Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

Russia is suspected of deliberately leaking chemical waste into a river, with deadly consequences for wildlife.

Ukrainian officials say the Russians deliberately poisoned the Seym River, which flows into the Desna. The Desna connects with a reservoir in the Kyiv region and a water supply used by millions.

The pollution crossed the international border just over a mile away and made its way into Ukraine’s Sumy region. The Seym’s natural ecosystem crashed. Fish, molluscs and crayfish were asphyxiated as oxygen levels fell to near zero. Settlements along the river reported mass die-offs.

Sloths, the famously slow-moving yet adorable creatures native to Central and South America, could face extinction by the end of the century due to climate change.

Researchers investigating how sloths respond to rising temperatures have found that the animals' slow metabolism and limited ability to regulate body temperature may leave them unable to survive in a warming world—especially for populations living in high-altitude regions.

"Despite being iconic species, comprehensive long-term population monitoring simply hasn't been conducted at a scale that reflects the true challenges sloths face," lead researcher Rebecca Cliffe told Newsweek. "However, from our 15 years of working with sloths in Costa Rica, we are very concerned. In areas where sloths were once abundant, we have observed their populations completely disappear over the past decade."

The study, published in PeerJ Life & Environment, focused on two-fingered sloths inhabiting both lowland and highland environments in Costa Rica.

"Sloths are uniquely vulnerable to rising temperatures due to their physiological adaptations," Cliffe said. "They survive on an extremely low-calorie diet, so conserving energy is critical for them.

"One key way they do this is by not actively regulating their body temperature like most mammals do—temperature regulation is an energy-intensive process."

A major concern is that sloths' slow digestion rates—up to 24 times slower than similar-sized herbivores—make it difficult for them to increase food intake to meet rising metabolic demands.

This slow metabolic rate, combined with their minimal energy-processing capacity, means that sloths cannot easily balance the increased energy requirements brought on by higher temperatures.

Published study : https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.18168

Every year on Aug. 20, meteorologists at Colorado State University ring a bell to signal the start of peak hurricane season — a weeks-long stretch when hot ocean temperatures tend to generate frequent and destructive storms. But this year, the tradition gave way to an eerie, echoing quiet, with storm activity in the Atlantic at its lowest level in 30 years despite projections of a historic season.

That lull came to a decisive end this week, when Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida’s Big Bend with violent, deadly force. Fueled by exceptionally warm Caribbean waters, the Category 4 storm is one of the biggest to ever make landfall in the United States — and forecasters are already warning that additional cyclones are hot on its heels.

This lopsided hurricane season illustrates the challenges facing forecasters as climate change makes extreme weather less predictable and more intense. Even as some scientists say that Helene’s rapid growth and historic rainfall are signatures of a storm influenced by human-caused warming, they are still striving to understand whether this year’s unusual storm activity is a fluke or a sign of things to come.

“Is every season going to be like this? It’s hard to say,” said Phil Klotzbach, a meteorologist at Colorado State University. “We’ll just have to keep our eyes to the sky.”

With the world shifting into a La Niña weather pattern, which is typically associated with severe hurricanes, and “off the charts” water temperatures in the Atlantic, experts projected that this season would be among the worst in decades. But after experiencing Beryl in July, its earliest-ever Category 5 hurricane, the ocean basin saw the longest stretch in more than 50 years without a single late-summer cyclone.

“The season wasn’t the way we expected it to play out,” Klotzbach said. “And we’re still trying to figure out why.”

Archive : https://archive.ph/BLLxu

“Texas has this sort-of macho heat thing, that we’re ‘Texas tough’ and we’re not going to let a little heat stop us. Heat builds character and sweat is how you get tough,” Jeff Goodell said, adding that such attitudes are “really dangerous.”

The report by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) details nine factors that are crucial for regulating the planet's ability to sustain life.

In six of these areas, the safe limit has already been exceeded in recent years as a result of human activity.

The crucial threshold for ocean acidification could soon become the seventh to be breached, according to the PIK's first Planetary Health Check.

The safe boundaries that have already been crossed concern crucial -- and related -- factors including climate change; the loss of natural species, natural habitat and freshwater; and a rise in pollutants, including plastics and chemical fertilisers used in agriculture.

"As CO2 emissions increase, more of it dissolves in sea water... making the oceans more acidic," Boris Sakschewski, one of the lead authors, told reporters.

"Even with rapid emission cuts, some level of continued acidification may be unavoidable due to the CO2 already emitted and the time it takes for the ocean system to respond," he explained.

"Therefore, breaching the ocean acidification boundary appears inevitable within the coming years."

Rafaela Drumond death a police officer in June 2023 was bullied relentlessly by her colleagues, was one of 152 suicides among Brazilian law enforcement agents last year, the highest number on record and a 13.4% increase from 2022, according to a new report released on Thursday.

“The number of public security officers who commit or attempt suicide is steadily rising,” says the report, produced by the Institute for Research, Prevention, and Studies on Suicide (IPPES) and the Public Labour Prosecution Office.

Among last year’s deaths, 9% were women – slightly below the proportion of female officers in the forces, which ranges from 12% to 16%. Twelve men and two women killed their wives, partners or exes before taking their own lives. Three of the murdered women had protective orders against their killers.

According to the researchers, the phenomenon is underreported, as some forces still refuse to share their statistics.

• A total of 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of forests, wetlands and grasslands will be razed to make way for a cluster of giant sugarcane plantations.

• And much of the sugar produced from the Merauke project won’t even be used for food. The government plans to develop sugarcane-derived bioethanol as part of its transition away from fossil fuels.

• Satellite imagery analysis shows that 30% of the concessions appear to fall inside a zone that the government previously declared should be protected under a moratorium program.

• A similar megaproject in Merauke, the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE), initiated by Jokowi’s predecessor turned out to be a failure, used as cover to establish oil palm and pulpwood plantations instead.

The Amazon rainforest has lost an area about the size of Germany and France combined to deforestation in four decades, fueling drought and record wildfires across South America, experts said Monday.

The world's biggest jungle, spanning nine countries, is crucial to the fight against climate change due to its ability to absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

However, researchers say a record spate of wildfires this year has instead released massive amounts of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

Various scientific reports have laid out the grim links between forest loss and a changing climate and the devastation that can follow for humans and wildlife.

Deforestation, mainly for mining and agricultural purposes, has led to the loss of 12.5 percent of the Amazon's plant cover from 1985 to 2023, according to RAISG, a collective of researchers and NGOs.

This amounts to 88 million hectares (880,000 square kilometers, 339,773 square miles) of forest cover lost across Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.

Central Europe's devastating floods were made much worse by climate change and offer a stark glimpse of the future for the world's fastest-warming continent, scientists say.

Storm Boris has ravaged countries including Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Austria and Italy, leading to at least 24 deaths and billions of pounds of damage.

The World Weather Attribution (WWA) group said one recent four-day period was the rainiest ever recorded in central Europe - an intensity made twice as likely by climate change.

One reason Boris has produced so much rain is that the weather system got 'stuck', dumping huge amounts of water over the same areas for days.

There is some evidence that the effects of climate change on the jet stream - a band of fast-flowing winds high up in the atmosphere - may make this 'stalling' phenomenon more common. But this is still up for debate.

Even if we don't get more 'stalled' weather systems in the future, climate change means that any that do get stuck can carry more moisture and therefore be potentially disastrous.

“The [severity of the] flood events is going to increase considerably in the future, so if you keep the flood protections at the same level as they are today, the impacts may become unbearable for societies in Europe,” explains Francesco Dottori of IUSS in Pavia, Italy.

Archived link

A rare polar bear that was spotted outside a cottage in a remote village in Iceland was shot by police after being considered a threat, authorities said Friday.

The bear was killed Thursday afternoon in the northwest of Iceland after police consulted the Environment Agency, which declined to have the animal relocated, Westfjords Police Chief Helgi Jensson told the Associated Press.

“It's not something we like to do,” Jensson said. “In this case, as you can see in the picture, the bear was very close to a summer house. There was an old woman in there.”

Typhoid, also known as enteric fever, is an infection caused by contaminated food or water. If left untreated, it kills one in five. But the cure is a simple course of antibiotics. Most people, if they get the drugs promptly, should start recovering within a few days.

But the antibiotics used to cure typhoid are now failing. The bacteria, Salmonella typhi, have developed resistance to the antibiotics meant to kill them. It’s a pattern repeated across the world; the problem of resistant infections is global and borderless. And children across the village – on the outskirts of Peshawar, northern Pakistan – had been falling ill.

The hospital was rammed. On the children’s ward, each single bed held four or five patients.

“Typhoid was once treatable with a set of pills and now ends up with patients in hospital,” says Jehan Zeb Khan, the clinical pharmacist at the hospital.

Infection was caused by extensively drug resistant (XDR) typhoid – a strain of “superbug” that emerged in Pakistan in 2016. XDR-typhoid is resistant to almost all of the antibiotics that are supposed to treat the disease, so options are limited and death rates are higher.

South Korea is projected to see its population drop significantly over the next 50 years, and its global population ranking fall by 30 notches over the ultra-low birth rate and rapid aging, data showed Monday.

The country's population is projected to come to 36 million in 2072, down 30.8 percent from this year's 52 million. Its population peaked in 2020 and has been on a decline, according to the data by Statistics Korea.

The world population, however, is forecast to continue to rise during the cited period to reach 10.22 billion in 2072, compared with an estimated 8.16 billion this year.

South Korea was the world's 29th most populous country in 2024, but the ranking is expected to fall to 59 in the 2072, the agency said.

The US is set to break a new record number of homeless people with more than half a million people living on the street this year.

Data collected and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal from more than 250 homeless organizations have counted at least 550,000 homeless people so far, a 10 percent rise from last year’s reports. The numbers gathered from cities and rural areas show homelessness as it was on a single night earlier this year.

The upward trend means that the US will probably reach and pass the 2023 estimate of 653,000 homeless people. It’s the highest number since the government began sharing such data in 2007.

The final estimate of the number of unhoused people will depend on data not yet reported from areas such as New York City, which had the highest population of any city in 2023.

Contributing to the most recent rise are migrants bused by Texas to cities such as Chicago and Denver. Large numbers of migrants have also arrived in New York, increasing the numbers last year.

Tuvalu is likely to be the first country in the world to become uninhabitable due to climate change. And the children of Tuvalu could become the last generation to live on an archipelago that is quickly going underwater. It's happening fast. Scientists predict that 95% of the country will be underwater at high tide by the year 2100.

Climate change is causing sea levels to rise, and that's a critical problem for a country like Tuvalu, where the average elevation above sea level is only two metres. Flooding is not a new problem, but they have become more frequent and severe in recent years.

The constant influx of saltwater is contaminating the country’s farmland and groundwater, leaving the island dependent on rainwater and vulnerable to droughts, water shortages and disease outbreaks.

Meanwhile, strong tides are washing chunks of land away. The sand is slowly being swallowed up by the sea. Today, there are hardly any sandy beaches left in the small archipelago.

Spain is slipping into a desert climate, according to a new study into the relationship between global heating and drought.

The Mediterranean country is clearly on the frontlines of climate change in Europe. Now researchers at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Barcelona have delved deeper into its climate vitals.

By 2050, they predict that rainfall will decrease by up to 20 per cent compared to current levels. This would tip Spain from a temperate Mediterranean climate into a steppe- or even desert-like one, as per the Köppen system which divides the world into five different climate zones based on plant growth.

“The warming process resulting from climate change has been very pronounced in mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands, representing a true hotspot,” the researchers write.

Here is the report (pdf): Dirty Money: How Fossil Fuel Sponsors Are Polluting Sports

Report finds that oil and gas sponsorship of global sports hits $5.6 billion, but this scale of “sportswashing” likely to be an underestimate, authors says

Top sports sponsors include Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company ($1.3 billion); British oil major Shell ($469 million); petrochemicals giant Ineos ($776 million); and French oil company TotalEnergies ($327 million), the study by the New Weather Institute found.

“Taking money from fossil fuel sponsors is sport signing a deal for more devastating impacts on floods, bush fires and heatwaves,” said Australian former rugby captain, now Senator, Dave Pocock. “If we are going to transition we need to stop fossil fuel companies trying to extend their social license through sponsoring sport.”

The authors said the report represented the first attempt to quantify the value of fossil fuel sports sponsorships globally, and warned that a lack of transparency over the deals meant the figures were likely to be an underestimate.

“Oil companies who are delaying climate action and pouring more fuel on the fire of global heating, are using Big Tobacco’s old playbook and trying to pass themselves off as patrons of sport,” said Andrew Simms, co-director of the New Weather Institute. He added that if sport is to have a future, “It needs to clean itself of dirty money from big polluters and stop promoting its own destruction.”

Almost 90% of Norway’s mainland kittiwakes have disappeared in the past four decades, as numbers of other seabird species also continue to fall. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of seabirds on the Norwegian mainland dropped by almost a third, according to the Norwegian Environment Agency.

“This is quite dramatic, but it is also one of the bird groups that have done most poorly when you look globally,” says Signe Christensen-Dalsgaard, a seabird ecologist at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research.

Seabirds are important to life on land: they bring nutrients from the sea to the coast through their guano. They are reliant on the ocean for food, so the fact they are struggling suggests other marine species are in trouble. “It’s a quite strong signal that something is not right in the ocean,” says Christensen-Dalsgaard.

Superbugs will kill more than 39 million people before 2050 with older people particularly at risk, according to a new global analysis.

While deaths linked to drug resistance are declining among very young children, driven by improvements in vaccination and hygiene, the study found the opposite trend for their grandparents.

By the middle of the century, 1.91 million people a year are forecast to die worldwide directly because of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – in which bacteria evolve so that the drugs usually used to fight them no longer work – up from 1.14 million in 2021. AMR will play some role in 8.2 million deaths annually, up from 4.71 million.

The study, published in the Lancet was conducted by the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (Gram) Project and is the first global analysis of AMR trends over time.

Researchers used data from 204 countries and territories to produce estimates of deaths from 1990 to 2021, and forecasts running through to 2050.

They also found millions of deaths worldwide could be averted via better prevention of infections and improved access to healthcare, as well as the creation of new antibiotics.

The study’s author, Dr Mohsen Naghavi, at the University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics (IHME), said: “Antimicrobial medicines are one of the cornerstones of modern healthcare, and increasing resistance to them is a major cause for concern.

“These findings highlight that AMR has been a significant global health threat for decades and that this threat is growing,” he said.

A firefighter has died during a flood rescue in Austria and one person has drowned in Poland, as torrential rain caused by Storm Boris continues to wreak havoc across Central and Eastern Europe.

The Austrian province surrounding Vienna has been declared a disaster area, with its leaders speaking of "an unprecedented extreme situation".

In Romania, where four people were killed on Saturday, the prime minister says two others are missing, while several remain unaccounted for in the Czech Republic.

The floods caused by Storm Boris proved deadly in Romania on Saturday, where four people were killed during floods in the south-eastern region of Galati.

"We are again facing the effects of climate change, which are increasingly present on the European continent, with dramatic consequences," Romanian President Klaus Iohannis said on Saturday.

Extreme precipitation is becoming more likely in Europe, as across much of the world, due to climate change.

A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, which can lead to heavier rainfall.

Storm Boris has already brought extreme amounts of rain across central and eastern Europe, with more torrential downpours in the forecast through until at least the end of Monday.

Some of the highest rainfall totals so far have been in the Czech Republic. At Lysa Hora in the mountains in the west of the country, 288mm of rain has fallen since Thursday. This is around three months’ worth of rain in just three days.

There isn’t much green in the Sahara Desert, but after an unusual influx of rain, the color can be seen from space creeping into parts of one of the driest places in the world.

Satellites recently captured plant life blooming in parts of the typically arid southern Sahara after storms moved there when they shouldn’t. It has also caused catastrophic flooding. Rainfall north of the equator in Africa typically increases from July through September as the West African Monsoon kicks into gear.

The phenomenon is marked by an increase in stormy weather that erupts when moist, tropical air from near the equator meets hot, dry air from the northern portion of the continent. The focus for this stormy weather – known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone – shifts north of the equator in the Northern Hemisphere’s summer months. Much of it sags south of the equator during the Southern Hemisphere’s warm months.

But since at least mid-July, this zone has shifted farther north than it typically should, sending storms into the southern Sahara, including portions of Niger, Chad, Sudan and even as far north as Libya, according to data from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

And this weather shift also affecting Atlantic hurricane season this year.

The situation can be complex because we don't know if these weather shifts will also affect the weather in other regions.

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.