Today’s headlines from the political left and right form a striking diptych that surely tells us something about the future of the human species. From Truthout comes this article, The March of Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, providing the sombre and sober truth about the state of the environment on planet Earth. While most of us do our best to ignore them, the signs of catastrophic climate change are all around us. This article does a good job of detailing several of the most recent signs and driving home the point that we are probably long past the point of no return…
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Posts Tagged ‘ Climate change ’
Climate change and capitalism
Scientists have been ringing the alarm bells about climate change for decades now, but the message, which is barely filtering through into the public consciousness, has yet to do anything to reverse the destructive path that human civilization is on. There are perhaps many reasons for this, but the crux of the matter is corporate capitalism and it’s control of the political process. Corporations are driven by the logic of maximizing profits at all costs, including costs to society and to the environment, and politicians are driven by the logic of catering to these corporations, on whom their political careers…
Do the Math (documentary)
Bill McKibben is one of the greatest environmental writers and activists of our time. In 1989 he wrote The End of Nature, which is considered by many to be the first book on global warming written for a general audience. Since then he has written countless articles, given hundreds if not thousands of public lectures, and is the main organizer of the 350.org movement to solve the climate crisis. One year ago McKibben published an influential article in Rolling Stone magazine entitled “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” The thesis of the article is that there are three significant numbers that everyone needs…
The climate change debate in brief
A new survey, published in the peer-reviewed Environmental Research Letters, a publication of the Institute of Physics (IOP), has definitively confirmed the scientific consensus in climate science literature: 97 percent of peer-reviewed papers agree that global warming is happening and human activities are responsible. The survey, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, examined some 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers and found a 97% consensus that humans are causing global warming. The work expanded upon an earlier survey of the literature by Naomi Oreskes, published in 2004, as well as an informal review conducted by James Powell, published on DeSmogBlog in 2012. Lead author of…
HOME (documentary)
HOME is a documentary that highlights how human activities are altering planet earth. It’s a direct, and at times emotional, appeal to viewers to wake up and pay attention to what is going on around them. It is filled with stunning and disturbing footage from around the globe. But it’s not all doom and globe. The film ends with uplifting scenes and information on some of the positive changes that are taking place all around the world today and ways in which individuals can act, as citizens and consumers, to avert catastrophe. Video embedding has been disabled by request, but…
Renewable energy could provide 99.9% of all power by 2030
It is commonly asserted that even with massive investments, solar, wind and other renewable energy technologies could not possibly meet all of the energy needs of any industrialized economy. However, a recent study done by Budischak et al. debunks this piece of conventional wisdom. The study suggests that with an optimized energy production and storage network, up to 99.9% of all energy needs could be met using nothing more than currently existing renewable energy technologies–and at roughly the same cost of conventional energy production. The abstract of the study report reads as follows: We model many combinations of renewable electricity sources (inland wind,…
New ideas for addressing climate change
Bill McKibben, one of the leading environmentalists of our time. has a real talent for taking the latest developments in climate science and explaining their significance in terms that the average person can easily understand. His latest piece in Rolling Stone magazineis no exception. In it, he gives compelling, fact-based reasons for why the prospects for containing global warming are very dim. But he also presents a new idea that just might provide a glimmering of hope. McKibben suggests that the divestment campaign that helped to end the South African apartheid may provide the model for a public campaign to…
Speaking out on climate change (TED lecture by James Hansen)
Another lecture that really should be required viewing for everyone. James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is a credible expert on climate change and global warming. In this lecture he describes some of the main features of the climate change taking place today and gives a good sense of just how much time is left before we reach the point of no return. Most amazing is the fact that Hansen firmly believes that the greatest challenge facing human civilization has a simple and elegant solution, which is for governments to collect a gradually rising carbon…
The great carbon bubble
If there is any single person worth listening to on the issue of climate change, it’s Bill McKibben. He’s the global canary in the coal mine, sending out ominous warnings that unfortunately fall mostly on deaf ears. He’s been at this for decades, and his messages, which are backed up by the latest climate science and corroborated by the events unfolding in front of our eyes, are getting louder, clearer, and more urgent. Still the changes made in response to this looming crisis are insignificant, inconsistent, and do not approach the scale of the changes that are required in order…
Keeping the public in the dark about climate change
If enough people were well informed about the reality and likely consequences of climate change the political changes required to bring this problem under control would surely be happening a lot quicker than they are. An important question then is why this problem is still insufficiently appreciated. There are a number of well-known and documented causal factors contributing to public ignorance about climate change. In the first place, according to this recent study by the Daily Climate organization, media coverage of climate change is actually decreasing at the very time (2010, 2011) that it should be increasing. Here is a…
Bill McKibben on Irene and climate change
Democracy Now once again demonstrated its ability to connect the dots–in this case on climate change. In an interview with Bill McKibben on Hurricane Irene, Amy Goodman remarks: We did not hear those words, “global warming.” I watched a lot of the media coverage this weekend. What about this? I mean, to say the least, there was time in the endless coverage. That the dots are not being connected by the mainstream media is deeply disappointing because it is precisely what the IPCC was predicting all the time: Climate Change 2007: Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis 3.8.3 Evidence for Changes…
Climate change is not just a theory
One still hears people saying that climate change is not a fact but a theory. Indeed that is what the U.S. House of Representatives recently declared while cutting off its funding for the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the claim that climate change is just a theory does not stand up to scrutiny. Already in 2005 a study was conducted to examine this problem and to reveal the biased presentation of the issue (Climate of scepticism: US newspaper coverage of the science of climate change). Here are some quotes: The results of this study indicate that…
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