We Are Being Lied To About Climate, Nature and AI
The climate crisis and artificial superintelligence are both threatening our very existence - and in the short-term. Despite the gargantuan magnitude of that fact, this sentence is likely to be dismissed by most as doom-mongering, which nobody has the appetite for. Life is difficult enough to navigate.
The evidence must be studied closely, however, because dishonesty and suppression are hiding the true picture, with the world’s respected experts being the ones who are sounding the latest alarms.
First, the climate emergency, and the associated ecological breakdown. This particulr failure to share vital information could happen anywhere, but for now it happens to be taking place in the UK.
The government is refusing to release the full national security assessment, titled ‘Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security,’ despite heavy campaigning to do so, notably by former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas.
Produced with the Joint Intelligence Committee - the body that oversees MI5, MI6 and GCHQ - the report has been teased only in heavily redacted form. Presuming, as we reasonably must, that the redacted information is the most inflammatory, this assessment is already dark enough to induce mass panic.
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Security and prosperity at risk
The report concluded, with high analytical confidence (its own words), that global ecosystem collapse now threatens UK national security and prosperity. The same applies to all countries, as we are all interconnected by ecosystems.
Those high confidence paragraphs read: “The world is already experiencing impacts including crop failures, intensified natural disasters and infectious disease outbreaks. Threats will increase with degradation and intensify with collapse.”
Not enough for you? Try this: “Ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse.” It helpfully places in parenthesis: “(irreversible loss of function beyond repair).”
To complete the picture of high confidence predictions: “Critical ecosystems that support major global food production areas and impact global climate, water and weather cycles are the most important for UK national security.
“Severe degradation or collapse of these would highly likely result in water insecurity, severely reduced crop yields, a global reduction in arable land, fisheries collapse, changes to global weather patterns, release of trapped carbon exacerbating climate change, novel zoonotic diseases and loss of pharmaceutical resources.”
The assessment’s timeline for this hellscape developing is 2030-2050.
‘The world is in peril’
So to AI. Resisting the temptation to take a sci-fi route to “robots taking over the planet,” let’s instead look at the facts.
Recent months have seen an increasing number of concerned former AI leaders and employees, blowing the whistle on the battle between Sam Altman, Elon Musk and others to be the person widely regarded as the one to nail the coffin on the human race.
Two of the people who built modern artificial intelligence, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, put their names to a statement calling for the brakes to be pulled on the development of superintelligence, until it can be shown to be safe and controllable - and until the public has a say.
Safety researchers have been resigning from the leading labs, and not quietly. Mrinank Sharma, head of Anthropic’s Safeguards Research Team, resigned in February 2026 with a five-word note: The world is in peril.
‘A sixth mass extinction may be underway.’
So there we have it. Two of the gravest forecasts imaginable, delivered by some of the most reliable sources on the planet. And yet… an eerie silence.
Reported in some sections of the media, yes. Latched on to by a number of YouTubers, also correct. But combined into a picture of systemic, establishment dishonesty affecting the immediate future of the entire population of Earth? That hasn’t been communicated loudly, if at all.
Suppression of the true facts is the important thread, here. Scientists have documented the collapse of wildlife populations for decades. They have warned about the implications for the human population. The government assessment, even in redacted form, makes no bones about the direction of travel: “The rate of extinction is tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years. It suggests that a sixth mass extinction may be underway.”
With AI, we can use hyper intelligent models daily. They have already replaced skills to make millions of people jobless, and seeking new identities. But the AI behemoths are not transparent about what they are working on right now. This is where we look to former employees to inform us, and you can see the fear in the whites of their eyes.
The fossil fuel thread between both threats
Both existential threats are conjoined by secrecy and dishonesty, but they intertwine more meaningfully, too. The race toward superintelligence runs on a massive amount of electricity. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that data centre electricity demand will roughly double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours - that’s close to the entire annual electricity consumption of Japan.
That power has to come from somewhere, and increasingly it is coming from fossil fuels. The consequence is clear in the tech companies’ own accounts. In 2025 Microsoft’s emissions rose 25 per cent, its largest jump since the pandemic. Google’s rose 18 per cent, leaving them more than 80 per cent above 2019 levels. Amazon’s rose 16 per cent, its biggest one-year increase on record.
Of course, burning fossil fuels warms the atmosphere, and this contributes to the triggering of ecological collapse. But pollution is also a major threat to ecosystems, and the fossil fuel industry’s ‘Plan B’ is culpable here - plastics. The IEA expects petrochemicals to drive more than a third of global growth of oil demand by 2030.
You need only accept, as the experts do, that there is a real possibility of ecosystems collapsing, and AI becoming the superior intelligence, both within the lifetimes of people now walking the Earth.
The rational response should be obvious. If human life is threatened by a genuine probability of catastrophe on either front, the sane thing would be to work together, urgently, to improve our odds.
Instead, look around you. Read or watch the media. The powerful are accelerating toward both points of no return, while simultaneously waging wars.
They are failing to tell us not to stand too close to the edge. We don’t know how close the edge is - that’s the problem.
The worst of the threats may ultimately not arrive. But it’s certainly possible that they will. The refusal to speak honestly about them is happening now, in plain sight.
We should be asking why, and demanding answers. That includes you.