Last Week in Collapse: October 1-7, 2023

New climate records are made, and Israel declared War on Hamas.

Last Week in Collapse: October 1-7, 2023

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

This is the 93rd newsletter. You can find the September 24-30 edition here if you missed it last week. Thank you for subscribing to the Substack.

Category 4 Typhoon Koinu (“puppy” in Japanese) blasted Taiwan, injuring hundreds and creating the third-strongest gust ever measured, at 342.7km/h (212.9 mph). Meanwhile, a marine heat wave struck Canada’s Atlantic coast; animals will have to adapt or die.

Climate data from last month suggest that the average global temperature for September was 0.5 °C warmer than previous Septembers—1.8 °C warmer than pre-industrial temps. Roughly one third of 2023 saw temperatures at least 1.5 °C hotter than usual. This is on schedule to be the hottest year on record. El Niño is still waxing. Some scientists are calling Doom.

A forest fire in Albania burns. Scientists try to override politics in negotiating the health of the Persian Gulf ecosystems. 14 dead and 100+ missing after flooding in India; and 6 dead in Sri Lanka. Concerning concentrations of sea ice.

A grim study in Scientific Advances looked at the Amazon monsoon season, and how its changing patterns may cause dieback in the world’s largest rainforest. Another study published in Nature suggests that the Amazon may already be carbon neutral, and on the way to being a net polluter. Rainfall patterns, topsoil health, and weather patterns are already disrupted.

Pope Francis, the first of his name, released an encyclical about the “Climate Crisis”, exhorting people to act more honestly and truthfully about the dangers of our warming world. It’s short enough that you can read it in several minutes.

1. We need to rethink among other things the question of human power, its meaning and its limits. For our power has frenetically increased in a few decades. We have made impressive and awesome technological advances, and we have not realized that at the same time we have turned into highly dangerous beings, capable of threatening the lives of many beings and our own survival. Today it is worth repeating the ironic comment of Solovyov about an “age which was so advanced as to be actually the last one”. We need lucidity and honesty in order to recognize in time that our power and the progress we are producing are turning against us. -Pope Francis

The EU is choosing an ex-Shell guy to be their new climate chief. (To be fair, he only worked there for two years like 20 years ago—before moving to McKinsey and Dutch politics.) Meanwhile, Canada’s wildfire season has displaced over 200,000 and burned record amounts of forest. Monthly Canadian temperature records are already being broken.

An emergency scientific summit was hosted last week to address the Antarctic ice melt. Scientists called for emissions reductions but nobody is listening. A Nature study on Arctic cyclones concluded that they are occurring more frequently and more intensely than 70 years ago.

Bangladesh continues to be at the vanguard of Climate Collapse, and a few other forms too. Crowded accommodation and heat waves and poverty. There are “water ATMs” in the slums of Dhaka where people acquire their water…while it’s still there. Last week Bangladesh crossed 1,000 deaths from dengue this year—over 200,000 confirmed cases total. Russia is also delivering uranium to Bangladesh; soon Russia will help construct Bangladesh’s first nuclear power plant, expected to be operational summer 2024.

Record temperatures in Latin American and the Caribbean, and in Germany. It was Japan’s hottest September ever. North Dakota broke records too. And France.

——————————

The age of low interest rates is over. Germany is booting up old coal power plants to generate power through March 2024. Meanwhile, negotiations within the WTO are breaking down, signaling inter-state tension and the growing irrelevance of the institution. Although India is growing as a global industrial power, personal saving is down and economists aren’t so sure about its long-term future.

Ahead of winter, homelessness surges in Canada. Institutional traders are selling oil & gas futures, pushing prices down slightly. This may have unintended consequences.

Prices of feta cheese may rise after flooding killed tens of thousands of Greek sheep & goats. El Niño is going to be blamed for food prices & shortages well into next year.

The Panama Canal has again reduced the number of ships that can transit the Canal daily, from 32 to 31. Drought continues to impact the region; long-term solutions seem impossible. Drought has also impacted global hydropower yields.

Data centers are going to get overloaded as water & energy sources decrease in the future. One third of the human population still isn’t connected to the internet, and they’re going to get data too. Data centers currently use 14% of Ireland’s electricity.

The largest refugee/migrant vessel to reach the Canary Islands landed last week, carrying 280 people. The Canaries have seen a 20% increase in the number of people arriving compared to last year. Australia and Papua New Guinea are sparring over 70 refugees while 100,000+ refugees flee Nagorno-Karabakh in one week, following their surrender to Azerbaijan.

Pakistan ordered the departure of millions of illegal immigrants (mostly from Afghanistan) by the end of October, threatening mass removal starting next month. Senegal is catching more migrants these days too. And the U.S. budgeted money for 20 more miles (32 km) of new border wall.

Bedbugs—and the accompanying panic—are making a comeback in France and beyond. Hardened after decades of chemicals, modern bedbugs present a lasting threat to psychological stability in a society.

OPEC is warning that oil prices won’t be declining soon, blaming “underinvestment” in energy across the globe. American and European clean energy companies are having a bad year; share prices are down 20% in a few months.

Blackouts in Tajikistan. Fuel shortage in Malawi. Food inflation continues around the globe.

——————————