Last Week in Collapse: December 22-28, 2024

Terrorism, pollution, fires, famine, and a large prison break in Mozambique.

Last Week in Collapse: December 22-28, 2024

This is the 157th weekly newsletter. You can find the December 15-21 edition here if you missed it last week. Happy New Year, and thank you for subscribing to the Substack.

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We are ending the year at or above record temperatures for Atlantic sea surface temperatures. Scotland is also ending the year hot, as is South Africa, and northern Africa, and the Pacific. Paris is ending its rainiest year on record.

Scientists say that a marine heat wave near Alaska is to blame for “the largest recorded die-off of a single species in modern history.” The nearly two-year heat wave struck from 2014-2016 and killed off about 80% of the area’s Pacific cod, which in turn deprived the murre birds of sustenance. The murre population plunged by about 60%, about 4,000,000 murres. Despite setbacks in biodiversity, scientists discovered a number of new species in 2024, some of which are already endangered.

Bushfires in Victoria state, Australia are consuming a third of a national park, forcing some to evacuate. An environmental emergency was declared in Peru after an oil spill covered several beaches. Much of the earth’s land is projected to end the year at warmer-than-average temperatures.

Damage Report from Mozambique, where Cyclone Chido rampaged across the country. 94 people are now confirmed dead from the category 4 cyclone (sustained winds at 220km/hr (137mph), and over 11,000 homes were obliterated. Over half a million people in Mozambique were affected by the storm. Conflict and migration are also complicating factors which increased the damage wrought by the cyclone.

A study in Environmental Science & Technology published last month (studying PFAS samples in the Arctic in 2019) found “widespread and chemically diverse contamination, including at remote high elevation sites” across a survey of surface snow in the Arctic.

Morocco is grappling with its lowest wheat harvest since 2008, a result of encroaching Drought. Wildfires around Abbottabad (pop: 1.4M), Pakistan. In Colorado, energy companies were found to falsify data for several years relating to their pollution in the state.

Mayotte (pop: 420,000?), wrecked by a recent cyclone, is coming to grips with the “environmental and biodiversity crisis” left behind. Most trees have been split or torn up, coral reefs are suffering from a massive influx of pollution which in turn is damaging the islands’ biodiversity. The destruction of trees and other buildings have also left birds without nesting opportunities, and created huge amounts of trash and rubble which will be hard to clean up.

An opinion article about Collapse (defining Collapse as “the loss of complex social and political structures over a few decades at most”) analyzes different accounts and studies of Collapse (Tainter, Diamond, etc) and is urging “dramatic social and technological changes” to address our predicament. A retrospective on the Mayan Collapse concluded that the Collapse of ancient cities and empires actually left many towns and smaller settlements relatively unscathed.

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Bird flu killed 20 large cats at a sanctuary in the U.S. state of Washington. Experts say that H5N1 and its variants pose a greater threat than many realize, because animal-to-human transmissions are undercounted and growing more frequent. Mutations continue, but the virus has not yet gone human-to-human.

A study on Long COVID found “high rates of depressive disorders (45.6%), generalized anxiety disorders (21%), sleep disturbances (76.3%), and…cognitive changes (94.7%)” among afflicted test subjects. Another study claims that about 30% of Americans have Long COVID now—a figure that varies wildly among different studies and groups—and that women experience this condition more than men. Meanwhile, about 300 health workers are suing the NHS because they weren’t provided PPE in 2020-2021, which led to serious COVID-related health complications & disabilities.

Researchers concluded that there is a link between prisons and tuberculosis in Latin America. “About a third of all tuberculosis cases since 1990 were associated with incarceration,” said one scientist working on a study00192-0/fulltext) published last month. Following recent Nile flooding which displaced 28,000+, cholera cases are rising in Sudan.

Animal waste is responsible for a crisis in Iowa, having runoff into 700+ bodies of water in the state. Over a million fish are reported killed from the pollution. A calculation made of the average Brit’s holiday travel, gifts, food, waste, etc. amount to 23x the average daily CO2 emissions.

Abkhazia, a Russian-occupied part of Georgia, is facing rolling power outages for about 10 hours each day. Scientists and others worry that Kessler Syndrome—runaway space debris—might already be happening in slow-motion. A Russian ship sunk in the Mediterranean after an accidental explosion.