collapse

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24384952

Some links to Aurelien's older essays, useful for the background.

Things have really changed … The entire system of research and higher education in the United States is really under attack.”

It was a glimpse of the “historic” moment the world was facing, said Éric Berton, the university’s president. “More than 80 years ago, as France was under occupation and repression, America welcomed exiled researchers, offering them a helping hand and allowing them to keep science alive,” he said. “And now, in a sad reversal of history, some American scientists have arrived in France in search of a space for freedom, thought and research.”

People are moving, for sure,” said Lee. “A lot of top people have already moved to China. And China is laying out the red carpet. If people are getting an offer from Canada, people are moving to Canada.”

But I’m saying, as an environmentalist, we have failed to shift the narrative and we are still caught up in the same legal, economic and political systems.

For me, what we’ve got to do now is hunker down. The units of survival are going to be local communities, so I’m urging local communities to get together.

“While the world is debating the potential collapse of the AMOC in the North Atlantic, we’re seeing that the SMOC is not just weakening, but has reversed. This could have unprecedented global climate impacts.”,

I have been expecting such a move during his last term already. Not looking up is easier with blinders on.

From Somalia to mainland Europe, the past two years have seen some of the most ravaging droughts in recorded history, made worse by climate change, according to a UN-backed report.

Describing drought as a "silent killer" which "creeps in, drains resources, and devastates lives in slow motion" the report said it had exacerbated issues like poverty and ecosystem collapse.

This is a slow-moving global catastrophe, the worst I've ever seen," said co-author Dr Mark Svoboda, founding director of the US National Drought Mitigation Center.

Abstract

The Permian–Triassic Mass Extinction (PTME), the most severe crisis of the Phanerozoic, has been attributed to intense global warming triggered by Siberian Traps volcanism. However, it remains unclear why super-greenhouse conditions persisted for around five million years after the volcanic episode, with one possibility being that the slow recovery of plants limited carbon sequestration. Here we use fossil occurrences and lithological indicators of climate to reconstruct spatio-temporal maps of plant productivity changes through the PTME and employ climate-biogeochemical modelling to investigate the Early Triassic super-greenhouse. Our reconstructions show that terrestrial vegetation loss during the PTME, especially in tropical regions, resulted in an Earth system with low levels of organic carbon sequestration and restricted chemical weathering, resulting in prolonged high CO2 levels. These results support the idea that thresholds exist in the climate-carbon system whereby warming can be amplified by vegetation collapse.

Celebrated historian Sir Niall Ferguson calls it “Ferguson’s Law” – a rule of thumb under which “any great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defence risks ceasing to be a great power”.

In a February paper for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he is a senior fellow, Ferguson explained that in 2024, for the first time in nearly a century, the United States spent a bigger share of gross domestic product paying interest on its debt (3.1 per cent) than it did on defence (3 per cent).

Even commies like Dimon think its a worry /s

Many analysts believe a sovereign debt crisis is a matter of when, not if. About a month ago, JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon said a crack in the bond market was “going to happen”.

Hamilton believes it is coming sooner rather than later. “At some point in the next 10 years, there is going to be a reckoning where the music stops and the markets say, ‘well, we’re not going to fund this any more’,” he says. “You cannot keep going along this pathway.”

Even if such a collapse doesn’t happen on its own, says Hamilton, the US debt burden leaves it in a precarious position to deal with a crisis, such as a future pandemic, war with China, or some sort of crisis arising from the advent of artificial intelligence technology

A glaring omission for me is climate change isn't even mentioned