Dogs and Cats Living Together
and other impossible things that happened
A register of events that were, until recently, hypotheticals — and in several cases punchlines. The instrument rests on one assumption: that the rate at which the unthinkable becomes the merely documented is a faster-moving indicator than any single catastrophe, and considerably easier to measure than the thing we would actually like to know.
30 seed events · January 2024 – August 2026 · every entry sourced, every entry independently fact-checked 19 August 2026
Static edition. This page is a printed snapshot, current to 19 August 2026. The live instrument — filters, search, and a form for logging new events — runs as a standalone file, because JavaScript on this site is a paid Squarespace feature and the reading is not urgent enough to justify the upgrade.
Events logged
30
January 2024 – August 2026
Last four quarters
15
events, weight 107
DCLT index
268
2024 = 100
Trend
+30%
weight vs. the four quarters before
Hard signals
26
scoring 7 or above
Incidence
Logged events per quarter
Bar height is event count; the figure above each bar is that quarter's summed DCLT weight.
Events by domain
Count, with mean DCLT weight in parentheses.
Prior art
"Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes… the dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together — mass hysteria!" Dr Peter Venkman, Ghostbusters (1984) — the first attempt at this instrument
| Fire and brimstone from the skies | Logged | 489,826 hectares burned across the EU by week 31 of 2026; France's worst since the harmonised record began, the UK's worst in fifteen years. |
| Rivers and seas boiling | Logged | 82% of the world ocean under marine heatwave conditions at end-June 2026. Boiling not yet observed. Directionally, Venkman was not wrong. |
| Forty years of darkness | Not observed | The closest entry is thirty days, on diesel generators, at Europe's largest nuclear plant. |
| Earthquakes, volcanoes | Excluded | These have always happened. The index counts departures from the baseline, not the baseline — which is precisely why it is more useful than a disaster count. |
| The dead rising from the grave | Not observed | Viable anthrax released from thawing Siberian permafrost was considered for this line and rejected as a stretch. |
| Human sacrifice | Out of scope | Definitional problems. |
| Dogs and cats living together | No longer remarkable | The trope has aged worse than the rest of the list. |
Method
Each event is scored on three ordinal axes, one to three points each. The DCLT weight is their sum (range 3–9). Events scoring 7 or above are hard signals. The index is the trailing-four-quarter sum of weights against calendar 2024 = 100 — a baseline chosen not because 2024 was normal but because it is the earliest year in the log, which is a different thing and worth remembering when the number looks alarming.
Axis 1
Novelty
- Rare but precedented
- First in decades
- First ever recorded
Axis 2
Reach
- Local or single-sector
- National or regional
- Global or cross-system
Axis 3
Persistence
- Transient shock
- Likely to recur
- New baseline; not reversible
What this instrument cannot do. The log is a convenience sample assembled by an interested observer, so a rising count partly measures the observer's attention — the same defect that makes raw crime statistics untrustworthy, and one no amount of care in the scoring can remove. Reporting infrastructure improved across the window, which biases recent quarters upward. Scores are judgments; two reasonable people will differ by a point per axis, and the third will object to the axes. The most recent quarter is always incomplete. Treat the trend as a prompt for inquiry rather than as evidence — and note that if the line ever turns down, that is the single most encouraging chart anyone could produce.
Event log
| Date | Event | Domain | DCLT |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-18 | A drone kills a worker at a bus stop inside a nuclear plant ✓ A drone detonated at a Zaporizhzhia NPP bus stop at about 06:00, causing 16 casualties among staff and subcontractors, one of them fatal. The IAEA relayed the plant director’s description of it as the worst event the facility has faced. | Security | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2026-08-13 | France records its worst wildfire year since 2012, and the UK its worst in fifteen ✓ 489,826 hectares burned across the EU by week 31 — France 99,092 ha, Spain 185,948 ha (its third-worst since 2012), the UK 22,206 ha. The EU total passed 505,000 ha days later, before the mid-August fires in Spain. | Biosphere | 6 2·2·2 |
| 2026-08-05 | An explosive-laden drone is found at a NATO logistics airport ✓ German federal police used a disposal robot at Leipzig/Halle after X-ray confirmed a drone fitted with explosives and a detonator near a Ukrainian cargo aircraft; the detonator was defective and did not fire. A DHL freighter struck an unidentified object 6km away and diverted. Germany logged 144 drone overflights the previous year. | Security | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2026-08-04 | Portuguese men o’ war sting 120 people in a day on the Basque coast ✓ The worst day of an influx that closed San Sebastián’s beaches under red flags; Cantabria recorded 236 stings from 4 July. AZTI researchers have found specimens only millimetres across inshore, suggesting the Bay of Biscay may now be warm enough for the species to breed there rather than merely receive drifters. | Biosphere | 6 2·1·3 |
| 2026-07-31 | The warmest July ocean surface temperature ever measured ✓ Copernicus put the 60°S–60°N average at 20.96°C, above the 2023 record. Global air temperature ran 1.47°C above pre-industrial; Western Europe’s June–July mean was 2.79°C above its baseline. | Biosphere | 8 2·3·3 |
| 2026-07-21 | US measles cases reach the highest level since 1991 ✓ 2,295 confirmed cases by 21 July, already exceeding all of 2025 and the most in any year since elimination was declared in 2000; the count passed 2,318 in early August and is still rising. PAHO reviews US elimination status later in 2026. | Public health | 6 2·2·2 |
| 2026-06-30 | About 82% of the world ocean is under marine heatwave conditions ✓ Copernicus Marine reported the figure for end-June 2026. Marine heatwaves touched 98% of the Mediterranean basin at some point in January–June; the tropical Pacific hit a record June mean of 27.26°C. | Biosphere | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2026-06-29 | A court blocks the first attempted firing of a Federal Reserve governor ✓ In Trump v. Cook the US Supreme Court denied the application 5–4, finding the government unlikely to succeed on the merits and holding that ‘cause’ turns on the seriousness of the alleged misconduct and its link to the governor’s duties. The opinion noted this was the first such attempt in the Fed’s 111-year history. | Institutions | 8 3·3·2 |
| 2026-01-26 | Gold breaks $5,100 an ounce ✓ Spot gold reached a record $5,104, having first crossed $3,000 in March 2025 and $4,000 in October 2025 — roughly 70% in ten months. | Institutions | 7 2·3·2 |
| 2025-12-31 | Finland seizes a cargo ship after another Baltic cable is dragged apart ✓ The Fitburg’s anchor was dragged for hours across the Gulf of Finland, damaging an Elisa telecom cable between Helsinki and Tallinn; Arelion’s cables to Estonia were damaged the same week. It follows Estlink 2 (2024), Balticconnector (2023) and the November 2024 fibre cuts. | Security | 6 2·2·2 |
| 2025-11-21 | The first human case of H5N5 influenza ever recorded, and it was fatal ✓ A backyard-poultry keeper in Washington State died after infection with a subtype never before confirmed in a human. No human-to-human transmission was found. | Public health | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2025-11-10 | The Americas lose measles elimination status ✓ PAHO withdrew the region’s verification after Canada’s outbreak re-established endemic transmission: 12,596 confirmed cases across ten countries and 28 deaths, a thirty-fold increase on 2024. | Public health | 8 3·3·2 |
| 2025-11-07 | Iran’s president warns Tehran may have to be evacuated over water ✓ The five dams supplying the city fell to about 10% capacity after 2.3mm of precipitation by early November, 81% below average, in a sixth consecutive drought year. Nineteen dams nationwide sat below 5%, up from nine three weeks earlier. | Biosphere | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2025-10-28 | Hurricane Melissa ties the strongest Atlantic landfall on record ✓ 185 mph sustained winds at landfall in Jamaica, tying the 1935 Labor Day storm and Dorian; the NHC’s post-season report later raised Melissa’s peak to 190 mph, tying Hurricane Allen for the strongest Atlantic hurricane ever measured. A dropsonde recorded a 252 mph gust, the highest ever measured by dropsonde in a tropical cyclone. 93 dead across the Caribbean. | Biosphere | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2025-10-23 | Europe’s largest nuclear plant runs on diesel for 30 days ✓ Zaporizhzhia lost all off-site power from 23 September to 23 October — the tenth and by far the longest such outage since 2022. Its grid connections have fallen from ten lines before the war to two. | Security | 8 3·3·2 |
| 2025-09-27 | China’s first large chikungunya epidemic: 16,452 local cases ✓ WHO reported local transmission across 21 cities of Guangdong. Globally, 445,271 suspected and confirmed cases and 155 deaths were reported across 40 countries in the first nine months of 2025. | Public health | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2025-09-10 | NATO aircraft shoot down Russian drones over Poland; Article 4 invoked ✓ The first time NATO forces have fired on Russian assets since the invasion began; most of the drones were downed by Dutch F-35s. Poland invoked Article 4 for only the eighth time in alliance history. | Security | 8 3·3·2 |
| 2025-08-27 | Thirteen governments jointly warn that Chinese state hackers reached Western telecom backbones ✓ Advisory AA25-239A, from NSA, FBI, CISA and partners in twelve other countries, described the Salt Typhoon campaign as targeting networks in more than 80 countries; the FBI said at least 200 US companies were hit. Reporting from October 2024 had already placed the actors inside carriers’ lawful-intercept systems and the communications of senior US officials. | Technology | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2025-08-20 | Europe records 27 local chikungunya outbreaks, including one in Alsace ✓ A continental record, with 111 cases in France and first-ever local transmission at that latitude. Aedes albopictus is now established in 369 regions of 16 countries, up from 114 regions a decade earlier. | Public health | 8 3·2·3 |
| 2025-07-21 | An AI system reaches gold-medal standard at the Mathematical Olympiad ✓ Gemini Deep Think solved five of six IMO problems for 35/42, officially graded by IMO coordinators, working in natural language inside the 4.5-hour limit. A year earlier the equivalent systems needed problems hand-translated into formal languages and took two to three days. | Technology | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2025-06-22 | The United States bombs Iranian nuclear sites in the first combat use of the GBU-57 ✓ Seven B-2s dropped 14 thirty-thousand-pound bunker-busters on Fordow and Natanz while a submarine fired more than two dozen Tomahawks at Isfahan — more than 75 precision weapons in one night, and the first operational use of the weapon. | Security | 8 3·3·2 |
| 2025-05-21 | West Nile virus found in British mosquitoes for the first time ✓ UKHSA and APHA detected fragments of West Nile virus genetic material in two pools of Aedes vexans collected in July 2023 near Retford, Nottinghamshire — the first UK detection ever recorded, announced on 21 May 2025. No locally acquired human or equine cases have been found. | Public health | 7 3·1·3 |
| 2025-04-23 | Coral bleaching reaches 84% of the world’s reef area ✓ The fourth global bleaching event, measured from January 2023 to March 2025, covered 82 countries — against 21% of reef area in 1998 and 68% in 2014–17. NOAA had to add three new alert levels because its existing top severity level no longer described the observed mortality. | Biosphere | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2025-03-22 | Arctic winter sea ice hits its smallest maximum on record — then does it again ✓ The 2025 peak of 14.31m km² on 22 March was the lowest in the satellite record; the 2026 maximum of 14.29m km² on 15 March was lower still, but inside NSIDC’s 40,000 km² threshold, so the two count as a statistical tie for lowest in 48 years. | Biosphere | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2025-02-14 | A drone strikes the Chernobyl containment arch ✓ A drone hit the New Safe Confinement at 87 metres, damaging outer and inner cladding and the main crane system and igniting fires that smouldered for weeks. The IAEA initially reported no breach of inner containment; by December 2025 it concluded the arch had lost its primary safety functions, including confinement. | Security | 8 3·2·3 |
| 2024-09-17 | Thousands of booby-trapped pagers detonate simultaneously across Lebanon ✓ At least 12 killed and about 2,800 injured on the first day, when pagers used by Hezbollah members exploded near-simultaneously; walkie-talkies detonated the following day. Human Rights Watch said customary international law prohibits booby traps of this kind and called for an investigation; UN experts called the attacks a violation of international law. | Security | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2024-04-29 | An airline drops a scheduled route because satellite navigation stopped working ✓ Finnair suspended Helsinki–Tartu for a month after two aircraft aborted landings due to GPS interference attributed to Russian jamming; Tartu’s approach depends solely on GPS. Service resumed in June once an alternative procedure was arranged. | Security | 7 3·1·3 |
| 2024-03-25 | H5N1 avian influenza establishes itself in dairy cattle ✓ A multistate US outbreak in a host species never previously known to sustain the virus. USDA passed 1,000 affected herds in April 2025 and by mid-2026 had confirmed roughly 1,166 herds across 19 states, 766 of them in California. | Public health | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2024-03-20 | America’s largest home insurer non-renews 72,000 California policies ✓ State Farm General, the California subsidiary of the largest US home insurer, announced non-renewal of roughly 72,000 policies — 30,000 homeowners and related lines plus about 42,000 commercial apartment policies, some 2% of its California book — nine and a half months before the Los Angeles firestorms. | Institutions | 7 2·2·3 |
| 2024-01-29 | Deepfaked executives on a video call take US$25m from Arup ✓ A Hong Kong finance employee of the engineering firm Arup made 15 transfers totalling HK$200m (about US$25.6m) to five accounts after joining a video conference in which the CFO and the other participants were AI-generated. Hong Kong police disclosed the case in February 2024; Arup was named in May. | Technology | 8 3·2·3 |