ApocaDocs
Today is December 24, 2025.
On this day (12/24), we posted 3 stories, over the years 2009-2016.

Converging Emergencies: From 2009 to 2016, 'Doc Jim and 'Doc Michael spent 30 to 90 minutes nearly every day, researching, reading, and joking about more than 8,000 news stories about Climate Chaos, Biology Breach, Resource Depletion, and Recovery. (We also captured stories about Species Collapse and Infectious Disease, but in this "greatest hits of the day" instantiation, we're skipping the last two.)
      We shared those stories and japes daily, at apocadocs.com (see our final homepage, upon the election of Trump).
      The site was our way to learn about what humans were doing to our ecosystem, as well our way to try to help wake up the world.
      You could call this new format the "we knew it all back then, but nobody wanted to know we knew it" version. Enjoy these stories and quips from a more hopeful time, when the two ApocaDocs imagined that humanity would come to its senses in time -- so it was just fine to make fun of the upcoming collapse.
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Biology
Breach

December 24, 2009, from Environmental Science and Technology

Flame retardants are the suspected source of a new compound in the environment

Dude. Our crap is making up its own shit.
Ed Sverko didn't set out to find a new compound bioaccumulating in fish when he and a group of Canadian colleagues began looking at a Lake Ontario sediment core sample to collect data on how the concentrations of the widely used Dechlorane Plus (DP) flame retardant changed over time... DP has been detected in the environment before, so Sverko and his colleagues expected to find it in the sediment core. However, during their analysis, the researchers also noted a number of the unknown mass spectra peaks that appeared to be from unknown compounds related to DP...the research team was able to identify plausible sources of all the new compounds. To the best of their knowledge, none have been previously reported in the environment.
Climate
Chaos


December 24, 2009, from The Providence Journal

Paula Moore: Invasion of jellyfish a sign of trouble

You'd think a knife would be more effective.
World leaders who attended the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen probably did not discuss the invasion of the jellyfish, but perhaps they should. While it might sound like the stuff of a B horror movie, millions of jellyfish -- some the size of refrigerators -- are swarming coastlines from Spain to New York and Japan to Hawaii. Last month, these marauders sank a 10-ton fishing trawler off the coast of Japan after the boat's crew tried to haul in a net containing dozens of huge Nomura jellyfish -- up to 450 pounds each. The best way to fight this growing menace is with our forks. Scientists believe that a combination of climate change, pollution and overfishing is causing the boom in jellyfish populations. Leaving animals, including fish, off our dinner plates will combat all three problems.


December 24, 2009, from Wired

7 Tipping Points That Could Transform Earth

Only seven? I can keep track of that!
...when the IPCC meets in 2014, tipping points -- or tipping elements, in academic vernacular -- will get much more attention. Scientists still disagree about which planetary systems are extra-sensitive to climate shifts, but the possibility can't be ignored. "The problem with tipping elements is that if any of them tips, it will be a real catastrophe. None of them are small," said Anders Levermann, a climate physicist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Levermann's article on potential disruptions of South Asia's monsoon cycles was featured in a series of tipping element research reviews, published December 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Also discussed were ocean circulation, polar icecaps, Amazon rainforests, seafloor methane deposits and a west African dustbowl. Each is stressed by rising planetary temperatures. Some are less likely than others to tip; some might not be able to tip at all. Ambiguities, probabilities a limited grasp of Earth's complex systems are inherent to the science. But if any tip, it will be an epic disaster.
Resource
Depletion
Recovery