As the saying goes, misfortunes rarely come alone. Attacks on food-related facilities and supply routes involving two of the world’s largest grain producers have coincided with a decline in global wheat production caused by drought and climate change.

According to estimates by the US Department of Agriculture, the combined production of the world’s seven largest wheat-exporting countries is likely to fall by 11 percent in the 2026-27 season.

Together, these developments pose a dual threat to global food security. The capacity to produce food is declining, while the ability to deliver it to importing markets is being disrupted, amid rising transport costs and the growing expense of securing shipments.

Residents often actively build their own informal information networks to help keep each other safe.

In my new book, I show that more than 90% of federal disaster funds went to roads, utilities and other standard infrastructure in the early 21st century, and less than 10% to libraries, parks, schools, places of worship and community centers, where neighbors check on one another and organize recovery.

Federal aid may go to rebuild some of these spaces, but it rarely pays to keep them open and running when communities need them most.

In another study, I found that Japanese communities with higher density of social infrastructure had half the number of deaths from a catastrophic tsunami in March 2011 compared to similar communities with fewer gathering spaces.

In my assessment, as federal aid becomes less predictable, these kinds of places people frequent often will have to carry us into the future. The communities that recover best from the next disaster may be the ones that kept their libraries open, their civic halls full of volunteers and their parks full of residents.

UN-backed report finds even temporary rises above Paris agreement target could cause harm to glaciers and polar ice sheets

The report, written by 80 scientists brought together by the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative (ICCI) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), found much of the damage would be permanent even if global temperatures were brought back down to 1.5C, such as glacier melt raising sea levels and threatening water security.

The report by Oil Change International concludes that existing oil, gas, and coal fields and mines will emit a combined 897 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, at a time when the remaining carbon budget for a 1.5°C future has dwindled to 130 billion tonnes.

This is what societal collapse looks like when it is imposed by humans.

Archived

• Using simple keyword searches on Chinese social media, Mongabay found hundreds of videos promoting the sale of endangered wildlife in Laos. Two major Chinese media companies have user agreements specifically barring the posting of content related to the illegal wildlife trade; a third does not have specific terms.
• Group tours leading Chinese tourists to wildlife markets in Laos are part of a recent boom in visitors following the opening of the China-Laos Railway and the lifting in pandemic travel restrictions.
• Experts say that Chinese media companies, and their counterparts in the West, must do more to keep their platforms free of content promoting the illegal wildlife trade.
• Warning: This story contains disturbing images of animals.

[...]

“The wet markets in Laos are like wildlife parks; however, while you can only look at the animals in our zoos back in China, the wild animals in Lao markets can be eaten.”

So proclaimed a Chinese vlogger as he toured a wildlife market. As he explored, he filmed himself showing off bear paws, various birds, dried rats, monitor lizards, and a live pangolin in his hands.

[...]

With the opening of the China-Laos Railway in 2021 and the lifting of China’s pandemic lockdowns in early 2023, Laos has become a top choice for Chinese tourists traveling abroad. According to the official Lao News Agency, nearly 1.16 million Chinese tourists arrived in the country in 2025.

The booming tourism has contributed to large-scale wildlife trafficking issues in Laos. In turn, Chinese social media has become a hotbed of promotions for illegal wildlife tours in Laos.

[...]

Global social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp have been widely criticized for failing to effectively crack down on the use of their platforms for wildlife trafficking. In the United States, where Facebook and WhatsApp’s parent company Meta is headquartered, laws shield media companies from liability for content posted by users, largely leaving the industry to regulate itself.

Chinese media companies are well known for their ability to carry out highly efficient censorship of certain topics: politics, pornography, disinformation, among others. Censorship mechanisms vary among Chinese Internet companies, but generally rely on tight human-AI collaborations to decide what content is allowed to be published.

China’s Wildlife Protection Law prohibits publishing advertisements for the sale of wild animals or illegal wild animal products, and notes specifically that online platforms are prohibited from providing services for such sales. However, the law does not specifically address the question of social media users filming illegal wildlife content.

The two major Chinese social media companies — Tencent, which owns WeChat, and ByteDance, which owns Douyin and is the original owner of TikTok — do specifically prohibit users of their platforms from posting content promoting the illegal wildlife trade. Another social media company widely used in China, Xiaohongshu, does not have similar provisions in its community guidelines.

[...]

[The author of these piece is Natasha Lindstaedt, a professor in the Department of Government at theUniversity of Essex.]

Archived

Authoritarian regimes have a history of keeping information about escalating disasters secret, even when it could harm their own citizens.

With more weather-related disasters caused by climate change predicted, the issue of whether governments are willing to act faster to share information with neighboring nations is an increasing concern.

The signs are not positive. After the recent massive floods on the Nepal-Tibet border, Chinese state media tightly controlled reporting with a focus on rescue attempts, rather than devastation. It also heavily censored unofficial accounts.

Handheld and security camera footage that showed the destruction at the border appears to have vanished from Chinese media platforms.

On this occasion and in the past, Nepal has accused China of not sharing information quickly about escalating dangers. But Beijing denied there was any disinformation, and said information was released in a “timely” way in this recent incident.

[...]

A new report says the Himalayas are approaching a tipping point in terms of the speed and risks of glacier melting and lack of monitoring – with millions of lives and livelihoods at risk. So this issue could not be more urgent.

[...]

The recent behavior of another world power, Russia, cast doubt on its willingness to be transparent during a disaster. When floods caused Siberia’s Ishim River to overflow in 2025, local officials hid much of the damage.

[...]

The severe consequences of such secrecy is apparent throughout recent history. In 1984, Ethiopian military dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam concealed and downplayed the catastrophic drought which led to a famine, in order to protect the country’s image. A strict media blackout was enforced, as Mengistu’s government refused to share data regarding the scale of the crisis or even acknowledge there was one.

Instead, he prioritized spending over US$100 million (£87 million) on celebrations to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Ethiopia’s Marxist revolution.

[...]

Autocracies are more likely to censor and monitor media platforms than democracies. For instance, China recently stopped non-official content being shared about the August 2026 floods.

Some autocracies also restrict access for international aid workers, independent scientists and observers.

[...]

Greater levels of secrecy has implications for disease. Natural disasters frequently lead to infectious disease outbreaks. A government’s refusal to report a climate-driven outbreak could prevent neighbouring states from taking protective measures.

Authoritarian regimes also frequently suppress or delay data regarding extreme weather, glacial melts or industrial accidents to protect the regime’s image. This can compromise the safety, stability and economy of their own citizens and, potentially, neighbouring countries too.

Ecosystems and disasters do not respect political borders. Information censorship and the suppression of data will make us all more vulnerable as climate change-driven incidents escalate.

or: how much should we worry?

The idea that ecosystems carry plenty of back-up, so if a small number of species become extinct there is little harm, has been greatly overestimated according to the largest global study of its kind.

The study, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, combined 423 published studies and 222,829 data points across land, freshwater, marine and estuarine ecosystems, producing a database more than twice the size of the largest previous effort and the largest of its kind.

Earth is warming faster than ever recorded, with scientists detecting a major acceleration in global temperatures since around 2015. A new study reveals that the warming rate has surged to approximately 0.35°C per decade, nearly double the average pace observed from 1970 to 2015. After removing natural climate fluctuations, researchers confirmed the acceleration with more than 98% statistical confidence.

This isn't about collapse in US politics, this is about us all being on the precipice of a much more general, brutal and longlasting global war.

Large global wars breakout, they are not carefully managed fires or designed plans, they are bonfires that grow so big the heat reaches everywhere inside the area that can burn...

Also, Trump does not always coward/chicken out, or rather he always cowards out/chickens out from avoiding destructive escalation by swallowing his ego...which is actually really dangerous for everybody.

The threat of nuclear weapons use here is not abstract, there is no evidence we should act like it is no matter what Trump/Vance says.

Canada’s already battered reputation on curbing climate emissions has become drastically worse under the leadership of Prime Minister Mark Carney according to a recent report card from Climate Action Tracker, approaching levels of inaction comparable to the “drill baby drill” Trump Administration

Report: https://www.scri.org.uk/s/Derailment-risk-report-v6.pdf

Two trends characterise the climate change predicament: accelerating progress, including a green technology revolution; and accelerating impacts and risks, which have been persistently underestimated. It is hoped that the former will prevail over the latter: that escalating climate impacts will reinforce action. But the opposite can also occur: climate consequences can distract from climate action. This will lead to more consequences and more distractions: a vicious cycle. We call this ‘derailment risk’.

This is a preview for what the rest of us are going to get if we do not stop this process of genocide NOW.

The unhappiness pertains to the insane workloads now normalised across the sector. “I didn’t have a weekend off for five months straight last year,” one worker reported in the NTEU report. But it is also related to what the university has become.

The problems aren’t caused by AI. As historian Nils Gilman says, “the arrival of large language models is acting as a catalytic solvent, titrating out the incoherence that was always there”. We might think of AI as a nucleation site where other issues crystallise and become visible.

Because of that, it may yet prove a focus of resistance, as the concept of “AI populism” implies. In early September, staff at the University of Sydney walked out on strike. One of their demands pertained to AI. Peter Chen, the union branch president, declared:

Higher education is the canary in the coalmine. Where we go on AI […] will travel through the rest of the economy.

That’s obviously true. The state of higher education should serve as a warning about the path we are hurtling down.

A great wholistic description of the way in which higher education in the US was collapsing even before AI came along to supercharge the process.