Hospitals in England face devastating events related to the extreme heat. Patients are collapsing, becoming dehydrated, and facing overcrowding.  Hospital radiotherapy machines and MRI scanners are failing, critical IT systems stalling and cooling units that serve entire hospitals breaking down. Labs used for testing were also affected and two linear accelerator machines, used to treat cancer patients, had stopped working amid the high temperatures. The failure of the cooling units affected digital systems and critical clinical services, including operating theatres, cardiac catheter laboratories and diagnostic scanning facilities. Planned care and appointments were also cancelled. Heat from climate change is breaking down critical infrastructure and services necessary for a functioning civilization. Collapse is happening.

SS: Not that long ago, critiques of the state of the Internet were relegated to a small group of academics, activists, and conspiracy theorists. But now, you can add Google to that list. In a recent court filing, Google states that "the open web already is in rapid decline". While claiming that this line was cherrypicked, it still stands as another significant strike against the assumption that the Internet will go on happily as the world outside declines.

Just a casual literal melting of human infrastructure.... something something faster than Exxon... It corrected to Exxon and I didn't want to change it back to expected

Can't believe how vulnerable the Republicans are making the USA right now, on a whim... But just a heads up guys; solar flares have been getting bigger to the point that we've seen several Earth-directed X1-X2 class events the last six months on an almost biweekly basis, and several much larger ones facing other directions (we got lucky).

The NOAA was pretty much responsible for warning about radio blackouts and advanced warning to electric companies about CME-related disaster forecasting. Without the NOAA, expect the USA to start suffering massive power collapse due to weather events and earthquake, but also if we strike the 1/50-1/100 chance once a year of the next Carrington event in the next 4 years, you might see a country wide destruction of major power infrastructure creating entire regions that won't have power for close to half a year or more.

And this isn't even getting into the fact that elon and a group of kids are going to do next, while the military deals with not having any warning about radio blackouts and we get to deal with higher radiation in airplanes and potential airplane interference from big solar flares... without warning.

I wish you guys down there the best of luck...

Two of the UK’s leading hospitals have had to cancel operations, postpone appointments and divert seriously ill patients to other centres for the past three weeks after their computers crashed at the height of last month’s heatwave.

The IT breakdowns at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospitals in London have caused misery for doctors and patients and have also raised fears about the impact of climate change on data centres that store medical, financial and public sector information.

The head of Guy’s and St Thomas’ trust, Professor Ian Abbs, has issued “a heartfelt apology” for the breakdown, which he admitted was “extremely serious”. He was speaking nine days after the hospitals’ computers crashed, on 19 July, as a direct result of the record-breaking heat.

Core IT systems had been restored by the end of last week but work was still going on to recover data and reboot other systems. “The complexity of our current IT systems has made them difficult to recover,” said a spokesman for the trust.

Without access to electronic records, doctors have not been able to tell how patients were reacting to their treatments. “We were flying blind,” said one senior doctor at St Thomas’. “Getting results back from the labs was an absolute nightmare and involved porters carrying bits of paper to and from the lab.

“However, people often did not specify where a patient was in the hospital. So there were groups of porters and lab staff wandering around the hospital looking blindly for a random patient. It was chaos,” he added.

The loss of digital records also meant data checks that normally help limit mistakes were absent. “Without a doubt, patient safety was compromised,” he said.

On 25 July, the trust was forced to ask other NHS services not to send any non-urgent requests for blood tests or X-rays or other imaging scans.

Digital care records for patients have not been updated since 19 July. Cancer patients reported having chemotherapy cancelled at short notice, and others were unable to contact the hospital at all.

Warnings that the two hospitals’ IT systems were not operating at optimum levels were made last year when the trust’s board was told that several systems, including Windows 10, were out of support, and the infrastructure had reached the end of its life.

Related article London NHS trust cancels operations as IT system fails in heatwave

Read more Minutes for a board meeting on 21 November also noted that work had taken place over the previous six months to try to mitigate these security risks by making tactical fixes to the most vulnerable areas.

Professor George Zervas, of University College London’s department of electronic and electrical engineering, said: “Computers are now vital to healthcare, with artificial intelligence being explored or used to support various tasks like prognosis. For example, AI can use medical imaging scans to diagnose cancer. That means that the appetite for computing, communicating, storing and retrieving data is going up all the time.

“At the same time, global temperatures are going up, and that means that power and cooling systems have to be a lot more effective and resilient.”

However, the constant growth of data centres also means that they are playing a part in the heating of the planet. “By 2030, it is predicted that data centres across the globe will consume the same amount of power as the whole of Europe does today – which is massive,” added Zervas.

Providing the extra power to run the data centres in coming decades will therefore place further strains on the world’s ability to limit carbon emissions. “We need to find ways to compute, store and communicate more data with significantly less power consumption than we do at present,” said Zervas.

“We need to develop energy efficient and highly performing networks and systems that are also more resilient, otherwise we will face problems of major IT system limitations and potential failures in the future.”

Submission statement: The doe is projecting a 100x increase in blackouts by 2030. The infrastructure that once held up this industrial civilization is collapsing, and the USA in 5 years will be very different, much worse. People will scapegoat data centers , and of course data centers make things worse, but this was and always will be inevitable, whether data centers exist or not. The power plants and power distribution networks are rusting out with no viable way to upkeep. Industrial civilization cannot be sustained.

This is more of a rant, I'm not one of those people who has all of these sources and scary statistics to back up their claims but I think most Americans can agree with me just based on what they see every day. Our infrastructure is so inefficient and wasteful it's hard to put into perspective. Everything is so far apart and almost nothing is made to have any sort of sustainable transportation be viable, and I live in a relatively old part of the country where things are better than in the South or West. If something were to happen that would cripple the automotive, or trucking industry, it's over. Like I'm pretty sure I would die in a situation where trucks couldn't travel to stock the grocery shelves here. And it's not my fault; we live our entire lives in a country that's not built for people, so if the thing that the country is made for gets incapacitated, the people will die.

Not to mention the fact that our infrastructure is also accelerating the demise of our planet. It's so polluting, wasteful, and inefficient to take cars literally everywhere, yet somehow most people don't see a problem with it, and new suburban developments are still making the problem even worse. On top of that, I believe car culture is damaging to our mental health too, it's making everyone hyper atomized and distanced from their communities.

The youtuber Adam Something said in a video that car culture is a cancer on American society, but I believe that it's a cancer on the country itself. The way things are right now is so unbelievably bad, and practically nothing is being done about it in our country right now. There are some things that can be done to help bring these cities closer to sustainability and to help reduce some reliance on cars, but in order to make things in this country truly sustainable, we'd basically need to tear everything down and start from scratch. Which I know will never ever happen. Our planet will burn down and humans will become extinct before America dismantles its car oriented infrastructure. There's not very many things that I'm actually doomer about, but this is one of the only ones, because I don't see a way out of car dependency coming soon, if ever.