Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

The physical stakes are still stark. Southern Louisiana is facing a convergence of rising seas, wetland erosion, stronger storms and land subsidence, much of it worsened by decades of oil and gas canals cut through the coast. The state contains what theIPCC has identified as the world’s most exposed coastal zone, where the shoreline is projected to move more than 30 miles inland of New Orleans.

By comparing today’s warming trajectory with the last interglacial period roughly 125,000 years ago, when global temperatures were similar and seas were much higher, the new study estimates that the region could eventually face three to seven meters of sea-level rise and lose as much as three-quarters of its remaining coastal wetlands.

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“Outmigration is often framed as tragedy or failure, but in some cases it signals agency,” said Brianna Castro, a co-author of the paper, who highlights that this is a chance to plan around choices people are already making.

China’s latest carbon data suggests it has changed the way it calculates carbon emissions, reducing by half the emissions growth the country previously reported from 2020 to 2025, climate researchers argue in a new report.

The “dramatic” change by the ​world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide has “erased half of the previously reported emissions growth ‌from 2020 to 2025”, said Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).

China’s latest statistics on carbon intensity in its five-year plan, when extrapolated to absolute carbon emissions, imply that China’s carbon emissions rose 7% from 2020 to 2025. The previous yearly figures on carbon intensity implied that emissions would have risen 14% ‌over ​the five-year period, according to the analysis by CREA for Carbon ⁠Brief, which was published on Tuesday.

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That ⁠implies a downward revision in carbon dioxide emissions by about 700 million metric tons per year, equivalent to Germany or South Korea’s yearly emissions, CREA said.

The changes mean that China could meet its 2030 climate commitments even if its absolute emissions increase, the report said.

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“While under the UN’s climate framework China is free to use any definition it wants to meet its own nationally determined climate pledges, retrospective changes to methodology or inconsistent accounting could erode the value of the country’s commitments,” the report said.

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Web Archived link

Trapped in a medical limbo, she took a nurse friend’s advice and began writing everything down. That journal, along with her medical records and interviews, offer a rare, harrowing account of how Arkansas’ abortion ban, not best practices or medical training, guided her doctors’ choices.

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“Oh my god, it isn’t just me,”Waldorf thought.“But she died.”

On the day Waldorf was admitted to the hospital, ProPublica had published an investigation on the death of Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old medical assistant who died of infection after doctors delayed emptying her uterus. Thurman left behind a 6-year-old son.

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She was convinced that this meant the doctors would finally have to induce her to avoid infection. But after confirming that her fetus still had heart tones, the OB-GYN on duty, Dr. Britte Smith, said she couldn’t induce yet. First she’d need to consult the hospital’s risk-management team.

“Oh,” Waldorf thought. “I’m a liability.”

Smith returned about two hours later, Waldorf recalled, and told her she had two options: She could remain under observation at the hospital, or she could get into her car and drive nearly four hours to Kansas, a state with no abortion ban, where doctors could induce her. The hospital would not authorize a transfer or arrange to send her in an ambulance, and it offered no explanation for why.

What collapse of a healthcare system looks like for an individual caught in the crossfire.

Some readers, I suspect, may feel I’m a bit late to the party on this one. After all, with the last ten years of Brexit, rolling PMs, corruption, scandals, and the hopelessly inept attempted cover ups of those scandals, it can hardly be said the British system has been firing on all cylinders. If you want to tell me we left meaningful democracy behind some time ago, I won’t fight you too hard on that. 

I would say however, as someone who lived in America through much of their transition to competitive authoritarianism, that even progressive cynics are often caught off guard by how much worse things can get. Yes, things are very bad (and very stupid) indeed, but this should not blind us to how much worse they can get. However one conceptualises it or labels it, our sudden reversal on trans rights is a massive red flag for our political and social system. 

And it’s one that I think is being missed by the vast majority of the public and politicians alike. Even those who disagree with trans exclusion seem to largely conceptualise it as both a minor issue and a separable one—unconnected to the rising tide of fascism across the globe.

cross-posted from: https://leminal.space/post/35754721

Global study finds wrappers, bottles and lids on shorelines of 93% of countries analysed as UN talks to tackle issue in turmoil

He said he was not surprised to see lots of single-use plastics in the data, but the fact those items turned up so consistently along coastlines across all seven continents had taken him aback.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/26331080

Scientists said this week that a developing El Niño is likely to amplify heatwaves, droughts and floods this year, but warned that the long-term warming caused by burning fossil fuels remains the main driver of climate extremes.

El Niño is the warm phase of a semi-regular temperature oscillation in the tropical Pacific Ocean, during which massive amounts of heat stored in the ocean are released into the atmosphere, temporarily raising the average annual global surface temperature by as much as 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

During an online briefing this week, researchers said that the consequences of a moderate or strong El Niño today are more damaging than those of similar events just a few decades ago because the entire global climate system is now substantially warmer.

If the projected El Niño emerges on top of that warmer climate, there is a “serious risk of unprecedented weather extremes” that would not have happened during similar historical El Niños, said Fredi Otto, a professor in climate science at Imperial College London and a lead researcher with World Weather Attribution, a research group assessing how global warming affects climate extremes.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/37799935

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/37745754

The paper is here

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/49192

Capitalism, Fossil Finance, and the Structural Logic of Ecological Breakdown.

From MR Online via This RSS Feed.

Get the hell out of arid areas prone to drought, this is only going to get worse, much much worse.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/37654893

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/37592302

No modern American city has ever run out of water. But chances are rising that Corpus Christi, Texas, could be the first. Absent a biblical rainfall event, its reservoirs are on track to completely dry up by next year.

That raises baffling questions for the future of Texas’ eighth-largest city and one of the nation’s major petrochemical hubs.

Economic inequality adds more than 100,000 deaths to the vast toll from heat and cold in Europe each year, research has found.

Cutting levels inequality to match that of Europe’s most equal region, Slovenia, as measured by the Gini index, would reduce temperature-related mortality by as much as 30%, equating to 109,866 people, the study found.

Countries including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have seen temperatures soar well above seasonal averages, with some areas approaching or exceeding 45°C

So far this year, 24,222 fires have burned nearly two million acres across the country, significantly surpassing the 10-year average for acreage burned by this time of year. In an average year, Colorado sees between 6,000 and 7,000 wildfires. Its largest fires are human-caused and the origins of many of them are unknown.

In Colorado, during the first 117 days of 2026, the state dropped more than 200,000 gallons of water and fire retardant from the air on over 50 days of flight missions, said Stan Hilkey, the director of the state’s Department of Public Safety.

A society on fire in almost every meaning of the word "fire".

over the past year, the Trump administration has been altering and removing decades’ worth of datasets as part of a sweeping campaign targeting so-called “woke programs”, “racial equity”, “gender ideology” and “climate extremism”.

This censorship has affected not just datasets, but also a wide swath of federal resources: tools that helped the public access data, ongoing surveys and, perhaps most concerning, the agency staff that made it all possible.

Experts warn that Trump’s destruction of the country’s data infrastructure will have lasting impacts on all aspects of life – whether it’s the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to extreme weather, public health departments’ monitoring of harmful new drugs in their communities or how food banks get meals to hungry families.

Sometimes collapse is necessary, sometimes it is unavoidable, sometimes it is simply an expression of an inescapable debt coming home to roost. To recognize these things doesn't necessarily mean you are an accelerationist, it means you are not in denial.

The amount of carbon dioxide detected in the atmosphere hit a record high in April. CO2 levels averaged about 431 parts per million (ppm) over that month, according to data collected at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

Prof Adrian Glover, merit researcher at the Natural History Museum, who led the review, said: “Contrary to general thoughts that we don’t know anything about the impact of a mining machine and the sea floor, we do actually know quite a lot.”

He said experiments over the years have produced useful data and that the findings are “not actually that surprising”.

“If you drive a six-to-10m wide giant vehicle over the seafloor … not surprisingly, you see decadal scales for any kind of recovery whatsoever.

“If you drive a large ploughing vehicle over a grassland habitat in the south-east of England it will take many decades to recover.”

Link to open access paper..

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02911-4

Also see this article

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2025/december/deep-sea-mining-reduces-number-of-seafloor-animals-by-almost-40-percent.html