January, 16 2009, 11:00am EDT
IPCC Chief Challenges Obama to Further Cut US Emission Targets
WASHINGTON
The head of the world's preeminent organization of
climate scientists said yesterday that incoming U.S. President Barack
Obama's stated emissions targets need to be strengthened to deal with
the climate threat.
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, said, "President-elect Obama's goal of reducing
emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 falls short of the response needed by
world leaders to meet the challenge of reducing emissions to levels
that will actually spare us the worst effects of climate change."
The comments were made at an event held by the Worldwatch Institute
yesterday afternoon in Washington to discuss its recently-released
report, State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World,
which finds the world will have to reduce carbon dioxide emissions more
drastically than has been widely predicted, even going into negative
emissions by 2050 to avoid catastrophic disruption to the world's
climate.
"The world is desperately looking for U.S. leadership to slow
emissions and create a green economy," said Christopher Flavin,
President of the Worldwatch Institute. "With the Copenhagen climate
conference rapidly approaching, this will be a crucial early test for
President Obama."
For more information, visit www.worldwatch.org/stateoftheworld.
The Worldwatch Institute was a globally focused environmental research organization based in Washington, D.C., founded by Lester R. Brown. Worldwatch was named as one of the top ten sustainable development research organizations by Globescan Survey of Sustainability Experts. Brown left to found the Earth Policy Institute in 2000. The Institute was wound up in 2017, after publication of its last State of the World Report. Worldwatch.org was unreachable from mid-2019.
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The complaint was brought by two families in Texas who allege that the Google-backed chatbot service Character.AI harmed their two children, including sexually exploiting and abusing the elder, a 17-year-old with high functioning autism, by targeting him with extreme sexual themes like incest and pushing him to self-harm.
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Google is also named as a defendant in the suit. In their filing, the plaintiffs argue that the tech company supported Character.AI's launch even though they knew that it was a "defective product."
The families, who are being represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project, have asked the court to take the product offline.
The explosive court filing comes not long after a mother in Florida filed a separate lawsuit against Character.AI in October, arguing that the chatbot service is responsible for the death of her teenage son because it allegedly encouraged him to commit suicide, per CNN.
Character.AI is different than other chatbots in that it lets uses interact with artificial intelligence "characters." The Texas complaint alleges that the 17-year-old, for example, engaged in a conversation with a character modeled after the celebrity Billie Eilish. These sorts of "companion apps" are finding a growing audience, even though researchers have long warned of the perils of building relationships with chatbots, according to The Washington Post.
A spokesperson for Character.AI declined to comment directly on the lawsuit when asked by NPR, but said the company does have guardrails in place overseeing what chatbots can and cannot say to teen users.
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Josh Golin, the executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit children's advocacy group, echoed those remarks, saying that "in their rush to extract young people's data and sow addiction, Character.AI has created a product so flawed and dangerous that its chatbots are literally inciting children to harm themselves and others."
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