Climate Change

Lithium mine at Salinas Grandes salt desert Jujuy province, Argentina
UTS report cover photo by EARTHWORKS is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 / Flickr

More Butterflies, Fewer Billionaires — Unrigging the Global Economy

Welcome to the New Green Colonialism- One Last Shot at Reducing Global Inequality and Saving the Planet In a fit of madness or just plain desperation, you’ve enrolled in a get-rich-quick scheme. All you have to do is sell some products, sign up some friends, make some phone calls. Follow that simple formula and you’ll soon be pulling in tens[Read More…]

by 20/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Crisis Threatens Largest U.S. Cities

Climate Crisis Threatens Largest U.S. Cities

Largest cities in the U.S. are at the forefront of climate change. An ABC News report (Climate Week NYC: Large cities are at the forefront of climate change, experts say, abcnews.go.com) said: About 80% of the U.S. population lives in urban settings, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Some of the country’s most densely populated cities, like New York City, are[Read More…]

by 19/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A climate of Insanity

A climate of Insanity

As the emission of greenhouse gases continues, new fossil fuel projects are subsidized, global warming acceerates, bushfires and floods engulf the planet, climate science is ignored, climate change projections are kept away from the public eye, nations invest in killer submarines rather than water spraying aircraft and other fire fighting equipment, politicians talk about clean coal, radioactive waters are spilled[Read More…]

by 18/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Change And Learning From The Disaster in Libya

Climate Change And Learning From The Disaster in Libya

One of the most important tasks before our troubled world relates to protective steps to reduce the harmful impacts of adverse weather and disasters arising from climate change. As is well understood and adequately documented, climate change leads to much increased possibility of adverse weather events and disasters which can be significantly more threatening than what the world has experienced[Read More…]

by 16/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Global Warming Did The Unthinkable

Global Warming Did The Unthinkable

  Jungfraujoch’s foreboding temperatures this September at the top of the world in Switzerland at 2.25 miles altitude alarmed glaciologists. If anybody has lingering doubts about global warming’s strength of power to directly impact Earth’s ecosystems, think again. Antarctica, at the bottom of the world, experienced record high temperatures during its winter, as record high temperatures were also recorded at[Read More…]

by 16/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Activists walk through lower Manhattan for the Global Climate Strike protests, Sept. 23, 2022, in New York. (AP Photo/Brittainy Newman, File)© Provided by The Associated Press

Climate Protests Around The World Call For End To Fossils Fuels As The Earth Heats Up

Tens of thousands of climate activists around the world are marching, chanting and protesting Friday to call for an end to the burning of planet-warming fossil fuels as the globe suffers dramatic weather extremes and record-breaking heat. Dozens Of Countries Hundreds Of Cities An AP report said: The strike — driven by several mostly youth-led, local and global climate groups and organizations, including[Read More…]

by 15/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Why the West is Reluctant to name the Biggest Culprit of the Libyan Disaster

Why the West is Reluctant to name the Biggest Culprit of the Libyan Disaster

This is clearly the time for giving the highest priority to the rescue and rehabilitation effort In Libya where the recent floods have caused massive destruction. At the time of writing this over 5300 persons are reported to have died, and thousands more are reported missing. According to Derna Mayor Abdulbenam al-Ghaithi ( quoted in a Reuter report published in[Read More…]

by 15/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Young Montanans Fight Climate Change for All of Us

Young Montanans Fight Climate Change for All of Us

The wording in Article IX, Section 1, of Montana’s constitution couldn’t be clearer: “The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.” Accordingly, in April, a district court judge in Yellowstone County voided a permit for a natural-gas-fired power plant under construction there. Over its lifetime, it would have released an estimated[Read More…]

by 15/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Phasing out fossil fuels

Phasing out fossil fuels

What would our vulnerable descendants choose: phasing out fossil fuels or a regulated managed decline of fossil fuels globally? Phasing out fossil fuels is rightfully the all important climate change topic this Fall. After decades of failure to even peak greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and with escalating damage from climate events, it is imperative that emissions be reduced rapidly. But[Read More…]

by 15/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Whole neighborhoods in the coastal town of Derna ,Libya were washed away after torrential rains caused two dams to burst. (Jamal Alkomaty / Associated Press)

Within 2 Weeks 4 Continents Face 8 Catastrophic Floods, At Least 10,000 Die, Neighborhoods Swept To Sea

A catastrophic flooding in Libya has taken its toll: At least 10,000 people died. The flood in Libya is just the latest in a string of intense rain events to hammer countries in four continents over the past two weeks. Whole neighborhoods have been swept into the sea by flooding in Libya. The country also experienced bursting of dams. Dead[Read More…]

by 13/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Climate Emergency And Urgency of System Change

The Climate Emergency And Urgency of System Change

Presentation, Panel on “Buddhist Advice to Cope with Climate Change”, the 18th United Nations Day of Vesak Celebration, June 1, 2023, Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University, Thailand. Climate change is a complex phenomenon involving unknown changes in planetary biophysical systems. However, there is scientific consensus that climate change is caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion, deforestation and other human activities.[Read More…]

by 12/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A man walks through wildfire wreckage Friday, Aug. 11, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii. Hawaii emergency management records show no indication that warning sirens sounded before people ran for their lives from wildfires on Maui that wiped out a historic town. [AP Photo/ Rick Bowmer]

A Global Maui Moment

From the earliest kingdoms to late last night, history has been the story not just of the rise of great powers but of their decline and fall. So, normally, there would be nothing particularly out of the ordinary about the aging America of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, a classic imperial power distinctly in decline and threatening to split into[Read More…]

by 11/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Change Can Trigger Conflicts: Dr Malcolm Mistry

Climate Change Can Trigger Conflicts: Dr Malcolm Mistry

Dr Malcolm Mistry, originally from India, is based currently at The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). He is a climatologist with training in climate modelling, econometrics and sectoral impacts assessment of climate change and variability. Malcolm holds visiting affiliations with the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC) – Italy where he spent[Read More…]

by 05/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Criminalising Activism: Woodside, Protest and Climate Change

Criminalising Activism: Woodside, Protest and Climate Change

On August 1, protesters against the Burrup Hub expansion in Western Australia, a project of one of Australia’s most ruthless fossil fuel companies, took to the Perth home of its CEO, Meg O’Neill.  The CEO of Woodside was not impressed.  In fact, she seemed rather distressed.   “It doesn’t matter if you’re a member of the business community, in professional athletics,[Read More…]

by 05/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
 Too late?  The climate & nuclear juggernaut

 Too late?  The climate & nuclear juggernaut

At 90 seconds to a midnight and a few decades to +4oC will ’sapiens’ end up on the beach? The clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at 90 seconds to midnight. When elephants fight the grass dies (an African proverb). Under the guise of lies and cover-ups, the global powers to be have set the stage for the[Read More…]

by 03/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Survival of Homo Sapiens on Planet Earth 

Survival of Homo Sapiens on Planet Earth 

Can the  genetic eukaryotic neurotic psychotic self-destructive discordant elements that are preventing humans from beginning a Phase Transition be constrained ? And If they can be constrained, then do humans have the intellectual strength and cohesiveness cooperatively to move on into a self-sustaining integrative Phase Reorganization that will  assure continuation of human life and all other life on the planet ? XXX X Extreme Biosphere temperature rise over the next[Read More…]

by 02/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Mega Risks Threaten Earth

Mega Risks Threaten Earth

The Council for the Human Future, which is a dedicated group of intelligent well-informed people, has identified ten Mega Risks to Earth. As it happens, all ten risks are threatening the planet all at the same time. Consequently, the board of the Council has called for an Earth System Treaty. This may be one of the most unique efforts to[Read More…]

by 01/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Wildfires Aren’t Just a Threat to People—They’re Killing Off Earth’s Biodiversity

Wildfires Aren’t Just a Threat to People—They’re Killing Off Earth’s Biodiversity

In early August 2023, a succession of wildfires ignited within the state of Hawaii, primarily affecting the island of Maui. It is considered “one of the worst natural disasters in Hawaii’s history, and the nation’s deadliest wildfires since 1918.” Driven by powerful winds, these fires sparked urgent evacuations, inflicted extensive devastation, and tragically claimed the lives of at least 115 individuals—though the final confirmed[Read More…]

by 30/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Cutting Climate Change Research: Cuts at the Australian Antarctic Division

Cutting Climate Change Research: Cuts at the Australian Antarctic Division

Australia’s funding priorities have been utterly muddled of late.  At the Commonwealth level, there is cash to be found in every conceivable place to support every absurd military venture, as long as it targets those hideous authoritarians in Beijing. It seemed utterly absurd that, even as the Australian federal government announced its purchase of over 200 tomahawk cruise missiles –[Read More…]

by 24/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Change Litigation: The Montana Precedent

Climate Change Litigation: The Montana Precedent

Climate change litigation is falling into pressing fashion.  In Australia, the 2021 case of Sharma, despite eventually failing before three judges in the Federal Court in 2022, suggested that ministers had been put on notice regarding a potential duty of care regarding the consequences of approving fossil fuel projects. The lower court decision had shaken the fossil fuel industry with[Read More…]

by 21/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Collapse 2.0 – What a 2005 Bestseller Tells Us About Climate Change and Human Survival

Collapse 2.0 – What a 2005 Bestseller Tells Us About Climate Change and Human Survival

In his 2005 bestseller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, geographer Jared Diamond focused on past civilizations that confronted severe climate shocks, either adapting and surviving or failing to adapt and disintegrating. Among those were the Puebloan culture of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, the ancient Mayan civilization of Mesoamerica, and the Viking settlers of Greenland. Such societies, having achieved[Read More…]

by 19/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Al Gore vs. Oil-Rich Dubai, Host of COP28

Al Gore vs. Oil-Rich Dubai, Host of COP28

Al Gore, former US VP, recently held a TED talk in anticipation of COP28, the upcoming Conference of the Parties, aka: UNFCCC or 2023 United Nations Climate Conference, November 30th – December 12th, 2023, to be held at Expo City, Dubai. It increasingly looks to be a freakish show of multi-dimensional illusions and fakery that the world of climate science[Read More…]

by 19/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Submission To Australian National  Anti-Corruption Commission: Corporations & Governments Ignore  Huge Carbon Debt

Submission To Australian National  Anti-Corruption Commission: Corporations & Governments Ignore  Huge Carbon Debt

Australia is among world-leading climate criminal countries in many areas. Corporations, governments and Mainstream media conspire to fraudulently ignore Australia’s huge and inescapable Carbon Debt that totals about $5 trillion and is increasing at up to about $0.7 trillion each year. This is appalling intergenerational injustice because this ever-increasing and inescapable Carbon Debt will have to be paid by our children,[Read More…]

by 19/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Homes consumed in recent wildfires are seen in Lahaina, Hawaii, Wednesday, Aug. 16, 2023. [AP Photo/Jae C. Hong]

Over 1,000 people still missing as Maui fire death toll, and social anger, continue to rise

As many as 1,300 people are still missing more than a week after an inferno, sparked by downed power lines and fueled by climate change, ripped through the Hawaiian island of Maui, killing at least 110 people and destroying the historic town of Lahaina. Fires continue to burn on the island, threatening residents in the Upcountry town of Kula, located[Read More…]

by 17/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Photo/Leons George

Our Food System Is the Bullseye for Solving the World’s Climate Challenges

The industrialized food system is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. The impact of agriculture on climate change is significant. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the agriculture sector is responsible for 10 percent of the total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, after transportation (29 percent), electricity production (25 percent), industry (23 percent), and commercial and residential usage (13 percent).[Read More…]

by 17/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Wildfire wreckage is shown Friday, August 11, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii. Hawaii emergency management records show no indication that warning sirens sounded before people ran for their lives from wildfires on Maui that wiped out a historic town. [AP Photo/Rick Bowmer]

Walking in an Oven World-One Step in the Right Direction

Too hot.Too dry. Too many weapons. This world needs changing. But that’s too vague. After all, this world is already changing, just not in ways that are good for you and me. You know the facts. July 2023 was the hottest month on record — ever — since we humans started keeping track of the temperature. And it’s only getting hotter. As Petteri Taalas,[Read More…]

by 16/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
You Could Fry an Egg on the Sunbelt - by Priti Gulati Cox

The Hubris of Plutocrats: They Can’t Escape the Heat That’s Coming

The future is here. A study recently published by a team of British and Dutch scientists found that this summer’s horrific heat waves “would have been virtually impossible to occur in the US/Mexico region and Southern Europe if humans had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels.” More and more, it seems that heat waves, more than storms, flooding,[Read More…]

by 15/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Wildfire wreckage is shown Friday, August 11, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii. Hawaii emergency management records show no indication that warning sirens sounded before people ran for their lives from wildfires on Maui that wiped out a historic town. [AP Photo/Rick Bowmer]

Hundreds likely dead in Maui wildfire

The number of confirmed dead from the horrific wildfire on the Hawaiian island of Maui last Tuesday and Wednesday rose to 93 on Sunday. It is now the deadliest such fire in the US in more than 100 years. On Saturday, authorities said that the work of searching for and identifying the dead was still in the early stages and[Read More…]

by 14/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Change: Why Action On The Crisis Is All Hot Air

Climate Change: Why Action On The Crisis Is All Hot Air

The debate about the climate crisis should have been settled in the early 1990s. And yet, three decades later, the extent, imminence and even existence of a looming catastrophe are still hotly disputed. That is not by accident. David Attenborough is on social media pleading, once more, for mankind to do something before tipping points are surpassed that cannot be reversed and temperatures[Read More…]

by 13/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Our planet desperately needs leaders who value humanity and have the compassion and energy to preserve this beautiful planet

Our planet desperately needs leaders who value humanity and have the compassion and energy to preserve this beautiful planet

Most everyone is aware of the ongoing climate related events: melting of the polar ice, entire Alaskan communities that are sinking into the ocean, catastrophic storms, massive forest fires, and, of course, the worldwide heatwaves. If one follows the science, one knows of the overwhelming evidence of the connection between climate and burning fossil fuels. Despite all these climate-related occurrences,[Read More…]

by 12/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
‘Project 2025’ Will Goose Up Global Heat

‘Project 2025’ Will Goose Up Global Heat

The Far-Right takeover of the Republican Party has readied a battle plan for 2025 that will crucify commitments to fight global heat, namely: Project 2025 / Presidential Transition Project, a 920-page formal proposal to take over and reconstruct government via abandonment and/or defunding of federal agencies that protect the nation’s health and environment. Project 2025’s call to arms: “The long[Read More…]

by 12/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Deadly Intersection of Labor Exploitation and Climate Change

The Deadly Intersection of Labor Exploitation and Climate Change

Neither the corporate media nor our politicians who are beholden to corporate lobbyists honestly address the common root causes of (and solutions to) worker exploitation and climate change. As temperatures soar in the United States this summer, some among us are lucky enough to be able to remain in air-conditioned interior spaces, ordering food, groceries, clothing, and other products to[Read More…]

by 11/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Betrayal: The threat to life on Earth

Betrayal: The threat to life on Earth

It has been overlooked that, under current policies, global warming would render aboriginal lands in central and northern Australia unliveable. In his classic book The Fate of the Earth speaking for humanity Jonathan Schell describes the horror of a full-scale nuclear holocaust where human beings and animals would die if twenty thousand megatons of bombs, more than a million times[Read More…]

by 06/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Meghalaya losing its sheen in a natural resource crisis

Meghalaya losing its sheen in a natural resource crisis

“Looking at water, I am seeing a crisis!” A mate shared while we were discussing the effects of climate change in Meghalaya. That scared me. Meghalaya is famous for its breathtaking landscapes, lush green tropical wet forest, rich tribal culture, and proudly tag-lined “the wettest land on the earth” surprisingly facing a paradoxical natural resource crisis.  The climate conditions of[Read More…]

by 05/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Is Earth Close to “The Great Dying”?

Is Earth Close to “The Great Dying”?

You may remember the 2004 disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which large parts of Europe and the American East Coast suddenly freeze up? The plot device is that the Great Conveyor Belt—also known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)—which brings heat from the south Pacific around the southern tip of Africa and up the east coast of the Americas[Read More…]

by 03/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Extremely Extreme

Extremely Extreme

Hey, who knows? It could be the Gulf Stream collapsing or the planet eternally breaking heat records. But whatever the specifics, we’re living it right now, not in the next century, the next decade, or even next year. You couldn’t miss it — at least so you might think — if you were living in the sweltering Southwest; especially in broiling, record-setting Phoenix with 30 straight[Read More…]

by 03/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A local resident reacts as the flames burn trees in Gennadi village, on the Aegean Sea island of Rhodes, southeastern Greece, on Tuesday, July 25, 2023. [AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris]

The climate crisis reaches a tipping point

A joint statement released Thursday by the European Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirms that the first three weeks of July have been the warmest three-week period ever recorded and predicts that the month will be the hottest ever experienced by human civilization. Carlo Buontempo, the director of C3S, noted as part of the[Read More…]

by 30/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Record-shattering heat signals a global climate change tipping point

Record-shattering heat signals a global climate change tipping point

Global climate developments in the month of July, which have shattered heat records and brought devastating fires and flash floods, have made clear that capitalist-induced global warming, fueled by the unrestrained emission of carbon into the atmosphere in the pursuit of profit, has reached a tipping point, with the direct effects being felt in real time by much of the[Read More…]

by 26/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The past twenty days have been the hottest ever recorded

The past twenty days have been the hottest ever recorded

Saturday marked the 20th consecutive day of the hottest temperatures recorded in human history. Since July 3, the average global temperature (the temperature over Earth’s entire surface, averaged over 24 hours) has remained above the previous high of 16.92 degrees Celsius (62.46 degrees Fahrenheit) recorded in August 2016, according to preliminary data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).[Read More…]

by 24/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
European Human Rights Court Hears Historic Climate Case Brought by Elderly Swiss Women (Photo: KlimaSeniorinnen/Twitter)

Climate Cases Are Catching Fire Across the Globe

With the increasing number of cases and diverse legal arguments, litigation is becoming a powerful tool to hold governments, corporations, and financial institutions accountable. At the end of June, the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics (LSE) launched its annual report on climate litigation. This report offers a comprehensive synthesis of the latest research and developments in the[Read More…]

by 23/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Antarctica’s Threatening Winter

Antarctica’s Threatening Winter

In the dead of winter, the Antarctic Peninsula, an 800-mile extension of the Antarctic continent, temperatures hit 32°F. (Source: It’s Even Hot in Antarctica, Where it’s Winter, Vox, July 13, 2023) Global warming has been on a hot streak, accelerating its record-setting impact on the planet over the past couple of years. And even though it’s winter down below, Antarctica[Read More…]

by 22/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A person wears a face mask as smoke from wildfires in Canada cause hazy conditions in New York City on June 7, 2023. (Photo: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)

The Eco Collapse We Were Warned About Has Begun

In 2023, different climatic anomalies have been recorded that set new historical records in the tragic progression of climate change at the global level. Thus, in June, the surface temperature in the North Atlantic reached the maximum increase of 1.3 degrees Celsius with respect to preindustrial values. In a similar direction—although in lower values—the average temperature of the seas at[Read More…]

by 22/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Facing Climate Change As One World

Facing Climate Change As One World

“. . . we need to do everything we can to keep (global) warming as low as possible.” When it comes to climate change, one two-letter word has me totally perplexed: “we.” There’s an implication of global unity — a transcendent “we,” marching as to war (so to speak) — facing humanity’s greatest crisis, undoing the exploitative, Earth-destroying aspects of our social[Read More…]

by 21/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Planetary Inferno: Nero fiddles while Rome burns

Planetary Inferno: Nero fiddles while Rome burns

The fast rise in global warming manifested by current extreme weather events betray a dangerous underestimation of the Earth’s liveable climate, while governments ignore climate science, claim to set limits on domestic emissions but allow major export of fossil fuels and emissions worldwide on a scale threatening life on Earth. With current policies there appear to exist few limits on[Read More…]

by 20/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Justice Based Planning Needed to Tackle Climate Change

Justice Based Planning Needed to Tackle Climate Change

Various development models which sought to reduce poverty and deprivation in the past tried to link the production/availability of various essential goods and services with the available financial and natural resources. However with the accentuation of the environmental crisis there are new challenges and pressing needs. It is well recognized by scientific opinion that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas[Read More…]

by 19/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
When It Comes to the Climate Emergency, It’s No Fun Saying, ‘I Told You So’

When It Comes to the Climate Emergency, It’s No Fun Saying, ‘I Told You So’

The dawning El Niño, which will produce worse chaos than we’ve seen so far, offers what I think may be our last viable political opening to make the large-scale global corrections in time to really limit the heating. This piece will be a touch more personal than most, because the past couple of weeks have felt personal. I wrote the[Read More…]

by 18/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Inaction Means Terracidal Climate Catastrophe: Act Now To Prevent Present Disaster Deaths

Climate Inaction Means Terracidal Climate Catastrophe: Act Now To Prevent Present Disaster Deaths

Atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) are increasing at record rates due to record fossil fuel extraction and burning, and record iron ore, steel. cement and animal production. Humanity will not act on climate change but it could at least act urgently  now to  emplace systems to save the circa 15 million people presently dying each year from carbon fuel burning pollutants,[Read More…]

by 17/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
By Priti Gulati Cox

Catching Heat from Big Brother: Education and Climate in MAGAland

In recent years, almost half of US state legislatures have passed laws that directly undermine local communities’ efforts to curb climate change. More prominent in the headlines, though, have been bills targeting public education and violating a host of constitutional rights, many of them now signed into law. These “culture war” laws don’t directly address climate. But unless they are[Read More…]

by 15/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Poison Pills in Congress

Climate Poison Pills in Congress

Republican lawmakers in the US Congress are unabashedly pro-global warming: “Bring it on! We’ve got air conditioners in our cars, offices, and homes… no sweat!” Not one Republican in Congress voted for the nation’s most inclusive climate bill of all time, the Inflation Reduction Act. Meanwhile, here we go again, this coming fall, with Congress in another deadline to avoid[Read More…]

by 15/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A Third Way? Don’t Sell Us Short

A Third Way? Don’t Sell Us Short

In case you hadn’t noticed — and how could you not? — there have been more than 500 (yes, 500-plus!) wildfires burning across the vast reaches of Canada, an unheard-of number, and more than half of them completely out of (human) control in a record-shattering fire season. That’s been true for seemingly endless weeks now with no end in sight. (And, by[Read More…]

by 14/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Being Free Means Getting Climate Reparations Right—but Not Everyone Is Onboard

Being Free Means Getting Climate Reparations Right—but Not Everyone Is Onboard

by Mwesigye Robert, Esther Afolaranmi, and Carter Dillard Those who would have to pay the most are trying to hide what the climate crisis is costing the rest of us and ignoring the fact that social justice begins with a fair start in life. Climate change has already caused harm not only to mothers and children, but also to people[Read More…]

by 12/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
In Just 15 Years Catastrophic Climate ‘Doom Loops’ Could Start, Warns Study

In Just 15 Years Catastrophic Climate ‘Doom Loops’ Could Start, Warns Study

Earth’s ecosystems may be careering toward collapse much sooner than scientists thought, a new study of our planet’s warming climate has warned. According to the study (Simon Willcock, Gregory S. Cooper, John Addy & John A. Dearing, Earlier collapse of Anthropocene ecosystems driven by multiple faster and noisier drivers, Nature Sustainability, Published: 22 June 2023), more than a fifth of the world’s potentially catastrophic[Read More…]

by 11/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
World Has Hottest Week On Record, Finds Study

World Has Hottest Week On Record, Finds Study

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said Monday that early data show the beginning of July saw the hottest week on record globally. “The world just had the hottest week on record, according to preliminary data,” the WMO said in a statement after climate change and the early stages of the El Nino weather pattern drove the hottest June on record. Temperatures are breaking records[Read More…]

by 11/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Earth’s 120,000-Year Heat Record Shattered, Finds Study

Earth’s 120,000-Year Heat Record Shattered, Finds Study

Earth is experiencing unprecedented heat waves, with record-breaking temperatures being observed. The University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer reported that Earth broke the record for its hottest day in 120,000 years three times in the past week. These extreme temperatures are expected to continue as El Niño intensifies, adding more heat to the Earth’s system. The climate scientists are confident in these assertions[Read More…]

by 10/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Iraq’s Climate Crisis – America’s War for Oil and the Great Mesopotamian Dustbowl

Iraq’s Climate Crisis – America’s War for Oil and the Great Mesopotamian Dustbowl

It was one of the fabled rivers of history and the Marines needed to cross it. In early April 2003, as American forces sought to wrap up their conquest of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, and take strongholds to its north, the Marine Corps formed “Task Force Tripoli.” It was commanded by General John F. Kelly (who would later serve as[Read More…]

by 10/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Sea ice is formed when chunks of the Greenland ice sheet break off and flow into the ocean.

The Greenland Threat Escalates

  Will the world’s major coastal cities, such as NYC, survive escalating global heat conditions in Greenland? And what if both Greenland and Antarctica follow the recent very disturbing pattern of the world’s oceans? For the first time that scientists can recall, sea surface temperatures that always recede from annual peaks are failing to do so, staying high. Climate change[Read More…]

by 08/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Hottest Days in 125,000 Years—So Far

The Hottest Days in 125,000 Years—So Far

Monday July 3 was the hottest day anyone had ever measured on planet Earth. True, our system for measuring the global average temperature—a network of weather stations, ocean buoys, and satellites—only dates back to 1979, but that means that at a bare minimum it was the hottest day a large majority of the Earth’s population had ever been alive to witness. And[Read More…]

by 07/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Fossil Fuel Proliferation Threat

The Fossil Fuel Proliferation Threat

Climate change negotiations and debates are characterised by some curious features.  For one, there are interminable stretches of discussion that never seem to feature the agents of cause.  Chatter about horrendous fires, toxic smoke, and environmental degradation often skirts around the culprit of anthropogenic change, so ably aided by fossil fuels. With the fossil fuel industries of so many countries[Read More…]

by 06/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Monday Was World’s Hottest-Ever Day

Monday Was World’s Hottest-Ever Day

The world registered its hottest ever day on Monday as temperatures surged across the globe, according to data released by the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). Media reports said: The U.S. governmental body, which delivers national and global climate guidance and forecasts from its headquarters in Maryland, said on Tuesday that it recorded an average global temperature of[Read More…]

by 05/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Change and the Two Paths Ahead

Climate Change and the Two Paths Ahead

There are four certainties about the issue of climate change which should not be disputed any more. Firstly, it is a very serious problem, a leading problem among those problems which threaten the life-nurturing conditions of our planet. Secondly, a big reduction of fossil fuels in the near future is a necessary condition for resolving this problem while at the[Read More…]

by 05/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Issues are Class Issues

Climate Issues are Class Issues

                                                         Capitalism is producing climate catastrophe due to its insatiable appetite for the accumulation of an unprecedented level of profit at the cost of people and the planet. In search of profit, capitalism destroys the environment on a daily basis. The worldwide capitalist system creates, sustains, and expands the ecological imbalance by consistently exploiting nature and human beings. The pandemic[Read More…]

by 01/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Ocean Red Zone

The Ocean Red Zone

Oceans of the world are in a dangerous red zone that exceeds safe limits for marine and terrestrial life because of excessive heat. Several statements by climate scientists show heightened concerns about how this plays out, as 2023 could be a major inflection point with global warming suddenly turning much worse. For example, the recent work of Annalisa Bracco, Ph.D.,[Read More…]

by 01/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Smoke fills the sky reducing visibility Wednesday, June 28, 2023 in Detroit. [AP Photo/Paul Sancya]

Over 120 million Americans under air quality alerts as wildfires continue to rage across Canada

Over 120 million people, or more than a third of the US population, were under air quality alerts in over a dozen states spanning from the Midwest to the East Coast, as a result of an immense smoke plume from hundreds of wildfires raging across Canada. Canada is presently experiencing the most destructive wildfire season in the country’s history, a[Read More…]

by 29/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
We’re Having a Violent Meltdown: The Human Costs of Global Warming — and of Our Response to It

We’re Having a Violent Meltdown: The Human Costs of Global Warming — and of Our Response to It

Several times in recent weeks I’ve heard people suggest that Mother Nature has been speaking to us through that smoke endlessly drifting south from the still-raging Canadian wildfires. She’s saying that she wants the coal, oil, and gas left in the ground, but I fear her message will have little more influence on climate policy than her previous ones did. After all,[Read More…]

by 28/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Global Reservoirs Are Becoming Emptier, Finds Study

Global Reservoirs Are Becoming Emptier, Finds Study

Comparison of normalized storage (NS) variations of global pre- and post-1999 reservoirs: a Locations of the global reservoirs (with pre-1999 reservoirs in red and post-1999 reservoirs in cyan). b Comparison of the NS values of global pre- and post-1999 reservoirs (excluding regulated natural lakes), along with the accumulative storage capacity of the post-1999 reservoirs. Source: Study report. Over the past two decades, global reservoirs have[Read More…]

by 26/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Plaintiffs await the start of the nation's first youth climate trial at Montana's 1st Judicial District Court in Helena on June 12, 2023. (Photo: William Campbell/Getty Images)

In Praise of Montana’s Climate Kids

It got…somewhat less coverage than the imploded sub, but for me the titanic story of the last week was the truly remarkable trial held in Montana over the last ten days—one of the first times that the climate story has played out in an American courtroom. The plaintiffs were 16 Montana youth, who charged that by continuing to issue permits[Read More…]

by 25/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Global Warming and Water Privatization

Global Warming and Water Privatization

                                                     Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou recently declared a state of emergency in the capital, Montevideo, due to water shortages. (1) Among the measures announced to address the country’s longest recorded drought in 74 years[Read More…]

by 23/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Current Emissions Threatens 2 Billion People in The Hindu Kush Himalayas

Current Emissions Threatens 2 Billion People in The Hindu Kush Himalayas

The glaciers and snow of the over 3,000 named peaks in the Himalayas are an important water resource that climate change threatens to destroy. Photo: Koshy Koshy/Flickr Scientists have warned in a report that Himalayan glaciers could lose up to 75% of their ice by the turn of the century, which will affect about 2 billion people depending on the system.[Read More…]

by 21/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Europe – Fastest Warming Continent In World Since 1980s, Says WMO

Europe – Fastest Warming Continent In World Since 1980s, Says WMO

Temperatures over Europe have warmed significantly over the 1991-2021 period, at an average rate of about +0.5 °C per decade, making it the fastest warming region of all the WMO Regions. This has been said by the State of the Climate in Europe, a new report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on Monday. The report said: Temperatures in Europe[Read More…]

by 20/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Planetary Heat is Happening Fast, and Faster

Planetary Heat is Happening Fast, and Faster

The evidence is starting to build that all bets are off on predictions that humanity has a decade, or more, of clear sailing before global warming turns vicious enough to run roughshod over climate change deniers and the mean-spirited anti-climate-change Republican Party. Voters better smarten up by 2024 or suffer the consequences. At least the Democrats enacted a partial baby-sized[Read More…]

by 20/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Global Temps Not Just Off the Chart, But Off the Wall the Chart Is Tacked To

Global Temps Not Just Off the Chart, But Off the Wall the Chart Is Tacked To

The rapid warming over the next couple of years is likely to be our last opportunity to really act coherently as a civilization to reduce the magnitude of this crisis, and so far we are blowing it We’ve reached the scariest moment yet in the climate saga: I noted in mid-April that there were all kinds of signs that a rapid increase in[Read More…]

by 17/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Why Is The North Atlantic Breaking Heat Records?

Why Is The North Atlantic Breaking Heat Records?

Large swaths of the North Atlantic are well above normal temperature (orange and red) for this time of year, a trend that could affect the forthcoming hurricane season. NOAA In the past few weeks, sea-surface temperatures in some parts of the North Atlantic Ocean have soared to record heights. The anomalous warming is occurring in a large swath stretching almost[Read More…]

by 16/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
An observer watches the talks in Bonn (Photo credit: UN Climate Change)

Bonn Climate Talks At Risk Of Collapse, After 7-day Agenda Debate

Seven days into climate talks in the German city of Bonn, governments have not been able to agree on an agenda, sparking fears of two wasted weeks of talks while the climate crisis worsens. Talks on issues like reducing emissions and adapting to climate change have continued but the Pakistani co-chair of the talks Nabeel Munir warned that all their[Read More…]

by 16/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Living on a Smoke-Bomb of a Planet – September 11th, Climate-Change-Style

Living on a Smoke-Bomb of a Planet – September 11th, Climate-Change-Style

As it turns out, it’s never too late. I mention that only because last week, at nearly 79, I managed to visit Mars for the first time. You know, the red planet, or rather — so it seemed to me — the orange planet. And take my word for it, it was eerie as hell. There was no sun, just a[Read More…]

by 16/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A person wears a face mask as smoke from wildfires in Canada cause hazy conditions in New York City on June 7, 2023. (Photo: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)

There Are No Climate Havens

One morning in May 1934, residents in the East woke up to find part of Kansas drifting over their cities. Until then “the black blizzards” of dust that had ravaged the Great Plains seemed like a far-off problem. But now as the gloom and haze darkened the skies over Washington and New York, the reality of the Dust Bowl was now clear[Read More…]

by 11/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Deadly wildfire smoke spreads across much of northeast US

Deadly wildfire smoke spreads across much of northeast US

Toxic smoke from raging fires in Canada continued to impact large swaths of eastern North America Thursday. Overnight and into the morning, air quality deteriorated to record-shattering levels. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the hourly Air Quality Index peaked at 491 Thursday, far surpassing the threshold of 300 considered “hazardous.” In Philadelphia, monitors topped out at 425 overnight, while in the Washington[Read More…]

by 09/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
France’s Global Warming Predicament

France’s Global Warming Predicament

  When one of the world’s most developed culturally elite countries, France, tosses in the towel on the IPCC 2°C barrier, it sends a loud and clear message that the global warming fight is losing the battle. Seriously, France expects 4°C. The country is bracing for 4°C according to Environment Minister Christophe Béchu: “We can’t escape the reality of global[Read More…]

by 09/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Wildfire Smoke Chokes Canada and Eastern US

Wildfire Smoke Chokes Canada and Eastern US

Environmental groups are demanding that world leaders take urgent action as smoke from Canadian wildfires fueled by the climate crisis continued to smother eastern regions of the United States on Wednesday, pushing the Air Quality Index (AQI) in both nation’s capitals to “unhealthy,” with at least 16 states issuing air quality alerts affecting millions of people. New York City had the worst air quality of any[Read More…]

by 08/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Terracidal But Ignored Carbon Debt From Gas Exploitation By The World & Climate Criminal Australia

Terracidal But Ignored Carbon Debt From Gas Exploitation By The World & Climate Criminal Australia

In Humanity’s present slow-motion suicide the World resolutely ignores the immense and ever-increasing Carbon Debt due to fossil fuel exploitation. In particular the inescapable  Carbon Debt from gas exploitation alone is increasing annually by $3.0 trillion for the World and by $118 billion for climate criminal Australia, or by about 3.1% and 7.6%, respectively, of the GDP of $96.5 trillion[Read More…]

by 08/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A Climate of Betrayal

A Climate of Betrayal

“All grimly true, but they can be sure that they won’t be recorded for their crimes in history – because there won’t be any history” (Noam Chomsky) No words can express the betrayal of humanity and nature as represented by the ease in which originally progressive parties and ‘leaders’ can reverse their original environmental credentials by supporting coal and gas[Read More…]

by 07/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Looking for Home in an Overheating World – If Emissions Continue, Will We All Be Migrants Someday?

Looking for Home in an Overheating World – If Emissions Continue, Will We All Be Migrants Someday?

Greenville, CA — Pines and firs parched by a three-year drought had been burning for days on a ridge 1,000 feet above my remote mountain town. On August 4, 2021, the flames suddenly flared into a heat so intense it formed a molten cloud the color of bruised flesh. As that sinister cumulus rose above an oval-shaped reservoir, it collapsed,[Read More…]

by 05/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
GM Crops Likely to Worsen Climate Change Related Problems for Farmers

GM Crops Likely to Worsen Climate Change Related Problems for Farmers

 The shadow of climate change related problems hangs heavy over most farmers as they struggle increasingly against unexpected weather conditions, extreme weather events and disasters. In such conditions it is very important for government policy to avoid any changes that can aggravate such difficulties and problems faced by farmers. Hence it is very unfortunate to see some authorities bent upon[Read More…]

by 30/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Next 5 Years Will Smash Global Temperature Records, Says WMO

Next 5 Years Will Smash Global Temperature Records, Says WMO

A new report by the World Meteorological Organization makes dire predictions for the next five years: Global temperatures rising to new record levels, continued ocean heating and acidification, sea ice loss and glacier melt, sea level rise, and more extreme weather. The new Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update, 2023-2027, released this week by the WMO said: There is a near[Read More…]

by 25/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Capturing Carbon With Machines Is a Failure—So Why Are We Subsidizing It?

Capturing Carbon With Machines Is a Failure—So Why Are We Subsidizing It?

Policymakers are pouring money into techno-fixes to solve the climate crisis, even though scientific studies indicate nature-based solutions are all-around more effective. Human activity—mostly the burning of fossil fuels—has raised Earth’s atmospheric carbon content by 50 percent, from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 420 ppm. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, we’ve released approximately 950 billion metric tons of carbon into the air.[Read More…]

by 25/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Atmosphere is Cooling Dangerously Fast

The Atmosphere is Cooling Dangerously Fast

The upper atmosphere is cooling too fast for comfort. Global warming is only one half of the impact of excessive CO2 emissions generated by cars, planes, trains, and industry. The other impact is rapid cooling of the upper atmosphere which may be of considerably more concern than global warming as it negatively impacts the ozone layer, which protects the planet[Read More…]

by 24/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Faster and faster: The pace of climate change keeps surprising us

Faster and faster: The pace of climate change keeps surprising us

This seems like the 10th time that I’ve read a story that says Greenland’s glaciers are melting faster than previously thought and thus the consequences of climate change are moving much more quickly than we have estimated in the past. Even the pace of such stories has picked up. I found some in 2015, 2016, 2019, 2021 and 2022. And, back in 2013 scientists reported that just a[Read More…]

by 23/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Cost Of Extreme Weather – 2 Million deaths And $4 Trillion Over Last 50 Years

Cost Of Extreme Weather – 2 Million deaths And $4 Trillion Over Last 50 Years

Over two million deaths and $4.3 trillion in economic losses; that’s the impact of a half-century of extreme weather events turbo-charged by man-made global warming, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Monday. According to WMO, weather, climate and water-related hazards caused close to 12,000 disasters between 1970 and 2021. Developing Countries Developing countries were hit hardest, seeing nine in 10 deaths and 60 per cent of[Read More…]

by 23/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
WMO Warning: 1.5 Degree C Warming Breach Very Soon & With Increasing Frequency. Act Now!

WMO Warning: 1.5 Degree C Warming Breach Very Soon & With Increasing Frequency. Act Now!

In 2015 the Paris Climate Change Conference decided that the world must take urgent action to ideally contain global warming to plus 1.5 degrees Centigrade (plus 1.5C) and to less than a catastrophic plus 2C. The present warming is about plus 1.1C. However the  World Meteorological Organization (WMO) now reports a 66% probability of 1.5C being exceeded for at least[Read More…]

by 19/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Old Future Is Gone, and Technology Won’t Bring It Back

The Old Future Is Gone, and Technology Won’t Bring It Back

  As we begin the second year of “In Real Time,” the future doesn’t look very promising. Almost one-third of US states have plunged into one-party authoritarian rule, and many are gripped by hostility to any form of climate action. Over the past year, voters and activists across the nation have managed to slow the anti-democratic slide, but nothing has[Read More…]

by 19/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate change and water crisis

Climate change and water crisis

Water crisis is not only a problem of our country but of the entire world. According to the United Nations. Today, 26 percent of the world’s population faces a crisis of clean drinking water. Not only this, in the next 27 years i.e. by 2050, 1.7 to 2.4 billion urban population of the world will face drinking water crisis. India[Read More…]

by 15/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Sea ice is formed when chunks of the Greenland ice sheet break off and flow into the ocean.

The Ocean Heat Bomb Ignites

For the first time that scientists can recall, sea surface temperatures that always recede from annual peaks are failing to do so, staying high   Global warming and extensive overfishing have damaged ocean ecosystems well beyond recognition from only a few decades ago. Still, on its own accord, the ocean stood tall for over 3 billion years. But, alas, in[Read More…]

by 13/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Peace for Environment Protection—Great Opportunities Missed Earlier Can Still be Realized

Peace for Environment Protection—Great Opportunities Missed Earlier Can Still be Realized

Many thoughtful people of world very rightly say today that the resolving of climate change and other inter-related serious environmental problems should get exceedingly high priority today as these threaten the basic life-nurturing capacity of our planet. Several of them, although not all, also realize that it is no less important to ensure peace in the world due to four[Read More…]

by 13/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
 Nuremberg trials for imperiling mass extinction of species

 Nuremberg trials for imperiling mass extinction of species

But while “leaders” fail to protect the people from global warming and nuclear war, they have succeeded splendidly in hiding the truth through the denial of climate change, accounting tricks and claims of reduction in domestic emissions, while in fact opening new coal mines, oil wells and fracked coal seams,  exporting hydrocarbons through the entire global atmosphere.          As mean[Read More…]

by 08/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Map showing where record breaking heatwaves are most likely. 

Record-breaking Heatwaves Likely To Cause Most Harm In Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea, and Central America

A new study has highlighted under-prepared regions across the world most at risk of the devastating effects of scorching temperatures. The University of Bristol-led research report (Thompson, V., Mitchell, D., Hegerl, G.C. et al. The most at-risk regions in the world for high-impact heatwaves. Nat Commun 14, 2152 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-37554-1), published today in Nature Communications, shows that unprecedented heat extremes combined with socioeconomic vulnerability puts[Read More…]

by 03/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Our Rapidly Changing Climate Mitigation Situation

Our Rapidly Changing Climate Mitigation Situation

The persistent La Niña of the past three years is rapidly cycling into the El Niño phase. There are indications that it could become a major El Niño which could push GMT warming to record levels – perhaps even exceeding a 1.5C rise while escalating climate impacts and damage. While this surge of impacts and damage will hopefully not be[Read More…]

by 03/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Sociology:  Guide to Analysis or to Action in the Global Climate Change Crisis? A Call for Action by the Social Sciences and the Humanities

Sociology:  Guide to Analysis or to Action in the Global Climate Change Crisis? A Call for Action by the Social Sciences and the Humanities

Climate change and environmental destruction is becoming an increasing threat to the well-being if not survival of a growing number of people around the world; it literally threatens the lives and well-being of millions if not billions of people around the planet.  (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its’ latest report of March 19, 2023, estimates that 3.3-3.6 billion[Read More…]

by 02/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Elephant In The Room: The Global Economy drives the Climate Crisis

The Elephant In The Room: The Global Economy drives the Climate Crisis

A perspective On World Earth Day 2023, a few dozen members of the 8-billion-and-counting Homo Sapiens species, met in an insignificantly tiny spot on Planet Earth. They met at the premises of The Institution of Engineers (India), Mysore, to discuss and think about Global Warming (GW) and  Climate Change (CC). Climate Change gains respectability EARTHDAY.ORG recognizes 23rd April as World[Read More…]

by 01/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Avoiding Climate Disaster: Our Last Chance?

Avoiding Climate Disaster: Our Last Chance?

The most recent IPCC report https://countercurrents.org/2023/04/2023-ipcc-ar6-summary-for-policymakers-last-warning/?swcfpc=1 https://popularresistance.org/ipcc-this-is-the-make-or-break-decade-for-climate-action/ https://popularresistance.org/does-climate-inaction-violate-human-rights/ https://countercurrents.org/2023/04/making-sense-of-the-latest-ipcc-report-2023/?swcfpc=1 The report states that globally “approximately 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change.” “Increasing weather and climate extreme events have exposed millions of people to acute food insecurity and reduced water insecurity, with the largest adverse impacts observed in many locations and/or communities[Read More…]

by 29/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
By Willy Stöwer, died on 31st May 1931 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Sailing on Planet Titanic

As I sit down to write this, April 15, 2023, it is 111 years to the day since the RMS Titanic sank beneath the waves of the North Atlantic. The largest moveable object humanity ever created, advertised to be unsinkable, it was the highest expression of the pride and hubris of the time. Torn open by an iceberg, over 1,500[Read More…]

by 26/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Capitalism Is Killing the Planet―and It’s Okay To Be Angry About That

Capitalism Is Killing the Planet―and It’s Okay To Be Angry About That

After a decade in the climate movement, one tends to get pretty good at avoiding the clawing hands of despair. It’s not that they’re not there, of course—the fear and anxiety that come with knowing that we’re living through the most consequential years in history, and that we’re doing nowhere near enough with them, are always there, lurking in the background of one’s[Read More…]

by 26/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Stories of permafrost

Stories of permafrost

“If something is permanently frozen, is it alive or dead?” After emerging from a deep dive into the terrific world of melting permafrost, typically defined as “ground (soil or rock and included ice or organic material) that remains at or below 0°C for at least two consecutive years” to use a low-hanging definition from The International Permafrost Association, I scribbled that question[Read More…]

by 25/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Monster Heat Hits 1/3rd of World Population

Monster Heat Hits 1/3rd of World Population

It has started, and it’s fierce… Monster Heat! “It’s a ‘monster heat spell like none before,” according to climatologist and weather historian Maximiliano Herrera, describing Asia’s heatwave as the worst in history. (Source: Extreme Heat Scorches Asia, Affecting at Least a Third of the World’s Population, The Verge, April 19, 2023) Global warming is hitting full stride as SE Asia,[Read More…]

by 25/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
On Earth Day, A 20-Point Plan to Definitely Resolve the Climate Crisis

On Earth Day, A 20-Point Plan to Definitely Resolve the Climate Crisis

World Earth Day (April 22) is a good time to suggest solutions for the climate crisis, so here is a 20-point plan that will definitely solve the climate crisis within a framework of increasing justice, peace, cooperation and democracy — 1.Reduce inequalities significantly, help the poorest peasants and workers much more, curb high luxury consumption of the richest in a[Read More…]

by 22/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
 El Niño Threatens Unparalleled Heatwaves

 El Niño Threatens Unparalleled Heatwaves

Can the world handle a climate that exceeds the far-reaching excesses of 2022 when the entire world turned upside down with unprecedented flooding, fires, and drought? NOAA and climate researchers in Germany and China believe an El Niño, starting in 2023-24, is in the works. El Niños equate to more heat throughout the planet. Buckle-up! El Niño could increase ocean[Read More…]

by 22/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Vasudhaiva Kutumbakkaam, G20 and Climate Change

Vasudhaiva Kutumbakkaam, G20 and Climate Change

Climate change is a global issue and the task to elevate the climate catastrophe is a common responsibility. The recent disasters of rising sea levels in the island countries, irreparable damage caused by floods in Pakistan, drought in Madagascar forcing migration, destructive heat waves in Indian farm lands are eye-opening instances which cannot be ignored. This triggers poverty, reduces crop[Read More…]

by 22/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Atlanta’s “Cop City” and the Struggle for Climate Justice

Atlanta’s “Cop City” and the Struggle for Climate Justice

Along the South River, in the southwest corner of DeKalb County, Georgia, lies a forested area of about 300 acres that has been owned by the nearby City of Atlanta for over a century. It was once part of a vastly larger wooded landscape, home to the Muskogee (Creek) people. They gave the river and forest the name “Weelaunee.” In[Read More…]

by 21/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Disturbing Sea Level Studies

Disturbing Sea Level Studies

For decades, climate scientists have been sounding the alarm that unless the nations of the world stop emitting greenhouse gases global warming will bring dangerous consequences. Rather, greenhouse gases, like CO2, have escalated to new highs year-over-year without hesitation. Now, new climate studies are exposing the results of decades of a couldn’t-care-less world interwoven within a deadly entrapment of free-market[Read More…]

by 15/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Can You Fight for Climate Justice Without Being Antiwar? 

Can You Fight for Climate Justice Without Being Antiwar? 

Can organizations sincerely say they are leading the climate justice fight without also being unapologetically antiwar? Short answer – no. Here’s why. We cannot end climate change without ending war. The United States military is the planet’s largest single emitter of greenhouse gasses and consumer of oil. The US military and its weapons, consistently deployed to secure economic dominance for[Read More…]

by 15/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Source: Getty Images

Pakistan’s poor governance amid Climate Change

Pakistan faced the horrors of climate change in the form of disastrous floods of 2022. According to the report of the National Disaster Management Authority, the country witnessed over 166mm of rain as opposed to the average 48mm. Around 30 million people became displaced due to the deadly floods. The spell of rain began in June 2022 which led more[Read More…]

by 12/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Call For A Radically Different Relationship – Homo Sapiens / Planet Earth 

Call For A Radically Different Relationship – Homo Sapiens / Planet Earth 

Albert Einstein told us that we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.We now have an existential problem that our thinking has created; Biosphere change leading to the possibility of Homo sapiens extinction.What part of our thinking created the problem? What part of our thinking needs to change? XXXX First we need to answer these questions: When[Read More…]

by 07/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
2023 IPCC AR6 Summary For Policymakers: Last Warning

2023 IPCC AR6 Summary For Policymakers: Last Warning

The Synthesis Report of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) has recently been released including a detailed 36-page Summary for Policymakers. Section A summarizes what is known of the observed warming, its causes and impacts. However just three short quantitative sentences allow readers to determine that there are only about 10 and 20 years to go before we reach warming[Read More…]

by 03/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Doctors participate in an Extinction Rebellion demonstration in London's Trafalgar Square on October 12, 2019. (Photo: Chris J. Ratcliffe/Getty Images)

Tinpot Legislators – Their One-Party Rule Will Be Ruinous for the Earth

The demise of Silicon Valley Bank last month triggered plenty of angst among solar energy developers. Before it collapsed, SBV claimed it had “financed or helped finance 62 percent of community solar projects in America,” according to Washington Post business reporter Evan Halper. At first, it wasn’t clear who might fill that gap. MAGA politicians took great delight in the disruption of what they tediously[Read More…]

by 03/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Making Sense of the Latest IPCC Report (2023)

Making Sense of the Latest IPCC Report (2023)

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), a UN agency with climatologists from over 70 counties included) has just come out with a new report about climate change.  (Available at https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/.)  The news is not good. Basically, their arguments have gotten more refined, more specific:  climate change is impacting humans, animals, and plants to a greater and greater extent, things[Read More…]

by 03/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Truth About Our Failure to Curb Carbon Emissions

The Truth About Our Failure to Curb Carbon Emissions

We all know what needs to be done: reduce carbon emissions. But so far, we members of global humanity just haven’t been able to turn the tide. The latest IPCC report documents that carbon emissions are still increasing, despite all the promises and efforts of the past few decades. The report tells us there’s only a narrow (and rapidly shrinking) pathway to[Read More…]

by 22/03/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Crisis Has Caused Increasingly Irreversible Losses, Says UN Report

Climate Crisis Has Caused Increasingly Irreversible Losses, Says UN Report

“Urgent” actions are needed to counter human-caused climate change, says a new report released Monday by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report said: Climate change has caused substantial damages, and increasingly irreversible losses, in terrestrial, freshwater, cryospheric, and coastal and open ocean ecosystems. Temperatures have already increased by more than 1.1 C since pre-industrial times, putting human[Read More…]

by 21/03/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Amazon Rainforest Destabilizes the World

Amazon Rainforest Destabilizes the World

A new 40-year study discovered the eye-opening fact that what happens in the Amazon Rainforest impacts the entire Earth system. This puts an exclamation point on the fact that the Amazon Rainforest, the planet’s most crucial source of life support, is in deep trouble mainly because of massive deforestation. The Amazon River Basin is the world’s largest rainforest, larger than[Read More…]

by 18/03/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Linking Climate Action to Decolonization and Degrowth

Linking Climate Action to Decolonization and Degrowth

  Billion-dollar disaster was the term used to describe the climate breakdown that rocked our world last year. Floods in Pakistan droughts in China and Europe and tropical cyclones in other parts of Asia and America. India in the month of October last year experienced extreme weather events on 30 out of 31 days according to India’s Atlas on the[Read More…]

by 17/03/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change, Counter Solutions
The quantity of energy contained in the fossil fuels used to produce feed grains for cattle is ten times the amount of energy contained in the marketable beef that’s produced by those cattle.

Climate Policy’s on Shaky Ground in the Farm Bill

Members of Congress have begun drafting the 2023 “Farm Bill,” and they’ll be wrangling over it through most of the year. This legislation, passed into law anew every fifth year or so since the 1930s, has had far-reaching influence on food and farming in the United States. Each version of the bill is given its own name; the previous one,[Read More…]

by 16/03/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A Brief analysis of India’s NDC : Its Climate Action Pledges, at Paris CoP-21 (NDC) and Glasgow CoP-26

A Brief analysis of India’s NDC : Its Climate Action Pledges, at Paris CoP-21 (NDC) and Glasgow CoP-26

  “World’s leading climate scientists issued an ear-splitting wake-up call to the world, that climate change is running faster than we are – and we are running out of time. We see the consequences all around us – more extreme weather, rising sea levels, diminishing Arctic sea ice. The scientists paint the most vivid picture we have ever had between[Read More…]

by 13/03/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Solar Mitigation Battleground

Solar Mitigation Battleground

A battle over how to protect the planet from overheating is heating up. Academics are coming out of the woodwork, forming coalitions, issuing declarations. A subdued debate over the merits versus demerits of solar geoengineering (SRM) has been ongoing for years. Now battle lines are forming. The SRM controversy is coming to a head, in part, because of a small[Read More…]

by 11/03/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Code Red Analysis and Sea Level Warnings

Climate Code Red Analysis and Sea Level Warnings

Climate Code Red, a very thorough and well-respected source on climate change/global warming, recently issued a three-part study on where things stand with the climate system via looking through the rearview mirror at 2022 and reflecting that charred image into the future: Faster, Higher, Hotter: What We Learned About the Climate System in 2022 by David Spratt, Research Director, Breakthrough[Read More…]

by 25/02/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Big Heat Hits Antarctica

Big Heat Hits Antarctica

A recent report out of West Antarctica is rattling scientists. It’s all about heat, big-time heat, encroaching upon the world’s biggest chunk of ice that locks down a couple hundred feet of sea level rise. This kind of news is enough to raise the shackles of smart well-informed people, as excessive CO2 emissions spewing like crazy ever since the turn[Read More…]

by 18/02/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
“Sometimes a Gas Stove Is Not Just a Gas Stove”

“Sometimes a Gas Stove Is Not Just a Gas Stove”

A Fox News headline writer called it “Biden’s War on Your Kitchen.” Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel wrote, “The reason gas stoves are in the news is simple: There is a coordinated, calculated—and well-funded—strategy to kill them off. It’s the joint enterprise of extremely powerful climate groups, working with Biden administration officials.” (“Extremely powerful climate groups”? Where can I[Read More…]

by 16/02/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Homo sapiens extinction?

Homo sapiens extinction?

Our near term future: Over the next 50/100/200 years Biosphere temperatures will rise. This will lead to a rise in Ocean waters. Human survival will be limited to habitable planetary niche areas. Our long term future: Temperature rise in the Biosphere of Planet Earth will adversely effect much of Planetary life. Corrective actions by Homo sapiens will be inadequate. A repeat of a Methane Hydrate[Read More…]

by 16/02/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Global Challenges Require Global Solutions: How We Can Prevent a Complete Climate Catastrophe

Global Challenges Require Global Solutions: How We Can Prevent a Complete Climate Catastrophe

by Jacopo DeMarinis and Drea Bergman When it comes to the climate crisis, we are running out of time. In 1994, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change established the Conference of the Parties (COP) to encourage UN member states to meet annually to discuss scientific data and technological advances related to climate change and implement international environmental agreements. Despite the global interest in[Read More…]

by 15/02/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A lone seal sunbathes on sea ice off the northwest coast of Greenland.

The Arctic’s Iceless Upheaval

Anybody who closely follows global warming knows that the Arctic has been clobbered 2-3 times beyond the impact on the planet. And knowledgeable sources also know that what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. After all, for millennia Arctic ice steadfastly served as the planet’s numero uno biggest reflector of solar radiation by reflecting 80%-90% of sunlight[Read More…]

by 11/02/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
 Merrimack Station: A Fifty Year NH Disaster Continues

 Merrimack Station: A Fifty Year NH Disaster Continues

Merrimack Station, the coal fired power plant on the banks of the Merrimack River in Bow New Hampshire, has recently passed its fiftieth anniversary. It’s New England’s last remaining coal plant. It’s also NH’s  largest point source of carbon pollution. The plant owners, Granite Shore Power,  proclaim that they  scrupulously comply with EPA and state regulations. The plant uses the Merrimack River water[Read More…]

by 07/02/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Rain and Heat, Fire and Snow – Life in a Destabilized California

Rain and Heat, Fire and Snow – Life in a Destabilized California

It was January 1983 and raining in San Francisco. The summer before, I’d moved here from Portland, Oregon, a city known for its perpetual gray drizzles and, on the 60-odd days a year when the sun deigns to shine, dazzling displays of greenery. My girlfriend had spent a year convincing me that San Francisco had much more to offer me[Read More…]

by 06/02/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Black Gold(s)

The Black Gold(s)

Climate Stalemate: Uncle-Twinkle Dialogue on Planetary Politics – Part 6 Uncle: You know, Twinkle, it was Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist, who pointed out more than a hundred years ago that the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuel burning could result in global warming. But the issue remained academic until the middle of the 20th century. Only after[Read More…]

by 02/02/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Why Checking Climate Change Needs an Entirely New Framework

Why Checking Climate Change Needs an Entirely New Framework

Two most prominently stated facts about climate change are—firstly, it is extremely important to check climate change and secondly, that greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced very significantly at a very fast pace, as scientifically determined. Both of these statements are absolutely correct. However if we confine ourselves just to these statements, then by themselves these can only give us[Read More…]

by 27/01/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Positive Tipping Point Disinformation

Positive Tipping Point Disinformation

Dr. Tim Lenton is one of my fav climate scientists. His work on the physics and maths of tipping points and the implications of tipping points within the earth systems science understanding of how our climate could change is both fascinating and cliff edge scary. Now a new report delivered at Davos by Dr. Lenton’s Exeter university team and the[Read More…]

by 26/01/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Will the weather eventually provoke radical action on climate?

Will the weather eventually provoke radical action on climate?

With two world summits on the global environment at the end of last year – COP27 and COP15 – there should have been the prospect of an immediate impact on the looming disaster of climate breakdown. In reality, results were limited at best. COP27 on climate change did agree to a ‘loss and damage’ fund that acknowledged the role of[Read More…]

by 22/01/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Floods as neo-apartheid in South Africa

Floods as neo-apartheid in South Africa

There is a consistent disaster of floods that keeps happening in South Africa and it is killing hundreds of people on every occasion. The national media does not publicise these disasters enough, largely because they are occurring in poorer areas where black people reside – and their consequences do not affect the country’s economy. This is usually how discourse is[Read More…]

by 19/01/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
ExxonMobil, Suppressing Science and Climate Change

ExxonMobil, Suppressing Science and Climate Change

Villains often have the best tunes.  In some cases, they also have the best evidence.  The tendency in the latter is to suppress or distort that evidence if it is contrary to their interests.  Exxon, now ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil and gas company, has revealed, much like tobacco companies of the past, that excellent research that might prove costly[Read More…]

by 14/01/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Invisible Global Heat Danger Zone

The Invisible Global Heat Danger Zone

  NASA claims that 2022 was one of the hottest years ever recorded with record-breaking heat waves around the world, as major commercial waterways, like the Danube, Po, Rhine, Yangtze, and Mississippi rivers temporarily dried up leaving humongous river barges choking in mud. But that was merely global-warming-lite. The real global warming threat is invisible. It’s the oceans where 90%[Read More…]

by 14/01/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Science or Politics?

Climate Science or Politics?

Climate Stalemate: Uncle-Twinkle Dialogue on Planetary Politics – Part 5 Uncle: So, Twinkle, I am not sure if we should worry more about the science part of the climate crisis or the politics part of it? Twinkle: Uncle, I feel like “It’s the politics, stupid!”  The climate crisis is very much here. No amount of networking, speaking, writing, researching, and[Read More…]

by 11/01/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Why the Climate Justice March in South Korea Could Be a Game Changer for the Environment

Why the Climate Justice March in South Korea Could Be a Game Changer for the Environment

On September 24, 2022, more than 30,000 people occupied the main roads of downtown Seoul, South Korea, for the nation’s largest climate justice march. The sheer turnout of people from all walks of life and the participation by a wide range of advocacy groups were a testament to the impact of climate change on every aspect of life: human rights, women’s rights,[Read More…]

by 10/01/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Metaphors of Belligerence: Wars by and against Nature

Metaphors of Belligerence: Wars by and against Nature

Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else. Aristotle, Poetics (1457b) It all seemed familiar.  Anthropomorphised Mother Nature in vengeful mood; humans wondering if they might meet a frozen demise in trapped vehicles; the planners taking stock as to how best to cope with grim circumstances.  The New York State governor Kathy Hochul was happy[Read More…]

by 03/01/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A, B, C, D — Where Are We?

A, B, C, D — Where Are We?

Planet on the Boil: Twinkle-Uncle Dialogue on Climate Stalemate Uncle: Among all these A-B-C-D’s where exactly are we, Twinkle? Twinkle: Uncle, we do and must take an unambiguous and uncompromising position that the climate crisis is a real and direct threat to our common home, the Earth. There are huge fault lines in the debate as we have already discussed.[Read More…]

by 03/01/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Another Blistering Year Next Year?

Another Blistering Year Next Year?

NASA claims that 2022 was one of the hottest years ever recorded. Furthermore, according to CareOurEarth.com, this past year experienced: “Record-Breaking Heatwaves Around the World.” It was the year of fires (everywhere, big fires), scorching heat (globally) floods (Pakistan! Europe, China) loss of potable water (especially France and Italy) nearly impassable commercial waterways (Danube, Po, Rhine, Mississippi) sunbaked droughts (US[Read More…]

by 31/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The media of Climate Anxiety and Debt Bondage: Cui Bono in a Post-Truth World?

The media of Climate Anxiety and Debt Bondage: Cui Bono in a Post-Truth World?

 “If you don’t like the weather, just wait a minute’ runs a wry idiom in New England where the weather may change dramatically in minutes. However, these days blaming the weather for pretty much everything is fashionable– be it global warming or cooling, no rain, or too much rain, drought, floods or a snow blizzard in winter. Recently the news[Read More…]

by 29/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
D – Climate Thinkers

D – Climate Thinkers

Planet on the Boil: Twinkle-Uncle Dialogue on Climate Stalemate Uncle: And how about the D’s, Twinkle? Twinkle: They are the Deniers, uncle. These conservative elements deny the very existence of the issue. For example, one Wag TV made a 90-minute documentary called ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ for Britain’s Channel 4. According to the channel, manmade climate change was “a[Read More…]

by 27/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A, B, C – Climate Thinkers

A, B, C – Climate Thinkers

Planet on the Boil: Twinkle-Uncle Dialogue on Climate Stalemate Uncle: There are varied and different opinions about the climate crisis. How do we understand these differences, Twinkle? I hear, the greenhouse effect was discussed by the French mathematician Joseph Fourier some two hundred years ago. Most recently the Nobel Prize for Physics for 2021 was awarded to climatologists Syukuro Manabe[Read More…]

by 21/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
UN Biodiversity COP15: Agreement Signed

UN Biodiversity COP15: Agreement Signed

On Monday, at the UN’s COP15 biodiversity conference in Canada, more than 190 countries approved an agreement to declare 30% of the planet as a protected zone by 2030 and to raise $30 billion per year for conservation in the developing world. Debates over the agreement have been held for nearly two weeks in Montreal, where representatives of about 200 governments[Read More…]

by 20/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Earth’s 6th Mass Extinction: Climate Crisis, Pollution, Depleting Resources Could Extinct 27% Of World Animal Life

Earth’s 6th Mass Extinction: Climate Crisis, Pollution, Depleting Resources Could Extinct 27% Of World Animal Life

The planet has entered the sixth mass extinction. Pollution, climate change and depleting resources could drive up to 27% of the world’s animal life to extinction, a new paper has claimed. The study used a supercomputer to map out how interdependent food chains could collapse in the coming decades. Published on Friday and authored by European Commission scientist Giovanni Strona[Read More…]

by 20/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Multiple Breadbasket Failures as Radicals Stop Private Jets

Multiple Breadbasket Failures as Radicals Stop Private Jets

Global warming is taking a big bite out of the planet. Unprecedented severe droughts dry up major commercial waterways and extreme conditions have either diminished or partially decimated many crops in the US, Europe, China, Australia, the Indian subcontinent and throughout regions of Africa. This article explores the impact of “multiple breadbasket failures” as defined by UN research. As well[Read More…]

by 17/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The brief lifespan of technological civilizations and the future of Homo Sapiens 

The brief lifespan of technological civilizations and the future of Homo Sapiens 

In his book ‘Collapse’ (2011) Jared Diamond portrays the fate of societies which Choose to Fail or Succeed. On a larger scale the Fermi’s paradox suggests  that advanced technological civilizations may constitute ephemeral entities in the galaxy, destined to collapse over short periods. Such an interpretation of Fermi’s paradox, corroborated by recent terrestrial history, implies that the apparent absence of[Read More…]

by 16/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Disinformation about the energy transition

Disinformation about the energy transition

Karl Burkart is deputy director of the ENGO One Earth and a prolific writer on environmental issues. Recently he has published two opeds defending the energy transition (here and here). These opeds are well intentioned but still disinformation at a crucial time for climate mitigation. I have written a critique of Mr. Burkart’s perspective, tried to find an address for him but[Read More…]

by 16/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The impact of climate change on tribal Communities

The impact of climate change on tribal Communities

India has about 80.9 million sqkm of forest cover, which is 24.62 percent of the country’s geographical area. The total forest cover has been estimated to have increased by 2,261 sqkm in 2019. The location of dense and open forests is prominent in this forest cover. In recent years there has been an expansion of forest cover in different states[Read More…]

by 15/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Planet on the Boil: Twinkle-Uncle Dialogue on Climate Stalemate

Planet on the Boil: Twinkle-Uncle Dialogue on Climate Stalemate

[1] Climate Change, or Climate Destruction? Uncle: Twinkle, what do you think about the whole climate crisis that we are facing now? Twinkle: What can I say, uncle? But I am glad you call it “climate crisis”. Some call it innocuously as “climate change”. Is it a slight CHANGE that we are encountering now? Uncle: No way, this is systematic[Read More…]

by 14/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Inferno: Climate Disaster Is Turning the Planet into a Tinderbox

Inferno: Climate Disaster Is Turning the Planet into a Tinderbox

Mike Savala’s boots scuffed the edge of a singed patch of forest littered with skinny fingers of burnt ponderosa pine needles. Nearby, an oak seedling sizzled as a yellow-shirted firefighter hit it with a stream of water. Spurts of smoke rose from blackened ground the size of a hockey rink. A 100-foot Ponderosa pine towered overhead. “Third response today,” said[Read More…]

by 14/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Increased Yearning for A Different Framework for Checking Climate Change

Increased Yearning for A Different Framework for Checking Climate Change

The growing disillusionment with the existing pace as well as the direction of the efforts for checking climate change is leading many people to explore the need for an alternative framework which can be more successful in checking climate change while at the same contributing much more to adaption aspects, and which is better integrated with important justice, equality and[Read More…]

by 08/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
by Gila National Forest – New Mexico is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Flickr

Are We Able to Understand What Nature is Telling Us Via Climate Change?

Nature has been desperately trying to tell us something very important. When even desperate calls go unheeded, what does the caller do? It is likely that the caller will yell even more loudly, jump and throw around limbs and legs, and when all this fails, will even turn violent. This is exactly what nature has been doing recently—in the form[Read More…]

by 06/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Life Beyond 1.5C

Life Beyond 1.5C

Headlines describing the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties (COP) of UNFCCC more commonly referred to as COP27 at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt sent troubling messages: “The Greenwashing Scam Behind COP27’s Flop” (In These Times) “COP27 Climate Summit Missed Chance for Ambition on Fossil Fuels” (Reuters) “COP27 Is Full of Politicians and Policymakers” (The Guardian). None of[Read More…]

by 03/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Paying for an Overheating Earth

Paying for an Overheating Earth

by Stan Cox & Priti Gulati Cox  On October 29th, 75-year-old Saifullah Paracha, Guantánamo Bay’s oldest detainee, was finally released by U.S. authorities and flown home to his family in Karachi, Pakistan. He had been incarcerated for nearly two decades without either charges or a trial. His plane touched down in a land still reeling from this year’s cataclysmic monsoon floods that,[Read More…]

by 01/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Montreal Biodiversity COP15 December 2022

Montreal Biodiversity COP15 December 2022

What is it about a bunch of high-ranking people getting together at a Conference of the Parties (COP) at some major metropolitan center with plenty of 4-star and 5-star hotels in order to figure out how to save the planet, but it never works! For example, the tenth (10th) meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on[Read More…]

by 29/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Tuvalu, Climate Change and the Metaverse

Tuvalu, Climate Change and the Metaverse

When lost to climatic disaster and environmental turbulence, where does a whole nation go?  History speaks about movements of people, whether induced by human agency or environment, finding sanctuary and refuge on other terrains, or perishing altogether. In the case of the Pacific Island state of Tuvalu, the response is seemingly digital or, as its officials prefer to call it,[Read More…]

by 29/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Populist Climate Action Requires Thinking About Freedom From Specific Oppressors—Not Just Species Survival

Populist Climate Action Requires Thinking About Freedom From Specific Oppressors—Not Just Species Survival

The climate crisis is a form of oppression by a wealthy few. In September 2022, an international group of climate scientists published a study showing that the world was close to, or in some cases had even surpassed, key tipping points in the climate crisis that would trigger irreversible changes in the world’s ecosystems. These include the collapse of the Greenland and[Read More…]

by 29/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
What If the U.S. and China Really Cooperated on Climate Change?

What If the U.S. and China Really Cooperated on Climate Change?

As President Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping arrived on the resort island of Bali, Indonesia, for their November 14th “summit,” relations between their two countries were on a hair-raising downward spiral, with tensions over Taiwan nearing the boiling point. Diplomats hoped, at best, for a modest reduction in tensions, which, to the relief of many, did occur. No[Read More…]

by 28/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Europe’s Large Parts Are Warming Twice As Fast As The Planet On Average

Europe’s Large Parts Are Warming Twice As Fast As The Planet On Average

Left and right figures show warming in Europe of the summer half year during the latest four decades, sub-divided for clear-sky and all-sky conditions, respectively. Credit: Paul Glantz/Stockholm University The warming during the summer months in Europe has been much faster than the global average, finds a new study by scientists at Stockholm University (P. Glantz, O. G. Fawole, J.[Read More…]

by 26/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
STOP COP

STOP COP

Fossil fuel interests have taken over climate talks. The acronym COP for “Conference of the Parties” should be changed to “Continue Oil Production.” Eighteen of the twenty companies that sponsored UN climate talks at the make-believe Egyptian resort Sharm El-Sheikh either directly support or partner with oil and gas companies. Global Witness/London identified at least 636 fossil lobbyists at COP27.[Read More…]

by 23/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Photo credit: Reuters 

COP 27 Again Confirmed the Glaring Inadequacy of Existing Framework to Check Climate Change

COP-27 (the 27th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) has ended as expected on a note more or less of status quo. True, the long pending demand of countries worst affected by climate change for a loss and damage fund has been accepted, an important gain in itself, but any celebrations over this will be[Read More…]

by 22/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Fight Climate Change With Communism

Fight Climate Change With Communism

There is nothing new to say Except that it is astounding, it is horrifying, it is revelatory that Those who began it, who knew what they were doing, who now know That the warming world, their enterprise, will kill itself and us too. And still they barely act.   We will not say anything new Except that we will omit[Read More…]

by 22/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
COP 27 Concludes Without Conclusion

COP 27 Concludes Without Conclusion

The much expected 27th Conference of Parties (COP 27) has come to its conclusion, but without any concluding outcome for the planet. UN secretary general Antonio Guterres’s deep disappointment with the outcome of the COP 27 is sure to be echoed across the world. Guterres said on Sunday that the planet continues to be in the “emergency room” and the[Read More…]

by 21/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
When Will Climate Change Become the Crucial Issue in American Elections?

When Will Climate Change Become the Crucial Issue in American Elections?

Believe me, it’s strange to be an old man and feel like you’re living on a new planet. On November 7th, the day before the midterm elections, I took my usual afternoon walk in New York City and I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt! That was a first for me. And no wonder, since it was 76 degrees out —[Read More…]

by 21/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A lone seal sunbathes on sea ice off the northwest coast of Greenland.

Greenland is Worse Than Ever, Much Worse

A new study finds Greenland’s ice sheet thinning much further into the ice sheet core than previously thought, 100 miles inland. (Source: S. Khan, et al, Extensive Inland Thinning and Speed-Up of North-East Greenland Stream, Nature, November 9, 2022) The implications are extremely concerning and far-reaching especially for sea level rise. It is a significant development that will prompt climate[Read More…]

by 19/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
No Red Wave, but Plenty of Red Flags

No Red Wave, but Plenty of Red Flags

This November, voters stood up and rejected a host of anti-democratic candidates all across America. Although the GOP eked out a victory in the House of Representatives, dimming prospects for further progress on climate and other issues for at least a couple of years, the nation managed to avoid a much worse fate. In Part 1 of “In Real Time”[Read More…]

by 18/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The West Is Using COP27 to Shift Blame to Poorer Nations—Private Greed Prevails Over Humanity’s Survival

The West Is Using COP27 to Shift Blame to Poorer Nations—Private Greed Prevails Over Humanity’s Survival

By Prabir Purkayastha / Independent Media Institute In the hands of capital, “clean” natural gas is worse than “dirty” coal. But rich nations have devised an elaborate system to conceal facts and shift blame to poorer nations. COP27 has begun in Sharm el-Sheikh. Although the Ukraine war and the U.S. midterm elections have shifted our immediate focus away from the[Read More…]

by 17/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
(Photo: Matt Zimmerman/flickr/cc)

Amazon Rainforest Crisis Report at COP27

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) issued a new Living Amazon Report, 2022 at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. The eye-opening report defines a horror story of human destruction of the world’s largest rainforest. There’s no other way to look at it. Commercialization of the Amazon Rainforest is rampant in a pattern of ignorance amidst reckless abandon with a level of[Read More…]

by 15/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Our Global (Dis)Order and Climate Change

Our Global (Dis)Order and Climate Change

Washington’s vaunted “rules-based international order” has undergone a stress test following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and here’s the news so far: it hasn’t held up well. In fact, the disparate reactions to Vladimir Putin’s war have only highlighted stark global divisions, which reflect the unequal distribution of wealth and power. Such divisions have made it even harder for a multitude[Read More…]

by 14/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Change Discourse—the Meaning of Changing Economy and Society

Climate Change Discourse—the Meaning of Changing Economy and Society

In the discourse on climate change, as the inadequacy of incremental change is increasingly realized, we are now beginning to hear those much needed words more frequently—that much wider changes in economy and society are needed to check climate change effectively. What exactly does this mean? It is a widely accepted norm of present-day society that people keep aspiring for[Read More…]

by 13/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Photo credit: Reuters 

COP27 Ignores Carbon Price, Climate Costs, Carbon Debt, Full Reparations & Global South

The COP27 Climate Change Conference is underway in Egypt but failure born of neoliberal greed is already apparent. COP27 is ignoring the fundamental  realities of Carbon Price, Carbon Debt, and the need for the social and environmental cost   of greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution to be fully borne by the polluters. This failure condemns the climate change-impacted global South to horrendous[Read More…]

by 13/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Carbon Emissions From Fossil Fuels Will Hit Record Levels This Year

Carbon Emissions From Fossil Fuels Will Hit Record Levels This Year

Figure 1Surface average atmospheric CO2 concentration (ppm). Since 1980, monthly data are from NOAA/GML (Dlugokencky and Tans, 2022) and are based on an average of direct atmospheric CO2 measurements from multiple stations in the marine boundary layer (Masarie and Tans, 1995). The 1958–1979 monthly data are from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, based on an average of direct atmospheric CO2 measurements from the Mauna[Read More…]

by 11/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate crisis: Exploitation and justice

Climate crisis: Exploitation and justice

The climate crisis question today has turned into the question of exploitation and justice – exploitation by a few, and justice for the entire humanity. The recently released Oxfam report – Carbon billionaires, The investment emissions of the world’s richest people (Nov. 22, 2022, https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621446/bn-carbon-billlionaires-071122-en.pdf?sequence=14) – says a lot about this reality of exploitation by a few rich, and of the[Read More…]

by 10/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
SAPACC National Conference on Climate Change December 15-18, at Kozhikode, Kerala

SAPACC National Conference on Climate Change December 15-18, at Kozhikode, Kerala

The common understanding is that climate change will happen in some a far away land in the distant future. Recent events belie this belief. South Asia experienced unprecedented heat waves in March-April this year, and Europe hit record-breaking temperatures of 40oC. A third of Pakistan was flooded in July-August, killing >1,500 people, putting half a million people in relief camps[Read More…]

by 10/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
125 Billionaires’ Carbon Footprint = Entire France’s 67 Million People

125 Billionaires’ Carbon Footprint = Entire France’s 67 Million People

A tiny number of persons produce the same level of carbon emissions as of entire France’s population, says a new climate report – Carbon billionaires The investment emissions of the world’s richest people (Nov. 22, 2022, https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621446/bn-carbon-billlionaires-071122-en.pdf?sequence=14) The study, published by Oxfam, an international NGO, found that the investments of 125 of the world’s richest individuals have a carbon footprint equivalent[Read More…]

by 09/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Developing nations bear the brunt of climate change

Developing nations bear the brunt of climate change

Mia Mottley, PM  of Barbodos, speaking at the ongoing ongoing COP27 UN climate summit, attacked the rich nations for their  historical criminal past for present climate crisis  and demanded 1 trillion US$ compensation to low income countries to tackle natural disasters. Madam Prime minister from a tiny Carribean nation is known for her bold speeches in world forums in advocating[Read More…]

by 08/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Change: Canada’s Continuing denial and appeasement

Climate Change: Canada’s Continuing denial and appeasement

From my vantage point out here in the boonies, it’s easy to see that most of my fellow Canadians and citizens of at least the developed world are in society-wide implicatory denial on climate. (The climate science facts are not denied or re-interpreted, but instead “the psychological, political or moral implications that conventionally follow” from these facts are denied or[Read More…]

by 08/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Temperature change by year compared to pre-industrial levels (1850-1900), based on data from six records compiled in the WMO's State of the Global Climate 2022, Kenan AUGEARD

COP 27 Opens: Past Eight Years Were The Eight Hottest Ever, Says WMO

The past eight years were the eight hottest ever recorded, says a new UN report. The report by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) indicates: The world is now deep into the climate crisis. Earth has warmed more than 1.1 degrees Celsius since the late 19th century, with roughly half of that increase occurring in the past 30 years, the report said.[Read More…]

by 07/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Photo credit: CommonDreams

Living in a Tipping-Point World

When I was growing up, there was a parody of an old-fashioned public announcement tacked to the wall of our kitchen that I vividly remember. It had step-by-step instructions for what to do “in case of a nuclear bomb attack.” Step 6 was “bend over and place your head firmly between your legs”; step 7, “kiss your ass goodbye.” That[Read More…]

by 07/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
COP27 Egypt- Oh, Well!

COP27 Egypt- Oh, Well!

Dateline: November 7-18, 2022, Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. Dignitaries from every country will be meeting to discuss climate change at COP27. Based upon early confirmations, 90 heads of state will attend, lending an aura of importance. “Climate change is the crisis of our lifetime. If we are not able to reverse the present trend that is leading to a catastrophe in[Read More…]

by 05/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Enacting Climate Justice in India

Enacting Climate Justice in India

New Delhi. 04 Nov 2022.   Leading up to the COP27 meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, Indian climate activists and academics associated with Climate Justice Network urge the Government of India to develop socially-just approaches to climate action and climate adaptation. This is crucial to protect the lives and livelihoods of the communities that are bearing the brunt of the climate[Read More…]

by 04/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Photo credit: Reuters 

What to Expect from COP27 in Egypt’s Police State: An Interview With Sharif Abdel Kouddous

The global climate meeting called COP27 (the 27th Conference of Parties) will be held in the remote Egyptian desert resort of Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt from November 6-18. Given the extremely repressive nature of the Egyptian government, this gathering will likely be different from others, where there have been large, raucous protests led by civil society groups. So as tens of[Read More…]

by 04/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Declare A Climate Emergency: South Asian People’s Action on Climate Change

Declare A Climate Emergency: South Asian People’s Action on Climate Change

The following statement is issued by the South Asian People’s Action on Climate Change (SAPACC), a rainbow coalition of individuals and organizations from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka who are deeply concerned about the climate crisis. Greenhouse gases (GHGs) have caused an observed average global warming of 1.1oC above pre-industrial temperatures. That global warming is due to anthropogenic carbon[Read More…]

by 03/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Glaciers In Africa Will Disappear By 2050, Warns UN

Glaciers In Africa Will Disappear By 2050, Warns UN

Glaciers across the globe – including the last ones in Africa – will be unavoidably lost by 2050 due to climate change, the UN says in a report. A third of glaciers located in UN World Heritage sites will melt within three decades, a UNESCO report found. Mount Kilimanjaro’s last glaciers will vanish as will glaciers in the Alps and[Read More…]

by 03/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Doctors participate in an Extinction Rebellion demonstration in London's Trafalgar Square on October 12, 2019. (Photo: Chris J. Ratcliffe/Getty Images)

Humanity’s Future Depends on Transformative Climate Action Now

Every year, the intensifying climate crisis brings more pain and suffering to hundreds of millions of people across the globe. The only way we can exit this climate crisis, and avoid an accelerating disaster, is by launching an urgent system-wide transformation of our economies and societies. But still, as the 2022 edition of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) “Emissions Gap Report” shows,[Read More…]

by 03/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
How Our Life Should Change to Check Climate Change

How Our Life Should Change to Check Climate Change

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our times. It has to be checked as a matter of highest priority. Despite this adequate attention has not been given to how human life must change to realize this objective. We know that fossil fuels must be phased out and replaced by renewable energy. But is renewable energy capable of[Read More…]

by 03/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Capitals’ moves in the face of climate crisis

Capitals’ moves in the face of climate crisis

Despite scores of scientific study findings warning climate crisis and its consequences at global scale, the world capitalist system is still pressing on with its business of climate destruction. Deniers’ propaganda is also unabated. A huge amount of money, a part of capital, is engaged with in the business of climate-profit at the cost of deaths – death to our[Read More…]

by 01/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Despite a marginal up-tick to $20.5 billion a year, climate finance into Asia remains patchy, contentious, and nowhere enough

Despite a marginal up-tick to $20.5 billion a year, climate finance into Asia remains patchy, contentious, and nowhere enough

Major contributors like Japan, Germany, France and multilateral banks need to engage with Asian governments to reform climate financial flows as an issue vital to the UN climate talks Asian countries have seen an annual 28% rise in climate finance to $20.5 billion in 2020 but this increase hides problems that are being mirrored across the world and are likely[Read More…]

by 01/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Can COP-27 Help to Improve the Climate Agenda Significantly?

Can COP-27 Help to Improve the Climate Agenda Significantly?

Will COP-27 help to improve the climate agenda in significant ways, or will it carry on as before? This is an important question for humanity, keeping in view the increasing evidence of the extremely serious nature of climate disruption related threats, which just keeps on piling. At the same time, it has become increasingly clear that the existing response of[Read More…]

by 29/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Hazards Threaten 70% of Population Of A Third Of World’s Cities 

Climate Hazards Threaten 70% of Population Of A Third Of World’s Cities 

Climate hazards threaten nearly 70% of population of a third of world cities, finds a new report by the CDP, a London-based non-profit which runs the world’s environmental disclosure system for companies, cities, states and regions. The analysis in Protecting People and the Planet, (https://www.cdp.net/en/research/global-reports/protecting-people-and-the-planet) released on October 13, 2022, is based on responses of 998 cities from across the[Read More…]

by 28/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Offloading Climate Responsibility on the Victims of Climate Change

Offloading Climate Responsibility on the Victims of Climate Change

In this interview, Nnimmo Bassey, a Nigerian architect and award-winning environmentalist, author, and poet, talks about the history of exploitation of the African continent, the failure of the international community to recognize the climate debt owed to the Global South, and the United Nations Climate Change Conference that will take place in Egypt in November 2022. Bassey has written (such[Read More…]

by 28/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
World’s Premier Marine Ecosystem at Risk

World’s Premier Marine Ecosystem at Risk

The Southern Ocean is 10% of the world’s oceans. Yet, it is arguably the most significant ecosystem of the planet for marine sea life as well as regulation of CO2 and ocean heat, serving as a buffer to climate change and thereby benefiting the entire globe. It is the final frontier of life support for Earth. A new scientific research[Read More…]

by 26/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Ahead of COP27, Big Oil Climate Denial More Potent Than Ever

Ahead of COP27, Big Oil Climate Denial More Potent Than Ever

It’s that time of year again, with the annual UN climate meeting (the conference of the Parties) or COP, just a couple of weeks away. This year’s meeting, COP27, will take place from 6-18 November 2022 at the luxury resort of in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt. This year, like so many before has once again shown in crystal clear terms why we[Read More…]

by 23/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A Flood Report: More Than 600 Deaths And 1.3 Million Displaced In Nigeria, And Australia Thailand Experience Deluge

A Flood Report: More Than 600 Deaths And 1.3 Million Displaced In Nigeria, And Australia Thailand Experience Deluge

At least 603 people have been killed by flooding in Nigeria, and all but three of the 36 states in the West African nation have been impacted. The floods have been caused by unusually strong rainfall. Citing the Nigerian humanitarian affairs ministry, media reports said on Sunday: The Nigerian national government also announced that more than 1.3 million people have been[Read More…]

by 18/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Surging Methane

Surging Methane

A mysterious uptick in atmospheric methane (CH4) was first detected 15 years ago. Of major concern, CH4 is a potent greenhouse gas that’s ~80 times greater than CO2. It’s like a turbo-charged booster heating up the planet. It is a climate change event that keeps scientist up at night, sleepless bouts of tossing, turning, sitting up, screaming on occasion. “In[Read More…]

by 17/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Planet Doomed: No Decrease In Record GHGs & Gas, Oil, Coal, Cattle, Cement & Steel Production

Planet Doomed: No Decrease In Record GHGs & Gas, Oil, Coal, Cattle, Cement & Steel Production

The 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference committed to ideally less than a plus 1.5 degree Centigrade (+1.5C) temperature rise, and to no more than a catastrophic +2C. The  2021 Glasgow Climate Change Conference committed to “net zero emissions by 2050”. However there is no decrease in our record greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution, gas, oil, and coal use, or cattle, cement,[Read More…]

by 16/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Heatwaves Will Make Regions Uninhabitable Within Decades: Warn UN, Red Cross

Heatwaves Will Make Regions Uninhabitable Within Decades: Warn UN, Red Cross

Heatwaves will become so extreme in certain regions of the world within decades that human life there will be unsustainable, the United Nations and the Red Cross said in a report on Monday. Heatwaves are predicted to “exceed human physiological and social limits” in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and south and southwest Asia, with extreme events triggering “large-scale[Read More…]

by 12/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Real Climate Action’s Not at COP-27, but It Is in a Thousand Rebellious Communities

Real Climate Action’s Not at COP-27, but It Is in a Thousand Rebellious Communities

The Teck Mining Co. open-pit Elk River Valley coal mines, located in southern British Columbia along the Alberta border. Drawn from a photograph by Garth Lenz. Teck Resources were fined $60 million for polluting the rivers in March 2021. Two high-profile events will coincide next month. One of them—the US midterm elections, which will conclude November 8—could provide the strongest indicator yet of[Read More…]

by 12/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
 Can COP27 Make a Difference?

 Can COP27 Make a Difference?

The National Press Club hosted a talk by climate activist and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Vanessa Nakate, 25, who addressed the question of reparation payments to developing countries in seeking climate justice to compensate them for their mounting losses and ongoing damages being caused by climate change. Nakate and others will be raising that issue at the upcoming United Nations Climate[Read More…]

by 09/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Crisis Has Made Summer Droughts 20 Times More Likely, Finds Study

Climate Crisis Has Made Summer Droughts 20 Times More Likely, Finds Study

The summer droughts that affected parts of the U.S., Europe, and China were made 20 times more likely by climate change, finds a new study by World Weather Attribution (WWA). China had its driest summer in 60 years, while drought conditions in Europe sparked brush fires and dried up rivers. The scientists with the WWA, an international organization comprised of[Read More…]

by 07/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Crisis Could Wipe $108 Billion From U.S. Property Market, Finds Study

Climate Crisis Could Wipe $108 Billion From U.S. Property Market, Finds Study

Sea level rise will flood huge swaths of the U.S. and submerge billions of dollars’ worth of land, according to a new report. The report – Sinking Tax Base Land & Property at Risk from Rising Seas – (9/8/2022, https://assets.ctfassets.net/cxgxgstp8r5d/2KKeTjnqbFelWrZalnPeRR/9a28719038f3a1dddbdd2e8b78b8455b/CC_Sinking_Tax_Base_20220908a.pdf ) by Climate Central delivers an assessment of sea level rise impact on the tax base of hundreds of coastal[Read More…]

by 03/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Sea Level Acceleration

Sea Level Acceleration

This article addresses the most current research on sea level rise, as well as adaptation measures being taken around the world. Of special interest, brilliant adaptation measures are taking place in the face of higher seas. “Sea level has been fairly stable for 6,000 years, which is most of human civilization… but its risen eight (8) inches or twenty (20)[Read More…]

by 01/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
To Youth of the World – Activists, Global Citizens, Earth Keepers, Red Road Walkers

To Youth of the World – Activists, Global Citizens, Earth Keepers, Red Road Walkers

When the corrupters, swindlers, betrayers, deniers – the practitioners of ecocide and insanity – tell you, “Calm down.” Don’t calm down.  Rise up! When they tell you, “Don’t be an alarmist.” Don’t!  But sound the alarm clear, loud, and relentlessly. There are no “alternative facts.” There is reality. And there is no Planet B. When they tell you, “Don’t panic.”[Read More…]

by 01/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Unprecedented Melt Of Swiss Glaciers, Finds Study

Unprecedented Melt Of Swiss Glaciers, Finds Study

Switzerland’s glaciers are melting like never before, found a study. Switzerland has the greatest volume of glaciers of any country in Europe. The study, released Wednesday, found with the glaciers’ ice volume declining by 6% this year amid rising concerns about global warming and a summer heat wave that swept across Europe. Media reports said: The Swiss Academy of Sciences[Read More…]

by 29/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Ugandan climate activists demonstrate in Kampala on September 23, 2022. (Photo: Hilda F. Nakabuye/Twitter)

Rallies Across Africa Demand Global Action, Climate Justice Ahead of UN Summit

Thousands of African activists and members of communities on the frontlines of the worsening climate emergency turned out Friday to call on world leaders—who will gather in Egypt in November for the United Nations Climate Summit—to urgently address a crisis that disproportionately impacts their lives. Demonstrators took to the streets, public spaces, and even waterways in countries across a continent that’s responsible for just 4%[Read More…]

by 25/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Breaching Human Rights: Australia, Climate Change and the Torres Strait Islands

Breaching Human Rights: Australia, Climate Change and the Torres Strait Islands

Australia has a mixed relationship with the United Nations Human Rights Committee.  Irritation, dismissal and even the occasional openly hostile comment, have registered.  But in 1994, the Toonen decision filtered through the Australian legal process, leading the federal government to remove archaically noxious provisions in the Tasmanian criminal code criminalising sodomy. The UNHRC has since found Australia’s compliance with the[Read More…]

by 25/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Connecting the Dots Between Climate Devastation and Fossil Fuel Profits

Connecting the Dots Between Climate Devastation and Fossil Fuel Profits

What do Pakistan, Puerto Rico, and Jackson, Mississippi, have in common? They’ve all recently experienced climate-related catastrophic rains and flooding, resulting in the loss of homes, electricity, and running water. But, even more importantly, they are all low-income regions inhabited by people of color—the prime victims of climate injustice. They face inaction from negligent governments and struggle to survive as[Read More…]

by 24/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Nightmare of Military Spending on an Overheating Planet

The Nightmare of Military Spending on an Overheating Planet

A Big Carbon Bootprint and a Giant Sucking Sound in the National Budget On October 1st, the U.S. military will start spending the more than $800 billion Congress is going to provide it with in fiscal year 2023. And that whopping sum will just be the beginning. According to the calculations of Pentagon expert William Hartung, funding for various intelligence agencies, the[Read More…]

by 23/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Preventing Climate Disaster in Africa; Eritrea Leads the Way

Preventing Climate Disaster in Africa; Eritrea Leads the Way

As what is mainly a western caused climate disaster continues to hammer Africa, with tens of millions facing famine and starvation in the Horn of Africa, the small, underdeveloped country of Eritrea is leading the fight to prevent this from happening. Eritrea is doing this by aggressively carrying out water conservation by building water reservoirs, both small and large. Over[Read More…]

by 22/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A flooded road is seen during the passage of Hurricane Fiona in Villa Blanca, Puerto Rico on September 18, 2022. (Photo: Jose Rodriguez/AFP via Getty Images)

Climate Crisis and the Age of the Super-Typhoon: Storms Batter Puerto Rico, Pakistan, Japan, and Shanghai

A mere category 1 hurricane dumped so much water on Puerto Rico so quickly that one of its rivers has swollen to 25 feet above normal, even more than it rose during Hurricane Maria in 2017, which was a Category 5 hurricane. The island is beset by flash floods, and is getting 16-30 inches of rain. The usual average amount of rainfall[Read More…]

by 20/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Pakistan’s Devastation Is Just a Preview of the Future—and the Biggest Climate Polluters Must Pay Up

Pakistan’s Devastation Is Just a Preview of the Future—and the Biggest Climate Polluters Must Pay Up

The developing world will not forget the leading role that industrialized economies have played in permanently altering the climate and making catastrophic events more likely. Around the world, 2022 has been a year of climate catastrophes, including droughts, floods, mega-fires, typhoons, and more. Among the hardest-hit countries is Pakistan. With torrential monsoon rainfall almost 190% above its 30-year average, extraordinary flooding[Read More…]

by 17/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
It’s Time to Call It What It Is—A Capitalism-Induced Ecological Crisis

It’s Time to Call It What It Is—A Capitalism-Induced Ecological Crisis

One-third of Pakistan is under water. Record heat waves blanket the globe driving up temperatures beyond what humans can survive. Polar glaciers are melting much faster than scientists predicted. Droughts, fires and floods are ravaging the planet, forcing the displacement of tens of millions of people. And this is just the beginning. It’s time to tell the truth. We can’t afford[Read More…]

by 17/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Monumental Plans to Fix the Planet

Monumental Plans to Fix the Planet

When Congress directs the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) to coordinate with other relevant federal agencies to research a five-year scientific assessment of solar and other rapid climate interventions, it’s only too apparent that the highest levels of government have gotten the internal memo that the climate is in trouble. Even so, they are still fashionably late[Read More…]

by 17/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate crisis, GDP and the working people – Part III: The working people

Climate crisis, GDP and the working people – Part III: The working people

Identifying the GDP’s limitations help find the losses the working people have to make, untold yet, due to climate crisis, although it’s the working people that bear the most. The reason that works to put the working people in this position is, in briefest way, they are chained by capital. Nothing, but GDP? No. Yet, to fathom performance in economic[Read More…]

by 17/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate crisis, GDP and the working people – Part II: GDP

Climate crisis, GDP and the working people – Part II: GDP

As is known, GDP, dating back to the 1930s, and innovated by Simon Kuznets, appraises the value of goods and services produced in an economy in a given period. At the same time, it’s now well-accepted that GDP, a Bretton Woods tool, doesn’t tell the whole fact. John Smith discusses the issue: “The ‘GDP Illusion’ is a fault in perception[Read More…]

by 16/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate crisis, GDP and the working people – Part I: Climate crisis

Climate crisis, GDP and the working people – Part I: Climate crisis

Climate crisis takes its costs from gross domestic product. A recent study1 finds about a quarter of the countries studied are sensitive to such impact. Climate crisis, negatively affecting economy in countries, takes toll; and it’s peoples that pay the toll while capitals, the dominant force creating climate crisis, reaps profit. “[A] critical and still unresolved empirical question is”, the[Read More…]

by 15/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Why We Need an Alternative Paradigm for Checking Climate Change

Why We Need an Alternative Paradigm for Checking Climate Change

While scientists and activists have done well to establish the urgency of checking climate change before it is too late, it is increasingly clear that the current paradigm of checking climate change is not working. Briefly, it has to be changed in ways which will link it very closely to checking militarism and inequalities while promoting peace and justice, preventing[Read More…]

by 12/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Floods  in South Asia and Climate Change

Floods  in South Asia and Climate Change

Havoc and misery  caused by recent floods in Bengaluru, Pakistan  and Assam are not only natural disasters  but are man made and due to climate change. Over exploitation  of urban land and water resources by greedy private real estate developers perhaps the chief cause of floods. Media relentlessly focused on  flooded upscale  villas, their swanky automobiles of super rich in[Read More…]

by 11/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change, Editor's Picks
How Bad Can It Get?

How Bad Can It Get?

 How bad can it (climate change) get? The sky’s the limit! No pun intended. Still, the general public is tired of negative articles about climate change. It turns them off. Climate change is impossible to deal with. It’s too much; it’s too negative! As a result, baffling emails come with loud and clear messages, some subtle but some not so[Read More…]

by 03/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Girls use a temporary raft across a flooded street in a residential area after heavy monsoon rains in Karachi on July 26, 2022. A weather emergency was declared in Karachi as heavier-than-usual monsoon rains continue to lash Pakistan's biggest city, flooding homes and making streets impassable. (Photo: Rizwan Tabassum/AFP via Getty Images)

CO2 Levels Are the Highest in a Million Years as Extreme Weather and Flooding Rage Across the Globe

CNN reports that satellite photos show that the overflowing Indus has created a new body of water in southern Pakistan some 62 miles (100km) wide. It will take days or weeks for the water to recede, and in the meantime millions are left homeless and over all, 33 million people have been affected by the worst monsoon floods in recorded history. CNN quotes Pakistan’s[Read More…]

by 02/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
GHG Concentrations, Sea levels And Ocean Heat Hit Record Highs In 2021

GHG Concentrations, Sea levels And Ocean Heat Hit Record Highs In 2021

The annual State of the Climate report ( https://ametsoc.net/sotc2021/StateoftheClimate2021_lowres.pdf)  report published Wednesday in the U.S. shows that in 2021, greenhouse gas (GHG) levels, global sea levels, and ocean heat reached record highs. The international report was led by scientists from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information. “The data presented in this report are clear[Read More…]

by 01/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A lone seal sunbathes on sea ice off the northwest coast of Greenland.

Beware the Climate Risks of War Over the Arctic

A recent Senate proposal would needlessly create conditions for conflict with Russia while generating more greenhouse gas emissions. For several years now, the U.S. military has been preparing to expand its presence in the Arctic. On August 3, members of the Senate showed their own interest in a larger military presence in the region with the introduction of the Arctic Commitment Act. Introduced[Read More…]

by 31/08/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
(Photo: FridaysForFuture/Flickr/cc)

Climate Scientists Call For Civil Disobedience

A group of climate scientists have said: Time is short to secure a livable and sustainable future; yet, inaction from governments, industry and civil society is setting the course for 3.2 °C of warming, with all the cascading and catastrophic consequences that this implies. In this context, when does civil disobedience by scientists become justified. The scientists said: The scientific[Read More…]

by 30/08/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Heatwaves Rated ‘Extremely Dangerous’ Could Triple This Century, Warns New Climate Study

Heatwaves Rated ‘Extremely Dangerous’ Could Triple This Century, Warns New Climate Study

As record-breaking high temperatures and historic droughts afflict millions of people around the world, a study published Thursday warned that by the end of the century, dangerous heat driven by the worsening climate emergency will hit much of the Earth at least three times more often than today. The study—conducted by climate researchers at Harvard University and the University of Washington[Read More…]

by 26/08/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
China Issues Nationwide Drought Alert In 9 Years As Crops Face Severe Threats

China Issues Nationwide Drought Alert In 9 Years As Crops Face Severe Threats

China has issued a nationwide drought warning for the first time in nine years as the country copes with below-average rainfall and one of the strongest heat waves seen in six decades. Authorities are trying to seed clouds to make it rain. The drought is threatening food production, prompting the government to order local authorities to take all available measures to ensure[Read More…]

by 25/08/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
90% of Marine Species Face Extinction Under Emissions Status Quo: Study

90% of Marine Species Face Extinction Under Emissions Status Quo: Study

A new study details the disastrous consequences that would result for marine life across the world’s oceans if current levels of fossil fuel emissions are maintained, with up to 90% of ocean species facing extinction. Daniel Boyce, a research scientist at Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia, Canada, led the study examining 35,000 species of marine flora and fauna as well as[Read More…]

by 23/08/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
This Is No Time for Climate Complacency

This Is No Time for Climate Complacency

The Inflation Reduction Act is being hailed by the mainstream climate movement, Congress members, and the media as the most important climate bill in U.S. history. That’s a pretty low bar, and it says more about our government’s long record of failure on climate than it does about whether this law can prevent dangerous temperature increases in coming decades. The[Read More…]

by 15/08/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Finding new and unfamiliar voices to tackle the climate crisis

Finding new and unfamiliar voices to tackle the climate crisis

“I always thought that we are the root cause of the pollution and climate change we are experiencing, now more than ever these days”, words of 17-year-old Poonam from Karauli district in Rajasthan. Poonam is one of the girl leaders of Rajasthan Rising, a young movement led by girls who primarily belong to Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, OBC and minority[Read More…]

by 14/08/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Europe Dries Up

Europe Dries Up

Scenes and pictures have been circulating of broken earth, lacking moisture, cracked and yearning.  But these are not from traditional drought-stricken parts of the planet, where the animal carcass assumes near totemic power amidst dry riverbeds or desert expanses.  Neither Australia nor Africa feature on these occasions – at least in a prominent way.  Europe, continent of historical arable sustainability,[Read More…]

by 14/08/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Warmer Nights Could Lead To A 60% Increase In Global Mortality, Finds Study

Warmer Nights Could Lead To A 60% Increase In Global Mortality, Finds Study

Increasing night-time heat could have high toll on human health, finds a new research. According to models, by the year 2100, the world could see an up to 60 percent spike in mortality due to rising temperatures at night. Published in The Lancet Planetary Health, data from Japan, South Korea and China show hotter night-time temperatures could lead to a 60[Read More…]

by 13/08/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Inflation Reduction Act – Is it Enough Soon Enough?

The Inflation Reduction Act – Is it Enough Soon Enough?

Could somebody please get an extension ladder to help Senator Schumer down from the ceiling? He’s stuck in the rafters in a high-pitched note of self-congratulation whilst spraining his elbow as he awkwardly and repeatedly tries to pat his own back, screaming over and over again “the greatest climate legislation of all time!” Compared to what? Still, one signal that[Read More…]

by 13/08/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Inflation Reduction Act – just more time-wasting pretend mitigation?

The Inflation Reduction Act – just more time-wasting pretend mitigation?

“(T)he technological and institutional status quo is a precarious predicament from which societies need to escape….If we act wisely, the coming century will be defined by the recognition of what we owe the future, and our grandchildren will look back at us with gratitude and pride. If we mess up, they might never see the light of day.”  William MacAskill[Read More…]

by 12/08/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
America’s Biggest Reservoirs Hit By Dead Pool Jitters

America’s Biggest Reservoirs Hit By Dead Pool Jitters

Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead is dangerously close to dead pool status for the first time since construction in the mid 1930s. A vicious hammering drought sequence for over two decades throughout the West threatens to bring America’s biggest water reservoir to its knees. In a word, the implications are unspeakable. America’s monuments, the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln[Read More…]

by 06/08/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Crisis, Tax Reforms and Sausages

Climate Crisis, Tax Reforms and Sausages

The pending massive climate legislation to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions 40 percent by 2030 as outlined by President Biden is still being held hostage in the Senate. The $369 billion package that is thicker than a New York phonebook contains 725 pages of text. Like any well-made sausage, the bill includes a myriad of bits and pieces of[Read More…]

by 05/08/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A fire burns trees next to grazing land in the Amazon basin in Ze Doca, Brazil. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Climate Emergency: Curtains for humanity? World leaders, Wake-up!

We humans live on a planet which we have named Earth which, along with several other planets each of which we have named, revolves around a star which we have named Sun – all with different names in different cultures. More recently, we have recognized life on Earth ranging from micro-organisms to elephants and whales, and understand that in physical[Read More…]

by 02/08/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Corporate Oligarchs Have Put Humanity on a Path Toward Self-Annihilation

The Corporate Oligarchs Have Put Humanity on a Path Toward Self-Annihilation

We are stumbling—seemingly oblivious—into the bared teeth of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch driven by humanity itself. We are walking straight into it and pretending it’s not here. The world today is on the verge of a major food emergency, provoked in part by Russia’s attack on Ukraine but more broadly by the damage heat from global warming is doing[Read More…]

by 30/07/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Breakdown of the Marine Food Web

Breakdown of the Marine Food Web

For the first time, a significant loss at the base of the marine food web has been detected. The Scottish research vessel Capepod reported the findings in equatorial waters of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a disturbing discovery, but first a look at the marine food web, starting with the lowest organisms: (1) phytoplankton – plant-like plankton: green algae, diatoms, and[Read More…]

by 30/07/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
by Gila National Forest – New Mexico is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Flickr

The Global Ruling Class Is Frog-Marching Us Towards Extinction

We were warned for decades about the death march we are on because of global warming. And yet, the global ruling class continues to frog-march us towards extinction. The past week has seen record-breaking heat waves across Europe. Wildfires have ripped through Spain, Portugal and France. London’s fire brigade experienced its busiest day since World War II. The U.K. saw its hottest day on record of 104.54 Fahrenheit. In[Read More…]

by 27/07/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Paper Straws Are Not Enough

Paper Straws Are Not Enough

As the UK suffered its hottest-ever temperatures only recently, Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now, interviewed Britain’s erudite environmental journalist George Monbiot July 21, 2022 about his most recent article in The Guardian: This Heatwave Has Eviscerated The Idea That Small Changes Can Tackle Extreme Weather, July 18, 2022. According to Monbiot: “Paper straws are not enough. Only System Change[Read More…]

by 25/07/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Meltwater flows off the Greenland ice sheet.

Temperature In Greenland Causes Unusual Extensive Melting Of Ice Sheet, Boosts Sea Level

In Greenland, last weekend temperatures rose enough to cause 18 billion tons of the country’s ice sheet to melt over three days. Scientists have warned about the fate of Greenland’s ice sheet. Scientists say what happened between July 15 and 17 is the latest massive melting event contributing to an increase in the global sea level. The amount of water from[Read More…]

by 25/07/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
by Gila National Forest – New Mexico is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Flickr

New Mexico’s Megafires Mark a Turning Point

Firefighters don’t normally allude to early English epics, but in a briefing on the massive Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire in northern New Mexico, a top field chief said, “It’s like Beowulf: it’s not the thing you fear, it is the mother of the thing you fear.” He meant that the flames you face may be terrifying, but scarier yet are the conditions[Read More…]

by 22/07/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Greenland Threatens

Greenland Threatens

It rained for 9 hours at Summit Station/Greenland, 10,530’ elevation. Greenland is sending signals to coastal metropolises around the world that it’s never too early to start building seawalls. These are not mixed signals from the big ice island. Rather, they are straightforward signals indicative of rapid breakdown of average ice thickness of 5,000 feet sooner than ever thought possible.[Read More…]

by 20/07/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
‘Collective Action or Collective Suicide’: UN Chief Pleads for Real Climate Response

‘Collective Action or Collective Suicide’: UN Chief Pleads for Real Climate Response

Governments can either come up with a collaborative and urgent plan to tackle the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency that is already wreaking deadly havoc across the globe or keep allowing corporations to pollute the atmosphere without limit, thereby condemning humanity to a grim future. That stark warning comes from United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, who said Monday: “We have a choice. Collective action[Read More…]

by 19/07/2022 1 comment Climate Change
Europe’s “apocalypse of heat” highlights capitalism’s climate crisis

Europe’s “apocalypse of heat” highlights capitalism’s climate crisis

Europe’s second heat wave this summer is setting record temperatures across the continent. Much of Southern and Western Europe will reach highs of 40-47°C (104-117°F). Thousands of people are dying, large swaths of land are burning, and harvests are being destroyed in what climate change is making an increasingly common and severe phenomenon. Wildfires are raging across Portugal, Spain, France,[Read More…]

by 19/07/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Wildfires Ravage Spain, France, Portugal As Heatwave Kills Hundreds In West Europe

Wildfires Ravage Spain, France, Portugal As Heatwave Kills Hundreds In West Europe

Wildfires ravaged parts of Spain, France and Portugal Friday in the blistering heat, burning forests and prompting widespread evacuations. The ongoing heatwave has already claimed hundreds of lives in the west European countries. There is a spike in heat wave-related casualties in Western Europe. On Saturday, La Vanguardia reported that there were more than 360 deaths in Spain caused by the[Read More…]

by 17/07/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate expropriation: US caused nearly $2 trillion damages to other countries from 1990 to 2014

Climate expropriation: US caused nearly $2 trillion damages to other countries from 1990 to 2014

U.S.-attributable climate damages. (a) Ensemble mean GDPpc changes in each country attributable to U.S. emissions, over 1990–2014 with territorial emissions accounting and a short-run (contemporaneous) damage function. Missing data (white countries) denotes countries without continuous GDPpc data from 1990 to 2014. b, c U.S.-attributable damages in the five countries with the greatest GDPpc percent decreases (b) and percent increases (c). The black lines[Read More…]

by 13/07/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
$2 Trillion for War Versus $100 Billion to Save the Planet

$2 Trillion for War Versus $100 Billion to Save the Planet

The West seems more fixated on spending social wealth on the military rather than addressing the climate catastrophe. During late April and early May, South Asia experienced the terrible impacts of global warming. Temperatures reached almost 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) in some cities in the region. These high temperatures came alongside dangerous flooding in Northeast India and in Bangladesh, as the[Read More…]

by 12/07/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Indigenous-Led Organization Opens New Salvo in Fight for Climate Justice

Indigenous-Led Organization Opens New Salvo in Fight for Climate Justice

NDN Collective, inspired by the Standing Rock Sioux movement, releases a report on Dakota Access Pipeline. Climate justice means something different to everyone but when it brings to mind images of shrinking glaciers, islands of floating garbage, or oil leaking into the soil from a cross-country pipeline, the associations being made are actually examples of climate injustices, according to climate[Read More…]

by 12/07/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Chomsky & the United Nations Warn of Collapse

Chomsky & the United Nations Warn of Collapse

It’s entirely possible that doomsayers of the world, though widely ridiculed, could be on target about the prospects for global societal collapse. But, of course, when? According to a recent Noam Chomsky interview, it’s an ongoing grind that will end with a thud. The onset of societal collapse is not hidden. Rather, similar to animals in the wild, people sense[Read More…]

by 08/07/2022 2 comments Climate Change
It’s Time. Pen & Ink on vellum embroidered on canvas/  by Priti Gulati Cox

Extreme Life – Or World War III (IV and V), Climate-Style

In recent weeks, a newly emboldened right-wing Supreme Court struck down a more than century-old New York law restricting the carrying of concealed weapons and a nearly 50-year-old precedent on abortion.  Meanwhile, the January 6th Committee has been laying out in graphic televised detail how our last president tried to subvert the 2020 election.  Inflation, of course, continues to run riot; gas prices[Read More…]

by 06/07/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Photo by FooTToo/Shutterstock

How PR is Preventing Awareness of Global Warming

Global warming has long been subjected to the propagandistic influence of a wide variety of public relations (PR) organizations. Yet, despite its overwhelming importance, the impact of public relations/propaganda on our awareness of global warming has long been overlooked. Over the past decades, gas and oil corporations have engaged many – if not almost all – top PR firms in[Read More…]

by 05/07/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
US Marine Press Takes on Hothouse Earth

US Marine Press Takes on Hothouse Earth

America loves its military. It should because it’s the most expensive defense force of all time. $778B was allocated for defense spending in 2022. China comes in a distant second at $229B. All of which prompts a provocative question: What if the Marine Corps publishes a landmark study that claims recipients of the US government defense budget are collectively responsible[Read More…]

by 02/07/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
CO2 Removal?

CO2 Removal?

Last year, worldwide energy-related CO2 topped 36B tons. That’s a new world record. “Carbon dioxide removal is essential to achieve net zero [greenhouse-gas emissions],” Diána Ürge-Vorsatz, vice-chair of the working group that produced the nearly 3,000-page UN climate panel report. (Source: UN Climate Report: Carbon Removal is Now ‘Essential’, MIT Technology Review, April 4, 2022) “Removing the greenhouse gas from[Read More…]

by 28/06/2022 2 comments Climate Change
Buckle Up! The Arctic’s Sizzling

Buckle Up! The Arctic’s Sizzling

The Arctic is turning into a dream come true for doomsayers. It’s heating way too fast! Nostradamus is dancing in the street. Record-smashing Arctic temperatures may brighten the outlook for those who thrive, actually enjoy, disaster scenarios, but the great majority of people only get off on disasters in a movie theater, not in the wide open spaces at the[Read More…]

by 18/06/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The heat to come

The heat to come

All the signs are that this summer will break all existing records for heatwaves. It is only the middle of June, and yet large parts of the world are already registering temperatures that in the past were not reached until the height of the season. The US weather map for June 16 shows almost the whole South and Southwest and[Read More…]

by 18/06/2022 1 comment Climate Change
The People vs. Petrocracy

The People vs. Petrocracy

The United States is moving fast on climate change—in the wrong direction. The Energy Information Agency forecasts that by 2023, the nation will set a new annual record for oil extraction: 4.6 billion barrels. Plans to build more than 200 new natural gas power plants are in the works. More than 130 new oil and gas pipelines now under development[Read More…]

by 16/06/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Overshoot Dilemma

The Overshoot Dilemma

Climate change and global warming, which is the largest part of the ‘change’ aspect, is suddenly getting the kind of special treatment that’s reserved for national tragedies. A special commission has been established to investigate a way out of the biggest human-caused failure of all time. It wouldn’t be quite so disturbing if it were not for the fact that[Read More…]

by 15/06/2022 1 comment Climate Change
Polar Scientist Explains Peril of Thwaites

Polar Scientist Explains Peril of Thwaites

Ted Scambos, a polar scientist with 20 trips to Antarctica under his belt, makes a living trekking across glaciers, measuring the speed, thickness, and structure of ice. Dr. Scambos (University of Colorado/Boulder) recently penned an article: Ice World: Antarctica’s Riskiest Glacier is Under Assault From Below and Losing Its Grip. The Conversation, June 7, 2022. Scambos is a lead principal[Read More…]

by 11/06/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Davos Development Dogma And Climate Catastrophe: Leaders Are Unconcerned

Davos Development Dogma And Climate Catastrophe: Leaders Are Unconcerned

Only few remain in denial of global warming (GW) leading to climate change (CC). At the other end of the scale, only few view GW-CC as an impending disaster. Leaders of societies and nations are among the bulk of in-betweens, and their understanding of GW-CC mostly remains limited. The Davos development dogma The focus of attention and planning among world[Read More…]

by 09/06/2022 1 comment Climate Change
In the Centre of Global Warming

In the Centre of Global Warming

May 15 this year came as a timely warning that India is in the center of the global warming crisis. On this day the maximum temperature crossed the 47 degrees Celsius limit in about 20 cities, mostly in northwest and central parts of the country. These cities also figured in the table of the hottest cities at world level on[Read More…]

by 05/06/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
John Kerry’s Global Fix-it Campaign

John Kerry’s Global Fix-it Campaign

“I’m absolutely convinced we will get a low-carbon, no-carbon economy at some point in time. The challenge is will we get there in time to heed the warnings of the scientists and avoid the worst consequences of the crisis?” (John Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, May 2022) In a soft pitch interview by Andy Serwer of Yahoo Finance on[Read More…]

by 04/06/2022 1 comment Climate Change
Portents of the unthinkable 

Portents of the unthinkable 

According to the Fermi Paradox the failure to date to achieve radio communication between Earth and extraterrestrial civilizations can be attributed to their short longevity due to inevitable self-destruction. Tragically Homo “sapiens” may not constitute an exception. The most extensive catastrophe in the history of Earth―the end-Permian- mass extinction 251 million years-ago, triggering atmospheric and marine warming, ocean acidification, toxic[Read More…]

by 03/06/2022 3 comments Climate Change
Climate Crisis, a Hot Topic for the Senate

Climate Crisis, a Hot Topic for the Senate

Activists from the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) “Climate Can’t Wait” project assemble on a street corner each week near the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill intercepting senators’ staff members as they walked to work. The group’s weekly action is a unique attempt to get their message across to the legislators through their staff that they need to take[Read More…]

by 29/05/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Survival of Homo Sapiens on Planet Earth

Survival of Homo Sapiens on Planet Earth

In our world today many leaders and their followers refuse to acknowledge a planetary/cosmic reality: The future of Homo sapiens hinges not on their thought process and actions but on a reconfigured societal form that will allow human evolution to proceed by way of reciprocal planetary/cosmic interrelationship. This refusal is now a danger to Homo sapiens continuation on Planet earth. Here is an outline of the problem and a step by step process explaining how humanity can remove these leaders and[Read More…]

by 27/05/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Ukraine War’s Collateral Damage

The Ukraine War’s Collateral Damage

The war in Ukraine has already caused massive death and destruction, with more undoubtedly to come as the fighting intensifies in the country’s east and south. Many thousands of soldiers and civilians have already been killed or wounded, some 13 million Ukrainians have been forced from their homes, and an estimated one-third of the country’s infrastructure has been destroyed. Worse yet, that war’s brutal[Read More…]

by 26/05/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
India – Birds Drop Out of the Sky, People Die

India – Birds Drop Out of the Sky, People Die

In case you have lingering doubts about the reality of human-caused global warming, hop on an airplane to parts of India or Pakistan and spend a few days. And, as long as you’re there, maybe be a good citizen and pick up a few of the dehydrated birds that drop out of the sky. Then, use the syringe you brought[Read More…]

by 25/05/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Biomass Peril

The Biomass Peril

Woody biomass, or burning trees to produce renewable energy, is spreading beyond the shores of Europe, where it’s wildly popular and outpacing solar and wind. It’s headed for Japan and South Korea, where subsidies for woody biomass displace funding for solar and wind. Umm, what’s wrong with this picture? In order to know specifically what’s wrong it’s pertinent to take[Read More…]

by 25/05/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
As the Planet Warms, Let’s Be Clear: We Are Sacrificing Lives for Profits

As the Planet Warms, Let’s Be Clear: We Are Sacrificing Lives for Profits

Climate change is the result of a deadly calculus: human lives are worth risking and even losing over the profits of global corporations. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) recently dropped a bombshell announcement that should have garnered news headlines in the major global and U.S. media, but did not. New WMO research concludes that “[t]here is a 50:50 chance of the annual[Read More…]

by 14/05/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Copyright © 2022 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Droughts Up 29% In A Generation And World At A Crossroads, Says UN

Humanity is “at a crossroads” when it comes to managing drought and accelerating mitigation must be done “urgently, using every tool we can,” says a new report from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Droughts have increased 29% in the space of a single generation, according to a paper the United Nations released on Wednesday, which observed that[Read More…]

by 12/05/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
50:50 Chance Of Global Temperature Temporarily Reaching 1.5°C Threshold In Next Five Years

50:50 Chance Of Global Temperature Temporarily Reaching 1.5°C Threshold In Next Five Years

There is a 50:50 chance of the annual average global temperature temporarily reaching 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial level for at least one of the next five years – and the likelihood is increasing with time, according to a new climate update issued by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The report was prepared by a team of 11 different forecast centers, including[Read More…]

by 11/05/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
World Drought Gets Worse, Cities Ration

World Drought Gets Worse, Cities Ration

The planet is wheezing, coughing and sputtering because of vicious attacks by worldwide droughts aided and abetted by global warming at only 1.2C above baseline. Some major metropolises are rationing water. What’ll happen at 1.5C? It’s not as if droughts are not a normal feature of the climate system. They are, but the problem nowadays is highlighted by reports from[Read More…]

by 10/05/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Photo credit: CommonDreams

Why we need feminist leadership for climate justice

It is increasingly clear that climate change is a social justice issue that can be resolved only if global inequalities are addressed. There is a well-documented wealth gap – reflecting historical injustices and unequal power relations – between the nations responsible for emissions and those forced to deal with their harsh effects, which range from flooding to droughts and wildfires.[Read More…]

by 06/05/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Aerial view of Farellones ski resort without snow on August 10, 2021 in Santiago, Chile. The Andean region faces historically low snowfall as a consequence of climate crisis. (Photo by Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images)

Drastic Water Rationing Restrictions In Chile As Drought Enters 13th Year

Chile authority has imposed new water restrictions for the capital city of Santiago, a city with six million population, as the country enters its 13th year of drought. Claudio Orrego, the governor of the Santiago metropolitan region said: “And we are in an unprecedented situation in Santiago’s 491-year history where we have to prepare for there to not be enough water[Read More…]

by 04/05/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Adapting to Drought

Adapting to Drought

America’s western metropolises are thriving in the midst of the fiercest drought in over 1,000 years. Not all climate change/global warming news is negative. Positive pushback to global warming is real and happening right under our collective noses. Still, climate scientists wring their hands in despair over the failure of the corporate-controlled world to come to grips with climate change’s[Read More…]

by 04/05/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Collapse of Industrial Farming

The Collapse of Industrial Farming

The most upending event of the past 10,000 years is the advent of engineered food as fermentation farms displace factory farms. “We are on the Cusp of the Fastest, Deepest, Most Consequential Disruption of Agriculture in History.” (RethinkX.com) “Modern foods will bankrupt the cattle industry within a decade.” (RethinkX) More on that to follow, but first: Industrial farming, alongside global[Read More…]

by 23/04/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
It’s Time. Pen & Ink on vellum embroidered on canvas/  by Priti Gulati Cox

The Climate and the Republic, Melting Down in Real Time

The United States is facing two grim prospects in 2022: one, that continued abuse of the ecosphere could render much of the Earth unlivable for humans and myriad other species, and two, that the United States’ current political drift toward autocratic rule could accelerate, dashing any hope of attaining a multiracial, pluralistic democracy. These two emergencies are intertwined. Either we[Read More…]

by 23/04/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Change is Killing Trees

Climate Change is Killing Trees

A long time ago in the Milky Way galaxy on a planet named Earth the trees died. It only happened once in the planet’s history. It was during the Permian-Triassic 252 million years ago. Henk Visscher, PhD, Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University makes a living studying exposed fossil beds of the transitional period of the Permian to Triassic era,[Read More…]

by 19/04/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The IPCC Mitigation report – another plan to fail?

The IPCC Mitigation report – another plan to fail?

Just before the release of the IPCC Working Group Three (WGIII) report on mitigation, this long time climate activist asked: Will the new IPCC report on mitigation detail and recommend supply-side pathways and policies to mitigate climate change? Will the report even mention regulating a phase out of fossil fuel production? Or will supply-side pathways and policies and their supporters[Read More…]

by 14/04/2022 1 comment Climate Change
Climate Crisis: Scientists Hit the Streets

Climate Crisis: Scientists Hit the Streets

A revolutionary slogan by climate scientists “1.5C is Dead – Climate Revolution Now!” emblazoned the streets of the world on April 6th spawned by the Sixth Assessment Report, Mitigation of Climate Change, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released April 4th. Overnight, civil disobedience by climate scientists erupted in 25 countries on every continent enraged that the IPCC report was[Read More…]

by 12/04/2022 1 comment Climate Change
Climate Inequality– Poorer People Exposed Much More in Overheated Cities

Climate Inequality– Poorer People Exposed Much More in Overheated Cities

As the world heats up with climate change, urban areas with their dense habitations, traffic congestions, higher pollution levels and excessive cement and concrete invariably heat up more than rural areas. What is less realized is that within a single city certain areas can heat up much more than others, and the difference can be as high as 10 degrees[Read More…]

by 12/04/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Dead table corals killed by bleaching on Zenith Reef, on the Northern Great Barrier Reef, November 2016. (Photo: Greg Torda/ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies)

The Great Barrier Reef on Life Support

“Five bouts of mass bleaching since 1998 have turned the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) into a checkerboard of reefs with very different recent histories, ranging from two percent of reefs that have escaped bleaching altogether, to 80 percent that have now bleached severely at least once since 2016.” (Source: T. Hughes, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies: 98%[Read More…]

by 09/04/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
10 Reasons Why Hydropower Dams Are a False Climate Solution

10 Reasons Why Hydropower Dams Are a False Climate Solution

by Josh Klemm & Eugene Simonov Not only does hydroelectric power fail to prevent catastrophic climate change, but it also renders countries more vulnerable to climate change while emitting significant amounts of methane, one of the worst greenhouse gases. A river is a spectacular living corridor that feeds forests, fisheries, coastal ecosystems, and farmlands; transports life-sustaining organic matter and nutrients;[Read More…]

by 07/04/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The World Climate: Doom Looming, But Hope Yet Not Lost

The World Climate: Doom Looming, But Hope Yet Not Lost

The IPCC on Monday released its latest report, which found that nations are falling short of their pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to avert catastrophic climate change. While the technology exists to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) of average global temperature increase — the goal that virtually every nation agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate agreement and[Read More…]

by 05/04/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The upcoming IPCC report on mitigation and reality

The upcoming IPCC report on mitigation and reality

Will the new IPCC report on mitigation detail and recommend supply-side pathways and policies to mitigate climate change? Will the report even mention regulating a phase out of fossil fuel production? Despite the increasing severity of climate impacts and the daunting timeline for mitigation needed to have even a fifty-fifty chance of staying climate safe? Or will supply-side pathways and[Read More…]

by 03/04/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Charles Koch, chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, is interviewed by Alan Murray, CEO of Fortune Magazine, at Fortune Brainstorm Tech 2016, on “What Makes a Large Private Company Tick?” on July 11, 2016. (Photo Credit: Photo by Kevin Moloney/Fortune Brainstorm Tech, via Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

It’s Time for Charles Koch to Testify About His Climate Disinformation Campaign

 For more than two decades, Koch-controlled foundations spent more than $160 million to stymie government action on climate change. The U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee kicked off its investigation of the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long climate change disinformation campaign last fall by inviting top executives from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell to testify about their role and subpoenaing their[Read More…]

by 31/03/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Costs of (Another) War, When We Could Be Fighting Climate Change

The Costs of (Another) War, When We Could Be Fighting Climate Change

What do a six-year-old in the United States and an 85-year-old in Russia have in common besides being on opposite sides of a war? They’re both feeling the strain of a warming planet. “Is the earth going to get so hot that we can’t survive?” my young son asked me last summer as we plodded through the woods behind our[Read More…]

by 29/03/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Urgent Need For Climate Action

The Urgent Need For Climate Action

Climate disaster seems a distant threat One reason why the Glasgow Climate conference failed so miserably to produce urgently needed climate action was that humans tend to react to what is close to them. Money to pay the rent is urgent, while a climate catastrophe seems to be a distant threat. Cultural inertia A second reason is cultural inertia. All[Read More…]

by 29/03/2022 1 comment Climate Change
Antarctica on Edge

Antarctica on Edge

East Antarctica, often times referred to as “the final frontier of global warming,” is making headlines once again. A few weeks ago East Antarctica’s temperatures soared by 50F to 90F above normal. (Ref: Antarctica Crushes Records, March 23, 2022) A couple of weeks later East Antarctica’s Conger Ice Shelf (1,200 sq km) completely collapsed and two additional calving events occurred[Read More…]

by 29/03/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Truth About IPCC Reports

The Truth About IPCC Reports

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in many respects, is a Delphic institution whose reports are a function of political discretion as it provides justification for nation/state policies that are seldom fulfilled, e.g., only a handful of the 193 signatory nations to Paris ’15 have met commitments. This scandalous outright failure at a dicey time for the climate system[Read More…]

by 25/03/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A Planet on Fire

A Planet on Fire

Three years after the end of World War II, diplomat George Kennan outlined the challenges the country faced this way: “We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships[Read More…]

by 25/03/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Antarctica Crushes Records

Antarctica Crushes Records

Extreme climate hits Antarctica, smashing records, shocking scientists as temperatures soar 50F to 90F degrees above normal. Welcome to climate change’s newest upheaval. But, don’t talk to the scientists about it. They’re speechless. But, they do tweet: “Antarctic climatology has been rewritten,” tweeted Stefano Di Battista, Antarctic researcher (Source: It’s 70 Degrees Warmer Than Normal in Eastern Antarctica. Scientists are[Read More…]

by 23/03/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Portents of an irreversible climate change

Portents of an irreversible climate change

Current mean greenhouse gas concentrations have reached a level similar to those of the Miocene (5.3 – 23 million years ago)  when average temperatures exceeded 4 degrees Celsius and, while terrestrial adversaries keep pushing the Earth toward wars and a possible nuclear catastrophe, looming in the background are increasing heat waves, extreme fires and flood events, manifesting the huge calamity[Read More…]

by 23/03/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
From Drought to Deluge on a New Planet

From Drought to Deluge on a New Planet

Those Who Contribute the Least to Climate Change Suffer the Most Greenville, CA — Snow began falling on December 24th, big fluffy flakes that made lace on mittens before melting. Within hours it had coated the ashes, the brick chimneys that the flames had left behind, and the jagged remains of roofs strewn across my burned-out town. White mounds soon[Read More…]

by 21/03/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Methane Acceleration Sets Record

Methane Acceleration Sets Record

In the year 2021 methane (CH4) concentration in the atmosphere exceeded 1,900 ppb for the first time in human history recorded by Global Monitoring Laboratory, Earth System Research Laboratories, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That level of 1,900 ppb is triple the pre-industrial level of 700 ppb. Furthermore, it is suddenly mysteriously accelerating over just the past 13 years.[Read More…]

by 16/03/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Sawyer Glacier in Alaska, July 2016. The Arctic is enduring unprecedented warming this year, affecting Alaska and Greenland specifically. (Photo: Ian Keating, Flickr)

Climate Breakdown

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change –IPCC- has issued its direst warning of all-time: “Climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly.” Additionally, they readily admit to overly conservative predictions: “Many impacts will be more severe than originally predicted.” (Source: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group II Sixth Assessment Report, 2022) The crowning blow of this heavy-hitting report is a chilling[Read More…]

by 05/03/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Is remaining under 1.5 C warming feasible?

Is remaining under 1.5 C warming feasible?

In the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change’s twenty sixth Conference of Parties (COP is an annual inter-governmental meetings held to discuss and negotiate climate agreements) held in Glasgow in November 2021, the meeting’s President Alok Sharma, UN Secretary General António Guterres and other top leaders repeatedly chanted “Keep 1.5oC alive,” to make it the best-known mantra of the[Read More…]

by 05/03/2022 2 comments Climate Change
The energy transition is not fit for purpose

The energy transition is not fit for purpose

Image by Thomas Homer-Dixon The second part of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) has just been released and “climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly, many of the impacts will be more severe than predicted and there is only a narrow chance left of avoiding its worst ravages”. The Working Group 11 report focuses upon local as well as global impacts[Read More…]

by 05/03/2022 1 comment Climate Change
In this photo provided by the Fraser Coast Regional Council, water floods streets and houses in Maryborough, Australia, Feb. 28, 2022. | Queensland Fire and Emergency Services/AP

Climate change is triggering a humanitarian crisis, UN report finds

“Our people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change. Nearly half of humanity is living in the danger zone now. Many ecosystems are at the point of no return now. The facts are undeniable,” Antonio Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations (UN) remarked in unveiling the latest international report on the impacts of climate change. “This abdication[Read More…]

by 03/03/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
COP-26: Dilution of Equity by the Global North

COP-26: Dilution of Equity by the Global North

by Deva Prasad M and Navaneeth M S   The 26th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 26) in Glasgow, although described by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson as a big step forward, in-ground, was uneventful and continuation of the status quo with few bright promises that gave optimism to the future trajectory of climate change negotiations. The[Read More…]

by 23/02/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Arctic Methane Threat: Global Warming Increasing Bacterial Methanogenesis & Methane Release

Arctic Methane Threat: Global Warming Increasing Bacterial Methanogenesis & Methane Release

The atmospheric level of the potent greenhouse gas (GHG) methane (CH4) is increasing, and is now nearly triple the pre-industrial level. There is a positive feedback loop in the Arctic with increased methane leading to warming and thence to further increase in atmospheric methane. In the warming Arctic methane release is occurring from  huge methane-water clathrate deposits, and increasingly from[Read More…]

by 13/02/2022 4 comments Climate Change
Ocean Heat Killing Spree

Ocean Heat Killing Spree

The oceans of the world are undergoing a dangerous and damaging upheaval that manifests throughout scientific studies of late. Whether it’s the world’s fisheries of the Bering Strait or coral reefs of the Mediterranean Sea or emaciated Gray Whales along the Pacific coastline, study after study after study describes sudden, sharp downturns in all categories of marine life. What is[Read More…]

by 12/02/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Fossil Fuel Companies and Their Mouthpieces Offer Net-Zero Logic on Climate Change

Fossil Fuel Companies and Their Mouthpieces Offer Net-Zero Logic on Climate Change

Oil and gas CEOs were too chicken to show up to a recent congressional hearing—perhaps fearing that their climate pledges will be revealed as nothing more than slick PR. Everywhere around us there is evidence of climate change, from the increase in winter storms such as New England’s late January blizzard, to California’s recent record-breaking winter heat wave. Meanwhile, the world’s biggest oil and[Read More…]

by 12/02/2022 1 comment Climate Change
How & Why Billionaires Actually Support Global Warming

How & Why Billionaires Actually Support Global Warming

Global warming has been extremely profitable for billionaires, even though many of them mouth and endorse policies (but only failed and failing ones) against global warming. All of this will be fully documented here. The public are actually strongly opposed to global warming, but they are very confused about the matter, largely because the policies that are advocated (by billionaire-fronts)[Read More…]

by 11/02/2022 1 comment Climate Change
Anthropocene Means The Future Is in Our Hands

Anthropocene Means The Future Is in Our Hands

Ecologists around the world are making the case for societies to change the systems that oversee development and resource extraction so that ecosystem functionality—which supports all life—can be maintained or restored. Geologists have classified most epochs in Earth’s history according to fossils, radiometric dating and composition of the strata. The widely endorsed label for our current era, the Anthropocene, describes the extent[Read More…]

by 10/02/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Emergency & Biodiversity Loss—It is Now or Never!!

Climate Emergency & Biodiversity Loss—It is Now or Never!!

At the turn of the 20th Century, the astonishing advances in science emboldened humanity, giving rise to confidence that science could, at last, as the fountainhead of truth provide the wherewithal for a stable and equitable social order for a sustainable future. In such a world, God was dead and religion regarded as a bundle of superstitions and blind faith.[Read More…]

by 10/02/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
More Than Two Dozen Major Lawsuits Are Putting a Price Tag on the Climate Damage Caused by Fossil Fuel Companies

More Than Two Dozen Major Lawsuits Are Putting a Price Tag on the Climate Damage Caused by Fossil Fuel Companies

Four years ago, Boulder, Colorado, sued ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy—owner of the only oil refinery in the state—for climate change-related damages and adaptation expenses. Boulder and its co-plaintiffs, Boulder County and San Miguel County, home to Telluride, estimated the damage caused by extreme weather events would cost them more than $100 million by 2050. As it turns out, they overestimated the time span—and underestimated[Read More…]

by 03/02/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Dangerous Heat Across the Globe

Dangerous Heat Across the Globe

The planet is heating up like never before, as “ground temperatures” hit all-time records in the Northern Hemisphere as well as the Southern Hemisphere, and ocean temperatures threaten the world’s major fisheries of the Far North, which are imperiled beyond any known historical precedent. (See- The Oceans Are Overheating, January 14, 2022) According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration[Read More…]

by 25/01/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Portents of a nuclear winter on a warming Earth

Portents of a nuclear winter on a warming Earth

The discovery by Alvarez and Alvarez (1980) of the Cretaceous-Paleocene boundary (~66 million years-ago) asteroid impact, eliminating approximately 80 percent of all species, has among other released enough dust and debris to cloud large parts of planet, enhancing the mass extinction of some 80 percent of species of animals. When Turco et al. (1983) and Carl Sagan (1983) warned the[Read More…]

by 18/01/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Photo by Eva Luedin

The Oceans Are Overheating

The world’s oceans in 2021 witnessed the hottest temperatures in recorded history. (Source: Lijing Cheng, et al, Another Record: Ocean Warming Continues Through 2021 Despite La Niña Conditions, Advanced in Atmospheric Sciences, January 11, 2022) According to the Ocean Conservancy: “From the beginning of industrialization until today, the ocean has absorbed more than 90 percent of the heat from human-caused global[Read More…]

by 15/01/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Accelerating global warming and amplifying feedbacks: The imperative of CO2 drawdown

Accelerating global warming and amplifying feedbacks: The imperative of CO2 drawdown

Satellite measurements indicate that 2021 was one of the warmest years on record, with the past seven years being the hottest period recorded globally  (M et Office, January 10, 2022). Attempts at global emission reductions, lowered in part due to COVID-19 economic slow-down, appear to have little effect on atmospheric CO2 rise, as indicated by the current rise of atmospheric[Read More…]

by 11/01/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
When to Build Sea Walls   

When to Build Sea Walls  

During the month of December 2021 two warnings of impending sea level rise were issued by highly respected groups of climate scientists. These are professional scientists who do not deal in hyperbole. Rather, they are archetypical conservative serious-minded scientists who follow the facts. The most recent warning on December 30th is of deteriorating conditions at the Arctic and Greenland. The[Read More…]

by 07/01/2022 1 comment Climate Change
The Biggest Threat in ‘Don’t Look Up’ Are the Capitalists on Earth

The Biggest Threat in ‘Don’t Look Up’ Are the Capitalists on Earth

As the dust settles on a movie that has well and truly got people talking about the climate crisis in a way that no other movie has, it is worth talking about one of the most important messages of the movie, and one that has largely been ignored. In Don’t Look Up, as the meteor hurtles towards Earth, finally the fictional[Read More…]

by 07/01/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Carbon Justice and Global Survival

Carbon Justice and Global Survival

by Thomas Klikauer & Meg Young Unlike rather known concept of “climate” justice, the idea of “carbon” justice is so advanced that it does not even have a Wikipedia entry, yet. One of the countries that might serve as a near perfect example for carbon justice is Australia. With its massive coal export, Australia is one of, or perhaps, “the” worst country[Read More…]

by 07/01/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A home is engulfed in flames as the Dixie fire rages on in Greenville, California on August 5, 2021. (Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)

Climate Chaos: What to Learn From 2021

To keep acting as if there wasn’t war declared against the planet and humanity is to accept we are already defeated. Continuing to play their game can only guarantee collapse. It’s time to flip the table. This year we saw some of the consequences of the climate crisis devastating rich countries in the Northern Hemisphere. This didn’t lead to any political[Read More…]

by 30/12/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
 Climate Mitigation: ’21 into ’22

 Climate Mitigation: ’21 into ’22

We’re on a trajectory to crash the futures of most people on the planet and finalize the irreversible annihilation of a big chunk of the natural world because of a mix of predatory delay and terminal entitlement.  Climate futurist Alex Steffen Climate wise it’s clear that as we limp from ‘21 to ‘22 those who want to protect the economy[Read More…]

by 30/12/2021 1 comment Climate Change
Warnings from the Far North

Warnings from the Far North

“Forces profound and alarming are reshaping the upper reaches of the North Pacific and Arctic oceans, breaking the food chain that supports billions of creatures and one of the world’s most important fisheries.”(Source: Susanne Rust, Unprecedented Die-offs, Melting Ice: Climate Change is Wreaking Havoc in the Arctic and Beyond, Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2021) “Breaking the food chain that[Read More…]

by 27/12/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Time for a Climate Insurgency?

Time for a Climate Insurgency?

Since the end of the feudal era the world order has been largely structured by the nation-state system. Individuals have been willing to kill and die for their countries. The pursuit of individual and collective interests has occurred largely within a national framework. Nonetheless, social and political movements have often transgressed national boundaries and expressed solidarities that go beyond them. People[Read More…]

by 21/12/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
What if the Doomsday Glacier Collapses?

What if the Doomsday Glacier Collapses?

The Thwaites “Doomsday Glacier” in West Antarctica is spooking scientists. Satellite images shown at a recent meeting December 13th of the American Geophysical Union showed numerous large, diagonal cracks extending across the Thwaites’ floating ice wedge. This is new information, and it’s a real shocker if only because it’s happening so quickly, much sooner than expectations. It could collapse. And,[Read More…]

by 18/12/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Crisis at the Top of the World – Global Orders and Catastrophic Change

Climate Crisis at the Top of the World – Global Orders and Catastrophic Change

When midnight strikes on New Year’s Day of 2050, there will be little cause for celebration. There will, of course, be the usual toasts with fine wines in the climate-controlled compounds of the wealthy few. But for most of humanity, it’ll just be another day of adversity bordering on misery — a desperate struggle to find food, water, shelter, and safety. In[Read More…]

by 16/12/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Arctic Scorches With Record High Temperature, Says WMO

Arctic Scorches With Record High Temperature, Says WMO

High temperature seems scorching the Arctic. The United Nations logged the hottest temperature in history in the Arctic, finding that the Russian town of Verkhoyansk hit 38 degrees Celsius (100.4 Fahrenheit) in the summer of 2020. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced the record heat in Verkhoyansk in a Tuesday press release, explaining that a meteorological station in the region completed the[Read More…]

by 15/12/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A home is engulfed in flames as the Dixie fire rages on in Greenville, California on August 5, 2021. (Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)

A Tour Guide to Hell on Earth, Small Town-Style – Climate Change, Up Close and Personal

Half a mile south of what’s left of the old Gold Rush-era town of Greenville, California, Highway 89 climbs steeply in a series of S-turns as familiar to me as my own backyard. From the top of that grade, I’ve sometimes seen bald eagles soaring over the valley that stretches to the base of Keddie Peak, the northernmost mountain in[Read More…]

by 14/12/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Whales Will Save the World’s Climate—Unless the Military Destroys Them First

Whales Will Save the World’s Climate—Unless the Military Destroys Them First

The U.S. military is famous for being the single largest consumer of petroleum products in the world and the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Its carbon emissions exceed those released by “more than 100 countries combined.” Now, with the Biden administration’s mandate to slash carbon emissions “at least in half by the end of the decade,” the Pentagon has committed to using all-electric vehicles and transitioning to biofuels[Read More…]

by 14/12/2021 2 comments Climate Change
Parasitic Symbiotic Discordance

Parasitic Symbiotic Discordance

The framework of the economic thought that formed in the Western world during the Holocene Period, gained momentum during the Industrial Revolution and is now global has brought on a parasitic symbiotic discordance between our species and our host: Planet earth.  It has become a threat to Homo sapiens continued existence on the planet. The hard fact is that if we continue this discordant relationship we face the possibility of extinction within the next[Read More…]

by 12/12/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Planetary Ecocide — The Crime Against Life on Earth

Planetary Ecocide — The Crime Against Life on Earth

“We are simply talking about the very life support system of this planet.” Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Germany’s former chief climate scientist (2009) “Burning all fossil fuels would create a very different planet than the one that humanity knows. The palaeoclimate record and ongoing climate change make it clear that the climate system would be pushed beyond tipping points, setting in[Read More…]

by 11/12/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
 Source: World Inequality Lab

The Wealthy Cause Climate Change Much More Than Poorer People Do, Says Report

The disparity in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions between rich and poor countries, and between rich and poor people within countries is just as extreme as economic inequality, a new report finds. Overall, emissions are closely correlated with income, according to a report released Tuesday by the World Inequality Lab, a Paris-based research organization. “Wealthy individuals pollute much more than low-income[Read More…]

by 08/12/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Why Poorer Nations Aren’t Falling for Green-Washed Imperialism

Why Poorer Nations Aren’t Falling for Green-Washed Imperialism

Fighting global warming is not just about providing a path to net-zero carbon emissions for all countries. It is also about figuring out how best to meet the energy needs of people across the world while working toward net-zero emissions. If fossil fuels have to be given up, which has now become an urgent need given the current environmental challenges,[Read More…]

by 08/12/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Time to Fight Climate Change, Not Each Other

Time to Fight Climate Change, Not Each Other

The Trudeau government’s plan to buy 88 new fighter jets and 15 combat vessels will do little to protect Canadians from this country’s most serious threats. And some people are angry enough to take the streets to send this message to Ottawa. Two dozen rallies were held across the country last week to oppose a fighter jet purchase that will[Read More…]

by 04/12/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A fire burns trees next to grazing land in the Amazon basin in Ze Doca, Brazil. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Burned-out Forests Are Not Re-Growing

Trees are not re-growing in burned-out forests. This strange occurrence is becoming more frequent as global warming turns verdant flora into flammable tinder, causing more and bigger wild forests fires. This article will examine the science behind failure of trees to regrow in burned-out forests. Additionally, and as a collateral issue, this puts one more distorted face on the consequential[Read More…]

by 03/12/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Noam Chomsky Says We Have No Right to Gamble with the Lives of Climate-Vulnerable People: Video

Noam Chomsky Says We Have No Right to Gamble with the Lives of Climate-Vulnerable People: Video

On October 1, 2021, a month before the kickoff of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, I had the good fortune to spend an hour with Noam Chomsky for a video interview. (A week before the summit, TomDispatch published an abridged transcript of the interview.) At the time we spoke, it was already clear that the powerful governments and corporations[Read More…]

by 30/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Big Industry That COP26 Failed to Tackle

The Big Industry That COP26 Failed to Tackle

The impact of agriculture on climate change is significant. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the agriculture sector is responsible for 10 percent of the total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, after transportation (29 percent), electricity production (25 percent), industry (23 percent), and commercial and residential usage (13 percent). However, according to Peter Lehner, managing attorney for EarthJustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm,[Read More…]

by 25/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
To Keep Fossil Carbon Out of the Air, Just Stop Pulling It Out of the Earth

To Keep Fossil Carbon Out of the Air, Just Stop Pulling It Out of the Earth

Expectations for the 2021 COP26 climate summit were always low. They had dimmed even further by the time the prominent climate activist Vanessa Nakate of Uganda spoke from the main stage on the Glasgow conference’s next-to-last day. Nakate chided her audience for sleepwalking toward catastrophe: “We see business leaders and investors flying into COP on private jets. We see them[Read More…]

by 20/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Colombian natives and activists protested against the government of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro over the fires in the Amazon rainforest, in front of the Brazilian consulate in Bogota, Colombia, on August 23, 2019.(Raul Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images)

The Climate Crisis Is a Human Rights Crisis

We must continue to demand that international climate negotiations focus on the experiences of those most affected by the climate crisis and their solutions to mitigating it while ensuring that those who speak out against climate-damaging activities are not subjected to repression or violence. COP26 ended last weekend and with it, hopes that the negotiations would meaningfully address the needs of[Read More…]

by 18/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Why Our Climate Isn’t Jumping for Joy After COP26

Why Our Climate Isn’t Jumping for Joy After COP26

by Vijay Prashad and Zoe Alexandra Two major gains took place at the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP) in Glasgow, Scotland, which concluded on November 13: the first was that there would be another COP in 2022 in Egypt, and the second was that the world leaders expressed their aspiration to keep global temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius alive.[Read More…]

by 18/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
COP26: Climate Pledges Don’t Match Up With Policies—or Consumer Behavior

COP26: Climate Pledges Don’t Match Up With Policies—or Consumer Behavior

After more than two weeks of negotiations during the United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, diplomats from almost 200 nations finally agreed on two major points: ramp up the fight against climate change and help at-risk countries prepare. Specifically, governments agreed to meet again next in 2022 with more robust plans to slash carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent by 2030,[Read More…]

by 18/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
COP26: ‘Walking Inches When We Must Move Miles’

COP26: ‘Walking Inches When We Must Move Miles’

Climate vulnerable countries were bitterly disappointed with the watering down of language on coal and lack of finance to cover permanent losses from climate change they are already suffering. A last-minute amendment to the Glasgow climate change deal further watered down wording on phasing out fossil fuels, leading to dismay from countries on the frontline of climate breakdown. Earlier during[Read More…]

by 16/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Woody Biomass Blunder

The Woody Biomass Blunder

One of the most controversial fixes for global warming is the use of woody biomass, cutting trees, burning trees to achieve “carbon neutral” status in the worldwide battle to conquer climate change/global warming. The term carbon neutral (which is not the same as zero carbon and not a scientific term) when used to distinguish a plan to reduce greenhouse gas[Read More…]

by 16/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Gasbagging in Glasgow: COP26 and Phasing Down Coal

Gasbagging in Glasgow: COP26 and Phasing Down Coal

Words can provide sharp traps, fettering language and caging definitions.  They can also speak to freedom of action and permissiveness.  At COP26, that permissiveness was all the more present in the haggling ahead of what would become the Glasgow Climate Pact. COP26, or the UN Climate Change Conference UK 2021, had a mission of “Uniting the world to tackle climate[Read More…]

by 15/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Change COP26 – “Planet SOS” and Leaders Who Betrayed People’s Hopes for Sustainable Future

Climate Change COP26 – “Planet SOS” and Leaders Who Betrayed People’s Hopes for Sustainable Future

“Climate change” describes a change in the average conditions — such as temperature and rainfall — in a region over a long period of time. Earth’s climate is always changing over long periods of time and has been hotter and cooler than it is now, but the pace of change has sped up significantly in recent decades. Scientists are deeply concerned about the changes they’ve observed since the Industrial Revolution.[Read More…]

by 15/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
How Coal and Oil Lobby Betrayed Climate Agenda in COP26

How Coal and Oil Lobby Betrayed Climate Agenda in COP26

The just ended climate summit COP26 has largely disappointed the people around the world  in taking bold steps to avert rapid global warming. Despite the urgency to halt catastrophic climate change,  the pact approved at the end of the summit, compromised continued use in coming decades  instead  of phasing out coal and other fossil fuels agreed to their. The ambitious [Read More…]

by 15/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate activists march through the streets of Glasgow, Scotland, Friday, Nov. 5, 2021 which is the host city of the COP26 U.N. Climate Summit. (AP Photo/Scott Heppell)

The People vs. COP26: Time for Politicians, Billionaires to Listen 

Of all the speeches and political grandstanding at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26), the words of Mexican President, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, were the most profound and least hypocritical. Lopez Obrador raged against the “technocrats and neoliberals” – world leaders who hold the future of humanity in their hands. This was a direct reference to[Read More…]

by 14/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Three Paradigms of Climate Change Response—Time to Make A Clear Choice

Three Paradigms of Climate Change Response—Time to Make A Clear Choice

The present world is a world based on high levels of glaring inequality, domination, violence and injustice (IDVI), all these four serious problems being related to each other at various levels and responsible for most of the distress. Such a world is now additionally faced by a very serious threat of climate change (and other related environmental problems) which even[Read More…]

by 13/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Big Lie Known as ‘Net Zero’ Will Lead Us to Climate Disaster

The Big Lie Known as ‘Net Zero’ Will Lead Us to Climate Disaster

Last week, at the UN climate negotiations, the International Energy Agency announced that pledges made thus far could hold warming to 1.8 or 1.9°C. Yet an investigation published on Sunday by The Washington Post found that countries’ pledges are based on faulty data. And a report released on Tuesday by Climate Action Tracker, a research group that monitors action on greenhouse gas emissions reductions, found[Read More…]

by 12/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
COP26- Real Climate Change Candor or More Dissimulation

COP26- Real Climate Change Candor or More Dissimulation

Mark Carney, Chief Financer Advisor to COP26 & Glasgow Financial Alliance (GFANZ)  COP 26 in Glasgow, Scotland is where the petal should hit the metal and all the foot-dragging must stop, but it won’t. “Just follow the money!”, as the old saying goes. In this case follow Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England,[Read More…]

by 12/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Change and our Dilemma

Climate Change and our Dilemma

On the sidelines of the climate change COP 26 meetings, a lot of background information came out in the limelight. The information is not new, would have been known to those working in the field for a long time but hasn’t received the attention it should. It is no doubt true that the Climate Change agenda is being driven by[Read More…]

by 12/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Damiao and Cosmo of the Huni Kuin tribe with their interpreter Audrey Paranque (Photo credit: Sagar Dhara)

Indigenous people hit by double whammy, is COP26 listening?

For the last ten days I have opened the COP26 daily programme website each morning to search for the events that may interest me. And I have been overwhelmed by the deluge that hits me. They run mostly like this: Presidency Event: The role of parliaments in climate and nature policy, Meeting Room 4; Multilateral Assessment (MA) working group Part[Read More…]

by 12/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Photo credit: Rise Up Times

Climate Change Cannot be Resolved Without Strong Commitment Also to  Justice and Peace

              It is becoming increasingly clearer by the day, and confirmed further by COP 26 deliberations, that the climate change crisis cannot be resolved without accompanying strong commitment to peace and justice. At a time when it has become increasingly important to explore all sources of potential reduction of GHG emissions, how can we expect to succeed when possibly[Read More…]

by 11/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Most Basic of All Human Rights: Clean Water

The Most Basic of All Human Rights: Clean Water

by Kumi Naidoo and Richard von Weizsäcker The most outrageous injustice is that the same people who lack access to water and sanitation are usually the ones most vulnerable to the effects of climate change—and the least responsible for causing it in the first place. As the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) is swiftly moving to its conclusion on Friday, climate[Read More…]

by 10/11/2021 1 comment Climate Change
Should Humans Try to Modify the Amount of Sunlight the Earth Receives?

Should Humans Try to Modify the Amount of Sunlight the Earth Receives?

Desperate times call for desperate measures, as the saying goes. As scientists, policymakers and politicians keep one increasingly startled eye on climate change’s ticking clock and the other on the ongoing, upwardly mobile trend in greenhouse gas emissions, it’s no wonder possible solutions that have been long dismissed as fringe slices of science fiction are making their way into the mainstream. Enter[Read More…]

by 10/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate activists march through the streets of Glasgow, Scotland, Friday, Nov. 5, 2021 which is the host city of the COP26 U.N. Climate Summit. (AP Photo/Scott Heppell)

COP26 climate summit ends in failure

As the global climate summit COP26 drags out to its miserable end this week in Glasgow, Scotland, the major capitalist powers and the banks and corporations that call the shots in national and world politics have largely failed in their efforts to use the summit to provide a semblance of “progress” in resolving the global climate emergency. The rival powers[Read More…]

by 09/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Protestors at venue of Glasgow summit on climate change

Climate Crisis: Our Collective Delusions

It’s apparent; Climate extremes are real. The last six years have been the hottest years on record.    Megafires, polar melting, very severe cyclonic storms and other extreme weather events made half of the world population suffer. The Scientific community has warned the global leaders to take necessary steps to keep temperature rise below 1.5 degree Celsius. Countries have been forced[Read More…]

by 09/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
COP26: By 2100, Bangladesh may drown, Pakistan likely to face severe water shortage, fear experts

COP26: By 2100, Bangladesh may drown, Pakistan likely to face severe water shortage, fear experts

Alok Sharma, the President of COP26, the mega make or break climate negotiation event currently underway in Glasgow, in a speech given at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on October 12 warned “Paris promised, Glasgow must deliver.” He ends his opening speech to COP26 on October 31 on a hopeful note saying, “We can launch a decade of ever increasing ambition[Read More…]

by 08/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
An account of the performance of the early days of the Glasgow Conference

An account of the performance of the early days of the Glasgow Conference

The Conference of the Parties(COP)-26 started on October 31, 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland and will continue till November 12. The main objective of this conference is to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2050 so that the earth’s temperature does not exceed 1.5 degree Celsius above the Pre-Industrial Revolution Period temperature by the end of this century to save humanity[Read More…]

by 07/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
COP26: Wall Street rolls out climate finance

COP26: Wall Street rolls out climate finance

The US climate envoy John Kerry is getting down to the real business at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Glasgow after President Joe Biden has had his photo-ops, made his idiosyncratic public remarks and flew back home.  The Xinhua new agency reported that Kerry and the Chinese delegation will “continue their dialogue and exchanges” at Glasgow[Read More…]

by 06/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Change and the Limits of Economic Growth

Climate Change and the Limits of Economic Growth

The only effective way to control carbon emissions, as well as related problems of pollution and biodiversity loss, is to address “overshoot,” the unconstrained use of energy and material resources well beyond planetary limits, particularly in the richer parts of the world. Since the nineteenth century, human society has experienced extraordinary but uneven economic growth thanks to the energy unleashed[Read More…]

by 05/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Protestors at venue of Glasgow summit on climate change

Glasgow climate summit: An elite farce?

The Glasgow summit on climate change has been a media extravaganza. The ruling elites from all continents cooped up in their national capitals due to the raging pandemic, finally got a break to throw away their masks and take to their private jets to fly off to “Global Britain” to display their leadership qualities.  There are some noble exceptions of[Read More…]

by 05/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
COP26: Will Humanity’s ‘Last and Best Chance’ to Save Earth’s Climate Succeed?

COP26: Will Humanity’s ‘Last and Best Chance’ to Save Earth’s Climate Succeed?

There is a chance we can prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis, but world leaders must hold businesses accountable and listen to Indigenous communities. It would be an understatement to say that there is a lot riding on COP26, the international climate talks currently being held in Glasgow, Scotland. Officially, the gathering marks the 26th Conference of the Parties[Read More…]

by 04/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Greta Thunberg leads protests in Italy ahead of COP26. Credit: Radio Habana Cuba

COP 26: Can a Singing, Dancing Rebellion Save the World?

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies COP Twenty-six! That is how many times the UN has assembled world leaders to try to tackle the climate crisis. But the United States is producing more oil and natural gas than ever; the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere and global temperatures are both still rising; and we are[Read More…]

by 03/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Crisis: Individuals Can Play a Role

Climate Crisis: Individuals Can Play a Role

With climate crisis, what roles can an individual play? An individual has much scope to play role in facing the crisis. An ABC News report — COP26: This is what individuals can do to slow down climate change, according to experts — by Julia Jacobo (November 1, 2021, https://abcnews.go.com/US/cop26-individuals-slow-climate-change-experts/story?id=80799029) said: “As the leaders of the world gather in Glasgow to[Read More…]

by 03/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Global South Widens the Frame on Climate

The Global South Widens the Frame on Climate

Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate was famously cut out of an AP photo taken with her White colleagues at Davos. In this excerpt from A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis, she explains the importance of visibility and real participation for advocates from the Global South, where the climate crisis is a[Read More…]

by 03/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Justice in America

Climate Justice in America

 by Thomas Klikauer and Meg Young A few days ago, President Biden was urging climate action when saying, we don’t have much more than 10 years. Fighting global warming is inextricably linked to what Bill McKibben and others call climate justice. Commonly, many like to distinguish between climate justice and ecological justice. Ecological justice is about non-human beings and the wild unspoiled by human interference. It is about animals[Read More…]

by 03/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Military-style Campaign To Combat Climate Change Is The Need, Says Prince Charles

Military-style Campaign To Combat Climate Change Is The Need, Says Prince Charles

Facing diminished hopes ahead of what many see as world leaders’ last chance to combat the climate crisis, Britain’s Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, on Monday called for a “warlike” effort as he opened a key United Nations climate summit. Prince Charles has suggested the audience during his speech at the COP26 climate conference that world governments had[Read More…]

by 02/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
400 Private Jets Carrying Politicians To COP26 Emit More CO2 Than Hundreds of Citizens Would In A Year

400 Private Jets Carrying Politicians To COP26 Emit More CO2 Than Hundreds of Citizens Would In A Year

More than 400 private jets carrying politicians and business executives to this week’s conference will belch out 13,000 tons of carbon dioxide, exceeding the emissions of 1,600 average Scots for a full year, according to an estimate by the Scotland’s Daily Record (Private jets flying to COP26 in Glasgow will blast more CO2 than Scots pump out in a year, by John[Read More…]

by 01/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The World Is Way Off Track To Limit Climate Change, warn UN and WMO

The World Is Way Off Track To Limit Climate Change, warn UN and WMO

Just days before world leaders meet in Glasgow, Scotland, for the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), a new report has revealed just how far off course we are to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement and limiting the impacts of global warming. From October 31 to November 12, the leaders of the world are gathering in Glasgow for[Read More…]

by 01/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
COP26 Exposes Failure of Neoliberalism

COP26 Exposes Failure of Neoliberalism

The UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow October 31st thru November 12th may be the most significant climate conference of all time. The fate of the planet is on the line. Prior to that august event, hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers evidenced an alarming fact that the climate system is broken, endangering all complex life. This fact is supported[Read More…]

by 01/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Glasgow summit, climate change, and the case for socialism

The Glasgow summit, climate change, and the case for socialism

Heads of state, government ministers and thousands of other delegates from all corners of the globe are converging on Glasgow, Scotland for two weeks of climate change talks beginning this weekend. This year marks the 26th round of negotiations following the ratification by more than 190 countries of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was agreed to[Read More…]

by 31/10/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Vanessa Nakate (R) cries after her speech as Greta Thunberg comforts her during the opening plenary session of the Youth4Climate pre-COP 26 event. The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP 26, is scheduled to be held in the city of Glasgow, Scotland between 31 October and 12 November 2021. (Photo: Nicolò Campo/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Either way, history will judge you

An Open Letter to the Global Media by Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate Dear media editors around the world, Melting glaciers, wildfires, droughts, deadly heatwaves, floods, hurricanes, loss of biodiversity. These are all symptoms of a destabilizing planet, which are happening around us all the time. Those are the kind of things you report about. Sometimes. The climate crisis, however, is much more[Read More…]

by 31/10/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Global South Needs Unity to Ensure Justice in Climate Funding 

Global South Needs Unity to Ensure Justice in Climate Funding 

There is increasing need for all the countries of the Global South to respond with growing unity on several important issues of common interest. One of these important issues relates to justice in climate funding. As the Glasgow Climate Summit—the Convention on Climate Change 26th Conference of Parties (COP26)–  starts today ( October 31) an important concern will be to[Read More…]

by 31/10/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate crisis to devastate the world’s leading economic powers including the U.S., says report

Climate crisis to devastate the world’s leading economic powers including the U.S., says report

The world’s largest economies will suffer severe human and economic consequences of climate change, especially if no action is taken to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, according to a new study (G20 Climate Risk Atlas, Impacts, Policy, Economics, https://files.cmcc.it/g20climaterisks/G20_all.pdf) from the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC), an Italian research center. “From droughts, heatwaves and sea level rise, to dwindling food supplies[Read More…]

Idiocracy: Australian Coalition Government Mendacity, Corruption & Inaction Sabotaging COP26

Idiocracy: Australian Coalition Government Mendacity, Corruption & Inaction Sabotaging COP26

The forthcoming Glasgow COP26 climate change conference is increasingly seen as a near-last ditch attempt to prevent massive and deadly harm to Humanity and the Biosphere. However a resolutely mendacious, dishonestly anti-science,  anti-environment, pro-fossil fuels, egregiously corrupt, genocidally racist, and remorselessly climate criminal Australia is set to sabotage COP26 as it has sabotaged all its predecessors. Australia’s  allies in the[Read More…]

by 30/10/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Economic Losses From Weather Extremes Can Amplify Each Other Across the World

Economic Losses From Weather Extremes Can Amplify Each Other Across the World

Weather extremes can cause economic ripples along supply chains. If they occur at roughly the same time, the ripples start interacting and can amplify, even if they occur at completely different places around the world, a new study – “Ripple Resonance Amplifies Economic Welfare Loss from Weather Extremes” – by Kilian Kuhla, Sven Norman Willner, Christian Otto, Tobias Geiger and Anders Levermann (published on 27[Read More…]

by 29/10/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Emergency Includes the Threat of ‘Nuclear Winter’

Climate Emergency Includes the Threat of ‘Nuclear Winter’

When world leaders gather in Scotland next week for the COP26 climate change conference, activists will be pushing for drastic action to end the world’s catastrophic reliance on fossil fuels. Consciousness about the climate emergency has skyrocketed in recent years, while government responses remain meager. But one aspect of extreme climate jeopardy—“nuclear winter”—has hardly reached the stage of dim awareness Wishful[Read More…]

by 27/10/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Despite Cutbacks, ExxonMobil Continues to Fund Climate Science Denial

Despite Cutbacks, ExxonMobil Continues to Fund Climate Science Denial

ExxonMobil has spent more than $39 million to manufacture doubt about climate science. In a secret video recording made public in late June, a top ExxonMobil lobbyist—Keith McCoy, who was fired soon afterward—not only conceded that the oil giant’s support for a carbon tax is a sham, but he also admitted that the company quietly financed climate science denier groups to stave[Read More…]

by 27/10/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Path to a Livable Future Or Will Rich Corporations Trash the Planet?

The Path to a Livable Future Or Will Rich Corporations Trash the Planet?

by Noam Chomsky and Stan Cox This month will mark a critical juncture in the struggle to avoid climate catastrophe. At the COP26 global climate summit kicking off next week in Glasgow, Scotland, negotiators will be faced with the urgent need to get the world economy off the business-as-usual track that will take the Earth up to and beyond 3 degrees[Read More…]

by 25/10/2021 1 comment Climate Change
Now or Never: Will Glasgow’s COP26 Help Save the World From Disaster?

Now or Never: Will Glasgow’s COP26 Help Save the World From Disaster?

Looking back on 30 years of climate conferences, Geoffrey Lean recalls the many missed opportunities for change that led us to this boiling point. Peering back through the tunnel of three frustrating decades, it’s hard to believe that, as the 1990s opened, the world expected to quickly agree on effective action to tackle climate change. Back then, the stars did seem[Read More…]

by 24/10/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Padyatra to Save Hasdeo Aranya/ Chhattisgarh Bachao Andoalan

A Local Rain-Check Before a Global Summit: What is India Busy with Pre-CoP26?

 The upcoming CoP26 is not without its own set of apprehensions and mired more in doubts than expectations with unrealistic ‘net-zero’ rhetoric and big consultancies like Boston Consultancy Group[i] managing the event, along with the latest rumours that one of the most notorious businessmen of the world, Adani[ii], trying to pitch for a presence in this global summit. Climate change[Read More…]

by 23/10/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Crisis: 1.3 Billion People in Africa Remain Extremely Vulnerable, warns UN

Climate Crisis: 1.3 Billion People in Africa Remain Extremely Vulnerable, warns UN

Africa’s 1.3 billion people remain “extremely vulnerable” as the continent warms more, and at a faster rate, than the global average, warns the UN. Yet Africa’s 54 countries are responsible for less than 4% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In State of the Climate in Africa 2020 (https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=10833), a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and other[Read More…]

by 21/10/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
La Niña is Here

La Niña is Here

The La Niña, a natural cycle marked by cooler-than-average ocean water in the central Pacific Ocean, is back, U.S. federal forecasters announced Thursday. It is happening for the second straight year. The La Niña (Spanish for “little girl”) climate pattern is one of the main drivers of weather around the world, especially during the late fall, winter and early spring. It is[Read More…]

by 20/10/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Climate Change Viewed from the Attic of the World

Climate Change Viewed from the Attic of the World

Thirteen thousand feet high on the far side of the Himalaya mountains, we have entered the past and the future at the same time. We are a medical expedition and also a pilgrimage, consisting of doctors, nurses, Buddhist clerics, supernumeraries like me, and a large staff of guides, muleteers, and camp tenders. We are bound for the isolated villages of[Read More…]

by 19/10/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Environmental activism severely impacts the next generation. Youth activists like Sena Wazer are calling for drastic and radical change in our current policies involving the environment. Here she speaks at an event organized by Sunrise CT to protest a proposed power plant in Killingly, CT on January 13th, 2021.
PHOTO BY DOMINIQUE JADE DEMARIA

Don’t Let Youth Climate Activists Like Me Burn Out

I was 5 years old when I first got involved with environmental activism. For me, it started with caring about whales and the ocean, and that morphed into climate action. From handing out pamphlets at the local farmers market and being on a local radio station when I was 6, to speaking with the Connecticut governor and organizing a rally[Read More…]

by 19/10/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Cheap Grace and Climate Change: Australia and COP26

Cheap Grace and Climate Change: Australia and COP26

It was not for everybody, but the shock advertising tactics of the Australian comedian Dan Ilic made an appropriate point.  Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a famed coal hugger, has vacillated about whether to even go to the climate conference in Glasgow.  Having himself turned the country’s prime ministerial office into an extended advertising agency, Ilic was speaking his language.[Read More…]

by 16/10/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Greta Thunberg on Climate Promises Versus Actions

Greta Thunberg on Climate Promises Versus Actions

On Sept. 28, Greta Thunberg mocked world leaders when she reiterated their promises to an audience of young activists at the Youth4Climate event in Milan, Italy, saying: “Build back better, blah blah blah, green economy, blah blah blah, net zero by 2050, blah blah blah, climate neutral, blah blah blah… This is all we hear from our so-called leaders. Words. Words[Read More…]

by 16/10/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
How to Save the World (from a Climate Armageddon)

How to Save the World (from a Climate Armageddon)

This summer we witnessed, with brutal clarity, the Beginning of the End: the end of Earth as we know it — a world of lush forests, bountiful croplands, livable cities, and survivable coastlines. In its place, we saw the early manifestations of a climate-damaged planet, with scorched forests, parched fields, scalding cities, and storm-wracked coastlines. In a desperate bid to[Read More…]

by 14/10/2021 1 comment Climate Change
Climate Crisis: Rich Countries’ Carbon Emissions Rose Rapidly in 2021

Climate Crisis: Rich Countries’ Carbon Emissions Rose Rapidly in 2021

Carbon emissions are rebounding strongly and are rising across the world’s 20 richest nations, according to a new study. The Climate Transparency Report, Comparing G20 Climate Action and Responses to the Covid-19 Crisis (https://www.climate-transparency.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Climate-Transparency-Report-2020.pdf) says that CO2 will go up by 4% across the G20 group this year, having dropped 6% in 2020 due to the pandemic. The 2020 edition of[Read More…]

by 14/10/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change