OMNI CLIMATE URGENCY TIMELINE
COMPILED BY DICK BENNETT
SEPTEMBER 4, 2022
WHEN DID WE KNOW? WHAT DID WE DO? TIMELINE OF AWARENESS OF GLOBAL WARMING, 1926
TO 2022.
“If
way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.” Thomas Hardy, “In Tenebris, II”
In
Bertolt Brecht’s poem “The Buddha’s Parable of the Burning House” Buddha
exhorted the inhabitants to leave at once, but they would not.
The following chronology of discoveries about increasing CO2 and
temperature and advancing climate change is based upon OMNI’s ANTHROPOCENE,
CLIMATE CATASTROPHE, MITIGATION, ADAPTATION NEWSLETTER #2, August 31, 2016 (rev. Nov. 29, 2016, and continually
enlarged since then), compiled by Dick Bennett. Following is the updated (9-4-22) edition.
PART ONE: URGENCY
What’s at Stake: How
Could We Have Known?
Our children ask us,
what did you do while
the planet was plundered?
Our grandchildren ask,
what did you do when
the earth was unraveled?
Our great-grandchildren ask,
what did you do
when the seasons
started failing?
when the mammals,
reptiles, birds were all dying?
(from Dellinger, hieroglyphic stairway)
Was it like a burning building full of people,
the roof already
ablaze,
their clothing and
hair scorched?
Yet the people stayed the same,
and seemed in no
hurry to put out the fire.
(from Brecht, “The Buddha’s Parable of the Burning House”)
A few saw the fire, studied it, and reported it.
But ears were
stopped and hands were tied.
Some understood the cause, and sought a new building.
But they were
hospitalized as mad, or jailed as un-American.
Still, our children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren ask
us,
what did you do when
you knew?
And we replied: how could we have known?
HOW COULD WE HAVE KNOWN? A Timeline 1926-2022. Compiled by
Dick Bennett, revised New Year’s Eve 2021.
https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/2151229136087998997
A CHRONOLOGICAL SAMPLE OF BOOKS, ARTICLES, FILMS, EVENTS
REVEALING THE LONG, OBSTRUCTED LEARNING CURVE OF GLOBAL WARMING ANTICIPATING
THE PRESENT URGENCY OF CLIMATE CHANGE BECOMING CLIMATE
CATASTROPHE/EMERGENCY/CHAOS: FROM 1926 TO 2022. (Years
in 18 point type; texts in 12. Roughly, Green indicates pieces in the puzzle of the advancing
knowledge of the reality of climate change, of ensuing climate calamity,
emergency, and chaos, and of resisters. Red
indicates the deniers, defenders of the status quo by corporations, religious
nationalists, mainstream media owners, financial system, chicanery, lying, dark
money, bribery, disinformation, anticommunism, Soviet/Russophobia, information
control.)
1926 (Vladimir Vernadsky, The Biosphere, early Soviet use of key concept of integrated living organisms
and nonliving environment (not trans. into English until 1998). In the
same time period Aleksei Pavlov referred to the Anthropocene and anthropogenic
era as the new mainly human-driven geological period.
1945-50 a major spike
of warming “marking
a Great Acceleration in human impacts on the environment,” particularly in
“fallout radionuclides from nuclear weapons testing.”
1950s and ‘60s: Rachel Carson observes
atmospheric and oceanic warming.
1953
In The Edge of the Sea, Rachel Carson observed the
atmosphere and oceans warming, and noted the importance of a stable temperature
to their creature inhabitants.
1958
Scientists began
sampling the air and measuring the temperature at Mauna Loa Observatory.
1962
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring. If undermined, the
living processes of Earth will “return in time” to haunt us.
1963
Rachel Carson, “Our Polluted Environment” introduced the concept
of ecosystem—an
integrated ecological perspective--to the US public, and “the need to take it
into account in all of our actions” (Foster, “The Anthropocene Crisis,” 11).
1965
On 5 November 1965
climate scientists summarized the risks associated with rising carbon pollution
in a report for Lyndon Baines Johnson.
1968
Keeling made his first visit to the Mauna Loa Observatory leading to the “Keeling Curve.”
1970
Earth Day Inaugurated.
1971
Oil Co.”Total has known that burning
fossil fuels could cause a climate crisis since 1971.1 1 - Science Direct “ “They knew. They lied. They stole our
future.” 350.org. (10-21-21).
1972
Stockholm Conference on the
Human Environment recognized that the more climate change is allowed to progress,
the more likely it is that humanity will face widespread hunger, water
shortages, flooding and droughts. UN Conference on the
Environment: serious warning we have seriously
compromised the health of the Earth (Bertell, 2).
Donella Meadows, et al. The Limits to Growth. (See A Synopsis: Limits
to Growth: The 30-Year Update by Donella Meadows, et al.)
We now know that climate change was first
brought to the attention of an American president, Lyndon Johnson, by a science
advisory committee in 1965. In 1977, Jimmy Carter, who
two years later would put solar panels on the White House (only to have
them removed in 1986 by Ronald Reagan), was warned by his chief science adviser of the possibility of
“catastrophic climate change.”
1973
First appearance of word Anthropocene in
English.
1977
“…the U.S.
National Academy of Sciences warned that
unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions might raise global temperatures as much
as 10’F [5.5’C] and raise sea level 20 feet.” Romm, Climate Change, 2nd ed.,
xv. That is, Jimmy
Carter's chief science adviser and director of the Office of Science and
Technology Policy circulated a memo on the coming climate crisis.
Both this and the item in 1965 I
found in Tom Engelhardt’s Tomgram “John Feffer, A Last Supper for
Humanity?” (June 23,
2022. They were repeated by Engelhardt
in “Tomgram:
Engelhardt, Is the Never-Ending Story Ending?”
POSTED
ON AUGUST 11, 2022.)
1978 “Our 1978 article, ‘Is
Mankind Warming the Earth,’ marks one of the earliest uses of the phrase ‘climate change.’” “Speak Truth
to Power,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (11-6-21).
1980
E. P. Thompson.
“Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization.” New Left
Review (May-June).
1981
James Hansen’s first article on warming. Disinformation campaign begins (Hoggan, Climate Cover-up).
1982
Barry Commoner. The Closing
Circle. Aware of the rift in the metabolism of the biosphere, he warns
of “the vast changes in the human relation to the planet, beginning with the
atomic age and the rise of modern… synthetic chemistry.”
William Catton, Jr. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of
Revolutionary Change. There must be
limits to our tremendous appetite for population growth, energy, natural
resources, and consumer goods.
1988
United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Established. IPCC is a scientific
body under the auspices of the United Nations (UN). It reviews and assesses the
most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information produced
worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change. It was first established in 1988 by two United
Nations organizations, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and later endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly through Resolution 43/53
Hansen’s report to Senate 6-23 on significant
warming.
James Hansen: “…in 1988 [Hansen
reported,} the four warmest years on record were all in the 1980s. The two
warmest years were 1981 and 1987.[25] During a senate meeting on June 23rd,
1988, Hansen reported that he was ninety-nine percent certain the earth was
warmer than it had ever been measured to be, there was a clear cause and effect
relationship with the greenhouse effect” (Wikipedia).
Peter Seidel. Invisible
Walls: Why We Ignore the Damage We Inflict on Our Planet…and Ourselves.
PBS/NOVA showed its first documentary on
CC in 1988, its 17th on April 18, 2018.
1989
Bill McKibben, The
End of Nature, “the first popular book warning of climate change”
(Hawken, Drawdown, 216).
1990
The UN’S IPCC published
its First Assessment
Report (FAR). Follow-up: a supplementary report in 1992, 2nd assessment
report in1995 (SAR), third
assessment report (TAR) in 2001, fourth
assessment report (AR4) in 2007, fifth
assessment report (AR5) in 2014, 6th in 2018-2021(AR6). The IPCC inspired an
outpouring of research and publications.
Colin Hocking, et al. Global Warming and the Greenhouse Effect. A textbook for grades 7 to 10. The earliest
textbook for youths on climate change of which I am aware.
Lester Brown, et al. “World Without End,” Natural History (May
1990).
The one public relations
individual most responsible for killing climate policy for corporations and
their hirelings in the 1990s: Bruce Harrison.
1991
Edburg and Yablokov. Tomorrow Will Be Too Late: East
Meets West on Global Ecology. A dialogue between Swedish statesman Rolf Edberg and Soviet biologist Alexei Yablokov,
Jeremy Rifkin”s Biosphere Politics: A New Consciousness for a New
Century recognizes nuclear war and greenhouse gasses as
wars against nature (and apparently he was unaware of Vernadsky or the
IPCC’s First Report). See 1926 and 1990. See Tom Engelhardt, “Our Not-So-Slow-Motion
Apocalypse” (2021), for the explicit linking of war and warming, war of
terrorists and tarrarists.
1992
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted based on scientists’
consensus of anthropogenic alteration of atmosphere. Went into effect in
1994.
Al Gore. Earth
in the Balance. (One of the earliest
books inspired by the IPCC reports.) Before the expression
“Green Apollo program”
gained usage, Gore “and numerous others” had urged such a program
(Hertsgaard 272). “Gore had urged the U.S. government to initiate a green Marshall Plan.” (Gore is one of the unsung heroes of the
ecology movement to save planet and civilization.)
“Warning to Humanity” “on the dangers of climate change signed by over 1,500 of the
world’s scientists, including more than half of the recipients of the Nobel
Prize among living scientists”
Lester Brown. State
of the World.
1994
John Bellamy Foster. The Vulnerable Planet. “biobeochemical cycles
of the Earth System were being disrupted by the increasing scale of capitalist production.” Foster, “The
Planetary Rift.”
1995
UN IPCC 2nd Second Assessment Report (SAR)
https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sar/wg_I/ipcc_sar_wg_I_full_report.pdf
David Edwards. Burning All Illusions. An
intense rejection of “the fanatical
system of profit,” because “all major
environmental problems . . .are all symptoms of the same massive trauma
resulting from industrial intervention interfering with the natural
life-supporting systems of global life” (144).
1998
Mark Hertsgaard in Earth Odyssey foretold massive dangers ahead and “proposed
a Global Green Deal, modeled on the New Deal” of
FDR (from his Hot).
Thomas Casten. Turning Off the
Heat: Why America Must
Double Energy Efficiency to Save Money and Reduce Global Warming. Notable for having
been published so early, though he had started his warnings about C02 in 1975.
2000
ExxonMobil denial campaign questions scientific
certainty. The success of this fossil fuels
industry campaign is widely explained as the result of copying from the tobacco
industry’s successful delay of tobacco regulation by instilling doubt, until confidence in climate change
science decreased and EM’s profits soared.
This explanation should be qualified by the different explanation
of denial of science asserted by Naomi
Oreskes as reported by Kendrick Frazier, “Science Historian Naomi Oreskes:
Science Is Doing Fine; Rejection is Due to Ideology, Not Distrust.” Skeptical
Inquirer (Jan.-Feb., 2022, 7.)
Oreskes argues in Merchants of Doubt that together market fundamentalism, fear of government regulation of
business, plus continuing Cold War anticommunism was “the major factor.”
Our children ask us,
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/2151229136087998997
2001
UN IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR)
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/
In 2001 an international panel of
distinguished climate scientists announced that the world was warming at a rate
without precedent during at least the last ten millennia, and that warming was
caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases from human activity. Spencer Weart
told the story in The Discovery of Global Warming (2008).
2002
Paul Crutzen’s essay “Geology of Mankind” in Nature suggests assigning term “Anthropocene” to the
present based upon the alteration of the atmosphere by fossil fuel combustion
and deforestation. The idea was formally studied and accepted by the
stratigraphy committee of the Geological Society of London, which passed the
idea up to the International Commission on Stratigraphy. Their decision was expected in 2016 (Kolbert,
The Sixth Extinction, 108-110), but
it was still in 2021.
2004
By now dire reports on warming are escalating and reports on corporate
disinformation are appearing. Gelbspan, Boiling Point, perhaps the first book-length expose of corporate/political cover-up. Lynas, High
Tide (’05); *Monbiot, Heat (’07, Climate change “is the greatest
danger the world now faces.”); *Hansen, Storms… (’09);
Gore, Our
Choice (’09).
Ross
Gelbspan.
Boiling Point:
How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal,
Journalists, and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis—and What We Can Do to
Avert Disaster Note the date—Gelbspan’s book the earliest
strong book-length warning of the climate denial cover-up
that I know of.
2005
Jared Diamond. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail
or Succeed. Diamond says that a
society can either see environmental
problems or not. If they recognize the problem they
can act to solve it or they can ignore it or they can take
ineffective action. (from Malcolm Cleveland)
Mark Lynas. High
Tide:
News from a Warming World. From
a review by Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian, 25 March 2005. “It really ought to be
read by everyone. . . .a passionate argument, with much evidence, for us to do something
about the catastrophe facing the planet
as a result of our dependency on fossil fuels.”
"If there's one message above all that I want people to take from
these pages," Lynas writes, "it's this: that all the impacts described here are just the first whispers of the
hurricane of future climate change which is now bearing down on us."
James
Bovard. Attention
Deficit Democracy. Why the public ignores political and
corporate frauds and swallows pervasive lies, why they are indifferent to facts
and increasingly incapable of judging when their rights and liberties are being
destroyed. (Humanity might not be facing
this climate crisis had it been educated by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
(CSI), whose many activities, especially its journal Skeptical Inquirer: The Magazine for Science and Reason, teaches critical
thinking in all aspects of life.)
2007
UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4)
The IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its work on climate change,
together with former US Vice-‐President
Al Gore.
Richard Smith began the first of 5 essays 2007-2014 published
together in 2016 as Green Capitalism: The God That Failed.
“How Did the Common Good Become a Bad Idea? The Eco-suicidal Economics of Adam Smith.” “Leaving
the global economy in the hands of private
corporations, subject to the demands of the
market, is the road to collective eco-suicide” (24). George Monbiot. Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Climate change “is the greatest danger the world
now faces” (212). Monbiot favorably cites
an article by Colin Forrest that makes the case that if CO2 concentrations in
the atmosphere remain what they were in 2005, the average temperature would
reach 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. “Beyond this point, in other words, climate
change is out of our hands” (xi). The “only means” to stop this rise “is for
the rich nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent by 2030”
(xii). Monbiot tells why he thinks
this is feasible.
Collectif Argos.
Climate Refugees. (Orig.
Fr. Ed. 2007). Predicts that by 2050,
there will be 150 million climate refugees
resulting from permafrost melt, island nations submerged, desertification,
floods, glacial melt, hurricanes.
Howard
Odum.
Environment, Power, and Society. Discusses
the biosphere, the earth as a system, the metabolism of the earth’s thin outer
shell threatened by capitalism.
Our grandchildren ask,
what
did you do when the earth was unraveled?
2008
Mark Lynas. Six
Degrees: Our Future on a
Hotter Planet. Lynas
cites the Katrina hurricane flooding of New Orleans as “what the 21st
century may have in store for many more of us, in a thousand locations across
the world, as climate change accelerates” (14).
“With up to 6 degrees Celsius, or 10.6 degrees Fahrenheit, of global
warming in the cards over the next hundred years,” according to the IPCC, “will
we all…be reduced to eking out a living from shattered remains of
civilization…?” (15). Lynas is
optimistic humans can muster the scientific/technical knowledge and the
political will, but “we need to cut
emissions [to 400 ppm to “keep us within the two degrees safety target”]
and do so within a decade” (300) (i.e. 2017).
[Inside
Climate News: Based on preliminary analysis, the global
average atmospheric carbon dioxide in 2020 was 412.5
parts per million (ppm for short), setting a new record
high amount despite the economic slowdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic.]
James Gustave Speth. The
Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from
Crisis to Sustainability. “There is a bridge at the edge of the
world. But. . .there is not much time”
(13).
2009
James Hansen. Storms
of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to
Save Humanity. “…we are running out of time” (xi). “It’s
crucial that we immediately recognize the need to reduce atmospheric carbon
dioxide to at most 350 ppm….” (xi). “…a
change of direction is urgent. This is
our last chance” (xii). “Our planet…is
in imminent danger of crashing” (277) yet our politicians hesitate to act. “…the biggest obstacle to solving
global warming is the role of money in politics, the undue sway of special
interests.” (x).
Still, our children, grandchildren,
greatgrandchildren ask us,
what
did you do when you knew?
And we replied: how could we have known?
German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU),
led by Hans Schellnhuber, chief
climate adviser to the government of Germany, argued that 2 degrees centigrade
temperature rise must be the limit, which would “require bringing down
atmospheric concentrations [of CO2] fast.” “Greenhouse gas emissions had to
fall at incredible speed.” Hertsgaard, Hot, 249.
Schellnhuber “put a new name on a set of ideas and policies that Al Gore
and numerous others had already proposed” (272).
Al Gore. Our
Choice: A Plan
to Solve the Climate Crisis.
Gore stresses urgency in every chapter.
For example, Chap. 14: “In communicating the urgency of the climate
crisis….” (315). Referring to the market
economy, “change is urgently needed….”
(Chap. 15, 320). Chap. 16, “We
urgently need solutions to remove the political obstacles that block us from
confronting the mortal threat of the climate crisis to the future of
civilization.” [This is a magnificent
textbook, illuminating and stimulating in both text and graphics, and he has
written several other outstanding books, yet he is often unmentioned. –D]
Larry Schweiger. Last
Chance.
“Decades of complacency and inattention…eight years of …Bush
administration coupled with procrastination and partisan politics of a divided
Congress have set the stage for enormous and permanent climatic
consequences....we must do much more much faster than we previously believed…to
divert a worldwide catastrophe” (8-9).
“We cannot take baby steps when much bolder action is required”
(6). Schweiger writes elsewhere of his
hope in the new President Obama, which was not realized. [Schweiger was president and CEO of the
National Wildlife Federation.]
Diane Dumanoski,
The End of the Long Summer
The “long summer” of unusual climate stability of 11,700 years, named
the Holocene, is coming to a close rapidly.
“The decades ahead promise unimaginable loss. Much of the world as we know it. . .will likely
vanish in the lifetime of a child born today.”
John Bellamy Foster, The
Ecological Revolution:
Making Peace with the Planet was first
published a little more than ten years ago in April 2009, at a time when
climate change had already been recognized as a pressing global issue for over
two decades, but when there was still hardly any realistic discussion of its
connection to capitalism or of the immense ecological and social revolution
that would be required to overcome the Earth System crisis.
2010
James Hansen’s Storms
of My Grandchildren is two books: the science of climatology and its
politics and his struggle to discover and reveal the truth about warming and
climate change, and to push leaders to take action. The book might have been titled “The Truth
and the Politics of CC.” The 2010
paperback includes a Q&A with Bill
McKibben in which Hansen condenses into blowtorch
intensity what will happen in our children's and grandchildren's lifetimes if
we follow the course we're on.)
Robert Jensen.
“In the Face
of This Truth”
YES MAGAZINE. It’s time to talk honestly about collapse–no matter how others may respond.
Bill McKibben. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New
Planet. After
listing some of the massive changes to the earth in recent decades: “These
should come as body blows, as mortar barrages, as sickening thuds. The Holocene is staggered, the only world
that humans have known is suddenly reeling.
I am not describing what will happen if we don’t take action, or warning
of some future threat. This is the current inventory” (5). ”We need now to understand the world we’ve
created, and consider—urgently—how to live in it. . . .But hope has to be real. It can’t
be a hope that the scientists will turn out to be wrong , or that President Barack Obama [or some
other magic] can somehow fix everything….Maturity is not the opposite of hope;
it’s what makes hope possible” (xiv).
Peter Ward. The
Flooded Earth: Our Future in a
World Without Ice Caps.
Introduction, “Miami Beached”: “What might make [the increase in sea
level] unique is the rate at which it is happening. There is every reason to believe that we are
on the cusp of the most rapid rate of sea level rise in Earth history….”(10).
Chap. 3, “The Flood of Humans”:
The correlation between
increasing population and
rising seas. “The rise in our numbers, more
than any other reason, will ensure the rise of the sea—which not only will
happen but also might be vastly underestimated unless we take immediate action”
(90).
Chap. 5, “Greenland, Antarctica, and Sea Level.” Describes from polar melting to rising seas.
Gwynne
Dyer. Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World
Overheats. Without drastic reduction in C02 the planet
will heat 4 degrees by 2060, and warming will increase militarism and
wars.
2011
Scientists are increasingly urging an immense global
mobilization to slow down the worst of warming’s consequences. Lester
Brown, World on the Edge (“massive mobilization at
[WWII] wartime speed”); Hertsgaard, Hot (“green Apollo crash program”).
Lester
Brown. World on the Edge:
How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse. Brown’s
long-developed “Plan B” urges “massive mobilization—at wartime
speed.” We did it during WWII; we can do
it now.
Mark Hertsgaard, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. The “first era of global warming (“the battle to
prevent dangerous climate change”) began on June 23, 1988—the day James Hansen
told the U.S. Senate that man-made global warming had begun.” By the turn of the century “the second era,”
“the race to survive it had begun.” “On
the one hand, we must reverse global warming [lower the global temperature],
and quickly—before the climate system passes tipping points,” and we must
“prepare our societies for the serious climate impacts that are already in the
pipeline” (24-25).
Hertsgaard in Hot urged “a
crash program,” a “Green Apollo” (272). “for
the rapid deployment of green technologies and practices” (273).
2012
Three World Bank’s reports begin, published as Turn Down the Heat (2014), based on IPCC and Hansen’s methods
regarding average and extreme temperatures.
Business as usual will push average to 4 degrees or over.
Fred Guterl. The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own
Extinction and How We Can Stop It . “A fine scientific explanation of our abuse of the natural world
that, despite the subtitle, does not explain how to stop it. “ KIRKUS REVIEW
2013
Mauna Loa Observatory reveals the
rise of carbon concentration in the atmosphere had reached 400 ppm as the
scientific consensus had long contended it would be with business as usual. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) using graphs from the Observatory show the speed with which the Earth System has
gone from 300ppm to 400 ppm of carbon concentration in the atmosphere. At minimum, anyone who denies warming and its dire consequences is either a
dunce or an enemy of humanity and all species.
Tomgram:
Dahr Jamail, The Climate Change Scorecard, December 17, 2013. “What,
in other words, is the worst that we could possibly face in the decades to
come? The answer: a nightmare scenario. So buckle your seat
belt. There’s a tumultuous ride ahead. Tom”
Are We Falling Off
the Climate Precipice?
Scientists Consider
Extinction by Dahr Jamail.
“I grew up planning for my future, wondering which college I
would attend, what to study, and later on, where to work, which articles to
write, what my next book might be, how to pay a mortgage, and which
mountaineering trip I might like to take next.
Now, I wonder about the future of our planet. During a recent visit with my
eight-year-old niece and 10- and 12-year-old nephews, I stopped myself from
asking them what they wanted to do when they grew up, or any of the
future-oriented questions I used to ask myself. I did so because the reality of
their generation may be that questions like where they will work could be
replaced by: Where will they get their fresh water? What food will be
available? And what parts of their country and the rest of the world will still
be habitable?” Click here to read more of this
dispatch.
2014
IPCC Fifth Assessment Report - Synthesis
Report.
The
National Climate Assessment 2014
Landmark Report Warns Time is Running Out to Save US
from Climate Catastrophe
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Naomi Klein. This
Changes Everything. “Faced with a crisis that threatens our survival as a species,
our entire culture is continuing to do the very thing that caused the crisis,
only with an extra dose of elbow grease behind it. . . .from conventional
sources of fossil fuels to even dirtier and more dangerous versions….”
(2). We must “change the systems that
are making the crisis inevitable” (4).
It will require a “Marshall Plan
for the Earth,” which will cost “billions if not trillions of dollars,” but
we can do it if we have the will (5), if we the people quit “looking away” and
declare “a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels” (6).
George Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. In his conclusion, “Four Degrees: Why this Book
Is Important” (pp. 239-42) Marshall recounts how for a “many years” scientists
focused on the catastrophic dangers of allowing global average temperature to
rise 2 degrees Centigrade above the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution. Here Marshall discusses
the increasing conclusion “that four
degrees is the actual future we face” (239). These scientists refer not to change, a
misleading euphemism, but to catastrophe. Praised
by Naomi Klein for having “the courage to look unblinkingly at this existential
crisis.”
2015
Nicholas Stern,
Why Are We Waiting? “delay is
dangerous. . . .I hope we can help bring about the acceleration in action that
is vital to the management of climate change.”
Stern’s book is for “understanding why we have been moving too slowly….”
(xviii). [A high-level, sophisticated
study that weighs seemingly all important factors of the economics of climate
change. Lord Stern is the Patel
Professor of Economics and Government at the London School of Economics,
President of the British Academy, and other distinguished positions. See Richard Smith’s denunciation of Stern
(and PM Blair) in Green Capitalism
6-7. --Dick]
Peter Seidel. There
Is Still Time to Look
at the Big Picture…and Act. In his
Preface he writes about his earlier (1998) book, Invisible Walls: Why We
Ignore the Damage We Inflict on Our Planet…and Ourselves. “Since
then, environmental damage has only grown worse . . .It is clear that if we
continue on our current course our future will be grim indeed.” But “facing the
dismal facts might get us to think and change.” In his Recap p. 171, first of all “We need
to: recognize that we are now on a path leading to catastrophe.”
2016
Michael Mann and Tom Toles. The Madhouse Effect. “Concerted
action is required…now if we are to
have any hope” of averting the “dangerous limit of 3.6F (2C)” (131).
Richard Smith, Green Capitalism: The God That Failed. World Economics Association, Book
Series, vol. 5. This book was published in
2016, but it is composed of five essays published 2007-2014. These essays are so dire
they make my organizing principle of urgency
seem timid. Yet he is not a forerunner as the preceding
entries attest (and see his extensive references). Smith quotes favorably from an essay by
George Monbiot published in 2003 (!):
“’Were we governed by reason, we would be on the barricades
today…demanding a reversal of economic
life as dramatic as the one we bore when we went to war with Hitler’” (5). And Smith’s opening page points straight to
the cause: [These essays] “deal with the prime threat to
human life on Earth: the tendency of global capitalist economic development to
develop us to death….the eco-suicidal tendencies of capitalist development”
because of “maximizing growth”(1).
*Ian Angus. Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. The “central theme of Ian Angus’s marvelous new book” is the
“dialectical interrelation between the acceleration into the Anthropocene and
the acceleration of a radical environmentalist imperative in response.” The “main achievement” of the book is the
bringing together” of “two aspects of the Anthropocene”: variously viewed as
the geological and the historical, the natural and social, the climate and
capitalism—in one single, integrated view” that “the world, under ‘business as usual,’ is
being catapulted into a new ecological phase—one less conducive to maintaining biological
diversity and a stable human civilization.”
(from “Foreword” by J. B. Foster).
John Bellamy Foster.
“The Anthropocene Crisis.” (Monthly Review, Sept. 2016). From his Foreword to Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene. Foster provides a short
history of the increasing awareness of the recently accelerated global warming
that has produced (possibly to be named) the Anthropocene epoch, given expanded
treatment in “Angus’s marvelous new book.”
Foster ends his essay by quoting Bertolt Brecht’s poem “The Buddha’s
Parable of the Burning House” (which I have cited several times) in which
Buddha exhorted the inhabitants to leave at once, but they did not, but instead
asked foolish questions. --D
Dolack, “No Planet for Optimists.” Z
Magazine (May 2016 ), 4-5. A dire conclusion based
upon recent studies:
Hansen, et al., in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics:
“swift action is necessary in the face of a ‘global emergency’”
because of “a future catastrophic rise in the oceans.”
Science:
planet “already committed…to a six-meter rise in sea level,” which is
likely to inundate 444,000 square miles of land “where more than 375 million
people live today.”
Even if the goals committed to by the
Paris Climate summit in December 2015 were achieved (1.5 degrees Celsius above
pre-industrial levels), temperature globally would rise “nearly 3 degrees
Celsius by 2100.” “We have a global
emergency” and must drastically reduce fossil fuel CO2 emissions quickly.
What to do? Because our
economic system requires constant growth, “There is no alternative to a
massive change in industrial activity.”
--Dick
Report in Science, 26 August 2016, page 852:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6302/852.
Here is an update on an important topic in Facing the Anthropocene. The 35th
International Geological Congress met in South Africa during August 2016. Their decision was pretty much what the book
predicted: These geologists are suggesting that a new geological “epoch”
should be established, named “Anthropocene,” that it should begin in
1945-1955, and that its geological “marker” should include the “black carbon”
deposited by coal plants and other fossil fuel plants. –Art Hobson
“Vanishing America,” “Louisiana Vanishing,”The Weather Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4THdX9KOZ_4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWoiBpfvdx0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_pb1G2wIoA
2017
Congressionally Mandated U.S. National Climate Assessment
Magdoff and Williams, Creating
an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation. As
leaders in the new movement of ecosocialism, Magdoff and Williams urge
us to replace the economic system that is destroying the climate by a system
supportive of nature and its creatures.
In contrast to mainstream incremental, ameliorative environmentalism, Magdoff
and Williams assert the need for system change on a massive scale. “They stress the dangers of a society in
which accumulation of profits is based on the exploitation of humanity and
the expropriation of nature.” (Foreword,
13-14). This is one of the major books
for the struggle.
Chris Hedges, We Can’t Fight Climate Change if We Keep Lying to
Ourselves. TRUTHDIG, Posted on
Jun 18, 2017. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/we_cant_fight_climate_change_if_we_keep_lying_to_ourselves_20170618 “Catastrophic climate change is inevitable.
Our technology and science will not save us. The future of humanity is now in
peril. At best, we can mitigate the crisis. We cannot avert it. We are fighting
for our lives. If we do not rapidly build militant movements of sustained
revolt, movements willing to break the law and attack the structures of the
corporate state, we will join the 99.9 percent of species that have vanished
since life first appeared on earth.”
“The Uninhabitable Earth” By David
Wallace-Wells. New York Magazine (July 9, 2017): “Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate
change could wreak — sooner than you think.” “…absent a significant adjustment
to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely
become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as
soon as the end of this century.” http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html
Dick
Russell. Horsemen of the Apocalypse. “The
science is overwhelming; the facts are in.
The planet is heating up at an alarming rate, and the results are
everywhere to be seen. Yet, as time runs
out, climate progress is blocked by
the men who are profiting….”
Dick
asked Prof. Cleaveland, How much time do we have?
“Dick, There is no time left. I fear
that we are about to undergo a Darwinian process -- as a species. Not
that we will become extinct, but our civilization might. In the long run
it will be beneficial to the planet to have 4 or 5 billion fewer humans, but it
may take millennia for the planet to recover. Our solution to the Fermi Paradox.”
Malcolm K. Cleaveland, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus
of Geosciences
2018
IPCC 6th
Assessment October 2018.
The
IPCC and the Sixth Assessment cycle
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ar6_material/AC6_brochure_en.pdf
UN body for assessing the science related to climate change. It ... of 2018. The Sixth Assessment Report will be ready
for the first UNFCCC global stocktake to ...
IPCC
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
The report was finalized in October 2018 ... Assessments of climate change by
the IPCC, drawing on the work
of hundreds of scientists from all over the world, ...
Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
https://www.ipcc.ch/news_and_events/pr_outreach_vietnam_2018.shtml
Oct 10, 2018 - Hanoi, Oct 10 – The
Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of Viet Nam ... a report on warming of 1.5°C in 2018, when nations review
the Paris .... 2015, the IPCC decided to produce a Sixth Assessment Report (AR6).
Oct 8, 2018 - Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) said on .... in
February 2015, the IPCC decided to produce a Sixth
Assessment Report.
Unprecedented Crime:
Climate Science Deniers and Game Changers for Survival by Peter Carter
& Elizabeth Woodworth, an intense call for an immediate and rapid
“slash” of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions (29). Denounces the denying fossil fuel
corporations and all their government and media enablers as guilty of “willful
crimes against life itself.”
Washington Post 5-3-18: CO2 average above 410 for entire month of April, a new record https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/05/03/earths-atmosphere-just-crossed-another-troubling-climate-change-threshold/?noredirect=on&utm_source=rss_energy-environment&utm_term=.5b0f9788868b
Brady, Dennis and Chris Mooney. “Major Trump administration climate report
says damage is ‘intensifying across the country’.” The
Washington Post (November 23, 2018). Climate change is
already affecting the United States — and is going to be very expensive. https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/11/23/major-trump-administration-climate-report-says-damages-are-intensifying-across-country/?utm_term=.db9b5edfd1f1
Here is that hard-hitting US government report on climate change you’ve been hearing about in the news: https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report
NADG 11-24-18
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6:39 AM (9 hours ago) |
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https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2018/nov/23/government-climate-report-warns-of-wors/
https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2018/nov/24/doug-thompson-the-weather-in-the-woods-/
Greta Thunberg. No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (1st ed.)
2019
Jeremy Rifkin, The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse
by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth. (See 1991). Mullins HD9502.A2 R537
2019
“Revisiting
the Climate Collapse: The view from Nuuk in the year
2070” By David Spratt. Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, Volume 75 Issue 6, October 31,
2019.
World scientists’ warn of a
climate emergency.
Mronline.org (11-8-19)
Most
public discussions on climate change are based on global surface temperature
only, an inadequate measure to capture the breadth of human activities and the
real dangers stemming from a warming planet. Policymakers and the public now
urgently need access to a set of indicators that convey the effects of human
activities.
How fast is the climate changing? Mronline.org (8-2-19).
Are
recent weather patterns a prescient warning that Climate Change is upon us?
Yes, according to John Molyneux, and time is running out. Source
The Convergence of
Catastrophes. “Climate change, dust bowls, fishery collapse:
metabolic rifts of capitalism and the need for socialism.”
Humankind and the environment are hurtling toward unprecedented ecological crises.
Global warming, sea level rise, and weather extremes due to carbon emissions
are catastrophic enough, but they will mix and combine with ocean
acidification, air and chemical pollution, water shortages, deforestation,
fishery collapse, soil erosion, and mass extinction, throwing both nature and
society off a […] Source
Global inequality in a time of climate emergency. mrronline.org
(6-16-19)
Our world’s richest have a great deal of money. They also have
the power to decide whether our civilization sinks or swims. So what can we do? Source 
“'Existential' Risk of Climate
Crisis Could Lead to Civilizational Collapse by 2050, Warns Report” by Eoin Higgins, staff writer. Common Dreams (6-4-19). "The world is currently completely
unprepared to envisage, and even less deal with, the consequences of
catastrophic climate change."
“The planet is on fucking fire.” The Intercept (5-18-19).
“By the
end of this century, if emissions keep rising, the average temperature on Earth
could go up another four to eight degrees,” said Nye, growing agitated. “What
I’m saying is the planet is on fucking fire.”
Source
Strike before the planet gets hot. Mronline.org (6-1-19)
Greta Thunberg
has called for a world-wide strike on Friday September 27-for children and
adults. Here’s how to make this a reality.
Source
A Climate Emergency Manifesto to avert climate catastrophe. Mronline.org (5-16-19)
The panic button needs to be hit to declare climate emergency.
We need serious action now; there is no more time to waste. Source
What kind of climate movement do we
need? Posted Apr 20, 2019 by Camilla Royle.
Mronline.org
Originally published: Socialist Review (April 2019 Issue) |
UN agencies prepare aid for hurricane-stricken Bahamas
More than 60,000 people in The Bahamas will require food aid and
support accessing clean water in the wake of Hurricane Dorian, according to the
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Aid teams
from OCHA, the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization are
preparing to deliver aid to the country, where the storm killed at least five
people.
WWMT-TV (Kalamazoo, Mich.)/The
Associated Press (9/3), The Jamaica Observer (9/4)
Greta Thunberg speech. Mronline.org (9-24-19)
Around
the year 2030, we will be in a position where we probably set off an
irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to
the end of our civilization as we know it.
Source
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“Climate
Disruption Spells Disaster: World War II Effort
Level Required.” NADG (3-20-19) |
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https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2019/mar/19/art-hobson-climate-disruption-spells-di/
“Revisiting the climate
collapse: The view from Nuuk in the year 2070” By David Spratt. Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, Volume 75 Issue 6, October 31, 2019. Failure to respond adequately. https://thebulletin.org/2019/10/revisiting-the-climate-collapse-the-view-from-nuuk-in-the-year-2070/.
Ann Pettifor. The Case for the Green New Deal.
[Green signifies any addition of truth. Red any hindrance or reduction.]
2020
Scientists say net zero by 2050 is too late. Mronline.org (11-18-20). Climate scientists now believe their
predictions about the rate of the global temperature increase have been too
conservative, and stronger
and more decisive action is
needed to reduce dangerous greenhouse gas emissions. | more…
WMO reports climate
efforts not meeting targets.
UN WIRE (3-11-2020)
Global efforts to
reduce emissions and mitigate climate disasters are "way off track"
and world leaders must remain focused on goals to limit climate change, which
poses a significantly larger threat to the world's population than the novel coronavirus, World Meteorological Organization
researchers say in a report released this week. The report notes that ocean temperatures rose to record highs last year, surface air
temperatures spiked in many regions, and glaciers lost more ice than they
gained for the 32nd consecutive year.
Full Story: The Guardian (London) (3/10), The Irish Times (Dublin) (3/10), CBS News (3/10)
Catastrophe is upon us–the grim view from Southern
Africa. Frontline.org (2-16-20).
The
word catastrophe is being used more and more by institutions reporting on the
effects of extreme weather in the two regions of Africa, Southern and South
Eastern Africa, and of late Australia. Source [Where have these linguists been during the
last 2 decades??].]
|
Five tribes have complained to the United Nations
Special Rapporteurs on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Peoples
(Cecilia Jimenez-Damary) and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Vicky
Tauli-Corpuz)regarding US failure to respond to climate change disasters
while also ignoring harmful exploitation by oil and gas companies. Learn more here. Why have these tribes waited so long to do
the obvious? |
NEW BOOKS ON GREEN NEW DEAL
Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin.
Climate Crisis and the Global
Green New Deal.
Stan Cox. The Green New Deal and Beyond.
Varshini Prakash and Guido Girgenti. Winning
the Green New Deal.
Bernd Riexinger, et al. A Left Green New Deal: An International
Blueprint. Monthly Review P, 2022. About Europe.
2021
.
Mronline.org
(8-17-21). The sixth report from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) runs to nearly 4,000 pages. The IPCC has
tried to summarise its report as the ‘final opportunity’ to avoid climate
catastrophe.
Tom Engelhardt, “Our
Not-So-Slow-Motion Apocalypse. My Extreme World And (Un)Welcome to It.” POSTED ON AUGUST 12, 2021. TOM
ENGELHARDT.
An example of the increasing awareness of the convergence of the climate and nuclear
war crises
2022
IPCC report calls for ‘immediate and deep’ carbon cuts to slow climate change. Editor. Mronline.org (4-7-22)’
Current pledges
to cut emissions won’t be enough to slow climate change, according to a new
report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC).
PBS, Frontline, “Earth Emergency”
(4-20-22). Explains
the feedback loops, terminal for world and life unless we stop the loops now.
Speaking ahead of an event marking the
50th anniversary of the 1972 Stockholm
conference (see), UN
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned against a "suicidal"
dependence on fossil fuels, which he says has been highlighted by the Ukraine
war. UN Wire (6-3-22). Full Story: The Guardian (London) (6/2), The Associated Press (6/1).
Lola
Seaton. “ Who is to blame for 30 years of climate change
inertia?” New Statesman. May 25, 2022. This superlative multiple
books review looks back not only to “the
expiry of our old world, but the closing of the political window in which it
could still be preserved.” It concludes
with the highest praise for Matthew
Huber’s analysis in Climate Change as Class War of the chief villains: neoliberal
economics and the “fraction of the capitalist class that
controls the production of energy from fossil fuels and other carbon-intensive
industries”.
Chris
Hedges. “The Dawn of the Apocalypse.” The
Chris Hedges Report, July 24, 2022. Conclusion: “The greatest existential crisis of our time
is to at once be willing to accept the bleakness before us and resist. The global
ruling class has forfeited its legitimacy and credibility. It must be replaced.
This will require sustained mass civil
disobedience.”
WHEN DID WE KNOW THE PLANET WAS
WARMING AND WHAT MUST WE DO TO STOP IT?
WE KNEW BY THE 1990S, WE DID LITTLE TO PREVENT THE COMING CHAOS, and we have
not yet, as I write today, September 9, 2022.
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