12-month period for first time

Summary: For the first time, global average temperatures have surpassed the pre-industrial baseline by 1.5 degrees Celsius for a full year, according to data collected by the European earth observation agency.

Context: This is notable in that it’s a major deviation from those prior norms, but also in that 1.5 degrees Celsius represents the ceiling of several international climate agreements, a level of change we’re attempting to avoid because of the potentially catastrophic consequences associated with such a climactic shift; there’s some indication that these past 12 months might be unrepresentative because of the El Niño phenomenon that’s heating up the surface of the Pacific Ocean right now, though there’s also a chance our measurements aren’t taking into account opposite factors, like sulfur-seeded cloud cover that artificially cools the planet, so this record is considered to be worrying, even though we will have to see several straight years of average temperatures heightened to this level before the climate science community formally declares that we’ve made a transition into a 1.5 degrees-warmer world.

—Financial Times

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Permian rivals reach deal to create $50 billion oil-and-gas behemoth

Summary: Fossil fuel giants Diamondback Energy and Endeavor Energy Resources have agreed on a merger that will create a new oil-and-gas-focused entity worth more than $50 billion.

Context: This is just the most recent of several huge fossil fuel industry mergers, and it’s focused in the US Permian Basin, where the majority of the country’s oil is currently produced; this wave of mergers suggests that companies in this space are scrambling to lock-down resources and infrastructure for the coming wind-down period of fossil fuels, all of them hoping to be the last business standing, essentially owning a dwindling, but probably still vital for decades into the future, facet of the global economy.

—The Wall Street Journal

Deepfake scammer walks off with $25 million in first-of-its-kind AI heist

Summary: A multinational company based in Hong Kong reported a loss of more than $25 million in early February after an employee was tricked by scammers using deepfake technology.

Context: The details of this scam are pretty wild, as it involved digitally faking the company’s chief financial officer and several other employees, having them all appear on a video call that was convincing enough that the employee made fifteen off-books monetary transfers that he didn’t realize were illegitimate until about a week later; the increasing sophistication and realism of these technologies, and their casual and inexpensive availability is expected to make this sort of scam more common, and a version of it that uses a replicated voice to falsely confirm a person’s identity when calling their workplace, bank, or loved ones, ordering a transfer or asking for money for an emergency, have already been reported by victims and would-be victims around the world.

—Ars Technica

Both illegal crossings and asylum applications are at their highest levels since 2015-2016 across EU nations, and 27 of those nations have clamped down on immigration as a consequence—though these same nations are experiencing worker shortages that are leading to calls for immigration-related solutions, some of which are now being deployed on a selective basis, leading to a strange situation in which new legislation is trying to limit and increase immigration simultaneously.

—Le Monde

123.4 million

Number of viewers who tuned in to watch this year’s Super Bowl, according to early data from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics.

If the data holds up, that’s a new US viewership record, making this game the most-watched TV program of all time.

—The Wall Street Journal

Trust Click

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