Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

Three rapidly growing Southern California wildfires have burned more than 100,000 acres in less than a week and continued to threaten homes in multiple communities as the state mobilized an all-hands-on-deck response to bolster front-line fire crews battling the raging flames.

Fueled by a punishing heat wave and fanned by gusting winds, the biggest blaze is the Bridge Fire, which ignited Sunday in the Angeles National Forest about 31 miles east of downtown Los Angeles and exploded overnight from about 4,000 acres on Tuesday to nearly 48,000 acres by Wednesday morning, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The fire remained out of control with 0% containment after spreading across Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties. Authorities issued widespread evacuation orders as the fire tore through the towns of Wrightwood and Mt Baldy, destroying at least 33 homes, several cabins, and racing through a ski resort.

At least 33 homes in Wrightwood and Mt. Baldy have been destroyed and another 2,500 structures in the area are being threatened by the fire, according to Cal Fire.

Vietnam has for days been battling landslides and floods caused by Super Typhoon Yagi the most powerful storm in 30 years, has also brought destructive floods to northern areas of Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. Which swept Vietnam over the weekend and has left more than 150 people dead according to preliminary estimates.

The Red River in Hanoi reached its highest level in 20 years on Wednesday, forcing residents to trudge through waist-deep brown water as they retrieved possessions from flooded homes.

Others fashioned makeshift boats from whatever materials they could find.

"This was the worst flooding I have witnessed," said Nguyen Tran Van, 41, who has lived near the Red River in the Vietnamese capital for 15 years.

A landslide smashed into the remote mountain village of Lang Nu in Lao Cai province, levelling it to a flat expanse of mud and rocks, strewn with debris and laced by streams.

State media said at least 30 people had been killed in the village, with another 65 still missing.

Vietnamese state media said the toll from Yagi -- the strongest storm to hit northern Vietnam in 30 years -- had risen to 155 across the country, with 141 missing.

It was not clear whether that total includes victims of Tuesday's landslide, where access remained difficult and internet was cut off, reports said.

• Plasticulture, the application of synthetic polymer-based technologies in agriculture, has found wide ranging uses, making it an integral part of food production today.

• Agricultural plastics are single-use or short-lived, and have been found to be a major source of micro and nanoplastics in the soil, which can have a long term impact on our health and environment.

• Experts suggest that it is time to recognise the chemical and ecotoxicological aspects of agri plastics and developed more sustainable alternatives.

More than a thousand Brazilian municipalities were on alert Thursday due to very low humidity -- in some cases comparable to that of the Sahara desert -- as the country is gripped by a historic drought that has fueled major wildfires.

Flames reached a protected forest on the outskirts of the capital Brasilia, which was enveloped in smoke for the second time in two weeks, and where it has not rained in 130 days.

The National Institute of Meteorology (Inmet) said in a report that Brasilia, as well as the southeast with its highly populated states of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais, were among the worst affected by a "relative humidity of less than 12 percent."

This was a "very dangerous" situation due to the "great risk of forest fires," the government agency said.

Such low humidity also impacts residents' health and can cause pulmonary disease or headaches.

• The prospect of water wars is a long-running and active debate, with everyone from high-ranking U.N. officials to renowned hydro-politics experts voicing their concern about the perceived risks.

• Growing competition for water in already arid areas, alongside the compounding effect of climate change, has led to a flurry of water-related headlines in recent months.

• Francis Galgano, an associate professor at the department of geography and the environment at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, identified nine international river basins as potential flashpoints.

A unique rainfall event is currently unfolding across the Sahara desert, one of the driest places on Earth. The amount of rainfall might not seem large by normal standards, but a large part of the Sahara will get well over 500% of normal monthly rainfall in September.

It’s not very often that the Sahara desert experiences these rainfall events. They are very rare, less than once per decade on average, but they are usually a sign that something is changing in the Earth’s weather system, indicating an unusual state of the Atmosphere as we head into Autumn and Winter.

Video source from x/twitter

https://x.com/MohanadElbalal/status/1831388228651565398

I don't know what to say to the future climate of the earth, as I watched on youtube Hainan was hit by super typhoon Yagi at 240 km/h, and currently over Hanoi at 200 km/h

A 41-year-old man in New Hampshire died last week after contracting a rare mosquito-borne illness called eastern equine encephalitis virus, also known as EEE or “triple E.” It was New Hampshire’s first human case of the disease in a decade. Four other human EEE infections have been reported this year in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Vermont.

Though this outbreak is small and triple E does not pose a risk to most people living in the United States, public health officials and researchers alike are concerned about the threat the deadly virus poses to the public, both this year and in future summers.

There is no known cure for the disease, which can cause severe flu-like symptoms and seizures in humans 4 to 10 days after exposure and kills between 30 and 40 percent of the people it infects. Half of the people who survive a triple E infection are left with permanent neurological damage.

Because of EEE’s high mortality rate, state officials have begun spraying insecticide in Massachusetts, where 10 communities have been designated “critical” or “high risk” for triple E. Towns in the state shuttered their parks from dusk to dawn and warned people to stay inside after 6 p.m., when mosquitoes are most active.

Like West Nile virus, another mosquito-borne illness that poses a risk to people in the U.S. every summer, triple E is constrained by environmental factors that are changing rapidly as the planet warms. That’s because mosquitoes thrive in the hotter, wetter conditions that climate change is producing.

Almost 40,000 people died alone in their homes in Japan during the first half of 2024, a report by the country’s police shows.

Of that number, nearly 4,000 people were discovered more than a month after they died, and 130 bodies went unmissed for a year before they were found, according to the National Police Agency.

Japan currently has the world’s oldest population, according to the United Nations.

The agency hopes its report will shed light on the country's growing issue of vast numbers of its aging population who live, and die, alone.

Taken from the first half of 2024, the National Police Agency data shows that a total of 37,227 people living alone were found dead at home, with those aged 65 and over accounting for more than 70%.

While an estimated 40% of people who died alone at home were found within a day, the police report found that nearly 3,939 bodies were discovered more than a month after death, and 130 had lain unnoticed for at least a year before discovery.

The effects of scorching temperatures are exacerbated in cities, where buildings and roads soak up warmth. As Earth’s warming climate intensifies the problem, scientists are investigating evidence-based measures to make cities safer during hot periods. Researchers say that although progress has been made to address the threat, there are still obstacles to cities’ efforts to track mortality rates and implement solutions.

[...]

Cities are hotspots because of the urban ‘heat island’ effect: buildings, roads and other impervious surfaces absorb the Sun’s heat during the day and radiate warmth into the night, raising air temperatures. High night-time temperatures amplify the problem [...] because the body can only withstand searing heat for short periods. Illnesses related to heat can develop slowly, when people cannot find respite for several days. That’s why the highest mortality rates occur a few days into a heatwave.

[...]

The stagnant air that accompanies a heatwave also magnifies air pollution, because ground-level ozone and particulate matter become more concentrated when the air does not circulate. Cities with high levels of air pollution, such as Los Angeles in California and Beijing in China face dismal air quality when the heat rises. This can compound the effects of heat on health.

"I am in Tonga to issue a global SOS -- Save Our Seas -- on rising sea levels. A worldwide catastrophe is putting this Pacific paradise in peril" he said.

Sparsely populated and with few heavy industries, the Pacific islands collectively pump out less than 0.02 percent of global emissions every year.

But this vast arc of volcanic islands and low-lying coral atolls also inhabits a tropical corridor that is rapidly threatened by encroaching oceans.

The World Meterological Organisation has been monitoring tide gauges installed on the Pacific's famed beaches since the early 1990s.

A new report released by the top UN climate monitoring body showed seas had risen by around 15 centimetres in some parts of the Pacific in the last 30 years.

The global average was 9.4 centimetres, according to the report.

"It is increasingly evident that we are fast running out of time to turn the tide," said the forecasting agency's top official Celeste Saulo.

Cancer cases and deaths among men are expected to surge globally by 2050, according to a new study.

In the study, published Monday in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, researchers projected an 84% increase in cancer cases and a 93% increase in cancer deaths among men worldwide between between 2022 and 2050.

The increases were greater among men 65 and older and in countries and territories with a low or medium human development index. The index measures each country's development in health, knowledge and standard of living, according to the study.

Using data from the Global Cancer Observatory, the study analyzed more than 30 different types of cancers across 185 countries and territories worldwide to make demographic projections.

"We know from previous research in 2020 that cancer death rates around the world are about 43% higher in men than in women," said CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook. "So this study today looked at, OK, what do we expect over the next 25 years? And it turns out that it translates to about 5 million more deaths per year in men in 2050, compared to today."

The Paris Olympics opened with rain on its parade, then blistering heat and, finally, a week of pleasant sunshine. As it comes to a close on Sunday, temperatures are expected to again soar up to 95 degrees Fahrenheit, or 35 degrees Celsius.

The only certainty about Summer Olympics weather is that there’s really no certainty at all.

Extreme heat is a growing threat for elite athletes, with cases of heat exhaustion and heatstroke becoming more common as fossil fuel pollution pushes temperatures and humidity levels up. Spectators, especially those those who fly in from cooler climates, are vulnerable to extreme heat, as well.

Most of the world’s cities will be unable to host the Games during summer in the coming decades as they blow past the threshold of safe humid heat, according to a CNN analysis of data from CarbonPlan, a climate science and analytics-focused nonprofit group.

A chemical used in rocket fuel and fireworks is also found in an array of food products, particularly those popular with babies and children, according to findings released Wednesday by Consumer Reports.

The tests by the advocacy group come decades after the chemical, called perchlorate, was first identified as a contaminant in food and water. The Environmental Working Group in 2003 found perchlorate in nearly 20% of supermarket lettuce tested.

Linked to potential brain damage in fetuses and newborns and thyroid troubles in adults, perchlorate was detected in measurable levels of 67% of 196 samples of 63 grocery and 10 fast-food products, the most recent tests by Consumer Reports found. The levels detected ranged from just over two parts per billion (ppb) to 79 ppb.

Foods often consumed by children had the highest levels of perchlorate, averaging 19.4 ppb, while fresh fruit and vegetables as well as fast food also contained elevated amounts.

In reviewing packaging types, foods in plastic containers had the highest levels, averaging nearly 55 ppb, followed by foods in plastic wrap and paperboard, Consumer Reports said.

On a scorching July afternoon, a municipal water truck rolls up in a cloud of dust on Liborio Mangiapane’s farm in southern Sicily. Some of the precious liquid gets transferred to a smaller cistern on a tractor that Mangiapane’s son will use to fill troughs for 250 cattle and sheep, but by tomorrow, all 10,000 liters from the truck will be gone.

Crippling drought from a nearly rainless year, coupled with record-high temperatures, has burned out much of the region’s hay and is pushing farmers to the limit. For Mangiapane, every day is a struggle to find water, with frantic phone calls, long trips to faraway wells and long waits for municipal tankers.

If rain doesn’t come by the end of August, he’s afraid he’ll have to sell off his livestock.

“We are in a moment of extreme heat and therefore animals need a lot of water,” Mangiapane said. “It’s a constant anxiety to keep the animals from suffering, but also just to have a chance to wash ourselves.”

The local water basin authority is tightly rationing water for almost a million residents, with water flowing as little as two to four hours a week in the most affected areas. While the taps are off, households and farms are being supplied by tankers since Sicily’s aqueducts lose up to 60% of the water they carry, according to local water company AICA.

As climate change has made rainfall more erratic and driven temperatures higher, there’s hope that aqueduct renovations, new reservoirs and deep wells will help Sicily adapt.

Giulio Boccaletti, scientific director of the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, said Sicily is experiencing “the new normal” of climate change, and the region will have to examine whether its scarce water is used for the right things — including what farmers produce.

A vital system of Atlantic Ocean currents that influences weather across the world could collapse as soon as the late 2030s, scientists have suggested in a new study — a planetary-scale disaster that would transform weather and climate.

Several studies in recent years have suggested the crucial system — the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC — could be on course for collapse, weakened by warmer ocean temperatures and disrupted saltiness caused by human-induced climate change.

But the new research, which is being peer-reviewed and hasn’t yet been published in a journal, uses a state-of-the-art model to estimate when it could collapse, suggesting a shutdown could happen between 2037 and 2064.

This research suggests it’s more likely than not to collapse by 2050.

Like a conveyor belt, the AMOC pulls warm surface water from the southern hemisphere and the tropics and distributes it in the cold North Atlantic. The colder, saltier water then sinks and flows south. The mechanism keeps parts of the Southern Hemisphere from overheating and parts of the Northern Hemisphere from getting unbearably cold, while distributing nutrients that sustain life in marine ecosystems.

The impacts of an AMOC collapse would leave parts of the world unrecognizable.

An AMOC collapse “is a really big danger that we should do everything we can to avoid,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a physical oceanographer at Potsdam University in Germany who was not involved in the latest research.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/1506529

At the Olympic Games in Paris, we can see that some athletes are struggling with the heat in France. In some countries, such as Italy or Spain, there are currently some warnings about extreme heat.

Make sure to always drink enough and protect yourself from the sun. In the shade, you can take a closer look at this map of the highest officially measured temperatures in Europe.

Source: WMO

Sea lions are stranding themselves on a long stretch of the California coast in what experts say could be a sign of widespread poisoning by a harmful algae bloom this summer.

The Channel Islands Marine & Wildlife Institute said that since 26 July, it has been inundated by daily reports of sick sea lions along the shoreline in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.

The marine mammals are suffering from domoic acid, a neurotoxin that affects the brain and heart, the institute said in a statement. The poisoning event is largely affecting adult female California sea lions, it said.

The nonprofit said it had rescued 23 animals so far. Coastal Vandenberg Space Force Base released photos of sea lions being rescued from one of its beaches this week.

“Rising ocean temperatures and excess nutrients are fueling these blooms, producing toxins that enter the food chain through small fish,” Vanderberg Space Force said in an Instagram caption that accompanied photos of a stranded seal being treated by wildlife officials.

“Local efforts, including monitoring and rescue initiatives, are in place to mitigate the impact.”

Vermont is flooding. Not just yesterday, two weeks ago and a year before that, but experts say the state could see catastrophic events like these for the foreseeable future.

Climate change is fueling stronger, more persistent storms and the state’s infrastructure is feeling the effects in villages along the Green Mountains’ rivers and streams, which carry a huge amount of water.

Now, these towns are the epicenter of a flooding conundrum that state and federal officials are scrambling to resolve.

In the meantime, many homeowners are still trying to rebuild from floods just over a year ago — considered historic at the time, now becoming the norm.

Italy is heading towards a future made of scorching and increasingly long summers, even up to 5 or 6 months: this is one of the most worrying data that emerges from the first Report on the Climate of the 21st century now in its third edition. The report was produced by iLMeteo.it and Corriere della Sera and represents a sort of spin-off of the Climate Liverity Index. The report is based on 185 million climate data for all 108 provincial capitals.

Climate has changed in Italy since 1985 and also offers a look at the future, deepening the increasingly prominent role that will play the ongoing climate crisis.

“Climate change is increasingly taking direct consequences on our lives and activities,” says Lorenzo Tedici, meteorologist and media manager of iLMeteo.it. "Italy, and the Mediterranean in general - continues Tedici - are a climatic hotspot where global warming runs at double speeds compared to the rest of the world. Warmer yes, but also more extreme weather events such as droughts, floods and hailstorms.”

On a general level, there are increasingly higher monthly average temperatures: extreme heat days, with temperatures above 35 degrees, have gone from 10 to 26 in Florence and from 1 to 7 in Bolzano. The record is Caltanissetta, which records 27 days of extreme heat more than in the 80s.

The heat leaves no escape even at night, as evidenced by the data on tropical nights: Bergamo is the city where they have increased the most, from 8 to 62, in Milan they have gone from 20 to 71 and in Rome from 51 to 90: it means three months with minimum temperatures that never drop below 20 degrees.

And even the forecasts of the next few days do not deviate from this trend. The high pressure will remain on our country until at least August 10 with high temperatures and the return of the African heat.

And the worst situation, Tedici points out, will affect extreme drought, especially in the south. "In the last month - he observes - the picture has worsened further also in Calabria, while for now 12 months the drought is 'severe' in Sicily with numerous basins literally dried up by the African heat and the absence of rain".

Precisely the rains will be the sore note of the next 10-14 days: "Europe, in fact - adds Tedici - will be divided in two with the Atlantic cyclones and the precipitation in transit at the high latitudes while, on the rest of the continent, we will have rain with the dropper.

In particular, until August 7, weather models indicate a accumulation of blue gold (water) up to 200 liters per square meter (200 mm) in the inland areas of Sweden, only 7 liters per square meter in Sicily and in general on our South. A fact, the latter, notes the meteorologist, "which with temperatures up to 40 degrees C means 'zero' in the hydrological budget: this small amount of rain will evaporate or not touch the ground".

Once upon a time, the vulture was an abundant and ubiquitous bird in India.

The scavenging birds hovered over sprawling landfills, looking for cattle carcasses. Sometimes they would alarm pilots by getting sucked into jet engines during airport take-offs.

But more than two decades ago, India’s vultures began dying because of a drug used to treat sick cows.

By the mid-1990s, the 50 million-strong vulture population had plummeted to near zero because of diclofenac, a cheap non-steroidal painkiller for cattle that is fatal to vultures. Birds that fed on carcasses of livestock treated with the drug suffered from kidney failure and died.

Since the 2006 ban on veterinary use of diclofenac, the decline has slowed in some areas, but at least three species have suffered long-term losses of 91-98%, according to the latest State of India's Birds report.

And that’s not all, according to a new peer-reviewed study. The unintentional decimation of these heavy, scavenging birds allowed deadly bacteria and infections to proliferate, leading to the deaths of about half a million people over five years, says the study published in the American Economic Association journal.

“Vultures are considered nature’s sanitation service because of the important role they play in removing dead animals that contain bacteria and pathogens from our environment - without them, disease can spread,” says the study’s co-author, Eyal Frank, an assistant professor at University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy.

Africa will overtake Asia as the continent with the highest number of people experiencing hunger in the world by 2030, the UN has predicted.

In its annual state of food security and nutrition report, five UN agencies said there was a “clear trend” of rising prevalence of undernourishment in Africa.

Africa already has the largest proportion of people who do not have enough nutritious food to eat (20.4%) but Asia is home to more than half the world’s hungry people. In 2023, 384.5 million people in Asia were facing hunger, compared with 298.4 million in Africa.

World temperature reached the hottest levels ever measured on Monday, beating the record that was set just one day before, data suggests.

Provisional data published on Wednesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which holds data that stretches back to 1940, shows that the global surface air temperature reached 62.87F (17.15C), compared with 62.76F (17.09C) on Sunday.

Earlier this month, Copernicus found that global temperatures between July 2023 and July 2024 were the highest on record.

The previous record before this week was set a year ago on 6 July. Before that, the previous recorded hottest day was in 2016, according to the Associated Press.