collapse of the old society

In Limits to Growth, a '70s era tome lauded by both environmentalists and doomsday conspiracy theorists, MIT scientists made a number of predictions about population growth, food production, etc, using the data available at the time -- and were immediately lambasted by the media and politicians as being fear-mongering, since they hinted that collapse would likely come in the 2nd half of the 21st century. Recently, investment guy Joachim Klement revisited the predictions, adding data from this century. The results were... not great, with some indicating that we're living in the peak of human development like literally right this minute.

Acute global food insecurity rose for the sixth year in a row in 2024, according to the 2025 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC), a collaborative effort coordinated by the Food Security Information Network.

The report shows that climate extremes, conflict, forced displacement and economic shocks continue to drive malnutrition and food insecurity around the world, with disastrous impacts on those living in many of the most vulnerable regions in the world.

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Plenty of farmland to go around.

You’re helping nature — but nature also has ways to help you, make you more resilient, and relieve the stress caused by environmental destruction.

• Climate change is colliding with land use practices, deforestation and biodiversity loss to drive a rapidly growing threat of crop pests.
• Future warming of 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels (likely by the 2040s or 2050s, according to current projections) could see substantial losses of staple crop yields for wheat (an estimated 46% loss), rice (19%) and maize (31%) due to pest infestations, according to a recent paper.
• Temperate regions are likely to see the greatest increases in crop pests as warming creates conditions for migrating subtropical species to establish themselves in previously unhabitable areas.
• The authors underline the need for more pest monitoring, diversification of farmland crops and biotechnological solutions to meet this growing threat.

Note that future warming is likely to be up to 50% greater than stated in this article.

archived (Wayback Machine):

• Mongabay article
• research cited

The rhetoric of “hopium” is failing as ecological overshoot deepens. “Hopium”, a colloquial term that is a blend of the words “hope” and “opium” (as though it were a drug), represents a faith in technological and market-based solutions to address our multiple reinforcing crises, despite evidence to the contrary. We're living in the long defeat and we must own and confront it with courage.

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...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28962153

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

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.

In the mid-1990s physicists Geoffrey West and Louis Bettencourt collaborated with biologists to study allometric scaling laws, where it is generally found that larger organisms are more efficient consumers of energy than smaller ones. After mathematically explaining these laws through fractal network effects, the researchers began applying them to the human built environment, particularly cities.

Certain environmentalists and sustainability advocates mistook the significance of these results, leading to decades of policy work and investments in urban growth that, West now admits, are doomed to fail.

The fact that so many, including the originators of the work, got this story wrong reflects the cultural blinders and techno-biases that typify most of us living in high energy modernity. Doing the opposite of our conditioned response to the overshoot predicament will likely lead to more favorable outcomes.

archived (Wayback Machine)

In the mid-1990s physicists Geoffrey West and Louis Bettencourt collaborated with biologists to study allometric scaling laws, where it is generally found that larger organisms are more efficient consumers of energy than smaller ones. After mathematically explaining these laws through fractal network effects, the researchers began applying them to the human built environment, particularly cities.

Certain environmentalists and sustainability advocates mistook the significance of these results, leading to decades of policy work and investments in urban growth that, West now admits, are doomed to fail.

The fact that so many, including the originators of the work, got this story wrong reflects the cultural blinders and techno-biases that typify most of us living in high energy modernity. Doing the opposite of our conditioned response to the overshoot predicament will likely lead to more favorable outcomes.

archived (Wayback Machine)

record annual jump cited (Wayback Machine)

Please note that this article contains questionable arithmetic:

That brings the annual mean global concentration close to 430 ppm, about 40 percent more than the pre-industrial level, and enough to heat the planet by about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius).

The actual figure from NOAA is 428.15 ppm (last updated 2025-04-14). If we use the more precise pre-industrial estimate of 278 ppm, then we get an increase of 54%, which is indeed "about 40%" if we round to the nearest multiple of 40%.

Climate models tend to underestimate the cooling effect of aerosol pollution, and the climate sensitivity is actually about 50% greater than previously thought, so a more realistic estimate of the warming caused by a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration over the pre-industrial level is 4.5°C. If we assume that the relationship is linear, this means that the current level of 428.15 ppm is "enough to heat the planet" by 4.5°C * 54% = 2.43°C, which is... more than 1.5°C.

the 2023-2024 spike of the global average surface temperature, which has also not been fully explained

Yes it has.

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Rice, the world’s most consumed grain, will become increasingly toxic as the atmosphere heats and as carbon dioxide emissions rise, potentially putting billions of people at risk of cancers and other diseases, according to new research published Wednesday in The Lancet.

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

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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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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20740784

Amid all the bad climate news flowing out of the Trump administration, you might have missed a quiet new consensus congealing in think tanks and big business. The targets set out by the Paris climate agreement, they argue—to limit global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)—are a lost cause. It’s time to prepare for a world warmed by at least three degrees Celsius.

Owing to “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a research report last month, they “now expect a 3°C world.” The “baseline” scenario that JP Morgan Chase uses to assess its own transition risk—essentially, the economic impact that decarbonization could have on its high-carbon investments—similarly “assumes that no additional emissions reduction policies are implemented by governments” and that the world could reach “3°C or more of warming” by 2100. The Climate Realism Initiative launched on Monday by the Council on Foreign Relations similarly presumes that the world is likely on track to warm on average by three degrees or more this century. The essay announcing the initiative calls the prospect of reaching net-zero global emissions by 2050 “utterly implausible.”

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Related: Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed?

(Previous climate models have underestimated the cooling effect of aerosol pollution and the climate's sensitivity to rising carbon dioxide levels.)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20737457

In the summer of 2023, a dozen people willingly walked into a steel chamber at the University of Ottawa designed to test the limits of human survival. Outfitted with heart rate monitors and temperature probes, they waited in temperatures of 42 degrees Celsius, or 107 degrees Fahrenheit, while the humidity steadily climbed, coating their bodies in sweat and condensation. After several hours, their internal body temperatures began ratcheting upward, as the heat cooked them from the outside in.

“Few people on the planet have actually experienced temperatures like this,” said Robert Meade, a postdoctoral researcher in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health who led the study. “Imagine moisture condensing on the skin like a glass of water on a hot day. That’s how hot it was, compared to skin temperature.”

Their experiment tested the body’s ability to cope with extreme heat by exposing participants to temperatures at which they could no longer cool themselves. Their study confirmed that this dangerous threshold is much lower than scientists had previously thought: a so-called wet-bulb temperature, which accounts for heat and humidity, of 26 to 31 degrees C.

https://archive.ph/Lj16Y

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nz/post/21414090

The memo, shared with The Grocer, warns food businesses are woefully unprepared for challenges including soil degradation, extreme weather events, global heating and water scarcity and that yield, quality and predictability of food supply are all at severe risk.

It goes on to claim that companies’ risk mitigation strategies are being assured by major audit and assurance firms and giving false confidence to investors, whereas the true threat to the supply chain is far greater than companies have acknowledged.