Last Week in Collapse: May 5-11, 2024

Russian forces are making a push, animal testing ramps up for H5N1, and over 365 days of temperature records…

Last Week in Collapse: May 5-11, 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 124th newsletter. You can find the April 28-May 4 edition here if you missed it last week. Thank you for subscribing to the Substack.

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Earth experienced its largest CO2 concentration increase over a 12-month period, scientists say, from March 2023-2024. It was a jump of 4.7ppm more of carbon dioxide, blamed on deforestation, fossil fuels, and El Niño. Experts are saying that El Niño has peaked, and will transition to La Niña within a few months. La Niña lasts about 1-3 years, and it generally cools the Pacific Ocean, and brings more rain to India & Bangladesh, among other changes. Earth also experienced its greatest atmospheric moisture for the month of April.

The effects of La Niña

Venezuela has lost its last glacier, the Humboldt, which was reclassified into an “ice field.” It is the first modern nation to lose all its glaciers. Scientists believe Indonesia, Mexico, and Slovenia are next in line to see the extinction of their glaciers. Colombia is also rapidly losing its remaining 6 glaciers.

A view of Colombia’s fastest-dying glacier.

Wildfires in Chile have killed about a hundred people, and injured & displaced thousands. Flooding in Afghanistan. And climate change is ruining cotton crops, and livestock, in Chad. Plus, flooding struck the DRC, overflowing rivers and latrines—affecting some 500,000 people. And some climatologists think we have been underestimating how much climate change is driving greater rainfall & flooding; the worst is yet to come.

The first week of May saw so many temperature records broken; some are claiming that it might be the “most record breaking month in climatic history”—until June, that is. Earth has been seeing 13 months of monthly records being broken for global sea surface temperatures. Literally 365 days of record-breaking ocean temperatures.

A study in PNAS examined North Pacific “warm blob” heat waves from 2010-2020, and concluded that China’s reduction in aerosols, which cleaned the air but also removed the sun-reflective particles, incidentally probably caused marine heat waves which killed fish and resulted in algae blooms.

Bees are having difficulty acclimatizing their nests to rising temperatures. The dugong, while still rarely seen in parts of the world, has been declared extinct inside China, having gone 24 years without a known sighting. In Florida, the suburbification of land under development is pushing the Florida panther closer to extinction; some 100 panthers remain in the sunshine state.

Siberia’s Batagaika crater—I prefer its alternative title, “megaslump”—is expanding by about 1M cubic meters, every year. Scientists naturally blame the rapid permafrost melting on climate change.

It looks like a horseshoe crab fossil…

A cruise ship entered New York City with an endangered 44 ft {13.4m} dead sea whale stuck on its bow (front). Investigators are looking into whether it was already dead when the ship hit it. A study in Conservation Letters looked at the 100 largest Marine Protected Areas (MPAs)—which cover 7.3% of all ocean area—and found that almost 60% of this area is not in range of meeting the 2030 preservation goals.

Part of India broke May records already; the Maldives, too. Eastern Ukraine ended a far warmer & wetter April than usual. And a heat wave in Mexico scorched previous May temperature records across 10 cities, as well as small regional blackouts. North America felt its all-time hottest May temperature...

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AstraZeneca is pulling its COVID vaccine from the EU over a rare blood clooting side effect. Nevertheless, some experts claim that vaccine saved over 6M lives. Whatever U.S. CDC data on COVID is still available points to “a small rise” in cases later this summer, mostly from the growing KP.2 “FLiRT” variant.

Source: U.S. CDC.

COVID patients and immunocompromised individuals are still using lots of healthcare resources, and the rise of resistant superbugs is developing alarmingly fast. According to the article, “It only takes about a year on average for bacteria to grow resistant to treatment, when they used to take 21 years to evolve back in the 1960s.”

Engineers and medical professionals remain concerned about nanoplastics, between 1-1,000 nanometers wide. One grain of sand is about 500,000 nanometers, and one strand of DNA is about 2.5 nanometers. A single wavelength of light ranges from 400-700 nanometers.

South Africa’s water shortage is projected to worsen through at least 2025. Nairobi’s water shortage continues, despite the city’s dams being filled with floodwater. Costa Rica is facing a Drought so bad it’s rationing electricity. Mexico City—the second-most-populous city (by metro area: 21.8M; São Paolo is #1, at 22M) in North America— is seeing more than 20% of freshwater sources exhausted, and rationing is not enough. It’s almost like we’re living at unsustainable levels of consumption…

As Latin America warms (and suffers flooding), disease is becoming more common—as well as heat stroke & serious hunger. Benin is refusing Niger the permission to use its port to export oil, as a result of a border dispute.

A paywalled study in Nature Water tested a new method for removing PFAS foam particles in water, with “near-complete destruction of PFAS in various water samples contaminated by the foams.” The process involves “ultra-violet (UV) light, sulfite, and a process called electrochemical oxidation” and does not require heat or high pressure. The number of U.S. states phasing out PFAS is growing.

As forcible repatriations of thousands of Afghans continue, millions of Afghans are suffering from lack of humanitarian aid—aggravated by recent deadly flash floods in the beleaguered, landlocked, failed state.

Yeasty superfungus Candida Auris infections were detected in 77 cases in Germany last year, authorities say. Candida Auris was only identified 15 years ago, but its three separate genetic variants (each on a different continent) have stealthily and stubbornly grown to pose a stealth threat to humankind. It is incredibly resistant to antifungal drugs, and it survives at higher temperatures than most other fungi. The WHO has listed it on a shortlist of top fungal pathogen dangers.

3 cats died from H5N1 in the United States last week. Some health professionals are getting more worried about a future H5N1 jump to become human-to-human transmissible, and claim that we are not ready as a species. Experts say we are not doing enough testing, and may already be in the prologue of a much more devastating pandemic. Scientists still say it is unlikely that a strain will make the critical mutation necessary, but the similarities between human and cow (and other mammal) flu receptors present potential complications.

The world is supposedly being divided into three general trade blocs: U.S., China, and the non-aligned states. For better or worse, globalization is crumbling, and governments are imposing tariffs, attempting to reshore industries, and restructure debt & credit flows. What will happen when the people, long-trained to expect high returns, find their profits wanting?

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Two camps for internally displaced people near Goma, DRC were bombed, killing 12+ and injuring 20+. The perpetrators and their motives are unclear.

Rising crime. Drinking water. Closing the Darien Gap. These were the issues propelling Panama’s president-elect to a victory last Sunday. The arrival of rain is also improving conditions on the Drought-choken Panama Canal, expected to return to normal for at least a month or two.