Last Week in Collapse: June 23-29, 2024
The heat is becoming unbearable. We are already living in a hell of our own making.
Last Week in Collapse: June 23-29, 2024
This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter compiling some of the most important, timely, useful, soul-crushing, ironic, stunning, exhausting, or otherwise must-see/can’t-look-away moments in Collapse.
This is the 131st newsletter. You can find the June 16-22 edition here on Reddit if you missed it last week. Thank you for subscribing to the Substack.
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A study in Nature Geoscience claims that slush contains most of the meltwater on the ice shelves in the Antarctic. The results indicate “slush and pooled meltwater leads to 2.8 times more meltwater formation than predicted by standard climate models.” The study authors conclude that many previous studies have dramatically undercounted the quantity of meltwater because many studies only look at pooled water and ignore slush.
Temperatures in Iraq hit 50 °C (122 °F), and knocked out the electrical grid. Anti-government demonstrations followed. Some cities in Iraq regularly go 10 hours each day without electricity. Kuwait also faced power outages caused by the record-hot temperatures. An adjusted death toll for people making the Hajj pilgrimage counts 1,300+ heat deaths now.
Drought around the Black Sea is causing harvest problems, particularly for grain. Last May was the driest May in Ukraine in 30+ years. Türkiye is experiencing many more wildfires now than at the same time last year. Mardin, Türkiye, saw a record hot night, at 30.9 °C (87 °F). A number of locations in Greece also saw record hot June days & nights. Southeastern Spain is bracing for a hot summer, after a nearly record-breaking hot & dry spring. Hong Kong is poised to set its all-time longest heat wave. Across the world, the dangers to outdoor workers are growing. Over 60% of the world’s population lived under extreme temperatures in June 2024.
8 died in a landslide in central China. Record temperatures for June struck across a number of Japan locations. At least 5 died in Kyrgyzstan mudslides & flooding. A 7.2 earthquake hit southern Peru on Friday, but there were no reports of human casualties. A long heat wave in Pakistan killed 560+ and counting.
The world’s worst coral bleaching event has some scientists wishing hurricanes, which act as large-scale “heat vacuums,” would happen more frequently, in order to bring up colder water that might cool the coral habitats. However, storms that are too strong can also tear up coral ecosystems, and cause damage to humans. The EU is forecasting 4-7 major storms in the Atlantic this hurricane season.
The EU Parliament is deprioritizing climate change legislation for the coming 5-year term. The 8-page strategic agenda released on Thursday instead focuses on “upholding European values,” improving regional security, managing the flow of migration, and improving economic competitiveness—although it does still mention the green transition and water resilience.
A paywalled study’s abstract claims that the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ)—a band of low-pressure latitudes near the equator—is expected to be pushed northward for 10-20 years, as a result of CO2 emissions and warming sea surface temperatures. Theoretically, this shift will bring tropical rainfall patterns several degrees northward, before shifting south for a long time. One climate professor claimed, “the northward shift will last for only about 20 years before greater forces stemming from warming southern oceans pull the convergence zones back southward and keep them there for another millennium.”
Drought in North Carolina, affecting 99% of the state, has caused a “total loss” of its corn crop this year. An uncontained wildfire in Maricopa County, Arizona, forced the evacuation of dozens of homes. In the Netherlands, they experienced (by far) their wettest 8 months in history.
Record heat in parts of Indonesia, and parts of Saudi Arabia, in Algeria, and parts of Germany. For the first time in 469 days, sea surface temperatures did not break a record.
Wildfires in Russia’s Arctic Circle woodlands. Scientists report that Canada’s wildfires in 2023 put more CO2 into the air than all of India’s fossil fuel burning. Canada’s wildfires were responsible for 27% of the world’s loss in tree cover last year. A paywalled study’s abstract claims that wildfires have more than doubled in the last 21 years, and that 6 of our 7 most extreme wildfire years have occurred in the last 7 years.
A 20-page article published last week identified almost 17,000 sites that should be conserved in order to protect the world’s most sensitive biodiverse ecosystems. 5 countries made up over 50% of the sites: the Philippines, Brazil, Indonesia, Madagascar and Colombia.
A study in Nature Geoscience looked at the ways water eats away at an ice sheet’s grounding line, the place at which many large ice sheets sit on earth. The researchers believe that the impact of warm and cool water weakening the integrity of ice shelves is underappreciated in forecasting future ice sheet retreat, and may indicate another tipping point for the stability of giant ice shelves.
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Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is expected to cause 10M+ deaths each year by 2050. Some believe the issue is “more acute than climate change,” though the two are interrelated. Some superbugs can live in the body for many years and later infect others.
Finland is offering a bird flu vaccine to people who work with animals—starting next week. Most experts don’t think a major vaccination effort is necessary, though they also say that government responses have been lacking so far. “It’s not [being] managed as a zoonotic disease that is a potential dynamic threat,” said one researcher. Bird flu traces have been found in San Francisco’s wastewater, and authorities aren’t sure how it got there, since there are practically no farms there.
LA’s mayor, who herself currently has COVID, is considering a mask ban at protests, following a controversial protest outside an LA synagogue. Horror stories continue to emerge about people who have had their once active lives upended by a debilitating case of Long COVID. The new “consensus” definition of Long COVID requires 3 things of a possible Long COVID case: 1) it is associated with a COVID infection, 2) it remains for at least three months (either continuously or intermittently), and 3) it affects one or more organ systems.
A 24-page report, published last month, on the Global Burden of Disease in the year 2021, claimed that COVID reduced worldwide life expectancies by 1.6 years—though they predict overall life expectancy will rise by 4.6 years from 2022 to 2050. The report is also focused on birth rates and overall health risk factors.
The most dangerous strain of mpox is circulating in the DRC, close to the border of Rwanda and Burundi. The province is one of the Congo’s most restive and violent regions, where treatments and vaccines for the contagious illness are unavailable. This particular variant, Clade I, has a CFR of 5-10%.
India’s water shortage worsens—yet some outlets seem to be primarily concerned with its impact on the country’s creditworthiness. Bengaluru, however, is expected to finish its wettest June on record.
Global lithium consumption is expected to increase 40x by 2040. Argentina has found itself scaling up lithium mining drastically, draining their water in the process. Locals are being pressured to cede their ancestral lands, and mining corporations are dividing communities to impose their will. One tonne of lithium requires about 2M liters of water to extract, as well as adding contaminants to the nearby ecosystem.
An article published in a Collapse blog last week reports that at least 20% of global soils are experiencing a potassium deficiency, as a result of “intensive agricultural practices.” Potash, a potassium compound used in fertilizer, is mostly produced in only 3 countries (Canada, China, and Russia, in declining order), though Belarus, Germany, and Israel also produce decent quantities. The author hypothesizes that supply shortages will prevent the necessary doubling of global food production to meet the expected demand in 2050, resulting in a massive energy shortage.
Nvidia’s market cap has surpassed the entire stock market in France or the UK. Water demand from AI may equal half the UK’s annual water consumption by 2027. Some believe that the increased electrical demand from AI—data centers are expected to consume another 2-6% of global electricity—is worth the additional productivity. AI has also recently been used to forecast the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) 18 months in advance, according to a study in Nature.
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