Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

As government regulators focused on reigning in air pollution, companies were busy generating new sources of pollution, including plastics and PFAS, the so-called forever chemicals. PFAS, which stands for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a large group of compounds used, among other things, to make fabric stain-resistant and pans nonstick.

Over time, these modern-era substances — which famously take decades to millennia to degrade — have leached into the environment, reaching every corner of the planet, no matter how tall or deep. Microplastics, PFAS, and some other compounds, such as pesticides, are now so widespread that they’ve essentially become part of our biome, not unlike bacteria or fungi.

They’re so common, in fact, that they’re even found in the rain.

A number of studies, for example, have documented microplastics in rain falling all over the world — even in remote, unpopulated regions. For one 2020 analysis in the journal Science, researchers documented microplastics in rainwater that fell on several national parks and wilderness areas in the Western US. Most of the plastic bits were microfibers, such as those shed from polyester sweaters or carpeting on the floor of a car. The researchers estimated that more than 1,000 metric tons of plastic from the atmosphere fall on parks in the West each year, including both as rainfall and as dry dust. That’s equivalent to roughly 120 to 300 million plastic water bottles, according to the study.

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Nearly three-quarters of everything on the average American plate is processed, packaged, shipped, stored, and/or sold under refrigeration. The United States already boasts an estimated 5.5 billion cubic feet of refrigerated space—a third polar region of sorts. Equal to what 244,444,444 domestic refrigerators (at 22.5 cubic feet on average) could hold. This is an almost unimaginably large volume: the tallest mountain on Earth, Everest, occupies only roughly two-thirds that amount of space from base to peak.

According to the most recent statistics from the Global Cold Chain Alliance, the world’s chilled and frozen warehouse space increased by nearly 20% between 2018 and 2020.

There are approximately 22.7 billion broiler chickens living out their five-to-seven-week spans on Earth at any moment, compared with just half a billion house sparrows or a quarter of a billion pigeons. Those chickens are also double the size and five times the weight of their preindustrial ancestors, giving them a combined mass that exceeds that of all other birds on Earth. The team of researchers behind these calculations used them to suggest that the layer of chicken bones currently piling up in landfills around the world is, in fact, an ideal marker of the Anthropocene.

Chickens may be a signal to future geologists, but environmental scientist Vaclav Smil suggests that cows might perform that role for aliens. Meat and dairy animals so vastly outweigh all other vertebrates that “if sapient extraterrestrial visitors could get an instant census of mammalian biomass on the Earth in order to judge the importance of organisms simply by their abundance, they would conclude that life on the third solar planet is dominated by cattle.” In aggregate, livestock make up 62% of all mammals on Earth; humans, at 34%, account for most of the rest. Everything else—dogs, cats, deer, rabbits, whales, elephants, bats, and even rats—only adds up to the remaining 4%.

Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land; cattle ranching is responsible for the deforestation of an area more than double the size of California in the Amazonian rainforest alone.

Fish are notoriously hard to count, but according to the best estimates, their numbers have decreased by half over the past fifty years.

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The staple crops of subsistence farmers — banana, breadfruit, potato, and so on — do not require refrigeration. What, then, could the problem be...

Tony Blair has called for the government to change course on climate, suggesting a strategy that limits fossil fuels in the short term or encourages people to limit consumption is “doomed to fail”.

In comments that have prompted a backlash within Labour, the former prime minister suggested the UK government should focus less on renewables and more on technological solutions such as carbon capture.

Blair said people were “being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal”. He said “any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail”.

The paper itself, written by the TBI’s Lindy Fursman, said net zero policies were now “increasingly viewed as unaffordable, ineffective or politically toxic”.

https://archive.ph/K6RLl

For a more sane on this topic, see: Preparing for a New Cultural Paradigm with Jean-Marc Jancovici

What was once considered rare has become alarmingly common, as climate change accelerates the frequency and severity of such events,” said an editorial in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. The country “remains woefully unprepared for the escalating climate crisis”, it said.

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The European Commission’s new plan to overhaul the EU’s main chemical regulation, REACH, risks undoing two decades of progress in protecting people and nature from toxic substances.

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The high growth rate of atmospheric CO2 in 2023 was found to be caused by a severe reduction of the global net land carbon sink. Here we update the global CO2 budget from January 1st to July 1st 2024, during which El Niño drought conditions continued to prevail in the Tropics but ceased by March 2024. We used three dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs), machine learning emulators of ocean models, three atmospheric inversions driven by observations from the second Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) satellite, and near-real-time fossil CO2 emissions estimates. In a one-year period from July 2023 to July 2024 covering the El Niño 2023/24 event, we found a record-high CO2 growth rate of 3.66~±~0.09 ppm~yr−1 (±~1 standard deviation) since 1979. Yet, the CO2 growth rate anomaly obtained after removing the long term trend is 1.1 ppm~yr−1, which is marginally smaller than the July--July growth rate anomalies of the two major previous El Niño events in 1997/98 and 2015/16. The atmospheric CO2 growth rate anomaly was primarily driven by a 2.24 GtC~yr−1 reduction in the net land sink including 0.3 GtC~yr−1 of fire emissions, partly offset by a 0.38 GtC~yr−1 increase in the ocean sink relative to the 2015--2022 July--July mean. The tropics accounted for 97.5% of the land CO2 flux anomaly, led by the Amazon (50.6%), central Africa (34%), and Southeast Asia (8.2%), with extra-tropical sources in South Africa and southern Brazil during April--July 2024. Our three DGVMs suggest greater tropical CO2 losses in 2023/2024 than during the two previous large El Niño in 1997/98 and 2015/16, whereas inversions indicate losses more comparable to 2015/16. Overall, this update of the low latency budget highlights the impact of recent El Niño droughts in explaining the high CO2 growth rate until July 2024.

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• webpage and PDF

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

For those who prefer to read the information:

https://www.albartlett.org/articles/art_forgotten_fundamentals_overview.html

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21206635

The world’s coral reefs have been pushed into “uncharted territory” by the worst global bleaching event on record that has now hit more than 80% of the planet’s reefs, scientists have warned.

Reefs in at least 82 countries and territories have been exposed to enough heat to turn corals white since the global event started in January 2023, the latest data from the US government’s Coral Reef Watch shows.

Coral reefs are known as the rainforests of the sea because of their high concentration of biodiversity that supports about a third of all marine species and a billion people.

I wonder what's causing that /s

For decades, farmers across America have been encouraged by the federal government to spread municipal sewage on millions of acres of farmland as fertilizer. It was rich in nutrients, and it helped keep the sludge out of landfills.

But a growing body of research shows that this black sludge, made from the sewage that flows from homes and factories, can contain heavy concentrations of chemicals thought to increase the risk of certain types of cancer and to cause birth defects and developmental delays in children.

Known as “forever chemicals” because of their longevity, these toxic contaminants are now being detected, sometimes at high levels, on farmland across the country, including in Texas, Maine, Michigan, New York and Tennessee. In some cases the chemicals are suspected of sickening or killing livestock and are turning up in produce. Farmers are beginning to fear for their own health.

The national scale of farmland contamination by these chemicals — which are used in everything from microwave popcorn bags and firefighting gear to nonstick pans and stain-resistant carpets — is only now starting to become apparent.

https://archive.ph/8rNG6

See also:

• Sludge Contaminated 10,000 Acres of Farmland. What Should Be Done?
• A Maker of Sewage-Based Fertilizer Leaves Town Amid a Toxic Crisis

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The UN’s International Maritime Organization [IMO] has just agreed to start charging ships for the greenhouse gases they emit. After decades of ineffective incremental tweaks to shipping emissions, the breakthrough came on April 11 at a summit in London. It makes shipping the first industry subject to a worldwide – and legally binding – emissions price.

[...]

There was sustained opposition to ambitious action from Saudi Arabia and other petrostates, as well as from China and Brazil. Second, the US had already disengaged from negotiations. Even so, from outside the meeting, the US administration’s tariff war and explicit threat to retaliate against states supporting a shipping pricing regime could have affected talks far more than they did.

But researchers are not sure that this agreement can be considered a success. While there is little traditional climate change denial at the IMO, “mitigation denial” is alive and kicking. Mitigation denial means making lofty promises, often in line with scientific evidence, but not adopting concrete measures able to deliver on these targets. This is exactly what petrostates pushed the IMO to do last week.

Ultimately, the IMO has well and truly failed the most climate vulnerable, by favouring a more gradual and less certain transition to low-carbon shipping. It’s even effectively making these countries pay the price.

[...]

In this powerhouse episode, Mark Lynas is joined by long-time friend and environmental journalist George Monbiot for a brutally honest conversation on where we are — and how we fight back. Together they challenge the idea that environmental progress is automatic or guaranteed, and instead delve into the deep political, economic, and social forces that shape our chances for a better future. Monbiot argues that unless we confront power, capitalism, and the failure of incrementalism, we’re simply sleepwalking into authoritarianism and ecological collapse. From colonialism to neoliberalism, from fascism to the failures of the left, this is a sweeping conversation on what went wrong — and how we can make things right, through a positive politics of belonging. This one pulls no punches.

🧠 Topics Discussed:

🏛️ Why environmentalism fails without confronting power

🛑 The myth of inevitable progress — and how it can be reversed

⚡ Technology is not enough: the limits of "techno-fix" thinking

💰 A crash course in the real origins of capitalism

📉 Why incremental change is a losing strategy

📢 What neoliberalism really is — and how it disempowers citizens

🧱 Private sufficiency, public luxury: a new vision for the future

🧠 Why the left keeps losing — and what must change

🎯 Popper’s paradox, politics of belonging, and how to counter fascism

📲 How social media is supercharging authoritarianism

😤 Can we still win? Yes — but only if we act boldly

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20970653

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For hundreds of millions of people living in India and Pakistan, the early arrival of summer heatwaves has become a terrifying reality that’s testing survivability limits and putting enormous strain on energy supplies, vital crops and livelihoods.

Both countries experience heatwaves during the summer months of May and June, but this year’s heatwave season has arrived sooner than usual and is predicted to last longer too.

Parts of Pakistan are likely to experience heat up to 8 degrees Celsius above normal between April 14-18, according to the country’s meteorological department. Maximum temperatures in Balochistan, in country’s southwest, could reach up to 49 degrees Celsius (120 Fahrenheit).

That’s like living in Death Valley – the hottest and driest place in North America – where summer daytime temperatures often climb to similar levels.

https://archive.ph/mmmT7

On February 18, a dam failed and a Chinese-owned copper mine spilled 50 million liters of acidic effluent into the Kafue River, damaging the lives of millions of people as pollution was detected at least 100 kilometers downstream.

Water supply was cut off in nearby towns. Fish populations have been devastated. Groundwater has likely been contaminated. Crops have been destroyed. And huge amounts of livestock have been killed, crashing the livelihoods of farmers.

“Prior to the 18th of February this was a vibrant and alive river,” Sean Cornelius, a local resident, told the Associated Press. “Now everything is dead, it’s like a totally dead river. Unbelievable. Overnight, this river died.”

“People unknowingly drank contaminated water and ate affected maize. Now many are suffering from headaches, coughs, diarrhea, muscle cramps and even sores on their legs,” Nsama Musonda Kearns, executive director of the Care for Nature Zambia NGO, told Climate Home News.

[...]

The company responsible for the February 18 spill is Sino-Metals Leach Zambia, which is majority owned by the state-run China Nonferrous Metals Industry Group (中國有色礦業集團公司). But it is not alone.

This year, four copper mining companies — one British and three Chinese — have been accused of releasing toxic mining waste into the Kafue River.

Chinese imports of Zambian copper were worth up to $4.05 billion in 2023, according to the United Nations COMTRADE database on international trade, and Chinese companies own many of the copper mines in the country.

Those companies’ records of environmental and worker safety have long been treated with skepticism. There have been clashes with miners over unfair pay and conditions and in 2018 there were riots against Chinese businesses. Zambia’s Ministry of Green Economy and Environment raised concerns about the Sino Metal dam that broke as far back as 2023.

[...]

“We’re moving into a political domain in which people understand you need to grab resources — food resources, mineral resources — and you need to create a hinterland and you need to control those hinterlands …” Martin Mills, director of the Scottish Centre for Himalayan Research at the University of Aberdeen explained a recent Institute for Security and Development Policy online event.

China and its companies are by no means alone in doing this. But it is certainly a useful description of their operations in Zambia.

[...]

“Chinese companies have a reputation locally and globally of having weak safety and environmental compliance, and this reputation is known before we give such companies the opportunity to mine or operate in Zambia,” Timothy Kamuzu Phiri, director and co-founder of Mizu Eco-Care, a Zambian environmental organisation that was one of the signatories to the statement mentioned above, [said].

[...]

Behind these declines lies a constellation of human-driven threats, with habitat destruction leading the charge. Each year, approximately 10 million hectares of forest — an area nearly the size of Kentucky — disappear to make way for agriculture, urban development, and resource extraction. Particularly devastating is the ongoing destruction of tropical rainforests, Earth’s most biologically diverse terrestrial ecosystems. The Amazon Basin alone has lost roughly 17% of its forest cover in the past 50 years, with deforestation rates accelerating dramatically in recent years despite increased awareness of the region’s critical importance to global climate regulation.

The connection between rainforest destruction and global agricultural systems reveals a particularly troubling cycle of environmental degradation. Vast tracts of pristine forest, especially in South America, are being systematically cleared to grow soybeans — not primarily for direct human consumption, but to feed livestock in industrial animal agriculture operations worldwide. This represents a staggeringly inefficient use of land: producing one pound of beef requires approximately seven pounds of grain, making meat production a principal driver of habitat loss. The irony is profound — forests that once supported immense biodiversity are destroyed to grow monoculture crops that feed animals raised in factory farms, all while greenhouse gas emissions from both deforestation and livestock production accelerate climate change.

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