Sentinel minutes for week #43/2024

Status: greenish. Tensions between Israel and Iran remain high while mpox continues to spread and H5N1 surveillance remains spotty

Status: greenish; forecasters did not anticipate events spiraling into global catastrophes this week, but tensions between Israel and Iran remain high while mpox continues to spread and H5N1 surveillance remains spotty.

Geopolitics

Middle East 

Israel launched an attack on Iranian military targets including missile factories, resulting in the death of at least two Iranian soldiers. Iran said that the damage was “limited”, suggesting that a major retaliation isn’t on the cards, though it vowed a “proportional” response. Oil refineries and nuclear sites were not targeted and Israel gave Iran advance warning of the attack, specifying the type of target but stressing that if Iran retaliates a more significant Israeli attack could occur (especially if Israelis are killed).

Forecasters believe there’s a 59% chance (range: 45%-75%) that Iran launches another missile or drone attack on Israeli soil by the end of 2024. They believe that there’s a 21% chance (range: 10%-30%) that Israel successfully strikes Iranian oil refineries by the end of the year, and a 13% (range: 8%-18%) chance that Israel successfully strikes Iranian nuclear sites by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah continues, with Israel launching airstrikes on a branch of a Hezbollah-linked bank and killing the man who may have become Hezbollah’s next leader. World powers also met in Paris to raise $1 billion in humanitarian assistance for Lebanon. 

Saudi Arabia participated in military exercises with Iran and other nations in the Sea of Oman, following a China-brokered normalization deal between the two countries last year.

Europe

The United States and its allies have said they have evidence that at least 3,000 North Korean troops are now present in Russia. Some appear to be heading to Russia’s Kursk region, while others could be deployed in Ukraine itself, with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin saying that “it’s our business” where North Korea’s troops are deployed.

In response, South Korea is reportedly considering sending military personnel from intelligence units to Ukraine, to analyze North Korea’s battlefield tactics or interrogate captured North Korean troops. However, South Korea is unlikely to deploy combat units to the country.

Turkey blocked the export of military-related goods to Russia. This followed a warning from the United States.

Russia raised its interest rate to 21%, the highest since 2003, as inflation almost hit 10% in September. Russia is also attempting to work around economic sanctions in a number of different ways, with China now exporting around $4 billion every month in machinery and electrical equipment to Russia, and Russia purchasing a shadow shipping fleet from Greek shippers. Previously, we noted that European countries were shipping goods to Russia via Kyrgyzstan and other former Soviet republics, and that Europe was buying oil from Russia via India.

Russia’s foreign military was hit by a cyberattack, while the BRICS summit was taking place in the country.

Moldova voted to join the EU in a referendum. Forecasters believe that this slightly raises the risk of a Russian invasion of the non-NATO country in the next few years.

Georgia’s increasingly Russia-aligned ruling party and the pro-EU opposition both claimed victory following a parliamentary election, with the central election commission claiming that the ruling party was in the lead. That the ruling party is likely to stay in power probably reduces the probability of another Russian invasion of Georgia over the next few years.

United States

The US Presidential election will occur in just over a week. In aggregate, forecasters assign a 51% probability to Trump becoming President (range: 45%-55%). 

Given that Trump has not committed to a peaceful transfer of power, forecasters evaluated whether he will become President even if he loses the popular vote in enough states to putatively deny him at least 269 electoral college votes. They assigned only a 7% probability (range: 4%-10%) to Trump being inaugurated as President by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court on January 20, 2025 conditional on the Associated Press declaring his opponent the winner of the election. 

However, they assigned a 36% probability (range: 20%-50%) to there being at least 10 deaths as a result of violent demonstrations conditional on the Associated Press declaring Trump’s opponent the victor.

Given the connections between Trump and many people who worked on Project 2025, forecasters also evaluated whether he will carry out a significant reshaping of the civil service (as called for in Project 2025). In aggregate, they assigned a 58% probability (range: 40%-80%) to Trump firing at least 10,000 federal civil service employees by the end of June 2025, if elected.

East Asia

General Charles Flynn, the US’s top commander in the Asia-Pacific region, has warned that the US military is overstretched and cannot afford another war, especially in the East Asia region.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called on his military to maintain heightened nuclear arsenal readiness, during a visit to the country’s strategic missile bases.

Biorisk

H5N1

A US CDC investigation into the contacts of a patient who contracted H5N1 in Missouri has found that the patient likely did not spread H5N1 to healthcare workers but also that a household contact who developed symptoms at the same time likely also had an H5N1 infection. Because the known H5N1 patient and the household contact developed symptoms at the same time, they likely acquired their infections from the same source, which could have been another infected human (they did not have any recorded contact with animals).

Mpox

A clade 1b mpox case was detected in Germany. The patient had acquired the infection in an East African country.

Surveillance of H5N1 in the United States remains extremely spotty, according to emails.

A study published in Cell of mpox virus genomes collected from 337 mpox patients in the Democratic Republic of Congo found that clade 1a mpox virus samples exhibited few mutations, consistent with multiple zoonotic introductions, whereas clade 1b samples had mutations consistent with human-to-human transmission. This study confirms the suspected transmission patterns of these two genetic groups of mpox viruses.

Tech

Miles Brundage, head of AGI readiness at OpenAI has resigned. The AGI readiness team was also disbanded. In his newsletter on the topic he wrote that “neither OpenAI nor any other frontier lab is ready, and the world is also not ready”.

Microsoft has announced it will let clients build autonomous AI agents, from November, using several AI models developed in-house and by OpenAI.

Anthropic’s latest Claude 3.5 Sonnet model can use a computer as a human would, with screen video as an input and using keyboard and mouse input to control the computer.

Rumors that OpenAI will be releasing GPT-5 as part of Orion before the end of the year have been circulating, though Sam Altman suggested it was “fake news”.

A national security memorandum on AI was released by the White House. In the memorandum, it was announced that the US AI Safety Institute will pursue voluntary testing of frontier AI models, to assess threats to national security.

The US government says it is concerned about China’s use of AI and that it could make other countries vulnerable to coercion.

A McKinsey report says Europe’s data center power demand is expected to triple by 2030.

AI is being used to decode pig oinks and grunts, which could be used to detect negative emotions to improve their wellbeing.

Other risks

Solar

The solar region that produced an X9 solar flare in May has rotated back into view and has produced an X3.3 flare. It is possible that the region will produce more X-class flares as it rotates across the near side of the solar surface over the coming week and a half.

Climate

A group of 44 climate scientists from 15 countries have written a letter to the Nordic Council of Ministers warning about the risk that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) may collapse over the coming decades. The letter states that, "A string of scientific studies in the past few years suggests that this risk has so far been greatly underestimated. Such an ocean circulation change would have devastating and irreversible impacts especially for Nordic countries, but also for other parts of the world."

Another article from the past week provides an explanation of the AMOC situation, the evidence, and the potential consequences of AMOC collapse: "The effects include a cooling of the northern hemisphere, particularly northwestern Europe. There would also be a shift of the tropical rainfall belt to the south, which is bad because the rains will move away from the rainforests to regions that are not used to so much rainfall. ... for some countries that will be in the midst of this, like Norway, and Scotland, the risks will be existential and raise the question whether people can continue to live there."

The effects of AMOC collapse would also include "reduced oceanic carbon dioxide uptake (and thus faster atmospheric increase) as well as major additional sea-level rise particularly along the American Atlantic coast, and an upheaval of marine ecosystems and fisheries."

We have mentioned the risk of AMOC collapse previously, in our reports for weeks 31 and 42. A preprint we discussed previously found that, "The collapse time is estimated between 2037-2064 (10-90% CI) with a mean of 2050 and the probability of an AMOC collapse before the year 2050 is estimated to be 59 +/- 17%." A new preprint reports similar findings.