Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

“When El Nino develops, we’re likely to set a new global temperature record,” Woodwell’s Francis said in an email. “‘Normal’ was left in the dust decades ago. And with this much heat in the system, everyone should buckle up for the extreme weather it will fuel.”

"The persistence and extent of the high, which also extended over the North Sea, making room, as it were, for the large volume of water flowing out of the Baltic Sea, is responsible for the scale of the phenomenon," he says. "We are talking about 275 cubic kilometres of water! This exceptional situation did not happen in isolation from the large-scale processes we observe in the Earth's atmosphere. The most important of these in this context is the disintegration of the polar vortex, a circulation of air in the upper layers of the atmosphere (10-50km) which, colloquially speaking, is responsible for keeping the Arctic cold. This vortex is linked to the jet stream, the rapidity of which and the course of this current are responsible for the migration of lows and highs. Hence, deviations such as blocked highs, Arctic frost waves or heat waves in the north are the result of disturbances to this jet stream, and hence the warming of the Arctic."

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During her research between 2004 and 2020, she noted a marked decrease in the density of the endemic bryophyte species Harmeria scutulata. "This allowed me to conclude that with climate change, there is also a reorganisation of species communities in the Arctic hard bottom ecosystem."

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The disappearance of ecosystems in turn translates into the collapse of the fishing industry, says the expert. Similarly, the exploitation of underwater metal resources - so-called rare earth mines on the ocean floor - involves environmental degradation on a larger scale than land-based open-pit mines."It is not only the bottom that is destroyed, but the overburden - that part of the excavated material that on land is stored in heaps - in the Ocean disperses throughout the depths, eliminating access to light and space for ocean creatures."

The Baltic is a sea with a reputation as one of the most polluted. However, according to Kijewski, the basin's worst period of pollution is behind it."Since the common policy of the Baltic States, coordinated by HELCOM and the EU, has led to the installation of biological wastewater treatment plants and generally increased attention to the state of the environment, pollution of the Baltic has largely been halted. A prime example is the Bay of Puck, which until recently was virtually extinct, and for the past two decades we have seen a spontaneous return of seagrass meadows and even seaweed there. The state of plastic pollution is also low, which, unlike the rest of the Ocean, has not increased during the last 30 years."However, he says, the peculiarities of the Baltic's hydrology require a long time for the water to undergo a purifying exchange. An event such as the current low is conducive to this purification, but it will still take another 30 years for the Baltic Sea to undergo significant self-purification.

Still, most of the prewar Fallout elites end up down in the doomsday bunkers. As Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires discusses, this is a very real, widespread, and completely illogical desire among our contemporary elites. As Rushkoff writes, “Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migration, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.”

Every bunker is both a safe haven and an underground prison. While some Vaults are civilizational seeds — which can technologically return life to the Wasteland through the Garden of Eden Creation Kit (or G. E. C. K.) — they are mostly tombs. Mark Zuckerberg’s Hawaiian doom island probably doesn’t have a G. E. C. K., and even if it did, that wouldn’t matter, as the most magical part of the Fallout series is that any life survives in the Wasteland at all.

Z, who asked to be identified only by her first initial for her safety, has been sheltering at home for about a month. Friends drop off groceries and, occasionally, art supplies, and days are spent indoors. She finds herself scrolling on social media. “All you see online are protests,” she said. “I can’t go out and protest, but I feel the anger. I’m like, what can I do?”

Another good window into collapse in the US.

For much of the 2010s, Nordic governments adopted a wait-and-see approach to platform work. Gig companies were framed as technological innovations rather than labor market actors. When regulation came, it often focused on markets rather than labor relations. Only recently have governments begun to address misclassification, proposing legal changes to strengthen the definition of employment. These efforts remain incomplete, contested, and slow — while platforms are already deeply embedded.

Going-against-the-grainers have attained some degree of moral autonomy – an autonomous, direct responsiveness to the relevant moral considerations. Sensitivity to audience is crucial for responsiveness to the full range of moral considerations, but it is not sufficient. The first reason is that some genuine moral considerations are absent from or in conflict with the expectations of an actual moral audience. The second reason is that responding to audience feedback – acting to avoid blame or garner praise – does not equate (or necessarily lead) to being moved by the moral consideration.

How to live and fight amidst collapse.

And while there were some significant areas in which Joe Biden seemed to learn from his former boss’s mistakes, the need for a more robust campaign of accountability was not one of them. Despite the ample reasons to launch investigations and obtain redress for past corruption, Attorney General Merrick Garland did little more than attempt to radiate an ambient virtue, perpetually endeavoring to shield his agency and the Biden administration from the perception that they were seeking purely political prosecutions.

Not that this ever stopped Trump from crying foul about witch hunts! Garland’s first major investigation into Trump’s misconduct wasn’t launched until three days after Trump announced his reelection campaign—the very thing that the Biden administration should have been trying in earnest to prevent after the Senate failed in its duty to impeach him. Once Trump entered the safe harbor of a presidential candidacy, efforts to hold him responsible fizzled—and the Supreme Court all but crowned him king.

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Axios reported this week that corporate America is being warned that the “subpoenas are coming.” I want that to be true; if we end up with political leaders on the left who are too timid to do what needs to be done, we will fall short. The Beltway-brained are perennially concerned with “political capital,” the allegedly short supply of which creates the perpetual demand for scaling back Democratic ambitions. Future party leaders need to shed these phantasmal fears. And they need to be ready for the political press to lobby hard against these efforts. After all, the sight of so many people being held accountable will raise serious questions of how much went wrong on their watch.

I know this is too US focused, I don't want to box this community in anyway into a US centric focus, though I am from the US so it is something I am always trying to escape but anyways, I think the point here extends broadly. The lesson in the collapse of the US to learn is not just a specific one to the collapse happening here, it speaks to how collapse must be averted with ideologies that actively resist the forces that undue our collective wealth.

No Justice No Peace

Our review's key conclusion is that empirical evidence for multilevel selection is abundant, refuting the misconception that MLS lacks empirical support. Rather than being rare or marginal, MLS appears frequently across biological systems and hierarchical levels. MLS is a useful conceptual and analytical framework for understanding trait evolution and natural selection overall.

Many evolutionary phenomena, including the origin of multicellularity, social behavior, cooperation, and cultural evolution in humans, are more clearly interpreted when MLS perspectives are applied.

Historically, debates about the "unit of selection" have been hindered by conceptual misunderstandings; this review suggests that focusing on empirical data could advance the field.

If the forces of natural selection, diversification specifically, can operate on many levels then it is reasonable to ask, should we not understand collapse and extinction from the same multidimensional perspective?

Extinction I am left to wonder, may be precisely describable in evolutionary terms in abstracted contexts such as culture and language in a way that shares the same basic apparatus of analysis as the study of the extinction of species and ecosystems.

I also look over at the processes of cancer and think hmmm.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2026.1752597/full

Like many US soft-power initiatives, the programme was imperfect, morally complex and at times at odds with the policies of other governments. Yet it is one foundation of what the internet is: a global commons. Today’s online world is dominated by large tech platforms and awash with illegal content and misinformation. But it is still a structure in which facts, ideas and information accessible from London are largely accessible from Delhi, Johannesburg and São Paulo as well.

That could change rapidly. On the one hand is the matter of US funding, now cut or apparently redirected towards a Trumpian, politicised effort to undermine global attempts to regulate US big-tech platforms.

On the other is the mounting export of censorship technologies, which are constantly improving and increasingly marketed overseas. These include devices sold by companies in China that give their customers – governments in Pakistan, Myanmar and Ethiopia among others – extremely fine-tuned control over what comes in and out of a country. It is believed that similar technologies are the foundation of Iran’s current shutdown.

This article unfortunately fails to mention the US has provided a significant portion of the apparatus to China.

Even while warning about national security and human rights abuse, the U.S. government across five Republican and Democratic administrations has repeatedly allowed and even actively helped American firms to sell technology to Chinese police, government agencies and surveillance companies, an Associated Press investigation has found.

And time after time, despite bipartisan attempts, Congress has turned a blind eye to loopholes that allow China to work around its own rules, such as cloud services, third-party resellers, and holes in sanctions passed after the Tiananmen massacre.

https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/us-government-allowed-and-even-helped-us-firms-sell-tech-used-for-surveillance-in-china-ap-finds/

In a context of growing international attention on Greenland—both due to rapid changes in the physical environment and cryosphere and the resulting geopolitical implications—the study findings take on special relevance. Bonsoms, the article's lead author, says that "the rapid transformation of the ice sheet not only has global environmental consequences, such as sea level rise and possible alterations in ocean circulation, but also places the Arctic at the center of new strategic, economic and territorial dynamics."

In global terms, 2025 ranked as the third-warmest year on record, following the unprecedented temperatures observed in 2023 and 2024, the latter being the warmest year on record. The global average temperature reached 14.97°C, which was 0.59°C above the 1991–2020 average and 1.47°C above the estimated 1850–1900 pre-industrial level.

While marginally cooler than 2023 (by just 0.01°C), 2025 continued a sequence of exceptionally warm years, with all of the past 11 years (2015–2025) ranking amongst the 11 warmest years on record. Although 2025 itself did not exceed the 1.5°C Paris Agreement threshold, the three-year average for 2023–2025 surpassed 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level for the first time since global temperature analyses began.

The answer, particularly in the US, is with breathtaking ease. The president, Donald Trump, has ramped up his attacks on climate policy in recent weeks – quitting the Paris agreement again and repealing a finding that underpins pollution controls – while going global with his “drill, baby, drill” policy. Chris Wright, the US energy secretary and former fracking executive, has pressured Europe to roll back methane standards and sustainability rules that could threaten American exports of liquefied natural gas. On Wednesday, he urged spreadsheet-wranglers at the International Energy Agency to “drop the climate” from its models.

Even in Europe, where polls show citizens overwhelmingly accept climate science and support stopping planet-heating pollution, a quiet but deadly form of denial has emerged.

Far-right parties have gained ground across the continent, even as they make fighting climate policy – aided by the Heartland Institute, a US thinktank funded by fossil fuels – their second priority after immigration.

Centrist leaders, alarmed by their success and anxious to placate polluting industries, are rolling back green rules with a vigour that has surprised even some lobbyists. This month, ahead of a meeting in Antwerp between the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and business leaders, the EU’s carbon price – the cornerstone of its pollution-cutting efforts – found itself in the crosshairs of the powerful chemical industry.

“It is also worth noting that such a framing would have been far harder to impose 15 years ago,” he said. “Its effectiveness today reflects a transformed media environment in which certain outlets – notably those within the Groupe Bolloré sphere – have normalised narratives about ‘left-wing violence’ and provided platforms that amplify and legitimise these interpretations. This media ecosystem lowers the cost of generalising blame and accelerates the politicisation of violent events.”

Atmospheric modelling suggested this plume had drifted 1600 kilometres from the area where the Falcon 9 re-entered the atmosphere. The study is the first to trace high-altitude pollution to a specific spacecraft re-entry.

The tiny metal particles “could be catalysing ozone destruction, creating clouds in the stratosphere and mesosphere, affecting the way that sunlight travels through the atmosphere”, says Wing. “But all of this is understudied.”

Billions of dollars have been wiped from research budgets, almost 8,000 grants have been cancelled at NIH and the US National Science Foundation alone, and more than 1,000 NIH employees have been fired.

Normal people in the US MASSIVELY underestimate the damage that has been done to the US by destroying science as a career here, it is sickening and to be honest makes it really hard to even want to try to be a part of this shit society in any meaningful way.

The US is racing towards collapse and scientific institutions included but the real collapse story here is the fact that everybody seems resigned to just letting science go away as if it was a fun hobby and not an existentially necessary pillar holding society up and bulwarking our "economic productivity" with new tools, new perspectives and new safeguards to prevent natural catastrophe from robbing us of success.

That is what I will remember most about this time, that the average person in my society sees supporting science with actual money as something akin to getting distracted about sending cool robots to Mars because it is exciting (which is cool and I think we should do it, but a different argument fundamentally then say funding basic vaccine research).

No, many many many of us will die because we have destroyed the funding of science in the US, many are already dying and yet in the midst of this wave of violence try talking to the average USian and they will act like it is a detail that science has been destroyed here, not one of the primary emergencies.

"We have to focus on the economy" US centrists say brushing the blowing out of the keystone piece of the US economy and basic cohesion of systems within it completely out of frame to focus on abstract fabricated ideas like GDP or stocks or some other nearly meaningless factor with respect to our daily lives.

Collapse is many things, but it is always a product of a refusal to listen in favor of orbiting a comforting theology without examining it closely enough to be disappointed.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34309891

In the past 20 years, Gardiner writes, plastic production has doubled, and it will double again, perhaps triple, in the near future. Petrochemicals for plastic are, she says, “expected to be the largest single driver of oil demand in the decades to come. Obviously these oil companies can see what’s coming – they understand that that shift away from fossil fuels is a threat to their business model that has been so profitable for them.” Plastic, she says, “is a way for them to keep drilling and to keep making money. Putting their expertise and muscle into solar or wind power was not the way they wanted to go. It’s not as profitable as selling oil and gas, so they’re all in on the current model, and plastic is a way to perpetuate it. Which is why it is, I guess, even more catastrophic. Because if it’s enabling the industry to keep drilling, to keep selling oil and gas, that is a huge threat to the climate.”

The extraction and transport of fossil fuels, and manufacturing and disposal of plastics, all create carbon emissions. According to the UN, in 2019, plastics generated 1.8bn tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions – 3.4% of total global emissions.

In Monday's hearing, the lobby group Coal Australia defended sending almost $4 million to "Australians for Prosperity" last financial year, which is a third-party group that attacked Labor, Greens and teal independent candidates during the 2025 federal election campaign.

Stuart Bocking, a former 2GB talkback radio host turned Coal Australia chief executive, denied it was a form of "astroturfing", telling senators that it was often easier to pay third-party groups to run political campaigns on one's behalf these days, because it left lobby groups to focus on other things.

"We're not engaged in astroturfing," he said.

Uh huh

The Atlas Network, first formed in 1981, partners with more than 500 free-market think tanks around the world, with 10 of them in Australia and New Zealand.

The ABC recently published a large piece which explains the history of the Atlas Network and what it is.

Dr Walker said Australians had little idea of the extent of the coordinated effort to prevent attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition to renewable forms of energy.

He explained how fossil fuel companies have funded certain think tanks globally for decades to push climate denial, anti-Indigenous rights and anti-renewable messages, a technique that has helped to obscure where ideas and money are coming from.

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And finally, science communicator Karl Kruszelnicki (Dr Karl) appeared at the Senate committee on Monday.

In an attempt to establish common factual ground with One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts, Dr Karl asked Roberts if he accepted that global temperatures were rising.

Their interaction illustrated how public discussions about the science of climate change get bogged down so easily:

Dr Karl: Do you agree that the climate records show that the last 10 years have been the hottest on record worldwide?

Senator Roberts: The last 10 years in Australia have been cooler than the 1880s and 1890s in Australia.

Dr Karl: Hang on … Worldwide. Do you agree that the last 10 years have been the hottest years on record worldwide?

Senator Roberts: No I don't

The fuck :)

Dr Karl: I feel like I'm talking to a school child who says seven times two is not 14, but instead seven times two is a bicycle divided by the square root of a banana.

Roberts: That's one way of making out that I'm a fool.

You do that all by yourself

Dr Karl: But all the scientists disagree with you. 99.999 per cent of the scientists disagree with you.

Roberts: So now you're into consensus, which is a political tool.

Dr Karl: Hang on, consensus is a political tool? … So if all the scientists agree that seven times two is 14, that's a political tool?

Roberts: That's obviously a stupid comment, in my opinion.

Most Hawaiʻi residents believe sea level rise is already affecting the state, expect major impacts within their lifetimes, and support significant changes to how and where development occurs. At the same time, many remain uncertain about how large-scale adaptation should be financed.

They talk about a type of person who understands or recognises the meaning of the phrase ‘nothing is certain’. This person understands or recognises their nepantla – that they are in between spaces, times, destinations, life and death – and so they recognise their indeterminacy, instability and radical uncertainty, what Mexistentialists call zozobra. In short, they are sure of one thing: that ‘nada es seguro’. That’s my father.

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My father’s attitude to certainty is not his alone. It is a worldview forged in the crucible of history and experience, and articulated for us by Mexican existentialists with concepts like accidentality, zozobra, relajo and nepantla – concepts that capture the contingency and vulnerability of human life. In pronouncing that ‘nothing is certain’, my father is merely echoing the teachings of experience, while simultaneously preparing himself for what may come. That he easily channels philosophers in critical life moments does not surprise me.

After all, he is a product of a historical circumstance that is not unlike those of the philosophers who came before him: although catastrophic, it is powerful and empowering. And we could say the same about the great majority of us, Mexican or not: we are products of a history that, while it may be traumatic and painful, can also be powerful and empowering.

Zooming out from these esoteric debates about ecosystem services, what really stayed with me were all these biologists I met who basically shrugged their shoulders, gave me these sad sighs of resignation, and conceded that they didn’t actually believe these strategies were going to work. Yet they still embraced the framework.

However disappointing, these decades of failure can also function as an urgent invitation to break from routine but ultimately self-defeating political assumptions, and to reach for more convincing (and yes, more realistic and pragmatic) alternatives.

Keeping Europe safe from extreme weather “is not rocket science”, a top researcher has said, as the EU’s climate advisory board urges countries to prepare for a catastrophic 3C of global heating.

Maarten van Aalst, a member of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change (ESABCC), said the continent was already “paying a price” for its lack of preparation but that adapting to a hotter future was in part “common sense and low-hanging fruit”.

Not really adaptation as 3c means it keeps getting warmer from the tipping pints being crossed, over about 1.5-2 c means civilization collapses, it's only a matter of when after that.

All this really does is kick the can down the road to civilizations destruction, the only adaption is how to restructure society to get to near zero emissions, our natural sinks can take up about 2t CO2 per person. Higher emissions then that is failure. We can start by banning flying, starting with private jets

Revisiting our work through the lens of Kantian philosophy shows why misinformation is so entrenched. We are trying to repair a broken digital public sphere at the informational level, when the deeper fracture lies at the metaphysical level: in the loss of shared structures through which reality appears. The real challenge is not “How do we correct false claims?” but: How do we restore a common world of shared appearance in which truth is once again possible?

The incident magnified existing issues of low wages and burnout. “The cumulative impact of grief, trauma, and exposure to violence can be really challenging,” Aalhus says. When “coupled with the uncertainty of the work and the political rhetoric that makes this into a moral conversation,” she adds, “it can be really draining for people.”

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Still, the model has limits. “Supervised consumption sites can’t carry the weight of a structural crisis on their own,” Aalhus says. She calls them a Band-aid solution—an effective one—to a problem grown out of control after years of government inaction. What’s missing, she argues, is a response that isn’t siloed: one that includes an accessible, regulated safe drug supply, culturally relevant treatment, evidence-based drug policy, and safe, affordable housing.

Costa Rica avoided mano dura but not its logic: security policy hardened through civilian punitive measures that narrowed democratic space rather than addressing the roots of violence. During the 2000s, rising petty crime created incentives to judicialize insecurity. The introduction of fast-track courts in 2009, presented as a response to an inefficient justice system, produced a sharp increase in the prison population. As a result, Costa Rica now ranks twenty-second globally in prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants and holds the third-highest incarceration rate in Central America.

During the 2010s, as the region became a key site of drug-trafficking, Costa Rica’s security policy continued to harden, supported by US security assistance, new taxes to finance the Ministry of Public Security, and the creation of the Border Police. The COVID-19 pandemic further intensified these dynamics, particularly in tourism-dependent coastal areas that became flash points for organized crime. This period was also marked by increasingly spectacular violence and a sharp rise in the homicide rate, from around six per 100,000 inhabitants in 2000 to over sixteen by 2025.

It was under these conditions that Costa Rica’s trajectory converged more clearly with that of the rest of the region through the politicization of crime.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/60447296

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May said the Carney government is not serious about climate change. May, who supported Carney's budget in December, has since questioned the prime minister's word after accusing him of a climate policy flip-flop.

"If we're serious about emissions reduction, then we have to actually revisit some of the measures that have been eliminated since (Carney) took over," May told The Canadian Press.

"They're miles from hitting any of the Paris Agreement targets, and the prime minister did recommit to me on the floor of the House on Nov. 17 that this government is committed to the Paris Agreement and achieving its targets. So the emissions reduction update, the so-called climate competitiveness strategy — there's lots of highfalutin titles for what boils down to...(no) climate plan.""