Last Week in Collapse: June 9-15, 2024
Droughts, diseases, disasters, and dieoffs. We have written a cheque we cannot cash—and Mother Nature is here to collect.
Last Week in Collapse: June 9-15, 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 129th newsletter. You can find the June 2-8 edition here if you missed it last week. Thank you for subscribing to the Substack,
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Flash flooding inaugurated the hurricane season in south Florida. One university predicts 23 named storms, 11 hurricanes, and 5 major storms—a jump from the average of 14 named storms, 7 hurricanes, and 3 major storms. Insurance companies are adjusting rates to account for a busy hurricane season, too. Flash floods killed 3 in Vietnam and brought landslides in Chile. Himalaya landslides killed 10 in India.
Despite a recent judgment by the European Court of Human Rights, Switzerland is not taking measures to address its serious emissions gap. Their parliament allegedly determined that “Switzerland did not need to react as it already had an effective climate change strategy.” Meanwhile, Antarctic sea ice continues dropping and a dead zone is expected to form in the Gulf of Mexico later this summer in which basically no marine life will exist. A paywalled study in Nature Geoscience re-confirmed that the Arctic is warming about 3x faster than most other regions on earth. This phenomenon is called Arctic Amplification. At least NASA released this cool image of Greenland sea ice swirling around…
Martinique hit a new nighttime heat record for June—and then broke that record again the following night. A heat wave in South America broke June records as it swept through the continent. In the Solomon Islands, in Thailand, at Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, on the Kenyan coast, and in China, June records were tied or broken. Parts of northern India have been experiencing the country’s longest ever heat wave, with daytime temperatures around 45 °C (113 °F), since mid-May. Parts of the Caribbean set new records for June as well.
The upcoming Collapse of the Thwaites Glacier has prompted some scientists to look for desperate measures to forestall its (and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet’s) demise—alongside eventually raising sea levels by over 3 meters. One attempt is less geoengineering and more…“ice preservation,” they say. The plan involves drilling into glaciers & pumping out glacial lakewater, and hoping to trigger a cooling feedback loop in the glaciers that remain. There are many complications, not least of which relate to the impracticality of drilling potentially thousands of deep holes, requiring equipment to be hauled on “thousands of shipping containers.” And the number of ice drills needed for a full-scale implementation is twice the number that exist worldwide today.
Drought in Sicily has drastically cut hay harvests, and impacted livestock development. Mediterranean olive crops are way down as a result of the Drought. Small wildfires in Cyprus and northern Greece. A minor 4.8 earthquake struck South Korea.
Flooding struck southeastern Spain bringing unprecedented rainfall. Locust swarms damaged crops in part of Iraqi Kurdistan. A heat wave closed the Parthenon after temperatures exceeded 43 °C (109 °F)—Greece’s earliest heat wave on record. A study in Climate Policy found that “only 22% {of companies} aimed to reduce emissions to a residual level and compensate with removals.”
The “Global Nitrous Oxide Report 2024” was released last week, and it analyzes the release of N2O released from 1980-2020, a period when N2O emissions increased 40%. It claims “The current growth rate of atmospheric N2O is unprecedented with respect to the ice core record covering the last deglacial transition…and likely unprecedented relative to the ice core records of the past 800 000 years.” Agriculture is responsible for 74% of human-released N2O. Nitrous oxide is also more than 250x more potent than CO2 and about 10x worse than methane for the atmosphere.
Finnish researchers are debating the ethics of solar geoengineering, and attempting to agree on guidelines and best practices in advance of new proposals. A new quantification of Canada’s seabed carbon was released, and it equals 60% of all Canada’s trees.
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A number of U.S. agencies are investigating the spread of HPAI/bird flu, which has been detected in livestock in 13 states—including Wyoming for the first time. (Poultry is not considered livestock.) Regarding U.S. poultry, bird flu has been detected in 48 states since the start of this pandemic, 525 counties, affecting about 97M birds (although only a fraction of them actually had avian influenza). In wild birds, there is a much lower confirmed count of affected birds, but bird flu has been identified in all 50 states, 1,148 counties.
What will happen to bird flu now? 24 countries—including most recently a human case of H9N2 in India—have recorded human avian flu cases in recent years, yet the “virus has proven its versatility to infect about any mammal it comes in contact with” said one expert. Testing isn’t scaling up, and the uncertainties and mixed incentives aren’t enabling experts across the world to react adroitly enough. Much like our shared predicament, the problem has simply become too big to manage—and too dangerous to be left in the wild.
A COVID wave may be coming this summer—to the United States anyway, if wastewater analysis is accurate. At least 13 diseases have also spiked after COVID, and scientists think “lockdowns shifted baseline immunities is a piece of the puzzle, as is the pandemic’s hit to overall vaccine administration and compliance. Climate change, rising social inequality and wrung-out health-care services are contributing in ways that are hard to measure.” A report emerged that the Pentagon sought to undermine confidence in China’s vaccine in the Philippines from 2020-2021. Researchers think they may have uncovered another clue to Long COVID: “rogue antibodies” that target the person’s own immune system. “Scientists estimate that around 10–20% of people who are infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus will develop long COVID.” Eventually, most people will have Long COVID......and then what will we do?
Economic Collapse has come to Nigeria (pop: 229M), with a weak currency losing value by the week, and food insecurity worsening. One year ago, Nigeria shifted to a floating currency—and the value just floated away. The common staple food, cassava, recently increased in price 3x, and partial blackouts continue to shake confidence in the authorities. Food imports rise 11% each year to compensate for reduced harvests and a growing population.
Drug contamination in rivers is impacting wild animals, after fish and other creatures consumed antidepressants, caffeine, and illegal drugs. Some have even become addicted. A Chinese study of semen found all 40 samples contaminated with microplastics. Some epidemiologists are concerned about how the Paris Olympics may become a global superspreader event.
Contrary to the predictions of many peak-oilers, the International Energy Agency predicts a surplus of oil exceeding even the demand for oil by the close of this decade. Worldwide oil demand is expected to peak around 2029, and slowly decline as a result of the electric vehicle shift, a predicted stagnation of China’s growth, and a shift in electrical production to renewable sources. In Bolivia, soldiers were deployed to gas stations to block fuel-smuggling, which they claim is causing a nationwide shortage; the country is looking to import Russian oil soon.
Another economic crisis is brewing in India, where some 25% of household loans are unsecured (some of which are taken to pay other loans), and the cost of servicing those debts is high. Meanwhile, Russia has made the Chinese yuan the primary foreign currency within Russia, and the ruble-yuan will become the benchmark currency pairing against which other currencies will be measured. In Taiwan, meeting consumer electrical demand is becoming a challenge, impacting the precious & fragile semiconductor industry. In the U.S., unemployment benefits claims have risen to 10-month highs.
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