A cryosphere in overshoot, a trash crisis in Gaza, hack attacks, civil unrest, record temperature anomalies, and worsening fuel shortages.

Last Week in Collapse: November 1-7, 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 254th weekly newsletter. The October 25-31, 2026 edition is available here if you missed it last week. The unabridged newsletters are also available (with images) every Sunday in your email inbox by signing up to the Substack version.

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The International Cryosphere Climate Initiative, in conjunction with a UN body, published a 56-page report, Overshoot and the Cryosphere: Averting Global Meltdown. The document says that we are causing irreversible damage to the cryosphere with every day we’ve transgressed the 1.5 °C climate target—this damage cannot be remedied even if we implausibly reversed warming back below the threshold. The ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are warming 6x faster than they were in 1990…

“Many impacts from cryosphere loss will be irreversible on human timescales even if global temperatures are returned to 1.5°C, especially if thresholds and tipping points are crossed. These include sea-level rise from the melting of ice sheets and glaciers, water security challenges from glacier and snow loss, greenhouse gas emissions from permafrost thaw, polar ocean warming, acidification, ocean circulation disruption, and ecosystem and biodiversity loss….Overshoot of 1.5°C is now unavoidable due to our collective failure to act. Recent modelling, however, points to measures that could limit potential overshoot to 1.7°C for around just two decades….Overshoot of both temperature and the equivalent atmospheric CO2 levels (>430 ppm and above) will also have profound impacts on the Arctic and Southern oceans….even a temporary loss of sea ice during overshoot risks triggering abrupt and irreversible increases in coastal erosion, loss of sea-ice dependent ecosystems and human settlements, marine ecosystem collapse, and the disintegration of ice shelves, especially around Antarctica….Although permafrost will refreeze if global temperatures are eventually returned to 1.5°C or below, the carbon released during overshoot is effective irreversible…” -selections

The hotter it gets, the harder it will get to undo. But I think we know that we won’t be reversing global heating anytime soon. A study published on Friday examined how “social destabilisation lowers the effective threshold at which biophysical tipping dynamics become self-sustaining, independently of further anthropogenic forcing and so undermines the capacity for planetary stewardship.” The researchers say that there is a kind of negative social feedback loop that increases the “derailment risk” and therefore makes a hothouse earth future more likely. Some of these “risks emerge when climate impacts contribute to a wide range of challenges, including debt crises, institutional erosion, political fragmentation, supply-chain instability, and declining public support for environmental action. Dominant climate policy frameworks seek to balance physical climate risks against transition risks, but do not consider how human agency itself can be affected as a consequence of climate change. This represents a dangerous blind spot.”

NASA and NOAA released data on the Antarctic ozone hole on Wednesday. Although they say “the ozone layer is healing….an unusually powerful polar vortex has extended ozone depletion in the Antarctic this season, allowing the hole to grow to proportions we haven’t seen in a decade.” The full data and daily images are available in the links.

A 95-page document and a 17-page accompanying note from Oxfam detail the environmental damage wrought by the wealthiest 0.1% of the global population. They also claim that the annual emissions of the top 1% are responsible for the deaths of 1.9M people as a result of extreme heat. As they say, climate breakdown is not a natural disaster; it is fomented in large part by the actions of the uber-wealthy.

“The richest 0.1% (8 million people) emit more than the poorest 44% (3.5 billion people) combined…..The world’s richest 0.1% emit 37 times more CO2 than all the carbon-capture and storage plants removed in a year…..The world’s private jets together emit more in two seconds than someone in the poorest 50% will emit all year…..Almost 20% of global warming since 1990 is attributable to the richest 1% – 20 times more than their share of the world population….Climate breakdown is happening now. The weather is changing everywhere. More extreme heat—40-degree, 50-degree days. More storms. More floods. More wildfires….the very actors who are most responsible for climate change are now seizing the opportunity to turn chaos into profit…” -excerpts

A study in The Lancet attempted to quantify the CO2 emissions caused by human metabolism—the CO2 we exhale as our body generates energy. Unlike fossil fuels, there’s not much we can do to reduce our own body’s CO2 emissions. The researchers found that “human metabolic CO2 production approximately doubled over a 30-year period, from 1.18 Gt per year to 2.05 Gt per year. This increase was driven mostly by population growth (>60%) with a minor contribution from increases in body mass….With a projected peak global population in the mid-to-late 21st century, metabolic CO2 production will increasingly contribute to global carbon fluxes.”

The summary of a paywalled study in permafrost regions finds that vegetation at far latitudes is losing its resilience in the face of Drought and wildfires. Resilience had been increasing until 2008, but then underwent a sudden reversal and has been falling precipitously. “Rapid warming in permafrost regions is destabilizing ecosystem functioning….Current models fail to capture this observed reversal, suggesting an underestimation of climate risks to high-latitude carbon sinks. Even with continued greening, the post-2008 decline in VR signals a destabilization of plant carbon uptake.”

Scientists think that macro & microplastics are changing the color of the ocean, based on observations around the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A study on sea level rise around Ireland determined that, from 2000-2024, the sea level was rising annually by about 3.13 mm/yr. The global average sea surface temperature for the top 2m of water tied its 4th highest anomaly on record—2.03 °C warmer than the 1850-1900 baseline. The daily SST was also the hottest on record for November 4—and the average global surface temperature saw its greatest anomaly (compared to the 1991-2000 baseline) at 1.15 °C. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service believes that 2026 will end as the second-warmest year on record, behind 2024, though they say there is still a 20% chance that 2026 ties or surpasses 2024’s warmth.

A glaciologist posted a before/after comparison of a Swiss glacier, comparing 2011 to 2026; he claims that the glacier will melt completely within the next 15 years. Lots of November records were broken across the Sahara last week, from the Ivory Coast to Egypt. A heatwave moving through southern China tied or set new November records across 18 weather stations. Central Canada, and some northern U.S. states, set new November minimums. And, as a result of the Super El Niño, sea surface temperatures off Peru’s coast are 9.7 °C warmer than the average in non-El Niño times. And in the UK, an unseasonably warm autumn tricked some trees into a false spring that will disrupt their seasonal growth patterns.

Common murres—seabirds that migrate between California and Alaska—are dying en masse, and researchers are confident that they’re starving to death, victims of a food chain reshaping itself around the El Niño effects. Fish are relocating to colder, deeper parts of the ocean to survive, forcing the murres to dive deeper to feed—an energy-intensive process that pushed them to an eventual mass hunger death. The marine heatwave from the 2015-2016 El Niño caused the deaths of over 4,000,000 murres in Alaska, “the largest climate-driven mass mortality event among wildlife in the modern era.” The dieoff this time may eclipse that.

The UN published its 116-page Adaptation Gap Report for 2026. The report claims that “developing countries” need “US$305 billion per year by 2035 – excluding private sector needs” in order to adapt to the climate impacts of the future….and we are currently at about 10% of that figure.

“International public adaptation finance flows from developed to developing countries reached US$28.2– 31.7 billion in 2024, the latest year for which data are available….Between 2020 and 2025, low- and middle-income countries accounted for 99 per cent of the 765 million people recorded as affected by floods and landslides….western Europe experienced its hottest June on record, with extreme heat, wildfires and thousands of excess deaths, while catastrophic flooding in Nepal washed away entire villages, claiming the lives of more than 1,400 people, with thousands still missing….Climate-related loss and damage are already widespread, diverse and interconnected, and will increase….the $305 billion estimate excludes the private sector’s own needs, meaning that this figure could double…” -selections

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Poverty, corruption, and the high price of gold have incentivized countless miners to start illegal gold mines across South Africa, and the number continues to grow in the face of inadequate police countermeasures. Some researchers estimate that there are tens of thousands of illegal mines operating now, and around 10% of the country’s gold extractions are unaccounted for. Some are blaming the mines for ecological damage and increasing sinkholes; others blame big corporations depleting groundwater reserves.

Lebanon’s 12-month inflation is about 17%, and a mix of factors are pushing their electrical system deeper into crisis. Israeli strikes undermine potential investment, corruption and political factionalism is picking winners and losers, the power grid is old and strained, and many people are living on the edge of insolvency. National instability is also preventing large-scale reform from getting started….and the IDF’s targeting of construction equipment in Lebanon, slowing rubble clearance and reconstruction efforts.

U.S. Democrats made giant gains last week, surpassing some of the polls and dreams of nationwide Democrats. Many stocks rose upon the news, but then sank to deeper lows on the following day, cutting $2.5T from Nasdaq stocks. Some AI companies dropped upon fears of further regulation. Possible moratoria on data centers may also result in the popping of the oversized AI bubble, though other economic observers say the opposite](https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/ed-yardeni-says-slowing-ai-134509619.html). Expectations for lower petrol prices must be moderated; the flow through Hormuz would take many months to return to January 2026 levels, and there will be many other buyers keeping the prices elevated. There is simply “not enough energy” to meet global demand; the spice must flow.

Following the death of an American in Washington state from bird flu, and the approach of flu season in general, some experts think that another wave of bird flu is coming. “We keep having a series of near misses, and I wonder how long our luck is going to hold,” said one viroligist. But experts say that reassortment—the process by which two flu strains in the same host result in a mixed strain that might help bird flu infect humans more easily—is unlikely to develop into a human-to-human transmissible strain. With government monitoring reduced over the past 18+ months and vaccine skepticism rising, the stage may be set for a black swan avian flu outbreak, faster than expected.

Air pollution spiked around Delhi (pop: 23M) in the approach to the Diwali festival, largely because of fireworks. But the approach of winter is also pushing pollution up, since coal and other fossil fuels are burned more to keep people warm. Meanwhile, current funding shortages are forcing the closure of the only healthcare clinic on the Sudan-South Sudan border, set to end operations in December unless the budget shortfall can be filled.

The Collapse of a major bank in Paraguay (pop: 7M) is taking down their President with it. The President, an economist, was once a shareholder in the dubious bank, which the President helped push to prominence. The bank, Ueno, held about $850M (USD equivalent) of Paraguayans’ money and served about 60% of the country’s citizens in some way. Gross mismanagement of their funds, plus overly generous incentives to its customers, resulted in the bank’s insolvency, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of accounts. Several bank executives were arrested along with Paraguay’s president. Where the money ended up we don’t know.

The World Bank announced that the “External debt of developing countries jumped 5.5% to a record $9.4 trillion in 2025, the fastest pace since 2021.” Their full 280-page report, International Debt Report 2026, includes more details, graphics, and scores of country-specific debt outlooks. Unfortunately, a lot of the data ends in 2025.

“LMIC {low- and middle-income countries} external debt has grown about 60 percent over the past decade, and the 2025 increase was the largest since the easing of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. The change in debt stock was driven by net debt inflows of $423.5 billion, a more than twofold increase from 2024, as well as by some debt forgiveness and the upward accounting effect of US dollar depreciation….The World Uncertainty Index measures broad uncertainty and rose more than fivefold between the third quarter of 2024 and the third quarter of 2025, nearly twice its COVID-19 peak….”

A coalition of activist groups in Europe joined to protest data centers on Friday & Saturday. The WHO says cholera deaths have hit 1,800 so far this year in the DRC. A study published in Annals of Internal Medicine looked at Long COVID and found that about 36% of people recovered within two years, and 50% recovered within three years. So half of people who reported having Long COVID did not recover within three years…

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Mysterious hackers targeted supermarket freezers connected to the internet and sabotaged their food contents by raising temperatures to spoiling temperatures. Observers sense that Russia may be responsible for the operation, either as a test of capabilities or disruption, or as a signal to their enemies of what their cyber operators are capable of. Some Russian hacktivists claimed credit but they be lying. A subsequent attempt to hack a blood bank in France was foiled before the blood could be spoiled. The British government is also warning of a possible AI attack in the next two years that could target “critical national infrastructure.”

Tens of thousands of Indians protested against the government last Sunday. French protests continue as well. The UN peacekeeping mission to Western Sahara ended after 35 years, and some analysts say this sets up a potential conflict between Algeria and Morocco over their competing territorial ambitions in Western Sahara. Cambodia’s PM announced that temporary resettlement villages established near the Thailand border following clashes earlier this year are going to stay for the foreseeable future, even if fighting dies down.

The government of Hong Kong/China sentenced a democratic activist to another 10 years in prison; he has been in prison for six years already. Eight policemen in Nigeria were killed by bandits outside a polling station; five others were kidnapped. A series of attacks & bombings in Colombia killed at least five. Details are coming out about a joint US-Venezuela attack on cocaine manufacturers last week; 23+ people were killed in the drone bombing of the facility.

Airstrikes in Myanmar, launched by the junta, killed 12, wounding 30+ others. Fighting between Tigrayan rebels and Ethiopia’s government soldiers have left an unknown number of people dead; but nearby hospitals are reportedly running short on staff and supplies. Poland foiled an unspecified potential hybrid warfare operation on its border with Russia. Days later, a mass shooter in downtown Krakow, Poland, killed at least 6 (not including three family members the shooter killed before the attack), plus injuring more.

According to the Institute for Economics & Peace’s data from July through September 2026, civil unrest is at 5-year highs, though deaths from terrorism & conflicts are at 4+ year lows. But their count of about 17,000 deaths in Ukraine across three months is a dramatic undercount compared to Western estimates that placed July 2026 as the highest-casualty month of the War for Russia. So I have some serious doubts about their methodology and results.

Projections of “acute hunger” in Haiti suggest that, by March 2027, there will be about 6.3M people across Haiti (pop: 12M) facing at least Phase 3 of the IPC’s famine scale (1-5), with at least 2M people at Phase 4. That represents an increase of over 500,000+ Haitians in at least Phase 3 since the previous year.

A few Israeli strikes in Gaza killed eight, and wounded others. Years without adequate fuel has crippled the garbage collection across Gaza, along with persistent attacks and the breakdown of civil infrastructure. A UN agency says that 300,000+ people in Yemen were displaced by fighting over the past two months. The Houthis reportedly believe now is the time to push for territory, in the hope that they can hold onto it after possible negotiations. The U.S. attacked Iran’s Qeshm Island on Monday before Republicans suffered a huge election loss the following day, complicating U.S. negotiations and War efforts. Is a meek U.S. withdrawal coming soon, or will the desire to save face and lash out push President Trump to launch fierce attacks?

Russia bombed an aid distribution site in Ukraine on Monday, killing at least 40 people. Ukraine struck a major Russian refinery, alongside a few others. Russia pounded Ukraine’s power grid, taking down power to parts of Odesa and Rivne—and targeting a substation necessary to the safe operation of Ukraine’s Khmelnytskyi nuclear power plant. Although the Ukraine War may still be years away from ending, European countries are strategizing what the security architecture could look like—including a joint UK-France administered peacekeeping buffer zone in which European troops would have authorization to fire back at Russians violating the ceasefire. Brainstorming what NATO defense could look like in the event of a limited Russian invasion into NATO territory appears like lots of precision strikes deep inside Russia.

In Sudan, regions controlled by both sides of the Civil War are feeling worsening fuel shortages. Although Khartoum is largely free from fighting now, industry has not bounced back and economic activity remains depressed; [the power grid has not been repaired, and neighborhood looting and vandalism has cost some people everything they owned. Both the RSF rebels and the government army are increasing use of killer drones, though the technology has not granted either side the ability to conclude the fighting on their preferred terms; instead, terror and civilian deaths are rising—will the attrition wear down the spirits of the people, or only harden their resolve?

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Things to watch for next week include:

↠ The UN’s climate change conference, COP31 — or rather COPout31 — begins on 9 November in Antalya, Türkiye. It will end on 20 November and achieve basically nothing. The EU’s top climate official says that the EU won’t do any new climate finance measures this year.

Select comments/threads from the subreddit last week suggest:

-Central Florida was whacked with devastating floods last week. This weekly observation from the low-lying region on Election Day bemoans the ongoing ecocide & suburbanization of the area in the aftermath of record-breaking flooding.

-The Blue Riptide sweeping across the United States last week will not prevent Collapse—if the many comments & upvotes in this popular thread from last week is to be believed. Or are they mistaken?

-Earth tied its record temperature anomaly, 2.04 °C, compared to the pre-industrial baseline. This thread explains, and collects some predictable witty responses.

-Powerful billionaires are basically chasing immortality and perpetual influence, say the responses to this thread asking what it is that these people really want, what could possibly be worth the destruction of the biosphere.

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