Last Week in Collapse: December 8-14, 2024

War, warming Arctic, power games, all-time gold highs, malaria, and new heat records.

Last Week in Collapse: December 8-14, 2024

This is the 155th weekly newsletter. You can find the December 1-7 edition here on Reddit if you missed it last week. Thank you for subscribing to the Substack.

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The Paris Climate goals are dead. Scientists are reasonably certain that 2024 will end as the warmest year on record, breaking an earlier record set by 2023. We have felt more than 12 months of at least 1.5 °C warming. And AI is being used to predict temperature increases, and it’s not optimistic about our situation. 26 of its 34 assessed locations are predicted to have hit 3 °C warming by 2060. So it goes.

Source.

NOAA released its 2024 Arctic Report Card—and the full 116-page document is not optimistic—but it is quite thorough, and features some useful graphics.

“Arctic annual surface air temperatures ranked second warmest since 1900….The last nine years are the nine warmest on record in the Arctic. Summer 2024 across the Arctic was the wettest on record….The Arctic remains a consistent methane source….Alaskan permafrost temperatures were the second warmest on record….The increase in Arctic (60-90° N) surface air temperature continues to exceed that for the planet as a whole (90° S-90° N), a phenomenon termed Arctic Amplification….Sea ice extent in September 2024 was the 6th lowest in the satellite record….” -excerpts from the report’s headlines

In the UK, Storm Darragh laid waste to the country’s largest solar farm. At least ten people were killed by flooding in Indonesia. A study in Nature Communications analyzed permafrost across Europe, and determined that “Substantial permafrost warming occurred at cold and ice-poor bedrock sites at high elevations and latitudes, at rates comparable to surface air temperature increase.” Some locations 10m deep registered a warming of more than 1 °C over the last decade. In contrast to many non-permafrost areas which see their warming predominantly in summer & autumn, most permafrost sites experience their largest average warming during the winter.

A report on biodiversity loss in Australia claims that three species of insects & invertebrates go extinct Down Under every week. About two thirds of these are “ghost extinctions” in which species died off before they could be named & studied. “Our analysis provides a warning of the likely continuing and escalating high rates of looming extinctions. We predict that 39-148 Australian endemic non-marine invertebrate species will become extinct in 2024…this rate of extinction will increase.” Meanwhile, the U.S. government added monarch butterflies to the threatened species list. So it goes.

Mostly because of rising Indian and Chinese demand, coal electricity production hit a record high in 2024, with 2% more power forecast to be generated, when compared with 2023. Coal emissions are projected to reach record highs this year as well, as seen with crippling levels of smog02711-9/fulltext) in India & Pakistan. Scientists say that some of Slovenia’s air pollution is due to wood burning for heat in the winter, a practice many locals believe to be harmless. San Francisco had its first tornado warning ever on Saturday.

The U.S. government is approving the sale of 400,000 acres (to oil speculators) in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; the tracts will be sold on 9 January 2025. Meanwhile, a new oil tract was discovered in Norway’s bit of the Arctic Sea, just as Arctic Sea ice hit a new daily low on Tuesday.

45,000+ people evacuated part of the Philippines to escape a volcanic eruption. Canada’s far north airstrips are being examined to see how permafrost melt may impact their integrity. Lots of new heat records reportedly were set in Indonesia, where fishermen venture farther and further out in the quest to extract whatever fish they can.

In Sicily, the Water Wars continue as Drought intensifies. Zimbabwe’s Drought is expected to continue. New heat in Oceania and in the Caribbean. Overall daily surface temperatures are experiencing a record streak of above-average temperatures.

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Welcome to the “Plastisphere,” a term which refers to microscopic organisms living on plastic waste—here, those left in the Antarctic. Scientists are concerned about previously untouched regions like Antarctica being contaminated with bacteria & plastics. So it goes.

A study in Geophysical Research Letters determined that over 75% of coastal aquifers will experience saltwater intrusion by 2100, as sea levels rise, coastlines become eroded, and saltwater creeps up ocean-facing rivers.

An Australian official admitted that hundreds of viral samples went missing from a lab in 2021, unbeknownst to the scientists for another two years. Central & South America reported record dengue fever cases this year—12.6M+ cases and 7,700+ deaths.

Wild geese with bird flu are migrating into Kansas. It seems as if we keep retreading the old talking points: not human transmissible yet, it’s probably not making the jump, and you aren’t a raw milk-drinking farm worker. Yet bird flu spreads in animals foreign & domestic, free & slave alike. Nobody would be surprised if H5 took off as a global pandemic worse than COVID. And yet little is done because the problem seems impossibly unmanageable—but then it becomes even more unmanageable. So it goes.