November 3rd
Dear friends,
Last month I read a number of articles about the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including a few from scientists who were very critical of the IPCC and did not think it went far enough. Where do you start in getting some perspective on the global ecological crisis? I have no idea! Across the summer I saw only one bee attempting to pollinate our morning glories at the entrance to Maryhouse, and I don't even know if it was the same bee arriving every day. By noon the flowers were closing up, but the bee struggled in and out of them heroically, undeterred by any rumors of planetary collapse. Our moonflowers, transplanted from Georgia, had a difficult time competing with the morning glories, and did not flower until much later. Do the insects somehow know that their numbers are way down all over the planet?
On Wednesday the Worldwide Fund for Nature reported that wildlife populations (across the board, not just insects) are already down by sixty percent since 1970. Even more dire are the regular bulletins from the Arctic News blogspot, but their team of scientists produce material that is too detailed and fact-intensive for most of us to digest. Attached to this message is "Feeding the Addiction," their response to the IPCC report, and "Will Humans be Extinct by 2026?"
Professor Noam Chomsky gave a long lecture at St. Olaf College in May, and my transcription has been posted by Information Clearinghouse and Dissident Voice:
"Will Organized Human Life Survive?"
Noam Chomsky at St. Olaf College -- May 4th, 2018
Dissident Voice, September 24, 2018
Notice that every international law precedent that Chomsky cited is also cited in the 33-page supplement to Bill Quigley's Motion to Dismiss for the Kings Bay Plowshares. (A copy of the motion is found at https://www.
In Britain, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams signed on to a declaration calling for massive civil disobedience and a public acknowledgement of a climatological state of emergency. (See articles below.) Okay, fifteen arrests in London is not exactly massive civil disobedience, but with this action and the adjacent declaration the call is going out. We cannot leave this up to the professionals on the intergovernmental panel, and wait for the next IPCC report, because time is running out.
Our two-year campaign on behalf of the people of Yemen is continuing, and every dismal report of the mass starvation and disease that this nation is experiencing, can also be seen as a foreshadowing of the impending fate of the whole human race. And just as the potential death ofYemen as a nation is a deliberately caused disaster, so also is the potential death of the Earth. Yesterday the hollowed out faces of those who were rescued from the death camps in Germanyand Poland, today the hollowed out faces of Yemeni children, and tomorrow. . .
It's not an accident. Humans chose every step of the way down what Martin Luther King called "the descending spiral," and humans can chose to the reverse that spiral, but they have to make that choice very soon. Where do you go for perspective, especially if all the dire articles and reports leave you cold? Here in NYC you can join us every Saturday in Union Square, and also this coming week at the US and Saudi Missions to the United Nations.
Voices Rising for Yemen
While life goes on, there is an opportunity for struggle, and also to make connections, as the group demonstrating for the Honduran Caravan did when they joined the Yemen vigil at noon as they prepared for their own demonstration. Carmen and Martha are on their way to Georgia for a pre-trial hearing on Wednesday for the Kings Bay Plowshares. I gave Martha the envelope of all the morning glory seeds that I harvested during the summer as the vines climbed up the fence to the second floor. She sniffed the warm dark seeds, and threw the envelope in the garbage. "Those are no good!"
I failed to keep the seeds dry. You learn something new every day.
Felton
UK Activists Kick Off ‘Extinction Rebellion’
Excerpt: More than 1,000 UK climate activists launched a massive civil disobedience campaign Wednesday when they blocked several roads near London's Parliament Square, The Guardian reported. The newly formed group Extinction Rebellion (https://twitter.com/
Dissident Voice, November 3, 2018
Rebellious Scientists Issue Urgent Appeal
by Robert Hunziker / November 3rd, 2018
On October 31st a select group of UK scientists launched a Declaration of Rebellion against the UK government at the Houses of Parliament: “For criminal inaction in the face of climate change catastrophe and ecological collapse.”
According to the scientists, now is the time to act as a planetary emergency is already upon us.
Nearly 100 British scientists, academics, and writers are willing to go to jail to make their point that anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is a surefire provocateur that’s already starting to decimate ecosystems.
“This is almost a cry of desperation,” says Andrew Simms of the New Weather Institute.1
Additionally, effective October 31st, Extinction Rebellion launched an international movement that will use mass civil disobedience to force governments to immediately establish a WWII-type effort to fight climate change.
Yes, civil disobedience is the way forward, as the group promises: “Repeated acts of disruptive, non-violent civil disobedience” if the government does not respond seriously to demands, and they anticipate “there will be mass arrests.”
Similar in tone to early American rebels like “Give me Liberty or Give me Death” Patrick Henry of American Revolution circa late 18th century, these rebel scientists are willing to make personal sacrifices, to be arrested, to go to prison, as they firmly believe it’s proper to start a planetary emergency global effort in the UK where the industrial revolution commenced. Essentially, full circle back to the beginnings of the fossil fuel era.
According to Extinction Rebellion the sixth mass extinction is already strutting its mettle in spunky fashion, for example, a recent Worldwide Fund for Nature report claims a wipe-out of 60% of animal populations has already occurred over the past 50 years alone. (See "Earth’s Wildlife Populations Have Dropped By 60 Percent Since 1970," by Hilary Hanson, Huffington Post, October 31, 2018)
All of which begs the provocative question: What does it imply for the next 50 years as climate change/global warming indicators firmly crank up to rapid-acceleration mode, in some cases exponentially? Thus, the next 50 years zoom-zoom will be supercharged. What then?
For example, an extremely alarming new study,2 reveals a mind-boggling cataclysmic falloff, up to 60-fold, of the “food web” in tropical rain forests with temps up 2.0-to-2.5°C over baseline, indicative of an ecosystem in early stages of disintegration.
A fall-off of “up to 60-fold” is extremely difficult to fathom. It’s almost like an out of body experience from far above, watching rain forests, over time, crumble into thousands of piles of grey dust in a dark nightmarish dream sequence.
The climate is changing much faster than nature normally functions because human-charged climate change works against the regular flow of nature, leaving it choking/gasping/disintegrating in the dust.
Ecosystems from the Arctic to Antarctica are starting to crumble right before our eyes, but nobody lives where it happens. So, nobody sees it first-hand as, for example:
--Vavilov Ice Cap (700 sq. miles) in the Russian High Arctic slipping sliding by 15-35 feet per day versus normally 2 inches per day- a real shocker.
--Three 100-year droughts (which normally happen once every 100 years) hit the Amazon Rain Forest like clockwork 2005-2010-2015 over the past 10 years… This is unprecedented.
--The Totten Glacier (16 feet of water), which comprises less than 1/10th of East Antarctica’s ice mass, is destabilizing 100-years ahead of previous climate modeling.
--West Antarctica’s rate of ice loss triples over 15 years, way ahead of scientific modeling.
--Arctic multi-year thick ice infrastructure melts, losing Northern Hemisphere’s biggest reflector of sunlight, exposing sub-sea permafrost methane trapped over the eons in clathrates, thus risking runaway global warming with concomitant wipe-out of mid latitude agricultural crops.
--The entire surface of Greenland (22 feet of water) turned to slush, freaking-out scientists.
--China’s Lancang River (1,330 miles in China), the Danube of the East, lost 70% of its head-water glaciers to global warming, threatening an irregular flow, sometime in the distant future, of this major river for all of SE Asia that flows into the Mekong Delta.
--The World Bank warns that 100 million people are at risk of loss of irrigation, drinking water, and hydropower because of rapid melt of Andes’ glacial water towers.
--Pingos imploding in Siberia, spewing methane. 7,000 Pingos identified, as Siberia enters ecosystem collapse phase.
--Alaskan permafrost emitting 220M tons of carbon every 2 years as it reverses from carbon sink to a carbon emitter. Ouch!
--Too much heat and CO2 are changing ocean chemistry, as acidification disrupts the base of the food web. Pteropod reproduction and/or development threatened.
--One-half of the Great Barrier Reef killed by excessively heated ocean water conditions 2016-17; scientists flabbergasted.
--Ocean plankton production off by 40% past 50 yrs., diminishing oxygen production.
--Thermohaline worldwide ocean circulation slowest in 1,600 years has negative worldwide impact.
--Underwater kelp forests decimated all along California northern coasts and Australia’s giant kelp forest declared “endangered ecological zone,” as a steady increase in ocean temps by nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit in recent decades was all it took.
--Colorado River Basin water flow down 40% in worst drought in 1,200 years, threatening major cities and agriculture.
--Middle East/Northern Africa Mediterranean coastlines drying up faster than anywhere on the planet because of global warming. Where will eco migrants go next?
--One hundred nature reserves in Europe experienced 80% drop in flying insect abundance, confusing scientists.
--NOAA says CO2 increasing 100 times faster than end of last Ice Age, which is hyper-speed in geological time.
Signatories to the Declaration of Rebellion include established names in academics like Professor Danny Dorling ofUniversity of Oxford and Dr. Ian Gibson, former chair of Parliamentary Science and Technology Select Committee and Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, and former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and Andrew Simms of the New Weather Institute, and widely published environmental journalist George Monbiot.
Thus and so, because of clear irrefutable evidence that demands an alert of worldwide “climate emergency,” 100 scientists, academics and writers are willing to stick their necks out to wake up the world to the most serious crisis of all time, as ecosystems commence an awful process of crumbling all across the planet, but once again, it happens where nobody lives. People do not see it in the flesh.
Postscript:
"The basic science is very well established; it is well understood that global warming is due to greenhouse gases. What is uncertain is projections about specifics in the next few decades, by how much will the climate change."
— Mario J. Molina, Nobel Prize in Chemistry
NOTES
1) Alex Kirby, UK Scientists Risk Prison to Urge Action, Climate News Network, October 31, 2018.
2) “Climate-Driven Declines in Arthropod Abundance Restructure a Rainforest Food Web,” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, 9 October 2018.
Robert Hunziker (MA, economic history, DePaul University) is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and appeared in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment