CLIMATE
MEMO MONDAYS, #94, SEPTEMBER 26, 2022
Henry
Fountain. “Climate ‘tipping points’ weighed.”
W. T. Whitney, Jr.. “Climate change has long prompted migration, now it may drive
anti-capitalist consciousness, too.”
Editors of the Monthly Review. What should be the name of the latest epoch and age?
Henry Fountain. “Climate ‘tipping points’
weighed” (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette),
Sept. 10, 2022. Climate ‘tipping points’ weighed. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Sep 10,
2022. Threshold for cataclysmic
events among findings in study. Read more...
Forwarded by Pat Snyder.
Failure to limit global
warming to the targets set by international accords will most likely set off
several climate “tipping points,” a team of scientists said Thursday, with
irreversible effects including the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic
ice sheets, abrupt thawing of Arctic permafrost and the death of coral reefs.
Even at the current
level of warming, the researchers said about 2 degrees Fahrenheit above
preindustrial levels, some of these self-sustaining changes might have already
begun. But if warming reached above 2.7 F, the more ambitious of two targets
set by the 2015 Paris Agreement, the changes would become much more certain.
And at the higher Paris
target, 3.6 F, even more tipping points would likely be set off, including the
loss of mountain glaciers and the collapse of a system of deep mixing of water
in the North Atlantic.
The changes would have
significant, long-term effects on life on Earth.
Johan Rockstrom, the
director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and
one of the researchers, said the team had “come to the very dire conclusion
that 2.7 F is a threshold” beyond which some of these effects would start. That
makes it all the more imperative, he and others said, for nations to quickly
and drastically cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases
to curb global warming.
The research is in line
with recent assessments by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, a group of experts convened by the United Nations,
that beyond 2.7 degrees of warming, the threats of climate change grow
considerably.
“It really provides
strong scientific support for rapid emission cuts in line with the Paris
Agreement,” said David Armstrong McKay, a climate scientist at the University
of Exeter in Britain and the lead author of a paper describing the researchers’
work, published in Science.
As with the U.N. panel’s
assessments, overshooting the 2.7 degree target does not mean all is lost.
“Every tenth of a degree
counts,” Rockstrom said. “So 1.6 is better than 1.7 and so on” in reducing the
tipping-point risks.
Countries have not
pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to meet either Paris target,
although the climate and energy legislation passed by Congress last month moves
the United States much closer to its own goals.
Current policies put the
world on pace for nearly 5.4 F of warming by the end of the century. At that
level of warming, even more tipping points would be set off, the researchers
said. MORE see above.
CLIMATE REFUGEES AND
CAPITALISM
W. T. Whitney, Jr.. “Climate change has long prompted migration, now it may drive anti-capitalist
consciousness, too.”
mronline.org (8-21-2022). (Posted Aug
20, 2022). Originally published: Peoples
World on August 11, 2022 (more by Peoples World). Capitalism, Climate Change, Immigration,
ImperialismAmericas, United StatesNewswireGlobal South
Because capitalism has driven climate
change, a war against capitalism is needed.
U.S. government
programs for migrants who cross the country’s southern border are punitive and
disjointed. Left-leaning political groupings may criticize, but they too have
fallen short in conceptualizing lives of dignity for migrants in the United States.
Nor do they adequately take into account adverse circumstances weighing on
migrants’ lives in their home countries.
First among the forces
pushing masses of people northward is the environmental crisis. The role of climate change in reducing soil productivity
and food availability and in predisposing already beleaguered people to migrate
is of great concern.
One assumption here is
that capitalist systems of production and consumption have been central to
causing the climate to change for the worse. Another is the need for a war on
capitalism so as to stave off more climate change and cope with its fallout.
That hasn’t happened in the industrialized northern countries.
Southern regions may
be different. The excesses of capitalist globalization have hurt masses of
people there; they were never afforded the relief northern peoples gained from
welfare-state remedies. So in some cases, they may be more ready to take up the
climate change fight. MORE: for the full
article click on the title.
What shall be the name
of the latest epoch and age?
NOTES FROM THE EDITORS of the Monthly review
September
2022 (Volume 74, Number 4). by The Editors
(Sep 01, 2022).
A
Statement by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark
Our article on the relation of capitalism to the Anthropocene, “The Capitalinian: The First Geological Age of the Anthropocene,”
published in the September 2021 issue of Monthly Review, was
directed at the question of how to characterize the current geological age of
Earth history. In recent years, scientists have proposed that the Holocene
Epoch of the last 11,700 years should be seen as having been succeeded by the
Anthropocene Epoch, reflecting the fact that anthropogenic (as opposed to nonanthropogenic)
forces now constitute the dominant factors in Earth System change and lie
behind the planetary ecological crisis. However, the designation of the
Anthropocene Epoch within the Geological Time Scale, though still not
officially approved by the International Union of Geological Sciences, means
that we are now not only in a new geological epoch,
but also in a new geological age, since every epoch
has a number of ages nested within it. [eon, era, period, epoch, and age].
In our article, we proposed that the first geological age of the
Anthropocene Epoch, following the Meghalayan Age—the last age of the
Holocene—be named the Capitalinian Age, reflecting the fact that it is the
capitalist system in its mature phase of globalized monopoly capitalism that
has given rise to the current anthropogenic rift in the Earth System. This
framework was subsequently carried forward in a new book by one of us (John
Bellamy Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene [Monthly Review Press,
2022]) and in our article “Socialism and Ecological Survival,” published in the
July–August 2022 issue of Monthly Review. MORE https://monthlyreview.org/2022/09/01/mr-074-04-2022-08_0/
