Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

“The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in one year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm,” the journal’s editorial board wrote in its latest issue.

The genocide perpetrated by the Israeli leadership in the Gaza Strip is a composite genocide formed of multiple, interlocking forms of annihilation

For decades, administering small towns and communities in the US largely centered on zoning amendments, fixing roads and ensuring that trash was collected. But today, the emerging presence of datacenter developments is creating a vicious new divide between local administrators, who play an essential role in rural America, and the residents they are elected to represent.

Invalidating someone’s identification documents has immediate and powerful consequences that cascade into all aspects of their life.

For example, without a valid driver’s license, many trans and nonbinary people will be unable to get to work, attend classes, pick up their children, visit the doctor, see friends or go to the grocery store. Trans and nonbinary people who need to drive with an invalid license risk fines and jail time, where they would be housed according to their sex assigned at birth.

Billions fewer birds are flying through North American skies than decades ago," reports the Associated Press, "and their population is shrinking ever faster, mostly due to a combination of intensive agriculture and warming temperatures, a new study found."

The researchers’ urgency stems from the recent collapse of similar corals in Florida. In 2023, a marine heatwave resulted in a roughly 98 percent mortality rate of elkhorn and staghorn colonies. Now declared “functionally extinct,” these corals do not exist in sufficient numbers in the state’s waters to provide effective coastal protection or thriving habitats for marine life.

“The problem is, if you’re the US military, anything you do can be cited as being for national security,” said Anthony. “Even if the appropriate process would just be an extra round of ecological surveys to make sure everything is done with the best intention to avoid unnecessary harm.”

Indigenous Chamorro people on Guam—who can trace their roots back over 3,000 years—have also not forgotten the environmental harm caused by the military’s past use of PCBs, PFAS and dieldrin.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34721401

It is a double-edged sword. As the planet heats up, more of us are turning up and turning to air conditioning to keep us cool. The trouble is that, as well as consuming vast amounts of electricity, AC also leads to significant greenhouse gas emissions and worsens the climate change we are trying to combat.

are we though ? trying to combat climate change, when nearly everything we do is wrong or making it worse.

this leads me to this article

https://theconversation.com/the-new-climate-denial-using-wealth-to-insulate-yourself-from-discomfort-and-change-199101

The new climate denial? Using wealth to insulate yourself from discomfort and change

However, worldwide, the number of days where severe fire weather has occurred in multiple places at the same time has more than doubled over the majority of fire-prone landscapes. With more fire weather occurring at the same time, countries may not be able to lend out tools and personnel as much because they’ll need everyone on deck at home.

We’ve got an elemental tug of war, then: As the far north rapidly and radically changes, how much carbon will these expanding peatlands sequester in the Earth, but how quickly will that carbon return to the atmosphere if these new peatlands dry out and catch fire? Only time — and scientists traipsing through the Arctic — will tell.

A century-old legal framework promises those users more water than there is to go around. The river’s flow has shrunk by about 20 percent over the last century as climate change has made the West more arid. As water has vanished, states have clashed over how to divide up what remains. The core dispute is between the sparsely inhabited mountainous states of the “Upper Basin,” where hay farmers and a few major cities like Denver draw water from the river and its tributaries, and the far more populous “Lower Basin,” which diverts water to support most of the nation’s winter vegetable farmers as well as megacities like Los Angeles and Phoenix.

A similar instinct could very well be at play in the United Kingdom right now, with some outlets reporting that the prime minister may be withholding the unabridged DEFRA report to avoid public criticism that the government isn’t doing enough to stave off the worst effects of biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse.

Unfortunately, any political motivations behind the decision to delay or withhold the unabridged biodiversity report are happening against a backdrop of failed global environmental commitments. Nations are pulling back on emission reductions targets or missing them altogether, countries are flouting contributions to global climate change funds for developing countries, and the United States has withdrawn from the landmark Paris Agreement for a second time, and abandoned the overarching diplomatic infrastructure of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

A new study spanning 11 years of data has revealed a clear link between wildfire smoke pollution and an increase in violent assaults in Seattle. These findings represent the first direct causal evidence that short-term exposure to wildfire-driven air pollution can increase interpersonal violence in an urban environment

Though relocation is widely accepted as a necessary step, the prospect of leaving a long-inhabited home carries an emotional cost for many residents. “We don’t want to leave,” says Gualteria Leyva, 74, who was born in Cuauhtémoc and has lived here ever since. A strong wind whips her hair as she speaks. “We’ve lived here our entire lives,” she says. “We aren’t used to living anywhere else.”

Like many here, Gualteria Leyva has seen friends and neighbors move away from the community. “People have already left,” she says, “and now the sea floods their homes.” Soon, Leyva accepts, she may have to join them.

An epidemic, by definition, is the significant increase in the occurrence of disease and is not driven entirely by a microorganism.31 For an epidemic to occur, a definite number of individuals need to be in specific kinds of contact, within certain distances, over discrete time periods. Further, the likelihood that any given individual may become infected and develop disease will also be driven by each individual’s own prior health conditions. These are themselves driven by history and context, and can include manifestations of corporeal rifts induced by alienated, often forced, labor under capitalism.

Therefore, while specific organisms may “cause” disease (in the dialectical sense of an asymmetry in the balance of reciprocal forces), the causes and processes of an epidemic are much more complicated phenomena that arise in specific social and historical contexts. It is reductive and one-sided to represent an organism as the cause of an epidemic. Rather, epidemics arise in the context of specific processes and relationships of a social metabolism in distinct times and places, which are themselves fundamental causes and dialectically related processes.32

Some frameworks of public health theory provide a broader focus that includes consideration of factors beyond a host organism and a “pathogen,” or beyond these two and sometimes a mediating vector, to include “environment.” Some of these frameworks add further clarity to the concept of what constitutes relevant components of environment (referred to as “social determinants of health” models).33 Most such models (1) limit consideration to the current environment, which is considered static and ahistoric, and often treat socially constructed processes (for example, race, ethnicity, or poverty) as “unmodifiable risk factors,” ignoring their social construction and historical trajectories; (2) under-consider the manifold interactions constituting the specifics of the social metabolism, such as human relationships with land, terraqueous environments, and nonhuman animals; and (3) ignore the capitalist social metabolism, with its alienated production and high-velocity circulation driven by exchange value and accumulation.34

“The goal of this research was really just to understand where in the world this is happening,” said Elise Mazur, a researcher with the Land and Carbon Lab at the World Resources Institute and one of the report’s authors. “We know where deforestation is occurring. But we were less sure about where non-forest ecosystems are being lost.”

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2521183123

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34564972

Chronic ocean heating is fuelling a “staggering and deeply concerning” loss of marine life, a study has found, with fish levels falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade.

Researchers examined the year-to-year change of 33,000 populations in the northern hemisphere between 1993 and 2021, and isolated the effect of the decadal rate of seabed warming from short shifts such as marine heatwaves. They found the drop in biomass from chronic heating to be as high as 19.8% in a single year.

“To put it simply, the faster the ocean floor warms, the faster we lose fish,” said Shahar Chaikin, a marine ecologist at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Spain and the study’s lead author.

“A 7.2% decline for every tenth of a degree per decade might sound small,” he added. “But compounded over time, across entire ocean basins, it represents a staggering and deeply concerning loss of marine life.”

The lack of access to healthy ecosystems is not random. The authors cited historical drivers: redlining, forced displacement of Indigenous peoples, discriminatory zoning and exclusion from the mainstream conservation movement.

In Chicago, where 85 percent of communities are nature-deprived, the main drivers are long-standing policy choices, the report said, including “historic land-use decisions, industrial development, and longtime discrimination from safe, accessible green spaces.”

“The nature gap has developed over centuries and its impacts cannot be attributed to any single presidency,” the authors said.

Collapse never happens like a "bang!" from the perspective and context from which it began, it builds and builds until its velocity becomes overwhelming to the context it only superficially appears to abruptly intrude on.

Rice, maize, and cassava crops cumulatively account for approximately 11% of total global deforestation—exceeding that of cocoa, coffee, and rubber—according to an analysis between 2001 and 2022, published in Nature Food.

Nearly 98,000 hospitality jobs disappeared between December 2024 and December 2025, international visitors to the United States fell by 2.5 million, and tourism revenue dropped $1.2 billion, according to a report by Unite Here, the US's largest hospitality workers' union.

All we did is eat some faces and now EVERYONE apparently thinks we are Leopards!?!

How is that even remotely fair to the US.

We will have to use our military might to stimulate tourism...

Reports from other industries describe similar labor disruptions. In South Texas, builders recently told The Wall Street Journal that repeated immigration raids have left projects idle and workers unwilling to return. "You can pay me whatever you want, but I'm not going to go work there," one contractor quoted a worker as saying.

Ok sorry but what kind of shit work ethic is that? You don't want to work for trash wages just because we might randomly ruin your life to satisfy our raging bigotry boner?

"Cuba's electric power sector is totally collapsed," he said. "If by March you don't see an oil cargo ship on the horizon coming either into Havana or Cienfuegos, they will have reached 'zero,'" Piñón said.

Before the Trump administration intensified sanctions on the island, Cubans were already facing extreme poverty and widespread shortages. As living conditions continue to deteriorate, Cuban leaders have vowed to resist and have approved another round of severe austerity measures for the population to endure.

Why? Idk they deserve to suffer I think, I don't remember why but it was a good reason I swear!

Climate impacts in the oceans in particular have been “a big missing piece recognized by every major assessment” of the social cost of carbon, said Bernie Bastien-Olvera, a climate scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in an email. He is the lead author of the new Nature Climate Change study.

Left: 1850–2025 global average sea surface temperature. (Data: UK Met Office Hadley Centre. Graphic: Dana Nuccitelli)

In a high-growth scenario for the space industry, there could be as many as 2,000 launches per year, which her modeling shows could result in about 3 percent ozone loss, equal to the atmospheric impacts of a bad wildfire season in Australia. She said most of the damage comes from chlorine-rich solid rocket fuels and black carbon in the plumes.