The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein. As the world is trying to hopefully recover from the tragic effects of COVID-19, it is reminded there is no vaccine for the existential threat for its life support systems posed by global warming, nor for the looming threats of future wars and[Read More…]
Global CO₂ rise and warming rates have reached a large factor to an order of magnitude higher than those of the past geological and mass extinction events, with major implications for the shift in climate zones and the nature and speed of current extreme weather events. Given the abrupt change in state of the atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere-land system, accelerating since the mid-20ᵗʰ[Read More…]
At several points in the history of our planet, increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have caused extreme global warming, prompting the majority of species on Earth to die out. In the past, these events were triggered by a huge volcanic eruption or asteroid impact. Now, Earth is heading for another mass extinction – and human activity is to blame. I am[Read More…]
Where the virus may potentially claim the lives of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, global heating above 4oC is bound to claim the lives of billions, yet most governments hardly listen to the science By the 25 March 2020 more than 4% of Covid-19 patients, nearly 19,000 people, tragically died worldwide, with more to come, and each[Read More…]
Global warming and its disastrous consequences are now truly with us since the second part of 2019. At the moment a change in the weather has given parts of the country a respite from the raging fires, some of which are still burning or smoldering, waiting for another warm spell to flare up. The danger zones include the Australian Capital[Read More…]
“Meeting the climate goals of the Paris Agreement is going to be nearly impossible without removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere” Kevin Drum (2019). No one knows how to impose 1.5 or 2.0 degrees Celsius limits unless drawdown /carbon sequestration of atmospheric CO2 is attempted, nor are drawdown methods normally discussed in most political or economic forums. The release of[Read More…]
Carbon, the essential element underpinning photosynthesis and life, is transformed into toxic substances in the remnants of plants and organisms buried in sediments. Once released to the atmosphere (Fig. 1) in the form of CO2, CO and methane, in large quantities these gases become lethal and have been responsible for mass extinctions of species (Fig. 2). Given amplifying feedbacks from[Read More…]
Since its inception the Paris climate accord has been in questiondue to,among other(1) its broad definition, intended to keep a mean global temperature rise this century to below 1.5oC and efforts to limit temperature increase well below 2oC above pre-industrial levels; (2) its non-binding nature; accounting tricks by vested interests. The goal assumes pre-determined limits can be placed on greenhouse[Read More…]
The effects of encroaching deserts andof fire storms onterrestrial forests, originally developed under moderate conditions distinct from those emerging under rapid global warming and extreme weather events, may have been underestimated. Average global temperatures do not tell the story — it is the increasingly frequent weather anomalies which do. Powerful psychological factors prevent many scientists from expressing their worst fears,a[Read More…]
As the concentration of atmospheric CO2has risen to 408 ppm and the total greenhouse gas level, including methane and nitrous oxide, combine to near500 parts per million CO2-equivalent, the stability threshold of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, currently melting at an accelerated rate, has been exceeded. The consequent expansion of tropics and the shift of climate zones toward the[Read More…]
First law of humanity – don’t kill your children(Hans Joachim Schellnhuber) It is not an accident that fascist philosophies and movements willfully ignore human-induced global warmingleading to the Sixth mass extinction of species, the largest since 56 million years ago. The nature of denialists is manifest in their venting of hate on the 16 years-old Gerta Thunberg, the voice of[Read More…]
The planetary consequences of injecting >910 billion tons CO2 into the atmosphere are playing in real time. The Arctic Circle is suffering from an unprecedented number of wildfires in the latest sign of a climate crisis. With some blazes the size of 100,000 football pitches, vast areas in Siberia, Alaska and Greenland are engulfed in flames. The World Meteorological Organisation[Read More…]
Extreme GHG and temperaturerise rates question linear climate projections Preamble “we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it”… “Now we probably don’t even have a future anymore, because that future was sold so that a small[Read More…]
As fires rage across tens of thousands square km the Amazon forest, dubbed the Planet’s lungs, producing some 20 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere, with some 72,843 fires in Brazil this year, where fires on such a scale are uncommon, as well as through Siberia, Alaska, Greenland, southern Europe and elsewhere,they herald a world where increasing temperatures and[Read More…]
In front of our eyes green forests are blackened by fire, draughts turn grassy planes to brown semi-deserts,fertile fields are flooded by muddy water,white snow and ice melt to pale blue water and clear blue skies turn grey with aerosols. Preamble The inhabitants of planet Earth are in the process of destroying the habitability of their world through the perpetration[Read More…]
$trillion space games and false prophecies by billionaires while Rome burns History testifies to powerful rulers’ aspirations for the position of gods, including the Pharaohs and Roman Emperors such as Caligula or Nero, nowadays mimicked by false messianic prophecies of “intergalactic civilization” made by billionaires and their followers in public and the media, including some scientists. This includes predictions of[Read More…]
Abstract As the world keeps increasing its carbon emissions and exports,rising in 2018 to a record 33.1 billion ton per year, the atmospheric greenhouse gas level has now exceeded 560 ppm CO2–equivalent when methane and nitrous oxide are included, intersecting the stability threshold of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The term “climate change“ is no longer appropriate since, what[Read More…]
“The first law of humanity is not to kill your children” (Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, EU chief climate scientist). Following a nuclear reduction agreement in the Eighties, workers of a US nuclear triggers factory went on strike over job reductions. In January 2017 British atomic weapons workers protested over pension conditions ―assuming they will reach retirement age notwithstanding their destructive products.[Read More…]
While a price placed on the Earth, estimated at $5000 trillion (New Formula Values Earth), belongs to the unthinkable, the haggle by conservatives over the price of mitigation of climate change underpins the reality of the Faustian Bargain, manifested by extreme weather events (Fig. 1).Under a plethora of misconceptions and cover-ups the current elections take little account of the scientific[Read More…]
“The first law of humanity is not to kill your children” Joachim Hans Schellnhuber,Germany’s and the EU’s chief climate scientist. “we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it”… “Now we probably don’t even have a future[Read More…]
As carbon emissions have been growing at an accelerated rate (Figure 1) and new power plants are under construction (Figure 2) the race to destroy species and civilization is heading toward its critical conclusion (Figure 3), already with fatal consequences (Figure 4). According to the UNHCR, since 2008an estimated 22.5 million people have been displaced by climate or weather-related events.[Read More…]
According to Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, chief climate advisor to the European Union, “We’re simply talking about the very life support system of this planet”. As fascism and the horror of murderous hate crimes areon the rise, governments are presiding over runaway climate change leading toward mass extinctions of species, costing the lives of billions and the demise of much of[Read More…]
“The science that we are doing is a threat to the world’s most powerful and wealthiest special interests: the fossil fuel industry. They have used their immense resources to create fake scandals and to fund a global disinformation campaign aimed at vilifying the scientists, discrediting the science, and misleading the public and policymakers. Arguably, it is the most villainous act[Read More…]
According to NOAA (https://www.arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card) Arctic surface air temperatures continued to warm at twice the rate relative to the rest of the globe, leading to a loss of 95 percent of its oldest ice over the past three decades. Arctic air temperatures for the past five years (2014-18) have exceeded all previous records since 1900 and are driving broad changes in[Read More…]
On January 24, 2019, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has stated: “Humanity now faces two simultaneous existential threats, either of which would be cause for extreme concern and immediate attention. These major threats—nuclear weapons and climate change—were exacerbated this past year (2018) by the increased use of information warfare to undermine democracy around the world, amplifying risk from these[Read More…]
Abstract As the Earth continues to heat, paleoclimate evidence suggests transient reversals will result in accentuating the temperature polarities, leading to increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. Pleistocene paleoclimate records indicate interglacial temperature peaks have been are consistentlysucceeded by transient stadial freeze events,such as the Younger Dryas and the 8.5 kyr-old Laurentideice melt, attributed to cold[Read More…]
It is not a mere coincidence that extreme right wing movements reject the scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change, which reflects their connections with the fossil fuel corporations from whom they receive funding, as well as a lack of concern for the living world.In the wake of Benito Mussolini’s adoption of “fasces” (a Roman symbol consisting of a bundle of[Read More…]
“Earth is now substantially out of energy balance. The amount of solar energythat Earth absorbs exceeds the energy radiated back to space. The principalmanifestations of this energy imbalance are continued global warming on decadaltime scales and continued increase in ocean heat content” (James Hansen 2018). “The people have no voice since theyhave no information” …“No First World country has ever[Read More…]
“Dear Caesar Keep Burning, raping, killing But please, please Spare us your obscene poetry And ugly music ” (From Seneca’s last letter to Nero) The excavation of more than 600 billion tons of toxic carbon and hydrocarbon geological remains of previous biospheres and their transfer to the atmosphere as carbon gases constitutes nothing less than insanity leading to global suicide.With[Read More…]
It takes only a spark, from a lightning or human ignition, to start a fire, but it involves high temperatures, a period of drought, a build-up of dry vegetation and strong winds to start a bush fire, such as is devastating Queensland and recently California. When all these factors combine firestorms ensue, enhanced by strong winds from the hot interior[Read More…]
In so far as it may have been assumed that the growing manifestations of global warming through extreme weather events will cause people to realize the reality and the implications of carbon emissions, this is only partly happening, due to ongoing attempts by large part of the mainstream media to attribute these events to natural causes., masking the existential threat[Read More…]
In a key paper titled “Scientific reticence and sea level rise” (https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha01210n.html)(2007) James Hansen, the renown climate scientist, has been critical of what he regards as major underestimates of the magnitude and pace of global warming, as further elaborated in the article “How the IPCC Underestimated Climate Change: Here are just eight examples of where the IPCC missed predictions)” (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-ipcc-underestimated-climate-change/)[Read More…]
Scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicatethat global temperature rise of 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures would constitute a threshold the planet cannot cross without suffering the worst effects of climate change. Yet according to the U.N. report, mean global land-sea temperatures have already risen above 1°C and the planet could pass the 1.5°C threshold as early as[Read More…]
Current temperature trajectories are on par with or exceed the IPCC’s dangerous projections (Figure 1). Acting as the lungs of the biosphere, over tens of millions of years the atmosphere developed an oxygen-rich carbon-low composition, allowing the flourishing of mammals. The anthropogenic release to the atmosphere to date of more than 600 Gigaton of carbon (GtC) is reversing this trend,[Read More…]
The history of Earth is marked by at least seven major mass extinctions, including asteroid impact effects 580 million years ago, the end Ordovician glaciation, late Devonian asteroid impacts, end-Permian volcanism and ocean anoxia, end-Jurassic volcanism and Cretaceous-Tertiary asteroid impact—mostly associated with an extreme rise in atmospheric CO2. Currently the seventh mass extinction of species is taking place, mainly as[Read More…]
In a key paper titled “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene“,published in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Science (6.8.2018),a group of 17 climate and environment scientists (Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Timothy M. Lenton, Carl Folke, Diana Liverman, Colin P. Summerhayes, Anthony D. Barnosky, Sarah E. Cornell, Michel Crucifix, Jonathan F. Donges, Ingo Fetzer,[Read More…]
There was a time when the contamination of drinking water constituted a punishable crime. Nowadays those who willfully ignore or promote the destruction of the Earth’s atmosphere and ocean acidification through the rise in emission of carbon gases (2014 ~36.08 billion ton CO2/year ; 2017 ~36.79 billion ton CO2/year), hold major sway in the world. Consequently the rise rate of[Read More…]
For many weeks much of the mainstream media world-wide, including broadcasters, been warning of potential concessions in the negotiations between the US and North Korea andbetween Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, lest vital interests of the west are compromised. In the process little has been said about the alternative for such negotiations and potential agreements, namely a nuclear holocaust on[Read More…]
The heroic rescue of 13 young people from the flooded Chiang Mai cave in Thailand represents everything which is wonderful about humans cooperating and helping each other, and where they are at their best.By stark contrast the cover-up by the authorities and the media of the underlying reasons for the unfolding tragedy of the Hiroshima deluge, in which to-date more[Read More…]
In her new book “Fascism: A Warning” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I27X9L8rReo), Madeleine Albright’s states that the Fascism of a century ago was not atypical: “In hindsight, it is tempting to dismiss every Fascist of this era as a thoroughly bad guy or a lunatic, but that is too easy, also dangerous,” she writes. “Fascism is not an exception to humanity, but part of[Read More…]
“To ignore evil is to become an accomplice” (Martin Luther King) Humans are of the Earth, physically adapted to its range of climates, gravity, radiation, electro-magnetic field and composition of the atmosphere. Had there ever been a single critical issue science has conveyed, it is that altering the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere can only bearfatal consequences for nature and[Read More…]
“Two plus two is five – if the party says so” (George Orwell). Should anyone record the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, they may report that, while temperatures and sea levels were rising, the human sense of reality has been clouded by electronic system, including television, the internetand smart phones, by science fiction, virtual realities, public circuses,[Read More…]
The extraction and transferfrom the earth crust to the atmosphere of every economically available molecule of carbon, including coal,oil, tar sand oil, shale oil, methane gas, coal seam gasand other forms of hydrocarbon, constitutes the most significant shift in composition of the atmospheresince the PETM hyperthermal event about 56 million years ago[i] and the K-T extinction of the dinosaurs some[Read More…]
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save human way of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophes.” Albert Einstein 1946 Figure 1.The Doomsday Machine, by Daniel Ellsberg. Daniel Ellsberg,former presidential advisor, who has released the famous top-secret Pentagon Papers related to the Viet Nam war[ii],has also possessed a cache of top secret documents related[Read More…]
A species which has invented combustion, electromagnetic radiation and nuclear energy orders of magnitude more powerful than its own physical potential, needs to be perfectly wise and in control lest it is overwhelmed by these powers. As tipping points in the Earth’s climate amplify, including hurricanes, snow storms and wildfires, it appears to be beyond human power to contemplate[Read More…]
The current warming of Earth (Figure 1),manifest in the rise in extreme weather events (Figures 2 and 3), including collapse of polar ice sheets, melting of the Arctic Sea ice, penetration of snow storms into mid-latitudes, permafrost thaw and methane release, hurricanes and wildfires(Figure 4), manifestsa shift in state of the atmosphere-oceansystem, constituting an existential threat to humanity and much[Read More…]
Arctic ice breakdown As is well known to students of the history of the climate, once a temperature threshold is breached, abrupt events follow due to amplifying feedbacks, even within a few years, examples being (1) stadial[i] freeze events which followed temperature peaks during past interglacial peaks due to influx of cold ice-melt water into the north Atlantic Ocean[ii]; (2)[Read More…]
“Dear Caesar, Keep burning, raping and killing, but please, please spare us your obscene poetry and ugly music“(From Seneca’s last letter to Nero) Astrophysicist Greg Laughlin came up with a figure of €3000 trillion for the worth of planet Earth, given its breathable atmosphere—a shield from cosmic radiation. A close estimate is by Greg Laughlinas as US$5000 trillion. By contrast[Read More…]
It has been said that in the nuclear age war is obsoleteii, but around the world tribalism and with it the drums of war are on the rise, including talk of “usable” nuclear weapons. The atmosphere is reminiscent of pre-WWII suppression of the press the judiciary and academia, extreme nationalism leads to persecution of minorities and ultimately genocide, with echoes[Read More…]
“The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.” Winston Churchill[i] On the 25 January, 2018, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the arms of its doomsday clock to 2.0 min to midnight, the closest it has been since[Read More…]
A review of a new book “Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival” by P. Carter, E. Woodworth and J. Hansen “We’re simply talking about the very life support system of this planet.”(Professor Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impacts). The extreme rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) since the onset of the industrial[Read More…]
“In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act” –George Orwell March 2016 set a new record temperature for that time of year, according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The global temperature was 2.30 °F (1.28 °C) warmer than the average for March from 1951 to 1980, which is used as a baseline. http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2432/[Read More…]
Violation of the human rights of an innocent family in Assam 
Premature Death 
Indian Farmers on the Frontline Against Global Capitalism 
The Captive Media in the USA 
The Light That Fell On The Finger 
The pandemic: Global death toll tops 2M 
Lessons from the Beer Belly Putsch 
Admiral Ramdas Appeals The Government To Repeal The Farm Laws 
For Farmers’ Movement, This Time is Ripe for Consolidation, Not Confrontation 
Data Privacy And Tech Giants 
Mahatma Gandhi Meets Shahid Bhagat Singh in Heaven 
Death by lethal injection: An inhumane way to die 
Encroaching Identity 
Yearnings for Alternative Food and Farming Systems 
Preview signals Biden’s foreign policy shifts 
Encircling China and Praising India: The US Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific 
Will the U.S. Senate Confirm Coup Plotter Nuland? 
Two Principles of Racial Equity that Outrage US Liberals Hold On To That Fear 
Can the U.S. and China Cooperate on a Failing Planet? 
In Conversation with Prof K S Chalam 
We Need Multi-Disciplinary Approach For Better Understanding of Crucial Issues International Support Continues for Protesting Farmers in India 
Abortion Rights and Abortion Laws In The Present Times 
Impeaching Trump 
Protests as a marker of Social change Today India Needs Both Gandhi and Bhagat Singh, and the Unity of Their Followers More Than Ever Before 
United States of South Asia 
MSM Re Trumpist Rioters & Israeli Elections, Covid Vaccination, Child Abuse & Nuclear Terrorism – What About The Palestinians? 
Two Streams of Freedom Movement Often Supported and Complemented Each Other 
Looming Large: The Middle East Braces for Fallout of US–China Divide 
David Weiller: Meditating on the world’s rainforests 
Shaheed Fazil Rahu: A frontrunner of deprived Sindhi peasants 
Religion is not Rational 
Dr. DS Kotnis as seen by Chinese Artists 
Reason Wounded—Government and Judiciary Miss the Essence of Farmer Protests 
Agroecology and Post-COVID Plunder 
Love Jihad, Conversions and Laws curbing Freedoms Jats: A brief history 
Capitol Hill Violence and Lessons for Indian Democracy 
For nearly two decades now Countercurrents has provided millions of readers around the world with deep insights and analysis of news, events, trends that are usually ignored by mainstream media. A key quality of this unique information platform has been its eclectic and open minded choice of themes, ranging from caste, gender and communalism to issues related to ecology, rapidly[Read More…]
