OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #94, SEPTEMBER 26, 2022

 

94.  CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #94, SEPTEMBER 26, 2022.   

Art Hobson. “Tipping points signal the catastrophic threats of global warming.”

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?

 

Tipping points signal the catastrophic threats of global warming

Sixteen tipping points threaten future generations by Art Hobson | September 20, 2022

https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2022/sep/20/opinion-art-hobson-tipping-points-signal-the/

Mother Earth has finally awakened most of us to the reality of global warming. As epic wildfires, unprecedented flooding, record heatwaves and devastating droughts strike around the world, extreme weather dominates the news.

For one example, the world's fifth most-populous country is fighting for its survival. Monsoon rains delivered five times Pakistan's normal amount of water. The country's glaciers are melting at rates never seen before. The resulting super flood has ravaged the entire nation. Fifty million are internally displaced, millions are homeless, a malaria epidemic threatens, a huge new inland lake has formed and famine looms.  (continued at link above)

 

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 should 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).

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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/