Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

A polar air mass has brought record low temperatures to Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, causing at least 15 deaths and forcing governments to restrict gas supplies and activate emergency shelters.

The three South American countries have all recorded sharply below-zero temperatures as the polar air originated from Antarctica and swept across the region.

In Argentina, at least nine homeless people have died from the cold this winter, according to NGO Proyecto 7.

The capital Buenos Aires recorded its lowest temperature since 1991 at -1.9 deg C on July 2, while the coastal city of Miramar saw snow for the first time in 34 years. Further south, the town of Maquinchao recorded –18 deg C on July 1.

Electricity demand caused cuts across Buenos Aires, leaving thousands without power for over 24 hours in some areas.

As European countries struggle with heat waves, some LATAM countries are facing polar air mass from South Pole.

and there is a video of heavy snowfall in the Atacama Desert

https://xcancel.com/BuenosDiasTVN/status/1938595103146168376

The number of tourists heading to Antarctica has been skyrocketing. From fewer than 8,000 a year about three decades ago, nearly 125,000 tourists flocked to the icy continent in 2023–24. The trend is likely to continue in the long term.

Unchecked tourism growth in Antarctica risks undermining the very environment that draws visitors. This would be bad for operators and tourists. It would also be bad for Antarctica – and the planet.

Over the past two weeks, the nations that decide what human activities are permitted in Antarctica have convened in Italy. The meeting incorporates discussions by a special working group that aims to address tourism issues.

About two-thirds of Antarctic tourists land on the continent. The visitors can threaten fragile ecosystems by:

• compacting soils
• trampling fragile vegetation
• introducing non-native microbes and plant species
• disturbing breeding colonies of birds and seals.

Even when cruise ships don’t dock, they can cause problems such as air, water and noise pollution – as well as anchoring that can damage the seabed.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/37895954

Archived

In recent years, China has been grappling with severe flood crises that have displaced millions, caused heavy economic losses, and exposed vulnerabilities in its infrastructure and disaster management systems. The China flood crisis is not just a national emergency—it is a reflection of global climate patterns that are becoming increasingly unpredictable and devastating. With torrential rains now an annual occurrence during the summer monsoon, especially in provinces like Henan, Sichuan, and Guangdong, the nation faces a daunting environmental challenge. This article explores the roots, repercussions, and remedies of China’s ongoing flood dilemma.

[...]

Floods in China are not new; the country has a long history of river-based civilizations, particularly along the Yangtze, Yellow, and Pearl Rivers. However, climate change has intensified the severity and frequency of floods, turning seasonal rains into life-threatening disasters.

[...]

At the start of July 2025, China's north and west is again on alert after sweeping rains trigger deadly floods.

China's north and west braced for more flash floods and landslides on Thursday as annual 'Plum Rains' left a trail of destruction and prompted the mobilisation of thousands of rescue workers to pull people from floodwaters.

Red alerts were issued tracing the rains as they moved from the southwestern province of Sichuan through the northwestern province of Gansu, and up to the northeastern province of Liaoning [...]

Extreme rainfall and severe flooding, which meteorologists link to climate change, increasingly pose major challenges for policymakers as they threaten to overwhelm ageing flood defences, displace millions and wreak havoc on China's $2.8 trillion agricultural sector.

Economic losses from natural disasters exceeded $10 billion last July, when the 'Plum Rains' - named for their timing coinciding with plums ripening along China's Yangtze River during the East Asia monsoon - typically reach their peak.

[...] According to Climate Analytics, a global climate science and policy institute engaged around the world in driving and supporting climate action, China not on track for a 1.5°C-aligned pathway to align with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C goal.

The Trump administration’s proposed budget seeks to shut down the laboratory atop a peak in Hawaii where scientists have gathered the most conclusive evidence of human-caused climate change since the 1950s.

The president’s budget proposal would also defund many other climate labs, including instrument sites comprising the US government’s greenhouse gas monitoring network, which stretches from northern Alaska to the South Pole.

But it’s the Mauna Loa laboratory that is the most prominent target of the President Donald Trump’s climate ire, as measurements that began there in 1958 have steadily shown CO2’s upward march as human activities have emitted more and more of the planet-warming gas each year.

The curve produced by the Mauna Loa measurements is one of the most iconic charts in modern science, known as the Keeling Curve, after Charles David Keeling, who was the researcher who painstakingly collected the data. His son, Ralph Keeling, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, now oversees collecting and updating that data.

The proposal to shut down Mauna Loa had been made public previously but was spelled out in more detail on Monday when NOAA submitted a budget document to Congress. It made more clear that the Trump administration envisions eliminating all climate-related research work at NOAA, as had been proposed in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for overhauling the government.

It would do this in large part by cutting NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research entirely, including some labs that are also involved in improving weather forecasting.

https://archive.ph/caA1y

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24158944

What a world :) Literally plumes of superheated toxic "shitwater" coming from the ground.

I wonder why it's so hot /s

https://archive.md/qmqsm

Drought is pushing tens of millions of people to the edge of starvation around the world, in a foretaste of a global crisis that is rapidly deepening with climate breakdown.

More than 90 million people in eastern and southern Africa are facing extreme hunger after record-breaking drought across many areas, ensuing widespread crop failures and the death of livestock. In Somalia, a quarter of the population is now edging towards starvation, and at least a million people have been displaced.

Links to the nation's most comprehensive climate reports disappeared from the internet on Monday — along with the official government website that houses them.

The White House did not respond Monday to questions from POLITICO's E&E News on what happened to the reports or to the website for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which coordinates federal climate research. An archived version of the USGCRP site confirms it was still active as of Sunday.

But the removal of the USGCRP website and the accompanying reports tracks with recent actions by the Trump administration as it relates to climate research.

The missing reports are known as the National Climate Assessments, which are mandated by Congress and are published periodically by the USGCRP. For years, they have outlined the dangers that climate change poses to the United States, and the most recent version — released in 2023 — warned of “potentially catastrophic outcomes” for the U.S. as global temperatures rise and extreme weather worsens.

A recent study has found that just 104 companies, mostly multinational corporations from high-income countries, are involved in a fifth of the more than 3,000 environmental conflicts it analyzed.

The study examined 3,388 conflicts, involving 5,589 companies, recorded in the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas) as of October 2024. The atlas is the world’s largest database of environmental conflicts documented by researchers, activists, journalists and students, and it includes records of extractive, industrial or legislative projects, including mines and oil pipelines that organized groups contest on socioecological grounds.

The study’s author, Marcel Llavero-Pasquina, an EJAtlas coordinator, found that around 2%, or 104 of the 5,500+ companies, played a part in 20% of all analyzed conflicts. Llavero-Pasquina labels these companies, involved in at least seven conflicts each, as “superconflictive” because they’re “a significant driver of environmental injustice globally.”

The Himalayan village of Samjung did not die in a day.

Perched in a wind-carved valley in Nepal’s Upper Mustang, more than 13,000 feet (3,962 meters) above sea level, the Buddhist village lived by slow, deliberate rhythms — herding yaks and sheep and harvesting barley under sheer ochre cliffs honeycombed with “sky caves” — 2,000-year-old chambers used for ancestral burials, meditation and shelter.

Then the water dried up. Snow-capped mountains turned brown and barren as, year after year, snowfall declined. Springs and canals vanished and when it did rain, the water came all at once, flooding fields and melting away the mud homes. Families left one by one, leaving the skeletal remains of a community transformed by climate change: crumbling mud homes, cracked terraces and unkempt shrines.

The Hindu Kush and Himalayan mountain regions — stretching from Afghanistan to Myanmar — hold more ice than anywhere else outside the Arctic and Antarctic. Their glaciers feed major rivers that support 240 million people in the mountains — and 1.65 billion more downstream.

Such high-altitude areas are warming faster than lowlands. Glaciers are retreating and permafrost areas are thawing as snowfall becomes scarcer and more erratic, according to the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development or ICMOD.

Kunga Gurung is among many in the high Himalayas already living through the irreversible effects of climate change.

“We moved because there was no water. We need water to drink and to farm. But there is none there. Three streams, and all three dried up,” said Gurung, 54.

New research sheds light on how rising temperatures are squeezing farmers and raising prices for consumers.

Two recent studies — one historical and the other forward-looking — examine how rising temperatures have made and could continue to make agricultural production less efficient, fundamentally reshaping the global food system as producers try to adapt to hotter growing seasons.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24038889

Pakistan is one of the world's most vulnerable countries to the effects of climate change, and its 240 million residents are facing extreme weather events with increasing frequency.

Wonder where they will move to when they've had enough ?

archived (Wayback Machine)

How does it feel to lose your home to climate change? The roughly 10,000 residents of Tuvalu will be among the first in the world to have to confront this question.

With an average height above sea level of less than 3 metres, Tuvalu is on course to become completely uninhabitable due to flooding, storm surges and erosion. By 2100, sea levels are projected to rise by 72 centimetres and the coral atoll archipelago, which is roughly midway between Australia and Hawaii, is expected to experience flooding for nearly a third of every year.

Archive : https://archive.ph/Qgk5z

The study - which takes a laser focus on climate change in the 2020s, a critical decade to stop the worst damage - finds all 10 measures are going in the wrong direction.

And most of them are doing so at a faster rate.

The findings are "unprecedented" but "unsurprising", given the world continues to pump record levels of planet-warming gases into the atmosphere.

"We see a clear and consistent picture that things are getting worse," said lead author Professor Piers Forster.

archived (Wayback Machine)

Destruction of habitat—as a result not just of climate change, but industrial agriculture, deforestation, and urbanization as well—is driving native species to the brink. Simply planting trees, if they’re non-native, may not help much and can even make the situation worse. In contrast, native trees and shrubs provide a food forest for birds and insects that would otherwise go hungry. It seems like a small gesture in the face of the cataclysmic trends converging on us, but at least it’s a push in the right direction: it restores ecosystems and makes them more resilient. That way, when civilization goes, it might possibly leave something behind other than a wasteland.

Both native forests and food forests offer a range of benefits and are well worth planting.

archived (Wayback Machine)

archived (Wayback Machine)

The UK’s Advanced Research & Invention Agency (ARIA) announced £56.8m to fund 21 geoengineering projects around the world over the next five years.

The announcement felt less of a scientific milestone and more like a plot point for that dystopian novel, which opens with catastrophic heatwaves we hope we never live to see, but increasingly fear we might.

The reality is that we simply don’t know what type of side effects these experiments will cause

As the impacts of drought only get worse, there is a chance that these weather manipulation experiments, and potentially far worse, will become far more common around the world. Scarier still is that the world’s billionaire class, rather than governments alone, could become rogue weather makers of their own.

Archive : https://archive.ph/rEn06

The UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has found that a shifting climate has already begun altering the production and distribution of pollen and spores.

As winter frost thaws earlier and spring weather gets warmer, plants and trees flower earlier, extending the pollen season, numerous studies have shown.

Air pollution can also increase people's sensitivity to allergens, while invasive species are spreading into new regions and causing fresh waves of allergies.

More and more people, particularly in industrialised nations, have reported developing allergy symptoms in recent decades.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/23919788

2025 marks 10 years since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 17 goals and 169 targets to achieve global prosperity.

In the mid-2000s, the energy imbalance was about 0.6 watts per square metre (W/m2) on average. In recent years, the average was about 1.3 W/m2. **This means the rate at which energy is accumulating near the planet’s surface has doubled. **

FAaFO , we're in the find out phase.

If this trend continues, we will reach a point of no return in two or three decades. Once the dry season extends to six months, there is no way to avoid self-degradation. We are perilously close to a point of no return. In some areas, it may have already been passed.