Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33853299

Dirty" or "extremely dirty": these are the classifications of 46% of the world's aquatic environments. This conclusion comes from a study that compiled and systematized data from 6,049 records of waste contamination in aquatic environments on all continents over the last decade.

A new study reveals that chemicals used to replace ozone-damaging CFCs are now driving a surge in a persistent “forever chemical” worldwide. The pollutant, called trifluoroacetic acid, is falling out of the atmosphere into water, land, and ice, including in remote regions like the Arctic. Even as older chemicals are phased out, their long lifetimes mean pollution is still rising.

But I’ve come to wonder whether the only thing worse than arguing on the internet is not arguing on the internet. Something happened over time, and I think it coincided with the rise of Donald Trump and the emergence of Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok as the social media platforms of choice. A lot of people just stopped bothering to defend their ideas against people who disagree with them. The arguments dried up.

...

The transition from forums and blogs to “social media” and video has disfavored longform writing, and it is a transition that has been engineered by massive companies. With the rise of AI, which allows people to avoid formulating thoughts altogether and let the machines do it for them, it seems to only be getting worse.

This is a difficult phenomenon to write about, because I’m not quite sure how to prove it or quantify it (suggestions welcome), but I know there has been a shift here, because I’ve experienced it firsthand over my 18 years as an online writer. I became so used to defending my ideas against critics, and then gradually the critics stopped writing criticism.

A rising number of American homeowners are ready relocate this year due to extreme weather events and other climate-related concerns.

Some 49 percent of those who own a house are considering moving in 2026 due to climate events, according to a survey of 1,000 American adults by insurance provider Kin Insurance. Also a concern among homeowners is the rising cost of homeownership, the study noted.

“Kin uncovered that climate is driving decisions about where people live and the rising costs of homeownership are changing when and how people buy homes,” the study noted. The study also found that nearly all homeowners are concerned about severe weather damaging their homes.

Kin’s survey found that within the 49 percent of homeowners who want to move, 19 percent “definitely” are considering it, while 30 percent are “somewhat” considering it. Some 45 percent said they were not considering a move.

As for how far away they want to move, Kin broke up respondents’ intentions into three groups:

• Moving within their current city or community: 41 percent
• Moving to a different city or community in their state: 35 percent
• Moving to another state: 25 percent.

For those considering a move to another state, more than half of respondents wanted to avoid disaster-prone states like Florida and California and preferred to move to what they perceived as low-risk states, including Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Connecticut.

Chronic exposure to pollution from wildfires has been linked to tens of thousands of deaths annually in the United States, according to a new study.

The paper, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, found that from 2006 to 2020, long-term exposure to tiny particulates from wildfire smoke contributed to an average of 24,100 deaths a year in the lower 48 states.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33714149

Extreme heat driven by climate change could make parts of the Northern Territory unlivable within the next 40 years, unless urgent action is taken, activists warn.

Some of the issue with all this is that it's unlivable now becase it will be unlivable in the near future, we're still stupidly building infrastructure etc and even theb that infrastructure is not passive, it's "cardboard" walls with a giant AC strapped to the side of the building. I order to undertake managed abaondment, we need ro start now.

I left FNQ 20 years ago, I started to need AC which is the red flag of unlivablity.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33601636

"whenever we're presented with a choice to do the right thing or the wrong thing, we do the wrong thing. We need to start making the right choices.

Britain’s national security thinking has traditionally been shaped by familiar concerns: hostile states, terrorism, energy supply, and, more recently, cyber threats. A new assessment from the U.K. government adds a different category to that list. Global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, it argues, now pose a direct and growing risk to national security, with implications that extend well beyond conservation policy and into food supply, economic stability, migration, and conflict.

A new University of Oxford study finds that almost half of the global population (3.79 billion) will be living with extreme heat by 2050 i

Most of the impacts will be felt early on as the world passes the 1.5°C target set by the Paris Agreement, the authors warn. In 2010, 23% of the world's population lived with extreme heat, and this is set to grow to 41% over the next decades.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42476601

Jiang Xueqin, born in 1976, is a Chinese-Canadian educator, writer, historian, and geopolitical theorist based in Beijing. He is recognized for his work in education reform in China, advocating for creativity, critical thinking, and global citizenship. He holds a degree in English literature from Yale College and has held significant positions in Chinese educational institutions, including Shenzhen Middle School and Peking University High School. His writings have been published in various prominent media outlets, and he's a researcher at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

He also hosts the YouTube channel, Predictive History, where he analyzes geopolitical developments using historical structures and game theory, drawing inspiration from Isaac Asimov's concept of psychohistory. I’ve compiled 2 of his most important video lectures related to economics:

1. This video explores the evolution of the global economic system.
2. This video traces the evolution of global financial systems in more detail and their impact on empires.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42476468

Jiang Xueqin, born in 1976, is a Chinese-Canadian educator, writer, historian, and geopolitical theorist based in Beijing. He is recognized for his work in education reform in China, advocating for creativity, critical thinking, and global citizenship. He holds a degree in English literature from Yale College and has held significant positions in Chinese educational institutions, including Shenzhen Middle School and Peking University High School. His writings have been published in various prominent media outlets, and he's a researcher at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

He also hosts the YouTube channel, Predictive History, where he analyzes geopolitical developments using historical structures and game theory, drawing inspiration from Isaac Asimov's concept of psychohistory. I’ve compiled 2 of his most important video lectures related to sociology:

1. This video lecture explores the cyclical nature of civilizations, detailing the factors contributing to societal decline.
2. This video lecture explores the concept of success, drawing on psychological theories and socioeconomic observations.

As we saw in Caracas, the Trump administration is deliberately blurring the line between the army and police, between home and abroad. The president is governing domestically with the same force that he rules America’s empire as commander-in-chief overseas. The result is a nation that is fast descending to a dark, paranoid and violent place.

All this is partly a language problem. Silicon Valley’s corporations are constantly recruiting us to embrace their goals and their language. Corporate capitalists teach us to be more like them, to value efficiency and profitability and forget about values that might matter more in the end. We lack the language that would let us prize the arduous, the uncomfortable, the slow and wandering, the unpredictable, the vulnerable or risky, the intimate, the embodied.

We resist the tyranny of the quantifiable by finding a language that can value all those subtle phenomena that add up to a life worth living. A language not in the sense of a new vocabulary but attention, description, conversation centred on these subtler phenomena and on principles not corrupted by what corporations want us to want.

...

Resisting the annexation of our hearts and minds by Silicon Valley requires us not just to set boundaries on our engagement with what they offer, but to cherish the alternatives. Joy in ordinary things, in each other, in embodied life, and the language with which to value it, is essential to this resistance, which is resistance to dehumanisation.

In the latter half of 2025, a phrase began circulating widely on Chinese social media: “The Kill Line” (杀线). It is not a slogan invented by policymakers or academics, nor a meme meant purely for ridicule. It is a sharp, unsettling, and revealing metaphor used by ordinary Chinese commentators to describe how American society appears from the outside. The Kill Line names an invisible threshold in the United States: a point at which a single shock, medical, financial, or legal, can push an otherwise productive middle-class citizen into irreversible collapse.

...

The Kill Line exposes how deeply American culture has internalized the idea that survival must be earned continuously, without interruption. It reveals how quickly empathy collapses once someone falls out of productivity. It shows how social trust erodes when people know that one misstep can erase decades of effort.

But the wind blew through me like I was a hologram. If you say I am a mystic, then fine: I’m a mystic. The trees are not trees, anyway

Jacob Geller examines collapse and isolation through the lens of the first Twilight Zone Episode, the video game Death Stranding, Ray Bradbury and other cultural touchstones all orbiting around the central motif of the empty room augmented by virtual experience.

Notably missing from this video essay however is the most stunning empty room crafted by a human artist of all, the film Stalker by Andrey Tarkovsky.

https://archive.org/details/stalker-movie

youtube link to video essay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0K2DnI1TDk

In embracing ultranationalist and ultrareligious rhetoric, they consider it a response to a globalised world in which distinct cultural communities and congregational religious life disappear. However, first and foremost they see in community a response to liberalism and its ‘extreme individualism’. In the activists’ understanding, liberalism is a system that destroys communitarian life and communitarian values at every level: political, economic, cultural, moral.

‘Liberalism is a suicidal system,’ Leonardo, an Italian activist told me once, shaking his head. ‘How can one believe in nothing?’ Far-Right militants’ embrace of the discourse of community is tantamount to a rejection of liberal modernity, and the wish to – in Leonardo’s words – ‘re-enchant the world’. The way they construe liberalism and liberals as opponents may sound like caricature, yet in fact is a key to understanding the appeal of far-Right visions of community – and, in the second step, of the appeal of community at large.

...

A statement shared with me by Ula, one of my Polish research participants, helps to shed light on this issue. In explaining what the ‘far-Right community’ means, she emphasised that it merges three other forms of community: a religious renewal movement, a scout association, and a martial-arts group. All three put emphasis on order, hierarchy and discipline.

Don't agree with everything here but this perspective on collapse and the groups responding to it is worth considering.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33169139

He said exports went from about 3,500 tonnes to nearly 10,000 tonnes.

Welp, thats the most enviomentlaly destructive and repugnat thing I've read today. Flying 10,000 tonnes of grapes to Japan alone

On the upside the day is early and I'm sure I'll be appalled further yet.

Mr Scott said he was pleased

On the otjer hand I think it's a pracrive that should be banned (and airports closed)

Sitting here atop my high horse eating an apricot and some strawberries from my garden.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33166281

Last week, Tunbridge Wells went without running water for days on end, for the second time this winter. Over the course of this decade, the town has suffered a run of outages and on-off supply, or what South East Water is pleased to call “resilience issues”.

One of the richest towns in one of the richest societies in human history shows the rest of us that even lavish private affluence cannot make up for the really important forms of public scarcity.

Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse (irreversible loss of function beyond repair)".

Global ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten UK national security & prosperity".

The impacts will range from crop failures, intensified natural disasters and infectious disease outbreaks to conflict within & between states."

Scientists have warned of a potential “regime shift” in the oceans, as the rapid growth of huge mats of seaweed appears to be driven by global heating and excessive enrichment of waters from farming runoff and other pollutants.

Over the past two decades, seaweed blooms have expanded by a staggering 13.4% a year in the tropical Atlantic and western Pacific, with the most dramatic increases occurring after 2008, according to researchers at the University of South Florida.

Since Sputnik 1 lifted off in 1957, objects have been steadily accumulating in orbit. Today, space networks track roughly 40,000 pieces circling Earth. About 11,000 of these are active satellites; the rest are junk. Yet these are only visible fragments. The European Space Agency (ESA) estimates that more than 1.2 million objects larger than one centimeter, each capable of causing catastrophic damage, are currently circling the planet. Despite decades of warnings, governments and private companies have continued launching missions with little plan for what happens after their useful life. The result is a growing halo of waste around Earth, and the trend is accelerating.

The global cost of greenhouse gas emissions are nearly double what scientists previously thought, according to a study published Thursday by researchers at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.