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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
While the Ukrainian people bear the lethal brunt of Russia’s invasion, shockwaves from that war threaten to worsen other crises across the planet. The emergency that loomed largest before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began — the heating of the Earth’s climate — is now looming larger still. The reason is simple enough: a war-induced rush to boost oil and[Read More…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
The September 2021 Scientific American included a description by the editors of the deplorable state of disaster relief in the US. They traced the root cause of problems with relief programs as their “focus on restoring private property,” which results in little attention to those “with the least capacity to deal with disasters.” The book Disaster Preparedness and Climate Change[Read More…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
“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…]
Consider us at the edge of the sort of epochal change not seen for centuries, even millennia. By the middle of this century, we will be living under such radically altered circumstances that the present decade, the 2020s, will undoubtedly seem like another era entirely, akin perhaps to the Middle Ages. And I’m not talking about the future development of[Read More…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
Some time ago Jeremy Grantham (83), a renowned value investor who runs the $65 billion asset fund GMO, called the stock market a “super bubble.” (Source: Erik Schatzker, Jeremy Grantham Has an Even Scarier Prediction Than His Crash Call, Bloomberg, January 26, 2022) Nowadays, a lot of the air has come out of hot stocks of the covid era, losing[Read More…]
A new freely downloadable book I would like to announce the publication of a new book, which discusses worrying recent developments in the Antarctic and the Arctic, which warn us of catastrophic consequences if we neglect urgent climate action. The book may be downloaded free of charge from the following link: http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/Warnings.pdf Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier Diagonal cracks have been observed[Read More…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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 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…]
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…]
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…]
The Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India and Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation conducted a pan-India assessment of climate change vulnerability based on fourteen parameters encompassing socio-economic aspects, livelihood, institution and infrastructure and biophysical features. “Out of 100 most vulnerable districts in the country, 70% of them are in five states of Eastern India– Assam, Bihar,[Read More…]
“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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
As indicated by the International Monetary fund, greenhouse gas emissions are funded world-wide by government subsidies totaling $5.9 trillion in 2020, about 6.8% global GDP, expected to rise to 7.4% of GDP in 2025, or $11million a minute. In the view of some scientists fuel subsidies are ‘adding fuel to the fire of the climate crisis’. Hollow words by dignitaries at COP-out-26 may have[Read More…]
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…]
“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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
When the leaders of more than 100 nations gathered in Glasgow for the U.N. climate conference last week, there was much discussion about the disastrous effect of climate change on the global environment. There was, however, little awareness of its likely political impact on the current world order that made such an international gathering possible. World orders are deeply rooted global systems[Read More…]
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 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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
“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…]
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…]
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…]
The COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow has failed to requisitely respond to the worsening Climate Crisis with national action pledges promising a catastrophic plus 2.4 degrees Centigrade temperature rise. However COP26 has at least identified the worst culprits. Thus, unveiled at COP26, the 2022 Climate Change Performance Index has ranked climate criminal Australia worst in the world out[Read More…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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 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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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 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…]
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…]
When I started reading Vanessa Nakate’s new book, A Bigger Picture (HarperCollins 2021), I didn’t immediately understand the connection between the title and the event that first introduced me to the Ugandan climate activist. It was January 2020 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. She and four other youth activists were there to encourage attendees to take the climate crisis seriously.[Read More…]
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 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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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 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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
A new freely downloadable book I would like to announce the publication of a book which presents the reasons why we urgently need immediate and drastic climate action The book may be freely downloaded and circulated from the following link: http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/action.pdf Use of fossil fuels must stop! The IPCC Report The 4,000-page report by the International Panel on Climate Change[Read More…]
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…]
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…]
The area under snow cover in Himachal Pradesh has declined by 18.5% according to a recent report published by State Centre on Climate Change (SCCC) and Space Application Center (ISRO) Ahmedabad. The report revealed this decreasing trend for the five major river basins in the State. As the report points out, the high altitude regions of Himachal Pradesh receive precipitation[Read More…]
These so-called ‘solutions’ are, overwhelmingly, empty promises that will lead to massive violations of Indigenous rights, while failing to solve the climate crisis. Imagine you’re a Baka, a hunter gatherer in the Congo Basin forest. That land has been your home for generations. You know every stone and every tree there. Your grandparents are buried on that land. You and your[Read More…]
Despite claiming to endorse a carbon tax, ExxonMobil has funneled millions of dollars to lawmakers who oppose the idea. When then-ExxonMobil lobbyist Keith McCoy conceded in a secretly recorded video in May that the oil giant voiced support for a carbon tax only because it assumed it would never happen, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said the company was “shocked by these interviews” and stood by its “commitments[Read More…]
FacingFuture.TV recently hosted a preview of the upcoming IPCC 2021 UN climate report, which report guides the gathering of dignitaries from around the world meeting in Glasgow this November to discuss, analyze, and decide how to deal with global warming/climate change. View the interview here: According to the Code Red interview, the IPCC is taking off its ultra conservative[Read More…]
Much of infrastructure in the U.S. is already at risk of being shut down by flooding, and as the global warming continues, the threat is expected to grow. a new report finds One-in-four pieces of all critical infrastructures in the U.S. including police and fire stations, hospitals, airports and wastewater treatment facilities face substantial risk of being rendered inoperable by[Read More…]
Between 2009 and 2018, the continuous rise in sea temperature cost the world 14 per cent of its coral reefs – that’s more than the size of Australia’s reefs combined – an UN-backed report revealed on Tuesday. In the Sixth Status of Corals of the World: 2020 Report, experts from the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, funded by the UN Environment[Read More…]
1.26 billion people at highest risk of conflict and displacement caused by environmental damage. A vicious cycle linking the depletion of natural resources with violent conflict may have gone past the point of no return in parts of the world and is likely to be exacerbated by climate change, said a report on Thursday. Food insecurity, lack of water and[Read More…]
About half of the world’s population will suffer from water insecurity by 2050, found The State of Climate Services 2021: Water , a new report from the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The report said: More than 2 billion people are living in countries under water stress and 3.6 billion people face inadequate access to water at least one month per[Read More…]
It was supposed to be the greatest transition of modern times. Practically overnight, a dirty, inefficient, and unjust system that encompassed 11 time zones was to undergo an extreme makeover. Billions of dollars were available to speed the process. A new crew of transition experts came up with the blueprint and the public was overwhelmingly on board. Best of all,[Read More…]
Global warming in Siberia is on a hot streak! It was +6°C last year. In like manner, if the entire planet hit +6°C above pre-industrial, it would be lights out, life snuffed out, sayonara. Meanwhile, the Siberian hot streak theoretically threatens the entire planet with methane induced runaway global warming, the dreaded monster of the North that takes no prisoners.[Read More…]
ABSTRACT This is a response to the two sets of articles written by Sajai Jose on the Fourth Industrial Revolution and on the world’s and India’s hunger crisis. It is in two parts. In the first part it lays the historical background of the response of capital in the face of periodic crises it faces and people’s response to it.[Read More…]
Pope Francis thanked a youth climate activist conference on Wednesday for the participants’ “dreams and projects of goodness” and encouraged them to keep up their advocacy of action to combat climate change. Speaking in Spanish via video to the Youth4Climate event in Milan, which drew 400 young activists from 197 countries, the Pope said their work is “for the good of humanity,”[Read More…]
When I was growing up in Kolkata, every monsoon the streets would get flooded. I remember looking forward to the days when school would get cancelled and I would get to stay home and watch cartoons. I would look out from the balcony to see life carrying on, people wading through sometimes waist-deep murky brown water. Somehow it all still[Read More…]
The fridays for future organisation that cropped up from worldwide student protest launch first by a lone Swedish girl student of Class IX, Greta Thunberg starting from August-September 2018, has called for a Global Climate Strike on coming Friday, September 24, 2021. For millions of Farmers and Farm labourers in India who are in the 10-month continuing protest sit-in around[Read More…]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies President Biden addressed the UN General Assembly on September 21 with a warning that the climate crisis is fast approaching a “point of no return,” and a promise that the United States would rally the world to action. “We will lead not just with the example of our power but, God willing,[Read More…]
The ongoing wildfires in California are again threatening the state’s millennia-old giant sequoia (also known as giant redwood) trees in central California. The most immediate danger is from the KNP Complex, a recent merging of the recently sparked Paradise Fire and Colony Fire, which has grown to 25,142 acres and is 0 percent contained. The wild land blaze has already[Read More…]
Heat waves, floods, droughts, and wildfires are devastating communities around the world, and they will only grow more severe. While climate-change deniers remain powerful, the need for urgent action is now recognized well beyond activist circles. Governments, international organizations, and even business and finance are bowing to the inevitable—or so it seems. In fact, the world has wasted decades tinkering with[Read More…]
Twenty years and more ago climate talk concerned long term global warming effects not really occurring until mid-twenty-first century at earliest with most problems occurring toward the end of the century. I remember thinking I would not see the changes as the forecasts were well beyond my lifespan. There were signs of change, obviously, or it would not be an[Read More…]
by Stan Cox and Priti Gulati Cox From the field and kitchen of discomfort food So much carbon dioxide has now accumulated in the atmosphere that it’s no longer possible to prevent a dangerous rise in global temperatures through purely technological means. In other words, it’s too late to prevent catastrophic ecological damage and human suffering simply through building more[Read More…]
In ancient Greek mythology, Cassandra was a priestess who was able to predict the future but unable to convince others to act upon her prophecies. The fate of Cassandra seems particularly relevant today, for there has been ample warning about three developments that threaten continued human existence—preparations for nuclear war, climate change, and disease pandemics—without, however, adequate measures being taken[Read More…]
by Thomas Klikauer and Meg Young Capitalism will not lead the way out of climate catastrophe (Markus Spiske) 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[Read More…]
The sixth report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms yet again that we are rapidly destabilizing the climate and making the earth a more dangerous and biologically impoverished planet. No surprise; we’ve known this since the 1970s. The primary cause of the worsening situation, however, is not the combustion of fossil fuels, but the massive political dereliction that has[Read More…]
The UK (in partnership with Italy) will host the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties, COP26 in Glasgow on October 31- November 12, 2021. COP26 will be one of the most significant meetings in modern human history, comparable to the meeting of the Big Three at the Tehran Conference November 28, 1943 when the Normandy invasion was agreed,[Read More…]
The Current Situation Shockingly, today’s climate crisis is driven by a mere increase of 1˚C in global temperature, primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Unless we take urgent action, the temperature could increase by four times that level within the lifetimes of our children, leaving them to face an apocalyptic future. In the US alone, the recent floods on the[Read More…]
Is this climate change? I asked as rains lashed out. Oh, that is a subject for experts, the bald man with a goatee said. We stood on the clouds and watched the water slowly submerge — seeping through the marshes rising, rising till it covered the fields, the houses. The cattle — did they swim? The cats and dogs?[Read More…]
Our planet cannot handle an eternal growth model. We live in a finite system and capitalist innovation can only take us so far. Eventually we run out of resources. Climate appears to be the limit. Too often climate change is reduced to quantification of greenhouse glasses or melting ice caps. These indicators of climate change are important to verify the[Read More…]
This article is adapted from POWER: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival (New Society Publishers, September 2021) by Richard Heinberg Climate change is often incorrectly described as an isolated pollution issue. In this flawed framing, humanity has simply made a mistake in its choice of energy sources; the solution entails switching sources and building enough carbon-sucking machines to clear the atmosphere of[Read More…]
Bart Everson, a Gaian and the convener of the Crescent City Gaian Guild in New Orleans, writes about his experience living through Hurricane Ida and her aftermath. If only my back didn’t ache, I could really enjoy this hurricane. Such were my thoughts as the outer bands of Hurricane Ida bore down on my home in New Orleans. I was sitting[Read More…]
As the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly begins Tuesday amid an unrelenting wave of extreme weather, thousands of academics from around the globe are urging governments to negotiate an international treaty to bring about a rapid and just transition away from coal, oil, and gas—”the main cause of the climate emergency.” In an open letter delivered on Monday, 2,185 scientists from 81 countries[Read More…]
Underscoring the necessity of immediate and sweeping action to take on the climate emergency, a World Bank report revealed Monday that 216 million people across six global regions could be forced to move within their countries by midcentury. Groundswell Part 2: Acting on Internal Climate Migration includes analyses for East Asia and the Pacific, North Africa, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia,[Read More…]
“Wally, Wally, quick, come and look at this!” These were the words of my roommate on a balmy Taiwanese evening on September 11th, 2001. Emerging into the living room I was just in time to see a plane slam into the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. Walking through the door to work the next morning, I[Read More…]
In a very insightful essay published a couple of weeks before Canada’s election call, Senator Rosa Galvez called for a seachange from neoliberal government to building government back better to handle the recovery from Covid and to mitigate climate change: “We need democracy back—stronger, wiser, and more open to new ideas—with all its checks and balances restored. Governments must[Read More…]
GREENVILLE, CA — At 10 a.m. on July 22nd, I interviewed a New York University professor about using autonomous robots, drones, and other unmanned devices to suppress structural and wildland fires. I sent the interview to an online transcription service, walked down the steps of my second-floor office and a block to the Greenville post office, where I mailed a[Read More…]
A momentous statement has just been published in the British medical journal The Lancet and in 200 other health journals. It is the global equivalent of the diagnosis you never want to hear in your own doctor’s office, complete with concurring second opinions from 200 other doctors. The statement’s authors are the editors of those journals, themselves doctors or highly trained health scientists,[Read More…]
I’m a climate scientist and on Wednesday night, I watched the rain outside my New York City window break the local record for the most accumulation in an hour. It was an event that caused catastrophic flooding and infrastructure failures across both the New York Metro area and a wide swath of the Northeast US, delivered by the remnant of a powerful hurricane[Read More…]
New research published Friday suggests that melting Arctic sea ice caused by global heating may be responsible for the deadly deep freeze that devastated much of North America and plunged millions of Texans into darkness in February. While climate researchers have previously connected the phenomena of polar heating and mid-latitute freezes, a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Science is the first to link Arctic warming[Read More…]
Massive flooding inundated broad swaths of the US northeast on Wednesday night, including New York City and downstate New York, as well as New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Areas of Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts were also flooded, and tornadoes were reported on Cape Cod. At least 43 people are dead and more than 250,000 households and businesses are without power.[Read More…]
The Amazon rainforest is arguably the world’s premier asset. Indeed, it’s the world’s most crucial asset in a myriad of ways, nothing on Earth compares. Yet, it is infernally stressed because of inordinate drought. The bulk of the Amazon rainforest is located in Brazil, where, according to the title of an article in NASA, Earth Observatory, the country headline says[Read More…]
Hurricane Ida made landfall Sunday as the second most powerful storm to hit the state of Louisiana in its recorded history, bringing widespread flooding from heavy rains and storm surge. High winds, blowing debris and falling trees damaged buildings and knocked out power to one million customers in Louisiana and over 120,000 in Mississippi. So far two deaths have been[Read More…]
The National Hurricane Center (NHC) expects Hurricane Ida will continue to produce heavy rainfall through Monday across the central Gulf Coast, resulting in “life-threatening flash and urban flooding and significant river flooding impacts,” after it made landfall just west of Grande Isle, Louisiana, Sunday afternoon. The NHC had warned residents to expect “extremely life-threatening” storm surge inundation along the Gulf[Read More…]
We are about to go through the most profound shift in the climate debate in 20 years. The result will be the end of the gas industry’s hope of being a transition fuel, a brutal market disruption to the agriculture and livestock industries and the arrival of the climate emergency into public consciousness. This will all be driven by the[Read More…]
According to SPEI Global Drought Monitor, no continent is spared the ravages of severe drought, except for Antarctica. This is happening at a global temperature of 1.2°C above baseline, not 1.5°C above baseline which climate scientists agree is locked in. This article explores the countrywide impact of 1.2°C above baseline for the most vulnerable as well as the most privileged.[Read More…]
Bolstering the case for meaningful climate action, a major report released Wednesday found that Earth’s atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and sea levels both hit record highs in 2020. Based on the contributions of more than 530 scientists from over 60 countries and compiled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), State of the Climate in 2020 is the 31st installment of[Read More…]
In recent months, Washington has had a lot to say about China’s ever-expanding air, naval, and missile power. But when Pentagon officials address the topic, they generally speak less about that country’s current capabilities, which remain vastly inferior to those of the U.S., than the world they foresee in the 2030s and 2040s, when Beijing is expected to have acquired[Read More…]
On Friday, the third anniversary of climate campaigner Greta Thunberg’s lone protest outside the Swedish Parliament, a global report revealed the scale of risks posed by the climate emergency for the world’s children. The United Nations’ agency for children’s rights, UNICEF, introduced the first-ever Children’s Climate Risk Index, which shows that nearly half of the world’s children are at “extremely high risk” for being faced[Read More…]
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 group 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.[Read More…]
The flooding disaster in Humphreys County, Tennessee over the weekend has so far killed at least 21 people, including two toddlers, with another 45 still missing. The flash floods were the result of a storm which dropped 17 inches of rain on the region on Saturday evening, likely a new state record. Early imagery shows whole communities devastated, with scores[Read More…]
The world is processing the dire warnings in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report: We are on a path to see global temperature rise to surpass the 2-degree threshold, bringing more intense heat waves, droughts, and sea-level rise—unless we shift rapidly away from fossil fuels. And the climate movement is grappling with both a sense of urgency and[Read More…]
It’s only 76 days until world leaders convene in Glasgow, Scotland, for some of the most important international negotiations in history. What happens during the twelve days of the Glasgow Climate Talks (known by climate wonks as COP26) will go a long way to determining the fate of much of the Paris Climate Agreement―which is another way of saying the fate[Read More…]
Rome is scorching hot. This beautiful city is becoming unbearable for other reasons, too. Though every corner of the beaming metropolis is a monument to historical grandeur, from the Colosseum in Rione Monti to the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in San Giovanni, it is now struggling under the weight of its own contradictions. In Via Appia, bins are overflowing[Read More…]
Admittedly, I hadn’t been there for 46 years, but old friends of mine still live (or at least lived) in the town of Greenville, California, and now… well, it’s more or less gone, though they survived. The Dixie Fire, one of those devastating West Coast blazes, had already “blackened” 504 square miles of Northern California in what was still essentially[Read More…]
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released a very large, detailed and important document “Climate Change 2021. The physical science basis” that is prefaced by a detailed Summary for Policymakers (SPM) . Set out below for the benefit of busy readers is a summary and critique of this summary. In short, the SPM superbly sets out the science[Read More…]
On Aug 5 this month a news alert emerged from London that all is perilously unwell with North Atlantic waters. Two science writers lost no time to put out reports, Sarah Kaplan from Washington Post (WP) as a Breaking News and Jessica Corbett with her version in Science Daily. This writer wrote an initial muted response to Kaplan in WP’s[Read More…]
The new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released on August 9, 2021—the first of four that make up the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment report—reiterates in scientific language (it deals with the physical science basis of global warming) what we have already known for quite some time from scores of previous studies: humanity faces a climate emergency, global warming is[Read More…]
Experts weigh in on how to change the systems and behaviors leading us to catastrophe. One of the best-known features of the Amazon rainforest is that it is, well, wet. But increasingly researchers are wondering how much longer that will be true. About three decades ago, disquieting research began suggesting that the twin effects of deforestation and climate change could cause the[Read More…]
The latest report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Monday morning goes beyond all previous global scientific documents to definitively link human industrial and agricultural activity to climate change, and to link climate change to specific weather events like recent droughts, heat waves, storms and flooding. Some 234 scientists summarized the results of more than 14,000 separate[Read More…]
Written by Pep Canadell, Joelle Gergis, Malte Meinshausen, Mark Hemer, Michael Grose Earth has warmed 1.09℃ since pre-industrial times and many changes such as sea-level rise and glacier melt are now virtually irreversible, according to the most sobering report yet by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report also found escape from human-caused climate change is no longer[Read More…]
“The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.” A panel of leading scientists convened by the United Nations issued a comprehensive report Monday that contains a stark warning for humanity: The climate crisis is here, some of its[Read More…]
The world is on fire like never before: “Wildfires Have Erupted Across the Globe Scorching Places That Rarely Burned Before” (CNN headlines July 22, 2021) but not only is fire raging, Biblical floods are destroying entire communities, e.g. 9,000 homes swept away in central China (BBC News) as towns were nearly decimated in Germany, “Europe’s Deadly Floods Leave Scientists Stunned”[Read More…]
While heatwaves, fires, and floods produce warnings that “we are living in a climate emergency, here and now,” a scientific study suggested Thursday that a crucial Atlantic Ocean current system could collapse, which “would have severe impacts on the global climate system.” The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, focuses on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream. As the United[Read More…]
The dog days of summer are upon us —and the record high temperatures killing hundreds in the Pacific Northwest and bringing 118 degree heat to Siberia serve as a harbinger of even hotter, more dangerous days unless we address the elephant in the room. The Pentagon. As the largest institutional consumer of oil and, therefore, the largest single U.S. emitter of greenhouse[Read More…]
On July 21, I was walking in the forests surrounding the German Air Force Base at Büchel in the Eifel Mountains with three Catholic Worker friends, Susan van der Hijden of Amsterdam, Netherlands, Susan Crane of Redwood City, California, and Christiane Danowski of Dortmund, Germany. We were there at the end of an “International Week” of protests against the approximately[Read More…]
More than a year after the Covid-19 pandemic shut down economies around the world and sharply reduced worldwide travel—sparking speculation among some that emissions would plummet as a result—a coalition of scientists said in a paper published Wednesday that the planet is nonetheless reaching multiple “tipping points,” with levels of sea ice melt, deforestation, and other markers revealing that urgent action is[Read More…]
Climate modelling isn’t the only way of forecasting what our climate-changed world will look like by the century’s end and beyond. Indeed, the huge complexities and caveats involved in trying to build an accurate picture of a carbon-soaked planet from initial tenets, may not even make it the best. Instead, we can look back in time to periods in Earth’s 4.6[Read More…]
Cyprus. Cuba. Turkey. Canada. Northern Ireland. Antarctica. All recorded their hottest-ever temperatures in the last two years, and according to a new study, more such extremes are coming. A Reuters report said: In the next three decades, “record-shattering” heat waves could become two to seven times more frequent in the world than in the last 30 years, scientists report in[Read More…]
“Cloud research is a tricky business. Clouds sometimes have a warming effect on the local climate and sometimes a cooling effect — it all depends on the type of cloud, the local climate and a variety of other conditions. “One of the most fundamental questions about climate change is also one of the thorniest: How much, exactly, will the Earth[Read More…]
Less than three months before leaving office, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has openly conceded that the industrial world has failed to adequately fight climate change and that more rapid, pain-inducing steps were urgently needed. Media reports said: Merkel, who has led Europe’s largest economy and one of the world’s leading emitters of CO2 for the last 16 years, reflected on her own bitter experience.[Read More…]
A widespread heatwave has begun across the contiguous U.S., with at least 35 million people likely to see temperatures reach or exceed 100°F by the end of the week. Heat alerts are in place across at least 16 states in the south, midwest and western U.S. Media reports said: The hot weather, which comes courtesy of another heat dome building[Read More…]
Apocalypse is complete destruction of the world as described in some detail in the biblical book of Revelation. Nothing worse can happen to humanity. Interestingly, it has been a recurring aspect of civilization for over two thousand years but every prediction of “End Times” has failed. Yet, modern day society is proving that apocalypse has multiple possible outcomes. In fact,[Read More…]
The Keeling Curve continues to rise steadily Measurements of the carbon dioxide content of the earth’s atmosphere as a function of time have been made ever since 1958 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. The resulting graph is called the “Keeling Curve”, in honor of Charles David Keeling, who started the monitoring and continued it until his death in[Read More…]
Heavy rainfall that has triggered deadly and catastrophic flooding in several western European countries, is just the latest indicator that all nations need to do more to hold back climate change-induced disasters, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Friday. The UN agency said that countries including Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands had received up to two months’ rain[Read More…]
Severe thunderstorms and heavy rainfall have led to severe devastation and at least 93 fatalities so far in the German regions of Rhineland-Palatinate (50) and North Rhine-Westphalia (43). At least nine people have also been killed in Belgium. The actual death toll could be much higher. According to reports, 1,300 people are currently missing. On Friday morning, the Interior Minister[Read More…]
As California faces devastating drought the U.S. state’s governor Gavin Newsom has asked people and businesses to voluntarily cut their water use by 15%. The western U.S. weathers a devastating drought. Reservoirs across California, which are depended on for agriculture, drinking water and fish habitat, have dwindled to dangerously low levels and some counties have already enacted mandatory water restrictions. Agriculture and tourism could[Read More…]
In San Francisco, we’re finally starting to put away our masks. With 74% of the city’s residents over 12 fully vaccinated, for the first time in more than a year we’re enjoying walking, shopping, and eating out, our faces naked. So I was startled when my partner reminded me that we need to buy masks again very soon — N95 masks, that is. The California[Read More…]
As another heatwave hits the U.S. West this weekend, firefighters struggled to contain an exploding Northern California wildfire under blazing temperatures. On Friday, Death Valley National Park in California recorded a staggering high of 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54 Celsius) and could reach the same high on Saturday. If verified, the 130-degree reading would be the hottest high recorded there since[Read More…]
The historic heat wave that struck the Pacific Northwest and killed hundreds of people would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change,” an international team of climate researchers said in a new report. The World Weather Attribution’s analysis, published July 8, 2021, Wednesday, found that the record-setting heat that triggered wildfires and was linked to hundreds of deaths was a one-in-a-1,000-year event that “would have been[Read More…]
‘Runaway climate change (1) is not just a technical term in climatology, but a profound reflection of the catastrophic crisis we have reached. In recent years, India is experiencing a series of extreme weather events and finally the Ministry of Earth Sciences has released its first Climate Assessment report. Although hundreds of books and scientific articles published daily on the[Read More…]
It is well established that global warming (GW) is driving climate change (CC). Thinkers believe that in coming years, GW-CC will adversely affect societies and nations on a global scale like nothing before. Important among the IPCC-predicted long-term effects of GW-CC, as applicable to India, are: (1) Rise in sea level due to polar ice-melt, leading to coastal erosion or[Read More…]
There is enough scientific evidence that tells us that climate change impacts are very much tangible as well as ravaging. These impacts are not only restricted to floods, droughts, melting glaciers, extreme events but are also striking hard on some of the important components of our very existence viz water, transport, energy, ecosystem and human health. To quote The Intergovernmental[Read More…]
Our planet hasn’t seen temperatures this hot in fifteen million years, when the sea level was forty meters higher than it is today. This is just the opening salvo. As the American west is gripped by potentially the worst drought since algebra was invented 1,200 years ago and temperature records are once again shattered on a weekly basis, we are entering into unknown[Read More…]
The ‘heat dome’ over western Canada and parts of the U.S. Pacific northwest is taking its toll: Already hundreds of deaths. A Reuters report from Vancouver and Portland said: In Canada’s British Columbia, at least 486 sudden deaths were reported over five days, nearly three times the usual number that would occur in the province over that period, the B.C.[Read More…]
Yes, once upon a time I regularly absorbed science fiction and imagined futures of wonder, but mainly of horror. What else could you think, if you read H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds under the covers by flashlight while your parents thought you were asleep? Of course, that novel was a futuristic fantasy, involving as it did Martians arriving in London to[Read More…]
Extreme heatwave has hit the Canadian west coast and the northwest U.S. leading to scores of deaths. In areas, temperature rose to more than 46°C to more than 47°C. Media reports on the heat dome now covering the Pacific Northwest are telling hardship of people in the regions, melting of power cables, buckling of roads, and closure of schools, universities,[Read More…]
As the Pacific Northwest and southwestern Canada bake under what’s being described as a “once-in-a-millennium” heat dome, green groups on Monday reiterated the need for transformational change to address the climate emergency, while progressive U.S. lawmakers underscored the imperative for any infrastructure legislation to center climate action. Temperatures exceeded 110 degrees in Portland, Oregon for the second straight day—and the third consecutive record-setting day—on Monday, melting power[Read More…]
The record-breaking heat and intensifying drought engulfing the western U.S. right now are a stark reminder of how climate change is loading the weather dice against us. It’s making heatwaves hotter and longer, and droughts stronger. Yet, what we see today is just a fraction of what’s anticipated unless serious and immediate actions are taken to reduce carbon emissions. Last week,[Read More…]
The news does not get much worse than a recent scientific report that the planet is trapping twice as much heat as it did only 14 years ago. If this one report does not turn heads and create a sense of panic to get off fossil fuels, as soon as yesterday, then nothing will ever move the needle to fix[Read More…]
Climate crisis has pushed communities in Madagascar to the verge of starvation. The World Food Programme (WFP) says resources are scarce in the country after the worst drought in four decades. The WFP said more than a quarter of people are suffering in one area. And $78.6 million is needed to fight the crisis. Climate change is the driving force[Read More…]
Hunger, disease and drought will afflict tens of millions of more people within decades, warns a draft UN assessment that lays bare the dire human health consequences of a warming planet. “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems,” the report says. “Humans cannot.” The forthcoming 4,000-page draft report[Read More…]
Heat wave is scorching the U.S. West. More than 50 million people in eight U.S. states were under heat warnings Tuesday as the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) urged people to remain hydrated and stay indoors. A week of triple-digit temperatures made worse by climate crisis is forecast across much of the U.S. West this week, with records poised to fall[Read More…]
Coal is a hot issue in this energy-starved world. There is a drive to get out of coal for a better climate. But coal is coming back in Europe. A Bloomberg report said: “Europe is so short of natural gas that the continent — usually seen as the poster child for the global fight against emissions — is turning to[Read More…]
In 1992, a Canadian ecologist named William Rees coined the term “ecological footprint,” a measurement of how much any entity was impacting the planet’s ecology. A decade later, British Petroleum started promoting a new term: “carbon footprint.” In a splashy ad campaign, the company unveiled the first of its many carbon footprint calculators as a way for individuals to measure[Read More…]
New data released Monday showed atmospheric carbon dioxide reached a monthly average level of 419 parts per million in May, which is not only the maximum reading ever recorded since accurate measurements began 63 years ago but also the highest level the planet has experienced in over four million years. Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and[Read More…]
The International Energy Agency (IEA), a Paris-based affiliate of the Organisation for Economic Co-ordination and Development (OECD), has released a special report outlining various pathways to ensure a world with a net zero carbon emissions rate by 2050. The report, which is titled Net Zero by 2050, states that in order to achieve a carbon neutral world by that year producers[Read More…]
“(W)e haven’t even started to talk about what might be ‘possible’ and are still mostly arguing about what is ‘feasible without compromising economic growth.’ These are of course extremely different things, and the latter will not get us anywhere near the 1.5 degrees C target.” Damon Matthews Although last weeks court cases and shareholder battles have been (rightly) called a[Read More…]
A group of 126 Nobel laureates and other experts on Thursday called on the leaders of the G7 nations and the United Nations secretary-general to help put the global community on a path to establishing “a new relationship with the planet,” as the world continues to battle the Covid-19 pandemic and faces a coming decade which will be “decisive” in determining[Read More…]
“Net Zero by 2050” is the rallying cry of scientists and policymakers throughout the world. However, that epithet echoes past decades of climate change/global warming mitigation plans, one after another, all failures. The world’s continuing failure to come to grips with the dilemma led three notable climate scientists, deeply involved at the highest levels, to publicly ridicule past and future[Read More…]
We are still in the middle of recovering from Cyclone Tauktae on the western side of our long coast, even the rescue effort is still continuing at the time of writing, and now we have to also prepare for meeting the challenge of Cyclone Yaas on the eastern side. This is just one reflection, a dramatic one, of the wider[Read More…]
“Without quick action to curb CO2 emissions, global warming is likely to increase by 4 degrees Centigrade (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above today’s normal during the 21st century and that is dangerously close to the temperature of 6 degrees Centigrade above normal that initiated the Permian-Triassic extinction event 252 million years ago when 96% of all marine species and 70% of[Read More…]
Our Planet, Our Future is the title of the 2021 Nobel Prize Summit. As a follow up to that summit, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently published Our Planet, Our Future: An Urgent Call for Action d/d April 29th 2021. The opening paragraph of the Nobel Laureate declaration implicitly calls for immediate unified worldwide action: “The first[Read More…]
A new research led by scientists at UC Irvine and Boston University, published in Nature Climate Change (Jonathan A. Wang, Alessandro Baccini, Mary Farina, James T. Randerson, Mark A. Friedl, Disturbance suppresses the aboveground carbon sink in North American boreal forests, Nature Climate Change, 2021; DOI: 10.1038/s41558-021-01027-4 ) suggests that all the new green biomass is not as large a[Read More…]
The recent pledges made by governments to limit carbon emissions will not be sufficient to meet the goal of keeping global temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius, claims a new report. Instead, those nonbinding commitments will result in a rise in the average global temperature to a potentially catastrophic 2.4 degrees Celsius. The Climate Action Tracker (CAT), an independent[Read More…]
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revealed new standards on Tuesday, May 4, 2021 for what an average or “normal” U.S. climate looks like, showing average temperatures in the U.S. rising significantly. Shifting the baseline for normal temperatures highlights just how quickly climate crisis is affecting conditions on Earth. Updating these standards is important for helping shape government[Read More…]
It is becoming increasingly clear that the most powerful and influential forces in the world are increasingly building a consensus around an approach to checking climate change which is centered on basically retaining the existing economic systems with all their distortions and inequalities. In particular excessive consumerism( based of course on excessive energy generation) of a significant section of the[Read More…]
Covering Climate Now, CCNow, is a consortium of publications and journalists dedicated to better climate journalism; I’m a climate activist not a climate journalist but I subscribe to the CCNow newsletter as a good source of climate news as well as an insight to the world of climate journalism. In the April 21st edition I found a link to ‘what[Read More…]
Chamoli April 23, 2021. Uttarakhand’s Chamoli District suffered flash flood yet again. [Ref.1] The previous one was on February 7, 2021. Both took sudden and huge toll of human and animal life and economic loss, including destroying infrastructure of dams and roads. Both occurred because of avalanches possibly triggered by glacier-dam burst. This writer argues that the avalanches were both[Read More…]
File Photo: China and the US have rediscovered a common interest in battling climate change. Photograph: Paul J Richards/AFP/Getty Images China’s Xi Jinping to attend Joe Biden’s climate summit is a major, welcome news that comes amid continued anti- China stance of the Biden administration. Virtual summit on April 22 Thursday will be the first meeting between the two leaders[Read More…]
Written by Aoife Daly, Pernilla Leviner and Rebecca Thorburn Stern Even before Greta Thunberg launched her school strike for climate when she was 15-year-old, youth activists have been key players in public action on the climate crisis. Now they are breaking new ground in court. On November 30, 2020, six Portuguese children and young people brought a historic court case[Read More…]
A climate summit is going to begin. Ahead of the summit, the World Meteorological Organization released a report on April 19, 2021, which has warned: Time is fast running out. The report – State of the Global Climate 2020 – finds that concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG) continued to climb in 2020, despite lockdowns imposed to slow the present pandemic.[Read More…]
Honourable Prime Minister of Bangladesh Madam Shaikh Hasina, Honourable Prime Minister of Bhutan Dr Lotay Tshering, Honourable Prime Minister of India Shri Narendra Modi, We, the South Asian People’s Action on Climate Crisis (SAPACC), a rainbow coalition of climate, ecology and rights groups from across South Asia, welcome the fact that you will be participating in the “Virtual Summit[Read More…]
The 21st century serves as an inflection point of acceleration of climate instability caused by human-generated greenhouse gases, as CO2 emissions increase well beyond the rate of the prior century. It’s also a defining timeline of an astonishing ice mass loss rate of 500% more than the last decade of the previous century. Throughout human history, this has never happened[Read More…]
Study warns of grave consequences for agriculture and economy, affecting over one billion people. If global warming continues unchecked, summer monsoon rainfall in India will become stronger and more erratic. This is the central finding of an analysis by a team of German researchers that compared more than 30 state-of-the-art climate models from all around the world. The study predicts[Read More…]
At a time when the world is already in the middle of a serious survival crisis, it is a matter of deep concern that most responses to crisis situations are narrow responses which cannot go very far as, while trying to respond to a part of the crisis, they fail to look at the whole and at best can make[Read More…]
Extreme drought may be going to hit across the Western U.S. Some scientists saying the region is on the precipice of permanent drought. In 2000, the Western U.S. entered the beginning of what scientists call a megadrought — the second worst in 1,200 years — triggered by a combination of a natural dry cycle and human-caused climate change. The U.S.[Read More…]
This is an important year for climate change negotiations and climate change diplomacy is picking up fast, with an important virtual meeting called by US President of several world leaders scheduled for April 22. What is absolutely clear is that climate change mitigation and adaptation are among the most important challenges before humanity, and all countries, all people should try[Read More…]
Grandiose plans to cool Earth, saving the planet from overheating by utilizing low-tech balloon flights sprinkling particles into the atmosphere to reflect solar radiation back into outer space have been delayed, nobody knows for sure when, or if, it’ll proceed. The planet-cooling scheme referred to as Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment aka: SCoPEx headed by Harvard professor Fran Keutsch hopes to[Read More…]
A new study projecting the amount of heat stress residents of the South Asia region will experience in the future finds with 2 degrees Celsius of warming, the population’s exposure to heat stress will nearly triple. Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will likely reduce that impact by half, but deadly heat stress will become commonplace across South Asia, according[Read More…]
Australia’s east coast is being hit by record rainfall, with flood warnings issued and a natural disaster declared for parts of New South Wales (NSW), Australia’s most populous state with 8 million people. The flooding comes in stark contrast with the devastating bushfires that struck Australia in late 2019 and early 2020, when nearly 7% of NSW land was scorched.[Read More…]
Here’s one of the things I now do every morning. I go to the online Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center and check out the figures there — global coronavirus cases and deaths, U.S. coronavirus cases and deaths. And I do so the way that, not so long ago, I would have opened the sports pages and checked out the latest scores of[Read More…]
This year 2021 is widely regarded as an important year for climate change negotiations. The more obvious reason for this is of course that the 26th Conference of Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change could not be held as per schedule last year due to Covid related factors and is now scheduled to be convened in[Read More…]
“(T)he most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” David Foster Wallace Bill Gates has both a new book and education campaign on mitigating climate change. Mr. Gates personifies successful, transforming innovation. His book is just coming out now but he has been following the evolution of our climate problem[Read More…]
CNBC recently produced a 17-min video about direct air capture (DAC) and corporations, specifically big oil, funding R&D operations. The video discusses the basic technology, as well as some pitfalls. Direct air capture is in early stages of developing technology to remove atmospheric CO2. (Source: Money is Pouring Into Carbon Capture Tec, But Challenges Remain, CNBC, March 3, 2021) By[Read More…]
A recent UN Assessment, as of February 26th 2021, regarding progress or lack thereof by the 195 nations to the Paris 2015 climate agreement is starting to look like a big bust. As described in the report, nations are not meeting their voluntary commitments to decrease carbon emissions, especially based upon the Paris ‘15 goals to decelerate CO2 emissions of[Read More…]
Warnings by leading climate scientists regarding the high sensitivity of the atmosphere in response to abrupt compositional changes, such as near-doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations, are now manifest: According to Wallace Broecker, (the “father” of climate science) “The paleoclimate record shouts out to us that, far from being self-stabilizing, the Earth’s climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts to even small[Read More…]
Big companies are finding profit in carbon offsets market. “The value of the global market for carbon emissions offsets,” writes Frank Watson (Global carbon offsets market could be worth $200 billion by 2050: Berenberg, 13 May 2020 https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/natural-gas/051320-global-carbon-offsets-market-could-be-worth-200-bil-by-2050-berenberg) “could increase to $200 billion by 2050, German bank Berenberg said in a note”. Frank Watson writes: “Although now relatively small, the[Read More…]
It is very sad that many reports of repression of climate activists are being received from several parts of world at such an early stage of climate activism. Even a very quick net search would reveal several recent instances from Brazil, Chile, Kenya, India , Russia and other countries. These are reports where climate activism is directly mentioned. But if[Read More…]
AN OVER-HEATED PLANET, UNCONTROLLED HUMAN POPULATION & COVID-19 A triad of intersecting world-wide pandemics simultaneously threatening humanity today are the end results of its own insatiable greedy human desire for endless, unchecked growth. Ugly, profit-based, commercial development, unimaginative high-rise towers or mega-social housing projects continue to destroy everything in their wake in an impossible attempt to try to accommodate the[Read More…]
Slowing the pace of climate change and getting “tough” on China, especially over its human-rights abuses and unfair trade practices, are among the top priorities President Biden has announced for his new administration. Evidently, he believes that he can tame a rising China with harsh pressure tactics, while still gaining its cooperation in areas of concern to Washington. As he wrote in Foreign Affairs during the[Read More…]
It is very, very sad that young climate activists are being victimized at an incipient stage of the movement in India. This is one of the relatively new movements and there are understandably some uncertainties regarding the exact course of action and the stand to be taken on certain issues, but one thing which is absolutely certain is that this[Read More…]
Media reports from U.S. said: The slow-moving winter disaster pummeling Texas that began with snow, ice and widespread blackouts is now moving into a new phase: A dire lack of food and fresh water. Millions do not have safe water at home, and residents looking for groceries or bottled water said they arrived to stores with bare shelves and long[Read More…]
Texas’s freeze entered a sixth day on Thursday. At least 31 people have died as of Wednesday afternoon as a result of the severe weather in Texas. But some media reports said, days of glacial weather have left at least 38 people dead in the U.S. The snow made many roads impassable, disrupted coronavirus vaccine distribution and blanketed nearly three-quarters[Read More…]
Texans are freezing to death because of Republican greed. Decades ago, corporations paid off politicians to support the deregulation of the Texas energy market and limit federal oversight of the state’s energy grid. As a result of the latest climate catastrophe, so many Texans lost sewer and water service for days. Their water pipes burst. Many apartment complexes have become[Read More…]
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and comprehensive summaries of the peer-reviewed literature raise questions regarding the assumptions inherent in computer modelling of future climate changes, including the supposed linearity of future global temperature trends (Figure 1). Computer modelling does not necessarily capture the sensitivity, complexity and feedbacks of the atmosphere-ocean-land system as observed from paleoclimate studies. Underlying published[Read More…]
Last year will be remembered for many things, and let’s be honest: most of them will be bad. But amidst the hardship and suffering, there is a positive story to be told. 2020 was perhaps the first time in living memory when governments around the world took radical action to put the interests of public health and wellbeing above that[Read More…]
If you live in California, you’re likely to be consumed on occasion by thoughts of fire. That’s not surprising, given that, in last year alone, actual fires consumed over four and a quarter million acres of the state, taking with them 10,488 structures, 33 human lives, and who knows how many animals. By the end of this January, a month never before[Read More…]
The world’s ice is melting so fast that sea level rise predictions cannot keep up. The ice melting is faster today than in the mid-1990s, new research suggests, as climate crisis nudges global temperatures ever higher. In the 1990s, the Earth’s ice was melting at a rate of about 760 billion tons per year. That has surged 60 percent to[Read More…]
Throughout the world, scientists are speaking out like never before. They’re talking about an emergency situation of the health of the planet threatening “complex life,” including, by default, human life. It’s scary stuff. On this subject, America’s green NGOs prefer to address the danger by sticking to a middle ground, don’t scare people, too much doom and gloom backfires, turns[Read More…]
It is hard to think of a more Orwellian expression than that describing the increase in toxic atmospheric methane gas as “gas-led recovery.” Several of the large mass extinctions of species in the geological past are attributed to an increase in atmospheric methane (CH₄), raising the temperature of the atmosphere and depriving the oceans from oxygen. Nowadays a serious danger to the[Read More…]
Early this new year, the Alliance of World Scientists (13,700 strong) delivered a biting report, not mincing words: “Scientists now find that catastrophic climate change could render a significant portion of the Earth uninhabitable consequent to continued high emissions, self-reinforcing climate feedback loops and looming tipping points.” (Source: William J. Ripple, et al, The Climate Emergency: 2020 in Review, Scientific[Read More…]
Ceasefire in our suicidal war against nature Here are some quotations from a December 2, 2020 article by Justin Rowlatt entitled “Humans waging suicidal war on nature – UN chief Antonio Guterres”: “Humanity is waging what he describes as a suicidal war on the natural world. “Nature always strikes back, and is doing so with gathering force and fury, he[Read More…]
Keeping in view the importance of checking climate change , all sectors must contribute to he reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. In this context the extremely important contribution which the food and agriculture sector can make was underestimated initially but more and more research is now indicating that the contribution of this sector can extremely important. In fact if all[Read More…]
Climate change has emerged as one of the most critical problems of our times. Its disrupting impacts on farming and related activities is already being felt by farmers, pastorals and others in the form of highly erratic weather, extremes of weather and rise in the intensity and frequency of various disasters. Hence two big questions arise—How can farmers make an[Read More…]
Climate change is a global issue but we should not forget that the impacts of climate change are highly localized. Most policies around water and irrigation issues are poorly informed by science and evidence, often leading to implementation failure. More importantly, these programs focus on getting things out, but the real challenge is in getting things to the right people[Read More…]
Global warming is the biggest challenge of all time. It impacts every living species. However, the inherent dangers are very difficult to comprehend, as such, people brush it off as one more issue in life that will somehow be handled, fixed, no worries, human ingenuity will prevail. But, what if it’s not that simple? Stuart Scott, executive producer of Facing[Read More…]
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein. As the world is trying to hopefully recover from the tragic effects of COVID-19, it is reminded there is no vaccine for the existential threat for its life support systems posed by global warming, nor for the looming threats of future wars and[Read More…]
Although sea levels are rising due to the climate crisis and threatening near-coastal infrastructures, higher temperatures in other areas are having exactly the opposite effect. The water levels are falling and causing massive problems. The consequences are equally serious. But the declining water levels are receiving less attention according to Matthias Prange, Thomas Wilke of the Justus Liebig University in[Read More…]
Every one of the world’s coral reefs could bleach by the end of the century, unless there are drastic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has warned. Coral reefs are incredibly important and sustain a wide variety of marine life. They also protect coastlines from erosions from waves and storms, sink carbon and nitrogen and help[Read More…]
Looking back at the climate change movements for the past couple of decades, it is easier to notice the role of governments and corporations of the Industrial era, in triggering the massive climate change effect. When it comes to main causes of climate change and global warming, more than often, fossil fuels, chemical affluent and pollutants are the usual suspects.[Read More…]
“Climate change is posing one of the greatest threats to our existence on the planet Earth. It is real, and we need to panic.” It has already been five years since 196 countries signed Paris Agreement, but we are still miles away from the target of limiting global warming to well below 2 (preferably 1.5) degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial[Read More…]
Am I doing my part in protecting the environment? Am I entirely aware of how to do the required? Are the government’s policies in favour of the protection of the environment or corporate-driven? Is media bringing the relevant environmental issues in front of me? These are just a few questions, and there are many more which come in our mind[Read More…]
“The story of methane really is a story of a very serious definitive threat to our future existence on this planet.” (Peter Wadhams) Legendary Arctic explorers Sir James Clark Ross, who located the northern magnetic pole in 1831 and Sir William Edward Parry, who set a record in 1827 for the Farthest North exploration serve as footnotes in the context[Read More…]
Ed Yong is a very insightful science journalist. In an article published in The Atlantic in September Yong lists what he calls nine errors of intuition, conceptual errors that still hamstring the US pandemic response. Remarkably many of Yong’s errors of intuition offer valuable insight into the global failure to enact effective climate mitigation. The successful and not very successful[Read More…]
Climate change truly is a global phenomenon whose ripple effects remain invisible to even the most well-read and educated. Part of the challenge is in understanding how an activity as simple as burning coal to generate electricity in India can have ramifications for the icecaps and glaciers in the Arctic. The human mind simply cannot fathom these far-reaching implications. We[Read More…]
The United Nations Environment Program’s (UNEP) emissions gap report – Emissions Gap Report 2020 – released on December 9 warns: Despite a brief dip in carbon dioxide emissions caused by the pandemic, the world is still heading for a temperature rise of 3.2°C this century. The report published at the end of every year measures national commitments to reduce emissions[Read More…]
“I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round…” John Lennon “Regain a sense of wonderous awe at the miracle of creation and work tirelessly to protect and restore nature’s splendor.” Dr. Glen Barry Look out the window, any window, and behold portends of the end of being. The very ecological fabric of being is unraveling. Disease, famine,[Read More…]
Climate Change: National Geographic defines climate change as “the long-term alteration of temperature and typical weather patterns”. The major cause of climate change is accumulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in Earth’s atmosphere. Human activity like burning of fossil fuels can be attributed to the recent increase in GHG emissions. There have been many international efforts for a coordinated response to[Read More…]
Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion/XR recently interviewed Peter Carter, M.D., who has the distinguished title – Expert IPCC Reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The interview was conducted to get to the bottom of what science says about the state of affairs, specifically the health of the planet. The following is a video link to that brilliant[Read More…]
Erich Fromm, the renowned German-Jewish social psychologist who was forced to flee his homeland in the early 1930s as the Nazis came to power, offered a disturbing insight later in life on the relationship between society and the individual. In the mid-1950s, his book The Sane Society suggested that insanity referred not simply to the failure by specific individuals to[Read More…]
In what critics are calling a parting gift to the fossil fuel industry, the Trump administration on Tuesday will ask oil and gas companies to choose which areas of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska—which is the sacred homeland of the Gwich’in Indigenous people—they would like to drill. The Washington Post reports the administration’s call for nominations is a key part of a rush[Read More…]
Record Numbers of War-Displaced to Be Dwarfed by Those Driven From Their Homes by Climate Change I saw them for only a few seconds. One glimpse and they were gone. The young woman wore a brown headwrap, a yellow short-sleeved shirt, and a long pink, red, and blue floral-patterned skirt. She held the reins of the donkey pulling her rust-pink[Read More…]
Scientists and science-informed activists say that to save the Planet there must be rapid cessation of fossil fuel exploitation, but oil, coal and gas use continue to rise. America and its lackeys Australia and Canada are variously committed to gas and a disastrous coal to gas transition (gas can be dirtier than coal greenhouse gas-wise). Pro-fossil fuels Trump has been[Read More…]
Mammals, birds and amphibians worldwide have lost on average 18% of their natural habitat range as a result of changes in land use and climate change, finds a new study. The scientists estimate that species have lost an average of 18% of their natural habitat range sizes thus far, and may lose up to 23% by 2100. The study (Robert[Read More…]
A notable satellite-telephonic call to colleagues in late October from Swedish scientist Örjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University briefly described a haunting discovery. On board the research ship R/V Akademik Keldysh, a 6,240-ton Russian scientific research vessel equipped with 17 on-board laboratories and a library, far off the coast of Russia, Dr. Gustafsson reported: “This East Siberian slope methane hydrate system[Read More…]
The U.S. has officially left the Paris climate agreement. However, the permanence of its departure hangs on the still-uncertain outcome of Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election. While President Donald Trump made the decision to withdraw the U.S. from the agreement, his rival former Vice President Joe Biden has promised to rejoin “on day one,” as NPR pointed out. Either way, the U.S. withdrawal has hurt trust in[Read More…]
Mega-droughts, droughts that last two decades or longer, are tipped to increase, finds a new research. The finding came after an analysis of geological records from the Eemian Period – 129,000 to 116,000 years ago – which offered a proxy of what we could expect in a hotter, drier world. The research (Hamish McGowan, Micheline Campbell, John Nikolaus Callow, Andrew[Read More…]
Soil has the capacity to bind large quantities of carbon in the long term. An international team of researchers, including from the University of Bonn, is now advocating effective use of this potential. Experts estimate that this could reduce the increase of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by a third. At the same time, agricultural yields in[Read More…]
This has been the year of fire. Across continents and climates, uncontrollable and destructive wildfires are becoming an expected part of annual calendars. This year has been a case in point. From the 45 million acres scorched during Australia’s 2019-2020 fire season to the record amount of carbon dioxide released from wildfires in Siberia (half of which burned on carbon-rich peatland), wildfires have gone[Read More…]
Twenty-five percent (25%) of the Northern Hemisphere is permafrost. By all appearances, it is melting well beyond natural background rates, in fact, substantially! Making matters much, much worse, new research has identified past warming events of large-scale permafrost thaw in the Arctic that may be analogous to today, thus spotting a parallel problem of large-scale thawing accompanied by massively excessive[Read More…]
I would regard anyone as my leader a) whom I have met personally, b) with whom I work or interact directly face to face on a more or less daily basis c) has proved themselves friendly, kind, sympathetic, compassionate and giving. I only trust someone who demonstrates behaviour in accordance with the positive human virtues and eschews negative actions. They[Read More…]
Flames from forest fire in Ras el-Harf village, in the Baabda district, Lebanon: An aerial picture. Hundreds of massive wildfires ravaged parts of the Middle East over the weekend, forcing thousands to flee their homes. The wildfires triggered by a heat wave hitting the region have killed three people, and detonated landmines along the Lebanon-Israel border. The areas hit by the[Read More…]
Our Homo sapiens reality is that global warming, if it continues at the current rate, could trigger a sixth planetary extinction. Unlike past extinctions, this one will not be brought on by a random meteorite/asteroid strike or a convulsive planetary volcanic eruption. It will be self-inflicted; the result of Biosphere degradation because of our use of fossil fuels. CO2 in[Read More…]
Two time scales The central problem which the world faces in its attempts to avoid catastrophic climate change is a contrast of time scales. In order to save human civilization and the biosphere from the most catastrophic effects of climate change we need to act immediately, Fossil fuels must be left in the ground. Forests must be saved from destruction[Read More…]
Global warming is ravaging forests throughout the world. “New studies show drought and heat waves will cause massive die-offs, killing most trees alive today.” (Source: We Need to Hear These Poor Trees Scream: Unchecked Global Warming Means Big Trouble for Forests, Inside Climate News, April 25, 2020) According to Bill Anderegg, a forest researcher at the University of Utah: “Global[Read More…]
In December of 2019, my best friend Kit took me and my partner to the place where she grew up, in the remote Thora Valley, in the pristine forested foothills of Eastern Australia’s Great Dividing Range. As we drove down Darkwood, the single road into the Thora, Kit told us stories of floods and mouldy houses, of Christmases spent at[Read More…]
Here are two comments regarding what we must do regarding the threat to our species’ continued existence being posed currently by global warming; here’s the first one: The primary reason for this headlong fling toward disaster is that our economic system is based on perpetual growth—on the need to consume the earth at an ever-increasing rate. Our world is dominated[Read More…]
Against the Institution of War As we start the 21st century and the new millennium, our scientific and technological civilization seems to be entering a period of crisis. Today, for the first time in history, science has given to humans the possibility of a life of comfort, free from hunger and cold, and free from the constant threat of infectious[Read More…]
The World Wildlife Foundation, in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London, recently issued an eye-popping description of the forces of humanity versus life in nature, the Living Planet Report 2020, but the report should really be entitled the Dying Planet Report 2020 because that’s what’s happening in the real world. Not much remains alive. The report, released September 10th, describes how[Read More…]
Arctic sea ice reached a minimum extent of 3.74 million square kilometers on September 15, likely the annual low, and the second lowest minimum on record. The orange line represents average extent of sea ice from 1981 to 2010 on that day. (NSIDC) Arctic sea ice extent fell to the second-lowest annual minimum on record last week, a status that[Read More…]
In my “Changing Our Species Name” I question Homo sapiens as an appropriate name for our species, and suggest an alternative that I believe to be more appropriate. The reason that I give in that paper is not the only reason, however, for changing our species name; in this paper I suggest another reason. Let me preface my remarks here,[Read More…]
Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus [1707 – 1778], known as the “father of modern taxonomy,” is the individual who can be credited with giving our species the name Homo sapiens. The “sapiens” in that species name indicates that we: are highly intelligent primates that have become the dominant species on Earth. Actually, however, “sapiens” is “a Latin word meaning wise;” and[Read More…]
Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction (published in 2014) reminds us that mass extinctions are not a novelty in Earth history;[1] and also that there have been some survivors of each of the five mass extinctions of the geological past. In fact, primates were survivors of the last (i.e., fifth) mass extinction—termed the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, and having occurred about 66[Read More…]
A new Arctic is emerging. The regions landscape is changing rapidly. Temperatures are skyrocketing, sea ice is dwindling and many experts believe the far north is quickly transforming into something unrecognizable. This week, new research confirms that a new Arctic climate system is emerging. A new Arctic will be warmer, rainier and substantially less frozen. Animals that used to be common may[Read More…]
Satellite images show that two important glaciers in the Antarctic are sustaining rapid damage at their most vulnerable points, leading to the breaking up of vital ice shelves with major consequences for global sea level rise. In recent years, the Pine Island Glacier and the Thwaites Glacier on West Antarctica has been undergoing rapid changes, with potentially major consequences for[Read More…]
Human calamities abound. The unrelenting coronavirus pandemic has already claimed more than 900,000 lives worldwide. The images of exploding wildfires from the American Southwest—California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington—look apocalyptic. Racial injustice and inequity in the United States marches on. And, the economic suffering?—painful. In this moment of so much death and suffering—do we even have the capacity to extend our[Read More…]
In my new book I examine an area of our thought process that is the primary cause of our extinction possibility today; the dark neurotic psychotic side of the human brain. XXXX That “dark side” is driven by a self-serving dynamic. We allow it to enrapture us. It can turn us against each other. We have been and continue to[Read More…]
I am one of those who did not obtain help to fix the house. I am living in it because I am not the owner of the house I’ve been living in for six years, and without documents I could not obtain help to repair it. Staying here in these conditions is not easy. But since I have my daughter[Read More…]
Countries in the Asia Pacific region are in the forefront of bearing the onslaught of climate change. During the last three decades 45% of the world’s natural disasters have occurred in this region, which is vulnerable to floods, cyclones, earthquakes, droughts, storms and tsunamis. While climate change affects everyone but impacts of climate change related events are not gender neutral.[Read More…]
One of the few rays of hopeful sunshine in the UK’s currently bleak political landscape is the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill. In fact, I feel like it is such a vitally important development that I want to use this article to urge you to get behind it, while also offering a rather different perspective on why I feel it matters[Read More…]
Since the turn of the new century, every aspect of climate change has gone ballistic, up, up, and away, not looking back, leaving the 20th century fairly harmless, but only on a relative basis, especially as compared to the rip-snorting 21st century. It’s a whole new ballgame, starting with this new century. Society is witnessing a great acceleration of climate[Read More…]
Greenland’s ice sheet, — the world’s second-largest ice body, would continue to lose ice even if global temperatures stop rising, and it may have passed a point of no return, setting it on an irreversible path to complete disappearance, according to scientists at Ohio State University. Snowfall that normally replenishes Greenland’s glaciers each year can no longer keep up with[Read More…]
Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes in Death Valley National Park. Temperatures in Death Valley in the U.S. skyrocketed to a blistering 130°F (54.4-degree Celsius) on Sunday. Possibly, it is the highest mercury reading on Earth since 1913. If the National Weather Service’s recording is correct, it would also be among the top-three highest temperatures to have ever been measured in Death[Read More…]
Two million Californians experienced rolling blackouts Friday night after officials declared a Stage 3 energy emergency due to a statewide heat wave. The last time California was in a Stage 3 emergency was in 2001. At that time, the state was in the middle of a very different type of energy crisis – and the governor lost his job over[Read More…]
When the complaint was lodged in May 2019, there was a sense of the audacious about it. Eight Torres Strait Islanders had taken the trouble to petition the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Committee, citing climate change and Australian violations as their main concern. Australia, they claimed, had violated their fundamental rights under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.[Read More…]
NASA satellite images of fires in eastern Siberia depict an inferno of monstrous proportions, nothing in modern history compares. And, as of July, it’s intensifying. Should people be concerned? Answer: Yes, and double yes. According to Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts: “What has been surprising[Read More…]
The recently launched ‘Towards a Better World’ campaign by Medha Patkar, conceived by Eco-Socialism Front and in the online presence of half a dozen activists from different countries representing Fridays for Future campaign of Greta Thunberg advocates taking small steps to achieve a more equitable society. It talks about contributing to economic, political and societal change through a personal commitment,[Read More…]
Australia has done vastly better than other rich European countries in the Covid-19 pandemic because (a) it is a large island that accordingly could readily minimize Covid-19 importation, and (b) while notoriously anti-science over climate change, Australia’s neoliberal government chose in this instance to listen to the health experts. However an Australian Senate Covid-19 Inquiry noted but declined to publish[Read More…]
It’s no surprise that first prize, or the blue ribbon, for exceeding 2°C above baseline goes to the Arctic with permafrost that covers 25% of the Northern Hemisphere. Recognition is long overdue, as it’s been totally neglected far too long by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This crucial nugget of knowledge comes by way of a recent virtual[Read More…]
“It’s time the government told the public about the impact climate change will have on our future and the economy.” Katta O’Donnell, The Guardian, Jul 24, 2020 While coronavirus ravages life, dominates policy and clouds debate, that other pressing issue of addressing climate change has moved into a more modest gear. That has not prevented some bubbling activity from taking[Read More…]
Human-caused carbon emissions islikely to trigger irreversible damage to the planet, according to a comprehensive international study released Wednesday. Researchers studying one of the most important and vexing topics in climate science — how sensitive the Earth’s climate is to a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — found that warming is extremely unlikely to be[Read More…]
Planetary heat is turning skeptics into climate change worrywarts with record temperatures galore! But wait, the worst is yet to come. It’s guaranteed, as future heat is already locked and loaded into the vast climate system. It’s the inertia bugaboo. Today, we’re living with yesteryear’s carbon emissions from the turn of the century. Meantime, the next decade and a half[Read More…]
As the pandemic continues to dominate public politics around the world, a single number – the reproduction rate (R) – has become the focus of policy-making and public communication. Keeping R below 1.0 appears to be the primary objective of public health policy. In the case of climate change the number 2°C (or 1.5°C) operates in a similar way. And[Read More…]
Indians are about 1 in 6 of the world’s people and how the World faces the existential threats of nuclear weapons and climate change, in addition to over-population, biodiversity loss and resource depletion, will impact India and vice versa. India needs to urgently stop population growth, biodiversity loss and loss of arable land. While the Developed World must embark on[Read More…]
Introduction Birds are chirping, highways have quieted, rush hour traffic follows easily, airports have been shut down, smog has disappeared, reviving sunny and blue skies. COVID-19 has left this earth with dramatic drops in air pollution and a hope to solve the climate crisis by putting a halt to several harmful practices. It has drastically changed life on a global[Read More…]
With the humans locked up inside, the past few months of Corona-pandemic have given us a world with nature reclaiming its space. The reduced levels of air-pollution have given a chance to rare-sighted mountains and peaks to reveal themselves to populations where their visibility had become folktales, only to be shared by elders as memories of yester years. AQI in[Read More…]
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…]
Climate strike has kicked off on Friday 20 September across continents. Millions of people and students from Sydney to Delhi and Melbourne to London and New York have marched/are marching for urgent action on climate crisis. Students and citizens of different ages and from different occupations have joined the strike in hundred of cities. Many mobilizations of people in cities[Read More…]
From August 31 this year, a part of the media and social media was abuzz with a supposed oracle of some scientists. Headings like: “We Cannot Fight Climate Change With Capitalism, Says Report,” “A dire new report reveals our capitalist economic system may not be up to the task of dealing with the climate disasters to come”, “This is how[Read More…]
The science of Climate Change has come to be well established. Predictive models indicate its dangers to the existence and survival of the future generations. While future technologies can arrest the dangers and reduce the pace of increase of atmospheric CO2, it has already crossed the alarm level of 408 PPM much above the acceptable limit of 350 PPM. Yet[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…]
Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement was by no means a surprise. For, the US has always been seeking to subvert the multilateral, global initiatives to address the vexing global problems. Those who express surprise at the US withdrawal seem to be unaware that the US was not a Party to the Kyoto Protocol, the global accord under[Read More…]
Climate criminal Australia is among world leaders in per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, climate change inaction, and in exports of coal, gas, iron ore and methanogenically-derived meat. However the Finkel Review chaired by Australia’s Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel advocates continued gas and coal use for over 50 years, and utterly ignores the worsening climate emergency, the worsening[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…]
Trump’s action withdrawing US from the Paris accord on climate change calls for outright condemnation. It should be opposed without letup. This US action is not new. His predecessors had taken almost the same attitude towards Kyoto Protocol like earlier agreements also. Imperialism means plunder and wars for plunder. No doubt, world public opinion should be created and intensified uninterruptedly[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.
It is known scientifically that the Earth System, or Gaia if you will, is organized and functions similarly to other scales of biology, including organisms and old-growth forests. Gaia is a self-regulating, reproducing life-form, and as such is alive. As industrial human growth destroys Gaia’s naturally evolved ecosystem organs, the human family is failing to embrace a rich and truthful[Read More…]
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…]
Maybe not now. But that’s what he could well become. Pope Francis’ Encyclical “On Care for Our Common Home” recognizes the incredible damage being done to climate change and biodiversity. Few realize how strong his beliefs are and the unused power of persuasion he has. Here’s 10 ways that power could be used. 1. Francis could call for a[Read More…]
Not since World War II have more human beings been at risk from disease and starvation than at this very moment. On March 10th, Stephen O’Brien, under secretary-general of the United Nations for humanitarian affairs, informed the Security Council that 20 million people in three African countries—Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan—as well as in Yemen were likely to die if not provided[Read More…]
Today is Ambedkar Jayanti. It would be appropriate to take a re-look at Ambedkar’s idea of nationalism in the face of virulent Hindutva nationalism in India and also on the global context
Are you confused about climate change/global warming: is it real, or is it fake news? And if it is real, what can be done about it? I have just published (April 2017) a peer-reviewed article on this subject and what we can do about it in the (relatively new) journal “Class, Race and Corporate Power” on this very subject, and[Read More…]
Will we experience a Methane (CH4) Hydrate Feedback Loop that will place us on a repeat path like that of the Permian Triassic mass extinction? Or, to our horror, will there be some other self-induced something even more horrific and impossible to reverse? “Biosphere” is a term used to define the relatively thin layer of the earth’s surface that[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…]
A metamorphosis of the human mind far surpassing others seen throughout history will be occurring. Humans finally will have come to an understanding of a harsh reality; by their own actions and inactions they have brought on the beginning of their end. A painful lesson will have been learned, one forcing them to accept the fact that their continued existence[Read More…]
With climate deniers sweeping into the White House, it’s time for scientists on the front lines of climate change to speak from the heart. I’m afraid to publish this article. Why? Because I’m a climate scientist who speaks out about climate change, and in speaking out I may be risking my career. But I do so anyway, out of love—love[Read More…]
Distortion? False information? Conspiracy theories? Hacked email? Climate scientists have known all this for decades. What can be learned from their rich experience with climate propaganda. The world is slowly waking up. “Post-truth” was declared the word of the year 2016 by the Oxford Dictionaries. Finally, people start to widely appreciate how dangerous the epidemic of fake news is for[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…]
OVERVIEW The Amundsen Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has most likely been destabilized and ice retreat is unstoppable for the current conditions. No further acceleration in climate change is necessary to trigger the collapse of the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet on decadal time scales. Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than a metre[Read More…]
Defeats are supposed to teach people how to do better; in theory. In practice, it often happens that defeats teach people how to become masters in blame-shifting. With some exceptions, this seems to have been the main result of the recent defeat of the Democrats in the 2016 presidential election, where we saw a truly spasmodic search for culprits: Putin,[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…]
Our window of time to act on climate may be shrinking even faster than previously thought. We may only have one year remaining before we lock in 1.5ºC of warming—the ideal goal outlined in the Paris climate agreement—after which we’ll see catastrophic and irreversible climate shifts, many experts have warned. That’s according to the ticking carbon budget clock created by[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…]
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should resign. That’s laughable presently. The Trudeau government is still enjoying an extra long honeymoon; Canadians are still as happy about the change to ‘sunny ways’ as Americans are distraught with the specter of at least four years of slime, sleeze and shame. But our PM is a dead man walking. Trudeau and his government[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…]
On December5, former vice president Al Gore met with Donald and Ivanka Trump in an effort to convince the president-elect that he should not gut federal policies and agreements dealing with climate change. Three days later, actor Leonardo Di Caprio also paid the Trump duo a visit, urging them to help build a green, climate-friendly economy with lots of[Read More…]
It appears that over the past 18 months or so we have pushed the earth into an irrevocable spiral. The accumulating feedback loops cannot now be contained, though with concerted effort we may be able to diminish them. Dr Thomas Crowther wrote “It’s fair to say we have passed the point of no return on global warming and we[Read More…]
The results of a search for “climate hoax” on Google Trends Google Trends shows a remarkable spike in the interest for the coupled terms “climate” and “hoax”. Does that mean that people are becoming more skeptical about climate science? Or simply more interested in the subject? On this point, Google Trends tells us that there has been no special[Read More…]
The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (CSLDF) was founded in September 2011 to defend climate scientists from harassing and invasive attacks via the legal system. Five years in, we’re expanding our efforts to reflect the new challenges scientists face, including increasing education and outreach work. Now more than ever, it’s important that scientists prepare themselves for how best to deal[Read More…]
President-elect Donald Trump’s Energy Department transition team has reportedly been asking for the names of civil servants that have worked on environmental policies under President Barack Obama, sparking fears of a coming “climate purge” by the incoming Trump administration. A “document circulated by the Energy Department,” first reported by Bloomberg Thursday and later by Politico, lists 65 questions posed by[Read More…]
As 2016 draws to a close, we appear to be living in a world that is increasingly defined by its illusions, where the truth is a matter of subjective interpretation or argumentative debate. Indeed, following the United States election and Brexit referendum there is much talk of a new era of post-truth politics, in which appeals to emotion count more[Read More…]
On the day that you read this article, 200 species of life on Earth (plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects, reptiles) will cease to exist. Tomorrow, another 200 species will vanish forever. The human onslaught to destroy life on Earth is unprecedented in Earth’s history. Planet Earth is now experiencing its sixth mass extinction event and Homo sapiens sapiens is[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…]
Co-Written by Michael Lazarus & Harro van Asselt The World Energy Outlook 2016, released last week, is just one among an increasing line of studies showing how nations need to slow and, ultimately, phase out investment in new fossil fuel supply infrastructure – from oil fields and pipelines to coal mines – if they are serious about keeping warming to[Read More…]
The election of Donald Trump reflects the unraveling of the centre-left across the West, and with it a fragile consensus on climate change. For two decades parties of the centre-left have created narratives about climate change that they do not really believe. They have done this to try and convince their fragile coalition of supporters and to try to bring[Read More…]
What is happening in the Arctic will not stay in the Arctic. In an ominous (though not hopeless) report published Friday, researchers warn that as many as 19 various ‘tipping points’ could be triggered by the increasingly warm temperatures in the world’s northern polar region. The Arctic Resilience Report, produced under the auspices of the Arctic Council by an international[Read More…]
The Great Barrier Reef suffered through the worst coral die-off in recorded history this year, scientists found, with unusually warm ocean water and record-setting bleaching eventskilling a stunning 90 percent of all coral in the worst-hit area. Those were the conclusions of a study published Monday by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. “One of the worst-hit areas[Read More…]
The 4th Assessment Report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change released in 2007, unambiguously states that climate change is not gender-neutral and women experience it differently than men.News reportsabound of exacerbated effects of climate change on women in the poorer and vulnerable parts of the world. It is a well-documented fact that globally women constitute the majority of the[Read More…]
While it was all but obscured in the course of the US presidential excitement, negotiators at the climate change conference in Marrakech were busy attempting to hammer out the means to implement the Paris Climate Agreement. The long and confusing shadow cast over the negotiations was considerable. Donald Trump has made no bones about climate change as a plot conjured[Read More…]
Another UN climate summit is over and despite the prevalent rhetoric of hope, the gap between the 1,5 or 2 degree target agreed in Paris last year and the real commitments to achieve this target is nowhere near to closing. Worse, this gap hasn’t even been a focus of this year’s UN climate talks in Marrakesh although time is running:[Read More…]
With the unexpected triumph of Donald Trump, what’s in store for U.S. climate and energy policies? Answering that question is hard since Trump has never run a public institution and thus has no track record. His most cited comment about global warming — that it was a Chinese hoax invented to destroy American jobs — came in November 2012 from[Read More…]
A year ago, it appeared that the once-promising and environmentally risky prospects for exploitation of new shipping routes through the Arctic Ocean were waning because of low oil prices, high insurance costs, and dangerous ice conditions that persist even though climate change is rapidly melting away sea ice. Only 17 vessels sailed through Canada’s Northwest Passage in 2014, due in[Read More…]
The degree of resignation spotlighted below is something that activists must pay attention to; there’s a clear need to change gears in reaching out to citizens. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (2015) demonstrated that a mere 52 percent of registered U.S. voters felt that alterations in the earth’s climate were mainly a function of human activity. That should[Read More…]
Climate change is viewed by many as a classic case of ‘tragedy of the commons’ i.e. anything used commonly and freely by people is not cared for by anyone. ‘Commons’ are usually natural resources such as air, land, water, forests, and fish. Thus, they are not anybody’s private property. The most cited example of this ‘tragedy’ is that of overgrazing[Read More…]
Many Americans are frightened by the idea of Donald Trump as the country’s new pilot-in-chief, fearing he’ll crash the airliner of state (including climate and environmental policies) into a mountain or the ground. Clinton, they argued, for all her flaws, knows how to fly this thing called a country using the federal government and at least won’t end up crashing[Read More…]
Global temperature goes from heat record to heat record, yet the sun is at its dimmest for half a century. For a while, 2010 was the hottest year on record globally. But then it got overtopped by 2014. And 2014 was beaten again by 2015. And now 2016 is so warm that it is certain to be once again a[Read More…]
Climate change is already affecting life on Earth, despite a global temperature increase of just 1°C, according to a new study published in the journal Science on Friday. Nearly every ecosystem on the planet is being altered, and plants and animals are being so affected that scientists may soon be forced to intervene to create “human-assisted evolution,” the study, titled[Read More…]
Arctic News June 10, 2014 “There are such massive methane reserves below the Arctic Ocean floor, that they represent around 100 times the amount that is required to cause a Permian style major extinction event, should the subsea Arctic methane be released in a short period of time into the atmosphere….The energy necessary to produce these Arctic methane release rates[Read More…]
In order for carbon storage even in tropical forests to be beneficial, it must remain stored essentially permanently (for many hundreds to thousands of years). No one can guarantee that future climate change, disease, and/or land use change won’t cause release of this forest carbon back into the atmosphere, which would bring us back to the starting point, before any forest carbon storage efforts were even attempted.
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…]
The Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is one of the first international instruments to include the term ‘climate justice’. While the notion of justice has been explored in several contexts – purely legal, economic, and social –, the visible effects of climate change, most notably in the form of extreme weather events, have[Read More…]
Miraculous nature is being murdered. Everywhere we look inequitable over-consumption is devastating the natural ecosystems that sustain a living Earth. Together we yield to ecological truth – personally embracing a global ecology ethic, and demanding others do so as well – or we all needlessly die at each others’ throats as the global ecological system collapses and being ends. The[Read More…]
From campaign finance reform to gun violence to poverty to education to LGBTQ rights,lots of important subjects were ignored by corporate media debate moderators in the presidential (and vice-presidential) debates. All of these topics are urgent and deserve a spotlight on the national stage. But one topic stands out as a non-factor: climate change. Climate change—or, more accurately, climate disruption—is[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…]
Even today, the fossil fuel industry remains one of the biggest contributors to release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, raising the temperature of the earth by 1.5 degrees which is lethal for life to survive. For these ‘Big Oil’ companies are bringing about an economic cost for the world in terms of impact of climate change. But these companies are[Read More…]
Scientists have reached a near unanimous agreement that the earth has entered a new geological era – anthropocene – characterised by human induced climate change. The resulting super floods, typhoons, and heat waves have caused several thousands of deaths in the past ten to fifteen years. However, climate change not only claims its victims through the occurrence of these mega[Read More…]
As the evidence mounts that we are fast approaching the final point-of-no-return beyond which it will be impossible to take sufficient effective action to prevent climate catastrophe – see ‘The World Passes 400 PPM Threshold. Permanently’ http://www.climatecentral.org/news/world-passes-400-ppm-threshold-permanently-20738 – the evidence of ineffective official responses climbs too. See, for example, ‘Climate Con: why a new global deal on aviation emissions is[Read More…]
A 2012 World Bank report stated that without quick action to curb CO2 emissions, global warming is likely to add 4 degrees Centigrade (39.2 degrees Fahrenheit) during the 21st century which is dangerously close to the temperature that initiated the Permian-Triassic extinction event 252 million years ago when 96% of all marine species and 70% of all terrestrial vertebrates were[Read More…]
Planet Earth, our habitat, is in dire straits And our world is suffering from various crises, conflicts and problems. There is hardly any sign that something is seriously being done to solve these problems. Some Americans – not government officials, not corporate big-wigs, but civil society activists – have now come forward to save the earth and, along with it,[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…]
Only with honesty, truth and justice can there be a future for our species, and I don’t see any of it-anywhere
To much fanfare, global leaders have agreed to tackle the climate crisis by ratifying theParis climate agreement, but a group of esteemed scientists is warning that current pledges to reduce emissions are far from sufficient and, in fact, put the world on track to reaching the dangerous 2°C climate threshold by 2050. “The pledges are not going to get even[Read More…]
On September 21, 31 countries, including Brazil and Mexico, ratified the Paris climate agreement at a United Nations event in New York City. They joined the U.S., China, and 27 other nations which had previously committed to the agreement,bringing the total to 60 and surpassing the first of two thresholds, requiring 55 nations to ratify it. In addition, their combined[Read More…]
The truth is we don’t know. We pretend that we can continue to dodge the mass terrors like the one a generation ago, where we eluded a nuclear annihilation. It is now more often that we find asking ourselves, that for how long the Earth will last, when we have poisoned the water and soils and trampled thousands of creatures[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…]
Washington based think tank and advocacy group Oil Change International in association with 14 other climate change groups have come out with a very relevant report which assesses the fossil fuel production and its likely impact on the climate change which has received global attention in the recent time in Paris climate meet where new goals for global warming were[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…]
One of the major treaties to combat climate change is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It is a binding multilateral agreement that entered into force in 1994 with the objective of “. . . stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Its[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…]
