Les Soulèvements de la Terre

This is not a call to despair, but an invitation to understand the forces driving the process of collapse, and to explore how we might navigate the descent with integrity, purpose, and care for the living world.

Que se passe-t-il lorsque les masses prennent conscience de l’effondrement ? L’illusion collective et le réconfort du déni La société s’accroche à des illusions réconfortantes face au destin funeste. L’histoire offre des exemples qui donnent à réfléchir. Les psychologues décrivent le « biais de normalité », c’est-à-dire notre tendance à sous-estimer les menaces et à continuer comme si de rien n’était.

A team of researchers in California drew notoriety last year with an aborted experiment on a retired aircraft carrier that sought to test a machine for creating clouds.   But behind the scenes, they were planning a much larger and potentially riskier study of salt-water-spraying equipment that could eventually be used to dim the sun’s rays — a multimillion-dollar project aimed at producing clouds over a stretch of ocean larger than Puerto Rico.

Societal downfalls loom large in history and popular culture but, for the 99 per cent, collapse often had its upsides

New research is warning that the most likely outcome is that human civilization is poised for collapse. As The Guardian reports, a sweeping new historical survey that analyzes 5,000 years and the collapse of more than 400 societies makes the case that we're in for a rude awakening.

The unspoken truth about humanity's frightening future.

An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished

New research reveals Earth's natural carbon sink nearly collapsed in 2024, absorbing almost zero human CO₂ emissions.

Interview with CBC: "If we had done it we would have saved billions of dollars and many many countless lives and we didn't do anything" "We have elevated economics and politics above science"

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”.

News and views on the coming collapse

This Contemplation is the result of my beginning to put together a different one that’s focussing upon an academic article I’ve been reading (Collapse, Environment, and Society) but that got me thinking about the academic ‘debate’ regarding what ‘societal collapse’ is, how it may–or may not–unfold for our current experiment in large, complex societies, and how things are perceived in the moment by those experiencing societal change. The ‘debate’ (centred more-or-less on the question: Do societies actually ‘collapse’ or are they ‘merely’ shifting/transforming/adapting to changing conditions?) is rather ‘academic’ in that in the grand scheme of things it’s intellectually interesting but doesn’t have much to do with the on-the-ground, real-life experiences and concerns of most humans in a society–especially if they are experiencing some of the more ‘problematic’ consequences of collapse/transformation.

A subreddit tracking apocalyptic news in a calm, logical way comforts users who believe the end The threat of nuclear war, genocide in Gaza, ChatGPT reducing human cognitive ability, another summer of record heat. Every day brings a torrent of unimaginable horror. It used to be weeks between disasters, now we’re lucky to get hours.

It’s actually pretty obvious: the climate catastrophe is escalating, climate collapse has in all probability already begun, all the while fossil fuel infrastructures are being expanded all around the world. More and more people are turning away from climate action, while more and more people, no longer only in the global South, are suffering the consequences of climate chaos.

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

Ten kinds of possible collapses examined.

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

What are the most significant groups in this complex network of our emergent ‘collapse culture’? These groups don’t cohere into a single unified culture that understands itself as singular. Instead, the are thinly connected inside the complex of contemporary culture, a set of linked clusters. Between them, ideas do circulate, but the links between them, as I will return to, are more often established through intermixing in the heads of their proponents, however chaotically this takes place.....

Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the seventh of a series of articles on some of these signposts.

I’m used to environmentalists and futurists writing about The Limits to Growth. I’m less used to seeing investment writers mention research that’s linked to The Limits of Growth. But that’s what Joachim Klement did in his daily newsletter recently.