💡 Warp News #334
🔥 The world has never burned this little. 📉 HIV infections and AIDS deaths at lowest level in over 30 years. 🌊 After decades of drought, groundwater south of the Sahara has risen.
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Free newsletter with fact-based optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress with the angry optimist, Mathias Sundin. If you are not a subscriber, become one here.
⚖️ The News Scale measures the imbalance in the news media
One of the things I knocked together over the summer is The News Scale.
As a subscriber, you already know that Warp News exists to contribute to a better balance between negative and positive news in the feed.
But how unbalanced are the news media?
That is exactly what the News Scale looks at. Every day for three weeks it has evaluated headlines and leads from 26 news outlets in 15 countries, more than 7,600 in total.
That the tilt toward negative news is large surprises no one.
But there is actually an interesting thing to note about the selection of news compared with the tone of the news.
This is a beta version that I hope to improve going forward.
There is one thing you as a reader can help with. Right now an AI does the assessment of headline and lead, something large language models have proven to be very good at. But you are also welcome to go to the site and rate five news items on a scale from very negative to very positive. That way we can compare with the AI's answers and improve the assessment over time.
How the News Scale is built and how it works, I write about here. If you want to go straight to the results and help rate news, the News Scale is here.
Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist
🏆 This week's Premium Supporter article
⚖️ The News Scale (which measures how balanced the news media are)
That the news media are one long doomscroll makes us all a little dumb. But how unbalanced are they? I have built a news scale.
💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week
🏊♀️ 50 years ago no one dared dip a toe in the Detroit River, now people fish, paddle and swim there
Friends of the Detroit River is now launching the 14th and final priority habitat restoration project in the Detroit River. Thirteen are already complete. Every spring, millions of fish move up through the river to spawn.
🔥 The world has never burned this little since measurements began
Wildfires in Europe and North America are more extensive than before. At the same time, the global figures show a different picture. During the first half of 2026, global emissions from fires were the lowest ever measured, according to the European climate center Copernicus.
📉 HIV infections and AIDS deaths at lowest level in over 30 years
Seven countries have reduced new infections by almost 80 percent since 2010. New prevention medicines offer protection close to that of a vaccine.
🚗 Transport emissions are falling in Australia, thanks to EVs
Australia's transport emissions fell for the second consecutive year outside the pandemic, driven by growing EV sales and lower petrol consumption. The country's total greenhouse gas emissions dropped 2.1 percent in 2025 and are now 24.5 percent below 2005 levels.
☀️ Solar replaces coal as the world's largest source of electricity within six years
Solar overtakes coal as the world's largest source of electricity generation within six years, according to research firm BloombergNEF. Solar is the cheapest source of new electricity generation. Coal costs almost twice as much.
🌊 After decades of drought, groundwater south of the Sahara has risen by 13 feet
The Sahel is the semi-arid belt south of the Sahara, stretching around 500 miles wide from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east. More than 150 million people live there. In the 1970s and 1980s the region was hit by severe drought. Now the area has more water than it has had for decades.
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