Monthly Archives: March 2015

It’s here, and it’s growing: the self-assembling Coalition of the Radical Left Updated for 2026

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In January, I went to the Oregon coast to get away from the city, clear my mind, and have some fun. While walking down the beach, though, we noticed a horrible sight.

Thousands of dead young birds, called cassin’s auklets, littered the sands, strewn amongst the bottles and random plastic like so many discarded dreams.

Scientists are baffled as to the reason for the die-off. National Geographic called it “unprecedented… one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded.” Between 50-100,000 birds as of the end of January.

The most direct explanation is simply starvation. The natural food of the birds has gone away this season, and it fits in with a larger trend of mass die-offs on the Northwest coast. It could be that ocean acidification is creating an ecological collapse, a lack of oxygen in the water, perhaps, but the main theory places the blame on the warming oceans.

It is climate change that is causing this death, just as climate change induced drought have led to the wars in Syria and Mali. It is killing our young; the entire planet is in grave peril.

Something must be done. But what?

The political party in power in Greece is called Syriza, an acronym meaning Synaspismós Rizospastikís Aristerás (Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς) or ‘coalition of the radical left’. Their organization is not what one could possibly call a conventional political party: it is more of a work of rethinking politics and its relationship to the state.

They formed in 2004 as an anti-establishment party, and surfed into power on the waves of riotous discontent incumbent on austerity programs and police repression. Although they have found turbulent times amidst negotiations with global financial institutions, Syriza has shown the North Atlantic the possibility of taking hegemony from the core economic and political powers of neoliberalism.

In the US, we are way behind the times. Would it have been possible to formulate an organized political response to neoliberalism during the antiwar movement that surged into existence during 2003? Instead, the tangled ball of anti-war sentiment unraveled in sectarian provocations.

A friend of mine who joined some anarchist black bloc protests during that era recently recalled an example that illustrates this reality.

We talked about a panel where an audience member asked, “Why did the anarchists continually co-opt the anti-war protests?” The audience member went on to site a specific protest, to which my friend replied, “We were one of the groups that organized that protest.”

Over a century on the front lines of radical change

Anarchists are often attacked as the destabilizing force of left politics par excellence, yet when we approach politics from an anarchist perspective, we see these to be misconceptions. Anarchists bled and died for the eight-hour workday in the 1880s. The Magónista Liberal Party raised the banner of ‘Tierra y Libertad’ (Land and Liberty) in the fight for the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s.

The anarchist-syndicalist party, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT), joined the Spanish Popular Front during the 1930s. Anarchists played a driving role in the 1960s antiwar movement, the alter-globalization movement, and organized the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Today, the Kurdish PYD in Rojava (Syria) is motivated by the formulation of ideas condensed through the meeting of minds between Abdullah Öcalan and libertarian municipalists Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl.

The goals remain the same: mutual aid, solidarity, justice. There is no reason why, today, the left cannot or should not band together to form political institutions around these tenets to confront the current global threats of climate change and the police state. In fact, there is every reason to perform and encourage such an act through radical new organizations.

Power bases are being built already. In Seattle, City Councilor Kshama Sawant has taken her seat under the party Socialist Alternative (SA). SA is not a conventional political party, nor is Sawant a typical candidate. An immigrant woman of color, she is the first socialist elected to City Council in Seattle since 1877.

Her forward momentum helped carry the $15 minimum wage into effect and inspire a like-minded organization called Right to the City in Portland, Oregon.

Nature in the blast zone (and us too)

Convening around issues of climate change and economic justice, Right to the City is one of several groups developing out of the Occupy movement that gets a sense of purpose from articulating a transformation of the relationships between private property and urban spaces.

The group will be supporting independent candidates in the coming city council elections with the platform of increasing the minimum wage, shutting down industrial polluters, and promoting free access to safer and more diverse public institutions.

The creative application of alternative networks and spaces is emerging with a new way of thinking labor policy in the US. In the Pacific Northwest, the climate movement and labor movement have joined together to shut down the Port of Vancouver and the Port of Longview in light of proposed fossil fuels terminals. Climate and labor activists are currently joining on the picket lines against refineries in the Pacific Northwest, as well.

The oil train derailments are rising at breakneck speed. On Thursday, an oil train derailed near the Mississippi River in Illinois, adding to the several other derailments already this year.

Because we are all in the blast zone, nature is in the blast zone, the environmental group Rising Tide posted an average of a blockade per month of fossil fuel infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest for the last half of 2014, and there is more to come.

Today in Pacheco, California, the IWW is joining with union workers at the Golden Eagle refinery to protest fossil fuel expansion. This confluence marks one of many ways that people are moving forward in defiance of conventional politics, bringing remarkable energy toward rethinking education, food distribution and production, energy and power.

Race, poverty, injustice

While productivity has increased, there has been a decline in median income since 2000, and rents are rising across the country. The poverty rate for African-Americans is nearly triple that of whites, and the environmental injustices related to real estate and inadequate health care mean that people of color are more likely to die of cancer than white people.

The fact that more than two-thirds of African Americans live closer than thirty miles to a coal-fired power plant translates to heart diseases, birth defects, and asthma.

To enforce de facto segregation, overwhelmingly white police departments are commissioned to disproportionately incarcerate and kill people of color. Although data is often sketchy, USA Today disclosed that between 2006 and 2012 a white police officer shot and killed an African-American every three and a half days.

That is saying nothing of the black sites maintained by the Chicago Police Department, for example, under the watch of the Democratic Party machine.

This is nothing new, and it only scratches the surface of the economic hardships experienced in the US. Being denied the meeting of basic needs, Native peoples continue to be dispossessed by land grabs from Peabody Coal in Black Mesa to Resolution Copper in Oak Flats.

Latino/a farm workers are exposed to the terrible crisis of industrial farming, from chemical fertilizers and poisonous pesticides to disproportionately low wages. With climate change-induced droughts, many will be forced to flee the Central Valley and Central Coast area of California, perhaps heading north to the Pacific Northwest.

A grand coalition of the local and grassroots

Something will have to compensate if a collapse in agriculture continues apace in California’s once fertile valley. According to the UN, sustainable compensation of food production can only come from local family and community farming. We will need to reformat the coding system and transform relations between urban and rural, farm and market in order to produce enough food for everyone – but it can be done.

The enormity of the problem is, perhaps, dispiriting, and manifests one reason left movements spin out into sectarian and fracture – after all, one lesson of left politics is that much can be done on a grassroots, local basis. But what if the groups organizing on a local basis joined together to form a Coalition of the Radical Left to confront these major dilemmas on a horizontal basis?

A primary place for such an entity to enter into existence would be the Pacific Northwest, as Portland and Seattle are both among the fastest growing and fastest gentrifying cities with climate refugees to come in the future.

This is how we rise up. It is how we return to our reason for being on this planet in order to overcome the despair, take and share power, and stop the die-offs.

Because when you look the cyclone of famine and drought in the eye, it looks like our own young will be the next to wash up starving on the shores of politics if we don’t seize the moments, the opportunities to stand for our right to live on this earth – a right that we won’t have if we don’t live up to the hard demands of liberation and dignity.

In direct opposition to the neoliberal agenda of the corporate political parties that brought about the financial collapse, a horizon of creative, local activism can be cultivated. This coalition, bringing together ideas of groups like Right to the City and Socialist Alternative, would have an eye to global relations, stopping free trade agreements that have proven to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

But it would also maintain accountability to grassroots activity for social and ecological justice on a local level – from switching agricultural production to a local level, as insisted upon by the UN, to transforming the daily relations of patriarchal and racist power associated with the police state and its capitalist agenda.

Is this the ‘coming together’ that Naomi Klein is asking for?

The Coalition of the Radical Left, or what might be called CORAL, would be able to dispose of the cancerous institutions of climate change and their power mongers on a regional level, replacing the dialectics of the city with ecologically sustainable and resilient regional networks.

Through this horizontal organization emerging out of the union of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, among other movements, the left could break down the sinister land and water politics that are exterminating native species and exhausting aquifers, acidifying oceans and choking the skies. We could galvanize opposition to capitalism, and generate power to be shared by all people.

Warming oceans, rising sea levels (four inches in two years, according to recent studies on the Atlantic seaboard), catastrophic droughts. They are destroying the complex diversity that the web of life requires to maintain an integral balance.

The coral reefs are an excellent metaphor for what is happening. Based on a diverse amalgam of life and calcium carbonate ecosystems built by groups of animals, the coral reefs have for a long time symbolized the dreamland of Aboriginal life.

Australia’s Indigenous peoples for centuries have mapped out their knowledge of the reefs’ systems through the composition of intricate artworks and musics that translate the vitality of those systems into a lived reality.

As climate change bleaches and destroys those ecosystems, the dreamscapes of the world’s peoples are obliterated. Scientists have begun working with Aboriginal peoples to restore the coral, because that collaboration is the only way to re-establish a sense of the place.

CORAL would have to work as a solidarity movement with Indigenous partnerships along with communities of color. Coming together, we can rediscover how to understand and appreciate both biodiversity and human diversity, how to live together amongst both Indigenous and migrant populations, and how to embrace both the new and the ancient forms of reconciliation and resilience.

It is not an easy path, but integrity and respect never is. It requires self-discipline and practicing our ideas in good faith, passing along the wisdom of life. That is how we spin the fabric of dreams into our realities and celebrate what makes us human.

 

 

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013). 

 




390999

Climate change sparked Syria’s ruinous war Updated for 2026

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In a dire chain of cause and effect, the drought that devastated parts of Syria from 2006 to 2010 was probably the result of climate change driven by human activities, a new study says.

And the study’s authors think that the drought may also have contributed to the outbreak of Syria’s uprising in 2011. The ensuing civil war has left at least 200,000 people dead, and has displaced millions of others.

The drought, which was the worst ever recorded in the region, ravaged agriculture in the breadbasket region of northern Syria, driving dispossessed farmers to the cities where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created the unrest that exploded four years ago.

The study, by scientists from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, US, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The authors are clear that the climatic changes were human-driven (anthropogenic) and cannot be attributed simply to natural variability – but are careful to stress that their findings are tentative.

“We’re not saying the drought caused the war”, says Richard Seager, one of the co-authors. “We’re saying that, added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region.”

Climate link to violence

Their study, although it contains new material, is not the first to suggest a possible link between extreme weather and the likelihood of violence.

Some researchers have investigated whether there may be a link between El Niño and La Niña – the periodic Pacific weather disruptions – and outbreaks of unrest. Suggestions of a global connection between climate change and political instability is being taken seriously by two influential groups – insurers and military planners.

Syria was not the only country affected by the drought. It struck the Fertile Crescent, linking Turkey, Syria and Iraq, where agriculture and animal herding are believed to have started around 12,000 years ago.

The Levant has always seen natural weather swings. Other research has suggested that the Akkadian empire, spanning much of the Fertile Crescent about 4,000 years ago, probably collapsed during a long drought.

But the authors of the Lamont-Doherty study, using existing studies and their own research, showed that the area has warmed by between 1°C and 1.2°C since 1900, and has undergone a 10% reduction in wet season precipitation. They say this trend is a neat match for models of human-influenced global warming, and so cannot be attributed to natural variability.

Global warming has had two effects, they say. First, it appears to have indirectly weakened wind patterns that bring rain-laden air from the Mediterranean, reducing precipitation during the usual November-April wet season. And higher temperatures have increased the evaporation of moisture from soils during the hot summers.

Other researchers have observed the long-term drying trend across the Mediterranean region, and have attributed at least part of it to anthropogenic warming.

Government stuck with water-intensive cash crops

The government has also encouraged water-intensive export crops such as cotton, while illegal drilling of irrigation wells depleted groundwater, says co-author Shahrzad Mohtadi, an international affairs consultant at the US Department of State.

The drought’s effects were immediate and overwhelming. Agricultural production – typically, a quarter of Syria’s gross domestic product – fell by a third. In the northeast, livestock was practically wiped out, cereal prices doubled, and nutrition-related diseases among children increased steeply.

And Syria was especially vulnerable because of other factors – including a huge increase in population from four million in the 1950s to 22 million in recent years. As many as 1.5 million people fled from the countryside to cities already strained by waves of refugees from the war in neighbouring Iraq.

“Rapid demographic change encourages instability”, the authors say. “Whether it was a primary or substantial factor is impossible to know, but drought can lead to devastating consequences when coupled with pre-existing acute vulnerability.”

Solomon Hsiang, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, says the study is “the first scientific paper to make the case that human-caused climate change is already altering the risk of large-scale social unrest and violence.”

 

 

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




391003

It’s here, and it’s growing: the self-assembling Coalition of the Radical Left Updated for 2026

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In January, I went to the Oregon coast to get away from the city, clear my mind, and have some fun. While walking down the beach, though, we noticed a horrible sight.

Thousands of dead young birds, called cassin’s auklets, littered the sands, strewn amongst the bottles and random plastic like so many discarded dreams.

Scientists are baffled as to the reason for the die-off. National Geographic called it “unprecedented… one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded.” Between 50-100,000 birds as of the end of January.

The most direct explanation is simply starvation. The natural food of the birds has gone away this season, and it fits in with a larger trend of mass die-offs on the Northwest coast. It could be that ocean acidification is creating an ecological collapse, a lack of oxygen in the water, perhaps, but the main theory places the blame on the warming oceans.

It is climate change that is causing this death, just as climate change induced drought have led to the wars in Syria and Mali. It is killing our young; the entire planet is in grave peril.

Something must be done. But what?

The political party in power in Greece is called Syriza, an acronym meaning Synaspismós Rizospastikís Aristerás (Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς) or ‘coalition of the radical left’. Their organization is not what one could possibly call a conventional political party: it is more of a work of rethinking politics and its relationship to the state.

They formed in 2004 as an anti-establishment party, and surfed into power on the waves of riotous discontent incumbent on austerity programs and police repression. Although they have found turbulent times amidst negotiations with global financial institutions, Syriza has shown the North Atlantic the possibility of taking hegemony from the core economic and political powers of neoliberalism.

In the US, we are way behind the times. Would it have been possible to formulate an organized political response to neoliberalism during the antiwar movement that surged into existence during 2003? Instead, the tangled ball of anti-war sentiment unraveled in sectarian provocations.

A friend of mine who joined some anarchist black bloc protests during that era recently recalled an example that illustrates this reality.

We talked about a panel where an audience member asked, “Why did the anarchists continually co-opt the anti-war protests?” The audience member went on to site a specific protest, to which my friend replied, “We were one of the groups that organized that protest.”

Over a century on the front lines of radical change

Anarchists are often attacked as the destabilizing force of left politics par excellence, yet when we approach politics from an anarchist perspective, we see these to be misconceptions. Anarchists bled and died for the eight-hour workday in the 1880s. The Magónista Liberal Party raised the banner of ‘Tierra y Libertad’ (Land and Liberty) in the fight for the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s.

The anarchist-syndicalist party, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT), joined the Spanish Popular Front during the 1930s. Anarchists played a driving role in the 1960s antiwar movement, the alter-globalization movement, and organized the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Today, the Kurdish PYD in Rojava (Syria) is motivated by the formulation of ideas condensed through the meeting of minds between Abdullah Öcalan and libertarian municipalists Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl.

The goals remain the same: mutual aid, solidarity, justice. There is no reason why, today, the left cannot or should not band together to form political institutions around these tenets to confront the current global threats of climate change and the police state. In fact, there is every reason to perform and encourage such an act through radical new organizations.

Power bases are being built already. In Seattle, City Councilor Kshama Sawant has taken her seat under the party Socialist Alternative (SA). SA is not a conventional political party, nor is Sawant a typical candidate. An immigrant woman of color, she is the first socialist elected to City Council in Seattle since 1877.

Her forward momentum helped carry the $15 minimum wage into effect and inspire a like-minded organization called Right to the City in Portland, Oregon.

Nature in the blast zone (and us too)

Convening around issues of climate change and economic justice, Right to the City is one of several groups developing out of the Occupy movement that gets a sense of purpose from articulating a transformation of the relationships between private property and urban spaces.

The group will be supporting independent candidates in the coming city council elections with the platform of increasing the minimum wage, shutting down industrial polluters, and promoting free access to safer and more diverse public institutions.

The creative application of alternative networks and spaces is emerging with a new way of thinking labor policy in the US. In the Pacific Northwest, the climate movement and labor movement have joined together to shut down the Port of Vancouver and the Port of Longview in light of proposed fossil fuels terminals. Climate and labor activists are currently joining on the picket lines against refineries in the Pacific Northwest, as well.

The oil train derailments are rising at breakneck speed. On Thursday, an oil train derailed near the Mississippi River in Illinois, adding to the several other derailments already this year.

Because we are all in the blast zone, nature is in the blast zone, the environmental group Rising Tide posted an average of a blockade per month of fossil fuel infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest for the last half of 2014, and there is more to come.

Today in Pacheco, California, the IWW is joining with union workers at the Golden Eagle refinery to protest fossil fuel expansion. This confluence marks one of many ways that people are moving forward in defiance of conventional politics, bringing remarkable energy toward rethinking education, food distribution and production, energy and power.

Race, poverty, injustice

While productivity has increased, there has been a decline in median income since 2000, and rents are rising across the country. The poverty rate for African-Americans is nearly triple that of whites, and the environmental injustices related to real estate and inadequate health care mean that people of color are more likely to die of cancer than white people.

The fact that more than two-thirds of African Americans live closer than thirty miles to a coal-fired power plant translates to heart diseases, birth defects, and asthma.

To enforce de facto segregation, overwhelmingly white police departments are commissioned to disproportionately incarcerate and kill people of color. Although data is often sketchy, USA Today disclosed that between 2006 and 2012 a white police officer shot and killed an African-American every three and a half days.

That is saying nothing of the black sites maintained by the Chicago Police Department, for example, under the watch of the Democratic Party machine.

This is nothing new, and it only scratches the surface of the economic hardships experienced in the US. Being denied the meeting of basic needs, Native peoples continue to be dispossessed by land grabs from Peabody Coal in Black Mesa to Resolution Copper in Oak Flats.

Latino/a farm workers are exposed to the terrible crisis of industrial farming, from chemical fertilizers and poisonous pesticides to disproportionately low wages. With climate change-induced droughts, many will be forced to flee the Central Valley and Central Coast area of California, perhaps heading north to the Pacific Northwest.

A grand coalition of the local and grassroots

Something will have to compensate if a collapse in agriculture continues apace in California’s once fertile valley. According to the UN, sustainable compensation of food production can only come from local family and community farming. We will need to reformat the coding system and transform relations between urban and rural, farm and market in order to produce enough food for everyone – but it can be done.

The enormity of the problem is, perhaps, dispiriting, and manifests one reason left movements spin out into sectarian and fracture – after all, one lesson of left politics is that much can be done on a grassroots, local basis. But what if the groups organizing on a local basis joined together to form a Coalition of the Radical Left to confront these major dilemmas on a horizontal basis?

A primary place for such an entity to enter into existence would be the Pacific Northwest, as Portland and Seattle are both among the fastest growing and fastest gentrifying cities with climate refugees to come in the future.

This is how we rise up. It is how we return to our reason for being on this planet in order to overcome the despair, take and share power, and stop the die-offs.

Because when you look the cyclone of famine and drought in the eye, it looks like our own young will be the next to wash up starving on the shores of politics if we don’t seize the moments, the opportunities to stand for our right to live on this earth – a right that we won’t have if we don’t live up to the hard demands of liberation and dignity.

In direct opposition to the neoliberal agenda of the corporate political parties that brought about the financial collapse, a horizon of creative, local activism can be cultivated. This coalition, bringing together ideas of groups like Right to the City and Socialist Alternative, would have an eye to global relations, stopping free trade agreements that have proven to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

But it would also maintain accountability to grassroots activity for social and ecological justice on a local level – from switching agricultural production to a local level, as insisted upon by the UN, to transforming the daily relations of patriarchal and racist power associated with the police state and its capitalist agenda.

Is this the ‘coming together’ that Naomi Klein is asking for?

The Coalition of the Radical Left, or what might be called CORAL, would be able to dispose of the cancerous institutions of climate change and their power mongers on a regional level, replacing the dialectics of the city with ecologically sustainable and resilient regional networks.

Through this horizontal organization emerging out of the union of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, among other movements, the left could break down the sinister land and water politics that are exterminating native species and exhausting aquifers, acidifying oceans and choking the skies. We could galvanize opposition to capitalism, and generate power to be shared by all people.

Warming oceans, rising sea levels (four inches in two years, according to recent studies on the Atlantic seaboard), catastrophic droughts. They are destroying the complex diversity that the web of life requires to maintain an integral balance.

The coral reefs are an excellent metaphor for what is happening. Based on a diverse amalgam of life and calcium carbonate ecosystems built by groups of animals, the coral reefs have for a long time symbolized the dreamland of Aboriginal life.

Australia’s Indigenous peoples for centuries have mapped out their knowledge of the reefs’ systems through the composition of intricate artworks and musics that translate the vitality of those systems into a lived reality.

As climate change bleaches and destroys those ecosystems, the dreamscapes of the world’s peoples are obliterated. Scientists have begun working with Aboriginal peoples to restore the coral, because that collaboration is the only way to re-establish a sense of the place.

CORAL would have to work as a solidarity movement with Indigenous partnerships along with communities of color. Coming together, we can rediscover how to understand and appreciate both biodiversity and human diversity, how to live together amongst both Indigenous and migrant populations, and how to embrace both the new and the ancient forms of reconciliation and resilience.

It is not an easy path, but integrity and respect never is. It requires self-discipline and practicing our ideas in good faith, passing along the wisdom of life. That is how we spin the fabric of dreams into our realities and celebrate what makes us human.

 

 

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013). 

 




390999

FLUMP – Slow origins of functional diversity, maladaptation, and more! Updated for 2026

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Opabinia_BW2

By Nobu Tamura (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons

It’s Friday and that means that it’s time for our Friday link dump, where we highlight some recent papers (and other stuff) that we found interesting but didn’t have the time to write an entire post about. If you think there’s something we missed, or have something to say, please share in the comments section!

According to a recent analysis of the paleo record of marine fauna in Nature Communications, functional diversity increased much more slowly than was previously hypothesized. Cambrian fauna attempted relatively few new ways of making a living, but functional diversity continued to increase through the Ordovician and following subsequent mass extinctions. (Photo credit Nobu Tamura, via Wikimedia Commons).

Species-area relationships are affected by ecological characteristics of species in Ecology.

What role does maladaptation play in evolutionary ecology? Farkas et al. use island biogeography to develop a framework for including predictions about maladaption in ecological time.

–Emily Grason

March 6, 2015

Save the Arctic sea ice while we still can! Updated for 2026

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Fossil fuel companies, and their supporters in government, seem blissfully unaware of the dangers ahead, threatening everybody on this planet.

The sea ice is declining far more rapidly than anyone expected. It is declining towards disappearance in summer months, yet the colossal negative impact of a low albedo Arctic has hardly been discussed. This is tragic because the whole situation could have been avoided with good leadership at negligible economic cost.

And as reported this week on The Ecologist, new scientific research indicates that the apparent ‘pause’ in global warming has, in fact, been no such thing. Instead the surplus heat – two Hiroshima bombs-worth a second – has simply been ‘buried’ deep in the Pacific Ocean.

That’s because of two important climate cycles, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, whose operation has masked the warming. But soon they will tip the other way and the ‘Big Heat’ is set to begin – a five to ten year burst of rapid warming that will be most severe in the Arctic.

Commercial advantages for some …

If you read the mainstream media, only the positive impact of a melting Arctic is mentioned: an Arctic ripe for exploitation.

Through not grasping the huge negative impact of a low albedo Arctic, the fossil fuel companies still appear entirely happy for the sea ice to disappear as quickly as possible – the sooner the better. Therefore they naturally resist any action to save the sea ice. In particular they don’t want geoengineering deployed to cool the Arctic, because it might succeed in saving it!

Certain fossil fuel companies have already invested heavily in exploiting the vast store of oil and gas in the Arctic. These companies, and the governments who support them, are preparing for a bonanza when the sea ice disappears in summer: it will be so much easier and safer to extract the fossil fuel when the sea ice and freezing conditions have gone during summer months.

Furthermore, the disappearance of the sea ice will open up the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route (formerly known as the Northeast Passage) to trade through summer months. So China and nations bordering the Atlantic (including the UK) are expecting to benefit enormously. Russia is investing heavily in ports and infrastructure to support the anticipated heavy traffic.

Various environment groups and the UK Environment Audit Committee have argued against drilling in the Arctic because they are concerned about oil spills and gas blow-outs which could ruin the local environment. They also seek to protect the wild life and Arctic ecosystem. But their arguing will be futile once the sea ice has gone in summer. It will be too late to protect the environment.

Environmentists have less concern about the opening up of the trade routes, because this will reduce CO2 emissions from transport of goods which at present have much longer journeys.

The Arctic bombshell is waiting to go off

While there is all this talk of exploiting the Arctic, little or nothing is said about the adverse effects of having an Arctic free of sea ice during summer months.

Nothing has been said by the IPCC. Nothing has been said in the mainstream media. Nothing has been said by the scientific community at large. This is a terrible omission. It is quite scandalous.

While most experts agree that there will come a time when the Arctic Ocean will be free of ice during summer months, there is no such agreement on the time-scale. Models suggest that it will take decades.

But observations of an exponential trend of sea ice decline suggest that this time could be within a decade. Scientific reports of especially rapid temperature rise in Alaska have also been emerged. For example Barrow, Alaska has experienced a 7C temperature rise over 34 years, attributed to the decline in sea ice.

So what are the effects? During summer months, a vast area of reflective ice will have been replaced by open water, absorbing 90% of sunshine and warming the Arctic air above. It is clear that the Arctic will be warming much faster than at present – likely at over 2°C per decade.

As heat dissipates around the planet, there will be a huge contribution to global warming in the long term. Estimates put this at equivalent of 3.3 W/m2 (Flanner, 2011) or about twice the current warming from CO2.

But what are the immediate consequences of this super-rapid warming in the Arctic? At present we have an acceleration of three particular processes, affected by Arctic warming to date:

  • Firstly, we have a dramatic rise in Northern Hemisphere weather extremes, as the jet stream behaviour is disrupted.
  • Secondly we have an exponential increase in meltwater from the Greenland Ice Sheet, flowing through moulins on the surface of the ice into the sea and raising the sea level.
  • And thirdly we have a dramatic increase in methane emissions from the Arctic Ocean seabed.

As the temperature in the Arctic continues to increase, these processes will continue almost indefinitely. We can expect worsening Northern Hemisphere climate causing widespread crop failures; faster sea level rise causing progressive flooding of low-lying regions; and growing methane emissions leading to even more catastrophic global warming.

These are three immediate results of the switching on of heat as the Arctic Ocean enters the low sea-ice state. The combination will be devastating for all mankind – with mass starvation and mass migration liable to trigger a world war.

This is the terrifying bombshell. The bonanza will be short-lived, as the effects of a seasonally ice free Arctic Ocean begin to bite.

For a few billion dollars a year, we can save the Arctic

Something must be done to prevent the ocean entering this low-ice state. Therefore the Arctic must be cooled enough to save the sea ice.

The first moment at the end of summer that the sea ice finally disappears from the ocean is called the ‘blue ocean event’. It is significant because it could mark the entry of the ocean into a permanent low-ice state for subsequent years – the point of no return. The point of no return could be a soon as next September.

By any ordinary standards, we have left it too late to cool the Arctic. But any reduction in the risk of passing the point of no return is worthwhile, when all our futures are at stake.

Fortunately researchers are increasingly confident that a stratospheric aerosol haze, produced from sulphur dioxide, SO2, could provide significant cooling of the Arctic for modest expenditure of the order of a few billion dollars per year.

This type of cooling could be replaced by cloud brightening using ultra-fine seawater droplets when the technology is ready for large-scale deployment within a year or two.

There should be no significant negative economic impact from this action, except that the resources in the Arctic become frozen assets. But they should be frozen assets in any case if global warming is to be kept below 2 degrees C, according to a recent paper.

There should be positive political impact, because governments will be working together in a common cause to protect their own citizens and all the citizens of the world. The fossil fuel industry has to be persuaded that preserving the Arctic sea ice is essential for the future of themselves and their stakeholders.

Objections from the anti-geoengineering lobby have to be overcome, because we have no other realistic option to reduce the colossal risk of passing a point of no return this September.

 

 

John Nissen is Chair of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group.

 

 




390984

Greenpeace Energy to launch legal challenge to UK nuclear subsidies Updated for 2026

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German green power supply company Greenpeace Energy (GPE) will take legal action against the European Commission because it has approved State aid worth billions for the building of the UK’s new Hinkley Point C nuclear plant.

According to GPE, the nuclear subsidy “threatens to distort competition in the European Union against genuine clean energy” and “could act as precedent and further undermine the EU energy market.”

“Highly subsidised nuclear power from this plant will noticeably distort European competitiveness. It will have an effect on prices at the power exchange in Germany as well”, says Sönke Tangermann, GPE’s managing director.

“This effect will have economic disadvantages for committed green power providers like us, and that’s why we are going to court.”

He adds that GPE will file a plea for annulment at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg “as soon as the Commission’s State aid approval is published in the EU’s Official Journal and the period prescribed for bringing an action begins.”

Austria is also expected to launch a legal action against the Hinkley C subsidies – in the face of menacing threats from UK diplomats that the UK would “embrace any future opportunity that arises to sue or damage Austria in areas which have strong domestic political implications.”

Far higher subsidies to nuclear than to renewables

Last October the EU Commission approved State aid for the new build of two nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point in Somerset. GPE estimates that the immediate subsidy is worth about €22 billion, or £16 billion.

However the picture is complex as the aid package includes an inflation-proof generation subsidy of £92.50 per MWh for 35 years, construction guarantees, limits on liability for decommissioning, and a low accident liabilty cut-off. Other analysts believe the true cost as far higher and could amount to £30 billion or more.

The generation subsidy alone guarantees Hinkley’s power a wholesale price of £92.50 per MHh, double the market price, or 9.25p per unit – equivalent to almost 13€c. Adding all the elements together, says GPE, “The resulting subsidy is far higher than that for wind or solar power in Germany.”

It’s also much higher than renewable energy subsidies in the UK. Last week the UK government awarded contracts to renewable energy generators under its new ‘contracts for difference’ (CFD) auction. Typically wind generators were bidding £82.50 per MHh, and solar generators came in even lower, at £79.23 per MWh and £50 per MWh.

Also the contracts are for only 15 years – as opposed to the 35 years for Hinkley C – and contain no additional support or guarantees. The entire CFD package for new renewable energy capacity is limited to just £50 million per year, rising to £65 million in future years.

As reported on The Ecologist, the effect of the UK’s energy policy will be to almost kill off the flourishing solar sector, reducing the rate of new solar build from 2,000-3,000 MWh per year, to an estimated 32MW.

Many critics believe that the government is cutting back on renewables that are increasingly competitive against fossil fuels as prices rapidly drop, to make way for far higher-priced nuclear power.

Hinkley threatens to distort the entire European market

An expert opinion commissioned by Greenpeace Energy from analysts Energy Brainpool shows that Hinkley Point C will lead to a shift in price levels in the European electricity market.

The opinion explains that lower prices for electricity at the power exchange in Germany will discriminate against those suppliers that procure green power at fixed prices directly from plant operators in the framework of the German Renewable Energies Act.

“Unlike the claims of Prime Minister Cameron, a new reactor built at Hinkley Point, supported by billions of taxpayers money, is not a purely British affair, but directly disadvantages us as a German enterprise active in the European electricity market”, says Tangermann.

Due to the price effects of Hinkley Point C, the costs of the system laid out in Germany’s Renewable Energies Act (EEG) to foster renewables are likely to rise because the operators of renewable energy plants – with fixed feed-in tariffs – would in future have to be paid a larger difference in the electricity price at the power exchange.

This would probably cause a small increase in the renewable energy surcharge, while “the strain it would put on the EEG system is an outrage”, says Tangermann.

Will Hinkley corner European Investment Funds?

GPE’s other fear is that Hinkley, and other nuclear projects elsewhere in Europe, could grab a huge share of the European Investment Fund presented by Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the EU Commission, when it enters into force.

The UK has already applied for €46 billion to fund Hinkley C and two other nuclear power stations from the projected €315 billion fund, and this could be essential as other potential funders have withdrawn. Poland is also applying for €12 billion for new nuclear build.

Moreover, the EU intends to massively extend cross-border power lines, meaning the negative effect of this development, as calculated by Energy Brainpool, would be reinforced on a massive scale.As such GPE sees in the approval of State aid for Hinkley Point C a precedent for other nuclear projects that will hugely distort Europe’s energy market, says Tangemann:

“If the Commission’s approval goes unchallenged, then Hinkley Point C is just the tip of the iceberg, which is why we are calling on the German government to take legal action against the unfair State aid approval for Hinkley Point C. It must not open the door to other hazardous and absurdly expensive nuclear power projects in Europe.”

Germany’s biggest independent energy co-op

GPE is Germany’s largest national, independent energy cooperative, supplying clean power to more than 111,000 customers, of which about 9,000 are businesses. It is organised as a cooperative with 23,000 members whose contributions provide a solid equity capital base.

Through its subsidiary Planet Energy it also builds its own power plants, and has 11 wind farms (see photo) and three photovoltaic plants totalling 65MW are already in operation.

GPE has appointed Dr. Dörte Fouquet at the Becker Büttner Held law office, specialists in this area, to prepare the application for the plea for annulment and assist in subsequent proceedings.

In coming weeks, Greenpeace Energy will also review the possibility of joining forces with other stakeholders in Germany’s energy market for bringing legal action as a collective.

 

 

Principal source: Greenpeace Energy.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

 




390968

Call goes out for dolphinarium-free Europe Updated for 2026

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The ‘Dolphinaria-Free Europe Coalition‘ (DFEC), consisting of 19 NGOs from 11 countries, are calling upon European citizens, Parliamentarians and Member State governments to end captive dolphin shows and interactive sessions which, they say, “exploit the animals and compromise their welfare.”

There are currently 33 dolphinaria in 15 EU countries, collectively holding an estimated 307 captive whales and dolphins. The Coalition’s first objective is to raise awareness about their exploitation.

“In our view, the scientific evidence is conclusive”, says DFEC’s Policy Coordinator Daniel Turner, also Programmes Manager for the Born Free Foundation, who is asking supporters to ‘Make a promise for freedom‘.

“The keeping of whales and dolphins in captivity, where they are trained to perform unnatural behaviours, not only distorts the natural attributes of these highly intelligent, social animals, but is also known to compromise the animal’s physical and mental health.”

The UK’s Green MEP Keith Taylor, a co-hosts of the launch, added: “To confine creatures such as whales, dolphins and porpoise which are used to roaming large territories to live in small pools – all in the name of public entertainment – is cruel.

“Denying these intelligent animals’ sufficient space and complexity causes them to develop abnormal behaviour and heightened aggression as, for example, shown in the film ‘Blackfish’. This is why I want to see an end to cetacean captivity.

The law is failing to prevent serious abuses

In the EU dolphinaria are regulated by national zoo laws in the State where they are located and by the EU’s 1999/22 Zoos Directive, which requires all dolphinaria to make demonstrable commitments to species conservation, public education and higher standards of animal welfare.

But a recent report by ENDCAP found widespread abuses taking place. Its main findings were:

  • “Dolphinaria in the EU are failing to comply” with the Zoos Directive
  • The dolphinaria are making an “insignificant contribution to the conservation of biodiversity.”
  • 285 live cetaceans have been imported into the EU between 1979 and 2008, violating a prohibition under EU CITES Regulation 338/97 on imports of cetaceans into the EU for primarily commercial purposes.
  • Public education in most surveyed dolphinaria was “poor”.
  • All dolphinaria in the EU display their cetaceans to the paying public in regular presentations or shows, often to loud music, in which the animals perform tricks and stunts.
  • 19 dolphinaria allow visitors to get close to cetaceans, including for the taking of photographs, in swimming with dolphins programmes or in Dolphin Assisted Therapy programmes – placing both parties “at significant risk of disease and injury.”
  • No captive cetacean in the EU has the freedom to express normal behaviour, a guiding principle for animal welfare. “Stress and stereotypic behaviour are common among captive cetaceans.”
  • Dolphinaria in the EU fail to meet the biological requirements of cetaceans in captivity and to provide species-specific enrichment – is a key requirement of the Zoos Directive.

Italian MEP Marco Affronte, also a co-host of today’s event, commented: “There is really no excuse – if dolphinaria cannot adequately provide whales and dolphins with their physical and behaviour needs, there is no longer a place for these attractions in the European Union. Emphasis must be given to the protection of these animals in the wild, not their incarceration in captivity.”

Welfare concerns grow over poor conditioons

According to DFEC, the largest captive facilities are a fraction of the size of the natural home ranges of whales, dolphins and porpoises. For example, orcas may travel 150 kilometres in a day, but the largest orca tank in the world is 70 metres long

Captive dolphins sharing a pool are often unrelated, from different geographic regions or from different species, which can result in dominance-related aggression, injuries, illness and death. In the wild, most cetaceans live in family groups of 100 or more animals.

Loud music and the regular, repetitive noise of pumps and filters are thought to cause significant stress to captive cetaceans, who are highly dependent on their sense of hearing. Tranquillizers including Diazepam (Valium) are widely used by the captive dolphin industry.

Captive facilities lack stimulation, and some (in Belgium, Lithuania, Bulgaria) only provide indoor facilities, without natural light and with possibly insufficient air circulation. Most pools are smooth-sided.

And far from promoting cetacean conservation, dolphinaria endanger wild animals. “Low breeding success has rendered the captive dolphin population not self-sustaining”, DFEC reports, necessitating the capture of wild cetaceans which “continues to be a threat to small, local populations.”

Spain (11) and Italy (4) host the majority of facilities. Species include bottlenose dolphins (an estimated 281 individuals), orca (12 individuals), harbour porpoise (estimated 11 individuals), beluga whales (two individuals) and one Amazon River dolphin (September 2014).

Thirteen Member States do not host dolphinaria. Slovenia, Cyprus and Croatia prohibit the keeping of cetaceans in captivity for commercial purposes, Hungary prohibits dolphin imports, whilst Greece has banned all animal performances.

Five Member States (Belgium, Finland, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom) have specific legislative standards for the keeping of cetaceans in captivity. The UK’s high standards currently preclude maintaining dolphinaria in the country. Italy has some of the best standards, but these are rarely enforced.

 

 

Pledge: ‘Make a promise for freedom‘.

Campaign: Dolphinaria-Free Europe.

 

 




390965

After UK’s record solar year, government tries to kill the sector Updated for 2026

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Marks & Spencer (M&S) has just completed the UK’s largest single roof mounted solar panel array on its East Midlands automated distribution centre in Castle Donington.

The 6.1MWp solar array comprises 24,272 PV panels, each rated at 250W, installed on the company’s 900,000 sq.ft (84,000 sq.m) roof.

It’s yet another contribution to the record growth of the UK’s solar sector, which now boasts over 650,000 solar installations across homes, offices, schools, churches, warehouses, farms, police stations, train stations and even a bridge.

Official statistics show that total capacity reached almost 5GW at the end of 2014, up from 2.8GW at the end of 2013. At peak production, that’s enough to power 1.5 million homes, and approaching 10% of the UK’s peak power demand.

But now the government is determined to kill UK solar

Despite the manifest success of the UK’s solar industry, the government last week anounced that only five large (over 5MW) new solar installations will be supported under its new  ‘Contracts for Difference’ (CFD) system.

The CFD ‘auction’, held earlier this year, required ‘established renewables’ – a category that includes onshore wind, landfill gas, hydro and solar – to compete with each other for a share of £50m for the next year, rising to 65m allocated for future years.

Relative to support for other technologies the sum is minute. The government is spending £3.1bn for under its established Renewables Obligation (RO) support mechanism for 2014/15. And while the RO remains open until 2017 to other technologies, it specifically excludes large-scale solar.

The Solar Trade Association predicts a catastrophic decline in the sector as a consequence. It estimates that 2-3GW (2,000-3,000MW) of large-scale solar will be completed in the current financial year.

But it predicts that next financial year new installations will collapse to just 32MW for all solar PV large and small – around 1% of current levels.

‘Blatant discrimination’

Some now accuse the government of “blatant discrimination” against solar power, owing to its unique exclusion from the RO, combined with the paltry sum available under the CFD package. In addition Britain’s Green Investment Bank has so far excluded solar power from loans of £1.6 billion for renewables.

The five solar projects selected from the CFD auction came in at the lowest prices of all the 27 winners, at £50 and £79.23 per MWh. Most of the others were onshore wind projects bidding at £82.50. This provides a strong indication that solar is already the UK’s lowest cost form of renewable energy.

Making government policy especially paradoxical, say critics, is the fact that solar PV is expected to be competitive with fossil fuel power as soon as 2020, according to the recent report ‘In Sight: Unsubsidised UK Solar‘. The report recommends:

“Solar PV will be a critical technology in the 21st century, and the British government should continue to support the industry until it is fully economic without subsidies; we believe that this will be reached within the next decade across all solar markets in Britain.

“Support must be reduced progressively and predictably towards elimination over the next decade, to help build a more mature, lowcost supply chain, while maintaining value for money and preventing developers from inflating prices. Getting the right support level is critical to driving sustained cost reductions.”

Even Amber Rudd, Minister for Energy and Climate Change, had nice things to say at M&S’s solar launch yesterday: “More rooftop solar means more jobs – and will also help deliver the clean, reliable energy supplies that the country needs at the lowest possible cost to consumers.”

But in fact, the government is putting the boot in. Why? A clue may exist elsewhere in the report: “Increasing cost-competitiveness and capacity growth of solar PV in Britain will impact the British power system, including falls in wholesale power prices, as already seen in Germany.

“The growth of solar power may threaten electric utilities which fail to transition away from solely supplying electricity, to providing residential energy services.”

Could the UK government’s apparently senseless policy on solar power be written by the energy companies in direct opposition to the consumer interest in lower electricity prices? So it would appear.

But M&S sticks to its solar guns

M&S’s record-breaking PV array will help the company maintain its commitment of sourcing 100% of its electricity for UK and Ireland buildings from renewable sources, with 50% sourced from small scale renewable sources by 2020.

The energy it generates each year – estimated at 5,000 MWh – will provide nearly 25% of the energy required for the distribution centre, and lower M&S’s carbon footprint by 48,000 tonnes over 20 years.

As such M&S’s solar commitment is driven by its low carbon policy commitment rather than subsidies. Since the launch of its ‘Plan A’ in 2007, M&S has lowered its carbon emissions by 37% and is carbon neutral across its worldwide operations.

And Hugo Adams, Director of Property at M&S, confirmed that there was more in the pipeline. The completion of this project, he said, was “the first significant step in a number of solar energy initiatives we are planning this year. The scale of the project demonstrates our ambitious goals and long term commitment to onsite renewable energy.”

And it may just be that as prices fall, other companies, landlords, schools, local authorities and home-owners will just carry on installing solar anyway, driving down their power bills and carbon footprint – and foiling the attempt by the UK government, in cahoots with the Big Six power companies, to kill the sector off.

 

 

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

 




390945

Coming soon: the ‘Big Heat’ Updated for 2026

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Forget the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming-new research says we might be in for an era of deeply accelerated heating.

While the rate of atmospheric warming in recent years has, indeed, slowed due to various natural weather cycles – hence the skeptics’ droning on about ‘pauses’ – global warming, as a whole, has not stopped.

Far from it. It’s actually sped up, dramatically, as excess heat has absorbed into the oceans. We’ve only begun to realize the extent of this phenomenon in recent years, after scientists developed new technologies capable of measuring ocean temperatures with a depth and precision that was previously lacking.

In 2011, a paper in Geophysical Research Letters tallied up the total warming data from land, air, ice, and the oceans. In 2012, the lead author of that study, oceanographer John Church, updated his research. What Church found was shocking: in recent decades, climate change has been adding heat to the oceans at an average rate of 125 Terawatts (TW).

How to convey this extraordinary fact? His team came up with an analogy: it was roughly the same amount of energy that would be released by the detonation of two atomic bombs the size dropped on Hiroshima. In other words, these scientists found that anthropogenic climate is warming the oceans at a rate equivalent to around two Hiroshima bombs per second.

Or looked at another way, all the world’s coal fired power stations currently have a generation capacity a little under 2TW. As they are typically about one third efficient, working flat out they would collectively produce about 6TW of heat and power. Now multiply by 20.

Actually, it’s worse. Much worse …

But as new data came in, the situation has looked worse: over the last 17 years, the rate of warming has doubled to about four bombs per second. In 2013, the rate of warming tripled to become equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs every second.

So not only is warming intensifying, it is also accelerating. By burning fossil fuels, humans are effectively detonating 378 million atomic bombs in the oceans each year – this, along with the ocean’s over – absorption of carbon dioxide, has fuelled ocean acidification, and now threatens the entire marine food chain as well as animals who feed on marine species. Like, er, many humans.

According to a new paper in Science from a crack team of climate scientists, a key reason that the oceans are absorbing all this heat in recent decades so well (thus masking the extent of global warming by allowing atmospheric average temperatures to heat more slowly), is due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), an El Nino-like weather pattern that can last anywhere between 15-30 years.

In its previous positive phase, which ran from around 1977 to 1998, the PDO meant the oceans would absorb less heat, thus operating as an accelerator on atmospheric temperatures. Since 1998, the PDO has been in a largely negative phase, during which the oceans absorb more heat from the atmosphere.

Such decadal ocean cycles have broken down recently, and become more sporadic. The last, mostly negative phase, was punctuated by a brief positive phase that lasted 3 years between 2002 and 2005.

Where’s all the heat gone? Buried in the deep ocean

The authors of the new study, Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, University of Minnesota geologist Byron Steinman, and Penn State meteorologist Sonya Miller, point out that the PDO, as well as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), have thus played a major role in temporarily dampening atmospheric warming.

So what has happened? During this period, Mann and his team show, there has been increased “heat burial” in the Pacific ocean, that is, a greater absorption of all that heat equivalent to hundreds of millions of Hiroshimas.

For some, this has created the false impression, solely from looking at global average surface air temperatures, of a ‘pause’ in warming. But as Mann said, the combination of the AMO and PDO “likely offset anthropogenic warming over the past decade.”

Therefore, the ‘pause’ doesn’t really exist, and instead is an artifact of the limitations of our different measuring instruments.

“The ‘false pause’ is explained in part by cooling in the Pacific ocean over the past one-to-two decades”, Mann told me, “but that is likely to reverse soon: in other words, the ‘slowdown’ is fleeting and will likely soon disappear.”

The disappearance of the ‘slowdown’ will, in tangible terms, mean that the oceans will absorb less atmospheric heat. While all the accumulated ocean heat “is certainly not going to pop back out”, NASA’s chief climate scientist Dr. Gavin Schmidt told me, it is likely to mean that less atmospheric heat will end up being absorbed:

“Ocean cycles can modulate the uptake of anthropogenic heat, as some have speculated for the last decade or so, but … net flux is still going to be going into the ocean.”

Next, the heat will transfer to the atmosphere …

According to Mann and his team, at some point, this will manifest as an acceleration in the rise of global average surface air temperatures. In their Science study, they observe:

“Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse with internal variability, instead adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.”

So at some point in the near future, the PDO will switch from its current negative phase back to positive, reducing the capacity of the oceans to accumulate heat from the atmosphere.

That positive phase of the PDO will therefore see a rapid rise in global surface air temperatures, as the oceans’ capacity to absorb all those Hiroshima bomb equivalents declines – and leaves it to accumulate in our skies. In other words, after years of slower-than-expected warming, we may suddenly feel the heat.

So when will that happen? No one knows for sure, but at the end of last year, signs emerged that the phase shift to a positive PDO could be happening right now. In the five months before November 2014, measures of surface temperature differences in the Pacific shifted to positive, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This is the longest such positive shift detected in about 12 years. Although too soon to determine for sure whether this is, indeed, the beginning of the PDO’s switch to a new positive phase, this interpretation is consistent with current temperature variations, which during a positive PDO phase should be relatively warm in the tropical Pacific and relatively cool in regions north of about 20 degrees latitude.

In January 2015, further signs emerged that the PDO is right now in transition to a new warm phase. “Global warming is about the get a boost”, ventured meteorologist Eric Holthaus. Recent data including California’s intensifying drought and sightings of tropical fish off the Alaskan coast “are further evidence of unusual ocean warming”, suggesting that a PDO transition “may already be underway a new warm phase.”

While it’s still not clear whether the PDO is really shifting into a new phase just yet, when it does, it won’t be good. Scientists from the UK Met Office’s Hadley Center led by Dr. Chris Roberts of the Oceans and Cryosphere Group estimate in a new paper in Nature that there is an 85% chance the faux ‘pause’ will end in the next five years, followed by a burst of warming likely to consist of a decade or so of warm ocean oscillations.

Arctic faces a double warming whammy

Roberts and his team found that a ‘slow down’ period is usually (60% of the time) followed by rapid warming at twice the background rate for at least five years, and potentially longer.

And mostly, this warming would be concentrated in the Arctic, a region where temperatures are already higher than the global average, and which is widely recognized to be a barometer of the health of the global climate due to how Arctic changes dramatically alter trends elsewhere.

Recent extreme weather events around the world have been attributed to the melting Arctic ice sheets and the impact on ocean circulations and jet streams.

What this means, if the UK Met Office is right, is that we probably have five years (likely less) before we witness the ‘Big Heat’ – a supercharged surge of rapid global warming that could last a decade, further destabilizing the climate system in deeply unpredictable ways.

 

 

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author, and international security scholar. He is a regular contributor to The Ecologist where he writes about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. He has also written for the Guardian, The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, Prospect, New Statesman, Vice, Le Monde diplomatique, among many others. His new novel of the near future is ZERO POINT.

Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed and Facebook.

Website: www.nafeezahmed.com

This article was originally published on Vice magazine’s Motherboard.

 




390917

Confronting industrialism: if you can’t clean it up, don’t make it! Updated for 2026

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Some of the most important questions confronting us are: what should we do about this culture’s industrial wastes, from greenhouse gases to pesticides to ocean microplastics?

Can the capitalists clean up the messes they create? Or is the whole industrial system beyond reform? The answers become clear with a little context.

Let’s start the discussion of context with two riddles that aren’t very funny.

Q: What do you get when a cross a long drug habit, a quick temper, and a gun?
A: Two life terms for murder, with earliest release date 2026.

And,

Q: What do you get when you cross a large corporation, two nation states, 40 tons of poison, and at least 8,000 dead human beings?
A: Retirement with full pay and benefits. Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide. Bhopal.

The point of these riddles is not merely that when it comes to murder and many other atrocities, different rules apply to the poor than to the rich. And it’s not merely that ‘economic production’ is a get-out-of-jail free card for whatever atrocities the ‘producers’ commit, whether it’s genocide, gynocide, ecocide, slaving, mass murder, mass poisoning, and so on.

Do we even care? We already know they don’t …

The point here is that this culture is clearly not particularly interested in cleaning up its toxic messes. Obviously, or it wouldn’t keep making them. It wouldn’t allow those who make these messes to do so with impunity. It certainly wouldn’t socially reward those who make them.

This may or may not be the appropriate time to mention that this culture has created, for example, 14 quadrillion (yes, quadrillion) lethal doses of Plutonium 239, which has a half-life of over 24,000 years, which means that in a mere 100,000 years that number will be all the way down to only about 3.5 quadrillion lethal doses: Yay!

And socially reward them it does. I could have used a whole host of examples other than Warren Anderson, who was playing on the back nine long after he should have been hanging by the neck (he was sentenced to death in absentia, but the US refused to extradite him).

There’s Tony Hayward, who oversaw BP’s devastation of the Gulf of Mexico and who was ‘punished’ for this with a severance package worth well over $30 million. Or we could throw another couple of riddles at you, which are really the same riddles:

Q: What do you call someone who puts poison in the subways of Tokyo?
A: A terrorist.

Q: What do you call someone who puts poison (cyanide) into groundwater?
A: A capitalist: CEO of a gold mining corporation.

We could talk about frackers, who make money as they poison groundwater. We could talk about anyone associated with Monsanto. You can add your own examples. I’d say you can ‘choose your poison’ but of course you can’t. Those are chosen for you by those doing the poisoning.

Civilization’s ability to overcome our native common sense

I keep thinking about one of the most fundamentally sound (and fundamentally disregarded) statements I’ve ever read. After Bhopal, one of the doctors trying to help survivors stated that corporations (and by extension, all organizations and individuals) “shouldn’t be permitted to make poison for which there is no antidote.”

Please note, by the way, that far from having antidotes, nine out of ten chemicals used in pesticides in the US haven’t even been thoroughly tested for (human) toxicity.

Isn’t that something we were all supposed to learn by the time we were three? Isn’t it one of the first lessons our parents are supposed to teach us? Don’t make a mess you can’t clean up!

Yet that is precisely the foundational motivator of this culture. Sure, we can use fancy phrases to describe the processes of creating messes we have no intention of cleaning up, and in many cases cannot clean up.

And so we get phrases like ‘developing natural resources’, or ‘sustainable development’, or ‘technological progress’ (like the invention and production of plastics, the bathing of the world in endocrine disruptors, and so on), or ‘mining’, or ‘agriculture’, or ‘the Green Revolution’, or ‘fueling growth’, or ‘creating jobs’, or ‘building empire’, or ‘global trade’.

But physical reality is always more important than what we call it or how we rationalize it. And the truth is that this culture has been based from the beginning to the present on privatizing benefits and externalizing costs. In other words, on exploiting others and leaving messes behind.

Hell, they call them ‘limited liability corporations’ because a primary purpose is to limit the legal and financial liability of those who benefit from the actions of corporations for the harm these actions cause.

Internalizing insanity

This is no way to run a childhood, and it’s an even worse way to run a culture. It’s killing the planet. Part of the problem is that most of us are insane, having been made so by this culture. We should never forget what RD Laing wrote about this insanity:

“In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex [and I would say this entire way of life, including the creation of messes we have neither the interest nor capacity to clean up], we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste to our own sanity.

“We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high IQs, if possible.”

We’ve all seen this too many times. If you ask any reasonably intelligent seven-year-old how to stop global warming caused in great measure by the burning of oil and gas and by the destruction of forests and prairies and wetlands, this child might well say, “Stop burning oil and gas, and stop destroying forests and prairies and wetlands!”

If you ask a reasonably intelligent thirty-year-old who works for a ‘green’ high tech industry, you’ll probably get an answer that primarily helps the industry that pays his or her salary.

Part of the brainwashing process of turning us into imbeciles consists of getting us to identify more closely with-and care more about the fate of-this culture rather than the real physical world. We are taught that the economy is the ‘real world’, and the real world is merely a place from which to steal and on which to dump externalities.

Does nature have to adapt to us? Or us to nature?

Most of us internalize this lesson so completely that it becomes entirely transparent to us. Even most environmentalists internalize this. What do most mainstream solutions to global warming have in common? They all take industrialism as a given, and the natural world as having to conform to industrialism.

They all take empire as a given. They all take overshoot as a given. All of this is literally insane, in terms of being out of touch with physical reality. The real world must always be more important than our social system, in part because without a real world you can’t have any social system whatsoever. It’s embarrassing to have to write this.

Upton Sinclair famously said that it’s hard to make a man understand something, when his job depends on him not understanding it.

I would add that it’s hard to make people understand something when the benefits they accrue through their exploitative and destructive way of life depend on it. So we suddenly get really stupid about the waste products produced by this culture.

When people ask how we can stop polluting the oceans with plastic, they don’t really mean, “How can we stop polluting the oceans with plastic?” They mean, “How can we stop polluting the oceans with plastic and still have this way of life?”

And when they ask how we can stop global warming, they really mean, “How can we stop global warming without stopping this level of energy usage?”. When they ask how we can have clean groundwater, they really mean, “How can we have clean groundwater while we continue to use and spread all over the environment thousands of useful but toxic chemicals that end up in groundwater?”

The answer to all of these is: you can’t.

First we must recover our sanity. Then we must act

As I’ve been writing this essay about the messes caused by this culture, there’s an allegorical image I can’t get out of my mind. It’s of a half-dozen Emergency Medical Technicians putting bandages on a person who has been assaulted by a knife-wielding psychopath.

The EMTs are trying desperately to stop this person from bleeding out. It’s all very tense and suspenseful as to whether they’ll be able to staunch the flow of blood before the person dies.

But here’s the problem: as these EMTs are applying bandages as fast as they can, the psychopath is continuing to stab the victim. Worse, the psychopath is making wounds faster than the EMTs are able to bandage them. And the psychopath is paid very well for stabbing the victim, while most of the EMTs are bandaging in their spare time.

And in fact the health of the economy is based on how much blood the victim loses – as in this culture, where economic production is measured by the conversion of living landbase into raw materials, e.g., living forests into two-by-fours, living mountains into coal.

How do we stop the victim from bleeding out? Any child can tell you. And any sane person who cares more about the health of the victim than the health of the economy that is based on dismembering the victim can tell you. The first thing you need to do is stop the stabbing. No amount of bandages will make up for an assault that is ongoing, indeed, one that is accelerating.

What do we do about this culture’s fabrication of industrial wastes? The first step is stop their production. Actually the first step is that we regain our sanity, that is, we transfer our loyalty away from the psychopaths, and toward the victim, toward, in this case, the planet that is our only home.

Once we do that, everything else is technical. How do we stop them? We stop them.

 

 

Derrick Jensen is Member of the Steering Committee of Deep Green Resistance. See more details. Read Derrick Jensen’s blog.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Reclaim Environmentalism!’ by Derrick Jensen & Lierre Keith.

 

 




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