I need to get this off my chest even though im sure it has been talked about a thousand times. Im just curious if others are experiencing the same thing or if I'm just going crazy. - When I just got my driver's license back in 2005 here in The Netherlands, I had a girlfriend in Amsterdam whom I drove to see a few times a week. It was about a 100 km drive. I had an old Opel Corsa and I can still vividly remember having to clean my windshield every week in the summer because it was covered in dead insects. Huge splatters and tiny spots, but the entire windshield was full of bug juice. Over the past few weeks I've driven several long distances, totaling about 1,000 kilometers, and I don't have a single dead insect on my windshield. Not one. The windshield is squeaky clean... I read that the insect population worldwide has drastically declined and it is due to climate change. Which i get. But why isn't this the main news story every day? How obvious does it need to be? This can't possibly be good. For us, but especially for our children. I have a bad feeling about this...

https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/usfs/map/#d:24hrs;@-100.0,40.0,4.0z

The title's warning of delayed flights kind of understates the problem. Extremely high temperatures reduce the amount of weight a plane can safely take off with due to hotter air being less dense and thus providing less lift. The effect is more pronounced at airports located at higher altitudes or with shorter runways, and there's a point where a plane physically can't take off with a given load. That's all in the article, and it makes sense.

The mitigations mentioned in the article all have significant downsides:

• Wait for the temperature to drop. Obviously this creates delays and the associated ripple effects, including increased burden on air traffic controllers during takeoff windows of cooler temps. Over time, the number and duration of those windows will shrink.
• Reduce passenger count or cargo/luggage weight. This delays people, their luggage, and/or parcels. It also means more fuel burned per passenger or unit weight of cargo, which increases cost and worsens environmental/climate impact. There's a point where a flight can't carry enough people or cargo to be economically practical.
• Carry less fuel and make intermediate refueling stops. More delays, more cost, more congestion and strain on air traffic controllers, and more fuel burned due to the additional takeoffs and idling.

Apparently this isn't anything new to historically hot regions and high-altitude locations, but it'll get worse for them, too.

I'm always equal parts interested, relieved and horrified when I see collapse awareness leaking into the mainstream. It's been happening more and more lately (duh). This is collapse related cuz it's a thread of gardeners across the globe, talking about how their growing zones have changed in recent years. There's good bits about climate chaos in there, too. Here soon, we literally won't be able to grow food. And that will be fun for everyone.

I have spent the past few weeks in a constant state of nausiated, sleep deprived anxiety about the climate. Here in the UK, Scotland (you know, the boggy, lake filled, cold bit) erupted into flame. Meanwhile, our prime-minister is considering bending to Trump and opeing up the north sea to drill for more oil and gas, BP announced record breaking profits and are currently "looking at oppertunitys" to drill in at least 9 new international locations.

I have checked out what kind of precidents there are for taking legal action against these big oil companies, up until 2025, there wasnt much. However, there have been some legal presidents being set recently by small isalnd nations who are working alongside "client-earth"...

Honestly though, it's already abundantly clear that the law doesnt seem to apply to these companies, or governments, who seem to be happy to inflict genocide, ecocide and infanticide alike, world over... and so what do we do when the rule of law breaks down? literally, what options are they leaving us other than riot?

What really gets me is the whole demographic of disadvantaged young men in our country who are of actual fighting age have been pitted against each other instead of organising to fight the elite...

Collapse related to the continued degradation of businesses' own outputs, oblivious to how it hurts even themselves. Enshittification has always been considered a revenue strategy for businesses and a cost to consumers, but few have considered how businesses are self-sabotaging themselves for the sake of growth.

The article outlines the factors turning eastern Congo's Ebola outbreak into a potentially historic disaster. These include rebel control of territory, mass displacement, strikes among response workers, weak surveillance, and the loss of functioning health infrastructure in the city of Goma. It also explains how mistrust, checkpoints, and insecurity are preventing responders from identifying cases, tracing contacts, and carrying out safe burials. Together, these pressures mean the outbreak is expanding faster than the institutions responsible for containing it can respond, with no end in sight.

Humanity: creates a climate where being outdoors becomes dangerous. Also humanity: invents human-sized refrigerators. Problem solved. Japan's cooling pods are impressive, but they also perfectly capture our approach to collapse - treat the symptoms with more technology while congratulating ourselves for adapting to a crisis of our own making.

I am not an expert in climate science or ecology or fire management (or any of the other appropriate disciplines that may have an intuition and rigor for investigating this kind of inquiry) and I cannot seem to find specifics about the proximity of the recent wildfires in Aragón, Spain to

the datacenter in Aragón, Spain mentioned in this paper on the existence of heat islands caused by large scale data centers from researchers at the University of Cambridge from earlier this year. Since I cannot nail down the proximity and I am not an expert, I'm seeking input from more knowledgeable people than myself about whether there is evidence of a causal relationship here and how one would practically go about investigating that (i.e. how to find good evidence that supports and/or refutes that these are or are not connected) in an age wherein neo-modern traditional research methods (e.g. employing Google-fu) have become broken and ever more AI-mediated and enshittified by capitalistic pressures.

Link to wildfire map shown in pictures

Bonus mainstream media coverage link for those not inclined to wading through academic papers

A staple crop for billions, a miracle to behold. Published today on Earth.com, the following article concerns the disastrous future of rice cultivation globally. This issue has been posted here before but the article focuses on new research with the unsettling conclusion of "faster than expected". Collapse related because rice is the base of the food pyramid for over half our species and it has a very bleak future.

Fun fact - there are over 40,000 varieties of rice and it would take a human over 750 years (at one variety per week) to try them all.

Collapse related as heat wave fueled by climate change disrupts pollination and costs growers hundreds of millions of dollars. For those of you on the lookout for one big major collapse, surely that's in the works, but what's here now is several smaller dysfunctions in the norms. A taste of local collapses if you will.

Invasive Aedes mosquitoes, the species that carry Zika and yellow fever, have adapted to US climates far faster than expected. Surveillance and control programs remain underfunded

Abstract of article: The 2026 closure of the Strait of Hormuz has disrupted approximately one-fifth of global petroleum transit, sending oil prices sharply upward and exposing medicine's structural dependence on petrochemicals, helium, and globalized manufacturing. This article examines how medicine's reliance on globalized commodities exposes patients to medication and device shortages during sustained supply disruption. Prior crises, including the 1973 oil embargo and the 2021 Suez blockage, revealed vulnerabilities that current just in time supply chains have deepened. We urge practice leaders, hospital administrators, and clinicians to establish supply continuity frameworks now, before scarcity forces improvised rationing and reactive procurement.

Text:

In February 2026, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz sent Brent crude oil above $125 per barrel within weeks. Ship transits through the strait, ordinarily carrying approximately 20% of global petroleum liquids, collapsed by more than 95%. 1,2 Fuel rationing, industrial shutdowns, and price increases across energy, agriculture, and manufacturing have already been documented across Asia and Europe. 1 Spillover impacts extend to industries that rely on helium gas and semiconductor chips, with eventual shortages for medical devices, including dermatologic imaging and phototherapy equipment. 3 Dermatology has a structural dependence on global commodities and we must act to mitigate supply constraint consequences.

Medical supply shortages stemming from the Strait of Hormuz disruptions raise ethical concerns about distributive justice and non-maleficence, particularly regarding how scarce resources should be triaged between high-income and low-income countries.

Medicine's Commodity Foundation

Petroleum is more than a transportation fuel; it undergirds modern medical infrastructure. Plastics, composed of petrochemical feedstocks, are the foundational material of single-use disposable devices and supplies. Petrochemical compounds also serve as raw materials, solvents, and excipients in API synthesis across most drug classes; most pharmaceutical packaging is petroleum-based with no identified substitutes. 4

This reliance creates severe supply chain vulnerability. Approximately 86% of US APIs are manufactured abroad, predominantly in India and China; one-third of generic APIs globally originate from a single facility in this region. 5 An energy or supply shock impairing these sites could translate into acute domestic drug shortages; a risk compounded by the already critical conditions that the American College of Physicians declared a public health crisis in 2025. 6,7

Petroleum is not the only commodity trapped in the Persian Gulf. Qatar produces approximately one-third of the world's helium as a byproduct of liquefied natural gas processing. 8 Helium is the coolant maintaining the superconducting magnets of MRI scanners; without continuous resupply, existing machines cannot function. 9 Semiconductors, the largest consumers of helium, are embedded in virtually every modern medical device. 10 Other non-petroleum commodities, such as sulfur, methanol, monoethylene glycol, aluminum, cobalt and polyethylene, are significant inputs for pharmaceutical synthesis and medical equipment manufacturing; they are now constrained. 3 Ongoing geopolitical developments have also limited REEs critical to MRI scanners, X-ray tubes, and laser technologies, while 2025 US tariffs have further pressured steel and aluminum supply chains for medical devices.

The Lesson from Past Crises

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is not medicine's first exposure to petroleum vulnerability, but the structural conditions are worse. During the 1973 Arab oil Embargo, OPEC's export halt quadrupled oil prices, and healthcare costs followed. 4 Consumer price index data from that period shows that decreases in petroleum supply produced rises in plastics and motor fuel prices that, after a several month delay, resulted in increased overall healthcare spending. 4 US Medicine's depth of dependency has only grown. In 1973, petroleum-based single-use devices now standard in dermatologic procedure rooms and the globalized just-in-time supply chains now moving APIs from Asia to US formularies did not yet exist at their current scale. 4,5 What the 1970s revealed was a vulnerability our current crisis threatens to catastrophically exceed.

More recent examples of our dependence on concentrated, globalized supply chains include 2017's Hurricane Maria, 2019's African Swine Fever (ASF), and 2021's Suez Canal blockage. The destruction of Puerto Rico's electrical grid triggered a nationwide shortage of IV fluids and critical medications within weeks, with supply depression persisting until mid-2018 as the FDA invoked emergency importation from European manufacturers 11 . The ASF outbreak originating in China caused significant, ongoing shortages of porcine-derived heparin. 12 The 2021 grounding of a single container vessel in the Suez Canal held up $9.6 billion of trade daily, including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and personal protective equipment, compounding COVID-19 era shortages already stressing American hospital formularies. 4 From 2017 to 2021, one in seven supply chain issue reports was associated with a drug shortage within six months under baseline conditions. 13 At the onset of COVID-19, the ratio surged to one in three, and even drugs without reported supply chain issues saw shortages rise from 4% to 10%. 13

Demand-side shocks from disease surges deplete inventory quickly but are generally well-contained through capacity expansion. 14 On the contrary, disruptions to key ingredients upstream of the supply chain, like petroleum, are much harder to mitigate. The Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCA) has forced the industry to maintain visibility from manufacturing through distribution and retail. But there is very little visibility into materials and components upstream of the manufacturing process. 15 Further, these materials are key inputs across many industries, which makes multiple supply chains vulnerable to disruptions in petroleum-based products and derivatives. Historically, the medical industry has not readily acknowledged this risk. 6 Since these key inputs are essential for many of the critical sectors, including energy, technology, and defense systems, the risk is that scarce capacity will be allocated to high-value demand products first, and much later to medical devices and equipment. Vulnerability to key inputs common across critical sectors remains the biggest blind spot for the industry. A sustained supply disruption affects the raw material inputs, manufacturing energy, and logistics of pharmaceutical production across all drug classes simultaneously.

Call to Action

The Strait of Hormuz possesses a distinct profile among maritime chokepoints. 2 Unlike most major passages, this strait offers no maritime alternative and land-based rerouting is extremely limited, meaning disruption ceases transit entirely rather than adding cost and delay. Interstate armed conflict, its current hazard class, carries significantly longer resolution timelines than other disruption types. 2 The healthcare consequences are therefore broad, potentially devastating, and slow to resolve. Existing federal mechanisms were designed for demand-side shocks and finite supply interruptions, not for sustained disruption. 6 Although severity is uncertain and consequence are impending, we can and should take steps for mitigation. Dermatology practice leaders, hospital administrators and clinicians should begin discussing supply continuity frameworks. ( Table 1 )

The Strait of Hormuz closure is an energy disruption that threatens to exceed 1973 and remains unresolved. Improvised rationing, reactive procurement, and inadequate allocation represent a failure of institutional preparation. 16 The Joint Commission, American Hospital Association, and specialty societies have the infrastructure, expertise, and influence to issue clinical guidance. Proactive mitigation tactics by drug shortage authorities should be enacted before allocation decisions are forced by scarcity rather than anticipated through surveillance. Managing this crisis is difficult, but necessary.

Ethical Consequences if we Fail to Prepare

Developing and under-resourced nations will be impacted the most and bear the greatest burden, since wealthier countries can draw on purchasing power and existing stockpiles to buffer the disruption. 17,18 This disparity in health equity and distributive justice will result in unequal access to life saving resources. Once shortages occur, who holds the authority to allocate what remains? By what criteria should resources be prioritized and distributed? Will suppliers with inventory exploit the situation through price gouging? The moral and ethical imperative is for domestic systems and the international community to plan for and mitigate the effects of this crisis before they compound further.

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Back for my second post and frankly I'm again supposed to be on my Collapse break, I try and minimize when I expose myself to reality so I can stay sane.

But alas it seems we are drastically changing by the day, so here I am dropping this here so it doesn't drive me insane.

"The Arctic is cooking. Across northern Russia—a region that is famously bitterly cold—temperatures this week have routinely surpassed 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32.2 degrees Celsius), adding to the mountain of broken heat recordsthis summer has racked up so far.
In recent days, the Selagoncy meteorological station, near the border of the Arctic Circle, recorded 93.0 degrees F (33.9 degrees C); another station, Olenyok, logged 90.9 degrees F (32.7 degrees C), according to data collected by weather information service Ogimet and reportedby climatologist Maximiliano Herrera. To put that in perspective, these temperatures are on par for Orlando, Fla., at this time of year."

Thoughts on a blue ocean event 2026??

Submission statement: Ray Bradbury's one-page science fiction short story *There Will Come Soft Rains* from 1950 is considered to be a seminal work in the genre, one which the author himself considered "the one story that represents the essence of Ray Bradbury". Its subject matter is both prescient and (thankfully, remains) speculative as it is set in a house, automated by AI systems, that has somehow remained relatively intact in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion and implied full nuclear war which has devastated the California city in which it is located. The AI system continues on with its quotidian tasks around the house as the world smolders around it, beginning with the announcement of the date, "Today is August 4, 2026". This is relevant to collapse as it, in my opinion, demonstrates 76 years of cultural recognition of our potential future of a collapse caused by nuclear weapons which arguably remains as much a risk today, if not more, than back then; as this was written prior to the advent of the hydrogen bomb and its much greater potential lethality. The brilliant move of including AI, especially an AI representing roughly the actual capabilities we have here and now in the year 2026, adds to the relevancy as I see it, in particular the idea of what we would perhaps leave behind us in a collapse situation.

Text of the story may be found in full here: https://users.wpi.edu/~zrbutzke/Docs/BradburyStories(1).pdf.pdf)

Quote of Ray Bradbury regarding this story from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains_(short_story)#cite_note-1#cite_note-1)

Published today by The Union of Concerned Scientists, the following article addresses our new climate reality and the horrific consequences that will follow.

Rachel Cleetus gives us a brief look at the widespread collapse of the Earth's climate and ecosystems and she warns us of the devastating future we face as a result of our inaction.

Collapse related because it is getting hot fellas. Very, very hot.

Written by a former police captain in East Providence, this article concerns the surge in 911 calls the author has witnessed, increasingly related to environmental disasters. Captain Broadmeadow argues that we are not prioritizing emergency response - to our detriment.

Collapse related because flooding and sea level rise pose an imminent threat to millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of people globally, something a lifelong resident of Rhode Island seems to know all too well.

Really interesting in the end of the article, the mention of social infrastructure in order to generate hope. I'm curious how our isolation is leading so many people down the path of not even trying to save/mobilize towards maintaining some part of our social fabric because it's already too far gone.

​We need to talk about the absolute clown show that our current paradigm has morphed into.

​For the last twenty years, we've completely bought into the Hollywood script that complex, multi-trillion-dollar societal survival hinges on a handful of eccentric main characters. We traded institutional competence, long-term engineering pipelines, and boring old collective state capacity for the "Founder/Savior" mythos.

​Look at the progression. You had your Gates, your Jobs, your Buffet. Guys who, whatever you think of them, built empires inside corporate frameworks that at least pretended to follow systemic rules. They were corporate titans. They kept the lights on, made the spreadsheet balance, and occasionally bailed out a liquidity crunch.

​Then we leveled up—or rather, devolved—into the Elon Era, where the pitch stopped being "we make a better PC or manage capital allocation well" and became "this guy is personally single-handedly carrying the torch of human consciousness to Mars so we don't go extinct." We hitched the entire existential survival of the species to a guy who spends his Tuesday nights shitposting, wading hip-deep into domestic political culture wars, and alienating half the domestic tax base.

​Meanwhile, look at what's actually happening on the board globally.

​China is moving toward a crewed lunar mission with the terrifying, clockwork efficiency of a massive state apparatus that doesn't give a single damn about public sentiment polls, short-seller interest, or Reddit threads betting on their financial collapse. They aren't relying on a volatile, highly polarized personality whose companies are constantly fighting public relations brushfires and regulatory dogfights. They have systemic momentum. They have institutional continuity.

​And what are we doing in the West? Half the population is literally treating national technological progress like a massive sports betting slip, rooting for high-profile failures out of pure spite, while the other half treats the same executives like secular deities. It's hyper-individualism eating its own tail.

​We've reached a point of absolute peak systemic fragility. If your entire framework for space hegemony, advanced manufacturing, and critical infrastructure relies on a single erratic billionaire not having a bad month on social media—while domestic sentiment is so fractured that a massive chunk of the public is actively betting against him—you don't have a space program or an industrial base. You have a reality TV show with a launch pad.

​Mass collectivism, for all its bureaucratic bloat and historical horrors, coordinates unstoppable, multi-decade momentum because it doesn't depend on the emotional stability or political distractions of one guy.

​If we genuinely think a handful of unstable "Enterprise Super Stars" tweeting through the night are going to out-execute a billion-person state apparatus playing a 50-year civilizational chess game, we are completely out of our minds. The Great Man Fallacy is going to be the epitaph on the West's tombstone.

​Change my mind?

what if it's for the elites to head to their bunkers and somehow you got on their contact list? it would make sense with the data centers taking water, food being poisoned, and I've seen the conspiracy about radioactivity poisoning - who knows what's real, but elites are eating/torturing/bombing/starving babies for their own amusement and burning the world out from under us and those are the FACTS

the THOUSANDS of epstein files I was able to get through genuinely has left me a tin foil hat tweaker, as nice as it would be to say "that's literally insane, who would do something like that", the insane top 1% that we do know of, and the ones that are so rich that we will never know who the hell they are, banking on US, the PEOPLE, the MASSES to not give a damn about anything until it's too late

there are more of us than there are of them, and my soul has never been and will never be for sale - if the product is free, YOU are the product

ALSO my identity was STOLEN and some person bought a HOUSE in MY NAME, with MY SOCIAL, and the cops can do nothing, the banks can do nothing, I've never even belonged to just myself - we will never be free

Stranded commercial ship traffic near the Strait of Hormuz could unleash an invasive marine "super-spreader event" when traffic resumes, scientists warn.

New research by an international coalition of marine scientists warns that invasive marine microbes, algae, and invertebrates have coated the ships.

"If you had to sort of design a worst-case scenario, it would look a lot like this," said Mario Tamburri, a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and one of the study's lead authors. "It's a perfect storm."

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