Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
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“Swampy” re-surfaces in HS2 eco-protest.
Veteran British eco-activist “Swampy” removed from protest site (trust.org)
“Trump’s denial of climate change represents worse threat to humanity than Hitler”, says Chomsky.
Sad proof that Chomsky has lost the plot. Trump’s policy was essentially the same as that of the last previous Republican, George W. Bush — not to accept any measures that would harm the US fossil fuel industry or more generally undermine the competitiveness of US capitalist industry in particular in relation to China.
It was just that Trump’s language was more erratic and provocative. It is not even clear whether Trump actually was a climate-denier. He seems to have been more of a climate-ignorer. Or a simple opportunistic vote-catcher.
https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-us-canada-51213003
Anyway it is silly to try to attribute economic and political events to a single individual. That’s the discredited Great Man Theory of History.
An article presenting a differing perspective of the climate refugee problem, suggesting more conservative numbers of future migrants and the difficulty in estimating projections
If production and consumption of other meat, milk and eggs would have to fall by half, and large forests of new trees planted, the analysis from the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission charity (FFCC) found UK’s beef herd could be part of a sustainable farming system.
The analysis assessed agroecology, a type of agriculture that includes organic farming and aims to work with nature and ensure fairness to farmers, citizens and future generations. The scenario the analysis produced would see no pesticides or synthetic fertilisers in use in 2050 and almost 10% of today’s farmland freed-up for nature. Net greenhouse gas emissions would fall by about 75%, meaning the remainder would have to be removed by other means to reach the UK’s net zero target.
It presented just one plausible agroecological scenario and that others with even lower livestock numbers would result in greater environmental benefits.
Over-population catastrophist Paul Ehrlich joins other researchers in positing an apocalyptic future scenario.
The report warns that climate-induced mass migrations, more pandemics and conflicts over resources will be inevitable unless urgent action is taken.
The planet is facing a “ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals”
“The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms – including humanity – is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts,”Prof Tom Oliver, an ecologist at the University of Reading, who was not involved in the report, said it was a frightening but credible summary of the grave threats society faces under a “business as usual” scenario.
Prof Rob Brooker, head of ecological sciences at the James Hutton Institute, who was not involved in the study, said, “We certainly should not be in any doubt about the huge scale of the challenges we are facing and the changes we will need to make to deal with them,”
Trees take in CO2 when they carry out photosynthesis – the process where plants absorb CO2 in order to build new materials, such as shoots, roots and leaves. This means that, as long as forests remain intact, they can act as long-term “sinks” of CO2. However, rising temperatures threaten land’s ability to absorb CO2. One reason for this is that temperature plays a chief role in moderating photosynthesis.
The land’s ecosystems are fast approaching a “temperature tipping point”, beyond which they could switch from soaking up CO2 to releasing it to the atmosphere, a new study finds.
Dr Katharyn Duffy, lead author and postdoctoral scientist at Northern Arizona University : “Unlike other tipping elements in the Earth system, the climate tipping point for the terrestrial biosphere could be exceptionally close – 20-30 years away – without action.”
Again research that stresses the urgency of mitigating action to be taken.
The melting of ice across the planet is now in line with the worst-case scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets speeding up the fastest.
Thomas Slater, lead author and research fellow at the centre for polar observation and modelling at the University of Leeds, warned that the consequences would be felt around the world. “Sea level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on coastal communities this century,” he said.
An analysis of more than 11,000 extreme weather events showed nearly 480,000 fatalities since 2000, with Puerto Rico, Myanmar, and Haiti the worst-hit countries.
Just last weekend, central Mozambique was hammered again by another tropical storm, Eloise, which wrecked thousands of buildings, ruined crops and displaced almost 7,000 people.
Meanwhile we get the same platitudes on nature programmes about how we can all do our bit. Such well-meaning effort, what a shame. Attenborough’s latest series, A Perfect Planet, if anything has a weaker message than his one last year. Unless he ups the ante in the final episode on Sunday.
Yes, indeed – we can all do our bit by joining the campaign for world socialism. If only.Well, Attenbourough did up the ante on the final programme of A Perfect Planet. Kind of. The whole episode was about the various ways in which “humans” are spoiling the planet. Lots of examples of people doing worthy, sincere things to buck the trend, and a talking head who said governments need financial incentives to do more. Needless to say, not a mention of capitalism.
Except by me…I ended up shouting at the TV and mentioning socialism, which for some reason always upsets my wife.
The rise in the sea level is likely to be faster and greater than previously thought, according to researchers.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the sea level was unlikely to rise beyond 1.1 metre (3.6ft) by 2100.
But climate researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute believe levels could rise as much as 1.35 metres by 2100.
“It’s not great news that we believe the former predictions are too low,” said the climate change scientist Aslak Grinsted, a co-author and an associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute.
Note the change, by the journalist, from “could” in the headline to “is likely to” in the text. Plenty of things “could” happen without being at all “likely to”. Sloppy journalism compounded by the “could” referring to a “worst case warming scenario”, but how likely is that? (Such scenarios are normally based on the assumption that no action is taken to deal with the threat, which is unlikely to be the case and in fact is not.)
It is one more study that indicates that on the whole, the scientific consensus has been rather conservative in its projections.
It is not only the technical research being re-assessed but, more importantly, there is, imho, an optimism that the governments of the world will take action to avert “the worse case scenarios” and make those less likely to transpire.
The ice melting is already at earlier worse case scenario
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/27/global-ice-sheets-melting-at-worst-case-rates-uk-scientists
With the sea level rises, precautions are not a priority.
Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta, of the University of Cambridge, says prosperity has come at a “devastating” cost to the natural world.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55893696
Sustainable economic growth requires a different measure than Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
“Truly sustainable economic growth and development means recognising that our long-term prosperity relies on rebalancing our demand of nature’s goods and services with its capacity to supply them,” Prof Dasgupta said in a statement. “It also means accounting fully for the impact of our interactions with nature across all levels of society.”
Flowery language which still presents the capitalist mind-set but stripped of its ideological loyalty to capitalism, it expresses the socialist truth that a new economic system is required.
Meantime, to return to the previous post that the worse case scenarios can be avoided by governmental action, the Public Accounts Committee complained of serious delays in tackling “critical” issues like air pollution, water quality and wildlife loss. The 25-Year Environment Plan, published in 2018, lacked a coherent set of long-term objectives or interim targets. The report said the government had not calculated the total costs of delivering its environmental goals. It argued that funding had been piecemeal, and environmental impacts were still not being taken into account in spending decisions.
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