Last Week in Collapse: June 25-July 1, 2023

Record wildfires, crumbling states, riots in France, and even more temperature records.

Last Week in Collapse: June 25-July 1, 2023

This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter bringing together some of the most important, timely, useful, depressing, ironic, amazing, or otherwise must-see moments in Collapse.

This is the 79th newsletter. You can find the June 18-24 edition here if you missed it last week. Thank you for subscribing to the Substack.

Canada’s wildfires continue setting air alarms in the United States, as about 500 wildfires blaze across Canada; track them here. It is Canada’s worst wildfire season ever, torching 77,000+ km², about the size of Ireland, or Japan’s northern island Hokkaido. The fires have allegedly put about 160M tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, according to EU climate watchers. The average Canadian car is said to emit 4.6 tonnes of CO2 every year. Canada also released its National {Climate Change} Adaptation Strategy, a 61-page report on their present and future environmental challenges.

Surprise: data indicate that rainforest destruction increased in 2022, and the COP26 pledge wasn’t strong enough to stop it. However, the all-time one-year record remains in 2017, when Brazil alone deforested almost 3M hectares (similar to Sicily’s size) of rainforest.

El Niño is making a bad situation worse. The jet stream has gone bonkers, and everyone’s comparing it to a Van Gogh painting. Temperatures are expected to vary considerably in Ireland over the next few weeks. El Niño is expected by many to be an especially strong one, but experts still say it’s too early to tell for certain.

The heat dome over part of the U.S. and Mexico was made more likely by climate change, according to a climate group’s report.

Somewhere between 70-90% of sunlight is reflected when it strikes sea ice. Unfortunately, as we all know, this ice is melting, and reaching new lows every year. The decline and fall of Mother Earth’s ecosystem is inevitable—but when is our hard landing going to be?

“Sea ice also plays one of the most critical roles on the planet in the ocean's depths. As seawater freezes into ice, salt is expelled, making the surrounding water denser. This heavier, colder water sinks and gets whisked around the planet. Warmer waters are predominantly pushed by wind into the polar regions, then freeze up into ice. The cycle is known as thermohaline circulation.”

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Scientists are doing best & worst case scenarios for our sea level by the year 2100. A temperature rise of just 1.5 °C (lol) will result in 28-55 cm of sea level rise. 2.7 °C will result in 44-76 cm, and 3.6 °C will bring us about 55-90 cm (22-35 inches) rise. The worst case scenario prophesied is a 4.4 °C rise by 2100, which would result in 63-101cm rise—or greater. As of two years ago, more than 400M people live at sea level, or less than 1 meter in elevation, a number that is expected to increase as urbanization and littoralization accelerate.

Antarctic ice continues shrinking, and it’s all because of us. At least Greenland has had an average melt season so far…but hairline fractures are developing, portending a future disaster.

The ice graph almost looks like a heartbeat monitor—in a few decades it will go flat.

Nestlé, along with EasyJet and Gucci, is dropping its net-zero pledge. I guess nobody told them that they could keep their pledge and just “fail to meet their targets” like most other companies and countries. A number of Asian energy companies are choosing profits over net-zero pledges and the green transition. The Oil and Gas Benchmark Report claims the same thing. Meanwhile, a Kiwi climate activist is facing 10 years in prison for sending a fake letter “canceling” a petroleum conference in 2019.

The UK admitted that it’s not meeting its climate targets, and going carbon neutral is a distant goal. Housing prices are expected to drop considerably in the UK, where they began falling in 2022. Annual inflation is about 8.7%, short-term mortgages will see payment hikes, and this will theoretically keep downward pressure on real estate prices.

Melting permafrost in the Austrian/Swiss Alps caused the collapse of a mountaintop that had been frozen for millennia. Most of the mountaintops above 2,500m in elevation are held together with permafrost. A similar process may happen to the Himalayas after all their glaciers melt.

A study in Nature Sustainability concluded that ecological Collapse is probably coming ahead of schedule, potentially within a few decades. I linked this study last week but I’ve had some time to interpret it now: when the cumulative effect of environmental stresses passes a certain threshold, the entire system rapidly collapses, sending shockwaves through related systems. It’s kind of like when a bunch of terrible things are around you, to the point where it just takes one more thing to push you over the edge into a tantrum or a breakdown…except this is the entire planet, and there is no recovery.

“stronger interactions between systems may be expected to increase the numbers of drivers of any one system, change driver behaviour and generate more system noise. As a result, we would anticipate that higher levels of stress, more drivers and noise may bring forward threshold-dependent changes more quickly…Overall, we find that, as the strength of a main driver increases, the systems collapse sooner. Adding multiple drivers brings collapses further forward, as does adding noise, and the two effects can be synergistic…systems do not collapse at a constant level of cumulative stress (that is, total stress built up over time) irrespective of the rate of stress change but rather underline the importance of rate over accumulated stress…”

A similarly-themed article posits the same basic reasoning applies for society. Heat waves, depression, economic troubles, radicalization, drought, violence, and other stressors are bringing civilization to a point of no return. What does a social tipping point look like in this context? Revolution, anarchy, fascism, the disinterested run-on-trust from our institutions, neomedievalist warlords, New World Order communism, corporatocracies, World War Four? This 3-page study basically predicts a massive resource (food & water) scarcity, coinciding with large-scale displacement, biodiversity loss, violence, crumbling states, and death. I think I just got Bingo…

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“My life is ruined,” said one Long COVID sufferer recently. The trains and buses and planes are full, the beaches are packed, and the world is seemingly back to “normal,” but countless humans have been totally debilitated by devastating cases of Long COVID. It has been linked to mental illness and decreased semen quality, as well as a number of other symptoms. For some, these symptoms are (so far) permanent; for others, they are temporary—or until they get infected with COVID again.

Malaria infections have been traced to Florida and Texas, marking the first time in 20 years that malaria has been transmitted in the United States.

Uganda has become “hell” for LGBT+ people recently. A widely popular law has come into effect that punishes same-sex acts with life in prison. Having sex while HIV positive, incest, and “aggravated homosexuality” is now punishable by death.

“Welcome to the Great Unraveling” was published a couple weeks ago. It’s a 67-page report from the Post Carbon Institute, and a kind of doomy primer to our state of global disarray.