Climat & Collapse

The Kenyan marine ecologist David Obura is chair of a panel of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the world’s leading natural scientists. For many decades, his speciality has been corals, but he has warned that the next generation may not see their glory because so many reefs are now “flickering out across the world”.

L’écologie donne le droit à rêver pour mieux réinventer le futur. Saisissons cette forme de résistance pour contrer tous les collapsologues et s’appliquer à habiter la Terre avec élégance.

Recent simulations using the Community Earth System Model (CESM) indicate that a tipping event of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) would cause Europe to cool by several degrees. This AMOC tipping event was found under constant pre-industrial greenhouse gas forcing, while global warming likely limits this AMOC-induced cooling response. Here, we quantify the European temperature responses under different AMOC regimes and climate change scenarios. A strongly reduced AMOC state and intermediate global warming (C, Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5) has a profound cooling effect on Northwestern Europe with more intense cold extremes. The largest temperature responses are found during the winter months and these responses are strongly influenced by the North Atlantic sea-ice extent. Enhanced North Atlantic storm track activity under an AMOC collapse results in substantially larger day-to-day temperature fluctuations. We conclude that the (far) future European temperatures are dependent o

A new point in history has been reached, entomologists say, as climate-led species’ collapse moves up the food chain even in supposedly protected regions free of pesticides

La Terre, notre précieuse planète bleue, semble être un endroit stable et inaltérable dans l’immensité de l’univers. Cependant, la question de son avenir, et plus particulièrement de la fin de la vie, est une interrogation qui taraude de plus en plus de scientifiques. Le changement climatique, l’épuisement des ressources naturelles, la montée des températures et d’autres facteurs liés à l’activité humaine contribuent à rendre notre avenir incertain. Mais que disent vraiment les données scientifiques sur la fin de la vie sur Terre ? Quand cela arrivera-t-il et comment ?

On Monday House Republicans released the final parts of their proposed tax and budget bill — and it’s the stuff of nightmares. As Bobby Kogan of the Center for American Progress documents, the bill would impose the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP — the program formerly known as food stamps — in history. Millions of low-income Americans would lose health coverage; millions would go hungry. Many of those suffering would be children.

Climate change is driving rising global temperatures, ecological degradation, and widespread human suffering. Yet, as a collective, humanity has failed to implement sufficient changes to mitigate these threats. This paper introduces the concept of “global narcissism” as a speculative lens to analyze the psychological barriers to climate action. By examining different levels of narcissism and their manifestations in human responses to climate change, this framework highlights key obstacles to meaningful action. While humanity is diverse, and lived experiences vary greatly, this perspective offers a way to discuss patterns of response and resistance. A central challenge lies in humanity’s difficulty in recognizing its symbiotic relationship with the non-human world. Through the metaphor of “global narcissism” this paper explores how humanity’s response to ecological crisis mirrors narcissistic defense mechanisms and suggests a collapse is taking place. This framework provides insights into how psychological int

... , il me semble suffisant d’imaginer qu’un scénario à 2 °C en 2050, et au-delà par la suite, pourrait provoquer une mortalité massive sur un pas de temps variable, s’élevant potentiellement à plusieurs centaines de millions d’êtres humains, sans qu’il soit loisible de fixer un plafond. Telle serait d’ailleurs tout simplement la conséquence d’une baisse significative, pour un temps indéfini, de nos capacités de production alimentaire, associée à une régression rapide des ressources marines.

Kohei Saito voit le monde au bord de l’effondrement climatique. Seul un communisme de guerre axé sur la décroissance pourrait nous permettre de retrouver des jours meilleurs.

What if the rules of the game have already sealed our fate? This is a brutal mathematical reality: an unstoppable, self-reinforcing chain reaction in the Earth’s climate system is now underway.

Lenton, the founding director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, was the lead author of the 2008 paper that formally introduced the idea of tipping points in the Earth’s climate system.

For years, climate scientists have warned us of rising temperatures, extreme weather, and ecological breakdown. Now, the very people who calculate financial risk—actuaries—are sounding the alarm. Their latest report projects a 50% collapse in global GDP within decades. That’s not a recession. That’s economic devastation on a scale we’ve never seen.

Les Suisses ont massivement rejeté dimanche une initiative des écologistes, visant à inscrire dans la Constitution le respect des limites naturelles de la planète.

Climate change will set the parameters of our post-Princeton lives. The fires that devastated the Palisades earlier this month were, as our nation’s exasperated and exhausted climate scientists continue to remind us, only harbingers of the floods, tornados, and heatwaves to come. Global warming is surpassing the climate models that scientists built in the 2010s and early 2020s that already forecasted a borderline-apocalyptic future. Undoubtedly, by the time current Princeton students reach middle age, they will have witnessed a slew of societal structures sag — or collapse entirely — under the weight of extreme weather events and ever-worsening ecological decline.

Global risk management for human prosperity

The risk of Planetary Insolvency looms unless we act decisively. Without immediate policy action to change course, catastrophic or extreme impacts are eminently plausible, which could threaten future prosperity.

Au cœur de la science du climat, il existe une déconnexion déconcertante entre les projections climatiques et les projections démographiques. En effet, si l’on compare les deux, on pourrait penser que les spécialistes de la population et les spécialistes du climat vivent dans deux mondes complètement différents.

La fin de la pensée critique et l’effondrement de la civilisation. À une époque où la logique et l’esprit critique sont plus importants que jamais, la société évolue dans la direction opposée – vers la désinformation, le mysticisme et les régimes autoritaires. Le monde est plongé dans un état permanent de polycrise : instabilité économique, effondrement écologique, tensions géopolitiques et fracture sociétale. Au lieu d’affronter ces crises avec logique et des solutions fondées sur des preuves, de vastes pans de la population se replient sur la superstition et l’autoritarisme.

Comment s'engager politiquement dans cette ère de destruction inouïe ? Le philosophe québécois Alain Deneault évoque l'écoangoisse qui nous saisit, et comment réorienter cette énergie vers l'action. Une piste ? Les biorégions.

The abrupt loss of many species from a system is generally attributed to a breakdown in ecological functioning. As species are sequentially knocked out, the whole community becomes unstable, and it all comes crashing down. Another mechanism that may be at play. My colleagues and I argue that despite the fact life on Earth displays such great variety, many species that live together appear to share remarkably similar thermal limits. That is to say, individuals of different species can tolerate temperatures up to similar points.