Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

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.

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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.

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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.

The Japanese government has begun to consult young people about their interest in marriage – or lack thereof – as Japan continues to struggle with a demographic crisis that is expected to result in a sharp population decline over the next decades.

The Children and Families Agency, launched in April 2023, held its first working group meeting on Friday to support young people in their efforts to find partners through dating, matchmaking and other means. Attenders included those considering marriage in the future and experts versed in the challenges facing younger people.

The government recognised that ideas about marriage among young people are different from what was once considered standard, an agency official said. The government has been seeking experts’ views and now wants those of single people.

From Afghanistan to Bangladesh, India to Nepal, flash flooding and torrential rain have killed hundreds of people in recent weeks, as the climate crisis amplifies the effects of the monsoon season, bringing widespread devastation to South Asia.

Millions of people have been displaced by floods, landslides and heavy rains in recent weeks across the region, which is home to about a quarter of the world’s population and among the most vulnerable to the impacts of the human-caused climate crisis.

Flooding from annual monsoon rains is common in South Asia but the climate crisis has turbocharged extreme weather events across the region, scientists say, with prolonged and intense heat waves giving way to record rainfall and storms.

At least 40 people were killed and 347 injured in flooding from heavy rains in eastern Afghanistan, the health ministry said on Tuesday. In India, 97 people have died in flooding in northeast Assam state since May, official figures showed. Large-scale floods in northeast Bangladesh have impacted more than 2 million people. And flash floods and landslides in Nepal have killed dozens, according to the NGO Nepal Centre for Disaster Management (NCDM).

The prolonged downpours have swollen rivers to beyond danger levels, critical infrastructure has been damaged, roads have been inundated and homes and crops destroyed across South Asia.

Sayuri Moreno found out while pregnant that her body was contaminated with arsenic, but could not afford doctors' advice to avoid breastfeeding and leave her home in a mining area in northern Peru.

The 37-year-old is one of 120 residents of the Huarmey slums in the Ancash department who were found to have high levels of arsenic in their blood when 140 people were tested last year, according to the Ministry of Health.

Some 3,000 live in this community of wooden houses facing the sea, most of them living off fishing. Behind the settlement rise the hills through which underground pipelines descend, transporting copper and zinc concentrate to Port Huarmey.

Arsenic -- a highly toxic chemical -- can be found naturally alongside copper ore and is released as a byproduct of its processing. Arsenic can also naturally contaminate groundwater.

Peru is the world's second-largest copper producer, however health authorities say they have yet to determine whether the widespread contamination in Huarmey is linked to mining operations.

Southern and eastern Europe will continue to experience a heatwave throughout much of this week, with daytime temperatures across the Balkans widely reaching the high 30s to low 40s celsius; more than 7C above the seasonal norm. Night-time temperatures will also remain elevated, often well into the 20Cs.

And in densely urbanised areas such as Athens, Greece, night-time temperatures are forecast at or above an uncomfortable 30C due to the urban heat island (UHI) effect. During a heatwave, the UHI effect intensifies urban temperatures because heat-absorbing materials, reduced vegetation and human activities retain the sun’s warmth overnight, which leads to increased health risks and energy demands.

The national weather services of several countries have issued excessive heat warnings and heat advisories for this week. The intense heat is expected to gradually subside towards the end of the week, with thunderstorms and cooler conditions anticipated across the Balkans by the weekend.