Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

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

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”.

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.

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.”

“What’s fascinating is that this process can become a self-reinforcing loop,” says Suvrajit Ghosh, a geology and geophysics Ph.D. student at Missouri S&T. “Rising sea levels can trigger carbon release, and that release can further accelerate changes that lead to even more sea-level rise.”

“Louisiana is in a unique position to build expertise and infrastructure that will be the foundation for coming generations,” said co-author Jesse Keenan, the Favrot II Associate Professor in Tulane’s School of Architecture and Built Environment. “Transition planning is not only key to maintaining continuity, but it offers significant economic opportunities, from land-building strategies to renewable energy and new housing development.”

The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately as the city has reached a “point of no return” that will see it surrounded by the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a stark new study has concluded.

Emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane from Australian coalmines are more than double official government estimates reported to the UN, according to a new International Energy Agency report.

What we’ve done in the Strait of Hormuz is one of those accidents that changes history: As the head of the International Energy Agency, the venerable Fatih Birol, said last week:

Migratory freshwater fish have declined by an estimated 81% since 1970 yet remain largely overlooked in global conservation policy. At the latest meeting of the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), a new assessment identified 325 species worldwide in urgent need of coordinated protection.

The roughly $10 billion, 330-megawatt data center would require 750,000 gallons of water a day to operate, said developer Sebastian Rucci, who insists electricity and water costs won’t rise due to the data center.

Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX), who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, expressed concern about a proposed elimination of grants that support extreme weather event warnings. He said he did not believe the budget request meets Trump’s expectation for NOAA’s mission to protect lives and property.

For instance, it is easy to see that growth—which has been a bedrock companion of modernity—cannot continue for much longer. So, why try? Fossil fuel use will necessarily decline, forming a pulse in time. Human population—temporarily inflated by agriculture’s heavy dependence on fossil fuels and other rapidly depleting gifts like aquifers and soils—will likely follow suit, exacerbated by climate change. A look at ore quality over time confirms that the low-hanging fruit is long gone, so that it becomes increasingly harder and more ecologically destructive to maintain the past century’s sprint in materials extraction—necessary for renewable energy technology. Recycling also has quantitative limits: only a few dozen cycles are practical before the recovered resource dwindles to insignificance. A forward, literal extrapolation of global ecological trends of the last century would leave us with no forests, wild land mammals or insects within a few human lifetimes—especially as firewood and hunting might offset faltering energy and agricultural outputs.

For a minute there in 2025 I actually stopped checking Climate Reanalyzer regularly, things felt like they weren’t accelerating so fast for a bit.

The heat wave’s intensity and early arrival shocked many climate scientists. “It is exceptionally difficult for the Earth system to produce temperatures this warm so early in the season,” wrote Daniel Swain, a climatologist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources who runs the Weather West blog.

According to the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, anthropogenic methane emissions account for nearly 45% of current net warming, making it an important factor in global warming

Delegates from more than 50 countries are gathering in Santa Marta, Colombia, from April 24 to 29 at the first-ever Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels.

Still, Erisman warns against focusing only on “green” production. “We mainly see ammonia as a climate-friendly fuel for ships, as it does not produce CO₂ emissions,” he says. “But during use, ammonia can leak into soil, water, or air, and burning it releases nitrous oxide and nitrogen oxides.”

Simultaneous exposure to toxic chemicals and climate change’s impacts likely generates an additive or synergistic effect that increases reproductive harm, and may contribute to the broad global drop in fertility, new peer-reviewed research finds.

You ever notice how little oxygen in the room there is to panic about the catastrophic rise of gambling and betting markets on smartphones yet there is unlimited oxygen in the tech press to panic about social media smartphone use and AI in a way that “paradoxically” favors consolidation of power into those realms and distracts from a massively profitable collapse of the well being of vulnerable people into gambling addiction?

Unsurprisingly, models of this kind, Stern, Stiglitz and Taylor note, have been seized on by “special interests” such as the fossil fuel industry to argue for minimal responses to the climate crisis. And it’s not just the oil companies.

Aldo Leopold saw this in the eyes of a dying wolf: when we no longer fear nature, we are on the road to its destruction

A meeting of G7 nations on the environment begins in Paris on Thursday but climate change has been left off the agenda to avoid a row with the United States.

Climate change is already at work

About 12 percent of plastic waste is burned globally, according to a landmark study based on data through 2015. Even when done in incinerators equipped with air scrubbers and filters, such burning is linked to higher rates of premature birth, congenital abnormalities including heart and neural tube defects, and may increase cancer risk for those living nearby, studies have found.

Among 18 rich countries, satisfaction with healthcare quality fell sharply after Covid hit and remains well below pre-pandemic levels. It is typically thought that domestic policy determines the challenges of healthcare but the article points out that, despite healthcare funding being the highest it has ever been, outside Covid productivity has stalled.

Ministers must get to grips with the “national scandal” of England’s shadow child social care system, the children’s commissioner has warned, as a report reveals the number of children in unregulated settings has increased by more than 370% in five years.

“The idea of cocaine affecting fish might seem surprising, but the reality is that wildlife is already being exposed to a wide range of human-derived drugs every day,”

The 4,140-sq-km bay is the largest estuary on the west coast of the US. Before 2018, this species of whales wasn’t known to stop seasonally or consistently in the bay, bypassing it on their migration route down to Baja California and back up the Arctic, said Josephine Slaathaug, who led a recent study on gray whale mortality in the bay.

Those who are convicted of sleeping outdoors could be given the option to avoid jail time by instead entering into a mandatory treatment program for at least 12 months. The bill authorizes local governments to set up semi-permanent camps in remote areas, where defendants would be required to stay and receive treatment.

“We were fighting over who had caught more fish, and then I saw my crewmate pushed overboard by the captain,” Akbar Fitrian, 29, an Indonesian crewmember says as he recounts an incident aboard a Chinese-owned fishing vessel in 2022. “The ship then started to drive away as my crewmate tried to swim towards us. And then I don’t know what happened. The captain never reported the incident.”

It can help to shift from long-range certainty-seeking to values-based navigation. Instead of asking, “Will this matter in 50 years?” try asking, “What matters to me now, and how can I build a life that honors that?” This is a core insight from acceptance-based approaches to anxiety. When we loosen our grip on specific outcomes and orient ourselves toward what we value, we can become more resilient and sustain our motivation. Values travel with us, and they’re what allow us to keep pivoting as circumstances change.

“I wanted to let people know what happened and however bad they thought that it might be inside USAID when Doge came in to tear it apart, it was way worse – especially the incompetence, ignorance and cruelty that came along with it,” Enrich writes

Some glaciers don’t just melt—they explode into motion, and climate change is making them far harder to predict.

The Boundary Waters are one of the most beautiful places on earth. This is an international crime.

When 240 million gallons of raw sewage spilled into the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., starting in mid-January 2026 and running through mid-March, it was estimated to be the largest sewage spill in U.S. history. But it wasn’t the first, nor will it be the last.

While it was already known to be weakening, most climate models disagree on the exact magnitude of the decline, but generally point to a one-third reduction by 2100. However, this new study puts the figure at a much more substantial 51%.

As future shifts in climate lead to more rain and less snow in the western United States, new research finds that water will move faster through a landscape, likely leading to negative impacts on summer water levels and water quality.

Helene’s floodwaters either washed away significant topsoil or deposited new sediment on top of it on thousands of farms. Some, including one of Runion’s neighbors, saw their fields stripped down to bedrock, or river rock. Runion and others woke to pastures blanketed by feet of sand or stone.

An even larger source is on the way. A sprawling LNG facility under construction near Lake Charles, about 40 miles east of the Sabine Pass terminal, is projected to produce substantially more emissions — eclipsing every LNG export terminal built in the United States so far and exceeding the dozens of LNG projects proposed for the next decade, according to a Verite News analysis of state and federal records.

Collapse isn’t always quick, and people often don’t call it collapse until it gets to the quick part but make no mistake this is collapse.

We have an everyday language for describing our economic relation to the future, using terms like stock price, interest rate, the advance of technology, and economic growth. But none of these terms explains the source of unearned income, to show how those coming later pay the bill. Nor do they explain how lives in the present are encumbered by previous extractions from the future or how such privatized relations to the future, in which tomorrow’s forms of life become assets bought and sold in the present, contribute to the destruction of a viable collective future. In fact, the language of finance blinds us to this relationship, persuading us that future human livelihoods are not the source of the gains but their beneficiaries.

Human activities have led to unprecedented global warming, making tropical cyclones (TCs) stronger over the past four decades (1, 2). Many of these intense storms undergo rapid intensification (RI), where wind speed increases by at least 30 knots within 24 hours, before making landfall (3, 4).

This is how you induce collapse in a society.

Earth’s glaciers are continuing to shrink at alarming rates, with new international research revealing that 2025 was among the worst years on record for global ice loss. Published in the Climate Chronicles collection of Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, the study provides the latest global assessment of glacier mass change, showing an accelerating trend driven by rising temperatures.

The mass drowning of emperor penguin chicks as sea ice is melted by the climate crisis has led the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to declare the species officially in danger of extinction

Emperors are the largest penguin species and jumped two categories, from “near threatened” to “endangered” in the new IUCN analysis.

The surge of interest in Bendell’s paper showed that people were craving answers about just how bad things will get, and how soon. Some were so shaken after reading it, they made major life decisions: to quit their jobs, to join a radical protest group, to move somewhere they felt would be safer to ride out the chaos. But Deep Adaptation also sparked a debate over whether Bendell went too far in his conclusions about climate science and what it meant for society, spreading a sense of defeat.