Climate Emergency
- Brian Tokar – _The Green Alternative_
- Murray Bookchin – “Listen, Marxist!”
- Murray Bookchin – “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought”
- _Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary_
The inquiry was instigated by Colombia and Chile, which together asked the court to set out what legal responsibilities states have to tackle climate change and to stop it breaching people’s human rights.
Earth’s record hot streak might be a sign of a new climate era - The Washington Post
The heat fell upon Mali’s capital like a thick, smothering blanket — chasing people from the streets, stifling them inside their homes. For nearly a week at the beginning of April, the temperature in Bamako hovered above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The cost of ice spiked to ten times its normal price, an overtaxed electrical grid sputtered and shut down.
With much of the majority-Muslim country fasting for the holy month of Ramadan, dehydration and heat stroke became epidemic. As their body temperatures climbed, people’s blood pressure lowered. Their vision went fuzzy, their kidneys and livers malfunctioned, their brains began to swell. At the city’s main hospital, doctors recorded a month’s worth of deaths in just four days. Local cemeteries were overwhelmed.
Arctic permafrost is now a net source of major greenhouse gases | New Scientist
Areas of permanently frozen ground in northern regions are now emitting more carbon into the atmosphere than they absorb, causing the planet to heat even further, according to the first Arctic-wide estimate of all three major greenhouse gases.
Frozen ground, or permafrost, which underlies 15 per cent of the northern hemisphere and contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, has shrunk in area by an estimated 7 per cent in 50 years as it thaws.
It was 85°F here yesterday (mid-Missouri). Forecast to be 83° today and 82° tomorrow. According to the Apple weather app this is 13° above average. Summer is going to be fun. 🥵
Our rapidly heating planet is regularly shattering records these days. December through February was so warm — in fact, the hottest winter on record in the U.S. — it’s been described by some climate experts as a “lost winter.” Last year also set new records for global surface temperature, hottest summer and ocean heat content. Perhaps most ominously, the world averaged temperatures 1.4º C higher than pre-industrial levels during those 12 months.
As technology develops, sound has become an increasingly important way of measuring the health and biodiversity of ecosystems: our forests, soils and oceans all produce their own acoustic signatures. Scientists who use ecoacoustics to measure habitats and species say that quiet is falling across thousands of habitats, as the planet witnesses extraordinary losses in the density and variety of species.
‘The doom sits on your shoulders’: Farmers share how weeks of wet weather have hit them hard
Rainfall was above average in most parts of Ireland last month. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service’s latest monthly report also identified that March was wetter than average across western Europe more broadly. It was also the 10th month in-a-row to see record-breaking average global temperatures as climate change escalates.
How do you define self?
Back around 1991 I co-organized and participated in a Council of all beings, a gathering created to help humans connect and empathize with the world around them. In our case the council was based upon the book Thinking Like a Mountain.
Whether it was the book or the gathering, what I took to be the foundation of both, remains with me 30+ years later: I am not just an individual human with a name. In fact, this human is trillions of bacteria, millions to billions of fungi, hundreds of trillions of viruses. We all contain multitudes. We are all an ecosystem. But we then also exist within the larger planetary ecosystem. Billions of humans sharing a planet with every other non-human species. And our “individual” wellbeing is connected to the wellbeing of the larger ecosystems in which we exist.
Those of us in the global north have focused on our individual selves and the nuclear family if we have one. Certainly this is true for those of us in the US. The cultures of the global north encourage us to focus on living a particular kind of (high energy, high consumption) life which ignores the fundamental importance and reality of our larger selves. The result of this disconnection is that humans are actively destroying the larger whole of which we are a part. Simply put, without healthy, balanced Earth ecosystems humans will cease to exist. This is an obvious truth and yet we ignore it every day. We pretend that we can exist without the rest.
From the Invocation written by John Seed:
We call upon the spirit of evolution, the miraculous force that inspires rocks and dust to weave themselves into biology. You have stood by us for millions and billions of years — do not forsake us now. Empower us and awaken in us pure and dazzling creativity. You that can turn scales into feathers, seawater to blood, caterpillars to butterflies, metamorphose our species, awaken in us the powers that we need to survive the present crisis and evolve into more aeons of our solar journey.
Awaken in us a sense of who we truly are: tiny ephemeral blossoms on the Tree of Life. Make the purposes and destiny of that tree our own purpose and destiny.
Fill each of us with love for our true Self, which includes all of the creatures and plants and landscapes of the world. Fill us with a powerful urge for the well-being and continual unfolding of this Self.
It may well be that the survival of our species will require such a shift of understanding and, following from that, a shift on our way of being in the world with our fellow species. And, for that matter, perhaps equally important, a shift in how humans relate to fellow humans. As it stands in 2024 we continue to waste energy a resources in war and competition with one another. We would do far better in cooperation. One human species working together with no loss of resources to conflict.
It would be a very different kind of world for all species on the planet.
An excellent episode of Solarpunk Now! podcast:
Episode 18 – Ecology is Radical: A People’s History of Environmentalism
This Earth Month, we’re looking back on the history of environmental radicalism. Brian Tokar is a teacher, activist, and writer who’s been involved in the movements he writes and teaches about since the 70s. We discuss how leftism and environmentalism came together, why ecology matters for the left, and what lessons we can learn from these traditions and put into practice today.
References:
Just another day in the climate emergency as the reservoir that supplies most of the water to Colombian capital city Bogotá hits a record low of 16%. A city that usually receives twice as much rainfall as London, is now rationing water.
Another result of the drought, some neighborhoods are choking in smoke as wildfires burn in the forests surrounding the city.
Meanwhile Mexico City is also rationing water and Guatemala declared a wildfire emergency on Wednesday.
The climate emergency is the long emergency that will have no end in our lifetimes, each future year worse than the last.
Canada risks more ‘catastrophic’ wildfires with hot weather forecast | The Guardian
Last year, Canada endured its worst-ever fire season, with more than 6,600 blazes burning 15m hectares (37m acres), an area roughly seven times the annual average. Eight firefighters died and 230,000 people were evacuated from their homes.
This winter the country experienced warmer-than-normal temperatures and widespread drought, setting the stage for another punishing summer.
Impact of climate change on marine life shown to be much bigger than previously known
Alter and her colleagues calculated the consequences of three projected scenarios of carbon dioxide increase, and thus of ocean warming and ocean acidification: extreme increase, moderate increase at the current speed and—due to possible measures—mitigated increase.
Alter says, “Our new approach suggests that if ocean warming and acidification continue on the current trajectory, up to 100% of the biological processes in fish and invertebrate species will be affected, while previous research methods found changes in only about 20 and 25% of all processes, respectively.”
Record-breaking rain in recent months has drastically reduced the amount of food produced in the UK, farming groups have said.
Livestock and crops have been affected as fields have been submerged since last autumn.
It has been an exceptionally wet 18 months. According to the Met Office, 1,695.9mm of rain fell from October 2022 to March 2024, the highest amount for any 18-month period in England in recorded history. The Met Office started collecting data in 1836.
The UK will be reliant on imports for wheat in the coming year and potentially beyond because of the drastic reduction in yields.
Schools close and crops wither as ‘historic’ heatwave hits south-east Asia | The Guardian
Thousands of schools in the Philippines have stopped in-person classes due to unbearable heat. In Indonesia, prolonged dry weather has caused rice prices to soar. In Thailand’s waters, temperatures are so high that scientists fear coral could be destroyed.
A “historic heatwave” is being experienced across south-east Asia, according to Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist and weather historian.
The case for paying ranchers to raise trees instead of cattle | The Guardian
There is a simple, cost-effective and scientifically sound way to turn back the clock on global warming and reverse the catastrophic collapse of biodiversity: pay ranchers to raise trees instead of cattle.
By mass, the world’s 1.7 billion cows are the dominant animal species on Earth, far outweighing the human population, and outweighing all the wild terrestrial mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians left on Earth by more than 15-fold. More than a third of Earth’s land is used to feed livestock.
Big surprise.
Nations Are Undercounting Emissions, Putting UN Goals at Risk - Yale E360
Because of lax rules, national inventories reported to the United Nations grossly underestimate many countries’ greenhouse gas emissions…
In the United States, an analysis published this month of the air over the country’s oil and natural gas fields found that they emit three times more methane — a gas responsible for a third of current warming — than the government has reported.
Not only will the cost of food contiune to rise, but an increasingly destabilized climate will decrease crop production as the population of the planet grows. We will have food shortages. The poorest of the planet will suffer first. And the wealthiest 10% are okay with that.
Extreme Heat Is Driving Up Food Prices — and It’s Only Going to Get Worse | Truthout
Food prices have climbed 25 percent over the past four years, and Americans have been shocked…
We’ve been warned, we sholudn’t be shocked.
In the US we’re just beginning to pay the price for what we’ve done. The wealthiest class in the top 10% on the planet (most in the US are in this group), are now feeling just a hint of the pain that is to come. The insurance crisis will bleed out into other economic crises. And we in western nations have not yet begun to experience the food shortages that will come soon enough as the climate emergency creates instability in the agricultural systems of the world.
The home insurance market is crumbling. These owners are paying the price | CNN Business
But as climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather, insurers — especially those in areas most impacted by floods and fires — are raising their premiums, or pulling out altogether, impacting the affordability and availability of home and fire insurance.
Herrera shopped around for a new plan, but he struggled to find a policy. Louisiana Citizens, the insurer of last resort for property owners in the state, was out of the question. It would have cost more than $7,000 annually…
“It’s a very difficult situation,” he said. He never imagined that when he bought his home, private insurance options would be this limited and the last resort insurer would be so expensive…
He never imagined because he, like most in the US, wasn’t paying fucking attention. Climate scientists and activists have been warning for at least two decades that this day would come.
Herrera’s insurance story is common in Louisiana and other places across the country at increasingly higher risk for extreme weather.
There were a record 28 weather and climate disasters with losses totaling over $1 billion last year in America, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By comparison, between 1980 and 2023, the typical annual average for these events was 8.5.
Just getting started.
Extreme heat could trigger the worst global financial crisis ever seen | New Scientist
Without dramatic action to curb greenhouse emissions, even high-latitude countries with cooler climates will suffer devastating, if indirect, financial losses as extreme heat disrupts global supply chains. The result could be the worst financial crisis the world has ever seen.
It is already well known that severe heatwaves have numerous health and economic impacts, including higher mortality rates, preventing people from working outside, destroying crops and disrupting industrial processes.
Study documents slowing of Atlantic currents
While scientists have observed oceans heating up for decades and theorized that their rising temperatures weaken global currents, a new study led by a University of Maryland researcher documents for the first time a significant slowing of a crucial ocean current system that plays a role in regulating Earth’s climate.