u/LastWeekInCollapse

An American heat wave, aftermath from Venezuela’s twin earthquakes, record new temperatures across many European countries, warnings about AI and the global economy, and conflicts around the globe.

Last Week in Collapse: June 28-July 4, 2026

This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter compiling some of the most important, timely, soul-crushing, ironic, amazing, or otherwise must-see/can’t-look-away moments in Collapse. You made it more than halfway through 2026.

This is the 236th weekly newsletter. The June 21-27, 2026 edition is available here if you missed it last week. These newsletters are also available (with images) every Sunday in your email inbox by signing up to the Substack version.

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As Côte D’Ivoire’s torrential rainy season continues, authorities say 59+ people have been killed by flooding since May, alongside 13+ others in Ghana. According to Ghana’s President, Tuesday’s rain set a new record for daily precipitation in Accra, at 140mm (5.5 inches)—surpassing the previous one-day record of 56mm.

Damage Report from Venezuela, where a pair of earthquakes struck on 24 June: tens of thousands were injured, and 60,000+ buildings damaged or destroyed. Official death counts record 2,950+ fatalities, a number likely to rise in the coming weeks. 45,000 people are still unaccounted for. This photo essay and the accompanying stories liken the structural damage to a war zone.

Kashmir’s lakes are shrinking, or vanishing altogether, as they face pressures from expanding human settlements, less frequent precipitation, and pollution runoff entering the bodies of water. 315 natural lakes in Kashmir have disappeared in the past 50 years, leaving just 382 remaining. Fish populations in the surviving lakes have also dropped considerably.

Much of the eastern and southern United States baked under a strong heat wave through the week, with temperatures from Maine to Texas well over 90 °F (32 °C). Some places saw temps over 100 °F, and with high humidity, a heat index of over 115 °F (46 °C). The Wet Bulb Globe Temperature “WBGT observed during this event exceeded the previous record by an exceptionally large margin.” Over 60M people were under high heat advisories, and 130M at risk of “heat risk.” In areas with large & new data centers, the strain on electrical grids tested old infrastructure, and caused some data centers to temporarily switch to diesel generators.

The WHO confirmed that over 3,700 people across Europe died from June 21-28, as a result of the blistering heat wave across the continent, with over 1,000 in France alone. Other reports say that 1,000+ people also died across Spain during the heat wave. Sydney finished their hottest June since records began in 1859.

Although the disintegration of the ozone layer was not known to humans until the 1980s, a study in PNAS concluded that we could have detected damage to the ozone layer as early as 1957, had we applied our scientific tools to the task. They write that “a clear human influence on the stratospheric ozone layer began nearly 70 y ago….human-caused ozone depletion was likely identifiable as early as 1957 in the tropical upper stratosphere.” They identified carbon tetrachloride as the primary cause of ozone depletion in days, when the chemical was used for dry-cleaning, degreasing, and fire extinguishers since the ~1930s.

An upcoming study on buildings in Sydney, Australia examined building codes for a world heading towards 5 °C of warming in extreme climate scenarios. They concluded that such an increase would “exceed current typical and extreme heat conditions” for some upper-level apartments for 4-7 weeks of the year, inundating residents with heat stress unless air conditioning or other cooling practices were used. They say “52.7% of apartments in {New South Wales} fail overheating criteria, with average overheating hours projected to double by 2050 alongside increased nighttime exposure.”

A study in The Cryosphere looked at Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier (PIG), and concluded that “anthropogenic trends in forcing enhanced the retreat of PIG since the 1940s and are responsible for just under one fifth of the retreat over the industrial era…equivalent to an excess grounding-line retreat of 4.3 km.”

The World Bank is dropping its pledge to commit 45% of its lendings to “projects with climate co-benefits.” The reason? Basically, pressure from U.S. government officials dissatisfied with the ESG & DEI initiatives the institution was pursuing. Meanwhile, in northern Quebec, and elsewhere, 100+ wildfires are burning, mostly sparked by lightning. And sea surface temperature anomalies in the mid-Pacific El Niño region remain at record highs for this time of year; we have already seen new heat records for SSTs globally at the start of summer 2026. The UN is warning that El Niño will become strong between now and September.

All-time record temperatures were recorded at Russia’s Arctic city Norilsk (pop: 175,000), which felt temps just over 32 °C (90 °F). Switzerland’s shrinking Moming Glacier is basically snowless, and unlikely to get any more snow for months. About a week ago, as Europe’s merciless heat wave began to recede, Germany felt a record warm night, at 29.4 °C (85 °F); it was supposedly also the hottest night ever recorded above 50 °N in latitude. They were not alone: Poland, Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia also set new national daytime records, at various temps above 40 °C. World Weather Attribution says that “this heatwave is the most severe ever recorded” in Europe.

Morocco felt its hottest June night last Monday, at 32.4 °C. Parts of Mexico and Costa Rica felt record warm nights for June. Many Central American countries also felt new July minimums at over 30 °C. It will not surprise anyone to hear that England set a new record for its warmest June on record, while France ended its hottest week in recorded history.

Storms killed two across Romania and Austria. Part of Beijing reportedly saw 65mm of rain fall in a single hour…a bit further south, a city felt 92mm fall in one hour. Another heat wave is beginning to close in on Britain, predicted to bring temps of 34 °C later this week.

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As of Thursday, some 1,400+ people have been infected, and 438 killed, by the Ebola outbreak centered in the DRC. Medical trials are underway for potential treatments; there is currently no vaccine or treatment for this strain of Ebola, called Bundibugyo. But large-scale aid cuts, fear, and eclectic spiritual beliefs have complicated responses; the U.S. has not released about $2B in funds earmarked by Congress. Experts say the worst of the outbreak is still ahead of us. And a local spread of Marburg in Uganda was also reported.

The next financial crisis may be sparked by AI bubbles, according to industry experts, because massive debts have been taken out to turbocharge cutting-edge data centers and algorithms that our economy has become increasingly dependent upon. American banks in particular have seen private capital firms invest almost $200B when compared to China’s $16B, or the EU’s $14B. With public & more transparent sources, the sums grow much higher. But billionaires saw their wealth surge by an average of 25% from April 2025-2026, and the global total of billionaires rose 13% in the same time. The 425-page AI Index Report from April details some of these trends, and is stuffed with graphics & data.

>“Global corporate AI investment more than doubled in 2025. Private investment grew fastest at 127.5% and now accounts for 60% of the total….The United States continues to lead in global private AI investment, committing 23 times more than China….Generative AI is now used in at least one business function at 70% of organizations….AI has moved from an emerging technology to a key strategic priority….In 2025, total investment reached $581.69 billion, marking a 129.9% increase from the previous year. Private investments represented the largest share of activity with $344.66 billion, up 127.5% from 2024….AI’s role in education is expanding faster than the data needed to track it…” -selections

Margin debt is money that an investor borrows so he/she can buy securities, using their other investments as collateral. U.S. margin debt is at record highs ($1.4T), and growing still, as increasingly desperate investors seek ways to make money anyway they can. Some are using margin debt to bet on options on a leveraged ETF which itself has a value based on underlying assets like stocks or bond. Most of these bets are on Big Tech in some shape: chip manufacturers, SpaceX, etc. Some of the funds are large enough to push the price of some assets upwards—for a fraction of the day in which these trades are being made. What will happen when the reckoning comes, and a lot of big players have their debts called in?

The Bank for International Settlements—a sort of “Bank for Central Banks” representing 95% of the world’s GDP across 63 countries—published its 133-page Annual Report last week, and they write that AI (and the attendant investment in U.S. tech companies) has been a large stroke of luck that has kept an otherwise unimpressive economy growing. The still-high stock market helped continue trade flows between the U.S. and Asia, even though tariff chaos, fiscal & financial mismanagement, and the Iran War’s many consequences continue unfolding across the planet. They warn about potential market panic, rising inflation, swelling government debts, and organized hostility to AI and what it portends for the people of earth. The prospect of stablecoins coming in the not-too-distant future are not reassuring, either.

>“...wave of optimism about AI spurred a surge in capital expenditure on AI infrastructure, lifting investment in the United States with spillovers along global supply chains….Rising energy prices once again pushed inflation well above central banks’ targets, echoing the post-Covid-19 inflation surge. Although the recent conflict in the Middle East seems to have abated, the economic effects of the Hormuz disruption may linger as the full restoration of physical energy supply takes time….Increasingly opaque financing of AI activities, high leverage in core markets and the growing footprint of private credit further undermine the resilience of financial markets. The current tension between exuberant risk appetite and elevated macroeconomic risks could unwind abruptly….With already high debt levels, governments face rising demands for spending amid energy shocks and geopolitical tensions…” -excerpts from the executive summary

An empty container ship ran aground in the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday. But transits are generally increasing through the Strait—but mostly heading out of it. Who wants to crew or insure a ship that might get stuck in the Gulf for three months? Empty oil & LNG tankers are reluctant to pass into the region, aware that it might soon be closed again.

U.S. tariffs coming later in July are set to increase prices on a range of goods, which prompted companies to buy now and stockpile for what may come. This, in conjunction with still high (but declining) oil prices pushed freight prices to 2-year highs. The Trump Administration is withdrawing from a North American trade agreement that they negotiated eight years ago.

The U.S. has now confirmed 31 cases of New World Screwworm in domestic wildlife, mostly in Texas but a few in New Mexico. A study of antibodies in about 3,000 Americans across the U.S. South concluded that humans there are much more likely to develop alpha-gal syndrome, the tick-spread disease that makes one allergic to red meats.

Research into university students across the OECD’s 38 member states found that the bloc has an average of 8% of students reading at the level of a 10-year old, or below. 9% on average had a grasp of mathematics equivalent to a ten-year old, or worse. These are not college-aged students; they are college students.

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Pakistani airstrikes against reportedly Taliban sites took out at least 36 people across Afghanistan last Sunday, injuring 160+ more. The Taliban responded with drones that were mostly intercepted; several people were injured. Some say the two countries are trapped in an escalation ladder which they cannot neatly exit.

Southern-Central Sudan’s city, El-Obeid (pop: ~500,000), is the latest battleground between government forces and the RSF rebels. Average drone killings across the large settlement amount to about two per day, plus injured. The population has swelled by about 100,000 IDPs from around Sudan, and government forces are building structures around the city in expectation of another grueling siege. Food and fuel has become much more expensive, preventing many from leaving but also pricing them out of staying—for what could be a bloody conclusion like the ethnic cleansing of Al Fashir last autumn.

Five people were slain in a mass shooting in a city in northern Germany. In Thailand, a boy drove into a procession of monks, killing nine Buddhist monks. A roof Collapse in Pakistan killed 14. Separatist rebels in Indonesia’s half of Papua Island killed an American pilot and burned his plane, which was allegedly used to support Indonesian military personnel.

18+ months of protests in Serbia pushed their President to announce his resignation—but that hasn’t quelled the protests, which began following the Collapse of a rail station in Novi Sad (pop: 375,000). The President, Vucic, is expected to assume the role of PM once he’s resigned from the Presidency. Meanwhile, a joint China-Russia military drill momentarily flew over South Korea’s air defense identification zone, a buffer zone near their airspace. Chinese naval vessels continue to trespass into waters claimed by Japan and also by the Philippines.

The Trump administration has restored access to Anthropic’s “Fable 5” model of Claude, and also lifted prohibitions on certain government agencies that prevented them from accessing their ultra-powerful model, Mythos. The administration also classified an Ecuadorean gang, the “Chone Killers,” as a foreign terror organization.

Colombia’s recent presidential runner-up, who lost by about 1% in the June 21 election, is threatening “peaceful civil disobedience” unless the conservative winner accedes to several of his demands. In Durban (pop: 3.3M), South Africa, protests against immigrants continued. Another attack and kidnapping in rural Nigeria saw at least three people killed by—and ten people later rescued from—Boko Haram fighters.

A conservative Catholic sect defied the Pope and appointed four bishops without Pope Leo XIV’s approval, sparking a crisis of authority in the Church. The so-called “schismatic act” was a long time coming; the rival group formed following the Vatican II conferences in the 1960s, and has since grown to include 750+ priests, hundreds of brothers/nuns, and about 600,000 followers worldwide. The Pope responded by excommunicating all priests of the rival society, and all lay members who “adhere formally” to the group.

Russian strikes killed 12 people on Monday between three large Ukrainian cities. Continuous Ukrainian strikes on Russian fuel refineries has brought Russia into an unexpected energy crisis, and fuel rationing has begun across several Russian oblasts. A possibly-Russian bombing in Monaco wounded a Ukrainian multi-millionaire and his family. Ukraine made a deal to purchase 16 Saab fighter jets, beginning in 2027.

Early morning strikes on Kyiv killed at least 20 people, and wounding 80+ more. Ukraine struck a shipping terminal in St. Petersburg on Friday night. A think tank’s 12-page brief claims that the full-scale invasion has resulted in, so far, over 2,000,000 wounded and/or dead across Russia & Ukraine. Russian casualties are estimated at over 30,000 per month in 2026.

The U.S. is again still considering a return to full-scale hostilities against Iran if the two parties’ memorandum of understanding is jeopardized. Iran is intransigent on wanting to charge transit fees on ships of all kinds. The reality of drone warfare and mass cheap production is forcing the U.S. into a new production style for its munitions—McMissiles, and anything else that can be produced simply, cheaply, and in colossal quantities. They say “attritional, high-intensity warfare is a game of numbers” and industrial output may be the determining factor on the battlefield of tomorrow today. Iran is allegedly preparing for a mass casualty event at the long-delayed funeral of the late Ayatollah. The U.S. House voted against limiting support to Israel’s operations in Lebanon.

In Gaza, Monday strikes by the IDF killed eight Palestinians. It has been over 1,000 days since the October 7th attack of 2023, and there has been no end to the War that erupted. The ceasefire has proven to be sham, even if news outlets continue to call it such. The total number of dead Palestinians is reportedly over 73,000, while Israel suffered 2,000+ deaths. The number of wounded, sick, or displaced is much higher. The Board of Peace has been unsuccessful in stopping the War. Israel holds about 70% of Gaza’s territory, and the Israel-supported militias in Gaza have not yet made much progress into supplanting Hamas. The world’s attention shifted to Iran, and then got tired and moved on to something else.

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Select comments/threads from the subreddit last week suggest:

-COVID has cast a long shadow over society, according to this weekly observation from the capital of the U.S. state, Indiana. People are rude, housing is increasingly unavailable and unaffordable, the weather is incredibly hot, and people still have debts to pay.

-There are some serious Collapse aggregator-thinkers, and one of them made a self-post about his website, https://barrysmiler.com. It’s a pretty thorough website, if you have the time to do a deep dive into his scenarios, research, and perspectives. The guy who made the site is about 70 years old, judging from his About Me. Comprehensive posts like these tend to fly under the radar on r/Collapse, with few upvotes compared to memes and stories of the day.

Got any feedback, questions, comments, upvotes, reports, gossip, Love Island predictions (ugh), World Cup Polymarket bets, etc.? Last Week in Collapse is also posted on Substack; if you don’t want to check r/collapse every Sunday, you can receive this newsletter sent to an email inbox every weekend. As always, thank you for your support. What did I miss this week?

Two strong earthquakes devastate Venezuela, unbelievably hot temperatures rolled across Europe, AI & data centers become a greater problem, and crimes against humanity continue.

Last Week in Collapse: June 21-27, 2026

This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter compiling some of the most important, timely, soul-crushing, ironic, amazing, or otherwise must-see/can’t-look-away moments in Collapse.

This is the 235th weekly newsletter. The June 14-20, 2026 edition is available here if you missed it last week. These newsletters are also available (with images) every Sunday in your email inbox by signing up to the Substack version. Last Week in Collapse has been around for 11 months longer than ChatGPT has been available.

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A catastrophic 7.2 earthquake hit Venezuela on Wednesday, followed by a 7.5 quake soon after. The second shaking lasted for over a minute in some places, bringing buildings down around the epicenter, which was about 160 km (100 miles) west of Caracas (metro pop: 5M), although Caracas’ suburbs were also hard hit. Over 900 people have been confirmed dead and thousands injured, but observers say the real number of dead may stretch beyond 10,000. Almost 50,000 people are unaccounted for. This photo essay , and this one , document some of the Collapsed structures and search efforts in the aftermath; or you can watch this before/after satellite image comparison to see the damage writ large.

A vicious & unprecedented heat wave rolled through Western Europe, leading to at least 40 drowning deaths in France, mostly among young people seeking relief from the heat. Temperatures across France and far beyond surpassed 40 °C (104 °F); Paris shattered old heat records, the UK hit its all-time hottest June day, as did Switzerland, Germany set its all-time heat record at 41.5 °C (106.7 °F) and Belgium and the Netherlands and Luxeumbourg. Experts say the heat wave was nearly impossible just 50 years ago. And as bad as it is, the worst is yet to come.

London set a record high dew point on Tuesday. One of Svalbard’s islands shattered its previous June record by over 9 °C, and the Barents Sea saw record low sea ice for this time of the year. Ireland set lots of new June records on Thursday, while Canada also set some new records in stations in its Arctic region. The state of Sinaloa in Mexico saw record warm temperatures. Lake Powell is at its record low, and falling every hour.

Another article on Antarctica’s mighty Thwaites Glacier (also the world’s widest glacier) profiles the rapid melt experienced since around 2000. Experts are concerned that the seawater surrounding the Thwaites is contributing to its melt, that the ice shelf fronting the Thwaites is unstable, that glacial fracturing is bad & accelerating, and that the overall situation is “going to lead to a rapid and catastrophic loss of ice from West Antarctica” towards the end of the century. If not sooner.

The summary of a Spanish-language study on climate change and migration found the two loose phenomena not as directly linked as assumed—though the data was less than conclusive and fraught with complexities. Sudden, large-scale events like flooding and wildfires tended to drive more international migration when compared to the slow-burn processes like Drought, topsoil erosion, groundwater depletion, etc. Climate migration tends to start as internal displacement before proceeding to international, though other dynamics like state size, economy, languages, can complicate this. The researchers conclude “that research on climate change and migration has not yet achieved sufficient consensus, due to the relatively recent nature of the discussion, the scarcity of empirical research, and the difficulty to achieve dialogue between different disciplines.”

A study on carbon sequestration emphasizes that dry air will reduce tree growth, perhaps by as much as 30%. In related news, the website www.phys.org , where I find many articles and studies for these weekly newsletters, is creeping towards limiting access to websites using AdBlockers. Additional pop-ups suggest that the website may be paywalled in the not-too-distance future.

The Himalayas are seeing coal pollution pass through the mountains in summers, carrying smog from India as far as Tibet. The associated study confirms that heavy metals are also travelling in the pollution, spoiling the once untouched mountain glaciers. A study in iScience proposes a new hierarchy of sustainability “under conditions of accelerating socio-ecological risk and political backsliding.”

Another new study discusses marine heat waves, which from “July 2023 to June 2024, global mean surface air temperatures met or exceeded 1.5 °C above the 1850–1900 pre-industrial baseline for 12 consecutive months—an unprecedented event in over 170 years of instrumental records….In a climate system fully stabilized at 1.5 °C global warming, the globally averaged surface ocean is projected to equilibrate near 1.06 °C above pre-industrial levels.” They also identified 201 marine “ecological impact events” during the 2023-2024 period, mostly in the second half of the year, 98% of which were associated with abnormally hot sea surface temperatures, and 52% which “involved mass mortality of marine taxa.”

As Typhoon Mekhhala moved past Japan, the government evacuated some 2M residents; at least one person was killed by the storm. A storm in New Zealand, with winds measured in some places as 150kph, cut power to thousands of homes. Equatorial Pacific Ocean temps are above average, and rising, from the nascent El Niño….far above, 1.75 °C above.

Part of Poland is warning about potential wildfires after moisture levels dropped below 10% in several forests. Boston is facing its driest year on record—for the first six months, anyway. India saw flooding in Arunachal Pradesh kill one; a few others are still missing. Southern China and parts of Southeast Asia are seeing new June temperatures break old records.

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Ebola cases in the DRC from the recent outbreak topped 1,000 on Monday, with 254+ confirmed deaths. It is now the second-largest Ebola outbreak on record, and about 300 people with Ebola have vanished in the DRC somewhere. A case was also confirmed in France in a man who had recently left Africa; the case is the first outside of Africa since the outbreak popped off.

A U.S. Supreme Court judgment blocked lawsuits against Monsanto concerning a popular cancer-causing pesticide. Iraq is threatening to leave OPEC unless the oil cartel raises its daily quota on oil extraction. Sri Lanka (pop: 23M) is grappling with a dengue outbreak that is causing 600+ cases each day, with over 50,000 cases nationwide since January.

Reports of some UK police engaging in predictive policing based on massive data collection and AI yielded mixed results, but police are still turbocharging their surveillance state. Britain is also ordering the removal of air conditioning units during their historic heat wave. And the UK is doubling tariffs on steel imports, pushing the price of building ever higher.

A hedge fund investor who bet smartly during the 2008-09 financial crisis is now shorting private credit markets, anticipating a financial reckoning. Tech companies experienced a selloff earlier in the week, which also cut Elon Musk’s fortune from over $1.2T to a mere $946B. When SpaceX saw a massive selloff and revaluation on Monday, the corporation set a new record for the greatest one-day loss in stock market history: over $400B.

Hormuz transits are scaling up a bit since the announcement of an Iran-U.S. ceasefire, though daily transits are still far below their pre-War totals of ~120 per day. An explosion at Qatar's largest LNG facility—officially labeled an accident but almost certainly a consequence of Iran's attacks—killed 13 people and wounded at least 66.

The Five Eyes coalition—the United States, Australia, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand—is demanding that governments “act now” to prepare for (and prevent, if possible) a serious and dangerous cybersecurity exploit, caused by bad actors using super-advanced AI models to harm businesses and governments. The full joint statement, rather short on details, posits that such a disaster may be coming faster than expected. “Frontier Al models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. The timeline is not years, it is months.”

A large study of Nepal’s kids found child health backsliding into malnutrition in the aftermath of large USAID cuts. More bird flu cases have been confirmed in Australia, which was until recently the last continent untouched by bird flu. The Central African Republic declared a cholera outbreak after 24 people died from the bacterial infection.

The U.S. is speeding up the construction of ten nuclear power plants to get them operational by the mid-2030s, in anticipating of huge needs from data centers and consumers. A report on data centers worldwide found a supermajority of them are exposed to climate hazards which they help fuel through their rising energy demands. Meanwhile, India’s data centers have multiplied about 4x in the past 5 years, and are expected to multiply another 6x by 2030—with the attendant energy & water crises in tow. You can’t drink AI….but AI might drink you dry.

>"Approximately 54% of global data center capacity operates in markets facing elevated chronic heat or drought stress, while 79% is exposed to significant acute hazards such as flood, wind, or wildfire....climate risk remains underpriced….Acute hazards such as flooding, wind, and wildfire drive rapid system disruption. Physical damage or upstream grid failure can cascade across systems, forcing a shift to backup power, destabilizing cooling, and ultimately interrupting IT operations. These are system-level outages, not isolated component failures….The industry is concentrating some of its largest and fastest-growing hubs in some of the riskiest locations. Northern Virginia, Johor, and Marseille all sit in the highest exposure tier…" -selections from the report

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The nigh-ungovernable UK is replacing its PM for the 7th time in 10 years. Zimbabwe (pop: 17M) passed some reforms further entrenching the President’s power and term of office. Protests erupted in Kenya on the anniversary of the country’s deadly 2024 riots, in which at least 60 people were slain. Reports suggest that Israel has sent about fifty soldiers with Ethiopian heritage into intelligence positions inside Somaliland, since March.

Off-and-on anti-immigrants marches through Johannesburg, South Africa, at times attacking foreigners, at other times intimidating them with a Zulu chant, “Mabahambe” (‘they must go’). European countries are planning larger scale deportations of migrants to “return hubs” in……Rwanda and Uzbekistan, aiming for human deliveries there by 2027. Peru’s recent leftist candidate who narrowly lost the country’s presidential election is refusing to acknowledge the result, and blaming the right-wing winner of rigging votes from the diaspora abroad. Tanzania suspended political rallies across the country, alleging that they posed a threat to national security.

Strict punishments are being levied by the Taliban against government workers using smartphones. Observers say the new ban on smartphones presages a country-wide ban, but enforcement varies by province, city, and individual enforcers. Attackers on Monday killed at least 20 people in rural Nigeria. Tension continues growing over India’s refusal to give Pakistan water through the Indus Waters Treaty.

South Korea’s military is smartly planning to train 500,000 “drone warriors” from across its military to prepare them for the future present conflicts.

Sudan’s rebel opposition has begun issuing its own currency in areas controlled by the RSF, which has its roots in the ethnic militia, the Janjaweed. The RSF are also surrounding el-Obeid, a city in south-central Sudan where UN officials are warning of “mass atrocities” looming. Another report talked about >!violent & ethnically motivated gang rape by RSF fighters!< that resulted in the deaths of at least 13 people.

Ukraine's frontline city Kostyantynivka (pre-War pop: 67,000; current pop: ~2,500) is being surrounded and invaded by Russian forces. Its strategically positioned land is being contested, and would open up parts of the unoccupied Donbas region to more Russian conquest. President Putin is meanwhile still pressuring Belarus to join its War against Ukraine. Yet the Americans say Ukraine has seized the initiative and is winning the War—for the time being, anyway. Reports from the frontline indicate that new Russian soldiers arriving at the deep front lines have a life expectancy of about 30 minutes, before they’re killed by a drone. Ukraine hit Crimea’s power grid on Wednesday, sending the peninsula’s cities into a power outage. Other Ukrainian strikes hit a military factory in Volgograd. Economic pains and discontent among Russian military elites is also coming closer to unseating Vladimir Putin—or so they say.

Another independent UN commission determined that Israel is committing a series of serious crimes, including starving the people of Gaza, committing torture, genocide, and crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, Israel claims to have trapped dozens of Hezbollah soldiers in an underground base & within tunnels in southern Lebanon; other deadly operations are ongoing throughout the region. The Israeli defense minister has again emphasized that IDF forces will remain in southern Lebanon, regardless of whatever U.S.-Iran talks hash out.

Negotiations between the U.S. and Iran continued for another week, apparently not getting much closer to a proper agreement that could please both sides. Iran has indicated that nuclear inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) might be able to proceed at advanced stages of the talks, and the U.S. removed its sanctions of Iran’s oil industry for 60 days. When Iran struck a vessel near the Omani coast, and hit Bahrain, U.S. forces struck some Iranian sites used for their drones and missiles. The mostly symbolic 50-48 passing of a resolution in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday demanding that President Trump cease military operations against Iran had little impact. Nobody knows if the Iran War is up or down, if operations are waning or still escalating. And we’re not supposed to.

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Things to watch for next week include:

↠ NOAA is predicting extreme heat across the American midwest for next week, stretching from South Carolina into South Dakota. Extreme temps, with the heat index expected at 115 °F (46 °C) in some places, may be felt even into the July 4th weekend.

↠ Tomorrow is Switzerland’s “Glacier Loss Day”, the day after which Switzerland’s glaciers have lost all the snow & ice they accumulated over the winter. From now until the cold weather returns, every day represents additional loss of their ancient glaciers.

Select comments/threads from the subreddit last week suggest:

-This year’s El Niño is a long way from those 30 years ago. This thread compares the two…and we’re still in the first month of El Niño.

-Collapse has landed, and the people—at least on Reddit—are aware of the reality. This popular recent thread from r/AskReddit, one of many in the past month, crowdsources some likely events coming in the next 5 years. The AI takeover and total erosion of trust, wet-bulb, breadbasket failure, biodiversity breakdown, and more. A similar thread from r/answers gets similar results.

Got any feedback, questions, comments, upvotes, reports, heat warnings, topographical maps, juicy memes, etc.? Last Week in Collapse is also posted on Substack; if you don’t want to check r/collapse every Sunday, you can receive this newsletter sent to an email inbox every weekend. As always, thank you for your support. What did I miss this week?

A ceasefire made (and soon broken) in Iran, more temperature records sweep the globe, a worsening Ebola pandemic threatens to spread, and Ukraine mounts a major refinery attack in Moscow. This summer is going to be a scorcher.

Last Week in Collapse: June 14-20, 2026

This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter compiling some of the most important, timely, soul-crushing, ironic, amazing, or otherwise must-see/can’t-look-away moments in Collapse.

This is the 234th weekly newsletter. The June 7-13, 2026 edition is available here if you missed it last week. These newsletters are also available (with images) every Sunday in your email inbox by signing up to the Substack version.

In Memoriam: The Major Oak, an approximately 1,200-year old tree in Nottinghamshire, England, has perished. The colossal tree was said to have been the most famous tree on earth, and experts say that tourism to the mammoth oak, along with Drought and heat eaves, led the tree to its death. The soil underneath was also reportedly seriously lacking in microbes. In death, the Major Oak will continue to play a role in the local ecosystem.

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How much damage do the Top 10% wealthiest people on earth cause to the environment? A study in Communications Sustainability found that the “annual damages owed by the global 10% to be $1.7–$5.7 trillion, equivalent to $2.3k–$7.5k per person (in $2017).” Biodiversity loss and climate change account for about 90% of their damages. “The top 10% of consumers are disproportionately responsible for transgressing planetary boundaries, causing one to two thirds of the overshoot of any given boundary.” Rich Americans were found to be the greatest contributors to environmental damage.

UNICEF claims that almost all children worldwide are affected by at least one "climate hazard," while about half of them face at least three different, overlapping hazards through the year. A study summary claims that the impact of reforestation on precipitation varies depending on whether the future is high or low warming. The scientists write, "under low warming, reforestation slightly increases global water but makes wet regions wetter, worsening water inequality. Under high warming, the same reforestation reduces global water availability....In a hotter world, planting trees may come with hidden water costs."

A 6.7 earthquake in Indonesia sent thousands fleeing, and left at least one person dead. Spain’s weather agency said 2025 was their 3rd warmest year on record, and last year broke 25 daily heat records for the country. The Equatorial Pacific Ocean’s temperatures hit at least 19 consecutive days of record warm temperatures, and as El Nino ramps up, this is expected to continue.

A gigaton of CO2 emissions equals one billion metric tons. Currently the world produces some 35-40 Gt of Co2 each year. The summary of a paywalled study suggests that the carbon emissions from AI over the next five and a half years will equal almost 3 Gt, and that AI will not begin to have a net negative carbon impact until around 2032. The researchers call this phenomenon a “carbon valley”: the period where AI still produces lots of emissions before (theoretically) eventually “AI will {somehow} save energy and cut carbon emissions across global industries.”

A study in Science Advances determined that CO2 emissions from melting permafrost north of 30° N are probably larger and earlier than previously expected. "Under high-emission pathways, the northern soil carbon balance shifts from a sink to a source of 32 petagrams of carbon {by 2100?}." One petagram is 1,000 Gigatonnes. China is currently the world's largest annual CO2 emitter, at 13.1 Gt. Scientists expect the region to shift into becoming a carbon source around 2050. So, deep permafrost carbon is probably a larger climate risk than many current models assume; Arctic warming could accelerate climate change more and faster than expected.

Though it appears impossible to prevent the forthcoming AMOC Collapse, some distinguished scientists are saying that we need to dramatically improve AMOC monitoring systems so we can at least get a better understanding of the crisis that lies ahead.

A remote part of Tasmania is seeing an “indestructible doomsday device” installed to monitor and record events on earth’s path to Collapse. They are calling it “Earth’s Black Box,” and it was announced in 2021, though it is only now beginning to be installed. The Box’s website claims that the Box “will record every step we take towards this {climate} catastrophe….The purpose of the device is to provide an unbiased account of the events that lead to the demise of the planet, hold accountability for future generations, and inspire urgent action.”

Fish dieoffs have been recorded from Minnesota to Arizona, attributed to Drought causing low oxygen levels in bodies of water. Though events like these happen every year, biologists say they have begun occurring earlier in the year than usual, and say that they will happen earlier and more regularly in future years.

Sydney, Australia saw ten consecutive days of weather topping 20 °C for the first time in 107 years. Record warm temps in Greenland. Morocco felt a new record minimum temperature at 31.4 °C (88.5 °F); Mongolia, too at 26.9 °C. Meanwhile southern Africa felt new daily highs across a few countries, Panama tied its hottest June night; so did St. Thomas in the Caribbean.

Pakistan felt its hottest night at 700m elevation, with 36 °C. Southern Thailand set a new June temperature record. Lima (metro pop: 12M), Peru saw a new hottest night for the year at 22.5 °C……and it’s winter. Global water vapor is rising, and expected to rise further by November, possibly later surpassing records set in 2024. A paywalled study in Nature Climate Change says that “Climate change may soon cause a catastrophic loss of global biodiversity….climate-related local extinctions were significantly more frequent among temperate (49% of surveyed species) than tropical species (33%).”

Where have all the monsoon rains gone? For the first two weeks of India’s historic monsoon season, rainfalls are down 41%, or 30cm below average. Some meteorologists say the monsoon rains could be linked to the AMOC Collapse (impacts on the mid-latitude jet stream may shift India’s rainfall northward); others say it’s partially the result of El Nino. This is India’s weakest monsoon in 11 years, and Mumbai’s driest June in some twenty years.

Despite the environmental challenges threatening humanity and global biodiversity worsening in the past decade, U.S. Democrats are pulling back from environmental policies in the wake of their 2024 election autopsy, which allegedly suggests that affordability and voters’ individual finances are more important to them.

Antarctica has been facing three weeks of record temperatures; a large section of ice that usually forms in West Antarctica failed to materialize this year. Some think it will never appear again; Antarctic sea ice is at its second-lowest on record for mid-June. On the opposite side of the planet, a British geoengineering attempt has been playing out: deep sea water, pumped up and onto snow-covered ice in the Arctic, has been freezing nearly instantly. This was done on a section of the Arctic in the winter, and the results are surprisingly optimistic: scientists say they have added an extra 7-10 days worth of ice on top of part of the ice, reflecting sunlight back and delaying the polar melt.

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Scientists say bird flu was responsible for the deaths of 13,000+ baby seals in Australia. A case of suspected bird flu in Western Australia marks the first recorded case of H5 bird flu in Australia; all 7 continents have now seen cases of avian flu.

SpaceX, which recently set the record for largest IPO, saw its value drop $620B in about two days. And a rule change on investments allowed SpaceX to join index funds ahead of schedule, essentially forcing millions of investors to tie their long-time retirement accounts into SpaceX and AI companies. When the AI bubble pops, it’s going to take a lot of retirement accounts down with it.

While more cases of the New World Screwworm are found in Texas, some entomologists are theorizing how far the parasite might be able to travel this summer. Extreme scenarios predict that, this year, it could travel as far as Virginia and Missouri, while more conservative estimates hypothesize that several generations of the fly could travel into Georgia and southern Florida.

He who controls the water controls the future—but not just because we need water to stay alive. Water has become the currency of power for cooling data centers, expanding at record speed to handle all your urgent AI slop, and the computations for our surveillance states. The countries that play host to the massive server farms (namely the United States, followed by China) also get to set the conditions for other countries. Though Europe has abundant water in its northern regions, electricity is expensive, and a maze of regulations is obstructing development, benefiting its people but eroding its strategic leverage in a more AI-dependent world. In fact, opposition to data centers is becoming a potent issue for voters to organize around, though tech giants are trying to intimidate their employees into staying out of the data center fight, and the U.S. government is accelerating approvals for new data center connections to the electrical grid.

Rising energy prices are pushing the UK’s industries closer to insolvency and Collapse. China’s retail sector saw a decline over the past 12-month period for the first time in three years. A study found associations between long COVID and cardiovascular disease, particularly angina and myocardial infarction.

Screening efforts for Ebola are increasing around the DRC and Uganda. As of Friday, 230+ deaths from Ebola were confirmed, and 896+ infections. About 9% of those killed and infected were healthcare workers. Experts say the outbreak is still quickly spreading, and has not yet reached its peak. Ebola is spreading particularly quickly among conflict-affected people, like those internally displaced in the eastern DRC.

A forthcoming Malthusian study to be published in August analyzed global population trends over 12,000 years and concluded that, in a “worst-case” scenario, where carrying-capacity constraints became abruptly active today,” the “global population could halve as early as 2064.” The study’s examples of a “doomsday criticality” suggest that a “crisis (global conflict, sudden climate acceleration, major epidemic) could reduce the efficiency of resource exploitation and abruptly activate a carrying-capacity constraint.” Totally implausible or somewhat accurate?

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India’s government denounced the 1960s Indus Waters Treaty as “outdated,” about a year after declaring their intent to suspend the landmark water-sharing agreement. “A treaty negotiated in 1960 cannot be treated as a perpetual entitlement which is insulated from accountability, detached from present-day realities, and untouched by the profound changes of the past six decades,” wrote a top Indian minister. Interestingly, the Treaty has no exit clause; it requires both parties to make a new agreement dissolving the old treaty, which does not seem likely.

Several weeks into the ongoing arrival of a United Nations “Gang Suppression Force” in Haiti, The UN Secretary-General visited and announced that 2,300 people have been killed in Haiti in 2026, so far. The GSF is expected to be about 5,500 strong, and is tasked with a nigh-impossible mission: breaking the grip of the gangs that terrorize and occupy 90%+ of Port-Au-Prince (metro pop: 3.2M).

Iran and the U.S. agreed on a 60-day ceasefire in Iran; and the deal imposes a ceasefire in Lebanon as well, though Israel has not yet signed onto the peace track talks, and probably will not. Israel pulling out of Lebanon seems to be a necessary part of the U.S.-Iran agreement. While some (like me) believe the negotiations represent a mere lull in hostilities and not a lasting framework towards peace, others say the ceasefire will provide the necessary time to settle several outstanding problems: Iran's future nuclear program, the future of the Strait of Hormuz, various sanctions against Iran, and Iran's network of proxy forces, among others. Oil prices dipped and the economy jumped a little upon the announcement of a preliminary deal, though allegations of ceasefire breaches surfaced on Saturday, just five days after the deal was inked.

What does the deal mean? Scores of mines are still being cleared from Hormuz, and the process is expected to take at least a few weeks. More time will be needed for the ~600 ships to exit the Persian Gulf; some analysts don’t expect normal transit to return until 2027. Iran will begin charging transit fees at the end of a 60-day period. Most observers are saying the U.S. took a clear loss in the peace deal, since U.S. sanctions will get lifted, Iranian assets unfrozen, and about $300B USD transferred to Iran for rebuilding—a sum on par with Iran’s annual GDP, and far below the $1.7B paid to Iran by President Obama 10 years ago. Even if the $300B is sourced from other Gulf states, as suggested, this is a clear victory for Iran’s regime, if the deal is actually implemented. The full text of the Memorandum Of Understanding sketches out some other requirements, including Iran “shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons,” and “will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program” that are planned to be confirmed by the UN Security Council.

Israel & Lebanon agreed on a new ceasefire on Friday, following an exchange of attacks on Thursday that killed somewhere between 22 and 51 people, depending on which country you ask. Gaza’s health ministry claims that 1,000+ people have been killed in Gaza since the latest “ceasefire” took effect in October 2025. As the Gaza War drags on, Israel is strangling the economy in the West Bank through controls on imports/exports, and the withholding of billions of dollars of collected tax revenue for 13 months now.

Nigerien Islamist fighters struck the airport in Niamey (pop: 1.6M), resulting in 11 soldiers slain, two civilians, and 22 attackers. An American B-52 bomber crashed shortly after takeoff, killing eight in California. A UN official claimed that 1,000+ civilians were slain by drone attacks in Sudan in the first five months of 2026. The U.S. administration invoked a law to mandate private companies to produce more weapons, since military stockpiles were reduced following offensive operations against Iran. Bolivia declared a state of emergency over their 50+ day protests rocking their economy and domestic politics.

Russia struck the historic Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery and cathedral, killing eleven and setting the stage for a quick retaliation. A large Ukrainian strike threw 1,000+ drones at Russia, and almost 200 against Moscow on Moscow, plus a few cruise missiles, devastating oil facilities and turning the Muscovite skies black with oil with a strike on one of Moscow’s three largest refineries. “If Ukraine is going to burn, your Moscow will burn too,” said Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy. It was Ukraine’s largest attack on Moscow yet; Ukraine has called the attacks “long-range sanctions.” A thin film of oil fell across neighborhoods of Moscow in the aftermath, and one politician in Russia warned that Russia “is on the brink of a social explosion….If the situation persists, social unrest and chaos will become more likely.”

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Things to watch for next week include:

↠ The second round of Colombia’s presidential election ends today, 21 June, and some observers say violence is inevitable regardless of which candidate wins. Early polling, plus the first election round, suggest that the far-right candidate will win, alongside his platform to combat drug gangs more militarily and construct a series of megaprisons in the jungle.

Select comments/threads from the subreddit last week suggest:

-We may be rocketing to a future where future El Niños get stronger and stronger, due to irreversible ocean heating, says this popular post from last week. Some theorize we may even emerge into a neverending El Niño… This is already expected to be one of the hottest El Niños on record.

-New Delhi (pop: 24M+) is cooked, if this weekly observation from a now-deleted account is accurate. India’s populous capital is not creating jobs in its flagship industry (tech), the climate is spiraling out of control, billionaires are running away with anything they can secure, and the young masses are trying to organize around a once-meme political party. Sound familiar?

-The United Kingdom is planning a ban on social media for children 15 and younger, starting in 2027. This observation from the UK repeats a familiar critique of the scheme: although in principle necessary to stem the brainrot corrupting today’s youth, the UK is turbo-charging a surveillance state that would make King Jong-Un jealous. Screen recordings, face scans, AI integrated at every level, a more unimaginable expansion of state censorship, and offshore data centers processing and empowering Big Tech at every turn.

-We all need a good laugh, even if it’s at our own expense. This meme thread shares a collection of Collapse memes that you might find amusing.

Got any feedback, questions, comments, upvotes, reports, Reddit threads, ghost stories, celebrity doomers, etc.? Last Week in Collapse is also posted on Substack; if you don’t want to check r/collapse every Sunday, you can receive this newsletter sent to an email inbox every weekend. As always, thank you for your support. What did I miss this week?

A grim report on global peace, a doomy prophecy for our oceans, record hot temps in Antarctica, and the world mints its first trillionaire.

Last Week in Collapse: June 7-13, 2026

This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter compiling some of the most important, timely, soul-crushing, ironic, amazing, or otherwise must-see/can’t-look-away moments in Collapse.

This is the 233rd weekly newsletter, and I think it’s the longest one so far. The May 31-June 6, 2026 edition is available here if you missed it last week. These newsletters are also available (with images) every Sunday in your email inbox by signing up to the Substack version.

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A research station in Antarctica recorded a new record temperature for June, at 15.4 °C (60 °F). NOAA's Mauna Loa observatory says Earth hit 432 ppm of CO2 by the end of May. The WHO claims that 200,000+ people in Europe died from heat from 2022-2025, an annual average of over 50,000.

The UN’s 5-section World Ocean Assessment was released on Monday, delivering an urgent call to safeguard our oceanic environments that has already fallen on deaf ears. Sea level is rising by at least 4.3mm per year, and 52M+ tonnes of plastic enter the ocean every year. The report has been unhelpfully divided into 5 subsections, each divided into other summaries which cannot be viewed as a whole, but only in parts. The last UN World Ocean Assessment was published in 2021.

>“the ocean is under mounting stress from overexploitation, pollution and the accelerating impacts of climate change….The ocean has already absorbed over 90% of the excess heat and 30% of the carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere by the anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels….Levels of pharmaceutical compounds (including antibiotics) continue to increase, particularly in coastal areas….Approximately 16% of the total increase in ocean heat content since 1955 has occurred since 2018….Overfishing and illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing are among the most pressing concerns when it comes to the sustainable use of the ocean resources….An estimated 37% of the global population, i.e. 3.03 billion people, live within 100 km of the coast, twice the overall average population density. Around 11%, or approximately 900 million people, live on land that is less than 10 m above sea level…” -excerpts from the Assessment’s various sections

>“The warming climate is causing an intensification of the global water cycle due to increased rates of ocean evaporation….Consistently ice-free September conditions (frequent occurrences of an ice-free Arctic) are anticipated by the middle of the twenty-first century (2035-2067)....The Atlantification of the Arctic Ocean, resulting from increased Atlantic water layer heat fluxes into the Eurasian basin, is resulting in reduced sea ice and changes in stratification….About 20 to 30% of the CO2 released by human activity into the atmosphere has been absorbed by the ocean, leading to an increase in the average surface ocean acidity of 0.1 pH units since pre-industrial levels….Ocean CO2 uptake rates have tripled over the past 60 years to 2.7 ±0.3 PgC per year….The intertidal zone has undergone considerable transformations, driven primarily by climate change, pollution and coastal development…..Global coral reef conditions have continued to deteriorate since the second World Ocean Assessment, with multiple compounding threats intensifying across all major reef systems…” -more excerpts

A 7.8 earthquake hit southern Philippines (pop: 118M) on Monday, killing at least 35 and injuring 140+ more. New research published in Science Advances claims "surface warming has broadly intensified nutrient stress" in the oceans over the last 20 years, imperiling microorganism populations, particularly in subtropical zones.

It’s official: Thursday marked the official start of El Niño, and scientists are warning us to brace for impact. They say there are 10 ways a Super El Niño might affect us: 1) Drought; 2) Food supply shock (from Drought & flooding); 3) Wildfires; 4) Flooding; 5) Increased use of coal (to power A/C); 6) Power grid failures; 7) Fish population shrinkage; 8) Geopolitical jockeying, mostly over over food; 9) Heat illness & death; and 10) Increased conflict within and between states. Click here if you want a deeper dive on exactly what El Niño is.

Data say last May was the second-warmest on record, after 2024. El Niño’s Pacific temps hit a new record high for the entire summer. Meanwhile, China set some new monthly cold records for June, while Vietnam felt some record warm nights at 30.4 °C (87 °F). Indonesia also set some record hot nights a bit cooler, and New South Wales set some record warm June nights right before the start of their winter.

A lake in Arizona reported a total fish dieoff following ongoing Drought aggravated by the upstream release of water contaminated by an unknown substance. A Canadian company's U.S. subsidiary is planning on deep-sea mining in contravention to international law. A four-day deluge in Indonesia was found to cause a mass dieoff in a rare species of ape last year, killing 58+ of the species' remaining ~800 creatures. A landslide in the Central African Republic killed 8 gold miners.

Australian bushfires have pushed a cockatoo species closer to extinction after the large-scale loss of their historic habitats. More gray whale strandings of the coast of Washington state bring the year’s tally, so far, to 27; across all the West Coast, at least 124.

A study in NPJ Environmental Science reports that over 90% of studies examined contained a “high risk of bias” when trying to communicate their data. The biases were usually found in failure to disclose uncertainties, and in a study's alleged duty to "inform, not persuade" its readers. "While evidence is urgently needed to support policies, this pressure might push scientists to blur the line between objective analysis and engaging in advocacy." They claim the relationship between pure science and the need for a rapid green transition has led to “emotive language” and damaged science's impartiality.

The 15-year average temperature increase (above the 1850-1900 baseline) is now 1.37 °C, and expected to hit 1.5 °C by 2030. "Average annual GHG emissions for the decade 2015–2024 were 54.6 ± 5.5 GtCO2e. Average decadal GHG emissions have increased steadily since the 1970s across all major groups of GHGs."

The abstract of a geological study on southern California says that "tectonic stress has steadily built along the southern San Andreas and San Jacinto fault systems, raising concerns of an imminent large earthquake." And by "imminent," they mean that the LA region is overdue for a 1-in-100-year earthquake. "Present-day modeled stress levels exceed historical maxima on multiple segments, particularly on segment SJB (∼3.6 MPa) {megapascals}, suggesting that the system is critically stressed. Given the elapsed time since these faults have ruptured, the probability of an earthquake in the near future is high."

Parts of Bangladesh are nearing Day Zero for groundwater after decades of unsustainable extraction. Wells are drilled deeper for smaller yields as Drought engulfs their northwest, highly dependent upon agriculture. Demands for communities to use their remaining groundwater only for personal drinking have angered and devastated farmers, some of whom feel that War for the precious resource is inevitable in the future. Many are adapting to new crops; but when the fields dry up and die, where will these desperate farmers go?

A study in Earth’s Future claims that the environmental consequences of human activity are locked in the earth and will persist until at least the year 3,000, the limit of the research. They write, “we are already stuck in a figurative ‘Anthropocene quicksand’, where only an active pull can free us from consequences like global heating—while even a very modest continuation of greenhouse gas emissions will keep us at high warming levels.”

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SpaceX launched its IPO on Thursday—the largest IPO of all time. The company was valued at $1.77 trillion, and Elon Musk's copious shares (valued at $867B at the IPO) launched Musk into wealth levels of well over $1T USD. On paper, anyway. Musk's net worth is now around $1.1T. That's $1,000,000,000,000; twelve zeros. Elon Musk is the world's first trillionaire, and most likely the richest person to have ever lived. Another arrangement, made with Tesla in late 2025, may yield Musk another trillion in compensation if he can hit a series of unlikely business targets.

Two co-founders of Extinction Rebellion believe we are heading to a 4.5 °C future by 2060. The reason? The rate of CO2 emissions is increasing, feedback loops are setting in, and humanity has zero desire to sacrifice their marginal economic gains for a slightly more sustainable planet.

An American study on Long COVID determined that cases may be about twice as high as believed among COVID survivors. The study claims that "approximately 1 in 6 patients with COVID-19 develops postacute sequelae, predominantly chronic conditions currently invisible to surveillance systems, representing an accumulating rather than resolving health care burden." The illness is often underaccounted for because insurers have an interest in denying it, and Long COVID is still not acknowledged by some people with the seriousness that the illness can bring on.

Protests continued in Kenya against the establishment of an Ebola quarantine facility; one person was shot by police in the protest. Confirmed Ebola cases now sit at 710, with 149 deaths. An attempted beheading by a Sudanese man in Belfast set off riots against immigration across Belfast; protestors set fire to several vehicles and clashed with police.

A soon-to-be-published study in Global Environmental Change looked at 105 countries and generally concluded that economic growth cannot be detached from "material resource demands." In other words, green growth is more mythical than proponents have stated. To most of you here, that has been self-evident for some time now. 25 of the nations examined showed some decoupling, but the study says this "represents temporary fluctuations rather than structural change" and its impact is overstated. They write, "when all countries are considered together, no Environmental Kuznets Curve is apparent. Individual successes are not yet making the collective difference required." The Environmental Kuznets Curve (an adaptation of an economic theory) claims that "environmental quality {in a country/region} deteriorates in the early stages of economic development and improves in later stages" as an economy shifts away from industry to cleaner service-based sources of income.

Cuba's months-long energy shortage is dragging on, bringing woes to regions urban and rural. Shortages of everything have driven prices way up, decimating the value of savings and pensions in the process. Fans and air conditioning are inoperative at the start of another hot season, hospitals are without power, and mosquitoes are prevalent. And the specter of American intervention looms ahead: surveillance drones never sleep, and many think the island could be weeks (or days) away from another Venezuela-like operation. Cuban morale is said to be quite high.

The Strait of Hormuz remained blockaded for another week. Sulfur prices are now up 140% since February. Stats show the EU imported about 18% more Russian LNG in the first 5 months of the year compared to 2025. The Asian Development Bank (ADB), which services 69 Asian states, has received 15 emergency requests for loans by member states suffering economic exigencies due to the Hormuz blockade. Growth in most of Asia is projected downwards, while inflation is up; plans for resilience come too late.

Globally, economic growth is slowing to 6-year lows, at about 2.5% annually. The World Bank is calling the 2020s a “lost decade” for the economy. While many countries are cutting energy use to maximize their dwindling (and increasingly valuable) oil reserves, Japan, the U.S, Europe, and China and others are seeing their strategic reserves slowly depleted. What comes next will be worse. The American reserves are at ~40 year lows. China will be forced to make serious energy adjustments by September.

New Mexico recorded its first case of New World Screwworm, in a dog. Other cases are being found in Texas. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, officials are tracking an mpox outbreak at a gay sauna/gym.

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Sudanese rebel forces killed 15+ people in el-Obeid (pop: ~560,000) at night. When village officials in Nigeria met for scheduled talks with the leaders of bandits terrorizing their settlements, the armed bandits kidnapped 39+ of them for ransom. So much for honor among thieves.

The Trump administration levied more sanctions on Cuba; this time on a state-owned oil & gas company. Pakistani strikes on border zones near Afghanistan killed 13-26 people, depending on whom you ask. A mass shooting in South Africa killed 12+, while a Texas shooting killed one and injured 10 others.

Reports of forced mass conscription in Myanmar are bolstering the junta’s army and making incremental gains in the country long torn by ethnic civil war; draftees are forced to do the work for regular enlisted men. The (theoretically capped) two-year period for conscripts has them working tirelessly in the brutally hot & humid jungles, supported by a growing number of Russia-manufactured drones that are steadily transforming the offense & defense of all sides.

A 54-page report from the UN High Commission for Refugees provides a round-up on global refugee statistics for 2025. They claim 5.4M new displaced people crossed borders last year, and that overall numbers of refugees (41.6M) have dropped slightly from 2024 and 2023 figures. “Global forced displacement fell during 2025, for the first time in a decade….There are an estimated 1 million IDPs in Lebanon at the time of writing this report and 3.2 million temporarily displaced in the Islamic Republic of Iran as of the end of March 2026.”

Reports have emerged alleging that, last summer, 300+ Iraqi migrants moving through Libya were kidnapped, threatened, tortured, and held for ransom by gangster-militiamen. At least one of the migrants died in their custody. When scores of women in Herat, Afghanistan protested the Taliban's strict women's dress code, security forces shot into the crowd, killing two and injuring three more. Protests over political representation in Pakistan’s part of Kashmir resulted in 11 deaths and 70+ others injured.

Although strong majorities of European nations still view the United States as a "necessary partner," 15 countries surveyed indicate that 60%+ are not confident that the U.S. would come to their aid if they were attacked...In the case of Spain, only 12% believe the U.S. would aid them. Only 11% of the countries' populations believe the U.S. is still their ally. Peru meanwhile appears to have very narrowly elected the arch-conservative daughter of a previous dictator, aiming to transform Peru into an El Salvadorian model state, where security comes at the expense of everything else.

A U.S. operation in Venezuela killed the head of Tren de Aragua, one of the transnational criminal gangs the U.S. previously designated as a terror organization. Switzerland (pop: 9.1M) is voting today on a proposal to cap its population at 10M, and the ballot referendum is reportedly expected to be close.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has now surpassed the length of World War I, and the War has settled into a mostly stagnant meat grinder for both sides. Attrition warfare at its ugliest. A Ukrainian arms company claims to have developed a cheaper version of Patriot missiles, surface-to-air missiles that can intercept other missiles or enemy drones; mass production is expected by August 2026. Russia is reportedly building more military infrastructure near its borders with various EU states as well. Meanwhile, last Wednesday confirmed a new milestone in the history of conflict, though the incident occurred two years ago: fully autonomous drones killed several enemy soldiers on the battlefield, without any human oversight once deployed. “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead… There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed,” one Ukrainian commander said.

Iran launched missiles at Israel on Monday; Israel responded in kind, delaying hopes that a tentative ceasefire between U.S./Israel-Iran could last. Yet some think, and say that an agreement may soon be reached, after a preliminary memorandum was assented to by Iran and the U.S. Iran and the U.S. traded strikes again on Wednesday, with Iran targeting an American base in Jordan and Kuwait, and a fleet at Bahrain. The U.S. hit Iranian ports and Iran's large Qeshm Island.

IDF strikes in Lebanon were continuously endangering a ceasefire agreement from being established there. A Tuesday morning airstrike by the IDF struck Tyre, in southern Lebanon, killing 8 and wounding 32+ others. With Lebanon’s infrastructure thoroughly damaged, its economy pushed deeper into crisis, and its political legitimacy long frayed, some say the country may be spiraling into a civil war between Hezbollah-backed factions of society and the remaining sectors, long divided among religious factions. Israel’s involvement in the country, officially against Hezbollah fighters, has not brought the rest of the country together. Despite whatever deal with U.S. and Iran might hash out, Israel has vowed to continue occupying the lands they’re sitting on in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.

In Gaza, a new concern is growing among the desperate masses: rats, fed upon the trash and corpses, have multiplied. They have found perfect sanctuaries among the countless buildings made into rubble—an endless maze of dark corners to escape into, and strike from. Compounding health concerns made worse by neverending blockades of supplies, hospitals lack the electricity and supplies to treat wounds that can become infected. On top of a sewage system disabled about 80% across Gaza, pesticides have also been brought in, in small doses, to try to kill the rats. Instead, they seem to simply further poison the earth. Amnesty International released a report accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

On Tuesday, the Institute for Economics & Peace released its 125-page report, Global Peace Index 2026, indicating that global peacefulness has again dropped for the twelfth consecutive year, and the world is dealing with the greatest number of conflicts since World War II. Conflict deaths in 2025 totalled 181,000+, according to their research, and drones and AI targeting has dramatically—and tragically—compressed the targeting cycle. The report claims 565 different armed groups mounted at least one drone attack in the past 7 years. The world is growing more multipolar, global rules are being cast aside as old window dressing, and mechanisms and processes for ending conflicts are failing. Some call it the “Great Fragmentation.”

Iceland again topped the list as the most peaceful country on earth, followed by New Zealand, Switzerland, Slovenia, and (#5) Ireland. In last place: Russia (#163), just behind Sudan (#162), the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukraine, and then Israel. Other notable countries on the list are: Canada (#14), Germany (#28), the UK (#39), the UAE (#73), Saudi Arabia (#95), China (#118), South Africa (#123), Venezuela (#133), the U.S.A. (#134), Haiti (#142), and Mali (#154). The report also provides regional outlooks, some individual country analyses, and lots of interesting graphics.

>“99 countries witnessed a deterioration in peacefulness in the past year, the highest number since the inception of the Index 20 years ago….The global economic impact of violence increased by 3.2% to US$21.81 trillion in 2025, equivalent to 10.5% of global GDP {$2,657 USD per person}….The three indicators with the largest deterioration since 2008 are violent demonstrations, internal conflicts fought, and external conflicts fought….there were just over 181,000 violent conflict deaths in 2025 driven mainly by the conflicts in Ukraine and Sudan….There were 20 countries that recorded at least 1,000 deaths from conflict in the past year….The economic impact of the Iran war could be substantial, but unevenly distributed….The Horn of Africa is no longer a set of separate conflicts. The conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan, and Somalia are now interlocked through every channel that causes conflicts to spread….Drones have become the defining weapon of modern warfare, spreading faster than any government can keep up with….Human oversight of AI targeting is increasingly being phased out….The international community remains largely unprepared or unwilling to adopt basic humanitarian AI governance….Ukrainian production capacity is reported to have reached as many as five million drones in 2025….threats are likely to come in one of three forms: Tactical threats, such as the use of AI-controlled drone swarms. Strategic threats, such as using AI to coordinate entire warfare operations. Existential threats, where AI control of critical decisionmaking systems could lead to mass-casualty events….” -selections from the full report

>“Government debt as a percentage of GDP is projected to exceed 50 per cent in half of middle power countries by 2030….The traditional pillars of the middle power tier, including Canada, Australia, and Western European countries, face a ‘grey ceiling’ where maintaining their current level of influence will become increasingly expensive….Military expenditure increased by 5.8 per cent in 2025, the largest single increase since the inception of the GPI nearly 20 years ago….Between 2024 and 2025, the economic impact of refugees and IDPs rose in 100 countries, with an average increase of 23 per cent, while military expenditure rose in 126 countries, with an average increase of 14 per cent….IEP estimates the economic impact of violence by comprehensively aggregating the costs related to violence, armed conflict, and spending on military and internal security services….The Iran war energy shock is occurring at a time when global debt levels are at record peacetime highs. Global government debt stood at 93 per cent of world GDP in October 2025, higher than any year in the post-war era outside the COVID-19 emergency….”

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Select comments/threads from the subreddit last week suggest:

-Me dumb. You dumb. They dumb. We dumb. Everyone is dumb now. And it’s not just COVID, though we seem to blame COVID for everything. Nor is it simply AI hollowing out our critical thinking. This thread on the cognitive decline of the U.S. (though it should not be limited to the U.S. alone) is full of anecdotes, complaints, and lamentations about how utterly incompetent people of all ages are. The contempt people have for reading & learning has doomed us all.

-Overpopulation is still too sensitive, or provocative, a topic to be discussed by the r/Collapse community. This thread on Malthus, Ehrlich, et al. hit 240 comments before it was locked, despite the 500+ upvotes. Maybe next time.

-Other subreddits are horizon-scanning for Collapse indicators, too. This thread from the significantly more popular subreddit, r/AskReddit , asks for things that are “highly likely to happen in the next 10 years that everyone is completely ignoring?” It appears there are tons of Collapseniks waiting in the wings. Tell your friends.

Got any feedback, questions, comments, upvotes, reports, Ebola predictions, summer survival tips, etc.? Last Week in Collapse is also posted on Substack; if you don’t want to check r/collapse every Sunday, you can receive this newsletter sent to an email inbox every weekend. As always, thank you for your support. What did I miss this week?

Shocking temperature predictions, the weaponization of hunger, Ebola expands in the Congo, planetary population rises unchecked, escalation in Lebanon, and AMR accelerates through a warming world.

Last Week in Collapse: May 24-30, 2026

This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter compiling some of the most important, timely, soul-crushing, ironic, amazing, or otherwise must-see/can’t-look-away moments in Collapse.

This is the 231st weekly newsletter. The May 17-23, 2026 edition is available here if you missed it last week. These newsletters are also available (with images) every Sunday in your email inbox by signing up to the Substack version.

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The WMO forecasts that the second half of the 2020s will be hotter than earlier predictions, and that we could see a year, by the end of 2030, that is 1.9 °C warmer than the pre-industrial baseline. They estimate with an 86% chance, that earth will experience its hottest year (so far) in the same time period…and a 75% chance that all the five years from 2026-2030 inclusive will exceed 1.5 °C. The 29-page report summarizes the last five years of global temperature change, and makes projections for the next 10 years of weather.

>“Arctic temperatures over the next five extended winters (November-March) are predicted to be 2.8°C above average temperatures for 1991-2020, an anomaly more than three and half times that of global mean temperature anomaly over the same period….Predicted precipitation patterns for May-September 2026-2030 suggest wet anomalies in the Sahel, northern Europe, Alaska and Siberia, and dry anomalies over the Amazon….Near-surface temperatures in 2025 were warmer than the long-term average almost everywhere over land with particularly large warm anomalies in North America, North Africa, Europe and parts of Asia…..The last three years, 2023-2025, are the warmest years on record….The chance of the five-year mean for 2026-2030 being higher than the last five-year mean is 91%....After a stable period since the strong decline observed during the 2000s, the AMOC is predicted to decline at a rate similar to climate projections. However, confidence in this forecast is low….The Arctic Oscillation has recently been close to neutral due to both high and low pressure in the winter season in the Arctic (Figure 24). The calibrated probability of above average for the next five years is 70%...” -excerpts from the WMO report

A heat dome hit Western Europe, having spread from North Africa. At least seven died in France as a result, and four in the UK. New temperature records were set across the continent, with London hitting a record daily minimum, and 35 °C (95 °F) daytime temps at Heathrow; and again in the following day. 36.1 °C in Paris. Part of Portugal over 39 °C, Luxembourg hit a new May high (33.6 °C), and Switzerland’s highest peak broke 0 °C. Europe is the fastest warming continent. The western Mediterranean Sea also pushed temps over 4 °C higher than usual in some locations. More frequent heat waves will result in more heat deaths, and it’s still spring…

Abnormally hot temperatures also stretched from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia. Oman had a 36 °C night. Parts of India got into the mid 40s Celsius. Scores of Chinese weather stations broke their May minimums on Tuesday & Wednesday, while parts of China saw their seasonal heavy rains starting a week or two earlier than normal. New monthly records were also set across Japan….and the two Koreas. And the capital of the Marshall Islands felt its hottest night in history, 29 °C. And some Caribbean islands felt record minimums, for the month, or all-time.

Somalia is still enduring a merciless Drought. Three rainy seasons have failed to materialize, farmers have lost their entire livestock herds, and two million Somalis are on the edge of famine. The situation is further compounded by fuel price increases, massive aid cuts, al-Shabaab, and inflation from the Iran War.

A satellite analysis of U.S.-Israeli strikes on March 7, 2026, against Iran found the event to be a “major emission event” that released 29,800 metric tons of SO2 (from burning oil, mostly), similar to a volcanic eruption. The study also says that “oil droplets, soot, and other combustion-related pollutants mixed with rainfall, producing dark ‘black rain’ with potentially corrosive characteristics.”

Predictions of a Super El Niño continue rising, with projections for average sea surface temperatures in part of the Pacific Ocean forecast at 3.0-3.5 °C warmer than usual, for this October-November. Some daily records for SST are already being made. Its effects are beginning to be felt in Canada and the U.S. Furthermore, SSTs are 4 °C higher than average off the coast of Peru…

In a moment of slightly good news, scientists are walking back the worst-case climate scenario, “RCP 8.5,” which had been talked about for over a decade and threatened temperature increases of 4.3-4.8 °C by 2100, the “RCP 4.5” scenario. Now the experts think that 2.8 °C is the most likely increase.

The 2027 Texas water plan expects total water demand to rise by about 6% through 2080, while annual water supply will fall 10%. Pew research indicates that most Americans believe countries will not do enough to mitigate climate change…but the March 2026 survey found that only 48% of Americans believe our planet is warming “mostly because of human activity.” 22% believe it’s mostly natural patterns, 17% are not sure, and 12% still believe “there is no solid evidence.”

Arctic Circle temperatures passed 30 °C in parts of Russia. Research indicates that the Arctic Ocean passed a “chemical tipping point” back in 2009, when melting sea ice hit a threshold beyond which nitrate died off in large quantities, permanently reducing the plankton population numbers in the region—and affecting many other creatures up the food chain. The study concludes, “Arctic sea ice loss is generally considered to be irreversible under continued warming based on models with realistic atmospheric CO2 emission scenarios. Given that the system has switched from light limitation to N limitation, even if the sea ice loss is reversed temporarily due to factors such as Arctic climate oscillations, it is unlikely to have an immediate impact on NPP {Net Primary Production} and BD {benthic denitrification—the process through which bacteria convert reactive nitrogen into nitrogen gas}.”

A study on a “cold blob” in the north Atlantic is cooling—a signal that the AMOC is weakening. “Our analysis of this “cold blob” and of ERA5 reanalysis data strongly suggest that this is not just a surface phenomenon but a deep‐reaching loss of ocean heat content, and that it cannot be explained by increasing surface heat loss but requires declining or weakened lateral heat transport. Surface heat loss appears to respond as a negative feedback to heat content changes: periods of increasing heat content coincide with periods of large surface heat loss….Our analysis supports the interpretation of the observed “cold blob” as a sign of a weakening AMOC.”

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The AI bubble is swelling, and data centers seem to be the only sure bets in a data-centric world. Investors are aware that the value of the AI infrastructure—computer processors, land, sprawling data centers & their associated power plants—is perhaps worth more money than the profits that AI is helping to generate. Legions of people using free AI services (have you ever paid for Premium AI yet?) are also taking profit from the infrastructure without yet contributing to AI corporations’ profits. A website tracking data center locations in the United States has also been launched. Other voices on the side of Big Tech argue that many opponents are reflexively catastrophizing over the (AI) data center boom, part of a so-called “Busybody Economy” propped up by other moneyed influence peddlers.

A study published in The Lancet last week concludes that “climate change is likely to accelerate the dissemination of AMR, particularly for zoonotic diseases….By 2100, the emergence of ARGs {antimicrobial resistance genes} is projected to be further intensified by warming.” The quantity of ARGs in Salmonella, the bacteria studied in depth here, increased by 38% from 1940-2023, and their research determined that “variability in ARGs follows a non-linear quadratic response to temperature and precipitation.”

The United Kingdom (pop: 70M) is stumbling into a multifaceted food crisis, says a group of nine experts, and it’s because of effects from the Iran War, inflation, and climate change. Some people are even blaming El Nino in advance for an economy expected to slump later this year.

Some scientists say that earth has entered a “negative demographic phase.” Meaning we have bypassed earth’s natural carrying capacity (some 2.5 billion people) and are now living on short-term resources which cannot be renewed in time. They expect the current trend of population growth to top off at around 12B near 2060 or 2070, with hard corrections to follow. The study, from about two months ago, says this negative demographic phase began around 1950, when earth’s population was 2.5B. Today the population of humans on earth is approximately 8.3 billion.

The WHO confirmed a doomy truth: the spread of Ebola in the DRC is moving faster than efforts to contain it. Yet they continue to say that the risk to the international community is low. Suspected cases bypassed 900, and suspected Ebola deaths now exceed 220. Conditions at the local IDP camps are squalid and cramped, a perfect ground zero for the worsening Ebola pandemic. The CFR/death rate in the DRC outbreak is 30-50% at the moment. Kenya’s High Court blocked the government from “from establishing, operationalizing, facilitating, approving or permitting the establishment and/or operation of any Ebola exposure, quarantine, isolation or treatment facility in Kenya.”

As the world focuses its attention on Ebola, the Hormuz closure, or whatever demands their personal lives confront, COVID is getting long forgotten, as is Long COVID. Even though countries are still grappling with Long COVID disabilities; Canada estimates 4% of the country has Long COVID. Some health experts estimate the number of real Long COVID cases is double what is reported in the United States, at over 5% of the total population.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is expected to increase energy costs for the UK by about 13% in the coming 12 months. Even a reopening now would take 4+ months to bring back the ship transits to 80% of the 2025 figures. The price or oil per barrel actually fell to one-month lows of $96 last week, amid hopes and rumors that the Iran War was nearing its end. This visualizer helps make sense of the blockade, the pipeline routes, national waters, and the impacts on planting & harvest seasons.

While the wealthier countries are able to buy pricy oil & gas to keep their lights on, poorer countries, like Bangladesh, are experiencing rolling blackouts. Vietnam and the Philippines are beginning to ration or limit energy use. In other places, like India, electricity is going to those families who can afford it. The price of diesel is still rising, and the blockade may still be in its early stages; the worst is yet to come. Some airlines are cutting flights, and most are seeing reduced demand. And the fertilizer market is less flexible and forgiving than the oil market. U.S. tariffs and the Iran War are also undermining the stability of the global economic system.

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Half-hearted negotiations between Iran and the U.S. may be making progress—but threats and attacks from Iran and the U.S. both endanger a lasting agreement. The specter of Houthi forces in Yemen closing the Bab-el-Mandeb also buttresses Iran’s position, if the Houthi rebels were to exercise the option. Iran has also floated the idea of striking oil wells across the Middle East. And President Trump also threatened Oman when the country suggested it might also charge tolls if Iran were allowed to do so.

The U.S. is pulling back some cooperation from NATO and scaling back its aircraft commitments. The Iran War is being cited as an alleged reason why U.S. arms shipments to Taiwan may be delayed. And Cuba, increasingly out of fuel, still has high morale amid American pressure on Cuba’s economic affairs. War gaming for Cuba is being planned for a range of scenarios. The U.S. also declared two Brazilian drug gangs to be international terror organizations. And the death toll from U.S. strikes on Caribbean vessels rose to 199.

A mysterious fire at a Kenyan girls’ dorm killed 16. Reports emerged of forced conscription, door-by-door, of men in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, amid fears that another Civil War is in its early stages; meanwhile, Sudan’s army was said to have recaptured land from the RSF rebels near their border with Ethiopia. Al-Qaeda affiliates killed 30+ in central Mali on Thursday.

Protests, austerity measures, and rising living costs continue plaguing Bolivia, several weeks into broad anti-government protests. Mexico’s senate passed a constitutional amendment (still needs state ratification, but it will probably get it) to empower the government to annul an election for alleged “illicit financing, propaganda, the systematic ⁠dissemination of misinformation, digital manipulation, and ⁠the intervention of foreign governments ⁠or agencies.”

A suicide bombing in Pakistan killed 23+ people, attributed to Balochistan separatists. Cambodia instituted a military draft for most men 18-25 years old. North Korea tested two missile technologies last week: a mobile rocket-artillery system like HIMARS, and an allegedly AI–powered mobile cruise-missile launching system—some fear North Korea is modernizing its military tech for a future war/deterrence, while others are concerned that the hermetic totalitarian state intends to beef up production for sale to Russia.

China’s surveillance state is growing by leaps and bounds with the increasing integration of AI into all levels of surveillance. Cameras are becoming proactive and interactive; footage is more easily interpreted by cutting-edge software, and anomalous events (such as crowds, traffic jams, suspicious movements/interactions) are more easily identified. The human is getting pushed out-of-the-loop…and what remains in the big black box is not strictly limited to China. The U.S. is building its own data-heavy spying infrastructure to amplify Big Brother’s the Algorithm’s power, and the tech giants may share/sell their surveillance tech with countries around the world…

After the Israel-Lebanon “ceasefire” fell through, Israeli forces pounded southern Lebanon in a large airstrike on Tuesday, killing at least 31. Israel’s PM promised to “increase the blows, to increase the intensity” in the coming weeks, as the IDF’s operations intensify against Iran-backed Hezbollah forces—and the large number of civilians trapped in the middle. Israel has declared southern Lebanon to be a “combat zone” and struck more buildings on Thursday, killing another 14.

In Gaza, food is increasingly weaponized, and the force of some 20,000 international peacekeepers has yet to materialize. The land Palestinians live on in Gaza is also expected to shrink even more. The Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu initially agreed in October 2025 to pull back IDF forces so that they controlled “only” 53% of Gaza; in recent months, this 53 has become 60%, and now the PM declared that Israel will expand its control to 70% of Gaza. Israeli strikes killed the top military guy of Hamas in Gaza on Wednesday, along with his family.

A few kilometers from the Ukraine-Romania border, a Russian drone hit a Romanian apartment building, injuring two. NATO again reaffirmed its willingness to “defend every inch” of its member states’ territory, though the incident fell short of a more active open response. Romania and Poland are both trying to position themselves as big-time drone manufacturers. Zelenskyy is warning of a “massive” attack forming from Russia; Putin aims to escalate in Kyiv to bolster his sagging poll numbers. The UK estimates that about 500,000 Russian soldiers have lost their lives now, fighting a pointless War against Ukraine.

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Things to watch for next week include:

↠ Colombia is voting for a new President today, amid the highest levels of political violence in years. Their leftist candidate is leading in the polls over a wealthy right-winger, plus a dozen other candidates. If nobody secures 50%, then a run-off election between the top two will follow on June 21.

Select comments/threads from the subreddit last week suggest:

-People in India are living through Hell, if this cross-posted thread from r/India is representative of what it’s like to endure daytime temps of 48 °C (118 °F).....in May.

-We need to make peace with our mortality. This self-post crowdsources some philosophical questions about making peace with death in a Collapsing world. More interesting is this thread from a member of r/Collapse who’s been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and will probably not live another 12 months, and is looking for some bucket list items to experience before the end.

-Regulars on the subreddit are generally not preparing for their retirement, if the comments on this post are representative of the subreddit as a whole. Not surprising, considering that about half of United States adults have basically no retirement savings whatsoever after decades of work. When this economy collapses, it’s going to take hundreds of millions of people down with it.

-Humans may still be living in the best of times. This post from r/dataisbeautiful about global poverty, child mortality, democracy, literacy, and more challenges narratives about how bad the present age is. Or it might just be a good before-picture that we can compare 2050 to when we want to show how far we will have collapsed by mid-century.

Got any feedback, questions, comments, upvotes, graphs, planting advice, book recommendations, Ebola horror stories, etc.? Last Week in Collapse is also posted on Substack; if you don’t want to check r/collapse every Sunday, you can receive this newsletter sent to an email inbox every weekend. As always, thank you for your support. What did I miss this week?

Cracks grow in the Thwaites, weather whiplash, accelerating sea level rise, the Ebola outbreak worsens, plastic megapollution warnings, predictions on Hormuz reopenings, and whispers of a war in the Horn of Africa…

Last Week in Collapse: May 17-23, 2026

This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter compiling some of the most important, timely, soul-crushing, ironic, amazing, or otherwise must-see/can’t-look-away moments in Collapse.

This is the 230th weekly newsletter. The May 10-16, 2026 edition is available here if you missed it last week. These newsletters are also available (with images) every Sunday in your email inbox by signing up to the Substack version.

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Antarctica’s mighty Thwaites Glacier, the so-called Doomsday Glacier, is breaking apart. The Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf, from outer space, “looks like a windscreen that's shattering,” according to one scientist. When the final separation will happen is hard to predict, but it will be…faster than expected.

India’s government is warning about the increased intensity, duration, and frequency of heat waves across central and northern India (pop: 1.48B). As El Niño emerges (perhaps as early as June), dangerous temperate anomalies are expected to appear, and not just in India. NOAA says El Niño will arrive by July with 80% certainty, and predicts a ⅓ chance of a Super El Niño; there have only been three such events on record (so far). Such an event could spark a global famine.

Southeast Asia saw minimum temperatures above 30 °C (86 °F). Parts of southern Japan felt daytime temperatures around 34 or 35 ° and Honduras had its hottest May night on record, at 29.7 °C. Strangely hot and humid conditions were felt across the U.S. East Coast for a few days: July weather in May—temperatures in Boston and NYC were, for a moment, hotter than southern Texas and Miami. And a giant marine heatwave that appeared last year off the West coast of the U.S. & Mexico has strengthened again, and is lingering…

A 32-page report from the World Meteorological Organization is warning of “hydrological whiplash” as countries in the region can experience heat waves, Drought, and flooding—all within a short time period. Particular emergencies are also identified—like Hurricane Melissa, which devastated Jamaica in October 2025, causing damage in excess of 40% of Jamaica’s GDP (plus 45 deaths). The report also says that the ocean pH level around Latin America has fallen from 8.10 to 8.04 in the past 40 years—and the pH scale is a logarithmic scale.

Research on the forthcoming AMOC Collapse made a perhaps-surprising conclusion: “efforts to improve air quality, particularly around the Atlantic basin but also far away in East Asia, will contribute to future AMOC weakening.” The cleaner our air is, the closer we move to the inevitable AMOC breakdown; many aerosols help reflect sunlight—and cleaning them from our air would be expected to weaken the AMOC by 6% by 2050.

A paywalled study concedes that “Even without glacial melting, sea level remains elevated for centuries due to the substantial thermal inertia of the ocean interior.” A summary of the research confirmed that “increased heat from the ocean's surface reduced cloud cover, which in turn, allowed in more heat. More heat meant even less cloud cover.” The temperature feedback loop will continue, since the oceans have the potential to absorb a lot more heat.

A Nature Communications study predicts that future coastal flooding will affect coastal cities more strongly than less-inhabitated coastlines. The reason: land subsidence in densely populated areas is worse, resulting in an average sea level rise of about 2x less populated areas. “VLM {vertical land motion} can exceed contemporary absolute sea-level (ASL) changes by as much as an order of magnitude (or more) in susceptible areas, like global deltas and especially coastal cities located on deltas.”

Scientists say the rate of sea level rise has, obviously, been rising since at least 1960. A study in Science Advances “The principal drivers for the GMSL {global mean sea level} trend (acceleration) since 1960 are 43% (41%) from thermosteric ocean expansion, 27% (9%) from glacier melting, 15% (16%) from Greenland, 12% (13%) from Antarctic, and 3% (21%) from land water storage.” From 2005-2023, the oceans have been rising 3.94mm per year—compared to an annual average of 2.06mm from 1960-2023.

Researchers are calling it “behavioral insulation”: private actions that insulate humans from the broader problems of climate change. For example, using air conditioning, buying a private generator/battery for heat-blackouts, working from home, and installing air filters in one’s home. One study just looked at use of air conditioning, and found that people who use it a lot tend to reduce engagement in “public heat mitigation” and other collective actions that respond to global warming. Actions like these also tend to use more electricity, perpetuating the problem and driving future feedback loops. Privatize the solution, socialize the problem.

Researchers say that the carbon “buffer pools” established by carbon credit schemes are smaller than expected. The risk of these new forests, planted as part of carbon offset programs, releasing their carbon back into the atmosphere through wildfires, Drought, and infestation, is apparently much greater than initially believed. They say the likelihood of this “carbon reversal” over the next ~100 years is approximately 25-80% greater than anticipated. Unfortunately the associated study is paywalled, so more information is not yet available.

A 5.8 earthquake hit southern Peru, though nobody was killed. Flooding in Afghanistan left 15 people dead. Another study on permafrost melt supports the Arctic Circle reality of mineral pollution poisoning rivers in the far north, and how it’s getting progressively worse. And a paywalled Nature Food study points to the can’t-live-with-it-can’t-live-without-it nature of the planet’s enormous rice industry: “net GHG emissions from global rice paddies approximately doubled from 1961–1980 to 2001–2020, driven primarily by a 52% increase in soil CO2 emissions and a 44% rise in soil CH4 emissions.” We humans produce about 1.1 billion tons of CO2-equivalent emissions each year through rice cultivation, equal to about 240M cars.

As historically wet areas, like Scotland and Ireland, experience climate change and future aridification, they will become more at risk of wildfires, particularly in rural areas recently abandoned and depopulated. Although conservation and land regeneration efforts are necessary to regrow lost biomass, experts say that totally unmanaged lands can also create fuel for future wildfires, when grazing pressure falls and controlled burns are not implemented in certain areas.

Animal migrations are being adjusted by climate change—chasing food, escaping Drought, forcing adaptation from predators new and old, incentivizing or discouraging reproduction—and also pushing creatures into new habitats altogether. A heat wave in Russia brought temps exceeding 34 °C (93 °F), while another heat wave pushed Saudi temperatures beyond 48 °C; pilgrims doing the Hajj have been warned about heat and dust storms. And Thursday saw a new daily high for global mid-latitude sea surface temperatures.

Negotiations on the Antarctic Treaty failed to reach the necessary unanimous consensus on the protection of emperor penguins when China and Russia opposed the measure. Consultative countries were scheduled to address the largely unregulated nature of tourism to Antarctica, but only agreed on sharing information and did not conclude anything concrete. However, there is a longstanding rule preventing more than 100 people in any single land area on the continent.

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Although the Ebola situation is, allegedly, at the moment, under control in Uganda, the Ebola pandemic is spreading across regions of the DRC. 750+ cases are suspected, 177+ deaths are believed, and 82+ deaths confirmed. Gatherings of 50+ people are banned in the DRC’s densely populated northeast, and the outbreak is believed to be “much larger” than what is confirmed. It is already the third largest Ebola outbreak on record. At least one case was confirmed in Bukavu, far south of the outbreak zone, and in the area long-contested by M23 rebel gang forces and DRC soldiers. And after villagers set fire to a tent camp housing Ebola patients, 18 people suspected with the virus fled and have gone missing…

A 28-page report by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board says that the risks of another pandemic are advancing faster than our resilience and preparedness are. If it’s not Ebola or Hantavirus, it will, inevitably, be something else. Responders react too late, disease crosses borders into differently-managed (or unmanaged) regions, and alarms are raised after the initial prevention window has expired. Bad incentives, competing priorities, and an undeveloped sense of urgency complicate the problem.

>“Infectious disease outbreaks are becoming more frequent and more consequential in terms of the number of cases and/or deaths, reflecting the changing risk landscape, including shifts in global mobility patterns, agricultural practices and farming, climate change, and urbanization….Climate change and armed conflict are exacerbating risk; geopolitical fragmentation, the erosion of civic space, and commercial self-interest are undercutting collective action….Many societies have emerged from major health emergencies poorer, more unequal, and more divided….while the routine burden of infectious diseases is declining, the frequency and severity of large-scale health emergencies are increasing….Health emergencies can erode democratic norms and strain governance for years, with prolonged states of emergency, restrictions on civil liberties, and heightened polarization often outlasting the crises themselves…” -selections from the GPMB report

I hope that bag of chips or that bottle of Pepsi was worth it: a One Earth study looked at 112 countries’ coastlines and found that food & beverage single-use plastics were the dominant plastic pollutant in 93% of nations examined. The 112 countries represent 86% of the global population. Plastic bags, and then cigarettes followed as the 2nd and 3rd most pollutant.

>“Around 460 million metric tons of plastic are produced annually, with cumulative production projected to reach 20,000 million metric tons by 2040….By 2060, the total accumulation of plastic in the ocean is projected to reach 145 million metric tons….the individual items most responsible were food packaging, caps/lids, and plastic bottles, which were among the top-ranked individual items in over half of all nations. Plastic bags were the second most dominant usage type, recorded as a top-three-ranked usage type in 39% of nations, followed by cigarettes (38% of nations), fishing and shipping gear (34% of nations), and EPS/ foam (27% of nations)...” -excerpts from the study

A toxic chemical leak in Orange County, California has forced the evacuation of 40,000 nearby residents. The disaster is going to end in one of two ways, according to fire officials: the giant chemical tank will explode—or thousands of gallons of the chemicals will spill out. Meanwhile, part of the English Channel saw very high PFAS levels when tested, 13x the safe limit for coastal waters.

Cuba is still nearing an energy grid Collapse as fuel shortages lead to longer and longer power outages. South Africa has amazingly gone one year without load shedding from the country’s largest electricity provider.

The UAE reportedly believes that the Strait of Hormuz will not reopen until Q1 or Q2, 2027. So it could be another year; woe to Kuwait, whose economy relies almost entirely on oil. And still, oil prices have not hit their peak; some people estimate that will happen in August, but who knows… Meanwhile, Pacific island nations are particularly hit by the oil crisis, since they rely heavily on imported oil, for fuel and energy production.

LNG price won’t be returning to normal soon, either. And other countries are looking at their maritime chokepoints, and are allegedly thinking about charging their own exorbitant tolls on commercial traffic. The resulting energy shock is also pushing the economy to a breaking point, since some industries cannot remain profitable with higher energy costs and bank interest rates are rising.

President Trump insists on retrieving any enriched uranium that Iran may have. The U.S. seized a sanctioned Iranian oil tanker on Monday or Tuesday. About 9% of the world’s aluminium also comes through the Strait; won’t somebody think of the Diet Coke can shortages?!

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Four people have died as a result of Bolivia’s anti-government protests, now in their second week. Alberta (pop: 5M) will have a non-binding referendum on separation from Canada this October. The United States indicted Raul Castro, the ex-Presidente of Cuba, leading many to suspect that an American operation is forthcoming against the “rogue state.” A U.S. aircraft carrier happened to also arrive in the Caribbean on the day of the indictment. And Japan & China’s feud & mistrust still seem to have no off-ramp.

30,000 more people in and around Port-Au-Prince were displaced by fighting; casualties unknown. A gas explosion in a Chinese mine killed 82 on Saturday—their worst mining disaster since 2009. In the Horn of Africa, the risk of spillover combatants from Ethiopia or Eritrea fighting in Sudan is growing, pushing the Horn closer to a regional conflict.

One year after the India-Pakistan conflict flared up into a shirt & limited war, experts say the tension is still high between the two populous states. Pakistan’s unlikely buddying-up to the U.S. and its allies—in Iran War negotiations, nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, and U.S. development of Pakistan's oil fields—complicates the rivalry. Pakistan is also fortifying mining sites in Balochistan with security forces so they can further strip the region of minerals.

The Board of Peace is pushing for disarmament of Hamas, before Israel withdraws from the positions and buffer territory it has taken—and expanded in recent months. IDF strikes killed 19 people on Tuesday in Lebanon, despite a “ceasefire” that some observers insist still exists. More strikes followed on Friday & Saturday, killing at least 10 and 4 in Lebanon. And Trump is reportedly planning new strikes on Iran.

China allegedly trained about 200 Russian drone pilots in China last year, before sending them to the battlefront. A Russian drone strike hit a funeral procession in Sumy, killing one and wounding others. Another long-range Ukrainian strike hit an oil refinery 500+ miles (800+ km) inside Russia. The Russian government meanwhile blamed a dormitory strike that killed 18 students in occupied-Luhansk on Ukrainian soldiers. The U.S. is meanwhile sending 5,000 more soldiers to Poland, and also paused some long-time defense cooperation with Canada.

2.8M Afghans are expected to return to post-Collapse Afghanistan from Pakistan and Iran in the coming 7 months. Nigerian-U.S. strikes reportedly killed 175+ Islamist militants in recent weeks, including operations on Sunday and Tuesday. 28 people were slain during a drone strike in a Sudanese market controlled by rebel soldiers.

Though the closure of the Straits of Hormuz are creating a delayed global food crisis, the keepers of the Doomsday Clock are warning about how worse it could be if a lowish-yield Nuclear War were unleashed somewhere on the globe. Crop yields would fall 70% in the U.S., trade would be disrupted like we have never seen, nuclear winter could cause long-term freezing of northern lands, and that’s not even mentioning the deaths from the Bombs and radiation. In the future, we may yet pine for the quiet days of 2026…

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Select comments/threads from the subreddit last week suggest:

-Collapse is necessarily deeply informed by geography, and it will largely dictate any mid/post-Collapse reality that we live through. This weekly observation from northern Norway examines the link between local culture/places and the shape and size of Collapse.

-Are we heading to a “systemic agrifood shock” as the UN is warning? Well, this post’s comments seem to think so. Find the FAO food price index here if you want to compare to previous months & years.

-We humans are not living in alignment with our purpose. So says this eloquent & frustrated manifesto on human evolution, religion, war, illusions, stories, and power. What a tragedy it is that we spend our one life dancing to somebody else’s song…

-Fortune Magazine is posting on r/Collapse now. Could this be an indication that we have gone mainstream? The post in question concerns the fact that a growing number of U.S. employers have stopped matching their employees’ 401k retirement contributions, due to economic pessimism and market uncertainty.

-We might be the “cancer of the earth” if this doomy image album post is reflective of humanity as a whole. The cross-post in question shares the colossal deforestation (of majestic old growth forests) and their massive, mighty trees. And that’s just in the United States and Canada…

Got any feedback, questions, comments, upvotes, Drought reports, summer survival skills, doomy TV shows, hate mail, etc.? Last Week in Collapse is also posted on Substack; if you don’t want to check r/collapse every Sunday, you can receive this newsletter sent to an email inbox every weekend. As always, thank you for your support. What did I miss this week?

River deoxygenation, drone warfare in Sudan, concurrent drought/flood events, inflation, internal displacement, and a really big data center in Utah.

Last Week in Collapse: May 10-16, 2026

This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter compiling some of the most important, timely, soul-crushing, ironic, amazing, or otherwise must-see/can’t-look-away moments in Collapse.

This is the 229th weekly newsletter. The May 3-9, 2026 edition is available here if you missed it last week. These newsletters are also available (with images) every Sunday in your email inbox by signing up to the Substack version.

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Marine Heat Wave: “temperatures spike above what’s typical 90% of the time historically, holding for at least five consecutive days before breaking.” Scientists say that some marine heat waves may become “near-permanent” in the not-too-distant future, if the study from April is as accurate as they fear. The 19 enclosed marginal seas examined “have already entered an unprecedented warming phase following the reversal of aerosol cooling effect in the late 20th century. Under unmitigated future scenarios, many seas would experience climate warming rates three to four times higher than previously observed, with 15 seas at risk of entering near-permanent heatwave states.” The scientists believe that most of these 19 seas will enter this state by 2050, and 15 will experience near-permanent heat waves by 2100. The water in the Gulf of Mexico/America’s Loop Current is also warming faster than average, which intensifies hurricanes and will be aggravated by the AMOC Collapse later this century.

A study published on Friday examines the connection between coal combustion and solar energy, and arrived at an unsurprising conclusion: “aerosols reduced global PV {photovoltaic/solar} generation by 5.8% in 2023. From 2017 to 2023, annual aerosol-induced PV energy losses from existing systems were, on average, equivalent to one-third of the energy added by new PV installations….This coal resurgence not only sustains emissions but also impairs solar performance by degrading air quality as the atmospheric emissions from coal-fired power generation directly reduce surface irradiance. When these coal plants are brought online as backup during periods of low solar output, their emissions can further intensify pollution and prolong dimming episodes.” Coal combustion in China was estimated to reduce solar power generation by 7.7% in 2023.

Research published on Friday in Science Advances says that rivers are suffering from disproportionate “sustained deoxygenation” and that dissolved oxygen (DO) “concentrations {will} decline by 1.1% ± 1.6% under SSP1–2.6 and 4.7% ± 2.7% under SSP5–8.5 throughout the 21st century.” About 79% of the 21,400+ rivers examined for the study were experiencing deoxygenation. “Short-term heat extremes caused both fluvial DO decline and deoxygenation acceleration.”

The world is running out of sand, says the United Nations in a 107-page report from a few weeks ago. Sand, gravel, and other such products are the most used solids on earth, used in construction, manufacturing, water filtration, and technological products.

>“...what is hardest to measure is often what sustains both nature and human societies over the long term. Over-reliance on short-term economic metrics risks obscuring the geological and ecological processes that take centuries to form and may never be restored once critical thresholds are crossed….Extraction is increasingly concentrated in ecologically sensitive riverine, coastal, and marine systems. Mismanagement can result in cascading consequences: deltas sink, coastlines erode, aquifers become salinised, and habitats fragment….Despite its central role in sustaining modern life and economic activity, sand still receive {sic} little strategic attention from national governments, leaving its long-term sustainable management uncertain….Sand is an integral element of many ecosystems in our mountains, drylands, rivers, coasts, deltas, and lakes, both on land and underwater. Where sand flows and accumulates, land is formed and ecosystems are created, biodiversity flourishes, water is purified, and livelihoods are sustained….” -selections from the report

A paywalled PNAS study concluded that “El Niño is known to heighten conflict risk….Because of their impacts on droughts, famines, and floods….conflict risk rises primarily through El Niño’s dry, rather than wet, teleconnections.” The impact is most strongly felt in the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia. Projected anomalies for El Niño continue growing more extreme at the top end of predictions. The average temperature of the top two meters of seawater made a new daily high on Wednesday. And the overall surface temperature of earth continues rising.

Yet another study on Antarctic melting warns about basal “melt-driven feedback” loops: “warming creates a feedback loop: as the high-salinity shelf water becomes lighter, it lets warmer ocean water flow underneath the ice shelf, which then increases ice-shelf melting.” Another study examined the impact of insect dieoff (globally we lose about 1% of insect biomass each year) and found that the dieoff will “exacerbate rates of poverty and micronutrient deficiency in vulnerable communities” like the ones studied in Nepal.

A pre-publication study found microplastics in Amazon tadpoles for the first time ever; what took you so long? A geoengineering startup wants to scatter “amorphous silica” particles in the air (0.5 microns in size = 0.0005 millimeter) to reflect sunlight back into space, and they say they’ve raised $75M to do it. Research from One Earth pushes for a holistic, integrative approach to social sciences, climate research, politics, etc.

The United States continues its worst Drought in decades: 20%+ is in extreme Drought, and over 60% overall. The Drought on the Great Plains is expected to cause the smallest American wheat harvest since 1972, a drop of almost 25% when compared to last year. The Sahel saw all-time highs for mid-May last week; Mozambique too. Parts of India baked under temperatures above 45 °C (113 °F); and part of Uttar Pradesh (pop: 245M) saw 90 killed in flooding.

A study found that “more concentrated precipitation decreases land water availability across all climates globally, a drying effect as strong in magnitude as the wetting effect of increased total precipitation,” meaning that as rainfall is becoming more concentrated, and the land is getting drier…even if more precipitation falls. One of the scientists involved said, “Consolidation of rainfall under global warming will lead to a drier land surface.”

A study predicts that Indonesia will lose its remaining Papua glaciers by 2030. All but two have already vanished in the last decade. When Death Valley in California hit 46.7 °C (116 °F) last week, it was the earliest time of the year it had experienced such high temps. Some places in the Philippines felt record hot nights, as did placed in Indonesia and Malaysia. Record May temps across Mexico ranged from 41 to 45 °C.

Greece’s tourism-heavy economy is suffering as Droughts and heat waves threaten its busiest holiday season; shrinking aquifers, aging water infrastructure, and agricultural demands compound the problem. Somalia is meanwhile struggling with crisis-level Droughts that have forced the deaths of livestock and wilted crops. A quasi-paywalled Nature study is warning about “compound events—such as concurrent hot–wet and drought–heat extremes” becoming progressively common as the world warms. They write that “historically frequent compound events increase almost linearly with increasing cumulative CO2 emissions, whereas rarer and more severe events escalate disproportionately.”

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The northeastern part of the DRC has recorded a large Ebola outbreak that has killed at least 80 people so far. Hundreds more cases are suspected, and other cases are confirmed but are not yet fatal. The CFR/death rate for Ebola ranges widely based on various circumstances, but kills about 50% of those it infects. At least one case has been found in Uganda. There is a vaccine for some strains of Ebola—but not this one. Ebola is a hemorrhagic fever that spreads by contact with bodily fluids. Its symptoms include tiredness, fever, headache, confusion, and bleeding—among other things.

The WHO is warning about future cases of hantavirus, even as they predict that the cruise chip outbreak will not spread much further. And there is a suspected hantavirus case at a New York high school, reportedly unconnected to the cruise ship outbreak. The incubation period for hantavirus ranges from about 2-6 weeks, so some new cases will not become clear until perhaps early July. Some epidemiologists reportedly feared at first that the cruise ship outbreak might be a human-human transmissible variant of bird flu, and were relieved when it was “just” hantavirus…

Tick season has begun in Canada, and scientists are warning of a possibly devastating tick season. A dark bioethics paper from last year, whose ideas were pushed to a few million readers last week argues that “tickborne AGS {alpha‐gal syndrome, which gives people allergy to eating red meat} is a moral bioenhancer if and when it motivates people to stop eating meat” because it would decrease beef/pork production across the world. The authors suggest that spreading AGS is a moral good for the environment; are they sinister actors or unconventional environmentalists?

Some scientists are looking for Vibrio species in Florida’s coastlines; Vibrio is a collection of 70+ flesh-eating bacteria that will be more common when ocean temperatures rise to a more habitable range for the bacteria. Today there are only about 100 deaths per year, but the habitat of Vibrio is moving as far north as Maine during the summers. The disease generally enters humans through shellfish consumption (generally oysters).

Another increasingly common strain of bird flu is more transmissible among chickens, though still not transmissible between humans. Poland and France saw new bird flu outbreaks earlier in May. And, confirmed for the first time, we saw a case of bird flu transmitted from a cat to a human; a study confirms it happened around December 2024.

Inflation in the U.S. hit a 3-year high at about 3.8% for the last 12 months. Gasoline prices also hit an average $4.50 nationwide, the highest price in almost 4 years. Prices are higher in most of the world. A colossal data center is being planned for Utah that is expected to need more than twice the energy consumption of the entire state (pop: 3.5M). The enormous complex is projected to increase local daytime temperatures by 5 °F and nighttime temperatures by as much as 28 °F. It will be constructed near Utah’s Great Salt Lake, within a watershed ecosystem already on the edge of Collapse. Also, a new natural gas power plant must be built on the site, which will sit on a 40,000-acre plot, equivalent to about half the size of Malta. Trillions more will be invested in AI and data processing over the coming years, one of the few “safe” investments in a tumultuous & exploitative world.

The Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and officials say a few more weeks of blockage will result in tens of millions of people pushed into starvation and famine far away from the resource chokepoint. Worldwide oil reserves continue being depleted, but some countries are benefitting from the oil shortage—or at least their oil corporations—namely the United States, Russia, Norway, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Kazakhstan.

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Hundreds of people in central Mexico were displaced by gang fighting against the community-established police forces. The Philippines is again impeaching their VP, who stands opposed to the President and warned in 2024 that hired assassins would kill the President if she were ever seriously threatened. A train hit a bus in Thailand, killing eight and wounding 32 others.

Taliban terrorist attacks continue against Pakistani security forces. U.S. and Nigerian forces killed an ISIS affiliate leader in Nigeria on Friday night. Gang warfare in the capital of Haiti killed 78 people in the last week, with 66+ others wounded. 5,300+ people were displaced by the attacks.

The EU is leaning more towards third-country hubs for people deported from the bloc. The Pentagon closed its program investigating and responding to civilian deaths in wartime. Meanwhile, a rare US-China summit in Beijing seemed to agree on little, except a few business deals; President Putin comes to Beijing in a few days for his own summit with President Xi Jinping.

Nine people across Ukraine were slain in a wide-ranging drone attack on Wednesday. The following day, Russia struck and destroyed an apartment building in Kyiv, killing at least 24. Meanwhile, the frontline city Izyum is covering its thoroughfares with nets overhead to protect residents from enemy drones. Battlefront soldiers from both sides have grown increasingly gaunt as rations are difficult to deliver to soldiers long-stationed in hidden positions. Germany is preparing to deliver some 500 ground drones to Ukraine, for use in transporting people from, and supplies to, the frontline. Robots are taking over positions relating to logistics and killing, further removing the human element from battlefield operations.

Israel and Lebanon are extending their ceasefire by 45 more days, but the meaning of “ceasefire” has lost its meaning over the past few years. Israel struck Tyre while the talks were being finalized. Other strikes occurred hours later. And 22 were slain two days earlier in strikes on Wednesday. IDF forces also reportedly eliminated one of the Hamas architects of the October 7 massacre.

The U.S. House of Representatives allowed President Trump to continue waging war in Iran, by the narrowest of margins. Mutual mistrust is preventing meaningful negotiations, despite being the only way out of a War that has jeopardized global oil prices and food security.

The 2026 Global Report on Internal Displacement was released last week. The 51-page document, which includes data up to the end of 2025, indicates a 60% rise in the number of those displaced due to armed conflict, when compared to 2024 data. The total number of displaced fell by about 700,000 from its all-time high in 2024, to 82.2M in 2025. The report includes regional overviews and some stories from individual countries affected by disasters and conflict. About 4M people across Afghanistan remain internally displaced; 7.2M in Colombia.

>“Internal displacement refers to the forced movement of people within the country in which they live….More than 82.2 million people were living in internal displacement across 104 countries and territories at the end of 2025. More than 68.6 million were displaced by conflict and violence, and almost 13.6 million by disasters. This is the first decrease in a decade….Conflict and violence triggered 32.3 million new or repeated movements across 48 countries and territories in 2025. This was a 60 per cent increase compared with 2024….Storms triggered 17.9 million movements, about 60 per cent of the total and the second highest annual figure on record for this hazard….Sudan recorded more than 1.7 million displacements, a significant decrease compared with the previous two years….The number of displacements triggered by conflict and violence in West Africa continued to decline from its 2023 peak….Conflict and violence triggered around 2.8 million displacements in Palestine in 2025….Floods triggered 3.6 million displacements across South Asia, a significant drop from the six million recorded in 2024….Wildfires triggered nearly 456,000 displacements in the Americas in 2025….Displacement in Haiti increased for the fifth consecutive year, reaching nearly 977,000 displacements….Around 7.2 million people were living in displacement {in Colombia} as of the end of the year, the second-highest figure in the world…” -excerpts from the report

Mali’s Russia-backed government launched an offensive against rebel Islamists who tried a coup in Mali a few weeks ago. Mali’s government claims to have killed hundreds of insurgents, but casualty counts are unofficial and unconfirmed at this time. In Sudan, where almost 20M people are facing acute hunger, UN officials say drones killed 880+ people from January-April 2026, mostly civilians. The distant and robotic nature of drone warfare also makes accountability difficult, complicating efforts at transitional justice and creating long lasting problems of accountability.

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Select comments/threads from the subreddit last week suggest:

-We are receiving conflicting messages about hantavirus, and this not-quite megathread from the subreddit includes a range of opinions, articles, pessimism, and dark humor. It has 450+ comments as of now, and may be worth your time.

-War enters the pores of humanity, its unconscious—and begins to transform everything. So says this well-composed piece from India.

-First they came for the garbage collection, then they came for the wastewater management… This thread tries to guess what services & systems will fail first in a slow-Collapse, when society rusts away in the background—as it is doing now. What will fail first? Hospitals, banks, schools, roads?

-Our method of “fishing” in the sea is not sustainable. This seldom-seen post from the bizarro–Collapse-meme/low-effort subreddit r/Collapze shows one reason why.

Got any feedback, questions, comments, upvotes, tips for staying sane at the end of the world, Collapse art fairs, pigeon recipes, etc.? Last Week in Collapse is also posted on Substack; if you don’t want to check r/collapse every Sunday, you can receive this newsletter sent to an email inbox every weekend. As always, thank you for your support. What did I miss this week?

A hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship, more extreme heat warnings and records broken, AI’s dangers to the financial system, several unreliable ceasefires, and the ongoing demoralization of society.

Last Week in Collapse: May 3-9, 2026

This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter compiling some of the most important, timely, soul-crushing, ironic, amazing, or otherwise must-see/can’t-look-away moments in Collapse.

This is the 228th weekly newsletter. The April 26-May 2, 2026 edition is available here if you missed it last week. These newsletters are also available (with images) every Sunday in your email inbox by signing up to the Substack version.

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Celebrating his 100th birthday on Friday, the eminent advocate for environmental conservation, Sir David Attenborough warned that irreversible and devastating runaway consequences of climate change will begin to manifest themselves in the 2030s, and never-ending in the history of humankind. “In the 2030s, The Amazon Rainforest, cut down until it can no longer produce enough moisture, degrades into a dry savannah, bringing catastrophic species loss... and altering the global water cycle….At the same time, the Arctic becomes ice-free in the summer….And the speed of global warming increases….Throughout the north, frozen soils thaw, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide, accelerating the rate of climate change dramatically….As the ocean continues to heat and becomes more acidic, coral reefs around the world die. Fish populations crash….Global food production enters a crisis as soils become exhausted by overuse. Pollinating insects disappear….A sixth mass extinction event... is well under way."

U.S. regulations prohibiting hunting & trapping on a range of wildlife refuges, federal lands, and coastal zones were lifted on Monday. Meanwhile, a Nature Sustainability study is urging the immediate relocation of New Orleans, since 3-7 meters of sea level rise is projected to swallow 99% of the city before the end of the century. The coastal defense system is expected to fail, and “the current warming is on track for 2.6°C by 2100.” Despite consistent warnings about sea level rise, Florida’s coastline has swelled with millions of new residents over the past 25 years. “As with all climate-driven migration, out-migration in coastal Louisiana is multi-causal, and climate drivers intensify pre-existing drivers such as poverty, suburbanization and economic development.”

Ecofeminists say climate change and its associated repercussions will affect women more negatively than men, and argue for a more holistic appreciation of the links between feminism and liberal environmentalism. Other writers are blaming “elite white eurowestern men” for high-extraction activities, automobile use, high irrigation practices, and more, according to the study references. The researchers write that “industrial modern fossil fuelled societies are founded on and structured by a worldview in which men have considered themselves to stand above nature and women with a boundless right to dominate, control and exploit.”

A fjord-based tsunami in Alaska last year (the second-tallest tsunami on record, at 481 meters) was triggered by a massive landslide induced by climate change. Permafrost melt and glacier retreat is expected to worsen over the coming decades, and these kinds of tsunamis generally produce waves that are taller than earthquake-caused tsunamis, say scientists.

A volcano erupted in Indonesia, killing at least three. Daily sea surface temperatures hit another daily high on Wednesday. And NOAA confirmed record CO2 ppm for the month of April, at 431 ppm. A 20-year retrospective on Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, concludes that Gore’s projections for CO2 ppm are right on track to hit the expected 500ppm around 2056. A few other predictions, like the forthcoming disappearance of Glacier National Park’s glaciers, have not materialized on the short timescale he estimated. Many of the other dangers—breakdown of the AMOC, sea level rise, bleaching of coral reefs, etc—are in not-so-slow motion.

As the sea level rises, Mexico City sinks, at about 2 cm per month. The city (metro pop: 23M; elevation: 2,240 meters, or 7,350 feet) is witnessing its infrastructure buckle in real-time—roads slanting, cracking, sinking. Buildings slumping irregularly, pipes snapping underground, soil and water shifting far underneath the ground in the ancient aquifers, existing but on borrowed time. And yet still the metro area is growing by about 250,000 each year, with no real effort made to stymie the subsidence.

The Palmer Drought Severity Index, which measures the severity of droughts of course, determined that April was the worst monthly Drought for the Lower 48 U.S. states on record. As the earth gets even hotter, the Hajj pilgrimage is becoming increasingly hazardous.

The Alps are facing an unseasonably dry period, following a dry winter. Part of Ghana saw its highest minimum temperature for May, at 27.2 °C (81 °F). South Africa and Madagascar both saw record May heats in some locations. So did Iran and Saudi Arabia. And water shortages in India’s large Maharashtra state (pop: 130M) are resulting from lots of things, but among them the voracious water appetite from sugar cane plantations. Coastal Queensland saw its warmest May night and parts of Bolivia and Paraguay saw record May temps, too.

El Niño continues building in the background. Sea surface temperatures are near record highs. Advanced climate models are still struggling to predict megastorms with the accuracy and urgency to meet the moment—and no predictive model can protect a coastal city from billions of dollars of damage.

Malaysia has reportedly begun cloud-seeding in an attempt to generate precipitation for its Drought-afflicted rice crops. A study on Antarctic ice says that basal melting (melting from the bottom) is probably going to accelerate faster than expected due to warmer circumpolar deep water intruding on the underside of the ice shelves. Another study on a related topic found that “persistent upwelling-favorable conditions under anthropogenic forcing may push the Southern Ocean into a prolonged low sea ice state.” A study from the other half of the world, the Arctic Circle, found that long-frozen microbes do not all reawaken at similar speeds and strengths—indeed, about half of them still lie dormant after their long thaw. And so their decomposition and carbon releases are not very predictable either.

A fresh study on deforestation in the Amazon says that the threshold for large-scale forest loss in the Amazon gets nearer and nearer depending on the precipitation received. Under higher emissions scenarios, the threshold for deforestation and savannahfication are more likely. The authors write, “under future climate conditions, rainfall reductions occur at progressively lower levels of deforestation, indicating that climate change amplifies the sensitivity of rainfall to forest loss…these findings highlight the southern Amazon is increasingly vulnerable to erratic rainfall from land-use changes, with its land-atmosphere system losing resilience.”

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A doomy study on the future of the nickel industry says that “half of mined nickel threatens the top 10% of global land areas most critical for conserving biodiversity and storing carbon, but avoiding mining in these areas increases the risk of supply shortfalls. In addition, 53 to 60% of future supply comes from coastal mines {mostly in Indonesia}, which threaten the top 10% of global priority areas for conserving marine biodiversity.” Will we spare these fragile ecosystems and accept a long-term nickel shortage, or maximize extraction at the expense of biodiversity and our treasured coastlines? On second thought, don’t answer that.

Hantavirus hantavirus hantavirus. You’ve probably heard about hantavirus, a rodent-carried virus that can be transmitted through contact with rodents or their waste. Its CFR (death rate) among humans ranges between 15-50%. There is no cure, and no vaccine—but researchers are working on developing a vaccine for humans. The vast majority of hantavirus cases are found in Eurasia, where the CFR is lower than the Americas. The MV Hondius, a cruise ship usually servicing clients visiting the poles, departed from southern Argentina, headed for Cape Verde with 149 total people onboard—and one deadly plague. The Ship of Death saw three fatalities so far, and it scheduled to land in Cape Verde today. Quarantines are in place, and the panic is largely overblown; all but one variant of hantavirus are not transmissible between humans. This website tracker was developed to visualize the outbreak and possible contacts.

Although another study from The Lancet unsurprisingly confirms that reinfection raises the risk of Long COVID, the national rates of developing Long COVID (at least in the U.S.) have flatlined, and seem to be holding constant. Of course many sufferers of brain fog, joint paints, insomnia, and/or chronic fatigue are still not being counted in the reports, or are not recognized as having Long COVID as opposed to another condition like depression.

There are microplastics, and there are colored microplastics. A [paywalled study in Nature Climate Change says the latter are more dangerous, since they are darker and therefore absorb more sunlight. Airborne microplastics are said to already trap about 16% as much heat as black carbon… But one good consequence of the Hormuz crisis is that plastics are becoming more expensive to produce in Asia.

President Trump is again threatening tariffs against the EU, if his new trade demands are not met by July 4th. A self-post from r/Afghanistan sounds the alarm on the mass forced exit of some 25,000 professional women working as teachers & health workers, to be replaced by…nobody. And negotiations by the EU to increase food imports from South America are imperiling Europe’s homegrown agriculture industry, still somewhat reliant on family farms. Romania’s currency hit all-time lows when compared to the Euro.

Regulators are again warning about the potential for advanced AI models like Anthropic’s Claude Mythos to breach the cyber defenses of lending giants and trigger a banking crisis, either locally or globally. Anthropic warned that “The fallout — for economies, public safety and national security — could be severe.” But still they move full steam ahead. Private lenders are increasingly heavily invested in AI and data centers, which could leave them potentially exposed to massive losses if the long-promised profits from AI fail to materialize, and more accurate revaluations of massive tech companies comes home to roost. And the power grid may not be able to handle the coming boom.

>“AI models have become increasingly effective at reading and reasoning about code—in particular, they show a striking ability to spot vulnerabilities and work out ways to exploit them. Claude Mythos Preview demonstrates a leap in these cyber skills—the vulnerabilities it has spotted have in some cases survived decades of human review and millions of automated security tests, and the exploits it develops are increasingly sophisticated…..On the global stage, state-sponsored attacks from actors like China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia have threatened to compromise the infrastructure that underpins both civilian life and military readiness. Even smaller-scale attacks, such as those where individual hospitals or schools are targeted, can still inflict substantial economic damage, expose sensitive data, and even put lives at risk. The current global financial costs of cybercrime are challenging to estimate, but might be around $500B every year…” -from Anthropic’s statement on Friday

The Iran War is in its third month, but some experts are already calling it the “worst energy crisis that anybody alive has ever seen.” Aggravating an already energy-strained global economy, fires at oil refineries are becoming more common—some caused by War, others by accident or negligence. The drone-ification of War has also increased vulnerabilities for oil facilities, which can be set alight with a $500 explosive drone.

Oil reserves worldwide are at 8-year lows, and shrinking still. Malawi is the hardest hit country in Africa by the fuel crisis, they say. Since 20% of the world’s oil flowed through the Strait of Hormuz, the cumulative oil shortage sits at over one billion barrels, a number to which another ~20M barrels is added every day.

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A fragile ceasefire in Iran is being continuously tested by both sides: U.S. vessels reportedly engaged Iranian vessels, and Iran claims to have hit U.S. ships as well. Is a truce forthcoming? Maybe, maybe not; negotiations seem to flip all the time. The War has also depleted stocks of weapons for the Americans—costing some $25B of munitions so far. Many of their fearful allies (Poland, Japan, etc) are going to see their orders of U.S. weaponry deprioritized to meet escalating demand from the U.S. military, which is still waiting for congressional approval of higher defense spending before they increase their production capacity. The War Machine is hungry.

Speaking of broken ceasefires, Israel killed the son of the top Hamas negotiator, which didn’t help talks progress over the not-quite-low-intensity conflict. Instead, Israel’s impatience with Hamas’ ongoing refusal to disarm is pushing the IDF back into larger scale warfare, even as the Israeli public grows more weary of war. Both sides accuse each other of violations to the ceasefire. Israeli operations continue against Lebanon, but everyone is too numb from everything else to pay attention.

A 3-day ceasefire was declared from 9-11 May in the Ukraine War, along with a prisoner exchange. The BBC estimates some 2,300 North Koreans have died fighting for Russia in/around the Ukrainian frontlines, out of 11,000+ total fighters sent to the battlefront. North Korea also reportedly sent short-range ballistic missiles to Russia to help their War effort. A growing number of voices, including Putin himself, believe the Ukraine War is actually nearing its “end” in the next few weeks, after both slides combined have lost 500,000+ soldiers, 352,000+ from Russia and around 150,000 Ukrainians. Many more wounded and displaced. Or will the grinding War keep going for a few more years?

A fire at a fairground in Mexico left five dead. Nine died in an explosion at a coal mine in Colombia, and eight miners are trapped following a coal mine collapse in Russia. Thailand is dissolving a diplomatic agreement with Cambodia concerning overlapping maritime claims. Balochi separatist attacks in Pakistan appear increasingly coordinated to disrupt American efforts to open large mining concessions in the region, and to scare off other potential extractors.

Analysts say that China and Japan are each entering a spiral of distrust over the other. Japan’s recent military posturing over the past few months has stirred up fears in Beijing, triggering a series of mutual & somewhat symbolic gestures that both cultures, used to face-saving maneuvers, are unaccustomed to de-escalating. The mutual suspicion over the other’s intentions may bring both countries into a more adversarial position—and drag in other players.

New U.S. strategy is identifying migration and left-wing causes in Europe and beyond as precursors to terrorism. Local elections across the UK saw colossal victories for the right-wing Reform party, and a strong showing for the UK Greens, with the traditional Labour and Conservative parties hemorrhaging large vote shares. Experts say the U.S. is probably going to pull out many more soldiers from Europe than the 5,000 announced to be leaving Germany soon; Poland’s PM is warning about the future disintegration of NATO as transatlantic political tensions deepen. Another American strike on a Caribbean vessel killed three.

Fighting continues in Mali, following a failed coup two weeks ago. Jihadists killed 30+ people across a couple village raids in the country’s central region on Wednesday. Tuareg separatists reportedly captured several dozen Malian soldiers, and Boko Haram reportedly killed 23 soldiers in Chad.

In Sudan, one week after Khartoum’s airport reopened for flights bringing Sudanese refugees back, rebel drones struck the airport. Sudan’s central government claims they were launched from Ethiopia, but the fog of war is thick. Observers fear that Ethiopia will be dragged into the War soon, since Sudan’s government is allied with Eritrea, one of Ethiopia’s current rivals (despite siding with Ethiopia in the recent Tigray War). Both sides in the Sudan War believe the War could continue until at least 2033. The country representatives self-appointed to end the War (UAE, Saudi Arabia, U.S., and Egypt) are not making much progress in de-escalating. And meanwhile Ethiopia’s Tigray region selected a rival President for the region as part of the establishment of a parallel political structure that might push the wartorn region back into violent separatism.

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Select comments/threads from the subreddit last week suggest:

-This year’s El Nino is going to push us over the tipping points, if this post and its linked article + comments are to be believed. 2027 could be, by some predictions, 1.7 °C warmer than the baseline, and trigger cascading climatic crises. Other predictions say the temperature anomaly could be 1.9 °C warmer in the most extreme and unlikely circumstances.

-There is a rich selection of Collapse-related books to flip through, if you are looking for some light summer reading. This thread has compiled several dozen books, old and new, to help expand your Collapse consciousness.

-Apparently the average monthly car payment in the United States is $680/month, if this post and its linked Forbes article are to be believed. No wonder affording life in America is so tough these days. Total annual automobile debt at the end of 2025 was $1.68T nationwide.

-“No one believes in anything anymore,” writes u/BlackMassSmoker in a thread about demoralization, desperation, and the corrupt rot in the hearts of mankind. The social contract is dead. Long live get rich quick schemes!

Got any feedback, questions, comments, upvotes, tips for staying sane at the end of the world, Collapse art fairs, pigeon recipes, etc.? Last Week in Collapse is also posted on Substack; if you don’t want to check r/collapse every Sunday, you can receive this newsletter sent to an email inbox every weekend. As always, thank you for your support. What did I miss this week?

Warnings about a food system breakdown, the overture to a Super El Nino, ice melt, UAE leaves OPEC, a comprehensive review of Long COVID, an attempted coup, and the Wars in Eurasia drag on and on and on…

Last Week in Collapse: April 26-May 2, 2026

This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter compiling some of the most important, timely, soul-crushing, ironic, amazing, or otherwise must-see/can’t-look-away moments in Collapse.

This is the 227th weekly newsletter, and it might be the longest one yet. The April 19-25, 2026 edition is available here if you missed it last week. These newsletters are also available (in full, with images) every Sunday in your email inbox by signing up to the Substack version.

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A group of representatives for countries frustrated with the impotence of COP conferences met in Colombia for a two-day climate conference, to discuss how to transition away from fossil fuels. 57 countries sent delegates, mostly from the upper-levels of government—but nobody came to represent the United States, China, India, or the Gulf petrostates. No binding agreements were made—only the hope to eventually have countries make an agreement next time the group meets…in Tuvalu. Colombia’s President declared that the capitalist model ruling humanity today is “suicidal” and unsustainable, and many attending the gathering called for large-scale debt-forgiveness in the Global South.

NOAA’s projection of the coming El Nino is literally going off the graph, with some extreme-end sea surface temperature anomalies forecast at over 3.5 °C warmer than normal. And a joint report from the EU and WMO confirm that “95% of Europe experienced above-average annual temperatures in 2025….The annual sea surface temperature for the European region was the highest on record….Wildfires burnt around 1,034,550 hectares, the largest area on record {equivalent to the size of Iceland or Cuba}….solar power {reached} a new contribution {of Europe’s electricity generation} record of 12.5%.”

The eminent climate scientist Dr. James Hansen predicts that 2026 will be our warmest year on record (so far), once the Super El Nino gets going in force. He is not alone in his predictions; estimates on the annual temperature anomaly keep rising. Temperature rise is accelerating, and some fear that the planet won’t cool down after the El Nino is through; we may be past 1.5 °C forever now.

A paywalled study in Nature Sustainability identified “ecological, and social tipping points that abruptly regenerate ecosystems and resources” and “have the potential to positively tip large-scale recovery of nature.” Unfortunately the study is locked and we cannot see more, but a summary of the study says there are four “positive tipping points,” including some very vague ideas: “nature-positive initiatives….{changing} consumption behavior….management of shared resources….{and} ecosystem recovery.”

Uzbekistan saw new record minimums for April at 26 °C (79 °F), while parts of Siberia saw daytime highs at 30 °C. Lightning strikes in Bangladesh killed 14 people in a day, most of them outdoor farm workers. New minimum temps in Nepal shattered old records by more than 5 °C. Several Indonesian island set new records as well for heat. And a late April snowstorm in Samara, Russia, killed three. India baked under hot temps again.

A UK research agency is planning a geoengineering project, or so they say, to spray salty water droplets high in the atmosphere so that sunlight will be reflected back. However, they have not chosen a location yet, operations will not commence until 2028 at the earliest, and the proposal must still pass through various approval stages. So it can’t be that urgent…

One NGO claims that, from 2024 to 2025, deforestation rose 66% in Indonesia, from 647,000 acres to 1.1M acres last year. That’s the equivalent to the size of Luxembourg in 2024, and the size of Australia’s Kangaroo Island in 2025. Analysts blame the loss of forest on expanding industry, new forest concessions under deregulated protections, palm oil, and pulpwood production. Meanwhile, planet earth’s albedo (the % of sunlight reflected back into space) is at another record low, at around 28.7%. This will increase earth’s energy imbalance more. And New South Wales is looking at restarting gas exploration for the first time in 10+ years.

Recent research indicates “an increase in upper-2000 m warm water thickness” affecting Antarctic ice. “The future climatic implications of a poleward shift in upper 2000 m CDW {circumpolar deep water} are substantial, given that the heat contained within CDW is the principal source of basal ice shelf melting.” In other words, changing water patterns is accelerating the melting of the bottom of Antarctic ice, and impacting carbon-rich deep water. And a pre-publication study concluded that extreme weather events in Antarctica—like the freak winter heat wave from July-August 2024, which saw temperatures exceed the seasonal average by 9 °C for 17 consecutive days—will be up to 26x more likely under high emissions scenarios, by the year 2100, when compared to a hypothetical situation with no human influence on climate.

A study from March found that “rivers may be losing oxygen up to 2.5 times faster than lakes and oceans globally.” The scientists estimate 1.5 billion metric tons of CO2 were emitted (mostly through the breakdown of organic material in the rivers) from rivers worldwide from 2002-2022, equivalent to about 3x the entire annual CO2 emissions of Brazil. Other research suggests that atmospheric dust pollution has an impact on heat-trapping that’s twice as large as previously believed.

As “ecosystems throughout the world slip closer to irreversible tipping points,” a study on Brazil’s deforestation found that, among other things, “degradation persists even after reductions in deforestation.” Public and private policies that may block deforestation still do not address the related forest degradation problem, nor risks from forest fragmentation or wildfires.

A research institution says tropical deforestation in 2025 was less than in 2024, by about 36%. 2024 was a record year, due to wildfires and agriculture mostly. In 2025 we only lost about 43,000 sq km—roughly the size of Denmark or Estonia. We are still 70% beyond the 2030 target that is believed to be necessary to stop & reverse forest loss.

A doomy study in Science of the Total Environment says that the previously-thought-stable carbon reserves in soil are actually not so stable. Instead, the study, supposedly “the world's longest soil warming experiment,” concludes that certain organic matter (believed to shed CO2 only by chemical reactions) can be released by simple long-term warming.

Snow cover in Greece’s mountains has been cut by more than half in the past 40 years, say scientists. And experts are alarmed over the March warming that swept across the United States (pop: 349M), and say that 2026 could be a year for massive water crises, especially around the Colorado River states.

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A study from April concluded that increasing exposure to synthetic chemicals is interfering with hormones and has “reduced fertility, fecundity, and even multigenerational harm” among a number of animal species. Including humans, of course.

The UAE is leaving OPEC (and OPEC+), in effect as of last Friday. As one of the cartel’s largest oil producers, the UAE’s departure will weaken OPEC, and also allow the Emirates to export oil beyond the caps set by OPEC. Meanwhile, since the closure of Hormuz, oil companies have been making huge profits if they’re based outside the Middle East.

Fuel prices are closing in on $5/gallon in the U.S. average, but have already blown past $6/gallon in California. In France, petrol prices are €2 per liter ($7.50 USD/gallon), and slightly more expensive in Germany. Rumors of shortages are sparking long lines of customers at the pumps. Parts of Africa simply cannot source enough fuel at all, and the situation will only worsen. And plane tickets may rise in price by ~20% as jet fuel also feels a supply crunch.

The new Ayatollah (who still has not been seen since his father was killed in March) decreed that Iran’s blockade of the Persian Gulf will continue, subject to a $2M USD fee that few countries/ships have been paying. Aid groups are calling for a “humanitarian corridor” for the Strait, but so far to no avail.

The skyrocketing price of energy has not seemed to have an impact on the rapidly developing data center industry, even in regions strapped for fuel. Supposedly, “Malaysia, which has emerged as one of the region's fastest-growing data center hubs, could see a sevenfold increase in power consumption by 2030.” Yes, the annual power consumption for Malaysia is somehow predicted to 7x over the next 4 years, so that data centers can process your data, and AI can churn out tailored responses to the hungry masses. Even as a global oil shortage is still worsening, and old power grids are strained further. This is not sustainable.

Speaking of unsustainable, global lithium demand is reportedly expected to grow 48x by 2040 (and production globally will double by 2029), as the EV industry really takes off, and electricity storage needs surge. The U.S. Geological Survey conducted a big exploration for the key metal, and found large lithium reserves (some 2.3 million metric tons of lithium oxide), mostly in New Hampshire and Maine.

The billionaire CEO of JP Morgan Chase is warning about U.S. government debt triggering a bond crisis that could result in mass sell-offs, a tight liquidity market, and a government bailout the likes of which none have ever seen before. France’s economy grew 0% in Q1 2026. Global economic instability and uncertainty is also pushing more countries, including some unlikely ones (Uzbekistan, Guatemala) to start buying and holding gold reserves.

A fellow Substacker is warning about the multifaceted “poly shock” from the Iran War on global food supplies. In his well-composed post, he hypothesizes that the coming fertilizer shortage (it is already planting season in much of the world) is timed to cause extra damage during the Droughts & flooding caused/amplified by a Super El Nino. During extreme weather events, plants need special combinations of nutrients to survive, and many farmers large & small will not be able to adapt. Chemical shortages will also lead to pesticide shortages; he predicts a global maize yield decrease of over 40%, and about 50% of the wheat yields in a worst-case lack-of-pesticides scenario. Less for rice and soy, but he approximates the caloric damage at “around 3,790 trillion kilocalories, equal to the annual energy requirements of roughly 3.79 billion people.” He writes that Brazil’s food production will be hardest hit, and the major food importers Egypt (pop: 120M), Indonesia (288M), and the Philippines (117M) will suffer particularly hard. Plus tertiary effects on livestock, fish, migration, energy levels, etc.

A 46-page UK report on the risks to our worldwide food system from a variety of threats, including Drought, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, trade disruption, and more.

>“Nature loss is accelerating across forests, soils, freshwater and oceans, pushing multiple Earth system processes beyond safe operating limits and towards tipping points….Once key ecological thresholds are crossed, ecosystem services like pollination, flood protection and carbon sequestration may collapse irreversibly on human timescales, with no technological substitute at scale….Acute shocks such as compound breadbasket failures, fishery collapse, trade disruptions and extreme weather, are already translating into higher and more volatile prices for food and other essentials….Increasing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) magnifies these pandemic risks….Ecosystems underpin human society. Their collapse will directly impact food security, supply chains, public health, and financial stability….Food grain production is concentrated into a few countries and global distribution managed by a few companies. Over 80% of the world’s wheat is produced in the top ten countries….Soil health is in precipitative decline globally….The food system also has several human-related chronic risks, including a skills shortage across the sector and globe, and weather-related impacts, such as extreme heat, on the ability of labour to harvest food….Another critical tipping point on land is pollinator collapse….If global warming, ocean acidification, overfishing and pollution continue on their current trajectories, the economic and social consequences are likely to be severe….” -selections from the candid report

A comprehensive review on Long COVID restates the dangers of the illness, plus possible treatments and lingering gaps in our knowledge. It is a great one-stop resource for the state of the science on Long COVID. Another study says that COVID’s neurodegenerative impact is similar to Alzheimer's and may raise the risk of dementia later in life. The many symptoms among Long COVID patients necessitates a tailored approach to each case, and not a universal treatment.

>“The global prevalence of Long COVID remains uncertain, largely due to the absence of standardised diagnostic criteria, inconsistent public health surveillance, and regional differences in pandemic dynamics. Recent studies estimate that between 65 and 400 million people worldwide have experienced persistent symptoms following confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection….The persistence of live (chronic productive infection or defective viral persistence) or reactivated viruses (latent infection) is an area of great importance in increasing the pathological understanding of Long COVID….Epidemiological and immunological studies have linked viral and bacterial infections, including SARS-CoV-2, to an increased risk of autoimmune diseases such as vasculitis, type 1 diabetes, and inflammatory bowel disease….Emerging empirical evidence implicates several interconnected mechanisms, including immune dysregulation (such as autoimmunity), gut microbiome dysbiosis, coagulopathies, and viral persistence….There is a plausible link between damage to the autonomic nervous system and Long COVID symptoms, but the exact pathophysiology remains unknown….Abnormal sweating, bladder control problems, gastric issues, skin discolouration, increased venous pooling in the legs, as well as syncope and palpitations are commonly observed {in neuropathic POTS cases}....Many of the neurological and neuropsychiatric symptoms seen in individuals with Long COVID appear to involve neuroinflammatory cascades triggered by systemic inflammation. This inflammation may contribute to the disruption of the blood-brain barrier (BBB)....Chronic fatigue is one of the most prevalent and debilitating symptoms reported by individuals with Long COVID…Hospitalisation for COVID-19 is associated with a significantly increased risk of breathlessness and sleep disorders compared to non-hospitalised individuals…” -selections of the review

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The Islamist armed group JNIM launched a series of coordinated attacks across Mali last weekend, reportedly in conjunction with a Tuareg separatist group, with the aim of overthrowing the government and possible separating the country’s north. Several military officials were slain in the attacks—a combination of drones, guns, and car bombs. At least one city in the north was captured, though other gains were only temporary. Other fighting is ongoing; casualty reports were not initially released, but scores of people are thought killed. Although the JNIM insurgency is unlikely to win, analysts say they are winning a long-game in forcing the country to accommodate their ideology progressively more. And another coup may be in the works.

A highway bomb in Colombia, attributed to FARC dissidents, killed 21 and wounded 33+ others. Another U.S. strike on an alleged Caribbean drug boat killed three; Reaper drone flights are becoming more common in the region. Somali pirates seized a vessel last Sunday, days after pirates captured two other vessels off the Somalia coast. Following a tribal water dispute in Chad, 42 people were killed, plus ten wounded; it is one of the country’s deadliest resource fights in recent years.

A train crash in Indonesia left 14 dead, and 80+ more injured. Migrants in Pretoria were warned to close their shops during a march against illegal immigration. The U.S. Supreme Court heard legal arguments for ending temporary protected status for several hundred thousand Haitians & Syrians who might be returned to their countries (or even the DRC ) if the outcome goes Trump’s way. Mexican special forces arrested the supposed head of the Jalisco cartel last week, amid an intensification of operations ahead of the World Cup.

An hours-long attack by Boko Haram on last Sunday in northeast Nigeria killed 29 people. The gunmen also torched a church and scores of civilian motorcycles. An attack on a Nigerian orphanage kidnapped 8 children. Reports surfaced of 154 dead prisoners who perished in a Nigerian military camp under mysterious circumstances (starved to death, mostly).

The UN is cutting its peacekeeper force in South Sudan by 5,000 troops, though hunger and conflict continue to displace people. In Afghanistan, Pakistani missile & mortar strikes killed 7, and wounded at least 85, at a university. Pakistani military officials also announced the killing of 13 people attempting to cross the Durand Line into Pakistan across two incidents on Thursday. The U.S. is moving 5,000 soldiers out of Germany, with more likely to follow.

In the 25 years that Reporters Without Borders has been producing a global Press Freedom Index, it has never before been this low. The Index ranks 180 countries on a 1-100 scale (where 100 is free & open), and found only seven countries above 85. A few interesting placements include: Norway (92.71) at #1, the UK (79.45) at #18, South Korea at (69.12) #47, Ukraine at (66.1) #5), the United States at (62.61) #64, Hungary (59.85) at #74, Haiti (50.32) at #107, El Salvador (38.88) at #143, India (31.96) at #157, Russia (23.15) at #172, and China (13.85) at #178. The Index uses 5 general metrics to assess the Press Freedom: Political, Legal, Economic, Social, and Security related factors.

Russian strikes on Oedsa wounded 11+, and a Ukrainian drone attack reportedly killed an employee working at the Zaporizhzhia Power Plant. Ukraine again struck an oil refinery killing none but causing a large blaze. Russia’s economy meanwhile contracted 0.3% in Q1, their first economic shrinkage since 2023. And a Ukrainian investigation into soldier morale found that soldiers stop caring about their lives about 40 days into a frontline posting. Lithuania arrested 13 Russia-linked saboteurs and attempted-murderers. And Ukraine blocked the sale of grain harvested on occupied Ukrainian land, transported on Russia’s so-called “shadow grain fleet.”

The Iran War is expected by some to stretch on indefinitely, since the fundamentals seem to favor Iran, and all sides are too proud to settle with a deal that would hurt them politically—not to mention the potential for an Iranian nuclear program. Yet in the meantime, the political and economic pain is only increasing for all. However, President Trump says the War is basically over already, that the ceasefire has terminated the conflict days before Congress is supposed to decide whether or not to authorize a full War. Experts say 2-9 months will be needed to actually wrap up the War and restore any sense of normal prices & supplies exports/imports again….once parties agree on a resolution.

Lebanon claims that 14 people were killed in an Israeli attack on last Sunday, in breach of their ceasefire. 37 others were wounded. Others were bombed while trying to rescue Lebanese trapped in rubble. Others were killed in other strikes on Thursday. Lebanon also accuses Israel of an ongoing ecocide on their territory, in effect since 2023—according to a 53-page report released in April. An IDF killing of a water engineer, plus a few water drivers, has obstructed the provision of clean water to many Gaza residents. Another famine is coming to Gaza, they say, as if the first one ended somehow. Israel also intercepted 22 aid boats from a convoy of 58, heading from Crete to bring relief supplies to Gaza. And Egypt is reportedly planning a live fire drill in the Sinai, causing fear among Israeli communities near the border.

Observers, and locals, fear that bombs in Sudan will keep exploding long after the shooting stops. Unexploded ordinance lies hidden across the old (and new) battlefronts of Sudan, particularly around Khartoum. Clearance operations done in 2025 removed hundreds of mines; thousands more may still lie under the rubble and sand. Updated estimates of the slain in the fall of el-Fasher in Sudan now place the number of dead (from starvation, sickness, or RSF massacres) around 70,000.

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Select comments/threads from the subreddit last week suggest:

-Although COVID levels in the U.S. are at perhaps all-time lows since early 2020, the long-term effects of infections are still mounting. This weekly observation recounts some of the dangers of COVID, before segueing into a catch-all state of the United States, from the strange assassination attempt last week to the soulless gray color scheme that has supposedly taken over society.

-You are not alone in having an ongoing existential crisis. This self-post and the associated study indicates that 32% of American adults are experiencing some kind of existential crisis—most often relating to affordability. Others are walking on the fine line between general stress-induced nervous breakdown and functional member of society (i.e. “the economy”).

-The Haves and the Have-Nots in suburban Florida, as depicted in this well-written weekly observation are truly living in separate realities, even as they live in the same geographic region. Tools are being pawned, vehicles are being lived in, smokers are cutting down on their vices due to financial pressure, and the daily grind is chopping up the poor into tiny bits. And still Florida is swelling with new inhabitants.

-The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has, for some reason, not resulted in $150+ per barrel prices of oil (yet), and the commenters in this well-cited thread on the topic addresses the global credit outlook, AI, and other topics closely related to the price of oil—which rose almost to a new all-time high on Thursday. Only for a brief moment in 2022 was the price of crude oil higher.

Got any feedback, questions, comments, upvotes, Drought tips, minimalism advice, garden planting suggestions, etc.? Last Week in Collapse is also posted on Substack; if you don’t want to check r/collapse every Sunday, you can receive this newsletter sent to an email inbox every weekend. As always, thank you for your support. What did I miss this week?