Huge thanks to August’s sponsor, Mick, who wishes recommend the book “Wild Free and Happy” by Richard Adrian Reese, which can be downloaded for free here. You can also find it in the PDF resource section at the excellent Post-Doom website.
“When water becomes war: The moral failure of global governance in the Middle East…
“The Middle East today is witnessing a transformation that goes far beyond conventional geopolitics or the competition for oil. One of the most urgent yet underexplored dimensions of its crisis is the question of water, which has increasingly become both a scarce commodity and a weapon in the hands of states and non-state actors alike.”
Drought wilts Israeli agriculture, farmers face significant water cuts
Local agriculture faces a crisis as drought and proposed water cuts of nearly 35% threaten farmers, with the Water Authority planning to reduce allocations to 250 million cubic meters by 2026; this could slash local produce, drive up prices and inflict significant economic damage.”
https://www.ynetnews.com/environment/article/skcaknekgl
“Timelapse Shows Iran’s Largest Lake Shrinking in Drought Crisis.
“Iran is enduring a historic drought, crippling energy shortages, and relentless heat waves with temperatures regularly surpassing 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).”
https://www.newsweek.com/iran-water-crisis-lake-urmia-energy-2116203
“Problems multiply as fresh heavy rain pounds Karachi.
“Death toll rises to 11 as Karachi braces for more rain: 245mm of rain floods port city’s roads forcing citizens to abandon cars: Schools shut amid deluge in megacity, Pakistan Army continues relief activities in Karachi.”
“Brutal Monsoon Season Kills at Least 1,860 in India and Pakistan.
“A deadly monsoon season has claimed at least 1,860 lives in India and Pakistan, with flash floods, landslides and inundated cities exposing the region’s growing vulnerability to climate-related disasters.”
“Blistering sanfu over, but extreme heat isn’t.
“China has endured its second-hottest sanfu period on record this year, and forecasters warn that high temperatures will persist in the south even though the period has ended.”
https://m.chinanews.com/wap/detail/ecnszw/heummsh1682224.shtml
JAPAN RECORD HEAT
Record heat never ends in this extremely hot summer (BY VERY FAR the hottest in history ahead of 2024) Records keep falling: The city of Shiga just had its hottest night in history with a minimum temperature of 28.3C. More records are on the way…
https://x.com/extremetemps/status/1958338901229052279
“Mid-latitude SSTs are record warm for the time of year in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and the N Hemisphere warmth is pushing above the 2023 all-time record (1982-present OISST data).
“In 2023, the North Atlantic was the big story, but now it’s the North Pacific.”
https://x.com/WorldClimateSvc/status/1958216628178456948
“EXTRAORDINARY HEAT IN THE CARIBBEAN:
“34.0 [93.2F] Point Salines all time record GRENADA AUGUST NATIONAL RECORD; MIN 28.9 Charlotte Amalie US VIRGIN ISLANDS AUGUST HOTTEST NIGHT; August hottest night Min 27.5 BARBADOS; Min 28.6 Carravelle MARTINIQUE.”
https://x.com/extremetemps/status/1958282761183035797
“Southern California Faces Record Heat and Braces for Wildfires.
“A days-long heat wave rolling across parts of the US West is expected to ramp up wildfire risk, prompting California to pre-deploy crews as record-dry vegetation potentially acts as kindling for blazes.”
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2025/08/20/836403.htm
“Colorado River Running Out of Water.
“Lake Powell risks hitting “dead pool” by year-end… imperils hydropower and cooling for thermal/nuclear plants, complicates data-center siting and fracking. As the U.S. grid already faces a big capex build-out, drought drives operating costs higher.”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Colorado-River-Running-Out-of-Water.amp.html
“Why are food prices still rising by so much? [UK]…
“In the five years to July, food prices increased by around 37%. That compares with a rise of 4.4% over the previous five-year period… One contributing factor is the climate.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyvn9z3y78lo.amp
“Did you know that already more than 1000 glaciers have disappeared in Switzerland over the last 50 years as a consequence of human-caused climate change?
“One of those is Pizolgletscher which I visited today. Always a saddening yet impressive sight…” [Matthias Huss]
https://x.com/matthias_huss/status/1957844253691764839
“A Water Crisis in Bulgaria Is a Warning for Europe…
“As a national crisis escalates, bathing, flushing toilets and washing clothes and dishes is now difficult from around June to September for as many as half a million people — or 8% of the population — in roughly a third of the country, according to environmental organizations.”
“Nearly a quarter of Chios burned in under a decade.
“Chios has suffered extensive wildfire damage over the past decade, with nearly a quarter of the eastern Aegean island’s land area scorched between 2016 and 2025, according to new data.”
“Niger floods drive thousands from their homes with at least 47 dead.
“At least 47 people have been killed and over 56,000 displaced by flooding triggered by recent heavy rains in Niger, authorities said Wednesday.”
https://trt.global/afrika-english/article/a97a0bb3196a
“A Debilitating Virus Surges Globally as Mosquitoes Move With Warming Climate.
“Chikungunya, which can disable victims for years, is spreading rapidly, including in China, France and other places that have not seen major outbreaks before.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/health/chikungunya-virus-mosquitoes-what-to-know.html
“From sea ice to ocean currents, Antarctica is now undergoing abrupt changes – and we’ll all feel them…
“What’s happening in Antarctica right now will affect the world for generations to come, from rising sea levels to extreme changes in the climate system.”
“Ash dieback triggers hidden surge in carbon emissions from woodland soils, research shows…
“While the loss of carbon from diseased trees themselves and reduced removal of CO2 has been previously noted by scientists, the authors of the latest study say a third impact—the effects on carbon cycling and storage in the surrounding environment—have not been considered before.”
https://phys.org/news/2025-08-ash-dieback-triggers-hidden-surge.html
“‘A climate of unparalleled malevolence’: are we on our way to the sixth major mass extinction…
“…while ours is a sturdy planet, resilient to all manner of unthinkable insults to which it is regularly subjected, once every 50-100m years, something truly very, very bad happens. These are the major mass extinctions when conditions on Earth’s surface conspire to become so vile everywhere that they exceed the adaptive capacity of almost all complex life.”
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You can read the previous “Climate” thread here. I’ll be back on Monday with an “Economic” thread.
Peter Brennan’s article only really looks at climate change driven extinction (maybe because that’s what drove the previous five that he covered in his excellent book and his new book is all about CO2). But we were doing pretty well, even before climate change really took hold, with HIPPO – habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, (human) population pressure – such as constant noise, light, interruption of migration routes, and overexploitation. These are all going to get worse as resource availability starts to decline and migrant numbers explode. Combining these with the rapidly accelerating climate impacts mean the impacts on species is non-linear with plenty of feed backs and tipping points (e.g. the Amazon, still the most species diverse biome, will be gone much faster because of continuing land clearance than with just climate change alone, the way we are now hoovering up krill might be a bigger hit to marine life than heatwaves (and of course feeds back to climate change by weakening ocean sinks).
HIPPO! That’s a new one on me. Did you come up with that? Anyway, spot on. The great doom convergence.
No – I think it was E. O. Wilson
OMG! WTF! How dare anyone even hint at “(human) population pressure”?
Correction: HIPO 😉
“… these threats are known as HIPPPOC: habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, population (human), predator loss, overexploitation, and climate change.”
The Colorado as a Drained Battery
The latest reports from the U.S. are alarming. Lake Powell, one of the Southwest’s key reservoirs, may reach “dead pool” level by year’s end. That would mean no more water can be released downstream. For forty million people, drinking water is at stake, and at the same time hydropower from the Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams would largely vanish. Together they supply about 3,000 megawatts of relatively cheap, clean power.
The irony runs deep. A century ago, the states bordering the Colorado River divided water rights on the basis of an unusually wet year. They drew up contracts as if abundance were permanent, as if the pie could simply be assumed larger than it really was. That fiction worked as long as dams were built and occasional wet winters came. But after decades of overuse, structural drought, and a warming climate, the story is unraveling.
The consequences go far beyond water. Hydropower is in many ways a giant battery: water stored behind a dam, ready to spin turbines on demand. When that disappears, electricity supply must fall back on fossil plants. That means higher costs, higher emissions, and added stress on a grid already facing a massive and expensive build-out.
And there’s more. Thermal plants—coal, gas, nuclear—all require cooling water. Low river flows or high water temperatures force output reductions. France experienced this in 2022, when EDF had to curtail five nuclear stations because the rivers were too warm. This is the new reality: electricity isn’t just about wires and plants, it depends on rivers and their temperature.
The broader implication is that the entire U.S. energy system is colliding with ecological limits. The electric sector itself, long a driver of climate change, now faces its own consequences: drought, warmer rivers, compromised cooling capacity. As always, the costs will be shifted to consumers through higher rates.
Add in industry and digital infrastructure, and the picture grows darker. Data centers consume vast quantities of cooling water, often hundreds of thousands of liters per day. Fracking, the backbone of U.S. oil and gas production, gulps water in already parched regions. Water scarcity thus threatens not just agriculture, but the pillars of the American energy and digital economy.
What emerges is a classic “nexus crisis”: water, energy, climate, and economy, entangled and amplifying each other’s vulnerabilities. What began as a hydrological error—too many rights granted to too little river—has metastasized into a systemic crisis touching drinking water, electricity, industry, and affordability.
It may be tempting to dismiss this as regional. But power shortages in the Southwest will be backfilled elsewhere. A deficit in one region pulls capacity from another, turning it into everyone’s problem. And the underlying mechanisms—overestimated resources, chronic overuse, denial of ecological limits—are global.
The second law of thermodynamics, our cynical tour guide, smiles from the back of the bus. Order slips into disorder, batteries run dry, rivers empty out. We can spin new stories about electrification, green growth, and smart grids, but the Colorado tells a harder tale: without water, there is no power. And the final stop is already written on the map.
Eloquent as always, Zip. Water, the master resource. I agree the southwest’s problems are not merely regional. Nonetheless I keep telling my friends in Tucson to get out, but they haven’t so far. Maybe when water rationing hits hard.
Assortment of articles today regarding water. Posting this from YouTube from the Epic Economist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmaWC-bwHM8&t=191s
Between July 19th and 22nd, China broke ground on the Yarlung Tsangpo mega-dam in Tibet’s Medog County – the world’s largest hydropower project. This monster costs 1.2 trillion yuan, that’s $167 billion, generating 60-70 gigawatts. China claims it’ll power 300 million people by the early 2030s and reduce coal dependency.
But here’s what Premier Li Qiang didn’t mention at his “century’s project” ceremony – this dam sits just 30 kilometers from India’s border in Earth’s deepest canyon, where water plunges 2000 meters across 50 kilometers. They’re blasting five cascade stations plus tunnels over 20 kilometers long through the Himalayas, all in a seismic nightmare zone with 600+ floods since 1980.
This isn’t about clean energy. This is about weaponizing water. India’s Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu called it exactly what it is – a “ticking water bomb.” And China’s track record proves him right. Their Zangmu Dam, operational since 2014, already showed the devastating pattern. Since that dam came online, downstream sediment flows dropped by 30%, fish populations crashed, and local communities reported unpredictable water levels that destroyed their traditional farming cycles.
Thank you for today’s thread Kali…
Yikes! 🤯
Those Chinese are super smart. They will figure out how to beat limits to growth. Which are not even mentioned in this article:
“The Collapse of the “China Collapse” Narrative
“I spent several weeks in China, expecting to find signs of a current or impending crisis. Instead, I witnessed a future taking shape at breakneck speed.”
https://forumgeopolitica.com/article/the-collapse-of-the-china-collapse-narrative
Felix Abt is not to be taken seriously, ever.
Thanks. I never heard of him before. I suppose I should’ve put a sarcasm warning on my comment but hopefully everyone understood that.
(NewsNation) — Internal emails from the Environmental Protection Agency show the EPA was systematically tracking and attempting to discredit an independent scientist who found high levels of toxins in East Palestine, Ohio.
That contradicts the EPA’s assurances to residents when they told them it was safe to return home following a train derailment and controlled burn of cars containing hazardous chemicals.
The emails show the EPA was also tracking residents, even as those same residents said the agency was ignoring their concerns.
After officials in East Palestine burned five tankers of vinyl chloride and the EPA said it was all clear for residents to return, independent testing expert Scott Smith found elevated levels of dioxins in the soil in East Palestine.
Smith’s findings contradicted what the EPA said at the time.
In the spring of 2023, after NewsNation reported Smith’s findings, former EPA administrator Judith Enck said the agency should pay attention to Smith’s test results.
Instead, EPA emails show they began collecting Smith’s personal information, tracking his movements and distributing his whereabouts to more than 50 EPA employees. They even circulated photos of his dog.
NewsNation even documented drones hovering near him on multiple occasions, which he believed were monitoring his actions.
Lesley Pacey, with the Government Accountability Project, told NewsNation it was an issue of public safety.
Yes, now they are cancelling air pollution standards for ICE because they are too burdensome and expensive….it’s getting to be so Kafka
AI Overview
“So Kafka,” used as slang, implies a situation is so absurdly complex, surreal, and frustrating that it feels like a plot from the works of the writer Franz Kafka. It points to a deeply illogical, confusing, and often bureaucratic scenario with a nightmarish quality, where things don’t make sense in a way that leaves one feeling overwhelmed or powerless.
Yes, it is…help!
Good one from Charles Hugh Smith:
“Nothing is as it seems. As correspondent Ray W. so presciently observed some years ago, “It is axiomatic that failing systems work the best just before they fail catastrophically.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/charleshughsmith/p/how-great-powers-fall-apart
Let me thank everyone for the ” unparalleled malevolence”. We are on the way to the one & only extinction of the Clever Ape? It going to be like Christmas, exciting. You’ve been bad so you are going to get what you deserve.
Watching the Third World’s children going hungry & knowing that hunger will be coming to the special, entitled First World’s children is a hard lesson for the FW’s exceptional parents. Wonder how Republican parents will handle watching the suffering of their offspring. I know several that are in complete denial of AGW. Hey Democrats, neither you or your children are exempt. Willful ignorance can lead to uncomfortable consequences. How many of the Greatest Country in the 11 Dimensions, American children are going to bed hungry? 😉
A great challenge for the medical profession: Eliminate the stupid gene in the baboon brains’ DNA or is that mission impossible.
Just read this.
“Someone told me I have two faults: I don’t listen & some other shit they were rattling on about.”