Last Week in Collapse: August 9-15, 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 242nd weekly newsletter, available here on Reddit, though their algorithm forced me to cut two paragraphs over there (the paragraphs on Long COVID & AI, just before the paywall). The August 2-8, 2026 edition is available here on Reddit if you missed it last week. Thank you for subscribing to the Substack.

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The American Meteorological Society (AMS) published the 527-page State of the Climate Report for 2025, bringing together 600+ scientists’ contributions to paint a picture of weather events, data, and climate indicators from around the planet. 87% of our ocean area experienced a marine heat wave in 2025, land-based glaciers continued to lose ice mass, cloud coverage worldwide was at its second-lowest on record, and permafrost temperatures were warmer than 2024 temps at 88% of sites measured. The reason why 2025 was only our 3rd warmest year for global surface temperature may be because La Niña was in effect for almost the entire year, bringing cooler temperatures along with it. There is also a 13-page summary available, but it lacks the many detailed graphics of the full report, which is divided into several sections: Global Climate, Global Oceans, The Tropics, The Arctic, Antarctica & the Southern Ocean, and Regional Climate profiles.

“The three main greenhouse gases that warm our atmosphere by trapping some of Earth’s outgoing energy—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—all reached record-high levels in 2025….Fossil fuel emissions in 2025 are estimated to be a record high of 10.3±0.5 petagrams of carbon….The average percentage of cloud area fraction in the sky during the year was the second lowest since records began in 1980, at 68.5%....surface soil moisture was lower in 2025 than in any other year since 1991….tundra and boreal forest ecosystems became a small net source of the gases over the last couple of decades….The average global mean sea level for 2025 set a new record, for the 14th year in a row, rising to 111.2 millimeters above the average for 1993….Of the 97 named storms, 50 reached hurricane strength….The record for most named storms in a single TC season is 104 in 1992, and the fewest since 1980 is 67 in 1985….Examining surface temperature in the Arctic, 2025 was the second warmest year since the observational record began in 1900. The surface temperature anomaly for the year was 1.38°C above the 1991–2020 mean….since 1979, the Arctic annual SAT {surface air temperature} has increased approximately three times faster than the global mean, a phenomenon often termed Arctic Amplification….There was continued ice sheet mass loss in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in 2025…” -excerpts from the report

Amid severe ongoing Drought in Puerto Rico, several hundred thousand islanders have begun rationing water; last July was their driest on record. In British Columbia, tens of thousands of Canadians have fled their homes recently to escape growing wildfires; and one died. Smoke from the blazes is moving eastward, into southern Canada and the northern United States. And the U.S. government appears to be ending the publication of its annual Arctic Report Card, a document that NOAA traditionally released every year in collaboration with 100+ scientists; a limited 2026 report might still find its way to publication though, absent U.S. participation.

Most of England is now in Drought, and about 27M people there are living with water restrictions of some kind. The airport of Abu Dhabi (metro pop: 2.5M) broke a record high temperature, and a record low, last weekend, at 48.3 °C (119 °F) and 36.4 °C (97.5 °F). Northern Mongolia hit a new record for this time of the year, at 30 °C, while China set new August temps at a couple cities, around 36-37 °C. South Korea felt its second-hottest first 10 days of August, with an average nationwide high of 34.4 °C. And the UK felt its hottest day of the year at 38.1 °C (100.6 °F).

Colombia felt its all-time hottest day in the north, at 42.9 °C (102 °F). Soon after, Colombia felt a 7.4 earthquake rock its western region, killing 250+ people, damaging at least six airports, and collapsing a number of buildings. Thousands were injured, and thousands more reported missing. A 7.7 earthquake also struck Indonesia early on Saturday morning, killing at least 47 people, and taking down several buildings.

The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reported all-time high sea surface temperatures, with an average of 20.96 °C (70 °F) for oceans outside the two polar zones. July 2026 was Western Europe’s hottest July (21.62 °C average), while only the planet’s second warmest overall for global air temps, around 16.9 °C. (It was also the hottest July in U.S. history, according to a NOAA announcement on Monday.) The full report, which is quite brief, also mentions that “Surface soil moisture levels in western Europe in July 2026 were significantly lower than those in July 2022, the last summer with severe drought across western Europe….Much of the region also saw the widespread dryness observed in May and June persist and intensify, with exceptionally low rainfall and/or soil moisture reported for France, Spain, parts of Germany and the UK.”

Flooding in the Philippines left at least 15 dead. Several thousand people were evacuated across high-risk sites in Beijing (metro pop: 23M) as the region felt about 24cm (9.5 inches) of rain fall within 24 hours. Six people died from flooding in Japan. Meanwhile, Italy’s Tiber River has dropped to such lows that an ancient Roman bridge was uncovered in Rome (metro pop: 4.2M)....and the heat in Italy is endangering their “cheese banks” held as collateral for personal & business loans. And Drought has pushed about 1,000,000 more people in Somalia into “emergency levels of food insecurity,” many of whom have become internally displaced.

Warm spring rains can cause rapid snowmelt; the resulting floods can sometimes wash away seasonal ice that communities would have used through the summer to provide water. A study in Science examined these phenomena in the western U.S., and found that they were/are the cause of a majority (7) of the 11 “spring superfloods” experienced in the past 76 years.

A paywalled study in Nature Climate Change concluded that “Under a high-emissions scenario, global HHEs {hourly heat extremes} are projected to increase fourfold and their population exposure to grow sixfold by late century. Each hot day will gain about four hot hours, and a further three hot hours will occur on non-hot days….Low- and middle-income countries bear more than three-quarters of the current and future heat exposure.” We’re cooked. Meanwhile, NOAA estimates that the Super El Niño coming will probably (70% confidence) be the strongest El Niño since records began around 1950. It might be the event that finally pushes the Amazon Rainforest beyond its tipping point into an irreversible savannah ecosystem…

Approximately 304 million years ago, before the dinosaurs walked the earth, it was the Late Paleozoic Ice Age. A summary of a paywalled study into this period studied a 7.5 °C temperature rise over a period of roughly 175,000 years, found “large-scale carbon release and the development of photic-zone euxinia…coincident with a marine biocrisis….{the phenomenon was} initiated by a modest carbon release and temperature increase potentially associated with enhanced volcanic activity…which likely crossed a climatic tipping point and triggered massive carbon release and abrupt large-scale warming.” Some scientists fear that a release of carbon triggering global warming (over a much shorter time period, earth has seen about 2 °C in 200 years) might trigger a feedback loop (à la permafrost melt) that unleashes runaway atmospheric heating.

A Russian-owned, China-operated, and sometimes-Cameroonian-flagged oil tanker in Russia’s “shadow fleet” has run aground on the Omani coast, believed to be carrying as much as 950,000 barrels of oil. It has begun to leak, though only a few hundred barrels may have polluted the Red Sea so far. But nobody wants to take responsibility for the vessel, and Russian authorities don’t want to admit that it even is/was part of their effort to evade sanctions. Complicating things further, the tanker is uninsured, and the monsoon rains would hamper salvage efforts through September.

Tropical Storm Lala has intensified to hurricane strength before making landfall on Hawai’i. Meanwhile, several Croatian cities felt all-time temps over 40 °C (104 °F), one of Switzerland’s glaciers has fully disappeared, Kuwait City hit a record hot temperature at 52 °C (126 °F!), Central Asia felt new minimums, and earth felt its hottest August 12th (by surface temperature) on record.

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Despite advances made in green energy and its wide construction, analysts say AI will eat up all that power—and then some more. So says a study in NPJ Climate Action. The authors determined that “AI’s modeled effects increase the carbon intensity of the global economy and reinforce fossil fuel incumbency” and estimated that AI could add (on average) about 1.3B tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere per year. Not to mention the risks of AI creating a biovirus, or turbocharging nuclear threats, or disrupting mental health, or rewiring human cognition, or the impact on water supplies and electricity prices.

Ebola deaths passed 2,100 early in the week, with about 4,500 confirmed cases—reportedly one death every half hour. The Bundibugyo strain of Ebola was recorded in a new province of the DRC last week, and experts say this current pandemic may have been kickstarted by a zoonotic transmission, from an animal to a human, before sustained human-to-human spread.

A study found that 27% of UK healthcare workers have, or had, Long COVID symptoms. A study00222-7/fulltext) on Long COVID found that “Loss of dopamine nerve terminals may be contributing to symptom correlates of apathy, motor slowing and memory” among those afflicted with Long COVID, but it only studies the brains of 48 adults, half of whom suffered from long COVID. The brain injuries from Long COVID were linked to long-term depression and apathy, which can last years—over four and a half years in their longest-lasting patient. Other preprint research suggests that people suffering from Long COVID may have immune systems long trapped in a prolonged struggle against traces of the virus.

The proliferation of AI has reached politicians and their staff. An article on American politicians growing dependence on AI profiles their reliance on its so-called expertise, for drafting communications, writing appropriations amendments, handling constituent relations, and for press management. Guardrails, if there ever were any substantive ones, have been cast aside in the quest for expediency.