Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/35147575

An article published recently in Nature Geoscience warns that Antarctica's ice masses have begun to experience a process scientists call "Greenlandification." The term refers to the unprecedented retreat of Greenland's outlet glaciers and longer surface melt seasons.

Like Antarctica, Greenland was originally expected to remain more stable despite climate change. However, recent Antarctic research contradicts this claim, showing rapidly increasing surface melt, shrinking sea ice, and higher rates of iceberg calving from ice shelves

well... faster than expected

In the 1980s and 1990s, climate change was a threat, not a reality. Back then, climate leaders hoped to slow or stop warming before our civilization would see material weather-related effects or reach levels of warming that would risk irreversible changes. Those leaders—people like George Woodwell, who created the institution that brought me into this work—achieved admirable results, building the infrastructure, frameworks, and culture that came to define the climate action community.

In 2026, what the climate leaders of the previous era hoped to prevent is now here. Global temperatures from the past three years (2023-2025) averaged more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level for the first time. Climate models project that we could reach 2°C of warming as early as the 2030s.

And yet, public acknowledgement and discussion of this physical reality remain confined to specialists. It has not penetrated mainstream climate messaging, media coverage, or public discourse anywhere near the scale its consequences demand. Some thought leaders even celebrate the current trajectory as a win compared to the much higher warming that once seemed likely.

The climate community is not a monolith, but having tracked climate messaging closely for over a decade, I believe the prevailing narratives are not keeping pace with the science. Terms like “doomerism” have discouraged realism, leading many to mistake clear-eyed risk assessment for defeatism or alarmism. The climate movement needs a shared narrative focused on what outcomes are inevitable, what we can still prevent, and what choices remain available. In other words: What futures can humanity still hope for?

Something that is paradoxical about the collapse we are experiencing is that the forces that dominate global movements of goods and money depend on periodic collapse in order to retain control even though collapse appears to destroy everything and be good for no one.

The fact that the global economy can come screeching to a halt in days is in some ways a reflection of how much collective wealth we have built together as a planet, but importantly in other ways it expresses how dictators and authoritarians retain control over our lives so easily with how they have designed the global economy, it only takes a handful of days of oil supply to be messed up for ruthless dictators to become existentially empowered to control our wellbeing.

To the dictators and leaders in power right now telling us they will heroically save the global economy by manipulating their levers of control over the flow of oil to markets, the rise of alternative, green energy is a direct, military threat to their power precisely because of the stability and decentralization green energy brings.

Naomi Klein is the necessary touchstone here with her amazing book The Shock Doctrine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine

“As the Strait remains closed, producers are shutting down, and this isn’t like turning off a tap that can be quickly restarted,” Krugman explained. “There’s apparently a real nonlinearity here: a two-week closure of the Strait has much more than twice the adverse impact on global oil supply as a one-week closure. If this goes on for multiple weeks... oil prices, which retreated slightly off their highs early this morning, could go much higher.”

I post this less so because I think THIS is the moment of collapse, though it certainly may be, and more because it is a real world measurement of fragile global systems are when they depend on fossil fuels.

THIS is why we need green energy, fossil fuel infrastructure is far too brittle.

also see https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/09/iran-war-oil-prices-stagflation-global-economy

The oil shock resembles those seen in the 1970s, when conflict in the Middle East resulted in surging prices and dragged advanced economies into persistent slumps, according to David Bassanese, chief economist at BetaShares. “If oil does stay above $100 a barrel and this disruption continues, then we may face a stagflationary moment in the first half of the year: weak growth, but central banks unable to do much about it because of the high level of inflation,” he said.

another related, timely article https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-09/us-israel-iran-war-oil-price-surge-share-markets/106432166

Rabobank's senior global strategist Michael Every believes a critical mass of traders are finally starting to appreciate the "quite terrifying" threat America and Israel's Iran adventure poses to the global economy and the companies that rely on it for their profits.

"This is now starting to look like a potential combination of the 1973 post-Yom Kippur War oil shock, the 2022 Russia-Ukraine War commodity shock, and the 2020-21 COVID supply chain shock," he warns.

"The longer this goes on, the more exponential the damage becomes, in a domino effect, which is exactly what oil is now showing to a market that saw some takes last week that 'things could be a lot worse'. Well, now they are."

One result cut against the old idea that apocalyptic believers simply stop caring about the future.

Instead, people who expected the end soon often supported stronger intervention, especially when they thought human actions were driving it.

That response challenges the simpler story that end-times believers only shrink their time horizon and stop investing in tomorrow.

Do you see any parallels between the inner experience of mental illness and the world at large?

We’ll know more about that in the future, I think. One of the books that I was thinking about while writing the book was Down Below by Leonora Carrington, which was about her mental disintegration and institutionalization when the Nazis were invading. To some extent, I read it and found myself thinking that hers was a reasonable reaction. I think some people are a little bit more in the wind of the world that way.

I know this is old, but I still think it's funny. Dark funny.

Depletion of this region’s reservoirs would lead to “controlled depression” for the local economy, “mass unemployment” and “industrial total shutdown,” according to a two-page report by Don Roach, former assistant general manager of the San Patricio Municipal Water District, which supplies many of the region’s large industrial water users.

That includes refineries operated by Flint Hills Resources, Valero and Citgo that provide jet fuel to Texas airports and meet much of the state’s daily demand for gasoline.

“This waiting disaster is under the radar for the rest of the state,” said Roach, who worked 20 years at the water district and retired in 2014. “We hear nothing from the Texas politicians about the seriousness of the situation or any state plan to mitigate it.”

Texas is a massive, brutal collapse experiment.

Now Rowley is writing a book about the decline of foreign correspondents. He said “hundreds” lost jobs in the last two decades.

“I think it’s hurting democracy,” he said. “I think it’s hurting Americans’ knowledge of the world and I think it may be contributing in some ways to the rise of isolationism.”

Researchers identify sharp rise to about 0.35C every decade, after excluding natural fluctuations such as El Niño

oofff, oh well, I'm sure we'll keep electing representatives to manage this /s

Climate breakdown is occurring more rapidly with the heating rate almost doubling, according to research that excludes the effect of natural factors behind the latest scorching temperatures.

It found global heating accelerated from a steady rate of less than 0.2C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.35C per decade over the past 10 years. The rate is higher than scientists have seen since they started systematically taking the Earth’s temperature in 1880.

buckle up buckaroos! we've fucked around for 40 yeses. now we're finding out.

EDIT: Tamino who co authored the paper the Guardian refers to has a blog post about it

https://tamino.wordpress.com/2026/03/07/global-warming-has-accelerated/

All these graphs plot the warming rate in °C per year, but when quoting numbers I have followed the custom these days to talk about the rate in °C per decade. According to this analysis, the current estimated rate is 0.31 ± 0.07 °C/decade.

Which estimate is best? I don’t know, but I do know that even 0.24 °C per decade will take us past 2 °C right around the year 2050. The whole point of the Paris agreement is: DON’T GO THERE. My advice: fasten your seat belt, things are going to get ugly.

We’ve made climate change a main focus of our work, but we also recognize that it’s part of a broader ecological crisis. On top of that we’re facing a host of threats in other domains; injustice, inequity, misinformation, polarization, censorship, surveillance, and armed conflict, just to name a few.

Each of these tugs on a thread somewhere else; ecological collapse ripples out through the economy, economic pressures ramp up societal polarization, and conflict undermines our ability to address global issues. In 2023, the term “polycrisis” entered the lexicon as a way to describe our modern predicament:

A polycrisis is a situation in which multiple, distinct crises occur simultaneously and interact in ways that amplify each other, producing outcomes more severe than the sum of the individual crises. The concept highlights the interdependencies and feedback loops between global systems, where shocks in one domain cascade into others.

Before we can address the polycrisis, we first have to make sense of this complex and disorienting threat landscape.

To make sure we’re presenting a balanced perspective, we’re drawing on one of the most comprehensive resources available: the Global Risks Perception Survey, or GRPS. Each year, the World Economic Forum conducts a survey of the global risk landscape, leveraging the expertise of over 1,500 leaders from government, academia, and the private sector, across every major region of the world.

We’ve gone through the reports from 2022 through 2026, and identified the 6 factors which consistently ranked the highest over that time period.

The modelling is an idealised scenario that does not suggest the AMOC will collapse in 400 years. But it does suggest an abrupt shift in the Gulf Stream could serve as an early warning of an impending AMOC shutdown, the only such prior indicator we know of. While it may be too late at that point to avoid AMOC collapse, Europe could prepare by insulating houses and finding more southerly places to grow food.

But if you really want to be prepared for long-term emergencies, you’re going to need more than just vitamins, fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. Even the most hardcore survivalists know that failing to include some kind of variety — or treats — in your diet is its own form of short-sightedness. The wartime prepping guidelines distributed by the Swedish government suggest keeping a stock of chocolate and fruit custard. Many posts on r/preppers acknowledge that you have to find ways of staying excited about your emergency food stores. “If you eat the same thing, over and over, you will get burnt out on it. And even if you are starving, you will not want to eat it,” wrote one user.

Another preparedness tip is to consider the comfort of food rituals. Al Nordz has been into gardening and growing fruits, herbs, and vegetables for years — they had previously lived in a very rural part of Northern California — but they didn’t get seriously into prepping until they moved to Los Angeles just before the pandemic. Nordz, who uses they/them pronouns, suddenly found themself stuck at home in a new city, so they started remediating the soil in their backyard and building raised beds. But one thing they love and couldn’t grow at home is coffee.

Almost by definition, people take prevention for granted. If programs focused on vaccination, substance use treatment and youth mental health are effective, many people never experience the crises that might have occurred without them.

But prevention depends on continuity: sustained staffing, stable partnerships and consistent data collection. The effects of disruption are difficult to measure in a single budget cycle, but they influence how confidently agencies invest in long-term strategies. In that sense, funding instability can become a public health issue of its own.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34895611

Although plastic particles in the air are increasingly coming into focus, knowledge about their distribution and effects is still limited. Chemical analyses from Leipzig now provide details from Germany for the first time: Around 4% of the particulate matter consists of plastic. Around two-thirds of this comes from tire abrasion.

Extrapolated, this means that people in a city like Leipzig inhale approximately 2.1 micrograms of plastic per day through the air, which increases the risk of death from cardiovascular disease by 9% and from lung cancer by 13%

If Trump does move to install a permanent leader, that person will have a lot of work to do to prepare the agency for hurricane season, according to Fugate.

“[Noem] has already broken them,” he said of the agency’s leadership, adding that the loss of many senior officials could leave it vulnerable during a big disaster. “There’s still good people at FEMA, but I just don’t know if there are enough of them, and if DHS has the sense to get out of the way.”

The collapse of disaster response, of the basic social contract that when things get bad we help one another...

This is why reinsurers focus so intensely on climate change. Take a glance at the websites of big ones like Swiss Re and Munich Re and you get a sense of how central this is to their calculations – a concern that has spread to property insurers who are starting to hire climate consultants. Even more than market volatility, climate is their biggest headache. ‘You won’t meet a single insurance or reinsurance CEO who doesn’t believe in climate change,’ the insurance investor and former Lombard Insurance CEO James Orford told me. ‘They see it in the numbers – a combination of more extreme, less predictable events, combined with big losses of sums insured. All the modelling suggests these are uninsurable risks.’

The private equity industry has been relentlessly pursuing workers’ retirement accounts for desperately needed infusion of cash – an effort that ramped up after Trump was elected. The administration is crafting rules to encourage broader investment in alternative investments like private equity – which, as we have pointed out, is a highly risky move that would threaten small individual investors.

But don’t take our word for it – just look at what the PE bigshots are saying themselves. Billionaire mega investor Josh Harris told an investment conference recently that these accounts are “the last big pocket of capital” and added: “My own view is that it’s not going to end well.”