Last Week in Collapse: January 22-28, 2023
It’s 90 seconds to midnight—but for Haiti, their time is up.
Last Week in Collapse: January 22-28, 2023
This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter bringing together some of the most important, timely, helpful, depressing, ironic, amazing, or otherwise must-see moments in Collapse.
This is the 57th newsletter. You can find the January 15-21 edition here on Reddit if you missed it last week. Thank you for subscribing to the Substack. Consider signing up a friend (or enemy) to the Substack if you think they should read these newsletters…
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The Doomsday Clock has ticked forward 10 seconds over the last year, bringing humanity 90 seconds until midnight. The adjustment was made mostly as a result of the Ukraine War edging closer to nuclear armageddon, with one professor stating “the war has challenged the nuclear order — the system of agreements and understandings that have been constructed over six decades to limit the dangers of nuclear weapons.”
They say a big battle is coming in the Ukraine War sometime in the next few months. Germany and the US are sending tanks, and Russia is responding with more missile strikes and manpower. The US has also designated the Wagner Group—a shadowy Russian mercenary company—as a “transnational criminal organization.” The Wagner Group had been deployed to Libya, Syria, Mali, and the Central African Republic in recent years.
Observers are also worried about another European War developing: Serbia against Kosovo. A conflict would derail Serbia’s aspirations to integrate with the EU, and upset Kosovo’s relatively peaceful 15 years of “independence”.
Far away from the Balkans, in Haiti, mayhem has worsened around Port-Au-Prince, where there is no longer an elected government, fuel/food shortages are widespread, millions of people are trapped across the failed state. Gangs are winning the war against police forces, and are rampaging without clear objectives. Haiti’s police forces are seeing defections as the border between police officer and gangster becomes reexamined. Rebels stormed the airport, temporarily obstructing the movement of the PM, whose house was attacked. And cholera.
The US state of Georgia has deployed 1,000 National Guard troops to Atlanta to manage violent protests that sprung up after police officers shot and killed an environmental activist. The slain protestor allegedly shot at police during a standoff wherein police were clearing part of a forest to build a large police training compound. Several other environmental protestors have been charged with domestic terrorism. Other cities called in the National Guard and mobilized police to manage the protests that sprung up after bodycam footage revealed the police assault of Tyre Nichols, who died three days later from his wounds.
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China claims that 80% of its population have gotten COVID already—1.1 billion out of 1.4. The Chinese CDC also alleges that cases & deaths have already peaked, and are now dropping quickly—though some experts don’t trust the data. If you trust the American data, the RSV/COVID/flu rates have peaked in the US, too, and are now sinking. The US is trying to normalize a yearly COVID booster for 2023 and beyond, and reports from Canada claim that 73% of Canadians have gotten COVID so far.
Scientists are closing in on one issue behind Long COVID: microclots. The spike protein from COVID can linger in one’s blood for up to a year, based on one study from last year.
The new synthetic drug Nitazine is said to be 40x stronger than fentanyl, which was the leading opioid killer in the U.S. last year. Nitazine appeared last year, and remains rare today, but officials are having difficulty tracing it. Nitazine can come in pill, powder, or liquid form.
Japan’s government is warning that it may collapse as a result of low birth rates, which have been a historic “problem” for the insular island nation for decades. It always seems to come back to the economy in some form…
Parts of India set new January heat records, with Nepal almost breaking its record.
Pakistan’s largest cities lost power on Monday, after much of the country’s electrical grid went down; water treatment facilities have closed, creating a clean water shortage. Routine electrical outages have grown worse, though power was restored about 24 hours later. Imports have backed up at the ports, and the economy is teetering on the brink. The nation has still not recovered from the devastating floods of last year.
South Africa, long suffering from power outages, is seeking power ships from Türkiye. These ships park offshore from a nation and generate power for them using onboard LNG power plants.
Gloucester, in the UK, is going to replant all 13,500 saplings that they planted last year; they all died from drought. This could be a lesson for the mini-forests being planted across France this year, attempts to slow climate change.
Drought is persevering in Europe for yet another year. Parts of Africa are also seeing another historically “rainy” season pass without much rain. Türkiye likewise is dealing with another year of drought ahead, and Spain is breaking a contract with Portugal over access to water.
Meanwhile Auckland, New Zealand is being flooded and has declared a state of emergency. In the United States, the 1,400+ mile (2,250+ km) Colorado River is drying up, and it is unable to meet the demands of the populations which draw on it. Snowpack is way down, and states are struggling with how to manage water rights when different states/counties/towns apportion water access differently.
Some parts of Texas have seen a 92% drop in the squirrel population just in the last three years, theorized to be the result of a particularly cold winter in 2021. Storms in California caused $200M+ damage to strawberry crops.
A study for Environmental Research suggests that one serving of freshwater fish can contain the equivalent PFOS from drinking 48 ppt PFOS water for a month. PFOS is one of the chemicals in the PFAS family. California considers unsafe PFOS levels to be 6.5 ppt (parts per trillion) or greater.
Another study, published in Earth’s Future, claims that the coming sea level rise is going to be much worse—and much faster—than previously expected. This study estimates that the rate of seal level rise could be 10x faster than earlier projections.
A fierce heatwave struck South America last week, which is experiencing a brutal summer at the moment.
![Twitter avatar for @extremetemps](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/extremetemps.jpg)
![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.substack.com%2Fmedia%2FFngMQfzXEAIKTSf.jpg)
Argentina in particular is undergoing a severe drought. Last year, every one of its provinces were affected by wildfires.
New York City is closing in on a record for how long it has gone without seeing any snow. Meanwhile, Ohio broke a snowfall record.
In East Asia, freakishly cold waves are reportedly becoming the new winter normal. Both Koreas declared a cold emergency amid a -30 °C (-22 °F) cold wave that swept across the region. North Korea is also struggling with reported food shortages the likes of which they haven’t experienced in ~30 years.
While a cold spell curses the north, rising temperatures in Antarctica caused a large chunk of ice to break from the Brunt ice shelf. The piece of ice is roughly 1,550 km2 (600 mi2), equivalent to the size of Greater London, or the island of Zanzibar.
![Twitter avatar for @BAS_News](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/BAS_News.jpg)
![A moving satellite image shows an iceberg the size of Greater London clearly separated from the expanse of the Brunt Ice Shelf.](https://substackcdn.com/video/upload/e_loop,vs_40/okckr6p1lgs5dunys9da.gif)
The Amazon rainforest is degraded more than earlier analyses suggest. Humans have caused long-term damage to more than ⅓ of the Amazon, a result of four identified factors: “forest fire, edge effects (changes that occur in forests adjacent to deforested areas), selective logging (such as illegal logging), and extreme drought.” You can read the study here if you’re interested.
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