Last Week in Collapse: January 21-27, 2024
Measles, Drought, and a very hot January. This planet has a fever that won’t break.
Last Week in Collapse: January 21-27, 2024
This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter compiling some of the most important, timely, useful, soul-crushing, ironic, amazing, or otherwise must-see/can’t-look-away moments in Collapse.
This is the 109th newsletter. You can find the January 14-20 edition here if you missed it last week. Thank you for subscribing to the Substack.
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Several temperature records were broken in the Alps for this time of year. The Maldives tied its January record; parts of Ivory Coast and Morocco, too. A vicious heat wave rolled across Australia. San Diego had its wettest January day ever and part of Spain had its hottest January day.
A landslides killed at least 8 in China’s Yunnan province. Colombia declared a state of emergency over growing wildfires. Chile is extending its state of Drought emergency by 9 months as agricultural difficulties mount.
Although rising sea levels threaten to swallow many cities, another threat is already here: land subsidence. Cities particularly in southeast Asia are sinking into the earth. On the eastern coast of the U.S., many cities are dropping about 1mm per year. That’s one inch every 25 years, and it adds up fast for cities on the coast.
A study published in Science Advances tracked temperatures and drought in the western half of North America over the last 500 years, and concluded—by measuring & analyzing tree rings—that the area has been heating and drying slowly for centuries, and its problems are accelerating.
A 7.1 earthquake struck China in its remote Xinjiang province, killing 3 and displacing 12,000+. Several hundred livestock were killed as well, and the structural damage has yielded greater suffering in the midst of a cold winter night.
On the same night after Tuvalu’s (pop: 11,200) election—in which climate change featured heavily—the country felt its hottest night temperatures in recorded history, with a minimum temperature of 29.3 °C (85 °F).
A 26-page study on European plastic waste in Vietnam paints a grim picture of “recycling” in Southeast Asia. In addition to the melting plastic, 7M liters of contaminated wastewater is reportedly disposed of in one village—Vietnam’s largest plastic recycling station—every day.
AI predicted in a study that our mountain glaciers will lose 50% of their volume by 2050.
The Canadian tar sands are much dirtier than previously reported. Air pollution from Athabasca, Alberta, is 2000%—6000% more than anticipated. Scientists say, yet again, that humans are responsible for the climate change which is causing Drought in the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest store of carbon. Everybody seems to know, yet nothing seems to change.
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Famine continues in Ethiopia. Aid to Syria is decreasing. Economic troubles are coming to Nepal as their exports drop and rice becomes increasingly imported; plus inflation.
In the United States, the Klarna-fication of holiday spending has resulted in debts coming due. You can’t run a planet on a buy-now-pay-later basis. In the UK, 47,000+ businesses are nearing insolvency, according to reports. Health, education, construction, and real estate companies are most at-risk. In the U.S., and just about everywhere else, rent has become unaffordable.
The UN is calling a measles emergency after a 45x increase detected in 2023 compared to 2022. In the first 9 months of 2022, fewer than 1,000 measles cases were reported; in 2023, the figure was 42,000+. An industrial corporation bought the U.S. helium stockpile—already a scarce resource
2025 is expected to set a record for nuclear power production, as many nations across Eurasia invest in nuclear power plants. Even Ukraine is planning to build more nuclear power plants, although more mines were laid outside Zaporizhzhia’s nuclear facility, according to reports.
Scientists are calling them “Methuselah microbes,” ancient viruses and bacteria trapped in permafrost and other frozen places. They are reportedly planning to start a tracking agency to detect and respond to new old threats emerging from the ice.
The Panama Canal has now dropped its water level by 2 meters in the last 12 months. Plans to remedy the ongoing drought’s effects on global commerce will require sacrificing ecological stability further. Ideas include routing water from Lake Alajuela to the locks, damming the Indio River, or cloud-seeding to engineer more rain. The global water shortage is also impeding the transition to renewable energy.
Some scientists say 10-20% of COVID survivors develop Long COVID. It appears more and more like Long COVID may be a vascular problem, and result in long-term immune system weakness. The “complement pathway” works in the human immune system, and is damaged by Long COVID. Treatments and therapies for Long COVID are still being developed and (re)assessed. JN.1 has become the most common variant across the United States. In Europe, the COVID vaccine was credited by the WHO as saving 1,400,000 lives. However, few people wear masks anymore.
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North Korea’s destruction of a reunification monument, combined with recent military tests, has caused some analysts to think that North Korea is planning on restarting its War against South Korea.
Some experts believe malevolent uses of AI will become everyday occurrences by the middle of this year. The 9-page study concludes that our highly interconnected infospaces leave us vulnerable to bad actors leveraging their power to damage society.
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