(The Economic Collapse Blog)—What in the world is happening in California? The state just keeps getting hit by major disaster after major disaster, but we are all supposed to pretend that this is perfectly normal. Of course the truth is that what we are witnessing is not normal at all. As you will see below, California just set a very alarming new record for earthquakes in a single year. In addition, the number of acres that wildfires have burned in the state this year is about three times higher than last year.
So please don’t try to convince me that this is normal. Of course it isn’t just the state of California that is experiencing an unusual number of natural disasters. As I have been warning for a long time, our entire planet is becoming increasingly unstable.
Early on Thursday morning, residents of southern California were shaken by a magnitude 4.7 earthquake…
A large, 4.7-magnitude earthquake rattled parts of Southern California early Thursday, according to the US Geological Survey.
The quake struck the Malibu area around 7:28 a.m. with an initial magnitude of 5.1, officials said. It has since been downgraded to 4.7.
The epicenter of this quake was in Malibu, but people living all over the Los Angeles area could feel it…
The 7:28 a.m. quake was centered in the Malibu area. Shaking from the earthquake was reported in Malibu, Hermosa Beach, La Mirada, Anaheim, the Hollywood Hills and parts of the San Fernando Valley so far.
I even saw one report that indicated that the earthquake could be felt all the way down in San Diego. Following the initial quake, there were over two dozen aftershocks.
By itself, this latest earthquake wouldn’t be that big of a deal, because very little damage was done.
What makes it important is the larger pattern that we have been witnessing. According to USGS seismologist Lucy Jones, the number of “magnitude-4 sequences” that we have seen so far this year is the highest ever recorded…
In a televised Q&A just after the temblor, USGS seismologist Lucy Jones said: “We have had more than the average [number of] magnitude-4 quakes in Southern California this year — the average being about eight magnitude-4 sequences, that being sequences of at least one magniture-4 … So far we’ve had 14 in Southern California; the largest previous year was 13.”
So what does all of this mean? Is all of this seismic activity in southern California building up to something?
If you ask one scientist you will get one answer, and if you ask another scientist you will get another answer.
But pretty much all of them agree that “the Big One” is way overdue.
When “the Big One” finally arrives, life in southern California will never be the same again.
At the same time that all of this shaking is taking place in southern California, wildfires in the region are burning tens of thousands of acres.
Firefighters are battling three major wildfires at this moment, and it is being reported that the Bridge Fire has now “exploded” and has become “the largest active fire in the state”…
A raging wildfire in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties has exploded to almost 50,000 acres, forcing residents to flee in a hurry and destroying dozens of homes.
The Bridge Fire has set over 51,000 acres ablaze and is 0% contained, officials said Thursday. Its rapid growth made it the largest active fire in the state, surpassing the Line Fire, which is also burning in San Bernardino and has scorched another 37,000 acres with 18% containment.
One evacuee described a harrowing scene on Tuesday as flames reached a neighborhood atop California’s Mt. Baldy. Looking at the mountain from afar, “it looked like a nuke went off, nothing but smoke,” Liz Wenzel said.
Can you imagine looking back at where your home once stood and seeing that it looks “like a nuke went off”?
What a tragedy.
You may be thinking that there are wildfires in California every year, and you would be quite correct. But what we are witnessing this year is particularly horrible.
We are being told that the state has already “seen nearly three times as much acreage burn than during all of 2023″…
California is only now heading into the teeth of the wildfire season but already has seen nearly three times as much acreage burn than during all of 2023. The wildfires have threatened tens of thousands of homes and other structures across Southern California since they accelerated during a triple-digit heat wave over the weekend.
Just think about that for a moment.
The number of acres that has burned in California is already three times higher than all of last year, and we are just now entering the heart of wildfire season for the state.
Of course we are also seeing lots of very unusual things happen elsewhere around the world too.
For instance, the number of hailstorms in Europe appears to be increasing at an exponential rate…
Having analysed the European Severe Weather Database, Chaucer said that the number of hailstorms has jumped 104% to 11,808 storms last year (year-ending June 30th 2024), up from 5,785 in 2022/23.
That certainly isn’t good.
And earlier today I came across a story about a landslide in Greenland that caused a mega-tsunami that “shook the Earth for nine straight days”…
After a mountaintop collapsed into the sea in Greenland, a ‘mega-tsunami’ as tall as a skyscraper shook the Earth for nine straight days, baffling scientists around the world.
No one was injured by the landslide or resulting tsunami, but the 650-foot-tall wave destroyed roughly $200,000 worth of infrastructure at an unoccupied research station on Ella Island.
We all live on a giant space rock that is hurtling through space at 67,000 miles per hour.
All throughout history, the giant space rock that we live on has been unstable, but now things seem to be getting a lot worse.
I am entirely convinced that we are entering a time when we will see cataclysmic geophysical events that would have once been absolutely unthinkable to most people.
In other words, if you have always wondered what it would be like to be inside an epic Hollywood disaster movie, you are about to get your chance.
So buckle up and hold on tight, because a tremendous amount of shaking is ahead of us.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Maybe all these earthquakes are God’s message to republicans to get out while the gettin’ out is good.
Its on a fault line. Fault lines across the world are interconnected. We live on a cracked crust floating on a massive see of molten magma. There is nothing abnormal about this.
God promised after the flood that the new creation would be stable. As it has been. And as it will remain until He unleashes the final judgment, which is likely near, but not yet here.
Seems to me a larger number of smaller quakes would be a good thing. It would mean the stress of tectonic movement is regularly being relieved, and would be less likely to build up enough to produce a major quake.