Veille 2.1

The Amazon rainforest is facing a barrage of pressures that might tip it into large-scale ecosystem collapse as soon as 2050, according to new research Wednesday warning of dire consequences for the region and the world. The Amazon, which holds more than 10 percent of the world's biodiversity, helps stabilize the global climate by storing the equivalent of around two decades of emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide.

A crucial system of ocean currents may already be on course to collapse, according to a new report, with alarming implications for sea level rise and global weather — leading temperatures to plunge dramatically in some regions and rise in others. Using exceptionally complex and expensive computing systems, scientists found a new way to detect an early warning signal for the collapse of these currents, according to the study published Friday in the journal Science Advances. And as the planet warms, there are already indications it is heading in this direction.

The new version of the “Seneca Effect” blog on Substack is doing reasonably well, so I thought it was time to prepare a page that explains what the Seneca Effect is and what it can teach us. (image by Dall-E) During the 1st Century AD, the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca observed the start of the disintegration of the Roman Empire. It was a process that would take a few more centuries to complete, but that was already evident to those who were willing to look beyond the surface of the still powerful Empire.

Societies and political structures, like the humans they serve, appear to become more fragile as they age, according to an analysis of hundreds of pre-modern societies.

World Meteorological Organization says 2023 will be hottest year on record, leaving ‘trail of devastation and despair’

Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory. For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, time is up. We are seeing the manifestation of those predictions as an alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records are broken, causing profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.

Scientists warn of unlivable heat and food shortages after analyzing 35 planetary vital signs.

Catastrophic climate change and the collapse of human societies By Josep Peñuelas, Sandra Nogué National Science Review, Volume 10, Issue 6, June 2023 The scientific community has focused the agend…

If you've ever seen the movie Soylent Green, you know it's not about cannibalism. It's about the banality of social collapse. It's not quick. It's a slow burn. Nobody shows any sense of urgency about anything. Everyone still watches talk shows, even if they have to pedal a bike to generate electricity for their television. Nobody under 50 remembers anything better. Here's the plot twist: It's not that corporations are using people as the main ingredient in everyone's favorite new food. It's

A collapse would bring catastrophic climate impacts but scientists disagree over the new analysis

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a major tipping element in the climate system and a future collapse would have severe impacts on the climate in the North Atlantic region. In recent years weakening in circulation has been reported, but assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based on the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) model simulations suggest that a full collapse is unlikely within the 21st century. Tipping to an undesired state in the climate is, however, a growing concern with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Predictions based on observations rely on detecting early-warning signals, primarily an increase in variance (loss of resilience) and increased autocorrelation (critical slowing down), which have recently been reported for the AMOC. Here we provide statistical significance and data-driven estimators for the time of tipping. We estimate a collapse of the AMOC to occur around mid-century under the current scenario of future emi

Climate breakdown and crop losses threaten our survival, but the ultra-rich find ever more creative ways to maintain the status quo, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

Just Collapse is an activist platform dedicated to socio-ecological justice in face of inevitable and irreversible global collapse. Just Collapse advocates for a Just Collapse and a Planned Collapse to avert the worst outcomes that will follow an otherwise unplanned, reactive collapse. Just Collapse recognises that there will be no justice in an unplanned collapse.

Around the world, rainforests are becoming savanna or farmland, savanna is drying out and turning into desert, and icy tundra is thawing. Indeed, scientific studies have now recorded "regime shifts" like these in more than 20 different types of ecosystem where tipping points have been passed. Around the world, more than 20% of ecosystems are in danger of shifting or collapsing into something different.

We ran computer programs that simulate ecosystems 70,000 times and the results are very worrying.

A major concern for the world’s ecosystems is the possibility of collapse, where landscapes and the societies they support change abruptly. Accelerating stress levels, increasing frequencies of extreme events and strengthening intersystem connections suggest that conventional modelling approaches based on incremental changes in a single stress may provide poor estimates of the impact of climate and human activities on ecosystems. We conduct xperiments on four models that simulate abrupt changes in the Chilika lagoon fshery, the Easter Island community, forest dieback and lake water quality—representing ecosystems with a range of anthropogenic interactions. Collapses occur sooner under increasing levels of primary stress but additional stresses and/or the inclusion of noise in all four models bring the collapses substantially closer to today by ~38–81%. We discuss the implications for further research and the need for humanity to be vigilant for signs that ecosystems are degrading even more rapidly than previo

Une présentation que j'ai récemment réalisée en conférence auprès d'une entreprise, et que je reproduis ici, sur les grands enseignements du rapport du Group...

Professor Joseph Tainter is an American anthropologist and historian studied anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Northwestern University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1975. As of 2012 he holds a professorship in the Department of Environment and Society at Utah State University. In this interview Professor Tainter discusses the thesis of his widely acclaimed work “The Collapse of Complex Societies”, 25 years after its publication in 1988. His book is among great classics of the study of collapse. In my view a work whose quality and relevance is comparable to Limits to Growth.

The collapse of modern societies has already begun. That is the conclusion of two years of research by the interdisciplinary team behind Breaking Together. How did it come to this? Because monetary systems caused us to harm each other and nature to such an extent it broke the foundations of our societies. So what can we do? This book describes people allowing the full pain of our predicament to liberate them into living more courageously and creatively.

Thème de ce premier épisode, la démographie ! J'ai collecté et commenté une quinzaine de graphiques qui me semblaient pertinents (sans prétention évidemment à être exhaustifs, ou même concluants) : ...

The scientific community has focused the agenda of studies of climate change on lower-end warming and simple risk analyses, because more realistic complex asses

By replacing thousands of equations with just one, ecology modelers can more accurately assess how close fragile environments are to a disastrous “tipping point.”

The steady destruction of wildlife can suddenly tip over into total ecosystem collapse, scientists studying the greatest mass extinction in Earth’s history have found. Many scientists think the huge current losses of biodiversity are the start of a new mass extinction. But the new research shows total ecosystem collapse is “inevitable”, if the losses are not reversed, the scientists said.

"Make Polluters Pay!" roepen wetenschappers en klimaatactivisten die nu de ingang blokkeren van de Aviapartner Executive Lounge en de Luxaviation terminal, exclusieve faciliteiten voor de superrijken die met privéjets van en naar Brussel vliegen. 
Deze geweldloze actie maakt deel uit van een wereldwijde campagne waarin wordt geëist dat degenen die het meest verantwoordelijk zijn voor de klimaatnoodsituatie, stoppen met hun destructieve levensstijl.


Elizabeth Kolbert writes about this week’s summit on biodiversity, where delegates will consider ambitious new conservation targets—even though the old ones have yet to be achieved.

It’s not just indifference. It’s an active, and deadly, cavalier attitude towards the lives of others: an example other nations follow

Une note privée de la Deutsche Bank alerte ses gros clients ultra-riches des dangers d'effondrement du système industriel et financier.

Mainstream energy analysts then and now assume that technology will continue to overcome resource limits in the immediate future, which is all that really seems to matter. Much of what is left of the peak oil discussion focuses on “peak demand”—i.e., the question of when electric cars will become so plentiful that we’ll no longer need so much gasoline. Nevertheless, those who’ve engaged with the oil depletion literature have tended to come away with a few useful insights....

In Madrid, the organisation showed a great sense of purpose. But beware a divided Europe and a US still tired of paying for the continent’s security

Strong climate action could wipe $756bn from individuals’ pension funds and other investments in rich countries

For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008.

Previous studies show that city metrics having to do with growth, productivity and overall energy consumption scale superlinearly, attributing this to the social nature of cities. Superlinear scaling results in crises called ‘singularities’, where population and energy demand tend to infinity in a finite amount of time, which must be avoided by ever more frequent ‘resets’ or innovations that postpone the system's collapse. Here, we place the emergence of cities and planetary civilizations in the context of major evolutionary transitions. With this perspective, we hypothesize that once a planetary civilization transitions into a state that can be described as one virtually connected global city, it will face an ‘asymptotic burnout’, an ultimate crisis where the singularity-interval time scale becomes smaller than the time scale of innovation. If a civilization develops the capability to understand its own trajectory, it will have a window of time to affect a fundamental change to prioritize long-term homeosta

The world may be facing a devastating “hidden” collapse in insect species due to the twin threats of climate change and habitat loss.

The rapid collapses of two ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula over the past quarter-century were most likely triggered by the arrival of huge plumes of warm, moisture-laden air that created extreme conditions and destabilized the ice, researchers said Thursday.

The Gulf Stream has weakened substantially in the past decades, as revealed by the latest data and new studies. Weather in the United States and Europe depends strongly on this ocean current, so it’s important we understand the ongoing changes and what they mean for our weather now and in the near future.

Welcome to the Great Inflation — Or, Why We Have to Pay for the Hidden Costs of the Industrial Age

New research suggests 75% of the rainforest has become less resilient to stress since the early 2000s.

Infinite growth on a finite planet has pushed us into crisis, and this forum tackles the difficult questions and taboo topics: Bursting the fantasy of sustainability based on clean energy transition and arguing for equitable approaches to global population. Pathways forward include a deliberate contraction of the human enterprise and a planned collapse.

Trois jeunes sur quatre sont éco-anxieux, nous apprenait fin 2021 une étude du Lancet. Demain, fera-t-on face à une génération de dépressifs ? Pas forcément, nous apprennent la sociologue Dominique Méda et le psychologue Pierre-Eric Sutter, qui ont tous deux participé à l’exposition « Renaissances », visible à la Cité des sciences et de l’industrie jusqu’au 6 mars 2022. Il est possible de surmonter l’effondrement et l’éco-anxiété, à l’échelle individuelle comme collective.

Wealthy companies are using the facade of ‘nature-based solutions’ to enact a great carbon land grab

The loss of its buttressing ice shelf could hasten the demise of the “Doomsday Glacier”

Habitat degradation, low genetic variation and declining fertility are setting Homo sapiens up for collapse

Aan de Britse tankstations staan er ellenlange files. De oorzaak? Te weinig truckchauffeurs om rond te rijden met tankwagens. Hoe groot is het probleem? Hoe is het zo ver kunnen komen? En wat betekent dit voor de toekomst? Frank Moreels, voorzitter van de Europese transportarbeidersbond geeft uitleg in "Laat".

analysts including Ting Lu warned in a note, predicting China’s economy will shrink this quarter. Article assez incroyable sur les pénuries d'électricité en Chine.

The Gulf Stream has weakened substantially in the past decades, as new data and studies show. Weather in the United States and Europe depends strongly on this ocean current, so it’s important we understand the ongoing changes and what they will mean for our weather in the future.

If Earth had a pulse, it might be The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – a swirl of ocean currents that carries tropical heat north towards polar waters. Over the past century this global heartbeat has eased, slowing to a speed not seen in more than a millennium. New research based on a range of indices has now bolstered views that the weakening isn't a trivial one, and critical transition is imminent.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a major ocean current system transporting warm surface waters toward the northern Atlantic, has been suggested to exhibit two distinct modes of operation. A collapse from the currently attained strong to the weak mode would have severe impacts on the global climate system and further multi-stable Earth system components. Observations and recently suggested fingerprints of AMOC variability indicate a gradual weakening during the last decades, but estimates of the critical transition point remain uncertain.

Climate scientists have detected warning signs of the collapse of the Gulf Stream, one of the planet’s main potential tipping points. The research found “an almost complete loss of stability over the last century” of the currents that researchers call the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The currents are already at their slowest point in at least 1,600 years, but the new analysis shows they may be nearing a shutdown.

A new study has revealed the top five countries that would survive the collapse of global civilisation. New Zealand (already home to a wealth of billionaire preppers) takes the top spot, with the other five entrants being Iceland, Ireland, Australia and the UK.

Study citing ‘perilous state’ of industrial civilisation ranks temperate islands top for resilience. New Zealand, Iceland, the UK, Tasmania and Ireland are the places best suited to survive a global collapse of society, according to a study.

La France est le deuxième pays qui croit le plus en une prophétie collapsologique, derrière l’Italie (71 %) mais devant le Royaume-Uni (56 %) et les États-Unis (52 %), selon les données d’une étude. Popularisée notamment par l’ouvrage de Jared Diamond, (“Effondrement : comment les sociétés décident de leur disparition ou de leur survie”), cette théorie « repose sur l’hypothèse selon laquelle le changement climatique, la diminution des ressources et l’extinction des espèces conduisent le monde à sa destruction à un rythme alarmant ».

Herrington, a Dutch sustainability researcher and adviser to the Club of Rome, has made headlines in recent days after she authored a report that appeared to show a controversial 1970s study predicting the collapse of civilization was – apparently – right on time. Coming amid a cascade of alarming environmental events, Herrington’s work predicted the collapse could come around 2040 if current trends held.

The Boiling Planet. The Pandemic. The Dying Planet. The Collapse. The Fascism. None of This is Remotely Normal.

A 1972 MIT study predicted that rapid economic growth would lead to societal collapse in the mid 21st century. A new paper shows we’re unfortunately right on schedule.

In 2018, a climate paper by Jem Bendell went viral, being downloaded over a million times. It helped to launch a worldwide movement of people seeking to reduce harm in the face of societal disruption and collapse. In this interview for Facing Future TV, Jem explains the concept of Deep Adaptation, how he developed the idea, what it means in practice, what he says to critics, and what his new book on the topic is about.

Le 12 mars 2019, j'ai eu le plaisir de me prêter au jeu d'un « Café Collapse » organisé à Grenoble, aux côtés de Vincent Mignerot. Le thème était la « collapsologie politique », la transposition dans le champ politique des questions liées à la problématique des risques d'effondrement.

The shocking collapse of a 12-storey building in the Miami area last week has raised questions as to the role played by the climate crisis, and whether the severe vulnerability of south Florida to the rising seas may lead to the destabilization of further buildings in the future.

Deep adaptation’ refers to the personal and collective changes that might help us to prepare for – and live with – a climate-influenced breakdown or collapse of our societies. It is a framework for responding to the terrifying realization of increasing disruption by committing ourselves to reducing suffering while saving more of society and the natural world. This is the first book to show how professionals across different sectors are beginning to incorporate the acceptance of likely or unfolding societal breakdown into their work and lives.

Analysis shows significant risk of cascading events even at 2C of heating, with severe long-term effects. Ice sheets and ocean currents at risk of climate tipping points can destabilise each other as the world heats up, leading to a domino effect with severe consequences for humanity, according to a risk analysis. Tipping points occur when global heating pushes temperatures beyond a critical threshold, leading to accelerated and irreversible impacts.

The world must rewild and restore an area the size of China to meet commitments on nature and the climate, says the UN, and the revival of ecosystems must be met with all the ambition of the space race. Existing conservation efforts are insufficient to prevent widespread biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, the global body has warned at the launch of the decade on ecosystem restoration, an urgent call for the large-scale revival of nature in farmlands, forests and other ecosystems.