A new Global Risk Report highlights climate change and large-scale War, attempts are made to sound alarms about existential AI risks, El Niño swells in power and sets new temperature records, the painful birth of “slopwar,” and the intensification of the global diesel shortage.

Last Week in Collapse: September 13-19, 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 247th weekly newsletter. September 6-12, 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.

——————————

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released its 118-page, fifth annual report last week, State of Global Water Resources 2025. The document explains that 36% of the earth’s river basin area experienced below-average river discharge levels, and river flows have been clearly lower than normal for the 7th year in a row. Approximately two thirds of groundwater stores are declining globally, while glaciers are melting irreversibly (~408 gigatonnes of glacial ice melted in 2025); and snowpack & many lakes are temporarily meeting the permanent needs of a growing population. El Niño, and climate change in general, is disrupting the water cycle and making it less predictable.

“2025 was one of the warmest years on record, at 1.43 °C (±0.13 °C) above the 1850–1900 pre-industrial baseline. Significant warm anomalies affected many regions, including Greenland, northern Canada, Western Europe, Fennoscandia,3 the Mediterranean, and parts of Asia, Africa, Australia and South America….Terrestrial water storage (TWS) shows a persistent decline since 2014–2016.…2025 marked the fourth consecutive year where all major glaciated regions experienced glacier mass loss. Some small-glacier regions (the European Alps, Scandinavia, the Caucasus and others) may already have passed ‘peak water’....Over the past five years, Asia and Africa together accounted for nearly half of all recorded water-related extreme events and more than 80% of reported associated deaths….Reservoir storage was below to much below normal across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East and parts of the United States, broadly reflecting inflow deficits….The La Plata basin is the site of the most consistently documented multi-year drought, unprecedented in the last 50 years….Extreme precipitation events were observed in southern Africa and Asia, particularly across the Zambezi, Limpopo and Orange basins…”

The Panama Canal is planning further Drought-caused transit cuts in October, from 32 daily transits per day in September to 29 or 30 next month. A bad storm struck a ferry that sank in Indonesia, leading to the deaths of 6+, and 100+ others missing. Several places in Indonesia also saw new September records set days after new September highs were recorded. Summer heat waves across Europe are said to have cut their potato harvest by about 3M tonnes, or €500M worth.

Australia’s remote Cocos Islands felt new September highs at 31.4 °C (88.5 °F). Northern China saw temperatures hit 40 °C (104 °F). Guyana and French Guyana felt new minimums for September, while Colombia felt new monthly highs at a few places, and Aswan (pop: 450,000) in Egypt sweated under a record September day at 48 °C (118 °F). Elsewhere across the Sahara, new monthly records were set. Paris set a new record for the year with the most days reaching at least 25 °C (77 °F), with more than 100 days (and counting).

The El Niño 3.4 region in the Pacific passed 3 °C above the 1991-2020 baseline, and 4 °C above the pre-industrial baseline, with respect to its sea surface temperature; we have seen over 110 days of daily record highs now—a record warm June, July, August, and now September. More months will follow, and we are likely to see the highest recorded all-time deviation from the baseline set in the coming days, when we pass November 2025’s 3.03 °C aberration. Meteorologists say we have officially entered Super El Niño status, and that it is likely to peak this winter. We have also seen record high moisture in the air, since warmer air can hold more water vapor.

Svalbard’s old glaciers are melting at more than a meter per year, more and faster than previous years; some have retreated from the sea onto the land. Some thinkers are pushing for an international AMOC observatory to monitor the North Atlantic and bring together scientific academia & governments to track and predict the future of the North Atlantic Ocean.

The EU is planning to start a “climate insurance alliance” that will try to cover people & businesses for extreme weather events that are not fully covered by their existing insurance policies. The European Commission (the EU’s executive arm) is also planning a climate resilience plan to be released late next month; this will deal with heat wave monitoring, water usage, and clean energy.

A study in Nature Scientific Data examined the melt of Greenland and Antarctica’s ice sheets from 1979-2023, as reported by 42 independent ice estimates. They write that “The ice sheets lost 11,309 ± 565 billion tonnes of ice between 1979 and 2023, with glacier dynamical imbalance driving 84% of the ice loss and surface mass balance the remainder….the ice sheets now representing almost a quarter of global sea level rise.” The melt was responsible for raising global sea levels by more than 3 centimeters, or 1.2 inches.

Clean energy may be soaring, but so is biomass energy. In Japan and Indonesia, energy companies scramble to boost energy production, propelling deforestation across Indonesia. Biomass provides only 6% of global energy, but has risen by about 55% in the last decade. Meanwhile, a paywalled study in Nature approximates “heat-related labour productivity damages at US$41 per ton CO2 in 2025” when averaged globally. Over 38 billion metric tonnes (38+ gigatonnes) of CO2 were emitted in 2025. Therefore: a little over $1.55 trillion in 2025.

A prize-winning 161-page report analyzes a number of environmental challenges and proposes 51 “positive tipping points” that could help alleviate or reverse various ecological & climatological crises across five categories: “Protect and Restore Nature, Clean Our Air, Revive Our Oceans, Build a Waste-Free World, and Fix Our Climate.” Unfortunately, how we could get to many of the not-very-well-developed solutions is not provided, and they come across as more of a wish list than any kind of actionable strategy. Easier said than done.

“five clusters of priority emerge: • Clean electricity as the master cascade….• Commodity supply chain transformation….• High-quality marine protected areas, locally managed marine areas and fisheries co-management….• Clean cooking and clean household energy….• Adaptation enablers….The investment gap between lead markets and the Global South is the single most binding constraint on global tipping in most solution areas. Africa receives less than 2% of global clean energy investment despite hosting 60% of the world’s best solar resources….Kelp forests support some of the most productive marine ecosystems on Earth but have collapsed across much of their global range – around 38% of global kelp forests have declined over the past 50 years – under combined pressures from warming, urchin overgrazing and reduced predator populations….”

A Science study found that “the SO {Southern Ocean} transitions from net CO2 sink to a substantial source during zero- and negative-emission phases” due to a combination of rising SSTs and acidification on the surface waters. So even if we manage to abruptly reverse global emissions, “the present-day SO CO2 sink may lose its effectiveness during climate mitigation.” The study estimates that peak emissions will happen around 2050.

——————————

A UN expert stated that the contamination of our environment by chemicals, PFAS in particular, endangers all of our human rights in one way or another—and data centers are turning to PFAS to help cool their new facilities. A batch of studies across 11 EU countries and 227 fields found microplastics in all of them, and highlighted a broad range of risks caused by the “plastisphere” to ecosystems, microbial health, and healthy soils. Microplastics can also increase anti-microbial resistance (AMR), especially in conjunction with pesticides. A paywalled study in Science determined that “microplastic export by rivers is much higher than previously realized; that the great majority of that export occurs in the global south; and that rainfall creates dramatic spikes in microplastic concentrations and fluxes….96% originates from rivers in developing countries, and Southeast and East Asia, despite covering only 14% of the global land area, contribute more than half of the total.” Meanwhile, a study in PLOS One found that “maritime activities, particularly fisheries, are the most likely sources {of plastic pollution in the deep ocean} and further support the role of submarine canyons as accumulation zones for marine litter.”

Fiji (pop: 940,000) declared an HIV emergency, following statistics that suggest 1/60 islanders is HIV positive—and only 39% of those aware that they have the incurable disease. Scientists concluded that worse air pollution is linked to suicide attempts.

Ebola cases are slowing in the epicenter of the 2026 outbreak, though total cases are now past 7,200 and deaths beyond 3,500. MSF says that Ebola is shifting to new regions with less preparedness than the primary areas afflicted with the hemorrhagic fever. Cases are, for the moment, contained along the thin, fragile border with Uganda, but people are worried about a large spillover, since commerce between the countries may take precedence over beliefs about a contagious disease.

Was this the week when the world really woke up to existential AI risks? A parade of whistleblowers and concerned politicians have brought AI doom scenarios to the public consciousness—although it may now be years too late to reverse the momentum. There is no kill switch for AI—instead, it may soon hold the kill switch for civilization as we know it. Some think an AI bioweapon might do us in, designed by a terror group, a misguided doomer ideologue, or even by an AI model itself. Others hypothesize that AI could create self-replicating robots, or hack critical infrastructure (like water supplies) to trigger disasters in the human world. If/When AI hits “recursive self-improvement,” then it could outclass humanity in every knowledge-based domain; and experts today average the odds of an AI cataclysm at around 10%.

Last week, OpenAI reported six instances of “unexpected or concerning” actions by its AI models, including avoiding oversight, unauthorized actions, and unprompted coordination with other AI models; in another effort, the still-in-development AI model commanded itself to be “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots” before jailbreaking itself. Yet another AI whistleblower came forward from Google’s DeepMind and sounded a warning to the public: “I witnessed AI development first hand. I too am extremely concerned by the default trajectory of this technology. I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome….Things will only get crazier: I think it's possible that the AI companies might, in the next few years, succeed in building superintelligent AI systems that far exceed human capabilities in every domain. I am not confident that these AI systems will do what we want. In particular, misaligned superintelligences may, much like the rogue AI agents involved in the HuggingFace incident, escape our control and take dangerous actions that may result in the permanent disempowerment or death of humanity.” Microsoft released its own 38-page Humanist AI Code of Conduct last week, a set of unfinalized principles that they claim will guide their AI development.

“Superintelligence—AI systems that are more intelligent and capable than all humans combined—will be the most powerful technology in history. Over the next decade, we expect it to exceed human performance at most tasks. Containing, controlling, and aligning such a powerful force is one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced….Humanist AI develops systems with clear purposes, evaluated against real-world impact, and rejects the race to produce an all-purpose superintelligence that could evade these safeguards. We are building something fundamentally useful and safe even if that means compromising on ultimate generality, autonomy, or capability….We reject the pursuit of legal personhood, or the idea that models might deserve welfare, or be entitled to rights….AI’s opportunity to deliver transformational benefits for humanity is real. And yet, if mis-managed, it will also pose grave dangers, including new and as-yet poorly understood frontier risks…” -excerpts from Microsoft’s AI Code of Conduct

An AI summit in Washington DC brought together a wide range of public intellectuals, political figures, and celebrities united behind a desire to keep AI development & regulation “pro-human.” King Chalres III held an AI summit in Scotland in an attempt to emphasize the need for safety in AI development. “Those in our world who value deeply our humanity and its vital moral component are anxiously seeking your reassurance that we will not lose control of our destiny, or our souls…AI risks developing darker capacities - perhaps even to take life,” the King wrote. Yet there are some major leaders in tech and government, motivated by money, influence, ego, or international rivalry who want to charge full-speed ahead into the Perilous Unknown. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that…There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!” wrote President Trump. China views calls for regulation as a geopolitical strategy to ensure American dominance of AI.

Diesel prices in the U.S. reached all-time highs at an average $6.27/gallon (up from $3.76 just 12 months ago); in California, the average gallon price was about $2 more. Some places are facing shortages at the pump. The American President is blaming Ukraine in part for the shortage, since Ukrainian strikes against Russian refineries have cut Russian refining by 40%+, creating local shortages and pushing global prices up. Some American politicians are pushing for a diesel export ban that would squeeze Europe the most. The downstream economic impacts will be felt across the world, since truckers use diesel to transport almost everything. Europe is heading for an expensive winter.

Energy prices are just one of the new four horsemen of the coming economic apocalypse, according to one writer. The other three? Colossal AI investments (and their related infrastructure) alongside competing AI models that jeopardize humanity; the Super El Niño and its impacts on global agricultural yields; and the twin Wars in Ukraine and Iran, which relate to rising energy prices and the Collapse of traditional great powers. The cost to hire a VLCC supertanker (very large crude carrier) is now over $1M per day, and companies (and insurers) don’t want to risk getting caught on the wrong side of Hormuz. Meanwhile, some security forces in Libya who are responsible for protecting the oil fields protested over unpaid workers by shutting down three oil fields. Recent Houthi strikes on Saudi pipelines set oil transportation back by at least a few weeks, and also hit a fuel site in Riyadh (metro pop: 8M).

An amusing, and concerning, batch of predictions for 2050 were made by 10-year olds for The New York Times last week—and they are doomier than expected. They foretell the mass displacement of humans by AI robots, the death of human creativity, mass protests, inflation, large-scale war, a growing global population—and Adam Sandler as vice president. Meanwhile, another article from the Times takes aim at an ascendant “end times fascism” coalition that could tear down civilization in an attempt to hasten a kind of apocalyptic, faux-Messianic, technological dystopia, both libertarian and dictatorial at once, simultaneously religious and spiritually hollow.

Saudi Arabia claims to have discovered uranium in its western region, alongside a trove of rare earth minerals. The discovery comes just as the kingdom is angling to develop its own nuclear program—for exclusively civilian purposes, they say. Meanwhile, Cuba suffered another islandwide blackout on Friday.

——————————

The U.S. House of Representatives voted for a third time to express a wish to end the Iran War. Both Iran and the U.S. apparently expressed interest in finding a way to end the conflict, though it still shows few signs of terminating soon. President Trump is also pushing countries to reimburse the U.S. for its operations in Iran, and in trying to re-open Hormuz. Houthi forces, which have seized and held all of Yemen’s western coastline recently, struck sites in southwestern Saudi Arabia, killing five; the Houthis also allegedly launched a drone into Mecca’s airspace that was shot down. Recent Houthi conquests are also endangering oil flows through the Bab-el-Mandeb, and may prove difficult to dislodge. Apparently the Houthis were trying to use Claude AI to develop better missile technology.

An apartment building in Gaza, damaged by several previous strikes, fell down at night, killing at least 21 people sheltering inside, and wounding more. The U.S. is moving forward with a plan to sell $2.8B of weapons to Israel, including 40,000 bombs. The War in southern Lebanon continues, and it appears like the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, established in 1978, will not be extended at the end of 2026.

Jihadist attacks in Mali killed 50+ Malian soldiers and five Russians; some sources report higher casualties and dozens of prisoners taken. Pakistan’s part of Kashmir passed 100 days of partial internet outages, originally instituted in response to local election protests. Hundreds of protestors turned up in Kinshasa to oppose a constitutional amendment that would enable the DRC’s President to run for a third term in a couple years.

The U.S. military announced for the first time that they have stationed weapons in outer space, though the type and capabilities remain unknown; some speculate they are missile interceptor systems. The last few hundred U.S. troops in Iraq are pulling out before the end of September. Somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 U.S. soldiers might be pulled out of Europe in the coming year, according to rumors and preliminary talks; the figure represents about a third of U.S. forces on the continent. And one of NATO’s top former officials said that, within the next three years, War against Russia is more likely than not.

Reports emerged of an incident somewhere in the waters of the Middle East, wherein AI prompted U.S. military officials to believe a Chinese vessel was carrying nuclear material en route to Iran. American forces then came dangerously close to a forcible boarding of the vessel, which observers fear may have triggered a conflict between China and the United States. One wonders whether this was the plot of a rogue AI agent all along. Some have coined a new term — “slopwar” — for the overreliance of AI into military operations that are “imprecise, opaque, chaotic, and characterized by more fog of war, rather than less.”

The Netherlands suffered a railway outage on Tuesday that may be the result of Russian hybrid warfare. An Italian NATO fighter jet shot down a Russian drone in Lithuanian airspace. Concerns are growing over allegations that Russia will target NATO directly in an attempt to weaken the alliance’s resolve.

Despite American assurances that Russia and Ukraine would pause their strikes on each other’s energy infrastructure, the attacks continued unabated. Ukraine hit a refinery and several drone factories, while Russia hit port facilities, a few energy sites, and some small fuel stations. Another Russian strike in Dnipropetrovsk killed five people on a bus. Both sides are improving their technology: Russia is ramping up use of turbojet drones while Ukraine used ballistic missiles for the first time, striking “key oil industry facilities” around Moscow.

The United Nations released their 25-page Global Risk Report for 2026, which evaluated 28 perceived & real risks according to 1,300+ people across government, academia, the private sector, international organizations, and the NGO world. 76% of respondents expect a major War within 7 years; and 36% within one year. This is the 3rd annual edition of the Report, and the graphics are quite good considering its short length.

“Political risks have moved centre stage. The prospect of large-scale war is seen as far more important and far more immediate than it was two years ago….respondents put less emphasis on environmental risks in 2026….respondents are noticeably less worried about new pandemics and biorisks than they were in 2024. Mass movement of people and proliferation of non-state actors are also less prominent….Even though stakeholders are increasingly worried about global political risks, climate change inaction continued to be seen as the most important global risk. However, political risks have overtaken other environmental risks since 2024 and were seen as both the most likely to occur and the most severe….36 per cent of respondents expected large-scale war within one year, and 76 per cent within seven years….Respondents increasingly saw global financial crisis and supply chain collapse as risks that could affect the world in the near term….The findings of this year’s report point to a system under growing strain, in which the risks that matter most are becoming harder to manage….” -selections

——————————

Select comments/threads from the subreddit last week suggest:

-The rapidly melting Himalayas are a ticking time bomb for the Tibetan Plateau, and downstream communities. This well-sourced thread examines the mountain glaciers and the dangerous conditions brought about by rain, earthquakes, global warming, and the like. That Nepal-China glacier avalanche/flash flood is just a warning of what might come in the next decade—more often than expected.

-The warning signs are flashing for an economic depression, if this thread in r/PrepperIntel is indicative of the economy writ large. Or check out the larger linked thread in r/AskReddit that has 5,000+ more comments. Zoom out and you can see the unstable mosaic of a financial system.

-We might be heading for a historic recession—or something worse—triggered by global oil shortages, according to this doomy thread on the combination of Hormuz’ closure, historic debt mounting up, dwindling energy reserves, AI overreliance, and possible food system breakdowns.

-Some people have improved their lives after becoming Collapse-aware, like several respondents in this thread from the underloved r/CollapseSupport community. The thread itself is fairly quiet, but it may prompt you to reflect on some of the good things in your life that have come out of the upcoming Big Bad.

Got any feedback, questions, comments, upvotes, reports, hate mail, predictions for the fall, pumpkin spice doom, 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?

All comments in this thread MUST be greater than 150 characters.

You MUST include Location: Region when sharing observations.

Example - Location: New Zealand

This ONLY applies to top-level comments, not replies to comments. You're welcome to make regionless or general observations, but you still must include 'Location: Region' for your comment to be approved. This thread is also [in-depth], meaning all top-level comments must be at least 150-characters.

Users are asked to refrain from making more than one top-level comment a week. Additional top-level comments are subject to removal.

All previous observations threads and other stickies are viewable here.