The Enlightenment substituted reason and the scientific method for primitive superstition. Science brought huge advances in agriculture, industry and medicine  but has had the downsides of over-population, massive biodiversity loss, deadly high-technology wars  and the existential threats to Humanity and the Biosphere from nuclear weapons and climate change. However in seriously addressing these horrendously damaging deadly downside consequences we must[Read More…]

Earth at 10°C above pre-industrial is unimaginable. It’s a deadly horrifying thought, but as shall be explained herein, it should not be dismissed out of hand. The following story might be labeled as reckless, and it might be criticized as a fearmongering piece of journalism and probably will be. Nevertheless, “10C Above Baseline” explores a dystopian world envisioned by John[Read More…]

My friend, Ashok A. in India, wrote me: “Clearly the main wealth of America lies in the vast territories it has usurped [from Native Americans – S. D.] and holds.  I agree, much of the world’s population will perish in this century.  We’ll be long gone.  Our children — those who survive — will find it in them to sustain[Read More…]

Who says President Trump doesn’t have a coherent foreign policy?  Pundits and critics across the political spectrum have chided him for failing to articulate and implement a clear international agenda. Look closely at his overseas endeavors, though, and one all-too-consistent pattern emerges: Donald Trump will do whatever it takes to prolong the reign of fossil fuels by sabotaging efforts to curb carbon[Read More…]

Last Week, David Wallace-Wells wrote a cover story for of New York Magazine, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” on some of the worst-case scenarios that the climate crisis could cause by the end of this century. It describes killer heat waves, crippling agricultural failures, devastated economies, plagues, resource wars, and more. It has been read more than two million times. The article has[Read More…]

[Paper presented for a day long discussion in the Central Party School of the CPI(ML) Red Stat held at Kolkata in June, 2016] Human beings, or rather, their dominant economic-industrial systems, have started to change the earth in major ways, leading many observers and thinkers to accept that we are into the new age of “Anthropocene” – a new chapter[Read More…]

President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement follows the path of previous presidents who have undermined international climate agreements. We disagree with Trump but it is important to understand his actions in the context of the history of the United States regarding previous climate agreements. Once again, the political problems in the US are bigger than Trump. His action brings greater clarity to the inability of the US government to confront the climate crisis and clarifies the tasks of people seeking smart climate policy.

  The People’s Climate March on Saturday, April 29, 2017, flooded Washington, DC, with over 100,000 protesters. Organizers claimed 150,000, with marches in 330 other cities across the country and in three dozen solidarity events abroad. Coinciding with President Trump’s 100th day in office, the marchers also protested his anti-environmental actions. The previous Saturday (April 22, 2017), thousands of scientists[Read More…]

The situation we face First, let’s please just acknowledge there is a crisis. I’m afraid any reasonably educated, rational, and unbiased adult (or younger) can understand what the climate science has been telling us now for two decades:  the Earth is warming (so far by about 1 degree Celsius since 1800), slowly but surely, due to humans’ putting carbon dioxide[Read More…]

Human caused global warming increasingly threatens all we love and care about.  Climate change from this warming caused (mostly) by greenhouse gases (GHGs) from our use of fossil fuels is a potent growing risk to our families, our kids and their kids, our communities and country. This radical change threatens most of the species and ecosystems with which we share[Read More…]

When Countercurrents.org started 15 years ago CO2 level in the atmosphere was 372 ppm. In the last 15 years it increased only at the rate of less than 2 ppm/year. This year we are seeing a jump of 3.5 ppm over the past year. United Nations climate change secretariat tweeted “January Mauna Loa record shows atmospheric CO2 concentration accelerating, now at[Read More…]

For the third year in a row, the world experienced its warmest year on the books, global scientists have determined. The new assessments come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the UK’s Met Office, as well as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which relies in part on data from those[Read More…]

Global sea ice levels are at their lowest in recorded history, according to new statistics from the U.S. National Snow & Ice Data Center. In the Arctic, the loss is due to climate change and extreme weather events that are likely influenced by global warming, while the changes in the Antarctic may be attributed to natural variability, the center said.[Read More…]

  The catastrophic climate change is no longer a subject for argument, at least on a mainstream level within the science community. Yet, as temperatures continue to rise, American efforts to combat global warming, sadly seem to decline. President Elect, Donald Trump is more concerned by the economic cost of combating global warming, and has repeatedly rejected United States’ role[Read More…]

The loss of Arctic sea ice has already been shown to be part of a positive feedback loopdriving climate change, and a recent study published in the journal Nature puts the spotlight on what appears to be another of these feedback loops. It has to do with soil, currently one of Earth’s carbon sinks. But warming may lead to soils[Read More…]

  Global domination by  neoliberal One Percenter climate criminals has meant that a catastrophic plus 2C temperature rise is now unavoidable  and that the Paris ideal of no more than plus 1.5C will be exceeded in 4-10 years. The most effective collective action now for decent Humanity to mitigate inescapable climate catastrophe is to promise that all climate criminals will[Read More…]

Why are we failing at communicating the danger of climate change? Maybe people don’t have enough information? (This is the “information deficit” model). Or maybe they have too much information? (This is called the “cultural cognition” model). Or maybe they are not getting the right information? Or there is something else that’s wrong? Without going into the details of the[Read More…]

Global warming is on track to top 3° Celsius, the United Nations warned this week, because today’s climate pledges are “not nearly enough” to prevent dangerous levels of warming. That’s according the latest annual “Emissions GapReport” (pdf) from the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), which concluded that pledges to cut emissions will result in a global temperature rise of 3.4ºC[Read More…]

Last month was the hottest September on record, which means 2016 is all but locked into being the hottest year on record, according to new NASA statistics released Tuesday. “With data now available through September, 2016 annual record (~1.25ºC above late 19th [century]) seems locked in,” tweeted Dr. Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. With data[Read More…]

September’s carbon dioxide output failed to drop below 400 parts per million (ppm) despite historically being the year’s low point for CO2 emissions, which means the Earth has very likely passed that symbolic climate threshold forever. The Earth has hit 400ppm before, but seasonal cycles have always reduced carbon dioxide output back below that level. Now, climate scientists say it[Read More…]

Time is about to run out on holding global warming to two degrees. The next President needs to be prepared to act promptly and decisively to assure that the world changes direction.  The world’s seeming inability to make progress on climate change appears to be more a refusal to jeopardize growth of the GDP, even though economic growth (a) has arguably[Read More…]

The planet could pass the critical 1.5°C global temperature threshold in a decade—and is already two-thirds of the way to hit that warming limit, climate scientists warned on Thursday. Speaking at a University of Oxford conference this week, led by leading U.K. climate researcher Richard Betts, scientists said global greenhouse gas emissions are not likely to slow down quickly enough[Read More…]

Illustration from the paper “The Sower’s Way.” by Sgouridis, Csala and Bardi  recently published in the IOP Environmental Research Letters journal. The main points of the paper are summarized in a previous post. Note how fast the production of energy must fall in order to prevent temperatures from rising above the 2°C limit. It is a true “Seneca collapse“, necessary[Read More…]

One of the silliest arguments of climate deniers goes like this: the atmosphere with its greenhouse gases cannot warm the Earth’s surface, because it is colder than the surface. But heat always flows from warm to cold and never vice versa, as stated in the second law of thermodynamics. The freshly baked Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts has recently phrased it[Read More…]

In a year of record-setting heat on a blistered globe, with fast-warmingoceans, fast-melting ice caps, and fast-rising sea levels, ratification of the December 2015 Paris climate summit agreement — already endorsed by most nations — should be a complete no-brainer.  That it isn’t tells you a great deal about our world.  Global geopolitics and the possible rightward lurch of many countries (including a potential deal-breaking election in[Read More…]

Another month, another temperature record shattered. NASA data released Monday shows not only that last month was the hottest August since record-keeping started in 1880, but that it tied with July for the warmest month in the last 136 years. According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, August 2016’s temperature was 0.16 degrees Celsius warmer than the previous warmest August[Read More…]

The highly influential but neoliberal Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) has published a detailed analysis entitled The Economics of Climate Change. However this report ignores a veritable Herd of Elephants in the Room apparent to science-informed climate change analysts, ignores the acute, existential  seriousness of the worsening climate emergency, and absurdly argues for effective Business As Usual (BAU)[Read More…]

The head of the United Nation’s climate body has called for a thorough assessment of the feasibility of the international goal to limit warming to 1.5C. Dr Hoesung Lee, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told delegates at a meeting in Geneva, which is designed to flesh out the contents of a special report on 1.5C, that[Read More…]

On Monday it was confirmed that the Earth has broken an ominous climate milestone amid a wave of troubling records: July 2016 was the hottest recorded month—ever. According to new NASA data, the global mean surface temperatures last month were 0.84° Celsius (1.51° Fahrenheit) above average and was the warmest July in their data set, which dates back to 1880.[Read More…]

John Michael Greer has written a provocative essay: Climate Change Activism: a Postmortem. His list of activist mistakes should be interesting to many of you but Greer makes the same tactical error as the activists he derides in his ‘postmortem’. Greer is still concerned about winning political and economic battles instead of getting to necessary emergency government as quickly as[Read More…]

Environmental records of all kinds are being shattered as climate change takes effect in real time, scientists warned on Tuesday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) released its annual State of the Climate report with the dire warning that 2015 was the hottest year on record since at least the mid-to-late 19th century, confirming the “toppling of several symbolic[Read More…]

Record global heat in the first half of 2016 has caught climate scientists off-guard, reportsThompson Reuters Foundation. “What concerns me most is that we didn’t anticipate these temperature jumps,” David Carlson, director of the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) climate research program, told Thompson Reuters Foundation late Monday. “We predicted moderate warmth for 2016, but nothing like the temperature rises we’ve[Read More…]

As the party of climate science denial convenes in Cleveland this week—minus the few Republicans who care about global warming—new data further confirms that the world is on fire. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) announced Tuesday that June 2016 was 1.62° F above the 20th century average, breaking last year’s record for the warmest June on record by[Read More…]

The June temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 71.8°F, or 3.3°F above the 20th century average, surpassing the previous record of 71.6°F set in 1933. The year-to-date (January-June) temperaturewas 50.8°F, 3.2°F above the 20th century average, making it the third warmest on record. The June precipitation total for the contiguous U.S. was 2.46 inches, 0.47 inch below the 20th century[Read More…]

“In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act” –George Orwell March 2016 set a new record temperature for that time of year, according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The global temperature was 2.30 °F (1.28 °C) warmer than the average for March from 1951 to 1980, which is used as a baseline. http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2432/[Read More…]

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will stay permanently above 400 parts per million (ppm) this year due to El Nino—and will likely not drop below that number again “within our lifetimes,” according to a study published this week in the journal Nature. The milestone represents a symbolic threshold that scientists and environmentalists had long sought to avoid. Greenhouse gases have jumped 48[Read More…]

Children suffer the most from fossil fuel burning. Fossil fuel combustion and associated air pollution and carbon dioxide (CO2) is the root cause of much of children’s ill health children today as well as their uncertain future. There are strong scientific arguments, as well persuasive economic ones, for reducing the world’s dependence on energy generated by the burning of fossil[Read More…]

Record carbon dioxide levels are set to surpass the symbolic threshold of 400 parts per million (PPM) this year and will likely never fall below that line again in our lifetimes, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change. Scientists at the UK Met Office used emissions data, sea surface temperature figures, and a climate[Read More…]

On the surface, things appear normal. The status quo of life in America circa 2016 isn’t to everyone’s liking, but at least the system is still working after a fashion. The price of oil is going up a bit: that means the cost of driving is also creeping higher, but steeper prices provide a little welcome relief for an oil[Read More…]