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CLIMATE CRISIS

CLIMATE CRISIS

Drought Digest: Dry planet: In every continent, flashing red

27th April 2016

The Indian Express reports: The Global Integrated Drought Monitoring and Prediction System (GIDMaPS) map shows large patches of dry areas in every continent, indicating droughts of varying severity. The GIDMaPS is a drought monitoring and prediction system that provides near real-time drought information based on multiple drought indicators and input data sets, mostly from NASA….

Video: Disobedience – The rise of the global fossil fuel resistance

Disobedience is the story of the struggle to save the world. Disobedience tells the David vs Goliath tales of front line leaders around the world risking life and limb in the fight for a liveable climate. Interwoven with this riveting verité footage are the most renowned voices in the global conversation around social movements and climate justice…

Riber Hansson

Study: Climate change takes from the poor, gives to the rich

17th April 2016

A new study finds that climate change is triggering a massive reallocation of resources to the world’s wealthiest countries. Fish and other important resources are moving toward the Earth’s poles as the climate warms, and wealth is moving with them, according to a new paper by scientists at Rutgers, Princeton, Yale, and Arizona State universities….

The gathering storm of climate migration

16th April 2016

Michael Igo writes: Since 2008, 22.5 million people have been forced from their homes due to floods and hurricanes, twice as many as the record 11 million displaced by conflict in 2014… As global temperatures creep higher, and storms, droughts, floods, and heat waves grow more severe, we face a future of mass climate-related migration….

Cowspiracy: ‘The film that environmental organisations don’t want you to see’

15th April 2016

Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret is a groundbreaking feature-length environmental documentary produced and directed by Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn. It follows the intrepid filmmakers as they uncover the real impact of the livestock industry. The film investigates why the world’s leading environmental organizations, including Greenpeace and Rainforest Action Network, are afraid to talk about it….

Special: A view from the Left: Capitalism, climate change and the environment

12th April 2016

From the point of view of greens, the Left in general, and Marxism in particular, is often seen as being myopic about the looming environmental crisis. Here we present a selection of articles and essays by leading writers from the Left, who are among the most interesting and constructive voices to engage with the issue….

Video: Bhutanese PM Tshering Tobgay on growth, happiness and carbon emissions

11th April 2016

Deep in the Himalayas, on the border between China and India, lies the Kingdom of Bhutan, which has pledged to remain carbon neutral for all time. In this illuminating talk by TED, Bhutan’s Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay shares his country’s mission to put happiness before economic growth and set a world standard for environmental preservation….

Global capitalism is facing three tipping points

5th April 2016

In this article, Sagar Dhara examines Capitalism’s crucial tipping points: The first, the impending energy and natural resource crisis, related to the sourcing of raw materials. The second, inequality, related to the production of goods and services. The third, global warming, which is related to greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) in excess of the earth’s sink capacity….

Industrial civilisation can’t wean itself off fossil fuels painlessly

4th April 2016

Chris Martenson writes: The data seems to confirm this: Humanity is not going to painlessly wean itself off of fossil fuels. Instead, we will hit some sort of a wall: a food/population crisis, a climate crisis, or a debt/fiscal/economic crisis. Each of those candidates has its roots in our global society’s addition to fossil fuels….

Bookshelf: Capitalism and Climate Change: The Science and Politics of Global Warming

3rd April 2016

The climate crisis is the greatest threat humanity has ever faced, which threatens not only global civilization, but the very survival of our species and many others. This book gives a lucid explanation of the science of climate change and illuminates the role of capitalism in creating and perpetuating the climate crisis and related dangers….

Video: Climate science pioneer Hansen warns of disastrous climate shift

31st March 2016

The world may be much closer to an abrupt and catastrophic climate shift than previously thought. That’s the warning from modern climate science pioneer James Hansen. His latest research suggests that polar ice sheet disintegration may cause sea level rise enough to drown coastal cities, not in a few centuries, but in a few decades….

Video & Report: How renewable energy is already taking over the world

30th March 2016

Juan Cole writes: In 2015 energy companies invested more in new renewables power plants than in fossil fuel plants for the first time in history. The majority of these plants were planned for developing countries, a sign that the technology is now viewed as less expensive. It is clear there is a secular trend upwards….

Digest: Climate crisis and the myth of ‘green’ capitalism

29th March 2016

Much of the mainstream media, corporate lobbyists and politicians would like the public to think of climate change as something akin to a natural phenomenon. In this second part of our series on Capitalism and Climate Change, we present a selection of articles that examine the deep-seated connections between climate change and a rapacious global economic order….

Some experts have attributed the unprecedented rainfall that led to the 2015 Chennai floods to climate change

The scientific challenge of attributing extreme weather events to human activity

28th March 2016

Roz Pidcock reports: Working out whether human activity is supercharging extreme events like floods, droughts and heatwaves, is one of the youngest branches of climate science. But it’s moving at breakneck pace. So much so, that the US National Academy of Sciences has fast-tracked a report taking stock of the science and where it’s heading….

The decisions we make about climate change today will reverberate for millennia

27th March 2016

David Roberts writes: The great irony of climate change is that it’s so big we can barely care about it. We’re in a brief window of time when it is still possible to blunt the worst effects of climate change. So let’s try an imaginative exercise: connecting long-term climate consequences to our current political moment….

Corporate Watch

Series: Capitalism and Climate Change

22nd March 2016

Climate change is real, and it’s going to get worse. This video looks at how obstacles to solving the problem are intrinsic to our capitalist system. The growing strength of the climate movement around the world gives us great hope, but it’s going to take a revolution to make the world inhabitable for future generations….

The Paris Climate Talks: A Nepali View

20th March 2016

Shail Shrestha writes at Local Futures: Technology transfer from the North to South has long been regarded as the path to a better life in less-developed regions of the world. But even the best and the most sustainable technology proposed in Paris would make Nepal less sustainable than it is today, leading us in the wrong direction….

Richard Heinberg: 100% renewable energy is possible, here’s how

19th March 2016

Since the renewable energy revolution will require trading fossil fuels for alternative ones (mostly wind, solar, hydro, geothermal and biomass), there will be some hefty challenges along the way. Therefore, it makes sense to start with the low-hanging fruit and with a plan in place, then revise our plan frequently as we gain practical experience. …

A new wave of climate insurgents defines itself as law-enforcers

16th March 2016

Jeremy Brecher writes: One in six Americans say they would engage in nonviolent civil disobedience against corporate or government activities that make global warming worse. That’s about 40 million adults. The fate of the earth may depend on them. Such actions are about to take a quantum leap both in numbers and in global coordination….

Human impact has pushed Earth into the Anthropocene, scientists say

8th March 2016

A new study provides one of the strongest cases yet that Earth has entered a new geological epoch. The question of whether humans’ environmental impact has tipped Earth into an “Anthropocene” – ending the current Holocene which began 12,000 years ago – will be put to the geological body that formally approves such time divisions….