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Call of Duty takes on Fortnite with Black Ops 4 battle royale mode

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The latest CoD instalment is ditching its Campaign mode and going multiplayer-only, taking lessons from Overwatch, Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

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Drugs should need to stop and you should only be able to do drugs for medication.

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Child Abuse, Stopping the Problem | humanservicesedu.org

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It is a sad fact that Child Abuse is on the rise in America. There is a hidden and growing epidemic of child abuse in the US, with 3.3 million cases of child abuse or neglect made in the United States affecting almost 6 million children.

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A cryptic missive went out last spring to all 3.6 million people who follow McDonald's on Twitter. The tweet read, simply: "100% Fresh Beef + John Goodman = ASMR(ish)" and included a link to a video. In the split-screen clip, the Big Lebowski and Roseanne star stares into the camera and-somewhat unnervingly-whispers a carnal ode to the fast-food giant's Quarter Pounder burger, accompanied by the sounds and visuals of an appetizing-looking patty sizzling on the grill. "Hey, you," Goodman murmurs intently. "McDonald's new fresh-beef Quarter Pounder is hotter and juicier. It'll leave you speech-less. I can almost feel that juice sizzling. . . . Oh baby, the melted cheese is hugging every corner of that grilled patty. . . . That cheese is so hot, so melty."

ASMR videos, named for autonomous sensory meridian response, typically star carefully primped young women tapping on objects and whispering into high-end microphones with the intent of creating a pleasant frisson in viewers, whereas this one featured a large man waxing near pornographically about a burger. But the spot was a viral hit, quickly racking up more than 3 million views. It was timed to the arrival-at every one of the restaurant chain's 14,000 U.S. outposts-of fresh, never-frozen beef patties in its signature Quarter Pounder burgers, a change that execs say has been as seismic for the company as the introduction of all-day breakfast, in 2015, or even the drive-through window, which McDonald's began experimenting with in 1975. (The new patty is also available in the chain's more premium Signature Crafted Recipes line of burgers, but not yet in Big Macs or its basic ones.)

Over the course of interviews with five top executives, I never once heard anyone mention Shake Shack (110 U.S. locations) or In-N-Out (334 restaurants) by name, but McDonald's has clearly been studying these chains-both of which serve fresh beef-along with their millennial customers who don't find frozen patties appetizing. "We were hearing from consumers that our burger wasn't good enough, and we've seen a lot of trends around expectations of high quality," says the company's new chief marketing officer, Morgan Flatley, who arrived at McDonald's from PepsiCo a year ago. "To be able to deliver that at the speed and scale of McDonald's was a unique opportunity for us," she says.

Fresh beef is just one element of a massive transformation underway at McDonald's. Steve Easterbrook-a McDonald's veteran who had also run British casual-dining chains PizzaExpress and Wagamama-was elevated in 2015 from chief brand officer to CEO at a time of real crisis. The chain had been suffering losses for six straight quarters, with net income down 15% from the year before. The iconic billions served signs didn't quite start rolling backward, but between 2012 and 2016, McDonald's forfeited a stunning 500 million transactions in the U.S., both to its typical competitors and a new wave of fast-casual spots like Shake Shack and Sweetgreen. "We'd lost a meaningful connection with customers," says Easterbrook, who sounds a bit like a younger Michael Caine. "They weren't excited about what we were doing, and that would be fairly universal on a global basis. So we rallied around a turnaround plan." McDonald's stock is up 60% since Easterbrook took over, but it has listed downward for much of 2018 as same-store U.S. sales growth has cooled from 4.5% to 3%. Consumers and investors alike are demanding more.

Now the company and its franchisees-owner-operators who typically sign a 20-year agreement for each restaurant and control more than 90% of the U.S. chain-are embarking upon its biggest innovation test in years with the rollout of the new Quarter Pounders. Can a company that's famous for its predictability succeed in selling a fresh-beef hamburger-with all the logistical and food-safety risks that entails-at the scale, speed, and price its customers expect?

The brand-new headquarters of McDonald's, a nine-story open-plan office tower, are in the rising Chicago neighborhood of the West Loop. From 1971 until this past June, the company operated out of a park-like campus in suburban Oak Brook, Illinois, 20 miles outside of the city. Now it's on a stretch of West Randolph Street that is currently Chicago's hottest restaurant row. "We felt like it would get us closer to our customers, closer to the competition, closer to the trends that are shaping society," says Easterbrook. Plus, he notes, it's good for recruiting: "The talent tends to be living downtown." The young corporate employees toting Sweetgreen bags back across the street to their office during a recent lunch hour-because who can eat McDonald's every day?-demonstrate that Easterbrook's plan is already taking hold. Several told me excitedly about the expanded lunch options the new HQ will provide.

The McDonald's café in the lobby of the building has one feature you won't find anywhere else: a rotating selection of regional items from outposts around the world, including a spicy-chicken sandwich from Hong Kong. The limited availability of these items has turned out to be a canny marketing move, sparking a flood of social media interest and press coverage, but the space is also, clearly, a test lab. Menu chief Linda VanGosen, who joined McDonald's from Starbucks last year, works closely with chefs and food scientists at McDonald's suppliers and keeps a close eye on food trends, which have to reach a certain level of mass appeal to make sense for McDonald's. She and her team also conduct ethnographic research, including shadowing customers to see how McDonald's fits into their lives, and take what VanGosen refers to as food safaris, eating their way across America. "If we want to find great coffee, we'll probably go to the West Coast," she says. "For burgers, it's probably somewhere in the South."

A key insight she's learned is that what consumers say they want, and what they actually buy, are two different things, which presents an interesting challenge. "That's kind of the secret sauce," VanGosen says. "What's an emotional need you can answer?"

The company had been receiving consistent feedback from a wide range of consumers in recent years-both via focus groups and from unsolicited comments-that its beef patty, the cornerstone of its business, was subpar. But figuring out exactly what customers found unsatisfying took time. Eventually, McDonald's determined that the burger was too dry and didn't arrive hot enough, and executives discerned that the culprit in both cases was the flash-freezing process the patties had been subjected to. "We looked at a lot of things-raw material, fat content, grind-for the right taste and textural elements," VanGosen says, noting that this work began well before her arrival.

They found that the patty itself didn't have to change, just the way it was handled. Keeping the meat fresh and cooking each burger to order improves the eating experience immensely. "The game changer turned out to be serving it hot off the grill," she says, adding that the never-frozen patties cook in 60 to 80 seconds-about a minute faster than frozen ones-which also helps offset the added time it takes restaurant workers to start cooking each burger as soon as it's ordered. McDonald's declines to reveal the costs associated with the new patty, beyond saying that it is not appreciably more expensive to produce than the frozen version, and that consumers won't see an increase in price. "I haven't seen data on this, but if I had to guess based on other restaurants, I'd say it costs McDonald's a little more," says industry analyst Mark Kalinowski, of Kalinowski Equity Research. "But we're getting a lot of evidence that they are selling well." Kalinowski says that the average McDonald's does twice the business of an average Burger King or Wendy's. (Wendy's, which has long served never-frozen patties, recently took the opportunity to mock its bigger competitor on Twitter: "Hey @McDonalds, heard the news. Happy #NationalFrozenFoodDay to you for all the frozen beef that's sticking around in your cheeseburgers.")

McDonald's began testing fresh-beef Quarter Pounders nearly two years ago at restaurants in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Dallas, markets selected because they are serious burger country. The response was conclusive: More than 90% of customers distinctly preferred the new burger. It's been a hit with critics too. "The meat was tender, it tasted fresh and delicious, with that classic whiff of black pepper McDonald's uses," said one Food & Wine review. "To boot, there was a nice bit of char around the edges. Simply put, there was no disguising the fact that this meat is a fairly significant upgrade from McDonald's as usual."

In addition to taste, today's restaurant-goers increasingly care about the provenance of the food they consume. At Sweetgreen (91 locations), for instance, an employee writes the names of the farms that supplied the season's ingredients on a chalkboard in the restaurant. Shake Shack published a cookbook last year that highlights its local purveyors. While moves like these are impossible at the scale of McDonald's, the chain has been taking gradual steps in these upstarts' direction. The company committed in 2015 to using exclusively cage-free eggs by 2025. Its chicken is now free of most antibiotics, which has been the policy in the U.S. since last year (though the Humane Society thinks these changes don't go far enough). McDonald's also recently announced it would stop using plastic straws in the U.K. by 2020 and begin testing alternatives in the U.S. Generally, the company has become more transparent about its sourcing in the post-Fast Food Nation era, distancing itself from the industrial food processes it formerly employed that had so disgusted consumers, including incorporating "pink slime"-beef castoffs treated with ammonia-into its burgers.

But fresh beef is many orders of magnitude more challenging than any menu update thus far, and more significant to the company overall. "We thought, How do we make the biggest difference to the most customers in the shortest possible time?" says Easterbrook. Rather than playing defense against critics by adding a healthful-and potentially unpopular-option to the menu, the company has homed in on its essential product: a hamburger, the biggest, burgeriest hamburger McDonald's sells.

On a late-spring Tuesday, not long after the new patty began being served nationwide, Christa Small, one of the company's top operations executives and the person whose team was responsible for coming up with the procedures that make fresh beef possible, visits a McDonald's near the old campus in Oak Brook. It's hard to imagine anyone you'd trust more with the task of making sure the biggest restaurant chain in the world can safely sell a potentially pathogen-carrying product to millions of customers a day. Small is friendly but intensely focused, with a tiny Golden Arches pin on her lapel. She's worked for McDonald's her entire career, beginning with a "crew member" position at a restaurant in suburban Chicago, followed by a corporate internship the summer before her freshman year at University of Michigan, where she studied electrical engineering (she also has a master's in computer engineering). She has served in a wide variety of roles at the company, from the IT department to helping develop the automated beverage machine.

Food safety, especially in the wake of Chipotle's disastrous E. coli outbreaks in 2015 and 2016, which hurt both its business and its brand, is clearly a priority for McDonald's. The company's suppliers have spent around $60 million to enhance equipment and systems, including new refrigeration and food-packing technology. (Lopez Foods, which supplies restaurants in the Texas and Oklahoma region, led the pilot program to develop a process to produce, pack, and ship fresh patties.) The distribution centers and cold trucks were also revamped, to ensure that the patties would be kept appropriately cool yet at no point be exposed to freezing temperatures, rendering the whole fresh-meat initiative moot.

The main equipment investment McDonald's franchisees have had to make for the fresh-beef switch is a squat, two-drawer refrigerator. ("Do [franchisees] like writing big checks?" Easterbrook asks. "Of course they don't! But if there's a strong business case behind it, they'll naturally want to invest.") Small's group also developed new "small wares" for the process, including trays and tongs that are only used with the new patties. Most crucially, she and her team developed a mandatory curriculum for the handling, cooking, and serving of fresh-beef patties. "It's the most intensive training process we've ever done for a new product," she says. "We really want to make sure we maintain our reputation in regards to food safety."

In crafting the new Quarter Pounder, McDonald's has made subtle improvements to the entire sandwich, adjusting grill time and the bun-toasting process, for example. But the biggest change is in the labor process to prepare it. McDonald's switched from batch cooking to preparing each Quarter Pounder when ordered. This required fundamental shifts in kitchen culture and training. "It takes them a minute to understand that I want them to react as soon as a customer orders," Small says of employees. "I want you to get the patty down, I want you to act with a sense of urgency. When you have to change the behaviors of hundreds of thousands of people, that's not a small thing."

To demonstrate, Small takes me to the other side of a McDonald's counter and asks an associate for a Quarter Pounder. As soon as the order enters the system, a cowbell sound-unique to the new burger-alerts the grill cook, who pulls on a fresh pair of blue gloves and grabs a patty from a sterile bag contained in a blue tub in the special fridge, which is labeled raw fresh beef only/solo carne. fresca cruda. (The combination of the plastic bag and the plastic tub provides two lines of defense against the escape of "purge," which is the unappetizing word for the juices that the raw burger releases in the packaging. "That's where your main risk of cross-contamination is," says Small.) As the grill cook's burger hits the grill, he lowers a clamshell top, which flattens the patty and allows it to cook on both sides at the same time. In another area of the kitchen, the prep team pops a bun in the toaster and, as soon as it's ready, applies condiments. When the patty is done, the clamshell automatically floats open. The grill cook seasons the burger with salt and pepper and passes it on a tray to a short conveyor belt, where the prep squad unites the patty with the bun and condiments and packs it all in a cardboard box. The whole process takes less than two minutes. And the finished product? It is, indeed, hotter and juicier. John Goodman's whispers are not lies.

The new beef patties have a 14-day shelf life from the time they are formed at one of the company's meat purveyors until the moment they're served. But there are many factors that could prevent them from getting to a customer at all. The refrigerated trucks McDonald's uses, for instance, are constantly temperature-monitored: If the interior temperature goes even one degree too high or low, the entire load is discarded. There's also, for the first time, a question of supply. After all, ground beef is a seasonal agricultural product, and even if you are one of the biggest purchasers of it on the planet, as McDonald's is, you still need to plan ahead for the arrival of barbecue season. "We're competing with retail on fresh beef, and we need to make sure we can access the supplies we need," says Marion Gross, the head of the U.S. supply chain and a 25-year veteran of the company. "This is new for us, and we're coming into our first grilling season and it's going to test the robustness of our supply chain. But so far, so good!" To better anticipate purchasing needs across the entire business, Gross's group is making significant investments in computer learning and researching emerging technology like the blockchain. "We're looking at all those kinds of things seriously," she says, "so we can better manage the data we have." She adds, laughing, "We have a lot of data."

McDonald's has put all of this energy into fresh beef because it really needs the burger to succeed. The chain's stalwartly low prices are the result of razor-thin margins and massive sales volume, so keeping costs down and getting more customers through the doors-or onto its highly regarded ordering app-is paramount. To this end, the company announced another step in its ongoing restructuring in June, closing regional field offices and further shrinking the management structure. All told, it plans to reduce expenses by $500 million by the end of 2019. And it's begun looking into a host of potential new offerings, from plant-based meat alternatives (like the Impossible Slider that White Castle has begun testing in certain markets; see sidebar) to restaurants that recognize diners upon entering and prompt them with their favorite orders. "Customer expectations are ever increasing," Easterbrook notes. "What used to be convenient 10 years ago, those rules get rewritten based on the Amazons and Ubers and the Netflixes. Just because we're large doesn't mean we have to be slow."

About a month into the fresh-beef rollout, things are definitely bustling during the dinner rush at a McDonald's on Manhattan's Upper West Side. A few minutes after a touch-screen-kiosk order for a Quarter Pounder with Cheese is placed, a young female employee brings it to my table. Have things been busier since the rollout? "Oh yeah," she says, already speeding back to the counter. "Everybody tells me how much they love this burger."

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The inside story of how McDonald's innovated the Quarter Pounder

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A cryptic missive went out last spring to all 3.6 million people who follow McDonald's on Twitter. The tweet read, simply: "100% Fresh Beef + John Goodman = ASMR(ish)" and included a link to a video.

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Since releasing its Alexa AI-driven personal assistant home speaker device, Amazon has been dogged by alarmist, clickbait reports that the device listens to and records user's conversations.

But Amazon has always claimed that Alexa only starts recording when the command, 'Alexa' is spoken.

© Amazon

How then, to explain recent reports from Danielle, from Portland, Oregon that a private conversation between her and her husband was recorded and mysteriously ended up in the inbox of her husband's colleague?

Danielle discovered this had happened after receiving an alarming call from her husband's colleague, insisting, "Unplug your Alexa devices right now, you're being hacked."

He then proved it by relaying the - truly hack-worthy - conversation about hardwood flooring that had taken place between the couple.

"I felt invaded," Danielle told KIRO-TV. "A total privacy invasion. Immediately, I said, 'I'm never plugging that device in again because I can't trust it.'"

Amazon first responded by simply confirming that this chain of events had taken place. So how does this tally with Amazon's claims that the device is not always snooping on our conversations?

Amazon has now produced an explanation which relies on muffled word cues instructing Alexa and her responses going unheard by the couple.

They say she was initially triggered by a word similar to 'Alexa', and then later heard 'send message' followed by the name of a contact upon her (presumably inaudible) request.

Although this chain of events does seem improbable, it would provide an explanation that keeps Amazon in the clear regarding Alexa's eavesdropping.

So are devices like Alexa and rival product Google Home really always listening?

Drawing from all the available information, the short answer is no. Both devices only listen and record conversations after a 'wake word' is spoken, and even then these requests can be deleted from your history.

There are two elements to this story, there is the conduct of Amazon and Google in regards to if and when it listens to and records conversations within earshot of their devices, and there is the threat that if these conversations are recorded, can they be acquired by hackers?

Google is clear that it does not record any ambient conversations around the Home device. The official data security and privacy support page states: "No. Google Home listens in short (a few seconds) snippets for the hotword. Those snippets are deleted if the hotword is not detected, and none of that information leaves your device until the hotword is heard.

"When Google Home detects that you've said "Ok Google," the LEDs on top of the device light up to tell you that recording is happening, Google Home records what you say, and sends that recording (including the few-second hotword recording) to Google in order to fulfill your request. You can delete those recordings through My Activity anytime."

Amazon is similarly clear in its Alexa and Alexa Device FAQ: "Amazon Echo and Echo Dot use on-device keyword spotting to detect the wake word. When these devices detect the wake word, they stream audio to the Cloud, including a fraction of a second of audio before the wake word."

You can also review voice interactions by visiting the history section in the settings of the Alexa App or the settings in the Google Home app. Users can even listen to audio sent to the cloud, delete voice clips and enter feedback.

It's important to note, however, that if you do delete your history this will adversely affect its ability to be a 'smart' assistant, as both use this data to tailor responses and learn your habits in order to get better the more you use them.

Simply put, if you don't want Alexa to listen you push the microphone button until it turns red, which indicates that the device is not listening or streaming data to the cloud, even if you say the wake word. Also, anything that is recorded is pretty secure with Amazon and Google and is encrypted in transit.

The truth is that neither Google nor Amazon would sell many of these devices if they were glorified wiretaps.

Of course, just ask Apple if you can completely hold off hackers. Research by MWR InfoSecurity successfully compromised an Amazon Echo by exploiting a vulnerability in the device to turn it into a 'wiretap' without affecting its overall functionality.

The vulnerability can only be leveraged through a physical attack, however, like an actual wiretap. The 2017 edition of the Amazon Echo and Amazon Dot are also not vulnerable to this physical attack.

A statement from MWR reads: "By removing the rubber base at the bottom of the Amazon Echo, the research team could access the 18 debug pads and directly boot into the firmware of the device, via an external SD card, and install persistent malware without leaving any physical evidence of tampering. This gained them remote root shell access and enabled them to access the 'always listening' microphones."

Amazon responded to the research with some fairly typical steps: "Customer trust is very important to us. To help ensure the latest safeguards are in place, as a general rule, we recommend customers purchase Amazon devices from Amazon or a trusted retailer and that they keep their software up-to-date."

My take

I've had multiple conversations with owners of these devices, as well as paranoid smartphone owners, who are convinced that they are being targeted by advertisements based purely off the back of ambient conversations they have had around their favourite devices.

Facebook even felt compelled to issue a short denial of this practice - entitled Facebook Does Not Use Your Phone's Microphone for Ads or News Feed Stories - back in June 2016.

The important thing to note here for sceptics is that Google and Amazon stand to lose way more in terms of consumer confidence and potential fines than it does to gain in monitoring all of your conversations and tweaking its advertising algorithms. The risk-reward equation simply doesn't match up.
Additional reporting by Laurie Clarke.

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Does Amazon Alexa or Google Home listen to my conversations?

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Since releasing its Alexa AI-driven personal assistant home speaker device, Amazon has been dogged by alarmist, clickbait reports that the device listens to and records user's conversations. But Amazon has always claimed that Alexa only starts recording when the command, 'Alexa' is spoken.

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Five and a half degrees Fahrenheit. It may not sound like much-perhaps the difference between wearing a sweater and not wearing one on an early-spring day. But for the world in which we live-which climate experts project will be at least 5.7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by 2100, relative to pre-industrial levels (1850-1900), should global emissions continue on their current path-this small rise will have grave consequences. These impacts are already becoming apparent for every ecosystem and living thing, including us.

Human influences are the number one cause of global warming, especially the carbon pollution we cause by burning fossil fuels and the pollution capture we prevent by destroying forests. The carbon dioxide, methane, soot, and other pollutants we release into the atmosphere act like a blanket, trapping the sun's heat and causing the planet to warm. Evidence shows that the 2010s were hotter than any other decade on record-and every decade since the 1960s has averaged hotter than the previous one. This warming is altering the earth's climate system, including its land, atmosphere, oceans, and ice, in far-reaching ways.

More frequent and severe weather

Higher temperatures are worsening many types of disasters, including storms, heat waves, floods, and droughts. A warmer climate creates an atmosphere that can collect, retain, and unleash more water, changing weather patterns in such a way that wet areas become wetter and dry areas drier.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in 2021, there were 20 weather and climate disaster events in the United States-including severe storms, floods, drought, and wildfires-that individually caused at least $1 billion in losses. "Disasters in 2021 had a staggering total price tag of $145 billion-and that's an underestimate because it excludes health damages," says Vijay Limaye, senior scientist at NRDC. "These climate and weather disasters endanger people across the country throughout the entire year. In fact, more than 4 in 10 Americans live in a county that was struck by climate-related disasters in 2021."

The increasing number of droughts, intense storms, and floods we're seeing as our warming atmosphere holds-and then dumps-more moisture poses risks to public health and safety too. Prolonged dry spells mean more than just scorched lawns. Drought conditions jeopardize access to clean drinking water, fuel out-of-control wildfires, and result in dust storms, extreme heat events, and flash flooding in the States. Elsewhere around the world, lack of water is a leading cause of death and serious disease and is contributing to crop failure. At the opposite end of the spectrum, heavier rains cause streams, rivers, and lakes to overflow, which damages life and property, contaminates drinking water, creates hazardous-material spills, and promotes mold infestation and unhealthy air. A warmer, wetter world is also a boon for foodborne and waterborne illnesses and disease-carrying insects, such as mosquitoes, fleas, and ticks.

Higher death rates

Today's scientists point to climate change as the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. It's a threat that impacts all of us-especially children, the elderly, low-income communities, and minorities-and in a variety of direct and indirect ways. As temperatures spike, so does the incidence of illness, emergency room visits, and death.

"There are more hot days in places where people aren't used to it," Limaye says. "They don't have air-conditioning or can't afford it. One or two days isn't a big deal. But four days straight where temperatures don't go down, even at night, leads to severe health consequences." In the United States, hundreds of heat-related deaths occur each year due to direct impacts and the indirect effects of heat-exacerbated, life-threatening illnesses, such as heat exhaustion, heatstroke, and cardiovascular and kidney diseases. Indeed, extreme heat kills more Americans each year, on average, than hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and lightning combined.

Dirtier air

Rising temperatures also worsen air pollution by increasing ground-level ozone smog, which is created when pollution from cars, factories, and other sources react to sunlight and heat. Ground-level ozone is the main component of smog, and the hotter things get, the more of it we have. Dirtier air is linked to higher hospital admission rates and higher death rates for asthmatics. It worsens the health of people suffering from cardiac or pulmonary disease. And warmer temperatures also significantly increase airborne pollen, which is bad news for those who suffer from hay fever and other allergies.

Higher wildlife extinction rates

As humans, we face a host of challenges, but we're certainly not the only ones catching heat. As land and sea undergo rapid changes, the animals that inhabit them are doomed to disappear if they don't adapt quickly enough. Some will make it, and some won't. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report, the risk of species extinction increases steeply with rises in global temperature-with invertebrates (specifically pollinators) and flowering plants being some of the most vulnerable. Moreover, a 2015 study showed that vertebrate species (animals with backbones, like fish, birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles) are also disappearing more than 100 times faster than the natural rate of extinction, due to human-driven climate change, pollution, and deforestation.

More acidic oceans

The earth's marine ecosystems are under pressure as a result of climate change. Oceans are becoming more acidic, due in large part to their absorption of some of our excess emissions. As this acidification accelerates, it poses a serious threat to underwater life, particularly creatures with calcium carbonate shells or skeletons, including mollusks, crabs, and corals. This can have a huge impact on shellfisheries. In total, the U.S. shellfish industry could lose more than $400 million annually by 2100 due to impacts of ocean acidification.

Higher sea levels

The polar regions are particularly vulnerable to a warming atmosphere. Average temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as fast as they are elsewhere on earth, and the world's ice sheets are melting fast. This not only has grave consequences for the region's people, wildlife, and plants; its most serious impact may be on rising sea levels. By 2100, it's estimated our oceans will be one to four feet higher, threatening coastal systems and low-lying areas, encompassing entire island nations and the world's largest cities, including Los Angeles, Miami, and New York City, as well as Mumbai, India; Rio de Janeiro; and Sydney, Australia.

But this isn't the end of the story

There's no question: Unchecked climate change promises a frightening future, and it's too late to fully turn back the clock. We've already taken care of that by pumping a century's worth of pollution into the atmosphere. "Even if we stopped all carbon dioxide emissions tomorrow, we'd still see some dangerous effects," Limaye says. That, of course, is the bad news.

But there's also good news. By aggressively reducing our global emissions now, "we can avoid a lot of the severe consequences that climate change would otherwise bring," says Limaye. While change must happen at the highest levels of government and business, your voice matters too: to your friends, to your families, and to your community leaders. Together, we can envision a safer, healthier, more equitable future-and build toward it. You can join with millions of people around the world fighting climate change and even work to reduce fossil fuels in your own life.
This story was originally published on March 15, 2016, and has been updated with new information and links.

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Are the Effects of Global Warming Really that Bad?

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Learn about global warming and the consequences to our environment from increased wildlife extinction rates to acidic oceans and polluted air.

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Debate.org is a dynamic social community where you can voice your opinion on today's hottest issues.

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football concussions  affecting the brain

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football concussions  affecting the brain

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3d printing is the key to solving world hunger

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3d printing is the key to solving world hunger

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3D Printing Could Hold the Key to Solving World Hunger

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Featured guest post by Matthew Young From its first appearance in the late 1980s, 3D printing has opened the technological door to possibilities formerly limited to the realms of science fiction. 3...

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It shouldn't be surprising that over 40 million people are playing Fortnite, an Epic Games production in which 98 percent of humans disappear and the final 2 percent are left to fend off zombies-like creatures. The game is so popular that Epic announced it will be putting $100 million into eSports player pools over the next year. Even watching people play Fortnite has become a full-time occupation:

People across the world have spent more than 5,000 years watching Fortnite streams on a video game streaming service called Twitch over the past two weeks alone.

That information is provided by an article on NBA players addicted to Fortnite. Some get hooked recovering from an injury while others log in hours before and after games. To some, game time is a distraction from Fortnite binges. Parallels between playing on a professional team and an online team are telling. As Orlando Magic shooting guard Terrence Ross says,

One hundred people on a map, survival game-find your supplies, weapons, materials. And basically after that, it's every man for himself.

Yet when playing in team or duo mode, collaboration matters. Communities form around games in the same manner as sports teams. While it might seem odd that people watch others play video games, consider mukbang: thousands of Koreans pay to watch other people eat. The biggest mukbang stars net $10,000 a month alongside lucrative sponsorship deals.

Why is Fortnite so addictive?

As with most every video game, those dopamine hits for small accomplishments are riveting. Problem-solving is an important skill set we innately attempt to hone, which games like Fortnite fulfill. Feeling a part of a larger mission, in this case destroying zombie creatures, offers a sense of purpose. True, that purpose might not be saving a democracy, but in a less violent world, it fulfills a certain yearning.

In his book, A Terrible Love of War , the late psychologist James Hillman writes that war is a "mythical happening." Veterans have a hard time reintegrating into society due to many reasons, but two are prominent: the brotherhood (and increasingly, sisterhood) one is part of, and the shared sense of meaning soldiers feel when engaged in mortal combat. The rules of battle and those of society are often at odds-a tension painfully explored in the Netflix movie, Mudbound, for one.

While we are warring less with one another these days, it is still a prominent fact of daily life, with increasing global tensions potentially throwing us in the other direction soon. As Hillman notes, in 5,600 years of recorded history there have been 14,600 wars. This does not include the daily violence that people around the world face. Yet Hillman offers caution in normalizing it:

To declare war "normal" does not eliminate the pathologies of behavior, the enormities of devastation, the unbearable pain suffered in bodies and souls. Nor does the idea that war is normal justify it.

War was a way of life for a long time. Still is, in certain regards. Homo sapiens warred against the half-dozen other homo genera before decimating them. They also waged war against other animals, enslaving billions in a process that continues to this day. Physical combat was a regular part of life until it wasn't, at least not so much. In War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, the journalist Christopher Hedges writes,

The accepted principles of humanity, the archaic code of the warrior, became quaint and obsolete. The technological and depersonalized levels of organized killing begun in World War I have defined warfare ever since.

Returning to Mudbound, Pappy might only have killed one man in his life, but he looked that man in his eyes while doing so. This gave him the moral authority (or so he believes) to criticize his son, Jamie, a decorated World War II bomber pilot, for thinking that the hundreds of soldiers he killed from miles up in the air irrelevant. Today, with drones controlled from continents away, the entire process of war has become like...a video game.

If the choice is between actually killing others and virtually doing so, the latter is a far better option. The distance between confronting a flesh and blood human and an avatar is vast; beyond hand-eye coordination, the virtual world poorly prepares you for real-world aggression. Yet having a sense of purpose is infinitely better psychologically than not having one, even if that purpose is invented-and really, on a macro level, what sense of purpose is not in some way invented?

While video games are sometimes criticized for inciting real-world violence, a popular claim by NRA supporters whenever school shootings occur, the opposite is true. Epic is pumping so much money into Fortnite because it is the game of the moment, but someday soon gamers will grow bored and seek new adventures, the history of human mythology playing out on a screen. Perhaps the vehicle is not as relevant as the feelings it instills in the participant. If this addiction is enhancing one's experience of life, so be it. It's better than the alternative.

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It shouldn't be surprising that over 40 million people are playing Fortnite, an Epic Games production in which 98 percent of humans disappear and the final 2 percent are left to fend off zombies-like creatures. The game is so popular that Epic announced it will be putting $100 million into eSports player pools over the next year.