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The Long, Hot March of Climate Change
The Pentag
It is climate change. And it is real. (REUTERS/Tim Wimborne)on knows it. The world’s largest insurers know it. Now, governments may be overthrown because of it. It is climate change, and it is real. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, last month was the hottest March on record for the United States since 1895, when records were first kept, with average temperatures of 8.6 degrees F above average. More than 15,000 March high-temperature records were broken nationally. Drought, wildfires, tornadoes and other extreme weather events are already plaguing the country.
Across the world in the Maldives, rising sea levels continue to threaten this Indian Ocean archipelago. It is the world’s lowest-lying nation, on average only 1.3 meters above sea level. The plight of the Maldives gained global prominence when its young president, the first-ever democratically elected there, Mohamed Nasheed, became one of the world’s leading voices against climate change, especially in the lead-up to the 2009 U.N. climate-change summit in Copenhagen. Nasheed held a ministerial meeting underwater, with his cabinet in scuba gear, to illustrate the potential disaster.
In February, Nasheed was ousted from his presidency at gunpoint. The Obama administration, through State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, said of the coup d’etat, “This was handled constitutionally.” When I spoke to Nasheed last month, he told me: “It was really shocking and deeply disturbing that the United States government so instantly recognized the former dictatorship coming back again. ... The European governments have not recognized the new regime in the Maldives.” There is a parallel between national positions on climate change and support or opposition to the Maldives coup.
Nasheed is the subject of a new documentary, “The Island President,” in which his remarkable trajectory is traced. He was a student activist under the dictatorship of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom and was arrested and tortured, along with many others. By 2008, when elections were finally held, Gayoom lost, and Nasheed was elected. As he told me, though: “It’s easy to beat a dictator, but it’s not so easy to get rid of a dictatorship. The networks, the intricacies, the institutions and everything that the dictatorship has established remains, even after the elections.” On the morning of Feb. 7, 2012, under threat of death to him and his supporters from rebelling army generals, Nasheed resigned.
While no direct link has been found yet between Nasheed’s climate activism and the coup, it was clear in Copenhagen in 2009 that he was a thorn in the Obama administration’s side. Nasheed and other representatives from AOSIS, the Alliance of Small Island States, were taking a stand to defend their nations’ very existence, and building alliances with grass-roots groups like 350.org, that challenge corporate-dominated climate policy.
Back in the U.S., March delivered this year’s first weather disaster that caused more than $1 billion in damage, with tornadoes ravaging four central states and killing 41. Dr. Jeff Masters of the weather website Weather Underground blogged about March that “records not merely smashed, but obliterated.” On March 23, conservative Texas Gov. Rick Perry renewed the state of emergency declared there last year as a result of massive droughts.
Texas lists 1,000 of the state’s 4,710 community water systems under restrictions. Spicewood, Texas, population 1,100, has run dry, and is now getting water trucked in. Residents have severe restrictions on water use. But for Perry, restricting corporations whose greenhouse-gas emissions lead to climate change is heresy.
Mitt Romney is on track to be the Republican candidate for president, with the support of former challengers like Perry. They are already attacking President Obama on climate change. The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, has been promoting legislation in statehouses to oppose any climate legislation, and rallying members of Congress to block federal action, especially by hampering the work of the Environmental Protection Agency. As the Center for Media and Democracy has detailed in its “ALEC Exposed” reporting, ALEC is funded by the country’s major polluters, including ExxonMobil, BP America, Chevron, Peabody Energy, and Koch Industries. The Koch brothers have also funded tea-party groups like FreedomWorks, to create the appearance of grass-roots activism.
This election season will likely be marked by more extreme weather events, more massive loss of life, and billions of dollars in damages.
President Nasheed is working to run again for his lost presidency, as President Obama tries to hold on to his. The climate may hang in the balance.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
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33 Comments so far
Show AllThis is one reason why the education system in the USA is no longer needed for the majority of people. By the time todays young children grow up to be working adults, the world may not be survivable, and education will be by the school of natural selection. Forget about a health care plan.
Atmosphere CO2 today is 395 ppm. Its bumping up at 2 ppm per year. The rate of increase is accelarating over the past few decades, concident with rising fossil fuel emissions, but this is no coincidence. If positive feedbacks increase it may jump up a little faster, getting up to 3 ppm more a year.
The upper safety margin was 350 ppm. The red danger zone, which is arbitrary after that, is almost meaningless, but let us pick 450 ppm as a point of no return. At the current rate of increase, 2-3 ppm per year, that is only 20 years away.
That is only twenty years left in which to switch off nearly every coal and gas electricity power plant in the world, and to wean almost completely off burning oil products as the favourite mode of personal transport. Thats an averaged 5 percent reduction per year.
No plan can do that in one year. Or even 5 years. Ten years may be possible, if lots of other emergencies, distractions, wars, and economic collapse do not get to take priority. Past ten years it will be more than likely too late. We need to be cutting emissions down now, as if our 20 years are already up.
Five percent reduction targets by 2020, even if based on decade old emissions data, are the lies of a global fossil fuel dictatorship. In reality our twenty years of transition grace time, probably started twenty years ago. Carbon fuel companies pretend that we still have lots of time, so the last generation of CEOS and majority shareholders, can whoop it up in their private parties and air conditioned mansions.
There is no plan and there will be no meaningful plan to cut CO2. The world is being run by a business class that is clueless about anything other than making as much money as possible, as fast as possible, and by any means possible. The environment, the planet itself is if little concern in their "grand scheme" of material self enrichment.
These people have little understanding, or interest in science or the natural world unless it is how to make a buck off of it. They think they are above it all as they live out their lives in a luxurious, social isolation.
Though PR they can manipulate most of the population to have whatever opinion they choose them to have. IMHO TV is paramount in this indoctrination. People don't even have to be literate for this indoctrination to occur. Ideas, opinions, and beliefs can be beamed right into their very souls, and they are completely unaware it is even being done.
The sociopathic big business class continue to manipulate the mass opinion as the planets environmental crisis worsens. First they denied it was even happening, as that becomes harder and harder to pull off, the argument is being changed to one where the climate change we are experiencing is the result of natural events, and man has little or nothing to do with it. The average American just laps this stuff up. Most seem incapable in remembering the previous lie they were fed, and happily eat up the next one, on the buffet of misinformation that is laid out for them.
I really hope I am wrong about this, but all indications are that I am not. Countries with claims to the Arctic are eagerly waiting for the ice to melt so they can get at any possible oil reserves up there.
So the big business class is leading humanity into the unmovable wall of cataclysmic climate change as fast as the can. The do not care, they will not care until it directly effects them in their gated mansions, and by then millions, if not billions of average people will be dead, and the cataclysm will be heading for its end game.
Sadly this is the only possible outcome when you have sociopaths running the show.
I went to a bank in Canada to renew my mortgage. I'm 54 years old. The loan officer was in his 20s. We made small talk about the weather, where he intoned his disbelief of climate change. My initial reaction was to slap him silly until he changed his mind, but then I thought better of it when I realized the poor S.O.B. probably reads the business pages -- so why should he have a clue?
yes, this is why I try to steer conversation away from 'climate' and toward 'chemical'...
the current equality of fact and notion allows for the ol' 'Grandma and the Hot Summer of 1892', and this proves nothing's changing...
harder to deny Fallujah women and their squid babies, or the oil and Corexit in the Gulf, or the radiation flowing eastward from Japan...
not that folks won't, anyway...
but, then, these are folks who see nothing wrong with texting while driving...to get to the industrial impact of the garment industry, or the causal role of property ownership is really difficult...
climate change (30 degrees F hotter this March!) is far too easy to dismiss, even as the swings widen, as the cool lows can always offset the impassioned highs...
oh, well...I'm worked up today...I enjoy your posts...
"This [. . .] season will likely be marked by more extreme weather events, more massive loss of life, and billions of dollars in damages."~ Amy Goodman
i remember the 'democracy now!' interview with nasheed. he told us that as the sea level rises if we do not offer a helping hand, the maldives and its entire population might be lost forever. the other day my 'fair & balanced' neighbors and i discussed the economic situation. "you know what's hurting the economy," arthur stated. "it's those nutty environmentalists!"
I find that all the climate-based websites are preoccupied fighting a rearguard action against well-funded, multi-faceted denialist attacks. Climate websites have left behind the climate science and are bogged down in climate politics. It seems the entrenched big business interests have their own occupy movement. They occupy our minds with politics and not science. It would also seem they are having more success than Occupy Wall Street because they only have to sow doubt -- much easier than igniting change.
You are correct Amy/Denis. The complicity of the Empire in this coup is as probable as in the case of the Honduran coup.
Maybe climate protesters can be shot thank's to ALEC's Stand Your Ground. If they resist being shot, then we can use the NDAA to brand them as terrorists and throw them in private jails indefinitely without charge. Then we can Spybook and Oogle to track down their accomplices and have them renditioned to the sinking islands. I love where we're going with this! It brings a note of joy to my heart. Song of the Mockingjay.
delete
This article demonstrates why TV/radio journalists should not write about things they do not know.
"last month was the hottest March on record" - The previous record, .5 degrees F lower, was set in 1910. Global Warming?
"rising sea levels continue to threaten this Indian Ocean archipelago" - Sea levels around the Maldives are declining, not rising.
"extreme weather events, more massive loss of life, and billions of dollars in damages" are not due to climate change. They are the result of human beings building ever more infrastructure in areas prone to extreme weather.
It's fun to make all kinds of claims without any references. Let's see...? We are entering an Ice Age because the solar system is entering a cool zone radiating from the center of the galaxy. Wow, what fun! Okay, um... We need to burn more coal so that the soot will cool the planet. See? Feel free to submit your own.
Climate science deniers are embarrassed by the shoddy quality of their own sources of information. Hayduke2000 finds it impossible to provide any references (as do scientific arguments), so he is constrained to such incoherent streams of unsupported assertions - while absurdly impersonating the voice of reason. The world needs clowns, I suppose.
Yes, it's bad, altho I've become less hysterical about it lately. Why? Even if all of the green initiatives were passed, a) they wouldn't be enforced, b) 2/3 of the world (Asia, S Am, etc) will continue to increase reliance on gasoline powered cars thereby negating our little US-Euro efforts to cut a little smog, c) even without warming we as a way over-populated species are going to hit several critical limits (inexpensive and abundant resources, fish in the ocean, etc) in the next few decades, thereby triggering what might be "The Collapse".
Cotopaxi
The thing about leading - others follow.
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"extreme weather events, more massive loss of life, and billions of dollars in damages" are not due to climate change. They are the result of human beings building ever more infrastructure in areas prone to extreme weather."
Areas prone to extreme weather. Like, for instance, Vermont?
Fukishima spent fuel on top of melted reactor cores is spreading deadly radiation in the Pacific ocean and destroying Japan. Now we are really talking climate change! By not mentioning this extreme environmental crises and only focusing on "global warming" clarity and urgency are destroyed.
Or maybe it's wiser to specify one concern at a time, CASCADIAN... lest the reader/viewer experience "Disaster Fatigue."
I know it's tough for me to read about each day's WORSENING data, the latest earthquake, the latest drone attack, the latest sell-out to big money on the part of our nation's would be lawmakers and representatives, the latest cessation of Civil Liberties, added to the latest shoot-out at our own not exactly O.K. corral...
Amy Goodman's work should not be equated with damaging clarity, urgency or credibility. However, she does seem rather lenient towards Obama considering he pulled off another bloodless coup... and this one reminds me of what was done to Haiti with the forced (by U.S. martial forces) removal of their popular president, Aristide.
NC-Tom says it true. Not much to add, except that you really have to wonder why the Repugs are going after Obama on climate change, as if he's done one goddamn thing about it. Of course, it's anathema to even breathe a word about it as if it even exists, and Obama has made offhand, vague comments once or twice in that direction, so naturally he's The Enemy of corporate profiteering.
The fact that he's as much a denialist as Romney or Santorum is irrelevant. He goes ahead with every fossil fuel extraction scheme ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Peabody and the Kochs could possibly imagine or demand, and yet he MUST be painted as a believer in the liberal hoax known as climate change.
The electoral Insanity Train is roaring across the heartland, with Dems and Repugs fighting in the engine room for the controls. They both want to be credited with sending the country, and the world, over the cliff of Ignorance and Greed, because the gods of private profit must be appeased. Who will preside over Planet Earth's descent into climatological, ecological hell? Obama or Romney?
As the Maldives are submerged, the Arctic ice caps melt and oceans rise, coastal cities drown, droughts, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and desertification transform the continent into a wasteland, no doubt there will still be staged battles between the two wings of the duopoly over which one can claim credit. Big Oil CEOs will advance from mere billionaires to trillionaires, while the rest of us try to survive in Mad Max Waterworld.
Don't forget to vote for those Democrats! Keep the delusion alive!
A tragically true portrait of the nation's mis-leaders.
Nice. Made me smile as I cringed.
In a just world, global warming deniers, their shills, and causers would drown or otherwise perish horribly in the mess they caused, while the rest of us observed with no small measure of schadenfreude. Unfortunately, this will not likely be the case, as it will be the poor and disadvantaged will suffer the most while the global warming denial complex will spout on even as their sugar daddies build their survival fortresses amidst rising sea levels.
Thank you, Amy, for highlighting the most serious threat to long-term human existence we have faced (nuclear weapons and power plants are the most short-term threats).
Perhaps you can now focus on investigating why World Trade Center Building 7, not touched by an airliner, collapsed symmetrically into its own footprint at free-fall speed on the afternoon of 9/11/01. Perhaps you could even invite Richard Gage, AIA, leader of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (http://www.ae911truth.org/) to be interviewed on "Democracy Now!". Perhaps the evidence of controlled demolition of the three WTC skyscrapers on 9/11/01 could begin to dispell some of the toxic Islamaphobia so rampant since then, which fuels the endless, futile, absurd "War on Terror".
Pilots for 9-11 truth: Let the pilots, some of whom had stick time in the aircraft supposedly used - speak for themselves. But one quick question - How was the A/C that hit (not) the pentagon commandeered, when the Fight Data Recorder (FDR) shows that the flight deck door was never re-opened after being secured prior to push back (the NTSB FDR file dump (delimited text), from pre-flight before push back to "impact" is available for your own perusal ..... Things that makes one go hmmmm
http://pilotsfor911truth.org/
Apparently, Obama is complicit in the ousting of Mohamed Nasheed, just as he was in the Honduran coup.
Amy Goodman is one of the only ones presenting this evidence.
“It’s easy to beat a dictator, but it’s not so easy to get rid of a dictatorship. The networks, the intricacies, the institutions and everything that the dictatorship has established remains, even after the elections.”
Not to mention the SCOTUS
ouch, 1/2 hour since I commented and not listed. Did I step on a sponsor's toes?
The question for me is, where should ordinary citizens put our energies when it comes to dealing with global heating? Should we follow Bill McKibben into protests aimed at policy makers in government? Should we follow the Deep Green Resistance folks into acts of eco-terrorism? Should we follow the Permaculture folks and just keep our heads down and try to be self-sufficient? Should we follow the Armageddon folks and just look forward to everlasting heaven?
If I knew the most effective way to get engaged in this epic, crucial struggle of our times, I would leap all the way in and not look back. As it is, I hesitate on the brink, sure that the emergency is real, but not sure what to do about it.
Read more at Transition Times: http://bethechange2012.wordpress.com/2012/03/03/looking-catastrophe-in-the-eye/
Nice to see you comment here Jennifer.
Your question - what to do - is one many of us wonder about.
How if I write what I feel - instead of what I think?
We have an election here in Alberta on April 23. Without a doubt - the far right will win overwhelmingly in the land of the Tar Sands and the Canadian oil patch.
But I just read Chris Hedge's "Death of the Liberal Class", which got me thinking seriously about "what is a liberal", and more importantly, "am I still a liberal"?
Answer - Yes, I am a liberal, always was, probably always will be.
Should I vote liberal - given that the liberals here, like your Democrats there, are neo-liberals, i.e., conservative far right?
There has been much talk about not voting - given this.
I will vote - and I will vote liberal, not because the party is liberal, but because I am a liberal, and I have the right and the obligation to vote.
As to the bigger question - what to do next?
How about pay more attention to politics?
Yes, a dirty business. But look what happens when we retreat into our own refuges from the muck - disaster.
The most salient point I took away from Chris Hedge's book was that you do the right thing, not because you know what result it will bring, but simply, and profoundly, because you believe it is the right thing to do, in and of itself.
That's about all I have to say just now.
Manysummits
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PS: Great article Amy - glad to see your focus on manmade global warming. For what it's worth, I think we're in the 'critical slowing down' phase as regards incipient tipping points.
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Great response to Jenifers post - and like many of us, we wonder what if anything can be done. I see no future in either of the "approved" parties, and so for me, I shall vote for Jill. I have held my nose for the last time. The enormity and scope of this event and its repercussions shrinks most other issues. The time has passed (long passed) to reverse communal course in a meaningful way, and now nature will take both its course and its revenge as it seeks re-balance. We must act individually and do what we can. The willful ignorance of the average person (at least in the US) is astounding. My cube mate, another engineer, a supposedly intelligent person, spews the most astoundingly naive, willfully ignorant, and just plain dumb statements. He listens to all of the drivel and official propaganda. I have asked him to please do his own research, for the sake of his children - he will not - he states he does not have the time, and then spews on, or talks of last night’s conquests in HALO. This is what humanity is left with. They will do nothing, because they have made the intentional choice to do nothing. This will end badly for this species but in the end, well for this planet. It will recover - Humans will have long sputtered out.
Mr. Nader and Ms. Goodman's pieces offer up a rather frightening glimpse of the future. Pray we win.
Or, Hummingbird, as another clueless Neanderthal-global-warming-denier proudly intoned one day, as I tried to engage him civilly and casually in a discussion on climate:"...all we have to fear is fear itself!..." not only was his comment plain stupid considering the issue at hand, he used a great quote from a great president, FDR, which is a double insult considering the seriousness of the topic! Ignorance truly is bliss!
But hey, we are surrounded by a sea full of pridefully stupid sheeple listening to Fox and the Koch Brothers